Ever After (16 page)

“Oh, won’t he!” agreed Dinah fervently. “Wouldn’t you like to see him in Court! And he speaks so well, he was born to be a Q.C.”

“He’s shy, though,” said Virginia slyly. “Is he afraid of
all
women, or did I do something to scare him?”

“Was he scared?” Dinah laughed. “When I asked him what it was like at luncheon that day, he said, ‘American women are always so pretty. I wonder how that happens.’”

“And with Clare right under his nose!” But Virginia was flattered.

“Oh, but you’re different from Clare, you’re—” Dinah broke off in the middle of her sentence and her eyes returned to her plate.

“I’m what?” Virginia insisted, with a glance at Bracken.

“I don’t know quite how to say it,” said Dinah uncomfortably.

“I’ll say it!” Bracken put in. “Virginia is a spoilt brat, which makes her amusing but very different, as you point out, from Clare. You
are
a brat, aren’t you, Ginny,” he added affectionately, “but we all love you just the same, I can’t think why!”

“Then I shan’t bother to change!” Virginia grinned at him good-naturedly. “It’s nice to be loved for one’s faults and not one’s virtues!”

“Oh, it must be!” said Dinah unexpectedly. “I do believe that’s the difference I mean. Knowing that whatever you do or however badly you behave, he still feels the way he said just now.”

“But if people really love each other their faults don’t matter,” said Bracken, sounding rather sententious even to himself, and Dinah regarded him with large, serious eyes.

“I wonder how many people could say that,” she murmured.

“Are you by any chance coveting my brother, darling?” asked Virginia kindly, for she understood.

“Yes, I suppose I am, rather,” Dinah conceded with unbroken gravity.

“Then I’ll share him with you,” Virginia offered generously. “He’s the only one I’ve got and you’ve got five, but if you want to go halves on Bracken I’m willing.”

“So is Bracken willing,” said Bracken quickly, preferring that role on the whole to the one of uncle. “Virginia, Dinah, and Bracken Murray, Incorporated. I’ll have Partridge draw up the papers tomorrow.”

He fed them with grilled sole, cutlets and new peas, with a glass of Deidesheimer each and finished the bottle himself. And for a sweet they had Gunter’s specialty, which was a famous peach ice. After that the Savoy wove its customary spell, and the matinée was to Dinah a time of complete enchantment. Bracken, who knew his Gilbert and Sullivan backwards and forwards, sat a little cornerwise in his chair so that he could see her face in stolen glances, and nearly wept at its rapt enjoyment. But what a privilege would be his, he marvelled, to open doors to this sensitive, half-starved creature, to lay his fortune at her feet like a magic carpet, to watch her unfold and blossom and come into her birthright of love and beauty. It would be, that is, if Lisl could be found and dealt with conclusively.

He had got off a letter to his father after all, and then laid the matter of Lisl before Partridge, who took rather a dim view of it all, but ponderous machinery was being put in motion. It would be necessary first of all for Bracken to give evidence of his intention to settle permanently in England. Partridge had suggested that he leave Claridge’s when his womenfolk departed and take rooms in Albany or some such stronghold of respectable bachelorhood. But Bracken was also contemplating another and more fascinating idea. He had mentioned in his letter to Cabot the possibility of their buying Farthingale to use as a country home when Eden and Cabot came to England as they did nearly every year—and as the house to which Dinah would eventually come as his bride.

B
RACKEN
had already made his bow to the Duke of York at a levee in April, and he was now watching with increasing amusement his sister’s gallant
savoir-faire
as her own ordeal approached. The gown arrived from the dressmaker’s and was put on for his inspection. As described and sketched in
The
Queen
the following week,
“Miss Virginia Murray wore white Duchesse satin with an overskirt
of
white
mousseline
de
soie
embroidered
in
a
festoon
design
in
silver
and
pearls.
The
close
swathed
bodice
was
of
the
same
em
broidered
mousseline,
and
the
train
was
apple-blossom
pink
brocade
lined
with
puffed
white
chiffon,
the
edge
embroidered
in
silver.
Her
ornaments
were
a
pearl
necklace,
the
gift
of
her
father,
and
a
pearl
and
diamond
brooch
given
by
her
brother.”

Bracken’s proud fraternal eye noticed that the head-dress of three white ostrich feathers with a tulle veil attached to their base suited her heart-shaped minxish face. Her bouquet, which he himself had chosen and arranged for, was pink roses and white orchids. Seated in an armchair, he gravely impersonated Queen Victoria and received innumerable curtseys while Virginia counted her steps and discovered the difference between her brocade train and the portière she had been practising with, and learned the most comfortable angle at which to hold her head under the Prince of Wales plume and veil. Lady Shadwell assured her that the white-gloved
Gentlemen
-in-Waiting, the man with the gold stick, and a footman with a little white crook would all assist her in governing the heavy, slippery weight of the train as she made her way into the Throne Room, along the line of Royalties, and out at the farther door. But Virginia, looking back over her shoulder at the yards of unruly pink brocade of the carpeted floor of their sitting-room at Claridge’s, nursed a growing fear that it would all lump up in an ungainly ball behind her, or become twisted and stringy as she advanced. They will slide it along after you, she was told—they are there just to do that—it will be taken off your arm and spread for you—it will be picked up and given back to you…. So then, reassured and reckless, she must try it once more, and that time she caught her heel in the lace and chiffon flounces round her feet and went down, right off balance, in a helpless heap in front of Bracken’s chair.

Virginia laughed first, and it wasn’t hysterics. While Sue and Lady Shadwell exchanged a quick glance anticipating nervous tears, while Bracken with a mask of concern on his face reached to help her disentangle herself, Virginia leaned against him and hooted with healthy laughter. “You m-mustn’t help me!” she gasped,
swaying towards the support of his shoulder while she stood on one foot. “The Q-Queen won’t help me!”

“She’ll do,” Lady Shadwell nodded to Sue, and on the theory that you must always get right back on the horse which has thrown you, they began all over again.

No one was giving Clare a train-party. Lady Davenant said she wasn’t feeling up to it, but Virginia suspected there wasn’t money enough. So Clare and a number of her friends were generously included on Virginia’s guest list, with Lady Shadwell’s approval. The late Lord Shadwell had owned coal-mines, which was a very different thing from depending on rent rolls and land values for an income, as Lord Enstone did. Lady Shadwell had known Enstone years before when his father was still alive and his sister, now Lady Davenant, was in her first season. It was saddening, she said, to think of him as being in low water financially. The Enstone Town house in St. James’s Square had been a very gay place in the old days. You would never believe it now, said Lady Shadwell, but Erminie Campion was once considered a beauty, before her marriage to Davenant took it out of her. But then, Lady Shadwell added with a shrug, she herself was the prettiest of four famous sisters and look at her now. Virginia, who loved to hear stories of the mid-Victorian days, looked as she was bidden, with her candid eyes under winged brows, and said that the least pretty of those four sisters was probably better-looking than anybody was nowadays. Lady Shadwell seemed surprised—her own daughters had no tact—and then her glance softened. It sounded so like Eden.

On the eleventh, Lady Shadwell’s carriage with two men on the box drove them to the Palace. The Queen would enter the Throne Room at three o’clock, but long before then the Mall was packed with carriages creeping towards the entrance, full of hungry, dithering girls in white with ostrich feathers in their hair. Few of them had been able to eat anything before they left home, because of nerves, and no refreshments would be served at the Palace. Most of them had been fortified by a cup of hot soup briskly laced with sherry, to which they were not accustomed and which was not sitting well. It was a warm day. They all had cricks in their necks from leaning forward in a special way to keep the veil from dragging backward on the feathers.

Cockney crowds lined the route, making outspoken comments on the occupants of the carriages in voices intended to carry.
Careful
sponsors, dreading the effect of personal remarks from the kerb, especially uncomplimentary ones, kept the carriage windows closed while their charges wilted for lack of air. Lady Shadwell had no fear of the verdict on Virginia and the glass was down. Ribald “Oo
-ers
” of admiration floated in, which Virginia bore with great
self-possession, though her palms were wet inside the long white gloves, and beads of perspiration showed at the edges of her hair. “Lucky girl, to have naturally curly hair in this heat!” Lady
Shadwell
remarked with a glance at the little rings and tendrils round Virginia’s ears, which only became more so with damp. She would never forget how Maude’s crimped fringe had disgraced her mother by going limp and straight before they even reached the Palace gates and Maude had developed a maddening nervous gesture of pushing it up with a gloved hand, which persisted all the way to the Presence.

At the entrance their groom jumped down and presented their cards, and they descended rather stiffly and their trains were arranged over their arms by powdered footmen in the scarlet Royal livery and white gloves. The muggy summer heat of the street followed them into the lower hall, and when they reached the grand staircase the air was heavy with scent and flowers. They ascended slowly and Lady Shadwell had the rail because of her rheumatism. This left Virginia in the middle of the step with no support and dizziness grew upon her as they reached the top. There they paused a moment while Lady Shadwell recovered herself, and she watched with an ironic smile the fragrant, rustling figures which flowed past them. She was thinking that she was not as young as she had been the first time she mounted those stairs—nor the second time, after her marriage—nor even the third, the year Maude had come out. Perhaps, for one reason or another, one always reached the top of those stairs a little breathless. She glanced sidewise again at Virginia, panting beside her, and Virginia grinned back gamely. “At my age, one longs for a lift,” Lady Shadwell admitted, and Virginia answered with her quick, instinctive tact, “And at mine, with my heart coming out the top of my head!”

Court officials were dexterously separating the débutantes and their sponsors from the Diplomatic and the Crown Ministers and their wives, who were diverted down a different corridor as Virginia and Lady Shadwell moved on into a crowded, stuffy, glittering
anteroom
. They soon encountered Clare, looking as white as her dress, with Lady Davenant, magnificent in mauve satin embroidered with silver and sequins. The sponsors fell into reminiscent conversation, and other people they knew appeared with white-clad girls in tow. Clare agonized because she was convinced that her feathers were working loose, and the smell of so many bouquets and so much perfume out of bottles made her feel very queer. Virginia’s pulses were pounding in her ears, and she was conscious for the first time in her life of being laced too tight, and the arm over which the heavy train had been draped ever since she descended from the carriage was beginning to go numb.

Lady Shadwell turned for a last critical inspection of her protégée. Virginia met it bravely, her chin up, while Lady Shadwell patted the shine from her forehead with her own handkerchief—no need to tell Eden’s child to straighten her back! Then Lady Shadwell looked to make sure Virginia’s right hand was now gloveless, and saw the tell-tale trembling of the bouquet. What one went through when one was young, she thought with her strangled, ironical smile. Thank God one hadn’t got to be young twice. One first season was enough for anybody to have to live through!

As she and Lady Davenant left the girls and moved away to take their own places in the Throne Room, Lady Shadwell was
remembering
her own girlhood qualms and heart-breaks and blunders with a kind of detached pity. And then you got married. Once was enough for that too, she thought cynically, for she had married well but not very happily, having been given no opportunity to fall in love before the ceremony, so that she drove away on her wedding journey with a man who was little better than a stranger. At least her Maude had been allowed to choose, and the other two as well, when their turn came, though goodness knows they had not had enough offers among them to make it difficult. But she was
wondering
cynically, even as she performed her own curtsey before the Queen, how much difference it made, really, as you drove away, how well you thought you knew him. All three girls had clung to her and cried, before they went. And then, with all that behind you, feeling a thousand years old and doubtless with a baby already on the way, you came back to the Palace and were presented again as a married woman. You weren’t so frightened the second time, you’d been through a good deal in the meanwhile. She found herself wondering too if at her age she would still be available when it came time to present this lovely, confident American after her marriage. They said Enstone’s eldest boy was badly smitten….