Privileged Children (17 page)
Read Privileged Children Online
Authors: Frances Vernon
‘Stop it!’ cried Miranda.
‘I see,’ said Anatole. ‘You have been told this sort of thing before. You have been told that you are a monstrous egotist, that you are incapable of loving anyone but yourself. And a year ago I would have said that the people who told you such things were lying. To think I used to believe that you were the misunderstood genius you make yourself out to be!’
He paused.
‘Probably,’ he said, ‘you are a misunderstood genius, but that doesn’t stop you being one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever met. Perhaps it makes you so.’ He threw open the car door and walked back to the house. On the doorstep he stopped and covered his eyes with his hands. He turned round and started to run back to where Miranda’s car was parked, expecting to see her now childlike face gazing from the window. The car was gone.
Anatole could not sleep that night for worrying about what he had done to her, although he had meant what he
said. The next day he received a note from Miranda, enclosed in a letter to Alice:
You are right. The odd thing is that I really believe it when it comes from you, and not only that, your telling me what I really am doesn’t annihilate me, although I believe what you say as I don’t when others tell me, because I know you don’t hate me.
‘Funny,’ murmured Anatole as he read it, ‘… that this fundamental confidence should make her so attractive and so repellent at once.’
‘What?’ said Liza.
‘Miranda.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Liza.
‘Spoilt little devil,’ said Kate.
Thank
you
for
sending
a
wreath
to
Kate’s
funeral,
wrote Alice to Miranda on 11 January:
It was the only wreath; I’m afraid we didn’t think of taking any. Yours looked very odd staring up from the grave before they started shovelling earth on it. Anatole threw it in — I think usually one lays them on top? It was a terrible day, purple sky and hailstones and all of us trying to keep from freezing and then feeling guilty about thinking of that when Kate was lying there. Clementina couldn’t come so I had to look after both Richard and Anatole — and I kept thinking how much better Kate would have coped with two dumb grief-stricken men. It was such a shock her dying like that — perhaps I ought to have worried as she conceived so late after being barren all these years, but we were all just overjoyed. Kate was a doctor, but she wouldn’t let the possibility of a disaster cross her mind, so none of us did either.
I remember how she and I used to resent each other until that time after Finola’s birth when I had that breakdown and Anatole was so bewildered — rather than furious — at my refusing to touch the baby, after I’d agreed to have her. Kate reconciled us then; she looked after me and got Anatole to get me that mindless tiring job, which was just what I needed to stop me worrying about all my problems. Kate liked me once she could help me — I think we all like people who need us, or who have needed us. It’s difficult to live with someone who’s so young and strong and confident that they seem to have no real need of other people. I’m not saying that everyone wants to be a mainstay to a host of nervous wrecks (though that’s what Kate was good at), but it’s terrible to feel that someone one knows well doesn’t
want
one.
All the women I’ve known well — Kate and Clementina and
Aunt Caitlin and of course especially Mamma — have been people on whom others could rely, people one could always turn to in trouble. I’ve always wanted to be like that too but I’ve never managed it. I suppose I’ve been some help to you and Anatole at times, but I’ve been a terrible mother to Finola, and that was in spite of my trying to copy in every way my own mother, who was the best mother in the world. She never interfered, never ordered me around, but she guided me gently and she gave me so much love. I always knew she loved me, although she always treated me as though I were just another one of her close circle of friends. I thought that if I just imitated her I couldn’t go wrong with Finola. Of course I knew I’d always be an inferior version of Mamma because apart from anything else she was so brilliantly intelligent. I don’t really question or reject anything that I wasn’t brought up to reject. I can’t think things through for myself.
Sometimes I think that my fault was in trying to impose my own thoughts on Finola. Sometimes I think that my mistake was that I didn’t guide her enough. I don’t know and she doesn’t know and we can’t do anything about it; and I want to do something so much, though now Fin isn’t interested any more. She’s really been taking off on her own recently, spending a lot of time with her friends and becoming increasingly like them as far as I can see. I’m not saying she’s mindlessly conventional, as I used to think — after all, she wasn’t brought up to be as she is and so she’s made her own decision against us all. She’s terribly realistic and sensible — she sees through things as Mamma used to and I never could. She’s nearly as beautiful and nearly as intelligent as Mamma, and I do love her but somehow I can never bring myself to tell her. I imagine myself telling her, I can picture it — and Fin looks almost shocked, in my fantasy, at my saying that.
Anyway, there’s nothing to be done now. Fin’s nearly thirteen, and she’s got her own life. Whatever we’ve done wrong, we haven’t made a snivelling dependent out of her, although when she was a small child she was so clinging, and I thought, backward.
I take the
Sketch
and the
Tatler
now, to see what you’re up to. You’re terribly reticent about your friends, as though you think I’d dislike them just because they’re rich and like a good time. After all, you’re one of them, and I like you …
She does not say ‘I love you’, thought Miranda — because I refused to take up with her where I left off eighteen months ago.
But all the same, Miranda thought that Alice probably
meant
love.
I
only
wish
I
could
meet
one
or
two
of
your
new
friends,
continued Alice, and Miranda frowned slowly to herself:
although I’d understand if they wouldn’t like me. Oh dear, that sounds almost resentful and spiteful, although it’s not meant to. I think I’d better leave off personal subjects; I’m using my letters to you almost as a sort of diary, because no one will hear except you but you
Will
hear, and I wouldn’t want to write in a book which no one will read till after my death, and then it’ll be the wrong person. How I do run on.
The weather is all right down here. I sold two paintings quite well recently. Anatole still hasn’t found a job yet and is very unhappy about it, but he’s got hopes of finding a place in another restaurant band — that was the sort of job he was hoping to avoid, of course, poor darling. Everyone else is fine, and we all send much love.
Alice
As usual, this letter had been quickly written and hastily posted; Alice had not gone back to correct anything.
Miranda was sitting at the little satinwood bureau in her sparsely furnished, pale-green room at Lynmore Hall, in Cheshire. It was twenty to six in the evening, in the middle of the short but empty interval between tea and drinks, during which Miranda usually wrote her letters; for she lived in the country as she lived in London, and was rarely out of bed before midday or in bed before four in the morning. She was wearing an old dark emerald green smoking suit of which her parents disapproved.
She yawned and frowned again at the letter. She too began to write, as though Alice were her intimate friend, her diary. She detailed her business; she wrote out clever remarks for future reference; and she confided.
Dearest Alice
, she began:
So lovely to get your letter. The weather is foul up here and we’re
en famille
at the moment so there’s absolutely nothing to do except read — once I start reading I can’t stop but after the Season it takes me at least two months to pick up a serious book and then get into the
routine. I’m coming down to London in ten days’ time and would love to see you then …
She consulted her diary to check that she had no social engagements and then she gave Alice a date.
Darling, why ever are you fussing about your treatment of Finola, who only wanted a nice strict nanny and a few friends of her own age — although God knows, if she’d had that, she’d probably have rebelled and kept on rebelling. You are not your mother, and you could never be ‘an inferior version’ because you’ve got qualities of your own which she didn’t have and which you can’t eradicate. You must realise, with your reason if not with your emotions, that she wasn’t perfect — though what chance did reason ever stand against the needs of the
body
?
I do agree with you that Kate and Clementina are (
was
, of course, in Kate’s case — I am so sorry) admirable women, and Caitlin is a superb old lady. I was told by one old chap who’d known her forty years ago that she used to be a real virago — but age mellowed, evidently. Clementina is thoroughly human, but you know Kate and I never got on. But I don’t understand how you could want to be
like
them. There is this aura of municipal socialism and cold baths, combined with a bit of clean honest sex, which hangs about them and
braces
one for the Fabian future. They’re converts, you see, and one used to get the odd gleam of fanaticism from Kate. But you’ve just got your happy, muddled, inherited beliefs, and that’s so much more comfortable. Really, it’s better for others if one just publicly adheres to beliefs one grew up with without actually abiding by them, instead of making a great fuss and abandoning them in favour of what one thinks is the truth. So long as people keep thinking like that we’ll never have Church disestablishment!
You must be shocked to hear me talking like this, darling. The truth is, I don’t know what I think — I expect I’ll be half a Whig and half an anarchist for the rest of my life (no doubt I’m grossly misusing the terms). What I really care about is comfort, but I want everything else too. That’s why I’m so looking forward to being twenty-one, when my father will settle some money on me. I can see it all, it keeps me going to think of it: twelve hundred a year and a flat in Chelsea looking over the river, meeting only the people I really
want to see, no questions asked by
anyone
— because I’m certainly not going to tie myself down to some man. Then I can see you
often.
I want a job, too. Something in the decorating line. I supervised the doing-up of this incredibly hideous house last year and I sometimes feel that I can move mountains because I did manage to get a little light and simplicity and what-all into this gloomy monument to Self-help. However, I doubt my experience would qualify me for designing materials from ten till four in a little cellar beneath some chic shop in Bruton Street. I only planned the redecoration because my father decided he’d had a financial crisis and a professional would be too expensive though we
had
to get rid of some of the worst horrors. Now every time a guest who hasn’t seen the new decor arrives and looks surprised he can say in hushed tones, ‘Miranda did it,’ and wait for him or her to look sympathetic. Most of the dear old things do.
Actually I don’t think the redecoration is a success because no one’s happier in the new house than they were in the old. The most important thing about a place is how people feel about it — your Aunt Caitlin has all sorts of beautiful valuable things jumbled together higgledy-piggledy in her sitting rooms, and the Bramham Gardens kitchen is mostly unwashed plates and cats’ cushions and books and God knows what-else, and the sweet nurserymaid I used to have who lives in the lodge now has the most repulsive ‘Present from Margate’ type ornaments — but it’s what you all want that makes each room beautiful. Good taste is all rot — I’ve got it, but it doesn’t make my rooms beautiful.
I’m afraid I’m feeling rather low at the moment. The hordes are descending on Friday and their presence may drown even Damian’s end-of-the-holidays misery, though to me that’s always a weight on the stomach. He still doesn’t know that I ran away — the story is amnesia, as you know. I’m sure both my parents think he’d leg it if he had an example, and if he’s still got the spirit he had in the nursery, he will anyway — but if he was discovered he’d be far worse treated than I was because it matters so much more if a boy doesn’t show the stiff upper lip.
All my love, Miranda
At seven o’clock Miranda changed into a dark brown silk dress which reached her ankles. She brushed her hair,
which she was now beginning to grow — like most other young women of fashion, who had all worn short hair for the last five years. Round her shoulders she wrapped a very unusual, heavy embroidered shawl. She left her room and started to wander through the narrow, dark-panelled, thickly carpeted corridors towards the family sitting room. The corridors reminded her of a luxurious old-fashioned railway carriage: she had not managed to have them redecorated as well as the rooms, because of the expense.
At drinks and at dinner none of the family said much. Flora Pagett made the odd remark and received polite responses and cool replies. Usually, Thomas Pagett was fairly talkative at dinner, even alone with his family, and he talked chiefly of politics. Parliamentary politics was the only subject about which he knew more than did Miranda, in which she was actually interested. Tonight, he was looking down at his plate, only pausing to frown at his wife’s remarks and to glance at Miranda, when he was sure that she could not see him.
After dinner her brother Damian went up to bed and the rest of the family retired to the small sitting room. The men did not remain in the dining room, because Miranda’s father and her sister Olivia’s husband did not have much to say to each other. Miranda started to play mah-jong with Olivia and her husband and her brother Jasper. Her sister Viola put a record on the gramophone and played it very quietly so as not to irritate her parents over much. The butler came with brandy, port and cigars on a tray. Thomas Pagett quickly poured himself some brandy, then remembered to offer something to Olivia’s husband. He thought that brandy and port and cigars were not for women, but tonight he asked Miranda, very nicely, whether she would like a little port and a cigar.
‘Thank you, Father,’ said Miranda. She looked at him and he turned away to pour her some port.
Presently Jasper called mah-jong. Thomas Pagett got to his feet.
‘Miranda, if you don’t mind, I’d like a word with you — could you come into the study for a moment?’ he said, straightening his tie.
‘Of course, Father,’ said Miranda. She followed him down
the cold passage. Her father flung open the study door and just remembered to allow her to precede him. He watched her glide through. She looked very calm and bored and beautiful.
Miranda was hurriedly rehearsing in her head the conversation which was about to take place, about her enormous dressmaker’s bill. She looked round the study. This room was filled with various pieces of furniture which had, by some accident, not been discarded when the house was restored in 1873. The portraits on the walls were all of the Fitzwilliams, into which old Catholic family Thomas Pagett’s father had married.