Abdication: A Novel (6 page)

She had an inkling of what it might feel like to be slim. She had once been left alone in a fitting room when the dressmaker had gone to fetch a measuring tape. Seizing her chance she had run her hands along the sides of a small-size tailor’s dummy, beginning just below the bust and travelling all the way down past the neat indent at the waist and further on to the pleasing gentle swell at the hips, closing her eyes as she did so. Her hands encountered no lumps or rolls, simply smooth, straight lines.
That
, she thought to herself with envy,
is what it must be like
. The evidence of her ill-fitting clothes was becoming impossible to ignore, even though the height that she had been lucky enough to inherit from her father helped to spread some of the extra weight across a larger area. Such a bonus would not have been hers if she had been born with her mother’s diminutive stature. Even so, there was no avoiding the truth: several of the dresses she had brought with her from
Baltimore would soon have to be altered. Altered? Dear God! What was she thinking? If she was being truthful what she meant was they would have to be let out. Evangeline felt sure that Wallis would be able to give her the name of a good English dressmaker.

Evangeline shifted uncomfortably in her seat, wondering whether to help herself to another sausage from the silver dish sitting on the hot plate. She felt a fleeting but familiar shiver of self-loathing. She knew that her public excuse for eating too much was that the curves were part of her character: rounded, jolly, up for a laugh, not in the least bit sensitive about the odd tease. But the secret truth was that Evangeline had no expectations that her status as a forty-year-old virgo intacta would ever change. So what difference was the odd fleshy roll here or there going to make to her solitary progress through life?

Sometimes she felt like a caricature of a middle-aged spinster. She wondered for the hundredth time when real life—by which she meant
happy
real life—was going to begin. As she scooped out a dollop of marmalade from the pot, whose label confirmed it came from Oxford and must therefore be the best of its kind, she reminded herself that at least for now during her time here in England she had a purpose. Ever loyal to friends that needed her and indefatigably romantically optimistic, she often felt sure her luck would change.

She could hardly believe that it had only been a matter of days since Wiggle had been squirming in discomfort beside her on the floor. After an initial flash of fury at the stupidity of the sweet young chauffeur, she had forgiven May. After all, pekineses, like their mistresses, were often choosy about their food, and the chopped-up kidney in thick gravy that the London cook had prepared for Wiggle had been causing havoc with his digestion. There had never been any question of leaving Wiggle back at home in Baltimore. Besides, who else would have shared the lonely nights with Evangeline? The ever-present warm body at her feet had been almost the only nocturnal companionship she had
ever known. Admittedly she had taken a gamble with the quarantine laws and had been careful not to produce Wiggle too often in public places. Before leaving Baltimore, she had persuaded herself that at least his dear little bark would not betray an American accent. And when the customs officers had waved her through at the dock she had been relieved that the capaciousness of her coat ensured there was ample room to hide a small dog within its folds.

Evangeline debated for a moment whether to have a third and definitively final slice of toast to go with the sausage. Joan had already left the table and there was as yet no sign of that tiresome Rupert in his absurd lacy cravat or of his captivating young friend Julian. She was alone. No one was here to count.

She had been delighted, if surprised, to receive the first letter from England. Although it felt like much longer ago—my, oh my, didn’t time play tricks—only six weeks earlier she had been at home, helping her sister-in-law with preparations for the family Christmas. Her mother’s death and the consequent terms of the will had left Evangeline without a home or any independent means and she had come to live with her brother Frank and his family at their invitation. Evangeline’s father, an affluent businessman, had died so soon after his daughter’s birth that Evangeline had no memory of him. A large man, fond of his food and drink, he had suffered a heart attack after breakfast when his wife was out shopping. Mrs. Nettlefold had returned to the house to find the barely warm figure of her husband spread out on the dining-room floor, a buttered roll lying, as if tossed away in overdue disgust, a yard or so from his rounded face.

During the subsequent years Evangeline had served as companion to her cantankerous widowed mother, putting up with an endless succession of Mrs. Nettlefold’s “suitors,” the covetous glint of her inherited wealth in their eyes. Evangeline’s filial devotion had gone quite unrewarded. Mrs. Nettlefold rarely failed to draw a visitor’s attention
to Evangeline’s size and had long made it clear that she considered her big-toothed, accident-prone, spinster daughter to be a disappointment. Since the age of twelve, her pubescent breasts evidence of approaching adulthood, Evangeline had dreamt of the day she would be set free from her mother’s critical presence.

“How many times have I told you to sit up straight? No man wants to marry a humpback,” Mrs. Nettlefold would say, producing a pencil from nowhere as if it were a magician’s wand, and prodding it deeply and painfully into the small of Evangeline’s back.

Once when Evangeline had already embarked on the hairpin bends of puberty, she overheard her mother on the telephone to a friend. “Evangeline reminds me of a tombstone. She is huge, grey and lifeless. She might as well be in the ground beneath that stone right now for all the trouble she causes me.”

A few days later Evangeline had woken to find her pillow covered in hair. Putting her hand to her head a whole section of pale brown fluff came away as if she were scooping up a field of dandelion clocks.

“Has your daughter had a recent shock?” the doctor asked Mrs. Nettlefold.

“Nothing that I know of, doctor,” Mrs. Nettlefold replied. “She leads the care-free life of a cosseted child.”

But Evangeline
had
experienced a shock. If pressed, the doctor might have confirmed that a declaration of lovelessness delivers a severe shock from which it is difficult to recover. But the doctor was not consulted again and the hair on Evangeline’s head had never grown back. For several months her mother’s friends, ignorant of the real reason why Evangeline always insisted on wearing a hat, even at mealtimes, had talked among themselves of how such an attractive mother did not deserve such a plain child. Hats became a passion for Evangeline. And ever since the shock she had paid extra attention to any outfit on the street that was topped off with a cloche or a bonnet.

No one was more aware than Evangeline herself that Mrs. Nettlefold felt cheated. Where was the vivacious elegance that would have ensured Evangeline’s inclusion in the society magazines? The Great War had obliterated so many of America’s eligible bachelors that Mrs. Nettlefold had joined a band of socially ambitious and avaricious mothers who escorted their unmarried daughters across the Atlantic to England. There they hoped to take advantage of a country that had proved until recently to be a reliable source of rich and titled young men. But the British upper classes had suffered still worse wartime casualties, and while second sons had become an acceptable second-best in the bazaar for upper-class husbands, in desperate cases third-borns had come to suffice. However, despite some of the very best introductions effected by her well-connected English godmother Joan, no one had so much as invited Evangeline for a cup of tea, let alone lavished upon her dinner, candlelight, romance and a seat as the
châtelaine
of a decent Georgian rectory. Well before Evangeline’s twenty-fifth birthday Mrs. Nettlefold gave up all hope of her daughter ever marrying, concluding that the root of the problem was not a scarcity of candidates but a matter of size. Evangeline was just too fat.

In her twenties Evangeline had read Michael Arlen’s bestselling, romantic novel
The Green Hat
. A passage about discomfiture, nothing in fact to do with hats, struck a note of empathy. Searching for something to fill the void created by a dissatisfaction with life, Iris Storm, the heroine, rejects cigarettes, cocaine, sex and even chocolate.

“Yes,” Evangeline said aloud in recognition of herself. That is how she spent her time: searching for the elusive
something
to banish the feeling of emptiness. On countless occasions she had thought chocolate might be the answer, but the relief the sugar brought her was evanescent and the emptiness invariably returned. Every day of her life Evangeline Nettlefold battled to suppress the bitterness that threatened to consume her. Jealousy and resentment remained her most pernicious
enemies. She was jealous of people’s looks, of their popularity, of their self-confidence, of the loyalty they received from others and above all of their apparent ease at attracting love. All her life Evangeline had felt unregarded, unimportant and unloved. And all her silent resentment was directed at the woman who had caused this state of affairs.

Evangeline’s brother Frank had long been distressed by his mother’s victimisation of Evangeline but, like everyone else, was too wrapped up in his own life to do anything about it. However, he was grateful to Evangeline for accepting almost single-handedly the nursing of their mother, who rarely spent a week without discovering she was suffering from some new ailment. She was plagued by aches and pains in every part of her body and Frank and Evangeline joked behind her back about their mother’s tedious “organ recital.” Eminent specialists had been unable to make a diagnosis. They could find no explanation for the intermittent fainting fits, shortness of breath and trembling limbs that could confine Mrs. Nettlefold alternately to the sitting-room sofa or, more extremely, to a demanding existence tucked for several days into her bed, waited on by her daughter. Evangeline felt persecuted, throttled and trapped and there had been occasions when she prayed her mother would not recover from her latest affliction.

In the end, for the first time in Evangeline’s life, a wish came true and a weakened heart was given as the medical consensus of the cause of Mrs. Nettlefold’s eventual death. Seeing his sister homeless and, valuing the uniqueness of a sibling bond, Frank and his wife had offered Evangeline board and lodging. Because of her generally cheerful and phlegmatic presence, and despite her occasional clumsiness, her dependency never felt like an imposition.

Six weeks ago, when the Baltimore morning post had been placed on the hall table, Evangeline had turned to the small pile of envelopes and the new Christmas issue of
Good Housekeeping
magazine, the publication
that was her single, modest flash of self-indulgence. Most of the envelopes contained Christmas cards and shop catalogues filled with pictures of tempting seasonal highlights. She had saved the best for last. The sight of the stamp with its crowned head in profile always brought her a little lift of pleasure, for she knew who had placed that stamp on the envelope.

Cuckmere Park, Near Eastbourne, Sussex

10 December 1935

My dear Evangeline
,

We have not seen you for so long. Our plans to come over to the United States keep on getting interrupted by Philip’s demanding parliamentary schedule. But recently I was at a dinner party and found myself talking to an old schoolfriend of yours. I believe you knew her as Wallis Warfield, although you may not have heard that since leaving school she has been married (twice in fact!). Miss Warfield became Mrs. Spencer and then not long after her divorce (most painful I believe, as
he
drank) she married an Ernest Simpson who is half-American and has an English mother. So now your friend is Mrs. Simpson
.

Although Wallis and Ernest settled here a few years ago, I do not know them well. During our chat the other night, I got the impression that Wallis, although devoted to her husband, was a little lonely, and would, I am certain, be much comforted by the presence of one of her countrymen here in England. In fact when I mentioned your name as a long-standing friend of our own family she lit up!

I wondered, dear child, if you might make two lots of people happy by agreeing to come over for a lovely long visit? Of course I do know how tight money is. Perhaps that final illness took its toll on your mother’s mind? I do hope you can manage to join me in blaming
ill health for her otherwise inexplicable failure to remember you in the will?

Anyway, my dear, I am enclosing a small cheque that might help persuade you to book a passage on the first ship to England to sail after Christmas. That way you could be here with us at the beginning of the New Year. I can already hear your protests, but you must know that it is actually an act of pure selfishness on my part as the pleasure of having you here will be mainly mine. And if you stay with us long enough you will be in time to travel home on the new Cunard liner in the summer. I hear that RMS Queen Mary is even to have a dog-walking deck so perhaps (if we are careful to avoid any nasty quarantine rules—a convenient blanket could be readily to hand!) you could bring Wiggle with you too? And, if I dare suggest that you might discover you are enjoying yourself, you might even extend your stay beyond the summer season. There are always so many jolly parties to go to and you would be welcome to join in everything as an honorary member of the Blunt family
.