Debutantes: In Love
Read Debutantes: In Love Online
Authors: Cora Harrison
This book is dedicated to my dear friend Prish Hawkes with gratitude for over thirty years of loyal friendship and in memory of her charming mother, Eve Fontaine, formerly The Honourable Evelyn Dickinson, who was a debutante in 1924 and wore a very, very short dress for her presentation at Buckingham Palace.
Contents
Chapter One
Friday 1 February 1924
Poppy and Baz had been playing New Orleans rhythms for an hour, but now there was silence in the little cottage. They sat gazing into the fire, sitting side by side together on the large, old sofa – threadbare, but beautifully soft and deep. Baz propped his bass against the table, where Poppy had laid her clarinet.
Music was Poppy’s security. Music had rescued her when the world had swirled into chaos on the death of her mother; it had brought order into that turmoil. Music had given her courage, but it was jazz that had set her free. The persistent beat had slowed the anxious fluttering of her heart, steadied her nerves and brought a thrill of happiness tingling through her veins. She smiled at Baz as he picked up his bass again and bent over it, an untidy lock of smooth black hair falling over his forehead and fringing his large chestnut-coloured eyes. He was the boy next door, the youngest son of an earl whose lands fringed theirs in west Kent. They had known each other all their lives, had played together, grown up together, even discovered a passion for jazz together. Poppy could not imagine life without him. The kitchen of the small cottage at the heart of the beech wood on this February day was warm and cosy with the heat from the ancient black range. Soon the other members of the jazz band would be here for their morning practice, but for the moment it seemed as though they were alone in the world.
She saw him look at her. An odd feeling, a sort of nervous tension that she had not previously experienced, ran through her as she looked into his dark eyes.
‘If only we lived here and I didn’t need to go home ever again,’ she whispered. The cottage that housed her father’s young chauffeur was so much warmer than her own home. Beech Grove Manor was a beautiful, grand old building, but living in a house where the ceilings of the huge rooms were twenty feet high and where a fire in one of the enormous fireplaces barely warmed those sitting directly in front of it was not so pleasant. And then there was her father’s gloom and Great-Aunt Lizzie, who lectured the girls as though they were five years old.
Baz, sensing her mood, put down the bass and stroked her hand gently. He said nothing, but his eyes were full of understanding.
‘Do you remember when we ran away together when we were eleven?’ said Poppy, trying to smile at the memory. ‘We were going to live in the woods – and I left a letter on my pillow saying that I had gone away for ever and ever – but Daisy tracked us with one of the hounds and persuaded me to come home.’
Typical Daisy, she thought. She had always been the more sensible one of the twins. At least they had thought themselves twins until last year when the true story of Daisy’s birth had been uncovered, although that had made no difference to them.
Suddenly Poppy stopped thinking about Daisy, stopped thinking about her troubles. Baz had put an arm around her shoulders – but not in the careless, half-affectionate, half-brotherly way of the past. Her heart racing, she turned her face towards him. His nearness seemed to be sending shocks through her. He reached out and put both arms around her, moved them up so that his wrists softly caressed the column of her neck, his face tilted towards hers. Poppy lifted her mouth and . . .
A log dropped with a clatter against the iron side of the stove and then flared up with a sudden flash of light. Poppy felt the warmth from the fire all over her body. Baz’s lips were soft, gently pressing against her own. Her fingers ran over the shape of his shoulder blades, the warmth of the back of his neck, the satin-silkiness of his hair. After a long moment she broke off and lay her head against his shoulder, amazed at the way her heart was pounding. Baz laughed softly and untied her long plait of dark red hair, combing it out with his fingers and pressing his cheek against hers.
‘We could run away together now; needn’t live in the woods either – not now that I’ve got my own house in London. We could get married, Pops.’ He caught her eye and smiled tentatively; there was a tremor in his voice and his eyes were golden in the firelight.
‘Don’t,’ said Poppy, but it was too late. Reality had crept back into the little warm kitchen. They were no longer eleven. She was seventeen years old. It might be 1924, but her father and Great-Aunt Lizzie were still firmly rooted in the age of Queen Victoria – the days when an offer of marriage had to come before the first kiss and when a man had to show his future father-in-law how wealthy he was before he was allowed to talk of weddings. The chances of her father or her great-aunt allowing her to marry an eighteen-year-old boy, with no income and who had only just finished school, were nil.
‘You might have a house,’ she said trying to sound sensible, ‘but where would we get the money to buy food? In the woods, when we were eleven years old, we were going to live on beechnuts and blackberries and wild mushrooms. Not too many of those on the streets of London.’ Poppy tried to laugh, but she could hear a wobble in her voice so she bit her lip hard.
‘We won’t need to buy food: we’ll have parties every night,’ continued Baz, taking her trembling hands in his. ‘We could ask people to bring something to eat and something to drink,’ he went on. ‘That’s the latest thing these days. When you are going to those debutante parties with Daisy you’ll make lots of friends. They’ll all get tired of those stuffy affairs and they’ll be delighted to come to our parties, which will be different and fun – and we’ll be playing jazz – which is the latest thing at really wild parties, or so my sister Joan says. And when we’re married they’ll all keep coming and bringing food and drink with them. Bound to be enough left over to keep us going until the next party.’ He looked at her closely and asked, ‘You are going to have a season, right, Pops? You haven’t had bad news, have you?’
Poppy shook her head. ‘Not bad news; just no news. We had expected to hear from Elaine by now. She did promise to come back from India and take a house in London for the season and present us.’ Surely, she thought, Elaine would not let them down. She had been the only sister of Poppy’s mother, Mary. But as well as that – and Poppy now knew the carefully hidden secret – she was Daisy’s mother.
‘Well, if you don’t go to London, I’ll stay down here too,’ said Baz in determined tones. ‘Mother wants me to go so that I can escort Joan, but I’d rather be . . . wherever you are.’ He smiled at her reassuringly. ‘But you might still hear. I saw the boy from the post office cycling up the avenue to your house when I was coming over.’
‘Today might not be a good day,’ said Poppy with a sigh. ‘Father has to go to court this afternoon. Daisy is terribly worried about it because she’s convinced that things will turn out badly. It’s all too horrible. I don’t want to think about it now! Let’s play something instead.’ She picked up her clarinet and waited until he had his bass.
‘I say, Poppy, try this. It’s called “Rhapsody in Blue”.’ Baz played a few notes.
Poppy picked up her clarinet, looked blindly at the music and put it down again. She had no heart to play. Beech Grove Manor, splendid though it looked from the outside, was just so miserable these days. Violet, their eldest sister, had got married last summer and rarely came near the gloomy place, and since their wealthy Aunt Elaine had paid for Rose, the youngest of the four Derrington girls, to go to school in Switzerland, only Daisy and she remained.
Poppy felt guilty that Daisy was so often left to bear the double burden of her father and their great-aunt while she sneaked off to the cottage in the woods to play jazz. Still, Daisy had her own dreams of producing wonderful films and spent hours in the old dairy pantry with her camera, her film tank and developing dishes. Poppy admired the way that Daisy always made the best of things. Since she had no opportunity of working with real actors, she was shooting a comic film about hens where one young hen, called Jane, was being bullied by her cousins, a pair of aggressive Rhode Island Red pullets, and their brother, a swaggering young cockerel. It was to be a chicken version of the famous novel
Jane Eyre
, according to Daisy.
‘Pops?’ Baz had stopped playing and was looking at her worriedly.
‘Tell me again about your grandfather’s house,’ she said softly. She knew all about it; Baz had talked of little else ever since the will had been read. The old man had bequeathed the small London mews house to his youngest and favourite grandson. Baz would have no money of his own, as the main estate and the house belonged to his eldest brother and the rest of the family property had been handed to his other brothers as they had come of age. But finally Baz had a house of his own, and that house was filled with his dreams of setting up a jazz club. It had been built originally for a coachman, his large family and a number of stable lads, so it was surprisingly roomy.
‘Four bedrooms, a big, big basement for the jazz club and a coal cellar absolutely chock-full of coal so that the place will keep nice and warm for years; great place for parties – right in the middle of the West End of London,’ recited Baz. ‘Oh, and, I’ve been thinking, Poppy: those two big attics – they’ve still got iron bedsteads in them that were used for the stable lads. Well, I’ll dig out some old mattresses from our place and get them up to London somehow or other, and then after parties people can sleep until daybreak if they like – one attic for the men and the other for the girls.’
‘Oh, Baz, it sounds wonderful,’ said Poppy wistfully. ‘I just wish there was some way I could . . .’ She stopped herself, knowing it would be futile to continue.
Baz put down his bass and pulled her into his arms. ‘That you could set up the club with me?’ he finished the sentence for her. His voice shook nervously, but his eyes were full of love. ‘I say, Pops, will you marry me? I’m serious. Then it would be our house, our jazz club. Your father couldn’t object to that, surely!’