Grace Hardie (10 page)

‘How very kind, Mr Faraday. Grace, come and admire it with me.' Aunt Midge led the way briskly up the stairs and into the drawing room, where the water colour was propped up on an armchair. ‘The view from the terrace.
The lake and the mountains. How delightful!' She was talking in a breathless manner quite unlike her usual voice. No doubt she was as excited about this unexpected gift as Grace herself had been when she unwrapped the cuckoo clock. ‘Where do you think it should hang, Grace?' she asked.

This was the first time that Grace had been in her aunt's drawing room: she looked carefully around to find the best place. Between two tall windows which stretched almost from the floor to the ceiling hung a painting which seemed to her greatly to resemble the one on the chair. Both were water colours, mounted and framed in exactly the same way, and of the same size. The one on the wall was of a waterfall rather than of a lake, but each of the two pictures contained trees and areas of sky and cloud which were painted in a similar style.

‘It would make a pair with that one,' she said, pointing. ‘You could put one on either side of the fireplace.'

‘You're quite right, Grace. And I haven't introduced you. Mr Faraday, this is my niece, Grace Hardie.'

‘Grace Hardie of Greystones?' asked Mr Faraday, shaking hands.

Grace's eyes opened wide with astonishment. ‘How did you know that, Mr Faraday?'

‘Mr Faraday is an architect,' her aunt told her. ‘It was he who designed Greystones.'

‘Specially for you.' The remark was made with a smile, but it caused Aunt Midge to frown at him as though he had said something wrong.

‘Well, for your family,' she told Grace. ‘But with that very special room for you.'

‘The tower, yes.' Mr Faraday accepted the correction. ‘Because you were ill and needed a high room with a lot of sunshine. I hope you liked it.'

‘It's lovely,' said Grace. ‘It's still my bedroom now.'

‘I'm glad it was a success. Well, Miss Hardie, you'll be wanting to rest after your journey. I'll be on my way.'

‘You must come and take tea with us when the picture is hung. Until then, thank you very much indeed for a most generous gift.' Aunt Midge held out her hand and the architect bowed over it before withdrawing.

‘Now I must show you where you'll be sleeping,' Aunt Midge said to Grace. ‘More stairs, I'm afraid. And then Mrs Linacre will have luncheon ready for us.'

It was fun to explore the house and to sit down in a proper dining room, just as though she were grown up. Only after the meal, when they returned to the drawing room, did Grace once again look closely at the water colour.

‘Mr Faraday's a very good painter, isn't he? Did he draw a picture of Greystones before he built it?'

‘A lot of pictures,' her aunt told her. ‘They're called plans when architects draw them. They don't have to be as pretty as a picture like this – just to show what the new building will look like. So he would have made four drawings of the outside – one from each side – and then added another set of plans to show how it would look inside.'

‘How do you do that?' asked Grace. ‘When I do painting with Miss Sefton she tells me to paint what I can see, but you can't see inside from outside.'

‘I'll show you. Your father's got the plans for Grey-stones, of course. But Mr Faraday designed the new wing of my school as well, and I have some of his first sketches for it here.'

‘That was curious,' commented Grace. ‘I mean, Mr Faraday doing my house and then your school.'

‘It was
because
he did your house so well that I suggested
his name to my governors when they were considering the extension.'

‘But I thought he said he only met you a few weeks ago.'

‘He met me in the sense of running into me again by accident.' Her aunt spoke now with a touch of irritation, as though she had had enough of this conversation. ‘I'll go and look for the portfolio for you.'

She returned within a few minutes and spread out half a dozen large sheets of paper. Grace, who had spent those moments wondering whether there was some kind of mystery about Mr Faraday, banished the question from her mind as she studied the drawings and tried to work out what it was about the lines that made her feel as though she were indeed looking into one of the classrooms. Miss Sefton had never taught her anything about the rules of perspective.

‘I'd like to be able to draw the insides of things like that,' she said wistfully. ‘Are the girls at your school taught how to do it in that art room I saw?'

‘Yes, that's one of the things they learn.'

Grace said nothing more then; and the next few days were busy with treats as she was taken to see some of the sights of London. Only as the end of the brief holiday approached did she ask the question which had been in her mind ever since the hockey lesson.

‘I wish I could come to your school, Aunt Midge,' she said. ‘Do you think, if I asked Father …'

She hardly dared to go on. The chance to become a pupil at the school was only half of what she was pleading for. It would only be possible if she could live in her aunt's house; and that was a tremendously large favour to ask. The only reason why she dared to hint at it was the feeling she had had when she first arrived in London – the impression that she was
expected
to ask, and had indeed been taken into the school building expressly to be shown
what treats were on offer. But if she had been right about that, her aunt would at this moment be clapping her hands with the enthusiastic pleasure with which she usually greeted Grace's suggestions. Instead, she looked undecided, her forehead creased in doubt.

‘I'd love to have you here, dear, if you think you could manage the work,' she said. ‘Would you like me to set you a little test tomorrow? You wouldn't want to come to a school like this if you were always going to be bottom of the orders, of course. But if you felt you could do well and keep up with the other girls, I'd be happy to ask your parents whether you might stay with me during term time. Suppose you sit down now and write a list of all the lessons you do with Miss Sefton – and then tell me what the last thing is that you learned in each subject. Then I'll know what kind of questions to ask you. There's no point in my giving you a long division sum to do, for example, if you've never been shown how to solve it.'

Grace licked her lips nervously. She had not expected her request to be answered with an examination. Since the girls at school had tests every Monday morning as well as examinations at the end of each term, she could see that she would have to get used to doing them. But she was not good at sums, and she suspected that the kind of history and geography she had learned was not the kind that Midge would ask her to write down. Her French and German were quite good, she thought, because as well as her lessons with Miss Sefton she spent an hour in conversation with her mother in each language every week. In English, too, she knew her parts of speech and could do parsing. She wrote these three subjects at the top of her list before struggling to think of some rule of arithmetic that she could be sure of applying accurately.

That night, for the first time since her arrival in London,
Grace slept badly. As she brushed her hair in the morning, she could see in the glass that her eyes were ringed with black circles, making her face appear even paler than usual. ‘Did you have a bad night, dear?' asked her aunt, concerned, as soon as she appeared for breakfast.

‘My chest was a bit wheezy,' Grace confessed. ‘It's all right now, though.'

‘Your room wasn't damp, I hope. I asked Mrs Linacre most particularly … Your mother said she thought you'd grown out of these attacks. Does your wheezing start again every time you leave home?'

Grace had not had a bad attack since she was seven. Her holidays at the seaside had never affected her health. But if she were to confess this, it would put an end to her hopes of being invited to live in London. ‘I'm quite all right,' she repeated. ‘May I do the test straightaway?'

A paper with two questions on each subject was waiting for her on the bureau in the drawing room. Her aunt read the morning paper whilst Grace settled down to work. The French part of the test was easy, and she could manage the English as well. But the sums refused to come right. Grace scribbled figures and crossed them out and tried again. Tears of frustration and disappointment began to trickle down her cheeks. As long as she kept her back to her aunt, and neither sniffed nor dabbed with her handkerchief, perhaps no one would notice. But as she continued to struggle, a rasping noise made itself heard first in her throat and then in her chest. She had to fight for breath, and soon was unable to think of anything else.

‘You must leave that and rest a little,' said her aunt, alarmed by the sound of her breathing. She came over to the bureau to take the paper away. ‘Oh, Grace dear, it's not worth crying about. We shouldn't have spoiled your holiday with nasty things like tests.'

‘I can't make the sums come right,' sobbed Grace. ‘Miss Sefton tells me what to do, but I keep forgetting.'

Aunt Midge crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the empty grate. ‘We're going to forget about all this,' she said. ‘Off you go and put your hat and coat on. I'll take you to Kensington Gardens. You can sit down and rest in the sunshine until you feel better – and watch the children sailing their boats in the Round Pond. There's to be no more talk of lessons or tests.'

That promise was kept – but the holiday was in any case almost at an end, for it was later the same day that Grace's father arrived to take her home. This was the moment when the invitation might have been issued – that Grace should become a pupil at her aunt's school. But nothing was said, and she knew that nothing would ever be said.

She assumed that it was because she was not clever enough. It was only just as they were leaving that another possibility entered her head.

Her father was studying the new water colour, which had been hung in the place suggested by Grace herself. ‘Pretty,' he said to his sister.

‘Yes, isn't it?' That was her only comment. Nothing about the fact that she knew the artist. No mention even that that artist had designed Greystones and so was known to her brother. Although Grace was not good at sums, she could put two and two together in other ways. She was not supposed to have met Mr Faraday, and her aunt did not want her to meet him again. She would be in the way here: that was why she was being sent back to Greystones.

Well, Greystones was her home and everyone had taken it for granted that she would return there at the end of her visit. If it hadn't been for the hockey lesson, no other idea would have entered Grace's head. She ought not to be
disappointed when she had had no reason to hope. Anyway, Greystones was where she liked to be.

‘Thank you for having me, Aunt Midge,' she said politely.

‘Grace! Grace, come and tango with me.'

Jay was calling from the old schoolroom, which was a schoolroom no longer. On Grace's sixteenth birthday, two months earlier, her years with Miss Sefton had at last come to an end. The scuffed desks at which all the Hardie children had learned their letters and carved their initials had been pushed to the wall to clear a space on the green linoleum.

Grace smiled at the eagerness in her younger brother's voice. Of all the Hardie family, he was the quickest to pick up a new craze – and to drop it again. The year 1913 had come in to the sound of ragtime; but by now, in August, ragtime was old hat. Everyone who was anyone was dancing the tango. That, at least, was the report which he had brought with him from London, where he had just spent a month of his summer holiday with a schoolfriend.

At the age of thirteen Jay was not precisely sophisticated, but he possessed a talent for social adaptability. His schoolfriend's sister, an eighteen-year-old debutante, had been doing her season, and Grace listened in amazement as Jay described the timetable of visits to photographers and dressmakers and milliners, rides in Hyde Park and formal calls, soirées and parties, dinners and balls. What a contrast with her own uneventful life!

Her brother had been too young to act as an escort, but his aptitude for observation and mimicry enabled him to give a realistic impression of a young man about town. He had taught Grace the new dance as soon as he returned. Now, winding up the gramophone, he led her into the
tango with self-possessed elegance, as though he were six feet tall and wearing white tie and tails.

One day, no doubt, he
would
be six feet tall, but for the moment Grace towered above him. Stronger as well as bigger than her younger brother, she found it hard to follow his lead with the swerving fluidity demanded by the rhythm. It was easier, when the record came to an end and Jay was rewinding the gramophone, to continue dancing by herself to imaginary music, dipping and pausing and turning with a swishing of skirts. Jay restarted the record – the only tango he possessed – and took her hint, touching just her fingertips as they danced side by side, together and yet separate.

Very soon now, Grace supposed, Jay would enter the clumsy stage through which all their brothers had passed, but for the moment he was a neat dancer, in perfect control of his body. There was a look in his eyes, dreamily intense, which she remembered from earlier enthusiasms. It meant that he had temporarily become someone else – Vernon Castle, perhaps, that most elegant of ballroom dancers, whose fame had crossed the Atlantic. She waited until the record ended for a second time before speaking.

‘How's the poetry going?' she asked, picking up a gramophone needle and sharpening it.

‘Oh, that.' Jay's pale cheeks flushed like a girl's. ‘I've given that up.'