Dorothy Eden (3 page)

Far from that, she found herself being stared at by a pair of sparkling brown eyes beneath an umbrella of tumbling curly brown hair. Rosy cheeks that dimpled when the young paragon smiled, perfect teeth, a slender body at least three inches taller than hers, and an easy natural friendliness that seemed to be extended to the whole world, herself in particular.

“Are you Caro’s best friend?” he asked, embarrassingly, for Beatrice was well aware that Caroline seldom bothered to speak to her.

Beatrice found that, under pressure, she had more poise than she had realised.

“Am I, Caroline?” she asked airily, and Caroline hadn’t the sophistication to carry off that direct attack.

“Don’t be silly, William,” she said pettishly. “You know very well that it was Papa who invited Beatrice today. I really don’t know why, except that sick people do strange things, and have to be humoured.”

“Caroline!” Mrs Overton said sharply. But the sharpness in her voice was manufactured. Beatrice knew very well that she agreed with every word her daughter had said. She also knew that William was laughing mischievously at them both, and enjoying himself no end.

“I’m sorry my husband couldn’t come downstairs today,” Mrs Overton explained to Beatrice, with tardy but meticulous courtesy. “He had a bad night and the doctor had to be called. All this is the result of that dreadful Indian climate. We’ve all suffered from it, and really in the end one’s country hardly appreciates it.”

“Moral,” said William, “don’t enlist in the Indian Army, or you’ll end up as a memorial in the village church. That’s where you’ll find all our family, Miss Bonnington. Died of wounds, died of cholera, massacred in a mutiny, drowned at sea.”

“Then what do you intend doing, William?” Caroline asked.

“I shall be a gentleman,” said William. “I shall drink and smoke and gamble and be gloriously idle. Shan’t I, Mamma?”

“Apart from catching butterflies,” murmured Caroline spitefully.

“Caroline, you mustn’t sneer at William’s hobby. You know he already has a famous collection. He’s even given specimens to the British Museum, did you know, Beatrice?”

“Will you come on the Heath with me this afternoon, Miss Bonnington?” William asked. “It’s a perfect day. I nearly had a splendid Peacock yesterday. We just might have the luck to get it today.”

He was only a little boy, Beatrice told herself, in spite of his sophisticated manner. He was only interested in a cissy thing like catching butterflies.

But to her surprise she found that she wanted to go with him. It really was rather difficult to resist the friendliness of those sparkling brown eyes in which she could detect no trace of patronage.

They didn’t, as it happened, catch a Peacock, but Beatrice, after leaping over humps and hollows, caught a fluttering creature in her net, and William exclaimed excitedly that it was a rare Swallowtail
(Papilio Machaon),
and a much more desirable catch than a Peacock.

Beatrice hated the crawling creepy legs of the struggling insect, but the delicate wings strongly marked with black had yellow patches like pale sunlight. Like spring primroses, she thought, and realised that it was the moment rather than the captured butterfly that was important. She knew that she was going to remember it for a long time.

“Well done,” William said approvingly. “I must say, for a girl, you’re rather jolly.”

That, then, seemed to be the final accolade.

But it was not one she was always going to appreciate, she discovered as she grew older. Who wanted the epithet of being jolly when other girls were dressing in their silks and chiffons and wafting about at parties, like butterflies themselves? Beatrice Bonnington, in spite of the snob school she had attended, either didn’t get asked to these parties, or, if she did, she had neither the gift for wearing pretty frilly clothes nor the ability to make flirtatious conversation.

Her school-friends were going to Paris or Switzerland to finishing schools. Caroline Overton was going to Switzerland, also, but not to school. The summer weather had not cured her persistent cough. She must go to better purer air. A few months in a sanatorium in Davos, the doctors said, would do the trick.

So her mother, her painted china face now covered with a fine crackling of lines, prepared to make the journey with her precious only daughter. William, who was now a tall stripling, would be left at home in charge of his invalid father.

Overton House was a tragic house, overshadowed with illness. If Caroline were to die, the old General would probably give up his tenacious hold on life, too. Then young William, who wasn’t much stronger than his sister, would be the master. And unless he followed some profession where would the money come from? It was rumoured that one of the family portraits, a Gainsborough, had already been sold to pay for Caroline’s sojourn in the Swiss Alps.

What the family needed was an injection of good healthy blood. And money.

Despite the expensive sanatorium and all the care lavished on her, Caroline Overton died. She was brought home for burial in the family vault. The house, sheltering the dying General and the bereaved mother, became more tragic than ever. William, who also benefited from a warm climate, was studying at the university in Perugia. He came home for Caroline’s funeral, then departed again.

Beatrice, now aged twenty, still too plump but grown to her full height which was a meagre five feet two inches, frequently walked past the high brick wall enclosing Overton House, and lingered at the scrolled iron gates. The house was still an object of seductive charm. If she walked slowly she could hear the doves cooing from the lime walk, and the wind in the leaves of the ancient black mulberry tree, planted in the reign of Queen Anne. A Judas tree topped the brick wall so that passers-by in the road could see the rosy blossoms on its bare branches in the spring. Pink and white may, flowering along the wall, had a lush hardy beauty.

Beatrice was well aware that she was having a love affair with a house. She knew that the charming graceful boy who had pursued butterflies over the Heath was part of it, although she had, as it were, met the house first. But since her encounter with William she had been completely uninterested in any other boy. And he and Overton House were inextricably bound. She could not have one without the other. It was a fantastic assumption that she could have either.

Her other desire was the shop. Bonnington’s. This, too, had seemed a hopeless desire until the day she was twenty-one, when Papa surprised her by putting a large heavy key in her hand.

“It’s yours, Bea.”

Her heart gave a great jump.

“I can come into the shop? You’ve decided? Oh, Papa, I can’t tell you how bored I’ve been lately, leading this idle life.”

“No, love, you’re mistaking me. I don’t mean you to come into the shop. Except as an ornament, of course. No, the key’s symbolic, so to speak. It means Bonnington’s will be yours one day when I’m gone. In the meantime, you might be interested in my plans for enlargement.”

“Oh, yes, Papa!”

Gratified by her interest, Papa explained that he intended to open a restaurant.

“We’ll have a high-class one, on the first floor at the back, so that customers have to walk through the shop to reach it. We might have an orchestra in the afternoons. Lure all those idle rich women to tea.”

“Like me?” Beatrice couldn’t help saying.

“You won’t be idle when you’ve a husband and family.” Papa looked at her thoughtfully. “Mind you, if you haven’t achieved that in say ten years—”

“Goodness, I’ll be dead of boredom long before that!”

Papa gave his loud guffaw.

“Tell that to your mother. If she weren’t so set against the shop I might just relent. I believe you have a good business head. But I expect your mother’s right. You must find a husband. Then you can give me some grandsons for Bonnington’s.”

Beatrice weighed the key in her hand.

“In the meantime I put this in a glass case?”

“You’re all I’ve got to give it to,” Papa said rather sourly. He still hadn’t forgiven her for not being a boy.

“But I really can do what I like with the shop when it’s mine?”

“I won’t be here to stop you, will I? All the same, don’t be in a hurry to bury me, love.”

Beatrice flung her arms round him. “Oh, I’m not, Papa. I apologise for my rudeness. I know I’m considered one of the luckiest girls in Hampstead.”

“And you’ll be one of the richest one day. So get a move on, Bea. Find a husband. You mightn’t have all the looks in the world, but you’ve got the cash.”

When, the next year, General Overton claimed his place in the family vault, Beatrice had neither forgotten his fiery face, nor a word of their conversation. She felt she had lost a friend. Without telling her parents, she attended his funeral service, and sat at the back of the church and watched Mrs Overton, on the arm of her son, follow the flag-draped casket up the aisle.

At that time she had not seen William Overton for four years. His back view, tall, slender and straight, was pleasing. His thick brown hair curled at the base of his neck. Papa would think it foppish, but it met with Beatrice’s ardent approval.

The service was moving. When the hymn ‘O Valiant Hearts’ was sung, Beatrice’s eyes filled with tears. She remembered vividly the vital figure of the old man sitting up in bed in his nightshirt. She was deeply sorry that he was dead. Where his daughter Caroline had been a mothlike creature, disappeared before dawn, one would almost expect to hear the General’s voice thundering angrily from the family vault.

“I will be buried there one day,” Beatrice thought to herself suddenly and surprisingly.

When the little procession moved slowly down the aisle she gazed eagerly and hungrily at William’s face. It was sober and sad, as one would have expected on such an occasion. His skin had a healthy tan from the Italian sun. He was slim, graceful and mature in his dark clothes, yet Beatrice was sure that he had only to look at her with recognition and he would again be the friendly boy on the Heath, excited over the capture of a butterfly.

By chance he did look straight at her. Her heart fluttered wildly, like the caught butterfly in the net, although she knew she must be unrecognisable behind the dark veil. She discovered, however, that she was as deeply infatuated as ever. This hardly surprised her, as she knew she was one of those dull women who loved only once and forever.

And what was she to do about that situation, she wondered, for now that her ally, the General, was gone, it didn’t seem that there would ever be an opportunity to renew her acquaintance with the Overton family.

She was mistaken, however, for some time after the General’s death a gilt-edged invitation arrived. Mr William Overton and Mrs Blanche Overton requested the pleasure of Miss Beatrice Bonnington’s company at a soirée with music and dancing on Saturday, the third of May, at seven-thirty.

Beatrice was not an adept at the art of enjoying parties. In fact, she dreaded them. She was unnatural, her mother said, and if she didn’t make an effort to make herself a pleasant guest she was going to become a social misfit. However, to her mother’s surprise, she accepted this invitation with every evidence of pleasure, although she wore the withdrawn dreamy look that meant she was dwelling on some private scheme.

In this case the scheme only amounted to a determination to dance with William, and when the dance was over, to lure him into the garden. She had always wanted to walk over those mossy lawns in the moonlight. William would be too well-mannered to refuse her request.

It didn’t turn out exactly like that however. In the first place, with her lack of interest in clothes, Beatrice allowed Miss Brown to overdress her in dark green taffeta with a great many ruffles. Beatrice rustled expensively as she walked. She rather enjoyed this. It made her feel like a duchess, she confided to Papa who had been persuaded to escort her to the door of Overton House.

He didn’t approve of this party any more than he approved of her association with the Overton family. He was afraid the classy lot of guests would look down on his daughter and give her a miserable evening. Besides, he had been checking accounts and had found that Mrs Overton and her precious idle son owed far too much to Bonnington’s where they had been customers for some years. He might shortly have to send them a dunning letter, which would be embarrassing after Beatrice had accepted their hospitality.

However, he grumblingly agreed to walk her the short distance to Overton House. He would call for her sharp at midnight, he said.

“Like Cinderella,” Beatrice said.

“Cinder—who?”

“Papa, you must read your fairy tales. Sometimes they even come true.”

They didn’t, of course.

Beatrice made that sobering discovery after she had handed her wrap to the maid and, exposed in all the importance (Miss Brown’s word) of her stiff taffeta dress, had seen that everyone else was wearing floating chiffons and soft silks. She looked like a little solid dark fir tree in a summer garden.

Well, it didn’t matter. She would be noticeable. That surely was the old General putting thoughts in her mind to give her courage, as Mrs Overton, in trailing misty grey, took her hand and murmured something inaudible. Then William came with his warm smile.

“Miss Bonnington! I’m so glad you could come.”

He spoke with such apparent sincerity, and looked so handsome that excitement and pleasure made a corkscrew of pain twist through her stomach. She hadn’t known one loved with one’s vital organs as well as with one’s heart, she thought dazedly. For this was love, she was certain. It had always been love.

But already William had left her and was the centre of a cluster of pretty young women with ringlets and gauzy dresses. She, the unexciting little fir tree, stood at the edge of this gay plot of flowers.

Violins were twanging. The long music room, lit by hundreds of candles, had all the desired appearance of a fairy tale even if already, for Beatrice, the right atmosphere failed to exist. There were a lot of little gilt chairs round the walls. She sat on one of these and opened and shut her fan, thinking how ridiculous these affairs were, fans, beaded evening bags, dance programmes, artificial chatter. When she was mistress here, she decided, indulging in her fantasy, parties would be comfortable cosy affairs with only one’s best friends, and at last she would learn to be a good conversationalist.