Distant Choices (9 page)

And then, when the ladies had taken their coffee, the gentlemen their port, Evangeline would lead her dinner-guests to mingle with the company she had invited ‘for the evening'a little music in the hall, a few violins, a piano across which she had draped an antique shawl, the drawing-room left open and the chairs arranged for conversation, the library arranged for cards, a tasty little supper on the
interesting
side of midnight of oyster patties, lobster salad, cold fowl, various highly complicated trifles, a great deal of claret-cup and champagne. A feast, a frolic, of which the sole purpose was to make Lord Merton's first taste of High Grange so agreeable that he would come to sip and sample it again. And bring his wife.

Dress – needless to say – was an immense preoccupation.

‘It would be rather interesting,' she murmured to Oriel, ‘if we could wear identical gowns, you and I – or very nearly. A positive froth of gauze for the skirt and almost no bodice to speak of. Bare shoulders just rising out of the foam – very enticing. Me in black and you in white. Yes? But too daring – alas – for the Gore Valley. Or, at least – until one knows the Mertons rather better. So – perhaps silvery grey with pearls? For me, that is.'

Inviting several Hepplefield dressmakers to attend her at High Grange she made her selection and ordered a ‘modest' dress of silver tissue, a flowing skirt which gleamed and swayed, a bodice which covered but did not conceal the wine-glass stem of her waist, the full breast, the regal arch of her back.

‘I expect you will think it too plain,' she said on the day the dress was delivered, posing before Oriel who knew it to be no such thing, and Kate who did not seem to notice.

‘Beautiful, mamma.'

‘Yes. And what do
you
think, Kate dear?' Kate looked at her, frowning, honestly considering.

‘I'll tell you …'

‘Please do.'

‘It looked like nothing at all when it came out of the box …'

‘And now?'

It was an enchantment, a display of wickedly enticing skill which would make other women appear over-dressed, full-blown, dismally run-of-the-mill. They all knew it. Was Kate so unwilling, then, to admit the fascinations of her step-mamma? Evangeline gave her purring smile, moving imperceptibly so that the skirt rippled and glinted, releasing a scent of magnolia.

‘You look magnificent,' Kate snapped at her. ‘How do you do it?'

‘Oh – my dear –' Evangeline was amused and very well satisfied. ‘One learns to know oneself. One creates an illusion.
Now
– let me create one for you. Both of you. White, of course. What else? And you must make the most of it while you can, for the time is not long. It ought to be forbidden, in my view, to any woman over twenty-five. Oh yes – for I have seen no one past that age with the teeth or the skin to cope with it. The bloom fades, my children – so “gather ye white dresses while ye may” is my advice to you.
White
– with hints of pastel. The only thing.'

For Oriel, certainly. But the same billowing yards of white silk, the same frills of fluted chiffon which made Oriel appear to be moving at the centre of a graceful cloud, seemed somehow to engulf Kate, to become a burden she carried unwillingly so that, from the first fitting, the frills, the puffed sleeves, the vast skirt looped up at the hem with white rosebuds over white chiffon, seemed to droop, and then to wilt, with her spirits. She did not like the dress. But because she did not know why, she kept silent, grew inattentive, lost interest entirely, so that she was late for her fittings, awkward in the dressmaker's hands, and, on one occasion, did not come at all.

‘Then we must proceed without her,' said Evangeline, who had been doing exactly that from the start. ‘One assumes – one hopes – although with Kate one can never be certain – that she may have some little ideas of her own about the trimming. But since she is not here to express them then – well – yes – white on white, I think is best. So just do it like my daughter's …'

‘Mamma.' Oriel had been waiting for her opportunity. ‘Is it necessary for us to be dressed alike?'

Evangeline smiled. ‘Oh yes, dear. Very necessary.'

‘Why, mamma? Since we are so different to look at, it seems – unfair.'

‘Unfair? To whom?' Evangeline smiled again. ‘Not to you, dear Oriel.'

‘No, mamma.
Not
to me. People are bound to notice.'

Evangeline's eyes narrowed and then opened wide with a sudden, feline gleam. ‘Yes, Oriel. Exactly. People
will
notice. And what will they see? That I have spent exactly the same on both dresses, down to the last silk ribbon and the last seed-pearl on the bodice – should anyone care to count them. That I have not favoured
my
daughter …'

‘You have favoured me, mamma.'

‘Of course I have.' Evangeline was crisp, now, with impatience. ‘Naturally. It is called the art of survival. Or just plain commonsense. You know that as well as I. So let us say no more about it. There is a great deal still to do. I am not quite happy with the table plan. If you could write out a list of who is to go in to dinner with whom and give it to Matthew, so he can learn it and get everybody together with the right partners at least ten minutes before dinner is announced, then that would be a help. I simply cannot bear to see people hanging around like lost sheep, not knowing with whom they are supposed to walk to table. So sloppy. Do see to it, Oriel.'

The guest list itself had not been the work of a moment.

‘Dear Evangeline is giving a dinner for Quentin,' breathed Letty to all her acquaintances, as if Evangeline had experienced a sudden conversion to the true faith.

‘My brother, Matthew, is entertaining some railway people,' Maud declared bluntly to several friends of her own who had not been invited, knowing she had been asked herself only as the inevitable spinster ‘sister-at-home', and to balance the ratio of male to female caused by the absence of Lady Merton.

Not that Evangeline intended Maud to walk in to dinner with Lord Merton, of course. Nor with the famous railway engineer Mr Morgan de Hay, who was far too interesting and important a gentleman to be wasted on Maud. Nor with the railway contractor, Mr Garron Keith, either, who, being newly-rich and consequently rather common, might prove a difficult dinner partner and had better be left to Oriel. Kate, of course, would partner Quentin. There seemed no help for it and no great harm in it either from Evangeline's always well-calculated viewpoint, since she was well aware by now both of Kate's aversion to her cousin, and at Quentin's cool tolerance of her. Which left two very self-important, enormously wealthy directors of the railway company who could partner each other's expensive wives, and a third director, apparently a bachelor, less affluent or perhaps simply less inclined to mention it so often, who could partner Maud. Letty and Rupert Saint-Charles she decided to place together to save anyone else the bother of putting up with them. Matthew, of course, would give his arm to Mrs Morgan de Hay as the most notable lady present, which would leave the great engineer himself to …? Oriel? The obvious choice. Certainly it would have to be a member of the family, for Mr Morgan de Hay, now that engineers were becoming so very much the fashion, had developed a most precise opinion of his own worth. Who else, therefore, would do him sufficient honour but a daughter of the house? Oriel. Or Kate, whom Evangeline neither trusted nor wished to bring forward. Or Evangeline herself, who would be far too fully occupied with Lord Merton. Oriel, then. Although it meant the inconvenience of finding some other female for the contractor, the difficult Mr Keith. Someone of only moderate consequence about whom there was no need to worry should the man offend her.

‘It will have to be one of Letty's dreary daughters,' she told Oriel. ‘The eldest, I suppose, so as not to cause a revolution. Is her name Constantia? Oh – is she the married one? Absolutely
not
, since Letty would expect me to invite the husband as well. Susannah, then. A perfect goose, as I recall, who will be scared silly – or sillier – by this Mr Garron Keith, who is – well – not the kind of man she is used to seeing at the vicarage. Nor the kind of man I am particularly anxious to see here, to be strictly honest.'

‘Then why invite him, mamma?'

Evangeline shrugged light shoulders, dismissing the very sizeable Mr Garron Keith, who had arrived only very recently with his army of labourers, his picks and shovels, his kegs of gunpowder, his teams of heavy horses, to blast his way through Merton Ridge into the Valley and lay down the track as far as Hepplefield, as a mere irrelevance.

‘Because, my dear, since it
is
a railway dinner, one hardly knew how to exclude him. One even felt that if one did so he just might arrive in any case. He has that kind of air about him.'

‘Poor Susannah.'

‘Indeed. She will not have the least idea how to talk to him. One of Letty's little lambs to the slaughter, I fear. Unless – yes, I will sit you on Mr Keith's other side, Oriel, so that you can rescue her from him, every now and then, and
him
from total boredom, I dare say. Although you must take care not to neglect Mr Morgan de Hay, who is altogether a gentleman, and will feel entitled – one rather imagines – to your full attention. You will manage it all very smoothly, dearest. I am not in the least worried about you.'

‘Thank you, mamma.'

‘Thank Heaven,' said Kate, coming to Oriel's room on the great evening, ‘that I only have to contend with Quentin, who will just ignore me. I have come to see how lovely you look.'

Very lovely, in fact, with the graceful white dress floating around her, her bare shoulders with a bloom on them like cream velvet, the startling contrast of a black velvet ribbon around her long neck, clusters of pearl and jet beads in her ears, black ribbons and pearl pins in the complicated coils and ringlets of her silver hair which, piled high on the crown of her head, made her even taller, even more of a fine-boned, pure-bred swan than ever.

‘Oriel – you – are – so – beautiful.' Kate, giving each word a separate emphasis, was stating a fact, telling a truth, her keen, dark eyes staring, assessing, in a way Oriel had found unnerving until she had realized it was the way in which other people examined a work of art. A garden statue, she thought wryly, in cool marble which could be animated at will – not always
her
will, either – to write place-cards and arrange flowers, to share herself evenly between two difficult dinner-partners who might flake off little pieces of her as they chose, since it was only marble after all.

‘Thank you, Kate.'

‘Lord, don't thank me. I didn't make you beautiful. You do it yourself, don't you? I mean – well, yes, you have lovely fair hair and big blue eyes and good skin, but so do lots of other people and they don't look like you. You have something
else
, Oriel. Do you know what it is?'

‘Oh – one creates an illusion …'

Kate wrinkled her nose. ‘Your mother says that.'

‘My mother
does
that.'

‘Yes. But not you. I think it's something you
have
.'

‘Like the measles?'

‘Well – maybe. But I wish
I
had it, that's all. I don't know how I ought to look, or how I want to look. I just know I'm wrong. I don't know which dress I ought to be wearing – except that it shouldn't be this one.'

Oriel, slowly and calmly, looked at the dress, taking in the white ribbons and white beading on white silk, the pure elegance which was, at the same time, too big and too civilized, too pale, too much the stuff of classical garden statues for Kate.

‘Well – yes,' she said, as if it had just this minute occurred to her. ‘Perhaps it does need a little something …?'

‘I know.' Kate had no hesitation. ‘It needs you inside it.'

‘Well – let's see …' Oriel, moving slowly, apparently in deep contemplation, opened a drawer and began to look through it very much at random until, finding the very thing she had put there to be found, she made an exclamation she hoped Kate would mistake for surprise, and produced a sash in vibrant, scarlet satin.

‘This might do it, Kate. What do you think? I had it once on a dress of mine – oh, ages ago …'

It was, of course, brand new, purchased by Oriel a week ago in Hepplefield when, having managed to evade her mother's scrutiny long enough to slip unobserved into the silk mercer's shop, she had been caught coming out and, in response to Evangeline's desire to know what she was up to, had told a swift tale of ribbons glimpsed in the window which, on closer examination, had proved not to match. A breathless moment.

‘Indeed?'

She did not think her mother had believed her. But the shop had been crowded, making a discreet enquiry difficult, and Evangeline, who would have been far more likely to suspect her daughter of wishing to snatch a few moments alone with a young man than of helping Kate, had let it pass.

And now here it was, long and very wide, the vivid fabric reducing Kate's waist to fairytale proportions as Oriel quickly wound it around her. its fringed ends making a swirl of wild scarlet to the hem of her dress, an odd effect, perhaps, but one which, instead of whispering ‘Evangeline'now boldly stated ‘Kate'. Or would do so, in a minute or two, when Oriel had done with her.

‘I have some scarlet ribbons somewhere too, I seem to remember – oh yes – what luck. We'd better have you all to match, I suppose.'

And, having deliberately chosen to wait until this last moment when there would be no time for anyone – Maud or Evangeline – to send Kate back upstairs to change, Oriel, working quickly now, brought out ribbons, combs, pins, brushed out the fussy, far too girlish ringlets into which Evangeline's maid had dressed Kate's hair, and piled it, instead, as high and smooth as she could on Kate's suddenly Oriental head, the weight of it lengthening her eyes, heightening her cheekbones, the coarse dark hair itself turning to ebony as Oriel threaded the chignon through with scarlet satin and scattered it with glowing, enamelled pins like a swarm of fireflies.