Chapter 13
13
SUMMER 1968
Eloise
‘Eloise, will you please get out from under my feet and do something?’ Muriel Hudson was irritable and Eloise knew it was because she, Eloise, was back at home. And this time for good. Thank God, she didn’t have to get through even one more day at that bloody awful school in Whitby. She’d never either managed to be invited, or been able to ingratiate herself, into the hierarchical tribes of girls who flocked together dependent on new or old money, academic ability or those, like her, who got through each day, each term, each year, always on the periphery. She had almost made it into Suzy Warrington’s little clique in the final term but had totally let herself down by throwing up over Annabel Bellingham’s burgundy velvet bell bottoms after downing too much of the vodka being passed round the dorm. The trousers were, as Annabel constantly reminded them all, a gift from some obscure cousin of Prince Charles. Apparently for services rendered. The trousers were ruined, as was her final attempt, after five years at St Bernadette’s, to infiltrate the inner circle.
Then, after school, the almost as bad nine months in Lausanne at Chateau Mont-Choisi where Muriel had insisted she go to be finished . ‘Actually,’ she’d heard her mother laugh in that put-on tinkly voice of hers over the table of one of her lunch parties with the girls – spiteful old hags as far as Eloise could see – ‘Eloise needs a bomb under her to actually get her started .’
Oh, ha ha, Mummy, such a bloody wit.
‘But I’m not sure what I should be doing,’ Eloise now said, trying to be logical as well as polite so as not to irritate her mother further. ‘I could walk around with several books on my head to show the world what superb posture I now have? I could lay the dining room table for you…’
‘Well, yes, that would be helpful,’ Muriel conceded. ‘Except we’ve no one round to dine until the Fairleys on the…’ She broke off as a movement in the garden made her stand and peer round the heavy damask curtains. ‘What is that woman doing now?’
Eloise moved across the room to join her mother at the window. ‘Oh, good, Granny’s here.’
‘Granny? Goodness me, the woman could be taken for the village idiot in that get-up. What is she wearing and what’s she doing ?’
‘She’s got Mr Bower’s old gardening coat on.’ Eloise giggled. ‘And his hat as well. He’d put them on one side to donate to Fred Hargreaves.’
‘Fred Hargreaves?’
‘You know, the farmer down Blackley Lane? He’s always on the lookout for old clothes, especially hats, to make new scarecrows, but Granny said she’d have them instead.’
‘Your grandmother is wearing our gardener’s cast-off clothes? Intended for a scarecrow?’ Muriel pulled a face of pure distaste. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘I took the dog down there for a walk and ended up talking to Mr Hargreaves. He offered to show me his scarecrows.’
‘I’ll bet he did,’ Muriel retorted indignantly. ‘You keep away, Eloise. Daddy and I haven’t spent an absolute fortune on your education just so you can hang around with… with… farmhands . I thought there was a bit of a whiff around you yesterday, but I didn’t like to say.’
‘It’s never stopped you before…’ Eloise knew she was pushing boundaries with Muriel and stopped as her mother glared in her direction.
‘That farmer has a reputation .’
‘What sort of reputation?’ Eloise was most interested.
‘Never you mind. What he gets up to down in The Green Dragon is no concern of ours.’
‘Well, it’s obviously a concern of yours , Mummy.’
‘Enough, Eloise, go and tidy your room. And then, perhaps you could help Mrs Baxter in the kitchen. A cake maybe? Don’t forget Michael is back home from school the day after tomorrow. You know what boys are like. They spend any time not kicking a ball stuffing themselves with cake.’
‘I’m a hopeless cook.’
‘But we sent you to Switzerland to learn to cook. All that money and you still can’t whip up a Victoria sponge or a batch of scones?’
‘They taught us the basics of shorthand and typing as well. Very much the basics, Mummy. They were more interested in the correct way to address the Ambassador to Nigeria if we should ever meet him…’
‘Nigeria? Goodness, I hope not. Bad enough with all these… these coloured people from India working in Daddy’s mill. The place is getting quite overrun with them.’
‘We had two really lovely girls from India at St Bernadette’s,’ Eloise pointed out.
‘Goodness,’ Muriel repeated, ‘Bombay to Whitby? I assume they were the daughters of someone high up in India? They must have got the money from somewhere?’
God, did her mother never shut up about money?
‘I’m going out to help Granny with the roses,’ Eloise said, turning to watch as her grandmother made her way across the lawn and orchards towards the beautiful walled rose garden.
‘I think not , Eloise. She’s more than happy out there by herself. There are broad beans to pod in the kitchen – Mrs Baxter never does it properly and…’ Muriel broke off as the telephone rang and, hearing her mother safely ensconced with her friend and the town’s latest gossip, Eloise slipped out into the drizzle and grey skies of a West Yorkshire July morning.
* * *
‘Hello, my darling.’ Maude Hudson grinned a welcome across the rose beds whose extravagant blooms, now harbouring droplets of moisture, were worthy of any professional rose grower. ‘How’s it going? Glad to be home?’ Maude held out her arms and Eloise went into them, the earthy, wet-dog smell of the gardener’s cast-off coat strangely comforting.
‘Well, glad to be back from Switzerland.’ Eloise nodded from the depths of the hug.
‘But finding it difficult to settle into being back at Hudson House? Back in this backwater of Yorkshire?’
Eloise nodded again.
‘Your mother being a pain in the arse?’
Eloise giggled at her grandmother’s language. Despite being brought up in the higher echelons of North Yorkshire society and, like Eloise, sent away to school and then to finishing school, Maude Hudson wasn’t averse to using the language of the lower orders. ‘Granny, what am I going to do with my life? Mummy’s insisting that I do the season.’
Maude cackled throatily, reaching into the pocket of the voluminous old tweed coat for her tin of roll-ups. ‘What season, for heaven’s sake? It’s 1968 and we’ve long moved on from all that nonsense, surely?’
‘No, it’s still being held,’ Eloise said gloomily. ‘And Mummy is determined I should be part of it, just like she was back in her day.’
‘Darling, your mother was never presented, was never a deb, though she likes to tell everyone she was. She married up when she married your father. Now, I had to go through the whole bloody circus when I was a girl.’ Maude inhaled deeply, blowing smoke rings up into the leaden sky. ‘Load of stuff and nonsense and, after all that rigmarole, I ended up marrying into West Yorkshire trade. My parents were not happy I was marrying and, not only moving to West Yorkshire from Harrogate, but marrying into a woollen textile family. Mind you, the Hudsons had the money. We Berkeleys had spent all our dosh on carousing, inheritance tax and trying to keep up appearances.’ She cackled again. ‘My mother might have looked down on the Hudsons, but she was jolly glad I was marrying into money and would eventually move into Hudson House.’
‘You didn’t marry Grandpa just for his money?’ Eloise was shocked. She was going to marry for love. When it happened. If it ever did.
‘Well, the Hudson trade money helped. Of course, it did. But no, luckily your Grandpa Frank was really rather delicious in his twenties. Thighs that could crack a nut with all that riding he did…’
‘Granny!’ Eloise giggled nervously.
‘Bloody good in the sack was your grandpa.’
Eloise put two hands to her ears, her face flaming with embarrassment.
‘Oh, deary me, what has that prudish mother of yours taught you? Nothing, I suppose? Listen, my darling, if I were you, I’d get out of here while you can. There’s London just two hundred miles down the A1.’
‘Mummy would never let me go.’
‘No.’ Maude shook her head almost sadly. ‘No, I don’t suppose she would. And, my sweet, if you were to head off by yourself, you’d be eaten alive.’ She was silent for a good few seconds. ‘Au pair, that’s it. You could be an au pair in London. I’ll bring you my copy of The Lady . France even… A year in Paris. That should toughen you up a bit…’
‘Granny, I’m no further on speaking French after a year in Lausanne than when I left school. “ Je voudrais un gateau, s’il-vous-plait ” is about all I managed. Mainly because I was always hungry. No one seemed to eat much at school. Probably because even an orange had to be eaten with a knife and fork.’
Maude laughed. ‘I remember it well. So, Eloise, what are you going to do with yourself, then? Because if you stand still, that mother of yours will have you married off to the highest bidder before you know it.’
‘I suppose that’s what she’s aiming for with the season. Mummy is chair of the Yorkshire Young Debutantes Association and is, “determined to uphold tradition”.’ Eloise air-quoted the words.
‘I bet your mother doesn’t know that Prince Philip considered the Queen Charlotte’s Ball “bloody daft” and…’ Maude broke off, laughing, ‘…Princess Margaret apparently said: “We had to put a stop to it… every tart in London was getting in”.’
‘I think Mummy is intent on it being local rather than in London. She’s planning a big ball at The Queen’s hotel in Leeds.’
‘Goodness, how utterly common.’ Maude turned back to the climbing rose she was determinedly tying to a trellis. ‘Mind you, I’m surprised she hasn’t considered having the whole of Yorkshire society in that great white monstrosity Frank’s father had built up beyond the orchard – it’s certainly big enough to fit them all in now she’s extended it.’
‘Actually, I think Mummy is planning something in there. My coming-out drinks do at some point before the big bash in Leeds.’
‘So you can be picked over by every beady-eyed, fortune-hunting mama in Yorkshire?’
‘Suppose.’ Eloise sighed gloomily.
‘Come on, darling. Get stuck into a bit of deadheading and then I’ll drive you back down to my house for lunch. Cheese on toast with Branston and a little glass of sherry? And I can show you what I’ve bought you.’
* * *
‘It’s a late birthday present,’ Maude said handing over a rather untidily wrapped box. ‘I didn’t want to send it over to you in Switzerland – thought it might get smashed. And, it’s always nice to have an un-birthday present, isn’t it?’
‘Gosh, what on earth is it?’ Eloise glanced across at her grandmother.
‘Open it and see.’
‘Oh, Granny. How did you know this is just what I wanted?’ Eloise stroked the box even before opening it to take out the contents inside. ‘A Praktica Super TL!’
‘I did my research,’ Maude said proudly. ‘Went into Schofields in Leeds and spent a very entertaining hour with a young man there. Now he was gorgeous.’ She laughed, delighted with Eloise’s response to the present. ‘It’s a 35mm, I believe? And SLR. Whatever that means.’
‘Single-lens Reflex.’ Eloise continued to stroke the box until Maude laughed again.
‘Get it open; start using it.’
‘There were a couple of 35mm cameras in Lausanne that we were allowed to borrow, but nothing as up to date as this.’ Eloise opened the box carefully, taking the camera out with reverence.
‘And here are a few bits and pieces to go with it.’ Maude passed over another, larger box.
‘More?’ Eloise’s eyes were saucers.
‘Darling, you are my very favourite granddaughter.’
‘I’m your only granddaughter,’ Eloise tutted.
‘Just a couple of accessories to go with it.’ Maude smiled.
‘Granny!’ Eloise took out the wide-angle and long-focus lenses, the teleconverter and leather case, ten rolls of boxed 35mm film and an instruction book, placing each one on the kitchen table as she did so. ‘I can’t believe this.’
‘Just don’t tell your mother. I keep telling her I’m broke,’ Maude added.
‘You’re not, are you?’ Eloise pulled a worried face.
‘No, darling, I most certainly am not. But I enjoy having your mother think there’ll be nothing coming her way once I go. Another little sherry?’
* * *
The grey overcast sky had eventually cleared and, while Maude went to sit in her favourite armchair by the window, immediately closing her eyes, Eloise made her way down the garden path of the cottage, which was situated in the centre of Beddingfield village. Near enough to the village duck pond for Maude to wander round a couple of times each day with Samson, her ancient Jack Russell, as well as just across from the cricket pitch where she wasn’t averse to whiling away her Saturday and Sunday afternoons eyeing up the local talent in their cricket whites.
Nervously, Eloise practised taking snaps without film in the Praktica before manoeuvring the film into the back of the camera to take close-ups of Maude’s rain- and windblown peonies, convex raindrops shimmering and winking amongst the scarlet petals and stigma, like smooth uncut diamonds.
This, then, was what she was going to do with her summer.
* * *
‘Eloise, you really can’t spend all summer mooching around taking photographs like some female David Bailey.’ Ralph Hudson had arrived home late from the mill where there’d been tension brewing amongst the directors and the union rep over an area of the mill being given over for prayer to the mainly Muslim workers newly arrived from the Mirpur district of Pakistan.
‘I should think not.’ Muriel, feeling somewhat guilty that she’d spent a too long, but rather lovely lunch with her current squeeze – the town’s local Tory MP, Sir Keith Wadsworth – patted her husband’s arm in agreement. ‘Who is this David Bailey anyway?’ she added, affecting the little-girl pout she often put on to portray herself, for some reason, as her husband’s inferior. Eloise knew it thoroughly irritated her father, rather than pleased him.
‘Oh, Ma,’ Brian Hudson tutted, pouring himself a whisky before lying flat out on the gold-tasselled Knowle sofa, legs splayed, tie loosened. ‘The great David Bailey? Where’ve you been all this time? What a job he’s got, photographing all those dolly birds, legs right up to their backsides. Beats arguing with Don Whitwam and his cronies round the boardroom table all bloody afternoon. Don’s on our side anyway, but has to show he’s not. Religion should be kept out of the workplace; we don’t let the Baptists or the Catholics go off to pray every two minutes.’
‘And surely, Eloise,’ Muriel interrupted, obviously refusing to relinquish the issue of her daughter spending her summer taking photographs in return for a deeper debate about religious and cultural differences and inclusion, ‘women wouldn’t want another woman taking their photograph? Surely, they want to pose for men? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want another woman looking at me in my brassiere.’ Muriel patted coyly at her kitten-bowed blouse with long red manicured nails.
‘So, Eloise, what are you going to do?’ Ralph wasn’t letting it drop. ‘Your mother was insistent you do this year in Lausanne rather than A levels, which would have got you into university.’
‘Oh, we didn’t want a blue stocking in the family, Ralphie, darling,’ Muriel trilled. ‘What would Eloise have studied anyway?’
‘I rather liked maths,’ Eloise said. ‘And I quite fancied doing engineering.’
‘Oh pish,’ Muriel retorted, irritated now. ‘A man doesn’t want a wife who is cleverer than him. Look at Pamela Hughes.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Her husband was soon off with another woman once Pamela started doing that part-time degree of hers in Bradford instead of taking her turn to host Ladies’ Lunch.’
‘Right, Eloise,’ Ralph said matter-of-factly. ‘We’re desperately short of staff in the offices. You can type? A bit of shorthand? Answering the phone and some filing? Or on Reception?’
‘Oh, no, I don’t think so, Ralph! The boss’s daughter in the offices, with all the town’s office girls?’ Muriel appeared utterly affronted.
‘Dad, she’d be hopeless.’ Brian frowned. ‘She’s so bloody clumsy, she’d file important stuff away and not pass on phone calls…’
‘Oy, d’you mind?’ Eloise stood, knocking over Muriel’s martini from the Hepplewhite side table and, desperately trying to retrieve it, tripped over her mother’s Chanel handbag.
‘Well, it’s either that or actually in the weaving shed? Or with the menders? You need to earn a living, Eloise. You can start in the morning.’