‘Don’t worry, Myrtle,’ he said again, giving her shoulder a squeeze. ‘I’ll think of something. You’ll see.’
Dr Lightbody, on the other hand, was one of the favoured ones who, at Muriel’s request, had been invited for all the festivities and therefore faced the problem not only of morning clothes for the wedding, but of acquiring a suitable costume for the ball. A hot afternoon just a week before his departure for Mersham accordingly found him standing in front of the long, fly-stained mirror in the dim, dusty shop of Nathaniel and Gumsbody, the theatrical costumiers in Drury Lane. An enormous tricorne hat with a cockade lurched over his left eye, he wore a blue military coat heavily braided in gold and his arm was folded in a characteristic gesture across his chest. Unmistakably, he was the Emperor Napoleon as immortalized in the famous portrait by David.
‘What do you think?’ he asked the pale young man in charge of rentals.
‘It suits you, sir. It suits you very well.’
‘I don’t like it,’ pronounced Dr Lightbody. ‘It’s the hat, I think.’ He removed it to reveal his high and intellectual forehead.
‘What about Admiral Nelson, sir? We do a very nice line in him. He comes in three sizes and the eye-patch is free.’
The doctor shook his head. To go as a person in any way injured or defiled, even in battle, was against his principles.
He allowed the young man to divest him of his uniform and, clad only in trousers and braces, began to walk along the rows of ermine-lined mantles and sumptuous velvet cloaks.
‘You don’t fancy a nice cavalier, sir? Those hats with the big feathers always go down very well with the ladies.’
Dr Lightbody shook his head. Though the ringleted Jacobean wigs were very flattering one never knew what went on underneath.
It was all so annoying, he reflected, pausing now by the leather jerkin and feathered head-dress of an Indian brave, Doreen still being in hospital. Doreen was a good needlewoman, he had to give her that – she’d always made his shirts. It would have been no trouble to her to have run something up for him. Instead of which she just lay there in that awful ward full of disgusting, wheezing old women and yellow people with tubes in them, staring at him with those big, grey eyes of hers as though he could help her. The sister had given him an odd look when he’d asked if it would hurt Doreen to do a bit of sewing while she was in there, so he supposed it was no good pursuing the subject. As a matter of fact, the hospital visits were an embarrassment altogether – the staff who talked to him about Doreen’s condition seemed to think that his title of ‘Doctor’ would make him understand their jargon. Whereas in fact his title was a courtesy one, the courtesy being one that he had, so to speak, bestowed on himself when, in the drudgery of his last year at the catering college, he had first glimpsed his vision of the perfectibility of man.
‘These are nice, we always think,’ said the assistant, holding up a Viking helmet and breastplate. ‘With a red beard, perhaps – and thongs?’
Again Dr Lightbody shook his head. He wanted something which would suggest what he saw as his threefold role: of teacher, of healer, of leader of men. Something in white and gold, possibly? A High Priest? A Zoroastrian?
Suddenly he had an idea. ‘What about the Egyptians? Akhnaton, the Sun King – do you have him?’
‘I don’t know if we have him specifically, sir, but our Egyptian section is very well stocked. If you’d just come through here . . .’
Ten minutes later, in the many-layered, pleated linen skirts, the curved sandals and golden, cap-shaped crown, Dr Lightbody stood before the mirror again.
It was closer, much closer – but there was something a little bit effeminate about the whole ensemble. Not surprising, really – when all was said and done there was a touch of the tarbrush about the Egyptians.
Then, with the inner certainty of all visions, inspiration came.
Why go as a mere Sun King? Why not a Sun God?
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said to the weary assistant. ‘I’d like to see the Greek costumes, please.’
It was obvious, really. He would go as Apollo.
In the breakfast room at Farne Castle, a great turreted keep set on a wave-lashed shore which the Nettlefords’ ancestors, after centuries of bloodshed, had wrested from a doomed Northumbrian king, the Lady Lavinia was eating kedgeree.
She was well satisfied with life. Her bridesmaid’s dress had arrived that morning, her costume for the ball was waiting for her in Newcastle. This time, she was certain, all would go well. At the Ritz, Tom Byrne had been charming and attentive, there could be no possible competition from the goitrous Cynthia Smythe and she had been able, by certain feminine gestures, to show the best man that she found him pleasing. Meanwhile, the morning’s shopping trip to Newcastle would provide more immediate delights. Not that one would ever seriously demean oneself, but still . . .
Stretching away to her left on either side of the dark oak table, sat the Ladies Hermione, Priscilla, Gwendolyn and Beatrice, all of them sporting, in various combinations, the close-set eyes, haughty expressions and huge, beaked noses which had struck dread into so many subalterns and Lloyd’s underwriters in the ballrooms of high society. At the head of the table sat the duke, buried in The Times, which he had scarcely put down since he’d discovered that his fifth child, too, was a girl. And opposite him Honoria Nettleford, his duchess, surveying, with some anxiety, her brood.
The season was virtually over and none of the girls had had so much as a matrimonial nibble. In three weeks it would be the twelfth and though they’d got up a good party for the shooting, it was singularly short of eligible young men, all of whom seemed to have previous engagements. Which was a pity, for the girls, though thin, were strong, hardy girls and showed, the duchess considered, to better advantage jodhpured and oil-skinned against the keening winds of a Northumbrian summer than in the tulle and feathers suitable for the overheated ballrooms of London Society.
What a problem it all was, thought the duchess, helping herself to kidneys. Where, oh where, in a world which the war had so cruelly decimated of young men, was she going to find anyone suitable? Because there was going to be no lowering of standards for the Nettlefords. Let other women bestow their daughters on fledgling curates or half-baked university professors. She, Honoria Nettleford, would never lower the flag!
So everything now depended on the wedding at Mersham and the ball at Heslop which preceded it. Lavinia herself seemed confident that Tom Byrne had grasped the advantages of marrying a Nettleford, but the duchess had seen too many best men scratch at the starting post to be certain. Should she give young Byrne a hint, perhaps? Mention Lavinia’s certificate for the 250-yards breast stroke? Or tell him what the vet had said about her when she delivered the Jack Russell of six puppies and one of them a breech? Lavinia was not only the eldest but – it had to be admitted – the bossiest and the plainest: once Lavinia was off her hands, the duchess was certain the others would quickly follow. Surely, at the ball, waltzing with Lavvy (but here the duchess closed her eyes, for the waltz was not quite Lavinia’s forte) Tom Byrne would see her worth? He had a younger brother too – perhaps he would do for Beatrice?
She was glad, really, that Lady Byrne had decided on fancy dress. It would give the girls more scope. Priscilla was going as Cleopatra, Beatrice as a Daffodil, Gwendolyn as Grace Darling, the local heroine. With Hermione (who had made rather a jolly severed head out of papier mâché) as Salome, and Lavinia as the water sprite, Undine, they should make quite an entrance. Once Lavinia’s costume had been altered that is, because those tight-fitting, glittering scales had suggested something quite different when Lavinia had first tried them on. It was to add a gauze overskirt and some gauze veiling that she was taking her eldest daughter to Newcastle. This done, she was sure the effect would be all they hoped for: mysterious, subtle and marine.
‘Don’t forget to be ready on time, Lavvy,’ she said now. ‘I told Sergei to bring the car round at ten.’
The
Ladies Hermione, Priscilla, Gwendolyn and Beatrice stopped chewing in unison, and in unison put down their forks. Four pairs of pale eyes fixed themselves on Lady Lavinia. Here was treachery: naked and unashamed.
‘You said Hudson was driving you,’ hissed Hermione to her eldest sister.
‘I really can’t see that it matters which of the chauffeurs drives us,’ replied Lavinia, tossing her head.
‘Oh, can’t you just!’ muttered Gwendolyn under her breath.
‘Mother, can I come in with you?’ asked Beatrice, quickest off the mark. ‘I’ve completely run out of wool for my tapestry cushion.’
‘Me, too,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘I want to go to the library.’
‘Well, I’m not staying by myself,’ said Priscilla. ‘Can I sit in the front, Mother? I always feel so sick in the back.’
‘You never feel sick when Hudson’s driving,’ hissed Lavinia.
‘Girls! Girls!’ The duchess held up her hand. ‘Silence, please! If you all want to come we’ll have to take two cars. Gwendolyn and Beatrice can go with Hudson in the Daimler and—’
‘No, Mother, why should we? It isn’t fair, just because we’re the youngest!’
It was at this point that the duke, though he had trained himself never to listen to a word spoken by his family, subliminally heard the warning bell which caused him to fold his newspaper and quietly steal away.
11
Anna had not given up her plan to cut her hair. She had received the earl’s message, duly delivered by Proom, and she had set it aside. She was leaving Mersham three days after the wedding and it was unlikely that she would see the Earl of Westerholme again. Nor did she believe that so busy and august a personage would have time seriously to concern himself with the length of a housemaid’s hair. Pinny was a more serious matter, but Pinny would be convinced when Anna swept into the little house in West Paddington, dazzling all who beheld her with her modernity and chic. And even had she felt inclined to hang back, she would have found it hard to do so in view of the support and encouragement she had received from the staff. For, one and all, the domestics of Mersham were convinced that Anna, with her dark hair cut softly to curve like a raven’s wing into her cheek, would provide a much-needed touch of below stairs glamour for the coming nuptials. It would also be one in the eye for the servants at Heslop when Anna, going over to help out at the ball, turned up with bobbed hair.
‘Because they’re a right snooty lot, I can tell you,’ said Peggy. ‘Give themselves all sorts of airs.’
It was quite a deputation, therefore, that saw Anna off on her free afternoon just a week before the wedding, clutching a whole half crown and bound for Maidens Over and the salon of René, Coiffeur des Dames, a young man who was reported to have trained in Paris and to be wholly conversant with the new techniques of shingling, bobbing and the rest.
René’s shop, painted a garish orange, was situated in the Market Square between a chemist and a fishmonger. Ignoring the churning of her stomach, which seemed not to have caught up with the New Thinking about hair, Anna pushed open the door. Inside, the shop was small and distinctly scruffy. Pieces of hair of all colours lay about as if dropped by confused and nesting birds, the washbasins were stained, the material covering the chairs was shiny and worn. It looked as though René’s Parisian days might be some considerable time behind him. Anna waited, examining pictures of Irene Castle with her shining bob, of Princess Marie of Roumania with her cropped fringe, trying to avert her attention from the trolley with its jumble of dirty combs and curling tongs.
‘Good morr-ninck, mademoiselle. May I assist you?’
René’s French accent was so strong that Anna, polite as always, felt compelled to address him in his native tongue.
“Bonjour, monsieur. Je voudrais que vous me coupiez les cheveux, s’il vous plaît. Très court!’
René’s button eyes popped. Consternation spread over his florid face. Too late, Anna perceived her gaffe.
‘I would like my hair cut short, please,’ she translated hastily. ‘Bobbed.’
René’s eyes lit up. This new fashion for short hair was going to make him rich. Not only were frequent visits necessary to have the hair restyled and trimmed, but nine out of ten girls who came to have their long tresses cut had no idea of the value of their discarded hair, which he sold, at a most gratifying profit, to a wigmaker in London.
‘Certainly, mademoiselle. Perhaps mademoiselle would care to be seated? Elsie, come here!’
Elsie came from the back of the shop, a vacant-looking girl of about fourteen, who took Anna’s straw boater and jacket and helped her into a far from clean flowered overall.
‘Comb, Elsie,’ ordered René.
Elsie loped over to the trolley, rootled in the debris, and produced a comb.
‘Not that one, you foolish girl! The big one. How often do I have to tell you?’
More rootling, accompanied by nervous sniffing, and Elsie produced the big one. René began to loosen Anna’s pins and his eyes glistened. Amazing that such a slim young girl could have such masses of hair. It was soft yet heavy, with beguiling threads of chestnut and bronze highlighting the inky darkness. He should get ten shillings a pound for it if she didn’t know its value and he was sure she didn’t. Painstakingly, greedily, René combed out Anna’s hair and set it free in a mantle which covered the back of the chair, flowed down her arms, fell in rich coils on to her lap.
‘You have beautiful hair, mademoiselle. It is excellently suited to the new styles.’
Anna, watching in the mirror, was fighting a growing panic. ‘It’s only hair,’ she told herself, ‘dead stuff. No blood vessels, no nerves.’ Yet it was as if in the falling cascade that surrounded her she again read her past.
Memories crowded in on her. Herself, aged four, sitting in the huge bath in the nursery wing in Petersburg while Old Niannka rubbed her scalp with some devilish concoction which she swore would strengthen the roots and turn the fine, dusky down that covered Anna’s head into thick and abundant tresses. Any compliment to Anna’s hair in later years was always taken by Niannka as a tribute to herself and followed by a detailed account of the magic recipe, which had included wolfsbane and (she swore) the blood of bats. Niannka, who had later betrayed them, stolen their jewels, and vanished . . . Petya, strap-hanging on her pigtails as he took the first, tottering steps across the limitless ocean of the bearskin rug beside his cot. And her father . . . Thinking of him she made a small, characteristic movement of the head, as if to shake away the pain, and René paused and said, ‘Am I hurting you?’
‘No . . . no.’
Her father, who had come in from a day of frustration, trying to make the tsar listen to reason over some matter of policy, and gone up to say goodnight to her, plunging his hands into her hair where it lay spread on the pillow as into a cooling stream. ‘And yet it isn’t cold, your hair; it’s as warm as the rest of you. Fire water you’ve grown there, my silly Little Candle.’
More and more memories came. Sergei, pulling her out of the river by her hair when she fell out of the rowing boat at Grazbaya. The Princess Norvorad, her godmother, that formidable grande dame whom the Bolsheviks had gunned down in the cellar of her house, loosening her braids as she came with Pinny into the drawing room and saying in her exquisite, archaic French: ‘After all, ma chère, we need not despair. Something can be done with her, I think. Yes, something can certainly be done.’ And Pinny, who, every night, ignoring the grumbles of the nursery maid, had herself administered the three hundred strokes with the Mason Pearson hairbrush from the English shop in the Nevsky . . .
Am I mad? Anna now thought, as René, with a flourish, put down his comb. Am I completely mad to cut my hair?
One last memory rose before her: not of Russia, not of her childhood. A recent one . . . by the lake at Mersham . . . of herself standing in the water desperately shaking out her damp locks so as to cover her naked shoulders, her breasts . . .
And with this image came courage and determinat
ion. She lifted her head.
‘I am ready, monsieur,’ said Anna. ‘Please begin.’
Anna was not the only person from Mersham visiting Maidens Over on the Wednesday before the wedding. Rupert, who had business with his solicitor, had driven his mother over so that she could visit Mrs Bassenthwaite in hospital and purchase some trimmings for the wedding outfit which Mrs Bunford was excitedly savaging in honour of The Day. Now, her tasks completed, she sat in the comfortable, chintzy lounge of the Blue Boar Hotel taking tea with her great friend, Minna Byrne.
‘So everything’s going splendidly, Mary?’ asked Minna Byrne, wondering why the Dowager Countess of Westerholme, with her fine bones and inherent elegance, should so resemble, a scant week before her son’s wedding, the hungrier kind of alley cat.
‘Oh, yes; quite, quite splendidly,’ said the dowager brightly. She closed her eyes for a moment as though to banish the spectre of Uncle Sebastien, sitting caged and shamed in the east wing with that unspeakable nurse; of Rupert, who had returned from Cambridge only to ride off at daybreak to the furthest corner of his estate; of Cynthia Smythe, who had arrived the previous day and whose idea of making herself useful was to follow Muriel from room to room, obsequiously repeating her remarks. The servants, too, all seemed to be going mad, knocking on her door one by one and begging her to take them to the Mill House at half their wages to do work that was grossly beneath them. James asking to be a handyman, Mrs Park offering to be a cook general and to scrub! Only she couldn’t take them, how could she? There wasn’t the money or the room. And Mrs Bassenthwaite really had lost her memory; she’d remembered nothing, just now, about the arrangements made for Win. ‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ the dowager repeated – and launched into a description of the menu for the wedding breakfast, an inventory of the presents received, an account of the trousseau for the honeymoon, which was to be short and spent in Switzerland. ‘And Muriel has been marvellously efficient. She’s dealt with everything. You can imagine what a comfort I have found it.’