The Finishing Touch

by Brigid Brophy

  Even the prejudice against precautionary measures, so potentially deleterious to the School among the girls, militated in its favour among the parents. It afforded Antonia a happy sense of continuity to know that so many of her girls, as they grew towards leaving age, had behind them a team of little sisters growing up to take their place, little sisters perhaps even prettier … (younger children so often were …). Invited to stand godmother to the newest Cobos de Porcel girl (who made, really, one too many), Antonia had even proposed a name for the infant: Contracepción: rejected, however, by the Cardinal baptising, Spanish Cardinals (with the exception of Pirelli) being notoriously narrower …

  Even that did not put her out of charity with the Cardinalate, whose sensibleness was all the more to be commended when one compared it to the Synod, the Archimandritehood, the spiritual directors of others among the girls whose rites made of Hetty’s Sunday morning, after its straightforward start, a scramble … a scramble to deliver the Greeks in time to hear the whole of their interminable, unaccompanied rite and yet to collect the Armenians before some encounter heterodox as their faith overtake them in their mosaic-floored narthex under their jewelled dome … and yet again Hetty must hasten to convey the single Moravian to wherever … Antonia had lately decided to reject, with regret (one liked the exotic), on account of the difficulty of the day, all Jews, Hindus and Moslems unless lapsed …

  (She had accepted an Old Catholic, difficulties though it entailed. ‘She does not seem to me’, Antonia had murmured, ‘so very old …’)

  Surely, by now, even the last Moravian or Melchite must be being garnered in, somewhere, somewhere not far, along the Corniche …

  In the gardens below, it seemed to Antonia, there was a restlessness. Even Fraise du Bois in her trench seemed to stir, into a kind, perhaps, of preconsciousness. The Badessa di Poggibonsi rose, still back-buttoned, from the asparagus fern and, leaving the Plash girls, began to hobble, a stiletto-heeled chèvre, up the terraces. Her breasts, Antonia thought, were vast. She could not be in milk?

  Antonia must soon turn to her own Sunday duty, arrogated to herself, of searching the advice column of Paris-Semaine to make sure none of her girls had written. They would write, of course, anonymously: yet Antonia was confident of discerning them by their plights. Occasionally Antonia’s eye would drop to the advertisements of the agences matrimoniales: ‘Mr sér., sit. st., cinq., allure jeune, agr., sport….’—the answer, could it be?, for the less finished, for the less finishable girls … even for He—— No. Impossible thought. The School could not be run without her …

  Only, in the gardens, little Miss Outre-Mer, whose name Antonia had lately learnt, shewed none of the restlessness of the others but sat, as she had sat all morning, disconsolate, like a poet seeking the shade, in the moist neighbourhood of the grenouillère … composing, perhaps, a letter to Paris-Semaine.

  She was certainly in love. Heaven send it was not, Antonia deprecated, a sailor … She was such a pretty little thing …

  The Badessa di Poggibonsi, having laboured to the top of the terraces, was photographing for the last time the chemical-coloured, faceted, pétillant Mediterranean, the mirages of water in the loops of the tarmac road (up which Hetty must soon drive), the distant glitter of the Armenian dome: for the last time because tomorrow all cameras were to be handed for safekeeping to Miss Braid, for the duration of royalty (‘the better part of discretion’, Antonia had decided) (‘for the duration’, one said; for who could tell how long it would take to finish royalty?)

  (‘I shan’t hand mine in’, Sylvie Plash was confiding behind the asparagus fern, the family pout which so became her sister’s face disfiguring hers,’ to that old beast.’)

  A lizard ran over Regina Outre-Mer’s wrist. Antonia, long-sighted to the point of talent, leaned forward to admire. Such a svelte, mince little wrist-bone, a rounded, perfected little knob, machine-turned, like the smallest and most accurate of gold wristlet watches.

  At last the bell, thrilling through the expectant heat.

  Girls rose, girls made haste, girls almost jostled … It was as though someone was madly throwing flowers across the gardens.

  (‘It’s bound to be Braid at lunch’, whispered Sylvie Plash as they hurried.’ Antonia will lunch in her room, since she has a headache. I expect she’ll have the melon water-ice.’)

  Only Regina Outre-Mer made no haste. Last, most pensive, prettiest (Antonia was becoming persuaded) … Antonia watched her … until the garden was empty.

  Sighing, Antonia shook open the pages of Paris-Semaine, amazingly with the gesture of an old French paysan in a third-class carriage (a thing Antonia had never been in in her life). Briefly she looked through the advertisements to see if there was one about armpits which could be shewn to the Badessa. (Paris-Semaine in its entirety was never shewn, nor even left where the girls might come on it, but burnt, in its entirety, by Hetty.) But the advertisements were all seins and poitrine: ‘C’est votre poitrine qui fascine le regard des hommes!’: the whole of this week’s issue seemed given over, seemed obsessed, seemed fetichist …

  If Hetty brought the melon water-ice, Antonia would accept; would, indeed, pour a little absinthe over it …

  ‘Raffermissez votre poitrine …’

  Really, thought Antonia, looking down, I don’t think I need to. And it was true—if surprising in so lean a woman: ‘une vraie poitrine de vraie femme’, as the advertisement expressed it. And in the right place, Antonia thought; what matter, je me demande, whether the heart is, providing …

  II

  TWENTY-SIX girls received replies by return of post (girls who had written two letters receiving two replies).

  The replies coming from such a diaspora of corners of the known world, it seemed inconceivable that return of post should mean in all cases the identical moment: yet by some miracles of contrivance, influence or even perhaps divine intervention (more than one prayer had ascended, more than one candle been lit, to Saint Christopher—or, with greater sophistication, to the apostle Paul himself, patron presumptive of epistles), it did … Like multi-various petals awaiting pounding into a pot pourri, the envelopes lay on the silver tray; the envelopes themselves petal-like, flimsy nautical blue, fibrous pale pink, crisp yellow, waxed white, each one stamped not merely with the normal timbres of its country of origin (though up to triple or quadruple the usual impoundage) but also stuck all over, like the vitrine of a shop threatened with bankruptcy, with wild, hoping streamers—‘Special Delivery’, ‘Express’, ‘Par Avion—Double’. Three or four had come in Diplomatic Bags, one or two had been delivered by hand by friends who happened to be flying … one had been transmitted by closed-circuit television … Distributed at breakfast by Miss Braid (Miss Mount took breakfast in her room), the envelopes yielded up their import at the same moment that the coffee pots liberated their morning aroma, and coffee fumes crept into the curled, the young, the faintly and in some cases quite naturally—they were young—scented meshes of twenty-six coiffures bent to déchiffrer the instructions from home.

  ‘… tu trouveras bien sûr que la pauvre princesse, habituée à une vie formaliste et figée parmi des courtisans intéressés, aura besoin d’une vraie camarade—d’une copine même, j’ose dire—sincère, sympathique …’

  ‘… se si può far amicizia … i tuoi genitori saranno contentissimi di te …’

  ‘… d’accueillir chez nous n’importe qui des vraies amies de notre fille (il ne serait pas absolument interdit à ton frère de faire un mariage protestant) …’

  ‘… might even be the means of bringing Mummy and Daddy together again …’

  ‘… ton papa vient d’acheter une agence de presse. Il a fait tout son possible. Fais-en autant.’

  *

  ‘What do you think of the letter from home?’ Sylvie Plash asked Eugénie.

  ‘Antonia has asked for our absolute discretion. That is enough.’

  ‘Ah, Antonia …’, said Sylvie.

  *

 
; ‘No, my dear Hetty’, Antonia murmured, giving the very faintest of shoves to her breakfast tray (Hetty’s pineapple and passionfruit conserve was positively not as good this year as it had been last), ‘you are not to wear your floral silk. One may smell but must not look like a suburban garden.’ (Though for Antonia’s own part she preferred scents less al fresco, more d’artifice …)

  ‘My darling’, replied the deep factotum voice (abustle these three hours, abustle, now, in Antonia’s very bedroom) ‘what I shall wear is the least of my worries.’

  ‘Really? It was my first consideration … Your poor worries’, Antonia frailly added, while Hetty picked up the tray. ‘You make me feel so—impuissante.’

  ‘No, no.’ Hetty set down the tray and knelt at Antonia’s side. ‘I didn’t mean … My darling’s not to …’

  ‘Have you’, Antonia exhaustedly enquired, ‘had another parcel of instructions from the Palace?’

  ‘I have, my dear. Such impossible things they seem to require. Their mind seems to run on lavatories.’

  ‘What’, asked Antonia, ‘from the Keeper of the Privy this and Privy that, can one expect …?’

  ‘And I don’t know how to fix a standard to the front of the car. And the rose suite’, Hetty pursued. ‘I’ve aired it all night, yet I swear you can still smell incense.’

  ‘But surely only faintly’, whispered Antonia, ‘amidst the Egyptian tobacco and the sandalwood …’ (delicious).

  ‘And the walls’, Hetty said, ‘are splashed.’

  ‘Splashed?’

  ‘Ineradicably, it seems—with some strange pale liquid.’

  ‘No doubt she bubbled things through it’, Antonia said.

  ‘I should be glad if that was all. And the bed——’

  ‘My dear, you make me feel a touch——’

  ‘O, my darling mustn’t … What a brute I am to my darling … My poor darling …’

  ‘Hetty, I won’t—I positively insist—I won’t keep you from your work. You have so many worries …’

  Looking in, later in the day—she had decided on her own costume, jusqu’au bout des ongles (pale pink with the faintest, she had determined, overtone of mauve)—at the rose suite, Antonia surprised Hetty scrubbing at the skirting board (such a frou-frou phrase, commented Antonia’s thoughts), dress tucked-up in, presumably (but fortunately, as she knelt, it was not clear), her bloomers, hair tucked-up in a turban—which, though that is of course the last impression one wishes to give, does, commented Antonia withdrawing, put one in mind of a seraglio …

  *

  ‘Braid’s still at it.’

  ‘She’ll be up half the night.’

  ‘She’ll be looking her worst, then, for Tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah, but Antonia won’t.’

  ‘Well of course Antonia won’t.’

  ‘She retired two hours ago.’

  ‘With what book?’

  ‘I couldn’t glimpse.’

  ‘I recognised the binding.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin. Again.’

  ‘It always is’, Eugénie Plash commented, affectionately, and slightly boasting of her knowledge, ‘the night before an Occasion.’

  III

  ASTONISHING, ran Antonia’s train of thought as her eye took what would be, for the time being, its last glance at the back of Hetty’s neck (Hetty was just bringing the car to a halt on the quayside), that women who chose to dress like men always chose for their model the most careless, the most thorn-torn, the most ash-(or was it dandruff-?) spattered type of man … The drive would have been so much less fatiguing had Hetty modelled herself on some really sprucely, though not, of course, flashily, uniformed chauffeur.

  Impossible, ran Hetty’s train of thought as she made sure of the handbrake, climbed out and hastened to open the rear door, for an unprejudiced observer to be sure which gave and which received honour, which came in and which was visited by state, which, in short, was the princess …

  And that, of course, was just the impression, just the doubt, Antonia had dressed to provoke.

  Leaning, as a frond might for a moment lean, on the arm extended, stepping beneath the shade of the parasol already erected and held in Hetty’s other hand, she left upon the very currents of the air she displaced an impress such that air itself seemed to have sunk in obeisance about her passage and then, finding her passed, to have been set buzzing, eddying, spinning, intoxicated by the presence in it of a few volatile atoms of her unplaceable scent—which had already misled half a dozen lavender butterflies to follow the car, like a princesse lointaine, all the way down the Corniche into the saltier environs of the harbour, in which for them too gross atmosphere they were doomed to die …

  For a second Antonia paused, unable to step further——

  (Was it a Tiepolo Cleopatra, come to what rendez-vous at what stately harbour, fainting away—bosom an inch exposed behind harbour-breeze-ruffled ruff—into attendant arms?)

  ‘The drive … so fatiguing …’

  ‘My beloved! … But bear up, bear up …’

  ‘They might have spared us so much trouble’, murmured Antonia before stepping boldly forward (was it now a Tiepolo greyhound straining the leash?) ‘by sending her in the Diplomatic Bag. Come, to the landing-stage …’

  ‘Gosh! Don’t the boats look pretty? I suppose that’s what they call “dressed overall”’ (dozens of tiny coloured triangles, flapping).

  ‘A trifle overdressed, admettons’, said Antonia, stepping …

  She herself—of course she herself …

  She herself (o admirable reproach to the undisciplined, the merely jolly fantasies of the yacht club) did not, as a matter of fact, disdain to borrow from masculine clothes but did so not in Hetty’s fashion—not, indeed, in any contemporary fashion: it was hussars (or was it lancers?), it was a hint of mess jackets (or walking-out dress?) which she conjured to mind with the sketched allusion she made to—was it frogging? or an epaulette here, a high collar there? or merely a straight, a darkening line of braid? (though not, one could feel sure, in honour of Miss Braid) … Somehow, at least, somehow, in giving indulgence to the dandy in her soul (was it, then, the hint of a stock?) she achieved a firm definition, a distinction, of upright outline. And yet, having borrowed from the masculine (or perhaps from the travesty: was there not, in the palimpsest of associations she impressed on the vision, a moment’s reference to Vesta Tilley?), she made it foil to the (thus the Paris-Semaine advertisement) vraie femme whose waist more than one pair of hands had proved could be spanned by a pair of hands, whose rib cage might have housed—might have empalaced—the most delicate of mechanical singing birds, whose vraie poitrine was calibrated with the architectural perfection, the touch of the glacial and yet the tender suspicion of the meltingness and (last, most poignant suggestion of all) the very ephemerality of twin domes of water-ice …

  All this, the hint of uniform, the material shiny and ribbed, its colour—what colour? dark … a changing colour, colour of a moody sea, the wine-moody sea—all this not merely offset; it actually, it openly, it all but blatantly revealed. For somehow, somewhere, the top was actually (the principle of all works of art:-excise) cut away (mess jackets, cut-aways …) And yet it was only all but blatantly, for what was revealed was by the same art withdrawn: bosom, throat, hair (‘I, at least, shall not flap in the breeze’), the lovely face itself … all lurked behind—not a veil but veiling, veiling without end and without beginning, mystic symbol of eternity …

  How, then, to tell, as she stepped, head and shoulders swathed in her veiling and her scent, which was royal? (Antonia affected even the royal dislike of carrying money and doing one’s own paying: her handbag followed after in Hetty’s hands—handbag, one said; it was the merest little gold sack of netting, just deep enough to encompass the small lavender-suede portefeuille; delicate—in the square, slightly embarrassed hands—almost to the point of évanouissement.) Antonia did not fall short even in entourage. The ca
r which had followed (Hetty glanced back, through the nimbus of Antonia’s scent, to make sure it was keeping to its schedule) bore three, as it were, maids of honour. ‘They shall be my nosegay’, Antonia had said, ‘my sweet-smelling orange stuck with cloves’—and, to make her promise good, had, before leaving the School, touched each girl behind the ears with a benison of—whatever it was; each girl had guessed at the scent; each guess had been wrong.

  Hetty had assumed the three girls would be selected according to precedence, after consulting the Almanach de Gotha; but Antonia had employed some other principle; the three were Eugénie Plash, Regina Outre-Mer and the President’s daughter of the black (the damson-blue) republic.

  (‘My dear, are you sure?’ Hetty had murmured about the last choice.

  ‘My dear, surely she’s used to it—from the Commonwealth?’)

  Hetty glanced back again, to make sure the girls were following. Antonia had no need. She recognised her scent.

  She stepped …

  She stepped up … Up, on to the floating landing-stage, which was got-up (dressed overall, no doubt) for the occasion: more triangles flapping, some effort towards cushioning the slatted benches and, at the other—the waterside—entrance, where SHE would presently appear, two pots of hydrangeas, which lurched with the landing-stage. ‘One can’t help feeling safe’, Hetty cheerfully said, ‘with the Navy’.

  The Navy—a sous-officier, in tropical kit—saluted.

  ‘Commander Curl presents his compliments.’

  At least, Antonia reflected, if I get my damehood, it will be without strings.