The Ladies of Missalonghi (9 page)

“Dearest Augusta and Antonia, it is the Saxon in us,” fluted Drusilla to the sisters she saw least of.

Aurelia was devoting herself almost exclusively to Lady Billy, who had been amputated from her horse for the afternoon, not without bitter protest. And Lady Billy was sitting looking encephalitically expressionless, for she had no daughters of her own and no interest whatsoever in women. En masse they both frightened and upset her, and the greatest grief of her life had been the acquisition of Alicia Marshall as a prospective daughter-in-law. Undeterred by the fact that she fought a lone battle, Lady Billy had loudly opposed Little Willie’s betrothal to his second cousin Alicia, declaring that they would never run together as a team, and would breed very poor stock. However, Sir William (called Billy) rode roughshod over her, as indeed he did over everybody; he had always had an eye for Alicia himself, and was delighted at the prospect of looking down his dining table every night to see Alicia’s shining flaxen head and lovely face. For it had been arranged that the newlywed couple would reside at Hurlingford Lodge with Sir William and his lady for some months at least; Sir William’s wedding present was prime land, ten acres of it, but the house built upon it was nowhere near finished.

Left very much to her own devices, Missy looked around for Una. She found Aunt Livilla, but no Una. How odd!

“I don’t see Una here today,” said Missy to Alicia when that ravishing creature drifted by with a bright and wonderfully condescending smile.

“Who?” asked Alicia, stopping.

“Una – Aunt Livilla’s cousin – she works in the library.”

“Silly girl, there’s no Hurlingford by that name in Byron,” said Alicia, who had never been known to read a book. And off she went to spread her glorious presence as thinly across the surface of the gathering as the layer of jam on a boarding school pudding.

At which point the penny dropped. Of course! Una was
divorced
! An unheard-of sin! Stirred to the extent of providing a roof over her cousin’s head Aunt Livilla might have been, but her humanitarian instincts would never extend to allowing that cousin – that
divorced
cousin – to enter Byron society. So it seemed Aunt Livilla had decided to keep quiet about Una altogether. Come to think of it, Una herself had been the sole source of Missy’s information; on the rare occasions since Una’s advent that Missy had found Aunt Livilla in the library, Aunt Livilla had never mentioned Una’s name, and Missy, who was afraid of Aunt Livilla, had not mentioned Una either.

Drusilla bustled up, her sister Cornelia in tow. “Oh, is this not splendid?” she asked, speech patterns perfect.

“Very splendid,” said Missy, shifting up on the sofa she had found behind a large potted Kentia palm cluster.

Drusilla and Cornelia sat down, replete with at least one specimen from every kind of delicacy offered at the buffet.

“So kind! So considerate! Dear Alicia!” waffled Cornelia, who regarded it as a great privilege to be permitted to work for a pittance as Alicia’s sales dame, and had no idea how cynically Alicia traded on her gratitude and devotion. Until Chez Chapeau Alicia had opened its doors, Cornelia had worked for her brother Herbert in his alteration room, so there were grounds for her illusions; Herbert was so stingy he made Alicia look like a lady bountiful. In the same way as Octavia, and with the same result, Cornelia had sold her house and five acres to Herbert, only in her case it was to help her sister Julia pay her tea room off when Julia bought it from Herbert.

“Hush!” breathed Drusilla. “Alicia is going to speak.”

Alicia spoke, cheeks glowing, eyes sparkling like bleached aquamarines. The names of the ten bridesmaids were greeted with squeals and claps; the chief bridesmaid fainted clean away from the honour of it, and had to be revived with smelling-salts. According to Alicia, the dresses for her attendants were to be paired in five shades of pink, from palest through to deep cyclamen, so that when the white-clad bride stood at the altar she would be flanked on either side by five attendants who gradually shaded from palest pink at the bride’s end to rich dark pink at the farthest end.

“We are all very nearly the same height, all very fair, and of much the same figure,” explained Alicia. “I think the effect will be remarkable.”

“Is it not a brilliant concept?” whispered Cornelia, privileged to have been a party to the preliminary planning of the entire bridal. “Alicia’s train will be of Alençon lace, twenty feet long, and cut on the full circle!”

“Magnificent,” sighed Drusilla, remembering that the train on her own wedding gown had been of lace and even longer, but deciding not to say so.

“I notice Alicia has kept her choice to virgins only,” said Missy, whose stitch had been bothering her ever since the seven-mile walk from Missalonghi, and now was growing worse. To leave the room was impossible, but nor could she sit still and silent a moment longer; to keep her mind off the pain, she started to talk. “Very orthodox of her,” she continued, “but I’m
definitely
a virgin, and I didn’t get picked.”

“Sssssh!” hissed Drusilla.

“Dearest little Missy, you’re too short and too dark,” murmured Cornelia, feeling very sorry for her niece.

“I’m five feet seven in my stockinged feet,” said Missy, making no effort to mute her voice. “Only among a collection of Hurlingfords would that be called short!”

“Sssssh!” hissed Drusilla again.

In the meantime Alicia had passed to the subject of flowers, and was informing her enthralled audience that every bouquet would consist of dozens of pink orchids that were coming down in chilled boxes on the Brisbane train.

“Orchids! How ostentatiously vulgar!” said Missy loudly.

“Sssssh!” from Drusilla, despairingly.

At this moment Alicia fell silent, having shot her bolt.

“You’d wonder that she’s happy to give the whole show away at this early stage,” said Missy to no one in particular, “but I suppose she thinks if she doesn’t, half the details she’s so proud of won’t even be noticed.”

Down swept Alicia upon them, laughing, glowing, her head full of limelight and her hands full of bridal sketches and swatches of fabric.

“It’s such a pity you’re so dark and so short, Missy,” she said, very prettily. “I would have liked to ask you, but you must see that you wouldn’t fit in as a bridesmaid.”

“Well, I think it’s a pity that
you’re
not dark and short,” said Missy, equally prettily. “With everyone around you of similar height and colouring, and all that gradual shading of pink, you’re going to fade into the wallpaper.”

Alicia gasped. Drusilla gasped. Cornelia gasped.

Missy got up in a leisurely manner and attempted to shake the creases out of her brown linen skirt. “I think I’ll be off now,” she said chirpily. “Nice party, Alicia, but utterly undistinguished. Why does everybody have to serve the same old food? I would have appreciated a really good curried egg sandwich for a change.”

She had gone before her audience managed to regain its breath; when it did, Drusilla was forced to hide a smile, and turn a deliberately deaf ear to Alicia’s demand that Missy must be fetched back to apologise. Served Alicia right! Why couldn’t she have been kind just this once, marred her perfect bridal group by including poor Missy in it? How amazing! Missy’s analysis was spot on; Alicia
would
fade into the wallpaper, or rather into the pink and white bows and bouquets and bunting with which she intended to deck the church.

Just outside the front door of Mon Repos, the awful pain and airlessness struck. Deciding she would rather die in decent seclusion, Missy left the gravel drive and darted round the side of the house. Of course Aurelia Marshall’s notions of garden layout did not permit a hint of thicket, so there were very few places wherein Missy might huddle undetected. The closest of these was a large clump of rhododendrons beneath one of the downstairs windows, so into the middle of the clump Missy crawled, and half-sat, half-lay with her back against the red brick behind the shrubs. The pain was unbearable, yet had to be borne. She closed her eyes and willed herself not to die until she could die in John Smith’s arms, like the girl in
The Troubled Heart
. What a depressing place to be found all stiff and stark, Aunt Aurelia’s rhododendron bushes!

She didn’t die. After a little while the pain began to recede, and she began to stir. There were voices nearby, and, since the rhododendrons were still rather bare from their autumn pruning, she didn’t want the talkers to come round the corner and find her. So she rolled over onto her knees and started to get up. That was when she realised that the voices were coming from the window just above her head.

“Did you ever see such a monstrosity of a hat?” asked a voice Missy recognised as belonging to Aunt Augusta’s youngest daughter, Lavinia; of course Lavinia was a bridesmaid.

“All too often, in church every Sunday to be exact,” said Alicia’s tonelessly harsh voice. “Though I think the person underneath the hat is a far worse monstrosity.”

“She’s so
drab
!” came a third voice, belonging to the chief bridesmaid, Aunt Antonia’s daughter Marcia. “Honestly, Alicia, you’re according her far too much importance by calling her a monstrosity. Nonentity is a much better word for Missy Wright, though the hat, I grant you, is indeed a monstrosity.”

“You have a point,” conceded Alicia, who was still smarting from the unexpected flick of Missy’s observation about fading into the wallpaper. Of course she was wrong! And yet Alicia knew that never again would the visual splendour of her wedding quite please her; Missy had planted her barb with more deadly skill than she realised.

“Do we really care about Missy Wright one way or another?” asked a more distant cousin called Portia.

“Due to the fact that her mother is my mother’s favourite sister, Portia, I’m afraid I have to,” declared Alicia in ringing tones. “Why Mama persists in pitying Auntie Drusie so, I don’t know, but I’ve given up hoping I’ll ever wean her from it. Oh, I daresay Mama’s charity is laudable, but I can tell you that I try never to be at home on Saturday mornings, when Auntie Drusie comes to gorge herself on Mama’s cakes. Lord, can she eat! Mama has Cook make two dozen fairy cakes, and by the time Auntie Drusie has gone, so have the fairy cakes, every last one.” Alicia produced a brittle unamused laugh. “It’s become a regular joke in our house, even among the servants.”

“Well, they are dreadfully poor, aren’t they?” asked Lavinia, who had been good at history at school, so aired her superiority by saying, “It always puzzled me why the French rabble guillotined Marie Antoinette, just because she said they should eat cake if they had no bread. It seems to me anyone dreadfully poor would adore the chance to eat cake for a change – I mean, look at Auntie Drusie!”

“Poor they are,” said Alicia, “and poor I am afraid they are going to remain, with Missy their only hope.”

That raised a general laugh.

“A pity one cannot have people condemned the way one can have houses condemned,” said another voice, a mere fourth or fifth cousin, by name of Junia; disappointment at not being chosen as a bridesmaid had concentrated all her natural venom down to one or two deadly drops.

“In this day and age, Junia, we are too kind for that,” said Alicia. “Therefore we must all go on putting up with Auntie Drusie and Auntie Octie and Cousin Missy and Auntie Julie and Auntie Cornie and the rest of the spinster-widow brigade. Take my wedding. They will quite spoil it! But Mama rightly says they must be invited, and of course they will come the earliest and be the very last to go home. Haven’t you noticed how pimples and boils always pop up when they’re least welcome? However, Mama did have a brainwave that will spare us from those hideous brown dresses. She bought my household linens from Auntie Drusie for two hundred pounds. And I will admit that they do the most remarkably fine and dainty work, so Mama’s money was not wasted, thank God. Embroidered pillow-slips closed with little covered buttons, and every last button embroidered with a tiny rosebud! Very beautiful! Anyway, Mama’s scheme worked, because Uncle Herbert slipped the word to her that Missy came in and bought three dress-lengths – lilac for Auntie Drusie and blue for Auntie Octie. Any guesses what colour for Cousin Missy?”

“
Brown
!” chorused every voice, and then there was a gale of laughter.

“I have an idea!” cried Lavinia when the merriment ceased. “Why don’t you give Missy one of your own cast-offs in a shade that will suit her?”

“I’d rather be dead,” said Alicia scornfully. “See one of my lovely dresses on that dago-looking scragbag? If you feel so strongly about it, my dear Lavinia, why don’t you donate her one of your cast-offs?”

“I am not,” said Lavinia tartly, “in your cosy financial position, Alicia, that’s why! Think about it, since you’re so peeved at her appearance. You wear a lot of amber and old gold and apricot. I imagine anything in that sort of range would look all right on Missy.”

At which point Missy managed to get herself on hands and knees out of the rhododendrons and onto the path. She crept on all fours until she was well clear of the window, then got to her feet and ran. The tears were pouring down her face, but she wasn’t about to stop and dry them, too angry and shamed to care who might see.

She hadn’t thought anything anybody might say about her could hurt, for a thousand thousand times in her imagination she had catalogued the various pitying or contemptuous things that might conceivably be said about her. Nor did it hurt, really. What stabbed to the quick were the dreadful things Alicia and her friends had said about her mother and all those poor spinster aunts, so decent and honourable and hard-working, so grateful for any attention, yet so proud they would accept nothing they suspected might be charity. How dared Alicia speak of those infinitely more admirable women so scathingly, so unfeelingly! Let Alicia see how she would fare if she were placed in the same pinched shoes!

As she hurried through Byron with the stitch again burning in her side, Missy found herself praying that the library would be open, for Una would be in occupation. Oh, how she needed Una tonight! But the premises were dark, and a sign on the door simply said CLOSED.