Sail Upon the Land
Page 17
Margaret had had a very clear idea of her marketable assets from her earliest teenage years. She was born after the end of the war, conceived during her father’s last leave, but he didn’t come home – his fate was an enduring mystery – and Helen, her mother, never mentioned him and didn’t remarry. There was nothing unusual about fatherless children in the Nottingham street where she had been born, or in her school.
Helen took in piece work, and her hands flew at the industrial Singer day and night to support herself and her one child. It hadn’t been deprived, but it was very ordinary. Yet Margaret never felt ordinary. Her friends had all left school at fifteen and worked in shops and factories, the additional income welcomed by their families. But Margaret insisted on stretching the family budget by completing a secretarial and business college course. If she could get into an office, she would meet a better class of potential husband.
She planned her progress through the best available offices, gaining experience. At twenty-one her certificate of excellence landed her a job in the secretarial pool at Mullins Industrial. The day Mr Mullins’ personal assistant Miss Atkins developed shingles and ceased to perform her Cerberus to Mr Mullins’ Hades, fate took Margaret in hand and threw her high.
The wedding followed on as night does day. Mullins had been a childless widower for many years. It was all perfectly respectable. Miss Atkins sat in the front right pew of St Peter in Chains, glowering and glaring from under her purple velour hat.
Margaret, very much a Christian – the Church Youth Club had been much more her style than the secular one – and a virgin whatever the mutterings, wore a long, blindingly white dress with bell sleeves. She didn’t take the trouble to worry about romantic love, ‘Soppy stuff, so impractical,’ she would tell herself, shaking her head. Love, for her, was what she felt for her mother and later for her twins. Gratitude was what she felt for Mr Mullins.
After eleven years of peaceful marriage, Joe Mullins had died suddenly. They’d been in the Bahamas. She was lounging by the pool flicking through Modern Woman, while the girls, who were ten at the time, played tennis.
She had glanced up and seen that Joe was face down in the pool. Screaming for help, she’d jumped in and tried to turn him over. But he weighed seventeen stone and she wasn’t strong enough. The pathologist said he’d died of a heart attack, not drowned, so she was reassured that she could have done no more.
He’d been a good husband, and had loved his identical girls, delighting in their prettiness and unable to get over how he, ‘an ugly old walrus’ as he called himself, could be father to two fairy children with golden hair.
After two years, there was nothing for her in Nottingham any more, especially as her mother, who’d moved in with them after Joe’s death, had also died. She dealt with her grief at that terrible loss, her faith sustaining her, and then in her usual efficient way moved on. Relying on good, bought advice, she sold their home and all her shares in Mullins Industrial, appointing a financial adviser to handle the resulting capital, and started a new life in London. She was richer than even she had expected, she’d had no idea of the depth and breadth of Mullins’ business activities, but everything came to her, enough to lead a very interesting life after his death. She would never have met Munty if it hadn’t been for Joe, and she remained grateful to his memory.
As soon as she had seen Castle Hey, she grasped its – and Munty’s – potential, and focused on moving him briskly to a proposal. She was very charming and she arranged all kinds of entertainment for this sad widower and his unresponsive daughter.
As soon as they were married, Margaret began to transform Castle Hey. When she arrived, her boudoir had been curiously empty. She wondered briefly why such a large light room at the front of the house had been shut up and neglected. But then a lot of the house remained very much as it had been when the Army handed it back in the Sixties. Munty hadn’t had the capital or the will, after Melissa died, to do anything apart from prevent it leaking as much as possible. That meant living in a handful of rooms, and locking any that could not be heated or decorated.
She had not been able to persuade the twins to make proper friends with Damson, but threatened to cut off their allowances unless they were as nice to her as they could manage. She explained to them that the house, although it looked to them like a dump, could be restored and would be a lovely place for parties and dances. She took them into her confidence on the subject of titles, and how desirable they were for people who wanted to get on in the world. The twins got it at once and, while not overwhelming in their friendliness, set out to convince Damson that it wouldn’t be an absolute nightmare to have them as stepsisters.
Her social secretary Iris bustled on her trotters over to the desk where Margaret sat surrounded by fabric samples, menus, invitations and all the other paraphernalia required to arrange a deb’s coming-out ball. An advertisement in The Lady had brought Iris Long to Castle Hey. She was a small rotund creature whose feet bulged out of her neat size-three navy courts. Her several chins were only partially concealed by the frilly ruff that decorated the neck of her blouse. Blonde highlights and a blow dry, pussy bow and a navy pleated skirt completed the look, which was Miss Piggy as Princess Diana.
Margaret appreciated Iris’s tactful social coaching, The first girl she’d employed for the joint role had been not only sneering but also wrong about lots of things – such as serviettes and pastry forks. She’d left in a huff when confronted. Margaret was eager to get it right and had no pride when it came to adjusting her behaviour in order to move up and fit in. Iris’s wages reflected this extra duty. Some of the advice was surprising, such as answering, ‘How do you do?’ when someone said, ‘How do you do?’ to you. She’d blushed when she remembered replying, ‘Very well, thank you’. The twins’ dance was, barring any future weddings, the apotheosis of Margaret’s dreams. She was so determined to get it right that she would pay any price to do so.
Iris was also good with Damson, whenever Margaret became exasperated with her stepdaughter’s ingratitude and rudeness. Damson seemed indifferent to all the trouble and expense that were being lavished on the party. She’d even turned down Margaret’s offer to have something made to go with the twins’ dresses, preferring what her grandmother could run up from a Modern Woman pattern.
The new Lady Munty had been thrilled to receive one of Peter Townend’s letters, in turquoise ink, suggesting that she should bring out her girls with the Hon. Damson Hayes, who must now be the right age. Townend, Margaret’s research had told her, was on a personal crusade to keep the whole debutante boat afloat after the end of court presentation in 1958. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of genealogy and Margaret was only too pleased for him to be aware of where the money for the big Castle Hey dance came from. Money rapidly gained lustre when attached to a genuine hereditary title, particularly an old one.
The twins responded to the whole deb scene just as she’d hoped. They went out of their way to be nice to Peter, linking both his arms, one on each side, and whispering gossip into his ears to make him laugh. They knew exactly which side their bread was buttered, and could see that everyone thinking they were Hons meant a lot in that world. They relished the effect of their good looks and liveliness on the debs’ delights after years of single-sex boarding school.
The Season was no longer the preserve of gentry and aristocracy. The Royal Household didn’t police who could or couldn’t take part as it had in the strict old days of Drawing Rooms and Presentation to the monarch. The last trace of snooty exclusion left, like the whale’s hind leg, was applying for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. It was money that counted for everything these days and the Season had been revivified by a healthy injection of cash and new blood after the nadir of the Seventies. Everyone grumbled that corporate entertaining was taking over the riverbanks at Henley and even Chelsea Flower Show. But for anyone who chose to be a deb, things went on much as they had before. The twins told their mother that they loved the debs’ tea parties
, the inaugural events of any girl’s Season, and made lots of friends who were like themselves both in appearance and background. First generation private school so no need for elocution lessons. Margaret was not frightened of anything or anyone, but when she’d found out that Munty’s mother had worked in a shop and Melissa had been a doctor’s daughter, it certainly helped her social confidence.
Even so, after Munty had asked her to marry him one night in the Poule au Pot, Margaret had visited a discreet address in South Kensington to brush up on her vowel sounds. She still had refreshers regularly to make sure she kept control of a whole herd of brown cows.
She was exasperated to hear from the twins that Damson, who had tried one tea party, said it was boring and went back to her work experience at St Saviour’s Hospital.
Noonie and Clarrie were turning into the sensation of the Season. The newspapers loved them. They starred in the Berkeley Dress Show, dressed in the same styles in different colours. Damson was rejected as a model. She’d turned up to the audition late, looking a mess, and knew she was at least a size too big. Noonie and Clarrie had been ‘finished’ for a bit of polish after school, and had learned all kinds of useful stuff at Jilly Dupree’s establishment in Knightsbridge, from secretarial and modelling skills to deportment and grooming, even – using the frame of an old MG in the garden – how to get into and out of a sports car without showing their knickers. Damson had been studying for her Cambridge entrance exams down the road.
As for the Season itself, Margaret took her usual approach: educate herself thoroughly and get the best help and advice money could buy. She’d loved the preliminary mothers’ lunches. She’d been a bit worried that she wouldn’t be accepted by the others, but found in fact that a good half of them were not at all grand but just like her. Younger wives of rich husbands many of them – ex-models, ex-secretaries, second wives, nobody in particular – and impressed by her title and in-depth knowledge of the Season.
Marrying Munty had been well worth it, even if he was still in love with his perfect dead Melissa. She couldn’t help being irritated by her predecessor’s gravestone. Why wasn’t there something suitable from the Bible on it instead of that mawkish poetry? But she comforted her husband by talking about them all meeting up again in Heaven. Secretly she wondered to herself how she would deal with that situation socially but, ever practical, the second Lady Munty thought she’d cross that celestial bridge when she came to it. She could never quite envisage her Mullins among the company of angels but did make the effort in her prayers every night.
Her guidebook to bringing out the girls was an old copy of the Fifties classic, Petronella Portobello’s How to Be a Deb’s Mum, which she kept in her capacious Hermès handbag and referred to at all times. She was better informed than many of the other mothers as a result, able to assume pole position and advise on everything from what to wear at Henley (skirts on the knee, certainly not above), to announcing dates for your dance well in advance to avoid clashes.
She knew that marriage was not the debutante’s goal in the Eighties, but if her twins had not befriended their way into valuable connections by August, she would eat her mink toque. The other girls had brothers after all, and wide social networks to which she herself didn’t have access. As for Damson, she despaired. She did her Christian duty by her stepdaughter, but Damson had always been cool towards her, appearing to grudge everything she did for her. She plainly believed herself to be above it all, superior because she was going to Cambridge. It annoyed her that Damson went to the parties at all. In fact Damson and her untouched room were the only dark spots in all the brightness, warmth and luxury of the renovated Castle Hey. The girl disconcerted her and sometimes made her furious. How dare Damson, with her mousy hair and untidy appearance, think she was better than Margaret’s own golden twins?
She didn’t want her own girls to have any particular career. They were not academic and she could see they would make good wives for rich men, and so with any luck wouldn’t have to work after marriage. But that was all later, maybe in their mid-twenties. She was looking forward already to planning their weddings, getting that nice man from Society magazine in to do the photography, with lovely Castle Hey in the background. She dreamt on, dismissing thoughts of Damson in her practical way.
The twins had chosen to have their dresses designed and made by Landy Lane, a new British couturier famous both for his sexy curvaceous evening dresses and his close ties with the more stylish bands. Margaret shook her head. It was a bit late now to start trying to control the twins’ choices, and everything was working out very well, so it didn’t seem necessary. But Landy Lane? He seemed a bit sophisticated for teenagers, and debutantes at that. She was hoping they would choose society designer Arabella Pollen for their coming-out dance, but no, it had to be Landy Lane and his artful wisps of fabric.
Margaret insisted on going with the twins to Lane’s Notting Hill studio. The designer was rumoured to be fitting a rock star’s muse in the inner sanctum, and was running very late. They flicked through Modern Woman and Society magazines, and chatted about what they would like to wear and whether it should be the same style in two different colours or the other way round.
Then Lane appeared, his yellow-white hair sticking up like a cockatoo’s crest, his measuring tape behind his neck. He was tall and extremely thin, wearing blue linen peg-top trousers tight around the calves and ending in pointed silver shoes, with a baggy white linen shirt only half tucked in. His loosened tie was also blue, and decorated with a picture of Donald Duck with a machine gun and cigar.
Margaret exclaimed: ‘Ah, Mr Lane. I wasn’t sure about using you, as the girls are only eighteen, but they adore your dresses and it is their special party.’ She tailed off as Lane ignored her and appraised the girls’ bodies. After all, the model on the latest cover of Modern Woman was wearing Lane, and perhaps the normal rules about manners did not apply.
‘Hello, lovelies,’ he said, grinning.
Their mother watched with pride as her twins blossomed from lanky limbs sprawled on the gilt chairs under the warmth of his smile.
‘Stand up, will you?’
They bounced to their feet and stood in front of him, both wearing tight pedal-pusher jeans, with braces and big men’s shirts, their blonde hair curling over their shoulders. Lane walked round them, while Clarrie said, ‘We really liked that album cover you did. With the angels, all in gold and silver. We’d like to look like that.’
‘Oh you would, would you? Not at all what I have in mind. Do I just measure one of you? Are you identical? Ha! Joke.’
And he set to work measuring every inch of them. Margaret knew his dresses were constructed with an artful internal geometry so that, externally, they appeared to be barely clinging to flesh, but in reality were fiercely structured and engineered. When he’d finished measuring, and his assistant had written everything down on quick sketches, he said: ‘Now, twins are a bit freaky.’ Margaret suppressed her reaction. ‘And I think dressing them identically is naff.’
Both twins winced this time.
‘We are going to do something completely different for each girl so they don’t look identical at all. Can one of you dye your hair silver?’ They glanced at each other as he went into the back room to fetch silk swatches of the kind of embossed, embroidered and painted fabrics that gave his dresses a three-dimensional quality.
Before they arrived, he had asked to see colour photographs of the house where the dance was being held. Margaret sent over a recent copy of Historic Décor magazine that featured the restoration of ‘forgotten Gothick jewel’ Castle Hey.
There were colour photographs of the south front, the linked drawing rooms, the single-colour garden borders in blue, pink, coral and green, and the reclaimed eighteenth-century fountain Margaret had had positioned in the shallows of the lake.
‘You, on the left. You’re gonna wear grey. And you, the other one, you’re gonna wear pink.’
They both began to protest.
The girls looked dumbfounded. Margaret had taken them foraging in Aladdin’s Cave in Berwick Street and come back with gold and silver crystal organza samples, which were now destined to stay forever in their Fiorucci handbags.
He was sketching briskly as he talked, Historic Décor open on the desk beside his pad. Then he picked up the pieces of paper and handed one to each girl. He had captured them, and when they saw themselves in what he had designed, the little family realised his mastery and succumbed to it.
‘The toiles will be ready this time next week. You’ll need to come then for one hour-long fitting. Then the dresses will be made up, and you come in again for a final fitting. They’ll be finished and the embroidery done exactly one week before the party, so don’t put on any weight. You won’t need bras. I’ll also need to talk about your hair and make-up, as we don’t want you spoiling the designs with anything crap. I have people I can send to you.’
Margaret knew then they would outshine any other deb at their dance, including Damson, who appeared to show little or no real interest in what she wore or how she looked. No need to make allowances for her either. She couldn’t possibly remember or mourn her mother as Margaret did hers.