Debutantes

by Charlotte Bingham

  He found her lying on the floor of her boudoir crying her heart out like a child. Gently he lifted his poor Jane up and sat with her in his arms. Her anguish was such that for a while Herbert was convinced that she might die from it, but when a woman cries with such force all a sensible man can do is hold her ever tighter and pray for her to stop. He didn’t bother with words because he knew that when someone was feeling as hurt as his beloved Jane there were none that would do justice to his pity for her.

  After what seemed an age he lifted her up in his arms and carried her bodily through to her bedroom where her maid Sally was waiting to undress her mistress and to put her to bed.

  ‘No, Sally, you go off. I’ll see to your mistress tonight. Go on, away with you,’ he ordered.

  As he began to undress her Jane stopped crying, and began to help undress herself. Finally she crawled into bed and buried herself under the bedclothes as if she was trying to hide herself from sight for ever.

  ‘No one ever got hanged for giving a bad party, you know,’ Herbert told the shape in the bed. ‘Even so, it weren’t exactly a night to remember so I thought I’d take you abroad. Switzerland. Or south of France maybe. If we went to the south of France we could hire a yacht. Buy one if necessary. We needn’t take it out of the harbour. We could just enjoy ourselves. Get over all this. The three of us. You, me and Louisa. We could have ourselves a bit of fun in the sun.’

  But as he pulled the sheet back from her face, Herbert saw that he could not raise a smile from his wife, and even without the sheet to cover her face she still went on staring blankly at the ceiling above her, as if life had stopped for her at the very moment when she realized that they had been snubbed by the future King of England.

  Watching how still and pale she was Herbert became worried. ‘Jane?’ he said, sitting down on the bed beside her. ‘Jane, you don’t look at all well, love – really you don’t. You just lie there while I go and instruct Williams to send someone for the doctor.’

  ‘No.’ Jane put out a cold hand and took his to stop him going. ‘I don’t want a doctor, Herbert, and I don’t need one. I just want you, that’s all. So please get into bed and hold me, that’s all I want. I just want you to hold me.’

  Herbert quickly undressed down to his underwear, turned down the oil lamps and slipped into bed beside her. Her terrible tears and her semi-comatose state had now given way to a fit of shivering, so gathering her in his arms he held her to him for the rest of the night. Yet all the time, while he was waiting for Jane to fall asleep, and then for sleep to come to himself, through those long dark hours and finally above the steady breathing of his wife once she had at last dropped off, all Herbert could hear was the sound of that derisive chorus, a carolling in his head of ‘Ee bah goom! Ee bah goom! Ee bah goom!’

  THE BOND

  Even when Herbert Forrester confessed to his wife in full the events of that afternoon in Mount Street she still refused to blame him, putting the fault firmly at her own door. For a start, Herbert had not done anything wrong. He might have found himself compromised but he had not actually done anything which could be considered sinful. Secondly, Jane claimed the fault to be hers because as she insisted hers had been the social aspirations, not his. It had been she who had taken up the idea of Louisa’s being presented at Court rather than remaining in York where, in spite of Herbert’s opinion of the most eligible of the local bachelors, if the truth were to be told she would have made a perfectly good match and probably a much happier one than any she might have made in London.

  Besides, it had to be faced that like her mother Louisa was no beauty, Jane reminded Herbert. In fact much as they loved her she was likely a little too large for sophisticated southern tastes and probably a mite too uncultured as well. Blessings often came disguised, surely Herbert remembered that? And this most surely was one of them, since within four months of their return to York Louisa had become betrothed to the exceptionally pleasant and comfortably situated only son of Sir Jack Gannon, a coal magnate who in the last year had moved from Huddersfield to York and had recently become a business associate of Herbert’s. Jack Gannon’s son Philip was not the most handsome young man who ever lived, Jane readily admitted, and he was uncommonly shy, but he quite obviously loved their daughter and Louisa just as obviously reciprocated his feelings.

  ‘So you see, Herbert dear,’ she reminded him several times, ‘embrace your reverses. They really can be blessings in disguise.’

  But while Herbert was perfectly content to be reminded over and over again of this particular truism, as indeed he was delighted that his daughter was after all to make such an advantageous union, he knew he would never be truly happy again until he was avenged for the social shame they both had suffered at the hands of Daisy Lanford.

  ‘Ee bah goom indeed,’ he used to seethe to himself in the morning as he shaved. ‘I’ll ee bah goom ’em all right. They won’t know what hit ’em.’

  At first, despite his knowledge of Hell’s famous rage, he had found it hard fully to accept quite why the Lanford woman, as he referred to her, had done what she had done. After all she had not had to suffer the indignity of his making love to her, and although he recognized her pride might have been hurt, the hurt could only have been incidental and would most certainly have been mollified if not healed entirely by his subsequent generosity. But then the more he thought about it the more he realized that it wasn’t just because he had turned her down. It was because he had turned down someone who had been the mistress of the Prince of Wales. People such as Herbert Forrester weren’t meant to do that. He was a vulgarian and she was an aristocrat and it simply was not done for someone such as he to make someone such as she feel immoral. That was the real reason why the Lanford woman had been so determined to humiliate Mr Herbert Ee-bah-goom Forrester.

  But what concerned Herbert Forrester much more than his social disgrace was the after-effect it had on his beloved Jane’s health.

  Immediately following the debacle Jane had seemed to be well enough, perhaps a little more silent than usual and without her usual appetite, but then Herbert considered such things were only to be expected. She had sufficient energy to supervise the packing up of their belongings at Wynyates once it had been decided to put the house on the market and move back as a family to York once again, although Herbert was to keep on a rental in London at least until he had appointed and overseen the installation of a fully competent manager in the new offices. But once back in York and reinstalled in the familiar comforts of Abbey Close Jane began to decline alarmingly. She completely lost her appetite and rarely got out of her bed, symptoms which the doctors insisted should not be allowed too much prominence, particularly following a shock such as the one she had apparently suffered. Nor was it uncommon for this sort of shock to be delayed. Bed-rest and the lightest of diets was prescribed, to be followed it was further suggested by recuperation abroad in a country such as Switzerland.

  So Jane was put to bed full time by Herbert precisely as the doctors ordered and the staff at Abbey Close were given instructions to see to her every need. She was not to be left unattended, even when she was sleeping, and every request she might make was to be met. Twice a day the hall boy was instructed to call on his employer at his offices and report on his wife’s progress, once in the morning and then, following Herbert’s own visit home at lunchtime, a second time in the afternoon. After three months both the doctors and Herbert noticed a distinct improvement in the patient, so much so that Herbert was once more able to turn his thoughts to taking her abroad for a long rest.

  Then, three days before they were due to leave for the continent, Sir Jack Gannon invited Herbert to dine privately at his club. Herbert was pleased to receive the invitation, imagining they were meeting to discuss arrangements for the marriage of their offspring, and he left Abbey Close in doubly good spirits because that day Jane had taken her first proper outing from the house since she had fallen ill. When he arrived at the club it was very busy, crowded with
several large parties of men who had been at the races that afternoon and were celebrating some sizeable wins on a horse owned by Gannon himself, whom Herbert found dominating a group in the library. Gannon indicated that Herbert should come and join them, which he did, although he found it difficult to enter the conversation since he was no racing man. Instead he watched Gannon dealing effortlessly with the compliments being paid to him by his grateful acquaintances and then entertaining the party, first with racing anecdotes and gossip and then with some more invaluable information which everyone crowded tightly round him in order not to miss. He was a magnetic man with a powerful charm, tall but not heavily built and almost classically handsome, so that looking at him Herbert found it difficult to believe that Gannon wasn’t bred in the purple instead of being only three generations out of the pit. He was unsure as to how exactly the Gannon fortune had been founded, but he had heard it rumoured that one of Sir Jack’s forebears had been gifted a broken-down racehorse which he subsequently got sound and with which he had then won some big plate race on Town Moor at Doncaster. Instead of blowing his winnings he had invested them back into bloodstock, shrewdly enough to end up with a string good enough to land some sizeable gambles in various handicaps.

  What was well known and certain was that Gannon’s father had inherited sufficient wealth to enable him to start buying up several apparently moderate coal mines and to turn them round into highly lucrative investments. Obviously the Gannon family had the gift of taking the halt and making them sound.

  Herbert admired the fabled Gannon business acumen as much as he admired Jack Gannon himself. He was the sort of man Herbert would like to have become and might have done so had he not been a generation short. For whereas Gannon’s father, himself an educated man, had been able to send his son to the very best of public schools, Herbert’s father had been born in a slum and had to work his way up by his bootstraps in a mill which by sheer hard work and diligence he finally came to manage. Herbert had started the same way as his father, working his way up from the factory floor to clerking in the office, and might well have had to be content with rising to assistant manager under his father had not his widowed parent taken the fancy of the mill-owner’s forty-year-old daughter, herself widowed five years before as the result of a fatal accident suffered by her husband at work.

  Forrester senior’s luck was twofold, because not only was his second marriage a great deal more successful than his first, Herbert’s mother having died from drink, but also his new wife was the only child of the mill-owner and so inherited the business when her father died two years later. Before he himself succumbed to influenza at the age of fifty-three Herbert’s father had already initiated the creation of a business which thanks to Herbert’s natural commercial ability now enjoyed a turnover of more than a million pounds a year.

  But rich as he undoubtedly was, Herbert knew he was less than half the man sitting opposite him at dinner. Whereas in polite company Herbert had to watch what he said and how he said it, Gannon was socially confident and fully at ease. Nor was Sir Jack simply rich either. He was very well connected and therefore powerful and influential. Before the constitutional revolution men such as Jack Gannon were kingmakers. Now they made governments and Herbert envied Gannon this. It was the very reason he was so pleased and excited by the prospect of his daughter’s marrying into such a family, because having no son himself, one of the few bitter disappointments of his private life, Herbert knew that, although he was considered rich and powerful enough to be an influence in local affairs, he was of insufficient stature intellectually and socially to progress any further.

  This would not be the case as far as any offspring of Louisa’s prospective union with Philip Gannon were concerned. They would enjoy every privilege and advantage possible and were he and Jane to be blessed with a grandson or grandsons there was no saying to what heights boys from such a background might rise. So as he and his host ate their way steadily through an excellent dinner, talking of this and that as they did so, of local affairs and the general state of the country rather than anything personal as yet, Herbert was hopeful that when they got to the port and Stilton and it was time to address the real subject of their meeting they would find themselves debating the finer points of the projected marriage between their two only children.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Gannon said, as he sipped his second glass of port. ‘That is indeed the very subject I wished to discuss with you, Forrester, and since we are sufficiently well acquainted with each other I considered it a far better thing to do over dinner than in any other manner.’

  Herbert nodded agreement, although he had no idea what his host meant by another manner. He did not query it, however, as he thought perhaps it must be some form of etiquette to which he was not accustomed.

  ‘I’m very glad, Sir Jack,’ he replied instead. ‘Very honoured to be your guest, and to find myself in such a position.’

  ‘Good,’ Gannon agreed, all the same avoiding Herbert’s eye. ‘Good, then let us to the matter now in hand. You know of course how delighted Lady Gannon and I were when it was proposed that our dear son Philip might marry your charming daughter Louisa.’

  ‘Equally, Sir Jack. Mrs Forrester and myself we were as pleased as punch, let it be said. As pleased as punch.’ Herbert nodded in return, although Gannon’s use of the word might rang an alarm bell somewhere in his head. Again he put this down to what he assumed to be proper patterns of speech and waited for his host to continue.

  ‘Good,’ Gannon said. ‘Then as long as we understand that personally speaking there were no reservations, none whatsoever, about the proposed union—’

  ‘Oh no, Sir Jack,’ Herbert hurried to agree. ‘None whatsoever. Why ever should there be?’

  ‘Why ever indeed.’ Gannon finished with his Stilton and signalled to the attendant waiter to bring over the cigars. ‘You’re a man I admire greatly, Forrester, a man after my own heart. There is nothing I admire so much as a man with aptitude, a man with the ability to build up a business empire the way you are building up yours. It takes integrity, fortitude and imagination, qualities you quite obviously have in abundance.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir Jack.’ Herbert accepted a cigar and once he had listened and checked its quality between finger and thumb handed it back to the waiter to be cut. ‘To be complimented by a man of your own great achievement is a compliment indeed.’

  Jack Gannon nodded for the waiter to leave them once their cigars were lit before he continued. ‘It is because I admire you, Forrester, that I find what I next have to say doubly difficult. Even so, I would rather come straight to the point. Last week I had a large shooting party on my estate and among the guns were several old friends, including I have to tell you George Lanford.’

  Even though Herbert had no exact idea of what was coming next, still he knew it wasn’t going to be something he wanted to hear. He hadn’t felt like this since he was a schoolboy, when the teacher used to stand in front of the class and begin to tease information from the guilty ones. I’m sure one or two of you know who I mean when I say the name Lanford. Herbert knew just who was meant.

  ‘Do you know George Lanford, Forrester?’

  ‘Not personally, Sir Jack. No I don’t.’

  ‘Although I believe you’re acquainted with his wife.’

  It was a statement, not a question. Of course he knows I’m acquainted with his wife, Herbert thought. I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I? We’re not here to discuss the forthcoming arrangements. We’re here to discuss the forthcoming cancellation.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t wish me to spell it out to you, Forrester,’ Gannon was saying when Herbert caught up with him.

  ‘There’s no need, Sir Jack,’ Herbert replied. ‘You can spare yourself the embarrassment of telling me you can’t afford the embarrassment.’

  ‘You must understand. A man in my position cannot have his family derided.’

  ‘No. It’s not some’at to be recommended.’

  �
��I cannot countenance the marriage of my son to a girl from a family that has not only no background to speak of, but which offends those who are close to the throne, Forrester. Surely you must appreciate this? All doors have been closed to you and that would be intolerable for my son. He would be marrying into social death and I could not possibly condone that. Not in my position. I mean any scandal, however indirect—’ Gannon let the rest of the sentence go in the air, lost in a cloud of cigar smoke.

  ‘There was no scandal, Sir Jack,’ Herbert said, now catching his acquaintance straight in the eye. ‘I did nowt – I did nothing wrong, nothing in the least.’

  ‘Perhaps not, Forrester. But that’s not what people are saying.’

  ‘For a long time people said world was flat, remember?’

  ‘Scandal is a different matter, Forrester. The truth is not necessarily the most important issue. What counts is what people say. And they are not saying good things about you.’

  ‘But what you’re saying is, Gannon, that because of what people are saying, regardless of the fact that there in’t a word of truth about it, it makes my daughter no longer good enough for your son. Right?’

  ‘In its own convoluted way,’ Gannon half-smiled, ‘that is it in a nutshell.’

  ‘Then I have to say because of what you have said, Gannon, the last family I would consider allowing my daughter to marry into would be yours.’ Herbert stood up and threw his cigar over Gannon’s shoulder into the fireplace.

  ‘It’s only natural you should react in such a way,’ Gannon smoothly conceded. ‘If it was me—’

  ‘Just because the Prince of Wales snubbed us then all of a sudden our daughter in’t good enough for your son! You ask Lanford to your shoot not just because he is one of the top shots but also and precisely because his wife at one time was the mistress of the Prince of Wales! And yet if the prince don’t show up to some confounded ball or other the engagement is off! You know what I’d say to that, Sir Jack? I’d say you and your lot have some pretty strange values, that’s what I’d say! But never mind that because to tell truth I’m delighted it’s off. Because I never could stand hypocrisy in anyone. I’d say Louisa is well out of it and there’s no more to be said.’