by Mary Wesley
Henry was saying, ‘It’s a bit shabby, I’m afraid,’ but not as though he cared. ‘The dress is in my dressing-room. Pilar thought it should hang; that, left in its box, it might crease.’ He watched the girls as their eyes, blue and brown, explored the room.
Barbara said, ‘What a lovely room. Is it exactly as it was for your parents?’
Henry said, ‘Not exactly,’ but made no attempt to tell of any changes he might have made. Barbara thought, I bet his parents didn’t throw ink.
Henry said, ‘They didn’t let the dogs in their bedroom,’ and, catching Antonia’s eye, laughed.
Antonia said, ‘Lying in bed you can see your horses swishing their tails in the shade of a tree.’ She pointed to the distant horses.
Barbara said, ‘I met them earlier on my way to the lake. Are you—er—are you very fond of them?’ Remembering Margaret’s snide allusion, she avoided Antonia’s eye.
Henry said, ‘I bred one of them from a mare called Petronella, who was bred by my father. The other is her foal.’
Barbara said, ‘Oh.’
Watching her troubled expression Henry thought that mischief had been sown, then that he was too sensitive; it was ridiculous to be thin-skinned. But when Antonia asked, ‘Was your wife’s room like this before she had it redecorated?’, he was wearily aware that his instinct was right. He answered crisply, ‘Quite like,’ and watched Antonia flush, turn away and gaze at the view.
He said, ‘I see that my wife has been confiding the secret of my bestiality,’ and did not try to relieve either girl of her embarrassment in the pause that ensued.
At last the girls spoke together. ‘The dress?’ Their voices were almost tearful.
Henry said, ‘In here,’ and opened a door into another room. ‘It was my mother’s sitting-room. I use it as a dressing-room.’ He opened a cupboard and lifted out the dress on its hanger.
Antonia exclaimed, ‘How gorgeous!’
While Barbara said simply, ‘We could never pretend it was one of ours, not in a thousand years.’
Henry said, ‘Try,’ and swung the dress to and fro, so that the champagne-coloured chiffon grew lighter and darker as it moved. ‘I thought,’ he said, watching their faces, ‘that perhaps she might be persuaded to get out of bed to wear it.’
Antonia said, ‘If she doesn’t she’s out of her tiny mind.’
Barbara hissed, ‘Honestly, Antonia,’ between clenched teeth and, reaching for the dress, took it from Henry. Holding it against her body, she said, ‘Alas, no looking-glass. May I try your eyes?’ and flirted up at Henry.
Antonia, jealous of her friend, said, ‘There are plenty in Margaret’s room. Come on, let’s take it to her.’
‘Now? This minute?’ Barbara clutched the dress.
‘Of course now, this minute,’ Antonia said tartly. ‘I don’t suppose Henry’s got all day, have you, Henry?’ and looked up to see whether she, too, was reflected in his eyes.
Henry thought that either of these girls would look well in the dress; it would suit Barbara’s brown hair and Antonia’s fair better than Margaret’s marmalade. He said, ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ and held the door open for them.
‘This is unbearable,’ whispered Antonia as they followed him down the corridor. ‘How did he manage to find a full-length dress when they are all shortish this season?’
‘It’s a wedding dress,’ suggested Barbara, also whispering.
‘That colour? Couldn’t be,’ muttered Antonia.
‘For a divorcee?’ said Barbara. ‘I am going to take along my smoky blue; shall you present your pink?’
‘Why not?’ said Antonia. ‘Come on.’
‘Good luck, girls,’ said Henry. Reaching the stairs, he went down them two at a time followed by his dogs.
‘I believe that suggestion about horses is a hoax,’ said Antonia when he was out of earshot. ‘It would be more likely to be dogs.’ She joined Barbara in a refreshing burst of giggles.
Hastening to answer the telephone which was shrilling in the hall, Henry thought that were he a composer he would weave the mix of high-pitched giggles and brazen telephone into five or six anarchic chords. ‘Hullo.’ He snatched up the receiver. ‘Cotteshaw 250.’
‘I have a call for Henry Tillotson,’ said the operator.
‘Speaking.’ (The chords would, of course, be treble.)
‘Hold on,’ said the operator.
Henry held on. Upstairs in his wife’s room the two girls would parade in front of Margaret in the Dior dress. Margaret would register each girl’s fierce desire to wear the dress at the party, willing her, in spite of themselves, to refuse to come. Perhaps on their way to her room they had tossed a coin to decide who, in event of Margaret’s refusal, would wear it? Possibly, since they were such close friends, they had decided to wear it in turn? He remembered how for want of a mirror they had peered into his eyes. ‘Such hard little bitches,’ he murmured into the receiver.
‘Cotteshaw 250, I have a call for you. Are you holding?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘yes.’
The two dogs flopped exhaustedly at his feet, worn out by the trauma of their bath. The temptation to prevent either Antonia or Barbara getting her hands on the dress would be even stronger than his original hope that Margaret would be unable to resist wearing it. Henry thought, I had not planned to hurt the silly little things, but they are sufficiently ebullient to bear the disappointment. ‘Hullo?’ he said angrily into the silent instrument. ‘Hullo?’
‘Henry? We got home sooner than we expected. Are we still welcome at your jamboree?’ said a man’s voice.
‘My God, yes! You certainly are,’ said Henry.
‘Gives me a chance to wear my white dinner jacket,’ said the voice. ‘Want us to bring anything?’
‘Just moral support,’ said Henry, feeling his spirits lift. He put down the receiver and went out to meet Matthew and James returning with their carload of ice and strawberries.
TWELVE
STEPPING FORWARD TO HELP James and Matthew with the ice, Henry realized that he was after all looking forward to the party. ‘That was Hector on the phone,’ he said cheerfully. ‘He’s going to wear his white dinner jacket.’
‘I thought they were in Italy,’ said Matthew, opening the boot of his car. ‘I nearly ran over a beastly child. It gave me a terrible fright; your lanes are dangerous. I only have a black dinner jacket. If I’d known—’ If I’d known, Matthew thought, I could have hired a white dinner jacket from Moss Bros. It would have pleased Antonia.
Henry, peering in at the blocks of ice, said, ‘You seem to have brought the Polar ice cap. In black you can pseudo-mourn for what did not happen.’
‘Come again?’ said Matthew.
‘Henry’s convoluted jokes. My dinner jacket is midnight blue; I always think white makes one look like a waiter,’ James said disparagingly.
‘I can’t see Hector being mistaken for a waiter,’ said Henry. ‘Can’t we carry this between us?’ He gripped one end of an ice block. ‘Come on, James, heave.’
‘Did something go wrong in Italy?’ asked James, taking reluctant hold of the ice. ‘Did Calypso throw a tantrum?’
‘She doesn’t,’ said Henry, and thought, Calypso would never be so mundane. Calypso who, in his teens, he had passionately adored and she, unaware, had married Hector, rich, handsome, old enough to be her father, one of her father’s friends, in fact. And she had, goddammit, fallen in love with the man. ‘It’s Hector,’ he said, ‘who decides to come back early from wherever they go. He can’t bear to be parted from his trees.’
‘Typically English,’ said James, who scarcely knew the Grants. ‘He doesn’t like “abroad”, retires to the country to plant a wood he won’t live to see mature.’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Henry, himself a considerable planter of trees. ‘Could you take the fruit through to Pilar?’ he said to Matthew. ‘We should get this to the scullery,’ he said to James. ‘Can you manage? Say if it’s too heav
y and I’ll get Ebro or Trask.’
‘Of course I can manage,’ said James huffily. ‘I helped load it. Who else is coming besides the Grants?’
‘Peter and Maisie Bullivant and the two Jonathans.’
‘That pair of old queens?’ Walking backwards, James collided with the hall table.
‘Careful,’ said Henry. ‘They are good neighbours,’ he said, resenting James’s tone, ‘and good company. Calypso likes them and so does Hector. They are my oldest friends.’
James said, ‘Oh. Yes. Of course.’
Following with baskets of fruit, Matthew enquired, ‘Where are our girls?’
‘Upstairs with Margaret, trying on dresses, deciding what to wear tonight. Gossiping, perhaps? A spot of verbal dissection? Who knows?’ said Henry. What possessed me, he thought, to clutter up the house with these people? I can’t revive my parents’ parties, that was another age. ‘At least,’ he said maliciously, ‘the Jonathans won’t compete for your girls. Perhaps I should have invited Claire and Evelyn,’ he said, the rise of spirit engendered by Hector on the phone beginning to ebb.
James said, ‘Who are Claire and Evelyn?’, gasping from the weight of the ice, wishing that Henry would not make him walk backwards.
‘Henry’s local lesbians,’ said Matthew, who had briefly met them on a previous visit. ‘A scary pair.’
‘What a timorous fellow you are,’ said Henry. ‘First it’s a child, now it’s two women.’
Resenting their host’s acidity, Matthew, following behind Henry, caught James’s eye, raised his eyebrows and depressed his lips in a sneer.
While Henry and James set the ice down in the scullery, Matthew carried the fruit through to Pilar in the kitchen. ‘Olé’ he said. ‘The frutta!’
‘Thanks,’ said Pilar, who detested having people say ‘Olé’ in condescending accents. ‘Put it on the table.’
‘Por favor,’ said Matthew, ‘what’s the grub for the party, senorita?’
‘Not senorita, I am married lady,’ said Pilar stiffly.
Unrepressed, Matthew said loudly, as to foreigners, ‘Of course, of course, my mistake. I was asking what the menu might be for tonight’s feast, fiesta to you.’
‘Gazpacho, salmon trout, saffron rice with shrimps, asparagus, strawberries and raspberries. Are there not more fruits than these?’
‘Yes, yes, lots more—’
‘Then—’
‘Why don’t I fetch them?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Oh, subito, silly me, subito,’ said Matthew, who was apt to confuse Latin languages, and hurried back to his car.
‘I’ve heard it said,’ said James, as he followed Henry to collect more ice, ‘that Calypso was lovely when she was a girl. Not that she isn’t lovely now, but you must have known her, you are about the same age.’
‘Just about.’ God, I was besotted, thought Henry. ‘I am a few years younger,’ he said casually. ‘She and Hector married early in the war, I believe.’ He had not known that she was married until, in a bar in Cairo, he overheard someone say, ‘There’s Hector Grant, the fellow who divorced old Daphne—Smith she is now—they never got on and now he has married a popsy half his age called Calypso, said to be a raving beauty. She must have married him for his money; jolly well heeled, is Hector.’ I went out and got very, very drunk, thought Henry, and it was the next day, when I had that terrible hangover, that I got father’s letter. ‘She’s an old friend,’ he said to James.
James said, ‘Broke a lot of hearts, from what one hears.’
Henry said, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ One good thing, he thought, was that Calypso had not known he loved her. If she had known she would scarcely have been affected, since at that time every man she met buckled at the knees. ‘It’s funny, really,’ he said. ‘She swears she married for money, but it’s an extremely happy marriage.’
‘Takes all sorts,’ said James. ‘I thought about it a lot before deciding on Barbara.’
Henry said, ‘One more slab of ice,’ remembering Valerie.
‘Let me help this time.’ Matthew caught up with them. ‘You collect the rest of the fruit, James, and I’ll take a turn risking a hernia.’
Upstairs in the west wing Barbara and Antonia sat side by side on Margaret’s golden sofa; in the bed, Margaret lolled on her pillows. Across the foot of the bed the Dior dress lay like an exhausted ghost.
‘Aren’t you going to try it on?’ asked Barbara.
‘I don’t think I can be bothered.’ Margaret yawned.
‘Perhaps you would like one of us to model it for you?’ suggested Antonia. ‘Then you could see how lovely it is on.’
‘If it fits us, it will fit you,’ said Barbara. ‘We are all about the same size.’ She was unsure that Margaret had believed them when they let her suppose the dress belonged to one or other of them. Margaret did not look the sort of woman who had any beliefs at all.
‘I don’t think I should find that interesting,’ said Margaret. The afternoon sun shone in and exposed a glint in her eye; she said something under her breath which sounded like, ‘What a pair of bitches.’ Neither Barbara nor Antonia, comparing notes later, could be sure.
‘Well?’ Antonia stood up. ‘Well?’ She picked up the dress and, holding it against her, twirled in front of the mirrors. ‘I suppose,’ she said, twirling, ‘that you collected all the mirrors in the house and had them hung in here?’
Margaret said, ‘Just about. Put that dress down.’
Antonia returned the dress to the foot of the bed. ‘So you do sometimes get up and get about?’ she said.
‘The Jonathans collected them for me.’ Margaret watched her.
‘Who are the Jonathans?’ Barbara asked.
‘Two of his fellow sodomites,’ said Margaret.
It was peculiar, Barbara thought, the way Margaret referred to Henry as ‘he’ or ‘him’, rarely by name. ‘We have been arranging the flowers for the party,’ she said. ‘I hope you will approve.’
‘An outmoded method of catching your man,’ said Margaret. ‘Valerie arranged flowers, although her man was already netted.’
‘Who was Valerie?’ asked Barbara.
‘James Martineau’s girl. He was very much in love, still is, no doubt.’ Margaret eyed Barbara. ‘They had a room down the corridor, made a lot of noise at night, lots of “oh”s and “oops”. Quite uninhibited. One wondered how the bed stood up to it.’ Margaret laughed, exposing her teeth and tongue. ‘Hang the dress in the cupboard,’ she said to Antonia. ‘Leave it with me. Valerie would look good in that colour.’
Seeing her friend’s stricken expression Antonia, reaching for the dress, said, ‘All right, you think about it. It’s a good colour for the older woman, kind to the skin.’ She shook the dress then, changing the subject, she said, ‘We’ve not only arranged the flowers but created an Edwardian decor. I had this great-aunt,’ she said, moving towards the hanging cupboard. ‘She used to tell me how women behaved in her young day—you would probably know this—they had lovers and when they were asked to house parties they made discreet love under their husband’s noses, and lots more than that, it seems. Oh, I say,’ she said, opening the cupboard door, ‘you have even had your cupboards lined with mirrors. Golly! I see me, me, me lurking in there.’ She hung the dress on a rail. ‘Don’t you weary of seeing you, you, you?’ she asked. ‘All the time?’
Margaret said, ‘No, I don’t,’ and ran her tongue over her teeth, exploring her gums.
Antonia said, ‘You look like an ape doing that, a golden orang-utan.’ She sensed that her friend had not yet recovered from Margaret’s disclosure of Valerie, whoever Valerie might be. ‘And your cupboard,’ she exclaimed, ‘is full to bursting with clothes! What a liar you are, telling us you never have anything new except nighties. You must take us for a pair of simpletons.’
‘I do,’ said Margaret, lolling back on her pillows. ‘D’you mind pulling the blind down before you go? The sun gets in my eyes.’
‘Oh, pull it your
self,’ said Barbara, recovering from her shock. ‘Come on, Antonia, I hear voices. James and Matthew must be back.’ She jumped up from the sofa and, slipping her arm through her friend’s, drew her towards the door. ‘We shall see you at the party,’ she said, opening the door, ‘tonight.’
‘Shan’t be there,’ said Margaret.
Antonia said, ‘Ho!’ as they went through the door. In the passage she said, ‘That woman is a phenomenal liar. Gosh! So Henry now goes in for sodomy as well as horses,’ and snorted with laughter.
Barbara said, ‘What’s sodomy?’
‘Oh, Barbara! What they did in Gomorrah.’
Barbara murmured, ‘This Valerie, who she said was—’
‘Another invention,’ Antonia answered stoutly, too stoutly. ‘If she had existed,’ she went on, ‘you would have heard of her.’
‘Would I?’ Barbara was doubtful about this.
Antonia, equally doubtful, said, ‘Of course you would. James is in love with you; when people are in love they tell each other everything, all their past, the lot.’
‘The more fools they,’ said Barbara with a flash of percipience.
THIRTEEN
WAITING FOR HIS GUESTS to arrive, Henry caught sight of his reflection in the french windows. Would it have been wiser to wear his honest old dinner jacket? No, let Hector in his white tuxedo suffer a pang of envy. Let the pipe-stem trousers, mulberry velvet coat worn over a cream silk shirt, pale blue stock and cummerbund, all from Saville Row and Jermyn Street in bygone ages, outshine Hector’s sharkskin.
My forefathers, thought Henry wryly, were not in the habit of stinting themselves. I am like them physically, he thought; they wore these clothes at their parties. Then, staring at his faint reflection, he questioned: Am I wise to revive a custom long dead? Would my father have revived it? And my mother? Ah, thought Henry, my mother! We may be built the same, my old pa and I, but it stops there; in our marriages we are poles apart. What would my mother have made of Margaret? She would, thought Henry, turning away from his reflection, have put a smart stop to that flight of Father’s fancy. Looking out at the white-clothed tables laid ready for the party, the sparkling glass, shining silver, and Antonia’s and Barbara’s floral arrangements, he imagined his mother’s voice. ‘A pretty idea,’ she would have said, ‘but have you envisaged its consequences?’