The Love Knot Page 35

  ‘No, as a matter of fact I did not. I have never been interested in girls of no consequence. She was merely the daughter of a tenant here, always determined to go to the bad from the start, and of course she did go to the bad. She went to London and fell in with the wrong sort of women. I attended her funeral merely to represent her family who had no further interest in her. They were ashamed of her.’

  Mercy nodded, believing him, and yet suddenly not interested.

  ‘I wish you would not use that expression, a girl of no consequence. Surely everyone in this world, one way or another, has value?’

  ‘She went to the bad at an early age, there was nothing to be done. She was a weak and silly girl, bound to go wrong.’

  ‘Why do you say that? And how do you know that? Only because you have been brought up to view life as offering you only two sorts of women, the good or the bad. But there are more than two sorts, just as there are more than two sorts of men.’

  ‘It’s this kind of conversation which makes me long for the hunting field. Do you know that, Mercy?’

  Mercy sighed. ‘Yes, and I can perfectly understand it too, John. But what I would like you to also understand is that until we can both see each other as human beings – colourful, weak, strong, generous, kind, unkind, pompous, engaging, but above all as realities, in the same way that trees and flowers, all of nature, are realities – we will only be a disappointment to each other. It is the fact that we have to pretend to be what we are not when we are together, that makes our life so impossible. I can not return to being the helpless young girl you married, and you can not be the fascinating older man, but we could be ourselves, and find out that we still love each other. There is that. We could even find that we love those people, those two real people, more than those two others who did not really exist.’

  John sighed impatiently, and after a second or two of silence he said, ‘Yes, I see what you are saying. You were too young. I should never have married you.’

  ‘That is not what I am saying, John.’

  ‘I should never have married you,’ he insisted. ‘You were far too young, and I hoped that you wouldn’t be, which was foolish of me.’

  This time it was Mercy who sighed, and said quietly, ‘I was not too young. I just did not have a chance with you so long as you still felt that you loved – or were attracted to – someone else in your past.’

  Her husband was silent, obviously not wanting to reply to this, but standing by the window, his back to her, so that Mercy half turned too, preparing to go, because addressing someone’s back was really so dispiriting.

  ‘I cannot feel sorry for you, the way I might feel sorry for myself. I mean – if we were not ourselves but friends of ours, I should feel sorry for the young woman, because I would know that for all her innocent foolishness she really loved you, John, whereas I would feel that the man did not love her as much in return. But now, well, I feel it would be weak and silly to go on as we were, not because of your going away, and – and making love with Lady Violet – although it still hurts me very much to think of it – but because I am so disappointed in you. I thought, when you came back, if I was strong with you, and truthful, that my so-great love for you would be enough, but it wasn’t was it, John? You had to call in your lawyer. I saw you for what you were, and myself for what I was, and both of us as we are now. But despite that, I found that I still loved you, whereas it seems that you only loved the idea of a young girl, all foolish compliance and love’s young dream. And when I became real and pregnant, a real woman, you stayed away, willingly lapsing into your old ways with your hunting friends and your old mistress.’

  ‘That’s not true! You told me to stay away! And I believed Lady Violet when she said that you did not want me with you, that you were perhaps disgusted – as she said young girls could be – by the other side of marriage, that you were in love with that young man with whom you spent so much time – that antiquarian fellow.’

  Mercy shook her head at this, determined to continue. She was halfway to the door now, and in some strange way she knew that the further she drew away from him the safer she felt to finish what she had to say.

  ‘You know how much I always loved you to make love to me. It simply is not true that you were suspicious of poor Mr Chantry. You were inconstant because you wanted to be. That is the truth. Even should you have supposed that I had fallen for a younger man you would not have left me after Christmas as you did. You left me to give birth on my own because you chose to believe some tittle tattle from your mistress. You never really believed that your child was not yours, not really, John. It was just easier for you, at that moment, to convince yourself of it, that is all.’ She stopped as she turned the handle of the library door, sighing suddenly with such sadness that it sounded even to her like the saddest sigh she had ever heard. ‘We will never recover from this, I don’t suppose. We are both now in mourning for those few lovely months that we spent together, months when we were really happy. Remember you said that our marriage was so happy that you feared we would cause a scandal? I will always remember that. And how we laughed together, how much we seemed to be one person. But all that is gone now, and so too will I be within the hour.’

  John looked at the closed library door, stunned. And slowly and dreadfully the thought came to him, that until that moment it was true, he had never known love. He had known everything but love. He had known lust, and adventure, he had known the thrill of the chase, and its assuagement, but he had never known love, until it left him, and closed the door. For he realized at once – he was too intelligent not to – that everything that Mercy had said was true. His young wife had been a fantasy in his life, just an enchanting young girl, not a person at all, and now that she was real, and strong, she was actually a great deal more appealing to him than the innocent young sprite he had married. But looking into her eyes and seeing that terrible sadness as he just had, he knew that he must no longer hold any appeal for her. He should never have believed Violet’s calumnies. She had some sort of obsession about their affair, as older women sometimes did. Nor should he have taken her advice and called in Gibbon. Mercy was right in realizing that he had meant to frighten her. But as it had transpired, she had merely succeeded in frightening him, for if Duffane was on the warpath, there would be a scandal, and such a scandal.

  He sat down and put his head in his hands, understanding at last that one way and another he had in a matter of minutes lost everything that he truly cared for. So long did he sit, and so immersed was he in his own thoughts, that he did not even hear the carriage drawing up in the drive, nor see his son and his nurse, and his young wife, leaving him.

  Fifteen

  There is nothing like rumour of an impending Society ball to bring about an escalating sense of drama in a tight circle of friends. Certainly, the mere mention of a ball to be given by Mrs Lawrence Leveen brought out a sense of excitement in all her friends, and none more than Leonie Lynch. She had never been to a grand ball before. She had never worn a ball dress, or been loaned jewellery, or had proper dancing lessons, and now all three excitements were to be hers, thanks entirely to Dorinda Leveen.

  Naturally Mrs Dodd was in seventh heaven. She had come to regard Leonie as being as close to her as a daughter might have been. Nowadays the day-to-day interests of her own life were as nothing compared to the comings and goings of Leonie. Above all she knew that Lady Angela was still as close as ever to the King, and since Leonie was now second in command to Lady Angela that was as close as you could get to your monarch, surely?

  ‘He is a good king, our king, because he always seems to be enjoying being a king, and a king who enjoys himself is good for the country. That is why he is so very popular, that is why people shout “Good old Teddy” when he drives by. People don’t want to be sad when they look at their king, they want to think that he’s going about being happy.’

  Leonie seemed to listen to one or other version of this short speech of her godmother’s every other
morning, and usually just before she herself left for the nursing home and her patients, looking forward as she always did to seeing to their many and varied needs, to everything and anything that a nursing home might bring. But lately she could not deny that there had been a rival claim on her thoughts, a frivolous claim, but a claim none the less – the ball to be given by the Leveens, to which all of London Society, including the King, was now destined to be coming.

  ‘My goddaughter, Miss Lynch, was one of the first to be invited, do you see? Mrs Leveen quite depends on her!’ Mrs Dodd boasted, quite frequently, for now that she had sold her ‘little business’ and retired from medicine she had fully enough time on her hands to be able to impress her friends.

  With great patience, and some fascination, Leonie had been among many to share the day-today agonies of who had called on Dorinda and who had not called on Dorinda.

  She had also lived through the crisis over her foster parents’ being about to change their mind about leaving Eastgate Street and taking up their position as lodge keepers on the Leveen estate in Sussex, and many more excitements. But now it seemed that everything had suddenly become oddly quiet, and all there was left for Leonie to occupy herself with was to be dressed for the great evening, with the help of a new French maid, and the knowledge that Gervaise Lowther’s large debt to Coutts the bankers had finally induced – as is the undoubted way of things – Lady Londonderry to call on Mrs Leveen. At least, she did not call exactly, but her coachman did graciously leave her card on the vast marble table of the hall of Lawrence House.

  Not to be outdone, of course, once Lady Londonderry had called so too did all the other hostesses of the day, not to mention other lesser luminaries who were really of little interest to Dorinda, but to whom she felt vaguely indebted as she found she always did to people who bored her. It was a rather dreadful form of social pity. As if the lesser folk who hung around the fringes of Society, needing, as they did, rather more of a push than the top of it, obliged Dorinda to consider them.

  ‘I am at pains to be kind to a great many people who would not otherwise be asked to this event,’ she had told Mrs Goodman more than once, ‘for our ball is going to be the most talked about since the Coronation. It will be talked about for months if not years afterwards. It will be our way of making a quite brilliant mark on these first years of the twentieth century.’

  The ‘ess’ shape was still in fashion despite the press of the newer couturiers to change the shape of women, to bring in the newer softer look, to allow women to abandon their tight corseting and move into a softer more fluid line, with higher busts and softer draping, with flowers pinned at the corsage and hair that curled about their heads at the front rather than being piled on the top. Fashion at that time was for the mature woman, not for young girls, perhaps because young girls could only wait for life to come to them in the shape of marriage, whereas marriage brought freedom and with it, very often, a love life that was quite definitely worth waiting for, once they had survived childbirth.

  Daringly therefore Dorinda had chosen for Leonie, who was still an unmarried woman, the newer, softer, more Empire or Grecian look. For herself she had pursued the line that would, she knew, give her darling Mr L the greatest pleasure, namely the figure tightly corseted, the sway of the back of her dress and train lending emphasis to this part of her body, the front being pushed to the fore, the cut of the bodice low, and the shoulders shown to be soft and rounded.

  When they were trying on their dresses in front of the endless mirrors at the couture house, Dorinda had laughed and said to Leonie, ‘See how we look, Leonie, my dear. I am dressed as “England Past” whereas you are “England Future”, wouldn’t you say?’

  Which was in a sense true, but also in another sense not true, for young unmarried girls had never been of much consequence in English Society unless they were crazed like Lady Caroline Lamb or made scandals like Emma, Lady Hamilton. Society had always been run and ruled by the older women, and doubtless would always be, since they were meant to have more sense than either young girls or men.

  As Leonie lay resting on her bed in her vast bedroom some few rooms away from Dorinda’s palatial suite, she thought of all the other women who were lying resting on their beds, and tried to imagine their thoughts, or their plans, for the evening ahead.

  Her own sex had never ceased to fascinate Leonie, knowing as she did, from the gossip of Eastgate Street as a child, and now from listening to Dorinda and Mrs Goodman, that women had to leave party politics to men simply and solely because they had their hands full with their own personal politics.

  Leonie knew now, but only from her recent observations, that there were not enough hours in the day to embrace the personal politics of women. There were no summer recesses for her sex as there were for the politicians, and no holidays. Being a woman, and most especially a successful hostess, was a year-round occupation.

  ‘Once they are married, women are not just the power behind the throne, they are the builders of it, they adorn it with gilt, or strip it to the wood, they place flowers on it or peacock feathers, they choose the attendants to it, and the families that will stand nearest to it. They are, and always will be, those who matter most. But that, of course, must remain their secret!’

  Lawrence Leveen had made this little speech to Leonie one evening the previous week when they had been dining quite quietly together, just the three of them, all of them purposely conserving their energy for the following week.

  And now the day was upon them, and everyone was experiencing the kind of butterflies that will always be associated with an event that will, within the opening few minutes, prove to be such a great success, or such a hopeless failure, that before long all of the fashionable world will know of it, and either praise or make fun of its hosts.

  Everyone would be wondering, as Leonie was wondering as she stared up at the intricately plastered ceiling above her bed, who was going to be singled out to be presented to the King? Who chosen to take to the floor first? Surely at this ball, more than any other, no-one would be reprimanded by the King for wearing a dress he had seen before? Lady Angela had told her that the King had been known to reprimand many people, sometimes for a medal wrongly placed, sometimes for an unsolicited comment, or worse. He must always be put at his ease, and kept amused. Suddenly, the possibility of a royal reprimand seemed all too real, and a great part of Leonie now wished, most heartily, that she was not going to the ball, and that she had never met Dorinda Montgomery, that she was back at dear old Eastgate Street pouring the tea for her foster mother of a Sunday.

  And yet if she had not met Dorinda at Sister Angela’s Nursing Home, her beloved foster parents would not now be happily ensconced at the lodge in Sussex, and Leonie would not be staring at the beautiful ball dress hanging opposite her bed. And the little French maid whom Dorinda had hired for Leonie only the week before would not be about to help Monsieur Claude weave flowers into her hair, or pull up silk stockings of the sheerest kind over Leonie’s legs as she lay on a great, gilded bed listening to the orchestra two floors below them briskly rehearsing the first of that evening’s music.

  ‘It is time to dress, mademoiselle.’

  The little French maid peeped through the curtains of the bed and stared almost benignly down at Leonie, as doubtless she would into a crib with a baby in it.

  ‘Mademoiselle will be visited any minute by Monsieur Claude, the coiffeur of madame. For this – mademoiselle must be en chemise et baignée, n’est ce pas?’

  As she arose from the beautifully draped bed Leonie’s thoughts once more turned to the rest of Society. It was not just the other women waiting to be bathed and dressed, as she was, nor the other maids waiting to do the bathing and dressing, it was everyone waiting, down below, and in all the other houses where dinners would be given before the start of the ball.

  The florists, the cooks, the flunkeys, the hall boys, the assistant chefs, the pastry chefs, the husbands, the valets, the housekeepers, the
butlers, the coachmen, the grooms, the carriage men, even the street cleaners, hired especially for the occasion and standing by outside. The flares would soon be lit in the garden, the fantastic spun sugar desserts given their final flourish, the sculptures in the hall draped suitably, the paintings placed appropriately, the great fireplaces, in all the houses, lit. The uniforms of the long-legged footmen would have been polished; the gentlemen’s frogging and the medals buffed until they would catch the light as surely as the diamonds on the ladies’ heads, or at their throats, or dangling from their ears. The long evening gloves would have been cleaned or, in the case of this great ball, freshly purchased (lest the smell of the cleaning fluid be detectable in the ballroom). And everywhere, all the ladies would have practised walking in their new gowns, for to hold your train, just so, your fan just so, and dance, just so, was an art of the most intricate and the most delicate, and that was even before it came to the all-important grand curtsy.

  Dorinda had taught Leonie most assiduously both to dance and to curtsy whenever she could find them both a spare hour, but what she could not teach her was elegance. As they both new, elegance came from the heart.

  ‘You have such elegance, Leonie, my dearest,’ Dorinda told her once or twice, her eyes full of admiration, ‘it makes me think that you surely must have the blood of kings running through your veins!’

  Of course this made them both laugh, for such a thing was not at all possible for Leonie Lynch of Eastgate Street, any more than it was for Dorinda Lawrence. They both knew themselves to be outsiders, invited into Society for one reason or another, and what was more they enjoyed the notion.

  Dorinda knew that Leonie, by reason of her illegitimacy, could never find a noble or even a wellborn husband, but what she hoped very much for her friend was that she just might find someone who was outside the aristocracy while being inside Society. Dorinda had her eye on just the person, someone of great warmth and kindness, someone who was affluent but not rich – someone whom she had, nevertheless, invited to her ball.