Privileged Children (16 page)

‘When your daughter and I met she was fourteen, which is old enough to leave school and take a job. She said she had no family. I lost my family at that age, so why should I question that? She had no home, and we live in a communal household, so she joined us. I don’t look at posters in the street, Mr Pagett, and I only ever read the
Daily
Worker
.’

‘I don’t believe any of this,’ he replied. He paused to decide what he did believe.

‘Randa,’ said Flora Pagett in this interval, ‘were you happy with — Monsieur Brécu and Mrs Molloy?’

‘Very, very happy, Mother.’

‘Well, Thomas, I don’t see why she shouldn’t go back to these people. As Mrs Molloy said, she’s old enough to leave school and have a job.’ Mrs Pagett stood with her back absolutely straight and her hands clenched by her sides.

‘Good God, Flora! Now listen, Mrs Molloy. Whatever the truth is, Miranda has made it quite clear that you are the ringleader in this business. I want to speak to you in my study. Flora, take these people upstairs. Miranda —’ he hesitated, ‘— go with your mother, my dear:’

He took Alice into his study, sat down at his desk and
fiddled with his pens. ‘I can prove nothing against you, Mrs Molloy. In fact, I believe that you knew perfectly well who she was, and you have been concealing her from the police. Possibly you even kidnapped her. However, let that pass. I am Miranda’s father, and I am responsible for her. She is here to stay.’

‘Five years you’ll have to keep her in misery. Then you can’t stop her coming to us,’ said Alice, standing near the door.

‘Please let me finish, Mrs Molloy. I will not allow Miranda to communicate with you, and I will censor her letters myself.’ He walked over to the window and then turned to face Alice, but he looked at her hard face only briefly. ‘You have misunderstood me. I don’t want to keep my daughter in misery, as you put it. I want to see her happy in her own home, her natural surroundings. I don’t think Miranda will find happiness in some sort of Bohemianism. I realise that I have made mistakes in bringing up Miranda. I wish to rectify those mistakes. I care about my daughter and I want what is best for her. She’s not a child any more, but she’s a very young girl and she can’t know yet what sort of life is right for her.’ He finished with a great sigh.

‘Oh, don’t be such a hypocrite. You just want her because you think of her as property.’

‘I have tried to explain my position, Mrs Molloy, and I see that you are not amenable to reason. Very well, you can think what you like, but the position is as it is. Goodbye, Mrs Molloy.’

Alice took a few steps and then stopped. ‘But what will you really do to her? she asked.

‘I will arrange for her to go to a finishing school — either in Paris or in Lausanne. Then, of course, she will come out when she is seventeen.’ He was holding the back of a chair very tightly as he spoke.

Alice turned round and walked out. There, at the bottom of the stairs, was Flora Pagett.

‘Randa’s with Monsieur Brécu and Miss Brécu,’ she said. ‘I left them alone together in the drawing room. Please, Mrs Molloy, let me talk to you for a while.’ She held the dining-room door wide open. Flora Pagett was a small
woman who, after twenty-four years in England, still had an American accent. Her face was heavily made-up, and her hair was hennaed. She had once had Miranda’s figure, but it had sagged and softened with age and childbearing. She made Alice sit opposite her, and looked at her intently. ‘I do think it’s right that Randa should stay with you if that’s what she wants, but —’

‘You can imagine what your husband said to me.’

‘Well, yes. You see, if she only had a choice, she might choose to come home. Oh, Mrs Molloy, I always knew she wasn’t happy, and really it did worry me so! Thomas always said she had plenty of people to look after her, the best, trained people, so I shouldn’t trouble myself about her.’ She broke off. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s been like, these last two years. She was driven to do this terrible thing to us. Maybe we deserved it. Did we?’ she said, gazing tearfully at Alice.

‘Yes,’ said Alice.

‘Everyone says that the upbringing we gave Randa never did them any harm. In New Orleans, now, we don’t treat children like they do here — oh, Thomas always says I mustn’t talk so much about life back home! I’m sorry. Mrs Molloy, I’m so selfish, pouring out my troubles to you at a time like this. I’m sure you’d like to go and see Randa now. The drawing room’s on the first floor, on the left.’

‘I don’t think it was really your fault, Mrs Pagett,’ said Alice suddenly.

Alice found Miranda crying in Anatole’s arms, choking and screaming and red in the face. She flung herself upon Alice when she came in. ‘It’s too terrible, too terrible to happen!’ she cried. ‘What did he say to you, Alice? What did he say?’

Alice could not answer. ‘Oh my little one, my own darling,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t say anything much. But he won’t be sending you back to Radfield, that’s for sure.’

Miranda calmed down a little. Liza and Anatole sat on a sofa by the fireplace, looking at their feet while Alice and Miranda clasped each other. In a way, they were all quite glad, momentarily, when after five useless minutes the Pagetts came in and Thomas Pagett asked them to say goodbye to Miranda.

They all kissed her before they left. Miranda stood there woodenly even after the door was closed behind them. Her parents said nothing.

Outside the house, they watched, as though expecting to see Miranda tearing through it, the heavy, gleaming black door. ‘She might as well be in Holloway,’ muttered Liza.

‘Oh God, don’t say things like that!’ cried Alice.

‘We must get home quickly,’ said Anatole. He walked them to Oxford Street, where they hailed a cab.

Alice sat in the corner of the taxi, blank-faced and shrunken. She resisted Anatole’s attempt to hold her, though he needed comforting as much as she did. He wished that he could go and talk to Kate, who now lived with Richard in Hampstead; but he felt that he could not leave Alice tonight.

Alice went up to her room, and she was left alone. Supper was very silent.

‘She had such a lovely body,’ cried Charlie suddenly. ‘Her waist asked you to put your arm round it.’

‘How can you be so crude about her today of all days?’ cried Anatole.

‘Don’t pretend you’re not thinking the same as we are,’ laughed Charlie. Volodya was silent. ‘She rejected your attentions too, didn’t she? Or gave you just a tiny taste? None of us ever made it with her.’

Anatole said nothing. It was, however, less disturbing to concentrate on his unsatisfied desires than on Miranda crying her heart out in a stately bedroom in Bryanston Square once again with no one to love her and no one to love.

Miranda was at that moment simply trying to think of a detective-proof method of murdering her father.

Alice slowly folded the letter, creased it, and then unfolded it again. It had been written without a break, scrawled in places, and hastily shoved into the envelope and posted. She got up and went downstairs with it. Anatole was practising on the violin in his room.

‘Never come in when I’m playing!’ he shouted as the door opened.

‘Letter from Miranda,’ Alice said.

He read it standing, with the bow in his hand. ‘It’s not very passionate or very sorrowful, is it?’ she said.

‘As she comes near to explaining, you’d have got passionate and sorrowful letters if she’d been able to write in May and June. Did you know that she’d be coming back and coming out so soon?’

‘I thought she would be. I wasn’t sure.’

‘
Sainte
Vierge!
’
he screamed, throwing down the letter, which Alice picked up. ‘You mean that you have been like this — maudlin and flying into rages with us all every day — when you knew that you’d see your little darling so soon?’

‘Soon! She might be dead by May. I didn’t know, did I? I wasn’t sure. That was the worst thing. I presumed that she’d be chaperoned everywhere, like my mother was when she was a débutante.’

‘Get out. I can’t endure you any more. If you really loved her, you’d be glad that she’s content enough; not angry because she isn’t in a continuous paroxysm of grief and anger such as
you
’ve worked yourself up into.’

Alice turned pale. Anatole watched her walk woodenly upstairs almost with glee, but when she had disappeared from view he returned, frowning, to his violin, and half hoped that Alice would come back quite soon.

Alice paced round her studio, looking at the many pictures of Miranda on the walls. She sat down, eventually, in front of a piece of foolscap, holding a pen. She looked at the paper and wrote:
Dear
Miranda.

Then she continued:

She wrote each sentence individually, with large full stops between every one. She began a new paragraph.

She folded it, put it in an envelope, and went to post it. She stood in front of the pillar box for a few moments, in the
dark, vaguely tracing the letters ‘VR’ above the slot with her finger. She would write another letter tomorrow, a cheerful, sympathetic, newsy letter which might provide some enlivenment in Miranda’s life.

‘Anatole says Miranda wrote!’ said Jenny, as Alice slowly opened the front door. Liza was behind her. ‘Show us the letter. Has she been sent back to boarding school?’

Alice gave them the letter and went upstairs. ‘I’m sorry I said that, Alice,’ said Anatole, coming out of his room. ‘It was cruel.’ Alice shook her head.

Jenny, in the kitchen, absent-mindedly gave the letter to Finola to read. ‘See?’ said Finola. ‘She’s all right. I bet she was making it up about how cruel her parents were to her.’

Liza took the letter away from her, thinking that she heard Alice’s footsteps on the stairs.

Miranda had to wait until she knew enough about parties to tell those from which she would be missed from those which she would be able to miss without being noticed before she could go to Alice. She went to some sort of party or ball almost every night.

One evening, she dressed in short black taffeta to go to a rather avant-garde party on the borders of Chelsea. Her parents smiled to see her coming downstairs, looking so happy, so handsome, such a credit to them. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ her father said.

‘I’m sure I will,’ she replied, and swept out of the front door.

Her parents had given her a small car for her seventeenth birthday, which the chauffeur had taught her to drive. Almost no other girl of her age was able to drive herself around London as Miranda was.

Miranda had had her hair shingled, because she wore fashionable clothes, with which heavy hair in a bun looked very odd; but she knew that her previous hairstyle had been more becoming to her strong-featured and intensely female face. She was peculiarly conscious of the missing weight on the back of her head as she drove to Bramham Gardens. She still had her own key to the house, which she wore round her neck, together with her other, more necessary keys.

She embraced everyone. Augustus and Clementina and Kate were there to welcome her home, as well as all the
household. ‘You do look fine,’ said Alice, in tears, ‘but why did you cut off your hair?’

‘Oh, in a fit of temper, it was so difficult to cope with and everyone was badgering me to have it cut,’ lied Miranda.

‘We’d have got champagne to celebrate if we hadn’t thought that the sight of it would make you quite ill after all the champagne you must have had to drink in the last month,’ said Augustus, his eyes twinkling.

‘Give me a big glass of stout, for heaven’s sake!’ laughed Miranda. ‘Where’s Finola?’ she asked.

‘Gone to the pictures,’ sniffed Alice. ‘Come on, tell us everything that’s happened since you came back from Lausanne.’

Miranda sat down in her favourite sunken armchair beneath the kitchen window and looked at Alice, almost surreptitiously. Alice had several grey hairs now and she was much thinner, almost emaciated. Alice was thinking that Miranda’s face had lost that look of something more to come which it had had a year before, although in compensation, she was more classically beautiful to look at now.

‘You “came out”, didn’t you, Clem?’ asked Miranda.

‘I did,’ said Clementina.

‘I’m sure it hasn’t changed much since then.’

‘Oh my dear, you don’t know! We still had daytime chaperoning then.’

‘I didn’t mean all that. I meant Queen Charlotte’s Ball and what it’s all about. Getting your daughters off your hands.’

‘Marriage was my escape,’ said Clementina. ‘Augustus and I plotted it together. It was a moderately respectable match, so we didn’t have that much trouble.’

‘Nonsense, my dear, my father was a grocer,’ said Augustus.

‘But a very rich one. Anyway, I shocked my parents by going to live in Bloomsbury — and that was before the name became associated with all those queer people, as my mother would say.’ Clementina was not much given to reminiscence on the whole.

‘What are all these parties you go to like then, Miranda?’ asked Alice, refilling Clementina’s glass.

‘All alike,’ replied Miranda. ‘Everyone drinks too much
and becomes disgusting. It’s not like you drinking. You can swallow pints of alcohol and remain perfectly sober. But they want to get drunk, so they can do it on very little. The conversation is like nothing on earth — actually, it’s nothing. If you don’t know someone’s name, you call them “darling”. There are two adjectives: “divine” and “foul”. You hear those three words in ringing tones, and everything else they say is inaudible. Really I loathe nothing so much as parties. Whoever said they were for fun ought to be hanged. The noise, the smell, the heat, the boredom!’

Alice laughed. (Undoubtedly Miranda had done something to her lovely breasts: Alice had read somewhere that fashionable women made their chests flat with tight bands.) ‘What do you do in the daytime, though?’ Alice continued.

‘Stay in bed in the morning. Read and write letters and see friends in the afternoon.’

‘Do you have many friends?’

‘A few,’ said Miranda.

‘Are there any special set events that you go to in the London season?’

‘I don’t know why you want to know all this. It’s too boring.’

‘I want to know what you’re doing.’

‘Well, there was the Fourth of June at Eton last Saturday. My brother Jasper’s started there. That’s a sort of open day. I went with my parents. Jasper was the cox in a boat race. And then there’s Ascot Week — that’s racing — and Goodwood, racing again, at the end of the Season. And Henley, which is boating.’

‘So what do you do in the rest of the year?’

‘Oh, there’s the shooting season, and then the hunting season. My parents made me go out with the guns last year, but I’m jolly well not going this. Standing around in the cold applauding some idiot who’s shot one bird in two hours!’

‘Blood sports ought to be banned,’ said Anatole.

‘I quite agree with you.’

‘Did I tell you Leo died?’ said Alice.

‘No. Oh, Alice, I’m so sorry!’

‘You needn’t be. He was in terrible pain for the last few months. They couldn’t do anything for him.’

‘I sometimes think,’ said Miranda, ‘that it would be a very good idea if everyone who lived long enough was killed at the age of seventy. Painlessly, of course. Then one would know exactly how much time one would have at a maximum, and one would have very little fear of being bedridden and dependent for years. One could plan one’s life.’

‘Just because you’re seventeen,’ said Anatole. ‘Thank you, but I’m forty-seven and I wish to live till I’m ninety if I can keep in good health. I’ve never had an illness in my life since I had rickets as a small child. Augustus thinks that deformed children should be strangled at birth, too. But where do you draw the line? I’ve been perfectly happy with my deformity. I can’t run or walk very far, but what does that matter?’

‘You can walk as far as most people would ever wish to, Anatole. Of course I’m not talking about crooked legs,’ said Augustus. ‘What I mean is congenital idiots and children born without arms, that sort of thing. They’d be happier dead than living in some frightful institution.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Miranda. ‘Anyone who has to be kept in any sort of institution for however short a length of time ought to be killed.’

‘Should you have been killed rather than be sent to boarding school?’ asked Anatole.

‘I’d have chosen death at the time, certainly.’

‘But you’re a fighter, Miranda. You ran away.’

‘I didn’t used to be a fighter. When I was twelve I was a meèk little mouse who jumped when anyone spoke to me.’

‘Come now, if you’d been as meek as all that they wouldn’t have been so cruel to you. They like meek children,’ said Kate.

Miranda laughed. ‘Well, I remember myself as a very cowed creature, but it might be a trick of memory.’

‘So your brother’s at Eton now. Is he all right there?’ asked Alice.

‘Jasper? Yes. He’s a bully. My sister Viola is at Radfield. She’s fifteen, a stupid fourth-form lump of a girl who’s — she boasts about it, Alice — captain of the Middle School lacrosse team. When I ran away from Radfield, my father
planned to send her somewhere else, and she actually begged to stay there. What can you do with a girl like that? And at fifteen, she’s a child.’ Miranda paused. ‘It’s little Damian I’m worried about. He’s only eleven, and Mother’s darling. He’s at prep school. He went the term I ran away from Radfield. He was such a sweet, inventive, kind boy when he was in the nursery. He hardly ever talks now. He’s totally silent for two weeks before he goes back to school. It’s absolutely horrible to be with him. I can’t do anything about it. I’ve tried to persuade my father to send him to private tutors, but no, that’s mollycoddling. The old brute’s learned nothing.’

They ate silently for a few moments.

‘Miranda, why do you hate your sister for being happy at Radfield, just because you hated it?’ asked Kate. Alice had not dared to ask that.

‘Because it makes her a barbarian.’

‘You’re so damned intolerant.’

‘You would be intolerant too, if …’

‘Aye, maybe I would, but you’ll make no friends if you can’t stand those who have different tastes from yourself. Is your sister a bully, or a liar, because she likes lacrosse?’

‘Elle
est
une
brave
fille
,’ shrugged Miranda. ‘And that’s all you can say about her.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Alice.

‘Very nice but not very bright,’ replied Anatole.

‘Well, most of the people in this world are “
brave
”,’ said Kate. ‘And you just have to get on with them as best you can. Intelligence sometimes causes only trouble.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that? That’s been my entire experience. And doesn’t stupidity cause trouble? Read
St
Joan,
Kate. It’s the cause of most of the cruelty in the world.’

‘I have read
St Joan
.’

‘Shaw is extremely overrated,’ said Augustus.

‘I don’t care what you say, Kate,’ continued Miranda, ‘but stupid people ought to be simply exterminated. Or if not that, they shouldn’t have any power over others. The highly intelligent should rule.’

‘I’d like to know how much coal would be produced if a Cambridge professor was responsible for the mines,’ smiled Anatole.

‘What about Nietszche as an example of an intelligent person?’ said Kate.

‘Voltaire? Erasmus? Bernard Shaw? Marie Stopes?’

‘Oh, just shut up, you two,’ said Clementina. ‘I’ve got a headache, and I didn’t come to hear a quarrel.’

‘Can you stay the night, Miranda?’ asked Alice.

‘I’m afraid not. If my parents ever found out I’d been out all night they’d suspect that I’d been here, and then they’d send me up to Lynmore.’

Miranda got up to go at one in the morning. She kissed goodbye to Alice in the hall. Alice was very tired that night, and went straight to bed. Anatole was still in the kitchen.

‘Yes?’ he said, in surprise.

She looked urgent. ‘I want to talk to you alone, Anatole. Please.’

‘But of course. Sit down.’

‘No — would you mind coming out to the car? I’d rather we talked there, for some reason.’

‘Ah, it’s your territory,’ said Anatole. ‘All right, if you like. Is it cold out?’

‘No, not in the least.’

Miranda’s car was parked round the corner. She walked slightly ahead of him. When they reached the car, she got into the driver’s seat and sat with her hands fixed on the steering wheel, looking straight through the windscreen, while Anatole looked at her.

‘The most ghastly thing has happened, Anatole.’ She fiddled with the gear.

‘Don’t drive me off. What is this thing?’

‘I don’t desire Alice any more. I’ve grown out of my homosexuality. Many people do, you know.’

‘I’ve read my Freud, yes,’ said Anatole. Miranda lit a cigarette. ‘Is there some young man you’re in love with?’ he continued.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Spotty chinless fools the lot of them. No, it’s just as I say: I’ve simply grown out of being a lesbian.’

‘Alice was worried, you know, that you’d no longer want her, because she looks so much older suddenly.’

‘God, she could be forty from the look of her!’

‘The light was not kind to her tonight. But she has aged, yes.’

‘It’s not just that, though. Even if she was as beautiful as she used to be, I’d still want a man — now.’ She looked at him and continued, ‘Anatole, I’m an awful coward, you know. I can’t bring myself to tell her that I want to — to change our relationship — because she’s in love with me, isn’t she, and I’m so fond of her, I couldn’t bear to see her pain. I feel so guilty already. I’d feel even worse if I told her myself.’

Anatole waited.

‘It would come so much better from you. If she didn’t actually see me while she was told … Anatole. If you could. I’d be eternally grateful. It would hurt her so much less if you explained, and were loving and reasonable — I’d just get hysterical, I know I would.’

‘You are a coward, aren’t you?’ he said. He sounded merely interested.

‘I told you I was!’ she shouted.

There was a pause.

‘But I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell her.’

‘Darling Anatole, thank you so, so much.’

‘You didn’t used to be given to effusiveness.’

‘No — but it’s different now.’

‘Yes, you’ve become a débutante. You like everything you were mocking this evening really, don’t you?’

Miranda opened her mouth to argue, then closed it and admitted, with an honest smile, to a certain human fallibility.

‘But I’m not a débutante inside,’ she added.

‘No one is a débutante inside, Miranda.’

‘All right. But what I mean is that most of us Bright Young Things wouldn’t appreciate someone like you. You are marvellous, you know. I’m being effusive towards you, if you like, but so I should be. It’s genuine. I mean it.’

Anatole watched her. Her coral-coloured lips were slightly parted, her black-shadowed eyes were slightly narrowed. She had only ever looked like that at Alice before, and she had used to leave her powerful young face bare of make-up.

‘You want me to go to bed with you, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said and she looked away from him.

‘I wouldn’t go to bed with you now if you were the last woman on earth,’ he hissed. She stared at him, because his voice was more shocked than angry.

She no longer looked like an openly lustful woman, and Anatole felt a little calmer as he looked into her frightened, painted eyes.

‘Are you so incapable of — of getting outside yourself, that you cannot see that your behaviour is monstrous?’ he said. ‘You come here. You see Alice and decide that she is not your adoring rescuer but an untidy, ageing bohemian. You have a general taste for men, you think, but the eligible young men available to you rather bore you, so you pick on me. You rejected me two years ago, but that does not matter. A little deformed musician is just the thing to add spice to the life of the modern young lady. So you take me out here, instruct me to tell Alice that she is not required any longer, and then expect me to be another Alice to you. Except that I shall be rather in the background, a pet to be brought out upon occasion. And you seriously expect me to fall at your feet.’