And when Amy emerged from the study ten minutes later, she was beaming. ‘I knew it would be all right. We can go ahead,’ she said, relief at having faced her father making her dance up the stairs, light as a leaf.
Mrs Villiers lifted her eyes as they followed her. ‘I do believe you could charm the birds off the trees, miss.’ She did not know what it had cost Amy to approach her father.
Most of Dorothea’s clothes were impractical, since she had had no need of any that were not, never having been one of the world’s labourers. Amy pulled out the dresses greedily, stroked the silks and velvets with sensuous fingers while wrinkling her nose at the smell of camphor, pouncing on a sophisticated emerald and black shot satin gown with black lace sleeves and a fall of the same lace round the low neck – though more in hope than expectation – and which indeed Mrs Villiers was immediately compelled to veto, not only on the grounds of its unsuitability for a young girl, but also because it was one Dorothea had worn on an unusually grand occasion at the bishop’s palace, and Francis would be sure to remember it.
In the end, Eleanor chose for her a simple deep ivory crêpe de Chine to which Amy, seizing the advantage, added a coffee-coloured georgette which she declared she must combine with it. ‘Because of course it will mean a complete remake,’ she said, scooping up an armful of pretty underwear while she had the chance, and adding some flesh-coloured silk stockings and a pair of bronze satin, high-heeled slippers with two delicate straps over the instep to her booty. ‘Everything’s hopelessly out of date.’
Nella sighed. ‘Don’t bank on it. It might be a party that never was.’
‘How can you be such a wet blanket!’
Because this invitation, for one thing, had been an unofficial one until William arrived home – and there was as yet no indication when exactly this would be. For another, even Sybil was aware that many of the homecoming soldiers were regarding the price they had paid for victory as too high to warrant the blowing of trumpets.
‘There’s no guarantee William will be in the mood for social occasions, Amy.’
‘Yes, I do know, Grandy, I haven’t forgotten,’ Amy replied, sobering. ‘But it’s not going to help anybody if we all go around in sackcloth and ashes, is it?’
Nella felt contrite. ‘You’re right, Amy, dear, of course. Help me to choose something, too. We don’t want to be seen as the church mice at this feast.’
She hoped Amy would not be disappointed, but very much feared she might. Not altogether because William might not wish for such a celebration: she did not really think even the war would have changed his amenable good nature, and whatever his private thoughts, he would go along with it, she was sure. It was more likely to be Eunice who would be the one to put a spoke in the wheel. No one, knowing Sybil, could believe that this affair she hoped to arrange for William’s homecoming was entirely altruistic. It was a typically impulsive and generous gesture on her part, but it would also provide an opportunity for Eunice to become reacquainted with those who had been marked down for her by her mother before the war. But the war had changed everybody. Eunice was not the biddable girl she had been then.
And especially don’t expect William to be the same boy who left home, Nella wanted to warn everyone. She had seen the change in him, the last and only time they had met in the wartime years, just after her arrival in France. Knowing which hospital she was attached to, he had sought her out when he had an unexpected two-day leave pass. By then he was already, at twenty-one, a captain, though this was not so unusual. Promotion came quickly at the front: officers, leading their men, were prime targets for the enemy guns.
Accustomed as she was by then to seeing men in every stage of battle fatigue, she had been shocked by his appearance. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘We were entrenched in a place they call Bellyache Wood, with a so-called medicinal spring. The name speaks for itself.’ He had laughed, but there was more to it than that. His big frame was wasted, his hands shook from time to time, his face was gaunt, his eyes haunted, as all their eyes were – boys who had seen and lived through horrors that no human being should have to witness. Neither she nor William had any idea that was to be their last meeting during the fighting, that he would soon be sent out on the Gallipoli campaign, suffer dysentery and fever, and after the huge and humiliating Allied defeat there, be sent back to France again.
Just a few hours they’d had together. ‘What will you do when all this is over? Go back to Oxford?’
No, he would not go back. He had been destined for the law, and politics thereafter, but now he was totally disillusioned; it was the politicians who had got them into this mess. After the war, it was practical and useful people who were going to be needed, people like their uncle, Arthur Foley. ‘And women like Eunice,’ he finished with a laugh. ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard what she was doing, helping to keep his business going. Surprising girl. She writes to me every week, you know.’
‘To me, too – though not every week,’ Nella smiled.
But perhaps I have been wrong about that, she thought now.
The responsible work Eunice had done helping her father had brought about a huge change in her. Who would ever have predicted what she would become? She had taken the load from Arthur’s shoulders, become his prop and mainstay, running the affairs of the works so capably and efficiently. She had always been ready to help lame ducks, take other people’s burdens to heart – but Nella was rather afraid that she had now become prone to arranging their affairs, too.
What was Aunt Sybil going to think when she learnt of the plans Eunice was making? To spend some time in Paris, perhaps to find some work there! A scheme Nella had only learnt of by chance, when she and Eunice had been having a cup of tea together before Nella went home after finishing her shift.
‘Paris? Work? Are you mad, Eunice? It must be worse over there than here in the aftermath of the war!’
‘Oh, I don’t know, there must be something I could do,’ Eunice said, sitting on the edge of the table, swinging her pretty little foot. She looked sideways at Nella. ‘Why don’t you come, too? It’s what you need.’
‘I’ve had enough of France, thank you. Whatever made you think of Paris?’
‘Oh, nothing special.’ She looked evasive, and somehow troubled. For a moment, Nella thought she was going to give her reasons for this extraordinary decision, but then she smiled, and shrugged. ‘I was talking to that doctor of yours, Geddes…he spent some time there before he came to England, didn’t he?’
‘Did he?,’ Nella asked, wondering just what Eunice meant by ‘that doctor of yours’. Yours, the hospital’s, or yours, Nella’s? She had evidently lost no time since his arrival in getting to know him. The hospital’s, of course. Eunice never made double-tongued remarks.
Amy had a good eye, and quick, clever fingers, and seams were soon unpicked, the pieces carefully aired, pressed and recut into what she considered more fashionable styles. For the next few days she treadled away so furiously on the old Singer that the dresses were finished at least a good two or three weeks before they were likely to be needed – assuming they ever were.
Her own dress was disappointingly not the one she had envisaged, sliding seductively around her hips, but a compromise. At least it gave her the slender silhouette she longed for: a long, short-sleeved V-neckline tunic from the coffee-coloured georgette, worn over a long, narrow shift cut from the ivory crêpe de Chine, with a creamy silk rose she was told must be tucked demurely into the neckline. Compromises are rarely entirely satisfactory, however, and when she tried it on, she twisted this way and that to see herself in the mirror. It felt homemade, she declared, tugging at the seams, and still smelt, a little, of mothballs, though anyone could see she was secretly delighted with herself, as well she might be, thought Nella.
‘It looks neither home-made, nor smells in the least of mothballs. You look absolutely sweet, Amy!’
Amy glowed. She decided that if she put her hair up in a Grecian
knot, it might not be so bad. And there was in the trunk a gold bracelet she might be allowed to wear, high on her arm…‘Well, you look lovely, yourself – and much more elegant than I ever could,’ she replied generously.
Nella had once thought the time would never again come when clothes, when looking and feeling one’s best and generally being a woman again, would matter, but yes, she did like the look of herself in the simple, bronze-gold heavy silk Amy had unerringly selected. It had scarcely needed any altering for Nella, not much more than a few inches off the hem, but its rich colour was lovely, and the burnt orange bandeau Amy wound around her hair did add a glow to her pale skin. It needed only the long rope of dark ambers Mrs Villiers slid over her head. But she mentally consigned it to the back of her wardrobe; she could not envisage wearing this finery in the foreseeable future.
Amy said, ‘What will you wear, Grandy?’
Mrs Villiers replied dryly that there would be enough with two belles of the ball and her pearls and her black velvet would suffice very well, thank you.
Sybil was similarly preoccupied with the party, addressing envelopes ready for posting when William came home and she had judged his reaction to the idea. She frowned as the gold nib of her fountain pen spluttered slightly over the address she had just written. Oh, bother! How too tiresome. She wiped the nib carefully on her flannel penwiper in its shagreen case and looked again at the envelope. Would it pass muster? She did not want to waste any of the last of her best pre-war stationery, creamy and thick as card, by rewriting it. There was no indication when supplies would be resumed.
Tapping the pen against her teeth, she glanced across to the big chair in the corner, where Eunice was daintily curled with her feet up and her softly waved head against a cushion, ostensibly reading, but with that small, secret, puzzling smile which hovered around her mouth whenever she thought herself unobserved, and which told her mother she was paying no attention to what she read and was thinking of something else entirely.
She frowned and turned back to her list. It was not promising.
There were all the Wentworths, of course, including the guest of honour, William; herself, Arthur and Eunice, which made eight. She considered the remaining names and reluctantly decided against very rich, handsome and immensely tall Henry Summers-Gently; though at the top of her list, pre-war, he had never at the best of times been the most amusing conversationalist, and now that he’d returned home from France he hardly spoke at all, stared into the distance and sometimes looked as though he might be going mad. It was the duty of every responsible mama to see her daughter settled, and he was a good match, but one didn’t want to marry off poor Eunice at any cost; what she really wanted for her child was a good man like Arthur who would look after her in case – her thoughts faltered – in case anything should happen to her, or to Arthur. For a moment she stared blindly out of the window. Then, determinedly, she took up her pen again.
Gervase Hatherley? Well, no. Perhaps not. He was simply too boring to be regarded as a potential son-in-law. In addition, dear Nella would be one of her guests, and it was obvious that, no doubt because he had been so very devoted to poor Marianne, even the sound of Hatherley’s name was painful to her. Sybil knew she avoided situations where she was likely to meet him. It really looked as though the possibles were boiling down to George Featherstonehaugh, who had come out of the war having suffered nothing worse than something utterly disgusting called trench fever, which was apparently caused by the bite of a louse – but perhaps one wouldn’t mention that – and to pleasant, handsome Freddie Anstruther. She put a mental star against this last name. Yes, Freddie could be a strong contender. He had a nice, obliging nature, had survived the war with only a shoulder wound and much gallantry, had inherited a large house and estate not too far away, and several thousand a year to go with it. He was a bit of an ass, but his only major fault, that Sybil could see, was that he was likely to talk of nothing else but how soon hunting could be resumed, which was frightfully tedious, but one couldn’t have everything. Of course, his sister, Gertrude, would have to be included, a woman with a face like a boot who had been something terrifying in the Ministry of Food during the war. Which made a total of eleven, and left her short of a man. It looked as though she would have to invite Gervase Hatherley, after all. But that might be just too embarrassing…oh, dear!
This dinner party was proving a little more than Sybil had anticipated. Well, I’ve started it and I must go on with it, and I’ll do my best to enjoy it, she thought. Her matrimonial ambitions for Eunice were only part of this proposed junket; she was genuinely pleased with the opportunity to celebrate William’s homecoming, but she could feel no real sense of joy. Would she never cease to feel that everything was dust and ashes since the loss of Grev? People thought her hard because, when he was believed to have been killed, she had never, in public at any rate, shed a tear, although the thought of him being blown to pieces, his body parts never found, was sometimes more than she could bear. Yet, she must still go on. She was still only forty-two and must manage to go on for the rest of her life. She pressed a hand to her temples.
‘We must decide what you are to wear, Eunice,’ she said at last, forcing herself back to the matter in hand and handing her daughter the list to look over.
Eunice looked up. ‘Oh, I don’t care what I wear. All that’s such a bore,’ she replied, though in fact she found the selection and wearing of pretty clothes anything but a bore, and she very much wanted to look her best at this particular party; it was simply that she increasingly felt if she did not stick up for herself her mama’s ambitions might swallow her up. She wanted to say all this marriage-making was rot, that no one was going to bother with that sort of thing anymore, but she knew the last wasn’t true: there would always be women like her mother, on the lookout for their daughters, although Eunice conceded that her mother genuinely wished to see her happily settled; the trouble was, happiness to her certainly included freedom from anxiety about money.
Sybil said suddenly, ‘I think I’ll take a walk, Eunice.’ It was no good, she simply could not concentrate, with this other thing on her mind. ‘I have rather a headache and perhaps the fresh air will do me good.’
Eunice, contrite, put aside her book. ‘Would you like me to come with you, Mother?’
‘No, no, just a few minutes’ fresh air, that should clear it.’
‘Are you sure? You do look awfully pale.’
‘Dearest child, I’m quite sure, thank you.’
‘In that case…’ Eunice put the list down, unread, smiled at her mother and said she thought she might walk along to visit the convalescents. She was aware of her mother’s eyes following her, knowing that these excursions were something else of which Sybil highly disapproved, but could find no adequate reason for stopping.
Whenever Sybil was troubled, one of the things which helped her was to walk around her garden. She called it her garden but was under no illusion that it really belonged to Hughes, her head gardener. He was a tyrant who had not, before the war, allowed her to do anything much more exacting than deadhead the roses – under his supervision, of course. He would listen to her suggestions, nod, and then act upon them or not, as he felt fit. She was sure he had been quite glad that her war work had left her with no time to interfere, allowing him to concentrate on his vegetables.
She took deep breaths of the fresh, cold air as she walked around. It was better to think about the garden than this other dreadful business, which was beginning to make her feel less alarmed than it had at first, but more angry. She bent to pull a dandelion in the lawn. It snapped off, as Hughes always warned her they would. The two of them kept up a running battle which she’d rather suspected he enjoyed as much as she did, truth to tell, about what was to go where and how, especially since he usually won, and was often proved right. But she’d won over the philadelphus he’d attacked so ferociously with the pruning shears early one spring. There were no arching branches dripping with heavenly perfumed whit
e flowers that year. He kept silent, but thereafter the shrub had been pruned at the proper time.
She was sad to see how neglected everything now was. What havoc the war had wreaked, even in the thousand little everyday, but important, things that made life worth living.
She paused to speak to some of the recuperating soldiers who were making a start on helping to restore the garden to its old beauty, under the direction of that formidable sergeant major, Broadbent, with his jaw half blown off. Sybil applauded his courage and tenacity in herding his volunteers, but to get the garden in good order again it was going to take a great deal more than goodwill, which was the most many of them could yet manage. None of the men was yet in the prime of health and this sort of work needed strong men, but it was a start, they had already made a difference, and in any case, she understood very well that it wasn’t the garden itself which was the object: it was the contribution to the men’s well-being which it would make. Not only by physical exercise, but with the feeling of damp, crumbly earth beneath your fingers, watching the yearly miracle, the cycle of life start again, the understanding that war could not destroy everything.
She came to a decision. She had a problem, and the problem must be faced and not just put aside. She must do something about it.
There was always a distinct brightening when Eunice came into the wards. A pretty face, a smile and a word for everyone, perfumed and prettily dressed, she was a change from the eternally busy, uniformed nurses and brought a breath of fresh air and femininity into the wards.
She spoke to one or two, then went to sit by Jack Shawcross, to whom she made daily visits. He was the son of a Huddersfield mill worker who’d won a grammar school scholarship, become a bank clerk, enlisted in the ranks at the beginning of the war and had risen rapidly to warrant officer, all of which were absolutely wonderful achievements, though her mother probably would not see it that way. Sympathetic as she was to all the men who had ended up here at Oaklands, Sybil was not able to keep a trace of disapproval from her voice whenever Eunice mentioned the young soldier. She would have been astonished, not to say delighted, at the nature of the conversation which followed, and to hear Eunice’s bracing tone when sat down by his bed.
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