The White Marriage Read online

  He couldn’t quite remember Leandra’s reply, but he thought it might have been something vaguely dismissive to indicate that if she, Leandra, had anything to do with it, his future wife-in-name-only would be as nice as pie. Certainly, if this young girl whom he had met by chance was going to be Leandra’s choice for him, she was not just nice, she was almost impossibly nice.

  He sighed inwardly. He should always trust Leandra to make everything perfect for him. She, after all, had perfect taste in everything, which was one of the many reasons why he loved her.

  Gray put aside the thought of Leandra, and her multitude of attractions, and turned his attention back to Sunny. She was sitting in a pool of sunshine, and her colour, with the aid, obviously, of the glass of water, had gradually returned to normal. He noticed that she sat quite still, did not fiddle with the knives and forks or keep turning and looking around, and that her eyes were large and thoughtful, staring at him as if he was someone from another planet.

  ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ he asked, after a pause.

  Sunny stared down at her plate of delicious-looking chicken, and then all too briefly at him, before her eyes returned to her plate.

  ‘I haven’t really been enjoying myself up to now, but I think I might be just about to.’

  Gray laughed. Miss Chantry was nothing if not honest.

  Arietta let herself back into her mother’s cottage, hoping against hope, as always, that Audrey Staunton would not be in, or that if she was she would not hear Arietta coming back but would continue ironing and listening to one of those radio programmes that, for some reason that Arietta could never quite work out, always made her mother excessively depressed. For if Sunny’s mother always seemed to be in a good humour, sewing and busying herself in house and garden, if she was always at pains to be looking towards a brighter future, confident that somehow or other good would ultimately triumph over bad, Arietta’s widowed mother was quite the opposite, which was probably why Arietta always found herself sidling into their cottage, hoping that she could reach her bedroom without her mother hearing her.

  ‘Ari-etta? Is that you, Arietta?’

  Arietta paused on the stairs, one foot poised to mount the next step. Her mother must have just switched the radio off as Arietta’s foot hit the squeakiest board on the narrow rickety old oak staircase.

  ‘Yes, Mummy, it is me.’

  Audrey came into the hall, removed her spectacles and stared up at Arietta, frowning.

  ‘What are you doing, Arietta, may I ask?’

  ‘I’m just going upstairs to study my shorthand.’

  ‘Study your shorthand? You’re always studying your shorthand; never have time to sit down and talk to me, never a moment.’

  ‘It’s not that, it’s just that I thought if I could do the course in half the time, I will be able to get a job sooner, which means you can stop worrying about bills because I will be bringing you home my wages.’

  Her mother turned away from her. ‘I don’t worry about bills. There’s no point,’ she said flatly. ‘And I certainly can’t imagine you making any kind of secretary! You’re really not the type! You’re far too dreamy! Far too much of an unmade bed! I mean, look at you!’

  Arietta nodded in agreement. ‘I know what you mean, Mummy, but now I have my brace off I do look a bit better, more the thing, don’t you think?’

  Her mother turned back to face her. ‘The money that brace cost, it doesn’t bear thinking of,’ Audrey sighed, and then made to go to the kitchen. ‘I suppose you want something to eat? There’s a rissole in the fridge.’

  ‘No, really,’ Arietta called as the kitchen door swung shut behind her mother. ‘Really, I don’t want anything. I’m trying to lose weight.’ After which she positively leaped up the last steps of the staircase, and quickly closed her bedroom door. ‘I hate rissoles even more than I hated my brace,’ she murmured to her small bedroom.

  She lay down on her bed. She wished – oh, how she wished with all her heart – that she had a mother like Sunny’s. Mrs Chantry was always laughing and smiling, sewing things for people, being kind, not always grumbling about money. It was not as if her mother had even had to pay for Arietta’s upbringing. She did not understand why her mother grumbled so much about money since they both knew very well that Arietta’s Uncle Bob, her dead father’s brother, had paid for everything for his niece, poor soul. Not that Uncle Bob could have got out of it should he have wanted to. Audrey being so particularly adept at extortion, she would ask him to lunch once a month, and grumble at him so long and so hard that Uncle Bob would inevitably find himself writing out an even larger cheque than on his previous visit.

  The theme, the constant theme that had dominated Arietta’s childhood was that she was a ball and chain anchoring poor Audrey to their cottage, forcing her into a life of washing and ironing, of drudgery and care, a life that without Uncle Bob might have reduced her poor mother to ‘living in a slum’. It seemed that had not her mother had the misfortune to give birth to Arietta, Audrey could have been an elegant woman attending fashionable parties where hostesses entertained glamorous guests, where life was easy and sophisticated, where attractive women met rich men who whisked them away to lives of luxury. All this would have been possible had Audrey Staunton not been left a widow with a child. No man wanted to take on a woman with a child, let alone a daughter.

  ‘If it wasn’t for you …’ Audrey would begin, and then she would sigh, and Arietta would try to think of something that would please her mother, try to make up to her for the deprivations her existence had caused.

  Strangely, Arietta perfectly understood her mother’s point of view – perhaps because there was no other point of view on offer, or perhaps because, being a practical girl, she could perfectly see that Audrey would have been far better off if she had been left a childless widow, which was why Arietta was in such a hurry to leave secretarial college and strike out on her own, earn a living, send money home to Audrey who would, at long, long last be able to be what she had always wanted to be: a glamorous single woman.

  Leandra picked up her white telephone receiver and was unsurprised to hear Gray’s mellifluous voice at the other end.

  ‘You are back from luncheon, and at your apartment?’ she asked, careful not to say his name in front of the maid, who was clearing her coffee tray from her desk.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And how was it all?’

  ‘It all was – interesting, and amusing too.’

  ‘As suitable as we thought it might be?’

  The maid had now closed the door behind her. Leandra lay back against her chair. She loved the time between lunch and dinner, time which could be spent in any way she chose, when there would be no guests expected and no one to whom she had to be charming.

  ‘It is quite as suitable, but terribly young. Hardly eighteen, you know. Almost half my age, Leandra. Really it doesn’t seem right to take a young sweetie like that and throw her into the maelstrom of Society. It does not seem at all right.’

  ‘Has the person other plans?’

  ‘Certainly she has. She has plans for the future which do not include marrying a man of well over thirty and leading a separate life.’

  ‘What are her plans?’ Leandra always kept her voice low when speaking on the telephone, for many reasons, one of them being that she knew only too well how many maids listened at doors, knew how they could be in the pay of other households whose mistresses would be glad to know anything about Leandra, from her clothes to her menus to her lovers.

  ‘Her plans are to become a secretary, and then save up the money she makes from that and open a flower shop.’

  ‘Tiens! Mon Dieu! What innocent ambitions.’ Leandra smiled. She had a very pretty French accent, which was why she often used French expressions. Besides, it was very fashionable. Nancy Mitford was living in Paris, everyone that was anyone was going there for Friday-to-Mondays, and coming back with glorious tales of heavenly meals, and shopping trips to Dior.
>
  Leandra would not go to live in Paris; she was too aware of her reputation. She did not want to encourage the sort of adverse publicity that others of her kind had attracted by going to live lives of ease elsewhere. She was always careful to stay in England, to look and seem patriotic, to divide her time between London and her country house, not to do anything that was not thoroughly English. Dilke had too many business affairs for her to want to be seen to be anything but exemplary. Besides, she knew that Dilke was beginning to harbour political ambitions, which, since he had recently become a British citizen, were not beyond the realms of possibility.

  There was a pause. Leandra allowed the pause to lengthen. It was one of her strengths, one of her many social skills, that she knew never to fill a pause hastily in case it made her seem ill at ease or, at the very least, neurotic.

  ‘Supposing I take the person in question to lunch, and learn a little more about flower shops and other notions?’

  ‘What can I say? I am putty in your hands.’

  ‘I am very glad to hear it. Quatre ou cinq?’

  This was their code for meeting up at tea-time. Despite the fact that she employed only Spanish maids in London and country girls at Maydown, who would not know a word of French, Leandra would not risk saying anything remotely suspicious on the telephone.

  She replaced the telephone on its cradle, and then she stood up, and strolled towards the window of her beloved sitting room. The room that Dilke had allocated to her, to do in it as she wished when she wished was one of her favourites. It was where she kept her long lists of amusing guests, important guests, dull but rich guests, newly arrived celebrities, and every other kind of personality. Her sitting room – or sulking room, as Dilke always affectionately referred to it – was in reality the engine room of their social and political life, which was why she never left it without locking the door.

  She pulled aside the net curtain and gazed down at the street below. London still looked so awfully post war, people hurrying along in old-fashioned clothes bravely altered, clothes with which they nevertheless sported fashionable hats, for which no clothing coupons had been required. Opposite Leandra’s apartment block, a window cleaner was propping up a ladder. Even from her distant point of view she could see that he was painfully thin, no black market produce coming to him then. A car passed. A large car with a gleaming body and with a silver lady on the front – the famous Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy.

  Leandra dropped the curtain. It was time to change. How glad she was that Dilke and she had never wanted to have children, because it meant that despite being in her late thirties, her body was still that of an eighteen-year-old – everyone said so, Dilke and Gray particularly. She was very lucky. She had two men who loved and adored her, but in such very different ways. One way and another she really had the perfect life.

  ‘I don’t really like the sound of her, Sunny.’ John Chantry looked round at his daughter, a worried expression on her face. ‘She sounds rough again to me.’

  ‘At least she’s going, Pa, and that really is something after all this time, don’t you think? I mean last weekend you couldn’t get her to even start, could you now?’

  Sunny was standing in wide-bottomed slacks, a favourite old cardigan done up around her, a pair of old white gym shoes on her feet. Her father stared at her, not really seeing her, listening instead to his old girl, his beloved Vauxhall.

  ‘She may be going, Sunny, but she’s running rough.’ As the engine suddenly stalled, a look of triumph came into John’s eyes. ‘See? See? I told you. Better telephone Clem Arkwright and get him out to us. I didn’t want to call him out, because he never will send me a bill, as you know, ever since my father did his father a turn with saving his favourite horse, which makes me feel worse than dreadful. I mean to say, that was in the Ice Age, but they say the Arkwrights never forget a favour, and so it would seem.’ He patted the Vauxhall as if it was a horse. ‘Poor old girl got a touch of the colic – I expect that is what Clem will say. But what a dratted nuisance, what a bother. Still, we must not expect too much of the old servant. She is, after all, of a certain vintage and, what is more, a really rather special one. Best if you pop indoors and telephone Clem Arkwright to come out to her, would you, Sunny?’

  Since Sunny did not move to do his bidding. John turned from comforting his car and stared at her.

  ‘Well, go on, go on, girl, or we won’t be able to go to this do tomorrow that your mother has talked us into, and I will never hear the end of it. I will be in hot water for the rest of time.’

  ‘Mr Arkwright’s already on his way, Pa.’ Sunny smiled. ‘Ma told him to be sure to be here for you at ten thirty. After what happened last Sunday, she thought the old girl might need a bit of help.’

  John shook his head and then smiled suddenly with satisfied understanding.

  ‘Your mother is a wonderful woman, Sunny, a really wonderful woman.’ He turned as he heard the front gate clicking. ‘And here is Clem, large as life and twice as horrible. Gracious, Clem,’ John went to hold out a large blackened paw before hastily withdrawing it to wipe it on one of the many rags that were now littering the drive, ‘I have only to rub the magic wand on my spanner, and here you are! Been working on her since last weekend, but I am dearly afraid I have not your magic touch, Clem.’

  Clem Arkwright smiled, standing back a little way from the old Vauxhall.

  ‘Good to see the old girl with her rugs off, though, isn’t it, Mr Chantry?’

  ‘It certainly is, Clem, it certainly is.’

  They both stood for a few seconds in reverential silence, gazing at the motor car, remembering her in her glory days before the war.

  ‘My father bought this from your father for my birthday, didn’t he, Clem?’

  ‘He did, Mr Chantry, he certainly did. And I daren’t think what he paid for her.’

  ‘Worth every penny. I learned to drive in her, and you know how I learned to drive in her, Clem?’

  Clem Arkwright, despite knowing only too well, shook his head. ‘No, I don’t remember, at least I don’t think I do.’

  ‘When I stopped driving into the ditches round Rushington, falling into the hedges, and reversing into farm gates, that’s when your father and my father considered I had learned to drive! Golly, but those were the days, Clem. Couldn’t do that now, not with this lot turning the country upside down and inside out, making laws for this and laws for that, turning England into some kind of police state.’

  They both nodded in agreement. They were as one on everything were John Chantry and Clem Arkwright.

  ‘Nothing like a new car when you’re young, eh, Clem?’ John asked, after a short pause.

  ‘No, Mr Chantry, nothing like it.’

  Clem Arkwright started to peer into the engine, which was a sign for Sunny to slope off back into the house, engines being what her mother always called ‘chaps’ talk’.

  ‘For you. A Mrs Fortescue?’

  Sunny stared at her mother. She was holding their telephone out to her and waggling it uncertainly as if it had something in the earpiece, an earwig or a wasp, that she wanted to get out.

  Sunny took the telephone from her and, covering it with her hand she whispered to her mother, ‘It must be for you. I don’t know a Mrs Fortescue, do you?’

  Her mother mouthed back to her, ‘No,’ and then quickly disappeared back into the dining room, where she had two bridesmaids’ frocks and a wedding dress to finish altering before the following morning.

  ‘Hello, Sunny Chantry speaking.’

  ‘Hello, Miss Chantry. My name is Leandra Fortescue. I do hope you don’t mind me calling you, but I am a friend of Gray Wyndham. You may remember you had lunch with him yesterday?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ It was embarrassing but just the mention of Gray Wyndham’s name made Sunny blush, and feel really glad that her mother was not in the hall, or even Arietta or someone. She stared at the white of her gym shoe. Staring at something white often helped to make the red go o
ut of her face.

  There was a short pause.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Leandra went on eventually, ‘if you would like to come to lunch with me, at Maydown? Nothing formal, just the two of us. It would give me such pleasure. Mr Wyndham has told me so much about you, I feel I know you already. But of course it might be dull for you, in which case I quite understand.’

  It was the mention of Maydown that did it. All of a sudden Sunny realised to whom she was speaking. This was Leandra Fortescue, the legendary socialite and hostess, a woman of such style that even personalities such as Beatrice Miller were known to go to her for advice. Mrs Dilke Fortescue was the acme of everything that was stylish and beautiful in post-war Britain, and she wanted to ask Sunny Chantry to lunch with her.

  ‘I would love to come to lunch—’

  ‘Well, that is excellent. Shall we say one o’clock on Tuesday? The Friday-to-Monday guests would have gone by then, and we can have the place to ourselves.’

  Sunny replaced the telephone and stared around the hall. Leandra Fortescue had asked her to lunch with her. Why? She felt dizzy. The hall seemed suddenly smaller and more enclosed. She stared down at the parquet flooring, shiny with polish and vigour. Everything was just the same. Her gym shoes were just as white, her wide-bottomed slacks just the same navy blue they had been before, but everything was quite, quite different, because Mrs Dilke Fortescue had telephoned to ask her to lunch.

  ‘Ma!’

  Sunny burst into the dining room, but her mother, well used to her daughter’s impetuosity, did not look up from her sewing machine, only kept her feet pedalling, and her eyes down.

  ‘Ma, I’ve been asked to lunch by Mrs Dilke Fortescue.’

  ‘Have you, dear? When?’

  ‘Next Tuesday.’

  ‘But what about secretarial college, Sunny? What will the principal say to you?’

  Sunny shook her head. ‘I’ll have to have a cold. You’ll have to tell Mrs Chandler I’m poorly.’

  ‘Can’t tell a lie, Sunny, you know that. I am George Washington’s direct descendant, always have been, always will be.’