Читать книгу Voyage of Innocence - Elizabeth Edmondson - Страница 12

Vee held the white, round box in her hand, hesitating. She lifted the lid, and shook two pills on to her palm.

Recently, these pills had begun to have a strange effect on her, in some mysterious way causing her to relive, in the utmost clarity, scenes from her life. Not truly dreams, for there was nothing in the sequences that rolled through her mind that hadn’t happened. The past was simply playing over again, as though she were watching a film.

When she woke, tired and thick-headed, for she always had alcohol to help the sleeping pills work, she could remember only a little of these waking dreams, the re-enactments of her former life, but the memories and images they left in her mind disturbed her profoundly throughout the ensuing day, until the evening came, and her mind cleared, and she could numb herself once more with a drink and companionship. She never drank to excess. She couldn’t risk losing control, the alcohol was merely a crutch, not a wiper-out of the emotions and dilemmas she longed to be free of.

She had been tempted, over the last few months, to try some of Mildred’s remedy for keeping the world at bay, but it wasn’t for her, she didn’t want a sense of heightened excitement, she had that on her own account. What she wanted was the cessation of feeling, then she could be happy.

Better to relive scenes of her past than to be caught in more nightmares.

She sat down and brushed her hair, long firm strokes to soothe her fears away. Then she climbed into bed, between stiff sheets, smelling of ironing and starch. She left the light on, a glowing blue night-light. Like on a train, she thought drowsily, as the pills began to take effect. Sweet dreams, she muttered to herself, as her eyelids closed. Sweet dreams, or bitter dreams, to match her thoughts.

Tonight, she was back in the Deanery. She was eighteen years old, she knew that, because there was a birthday just past, and a card on the fireplace of her room, wishing her a happy birthday from Hugh. He’d drawn a caricature of her and her cat, a brilliant sketch, both the cat and the chair it was on decorated with bows. Hugh was as gifted with his pen as he was with words.

She was sure that it wasn’t going to work. It was worth a try, it was always worth a try, but she, and the mistresses at school, and Hugh, who had been as encouraging as he knew how, had all known that Grandfather would forbid her to go to university.

‘No chance of a scholarship, Vee, I suppose?’ Hugh asked her as they sat, legs outstretched, on the white window seat in their sitting room on the top floor. The window was open, although the day was cold, since they were enjoying an illicit cigarette. Smoking, like alcohol, was banned in the Deanery.

‘There’s a chap I know at the House, he gets two hundred and fifty a year. Twice what his father earns, actually.’

‘What does his father do?’ Vee asked.

‘He’s a carpenter, I think.’

‘Only Daddy isn’t a carpenter, unfortunately, so I doubt if I count as a deserving case.’

‘Should have had Jesus for a father,’ said Hugh irreverently. ‘After all, God the Father, one substance with the Son, so … All right, I’m not really being frivolous, I’m trying to help.’

‘Irreligious rather than frivolous, don’t you think?’ She tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette carefully on to the outside ledge of the window. ‘Women’s colleges aren’t rich, and the scholarship girls are all poor.’

‘You’ll be poor, if Daddy and Grandfather cut off your allowance.’

‘It isn’t the same. Besides, you have to be brilliant to get a major scholarship, as well as being deserving, and I’m neither.’

‘True. Joel Ibbotson is brilliant, no doubt about it.’

It was all very well for Hugh, but however compassionate he was, his was a different situation. He was a man, he didn’t have to earn or justify or sweat for his place at university. It was the next natural thing for him.

‘Whereas for me, the next natural thing is getting married and starting a family.’

‘I pity the poor husband,’ said Hugh, tossing the butt of cigarette out of the window.

‘You are an ass, Hugh, now we’ll have to go down and find it before the gardener does.’

The gardener, a dour ancient of even more puritanical inclinations than the Dean, deeply disapproved of smoking, and had been known to harangue tourists with a stream of Old Testament prophecy about where those who smoked would end up.

Hugh slid to his feet. ‘Lord, yes, what a bore, but anything not to get a lecture about going from one smoking pit to another.’

Vee got up and linked arms with him. ‘Or Daddy being distressed and asking himself where he went wrong with us.’

Hugh looked at Vee with affection. He was barely half a head taller than her, short for a man. They were very alike, obviously brother and sister in physique and colouring, and with the same direct gaze in their dark eyes.

‘He did go wrong, in a very big way, I fear, but smoking is the least of it.’

Hugh wasn’t there when their grandfather arrived to discuss Vee’s future. ‘Lucky for me I’ll be back in Oxford when he comes,’ he’d said. ‘You know how scenes upset me.’

Unfortunately, scenes didn’t upset Grandfather.

With the easy movement of dreams, she was no longer in her austere, bare-floored bedroom, but in the drawing room, large and sombre; Victorian in furniture and colour, and even smell.

It was a Monday. Family conferences always happened on a Monday. Grandfather never came to the Deanery at the weekend, because on the Saturday the Dean would be polishing his sermon, and on Sunday, Grandfather’s absence from divine service would be noticed.

Unlike many a child of the clergy, Vee never longed to escape Sunday services. The time spent in the great gloomy, chilly Minster: Matins and Evensong, and sometimes Holy Communion as well, gave her hours of peace. Sometimes she thought it was a God-given peace, could almost feel herself wrapped in the arms of a loving God; at other times a harsher realism told her it was simply that it was possible to be alone in church in a way that you couldn’t at home. The Dean never questioned his children’s faith. Even though he had lost all his trust in a beneficent and watchful God, he hoped by one means or another that his beliefs would return, and, meanwhile, his remaining children were going to be brought up in godly ways.

They were both a disappointment to him, Vee knew that perfectly well. Hugh was an aesthete from birth, a fey, babbling infant who had grown into a brilliant twister and spinner of words. His time at school had not been celebrated, as the Dean’s had, by success at sport, and the grim establishment he was sent to at thirteen, his father’s old school, had neither time nor liking for any boy who was different, who wasn’t obsessed with sport, who was in any way unchristian.

Hugh had survived, as Vee had survived her own bleak, northern boarding school. In fact, for most of the time, she was happier at school than at home, although in the holidays there had always been Hugh to escape with, to share jokes and enjoy the excitement of a modern world beckoning from outside the Deanery walls.

Grandfather, when he arrived late on Sunday evening, was in one of his jolly moods. Vee’s heart sank as she gave him a dutiful kiss, allowed him to pinch her cheek – how she hated that, and put his stick in the hall stand.

Grandfather in a jolly mood meant he had a scheme, something that pleased him, and she had a presentiment that it was to do with her – that was why he had come, she was sure of it, from the hints her mother had let drop, clothes for her, now that she was growing up, not much scope for a young lady in York …

She had already broached the subject of What next? with her father. When she told him her plans, striving to sound natural even while her hands were held so tightly together that her nails dug into her skin, he’d simply looked through her in that way he had.

‘Oh, I doubt if that will be possible, my dear. Your mother would hardly like it.’

The truth was, her mother wouldn’t care what she did, as long as she did it somewhere else. Vee knew that her mother was dreading her leaving school and spending days and weeks and months at the Deanery. Almost as much as she herself was dreading it.

‘Besides,’ her father went on, ‘there is the question of money.’

‘Hugh’s paid for.’

Which was a stupid thing to say. Hugh was a man, it was different for Hugh.

‘Your grandfather’s paying for Hugh at Oxford, not me. You’ll have to ask him.’

She knew what the answer would be.

Now they were all in the drawing room. Grandfather, his large and magnificent head under a mane of splendid white hair, sitting erect in the Dean’s chair. The Dean standing awkwardly by the fireplace, not looking at Vee, and Mummy, sitting on a slender upright chair, her tapestry in her hand, fingers searching among her wools for a colour match. Like one of the fates at work, Vee thought with a sudden feeling of resentment. Spinning and weaving and cutting, and what choice or say did any of the lives represented by those slender threads have in their fates?

Vee perched herself on the edge of the heavy-footed sofa.

‘Eighteen, now,’ said her grandfather genially. ‘A grown-up lass. Time to go out into the world. You’re looking forward to leaving school, I feel sure.’

Vee said nothing.

‘So we need to settle what you’re going to do next. You can’t hang around at home, getting under your mother’s feet and taking up with some stiff-necked young curate, that would never do.’

The Dean stirred uneasily and gave the fire an unnecessary stir with the poker.

Vee took a deep breath. ‘I know what I want to do when I leave school, Grandfather.’

‘You do?’ His face became more watchful. ‘Out with it, then.’

‘I want to go to university. I sat the exams, at school, and I’ve been accepted. At Oxford.’ She swallowed, and ploughed on. ‘For the new academic year that starts in October.’

The silence was palpable. The Dean looked down at the floor, her mother stitched resolutely on. Grandfather’s face was reddening alarmingly.

‘And I thought that perhaps I could spend six months abroad before I went up. I’m going to study modern languages, you see, and I’d like—’

Vee moved her head from side to side in a vain attempt to avert the explosion of wrath, the deadly missiles of her grandfather’s anger as they rained about her. She always hated to be shouted at, and even her mother’s cold reserve and chilly indifference was a thousand times better than this terrible rage.

Alarmed, the Dean rang for the maid, ordered a brandy, and the maid, after a frightened glance at the thunderous countenance of the bellowing Jacob Trenchard, scuttled away for the restorative.

It would take more than a brandy to soothe Grandfather. His contempt poured over Vee in an abusive torrent, the stupidity of all women, the wickedness of any university to open its doors to women, the incredible folly and wilfulness she had shown in going about her selfish, pointless schemes with no thought for family or her place in the world.

‘Have you wasted my money on education, so that you can turn into some dreadful bluestocking? Why, they won’t even give women degrees at Cambridge, because they know the whole thing’s a sham. Women’s brains aren’t designed for academic study, just as they aren’t designed for business or politics or any of the other spheres they try to meddle in these days.’

Her grandfather’s hatred and fear of women streamed out of him. Even Vee’s mother looked up from her needlework with a doubtful glance, but she wasn’t going to defend her daughter.

He hated educated women? Dear God, if only he knew how much she hated and despised him. ‘Daddy, please,’ said Vee desperately.

She should have known better than to expect any support from that direction.

‘My dear, it’s folly, and the school should never have encouraged you or allowed you to think of such a thing. I shall have something very sharp to say to your headmistress there, in fact, I shall write to the governors. They have no right to put such notions into an impressionable young head. Your grandfather and your mother and I will decide what’s best for you, and you should know that.’

‘What’s best for you, not what’s best for me.’

Vee had prayed she wouldn’t cry, she mustn’t show any weakness in front of Grandfather. Now she was white hot with rage of her own, and she had no tears to shed.

Grandfather sipped his brandy, calmed down, and proceeded as though she had never spoken, as though he hadn’t said the terrible things about her, about women.

‘Your mother’s place is here, a man in your father’s position needs a wife to help him. So we can’t ask her to go to London with you.’

‘I don’t want to go to London.’

He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘Her sister, your Aunt Lettice, is bringing out Claudia this next season, and she’s agreed that you shall do the season together.’

Vee stared at him. ‘Do the season? In London? Me? Are you mad?’

Not all her arguments or pleading could avert her doom. Grandfather held the purse strings, and her father was too weak and too poor to stand up against his domineering sire – why should he, over this, when he hadn’t gone against the paternal wishes ever in his whole life? As for her mother, London was a long way away, and Vee would be out of her sight, which was all she cared about. She had suggested a year – two years, even – in Switzerland, for Vee to work up her languages and that kind of thing, but she had been overruled.

‘Waste of time and money,’ Grandfather had said. ‘Let her be a debutante, then she’ll meet the right kind of young man and marry. Young women can’t marry too young these days, it’s the only thing that keeps them out of mischief. Let Vee find a husband a bit older than herself, that works best. Mind you, I don’t want her getting attached to any layabout young aristocrat. I don’t have any time for that kind of thing, and I shan’t part with a penny unless I approve of the man. She can pick someone who’s got a career ahead of him, of good family, she is your daughter, Anne, and the cousin of an earl, she’s no reason to go feeling grateful for any fly-by-night who grabs her in a taxi and wants to whisk her to the altar four weeks later.’

‘You’re to go to London and do the season and be grateful for it,’ were her grandfather’s parting words.

He was gothic, as gothic as the Minster, as gothic as Daddy’s encrusted beliefs.

‘I’m very displeased at the way you’ve behaved, Vee. I shan’t forget it.’

And I, vowed Vee, shan’t ever forget the way you’ve behaved, and one of these days I’ll get my own back.

She was a modern, and they could make her go to London, but they couldn’t make her marry any man against her will. Which meant, any man at all, for the last thing Vee wanted was to move from the authority of her grandfather to be under the thumb of a husband.

‘Ring for the maid, Vee, your grandfather …’

* * *

Vee wrenched herself awake, to find herself bathed in sweat and hardly able to breathe. There was a tap at the door and Pigeon peered round it. ‘You rang, madam. Are you ill?’

‘I didn’t ring,’ Vee said, but knew that she had no idea what she might or might not have done in the grip of that haunting memory.

Pigeon advanced into the room. She was wearing her uniform; did she sleep in it? Vee wondered.

‘Is it seasickness, madam? Shall I fetch a basin?’

‘No, I’m not sick. It was a bad dream, a nightmare.’

‘If you’re sure. That’s why I’m up, so many of my ladies have succumbed.’

‘Go away!’ Vee said, under her breath.

‘Can I fetch you anything?’ Pigeon asked.

‘No, thank you,’ said Vee, with an attempt at a smile. ‘I’ll be fine now. I’ll just have a drink of water, please.’

Pigeon poured out half a glass from the carafe that had been sliding up and down on the shelf beside the bed. The water slopped to and fro, mimicking the roll of the liner, Vee timed her swallows and gulped it down. ‘Thank you, Pigeon. I hope you manage to get some sleep yourself.’

Typical, Vee thought wearily. Pigeon was a working woman, who probably put in a twelve-hour day, and she had to stay up to pander to the needs of the wealthy passengers who’d probably never done a day’s, let alone a night’s work in their pampered lives. It was all so unfair, she’d always said it wasn’t fair. It was that nursery cry of ‘It isn’t fair’ that had, in the end, brought all her troubles upon her.