John might approve of the name Rose. There had been no further word from James Lorrimer about his possible true name or whereabouts. She must accept that he had vanished; and that he had chosen to. She glanced at Nigel, his face gentle and intent as the door opened, and Nurse carried a baby in each arm, each one murmuring a little, tired of waiting. They already knew they only needed to make their desires known, these so deeply wanted children. No need to make a fuss.
‘Stay while I feed them,’ said Sophie to Nigel. And Nurse — who had evidently been well briefed by Maria on Sophie’s tendency to make up her mind and have the world follow her decision — did not even twitch her lips at the temerity of a male watching this rite of motherhood.
Chapter 66
Every birth is a new beginning. Though every day, or hour or minute may be a new beginning too. And every beginning is an ending of what was new the moment before.
Miss Lily, 1914
Darling Sophie,
It is in every newspaper! Our very own Countess of Shilling has had twins! I don’t think there is anyone from Sydney to the back of the black stump who doesn’t know of the great event.
Darling, I am so happy for you, and your Nigel. I will also add, very quietly indeed, that friends who count the weeks don’t count. I am at the centre of a wide gossip ring, and I can promise there has not been a breath of anything but delight. You are merely expected to produce the earl, the offspring, and a vast garden party as soon as it is practicable to travel such a long way with Rose and Daniel. I love the names, by the way.
It is impossible to say how delighted I am. The only thing that will make me happier is to see you again. Harry sends his regards, which is man talk for ‘love’.
Love from all of us, and especially me,
Midge
PS Ethel says Nigel is a ‘good egg’. I trust her judgement! He must be nearly good enough for you.
No news of John. And Midge would tell her if she knew of him, especially as she guessed the children might be his. Possibly she had already found out his real name from Harry, but ‘John’ might now have a third name, and a new and unknown refuge. I must not think of him, she thought. It is not fair for Nigel, nor the children, all of whom deserved certainty.
The Vailes sent a stilted letter of congratulations. Sophie resolved that she would keep the Vailes from ever visiting her children, not only because they were unlikeable, but in case they came deliberately bearing chickenpox or measles. She would not put juvenile germ warfare past that lot.
They never had collected their zebras, which still grazed in the field, their coats grown conveniently shaggier. The hippopotamus though had been rehomed in the London Zoo.
Small knitted garments arrived, sent by every female she had worked with, including Doris; a matinée jacket from Her Majesty, which had needed a consultation with Nigel to find the correct response; a large toy zebra from the Prince of Wales; and a crocheted blanket in complicated baby stitch from young Sophie. More letters arrived: weekly ones from Midge; from Ethel, Sloggers and Dodo at Oxford; from Lady Mary in London whose acquaintance she had renewed; from women she had worked with in Belgium and France; from Mrs Henderson, telling in detail of vast sunsets as their new airline carried supplies across the north; and a postcard of a didgeridoo from Miss Morrison, saying simply, We’ve done it. Thank you. Eugenia M.
Georgina arrived too, with Timothy, who had taken photos all the way from Australia, and needed to show her and Nigel every one once Green had taken him up to the attics to show him how to develop the film. Georgina left him at Shillings while she made a first cautious visit to the Dorchester to see Lady FitzWilliam.
She returned with a deep peace in her eyes, and plans to visit, ‘just for a few days’, the estate Timothy would eventually inherit. Sophie suspected the days would become weeks, the visits longer and more frequent and that, within a year, both mother and viscount would be in residence, creating the bonds that held Shillings together as a community, and the estate benefiting a great deal from Georgina’s talent for management.
Business wires and letters sat on Hereward’s silver salver and then the breakfast table almost every morning now, Cousin Oswald and the Slithersoles Senior and Junior having evidently decided that the business of birth was completed and the business of corned beef, fruit cocktail and other products could be resumed.
Mostly little was needed except her agreement. Sophie had, however, noted Martinus van der Hagen’s Nutricia NV baby food company in the Netherlands, and now Mr Clapp in America was selling his versions too. As she knew from the Shillings apples, any blemish made fruit unsaleable, and carrots too. There was not just a market for the new canned baby foods but a plentiful supply of a cheap yet nutritious raw material that would otherwise be fed to pigs or wasted.
I am thinking of small jars, she wrote, each holding one meal’s serving of mashed apple, pear, or a combination of potato, carrot and puréed pea, called ‘Baby’s Vegetable Medley’ or ‘Baby’s Fruit’. This would mean that, as with Her Ladyship’s Fruit Cup, we could alter the contents according to the harvest.
We could begin with a trial factory here, near Shillings, preferably before Miss Thwaites goes home, so she can supervise the build and first production runs and then take her experience back to create one at Bald Hill.
I hear the soldier settler blocks are proving a sad disappointment to many of the hopeful demobbed veterans and this would give them another market to help them survive. Once again I must emphasise that while these factories must of course produce a profit, it should be no more than three per cent, with a further five per cent for future capital investment, thus giving the highest price possible to the growers. There would be, of course, the usual Higgs working conditions in the factories.
I do not think the French or other European nations would be potential major markets, but if we perhaps put ‘Under the Patronage of the Earl of Shillings’ on the labels for an American market, Mr Clapp may find us serious competition.
No, there was no need to travel to London, or Sydney or Thuringa. Life was here. And yet . . .
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow . . .
Home was still the hush of midday in a gum forest, or the insane shriek of the cicadas. It was Harry Harrison yelling at the sheep dogs while the flock moved in a grey wave across the hill. It was pelicans landing like unsteady seaplanes on the river, the shrill of mosquitoes in the night and stockmen whose skin might be black or white, and women with rough hands who called her ‘darl’ and who had voted for her.
Shillings mattered. It was an unalterable part of her life now. But for her heart to be truly fed, she must see home.
Chapter 67
Social rules are both senseless and eminently meaning ful. To know them is to show that you belong.
Miss Lily, 1914
‘David insists on coming,’ said Nigel, emerging from the library, a box in his hands, ‘but he says it must be in London as he can’t get away.’
Sophie sighed. If the Prince of Wales was going to attend the Christening, it would need to be a formal affair. They should even open Vaile House, which had been rented for the past twenty years, the tenant inconveniently dying only a month earlier, leaving time for renovations but not enough for a new tenant, giving them no excuse not to celebrate in style.
She needed a social secretary. She smiled. Georgina could find her one. After all, Giggs had never officially resigned her position, even if she had never actually been paid a salary either.
Georgina and Timothy were up at the FitzWilliam estate again, but surely Georgina could still find her a secretary, or at least advertise for applicants to come to her for vetting. They would need a month to move the household, and the guests must be given at least a fortnight’s notice, even in these informal days. The new secretary had better have exquisite handwriting, as she wasn’t
going to write out two hundred invitations, nor would she inflict that duty on Maria, who had accepted an invitation to visit Sloggers, tutoring at Somerville College in Oxford.
And dash it, she would have to ask Emily, if the celebration was to be in London. Emily had already sent her two invitations to dine, knowing it was impossible for her to accept, but still conferring the obligation on the Countess of Shillings to return the invitations. Emily played the game well.
And Emily would need to put up with bluestockings and archaeologists — Midge’s friend Anne was pregnant, was returning next week and would therefore be in England for at least a year or even two — and an extremely long royal performance on the bagpipes.
‘If you can put up with the formality, I can too,’ she said. Because one day, only eighteen years away, Rose would make her debut just as her mother had done, or possibly not just as her mother had done, but according to whatever conventions one was following at the time. And Daniel would perhaps hunt the ballrooms for an acceptable wife for Shillings. No, a loving life partner: that sounded better.
But for those events to happen, the children’s parents must play their roles too. Australia must be part of their lives, but at least a few social seasons were inevitable, beginning with this.
She looked at the box in Nigel’s hands, then at his amused smile as he held it out to her. ‘What’s this?’
‘Traditional, darling, on the birth of the heir.’
Sophie stared at the most opulent tiara she had ever seen, larger even than Queen Adelaide’s. ‘You didn’t buy this.’
‘Of course not. It’s been in a bank vault.’
‘Do you think it might go back there?’
Nigel laughed. ‘Tomorrow, if you are sure you don’t want to wear it for the party after the Christening.’
‘Never. Why not sell it?’ That tiara would buy mechanical harvesters for all of Southern England.
‘I can’t. It’s part of the entail. The entail can only be broken if the current earl and his heir agree — once the heir is over twenty-one.’
‘I profoundly hope that in twenty-one years Daniel signs away every ugly stone of it. Any other traditions I don’t know about? Wearing a crinoline for a year after childbirth? Doing a Lady Godiva around the village?’
‘Just the Christening.’
‘The vicar will be thrilled.’
‘By the archbishop, as it will be in London. Darling, it will be expected.’
‘And you of course never do the unexpected. No, you are correct. Sometimes one has to do the right things. Or the silly thing that society thinks is right.’ She would manage, she thought.
And manage quite easily. It seemed she had absorbed the lessons of the Dowager Duchess of Wooten, who had guided her through her debutante season, extremely well. The Dowager had never seemed incommoded. Sophie realised now that it was because she never was.
The admirable Miss Pinkley, bless Georgina and her ready understanding of who was required, took Sophie’s twelve or so scribbled names and, after adding dozens more, wrote out beautiful guest lists. Sophie waved these away without even reading them, after making sure the guests she did want had been included.
She did, however, consult Mrs Goodenough about the menu for the luncheon after the Christening. It would be an indoor luncheon buffet, unthinkably informal before the war, but at least it meant she didn’t have to worry about precedence if the Prince of Wales didn’t turn up, or arrived just as the affair was over, as he was notorious for doing.
Mrs Goodenough glowed with the joy of feeding royalty, as well as the cream of London society, though Sophie suspected that ‘flotsam’ would describe many of the guests better — butterflies who fluttered from one function to another. But butterflies were decorative, she had to admit.
It still seemed strange to order the menu in her own home, after so many years of Maria or others taking care of the task. She and Mrs Goodenough decided on caviar on toast; glazed ham decorated with candied satsuma slices; game pie; boned stuffed goose; and silver hotplates with curry and yellow rice, and small dishes of what Jones referred to as ‘the fixings’ to eat with curry. Sophie had toyed with vast centrepieces of corned beef, but relinquished the inspiration reluctantly. Besides, for many there, it would bring back memories of battlefields . . .
She included two new Australian dishes for sentiment; vast pavlovas, their meringue skirts named for the divine dancer, laden with whipped cream and strawberries and passionfruit she had imported specially. (Although Cousin Oswald had told her firmly that the pavlova had been invented in New Zealand and not by a shearer’s cook turned chef in the west.) And small individual lamingtons would be served with coffee, those chocolate-and-coconut-coated sponges named for Lady Lamington, much-admired wife of the deeply disliked ex-Governor of Queensland. Sophie approved of lamingtons. The coconut kept your fingers from getting sticky; though naturally at the Christening they would be eaten from plates with cake forks.
Miss Pinkley supervised the opening of Vaile House; Jones managed the hiring of extra staff for the month the family would be in residence there; Green took care of matters sartorial; and Nurse packed whatever paraphernalia would be needed to move the babies and the nursery. Jones even drove the car.
London had not changed. Fog hung, yellow as pus, wisping between houses, sitting as if it had conquered the town, thicker than mustard gas, though slower to poison and kill. Cars burped exhaust fumes, outnumbering horses now, the scent stronger than manure.
Poor sparrows, thought Sophie. They had lived so well on horse droppings and undigested corn. What could feed on car exhaust?
Vaile House felt like a hotel: sumptuous, tasteful, temporary. They would let it again after the Christening, Sophie decided, unless Nigel objected. But entertaining at Shillings sometimes would be necessary now, if she and Nigel were not to be labelled eccentrics, damaging their children’s prospects. Although with the Higgs fortune and the Vaile titles, possibly four dinners a year and an annual charity garden party would suffice.
Yet once they were settled, the move to Vaile House was almost imperceptible: waking up beside the same husband, in an almost identical bed, in a similar room, to the same face bringing the same morning tea. Mrs Goodenough had been transported along with the rest of the household so even breakfast was the same, the two boiled eggs on torn-up white bread that Nigel consumed as a matter of course, her own kedgeree. Maria Thwaites, frowning the same gentle disapproval at the same newspapers . . .
To her surprise what she had thought of as merely convention was one of the most meaningful experiences of her life: to hand each tiny child to the archbishop, to see the Prince of Wales, surprisingly small in this large space, holding the Godfather’s candle, and Jones too beside him, with Georgina and Ethel as Godmothers, for as she had explained to Maria, her place as Sophie’s true mother meant she was grandmother, and needed no other role to bind her to the children.
The archbishop came to luncheon. The Prince of Wales piped the guests in but, thankfully, two tunes sufficed. The twins peered at the bagpipes, Rose with interest, as if already wondering how they worked, Daniel with joy at anything that so effortlessly made so much noise.
The prince promised to play for them again as soon as they wakened from their nap.
Sophie floated. A rose-coloured dress, embroidered in deeper pink on one side, a slash of silver beading on the other, her hair newly shingled with Green standing sentry to ensure not a quarter inch too much or little was shaved off the back of her neck, rose shoes, with silver flowers on the toes and tapping heels, a silver bandeau with a matching rose above her temple, and the fashionable length of pearls Georgina had given her.
‘My dear Emily, that dress — you look divine!’ And have put on weight. What had Giggs called her? Podge. That was it. And Nigel says your husband is still stuck in the government position he was in seven years ago. Even your wiles can’t shape a better career for him . . .
‘You look wonderful too. And so
young. And so does your husband. No one could ever think him old enough to be your father,’ said Emily, with sugar-filled grace.
‘No one ever has, Podge darling.’
Emily’s smile froze slightly. ‘So clever of you to produce an heir so quickly and conveniently.’
‘We tried extremely hard,’ said Sophie sweetly. ‘It was great fun. And of course,’ she added, unable to resist, ‘Nigel had access to all his cousin’s woodcuts. A knowledgeable man is irresistible.’
She passed on, leaving Emily’s mouth in a perfect O, like a goldfish’s. But Emily’s dress had been extremely good, partly concealing the new mass of her bosom. Green must find out where she had obtained it. She’d glimpsed Green peering from an upstairs window, evaluating every ensemble. ‘Do you mind very much not attending?’ Sophie had asked.
‘Goodness no. Wouldn’t touch that crew with a barge pole. You can do a lot with a barge pole,’ Green had said reminiscently, though without specifying if it was in the arts of love or war.
‘Sloggers, I absolutely adore that hat! Lady Boniface, how lovely to see you. Thank you so much for being here today.’
Oysters in crisp bacon coats were circulated on silver salvers, as was the champagne, and whisky for the old buffers, and the Prince of Wales cocktail ordered in his honour — champagne based but with a decided kick.
Now and then she caught Nigel’s eye above the crowd and smiled, both of them concealing boredom interspersed with genuine delight.
‘How wonderful to see you . . .’
‘The Honourable Miss Mary Macintosh,’ whispered Miss Pinkley.
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