The Finishing Touches

  It didn’t work out like that.

  At the end of the summer Franny and Lord P took me out for lunch at the Savoy Grill to celebrate my A-level grades, and after some discussion about what kind of dog would result if Lord P bred his Great Dane with their neighbor’s evil little Border terrier (a Great Derriere, we decided), the conversation turned to my “future plans.” The atmosphere till then had been quite merry, and I was sure that Franny was hinting that I should get myself a cashmere twinset in readiness for some Academy finishing.

  I beamed at her over the cheese platter and said, “Liv reckons we should drive across America and make a road movie, but she’s failed her test again, so that’s not on. I thought I might have my gap year in London and learn some manners.”

  Franny smiled sadly and pulled her triple string of pearls tight, and I knew something was wrong.

  I followed her gaze to Lord P, who was jabbing awkwardly at the Stilton in a fashion that wouldn’t have passed muster in the Academy’s Social Dining class.

  “Finishing school’s wasted on a girl like you,” he mumbled, flushing and spraying crumbs over the tablecloth. “Get yourself a degree, something useful…How about Durham? Know some people there…My old college, jolly good math faculty…”

  I felt as if I’d just swallowed a wasp. A girl like me? What sort of girl was that?

  Though we’d always had an affectionate relationship—roughly on a par with his horse but not as close as his dogs—Lord P’s personal involvement in my upbringing so far had been limited to riding lessons at five and a short lecture on credit cards at eighteen. Why on earth was he starting now? Even though I had every intention of going to uni, thank you very much, I was stunned. I tried to tell myself that it was a compliment, that he was proud of my academic achievements, but I couldn’t get round the fact that he obviously thought there was no point wasting time or money trying to turn me into something I wasn’t.

  I’d never felt more adopted in my whole life. I wanted to slide under the table with humiliation.

  Franny leaped in at once. “Pelham, it’s up to Betsy where she studies!” She glanced at me, and her eyes were full of something I hadn’t seen before: frustration. “How about the London School of Economics, darling, nearer home? With your grades, they’ll be begging you to apply!”

  But she didn’t try to talk him round, and something inside me curled up into a tight ball.

  Well, I thought grimly, if he wants me to go away, I’ll go away.

  I applied to St. Andrews—the farthest British university I could find—that afternoon and moved up to Scotland, where I turned my back on everything the Academy stood for. Manners, etiquette, twinsets, behaving like Audrey Hepburn—it hurt even to think about it. Much to Liv’s horror, I ditched my kitten heels for cargo pants and vowed I’d never, ever write a stupid bloody place card.

  It broke my heart that I hadn’t been able to be what my mother wanted, but if she’d known what the entry requirements were, maybe she should have thought about putting a pedigree in the Cooper’s marmalade box with me, not a plea for help and some jewelry.

  I got over it, of course. Franny refused to acknowledge my hurt silence and sent me Fortnum & Mason hampers and funny letters full of advice and gossip and passed on worried queries about whether I was eating enough (from Kathleen) and wearing thermals (from Nancy). In the end, as I told Liv, I was glad I hadn’t wasted precious time on curtseying: I learned more useful things in one freshman week than I would have done in a year of napkin folding. I left with a first-class degree and ten different hangover cures and started my life over again in Edinburgh, where no one would have believed the “left in a box at a finishing school” story even if I’d told them. Which I didn’t.

  I thought I didn’t care about the Academy anymore. And yet, standing there on the doorstep, a grown woman with a proper job and her own flat, I felt a weird sense that there was something waiting for me behind the door that I didn’t even know about yet. Like one of those spooky “and this is how your life could have gone” films.

  “Come in, Betsy,” said Lord P, and I realized I was hovering, blocking his polite attempts to shake Liv’s hand. “And thank you for coming, Olivia.”

  “Oh, my pleasure,” said Liv, and I could see Lord P melt under her most concerned smile.

  I took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold, looking round at the reception going on beneath the old crystal chandeliers. Between the swooping staircase on one side and the table of wineglasses and teacups on the other, the hall was packed with women, all somewhere between the ages of thirty and seventy, although you couldn’t put an exact age on a single one of them. They were stylishly dressed in flattering pastel shades and engaged in animated conversation, and most were wearing nude shoes to elongate their legs.

  Lord P stuck by my side, seeming a bit lost amid the female hordes. “What on earth are they laughing about?” he asked, more bemused than upset. “Half of them were in floods half an hour ago. I’m down to my last handkerchief, and I brought four.”

  “Tea!” said Liv, who was normally very good with older men. “That’s what we need! I’ll go and get some!”

  Before I could reply, two sisters beetled up and accosted us with outstretched hands to shake. Phillimore girls were not shy in a cocktail party situation.

  “Betsy! It’s Marcia Holderstone!” said one of them. “You won’t remember me, but I used to braid your hair, do you remember, in Personal Grooming! You must have been about six! How lovely to see you again!”

  I found myself smiling as my hand was grasped and shaken warmly. There was something effortless about confidence like that. I really envied it. Franny had taught me all the tricks about walking through a party, head high, pretending you knew everyone, but women like Marcia really did know everyone and had probably been networking since they were knee-high to a Shetland pony.

  “Oh, we had such a wonderful year here, didn’t we, Kate?” Marcia turned to her sister and then suddenly turned serious and sympathetic as her funeral manners kicked in. “We’re so sorry for your loss, Lord Phillimore. And yours, Betsy. Lady Frances was marvelous. I still think of her every time I pack my suitcase. Shoes at the bottom, clean knicks in the…”

  “I don’t think Lord Phillimore needs to know the details,” said Kate quickly.

  I glanced at his frozen expression. In Lord P’s circles, the women were trained for social occasions and the men drank port and communicated about death and childbirth via grunts. It must be torture, I thought, hearing how everyone adored his wife and not having the faintest idea what to say.

  “That’s the secret of a well-packed case, isn’t it?” I interjected, in a voice that sounded a bit higher than my normal one. “No one sees the details!”

  “Absolutely! Oh, it’s such a thrill to be back!” Marcia’s eyes darted around. “Can we see the old ballroom, do you think?” she asked, already gazing up the curving staircase to the teaching rooms on the first floor. “Do you remember, Kate, learning the fashion catwalk?”

  “Ah, no!” Lord Phillimore sprang to life with a sudden cough. “No, I rather think Miss Thorne has decided to keep the reception to one room…health and safety, you see…”

  “Oh! Of course, yes.” Marcia recovered but looked disappointed. “What a shame.” She shook his hand again. “Mustn’t monopolize you; I’m sure everyone wants to share their condolences.”

  I spotted the hovering line of women waiting to have similar conversations, all primed with kind things to say. Funerals, broken engagements, hairs in soup—Phillimore girls were well briefed on every awkward situation. No cringe-making silences for them. I touched Lord P’s arm as Marcia and Kate swayed toward the buffet and the next commiserator approached. “Would you like a moment on your own? I know it’s a strain thinking of new things to say every time. If you want to slip out to the library, I can bring some tea…”

  “No, duty first.” Lord P grimaced as if he were about to be shot at dawn, then drop
ped his voice. “Maybe in a quarter of an hour? If you see me trapped in a corner? Frances used to wait for me to put my spectacles on, then she’d come over and save me. Subtle, you know.” He looked forlorn, and I suddenly saw what a team they’d been for forty-odd years.

  “OK,” I whispered back, and he squared his shoulders and went back to his task.

  I was gasping for a cup of tea, though, and my eyes darted greedily around the hall as I headed for the table. I kept seeing things I’d forgotten about—the moody painting of the first Lady Phillimore draped on a chaise longue (her magnificent Georgian bosom painted over by a disapproving Victorian ancestor), the china bowls of potpourri on dark oak side tables, the framed photographs of each year’s class adorning the deep red walls. All just as I remembered.

  Liv was deep in conversation with a flamboyant-looking granny, so I picked up a cup and drifted over to the wall of photographs, which started with postwar smiles and neat ankles and ended around 1995, in a cloud of Elnett hair spray. Automatically, I looked for the 1981 photograph, “my” year—a dozen or so girls arranged around the rose garden seats, all looking up from under their floppy Duran Duran bangs with bashful expressions and pearlized pink lipstick.

  I wondered what they all looked like now—how many of them were here? And whether they would remember me, and my arrival on the steps. Whether, in fact, they knew who might have put me there.

  Ever since Franny’s funeral, I’d been having the same nagging thought: who knew where my birth mother was now? Over the years I’d daydreamed various dramatic meetings with my biological parents, but I’d never thought seriously about actually tracing them. As far as I was concerned, Franny was my “real” mother, and though she’d never made a secret of my mysterious beginnings, her eyes filled with unbearable sadness whenever I asked about it, so I rarely did. But now that Franny wasn’t here to be hurt, I’d started to wonder if it mightn’t be the time to start investigating. The only trouble was, I thought, staring at the Class of ’81, I had nothing to go on but a note and a necklace. But if anyone was going to know something, surely it would be here?

  I peered closer at the frilly collars and blue eyeliner. Maybe even in this very photograph…

  “Oh, my God! Didn’t we all look awful! Look at me in that ghastly ruffly shirt. I look like someone’s just attacked me with aerosol cream.”

  I jumped as a woman in a Pucci print dress shimmered up behind me. She’d taken the “cheerful” dress code to heart and added turquoise shoes and perched a jaunty feather headpiece in her black geometric bob in case her swirly dress wasn’t cheerful enough. She was carrying it off, though. Her eyes twinkled naughtily, as if she knew me, but I wasn’t sure whether we knew each other well enough for me to agree with her about her hideous blouse.

  “Oh, um, I think ruffles are coming back in,” I said vaguely.

  “Only if you’re a female impersonator, darling.” She waved her hands in the air, nearly spilling her wine. “But you’re far too young to know how embarrassing these clothes are! If you’re who I think you are, you popped up about three days after that photograph was taken! While we were all queueing down the Mall to get a peek at Charles and Diana, the real excitement was unfolding on our doorstep! Quite literally! It’s Betsy, isn’t it? The Phillimore baby?”

  I felt my cheeks go hot under her frank gaze. Seriously posh people could be incredibly direct, even with intensive finishing, it would seem. “Um, yes. I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t remember…”

  “Well, how would you, darling? You were teeny enough to stash in an evening bag last time I saw you.” Her eyes creased up as she smiled. “I’m Nell, Nell Howard. Or Eleanor, as I was here. Are you still Betsy Phillimore, or have you racked up some double-barrels yet?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m still Betsy Phillimore.”

  “Ah, not a true Phillimore girl until you’ve bagged a few spouses,” she said with a sardonic flick of her black brows. “Miss Thorne must have had shares in the Great Trading Company wedding list, the way she banged on about the importance of getting ourselves shacked up. Well, hello, Betsy.”

  I juggled my teacup and biscuit while she expertly juggled her wineglass and side plate, and we shook hands.

  “So, do tell,” she went on chattily, “did you ever track down your real ma and pa? Oh, sorry! Personal questions!” She slapped her own wrist and looked slightly, but not very, remorseful. “I’m not the most tactful conversationalist—used to get some dirty looks from Miss Vanderbilt. But if you don’t ask, and all that…”

  “No, I never tried,” I admitted. “I was very happy. The Phillimores were all the family I needed, and Nancy and Kathleen looked after me—”

  “Oh, I can imagine those two! Mother hens! But you never even looked?” Nell squinted at me as if I were standing in front of a bright light. She had the squinty tanned face of the habitual ski/sun/sand Sloane Square debutante, who’d happily take a few wrinkles in the name of snow, wine, and shrieks of hysterical laughter.

  I shook my head. “I think it would have hurt too many feelings.”

  That wasn’t the whole truth: I had to admit to a fair bit of suspicion about my father’s identity, at least, though I’d never have said.

  Everything pointed to feckless Hector, Franny’s runaway black-sheep son, with the aristocratic good looks and the debt management problem. Why else would the Phillimores have taken me in and looked after me like their own if they weren’t secretly sure that he’d had a hand—at the very least—in my arrival? From what I’d managed to glean from Kathleen, he was irresponsible enough; had access to a veritable sweetshop of impressionable girls; and had skipped off to Argentina years ago, which in Nancy’s book(s) was standard Guilty Cad Behavior. If there were any photos of Hector twiddling a mustache while posing next to a sports car, the evidence would be complete.

  Sadly for my detective ambitions, there were no photos of Hector, because Franny had hidden them all, apart from the one by her bed—which, to my mind, explained why she doted on me the way she did. I was the last link with him. Nancy had looked after Hector as a baby and missed him too, so I couldn’t ask, but a couple of times I managed to enter into a dark hinting exchange with Kathleen. She insisted she didn’t know my father’s identity but that she could “feel it in her water that whoever it was wasn’t a million miles away from here. If you know what I mean.”

  Nell didn’t need to know the complicated emotional reasoning behind all this, though.

  “Besides,” I said as lightly as I could, “I didn’t mind not knowing. It meant I had nothing to live up to, or down to. I was just me!”

  She tipped her head on one side, and her feather bounced. “Fair enough.”

  “I did wonder whether it might be…” I hesitated, surprised at myself. “Whether my mother might have been at the Academy. Someone who knew what time Kathleen collected the milk in the morning? Did anyone else wonder that?”

  “God, yes!” Nell nodded. “Quite possible. It was a bit of a scandaloso year—tons of really gorgeous girls who ended up as models, three-second roles in a Bond film, soap commercials, that sort of thing. And of course they went round town with the Bentley Boys. Gosh.” She fanned herself with an enthusiastic hand. “They were even more divine than the girls, to tell the truth. We’d be in some tedious dressmaking lesson, and the horns would honk outside, and there they’d be—Rory, Simon, Hector…all floppy-haired and disgraceful, exactly the sort of silver-tongued charmers we were supposed to steer very clear of. Everyone would squeal. Apart from Miss Vanderbilt, obviously. But even she went a bit pink around the gills, old Vanders.”

  “Bentley Boys?” I repeated.

  Nell fixed me with a look. “Did Lady Frances keep you in a bunker all your life, darling? The Bentley Boys. As in, not safe in the backseat of. They were in all the gossip columns at the time, drinking, driving cars through champagne tents, furious fathers here, there, and everywhere. Then again, I suppose Hector Phillimore was the worst of the lot,
which would explain why Lady Frances never mentioned it…” She looked more curiously at me. “Now, did he ever turn up? The bold Hector?”

  I shook my head. Nell had an outrageously forthright manner, but I was too curious to be offended. I just wanted her to keep on talking. It was like a gossip sugar rush. “He’s still in Argentina, as far as I know. Didn’t even come back for the funeral.” I bit my lip. “It was very sudden, though—a brain tumor. By the time—” I gulped.

  “I heard.” Nell sighed. “He always was a selfish sod, darling. Anyway, moving on—”

  “So, you think my mother was one of these girls?” I asked, pointing at the photograph, my pulse hammering with the thrill of asking proper questions at last. “One of your friends?”

  Nell barked with laughter. “My year? I don’t think so! Look at us!” She gestured at the photograph with her glass. The wine sloshed. “Bunch of heifers! The only film we’d end up in would be Star Wars! No, they were a year older. We all got mixed up, you know—some people did one term, some did three or four.”

  But I was already searching for the 1980 photograph. “1979…1982…” I turned to Nell. “It’s not here.”

  “Isn’t it?” Her cat’s eyes widened, and she put a finger on her chin. “Ooh! The plot thickens. I must say, they weren’t the most popular year. Not with the staff, anyway.” She winked.

  “Elizabeth! And Eleanor Howard! What a nice surprise!”

  I whisked round to find Miss Thorne, the new headmistress, right behind us.

  No, not new headmistress, I corrected myself. She’d been running the place for four years, since Miss Vanderbilt retired. The trouble was, it was very hard to think of the Phillimore Academy without thinking first of Franny, then of Miss Vanderbilt. I imagined Miss Thorne was probably more aware of that than most.