The Season

by Charlotte Bingham

  It seemed to Edith now, in her self-pitying mood, that England was a cold place, and that although there was less rain, and less poverty, there was also less gaiety and less happiness. And undoubtedly the fact that English doors were always shut was something to do with the state of their hearts, for in England no-one danced because it was fun and for the sheer joy of the moment. She could never imagine a day in England like the one at Glendarvan when Papa had let a band of beggars and musicians into the hall because a storm was blowing, and they played an air so irresistible that all the servants, not to mention Papa and Mama and their friends, stopped doing whatever they were doing and got together to dance; and drink was taken and everyone danced all the faster because of it. In England they only danced to make eyes at each other and then to marry each other for financial reasons. Whereas in Ireland the doors were always open, and people called on each other and offered hospitality at all times, and they did not give you queer looks when you gave your name as ‘O’Connor’. And more than that they talked.

  It was that perhaps more than anything that Edith was missing in England, for all that she was being chaperoned by her own mother. She missed the endless flow of chatter, the constant sound of the servants talking, the sounds of voices singing and laughing in the stables. She even missed the sound of her parents arguing, but more than all that – she missed the laughter. Gracious heavens! The English, until they came to Ireland, were so serious. They rarely laughed and hardly smiled, her papa had warned her.

  And that was the main person that Edith missed – her papa. He was always so kind and so happy, and this despite his never being able to ride or hunt ever again, and having to have special chairs to cope with his terrible back injury. Papa loved life so much that Edith knew he would never, ever let such a trifling thing as pain get him down. Any more than he would listen to Mama about not asking his strange poetical friends to Glendarvan. Mama was dreadfully put out by Mr O’s strange friends. She particularly objected to their dematerialising and then materialising again somewhere else. She said it was ‘importunate’ and ‘irresponsible’ and worse – a bad example to the servants.

  Edith did not really have much of an idea what all that meant, and cared less for that matter, but she did understand that dematerialising was not something that ‘nice’ people did, although she had a feeling that quite soon – very, very soon – she herself would be only too happy to dematerialise from some London ballroom, or from the presence of Their Majesties on the morning of her own presentation. The truth was that Edith had less than a thread’s interest in the opposite sex. She truly only liked dogs and horses, and was quite sure that she could favourably swap any young man’s company for that of their groom and his friends in the stables at Glendarvan, for all that nowadays the old man never seemed to remember to put in his teeth to have his tea.

  ‘What is going to happen to me, Minnie,’ she asked her maid – her mother’s maid, really – as they now both bent their heads against the impact of the rain that was coming down harder and faster.

  ‘What do you mean, Miss Edith, happen? Why, you’re going to get married the same as every other young girl, that’s what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Yes, but Minnie, who to? Or as Lady Devenish would say to whom? The fact is, and there’s no denying it, Minnie, the fact is that I am a hoyden and only fitted for the life of the stables in Ireland, and although I care not two hoots for Lady Devenish, the awful fact is I certainly know when a person is speaking the truth, and she was, Minnie, she was, she was speaking the truth when she said that I would never get further than the tack room in the stables of a country house. I have no more chance of surviving in an English ballroom than I do of driving a coach and four through a hunting gate. I begged and begged Mama before we came here to have me thrown to the wolves in Dublin – just a quick curtsy to the Viceroy and I’d have been home to the stables before you could say powder on your nose, so I would. But no, Mama wanted me “done” here so that she could leave Ireland, and order dresses that we know we shouldn’t afford, and generally enjoy herself without Papa tagging along and bringing all his poetical people with him.’

  ‘Lady Emily is doing what she thinks best, and that is all there is to it, Miss Edith,’ Minnie told her, putting on her most squashing face. ‘Your mother has been a gorgeous mother to you, and your brothers and sisters, and I will have no word said against her. For all that what you say is true, it does not stop her being head and shoulders above most women, nearly all women, in my opinion, God bless her. Why, the local people speak of her as of a saint beatified. Wasn’t it your mama who caught the scarlatina for herself in trying to save the O’Gradys’ grandson’s life? And didn’t he survive because of her, and haven’t they said a thousand novenas in Glendarvan for her ever since? And wasn’t she the one who would take the priest up to the nursery for you all to be christened the second time in order to please Nanny, Nanny being a Catholic woman in a Protestant house? And indeed because of that you would not know that any of you were Protestant, thank the Lord so, because of her and her natural sweet ways.’

  Edith nodded, her eyes now drifting towards the Park, and towards the host of horses and carriages, and the brilliance of the turn-outs that were passing them, albeit miles ahead. She knew that the O’Connor fortunes could never run to a brilliant horse for her in England, or a beautifully cut riding habit from Busvines, but that did not stop a girl from dreaming, did it?

  ‘If you had behaved yourself better at Lady Devenish’s house you could have made friends with that rich American heiress and she could have loaned you one of her thoroughbred horses. That would have been a start anyway, Miss Edith. But you always did know better, didn’t you? Ever since you were knee high to a grasshopper, you knew better all right. I used to say that to your poor nanny, but she never could see anything but good in you, the Lord have mercy on her.’

  ‘But Nanny’s still alive, Minnie.’

  ‘All the more reason for needing God’s blessing,’ Minnie stated piously. ‘It’s God’s mercy that we need after we have been gathered, not His blessing. The Lord save us all, but the English are so pagan nowadays that if you mention the Almighty below stairs, or cross yourself or say grace before your meal, sure they all stare at you! It’s a terrible thing to be as godless as the English, with no bottom to their souls except money.’

  ‘Ah come on, Minnie, now, we are not going to say that we Irish do not like money, are we?’ Edith started to laugh as they turned the corner into the Park and Minnie’s cloak and cape flew out and up over the umbrella. ‘We Irish not like money? We like it as well as the next person, don’t we?’ She pulled down Minnie’s cloak straightening it out again before handing the gamp back to her, and they continued with their walk, both of them grateful for the smell of the rain coming at them from across from the grass and the trees of the Park.

  ‘Well, I’m not saying that I would not be grateful for a bag of gold sovereigns if I came across them on this walk,’ Minnie conceded. ‘The difference being that if I found it—’

  ‘You would say a novena of thanks to Almighty God, and an Englishwoman would forget to, so – is that right, Minnie?’

  ‘I would do more than that. I would go on a pilgrimage to St Patrick’s holy shrine.’

  ‘It would be a long walk for you, I am thinking. The only shrine you will find in London, Minnie, I’m afraid, is to Prince Albert.’

  ‘And he was not the saint he was cracked up to be, by all that I hear tell – over fond of the bedroom, which is why the poor Queen had so many childer.’

  ‘Why, Minnie, this is fast talk indeed from one as holy as you.’

  Minnie blushed furiously, because it was true. She would never normally speak as she just had to Miss Edith, but being away from all her friends below stairs she missed the other servants, the friendliness of the chats and the talks and the innumerable innuendoes, the marvels of the gossiping over tea, the soda bread and the homemade butters and jams of the kitchens at Glen
darvan. She missed it all, for all that she did agree with her mistress that Miss Edith had to come to London for a husband if she was to have any sort of chance, the young men in Ireland being wild and woolly and not up to much when it came down to providing for a wife.

  ‘If I have fallen into bad conversations in front of you, Miss Edith, forgive me.’

  ‘You have no such thing.’ Edith squeezed Minnie’s arm. ‘It’s all right, I knew about the Prince of Wales at the Curragh and all those things from Papa. He never has paid much attention to whom he is talking, a son or a daughter, and to tell you the truth, when I see other girls of my age, their innocence and their ignorance, I am, it has to be said, quite grateful. For if there is one thing I know, it is that if your own dear father has always had the habit of honesty, you know where you stand in life. And I am a plain Jane, as he says, but I have a good wit on me on my day, and Papa has always said you spend more time talking to a woman than you do staring at her nose, so I must not worry about looks.’

  ‘You are not plain so, sure you’re just not a beauty. But beauties can be all trouble, especially when age comes upon them, and when there is nothing but a mirror to tell you who you are you turn into a poor sad sack of a sort of a creature, I always say.’

  And so on and on their talk went, as it always did, until eventually maid and mistress turned once more for ‘home’, or more particularly Medlar House, where Edith and her mother were now staying, it having been long ago arranged that Edith was to be introduced to London Society with the help of Lady Medlar.

  Edith’s spirits sank lower and lower the nearer their steps brought them to the grand entrance to Medlar House, with its massive arch, and its courtyard with its steps leading up to the great doors, everything proclaiming to the visitor that they were approaching not just the doors of an aristocrat, but a seat of power. These were the doors of a personality of the day who could, and did, make and break not just reputations and individuals, but political parties.

  Power was what London Society was about, and that was why the London Season, for all its apparent fripperies, was so important to so many. The London Season was all about luring the men with the money away from their country estates and bringing them to London. It was about laying before those same men, and their heirs, not just the flower of upper class girlhood, but also political possibilities, ideologies, causes, ambitions, that might perhaps change much that was good, and much that was bad. That was what the London Season at the height of the British Empire was all about, and that was what Medlar House from its entrance gates onwards declared. It declared grandeur, it declared importance, it declared influence.

  ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here,’ Edith murmured as she and Minnie turned under the arch, and their feet started to tread across the stone setts of the interior courtyard and so towards the great doors with their enormous panels which would be opened by the flunkeys, their town liveries declaring them to be in the service of the Medlars, in effect a small private army that stood between the old family and the populace that walked past their doors in nearby Piccadilly. ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE!’ Edith raised her voice.

  ‘Shushy, shushy, will you now, Miss Edith, one of the footmen will hear you and tell.’

  Edith squeezed Minnie’s arm and then quickly let it go, for in England no-one seemed to like their servants as much as the Irish did. It just was not done to treat them as anything except lah-di-dah and don’tcher know.

  Or as Edith’s youngest sister Valencia always put it, as nose-in-the-air, crook-your-little-finger, how-h’are-you-today-my-ladeah and hawfully-well-thank-you-but-ahctually-couldn’t-care-a-damnty-about-youah-folk.

  Except the way Valencia said it was always very, very quick, almost a party piece. But that was Valencia. She never did like anything to go by without making a meal of it. Edith put away the thought of her youngest sister, ethereal, pretty as a flower and the most lovely of all of them, but with such frail health that leaving her had torn at Edith’s heart.

  ‘Bring me back a big hat from England, Edie, oh do!’ she had pleaded.

  ‘Course, darling, and anything else I can get my greedy hands on too.’

  They had parted with laughter and kisses, and many promises to bring back the earth if not the sea too, and Edith had walked towards the waiting coach with Minnie a yard behind her, whistling softly to keep away the wretchedness of the moment. Valencia’s kisses and her rounded childish arms had caught at her eldest sister’s heart in such a way as to make even the memory of it now just too painful. Indeed, Edith had been hoping that, with the help of Phyllis de Nugent, she would have been sent smartly back from Lady Devenish’s house to Ireland, and straight away. But it had not been that easy, simply because nothing is as easy as you hope, she had always found. Except riding over the gorse on a wild pony on a sunny day with a light summer breeze blowing, and the wild flowers in the hedges making patches of colour that would stay locked in your memory long after you fell asleep in your bed with the sound of the sea in the distance, and the warmth and the cool of Irish linen sheets to cover you.

  Once again Edith headed up the wide shallow stairs of Medlar House. It had to be faced, whether she liked it or not, there would be no going home until she had fairly frightened the ballroom bare of likely husbands, and even Lady Devenish had given up all hope for her. If she was to ever see Ireland again, or watch Valencia opening up a big box with a great plumed hat in it, she would have to prove that no man would want her, and given her looks that surely would not be difficult?

  She strode ahead, up the second flight of stairs, ignoring the great mêlée of people in the saloon on the first floor, who were there for something or someone whom they could use to their own benefit, in the hope of aggrandisement, or of enrichment.

  ‘Lady Medlar does not have guests to her house,’ she remarked, sotto voce, to Minnie as they went on up the stairs to the bedrooms above, ‘she has petitioners. All wanting something! From her. Or, in the old days, via her from King Edward, who used to love her, they say. But then the old king loved everyone didn’t he?’

  ‘Shush, Miss Edith,’ said Minnie for the second time. ‘We don’t want to offend her ladyship, not with us hardly having arrived here.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s all right once we’ve been here a month or two, is it, Minnie?’ Safely outside Edith’s bedroom door now they started to laugh.

  ‘You’re a caution!’

  Portia paused at the turning of the street, and wondered at where she had found herself, for it was a very different street from any she would normally walk down, a street she knew few of her acquaintance would find themselves in, albeit she was not so foolish as not to be still accompanied by her personal maid, the ever faithful Evie.

  ‘Lordy, Miss Portia – I mean my lady – what are we doin’ ’ere, eh?’ Evie shivered. Her eyes ran round the shabby doorways and the general air of fading gentility, and a look of fear came into her eyes, the kind of fear that sharp reminders of former days of poverty can bring into the eyes of those who have known what it is like to go hungry for half the week. Nowadays Evie was used only to the grand life, and the feeling of ease which associating with wealth can sometimes bring in its wake, when all the doors seem newly painted, and gold leaf and silk fabrics and beautiful objects abound.

  There was certainly no beauty in this street. There was nothing of new quality, and what there was of old quality had to struggle to show itself, so that doors and window frames that had once been properly joined were starting to split, and brass knockers that had been made to resound heavily against good-quality wood were now darkened to black, and the doors to which they were attached forlorn and peeling. Evie would have dearly liked to ask her mistress what exactly they were both doing in such a street, but Lady Childhays – or Miss Portia, as Evie knew her – was not a person to communicate with her maid, no matter how long Evie had been in her service.

  Of course she talked to her – Evie would not have stayed with a mistress who did not confide in her
, for that, after all, was what maids were for. Maids did not just dress you and bath you, they were a shoulder on which to lean. A person to confide in as they dressed you, as they bathed you. In every way a maid was there to listen to you.

  But Lady Childhays, as Evie well knew, had the artless, or artful, habit of communicating to Evie, or anyone else, everything about herself except that which truly mattered. Therefore Evie would know of all her mistress’s worries about Miss Phyllis, about her dismay at having a daughter who had become feral to a degree that was almost distressing, but nothing at all about why they had, of a London afternoon, taken a hackney of all things, and driven off to such a shabby address, an address which Miss Portia had written down in a little beaten gold notebook – her aide memoire, as she called it.

  Portia stopped. ‘Ah, yes, here we are.’

  ‘Where are we, Miss Portia?’

  ‘Here.’ Portia had said here very flatly. Even she could hear how flat her here was. ‘Yes, this is it.’ She nodded her head at Evie, as if Evie was cognisant of where they were, and why.

  ‘Where are we, Miss Portia?’

  Portia liked the way Evie still called her, in private, ‘Miss Portia’ but never more than at that moment. She did not want Evie’s clear voice ringing out with a Lady Childhays in a place like this. It would be enough to bring around every pickpocket and thief in the neighbourhood.

  She glanced nervously towards the hackney carriage, and having reassured herself that it was still waiting, she nodded at Evie to follow her, and the two women walked up the short flight of steps to the doorway of the shabby house to which Portia had directed the driver of the hackney to bring them, Evie tightly gripping the old silver handle of Portia’s black umbrella, ready, in her own mind at least, for anything.