Debutantes

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘It is doomed to failure, Tatiana, no matter what you say,’ she would weigh in at every given opportunity. ‘All crafts movements fail and deservedly so, for weave, woof and warp as you people may you are never going to succeed in turning back the clock. The Industrial Revolution has occurred and there it is. There is nothing you people can do to alter things and that is a fact, take it or leave it.’

  Such statements were usually followed by a long disapproving look round at the peacock feathers and Japanese screens which ornamented the main reception rooms, together with the new hand-blocked wallpaper and other characteristic Arts and Crafts movement foibles which declared to the visitor that Bannerwick Park was unreservedly a place of modish rather than inherited values.

  In return Aunt Tattie was forever wishing aloud to Portia and Edward as they sat toasting muffins in front of the large fireplace with its many beautiful hand-painted tiles that Aunt Augustine would leave them in peace.

  ‘Why can’t she just go away and hunt her foxes, and let us mind our own business in our own way?’ she would ask, sighing deeply nevertheless, as if to show that she knew such a thing was not even vaguely possible. For it could not go unnoticed that Aunt Tattie’s world, a world of Japanese finger paintings and carefully selected poppies set singly in specially chosen vases, was known to be completely anathematical to her sister-in-law. ‘I simply do not know why she keeps insisting on visiting us here,’ she would wonder out loud to the children without expecting an answer. ‘There is nothing here of any interest to her. She knows that the Arts and Crafts movement is proving very popular in this part of the country. This region is increasingly a place of culture, not of venery, I am glad to say.’

  Despite the visits and the differing views of life held by the children’s aunts, Bannerwick Park nevertheless was a happy place. Nanny Tradescant might be forever grumbling about the peculiarities of their upbringing but to a child like Portia who enjoyed her own company Bannerwick’s eccentricities were gentle and undemanding.

  Even Edward her brother was everything that Portia could wish for, despite his usual running nose, so much so that sometimes when Nanny’s back was turned Portia found herself hugging him just for the sheer joy of living, and usually to her brother’s quite open disgust.

  The position of the house, standing as it did overlooking flat golden meadows beyond which could be seen what might appear to be endless pale sands, added greatly to its atmosphere. So even if Portia hadn’t liked Aunt Tattie’s William Morris wallpapers or the Arthurian tapestries that she wove so lovingly, when she looked up and out at every one of Bannerwick’s windows what was always there to be enjoyed was the ever-changing vista of the ever-restless sea. Always moving and reflecting, always leaping up white-tipped as if to touch the sky, or diving down or darting sideways to fling itself shawl-like to smother a rock at one moment or pull back and expose it at another, always running forward only to run back, one moment a smooth blue carpet, the next a mass of finely torn tissue paper being blown around on a piece of grey glass. And all the time covering another world, not a world of ghosts and spirits but a real tangible world of crabs and shrimps, of shells full and shells abandoned, of seaweed that could be hung by the nursery clock to tell the weather the next day, or wrapped about arms and legs to see if its strangely scaly texture was bearable against the skin.

  To Portia the sea was at the same time a friend waiting patiently for her to come and play, a picture constantly re-painting itself, a portent of future adventure, a sound to sleep by, but above all her first barnacled sea-sprayed memory, stretching as it did back to when she was tiny and had been first taken to the beach by Aunt Tattie.

  In her mind’s eye she would always see her aunt holding her skirts up in one hand and Portia’s hand in her other while together they carefully tiptoed into a flat calm sea whose tiny waves broke in soapy bubbles over their bare feet. There was something so intensely exciting in that moment that sometimes, even now, Portia would wake thinking it had happened yesterday instead of over a thousand days ago, and when she closed her eyes she could feel the light wind coming off the water, the silky smoothness of the sea, the smell of the salt. She could even recall the feel of the actual material of her striped paddling drawers that had been pinned on her over her skirt, while all around her were other girls, older girls in curly-brimmed hats of straw holding up the skirts of their long-sleeved summer dresses as they paddled, showing frilly white petticoats underneath and drawers rolled up above their knees.

  Most of all she remembered that moment with Aunt Tattie as being very serious, though of course she hadn’t understood why. All she knew was that girls of all ages were staring down solemnly at the sea as they either stood quite still in the waves or paddled about very slowly. In her memory no-one laughed, or shrieked in mock fright, or splashed about in excitement. Rather they behaved as they would in church, soberly and respectfully, and as if the waters in which they bathed their feet might have some special, magical quality, part healing, part forgiving, wholly accepting of their frailty.

  ‘That is where we all come from, dearest,’ Aunt Tattie had told her. ‘Once upon a time we all lived in the sea, not as ourselves of course, but as other creatures, creatures who were able to live underwater.’

  ‘Like fish and crabs and things.’

  ‘In a kind of way,’ Aunt Tattie had replied, her Darwinism beginning to founder somewhat. ‘It’s all to do with something they’re just discovering called evolution I believe, dearest, for it seems that it is from here that all life came, and therefore it is a holy place.’

  Portia had become increasingly mystified and enthralled by the vast expanse of water, sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes even a drab and lacklustre grey which stretched without end to the horizon and which Nanny Tradescant was still convinced was the edge of the world no matter what anyone said.

  She would sit with Edward beside her for hours in the dunes, his sandy legs climbing over and around her while he searched for tiny shells and Portia sat quite still, watching the surface of the North Sea intently in case she should see something which had been far below it rise up from the water.

  Of course she had wanted to learn how to swim from an early age so that when Edward and she were older they would be able to do so from the raft she dreamed of building, and dive down into the deep to see if they could find the water babies that had once been made to sweep chimneys, and whoever and whatever else lived down there in that mysterious ever-changing world. Nanny Tradescant, however, would not even entertain such a notion, insisting that those who tried to walk on water drowned in water.

  ‘You’ll understand when you’re older,’ Nanny said with her usual mysterious authority, the hairs on her upper lip bristling in the clear light of the morning as she spoke. ‘When you’re older you’ll understand that the people who drown are the people who can swim, whereas the people who can’t swim never drown, or else why would I be here, might I ask?’

  Whenever the subject was raised Nanny continued her opposition, allowing Portia to do nothing more than paddle without giving any proper explanation for her resistance. ‘Nanny knows best, Miss Tattie,’ she would say with a vague wave of one hand. ‘We all of us know that, don’t we?’

  Even Aunt Tattie pretended that she agreed with this edict, although as it subsequently turned out thinking quite the opposite because it was Aunt Tattie herself who finally came to Portia’s aid.

  It seemed that since she herself had never been taught to swim until she was much older than Portia was at present, and only when both her parents were dead, so she was privately determined that both Portia and Edward should learn to swim like little fishes. But because she still held her old nurse in such awe she confided in Portia that her swimming lessons would have to be held well away from the house and out of sight of the old woman.

  The sea would be too dangerous a place to be taught and anyway was visible from the house, so Aunt Tattie chose instead the old trout lake which lay deep i
n the woods a long way to the south. It was surrounded by trees, planted so deep that strangers could not know of its existence and would pass it by without realizing what lay so near to them. Here, as Nanny walked Edward out to the town and back and Uncle Lampard snored in a deckchair with a copy of The Times over his face, Aunt Tattie would smuggle her niece out for her lessons on summer afternoons.

  Once changed into her all-in-one striped and square-necked serge swimsuit chosen from the Whiteleys catalogue and sent under plain wrapper, Portia would be attached to her aunt’s homemade swimming machine: a ship’s lifebelt attached to a wooden scaffold which in turn she had fixed firmly to the side of the boat. Then she would row up and down the dark calm waters of the lake with Portia suspended in the lifebelt rehearsing the strokes she had taught her.

  The next stage was to disengage the lifebelt from its attachment leaving Portia to splash around in the water, safely enough of course because she still had the belt, but by the time Aunt Tattie had finished rowing far enough from the boat to have to swim back to it with the belt under her arms.

  Finally the belt was removed altogether and Portia found herself floating in the deep water with just her aunt’s hand under her chin for support. Because she was so determined to swim she refused to show the fear – sometimes verging on panic – that she was feeling, and although in her heart of hearts she thought the moment her aunt removed her hand she would sink like a stone and drown she would rather have done so than show her fright. So when her aunt called Ready? Portia called back Yes thank you, Aunt Tattie! in return, while all the time feeling certain that she would all too soon be joining the water babies in their underground kingdom or, in the case of the Bannerwick lake, the carp and the brown trout.

  Of course when it happened she hardly noticed that the hand supporting her was gone. Aunt Tattie told her proudly afterwards that she was already floating by herself long before she asked her if she was ready, but Portia, although pleased by the idea, thought it was just another of her aunt’s fanciful notions. What she most certainly did remember was the sheer magic of the moment, one minute so frightened that she was about to drown in the impenetrably dark waters beneath her, waters full of slowly waving dark green weed and the occasionally glimpsed silvery shimmering fishes, and the next moment swimming through them, her chin held high above the surface, her legs kicking out and together and her arms propelling her on, thrusting forward first like closed shears and then with hands turning outwards pushing the waters aside as if opening a pair of curtains, hearing the water swish by her ears and the sound of her aunt’s delighted laughter growing ever fainter the further she got from the boat.

  She swam round in a large circle, turning left until the boat was back in view, full of that indescribable thrill that conquering fear can bring. Water seemed so inexpressibly exciting, being such solid matter one moment and so ephemeral the next, yet two swallows of it and you started to choke or drown, and two more perhaps and you were dead. Yet here she was, Portia thought, floating on it, moving through it, swimming and turning round in it, and now as she reached the boat and waited for her aunt to throw her the lifebelt, walking in it, treading the water that stretched boundless below her, her head thrown back with her long hair spread out in a watery fan around it while she smiled and then laughed, at this most wonderful of moments.

  ‘When I grow up I am going to be an explorer and travel the world,’ she had told her brother that night, having made him promise to keep her secret about her adventures with Aunt Tattie in the lake.

  ‘No you won’t,’ Edward had replied, getting into his bed. ‘Girls don’t do those things. Boys do. You don’t count. Nanny says so.’

  ‘I don’t care what Nanny says, Edward,’ Portia said, tucking her brother in tightly. ‘I shall be the very first girl who does do those things. You’ll see. One day I should like to sail right the way round the world. Do you want to come?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Edward had replied with a sigh as he lay back on his pillow. ‘I shall be too busy. I’m going to be a king.’

  Later that night as she did most nights after she had helped put her brother to bed and Nanny Tradescant had gone downstairs to sit with the staff in her sitting room, Portia sat for a while in the window seat and day-dreamed.

  She loved the nursery floor, most of all because like everything Aunt Tattie did for them it was so different from every other nursery she had ever visited. Instead of plain painted walls and woodwork their nursery was decorated with a frieze of hand-painted tiles depicting tales of the Arabian Nights and Hans Andersen. The ceilings and the wood were highly decorated as was the fireplace, the floor covered with heavily patterned carpets, and the windows hung with specially woven and smocked woollen curtains. Even their beds were different, hand-carved with basket-weave sides and made up with goose-feather mattresses and hand-embroidered sheets. The nursery world at Bannerwick was light years away from the nursery worlds inhabited by less fortunate children, toddlers brought up in gloomy rooms of washable floors which smelled of carbolic and disciplined by a cruel regime of posture boards and finger screws.

  From all this Portia understood that Aunt Tattie really did want Edward and herself to be different and for some reason had always done so. Their aunt wanted them to grow up to be sensitive and poetical and to love natural things, such as putting sunflowers in blue and white vases as opposed to growing hot-house flowers and living in houses full of the skins of bears and tigers and flanked by suits of armour, and, worst of all worsts, places where the heads of dead stags and foxes stared down meaninglessly from dark panelled walls.

  But much as every detail of what she understood was called the Aesthetic movement met with young Portia’s approval, none of the trappings of this organic culture ever met with the approval of Nanny Tradescant. Nanny not only disapproved of everything to which Aunt Tattie was obviously artistically committed, she deeply, visibly and vocally disapproved of the ambience in which the children whom she considered to be hers were being brought up.

  Naturally Nanny had a staunch ally in Lady Medlar, and so it was that one hot afternoon when Aunt Tattie and Uncle Lampard were away in London Lady Medlar arrived quite suddenly and seemingly out of the blue to talk to Nanny about the children and their future.

  Because it was hot both Edward and Portia were outside playing on the lawn when she arrived, involved in one of their favourite games which was sitting on an old eiderdown and pretending to row out to sea, off to discover a Magic Island. None the less Lady Medlar’s somewhat deep voice drifted in their direction, drowning even the sounds of their imaginations.

  ‘The girl doesn’t count, of course,’ she was saying, ‘but the boy will need to be brought up to be a proper boy. How could Tatiana possibly expect him to go off to Eton with his hair halfway down his back and only used to skipping about the garden banging a tambourine and wearing a shepherd’s smock?’

  ‘What is Eton, Porty?’ Edward asked her, with no great curiosity.

  ‘I have no idea at all,’ Portia lied, still rowing as hard as ever out into the pretend open sea. ‘And even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you, because it sounds rather frightening to me, specially if Aunt Augustine likes it.’

  Portia didn’t hear Nanny disagreeing with Lady Medlar about anything that afternoon, not the way she did with Aunt Tattie, but then she knew Nanny was too clever for that. To disagree with Aunt Augustine might be to endanger her position with her only known ally. On the other hand she didn’t hear her agreeing with her either. She was too clever for that as well, as even Portia understood. But even so for days after Aunt Augustine’s surprise visit Nanny Tradescant gave both Portia and Edward what Portia called her you-just-wait look. Finally this subterfuge irritated Portia so intensely that she decided to confront Aunt Tattie about Edward’s being sent away to Eton when they were out walking by the sea.

  ‘Eton’s a school, isn’t it, Aunt Tattie?’ she enquired. ‘Nanny says you’re going to send Edward there.’

  Aunt
Tattie’s mouth opened and her eyes seemed ready to pop as she immediately started to breathe rather too fast, stopping in her tracks on the sandy beach with one hand clasped to her bosom. ‘Such is certainly not my intention, nor your uncle’s either, dearest. Good heavens, wherever could you have got such a notion?’

  ‘Nothing. I just heard about it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – it was your sainted Aunt Augustine. I suspected that she had been here again when we were away, on one of her silly visits. Eton indeed.’ Aunt Tattie sighed. ‘I do believe sometimes that she comes here expressly to make mischief. She cannot stop herself, ever since I don’t know when. But why she does it I have simply no idea.’

  ‘She’s been doing it ever since the day she crawled out of the sea,’ Portia extemporized solemnly.

  Aunt Tattie’s face, which had gone distinctly pale at the realization of Aunt Augustine’s visit, now pinkened slightly as she laughed.

  ‘Oh, Portia, dearest, how very apt. But why mention Eton indeed?’ she continued as they began to walk off again down the deserted beach. ‘I have no intention of sending dearest Edward away to school, believe me. He is to be educated here at Bannerwick. We are to employ tutors. A tutor for Edward and a governess for you, for I will not have it any other way. Lampard and I shall personally supervise every inch of your upbringing as we have been doing. That is why Uncle Lampard and I had to go to London. We went to find a tutor and a governess.’

  ‘That’s what I told Edward,’ Portia replied. ‘That’s exactly what I said. But you know Edward. He knows best and always has done. He thinks he’d like going to Eton like Papa.’

  ‘Then Edward is wrong, dearest. And you may tell him so on my authority. Never would we send any child of our blood to such a philistines’ hatchery!’

  Portia was not at all sure what a philistines’ hatchery might be, but reassured now that Edward was not to be sent anywhere anyway she smiled happily to herself, seeing Edward’s and her childhood stretching on happily into the unforeseeable future, while Aunt Tattie walked on ahead of her singing softly to herself, one hand holding her pretty straw hat in place.