The White Marriage Page 7

  ‘Very well, you can say that I am going to have to be excused because I have to go to a very important appointment, which is true.’

  ‘But how could it be very important, Sunny?’

  ‘Mrs Dilke Fortescue, you know. Mrs Dilke Fortescue, Ma! You were pointing her out in Vogue only last month, remember? The article about style in post-war Britain – she was picked out as the one with the most, remember? It was in Chez Gaston; you were having your hair permed. You must remember.’

  ‘I still don’t think Mrs Chandler will be very pleased if I ask for you to take the day off, Sunny, really I don’t.’

  At that moment there was a shout from the drive.

  ‘Come on, Sunny, we’re ready for the off. Come on!’

  Sunny dashed out into the drive and jumped into the Vauxhall beside her father.

  ‘Hold on, Sunny, wave to Clem – shout thank you!’

  Sunny did as bidden as the old Vauxhall once more sailed triumphantly into the empty road outside their gate, and Sunny sat back in her seat and stared ahead of her.

  ‘Got her up to twenty-five already!’ her father shouted excitedly. ‘How about that, Sunny? What a wonderful old girl she is.’ He beamed proudly at the road ahead. ‘What a morning for a spin,’ he said, lowering his voice as the excitement of the moment transformed momentarily into something calmer. ‘What a morning. I dreamed of this when I was in prison camp, you know – dreamed and dreamed of the first morning in late spring when I could take out the old girl for a spin. Nothing will detract from this moment, Sunny, nothing.’

  Sunny stared ahead of her, not replying. She hated her father mentioning being a prisoner of war, knew that he still had nightmares, knew that his experiences would haunt him for ever, but at that moment all she wanted to think about was that Mrs Dilke Fortescue had asked her out to lunch at her famous house, Maydown. She was going to have lunch with a woman who advised editors of magazines on what was good taste and what was not, who was worshipped by the fashionable world for her style. If her father could not believe that he had the old Vauxhall going, his daughter could not believe what had just happened to her. She had just been telephoned by Mrs Dilke Fortescue.

  ‘Oh God, she’s stalled – she’s broken down.’

  As the car came to a reluctant and shuddering halt, which made Sunny cling to the side of her leather seat, John pulled on the handbrake and leaped out of the driver’s seat.

  Then, Sunny heard him say in surprise, ‘Oh look, there’s Clem.’

  Sunny smiled with relieved satisfaction. She knew, even if Pa didn’t, that Mr Arkwright would never let Pa out in the Vauxhall for the first time without making sure that he really had been able to get the old girl going. He had obviously followed them down the road, just to make sure.

  ‘Oh blow, seems that she must have a bit of indijaggers, Clem. Bit of a tow needed, would you say?’

  ‘Might be a good idea, Mr Chantry.’

  They both smiled ruefully.

  ‘At least we got her as far as the crossroads, Clem!’

  The short return journey stopped momentarily outside the Chantrys’ cottage to let Sunny out, before continuing on to Arkwright’s Garage.

  Sunny let herself back into the house, making sure that she made as little noise as possible, before creeping up the stairs to her bedroom where she sat for the next hour gazing out of the window in a trance. What was happening to her life, and why? Something – but what exactly it was, she could not have said.

  The question of Sunny missing a day at college came up again over the weekend, but Mary Chantry remained intransigent. She would not ring and make an excuse to the secretarial college, and what was more and what was worse, she thought that Sunny should really reconsider whether she should go to lunch with Mrs Dilke Fortescue.

  ‘She is out of your league, Sunny, really she is,’ Mary insisted, while John remained silently disinterested, wondering only if the reason that his old girl had misbehaved herself was plugs, dirt in the petrol, or too long on blocks in the garage.

  Sunny was silent.

  ‘I cannot insist that you ring and cancel, Sunny, but I do advise you that you should,’ her mother went on.

  Sunny still said nothing, so Mary left her at the kitchen table and went back to her sewing in the dining room. Sunny stared at the beetroot salad, at the piece of jellied tongue and the undressed salad leaves from their garden.

  She did not want to think of Mrs Dilke Fortescue as being out of her league, at least not for ever. After all, if you always thought of everyone as being out of your league, then you would never go anywhere or get anywhere, or do anything. She was sure of it, and yet at the same time she was reluctant to upset her mother, who rarely if ever took a stand about anything. For some reason that she could not understand, Mary did not want her daughter going to Maydown to lunch. Of course, this made the whole idea even more exciting. Sunny started to clear away. She would go to Maydown. She just would not tell her mother she was going to go. She would probably become all too occupied in her next bout of sewing and would forget all about it, as she so often did, and Sunny would be able to go and come back without her remembering.

  She laid her plans carefully. All through Monday, during her classes she took care to act as if she was not feeling very well, swallowing aspirins in front of teachers at given moments, and powdering her face with talcum powder so she looked becomingly wan.

  The following morning she put on what she wanted to wear to lunch at Maydown beneath what she would normally wear for college. It was exhausting and hot, and meant that she had to pass her mother very, very quickly when she popped her head out of the dining-room door to say goodbye.

  ‘’Bye, Ma, ’bye.’

  Once in the drive, all was well, and she managed to stagger towards the Greenline bus, and climb aboard without too much trouble, stepping off at exactly the same stop as she always did, and watching for the bus to disappear from sight before doubling back to the station where she went to the ladies’ cloakroom, and stripped off her college clothes.

  It was a nuisance, but when she saw how nice she looked in her sprigged muslin dress and matching jacket, she smiled at herself. Now all she had to do was to leave the bag of clothes and college books in the left-luggage place and wait around the tea-room until the appropriate time, and then catch a train and a taxi to Maydown.

  Rule opened the front door before Sunny had time to ring the bell, which was strangely disconcerting, as if he had been waiting for her all morning.

  ‘I hope you had a safe journey, Miss Chantry?’

  As Sunny followed the butler through the hall she tried to put the memory of the two hours of boredom she had endured in the station tea-room, the dirty train, and the bumpy taxi ride out of her mind. She knew from the butler’s smile that, since she had arrived in a taxi, he must know just what a series of hoops she would have gone through to get to Maydown, which was not easily accessible, to say the least. He would know that she was poor, because not only was he the butler, but because he would be used to seeing their more normal guests stepping out of motor cars – the doors of which would have been held open by chauffeurs.

  Sunny frowned as the butler waited for a reply to his question. ‘It was very interesting,’ she said finally, looking round the hall as Rule took her jacket from her. ‘Although there were quite a lot of people eating rather black bananas on the train. I hate bananas when they go black, don’t you?’

  Normally Rule’s coat taking and door opening were done in one smooth movement without pause. Now, however, he was forced to pause, albeit only fractionally, as he stared at Miss Chantry, at the same time struggling not to laugh.

  ‘Quite so,’ he agreed, having cleared his throat.

  ‘When someone starts eating an overripe banana you do so often find yourself praying that it will all be over in a minute, don’t you?’

  ‘Naturally, one does,’ Rule agreed. ‘Would you like to follow me, Miss Chantry? Mrs Fortescue is expecting you in t
he Blue Room.’

  If Sunny was feeling nervous she certainly did not show it, but followed the butler across the hall, which was actually more like a very grand drawing room. She could not help turning and gazing back at the vastly opulent decoration. The walls carefully painted in what even she knew the Pre-Raphaelites called yallery-green, the gold and white marbled insets, the red-velvet-coated gentleman over the fireplace, the equally carefully matching red-velvet-covered sofas and chairs placed artlessly around the fireplace on a vaguely faded rug, itself made up of colours that toned in quite exactly with the rest of the décor. Sunny took in all this in a few seconds, just before she turned right, following Rule down past a bust on a plinth, and so on to the Blue Room, where she found herself stepping into a sea of such blues that she was only too glad that her sprigged muslin dress and jacket were white with small pink flowers picked out, and not blue.

  Leandra too was not dressed in blue, but in palest apple green, which set off her justly famous chestnut hair to perfection, as it was meant to do. One glance at her told Sunny that here was a great beauty who knew just what to expect of life, and what was more, the best way to achieve it. Sunny thought her grandmother, when she was alive, might have described Mrs Fortescue as ‘a bit of a go-getter’.

  ‘How nice to meet you. I have heard so much about you from Gray Wyndham.’

  Sunny held out a gloved hand and shook the ungloved hand of her hostess, before sitting down and removing both gloves and placing them carefully in her handbag. Leandra watched her with some interest. Miss Chantry was a much prettier girl than Gray had led her to believe, but then she had always found that the male of the species was never really very good at describing the female of the species, unless they were particularly voluptuous, at which point they tended to go to town and over-describe them. Just as they were hopeless at remembering what someone had been wearing at a particular event, unless they were sporting a colour they loathed, or a truly ridiculous hat.

  If Leandra herself had been asked to depict Sunny Chantry, she would have described her as a young girl of medium height, with rich dark brown hair, large grey-green eyes, and an elegant slender figure. She noted with interest that as the young girl sat down, the expression on her face was of an almost mischievous interest, and she exuded the kind of enviable confidence of someone who has never known unkind-ness. To say that she looked innocent would be to give the wrong impression of Miss Chantry, Leandra decided, as they exchanged the usual introductory banalities. Miss Chantry did not look innocent, she was innocent, which meant that she was just what was wanted for Leandra’s purposes.

  ‘So-ooo.’ Leandra paused, her head tipped slightly back, her own famous violet-blue eyes looking at Sunny with an increasingly amused expression. ‘So-ooo, you had luncheon with Mr Wyndham?’

  Sunny nodded, at the same time adjusting the skirt of her muslin dress minutely. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I did have luncheon.’ Just in time she remembered to add the last bit. There was a long pause, which neither jumped in to fill. ‘Yes, I had lunch-eon with Mr Wyndham, and the food was delicious.’

  Leandra, like Rule before her, found herself struggling not to laugh at Miss Chantry’s insouciant manner.

  ‘Oh, good, I am so glad it was delicious.’

  For a second Leandra allowed her mind to trot through all the young ladies and women who would give their eyeteeth to lunch with Gray, but she could not think of one whom she could imagine saying afterwards that the food was delicious. That Gray was handsome and charming, yes, but not – well, never mind. Miss Chantry herself was quite obviously, if nothing else, an original.

  ‘Yes, and we had a jolly good chat.’

  ‘Well, that was good.’

  ‘Yes, he told me all about how he is going to help bring Britain back into the forefront of everything. He and lots of other people are going to start some sort of design programme. They want everything that we handle every day to be original and beautiful as well as functional, so they are dying to get going. My father too is dying to get started on rebuilding, but the restrictions are so tiresome, he thinks he will be an old man before they are fully lifted, and that life is doomed to go on being post-war dreary.’ Sunny looked round the room in which they were sitting, noting the vast arrangements of hothouse flowers, the large blue vases, the marble columns, the carved gold picture frames, the vast eighteenth-century rug. ‘Not that it is dreary here,’ she finally added a little hastily, after which she smiled and cleared her throat.

  Rule entered. ‘Luncheon is served,’ he said, speaking quietly from the door.

  ‘Ah, madame est servie?’ Leandra asked, as she always did.

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  Rule bowed slightly. He did not like French except on menus, but if Mrs Fortescue insisted on speaking it now and then, there really was very little that he could do about it.

  Leandra stood up and Sunny followed her. They walked across the beautiful room into a small conservatory, where a table was laid for two, silver, cut glass, eighteenth-century polished knives and forks with the initials ‘DLF’ discreetly engraved into the handles, and stiffly starched napkins placed in front of each setting and tied into the shape of a water lily.

  ‘It is so pretty it seems a pity to unwrap it,’ Sunny stated, admiring her napkin before unravelling it, and spreading it over her knees.

  ‘So,’ Leandra said again, as a maid walked in and placed a plate of beautifully arranged melon in front of each of them, before holding out small silver dishes, one Sunny found to be holding ginger and the other caster sugar. ‘So, you enjoyed a delicious luncheon with Mr Wyndham.’ She waited until the maid had left. ‘Did you also enjoy his company, may I ask?’

  Sunny stared at the melon, wondering if she had put too much ginger on it, before speaking.

  ‘Mr Wyndham is very nice. We had already met, you know, at the ball, and then he rang to ask me to lunch-eon, because he wanted to thank me for helping him, or rather for getting Mr Arkwright to help mend the hose in his motor car. At any rate, it all went very well, and we parted the best of friends, I think. Not that you can ever be sure with an older man, if you see what I mean? I mean, older men always make one feel so much younger, so one has to work awfully hard to impress on them that one is not as wet behind the ears as they perhaps think. I expect I failed dismally, but then how would I know, because although I wrote and thanked him, I cannot know what he thought. It is awfully difficult with a man like Mr Wyndham, because he is so easy to talk to, and yet he doesn’t really let one know how it’s going his end. He was probably bored stiff, poor chap. But at any rate, we did laugh a lot, mostly –’ she leaned forward confidentially – ‘mostly, I am ashamed to tell you, about the people at the other tables, who were even older than Mr Wyndham, and very, very proper, so we had to keep our voices down in case we said something to upset them. I will say he caught on very quickly, because actually it is a good game.’

  Sunny stopped suddenly, possibly because she had come to the end of her melon, or possibly because she had suddenly become aware that she might have said rather too much.

  ‘Mr Wyndham can be most amusing,’ Leandra agreed, but she did not continue because the maid had returned to remove the plates, and replace them with fresh ones.

  The second course was the lightest fish pie that Sunny had ever eaten, but because the sun was now shining on the conservatory it had grown hot, and she found herself having to lift the glass of water in front of her to her cheeks once more to cool them. This time, however, she felt that an explanation was needed.

  ‘I had to do this when I had lunch – when I had lunch-eon – with Mr Wyndham, but then it was because of the sherry! A sip of sherry and I turn the colour of that geranium!’

  Leandra imagined Gray faced with this young girl applying her water glass to her cheeks to cool them, and wondered for a second at the scene. Gray was so sophisticated she feared he might have found such behaviour embarrassing.

  ‘It is quite hot in here. Reall
y conservatories were only meant to be used in the winter, as winter gardens, as you know’

  ‘No, I didn’t …’

  Sunny stared around her. The scents on the air were delicious. The whole scene with the dark blue china and the dark blue flowers, the maids serving them, and Leandra wearing apple green was so beautiful, and so different from life at Rushington, where sophistication meant napkins with rings, and mats with men shooting pheasants on them, and a daily cleaning lady who called you ‘madam’ and went home at twelve.

  For a second it seemed to Leandra that her young guest’s face had clouded over, and that she had, in a spiritual sense, left Maydown and gone back to Rushington.

  ‘My dear,’ Leandra put her head on one side and smiled, ‘can I be very honest with you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. I like people who say that, because you know it is never very easy to be honest with people, that you have to like them so much that they won’t mind the truth, wouldn’t you say?’

  Now it was Leandra’s face that seemed to Sunny to have clouded over.

  ‘Oh, I say, I am sorry. Have I said the wrong thing? I talk too much. I get it from my father. I told Mr Wyndham that when we first met, when he came to the house the day his Bentley had a broken hose. Pa is a chatterbox, except when he is cross, which luckily for Ma and me is not very often.’

  Leandra beckoned to the maid, who was now hovering once more, preparatory to removing their plates, which she did, replacing them with fruit plates.

  ‘Do have a peach. They’re from our own hot-houses, and really, they are so delicious.’

  ‘Shall I need to wear a mackintosh to peel them?’

  They both laughed, and in fact Leandra noted that Sunny peeled and ate her peach using her fruit knife and fork in a commendably elegant fashion.

  ‘I was about to be honest, wasn’t I?’ Leandra asked her guest. ‘So what I wanted to say to you was this. You impressed Mr Wyndham a great deal, so much so that he wants to – he asked me to ask you – to …’ She stopped. ‘Well, it seems he has it in his mind to marry you, if you should so wish.’