At about eleven, there was a great surge from the ballroom into a smaller room next door, where a sit-down supper of caviar, lobster, quail, asparagus, strawberries, and cake was served. I forgot to mention how hot and stuffy the ballroom was, with all the lights blazing away and the hundreds of sweaty dancers, and how noisy, with the band and the chatter. The supper room wasn’t much better, so Julia and I climbed out some French windows onto a balcony for a breath of fresh air. Normally, London balconies are too sooty to go anywhere near, but this one had been draped in red felt for the occasion.
“That’s better,” said Julia, fanning herself. “Well, Sophie, what do you think of Society?”
As I hadn’t talked with anyone new, apart from the maid in the cloakroom, it didn’t seem I was any more a part of Society than before. Julia laughed and said it would get better, then teased me about a young baronet she claimed had been gazing across the ballroom at me.
“More likely gazing at Veronica,” I said. We both looked back through the window to where Toby, Veronica, and Simon were leaning into each other over the tablecloth. Veronica and Simon were squabbling about something, and Toby was laughingly trying to insert himself between them. Veronica looked especially beautiful, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks flushed, her lips as red as the rubies glowing at her throat.
“What a very good-looking family you have,” sighed Julia. She tilted her head towards me. “And they are all family—aren’t they?”
I paused. The Stanley-Rosses are our closest (really, our only) friends, so it seemed silly to keep secrets from them. Yet Julia did love to gossip … But I’d hesitated too long.
“I knew it,” she said triumphantly. “Veronica and Simon are so awfully alike.”
“Don’t say that around Veronica,” I warned her. “And Aunt Charlotte isn’t exactly thrilled about it, either.”
“Oh, of course,” Julia assured me. “My lips are sealed. Although I think it’s rather romantic—it gives him a mysterious, brooding air.” This certainly seemed to be a view shared by others, because after supper, Simon was dragged onto the dance floor by a succession of glamorous women. Not that I paid any attention to that. Well, not much.
Veronica and I went back to Milford the next day, but Toby and Aunt Charlotte stayed because they’d been invited to King George’s coronation at Westminster Abbey. Toby gave a very funny account of watching the peers shuffling into the Abbey with packets of sandwiches concealed under their coronets and flasks of whisky tucked inside their robes. He said he wished he’d thought to do the same, because the ceremony seemed to go on for hours, enlivened only by a couple of mishaps. The Archbishop of Canterbury fumbled with the crown at a crucial moment, and a bishop stepped on the royal robes as the new King was trying to get out of his chair. Little Princess Margaret, watching from the royal gallery, squirmed about, tapped her feet, poked her sister Elizabeth in the arm, yawned widely, and otherwise made her boredom very clear. It was some consolation to hear that there are other badly behaved princesses in these parts, because Henry, we discovered when we arrived at Milford Park, had just chopped all her hair off with the garden shears.
“Much easier to manage,” she said cheerfully. “This way I don’t have to curl it or comb it or whatever it is Miss Bullock keeps trying to make me do.”
Henry’s governess had also ordered a lot of new summer clothes for Henry, but as they are mostly frilly and pastel-colored, Henry refuses to wear them. She stomps around in her riding gear or Toby’s old trousers, which aren’t nearly as long as they used to be on her—she’s shot up at least three inches this year. It must be all the good food. She certainly seems happy, spending hours hurtling over fences on her pony or taking Carlos and her piglet, Estella, for long walks. (Estella’s name comes from Great Expectations—she’s a very haughty-looking piglet.) I must say Henry was also very helpful at the Old Mill House, washing our paintbrushes, running errands, and chopping wood for the stove. And I suppose there’s still another six or seven years before she needs to put on a frock and start practicing Court curtseys.
Our curtseys at Buckingham Palace, I should note, went off rather well last night. I did wobble a bit coming up from one of them, but I don’t think anyone noticed—certainly not the King or Queen, who were propped like little wax dolls upon their thrones (and quite possibly asleep, in the case of the King). It was interesting to see Buckingham Palace from the inside. The furniture and paintings and chandeliers were certainly very grand, but it was disappointing to see how grimy everything was. Perhaps it was just the week I’d spent at the Old Mill House, but I found myself longing to give the walls of the Throne Room a good going-over with a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush.
After our official presentation to the King and Queen, we all trooped down some red-carpeted stairs for a champagne supper in the basement of the Palace, where Toby and Simon were immediately surrounded by admiring debutantes. The boys both looked very dashing in Court dress—black velvet coat with white lace jabot, blue sash and medallion of the Order of Benedict worn on top of that, black knee breeches, and black silk stockings (with black cotton ones worn underneath, so their hairy legs didn’t show). There’d been a lot of good-natured bantering between them over who had the better legs, although Toby said it wasn’t a fair competition, with one of his calves skinnier than the other after being squashed in plaster all that time. It was nice to see them getting on so well, because they were very formal and polite with each other for quite a while after the Elchester ball. I think Toby felt Simon had spent a bit too much time dancing with one particular lady. They must have made up while Veronica and I were in Milford. I am not going to speculate on how they managed this—although it may just have been that Toby felt sorry for Simon, who had to rush off to Poole to calm down Rebecca (she’d thrown a massive tantrum after her roommate was declared “cured” and sent home).
We’d been invited to several debutante dances scheduled for the same night as our Court presentation, but Veronica was most insistent that we attend one particular dance. I couldn’t understand why, as it was the coming-out ball for one of the most poisonous debutantes we’d encountered thus far (I shan’t call her catty—that’s unfair to cats). It turned out the girl’s godmother was a friend of Aunt Charlotte’s, so we didn’t have a hope of avoiding the occasion. The house in Cadogan Square was rather too small for the number of guests, and I lost Veronica in the crush soon after our arrival.
“Who’s that interesting-looking chap with Veronica?” Toby asked nearly an hour later, nodding towards the doorway. “The one in the baggy suit. He’s been talking to her for ages.”
I glanced over my shoulder and nearly dropped my plate of salmon. “It’s Daniel!” I whispered.
“Is it really?” said Toby, brightening. “Excellent!” He stood up and waved both arms over his head until he’d caught Veronica’s attention (as well as the attention of nearly everyone else in the room).
“Aunt Charlotte will be furious,” I groaned, but fortunately, our guardian didn’t seem to be anywhere nearby. “So that’s why Veronica was determined to come to this dance! She must have told him to meet her here.”
Veronica was leading Daniel over by then, and he looked exactly as he had four or five years ago, the last time I’d seen him. He wore the same round spectacles, which were still slipping down his nose and being shoved back into place with a long, ink-streaked forefinger; his warm brown eyes were still peering out at the world through the smudged lenses with amusement and a very gentle sort of cynicism; his dark hair was still straggling around his ears and down his neck, badly in need of the attentions of a barber. He wasn’t the slightest bit handsome, and yet he was undeniably pleasant to look upon. I couldn’t help grinning back at him as he arrived in front of me.
“Sophie, I would never have recognized you!” he said, grasping my hand with both of his. “All grown up, I see! And you must be Toby—I’ve heard so much about you!”
While Toby was complimenting Dan
iel on his suit (“You’ll start a new trend, like Oxford bags in the twenties.” “Well, actually, I borrowed it from my cousin—”), I pulled Veronica to one side and gave her a pointed, enquiring look.
“He was hungry, poor thing,” she said unrepentantly. “His landlady doesn’t feed him properly, and there’s always far too much food at these events. Besides, I needed to discuss the Basque refugees with him. He’s spoken to the Committee and got us a letter of introduction to the children’s camp. They’re supposed to be arriving on the twenty-third now …”
“I think I might write an article on this,” said Daniel a short while later, between mouthfuls of roast chicken and asparagus. “ ‘The Decadent Life of the Debutante.’ As careworn maids slave away in furnace-like kitchens, aristocrats loll about upstairs, stuffing themselves with lobster and caviar …”
“And don’t forget the footmen,” said Toby, who was getting along famously with Daniel. “Servingmen staggering under silver salvers of sumptuous sustenance. And the chauffeurs, shivering in the chill air as they chafe their chilblains.”
“You should write an article yourself,” said Daniel. “You’ve a definite flair for alliteration. I think a talent for words must run in your family.”
Then he turned to me and we had a nice long discussion about poetry, until Veronica spotted Aunt Charlotte at the far end of the room and Daniel decided to make a hasty exit. Although not before jotting down the names of some contemporary poets for me on the back of my dance card—he was horrified when I admitted I’d never even heard of W. H. Auden.
Oh—and that reminds me to note that Toby has just received a letter offering him a place at Christ Church, Oxford, to read History. He’d already reported that he’d managed to get through the entrance examination all right, thanks to Veronica cramming facts and theories into him for weeks beforehand, and that his interview had gone extremely well—mostly because one of the dons had been the tutor of our father and another, very elderly don recalled our grandfather with great fondness. Toby sounded rather resigned about it all, but then he found out that Rupert got in, too, and became a bit more cheerful. (Apparently, Rupert had been trying to talk his father into letting him go to the Royal Veterinary College instead of Oxford, but without success.)
I should also mention how magnificent Aunt Charlotte looked last night at Buckingham Palace. She wore a full-skirted midnight-blue satin gown heavily embroidered with gold, and she was absolutely ablaze with diamonds. A few of the gentlemen seemed quite dazzled, and not just by the jewels, which made me wonder, not for the first time, why she never remarried. She might seem ancient to us, but she was barely in her twenties when poor old Uncle Arthur died during the war (he wasn’t a soldier; he just had a heart attack while inspecting one of his factories). And she was even more splendid-looking then—I’ve seen the photographs—so she must have had lots of suitors. Perhaps she thought they were just after her money. Or perhaps her experiences with Uncle Arthur made her decide that men simply weren’t worth bothering about. Amongst all her advice to us, she has dropped a hint or two that, for women, the physical side of marriage is mostly a matter of duty rather than pleasure. Of course, Uncle Arthur was so old—in his sixties, according to Veronica—that he probably couldn’t do anything at all. It’s no wonder they didn’t manage to have any children.
I suppose it’s lucky for us that Aunt Charlotte did keep her fortune to herself, given that none of us have any money of our own. Simon has just negotiated a monthly allowance for each of us. Veronica’s and mine are very generous (though not half as generous as Toby’s, but he’ll have more expenses, being at university). We’re expected to pay for everyday clothes and hair-dressing appointments and things like that out of it, but Veronica has already spent all hers on supplies for the Old Mill House.
And now I really must go to bed, as I can barely keep my eyes open. We didn’t get home till half past three this morning. Being part of Society is such an exhausting business …
27th May 1937
The Basque children arrived on the SS Habana on Saturday evening, and on Monday, Veronica and I drove across to Southampton to visit their camp. It was an amazing sight—hundreds of white tents had sprouted on what had been a bare field only a few weeks ago.
“Just like the tepees in that cowboy film,” breathed Henry, who’d insisted on coming along. “And look at all the people!”
There were nurses pinning back the flaps of a marquee, Boy Scouts carting buckets and benches, young men inspecting a freshly dug drain, and lorry drivers unloading crates of food. And then there were the children, thousands of them, ranging in age from about four years old to fifteen, running in and out of tents, straddling benches, clustered round a water pipe.
“The camp organizer’s called Mr. Sams,” said Veronica as we got out of the car. “I need to speak with him or Mrs. Manning. Henry, what’s that?”
“Just some things for the children,” said Henry, hugging a large, roughly wrapped parcel.
“Oh, that’s very thoughtful of you,” said Veronica.
“Wait a minute,” I said, suddenly suspicious, but Henry had already skipped off and accosted a young lady with a clipboard, who beamed, accepted the parcel, and marched away with it. (Later, of course, I discovered Henry had given away her entire collection of summer frocks.)
Veronica was very warmly welcomed, as few of the British volunteers spoke Spanish. In no time, she was translating in the medical tent while I offered to help serve the children’s first English luncheon. It was heartbreaking: The children were so thin, so used to subsisting on whatever they could scrounge. They were astonished by the quantity of food and, in particular, all the soft white bread—one girl grabbed a piece and stuffed it in her pocket, announcing in a loud voice that she was saving it for her mother back home. As I washed up afterwards, another small child attached herself to my skirt and started sobbing for her mother. Luckily, Henry had brought along her skipping rope and a football, which were well received by a large group of children.
There was a bad moment later in the afternoon, when some aeroplanes from nearby Eastleigh Aerodrome thundered overhead. Instant panic—all the children screamed in terror and bolted for cover, and I have to admit my first instinct was to join them. The whine of the engines brought back such dreadful memories—half an hour later, I was still trembling. Veronica said afterwards that she dropped a thermometer and almost dived under the table when she heard them, which made me feel a bit better. It made it seem less like cowardice and more like a normal reflex, like one’s knee jerking when a doctor hits it with a little rubber mallet.
We could only spend a day at the camp, because we had to go back to London for our coming-out ball. Montmaray House, when we arrived, was also a maelstrom of activity, although of a rather different type. A battalion of servants was busy polishing everything from the enormous crystal chandeliers to the marble floors. Footmen bustled around the ballroom arranging chairs along the walls while maids snapped lengths of damask over the tables in the largest drawing room and set out the sparkling glasses and china, the monogrammed linen napkins, and the antique silverware stamped with the FitzOsborne crest. Immense arrangements of white lilies were carried into the hall, white climbing roses were twined around the banisters and secured with white satin bows, and vases of white tulips were set upon each table, along with hundreds of white candles in silver candlesticks. Aunt Charlotte had also decided Veronica and I would be wearing … white.
“She might as well stick a sign on us,” grumbled Veronica. “Virgin nieces—all reasonable offers of marriage considered. She could hold a double wedding tomorrow morning in the drawing room, we wouldn’t even need to change our dresses.”
“It’s all right for you,” I said. “You look wonderful in white. I look as though I’m dying of consumption.”
Toby, who was perched on the end of Veronica’s bed, suggested I put on a pink-lined sash and asked Barnes to fetch all Aunt Charlotte’s amethysts—which did improv
e matters somewhat. I asked him whom I’d be sitting next to at dinner.
“Lord Londonderry, I think,” he said. “Veronica’s beside Lord Elchester.”
“Not again! I’m always stuck with that ghastly old Fascist!” exclaimed Veronica. Phoebe, who’d been trying to fasten Veronica’s pearls, squeaked and dropped them on the carpet, whereupon they slithered under the dressing table.
“Never mind, Phoebe. I’ll get them,” I said hastily. “We’re pretty much finished, anyway. Why don’t you go down and have supper now?” Phoebe ran off, sniffling.
“What is wrong with that girl?” said Veronica, staring after her.
“Perhaps she’s in love,” suggested Toby. “Suffering from some unrequited passion—that always turns everything tragic.”
“Or else she’s still worried about her brother,” I said as I retrieved the pearls. “He was in some sort of trouble in Liverpool. She started to tell me about it once, then Aunt Charlotte came in and she got scared off.”
“Well, if she ever manages to explain it, please do something to help her,” said Veronica. “She’s getting more dim-witted by the hour. I caught her fumbling through my post the other day—said she was looking for the shopping list Barnes gave her. Why on earth would it be on my desk?”
“Speaking of which, you haven’t had any more of those poison-pen letters, have you?” asked Toby.
“Not really,” she said, which was Veronica-speak for “Yes, but stop fussing about it.” I finally got the diamond clasp secured on her necklace, and she leaned forward to straighten her coronet. “Anyway, Toby, I meant to ask you about—” There was a knock on the door. “What do you want?”
This last was addressed to Simon, who walked into the room looking very elegant in his tails and white tie. He ignored her and held out his wrist so that Toby could fasten his cuff link. “You look very nice, Sophia,” he said, smiling at me.
The FitzOsbornes in Exile Page 11