The Winter Folly

by Taylor, Lulu

  ‘Julian Sykes and I have been talking and we both agree that his boy Laurence could make a very good match for you. He has excellent prospects in the Blues. It’s a good regiment and he’s keen to find a wife. All successful officers need a good wife to support them. I’d like you to meet him, and if you both get on, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t turn out very well for all of us.’ Her father had given her a cold smile, one of the ones that told her the conversation was at an end, that no opposition would be brooked. He always demanded complete obedience and questions were not tolerated. No matter how often she resolved to stand up to him, Alexandra couldn’t help being cowed by his tremendous strength of will and his absolute certainty in his own opinions. She had distant memories of towering rages directed at her mother and she’d do anything to avoid bringing down that awful anger on her own head. The truth was, she wanted desperately to win his love. What harm could it do to meet this man, if that was what her father wished? She could always say no to anything more if she wanted to.

  So she let it happen. One day there was tea, with Laurence Sykes sitting awkwardly opposite her and asking polite questions, before the two of them were told to walk around the garden together for half an hour. Another two or three visits just like the first followed, and then there was a trip to London where the two young people, accompanied by Mr and Mrs Sykes and Alexandra’s father, dined out in a horrible, formal restaurant with fish-eyed waiters and clinking silver, and then went on to a dance club. Girls in stiff satin dresses with long gloves waltzed awkwardly with young men in tail coats and brilliantined hair. Alexandra knew it was supposed to be fun, a taste of the sophisticated life that awaited her if she married, but it had felt like an enforced jollity that was hollow at its heart.

  Laurence was perfectly pleasant and seemed kind enough, but she felt nothing more than friendship for him. He was nice looking, if rather small for a soldier, with his fair hair in that short military haircut, and eyes of washed-out pale blue, like a morning sky after a rain storm. He had regular, almost delicately small features and straight teeth with particularly sharp canines that emerged high in the gum and gave him a rather wolfish look when he smiled. His slim bony hands always had a cigarette clenched in the fingers, and he jiggled his left knee unconsciously when he smoked. He talked to her of everyday things and appeared interested in her uneventful life. She found that once she had a willing listener, she could chatter on for ages about nothing much and rather enjoy the feeling of amiable companionship. If marriage was like that, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. A couple of times she’d caught him staring at her in a peculiar way, and had smiled at him shyly, almost hopefully, wondering if he might be able to awaken something in her like girls felt in books and poems for men they loved, but he’d quickly glanced away.

  Perhaps she was asking too much to feel those things, whatever they were. It might even be better if she didn’t. Sometimes she wondered whether there was something wrong with her. Nobody else seemed to struggle with suppressing their emotions the way she did. She was quick to tears or laughter, prone to wanting to dance for joy or slump down with misery, and she lived every word of the books she read. Her aunt told her she wore her heart on her sleeve, which she supposed meant the same thing. She sensed that life might be a good deal easier if she could learn to live it without feeling anything at all.

  Her father’s enthusiasm for the match grew. It was revealed in the way Mrs Richards, the seamstress, came to the house to fit dresses, skirts and coats that her father had ordered for her. He arranged for a small amount of pin money to be paid into her post office account ‘for you to have a little fun with, for lipsticks and so forth’, and he began to talk to her over his newspaper at breakfast, making comments on world affairs that he obviously hoped she would absorb. She felt that she had let things go too far to pull back now, and that the inevitable was approaching.

  It’s for the best, she told herself stoutly. It’s what he wants for me. Besides, I’ve got virtually nothing to do but keep house. Am I going to sit in the cold breakfast room, morning after morning, pouring coffee for Father, forever?

  Perhaps marriage, whatever it meant, would be a better fate than that.

  When Laurence appeared unexpectedly one afternoon, she knew that the moment had arrived. Her stomach lurched with something that she supposed must be excitement when she was called down to the drawing room to find him there, white faced and trembling, but with bravado in his eyes as though he was determined to prove himself.

  The words, sounding well-worn even though she had never heard them before, came out as she stood there, feeling shabby and schoolgirlish in her tartan skirt and old green jumper. They fell in and out of her consciousness like a wireless with the volume turned high and then low and back again. ‘The respect and admiration I have for you . . . over recent months . . . ripened to something deeper . . . If you would do me the honour . . . the happiest man in the world . . . become my wife.’

  There she stood, listening as she stared at him and wondered who on earth he was. She couldn’t help feeling sympathy for him, so pale, his fingertips shuddering. Was the terror in his eyes for fear she might reject him or accept him? Why was he asking if he might share his life with her? Did he love her? She wasn’t sure if he had said it or not.

  It seemed an age that she stood there staring, unable to speak, feeling that she was at a great fork in the road where two futures awaited, each hidden from view but equally momentous. The day she learned her mother had died had been the only other time she had felt this way: as though, after years of sameness, life had made a sudden decisive turn and everything had changed in an instant.

  ‘Your father,’ ventured Laurence at last, to fill the yawning silence, ‘has given his permission.’

  She remembered her duty. Besides, being proposed to felt a little like being asked to dance. Never refuse – it had been drummed into her. It’s bad manners to turn somebody down and hurt their feelings. It doesn’t matter what you want, you must do what is asked of you.

  One of the forks in the road faded and disappeared. There had really only been one path all along. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Thank you. Yes, of course.’

  ‘You . . . you’ll marry me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said distantly, adding, ‘please,’ in a small voice and then, more uncertainly, ‘thank you.’

  ‘No. I must thank you.’ A look of intense relief passed over his face and she felt a sudden bond with him. They were both glad it was over. ‘You’ve made me very happy.’

  He approached stiffly and she thought for a moment he was going to embrace her, but he lifted her hand and pressed it to his lips.

  Her father was delighted when they went together to tell him, and the smile he gave her and the kiss on her cheek filled her with a sense of happiness that warmed her like a cup of hot milk on a cold day. He even embraced her briefly and she clung to him, her chest constricted with emotion, not wanting the precious moment to end.

  ‘Well done, Sykes,’ he said heartily to Laurence, before taking her fiancé away to drink a good claret in his study. Alexandra sat in the window seat in the drawing room and tried to recall every sensation of her father’s embrace, quietly and deeply happy.

  The next few days, with the air full of satisfaction and hope, were the happiest she could remember. Everybody was so delighted at the news of the engagement that Alexandra felt that she had evidently done the right thing and she was glad to have pleased them all so much. But the feelings and emotions they attributed to her and Laurence were so at odds with reality that she couldn’t help feeling a shade of apprehension.

  ‘You must long to be alone together!’ ladies cooed. ‘Oh, young love, so wonderful, so romantic! The first flush of passion – quite the most delicious thing in the world.’

  Alexandra stole glances at her fiancé and wondered if he felt these things but she saw no evidence of it. He didn’t try to be alone with her – almost the opposite, in fact – and he ce
rtainly didn’t make her feel that he thought of her romantically. The things that were supposed to come with love – like kisses and embraces – simply didn’t feature. Perhaps, she thought, they would come after the ceremony.

  Her father wrote to his sister Felicity, who arrived with three suitcases to take over the arrangements and make sure that everything was done properly. It was she who had organised the engagement party.

  Now here Alexandra was, in her ice-blue chiffon, receiving the nice comments, the congratulations, and still it felt unreal. She shook hands with Laurence’s parents who smiled at her and said they looked forward to welcoming her into their family as a daughter, and greeted his younger sister, Maeve, and his older brother, Robert, whose smile she didn’t like, or his pale blue eyes, so like Laurence’s. Soon she would know these people intimately.

  How strange, she thought. This is going to happen to me. It’s going to be my life.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all about someone else. It was the same when the wedding presents arrived, endless boxes of glassware, vases, china ornaments, bonbonnières, trinket boxes, lamps and ugly paintings. These were going to furnish her new life in the married quarters in London, where the Royal Horse Guards were based. But it was impossible to imagine that after finally winning her father’s approval she was going to leave him forever, so she tried not to think about it at all.

  When the wedding was only a week away, Alexandra couldn’t ignore the fact of the suitcase in her room filling with clothes as the drawers and wardrobe emptied. At night she covered the suitcase with a blanket, turned her back on the pile of trousseau and tried to pretend none of it was there.

  When Aunt Felicity called her into the spare room and asked if she was all right, Alexandra was surprised. She thought she was doing very well at being all right. Everybody was happy with her. Her father had been sunny and well disposed towards her for weeks now. ‘Yes, of course. I’m perfectly well, thank you.’

  Her aunt looked worried. ‘But you’re so thin, Alexandra, thinner than ever. Are you sure you’re quite ready for this . . . for your marriage, I mean?’ She took hold of Alexandra’s hand and clutched it in her own.

  ‘Yes . . . I think so.’ There didn’t seem to be any other answer. What could change? It was all going to happen, it had been decided.

  Felicity gazed searchingly at her, still clasping her hand tightly. Her thin mouth, wrinkled around the lips, looked stern but her eyes were worried. ‘And . . . I don’t suppose anyone has told you about what marriage means, have they? About . . . love and children?’

  Aunt Felicity had been married once but her husband had been killed in the war, only a fortnight after the wedding, and she had never married again. Alexandra shook her head.

  ‘Of course they haven’t,’ muttered Aunt Felicity. ‘Who is there to tell you, you poor lamb?’ She pulled Alexandra gently over to the bed and they both sat down. ‘Now, listen, my dear. I do not presume to know the innermost secrets of your heart, but you have agreed to become Laurence’s wife and I assume you would not do that unless you love him. You must understand that marriage makes certain requirements of women, and when a man and a woman love each other more than anything, this requirement is no burden – indeed, it is a pleasure and a matter of great fulfilment.’ Felicity stopped, and sighed shortly, her expression concerned and awkward at the same time. Alexandra felt her cheeks burning and stared down at the candlewick bed cover, one finger tracing round and round the raised pattern. ‘But,’ continued her aunt, ‘I believe it can be an ordeal and an onerous duty if there is not a mutual love between a husband and wife. Do you know what I’m talking about, Alexandra?’

  Alexandra nodded, thinking that she did understand her aunt’s words, just not very much about what they meant in practical terms.

  ‘Good, good.’ Her aunt began to colour around the cheekbones and she looked flustered. ‘And . . . the way children are made. Do you know about that, my dear?’

  Alexandra nodded again. The village woman who had come to look after her when her mother had died had explained it, at the time when she first experienced her monthly course. It had sounded more revolting than anything she could have imagined and she had decided that it must be a pack of lies, until girls at school had whispered about it and she had learned that what she had been told was more or less true. But, just as her aunt had said, the girls had agreed that if your husband was your one true love, it was heaven. Otherwise, it was sheer hell. Therefore, it followed that you would not know if you had married your one true love until the wedding night, when the experience that followed would reveal all. She tried to imagine Laurence doing that with her but again it was impossible. All she could imagine was his cool lips pressed on hers, pressing and pressing and pressing . . .

  ‘Alexandra? Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh!’ She looked up into her aunt’s worried eyes. ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad we had this little talk, aren’t you? It’s put my mind at rest. But . . .’ She hesitated again, troubled. ‘You do love Laurence, don’t you?’

  I may as well get used to saying it, Alexandra thought. After all, I’m going to be promising to love him forever in a week. ‘Yes, Aunt. Of course.’

  ‘Good.’ Her aunt squeezed her hand and smiled. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll be very happy, my dear. Now, let’s go downstairs and have some tea.’

  Mrs Richards came up trumps with the wedding dress. Alexandra thought that it looked just like something in a society magazine, the kind that might be worn at a smart London wedding, with its pleasingly full skirt, long tight sleeves and lace train.

  ‘You’ll look an angel!’ Mrs Richards said, dabbing her eyes, and even Aunt Felicity seemed impressed. It seemed a consolation that her wedding dress would be so pretty.

  And then, one morning, Alexandra woke up in her old bedroom, opened her eyes to the dress hanging on the back of the bedroom door, and knew that today she was going to wear it for its proper purpose. When she was dressed and the veil was arranged over her face, she looked at her reflection and saw an almost ghostly white figure, its face concealed, the eyes only just discernible through the net. She could not see her own expression.

  Outside the church her father turned to her, smiled and said, ‘You look lovely, my dear.’ He kissed her cheek and took her hand, placing it on his arm and covering it with his own. Her heart lifted with pleasure. ‘Are you ready?’

  She nodded. The strains of Handel were pumped out by the wheezing organ, and they set off up the aisle, followed by two tiny attendants, the children of a relation – a little girl in pink organza and a boy in a kilt and a brass-buttoned jacket with a frothy lace cravat – towards Laurence, who waited at the top, his brother beside him. The church was full. Through her veil, everyone seemed misty and half obscured but there they all were: her own family, local people who’d known her all her life and, on the other side, Laurence’s family. There was his mother, small and fair and somehow a little monkeyish, a bit like Laurence himself, his sister Maeve, and his father, her own father’s friend, who had made this come to pass. They’d all come, putting on dresses and hats, morning coats and polished shoes. Everything that needed to be done had been done. There was no backing out now. She clutched her father tighter, taking comfort from the unfamiliar feeling of his closeness and the firm arm beneath her hand.

  As she approached Laurence, she could see beads of sweat on his nose and forehead. His skin was paper white and his chest moved rapidly under his coat. He looked as though he was going to faint. Alexandra felt light-headed and dizzy herself; she had not been able to keep down the toast that Aunt Felicity had made her eat, and now there was a painful knot in her stomach. It occurred to her that both she and Laurence might faint and she had a wild urge to laugh at the mental picture of the bride and groom both unconscious before the altar.

  Laurence tried to smile at her as she came level with him but he looked suddenly sickly and swayed for a moment before he seeme
d to regain control of himself.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the vicar asked quietly as the organ sounded the last notes.

  Laurence nodded, gulping for breath, and his brother said, ‘He’s fine. Overcome with happiness, that’s all. You can start.’

  Alexandra had the sudden feeling that until now they’d been playing a game of getting married and everyone had made a terrible mistake and taken them seriously. What are we doing? she thought. Isn’t anyone going to stop us?

  But no one said anything, not even when they were asked if they knew of any just cause or impediment. When bidden, Alexandra took Laurence’s hand, repeated the words, listened as he spoke the same to her, and still couldn’t shake the strange impression that all this was make-believe, not really happening to her, even as she watched him push the slim gold band onto her fourth finger. Surely at the end of this odd ritual, she would take off the white dress and the veil, give back the flowers, put on her old clothes and go back to her room, still Alexandra Crewe, nineteen years old, living with her father and wondering when her life would begin.

  But when she walked out of the church at Laurence’s side, into the blustery June sunshine, everything had changed. In half an hour, and to the tune of reedy hymns and an aria sung flat by a girl from the village, she had been transformed into someone called Mrs Laurence Sykes. She was now a wife, a woman of the world, with new duties and tasks ahead of her.

  That evening they set off in Laurence’s Triumph Herald, her suitcase wedged on the back seat, to go to the seaside for their honeymoon, and they would return not to her home but to married quarters in London.

  Her old life was gone forever.

  Chapter Four

  Present day

  Delilah’s whole life with John had almost never come to pass. The magazine had booked a fashion shoot at Fort Stirling and she was meant to be directing it, but she decided to send her deputy instead.