The Edwardians (22 page)

Nor was the writing table the end of her delights, for everything in the room seemed to be marked with the sign of its ownership. Even the beribboned cosy which went over the hot water can had the crossed C's and the coronet embroidered upon it; likewise the sheets, when Teresa turned down the counterpane to see; and they, furthermore, had a wide pink satin ribbon threaded through them. Teresa kept on exclaiming what all this must cost, “and fancy, John,” she said, “it isn't only one bedroom, but twenty bedrooms, thirty bedrooms! so all this has to be provided twenty, thirty times over. But I don't like the duchess; do you, John? I'm sure she's very snappy in private life. Such a funny crumpled face, and I bet she dyes her hair. I wish Lady Roehampton was here. I don't like that Mrs. Levison either, though I know she's terribly smart—really the cream of the cream. I bet she has a tongue. And Lady Viola—she looks as cold as ice. Isn't it funny, John, that a nobody like Mrs. Levison should be so smart? You never can tell with these people, can you? They say that she is trying to set the fashion for women to dine alone with men in restaurants. I don't like that sort of thing; do you, John? Fast, I call it. Oh, dear, I do wish I had some jewels to put on for dinner. Do you think the ladies will wear their tiaras? No, perhaps not in a private house. Who do you think will take me in to dinner? I wish it could be the duke, but I suppose that's impossible, with all these ladies of title about. I must say, I think he was very nice when we arrived, and what dear little dogs he has; I daresay he thought we might be a bit shy. I wasn't; were you, John? One is all right so long as one doesn't put oneself forward, don't you think? What a lovely big room that was, and, oh! did you notice the flowers? Lilac, and roses! At Christmas! Do you think the duke would show us the hothouses? Could I ask him, do you think? Or would it look silly?” So Teresa had run on, until it was time to dress for dinner, when a maid scared her by coming to ask if there was anything she wanted.

At home, when doing her packing, she had looked with some satisfaction upon her clothes. Nothing there that might not meet the critical eye of the Chevron housemaids! Except, perhaps, her bedroom slippers. She had scrutinised them, then had decided in their favour; they were a little worn on one side, certainly, but that might be overlooked, and really she could not ask John for any more money; he had given her a generous cheque already. But here, at Chevron, in this luxurious bedroom, her poor little chemises and her nightgown looked paltry; and as for the slippers, they had turned unaccountably shabby. She wondered if she should hide them away; but it was too late; the housemaid had unpacked and had seen them. Teresa felt vexed. She regretted that she had given up her keys before dinner, when a footman came to ask her for them. But how could she have said that she would unpack her trunk herself? That would have revealed a woeful lack of
savoir faire
;
and
savoir faire
for the moment Was Teresa's god. She had given up her keys as though all her life she had been accustomed to have a maid; indeed, she had hoped that everybody Within hearing would assume that she had brought her own maid, and that her retention of the keys was accidental. The Chevron housemaid was the only blot on Teresa's paradise.

Then she made a fresh discovery, which again scattered her regrets in the wind of her excitement. She discovered a nosegay upon her dressing table: two orchids and a spray of maiden-hair fern. She flew into John's dressing room next door, and there discovered the masculine counterpart: a buttonhole consisting of one exquisitely furled yellow rosebud. John by then was in his bath. She stood, cupping the rosebud within her hands as though it represented the total and final expression of everything refined and luxurious.

That had been last night. At dinner, the butler had thrown Teresa into a fresh fluster by saying to her, “Champagne, m'lady?” After dinner they had sat upstairs, in the great drawing room, surrounded by more lilac and more roses, and the family portraits had looked down on them from the walls, filling Teresa with curiosity and admiration; but as nobody else made any comment, she judged it prudent to make none either. She had felt acutely uncomfortable during the half-hour she sat up there alone with the ladies, for Teresa did not care for women at the best of times, and these ladies who addressed a few remarks to her out of good manners, but who could certainly not fail to wish her out of the way, were especially not calculated to put her at her ease. Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions; until Teresa, unable to do anything but observe, came to the conclusion that they thought their topics not merely the most absorbing in the world, but, rather, the only possible topics. She watched them wonderingly, much as Anquetil, also an outsider, had once watched them, but her reflections were very different from his. She envied, instead of scorning, their prodigious self-sufficiency, their tacit exclusion of all the world outside their own circle. She marvelled at the uniformity of their appearance: tall or short, stout or thin, young or old, there was an indefinable resemblance, something in the metallic glance of the eye, the hard line of the mouth, the movement of the hands with their many rings and bangles. This glance of the eye was peculiar; although penetrating, it had something of the deadness of a fish's eye; glassy, as though a slight film obscured the vision; and the eyelids moreover were sharply cut, as though a narrowing tuck had been taken in them, still further robbing the eyes of any open generosity they might once have possessed. Altogether, Teresa thought that these ladies ought properly to be sitting under glass cases in a museum, so fixed did they appear, so far removed from any possible disorder; their coiffures elaborate and perfect, their gowns so manifestly expensive and yet so much a part of them, their manner so secure from any conceivable bewilderment or confusion. Surely no natural element would ever disturb that fine complacency; no gale would dishevel that architectural hair, no passion ravage those corseted busts. No passion, thought Teresa with an exquisite shiver, but a chill and calculated wickedness. She did not criticise; she admired. She thought that they were like all the portraits by Sargent that she had ever seen—and she went to the Academy every year with John, so she had seen a good many—divine inhabitants of a world apart, for whom nothing sordid, nothing petty, and nothing painful had any existence at all; served by innumerable domestics, prepared for the day or the evening by innumerable maids, hairdressers, manicurists, beauty specialists, chiropodists, tailors, and dressmakers; sallying forth, scented and equipped, from their dressing rooms, to consort as familiarly with the Great as she herself with Mrs. Tolputt.

Yet she was forced to admit that they did not seem to be saying anything worth saying.

She had expected their conversation to rival their appearance. She had expected to be dazzled by their wit and thrilled by their revelations. Try as she might, she had not been able to imagine what form their conversation would take; but had resigned herself humbly in anticipation, telling herself that she was in the position of a London child who had never seen the sea, or of a beggar suddenly promised a meal at Dieudonné's, She did not know what it would be like, only that it would be wonderful. And now she found that it differed very little from the conversation of her own acquaintances, only the references were to people she did not know, and the general assumptions were on a more extravagant scale. They even talked about their servants. “Yes, my dear,” Lady Edward was saying, “I have really had to get rid of the
chef
at last. We found he was using a hundred and forty-four dozen eggs a week.” They went into screams of laughter at phrases that Teresa (reluctantly) thought quite silly. In particular, there was one lady whose name Teresa did not know, but who could not open her mouth without pronouncing some quite unintelligible words that instantly provoked hilarity. Nevertheless, Teresa was interested. She supposed it must be some kind of jargon confined only to the most exclusive circles, and the fact that it should be used in her presence gave her a sense of flattering privity. She tried to dismiss the idea that it was really rather tiresome and affected, and that it reminded her of nothing so much as of a secret language used by herself and her fellows at school, which consisted in adding the syllables ‘jib' and ‘job' to every alternate word. ‘Are-jib you-job going-jib to-job play-jib hockey-job to-jib day-job?' The language had been known as Jib-job, and only the élite of the school had been allowed to use it. This language of the élite of London was apparently composed on much the same principle. It consisted in adding an Italian termination to English words; but as that termination was most frequently the termination of Italian verbs of the first declension, and as it was tacked on to English words irrespective of their being verbs, nouns, or adjectives, it could not be said to be based on any very creditable grammatical system. Smartness, Teresa couldn't help thinking, was cheap at such a price. “And after dinn-are, we might have a little dans-are,” said this anonymous lady; a suggestion greeted by exclamations of “What a deevy idea, Florence! There's nobody like Florence, is there, for deevy ideas like that?” The critical faculty, raising its head for a second in Teresa, though immediately stamped upon, suggested that there was nothing very original or divine in the idea of dancing after dinner. But, “How lovel-are!” cried Lucy, and suddenly recollecting her obligations as a hostess, she added, “You must tell Sebastian to bring Mrs. Spedding as his partnerina.” All those searchlight eyes were turned upon Teresa, modest in her corner. She was just shrewd enough to realise that the duchess with a twinge of social conscience had remembered her, left out in the cold. Hitherto, nobody had addressed any word to her but some phrase such as, “Do you live in London or the country, Mrs. Spedding?” a phrase which clearly could have no sequel but the actual timid reply. Now, thanks to Lucy's effort, Teresa became the momentary focus of interest. All the ladies took up Lucy's cue. They examined Teresa with a stare that was meant to be flattering, but which, in effect, was so patronising as to arouse Teresa's defiance. ‘‘I'm afraid I don't dance,” she said, knowing that she danced extremely well; far better, probably, than all these ladies getting on in years. No sooner had she said it, than she wished to bite her tongue out for thus obeying an unregistered instinct. Involuntarily she had been rude; and, though half of her was pleased at daring to be rude, the other half was frightened. But their good manners were, apparently, not to be shaken. “We don't believe that,” said Lucy with her light laugh; “we just don't believe that—do we? I'm sure Mrs. Spedding dans-ares like a ballerina. And anyway, if you won't let Sebastian bring you as a partnerina, I shall ask you to bring Sebastian as a partnerino. I'm sure you would never be so unkind as to refuse an anxious mother.”

After that, they had left Teresa in peace. She was at liberty to recover from the flutter into which they had thrown her. She could look round once more at the vast drawing room, and, unobserved, could take in the details of the panelling with the frieze of mermaids and dolphins, tails coiled into tails, scales overlapping onto scales in Elizabethan extravagance; she could look at the portraits while the click-clack of the conversation crackled in the background of her consciousness; she could leap across the centuries from the painting of Edward the Sixth holding a rose between finger and thumb, to the silver-framed photograph on a table of Edward the Seventh in a Homburg hat, his foot lifted ready upon the step of his first Daimler. Teresa devoted a good deal of her attention to a furtive observation of the photographs. Thanks to her own private collection, she was able to identify most of them. There was Lady de T., very dark and lovely, sitting, in evening dress, on the ground in a wood, a scatter of faggots beside her. There was Lady A., seated on a Louis Quinze
berg
è
re,
occupied with a spinning wheel at which she was not looking—a favourite composition of Miss Alice Hughes. There were the three beautiful W. sisters leaning over a balcony with a poodle. “For darling Lucy,” ran the inscription in a flowing feminine hand. There was Mrs. Langtry wrapped in furs, her profile turned to display her celebrated and lovely nose. There was Queen Alexandra wearing a crown, and Queen Alexandra wearing a bonnet, and Queen Alexandra surrounded by her grandchildren and dogs. There was the German Emperor in uniform, with an eagled helmet, his hands clasped on the hilt of his sword. These indications of intimacy sent associative shivers of delight down Teresa's susceptible backbone. She longed to prowl about the room alone, and savour the treasures that every table offered. But this, she told herself, was foolish. Was she not better employed in observing the flesh-and-blood that surrounded her? Photographs, after all, could be cut out of any illustrated paper. Teresa floated away on a dream. She considered the possibility of cutting out the next available photograph of the duchess; buying a silver frame for it; faking an inscription—”For dear Teresa,” it would run; or would “For dear Mrs. Spedding” be more probable and more convincing? “Chevron, Christmas 1906”—and standing it upon her own drawing room table for the benefit of Mrs. Tolputt and her friends. But what would John say? And what would she do if Sebastian unexpectedly came to call? Reluctantly she discarded the idea. The champagne must have gone to her head.

She decided that she did not like women. She felt much happier when the men came upstairs, and Sebastian immediately made his way to her side. She said again to John, that night in her bedroom, that Sebastian had been “very nice.”

Now she lay in her vast bed, having breakfast on a tray. She had already written a great many letters, and had boxed them into a pack, like cards, putting on the top of the pile a letter addressed to the only other titled person she knew—the wife of a surgeon who had recently been knighted. She looked very pretty, breakfasting in bed as to the manner born, and felt as luxurious as a cat in the sun. John teased her by saying that she would now never be willing to return with him to the wrong end of the Cromwell Road. Outside the window, the snowflakes were falling silently; the great courtyard was all white, every battlement was outlined in snow, and every now and then came a soft plop, as men shovelled the snow off the roofs. “Doesn't one feel,” said Teresa dreamily, “that all this has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years?—I mean, that the snow has fallen, and that men have gone up to shovel it off the roofs, and that it has fallen with that same soft sound, and that the flag has hung quite still, and that the clock has struck the hours. I wonder what Chevron is like in summer! I do hope the duke will ask us again.”