Flowers Stained With Moonlight

by Catherine Shaw

  Your loving

  Vanessa

  Paris, Friday, July 8th, 1892 (although it is already the 9th, really!)

  My dearest sister,

  It is extremely late, nearly one o’clock in the morning. I am very tired and feel I should go to bed at once, but then, if I do not throw my thoughts and impressions upon the paper, and share them with you as I always do while they are still imprinted fresh upon my mind, I am afraid that a long night of deep sleep will dull their sharpness and I shall forget most of what I saw and learnt.

  For I must confess to you before anything else that I have actually been to a party, and that at this party, there were a great many things to eat and particularly to drink; most delicious and succulent things the latter were, sugary and innocent seeming upon the tongue, but actually most unexpectedly treacherous, so that after several hours I found myself tottering instead of walking, and am not at all sure how I could have arrived home if Arthur had not held my arm and recalled the way. Now that I think of it, he cannot have been so very cool-headed himself, for he sang me a very lovely aria as we went along, which I thought nothing more of at the time than that I had never noticed him to sing so pleasantly, but find rather surprising now that I write it down.

  The darkness is complete except in the little circle glowing about my candle’s flame. My eyelids feel alarmingly heavy, and Annabel is already sleeping deeply, so I feel I must hurry to write, and clear up the mass of confused impressions in my mind. Let me begin at the beginning, and tell you how I went yesterday to call upon Mrs Hardwick, whose husband is a diplomat, and who used to be quite a close friend of Mrs Bryce-Fortescue in her youth.

  I found her in, but she was on the point of leaving, apparently to walk her dogs. Still, she welcomed me kindly, although a little as though she did not really know what she should do with me. She is very unlike Mrs Clemming, and does not seem to be interested in gossip, to the point that she seemed to make an effort to ask me even the simplest questions, and those were couched in the briefest of terms.

  ‘So you’re acquainted with Eleanor,’ she said abruptly, upon hearing my name. ‘In Paris alone, are you? No? With friends? Good, that. Not too lonely, then. Looking for something to do? People to meet? They all do. Can’t stand parties myself. Have to go to far too many of them, that’s the problem. Part of my work. And can’t have my dogs here. Only real company, dogs.’

  I was surprised at this remark, in view of the very large Saint-Bernard she held on a leash and the two sharp-voiced terriers which bounded about her feet yapping unceasingly as we spoke. She caught my look.

  ‘Those are not dogs,’ she observed more telegraphically than ever. ‘At least, they are dogs, I suppose, but not my pack. Hounds, I mean. Best I can do here, living in a city.’

  ‘Oh, I see!’ I said, somewhat taken aback. ‘You mean you cannot hunt here. But surely there are many compensations, living in Paris.’

  ‘Awful place. Awful people. If you knew. But probably won’t have time to find out. English here just as bad as the French. Worse, maybe.’

  ‘Oh! And … I suppose you are obliged to frequent a great many people?’

  ‘Course, part of my job. Diplomat’s wife – got to meet people all the time. Parties – far too many of ’em. Even worse when I have to organise them myself. Cook is wonderful – fortunately – but still, got to be there. We’re hosting one this evening, round at the Embassy, Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Come, why don’t you? Come and bring your friends. How many? Four? I’ll tell the maître d’. Eight o’clock, then. Nice to see some fresh faces.’

  I felt these remarks to be in the nature of a dismissal, and accompanied Mrs Hardwick out the door and down the stairs in silence, as no conversation was possible above the pulling, tugging, dashing, leaping and yapping of the dogs in their eagerness to plunge into the fresh sunshine. I then hastened to my teatime rendez-vous with my friends, eager to share the news about the evening’s invitation.

  Their reactions were most varied.

  ‘It might be an awful bore, what?’ said Charles doubtfully.

  ‘Oh, how lovely, a real party here in Paris!’ exclaimed Annabel with delight, at the same time.

  ‘Yes, perhaps it’ll be wonderful after all,’ said Charles, exactly at the same time as Arthur said,

  ‘But we were supposed to compute Hermitian matrices this evening.’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ I laughed, ‘too much work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’

  ‘Do you think everybody will be very elegant?’ worried Annabel.

  ‘What does it matter if they are!’ said Charles. ‘Fresh cheeks are much prettier than pearls and diamonds any day.’

  I looked at him in surprise, suddenly hearing him as though for the first time, and felt a tinge of worry. I must take Charles aside at the first opportunity and try, as tactfully as possible, to make him understand something very important.

  We repaired to our rooms after tea; Annabel and I to prepare ourselves, while Charles and Arthur expressed the intention of packing as much calculation into the next two hours as possible in order to make up for the lost evening of work. I even heard them saying something about rising early in order to have something concrete to show at their meeting with M. Hermite tomorrow afternoon. (It seems a little unlikely, considering the aria and other behavioural phenomena observed this evening, but one never knows.) In any case, they disappeared into their room where they made a great rustling of paper and pencils, whilst Annabel and I once again laid out our prettiest items and I allowed her to compose and select for the two of us.

  In spite of the ample amount of free time which lay before us, we were late, of course; a great deal of inertia and confusion must necessarily be overcome before four people can be simultaneously ready to depart (I admit, from long experience, that it is generally much worse when some of them are children). By the time we were all arrayed neatly in our best and standing ready in front of the main entrance of the hotel, tapping impatiently because Arthur had dashed back upstairs for a handkerchief, it was a quarter to eight, and after walking along the Seine to the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, somewhat slowly so as not to become hot and ruffled, it was nearing eight-thirty. However, as it turned out, this was a perfectly reasonable time to arrive; a great many guests were present, but many others were not yet come.

  We were ushered in by the gentleman Mrs Hardwick referred to as the maître d’, whom I would have called the butler. He bowed courteously at the door, and asked for our names in a humble murmur. He did, however, check against a list which he had discreetly hidden under a napkin, and cross off an entry marked ‘Miss Duncan and friends’. The room he then escorted us to was of noble proportions, spacious and high-ceilinged. A grand piano stood in one corner, its rich colour contrasting with the light polish of the parquet. The walls contained numerous paintings, and heavy curtains draped the enormous windows, not to shield the guests from the looks of curious outsiders, for the windows did not give directly onto the street, but perhaps to increase the intimacy of the room by preventing the guests from seeing the outer reality.

  Taller than almost anybody else, very regal in black silk and pearls, Mrs Hardwick stood in the middle of the vast salon, receiving. She may not have been gifted with many of the social graces, and certainly not with that of making easy conversation or flitting from group to group, but she appeared adequate enough in the role of queenly hostess, looking down her nose and offering her fingers to the arriving guests nearly as though they were supplicants – radiating British superiority the while, quite as though she had not made such uncharitable remarks earlier that very afternoon. She looked very cool and composed. The dogs, fortunately, were nowhere to be seen.

  The guests were a motley mix of nationalities, all apparently from the diplomatic milieu. There were many British and French people there, but also an assistant to the Greek ambassador, a Turkish gentleman with a fez, a tall and very quiet American with spectacles and various other specimens of all flavours.
Amongst them circulated graceful and silent young men and women, laden with trays. Some carried flutes of champagne, others tiny discs of bread, all different from each other, each containing an astonishing variety of tiny morsels piled upon it; a currant, a shred of Italian raw ham, a dice of cucumber and a microscopic sprig of parsley, or else a scrap of smoked salmon topped by a point of cream and a tiny wedge of lemon. We made our way across the room to Mrs Hardwick.

  ‘So here you are,’ she said, extending her hand to each of us in turn, and looking downwards upon us (not that she was really taller than the men, but she looked downwards at them anyway. An excellent tactic to master). ‘Good to see you, good to see you,’ she went on. ‘A pleasure. Do any of you speak French? You do?’ she said to Annabel. ‘You’ll be a real boon to me, my dear, if you will.’ With an effortless gesture of the hand, she attracted the attention of a lonely gentleman holding a glass of champagne and standing at some distance from her, much as some people, blessed with the gift of authority, effortlessly attract the attention of waiters in restaurants while others are condemned to remain humbly unnoticed although they may gesture and wave their hand a dozen times in order to ask for more wine or for the bill to be brought.

  ‘Now, you’ll converse with Monsieur Olivier,’ she said, the authoritarian ring in her voice quite audible although muted behind an air of jollity, as though she were proposing a great pleasure to all concerned. ‘Venez, venez, monsieur, rencontrer une charmante jeune amie anglaise,’ she added for the benefit of the approaching gentleman, fluently albeit with a strong British accent, and Annabel found herself accepting a flúte de champagne from Monsieur Olivier’s hand, and chatting to him lightly as though she had no will of her own.

  I was hoping to escape the same fate, but Mrs Hardwick had every intention of using her guests to neutralise each other to maximal effect. Charles, the next in line, was introduced to a dowager lady whose ample bosom was built up by stays to alarming proportions, so that her glorious emeralds lay upon it rather than hanging from her neck, while Arthur found himself speaking English at a snail’s pace to a sallow-cheeked, black-haired and melancholy-eyed Spanish beauty. The very second Mrs Hardwick turned to deal with me, I took the bull by the horns.

  ‘I should so like to meet anyone who is acquainted with Sylvia,’ I said flutteringly – ‘I am sorry, I am so very inexperienced in society, and it truly would help me to have a common friend to talk about.’

  ‘Sylvia, Sylvia, what Sylvia is that? Oh, you mean Eleanor’s daughter.’

  ‘Yes, she was here last winter – surely she must have met many of the people here now,’ I continued hopefully. Mrs Hardwick was too distracted to ignore my request and insist on something else; other guests were approaching and she wished to dispose of me quickly and without argument.

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ she said, glancing about her, a little at a loss. ‘Here, you’d better ask my husband. He’ll remember better,’ and she directed me towards a diminutive gentleman whom I had absolutely not spotted until that very instant, although he was greeting guests assiduously at a mere arm’s length from his wife.

  I approached this gentleman quite timidly, but he seemed delighted to meet me, and I had immediately to revise my initial impression of an insignificant little man in the shadow of his wife. Small and slight though he was, Mr Hardwick was a consummate diplomat; suave to the point of liquidity, he greeted me as warmly as if I were exactly the person he had most desired to see at that precise moment, and I was quite carried away by the delight radiating in his sunny smile, the way he looked directly into my eyes, and the kind, familiar gesture with which he laid his hand upon my arm; only later did I notice him behaving similarly with nine out of ten of the other guests he greeted.

  As he was so very welcoming, I decided to proceed to action at once.

  ‘Mrs Hardwick would so like me to meet some of the people here, as I don’t know anyone except my friends,’ I began.

  ‘Oh, now, we can surely remedy that very soon,’ he smiled, and as though by a natural reflex, his eyes roved swiftly over the assembled crowd. I spoke quickly.

  ‘I did hope to meet some people who were acquainted with Sylvia, my friend Sylvia Granger. Perhaps you remember her. She visited here last winter.’

  ‘Naturally I remember Mrs Granger; I never forget anyone,’ he said. I suppose it is due to a professional habit which must be quite useful and even indispensable – how awful to be introduced, in the home of the Prime Minister of some Republic, to some gentleman who says ‘Of course we are already acquainted’, and to have no idea whom he might be! I imagined, peculiarly, that my own face, form and name would be inscribed in the inscrutable and secret agenda hidden behind the friendly mask for all eternity – or at least until the man himself should have disappeared into the grave.

  ‘A charming young lady,’ he went on. ‘She attended at least two of our parties.’

  ‘Who was she with?’ I asked suddenly, as an idea started up in my mind. ‘With your memory, perhaps you can tell me – I – she—’

  I stopped, confused because of the abrupt oddity of my request, and hesitating between excusing myself on the grounds of shyness, or explaining untruthfully that Sylvia had spoken to me about so many of the kind guests at his excellent parties. But though he glanced at me with amusement, the echo of flattery in my words caused him to answer my question without any detours due to curiosity, and his words caused my hair to start up upon my neck.

  ‘She came the first time with a lady friend, a very lovely girl, I remember, a real statue; tall and dark. I should remember her name. Yes, Camilla, of course. A perfect flower, a very suitable name. I quite enjoyed her company. My wife’s friends do so often bring a breath of change to our familiar professional gatherings. I was very sorry not to see her again. The second time Sylvia attended a party here, she was accompanied by a gentleman.’

  ‘Accompanied? Really accompanied? Or were they simply casual acquaintances of the evening?’ I asked, hiding the excitement his words engendered within me.

  ‘Oh, really accompanied!’ he laughed. ‘They were inseparable, and Katherine was in high dudgeon because they mixed so badly. A most interesting young gentleman – he would have been perfect for the old ladies, but Sylvia hardly let him speak to anyone.’

  ‘Do you know who he was?’ I asked, but I knew the answer would be negative before the words left my mouth.

  ‘Not at all, never saw him again. I really don’t know where she found him. He was the sensation of the evening among the old ladies, as a matter of fact. I can’t recall what he said his name was, but it was something highly exotic, at any rate. Dear me, you had better circulate, hadn’t you,’ he added quickly, as a group of new arrivals, having paid court to Mrs Hardwick, bore down upon him. ‘Here – come along,’ and guiding me just a few steps towards the edge of the room, where chairs were lined up against the wall for those who were too elderly or tired to make continuous use of their legs, he presented me to a clump of ladies who sat there, gossiping and fanning themselves.

  ‘Mrs Thurmond, Mrs Hilton, here’s Miss Duncan, a friend of Sylvia Granger’s, just arrived from England,’ he said, pushing me forward slightly with his hand in the small of my back. ‘You do remember Mrs Granger, of course; it was she who came here in … January, was it? Yes of course – it was the New Year’s celebration, for there were fireworks over the city at midnight. She came with an interesting young foreign gentleman – Miss Duncan is most interested to hear more about him. I thought you ladies would be sure to remember everything he said and did.’ He slid away smoothly, leaving me in the hands of the dowagers, who shifted in their places, drew up a chair for me, and installing me in their midst, transformed me in a single gesture into one of themselves: I felt myself to be rather aged and bodily weary, and perhaps even somewhat heavy; much decked out and tightly constricted in my stays, a little too warm but acutely interested, in spite of all this, in the sayings and doings of every human being unlucky enough to str
ay into the radius of my small influence. As I sat, I spied Arthur, at some little distance, laughing wholeheartedly with the Spanish girl and bringing a melancholic smile to her lips. I felt a little twinge, as though my identity were slipping away from me.

  However, I brought myself severely back to the matter at hand, and turned the conversation without the slightest difficulty onto the subject of my friendship with Sylvia and her fascinating masculine acquaintance, about whom I implied that she had told me many obscure and deeply intriguing facts.

  ‘Oh, he was a sensation,’ said the lady called Mrs Hilton, who wore a bonnet with an alarming amount of lace and appeared positively short of breath, whether from excitement or the tightness of her dress I could not be sure. ‘He was so very romantic! A Russian prince, he was.’

  ‘A Russian prince!’ I was astonished at this unexpected piece of information, more worthy, seemingly, of a fairy tale than of bitter and sordid reality. But Mrs Hilton did not consider that being Russian was anything so very exotic.

  ‘Paris is simply crawling with Russians,’ she said. ‘That’s because the French lost the war in Russia eighty years ago; they’ve been swarming over here ever since. They learn French there as children, and then when they come here, they marry French girls as often as not and stay forever, living a life of parties and gambling.’

  ‘Some of them are just here because they’re diplomats,’ observed another lady. ‘We’ve a couple right here in this room, haven’t we, dear?’ and she turned to her friend Mrs Thurmond for confirmation.

  ‘Why, certainly,’ said this lady. ‘There’s Mr Grigoriev over there now, by the curtains; he’s the gentleman petting the dog. He shouldn’t do that,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘Katherine’s dogs don’t much like to be petted – there! He’s snapped at his hand. I’m not in the least bit surprised.’