She embraced everyone. Augustus and Clementina and Kate were there to welcome her home, as well as all the household. ‘You do look fine,’ said Alice, in tears, ‘but why did you cut off your hair?’
‘Oh, in a fit of temper, it was so difficult to cope with and everyone was badgering me to have it cut,’ lied Miranda.
‘We’d have got champagne to celebrate if we hadn’t thought that the sight of it would make you quite ill after all the champagne you must have had to drink in the last month,’ said Augustus, his eyes twinkling.
‘Give me a big glass of stout, for heaven’s sake!’ laughed Miranda. ‘Where’s Finola?’ she asked.
‘Gone to the pictures,’ sniffed Alice. ‘Come on, tell us everything that’s happened since you came back from Lausanne.’
Miranda sat down in her favourite sunken armchair beneath the kitchen window and looked at Alice, almost surreptitiously. Alice had several grey hairs now and she was much thinner, almost emaciated. Alice was thinking that Miranda’s face had lost that look of something more to come which it had had a year before, although in compensation, she was more classically beautiful to look at now.
‘You “came out”, didn’t you, Clem?’ asked Miranda.
‘I did,’ said Clementina.
‘I’m sure it hasn’t changed much since then.’
‘Oh my dear, you don’t know! We still had daytime chaperoning then.’
‘I didn’t mean all that. I meant Queen Charlotte’s Ball and what it’s all about. Getting your daughters off your hands.’
‘Marriage was my escape,’ said Clementina. ‘Augustus and I plotted it together. It was a moderately respectable match, so we didn’t have that much trouble.’
‘Nonsense, my dear, my father was a grocer,’ said Augustus.
‘But a very rich one. Anyway, I shocked my parents by going to live in Bloomsbury — and that was before the name became associated with all those queer people, as my mother would say.’ Clementina was not much given to reminiscence on the whole.
‘What are all these parties you go to like then, Miranda?’ asked Alice, refilling Clementina’s glass.
‘All alike,’ replied Miranda. ‘Everyone drinks too much and becomes disgusting. It’s not like you drinking. You can swallow pints of alcohol and remain perfectly sober. But they want to get drunk, so they can do it on very little. The conversation is like nothing on earth — actually, it’s nothing. If you don’t know someone’s name, you call them “darling”. There are two adjectives: “divine” and “foul”. You hear those three words in ringing tones, and everything else they say is inaudible. Really I loathe nothing so much as parties. Whoever said they were for fun ought to be hanged. The noise, the smell, the heat, the boredom!’
Alice laughed. (Undoubtedly Miranda had done something to her lovely breasts: Alice had read somewhere that fashionable women made their chests flat with tight bands.) ‘What do you do in the daytime, though?’ Alice continued.
‘Stay in bed in the morning. Read and write letters and see friends in the afternoon.’
‘Do you have many friends?’
‘A few,’ said Miranda.
‘Are there any special set events that you go to in the London season?’
‘I don’t know why you want to know all this. It’s too boring.’
‘I want to know what you’re doing.’
‘Well, there was the Fourth of June at Eton last Saturday. My brother Jasper’s started there. That’s a sort of open day. I went with my parents. Jasper was the cox in a boat race. And then there’s Ascot Week — that’s racing — and Goodwood, racing again, at the end of the Season. And Henley, which is boating.’
‘So what do you do in the rest of the year?’
‘Oh, there’s the shooting season, and then the hunting season. My parents made me go out with the guns last year, but I’m jolly well not going this. Standing around in the cold applauding some idiot who’s shot one bird in two hours!’
‘Blood sports ought to be banned,’ said Anatole.
‘I quite agree with you.’
‘Did I tell you Leo died?’ said Alice.
‘No. Oh, Alice, I’m so sorry!’
‘You needn’t be. He was in terrible pain for the last few months. They couldn’t do anything for him.’
‘I sometimes think,’ said Miranda, ‘that it would be a very good idea if everyone who lived long enough was killed at the age of seventy. Painlessly, of course. Then one would know exactly how much time one would have at a maximum, and one would have very little fear of being bedridden and dependent for years. One could plan one’s life.’
‘Just because you’re seventeen,’ said Anatole. ‘Thank you, but I’m forty-seven and I wish to live till I’m ninety if I can keep in good health. I’ve never had an illness in my life since I had rickets as a small child. Augustus thinks that deformed children should be strangled at birth, too. But where do you draw the line? I’ve been perfectly happy with my deformity. I can’t run or walk very far, but what does that matter?’
‘You can walk as far as most people would ever wish to, Anatole. Of course I’m not talking about crooked legs,’ said Augustus. ‘What I mean is congenital idiots and children born without arms, that sort of thing. They’d be happier dead than living in some frightful institution.’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Miranda. ‘Anyone who has to be kept in any sort of institution for however short a length of time ought to be killed.’
‘Should you have been killed rather than be sent to boarding school?’ asked Anatole.
‘I’d have chosen death at the time, certainly.’
‘But you’re a fighter, Miranda. You ran away.’
‘I didn’t used to be a fighter. When I was twelve I was a meèk little mouse who jumped when anyone spoke to me.’
‘Come now, if you’d been as meek as all that they wouldn’t have been so cruel to you. They like meek children,’ said Kate.
Miranda laughed. ‘Well, I remember myself as a very cowed creature, but it might be a trick of memory.’
‘So your brother’s at Eton now. Is he all right there?’ asked Alice.
‘Jasper? Yes. He’s a bully. My sister Viola is at Radfield. She’s fifteen, a stupid fourth-form lump of a girl who’s — she boasts about it, Alice — captain of the Middle School lacrosse team. When I ran away from Radfield, my father planned to send her somewhere else, and she actually begged to stay there. What can you do with a girl like that? And at fifteen, she’s a child.’ Miranda paused. ‘It’s little Damian I’m worried about. He’s only eleven, and Mother’s darling. He’s at prep school. He went the term I ran away from Radfield. He was such a sweet, inventive, kind boy when he was in the nursery. He hardly ever talks now. He’s totally silent for two weeks before he goes back to school. It’s absolutely horrible to be with him. I can’t do anything about it. I’ve tried to persuade my father to send him to private tutors, but no, that’s mollycoddling. The old brute’s learned nothing.’
They ate silently for a few moments.
‘Miranda, why do you hate your sister for being happy at Radfield, just because you hated it?’ asked Kate. Alice had not dared to ask that.
‘Because it makes her a barbarian.’
‘You’re so damned intolerant.’
‘You would be intolerant too, if …’
‘Aye, maybe I would, but you’ll make no friends if you can’t stand those who have different tastes from yourself. Is your sister a bully, or a liar, because she likes lacrosse?’
‘Elle est une brave fille,’ shrugged Miranda. ‘And that’s all you can say about her.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Alice.
‘Very nice but not very bright,’ replied Anatole.
‘Well, most of the people in this world are “brave”,’ said Kate. ‘And you just have to get on with them as best you can. Intelligence sometimes causes only trouble.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that? That’s been m
y entire experience. And doesn’t stupidity cause trouble? Read St Joan, Kate. It’s the cause of most of the cruelty in the world.’
‘I have read St Joan.’
‘Shaw is extremely overrated,’ said Augustus.
‘I don’t care what you say, Kate,’ continued Miranda, ‘but stupid people ought to be simply exterminated. Or if not that, they shouldn’t have any power over others. The highly intelligent should rule.’
‘I’d like to know how much coal would be produced if a Cambridge professor was responsible for the mines,’ smiled Anatole.
‘What about Nietszche as an example of an intelligent person?’ said Kate.
‘Voltaire? Erasmus? Bernard Shaw? Marie Stopes?’
‘Oh, just shut up, you two,’ said Clementina. ‘I’ve got a headache, and I didn’t come to hear a quarrel.’
‘Can you stay the night, Miranda?’ asked Alice.
‘I’m afraid not. If my parents ever found out I’d been out all night they’d suspect that I’d been here, and then they’d send me up to Lynmore.’
Miranda got up to go at one in the morning. She kissed goodbye to Alice in the hall. Alice was very tired that night, and went straight to bed. Anatole was still in the kitchen.
‘Yes?’ he said, in surprise.
She looked urgent. ‘I want to talk to you alone, Anatole. Please.’
‘But of course. Sit down.’
‘No — would you mind coming out to the car? I’d rather we talked there, for some reason.’
‘Ah, it’s your territory,’ said Anatole. ‘All right, if you like. Is it cold out?’
‘No, not in the least.’
Miranda’s car was parked round the corner. She walked slightly ahead of him. When they reached the car, she got into the driver’s seat and sat with her hands fixed on the steering wheel, looking straight through the windscreen, while Anatole looked at her.
‘The most ghastly thing has happened, Anatole.’ She fiddled with the gear.
‘Don’t drive me off. What is this thing?’
‘I don’t desire Alice any more. I’ve grown out of my homosexuality. Many people do, you know.’
‘I’ve read my Freud, yes,’ said Anatole. Miranda lit a cigarette. ‘Is there some young man you’re in love with?’ he continued.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Spotty chinless fools the lot of them. No, it’s just as I say: I’ve simply grown out of being a lesbian.’
‘Alice was worried, you know, that you’d no longer want her, because she looks so much older suddenly.’
‘God, she could be forty from the look of her!’
‘The light was not kind to her tonight. But she has aged, yes.’
‘It’s not just that, though. Even if she was as beautiful as she used to be, I’d still want a man — now.’ She looked at him and continued, ‘Anatole, I’m an awful coward, you know. I can’t bring myself to tell her that I want to — to change our relationship — because she’s in love with me, isn’t she, and I’m so fond of her, I couldn’t bear to see her pain. I feel so guilty already. I’d feel even worse if I told her myself.’
Anatole waited.
‘It would come so much better from you. If she didn’t actually see me while she was told … Anatole. If you could. I’d be eternally grateful. It would hurt her so much less if you explained, and were loving and reasonable — I’d just get hysterical, I know I would.’
‘You are a coward, aren’t you?’ he said. He sounded merely interested.
‘I told you I was!’ she shouted.
There was a pause.
‘But I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell her.’
‘Darling Anatole, thank you so, so much.’
‘You didn’t used to be given to effusiveness.’
‘No — but it’s different now.’
‘Yes, you’ve become a débutante. You like everything you were mocking this evening really, don’t you?’
Miranda opened her mouth to argue, then closed it and admitted, with an honest smile, to a certain human fallibility.
‘But I’m not a débutante inside,’ she added.
‘No one is a débutante inside, Miranda.’
‘All right. But what I mean is that most of us Bright Young Things wouldn’t appreciate someone like you. You are marvellous, you know. I’m being effusive towards you, if you like, but so I should be. It’s genuine. I mean it.’
Anatole watched her. Her coral-coloured lips were slightly parted, her black-shadowed eyes were slightly narrowed. She had only ever looked like that at Alice before, and she had used to leave her powerful young face bare of make-up.
‘You want me to go to bed with you, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said and she looked away from him.
‘I wouldn’t go to bed with you now if you were the last woman on earth,’ he hissed. She stared at him, because his voice was more shocked than angry.
She no longer looked like an openly lustful woman, and Anatole felt a little calmer as he looked into her frightened, painted eyes.
‘Are you so incapable of — of getting outside yourself, that you cannot see that your behaviour is monstrous?’ he said. ‘You come here. You see Alice and decide that she is not your adoring rescuer but an untidy, ageing bohemian. You have a general taste for men, you think, but the eligible young men available to you rather bore you, so you pick on me. You rejected me two years ago, but that does not matter. A little deformed musician is just the thing to add spice to the life of the modern young lady. So you take me out here, instruct me to tell Alice that she is not required any longer, and then expect me to be another Alice to you. Except that I shall be rather in the background, a pet to be brought out upon occasion. And you seriously expect me to fall at your feet.’
‘Stop it!’ cried Miranda.
‘I see,’ said Anatole. ‘You have been told this sort of thing before. You have been told that you are a monstrous egotist, that you are incapable of loving anyone but yourself. And a year ago I would have said that the people who told you such things were lying. To think I used to believe that you were the misunderstood genius you make yourself out to be!’
He paused.
‘Probably,’ he said, ‘you are a misunderstood genius, but that doesn’t stop you being one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever met. Perhaps it makes you so.’ He threw open the car door and walked back to the house. On the doorstep he stopped and covered his eyes with his hands. He turned round and started to run back to where Miranda’s car was parked, expecting to see her now childlike face gazing from the window. The car was gone.
Anatole could not sleep that night for worrying about what he had done to her, although he had meant what he said. The next day he received a note from Miranda, enclosed in a letter to Alice:
You are right. The odd thing is that I really believe it when it comes from you, and not only that, your telling me what I really am doesn’t annihilate me, although I believe what you say as I don’t when others tell me, because I know you don’t hate me.
‘Funny,’ murmured Anatole as he read it, ‘… that this fundamental confidence should make her so attractive and so repellent at once.’
‘What?’ said Liza.
‘Miranda.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Liza.
‘Spoilt little devil,’ said Kate.
CHAPTER 22
LYNMORE
CHESHIRE
January 1929
Thank you for sending a wreath to Kate’s funeral, wrote Alice to Miranda on 11 January:
It was the only wreath; I’m afraid we didn’t think of taking any. Yours looked very odd staring up from the grave before they started shovelling earth on it. Anatole threw it in — I think usually one lays them on top? It was a terrible day, purple sky and hailstones and all of us trying to keep from freezing and then feeling guilty about thinking of that when Kate was lying there. Clementina couldn’t come so I had to look after both Richard and Anatole — and I kept thin
king how much better Kate would have coped with two dumb grief-stricken men. It was such a shock her dying like that — perhaps I ought to have worried as she conceived so late after being barren all these years, but we were all just overjoyed. Kate was a doctor, but she wouldn’t let the possibility of a disaster cross her mind, so none of us did either.
I remember how she and I used to resent each other until that time after Finola’s birth when I had that breakdown and Anatole was so bewildered — rather than furious — at my refusing to touch the baby, after I’d agreed to have her. Kate reconciled us then; she looked after me and got Anatole to get me that mindless tiring job, which was just what I needed to stop me worrying about all my problems. Kate liked me once she could help me — I think we all like people who need us, or who have needed us. It’s difficult to live with someone who’s so young and strong and confident that they seem to have no real need of other people. I’m not saying that everyone wants to be a mainstay to a host of nervous wrecks (though that’s what Kate was good at), but it’s terrible to feel that someone one knows well doesn’t want one.
All the women I’ve known well — Kate and Clementina and Aunt Caitlin and of course especially Mamma — have been people on whom others could rely, people one could always turn to in trouble. I’ve always wanted to be like that too but I’ve never managed it. I suppose I’ve been some help to you and Anatole at times, but I’ve been a terrible mother to Finola, and that was in spite of my trying to copy in every way my own mother, who was the best mother in the world. She never interfered, never ordered me around, but she guided me gently and she gave me so much love. I always knew she loved me, although she always treated me as though I were just another one of her close circle of friends. I thought that if I just imitated her I couldn’t go wrong with Finola. Of course I knew I’d always be an inferior version of Mamma because apart from anything else she was so brilliantly intelligent. I don’t really question or reject anything that I wasn’t brought up to reject. I can’t think things through for myself.
Privileged Children Page 17