Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (11 page)

‘You mean because he isn’t English?’

‘He isn’t English, he hasn’t a title, he doesn’t know any of the people we know and he isn’t even a Christian.’

‘Your father hasn’t got a title.’

‘No. But then Mummy’s father made his money in cotton mills. That had to be lived down. An untitled landowner was quite
good enough for her.’ I remembered Dimpsie telling me years ago that Evelyn had confessed to her father being in trade and had sworn her to secrecy. I had wondered at the time what the fuss was about. I could see nothing wrong with being a daughter of the loom. Now I was older and wiser I understood that to Evelyn it was a shameful blot. ‘She thinks because I’ve gentle blood in me I ought to aim higher. She’s got Lord Dunderave’s son in her sights.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She’s been dropping his name – it’s Ronald, can you believe it? – into the conversation whenever possible. Apparently he can play polo, waltz, carve, help a woman on with her coat, open champagne without spilling it and he changes his underpants daily. Also he’s a bruising rider to hounds, a brilliant shot and the salmon he catches are so enormous they have to be brought home by Carter Patterson.’

‘Really?’ I envisaged a salmon as big as a whale, quivering with harpoons.

‘No, you clot! But that’s the gist of it. What she really means is he’s a bit thick and never opens a book but he’s a guaranteed, true-blue, copper-bottomed member of the English upper classes. He’s just got back from Cirencester – he’s been doing a course in land management to equip him to run the ancestral acres – so she’s going to ask him to dinner. Meanwhile she’s been lushing up to Lord Dunderave like mad. She had him to dinner yesterday. He’s a pig of a man. Bad-tempered. And he was rude to Daddy when he repeated himself.’

‘Honestly, Isobel, I think you’re awfully hard on your mother. She’s always been angelically kind to me and it can only have been out of genuine good-heartedness. I’ve never been able to give her anything in return.’

‘When we were children it suited her to have someone around for me to play with. It saved her the trouble of finding things for me to do.’

‘Yes, but she took the trouble to be sweet and generous to
me when she needn’t have bothered. Now you don’t need entertaining and she’s just as warm and hospitable.’

I had met Evelyn in the hall that afternoon as she was on her way to a meeting of charitable people busy raising funds for impoverished war widows. She had looked stylish as usual, a fur coat over her tweed suit and shining crocodile shoes. She had stopped to ask me about my foot, my mother, my diet and my prospects, and she had pressed me to come to Shottestone whenever I wished. I only had to ring and Spendlove would come with the car.

‘She wants to get you on her side over the business of Conrad. She thinks you might be a good influence on me. She sees you as serious and hard-working and brainy.’

‘No!’

‘Oh, yes. She told me after that horrible dinner party the other night that she was very impressed by the way you’ve turned out. Apparently the archdeacon said you were decorative but a little too intellectual for his tastes. He thinks young ladies should be compliant and not argumentative. Mummy knows the man’s a first-class idiot, so she was rather pleased by his not quite approving of you.’

‘I’m afraid it’s a con.’ I explained about the reading list for intelligent conversation and that I had so far only managed to read a fraction of each of the two books at the head of it.

‘Thank God for that. I was worried that you’d turned into a prig. Have a cigarette.’

She picked up a packet of
Disque Bleu
and offered them to me. I was about to refuse, mindful of my lungs, but I was afraid of seeming priggish so I took one. Isobel lit it with a lighter shaped like a silver pistol.

‘You needn’t hold it as though it was a stick of dynamite. It won’t blow up in your face.’

I took a puff. My body went into revolt. Even my toes and fingertips got pins and needles.

‘Tell me,’ I blurted out between coughs, ‘about Conrad.’

‘Hm. Where shall I begin? Can I trust you, Mother’s nark?’

‘If you’re going to be beastly … I shall … go home.’ This had been my refrain when we were children.

‘I
was
a beast. And I still am. I’m sorry, you’re an angel.’ Isobel put her hand – soft, with nails painted dark-red – on mine and looked solemn. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. Being at home does terrible things to my character. Say you forgive me?’

‘Oh, I know all about that mock penitence.’ I smiled and turned my hand up so that hers rested in my palm. ‘You’re trying to lure me into trusting you so that you can trip me up later. Tell me about Conrad. What does he look like?’

‘Well,’ Isobel appeared to be thinking, ‘you couldn’t say he was exactly good looking. Unless you have a taste for short, bald men with large stomachs.’

‘Does anyone?’

‘Some people might. And he has a very large hooked nose. His feet are very broad and long. It was almost the first thing I noticed about him, that he had very big feet. But though the packaging isn’t beautiful, he has the most engaging personality and that’s far more important, isn’t it?’ I agreed that it was, feeling impressed by Isobel’s maturity. ‘And of course he can afford the most elegant clothes, so you don’t notice so much. He’s one of those people who’s always the centre of attention. He has a joke for every occasion. A fantastic memory. I can never tell jokes, can you?’ I shook my head. ‘Well, Conrad remembers entire stories
and
the punch-line. Honestly, he’s a hoot!’

I tried to look captivated by her description. No doubt it was due to a reprehensible lack of humour on my part, but I was not particularly fond of jokes. I always found it a strain to try to rig my face into pleased anticipation before producing the mandatory laughter at the end. ‘How can you tell if they’re funny if he tells them in Yiddish?’

‘Oh, yes. Well, he speaks French. And German, of course.
And I’ve got O levels in both. He’s a great tease, too, tying people’s shoelaces together when they’re asleep and putting salt into the sugar caster, that sort of thing. He’s got a disarmingly childish streak but he’s really terribly clever.’

‘Where does all the money come from?’

‘I’m not sure. Property I think. And Conrad’s made masses himself. He owns a lot of casinos.’

‘Does Evelyn know that?’

‘No, and she won’t like it at all, though it’s a more honest way to make a living than exploiting the poor like Lord Dunderave. He owns half of Paddington, apparently. Poor people are shoved ten to a room in his nasty tenements while Lord D creams off all the profits. I can’t see what’s so admirable about that.’

‘I quite agree,’ I said. ‘But casinos do sound a little …’ I paused, wondering how to put it. I took another puff of my cigarette and felt a strange giddy sensation, not unpleasant.

Isobel withdrew her hand from mine. ‘Vulgar, you mean.’

‘Oh, not that
I
think that. But your parents might … undoubtedly will. Do you think you could persuade Conrad, without hurting his feelings, not to mention the casinos?’

‘I’m not ashamed of Conrad.’ Isobel looked rather angry and I accused myself of tactlessness.

‘Absolutely not. He sounds … remarkable. Such a jokey character when you consider how tragic his childhood was.’

‘I can’t live my life according to my mother’s rules.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘One of the good things about money is that when you’ve got a lot of it you can do as you like.’ Isobel threw herself back on the sofa and smiled with satisfaction.

I had a healthy respect for money myself, never having had any, but I wondered if Isobel wasn’t relying too much on the happiness she imagined it would bring her. Altogether I began to fear for her future.

‘Don’t look so solemn, you little Jeremiah!’ Isobel stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Let’s go and see Rafe. He’s in the conservatory.’

I put out my cigarette thankfully, for the room was beginning to spin and my mood seemed to dip and soar alarmingly. Isobel walked on ahead with that swaying sexy walk she had had from her early teens, while I stumped along behind. The conservatory looked west towards the head of the valley. On any day of the year it was filled with light; in warm weather it became steaming and sultry because the gardeners watered the plants several times a day. Years ago, during a rare heat wave, Isobel had dared me to see how long we could withstand the furnace-like temperature, lying on the burning encaustic tiles with the sun scorching our faces through the glass. I had given in quite soon, emerging scarlet and sizzling, but Isobel had stuck it out. She had been discovered by one of the gardeners in a dead faint. She was put to bed and my father sent for and there had been another row.

Now the conservatory was dazzling because of the snow. Rafe was standing with his back to us, looking out at the hillside, an easel in front of him, a paintbrush between his fingers. Isobel crept up behind him and put her hands over his eyes. He gave a shout, spun round, hit out and caught the side of her face with his hand. She staggered and fell. It all happened in a second and then he was on his knees beside her.

‘Darling, I’m so sorry!’ Tenderly he pulled her into the circle of his arm and examined her face, then stroked her head. ‘I was miles away and you startled me. Did I hurt you?’

‘I’m all right. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have crept up on you. It was stupid of me.’

Rafe helped her up. ‘Hello, ‘he said to me, but his attention was given to Isobel.

‘Lucky it wasn’t Marigold.’ Isobel laughed. ‘Imagine the clatter of flying crutches and cracking of plaster and the crunching of bones.’

‘I’m ashamed of myself, overreacting like that.’ Rafe’s voice was soft, his hands gentle as he smoothed his sister’s hair. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘I’m absolutely fine. Don’t fuss. How’s the painting going?’

‘I was so absorbed trying to capture those shadows … there, beneath that line of trees –’ he looked out towards the landscape and tapped his own painting with the end of his brush – ‘that I was in another world.’

‘Dancing feels like that quite often,’ I said. ‘The walls of the rehearsal room simply disappear. And on the stage during a performance you completely forget about the audience. It’s a terrific jolt when you come back to reality.’

‘Yes. Forgetting oneself is the best thing about painting for me.’ I saw the incident with Isobel had jarred his nerves. His eyes were very bright in contrast with cheeks that were pale, unless it was the reflection of the snow.

I looked at the snowscape on the easel, a watercolour of greys and purples and blues, very bold, almost abstract. ‘It’s very good.’

‘Thanks. I’m sadly out of practice.’

‘But it’s really lovely. It’s caught the beauty of the countryside but it makes you think of other things too … sadness, resignation … that figure on the road … it’s about the indifference of the hills, isn’t it? The puniness of all our efforts.’

‘You can see that?’ He stared at me for a moment as if I had surprised him, then studied the painting again. ‘That’s what I was thinking of all the time I was doing it.’

Isobel folded her arms and looked stern. ‘If you two are going to drivel on like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with an attack of existential
angst
, I’m going away to wax my bikini line.’

I saw that for some reason she was put out.

‘I must go home,’ I said.

‘Honestly, it wasn’t a hint,’ I said a quarter of an hour later to Rafe as I struggled into the car. No one had answered the telephone at Dumbola Lodge.

‘I’d had enough of being indoors anyway.’ He took my crutches and slung them in the back, then got into the driver’s seat.

‘And really it’s too kind of you to give me this.’ I looked at the watercolour, still a little damp, that rested on my knee.

‘You saw what I meant to paint. That doesn’t often happen. You must be a girl of rare sensibility.’ The teasing tone was back. He started the engine. ‘How’s your sister? Kate, isn’t it?’ he said as we swooshed down the hill through a fresh fall of snow. ‘Do you know, I haven’t seen her since she was a tot.’

‘She’s married, did you know?’

‘I have to confess that if Evelyn told me I’d forgotten. She hardly ever came to Shottestone, did she? Why was that?’

‘She and Isobel didn’t get on. Kate was a year older and rather … well, bossy, to be truthful.’

‘And Isobel is nothing if not rebellious. I expect she tried to tyrannize and Kate wouldn’t have it. Whereas you were angelically long-suffering, so she tells me.’

I laughed. ‘I don’t know … Kate always took my father’s side in everything so she thought any friend of Dimpsie’s – the Prestons, in other words – were the enemy. Our family was – is – sadly divided.’ I paused, thinking. ‘But what’s even sadder, it’s not very rewarding to be on my father’s side. He doesn’t need associates, you see.’

‘Families can be hell, can’t they?’

‘Mm.’ I closed my eyes as we came to the precipitous drop. Rafe was easy to talk to. He didn’t bully, he didn’t show off. It was restful being with him. Then I saw Isobel falling backwards, her arms outstretched, heard again the smack as she hit the floor of the conservatory. As I left, there had been the beginnings of a bruise on her cheek. Of course it had been an accident and no one could have been sorrier. ‘I think I always envied Isobel her family. Though naturally I love Dimpsie dearly.’

‘Of course you do. So what’s Kate’s husband like?’

‘He’s a surgeon, specializing in the pancreas. Kate went into nursing, hoping to please my father. She met Dougall in the operating theatre. Perhaps he looks attractive in a green hat and mask. Kate says he’s brilliant but it’s hard to tell because he isn’t
interested in anything but people’s insides. And he’s fussy about hygiene. They have covers for everything. They’re whisked away to be washed the minute you even look at them. Soon they’ll have covers for the covers.’ Rafe laughed, a happy, relaxed sort of laugh. I felt encouraged by this response to my little essay in cattiness. ‘Everything you eat with or drink out of goes into a tank to be sterilized. Last time I was there I watched her wash the vacuum cleaner nozzle in Dettol, then hoover out the toaster. We all know he’s potty, of course, but no one likes to say so. Dimpsie is frightened of Dougall – he can be quite cutting – and she feels sorry for Kate. My father despises them both.’