Farthing (6 page)

remember word for word. I’m probably more accurate recording what other people said, because I

listened to that, whereas for what I said, I just remember the general gist. But I know I said

“letting the side down” to poor Daphne. I don’t think I thought that at the time, that I was being like Mummy, I

mean. I was so cross with Daphne for being such a fool. I also thought she was using “Jew” the way she might say “anarchist” or even “murderer” or “bastard”—I had no idea then about the star or anything.

“You’re right,” she said, snatching up the cup again and swallowing all the brandy down in one go.

“She’s the grieving widow, I’m her devoted sister, Mark is my devoted husband, none of the rest of it matters or shows. Sorry. Thank you.”

The strange thing about that was that she obviously meant it— she really was thanking me for being such a bitch to her. I’d never known Daphne all that well. Angela was a few years older than me, but within my age cohort. Daphne was six or seven years older than her, probably ten years older than me, Hugh’s age. She was old enough to have been one of “the big ones” when we were children. Then she came out and got married when I was still at school. Angela was one of “last year’s debs” actually two years before, when I came out. The only thing I really knew about Daphne was that while both sisters looked very much alike, she was the one who Nature’s lottery had handed all the brains meant for both girls, which meant that Angela looked like a student’s copy of the masterpiece that was Daphne, because Daphne had the animation to go with her looks.

That morning, Daphne was wearing dove gray and ruby red, a gray skirt and jacket and a red sweater underneath, with no jewelry. She was carrying a red clasp-bag the exact color of her sweater, and now she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, opened her bag, drew out a gold compact, powdered her face, squinted, frowned at her reflection, snapped the compact shut, and took a deep breath. “Show me where to go to play devoted sister,” she said.

She followed me back to Sukey’s room. Daddy looked terribly relieved to see us. Angela was still out cold.

“This is very good of you,” Daddy said to Daphne. “She’s had a terrible shock.”

“Poor Angela,” Daphne said, entirely in control of herself now, and to all appearances full of
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sororal concern.

“I’ll leave you to see to her, loosen her stays or whatever,” Daddy said. I rolled my eyes at him.

I’m sure

he knew that stay loosening was pure Victorian bunk, but then I suppose that so is fainting like that, so maybe he was justified. “Ring if you need anything,” Daddy said, and went off.

Then began an afternoon that remains unrivaled for sheer bloody ghastliness. Daphne soon did whatever stay loosening needed to be done. She spent her time sitting on the windowsill and smoking continuously, not using a holder, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last, shedding ash all over Sukey’s immaculate cushions. She barely spoke to me except to say when she saw a police car draw up outside, but when I tried to leave she begged me to stay.

I’m not sure what I felt myself, except embarrassment and irritation. Sir James didn’t mean anything to me personally. I’d never known him well. He was always “Sir” James in my mind, never just James the way a friend would be. Before I came out he was just one of Daddy’s boring friends; after all, he must have been all of fifteen years older than me. I vaguely remember hearing about the scandal with Daphne when I was in school. She was a deb, seventeen or eighteen, and he was old enough to have made a good start on his political career. He was married to someone else, whose name was Olivia, and who I vaguely remember as one of those very political women with really formidable hats. She was one of

Mummy’s allies, but never really a friend. We didn’t see quite as much of Sir James when she was alive as we did later. The scandal with Daphne was something deliciously wicked that people used to whisper about. I remember asking Hugh, who would have been perhaps sixteen then, whether it was true what

Angela had told me, that Daphne was in love with him as well, and wasn’t it like Romeo and Juliet. Dear

Hugh poured cold water on my romantic imaginings and explained the word “adultery” to me.

“They sometimes call it ‘Paris’ and try to make it seem very sophisticated and romantic,” Hugh said. “But

I think it’s sordid and horrible, and it’s like somewhere—like—like Bognor.” Bognor Regis was a horrible little town that thought very well of itself. It had once been a fashionable watering spot but was now impossibly vulgar. It was also known as somewhere people went for illicit weekends. Adultery was always “Bognor” to us from then on.

In any case, Daphne was married off as fast as possible to the first possible contender, who was Mark

Normanby, then a rising young politician, very bright, very handsome, but not really anybody yet. Then, during the war, Olivia Thirkie died in the Blitz, one of the very first casualties, and when I heard about it, true to form the first thing I thought was that it was too late for Sir James and Daphne, and I clapped my hand to my mouth to catch the train, of course, but people thought I was very cut up about it because I

had known her. It even gave me a sort of cachet in school for a little while, to have known someone killed by a bomb, until it became so commonplace that the unusual thing was not to have had it happen.

Several girls lost parents and brothers—both of Angela’s parents were killed, her mother by a bomb and her father at Dunkirk. By the time Hugh died in the spring of 1941 it wasn’t thought of as anything special for a brother to be killed, so, ironically, I was given rather more sympathy and consideration at the death of Olivia Thirkie, who I hardly knew, than at the death of Hugh, who I worshipped.

Then, after the war, Sir James became very close to Daddy and Mummy, especially Mummy. He was always here for houseparties, and very often overnight, which hadn’t been the case when
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Olivia was alive. He was very involved in the peace accords, of course, and the whole Farthing Set thing, which seemed mostly humbug to me, because it was just people Daddy and Mummy knew, and sometimes the papers would say someone was one of the Set who I knew Mummy particularly disliked. All the same, insofar as there was a Farthing Set and they had a coherent policy in the early years of the peace, it was

Mummy and Daddy and Sir James and Mark Normanby who were at the core of it, with other people like Uncle Dud and so on hanging on.

I wasn’t around especially much in those years, because I was in school, and when I was at Farthing I

used to mope about doing the things I’d done with Hugh and missing him and making myself thoroughly

miserable. If I paid attention to any of them it was Mark, who I had a kind of crush on, and not Sir

James, who always seemed very dull—in a good kind of way, I suppose, but he seemed to lack any kind of spark. Then, when I was seventeen I had a few months in Switzerland with Abby and then came out, and suddenly Sir James was one of my set, as well as one of Mummy’s, and after waiting five years or so after the death of Olivia, he married Angela the minute she was twenty-one. He’d have married her before, she told everyone, except that her stuffy old guardian, who was a great-uncle or something of that nature, had refused permission because of that ancient scandal about Daphne.

The funny thing was that everyone had assumed that Sir James was marrying Angela because he couldn’t have Daphne, and it had never crossed anyone’s mind as far as I knew that he was having Daphne. I’d never heard a breath of scandal about Daphne since her marriage until she’d as much as admitted to me that morning that she was having an affair with him. I was shocked, although I didn’t want to be. Hugh was right. Adultery was sordid, not in the least romantic.

Bognor.

I tried to feel sorry about Sir James’s death. I tried to recapture the feeling I’d had in church of loving the whole world. It wouldn’t come back no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t think of a single time Sir

James had been nice to me, or even especially taken notice of me, except to lecture me about the inadvisability of mixing my blood with that of a lesser race. I’d told him he had no right to talk to me, and really he didn’t, not a shred. I’d listen to that sort of thing from Mummy, but hearing it from her friends was the outside of enough. He said he’d make marriage between Jews and people like me illegal if he had his way, and I said it was a good thing he didn’t have his way.

Nobody could get a bill like that through Parliament in England, whatever happens on the Continent.

After at least an hour, which felt like one of those geological eras Lyell talks about, Angela started to stir.

We naturally got up and went over to her. She woke, saw us, and began to scream. I rang for a pot of strong tea.

“Strong tea, madam?” Jeffrey asked, astonished, and allowing his astonishment to show as no proper

London servant ever would.

I grinned at him. “Very strong Indian tea, and plenty of milk and sugar.”

“Very good, madam,” Jeffrey said. “Just the thing for shock.”

I nodded, and he bowed and hurried off to fetch it. He must have heard Angela carrying on but that was the only reference he made to it. There are some servants who remain strangers however long they stay with you and others who become members of the family. Jeffrey was definitely in the latter category.

I had learned to drink tea during the war when sugar was rationed and not to be wasted on young girls.

By the time it became readily available again I had learned to like my tea weak, milkless, and unsweetened. This was a taste David and I shared; he said this was the usual way to drink flavored or

China teas on the Continent. At home we drank vast quantities of Lady Grey from the elegant white-on-white Shelley tea set we had chosen together. But for shock, and nobody could deny that

Angela had suffered a shock, there was nothing like strong Indian tea.

When Jeffrey brought the tray, I saw that it had been exquisitely prepared. There was a silver teapot, a silver hot-water jug, and a smaller silver milk jug, a large silver sugar bowl, three china cups and saucers, not the Spode, just everyday Royal Albert, and the open bottle of brandy that had been in the library. I

set it all down on Sukey’s dressing table, moving the prayer book. “Where is Miss Dorset?” I asked

Jeffrey. “Does she need her room?”

“She’s with her ladyship,” Jeffrey said. “She told me to tell you to make yourselves comfortable in here.”

“That’s very kind of her,” I said, and Jeffrey bowed his way out.

I managed to get several cups of the tea into Angela. She refused the brandy. She kept crying and almost howling, and clinging to me. There was something quite excessive about the way she behaved. She wanted to go to her husband’s body, which I didn’t think advisable. Daphne, thank goodness, didn’t let on that she had seen it. She drank some of the tea sitting ramrod straight on the edge of the bed.

“Are you sure you won’t have some brandy?” I asked Angela as I poured her another cup of tea.

“It’s very calming.”

To be honest, I had an ulterior motive with the brandy. I was hoping she might pass out again and be someone else’s problem when she woke up. I still didn’t feel much in charity with her.

“It’s not good for me in my condition,” Angela said, her hand on her stomach exactly like Lady Manningham earlier.

Again I felt a wave of envy, and for the first time some actual sympathy, for the poor baby. Bad enough for the poor little thing to be fatherless, but to be fatherless and to have a mother as idiotic as Angela

Thirkie seemed very unjust.

“You’re making it up,” Daphne said, standing up and taking a step away. She looked as if someone had unexpectedly punched her in the stomach.

I looked at her in surprise.

“Why should I be?” Angela said, rubbing her stomach. “We’ve been trying for four years, after all. I’m going to have a baby in December, and the one thing that gives me comfort in this terrible situation is that

James knew about it before he died.”

She said this in almost the same way she’d recited the Browning earlier, as if it was something she’d memorized. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t exactly congratulate her on her pregnancy in the circumstances. I glanced at Daphne, who was staring at her sister and looking suddenly old.

“Oh I know you’re not pleased,” Angela said, sipping her tea and looking at Daphne over the rim of the cup. She had been clinging to me earlier—now she entirely ignored me, as if Daphne were the only person in the room. “You always wanted James for yourself, and you’ve never had a baby. If you’d wanted a baby you should have married a man who could give you one, not a
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vicious nancy-boy like

Mark.”

I clapped both hands to my mouth to hold back absolutely all the things that I was thinking, about sisters, Bognor, Macedonians, Sir James, Mark, and even pregnancy. It probably wouldn’t have mattered. I

think I was invisible to both of them. I looked from one of them to the other as they stared at each other.

Angela looked triumphant and Daphne devastated, like a pair of goddesses done by some genius sculptor who wanted to show that Victory and Defeat have the same face.

6

The rooms didn’t yield much of interest. They were a standard bedroom and dressing room, clearly furnished for guests. The bedroom was carpeted in the center of the floor with polished wood around the edges. It had a fireplace, with a fire laid but not lit, and a window that looked out over the same landscape the men had walked through. “At the front of the house,” Royston said.

“Not that it means anything,” Carmichael said. “I wonder where the bathroom is, and how many share it.”

“You’ll have to ask Jeffrey that,” Royston said.

The dressing room had carpet that was fitted but of lesser quality. It also lacked a fireplace, having instead a small gas fire. “Must get chilly in winter,” Royston said.