The White Marriage Read online

  ‘I truly cannot tell you how, since a few hours ago I was slightly, if unfashionably, broken down.’

  ‘The new motor?’

  ‘The new motor.’ Gray sighed.

  ‘Something special?’

  ‘No, nothing very special, just a hose.’

  ‘You made sure to break down somewhere convenient, I hope?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I did. A dear little gentleman in a bowler hat and immaculate overalls arrived within minutes, and mended the hose in a trice.’

  They both laughed. For some reason ‘dear little men’ in bowler hats were always quite funny in Society, perhaps because they lived in such a different world. Or maybe they were just funny anyway. Or again, perhaps the image was funny, in a Charlie Chaplin kind of way. Who knew? Possibly none of these. What they both did know was where to laugh lightly and appreciatively.

  ‘Shall I read you the guest list?’

  Leandra asked this as Rule opened the drawing-room door once more and, with a maid following with a tea tray set for one, pulled up a small black pug made of papier-mâché and supporting a table of just the right size to hold the wooden inlaid tray with its Meissen tea service carefully laid.

  ‘Lemon and one lump of sugar, sir?’

  Gray smiled his assent as Rule poured the cup of tea and withdrew, the maid following solicitously.

  Leandra opened a large leather folder embossed with a gold coiled serpent, its head supporting the initials ‘LF’ on the front.

  ‘Very well. We have coming for our Friday-to-Monday the Arthur Bridlingtons—’

  ‘Don’t know them.’

  ‘You’ll like them, Gray. Truly, you will. James and Lavinia Metcalfe, whom you know. Herbert and Betty Chambers, Celia Hopwith, Ginny Braithwaite, darling Randy Beauchamp, and last but not least – Gray Wyndham.’

  ‘Now let me see – Gray Wyndham? Do I know him? Oh, yes, I fear I do. Rather a dull fellow, isn’t he? But good for making up numbers,’ Gray added lightly.

  Leandra closed her folder with its immaculately laid-out menus and notes, and smiled. ‘That is for you to say.’

  ‘Yes, I think I do. I think I know him just a little. He’s quite a good fellow. A member of Brooks’s Club, rides well, plays tennis well, dresses quite well—’

  ‘Dresses beautifully,’ Leandra put in.

  ‘Can be quite amusing.’

  ‘Is always very amusing.’

  ‘And one way and another, very occasionally, gets asked.’

  Leandra laughed. ‘Everyone wants you at their house parties, Gray, you know that. For that reason it is always so hard to get you. Last week you were with everyone, including the Suffolks, in – where was it?’

  ‘Norfolk, actually.’

  They both laughed again.

  ‘Next Friday-to-Monday I expect you will be somewhere much more exciting than poor old Maydown.’

  ‘No, no, there can be no more exciting place than here. Where else is the company amusing, the food exquisite and the atmosphere so relaxed that we all give of our best?’

  ‘Saying which, I think I can hear the Bridlingtons arriving. They are always a little early. Their house is still so cold, you know? I think they can’t wait to come here because we are at least warm, if nothing else.’

  Rule stood by the door and announced, ‘The Earl and Countess of Bridlington,’ from the door.

  Gray noted that Rule did so in rather louder tones than those he had employed when ‘Mr Gray Wyndham’ was announced; so inevitably the thought came to him that Rule might well raise his voice, or drop it, according to the exact importance of a guest’s title, which would surely mean that when announcing royalty he would bellow.

  Perhaps the Bridlingtons were not the only guests who wanted to warm up at Maydown, for they were closely followed by the Metcalfes, and the Chamberses, by Miss Hopwith, and Miss Braithwaite, and finally – off the train and looking madly dishevelled – Randy Beauchamp, gaiters spattered with mud, monocle dangling, three or four bright white hairs standing up at the back of his head in an alarming manner.

  Now the tea table at the far end of the room was laid out for everyone, with small drop scones, home-made strawberry jam, and butter that looked to Gray as if it must have come from France, since it was light coloured and not farm yellow. Besides the scones, there were tiny biscuits shaped as farm animals, with which everyone amused themselves, biting off their heads and tails and then pretending to be shocked at what they had just done. Small coconut and chocolatey cakes were also laid out invitingly, their coloured paper cases giving the tea table fleetingly a look of a child’s party.

  When Gray and Ginny had finished laughing at their headless biscuits, Ginny’s eyes strayed to the maids, who were busy hovering with plates of teatime delicacies.

  ‘I remember my mother,’ she dropped her voice. ‘I remember my mamma telling me that during the First World War, she was forced to write to Lord Kitchener to ask him to cease conscription at once for young men, because it was having a bad effect on her household. Never before, she said, never before had they had to have maids rather than footmen to wait on them at Chaseley.’ She paused. ‘Can you imagine that now?’

  Both she and Gray shook their heads, because of course neither of them could.

  ‘You hardly see footmen now, outside of royal or ducal circles.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Gray turned his eyes on the small cake he had just taken from a proffered plate.

  ‘I don’t know when I last saw footmen in a private house in London, but then I don’t get asked much in London,’ Ginny went on.

  ‘Such a pity not to have footmen any more, I suppose; but all those uniforms and bulging calf muscles – would we really want them now?’ Gray asked of no one in particular, because he knew that Ginny could hardly afford a maid, let alone a footman, let alone a butler. Nowadays few people were as rich as their weekend hosts.

  ‘It all depends on what you happen to be wanting them for.’

  Ginny was straight-faced, but only for a second, because they both laughed again.

  Gray popped his cake into his mouth and his gaze wandered off to take in the rest of the party, some of whom were now putting down their teacups preparatory to climbing the wide staircase up to their suites of elegantly appointed and brilliantly comfortable rooms.

  Somewhat thankfully Gray followed suit. He liked Ginny Braithwaite, she was good-hearted, even if she was a bit of a hunt bicycle. He just wished that her moustache was not quite so heavy, and her voice a little more musical, her chest less flat, and her eyes less hard.

  Later, as he came down, changed into dinner jacket and black tie, and stood around murmuring pleasantries, his eyes strayed to Leandra’s immaculately designed yellow taffeta drawing-room curtains, and inevitably, because they were yellow, he found his thoughts straying back to earlier in the day, to the young girl in the pre-war yellow satin dress with all the pins down the side. And as he stroked one of Leandra’s four toy poodles, he could not help remembering the look of longing in the girl’s eyes as she spoke of one day being able to afford even one dog, let alone one dog and one cat.

  Dinner came and went, with all the usual vaguely scandalous conversations kept for later when the ladies retired to powder their noses, and the men were left with the port. Who was doing who, but much more importantly why – dominated the ladies’ conversations; while who was making how much money and why – dominated those of the gentlemen.

  Eventually the sexes came together once more, and this reunion was followed by cards for some, and more gossip and tittle-tattle for others. It was all very decorous and delightfully elegant. The food was delicious, the women decorative, and Gray was, as always, the perfect guest, but as he finally climbed the stairs once more for bed, he found himself feeling vaguely claustrophobic, and the prospect of Saturday and Sunday seemed to stretch ahead almost endlessly, certainly longer than they should, the whole weekend not so much a Friday-to-Monday, as a Friday-to-Friday.
r />   He must be tired, he told himself as he surveyed his pyjamas laid out carefully on the bed, turned down so that the linen top sheet seemed to have been ironed. He knew that beneath the sheet and woollen blankets would be found an old-fashioned stone hot-water bottle dating back perhaps a hundred years. He usually adored staying at Maydown, never wanted to go back to London, certainly never normally longed for Monday to come. After all, as everyone he knew would agree, if you tired of Maydown and Leandra Fortescue, it could well be said that you had tired of life.

  ‘Of course you’re tired,’ Leandra told Gray the following day. ‘You have so much to think about, so much in that handsome head of yours that you are turning over and over. You are also tired because you are, as they say, on the horns of a dilemma. You know you are happy, but you also know you have to have, must have, a future but you don’t quite know where it lies, and that is always and ever worrying.’

  Leandra was wearing a sapphire-blue silk dress with a wide belt that showed off her tiny waist. The dress had long fluid sleeves, which in their turn showed off the beauty of her sapphire ring, just as the shirt collar of the dress, worn standing up, showed off her matching sapphire earrings.

  ‘You look beautiful, Leandra,’ Gray told her, all of a sudden.

  Leandra smiled. ‘I feel beautiful this morning,’ she told him with quiet satisfaction. ‘Oh, look, there’s Dilke.’

  Her smile widened as her tall, if ample, husband strolled across the lawn towards the terrace where they were seated.

  ‘Darling, what can I do for you?’

  ‘You can tell me how much you’re going to miss me now that I’m off to have luncheon with that rascal Percy Yatcombe.’

  ‘Of course I shall miss you, sweetheart. We will all miss seeing you at luncheon, won’t we, Gray?’

  Gray nodded obediently, only to be dismissed from his host’s view by a peremptory nod. Gray was quite used to this, just as he was quite used to the way Dilke Fortescue said his name, on a sigh – which was a signal to all and sundry that Gray Wyndham was a friend of Leandra Fortescue, but certainly not of Dilke Fortescue.

  ‘Of course we will miss you. Leandra would never forgive us if we didn’t,’ Gray told his host, but by that time Dilke had turned to leave, walking across the lawn with the speed normally associated with a far slimmer man.

  ‘Dilke is amazingly light on his feet,’ Leandra murmured, watching him. ‘As always with a man with small feet and a tall frame, he dances beautifully too.’

  Gray tried to look interested in the size of his host’s feet and failed.

  ‘Now,’ Leandra turned her large violet-blue eyes back on Gray, ‘now is the moment we must return to the subject upon which we touched last night at dinner, namely your father and his indifference towards you. What would it take to change his attitude, do you think?’

  Gray’s eyes wandered from Leandra’s beautiful face and out to her flower-filled garden. ‘I don’t know,’ he stated lazily, without the slightest attempt at truth.

  ‘I think you do, Gray. And I think I do too. I think we both know what would change your father’s attitude to you, what would change your future.’

  Gray’s expression, normally good-natured if reserved, turned to one of all-too-evident concern. ‘Yes, you are right, I do, Leandra. I know what will change his attitude towards me.’

  ‘In one word?’

  ‘Marriage.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Gray stood up, pushing out his chair behind him impatiently, then starting to walk up and down the terrace.

  ‘I cannot marry, Leandra. You know my feelings on marriage. It is impossible for me to marry, being as I am – you know my secret.’ He stopped, looking at her with intensity. ‘Feeling as I do, I cannot marry.’

  Leandra watched him, her head on one side, allowing him to stroll up and down for a while, before patting the seat beside her.

  ‘Come and sit near me.’

  Gray sat down. Leandra was so beautiful, it was difficult to sit down beside her and not give way to his feelings.

  ‘Gray, look at me?’

  Gray looked at her. At that moment it seemed to him that Leandra matched the sky. She was certainly as beautiful as her surroundings.

  ‘There are ways around this.’

  Gray found this vaguely amusing. How could there be ways around a marriage? It would be like saying there were ways around dying, or the law. He was, however, careful to keep his expression serious. It was so terribly ‘Leandra’ to be so careless of marriage, one of the most sacred foundations of civilised society.

  ‘Leandra, I know that you can work miracles. But of one thing I am quite sure and that is that even you cannot find a way to work round the marital status in our society. It is simply not possible. Marriage is marriage, and just as the sun comes up in the morning and goes to bed at night, marriage is the sensible, safe and sacred centre of our society, and try as we can to overcome this, it is impossible.’

  ‘And that being so, I have thought of a plan.’

  ‘If you are going to suggest I marry someone and then divorce them – then no, I cannot. Divorce may be recognised by the law, the people, the police, whomsoever you care to name, but in the Wyndham family it is unacceptable. I come from a very, very stuffy family. We have never borrowed money, and we have never, and will never, have anything to do with divorce. That is all there is to it – alas. To do so means a severance of any connection with the family trustees, which is a fairly polite way of saying – ruin.’

  Leandra waited for him to finish his short speech, a tolerant expression on her face, and then began again.

  ‘My plan for you is that you should make a white marriage, Gray. If you think about it, a white marriage is the one marriage that never, ever enters the lists at the divorce courts. A white marriage would you keep you both safe, and in the black!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘You mean marry in church? The bride in white, the bridesmaids in white, white flowers and white faces, not to mention the father’s whitened face when he sees the bill?’ Gray went on, determined to be facetious.

  ‘Silly old bear,’ Leandra murmured. ‘You know very well what a white marriage is! It is a marriage of convenience, such as the French, and indeed the Americans, have always made. You know that very well.’

  ‘Indeed I do, but really, I cannot see myself being able to live with a woman who does not like men. I am far too – how can I say? – I am far too loving a personality to live with someone who will be permanently upset by my presence in her house, who will want me to spend not just my days but my nights at my club, who will be pained by my albeit not particularly overt masculinity.’

  ‘As always you go too far,’ Leandra laughed. ‘No, no, bless you, my plan is that we should find some nice person who will marry you on the understanding that you can never have conjugation, that you will lead fashionably separate lives. It can all be arranged in a very civilised fashion. They do it all the time in France.’

  Gray rolled his eyes expressively. ‘They do a great many things in France, Leandra, that we would surely not attempt here. We are not a sophisticated society like the French.’

  ‘No, but we are civilised, and it is most important that we should remain just that.’

  ‘So you propose we find some young woman who will consent to marry me, lead her own life, and generally remain civilised, in return for what?’

  ‘In return for everything you can give her, of course,’ Leandra stated smoothly. ‘It happens all the time. Why, in Paris I know of two or three such unions, and they are not just successful, they are very happy.’

  ‘Are they indeed?’

  ‘Of course, yes. After all, they have gone into the union with their eyes open. They do not have their heads filled with romantic nonsense.’

  Gray went to say something, and then stopped.

  ‘You were going to say …’

  ‘Nothing of interest,’ he returned quickly. ‘Really nothing of interest.�
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  Leandra smiled at him, her expression protective.

  ‘You had a brilliant war, that you have suffered from it is undoubted, and that is something I can never understand about your father—’

  Gray stopped her. ‘Before you go on, Leandra, there is nothing to understand about my father. He is everything to himself, but not much to anyone else, believe me.’

  Gray sighed inwardly, and his eyes drifted towards the outer limits of the garden, and eventually towards the distant hills, rounded, green, and perfect. He had fought his way through six years of war, somehow surviving unscathed, although only God, and God alone, knew how. Eventually arriving home at midnight in late 1945 he had been greeted by his father the next morning at breakfast with the immortal never-to-be-forgotten words, ‘Don’t hog all the marmalade, will you, Gray? There are other people on this earth, you know.’

  Gray had wanted to reply, ‘Yes, and I have just finished killing a great number of them,’ but instead he had remained silent, knowing that to say anything at all was worse than a waste of time; it would be to court yet more pain.

  ‘No, Leandra, there is nothing to understand about my father at all, except that he is, as far as his son is concerned, unloving and unlovable. He does not even love himself. As a matter of fact I think he does not even like himself.’

  Leandra pulled a little face. ‘Gracious. That is sad. Most of us are able to love ourselves, sometimes inordinately.’

  ‘Very well, let us go back to our conversation. Supposing, just supposing, we find this young woman who will consent to this marriage. What happens if – if she falls in love with someone else once she has married me, knowing that we can never love, poor thing?’

  ‘Precisely nothing, Gray darling, precisely nothing. She will abide by the rules.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘The old rules – as the Edwardians used to say as they nipped in and out of each other’s marital beds – à chacun sa chacune! To each his own. People like Dilke and myself stay married, and observe civilised behaviour. It is our duty. If we wish to pursue other interests, that is our affair.’

  ‘And you think this poor innocent will consent to all this?’