Sail Upon the Land (21 page)

Frightened that someone would come down and witness her triumph or disaster, she took a rush at it, lifting the little glass door and snatching the post inside. Brown, white and blue envelopes addressed to Lord Mount-Hey, Lady Mount-Hey, The Hon. Clarice Hayes (which she isn’t, she’s just plain Miss Clarice Mullins). All delaying tactics exhausted, Damson dropped the other letters on to the hall table and held in her hand an official white envelope from the examinations board.

Her heart banged in her chest as she folded down the edges and tore with exaggerated care along the dotted line. She shut her eyes as she unfolded the piece of blue paper and held it up to her face.

She turned her head away, trying to catch a glimpse of her A Level results out of the corner of her eye without looking. But what she glimpsed caused her to collapse to her knees on the stone floor.

Maths: A, Biology: A, Chemistry: A, Biology S Level: Distinction.

She could hear someone’s slippers flapping down the stairs behind her and turned around, beaming through her tears when she saw it was her father.

‘I did it, Munty! I did it!’

‘I thought you’d hurt yourself. What have you done?’

‘Straight As, Munty. I got straight As!’

‘Oh darling, you splendid girl. I’m so, so proud of you. Is it too early for champagne?’

Damson was relieved that her father was alone for a change. Margaret would somehow have made it all about her.

‘It’s only eight o’clock. But we can have some later. I’m so excited. Do you think I’ll get into Cambridge now?’

‘They can hardly keep you out can they? But don’t you have to go back to school next term to do that other exam?’

Not having gone to Oxbridge himself, Munty was vague about the details.

Damson shuddered at the idea of being at school for another moment. Lots of her friends were going to Artillery Tutors in London, which seemed infinitely glamorous.

‘If you don’t mind, Munty, I would like to go to London and get a change of tutors. At the end of last term we were starting again at the beginning of A levels.’

‘Well, we’ll see what we can manage. We must ring your grandparents.’

Damson jumped up. ‘Grandpa will be so pleased I’ve got the chance to follow him to St Bennet’s, if they’ll have me.’

She was seized by a sudden doubt. She hadn’t expected As. She glanced at the paper again, and there they were. Lovely as a row of teepees. She would always love the letter A.

There was a hot light burning in her chest as she went over to the old sedan chair beside the front door. Inside lived the black Bakelite telephone with its chrome dial and its cohort of phone books, address books and doodled notepads, with a biro attached to a shelf with a piece of string and a drawing pin – Munty’s vain attempt to stop people wandering off with it.

‘I’ll go and make some tea for Margaret,’ said Munty, pottering in his old sheepskin slippers down the passage to the kitchen. She looked after him with affection – with results like that she could love anybody. And she liked the way his hair was fluffy and silvery in the mornings.

Her grandmother answered the phone quickly. A lifetime of calls from patients, before all these things became automated, had accustomed her to grasping the point very fast.

‘Oh darling, that’s simply marvellous news. I must go and tell Grandpa.’

It had always been to Granny that Damson fled whenever she could, and to her kind, faintly antiseptic grandfather. While she knew she was no replacement for their beloved lost Melissa, she was at least female and loved and physically there, in arms and on laps, in cots and on sofas.

Everywhere that her mother wasn’t.

Her grandmother – and indeed anyone who’d lived through the war – would not burden others with her grief particularly not her own granddaughter. The warm thrum of love in her grandparents’ house was uninterrupted, as if her being born just before her mother died had allowed for no hesitation or breaking off. Damson was aware that she had a very different relationship with Granny from that of her other Reeves cousins, her uncles’ children. She sometimes felt more like their child than their grandchild, as Munty was so detached and Melissa just a kind of absent presence.

Visiting Mummy’s grave had been a regular ritual since she was very small, whenever Munty took her to the church down in Hey. Damson had run her fingers across the words inscribed on the gravestone.

‘What does that mean, Munty?’

‘Just that your mummy was lovely.’

Even at nine, Damson had sensed she shouldn’t ask anything else. She tried asking Granny and learned that her mummy had always been delicate but no one had realised that having a baby might prove dangerous to her health – hesitation on that word. Granny would talk about the midwife Miss Smith who had delivered Damson and looked after her for the first few weeks, retired and living now in an Eastbourne nursing home, and whom she would visit still. Perhaps Damson would like to? It was clear that the death had been a complete shock to everyone. Damson had been just five weeks old. She was so used to the story that she didn’t think to ask for more.

Her response to her grandmother’s going uncharacteristically quiet was to climb up on to Sarah’s knee and nestle into her warm, comforting and sweetly scented bosom. As she grew older she would carefully move the reading glasses on their string out of the way first.

‘Darling Damson,’ her grandmother would murmur, resting her chin on the little girl’s head and holding her tight.

‘Iris, I need to look at the guest list. Can you bring it here?’ Margaret was in her boudoir, as she liked to call it, a lovely room with a high ceiling overlooking the lake at the front of Castle Hey. Her Biedermeier desk was positioned in front of the triptych of arched windows framed in chintz scattered with creamy, golden-hearted lilies, and she gazed out across the sparkling water at bright trees in new leaf. What had been rank grass and mud when she had arrived as a bride, was now turfed to an Englishman’s dream of a lawn, running down beyond the carriage sweep to the neat and tidy gravelled lake shore beyond.

Margaret had had a very clear idea of her marketable assets from her earliest teenage years. She was born after the end of the war, conceived during her father’s last leave, but he didn’t come home – his fate was an enduring mystery – and Helen, her mother, never mentioned him and didn’t remarry. There was nothing unusual about fatherless children in the Nottingham street where she had been born, or in her school.

Helen took in piece work, and her hands flew at the industrial Singer day and night to support herself and her one child. It hadn’t been deprived, but it was very ordinary. Yet Margaret never felt ordinary. Her friends had all left school at fifteen and worked in shops and factories, the additional income welcomed by their families. But Margaret insisted on stretching the family budget by completing a secretarial and business college course. If she could get into an office, she would meet a better class of potential husband.

She planned her progress through the best available offices, gaining experience. At twenty-one her certificate of excellence landed her a job in the secretarial pool at Mullins Industrial. The day Mr Mullins’ personal assistant Miss Atkins developed shingles and ceased to perform her Cerberus to Mr Mullins’ Hades, fate took Margaret in hand and threw her high.

The wedding followed on as night does day. Mullins had been a childless widower for many years. It was all perfectly respectable. Miss Atkins sat in the front right pew of St Peter in Chains, glowering and glaring from under her purple velour hat.

Margaret, very much a Christian – the Church Youth Club had been much more her style than the secular one – and a virgin whatever the mutterings, wore a long, blindingly white dress with bell sleeves. She didn’t take the trouble to worry about romantic love, ‘Soppy stuff, so impractical,’ she would tell herself, shaking her head. Love, for her, was what she felt for her mother and later for her twins. Gratitude was what she felt for Mr Mullins.

After eleven years of peaceful marriage, Joe Mullins had died suddenly. They’d been in the Bahamas. She was lounging by the pool flicking through
Modern Woman
, while the girls, who were ten at the time, played tennis.

She had glanced up and seen that Joe was face down in the pool. Screaming for help, she’d jumped in and tried to turn him over. But he weighed seventeen stone and she wasn’t strong enough. The pathologist said he’d died of a heart attack, not drowned, so she was reassured that she could have done no more.

He’d been a good husband, and had loved his identical girls, delighting in their prettiness and unable to get over how he, ‘an ugly old walrus’ as he called himself, could be father to two fairy children with golden hair.

After two years, there was nothing for her in Nottingham any more, especially as her mother, who’d moved in with them after Joe’s death, had also died. She dealt with her grief at that terrible loss, her faith sustaining her, and then in her usual efficient way moved on. Relying on good, bought advice, she sold their home and all her shares in Mullins Industrial, appointing a financial adviser to handle the resulting capital, and started a new life in London. She was richer than even she had expected, she’d had no idea of the depth and breadth of Mullins’ business activities, but everything came to her, enough to lead a very interesting life after his death. She would never have met Munty if it hadn’t been for Joe, and she remained grateful to his memory.

As soon as she had seen Castle Hey, she grasped its – and Munty’s – potential, and focused on moving him briskly to a proposal. She was very charming and she arranged all kinds of entertainment for this sad widower and his unresponsive daughter.

As soon as they were married, Margaret began to transform Castle Hey. When she arrived, her boudoir had been curiously empty. She wondered briefly why such a large light room at the front of the house had been shut up and neglected. But then a lot of the house remained very much as it had been when the Army handed it back in the Sixties. Munty hadn’t had the capital or the will, after Melissa died, to do anything apart from prevent it leaking as much as possible. That meant living in a handful of rooms, and locking any that could not be heated or decorated.

She had not been able to persuade the twins to make proper friends with Damson, but threatened to cut off their allowances unless they were as nice to her as they could manage. She explained to them that the house, although it looked to them like a dump, could be restored and would be a lovely place for parties and dances. She took them into her confidence on the subject of titles, and how desirable they were for people who wanted to get on in the world. The twins got it at once and, while not overwhelming in their friendliness, set out to convince Damson that it wouldn’t be an absolute nightmare to have them as stepsisters.

Her social secretary Iris bustled on her trotters over to the desk where Margaret sat surrounded by fabric samples, menus, invitations and all the other paraphernalia required to arrange a deb’s coming-out ball. An advertisement in
The Lady
had brought Iris Long to Castle Hey. She was a small rotund creature whose feet bulged out of her neat size-three navy courts. Her several chins were only partially concealed by the frilly ruff that decorated the neck of her blouse. Blonde highlights and a blow dry, pussy bow and a navy pleated skirt completed the look, which was Miss Piggy as Princess Diana.

Margaret appreciated Iris’s tactful social coaching, The first girl she’d employed for the joint role had been not only sneering but also wrong about lots of things – such as serviettes and pastry forks. She’d left in a huff when confronted. Margaret was eager to get it right and had no pride when it came to adjusting her behaviour in order to move up and fit in. Iris’s wages reflected this extra duty. Some of the advice was surprising, such as answering, ‘How do you do?’ when someone said, ‘How do you do?’ to you. She’d blushed when she remembered replying, ‘Very well, thank you’. The twins’ dance was, barring any future weddings, the apotheosis of Margaret’s dreams. She was so determined to get it right that she would pay any price to do so.

Iris was also good with Damson, whenever Margaret became exasperated with her stepdaughter’s ingratitude and rudeness. Damson seemed indifferent to all the trouble and expense that were being lavished on the party. She’d even turned down Margaret’s offer to have something made to go with the twins’ dresses, preferring what her grandmother could run up from a
Modern Woman
pattern.

The new Lady Munty had been thrilled to receive one of Peter Townend’s letters, in turquoise ink, suggesting that she should bring out her girls with the Hon. Damson Hayes, who must now be the right age. Townend, Margaret’s research had told her, was on a personal crusade to keep the whole debutante boat afloat after the end of court presentation in 1958. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of genealogy and Margaret was only too pleased for him to be aware of where the money for the big Castle Hey dance came from. Money rapidly gained lustre when attached to a genuine hereditary title, particularly an old one.

The twins responded to the whole deb scene just as she’d hoped. They went out of their way to be nice to Peter, linking both his arms, one on each side, and whispering gossip into his ears to make him laugh. They knew exactly which side their bread was buttered, and could see that everyone thinking they were Hons meant a lot in that world. They relished the effect of their good looks and liveliness on the debs’ delights after years of single-sex boarding school.