He sneezed heavily. There were shooting pains in his head.
‘It’d best not rain tomorrow. Rainy Bradford,’ he said desperately, ‘that’ll be the next thing for you.’
‘Dick dear,’ she said, resting her head on her knees, then turning to look at him, ‘I’ve been thinking. Dear, would you still like us to be wed?’
12
1926 and Sybil and Maria are going dancing. They are taking a cab from their small house in Chelsea. Dancing has become a way of life. Three or more times a week they are collected by their escorts and whisked to the Savoy, the Piccadilly, the May fair.
Maria thought it must have been in her legs, her arms, her head, all her life. Now even before she was on the floor, as soon as she heard the drums, the clarinet, the cornet, she would feel her legs tingle. She could hardly wait to order the meal or sip a drink. She wanted to dance, to feel that lightness of her body, head tossing in time with the music, hands turned in, out or lying lightly in her partner’s. Twist of hips. Necklace swinging on bead-encrusted bodice. I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate. Then, excited, to stop breathless for just a small drink held in jangling braceleted hands.
Dancing at the Carstairs’ Fancy Dress Ball (I don’t want to remember that), dancing with Pip and his Oxford friends that June evening of 1921 … Pip was married now. He had three children by his tall blonde rather horsey wife, Nessie. Sybil was not too fond of her. Maria suspected jealousy.
Sybil and Maria belonged to each other in friendship. It had been one of the unexpected good things to have happened since her return to the everyday world from the darkness, stumbling like a pit pony, half-blinded by the light of day. They’d been living together for nearly four years now. She thought of Sybil as having saved her life: remembering not that first visit with Pip but a telephone call in the spring of 1923.
‘I’m in London like I’d always promised! I want you to come over at once, Maria.’
Maria had been six months out of The Laurels and was living with Ida at a small flat in Sussex Gardens. Lettice had left to teach in New Zealand. Ida had been insistent Maria lived with her and be looked after, but she was out all day teaching. Maria had little to do. She was meant to ‘rest’, and do a little embroidery. Ida cosseted her: hot-water bottles, dainty suppers on a tray, breakfast in bed.
In the afternoons she went for long walks, always forgetting afterwards where she’d been, and from January she sat three mornings a week with a General’s widow, Mrs Collinson, to whom she would read out her mail past and present, together with novels by Robert Hichens and Mrs Humphry Ward. Mrs Collinson showed no interest whatever in Maria, which was a mercy, as were the embroidery, the walks, the dainty meals – for without such a routine, however empty, she could see nothing but a return to The Laurels. She paid no visits to Middlesbrough. Thackton was, as ever, out of bounds. She did not attend Dick and Gwen’s wedding in Bradford in the January of 1923 even though she was invited. Peter would surely have been there.
It could not go on for ever, though, this life with Ida, although often it seemed that it would. No one suggested she should work again. She had no money and needed none, except an allowance for clothes in which she wasn’t at all interested. She was empty of everything – feeling, caring, excitement, malice, even sorrow. But not anger. She met it in her dreams as she scrambled up mountainsides, slipping, sliding, pulling at bare earth with her fingernails, or fighting for breath under the weight of green foaming seas, hurtling from towers to see the unforgiving earth rush to meet her. Dreams as fearful as any at The Laurels. But here was no white-coated attendant at her bedside, only large Ida wrapped in maroon corded dressing-gown saying, ‘Shall I make you some cocoa, dear?’
And then Sybil had telephoned.
‘… I want you to come over at once. I’m with Aunt and Uncle Detherington in St John’s Wood …’
‘I’ll get a cab and come right round,’ she said, treating the invitation as a summons – a welcome summons.
‘Wonderful,’ cried Sybil. ‘And look, come absolutely at once. Dinner’s in an hour, an hour and a half at the most.’
Ida was at that moment steaming Maria an egg custard. ‘Isn’t it a bit short notice?’ she asked amiably. ‘And are your clothes in order?’
But except for a faint whiff of anti-moth herbs, her best fur-trimmed coat was all right and there was a grey silk dress with a red cravat which would do. She realized even as she hurriedly dressed, how unaccustomed this was. (Maria doesn’t go anywhere. She has been very ill.)
At the red brick house with its green leafy garden and its view on to Regent’s Park, Sybil rushed to greet her. It was as if there’d been no years in between.
‘You angel … I thought it’s silly to suppose that because we haven’t heard from you, it means you don’t want to hear from us. And me.’ As they stood in the long drawing-room sipping dry martinis, she told Maria, ‘I’m here for at least six months. Isn’t it wonderful?’
It must have been wonderful because by the end of the evening after a delicious meal at the Georgian dining table, waited on by a white-gloved butler (who Sybil said afterwards was making enormous eyes at Maria), she had almost persuaded Maria to come there and live. ‘Darling, we could have such fun together –’
Fun. Strange used-up word of the past. People who had not loved and lost had fun.
‘I guess – I’d have to see about it.’ She felt a pang for Ida, and fears for herself (how would I manage?)
But she found over the next few days new strengths in herself. Writing carefully to Uncle Eric (after all, he had arranged that Ida should watch over her. Perhaps he wouldn’t allow it? She was not only dependent on him but under twenty-one still). Telling Ida. She loved and admired Ida for the easy, jolly way she took it. (Perhaps it had been so with Lettice: ‘Oh well done – off you go! Send me a picture of a kangaroo, or is that Australia?’)
Ida’s main concern had been money. ‘Do they expect to be paid, dear? Because if so, Dad …’
A clutch of cold fear that the gate so suddenly thrown open might now be shut. She said shakily, ‘They want me as a companion for Sybil,’ and Ida said, ‘Oh – a sort of paid post then, really. That’s all right.’ But Maria didn’t dare to mention any of this to Sybil for the first few weeks. When at last she did, she threw the question carelessly:
‘Oughtn’t I to do something? Embroidery? Six months, you see, it’s a long time to be a guest …’
‘Oh, but I hope it’s going to be longer than six months!’ Sybil cried. ‘At the very least until one of us gets married. After all, we’re having such fun.’
And they were. She and Sybil, exploring London in the way she should perhaps have done in 1920, if she’d been whole. On top of an omnibus, taking a boat up the Thames, gawping at the Crown Jewels, but above all shopping, though not necessarily to buy. Marshall and Snelgrove’s, Debenham and Freebody’s, Harrods, were at first sufficient delight (they did not go to Swan and Edgar’s). From department stores they moved to dress shops. Sybil, dripping fox furs, would try on models; Maria was the friend who gave advice. Nothing suited, they needed time to think it over. Occasionally, playacting, Maria would feel back in the shoes of the little Sicilian-American girl who had been equipped so smartly for the voyage of the Lusy.
At dinner at least once a week there would be a young man or two purposely invited. Afterwards, a letter or a telephone call, a party or even a dance either in London or the country. Maria began to go out, to take an interest in clothes again. Her petticoats, shortened, were crêpe-de-chine now, not calico.
In early August Aunt and Uncle went to their villa in Provence, taking Sybil and Maria. For nearly two months Maria gave herself up to sun and scents: lavender, thyme, sage, fennel – reminding her of faraway days in Monteleone. She ate goat’s cheese, huge golden peaches, the first of the purple figs.
After the first three weeks they were joined by a young, newly married couple, Dodie and Clive Gilmour. Sybil and Maria were at onc
e at home with them. They often sat up late after Aunt and Uncle had gone in to bed, breathing in the lavender-filled, flowery dusk, playing cards and drinking. Talking. Dodie never tired of hearing about Maria’s Sicilian and American past. (‘My dear, all that before you were twelve. Your life since then must have seemed very ordinary …’) When after a fortnight they left to go back to their new home, a small house in Chelsea (‘the excitement of it!’), Maria and Sybil felt they had made new London friends. And so it proved. Soon there were invitations to dinner and, as autumn turned to winter, parties and more parties, visits to clubs, even night clubs. Several times Sybil and Maria slept over, because at four in the morning it seemed easier.
Then just after Christmas, Sybil became restless as if suddenly they’d done everything, seen everybody. Maria felt the same. It wasn’t Aunt and Uncle, who were kindness itself. Perhaps it was because although the days of chaperones were over, they knew an eye was kept on them that was still fairly strict. (‘Do we know him?’ was Aunt’s phrase when a young man introduced himself who had not been through the usual hoops of dinner, afternoon tea, or some other approved entree.)
It was Dodie who came up with the idea, her smart shingled hair clinging shiny to her scalp, pretty chiselled features sparkling, ‘I think you should live with us for a while. Both of you … Clive and I would simply adore it.’
‘A thorough good idea,’ Uncle said surprisingly. ‘Though we shall miss you like anything.’
Maria wasn’t sure. She feared that Dodie would all too soon become pregnant and then she would have to live in a house with a baby. I could not. But if Sybil moved out, she could hardly stay alone with the Detheringtons, however fond they seemed of her. She would have to leave.
Sybil mentioned money tactfully. ‘Mummy says if I go, we shall have to pay something – even though they seem to have lots of dibs –’
‘I’ll have to work again,’ Maria said. ‘I can’t ask Uncle Eric …’
‘Flowers,’ Sybil said. ‘Or hats. Some fearfully smart people have flower or hat shops these days. I read in The Tatler only the other day … I forget her name.’
But before anything could be done about it, there was Jenny’s wedding, to Archie Douglas, twenty-two-year-old son and heir of a Canadian firm, over in England for a year to work at the foundry. It had taken six months for them to fall in love, another three to become engaged. Now his year was up: they would sail for Vancouver after a honeymoon in Scotland. At first some of the family had thought it too hurried and Jenny at nineteen too young. But Aunt Maimie trumpeted her satisfaction. The Douglas family were people of standing.
For Maria it wasn’t a happy occasion. Although the wedding was in Middlesbrough, she found it difficult not to think of Thackton since Eleanor was one of the guests. Maria avoided her. Peter also, although that was more difficult. She heard he was doing well at Durham. Taller, heavier, sulkily handsome, favouring his mother’s family still, he stood in his morning coat and grey striped trousers, three young girls listening to him admiringly. Her hate was slow and deep.
She looked at Jenny’s excited little face framed in Brussels lace above the white georgette, Jenny hanging on Archie’s arm and gazing up adoringly, and thought: She is running away. She knows she is escaping. It has always been wrong for Jenny. Running along behind the others, ‘wait for me’, never ousting Peter of his place as Benjamin. And then I came. I was the last straw.
Aunt Dulcie wept during the ceremony and again during the feast that followed. They were not tears of happiness. She said to Maria in a bright little voice, ‘She’s awfully young. And to go so far away …’
A week after the wedding, walking along Dover Street with Sybil, she saw a notice on the door of a dress shop. An assistant wanted: ‘Some experience necessary. Smart appearance and good manner essential.’ Fortunately it was not a shop they had been to for trying on frocks. Leaving Sybil on a gilt sofa reading a magazine, she was shown at once into a small room, with frocks hanging from a rail and boxes toppling in the corner. The manageress – ‘I’m Mrs Goldman, dear’ – sat behind a table desk covered entirely by invoices, letters, brochures and fabric samples. She talked with an adenoidal but refined Cockney accent, asking Maria directly:
‘You’re not English, are you, dear? No, I thought not … Mr Goldman is from a Polish family, and my dad was from Calabria. He married a nice young lady from Balham.’ She fiddled with the heavy garnet brooch at her throat. ‘You speak Italian? We have a good little bunch of girls working here, but all from London. I’d enjoy it ever so if I could speak my dad’s language.’
Maria would never have guessed the Italian blood. In looks, Mrs Goldman must have favoured her mother. She was more like a bird than anything, with sharp little features and brown hair turning grey. ‘Now I’ll take you to meet the others.’ She walked carefully as if her feet hurt. ‘It’s being on them all day – ever such aching legs.’
A tall girl with buck teeth and a high colour came rushing up. ‘Here is Miss Collins.’ But Miss Collins was already pressing her mouth to Mrs Goldman’s ear. ‘Lady Staveacre … in the first cubicle.’
Mrs Goldman placed a hand on Maria’s wrist. ‘Wait there, dearie.’
Maria sat down beside Sybil, pulling an encouraging face at Sybil’s questioning one. ‘Tell you later,’ she said quickly. Miss Collins remained standing: ‘Excuse me, but are you clients?’ Sybil told her no.
‘You’re ever so smart,’ the girl said. ‘I thought … You see, Miss Gina has the ‘flu and I’m here alone. I’m Vera, by the way.’
After Lady Staveacre in a flutter of promises and assurances had been shown to her motor, Mrs Goldman took Maria back into her office.
‘It sounds the most fearful hard work,’ Sybil said later. ‘And our social life. Our dancing …’
‘Yes,’ Maria said, mimicking Mrs Goldman: ‘ “Ever such aching legs” … I expect, though, I’ll manage.’
She didn’t see it as a choice, really. She had walked down the street, seen the post, and been offered it. It was meant. And – she would be independent of Uncle Eric.
So began a way of life. Except that she could no longer go to tea dances, it wasn’t unlike the other. Finish work at six-thirty, hurry back to Chelsea. A hot bath, a milky drink and into her black crepe-de-chine, her gold sequinned tunic, her grey silk tiered. Dodie’s maid, O’Connor, doing her hair for her. At eight-thirty, a ring at the door, and their escorts for the evening. Then dance, dance, dance … Two nights a week perhaps an early night, in bed with supper on a tray by eight. As a way of life it left little time to think. Dancing was the anodyne, her work, something to get up for in the morning.
In the shop, Vera and she spent their lunch-hour together always. Vera was seventeen and her ambition was to get married. Clothes were the answer. The more elaborate the frock, the more irresistible to Vera. She was too scared to borrow overnight from the shop, but since she could buy at cost, she was always saving towards a frock which by the time she could pay for it was no longer fashionable.
The other assistant, known always as Miss Gina, was a niece of Mrs Goldman’s. She was rather superior, and liked to ask Maria questions about her life outside the shop. ‘Been dancing again, I suppose? Which hotel this time?’ Her voice was nasal and penetrating, and could often be heard admonishing customers.
Mrs Goldman, who fussed herself regularly into a state of near-collapse, was seldom in her office. It was as disordered as when she’d first seen it. ‘Ever such a muddle, dearie,’ she told Maria one day. ‘Keeping books and everything, I don’t know how ever …’ One day Mr Goldman appeared, shut himself in there and then yelled for his wife. ‘Norina, Norina!’ Fortunately there were no customers. ‘This you call in order … If this place last one week more, you are clever.’
Maria liked dealing with the customers. When one was being particularly difficult, Mrs Goldman sent for her. Her days were often made up of small comforts, small goals. Today I shall sell four dresses, tonight I shall dan
ce at the Savoy. When she looked really forward into the future, she closed her eyes and wished it away. One day, Sybil would marry, Dodie and Clive would have a houseful of children …
As yet, after nearly four years of marriage there were none, although she knew there had been at least two miscarriages. When she went on Sundays to Mass at the Oratory, Dodie would whisper, ‘Say a prayer, darling, to your Virgin or whatever, that we get a little one soon.’
Maria, who hadn’t told Sybil about Peter or the baby, and didn’t intend to, found the easy way she confided her superficial day-to-day feelings passed for sharing secrets. Sybil told Maria that she did want to get married – but not yet.
‘I can understand in the war, people rushing – but it’s different now. We know what tomorrow’s going to be like. Giving Cook her orders for the day, planning a little dinner-party for next month … If I married too soon, I know I’d have a sickener for it all. In fact, it might drive me potty.’
She’d ask Maria, ‘What’s your ideal?’ Hers was: ‘Fair, with a bushy blond moustache and great strong hands with hair growing on the backs. Not too young – he must have been in the war, perhaps with a decoration …’ Once or twice they’d met someone who fitted this picture. But he was never recognized by Sybil.
Maria did not have an ideal. Either awake or asleep, nobody perfect came before her eyes. But to keep Sybil quiet, she invented ‘a slight man with auburn hair and a freckled face, who owned a castle in Scotland’.
Their partners changed often. If one became at all serious, Sybil would say, ‘Oh, So-and-So is beginning to pine,’ and suddenly she and Maria would be no longer available. Sybil’s favourite saying was, ‘I won’t say I will but I won’t say I won’t …’ She was sometimes ‘a little bit naughty’ as she called it. Maria – never. She was on guard even as she danced. All her animation, her passion, went into the rhythm. She too received, and refused, proposals of marriage.
The Golden Lion Page 19