The White Marriage Read online

  She turned and started to walk back to her own bedroom across the landing.

  ‘So what is it now that you are going to the Chantrys for? If Sunny isn’t there, what is it now? Mary making you model a cocktail frock for one of her swanky ladies? Honestly, the way that woman works, sews her fingers to the bone, God help her. Rather her than me. So what is it?’

  Arietta stood at her own bedroom door. ‘No, Mummy.’

  For perhaps the thousandth time Arietta found herself wishing to goodness she could call her mother something other than ‘Mummy’. It suddenly sounded so babyish.

  ‘So what is it?’ Audrey demanded yet again.

  ‘I told you, I am not going to the Chantrys!’ Arietta stated, speaking with uncustomary force.

  ‘Don’t shout, Arietta. My head hurts.’

  ‘I am not going to the Chantrys, I am going to London. I have a job. I am leaving home. I have a job.’ Without realising it Arietta’s voice had taken on a tone that was exultant.

  Her mother stared at her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Going to London, got a job? Don’t be pathetic, Arietta. Only a mad person would want you!’

  Arietta turned and very slowly snapped the locks on her cheap suitcase.

  ‘Well, actually,’ she paused, avoiding the word ‘Mummy’, ‘a very nice lady wants me to work for her, in Mayfair.’

  ‘In Mayfair?’

  Audrey stared at Arietta and it seemed to the daughter that the mother’s jaw was dropping. Mayfair, with its quiet streets and elegant houses, was not somewhere that Audrey knew at all, although of course, because it was the London home of the patrician classes, she had read about it in books and gossip columns.

  ‘Yes, in Mayfair. It is a tall house with very elegant rooms, and the lady has a very nice butler, Mr Joseph, and Mrs Joseph, his wife, and they look after her in London. She also has a beautiful house in Surrey, where royalty have stayed.’

  Arietta buttoned up the jacket of the suit that Mrs Chantry had made her, and taking a small hat and placing it on her brown hair, and pulling on some cotton gloves she finally straightened and faced her mother.

  ‘Just think, Mummy, you’re going to be free of me,’ she stated gravely. ‘What you have always wanted.’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic, Arietta. That is such a hurtful thing to say. Of course I shan’t be free of you. You’re my daughter. It is a fact. I am your mother. That also is a fact.’

  Audrey sniffed and started to turn away as Arietta picked up her suitcase.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be hurtful, Mummy, but I know that I have been such a burden to you all these years, costing you so much money, as you always said, so now I have a job, you will be free of the worry of me. It will be so good, won’t it, not to feel worried by how much I eat, or the cost of my clothes, or fees for college? All that is now behind you. I am no longer your burden, which is good, isn’t it?’

  Audrey did not choose to dispute the fact that Arietta had always been a burden. Instead she changed tack.

  ‘I don’t believe you will hold down this so-called job for more than a second. You’ll be back to plague me, mark my words, and probably within the week.’

  Audrey crossed the landing, went into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  Arietta stood for a moment staring at the door, remembering how often as a small child she had been dragged into it to be punished, until the day she bit Audrey on the hand. It was an event that had somehow brought about an uneasy truce. She remembered the look in her mother’s eyes as the pain registered, and Arietta flung herself down the stairs and through the front door and out on to the village green, from where she fled across to the Chantrys’ cottage.

  Mrs Chantry had stood in the doorway, looking down at the six-year-old, her hair awry, her small chest heaving with emotion.

  ‘Mrs Chantry, I wonder if I could come in for a while?’

  ‘Of course, dear, come in, do.’

  She sat Arietta down in the kitchen where, her small body still shuddering with suppressed emotion, the little girl had found herself the object of Sunny’s amazed interest.

  The silence in the kitchen had been broken by Mary Chantry’s voice calling to her husband, ‘I’m just going to pop across to Audrey Staunton, John. Keep an eye on the girls until I get back, would you?’

  She had not been gone long.

  ‘You will be staying the night with me, Arietta. Your mummy has agreed,’ Mary Chantry said in a commendably kind voice. ‘Now who would like some toast and golden syrup?’

  Never had toast tasted so good, nor would it ever again. Nor would Arietta ever forget the kindness of Mrs Chantry as she walked her up to the bathroom and ran a bath for her.

  ‘You can manage, can’t you, dear?’ she asked tactfully, before half closing the door.

  Arietta had undressed herself, stepped into the warm water, and then suddenly overwhelmed and shuddering with suppressed tears, she had put a flannel on her face. She knew now, somehow she just knew, that from now on her young life would get better.

  As she remembered this, not slowly, but in a few seconds – the smell of the soap, the borrowed nightdress, the bliss of going to bed with another little girl in the room, not all alone – Arietta gave a great sigh, knowing, as she had all those years before, and with the same strange certainty, that her life was about to get better. She went slowly down the stairs and out into the fresh air.

  She closed the front door behind her, realising that she would never have to open it again except by choice, for even if Mrs Ashcombe-Stogumber did not like her work, even if she failed at her new job, Arietta knew that she would rather scrub floors, work in a factory, anything – anything rather than go back and live with her mother.

  Sunny was enjoying Sunday lunch with Jocelyn and Gray, and not just because the food was delicious, and she had spent a heavenly morning walking round the grounds with the old man, but because she knew now that she was a success with him. The truth was that he could not take his eyes off her.

  ‘You remind me of my mother, Miss Chantry,’ he had said earlier as they walked past the lake with its fountains and grottoes, and on to the fields above it, from where they paused to stare down at the ten-acre garden in all its summer radiance. ‘She was dark-haired and small-framed like you. And she loved to laugh. I can see you love to laugh, that you have a happy nature.’

  Sunny smiled at old Jocelyn and pulled down her hat a little lower to avoid becoming sunburned.

  ‘We are not put on this earth to be sad, are we, Mr Wyndham?’

  Jocelyn had stared at her and then, avoiding her question, but only because he didn’t know what to say in reply, he said after a short pause, ‘I see you’re sensible too. Don’t want to ruin your complexion with this fashionable tanning business.’

  Sunny continued to smile at him from under her hat, but he, finding her smile unexpectedly affecting, dropped his gaze and stared down towards the gardens. It was odd, but he had woken up that morning feeling as if he had recovered from a long illness. He had not sprung out of bed – he was too old for that – but he had run his own bath, and chosen his own clothes, which he normally left to his valet. Then he had been the first into the dining room, and what was more and what was better, he had eaten a good breakfast – a hearty breakfast for him – after which he had walked out into the garden and picked some roses for Miss Chantry which he put into a jug and placed by her table setting, something that he had always been in the habit of doing for his wife when she was alive.

  Sunny had changed into a white linen many-folded skirt and a green linen jacket with large white buttons up to the neck.

  ‘You cannot go to stay at Chelston Manor without several changes,’ Mary had murmured, and although her voice registered disapproval of Sunny’s proposed visit to Jocelyn Wyndham’s house, she had set about altering three or four outfits – yet more discarded pre-war clothing given to her by her customers – to suit Sunny.

  Sunny did not know it but, seated between the older and the y
ounger Wyndham men, she looked as fresh as the roses that Jocelyn had picked for her, and just as a film director, to enhance the beauty of his female star, will first slip in a close-up of an older, uglier woman, so seated between her host and his son, Sunny looked younger than springtime itself.

  ‘What on earth are you doing with my son, Miss Chantry?’ Jocelyn demanded as, lunch being over, they once more walked off down the gardens.

  Sunny coloured slightly and found herself hesitating before she could find a suitable reply. She did not mind the old man being so direct; what she minded was the possibility that she might have to tell a lie and so run the risk of the old man knowing that she was not telling the truth, and thinking less of her because of it. She wanted to keep his respect.

  Finally, after the pause that had become almost too long, and during which it seemed to her she could hear every sound in the garden, from the humming of the bees to the birds in the trees, becoming louder and louder until it became a symphony as insistent as anything that had ever been written, she turned to him.

  The look in the old man’s eyes was too shrewd, too anxious, too direct.

  ‘I am learning to love him in the only way that I can, Mr Wyndham.’

  Jocelyn gazed at her briefly, before starting to walk on.

  ‘Ah,’ he said softly, appreciatively, giving a brief smile. ‘I thought as much. I thought you could not be in love with him. I must be honest, Miss Chantry. In a way I hope that you never will be in love with my son. It would be hopeless. Gray cannot love you in return, you know – the war changed all that. He shut up shop as a man. I saw it the moment he came into the dining room that first morning back. He was no longer the same person, but someone quite different. I would not have known him. I would not have known my boy.’

  Sunny looked away. It did not seem right for a father to be talking about his son in that way. On the other hand, it was only what Leandra Fortescue had told her, so it was obviously not something that grown-ups, as she still thought of them, found in the least embarrassing.

  Perhaps that too was a result of the war? Perhaps, after all the bombs and the killing, older people did not mind referring to such things? Perhaps it was something to which she too, one day, would be able to refer quite openly and casually? She could not imagine it, but she knew, nevertheless, that she had to at least embrace the possibility, if not the probability, like having grey hair, or walking with the aid of a stick, which she sometimes tried to imagine, and failed.

  ‘Gray is very sensitive,’ she suggested.

  Sunny knew that being sensitive was a good thing. She knew this because it was always spoken of in Rushington with quiet appreciation. Someone who was sensitive was a good person, a person who was aware of others, of their happiness and unhappiness.

  ‘He is pleasure loving,’ Jocelyn announced of Gray, after a pause during which he stopped and frowned for no particular reason at some wild flowers that they happened to be passing.

  ‘Perhaps that is a result of the war, Mr Wyndham?’

  That was something that everyone in Rushington had been in the habit of saying. If there was an unexpected divorce, or someone took to the bottle, or a husband ran off with another woman, the inevitable conclusion was that their behaviour was a direct ‘result of the war’. It was Rushington’s way of brushing anything uncomfortable under the carpet.

  ‘Everything is a result of something, Miss Chantry, but it does not make it excusable.’

  ‘No, not excusable,’ Sunny agreed, ‘but understandable, don’t you think?’

  That was something that her mother was always saying.

  Sunny frowned, realising with an odd feeling of guilt that she seemed incapable of saying anything original.

  ‘You are very mature for your years, Miss Chantry.’

  This remark served only to increase Sunny’s guilt as she realised that far from being mature she was really just a parrot.

  ‘I am afraid I am not at all mature, Mr Wyndham,’ she confessed, staring ahead at the summer sky, at the swallows swooping above a distant pond, at the variegated greens of all the trees, all seeming quite determined to subtly capture the eye, while flattering their surroundings that they were staying hidden. ‘I realise that everything I say is really rather second-hand, which is actually quite a lowering thought.’

  The old man stopped and turned towards Sunny, his resident frown deepening into two granite-like furrows.

  ‘Nothing that you say, whether second- or first-hand, matters beside the fact that you are a very truthful young woman, Miss Chantry, and as such, if I were you, I should reconsider your relationship with my son.’ He leaned forward. ‘Indeed, if I was your father there is only one word I would say to you, and that is – run!’

  Chapter Five

  For Arietta, arriving in London for the second time was a revelation. This time she was not nervous; this time she had a destination.

  ‘Number forty-two Upper—’

  She stared up into the taxi driver’s lined face. He was wearing a smart if old-fashioned hat, probably the kind of hat that his grandfather had worn when driving a hackney carriage.

  ‘I’ve had a sudden blank.’ She fumbled in her handbag and produced the address written on a piece of paper. ‘There, here.’

  She went to show him a piece of paper, but the driver had already climbed out of his cab and, taking her suitcase from her, he carefully strapped it into the luggage space before looking at the piece of paper with the scribbled address.

  ‘Oh yes, I know.’ He nodded at the piece of paper without taking it. ‘Matter of fact, I just came from near there, Curzon Street. A nice old gent, saying goodbye to his town house, he was. Can’t afford it any more. Has to sell. Imagine, he said, the bombs missed it, Hitler missed it, the doodlebugs passed it by, only for the government to get him with their supertax. It’s a shame, really, for people like him, a crying shame.’ He held open the door for Arietta. ‘In you get, dear, and don’t you worry about a thing. Old Arthur will get you to your address in no time.’

  He shut the door, and as he did so Arietta sat back in the seat, half closing her eyes. She was here at last. She was in London. She was going to be happy. She knew it.

  It was as if she had become a part of everything, and everything a part of her: the train, the passengers, the station, the bombed-out buildings they were passing, and then as they grew nearer and nearer to Mayfair, the elegance of the people walking along the street, the doormen opening and shutting car and taxi doors, the London pigeons strutting in the roads, hardly bothering to move before the oncoming traffic, until at the last minute they neatly sidestepped into the gutter, only to reappear in the middle of the road once more.

  ‘I’ll take you past the park, then you can see the. ’orses in Rotten Row,’ the driver called back to her. ‘Lovely sight, that is, specially for a country girl.’

  Arietta would have liked to have asked him how he knew she was up from the country but, the roads being empty at that time of day and the streets uncrowded, the taxi drew up in front of number forty-two before she had time.

  Mr Joseph took her suitcase from the driver, and Arietta made sure to tip the driver, who very promptly gave her back the coin.

  ‘You’ll be needing your pennies in London, dear, more than what I do, I assure you.’ He winked at her. ‘Good luck with your new job.’

  Arietta blushed, and smiled, and then waved to the receding taxi, before turning to walk after Mr Joseph. Was it that obvious that she was a hayseed? It must be.

  ‘I, er, I brought Mrs Ashcombe-Stogumber some flowers.’

  She had dampened the newspaper that directly surrounded the flowers to keep them fresh, and then wrapped them about with Christmas paper, carefully ironed.

  Mr Joseph stared at her offering, took them and laid them on a silver salver beneath a vast arrangement of hot-house blooms.

  ‘Mrs Ashcombe will be most pleased with your offering, Miss Staunton. I will have them brought to the kitchen and ar
ranged and placed upon her breakfast tray tomorrow morning. She dearly loves the flowers of field and garden.’

  Arietta knew the butler was being kind, he knew he was being kind, and at the same time they both knew that it was most likely very true that, amid all the hot-house blooms, the carefully picked garden flowers, a mix of roses and sweet peas, of lavender and cornflowers, would indeed be very welcome.

  ‘Perhaps they will be a change?’

  ‘If you will follow me I will take you to your room.’

  Arietta was fit and young. Mr Joseph was neither, so that by the time they both reached the top of the house and the attic room that was to be Arietta’s small kingdom, he was breathing so heavily it was frightening.

  ‘This is your room, Miss Staunton, and opposite, the usual offices. You will be quite alone up here, you will find. My wife and myself are in the basement – when we are not in the country with Mrs Ashcombe, that is. Mrs Ashcombe, by the way, Miss Staunton, does not use her full name except in Society. At home, here and in the country, she uses only the first surname, never the second. That is the rule.’

  Arietta could hear his heavy tread going down the steep, creaking old London staircase, and as she did she felt a sudden desire to run after him, and ask him not to leave her alone at the top of the house, to stay with her as she unpacked.

  Once she had hung all her clothes in the curtained cupboard and put her few things tidily in the chest of drawers, Arietta went to her bedroom window and found herself staring at yet more London pigeons. She opened the window and secured the latch. They cooed, they moved, but they did not fly away, seeming, like their relatives in the roads below, to be filled with an admirable confidence.

  ‘If I am to stay in this town, I am going to have to become like you, aren’t I?’ she asked them, but they, being pigeons, paid no attention, for pigeon-business is all too preoccupying.