Dorothy Eden (15 page)

“Yes,” said Miss Medway in an absent sort of voice. “He is pretty. You did tell me the truth.”

Y
OUNG AS SHE WAS, FLORENCE
had already discovered that realisation seldom lived up to anticipation. The longed-for happening was never quite as wonderful as one had expected it to be. Even the happiness of Papa’s homecoming had ebbed away into disappointment and secret tears when it became obvious that his visits to the nursery were to talk to Miss Medway rather than to Edwin and herself.

She had so hoped he would think her not too big to sit on his lap, as she had done occasionally in the past. But of course she was a great girl of six now, as Lizzie frequently said, and too old to sit on a gentleman’s lap, also too old to shed those silly tears.

The trouble was, as Lizzie said again, she got too excited by half. Her face was inclined to turn paper white and her stomach to close into a small tight space that refused food. So it was lucky, in a way, that Papa was so interested in Miss Medway, where she had come from, what her family was, how she liked living at Overton House, and looking after his brats. For no one noticed that Florence couldn’t eat her tea, and sat hopefully invisible at the far end of the table, while Mamma plied Papa with cups of tea, and Miss Medway answered his questions in her soft pleasant voice.

That small tea party passed without any disaster, but the big party for Papa tonight which she had so much looked forward to, was not going to do so. Florence realised that as soon as she had eaten the sugar plum that Grandmamma had given her.

The music room was looking lovely, with bowls of late summer flowers everywhere, and all the candles in the shining Waterford crystal chandeliers alight. Mamma had said that there was to be no gaslight on this occasion, and Annie and Mabel had been kept busy first with the long lighted tapers, then with the snuffers. Groups of chairs were placed round the walls so that the centre of the floor would be free for dancing later.

Edwin, who was not at all shy, wandered among the guests, giving his angelic smile (which didn’t deceive anyone who knew him, Florence thought bitterly), while she, in her usual self-effacing way, sought the refuge of Grandmamma’s side, and the treachery of the sugar plum offered by Grandmamma’s fat stubby fingers.

Soon afterwards the room began to blur. Mamma, in her beautiful dress, Papa with the candlelight glinting in his well-brushed hair and his little well-groomed golden beard, Miss Medway neat and unobtrusive in her half-mourning, talking a little, but mostly keeping a wary eye on Edwin who was showing off—these familiar figures disappeared into the queer blurriness of the room, and Grandmamma, an immense rustling figure above her, was saying in a loud voice, “Miss Medway! Bea! You’d better come here. This child is going to be sick.”

It was all too humiliatingly true. Florence’s unreliable stomach had closed up again, and was about to reject the carelessly eaten sugar plum. The only thing to be thankful for was that, whisked away by Miss Medway, she reached the bathroom in time. Imagine if there had been a disaster on the beautiful shining parquet floor on which the guests’ expensive skirts were brushing. She would never have been able to show her face in public again. She would have asked to be a nun and spent the rest of her life saying prayers. Perhaps she should do this anyway, since she had this uncooperative stomach and was such a failure in society.

“I always do the wrong things,” she wept, in the haven of the bathroom where Miss Medway was washing her face with a cool cloth.

“Nonsense,” said Miss Medway. “You just get too nervous. You’ll get over that.”

“Will I?” Florence pleaded.

“Of course you will. In two or three years or less. I promise.”

“Papa will hate me tonight.”

“Not a bit of it. He’s much too kind. Much too kind,” Miss Medway repeated the words in a reflective way, as if she enjoyed saying them.

And, as it happened, she was right, for shortly afterwards Papa came up to the night nursery to see Florence in bed, and patted her cheek and said, “It could have been worse, old thing. Don’t worry. Are you all right now?”

Florence was filled with tearful gratitude for Papa’s thoughtfulness, even though he only stayed a moment. Then he took Miss Medway’s arm and led her out of the nursery.

“Send Lizzie to her,” Florence heard him saying. “You’re not to miss all the fun.”

“Oh, but should I? And I think it’s time Edwin came up to bed, too.”

“Isn’t Lizzie capable of seeing to that? Come along. I want you to enjoy yourself. By the way, no one’s told me your first name.”

Miss Medway’s voice was lowered, almost inaudible.

“It’s Mary.”

“Then come, Mary…”

Dear Papa. He always wanted people to be happy. He loved happiness. He was not made for sorrow, Mamma had once said.

Mamma stood over her later saying, not unkindly, “Florence, couldn’t you have had more sense than to let Grandmamma stuff you with sweets. Now you’ve had to pay for it. Never mind, I’ll ask Papa to slip up for a minute.”

“He’s been,” said Florence drowsily. “With Miss Medway.”

“Oh,” said Mamma, after a pause, and from what seemed a long way off. “Didn’t Miss Medway stay with you?”

“Papa wouldn’t let her. He wanted her to dance, I think.”

Then Florence’s heavy eyelids closed and in the darkness she imagined she could see the figures of Papa and Miss Medway twirling round and round, growing smaller and farther away, until they were lost from sight.

I’ll have to speak to her in the morning, Beatrice thought. If one of the children is ill it’s her duty to stay with them. But if William had ordered her not to, through sheer kindness, of course, one supposed she would have to obey. Though he might have thought of his daughter’s comfort, rather than Miss Medway’s.

However, there was no mirror room now, and Mary Medway was a quiet little thing, not the kind to appeal to William. Besides, it had been such a successful party and he had had so much adulation, no wonder he wanted everyone to share in his happiness and triumph.

He had proved he was not an idler, after all. He had another dimension now, as an authority on art. He was already receiving invitations to speak at various functions, and also, he told Beatrice after the guests had gone, and they were alone in the music room, he thought he would begin adding to the collection of paintings and
objets d’art
begun by his ancestors. The china room was lamentably short on early English porcelain, and English painters had been shamefully neglected in their own country.

It seemed that Miss Medway had a considerable knowledge of eighteenth-century porcelain.

“We were in the china room, if you wondered where we had disappeared to,” he said with his charming ingenuousness. “I hope you didn’t think I was neglecting our guests.”

“I only thought Miss Medway might have stayed with Florence,” Beatrice said calmly. “It’s most unfortunate about that child’s delicate digestion. And Mamma will persist in thinking that children should be stuffed with food. But it was a nice party, wasn’t it?”

“Capital, Bea. Absolutely capital.”

He hadn’t said she looked well in her new dress. He hadn’t seemed to notice that her shoulders were very pretty, and quite her best feature, though now he touched them in an absent manner.

His eyes were shining. He seemed curiously preoccupied, though happy.

“They all think the book will get good reviews. Well, we must wait patiently.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ll be good,” Beatrice said enthusiastically. “Actually, I had a long talk to Mr Aberconway. Aren’t publishers nice people!”

“I’ve no idea about the remainder of the profession, I’m sure some of them are robbers, but I grant you, Aberconway is pretty decent. What did you talk to him about?”

“I suggested doing a window display of your book in Bonnington’s. I thought we could back it up with reproductions of some of the paintings you discuss, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Titian. It would make a lovely display.”

To her surprise, William’s face closed.

“I didn’t know Bonnington’s had a book department.”

“They haven’t, but—”

“Then how can you sell books? Besides, I detest reproductions of great paintings.”

“But, darling—”

“No, Bea. This time I can manage without Bonnington’s. It knows as little about art as, forgive me, its owner. Now admit it. I’m only speaking the truth. Museums and art galleries bore you to death.”

Beatrice was deeply hurt. He had never spoken to her like that before, as if she irritated him unbearably. Perhaps she had been stupidly clumsy in her suggestion. He must have thought she was trying to steal his thunder, when in all truth she was only wanting to share it.

“I’m sorry, William. Forget I suggested it.”

“You and your precious shop,” he said, but more amiably. “Me and my humble effort. We wouldn’t tread on holy ground.”

“Now you’re being absurd. Actually Mr Aberconway didn’t think it was such a bad idea, but never mind. Will you come to bed now?”

He yawned. “Presently. I’m tired but I’ll never sleep. Sorry I seemed so ungrateful. I don’t deserve you to be so good to me.” He kissed her, an affectionate but brief kiss, scarcely touching her lips. “You go on up. Don’t wait for me.”

She hesitated, wanting to say she would stay with him until he was ready to sleep. It was almost morning. They could walk in the garden and watch the dawn.

But in the end she said goodnight quietly, not even telling him she loved him. She acted from intuition, as always, but she was less sure now that her intuition was right.

She knew he would not join her in her room that night.

Lately Beatrice had instituted weekly meetings in her father’s office of all the department buyers.

The buyers were encouraged to express ideas. After all, who knew the desires of customers better than those who dealt directly with them. All ideas were discussed round the table, some were adopted, some dismissed. Quiet but effective innovations had been made in this way. More important, the buyers developed a much stronger interest in the welfare of the store. Beatrice was always generous with appreciation, but caustic when her time was wasted by high-flown or plainly foolish suggestions.

Since everyone was encouraged to speak his mind, Beatrice wondered who would be caustic with her when she put forward her new idea this morning.

As she might have anticipated, it was Adam Cope. He was the only member of the staff who was not in awe of her, and also the one who had to be convinced that any change was desirable. Old stick-in-the-mud Adam, but always honest, always capable, and always there. Loyalty. A characteristic perhaps more important than brilliance.

“I presume you know the profit on books, Miss Beatrice? We would need to sell large numbers to make this venture profitable, and that means a lot of space. Besides, books aren’t part of our overall design.”

“We can make them so,” Beatrice answered. “A counter on the ground floor next to haberdashery. The bindings would provide a nice note of colour. After all,” she said with gentle sarcasm, “we do have the sort of customers who can read.”

“Popular novels, Miss Beatrice?”

“Of course. The customers who wander about the shop are usually ladies of leisure. Bored ladies. They’ll buy the latest novels. But I also have in mind more serious books. Dictionaries, travel books, atlases, art books. Children’s books make a colourful display. And of course a selection of religious books, which are infallible sellers. You all know how successful our mourning department has been. I believe religious books and Bibles will sell in the same way.”

“This sort of thing will need to be run by a specialist,” Miss Brown said.

“Of which there must be plenty about. I can speak to my husband’s publisher. He’ll be able to suggest a suitable person, I’m quite sure.”

She was perfectly aware of the thoughts going on behind the polite faces. Was Miss Beatrice’s canny business sense being pushed aside in the desire to please her husband? But why should books not be a part of Bonnington’s? She thought of the shop as a well-stocked house, and every fashionable house had a library.

“So I plan to move handbags and umbrellas back, take a yard or two off haberdashery—you could manage with a smaller space, couldn’t you, Miss Perkins?”

“My girls—” Miss Perkins began, then thought better of disagreeing with the boss. In spite of the candour of these meetings, when it came down to it nobody did really disagree with Beatrice. She had a way of making her proposals sound such good sense, and indeed they almost always were. Besides, she had that quiet but immensely strong will. No one underestimated her.

So Miss Perkins gave a small sniff and giggle. “Actually, my largest girl, Miss Oates, is going to be married soon, so perhaps we could make a point of engaging a rather small one when Miss Oates leaves. I must say that girl has been the clumsiest creature I ever knew.”

Adam Cope, who had a limited sense of humour and took every statement seriously, pointed out, in his meticulous way, “Surely it’s not so much the salesgirls as the goods we have to consider.”

“The goods we sacrifice in haberdashery,” Bea said, “will be more than compensated for by the sales on the book counter. I’m convinced of that. However, we must wait and see.”

A month later, with remarkable speed, the book department, a small bright area of colourful books, was opened.

It was only the nucleus of what it would eventually be, Beatrice said. But it was a beginning. And William, although he was disappointingly lacking in enthusiasm, was too courteous to refuse to go to the opening. After all his own book was prominently displayed, and he had agreed unwillingly to sign a few copies.

Beatrice was not quite sure whether he hated publicity, or just publicity in Bonnington’s. He had certainly shown every pleasure in the good reviews the book had received. When, however, she had told him what she had planned he had said in some distress, “But why, Bea? Why? There are plenty of bookshops to sell my book.”

“Because this is my husband’s book and I love him,” she said. A simple statement which he seemed to find embarrassing and unanswerable.