by Tessa Hadley
Ann was accomplished at congratulating other women on their engagements. She hardly felt a pang – felt instead something sprightly and audacious, more like relief. — Do you know about our prices? she said tactfully. — I could show you a price list.
— Oh, that won’t be a problem, Nola began to say. — Because the man I’m marrying, my fiancé –
And then she had to break off, because her eyes brimmed with tears and a red heat came into her cheeks; Ann had an intuition that the flush ran thrillingly all over her body. Who’d have thought that Nola Higgins would be susceptible to that kind of thrill? She was bending over her handbag, fishing for a handkerchief. — How silly, she said. — It’s ridiculous, Ann. But I’m just so happy. I can’t quite believe that I’m saying those words, that we’re really going to be married. He’s such a lovely chap. And he’ll be able to pay your prices. I knew you wouldn’t be cheap.
— Aren’t you the lucky one, Ann admired. — A lovely chap, and he can pay as well!
— I am lucky! Don’t I know it. I was his nurse, you know, when he was very poorly. That’s how we met. But it’s not how it sounds: that isn’t what he wants me for, just to look after him. I mean, to see him now you couldn’t tell he was ever ill, except he has a little limp, that’s all.
— I’m happy for you, Ann said.
Nola sat very still, holding up her coffee cup in both hands, smiling almost dazedly, accepting the tribute. She had brought some fabric with her in a paper bag – the brides often did, and Ann usually had to talk them out of it. Her fiancé had a lot of material in his home, Nola said, put away in trunks and cupboards. And there were some lovely old clothes too: Ann should come out and see sometime. Ann made a politely interested noise, wondering if he kept a second-hand shop; she was imagining someone much older than Nola, respectable and considerate, quiet, perhaps a widower. The material in the bag smelled of mothballs but it looked expensive – thick silk brocade, off-white, embroidered with cream flowers. — It’s old, Nola said, but it’s never been used. And there’s some lace too, good lace. I didn’t bring that – I wanted to ask you first.
She fingered the brocade uneasily, staring down at it. — It’s too much, isn’t it? I’ll look like a dog’s dinner, that’s what I said. I just want to wear something sensible, look like myself. But he insisted, said I had to bring it.
Ann really was convinced that if only you could find the right clothes you could become whatever you wanted, you could transform yourself. She let the heavy fabric fall out of its folds and made Nola stand up, then held it against her in front of the cheval mirror, pulling it in around her waist, frowning expertly at Nola’s reflection across her shoulder, tugging and smoothing the cloth as if she were moulding something. — You see? The rich off-white is very flattering against your dark hair and your lovely skin. There isn’t enough for a whole dress if you want full-length, but I think we could get a fitted bodice and a little peplum out of it and find a matching plain fabric for the skirt. With your full figure you want to go for a nice clean silhouette, nothing fussy. This could look stunning, actually.
— Do you think so? Nola’s eyes, doubting and trusting, looked out from the reflection into hers.
KIT CAME SLAMMING through the glass door after lunch, in the middle of telling some crazy story, screaming with laughter, half cut already, with a couple of men friends in tow. Ann was just starting on the lining for the lilac suit. One of the friends was a medic, Ray, Kit’s current boyfriend, or he thought he was – Ann knew about other things, one married man in particular. The second friend was also a medic. Ann hadn’t seen him before: Donny Ross, who played the piano, apparently, in a jazz band. Donny Ross had a body as thin as a whip and cavernous cheeks and thick jet-black hair with a long quiff that flopped into his eyes. His mouth was small and his grin was surprisingly girlish, showing his small teeth, though he didn’t grin much – or say much. He was mostly saturnine and judgemental. It was obvious to Ann right away that Donny didn’t think much of Kit. He saw through her bossy know-how and the whole parade of her snobbery: going on about how Proust was her favourite author and her mother used to have her hats made in the Champs-Elysées and weren’t the little bureaucrats who wanted our taxes so ghastly – as if she couldn’t guess what Ann had guessed already, that Donny was a socialist.
He got up while Kit was still talking and went into the kitchenette, banging through the cupboards, looking for something he didn’t find – alcohol, probably; he came out with the bag of sugar and a cup of the coffee that Ann had made for Nola earlier, which must have been quite cold. Then he sat spooning sugar out of the bag into his cup, no saucer, spilling it all over the table, six or seven spoonfuls just to make the coffee bearable, and Kit didn’t say a word about the sugar bag, though she was so particular about everything being served up in the right way. Perhaps Donny Ross frightened her, Ann thought.
She told Kit about Nola’s wedding then; best to get it over with while she was in this mood, and there was company. — I know it’s not exactly our style, she said. — But we could do with the work.
She gave Kit the piece of paper where Nola had written down the details, and expected her to make her usual disdainful face when she read through it, as if something smelled funny. Kit had a long, horsey face, tousled honey-coloured hair, and a stubby, sexy, decisive little body, like an overdeveloped child’s; she expressed all her tastes and distastes as if they afflicted her physically, through her senses. To Ann’s surprise, she sat up excitedly. — Oh Lawd, this is a marvel. I can’t believe you don’t know where this wedding is, you angel-innocent. It’s the most perfect little bijou Queen Anne house, tucked away into its own deer park on the way to Bath. Look what you’ve done, you clever daft thing! The pictures will be in all the good papers.
— But Nola Higgins is from Fishponds. We were at school together.
— I don’t care who she is. She’s marrying a Perney, and they’ve owned Thwaite Park for centuries.
Then Ann began to understand why Nola thought she was so lucky. She explained it all to Kit, and showed her the old brocade that Nola had left. — She said he had lots more fabric in his house. And old clothes too – she thought I might like to see them. And I turned her down! I thought he must be running some kind of second-hand shop!
— Which, in a funny way, you could say he was, said Donny Ross.
Kit flopped back onto the chaise longue in exaggerated despair, limbs flung out like a doll’s. — When she comes back, you’re to tell her you’ve changed your mind. I’d die for an invitation to go out there and poke around. Imagine what they’ve got in their attic!
— Skeletons, Donny Ross said.
Later that afternoon, while Kit put on different outfits to entertain Ray – and at some point Ray exhibited himself too, in a green satin gown, made up with Kit’s lipstick and powder – Donny Ross came prowling around where Ann was cutting out the lining for the suit. — Do you mind? he said. And he called her an angel-innocent and a clever daft thing, in a comical, mincing, falsetto voice. Ann didn’t usually let people into the sewing room; she was anxious about keeping the fabrics pristine. With his hands in his pockets, frowning, Donny was working through some jazz tune to himself, in a way you couldn’t really call singing; it was more as if he were imitating all the different instruments in turn, taking his hands out of his pockets to bang out the drum part on the end of her cutting table. Ann might just as well not have been there: he threw his head back and stared up into the corners of the room as if all the evidence of her sewing, spread out around him, was simply too frivolous for him to look at. It was peculiar that she didn’t feel any urge to entertain or charm him, though she knew how charming she could be when she tried. She carried on steadily, concentrating on her work. Some new excitement seemed to be waiting, folded up inside her, not even tried on yet.
NOLA MET KIT when she dropped in to look at Ann’s designs. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform; she wanted to keep on working until she mar
ried. Kit went all out to win her over and Nola sat blinking and smiling – her plain black shoes planted together on the floor, her back straight – under the assault of Kit’s crazy exuberance, her flattery. Kit really was good fun; when you were with her something new and outrageous could happen at any moment. Going through the drawings, Nola was full of trepidation. The models in Ann’s designs were haughty and impossibly slender, drifting with their noses tipped up disdainfully. This was how she’d learned to draw them at art college; it was only a kind of shorthand, an aspiration. If you knew how to read the designs, they gave all the essential information about seams and darts.
— She knows what she’s doing, Kit reassured Nola. — She’s a genius.
Kit sewed well, and she had a good eye for style; she could work hard when she put her mind to it, but she couldn’t design for toffee or cut a pattern. — Ann’s going to make my fortune for me, she said. — You wait until we move the business up to London. We’ll be dressing all the stars of stage and screen. I’d put my life in her hands.
— These do look beautiful, Nola conceded yearningly.
Eventually they decided on something classic, full-length, very simple, skimming Nola’s figure without hugging it. Ann would use the brocade Nola had brought for the bodice and the sleeves, and a matching silk satin, if they could find it, for the skirt. — Unless there’s any more of the brocade?
Of course they’d planned all along to ask her this, angling for an invitation to Thwaite Park. And eagerly Nola invited them. — Blaise would love to meet you, she said. Privately, Kit chose to doubt this. — He probably thinks it’s pretty funny, she said, — being invited to meet his fiancée’s dressmaker. I mean, their love affair’s the most darling romantic story I’ve ever heard, and Nola’s an angel – but what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall at that wedding! Fishponds meets Thwaite Park.
— What do you know about Fishponds? Ann said sharply.
— Come on, Annie-Pannie. You think it’s pretty extraordinary too, I know you do. Don’t be chippy, don’t get on your old socialist high horse, just because you’ve got a pash on Mr Misery-Guts Donny Ross.
SO KIT AND Ann drove out one Sunday, with Ray and Donny Ross, for a picnic at Thwaite Park. Kit was engaged to Ray by this time, though Ann didn’t take that too seriously. She’d been engaged several times already; and anyway Ann knew the other thing was still going on with Kit’s married man, Charlie, who was a lawyer. Ann had bumped into Charlie recently, out shopping with his wife and children. She’d been waltzing around the fitting room with him only the night before, while Kit played Edith Piaf on the portable Black Box gramophone he’d bought her, yet when he passed her in the street he pretended not to know her, staring at her blankly. His wife was hanging onto his arm, and Charlie held his gloves in his clasped hands behind his back; as Ann looked after them, he waggled his free fingers at her in a jaunty, naughty secret signal.
On the day of the picnic it was warm for the first time since winter and the clear air was as heady as spirits. Ray put down the roof on his convertible and drove fast. Kit tied on a headscarf, but Ann hadn’t thought to bring one, so her hair whipped in her face, and by the time they turned in between the crumbling stone gateposts – there were no gates; they must have been requisitioned for the war effort – she was bewildered with the speed and the rushing air. The house was a Palladian box, perfectly proportioned, understated to the point of plainness, its blonde stone blackened with soot; sooty sheep grazed on a long meadow sloping down in front of it. A few skinny lambs scampered under the ancient oaks, where new leaves were just beginning to spring out, implausibly, from the grey crusty limbs. There were other cars in the drive and in the car park, because the house and grounds were open to the public. Laughing and talking confidently – at least, Kit was laughing and confident – they walked right past the main entrance, where tickets were on sale; peacocks were shrieking and displaying on the stable wall. Nola had instructed them to come round the side of the house, then press the bell beside a door marked ‘Private’ in white painted letters. Ann half expected a butler. Donny was stiff with disapproval of class privilege.
Blaise Perney – who opened the side door himself, promptly, as if he’d been waiting for them – wasn’t in the least what they’d prepared for. To begin with, he looked younger than Nola: very tall and ugly, diffident and smiling and stooped, with a long bony face and hair like crinkled pale silk. He welcomed them effusively, blushing as if they were doing him a favour, and said that he was so looking forward to getting to know them. Ann thought with relief that Blaise could easily be won over; she always made this assessment, when she first met men, of whether or not she could get round them if she chose to test her power. Charlie, for instance – although he liked her and flirted with her madly – she could never have deflected from his own path in a million years, whereas Ray was a walkover. Blaise said that Nola was packing a picnic in the kitchen. He led them through a succession of shadowy, chilly, gracious rooms with shuttered windows, apologising for the mess and the state of decay: his dragging foot seemed to be part of his diffidence.
These were private rooms, not open to the public, not arranged to look like scenes from the past but with the past and present simply jumbled together: a cheap little wireless set balanced on a pile of leather-bound books, a milkman’s calendar among the silver-framed photos on a desk whose roll-top was broken, an ordinary electric fire in a huge marble fireplace dirty with wood ash. Ann found this much more romantic; it set her imagination racing. What she could have done with this place if it were hers! In the cavernous, dark kitchen, where the giant-sized iron range was cold and there were fifty dinner plates in a wooden rack, Nola in a summer dress was boiling eggs on a Baby Belling, looking surprisingly at home. Ann’s envy was only fleeting – it was benevolent, gracious. Whatever lay ahead for her, she thought, was better than any house.
When they took their picnic outside, Blaise said that they should have seen the gardens when his mother was alive. Nola in her funny, shapeless flowery dress, squinting and smiling into the sun, looked more like a mother than anyone’s wife; they saw how she would restore things and bring back order. Scrambling up among birch trees in a little wood, they were out of the way of the visitors on the paths below; the bluebells were like pools of water among the trees, reflecting the sky. Ray and Donny raced like schoolboys and wrestled each other to the ground, while Kit kept up her bubbling talk, making it sound to Blaise as if she and Ann were specialists in old fabrics. Hoping for more brocade, she said, they hadn’t started yet on Nola’s dress. Blaise said they must go in search of the brocade later. There were all sorts of old clothes and fabrics and embroideries upstairs in the cedarwood presses, he told them; he’d hardly looked in there himself but would love them to discover something valuable, which he could sell. — You can help yourself to anything you like. I expect it’s all old junk. I’ll show you around properly when the public have gone. Not that I’m objecting to the public, because they are my bread and butter.
— What happened to your leg, old man? Ray asked.
Blaise apologised, because he wasn’t a war hero. He’d managed to catch the dreaded polio – wasn’t that childish of him? Nola spread out a tablecloth in a little hollow among the bluebells, while the young doctors interrogated her sternly about neck stiffness, light intolerance, respiratory muscle weakness. Blaise rolled up his trouser leg and Ray and Donny examined his twisted, skinny calf; Kit turned her face away, because she didn’t like looking at sickness or deformed things. Yet Blaise Perney was hardly deformed at all; he’d made a wonderful recovery. He told them that Nola had saved his life, and she laughed with shy pleasure. She said he was just lucky, that was all.
The surprise was that Blaise turned out to be as much of a socialist as Donny Ross, even if he did own a deer park. He didn’t object to any of the taxes, he said. The only damn problem was finding enough money to pay them, because old houses these days didn’t come with money attached. Th
waite was a bottomless pit when it came to money. He ought to give the place up, sell it for a hotel or something, but he was too sentimental. Anyway, there were an awful lot of big old houses on the market, and it wasn’t a good time in the hotel business. He and Nola called each other ‘dear’ and passed each other salt, in a twist of greaseproof paper, to go with the eggs. Kit had made little crustless sandwiches with cucumber and foie gras from a tin, and pinched bottles of champagne from her father’s wine cellar. She still lived at home in the suburbs with her widowed daddy, retired from his insurance job, whom she adored – though Ann thought he was a horrible old man. He’d told her once that little tarts ought to be flogged, to teach them a lesson.
They drank his champagne anyway, from eighteenth-century glasses, which they’d brought from the house because Blaise couldn’t find anything else. When the champagne was finished, Kit brought out a bottle of her father’s Armagnac – I won’t half be in trouble, she said. And somehow that afternoon they achieved the miraculous drunkenness you only get once or twice in a lifetime, brilliant and without consequences, not peaking and subsiding but running weightlessly on and on. Afterwards Ann could hardly remember any subject they’d talked about, or what had seemed so clever or so funny. When they wandered in the grounds in the evening, after the public had gone, Nola took off her black shoes and walked carefree in her stockings. And Donny Ross’s pursuit of Ann was as intent and tense as a stalking cat’s: invisible to everyone else, it seemed to her to flash through all the disparate, hazy successive phases of the afternoon like a sparking, dangerous live wire. They lay close together but not touching, in the long grass under a tall ginkgo tree, whose leaves were shaped like exquisite tiny paddles, translucent bright grass-green. The light faded in the sky to a deep turquoise and the peacocks came to roost in the tree above them, clotted lumps of darkness, with their long tails hanging down like bell pulls.