Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Mother, I’ve told you before it’s out of the question.’

  ‘I was not consulted. Caroline can’t possibly come out on her own. She’s incapable of catching anything with less than four legs. She’ll simply be asked to a succession of dreary hunt balls. Hopeless!’

  Caroline’s mother, a tall, brown-haired woman with the same yellow skin as her daughter, pressed the bell on the floor with her foot and the butler appeared to clear away the goldrimmed Minton plates. Dinner at Bourton was almost always tinned soup followed by game; Hugo justified the staggering sum he spent on shooting by bringing hundreds of birds back to be hung in the game larder until semi-putrid, when they would be drawn, plucked and stored in the walk-in freezer. This evening they were eating curried grouse. Monty quite liked it. If you mixed in enough chutney, you couldn’t taste the grouse at all.

  ‘I simply cannot afford to bring out three girls. You must be reasonable, Mother.’ In the shadowy radiance from the candelabra, which had been converted to electricity but for economy’s sake was run on half the right number of light bulbs, Hugo looked exactly like a wicked uncle, with his heavy features, beaky nose and blue jowls.

  ‘I am being reasonable, Hugo. It will be a complete waste of money to bring out Caroline by herself. And three girls will cost you hardly any more than one.’ Lady Davina’s Pomeranian dog jumped off her lap, dislodged by her arthritic gesticulations.

  ‘The money simply isn’t there, Mother.’

  ‘Nonsense. One can always find money from somewhere. I shall sell some jewellery.’ This was Davina’s ultimate weapon. Almost all her jewellery was what an auctioneer would describe as important; the sale would make headlines. Lady Davina herself, although long past the age of scandalous behaviour in nightclubs, was still a name known to society columnists. She chafed in the obscurity of a dowager, and would seize any opportunity to be talked about once more. Hugo sawed into a grouse leg with resignation. His mother was right as usual. Family prestige was the issue.

  ‘On the other hand, it won’t look very good if the girls don’t come out after all this business.’ He forked a sinewy morsel into his mouth and chewed it vigorously. ‘They’re on at me to fell some more of the West Wood this year.’

  ‘Then that’s settled.’ Davina swivelled her mud-coloured eyes, beaded with black mascara, towards Cathy and Monty and gave them an enormous, theatrical wink. ‘The three of you can have a season next year.’

  ‘Two.’ Monty looked firmly at her grandmother. ‘You’re not trailing me round that cattle market.’

  ‘Miranda!’ Bettina, sitting in unsteady silence opposite her daughters, spluttered to life. ‘How dare you be so ungrateful! You wicked children – you’ll do exactly as you’re told. It’s the least you can do, after all this mess. Apologize to your grandmother this minute.’ Monty’s defiant stare raked round the table like a machine gun.

  ‘Be quiet, Mummy. I’m saving Uncle a lot of money, so you can’t complain. I’d rather die than be tarted up in a white frock and led off to be mated like a prize heifer.’

  Lady Davina scooped up her lap-dog and gave a tight, blood-red smile. ‘As you wish, Miranda. I shall have quite enough to do with your sister and Caroline.’

  Davina’s energy was suddenly phenomenal; she itched to relive the sexual and social triumphs of her own nubile years. Monty’s defection made little difference, since she knew that attractive sisters close in age were often invited together, even if only the elder was officially coming out – and what young girl would be able to resist going to glittering balls and riotous parties all summer long? The endless, ill-defined medical conditions which had for years restricted Davina’s existence, mysteriously abated. Lounging on the blue velvet daybed by the drawing-room fire, with the Pomeranian at her feet and a copy of The Tatler on her lap, she telephoned ceaselessly around the country, activating the network of acquaintances she had first made during her own season before the First World War.

  ‘Nancy! Too divine. Yes we shall certainly see you at Fugborough for Fiona. In May, you said?’ She covered many pages of thick, blue writing paper with notes in arthritic script.

  ‘So sick-making, they can’t be presented. Never mind, Thelma darling, we shall make do – now who is this little man with a list?’

  She was particularly gushing with the friends she knew to have eligible sons and grandsons. ‘Nothing makes you more popular than knowing heaps of young men – now where’s Marina’s number, I’m sure they’ve got three, but perhaps Charlie is still at Eton …’

  Cathy and Caroline were summoned to her bedroom, chilly, stuffy and smelling of stale Schiaparelli scent, and made to try on jewellery.

  ‘Remember, Caroline, never emeralds for you – they make your complexion look like dishwater.’ Immune to such abuse, Caroline pulled off the necklace and stepped forward to replace it in its box, treading on the dog which yelped and scuttled under the pink chintz skirts of the dressing table. ‘Pearls for daytime, of course, and always diamonds for evening, but remember that at your age, you must shine, not your jewellery.’ Catherine tentatively picked up a collar of baguette diamonds, showy in the severely Art Deco style.

  ‘Certainly not, most unsuitable.’ Lady Davina took it from her and picked out a modest Victorian pendant instead. She obviously intended to keep the best pieces for herself.

  ‘Thank you, Grandmother, it’s really pretty.’ Cathy held the almost invisible gold chain against her throat and admired the small rubies and even smaller diamond sparkling on her smooth skin.

  ‘I think you had better call me Didi, darlings, everyone always does.’ Lady Davina made this suggestion in carefully casual tones, inwardly appalled at the prospect of being called ‘Grandmother’ in public.

  In a week, she had acquired all the vital information she needed to lay the ground to plan the season. Although trained from puberty to present a façade of adorable idiocy, and now able to add the dimension of approaching senility to the performance, Lady Davina had a magnificent memory. Soon she had stored in it the names of the two-hundred-odd girls who were to come out the next year, as well as the likely dates for their dances. This data she added to the encyclopaedic store of information she had amassed about the wealth, property, estates and connections of each family. From a society columnist in London she then acquired ‘the List’ – a roll of young men’s names which came with the unwritten guarantee that every one was a sound prospective husband, with a decent family and reasonable wealth behind him and no known social vices.

  ‘Three earls,’ she announced, setting down her translucent, porcelain teacup with a tremulous hand. ‘You should be able to manage one easily, Catherine. I shall be most disappointed if you let me down.’ Cathy nodded uncertainly. She felt crushed by the responsibility she now had to restore the family’s name and fortune by marrying gloriously. Her thrilling, romantic dreams were all too quickly turning into frightening reality. ‘Who are they, Didi – do we know any of them?’

  ‘Sholto Mayleigh Shillingworth – over thirty, I should say. The longer a man stays unmarried, darling, the harder he is to catch. Andrew Downcliffe’s people own half of Ayrshire, but you won’t want to live in Scotland if you can avoid it. Then there’s Charlie Coseley, in banking, I believe.’

  ‘He’s a dreamboat,’ said Caroline suddenly, giving her first evidence of interest in flesh that was not equine. ‘His cousin was at school with us and I saw him once when he came to take her out.’

  Monty spent three or four days sulking and smoking, wandering aimlessly around the estate feeling irritated by the noisy busloads of tourists. She was not only bored but wrapped still in a blanket of guilty sadness which muffled the effect of the outside world upon her. She was sullen with the adults of the family, contemptuous of Caroline and vilely rude to Edward. No one took much notice of her, except Cathy.

  ‘Please, Monty, won’t you change your mind? It won’t be any fun coming out without you,’ Cathy pleaded, finding her skimming pebbles into the lak
e one afternoon.

  ‘But it won’t be any fun for me, don’t you see? I’m not pretty like you, you’ll get all the boys and I’ll just be stuck with Caroline and the rest of the no-hopers.’ Monty let fly a stone at exactly the right angle and it bounced across the water much further than she had intended, frightening a moorhen.

  ‘You won’t – don’t be silly. You’ll probably do much better than me. Rosanna said her brother thought you were fabulous looking when he came to take her out from school.’

  Monty sniffed, unconvinced. They both knew that Cathy, with her slim, coltish legs, her swinging straight hair, beautiful complexion and boyish figure, was so pretty she could have stepped straight from the pages of Vogue. What Cathy recognized, but Monty refused to believe, was that Monty was just as attractive, but in a lush, sensual way that was not, at the time, particularly fashionable.

  ‘You’re only saying that to be nice,’ Monty stooped to pick up some more pebbles.

  ‘No I’m not. Oh please, Monty. I’ll hate it without you.’

  ‘But why are you doing it? You wanted to go to university.’

  ‘I know, but it’s different now, isn’t it? Can’t you see – if one of us doesn’t get married to someone rich soon we’ll be stuck living on Uncle Hugo’s charity. And everyone will point at us as the daughters of the Suicide Peer.’ This was the name the newspapers had found for their father. Rumours about his death were still appearing in print.

  ‘Anyway, what good would university do me? I’d only get a lot more useless exams while everyone else was getting the best men. Please, Monty.’

  Monty shook her head. ‘I’d only do something awful and get you a bad name. All those chinless wonders would drive me nuts. It’s your choice, Cathy, but not mine.’

  A few days later, Monty wandered out of the estate to the side of the main road, and casually stuck up a thumb as she had seen hitchhiking servicemen do. Instantly a car stopped for her.

  ‘Where to?’ The driver was a plump, golden-haired man of about forty, in tweeds. Monty, thrilled with the sudden success of her half-planned scheme, looked wildly at the signpost across the road. It said Frome 70, Bath 80, Exeter 110.

  ‘Exeter,’ she said with what she did not realize was a ripe, inviting smile.

  ‘Hop in.’ He took a pile of papers from the passenger seat and flung them in the back, on top of a heap of small brown, cardboard boxes.

  He was a salesman for a firm manufacturing agricultural pharmaceuticals, jolly, stupid but worldly enough to recognize Monty straight away for a posh piece kicking over the traces.

  ‘Live round here? Had a row with your family?’ He offered her a strong cigarette, stabbed in the dashboard lighter then flipped it out and held it for her, while steering with one negligent finger. Monty inhaled deeply, feeling fabulously adult.

  When they reached the town two hours later he bought her a hamburger in a coffee bar.

  ‘Seen that, have you?’ he asked casually as they went past the cinema where a Beatles film was playing.

  ‘Not yet,’ she answered.

  They sat in the back row and watched John Lennon playing a harmonica in a train. After a while the man’s left hand, moving as if of its own volition, appeared on her shoulder. Full of delicious anticipation, Monty turned her face towards him; his thumb gently tipped up her chin and suddenly they were kissing.

  My first real kiss, she realized with mounting excitement, eagerly parting her lips. Obviously that was the right thing to do, because his hot tongue snaked into her mouth immediately. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Ringo Starr on the screen, with arms outstretched, whirling around like a helicopter rotor, but she was much more aware of the delicious, tingling excitement in her limbs. She tried putting her tongue in his mouth, and was rewarded by a crushing embrace.

  In the afternoon, the small country cinema was almost empty. The man’s firm, fat fingers undid her blouse and began stroking her breast over her bra, then dipped experimentally inside the cup. Is he going to take my bra off, Monty wondered, undecided if she wanted him to try, but longing to feel him touch her naked flesh.

  What she didn’t know was that in fifteen years on the road the man had picked up and made love to enough girls to know an over-eager virgin when he kissed one and, being fundamentally decent and the father of girls who would soon be Monty’s age, he had no intention at all of taking this puss for the hot number she was obviously pretending to be. They necked pleasantly through the rest of the movie, by which time Monty’s knickers were damp with excitement. Then he drove her to the edge of the town, and she hitched a ride back to Bourton, arriving in perfect time to change for dinner, at which she was unexpectedly pleasant to everyone.

  Monty now had an excited sparkle about her which subtly signalled her craving for sexual adventure to every boy interested enough to read the signs. A youth who served behind the bar at the Bourton Arms, the pub outside the estate gates where she was in the habit of buying her cigarettes, asked her if she wanted to go for a ride on his motorbike and a couple of days later kissed her as they leaned on a gate from which there was supposed to be a view over five counties. He was rather clumsy and smelt of pickled onions.

  The French tourist who asked if he might take her picture by the rotunda was much more accomplished and could unfasten her bra with one adroit hand. He was very persistent about trying to pry inside her knickers, which Monty eventually allowed him to do.

  By the time the girls had to go up to London, Monty had also tried her new found allure on a Cockney coach-driver, a suave young expert in nineteenth-century militaria who came to value the Witherham collection and one of Uncle Hugo’s shooting chums who visited for a weekend without his wife. She felt slightly ashamed, madly attractive and tremendously powerful with her newly-discovered seductive ability. She was more than half regretful that she was not coming out. She longed passionately to find someone she liked enough to whom to lose her virginity. Preferably someone who looked like Brian Jones.

  ‘This is my brother Simon.’ Rosanna Emanuel’s demeanour was excessively formal, in order that her brother should not realize how much and how intimately he had been discussed in Benenden dormitories.

  ‘Hello,’ said Simon ceremonially shaking hands and hoping that Cathy and Monty should not realize how much and how intimately he and his friends had in their turn speculated about his sister’s friends.

  ‘There is not the slightest use in dining with a Jewish family,’ Lady Davina had warned. For once, Cathy had argued with her.

  ‘We were tremendous friends at school and it would look awful if we didn’t see her now we’re in London for a year. Besides, Rosanna’s a very good influence on Monty.’

  ‘Never confuse friendship with social climbing,’ was their grandmother’s reply, but she let them go, knowing that forbidding the association would only make it more alluring.

  And so Cathy and Monty had walked across Hyde Park, from the Bourton family’s small house in Trevor Square to the Emanuels’ large apartment by Marble Arch. It was double-glazed and lavishly heated, with sumptuous deep-pile carpets. There were small silver dishes of chocolates everywhere.

  Mrs Emanuel was a tiny, vivacious woman with a strong foreign accent of which both her children were violently ashamed. She had arrived in London in the late thirties from Vienna, one of the hundreds of educated girls from Germany and Austria who had taken jobs as domestic servants to circumvent the British immigration law and escape Nazi persecution. Having married into the Emanuel family, prominent among the rising tycoon class of British Jews, she found fuel for her bottomless feelings of insecurity as well as scope for her limitless social ambition.

  It was soon clear that Simon was a major irritation in his mother’s life. ‘Why don’t you cut your hair?’ she asked him bluntly as soon as they sat down to lunch. ‘You promised me, Simon. No nice girl wants to go out with a boy with long hair. Tell me, Catherine, what do you think?’

  Cathy was startled by the di
rectness of this attack and the unembarrassed way that she, a stranger in the house, had been invited to contribute to a personal argument. In her own family no intimate matter was ever mentioned to guests; indeed, most intimate matters were never discussed at all. Cathy struggled with the majolica asparagus-tongs to give herself time to think.

  ‘Quite a lot of boys do wear rather long hair nowadays,’ she began diplomatically.

  ‘But not as long as Simon’s surely. Look it’s falling right over his collar now.’

  Simon squirmed in his chair. His glossy black hair covered his ears and the back of his collar, in a laboriously groomed bob. His head was neat and his features regular, almost classical in proportion: he looked like a pre-Raphaelite knight. Nothing like Brian Jones, Monty acknowledged, but pretty groovy all the same.

  ‘I think people don’t really mind long hair as long as it’s clean and well-cut. What a beautiful chandelier, Mrs Emanuel, is it Venetian?’ Cathy’s attempt to change the subject was defeated at once.

  ‘Long hair, it looks dirty – ugh. You must go to the barber with your father tomorrow, Simon. Joseph, you must take Simon with you. See that he goes. When you are working in your father’s office, Simon, you must look decent.’

  ‘But I’m not working in the office, and I’m not going to work in his office, ever.’ Simon glared at his mother from under the coal-black sweep of his eyebrows. Angrily she clutched at the swag of gold chains at her throat.

  ‘And what else are you going to do with your life? You are not such a clever boy, you know. You are thrown out of school, you don’t take your exams, we send you to college for special teaching and you don’t do any work. So who will give you a job if your father does not?’

  Simon shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘There are plenty of jobs.’