Chapter Six
London
Brigid
‘Come with me, do,’ Brigid begged Patsy.
But Patsy – still new to being a married lady – said she couldn’t, she must be home when Alan came back from the House of Lords. ‘Anyway,’ she added, her voice tinny down the telephone. ‘It’s only tea with Honor. You don’t need company.’
‘Even tea with Honor is less fun without you,’ Brigid said sadly.
She sat on the bottom stair facing the front door of Number Five Grosvenor Place.
She knew she was in the way of the servants who moved through the house at their many tasks, but Lady Iveagh didn’t allow her to use the telephone in her sitting room, and Lord Iveagh had forbidden her the library after she had knocked a jug of water over the desk.
‘How clumsy you are,’ he had said. But he said it fondly.
After all, if she was clumsy – and she was – where else did she get it but from him?
‘Why did you have to go and marry?’ she asked, wedging the chunky ivory-coloured receiver between shoulder and ear so that she could wrap her arms around her bent knees and rest her chin on them.
Patsy was too pleased, and proud, to let that pass. ‘Because we all marry,’ she said piously. ‘And,’ with a gush of laughter, ‘because I am so very happy. My very own house, Biddy. My own car. You can’t imagine.’
‘Don’t gloat, for I cannot bear it.’ Brigid pulled the sleeves of her cardigan down over her hands. The house was cold. Lady Iveagh was clear that there were to be no fires after March, no matter the weather.
‘Well, you’ll be next. As soon as ever you want, I hear. Rumour has it that men are simply queuing up to ask you.’ Now that she was married, and safe, Patsy could afford to be generous.
‘Not I!’ Brigid said. ‘Not yet, anyhow. I know you say it’s jolly good fun, but I don’t know …
’ She paused. ‘It doesn’t always look like so much fun,’ she said in a rush.
‘I mean, not you and Alan. Or Mamma and Papa,’ she added loyally.
‘You seem very fond, but Honor and Chips … Maureen and Duff. The rows.’ She shuddered. ‘Oonagh and …’
‘Philip? Or now Oonagh and Dominic?’ Patsy supplied with a laugh. Cousin Oonagh was on her second husband, a man her father called The Stallion in a way that Lady Iveagh said ‘wasn’t quite nice …’ Neither Brigid nor Patsy knew what was meant, but they knew it was something to giggle at.
‘Quite! So you see, I am not so very quick to leap into it. I should like to do other things first.’
‘What other things?’ Patsy was curious.
‘I don’t know yet, but more than parties and nightclubs. And those interminable dinners where the entire time one is talking to the man on one’s right, one simply dreads the moment one has to turn and start all over again talking to the man on the left.’
‘Those!’ Patsy laughed. ‘But you are so good at them. A steady stream of charming patter …’
‘I have learned from the best,’ Brigid said.
‘The best?’
‘Chips, of course.’ She laughed, then winced as the receiver jerked against her chin.
‘Of course. I must say, you are quite a project for him.’ Did Patsy sound a little wistful? ‘I have heard him say there is nothing you cannot do.’
‘All but rubbing his hands in glee … He is like Mr Ainsley the grocer at the Elveden summer fete when he knows he has the largest marrow.’
Patsy started to laugh at that. ‘How funny you are. Well, don’t let him take you over entirely. In any case, I’m sure Honor will not allow it.’
‘I’m not at all sure,’ Brigid responded. ‘Lately it seems to me that she will allow anything that keeps him away from her.’
‘Brigid! Do not say so!’ Patsy sounded shocked.
Brigid sighed. Was there something that happened to girls when they got married?
she wondered. Some way in which they changed – became a tiny bit pompous or stuffy, or something?
It seemed to happen to them all. As if, on their wedding day, someone took them aside and let them into a solemn secret that only married ladies could know.
She hadn’t expected it of Patsy – always first to laugh during their nursery days.
She never used to say ‘Do not say so!’ in that scandalised tone.
‘I must get on,’ she said. ‘Already Minnie is eyeing me most beadily because I am blocking the dusting of the stairs.’
‘Liar!’ Patsy said cheerfully. ‘Do not tell me Minnie is anything but your devoted slave.’
‘Minnie is no one’s slave. I am positively terrified of her,’ Brigid said, then hung up and grinned at Minnie, who stood at the bottom of the stairs, neat in her black-and-white uniform, with a metal pail in one hand and duster in the other.
‘If that were true it would be useful, Lady Brigid,’ Minnie said. She didn’t smile – she never smiled much – but her eyes were merry.
‘Oh but it is. Only I don’t show it. By some heroic effort, I don’t show it. And I wish you would stop calling me “Lady Brigid”. You only do it since that ridiculous coming-out, and I hate it. Call me Biddy, like you used to.’
‘It’s the proper thing now,’ Minnie said. ‘So you’ll have to lump it.’
‘That’s what I love about you, Minnie darling. Always so accommodating.’ Brigid laughed. ‘Will you come and help me dress? I have tea at Belgrave Square.’
‘When I’m done my other duties,’ Minnie said. ‘I’m not your lady’s maid yet, as you well know.’
‘No,’ Brigid agreed. ‘Mamma says I have no need of a proper maid yet. And so I must share you with the stairs and the dusting.’
‘Don’t make me choose,’ Minnie said. ‘Now, get on with you. I will come and do your hair in a bit. You can look out your own clothes.’
Arriving at Number Five Belgrave Square that afternoon, Brigid gave her coat to Andrews and started across the vast hall.
Her heels clipped smartly on the marble tiles and as always she had to stifle a laugh at the opulence around her.
The hall reached up and around, disappearing into the dim, echoey depths of the house.
Everywhere was warm brown marble, softly shining wood and polished mirrors in gilt frames, so that she caught glimpses of her reflection trying to draw her on, this way and that, among the many urns and objects.
‘It’s as if he has created a zoo for things,’ Patsy had whispered to her, the first time they came to the house, nearly two years ago.
‘Perhaps they will mate with one another,’ Brigid had whispered back, causing Patsy to snigger.
She waited now, looking at the paintings that stared down upon her from gilt frames; some simpering, some stern.
Ladies and gentlemen of other times, brought together by Chips as witness to his triumph.
Somewhere, she knew, there was a Boucher, a voluptuous nude, that had caused her father consternation when Honor had shyly asked for money to buy it.
‘Six thousand pounds,’ her father had said, scandalised.
‘For a painting of someone else’s dead relative.
What can he possibly want with such a thing? ’
Chips came bustling into the hallway then to greet her, kissing her on both cheeks in a way that she found excessive and taking both her hands in his.
‘Let me look at you. Exquisite, as ever.’ His eyes ran over her as though they poured something hot and wet across her face, and Brigid felt – as Chips often made her feel – like she was something for sale in a window that had caught his eye.
‘I hear you were at the Café de Paris last night,’ he almost whispered as he leaned in. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I won’t tell.’ He twinkled at her. ‘I believe you were in very jolly company. Young Billy Cavendish. Hugh Fraser.’
‘Tell if you like,’ Brigid said. ‘I mean, there is nothing to tell.’ She shrugged.
‘We danced. Then we danced some more. Hugh ran me home. Everyone was perfectly pleasant and proper and terribly dull. And that’s it, all there, in a nutshell.
Nothing to tell. Nothing to not tell.’ If she had hoped to irritate Chips, she failed.
‘You say “pleasant and proper” as though they are bad things.’ He twinkled at her, all approval and conspiracy, until Brigid laughed and said, ‘Where is my sister?’
‘Upstairs. Come.’
In the first-floor drawing room, Honor sat beside the fire with a book. She looked, Brigid thought, tired and heavy but her face brightened when she saw Brigid.
‘Darling! How lovely. I have a postcard here for you, from Doris. Came this morning.’ She handed Brigid a card.
On the front was a cartoon of a jolly-looking pig wearing a top hat and tails.
On the back, Doris had written ‘Darling Biddy – you don’t mind that I still call you that, do you?
– I saw this dear fellow and thought, is he not fine? And yet a pig still, beneath it all.’
Brigid laughed. She knew well that Doris was teasing her.
She must have seen some of the society pages that went on about ‘Lady Brigid Guinness, splendid in tulle, with a tiara of emeralds on her head, attends Lady Astor’s ball’ and was gently mocking her, reminding her that she was still her same self beneath all the fuss.
Long ago, when Brigid was still in the schoolroom, they had both agreed that pigs were ‘quite the cleverest animals, though horses are the dearest’.
‘Did she write to you too?’ she asked Honor, tucking the card away in the pocket of her cardigan.
‘She did.’ Honor made a face. ‘It’s never enough. But better than nothing.’ Then, ‘I’ll ring for tea. Chips, you needn’t stay.’ Secretly, Brigid hoped he would. She didn’t trust Chips – not at all – but the truth was, he was better company than her sister.
‘But I do need. We have other guests.’ Chips wagged his finger at Honor in a way that could only have been annoying, Brigid thought.
Sure enough, a look of irritation flashed across Honor’s face.
She wore no lipstick, Brigid saw, and whatever powder she had applied earlier had settled into the deepening crease between her eyebrows and the grooves on either side of her mouth so that her face seemed clogged and weary.
‘Chips, I thought we agreed not …’