‘I find them a lively pair,’ said Archibald Loftus, ‘the girl makes me laugh.’
‘A bit too lively,’ said Flora, ‘though I can’t put my finger on why I think so.’
Touched by his relatives’ machinations for his welfare, telling himself that their anxiety was superfluous, Ned after considerable havering had decided to pick Rose from the choice presented to him. He was never in any doubt that she would accept him.
Thus, sitting on the stone seat in the garden at Slepe, the morning after their wedding, Ned honestly believed himself when he told Rose that he had fallen in love with her nine months before at the Boxing Day tennis party.
10
ROSE’S RECOLLECTIONS OF THE winter tennis party bore little relation to Ned’s; perhaps all that they had in common was their initial reluctance to go to it.
Mrs Freeling had answered the telephone and accepted Mrs Malone’s last minute invitation on Rose’s behalf.
‘That’s extremely kind of you,’ she enthused. ‘I am sure she will be delighted. Oh, yes, she plays a reasonable game, though that sounds boastful on my part. Be there by eleven-thirty? Yes, of course she can. The Thornbys will give her a lift? How kind of you to arrange it. Of course, my husband would have brought her, but he’s not very well at present. Rose will be thrilled.’
‘I am not thrilled,’ said Rose, overhearing.
‘You should be, you have never been invited there before. The Malones’ winter tennis is an event,’ said Rose’s mother.
‘As a stop-gap,’ said Rose. ‘Barrel-scraping only.’
‘What does that matter?’ snapped her mother, who felt perpetually guilty that she had not got what she thought to herself as the nerve to launch Rose socially. Rose made no effort herself. ‘You make no effort, here’s a chance to meet new people. You know how difficult it is for me to give parties for you with your father so unwell and …’
‘So little money.’ Rose knew the litany.
‘Really, darling!’
‘I don’t want to go,’ said Rose. ‘Tennis in midwinter is ridiculous.’
‘It’s a covered court. I’ve heard it’s beautifully warm. There will be a house party from London. Nice young people.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ Rose already felt her toes curling with horror at the prospect of meeting sophisticated strangers from London.
‘And the Malone boys, Richard and George, you hardly know them since they’ve grown up. This is a chance to get to know them better.’
‘They have had every chance to get to know me all these years, Mother, and they haven’t bothered.’
‘Rubbish, Rose.’ Mrs Freeling stifled her agreement with this statement. When they were little she had invited the Malone boys to the children’s party she forced herself to give once a year for Rose, her only child, an enormous effort this, after which she would relapse into her habitual lethargy, feeling that she had done her duty.
‘The only time they ever came to this house George Malone threw jelly at the other children and shouted that this was the bloodiest party he had ever been to,’ said Rose.
‘Well, yes, darling, but he was very young, only eight or ten. Mrs Malone rang up and apologised. She did. I remember it well. The poor little boy was over-excited and had a temperature.’
‘Ho!’ said Rose. ‘Ha!’
‘Rose!’
‘They made excuses for ever after when you invited them, they never came again.’
‘Well, darling, they are grown up now, it’s quite different.’
‘So am I,’ said Rose. She had admired George’s action, remembered it with glee, pink and yellow jellies had flown through the air, splattering against the walls of the dining-room, and lodged in nice little girls’ hair. George had been right: her mother’s parties were of an extreme awfulness. ‘He’s grown up jolly boring,’ she said, ‘more’s the pity.’
‘You don’t know him well enough to judge,’ said her mother.
‘I have no tennis clothes,’ said Rose.
‘That is not true, you bought new shoes in July.’
‘No dress.’
‘Rose, you are being difficult.’
‘No racquet.’
‘You can borrow mine,’ said Rose’s father, looking up from The Times, hoping to put a stop to the argument. ‘I shall never use it again,’ he said with self-pity.
‘Oh, Father,’ cried Rose, ‘don’t!’
‘Just go to the party; please your mother; you will find you enjoy it.’
‘So you want me to go?’
‘I should like to think that my racquet is being used,’ said Rose’s father, spoiling his otherwise generous offer by his tone of voice, wringing his daughter’s heart.
‘All right, I’ll go,’ said Rose. (And why must he wring my heart with his bloody racquet? Why must he thrust his cancer down my throat, she cried to herself as she watched her father fold his newspaper and limp from the room. Why does supposed cancer of the stomach make him limp?) ‘I am not going to wear white,’ she told her mother.
Mrs Freeling did not answer. Let Rose go wearing every colour of the rainbow, so long as she went. People as rich as the Malones did not invite inconspicuous, shy and—let’s face it—moneyless girls like Rose a second time. It was not often one of their guests went down with flu at the crucial minute, leaving a heaven-sent gap: Fate, Mrs Freeling told herself as she made her way to the kitchen to make her shopping list, was not always malign.
If there should be some personable young man at the Malones’ party, he might just possibly be attracted to Rose. Ask her out when they got to London. Perhaps Rose was not destined, as she felt herself to have been destined, to be crushed by life. I never had any real opportunities, Mrs Freeling told herself as she planned the day’s meals; I have always been crushed.
Mrs Freeling at that time felt particularly harassed since the specialist had said that her husband’s only chance was an intensive course of treatment in London. In a week’s time they were to move into an expensive flat for half of every week so that Rose’s father could receive this treatment, returning to the country at intervals to keep a toehold in his ailing practice.
What harassed Mrs Freeling even more than her husband’s probable cancer (there was no certainty yet that he had it), their impecuniosity and Rose’s rebarbative shyness was her subconscious wish that her husband would quite simply drop dead, that her long sad unsatisfactory marriage would come to an end while she was still of an age to have some fun. Naturally Mrs Freeling did not know she harboured such thoughts; they milled about in the recesses of her unconscious.
Sulkily, Rose went to the cloakroom where her father’s racquet hung in its press. She took it out and twanged the strings.
Upstairs, she fished her tennis shoes out from the back of her cupboard. She had put them away dirty, they were stained green; she laid them aside to blanco. She pushed aside her winter clothes, and pulled out the only summer dress she liked, a simple cotton dress in a deep rose colour made by the village dressmaker the previous summer. Her mother had misjudged the amount of material, bought too much; there had been enough left over from the frock to make matching knickers; it was this that made the dress her favourite. Her mother had bought the material for her and for once she had not questioned her mother’s taste. Laying the garments on the bed to be washed and ironed, Rose almost began to look forward to the party.
‘My mother,’ she said to her reflection in the glass, ‘hopes I shall meet Mr Right. God, my hair’s a mess!’ She went to the bathroom to wash it. ‘It’s greasy and the ends are splitting.’ She was still at the age when girls dramatise their hair; her hair was not in the least greasy, nor were the ends split.
‘What are you doing?’ Her mother’s voice floated up the stairs.
‘Washing my hair,’ Rose shouted, her head in the basin.
‘Don’t use all the hot water.’
‘It’s automatic, it’s automatic, she doesn’t even think!’ Rose plunged her head down in th
e basin so that water sloshed out onto the floor. As she came up for air, she heard her mother’s voice again. ‘What?’ she shouted. ‘Can’t hear. What did you say?’
‘I said,’ Mrs Freeling stood in the bathroom doorway, ‘I said Ned Peel is going to be at the tennis party. Oh, look what a mess you’ve made of the floor. You will mop it up, won’t you?’
‘Who is Ned Peel?’ Rose worked shampoo into her hair.
‘Is it good for your hair to wash it so often? You only washed it two days ago. Ned Peel is the man who has come into Slepe, old Mr Peel’s heir.’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t be rude, Rose. I was making sure Emily and Nicholas will pick you up tomorrow. Emily told me that he is to be there.’
Rose said nothing, rinsing her hair, rubbing her head with a towel, jerking a comb through the wet hair. ‘Don’t do that, darling,’ said Mrs Freeling, ‘let your hair dry naturally; wet hair is so brittle.’
‘Mother!’
‘All right, darling, I will leave you. I only want you to enjoy yourself …’ Mrs Freeling retreated. Rose ran after her, flung her arms around her and hugged her. ‘Oh, darling, you are making me all wet,’ said Mrs Freeling.
‘Oh, oh,’ whispered Rose, watching her mother go down the stairs, ‘neither of us ever gets it right.’ She watched her mother’s diminishing back with pity. ‘Poor Mother, am I supposed to be gobbled up by this Ned Peel?’ She began filing her nails, waiting for her hair to dry. I’d better shave my armpits, she thought. And what about my legs? She pulled down her stockings and eyed the soft almost invisible hairs on her legs. No, leave the legs hairy. She went back to the bathroom and stole one of her father’s razor blades. After shaving her armpits, she took the blade out of the razor and put it in her purse. A desperate idea had occurred to her.
11
ONE OF THE MYSTERIES about Nicholas and Emily was that in spite of their perpetual cries of poverty, they always managed to look chic; they exuded an aura of confidence and one-upmanship which Rose found unnerving. Arriving to fetch her in their father’s respectable old Morris, wearing immaculate white tennis clothes under twin camel-hair coats, they jumped out to greet her, showing themselves off.
Rose often thought of them as saplings planted too close together, growing up entwined. She grinned at them posing, their arms round each other’s waists. ‘Willows,’ she said, ‘wandlike, unpollarded.’
‘What?’ asked Emily.
‘Nothing,’ said Rose.
Nicholas cried, ‘How pretty you look, Rose,’ meaning: look at us, are we not pretty?
‘Shall I sit in the back?’ asked Rose, drawing her old school coat around her, muffling it over the pink dress. ‘What are the suitcases for?’ she asked, squeezing into the back seat, pushing aside tennis racquets and suitcases.
‘There’s usually a dance in the evening,’ said Emily, getting back into the car. ‘We’ve brought our evening clothes to change into.’
‘Oh,’ said Rose, surprised.
‘It’s for the house party, but we are prepared, if asked, to stay on for it,’ said Nicholas, settling himself in the driver’s seat. ‘Come on, you old rattler.’ The car shot forward.
‘I see you’ve got your father’s racquet,’ said Emily, whose beady eye missed nothing, ‘his new Slazenger. What happened to yours?’
‘Bust,’ said Rose, feeling inferior. If they had told me about the dance I would have cried off, she thought, seeing in her mind’s eye people dancing in evening clothes while she still wore her pink cotton. (She would have sweated under the arms by then, or spilt something down her front.) She said, ‘Nobody said anything about dancing to me.’
‘Never mind,’ said Emily, who had discussed with Nicholas whether to tell Rose and voted not to. (Nothing worse than an odd girl to upset numbers.) ‘Nicholas or someone can run you home. We got our racquets in the end of summer sales,’ she said, ‘they are brand new.’
‘They smell nice.’ Rose sniffed the leather on the racquet handles. ‘Delicious.’
‘Father is letting us have this car for ourselves from now on; the diocese are providing him with a new one now he is a bish,’ said Nicholas.
‘Oh,’ said Rose, impressed. ‘A car for nothing.’
‘We will swop it soon for something more dashing; it looks a bit too churchy, don’t you think?’ said Emily. ‘We want a red sports.’
‘One could have guessed,’ said Rose.
‘A soupçon of vulgarity suits,’ sang Nicholas.
‘And,’ said Emily, leaning over from the front seat, ‘Father is sinking his savings in the Rectory.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The new parson wants a smaller house. Father is buying the Rectory from the Church Commissioners and putting it jointly in our names. He’s heard this will save death duties.’
‘Very thoughtful is Father,’ said Nicholas.
‘We are going to live in it, just us two,’ said Emily.
‘The real reason is he would find us an embarrassment in the Bishop’s Palace,’ said Nicholas. ‘Not that he actually says so.’
‘Why,’ asked Rose, bewildered, ‘should he?’
‘If you don’t know, we shan’t tell,’ said Emily in the tone of voice which would lose her many a friend through life.
Nicholas sniggered.
Rose wished fervently that she had not let her father work on her feelings. ‘Have you been to this winter tennis before?’ she asked dubiously.
‘Oh, yes, often,’ said Nicholas.
‘Several times,’ said Emily.
Once, perhaps, thought Rose.
‘I hear Ned Peel is going to be there. I hope we shall like him as a neighbour,’ said Emily. ‘I plan that he shall be an asset.’
‘I quite took to him when I met him,’ said Nicholas, who had happened to sit next to Ned on the London Underground on a brief journey between Knightsbridge and Piccadilly and seized the opportunity to introduce himself. ‘I met him in London not so long ago. Of course, he never came down to Slepe before his uncle died.’
‘The old man was a recluse,’ said Emily, ‘never entertained. Ned hasn’t opened the house properly yet, let’s hope he’s not like his uncle.’
‘Oh, no, he’s not at all like the old man,’ said Nicholas, ‘he’s entirely different.’
‘All the old man liked was his garden, they say,’ said Emily. ‘He kept a full-time gardener but no proper servants. I bet the house is in a state.’
‘Supposed to be full of lovely things,’ said Nicholas, double de-clutching around a corner. The Morris, unused to such grand treatment, screeched its gears like a demented turkey and stalled its engine.
‘Poor old dodderer, outlived his welcome in this world,’ said Nicholas, re-starting the car. ‘High time there was some young life at Slepe.’
What a lot they know, thought Rose, wondering whether the skirt of her dress was the right length, sure that it wasn’t, fingering her father’s racquet as it lay across her knees. It’s too heavy, she thought, it’s a man’s racquet, I shall never be able to play with it, I shall look a fool, I wish I had not come. Then she thought, Nobody will notice me, they never do, they will notice Emily who is so lively, she will hold her own, outdo the girls from London, why the hell should I bother? Then again, she thought, they will all wear white. I shall stand out like a sore thumb. My pink dress will make me obvious when I do something awkward, I don’t want to be noticed, and Emily does, they will notice Emily if only because she is wearing white and has a new racquet, I wish I had the nerve to ask Nicholas to drop me by a bus stop to find my way home. (There is no bus stop.)
Nicholas drove the old Morris up to the Malones’ front door. ‘Here we are, girls, let battle commence.’
They had arrived too early.
George Malone, coming round the house from the stable yard, found them grouped on the doorstep waiting for the bell to be answered.
‘Hullo, hullo,’ said George, ‘you are early birds, we don’t s
tart play until twelve, but do come in. Everybody will be changing. I bet some of the girls are not even up yet, there were faces missing at breakfast; we went to a party last night and got to bed in the small hours, but, tell you what, I’ll get Betty to take you round to the court, you’d probably like to knock up or something, get your eye in. Will you show them the way, Betty?’ said George to the maid who had appeared to open the door. ‘You haven’t been before, have you?’ he said to Emily.
‘It’s Rose who hasn’t been before,’ said Emily quickly, ‘I know my way to the court. Come on, Rose, I’ll lead the way.’
George smiled at Rose and said, ‘Does your mother’s cook still make those stupendous jellies?’ And to Nicholas he said, ‘I must rush up and change. Mother likes us to be ready to greet our guests.’
This is where if I liked Nicholas better I would feign a pain and ask him to drive me home, thought Rose, but he would see through me. Why, oh why, do he and Emily make me feel so provincial? She followed Nicholas, Emily and the maid through the house, out through a side door, across a stretch of garden to the building which held the covered court. Here the maid left them.
Nicholas and Emily took off their coats; Nicholas measured the height of the net, adjusted it, bounced several times on the balls of his feet, swung his racquet serving an imaginary ball.
‘Isn’t George an old comic,’ said Emily, swishing her new racquet. ‘What was that reference to jellies, Rose?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rose, remembering with relief that Nicholas and Emily had not been at the party where George had disgraced her mother, but been in bed with mumps.
‘Let’s knock up,’ said Emily, swishing her racquet again. ‘Where are the balls?’
‘Here.’ Nicholas opened a box of new balls. ‘Come on, girls, I’ll take you both on.’
‘No, you and me against Rose and her father’s wonder racquet,’ cried Emily, ‘let Rose Freeling take on the Thornbys.’
‘Why not,’ said Rose, fiddling with her shoe laces, standing up to confront Emily, gripping her father’s racquet. The handle was too thick, intended for a man’s hand. It occurred to her that one reason she had so enjoyed George’s awful performance with the jellies was that Emily and Nicholas had not witnessed it; life unwitnessed by Nicholas and Emily was tolerable. Nicholas was already on the court practising his service. ‘Why don’t we play a single and let Rose ball-boy?’ Nicholas was furious with George for belittling his sister, snubbing him for his ineptitude at arriving early, and for having secret knowledge of Rose (what’s this about jellies? I must find out). He knew George only pretended to think this was Emily’s first visit; he had once overheard George tell another man that Emily was a pushy little tart who could do with taking down a peg. Hitting the ball as hard as he could, Nicholas vented his anger. Rose could be whipping boy.