Crimson (17 page)

“Look what we’ve got for you!” Miranda thrust a wilting bunch of wild flowers into her grandmother’s hands.

“What’s wrong?” Clare asked, looking at her grandmother’s face, at her untouched breakfast, and at the crumpled handkerchief in her hand.

It’s nothing…” Yes it is we can see you’ve been crying,” Annabel said.

“Well, that was silly of me. I thought I might win a prize the International Romance Writers Award, but they gave it to Daphne du Maurier.”

“Well, they’re silly!” Miranda shouted. The three girls flung themselves upon their grandmother and hugged her.

“We think you’re the best at everything,” Annabel said loyally.

“We’ll make you your favourite chocolate cake,” Miranda promised, “and we’ll write “Number One Gran Award” on top., Smiling at this display of loyalty, Buzz knew that Elinor would forget her disappointment by teatime. Elinor had long ago acquired the knack of instantly dismissing or forgetting anything that made her unhappy. Buzz supposed that this was how she had managed to survive life with Billy. For a moment, Buzz remembered Billy’s drunken, angry, bloodshot, half-closed eyes, yet she knew Nell remembered only the clear, sea-blue flashes that had originally entranced her. Over and over Nell astounded her as

she told some journalist that the reason she had not V0010tried was that she knew she’d never find anyone to replace her darling husband.

Whether or not Nell had brainwashed herself into believing that, Buzz knew the truth of the matter. Elinor, now freed to fly high in the sky, was afraid of finding herself chained to another bully.

SATURDAY, 24 MARCH 1951

“What’s that noise?” Twelve-year-old Clare, in a ginger tweed coat and black gum boots ran to the bottom of the orchard, followed by her sisters. Beyond the boundary hedge was a rough meadow above which rooks swirled in a fight blue sky. Elinor’s overgrown woods lay to the left. From the hill on the right came the faint sound of horses” hooves.

Again the melancholy sound of a horn hung mournfully in the air.

“It’s the hund” Clare climbed the five-barred wooden gate and sat upon it. Her sisters joined her, and they watched a wisp of russet streak down the hill to their right.

Hard-hatted black heads appeared above the hill, followed by shoulders of scarlet or black; then the heads of horses, followed by their graceful bodies and long, delicate legs: the hunt looked an unstoppable mass as it rushed towards the hedgerow at the base of the hill, and even from a distance the girls could sense the exuberance of the Warmingford Hunt in full cry on a fresh, damp day.

The hounds were gaining on the exhausted fox: streaks of black and tan, they bayed with the excitement of the chase.

Some four hundred yards behind the hounds, a bunch of about thirty horses and ponies now thundered down the hill. Straggling behind were a group of children from the Pony Club mounted on shaggy, dark ponies; their hooves ,-threw up clods of earth as they leapt the hedge in pursuit of the fox.

The desperate vixen was clever: several times she had thrown the hunt off the scent by running through streams, past manure heaps, and once through a flock of sheep. But after being hunted for four hours, she was bedraggled and exhausted.

“It’s the vixen who lives in our woods!” Annabel exclaimed. Only the previous week, the vixen had broken into the O’Dares” chicken house again, gnawing through the planking to steal a couple of birds.

“Can’t we hide her? She’s our fox; she lives in our woods.” Annabel jumped down on the far side of the gate and started running towards the frightened animal.

“Come back! The hounds’ll knock you-down!” Clare shouted after her sister, jumping down to run after her, followed closely by Miranda.

The fox was a pathetic sight; her eyes were glazed, her tongue hung out of her mouth as she panted, and her breath came in heavy gasps. She slowed her pace, then staggered and swayed, unable to go farther.

When Annabel was about ten yards away, the hounds caught up with the vixen, who had no chance. Weakly she turned her head and bared her teeth at her tormentors; then the leading hounds flung themselves at the fox’s body, each seizing whatever part of her flesh it could reach. The rest of the pack piled on top of the exhausted animal, like a rugger sc rum upon the ball.

As the hunt cantered down the hill towards the kill, Clare recognized a couple of local farmers, the vet, and Colonel Bromley on a well-groomed bay.

“You girls! Keep out of the way!” shouted the Master of the Hunt. Mounted on a grey, he was a splendid sight in scarlet coat, white breeches, and black boots with tanned tops.

.-you damn, damn, damn bastards!” screamed Miranda, using forbidden swear-words.

“You damn, damn murderers!” yelled Annabel.

Colonel Bromley, in black bowler and beige raincoat, moved towards the girls.

“Don’t be sentimental,” he said.

“Foxes kill my lambs, my pheasants, and your chickens. You mustn’t cry over a fox. Hunting keeps the foxes down, and it isn’t as cruel as other killing methods.” Clare sobbed, “Why can’t you kill the foxes some other way? With traps or with poison?” “Farmers can’t put down poison, in case their working dogs eat it. And if an animal is trapped, it might be held in fearful pain for days.”

“Well, shoot them! That’s fast and not so cruel,” Annabel shouted.

“Farmers can’t sit up all night waiting to shoot foxes.”

“I’m glad I’m not the sort of person who hounds an animal to death for fun,” Annabel shrieked, “and then watches while other animals tear it to pieces!”

“Keep your voice down,” Colonel Bromley said.

“Your grandmother will not be pleased if you upset the Master.”

“We don’t care, you bloodthirsty old pig!” Annabel shouted.

Colonel Bromley looked at them in silence, and kept his horse between the girls and the rest of the hunt until it had moved off.

Two hours later, when Elinor and Buzz returned from a shopping trip, the sisters were in the orchard burying what was left of the fox.

Having heard the car come up the drive, the girls hurled themselves at the returning travellers before they had time to unbutton their coats.

When Elinor disentangled their story, she said indignantly, “I’d like to see the Master after he’d been hunted for four hours by huge bloodthirsty, baying creatures I bet that’d change his point of viewt Expensive dressing-up can’t disguise barbarity.” Later, Elinor skimmed the hand-delivered letter from Colonel Bromley: ‘… undisciplined … worse than hooligans … no more disturbance … police … their headmistress…”

“Around here you can’t upset the hunt without running into trouble,” Buzz said.

“And the Master of the Hunt has complained to the police. You’d better lay on the charm, old girl.” Elinor looked worried. She had now been accepted by local society, but she knew that, should she argue against the hunt, she would be … well, not exactly ostracized but … “The girls were absolutely right to behave as they did,” Elinor said firmly.

Nevertheless, hoping to circumvent any further complaint from the Master of the Hunt, Elinor saw Sergeant Brown, who was well aware of her generous annual cheque for the police widows and orphans fund. Elinor also visited the headmistress of the local school.

“Frankly, I’m not surprised to hear of this behaviour from Annabel,” said Miss Pryor.

“She behaves as if she were an only child.” Spoiled, selfish, imperious, was what she didn’t say.

“Annabel is overshadowed by her sisters,” Elinor rationalized, “because Clare is clever and Miranda has a very strong character.”

“Annabel is certainly jealous of her sisters,” Miss Pryor said firmly. Overprivileged little tyrant, she thought.

“Had you considered sending them to boarding school? Not Benenden or Heathfield somewhere where they’d learn to fend for themselves.”

After a long pause, Elinor said, “I’ll think about it.” She went home and telephoned Joe Grant.

TUESDAY, 27 MARCH 1951

On the back lawn, swaying golden stretches of daffodils bent before a wind that swept scudding clouds from the sky; they looked like fat cupids being shooed off to bed by Nanny, Elinor thought. She pulled her coat collar up and turned to Joe. After a delicious meal of grouse and an excellent claret, he was dutifully admiring the daffodils: they ran down to a stream that wandered along the back of the garden, under pale green fronds of weeping willows.

Elinor laughed with excitement as the trees rustled before the frisky March wind. Her blonde hair whipped around her cheeks.

“I feel as if my face has been dipped in a snowdrift, Joe. Isn’t it exhilarating?”

“It’s damned cold.” Joe left his garden to the gardener and only enjoyed looking at it from behind snugly closed, draught-proofed windows.

“I don’t know why you want my advice,” he added.

“You’re perfectly capable of making up your own mind.”

“A woman needs a man to guide her.” Elinor smiled at him.

“I know how lucky I am to be guided by you. Thank you for that income forecast, by the way.”

“You could do that sort of forecast much more cheaply from here if you had a bookkeeper in once a month.” Elinor looked up at Joe with gratitude.

“You see? Bookkeeping is the sort of thing that I simply don’t know about so it would never have occurred to me to do that forecast. Remember that the girls of my generation had no business training.”

“Business training is useful but not all-important,” Joe said.

“Common sense and hard work are just as important. What a business boils down to is having a product, or a and selling it, and that applies whether your product is a book or a bulldozer. You increase your income in two ways: by decreasing costs and by increasing prices, or production.”

“But that doesn’t apply to an author.”

“Oh yes it does. I think you should try to dictate your books. You’d double your output. Incidentally, I’ve arranged for that history professor to correct your manuscript; he’ll pass it on to an English professor, to check the grammar and spelling.”

“Of course I learned Yankee Spelling,” Elinor said, “but then I ended up over here, and now I can’t spell in either language. But I didn’t ask you here today to talk business.” In answer to Joe’s raised eyebrows, she added, “I want you to advise me about the girls.” Joe laughed.

“You’ve always said that Ethel and I are too harsh with our boys. But boys need discipline and so do girls. I’ve always told you that you should send those girls to boarding school when they’re old enough. It’s not fair to keep them at the village school so you can have them at home with you. They’ll suffer for it later. Quite frankly, it’s your duty to send them somewhere where they’ll get an excellent education and be among the sort of girls that they’ll mix with socially when they grow up.”

“I want…” Elinor paused.

“I never want them to feel the sort of amused and supercilious contempt that I ran up against when I met Billy’s family. I don’t want them ever to know that sort of anxiety and humiliation. I want those girls to be the social equal of anybody.”

“You are the equal of anyone,” Joe said angrily, “and you always were! Billy was lucky to have you.” He remembered Elinor’s vitality, her cheerfulness and popularity in that Frenchie hospital where he had visited Billy so long ago. He remembered her wedding day, when Elinor

carried a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, which Joe personally had liberated from what was left of somebody’s garden.

“We were all a bit in love with you, Elinor with your vitality and warmth but Billy made sure that nobody else got a chance to get near you.” Fiercely Joe added, “Billy married you because you were the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and he wasn’t the only one who thought that!” He smiled at her.

“And now you’re a beautiful woman. But I don’t suppose I’m the only man to tell you so.” Elinor looked delighted.

“Nobody’s told me for a long time, Joe.” Joe glanced lovingly at her.

“The only possible reason is that you don’t allow a man to get close enough to say so.

But you need a man in your life, Elinor. You’re still young enough to enjoy … male companionship.”

“Men want more than companionship. I don’t want to lead a man on and then refuse him,” Elinor said.

“Because I shall never remarry. Nobody could ever replace Billy in … in certain ways.” She looked Joe straight in the eye and softly added, “And as I’m sure you realize, I would never have an affair, Joe.” Well, Joe thought, he’d hinted and she’d given him her reply. He smiled again and put his arm affectionately around Elinor’s shoulder.

“About the girls,” she said.

“As you know, I want them to have the best I can give them, Joe. A proper society debut. And I want you to tell me how to arrange it.” Joe understood at once what she meant. He had come a long way himself and knew that Elinor wanted her family to go a lot farther. He looked at the little girls playing on the front lawn.

“If that’s what you want, I can certainly help you,” he said.

“But remember that too much privilege can be a disaster.” Briefly he thought of one or two of Adam’s arrogant friends at Eton.

Elinor nodded.

“That’s what I want.” 4%joe said, “You start by getting a better car.” it’s almost impossible to get any car! The dealers” waiting lists are years long!” I “I think I could get you a prewar white Rolls. Chap I know wants to get rid of his.”

“But I can’t drive a Rolls-Royce! It’s far too heavy.”

“No,” Joe agreed, “you’ll need a chauffeur. And the first place he should drive you to is Norman Hartnell.”

“I can’t afford the Queen’s dressmaked”

“Hartnell is the best designer of appearance clothes, and that’s why the Queen goes to him. And you can afford it if you produce more books. You must dress the part before you play the part.” He added, As you no doubt know, you can only be presented at Court by a lady who has herself been presented. I’ll arrange for someone to present you next year and give you a season in London. I happen to now that Sonia Rushleigh came out of her divorce badly, and she needs money.”

“But how can I spare the time for a London season, Joe, if I’m writing books to pay for it? “Get up earlier.”