Mrs Haddington sat down on the arm of her daughter’s chair, and tenderly smoothed the helmet of spun gold about her pretty head. ‘Listen, my pet! I know Dan’s attractive, but he’s not the man for you. He’s an – an old friend of mine, but if I thought that you –’
‘Darling Mummy, do be your age!’ begged Cynthia. ‘I haven’t the slightest desire to cut you out with Dan!’
Mrs Haddington saw no need to reprove her offspring for this speech. She merely said: ‘Then that’s all right. But you mustn’t think I don’t know that he’s been doing his utmost to get you to fall for him. And, of course, men of his age –’
‘Too Victorian!’ interrupted Cynthia. ‘Really, Mummy! Oh, God, is it actually six o’clock? I must fly!’
She wrenched her slim body out of the chair, and bent to pick up the discarded hat. Mrs Haddington said: ‘You’ll have time for a hot bath: it’ll freshen you up.’
‘I shall be all right,’ Cynthia repeated. ‘Who’s coming with us?’
‘Roddy Vickerstown, the Kenelm Guisboroughs, and Freddy Atherstone.’
‘Christ!’ observed Cynthia.
‘Well, I know, darling, but the Kenelm Guisboroughs know everybody, and I’m particularly anxious to get you invited to Mrs Atherstone’s dance. It’ll be one of those intime affairs –’
‘It sounds lousy,’ said Cynthia. ‘And Kenelm Guisborough is so dull he makes me practically basin-sick, besides having that dim wife, and hating Lance’s guts for being the heir! I suppose it’ll be some ghastly play, too, with a Message, or something that makes you want to cry with boredom!’
Mrs Haddington regarded her in some perturbation. ‘Darling, if you’re really too tired, I’ll ring Nest up, and ask her if she can possibly –’
‘Oh, Mummy, do stop fussing!’ Cynthia said impatiently. ‘I shall be all right when I’ve had a bath!’
Mrs Haddington looked doubtful, but when she next saw her daughter she perceived that the hot bath had had unexpectedly recuperative powers. A vision in delicate shades of floating yellow chiffon, Cynthia ran down the stairs three-quarters of an hour later, and burst upon the assembled theatre-party, partaking of sand wiches and cocktails in the library, with apologies for her tardiness on her smiling lips, and such a brilliant glow in her eyes as caused Mr Freddy Atherstone, hovering on the brink of matrimony with another, to experience a serious cardiac qualm. Only Mrs Haddington, staring for an unwinking moment, seemed to derive no pleasure from her daughter’s radiant beauty; and although Mrs Kenelm Guisborough afterwards informed her husband that Lilias had looked at Cynthia in the most extraordinary way, the revealing moment passed so swiftly that Mr Kenelm Guisborough was able to assert that he had noticed nothing, and that his wife was always imagining things.
Four
By the time that Mrs Haddington’s duplicate Bridge-party assembled, at nine o’clock on a Tuesday evening, several persons’ tempers were exacerbated, and Miss Beulah Birtley had been obliged to swallow an aspirin to quell an incipient headache.
The day began badly with the inevitable discovery by one of the invited guests that circumstances over which he had no control would prevent his honouring his engagement. Having assured the delinquent, in her sweetest voice, that it didn’t matter at all, Mrs Haddington slammed down the telephone, and ordered her maid, who had just brought up her breakfasttray, to send Miss Birtley to her at once, and to tell her to bring the address-book with her. Upon its being pointed out to her that Miss Birtley was not due to arrive in Charles Street for another quarter of an hour, she delivered herself of some rather venomous remarks about the inefficiency and laziness of every member of her staff, which did nothing to endear her to the representative before her. Indeed, this prim-lipped virgin lost no time in requesting her employer, in accents of painful gentility, to accept her notice.
‘Don’t be a fool! Why should you want to leave?’ demanded Mrs Haddington.
Miss Mapperley said that she would rather not say; and at once, and in curious contradiction of her statement, began to enumerate the many and varied reasons which made her disinclined to remain under Mrs Haddington’s roof. Chief among these seemed to be her dislike of being expected to wait on two people. She said that she had never been one to complain but that maiding Miss Cynthia was one person’s work, and work, moreover, for which she had not originally been engaged.
As Mrs Haddington had been determined to set her henchwoman to work that day on the task of altering the frock she had bought for Cynthia to wear that very evening, and which a conscienceless couturier had delivered on the previous afternoon in a far from perfect condition, these fell words made it apparent that some at least of the day’s plans would have to be re-edited. She was not the woman to bandy words with one who would all too probably walk out of the house on slight provocation, so she merely dismissed Miss Mapperley from her room and vented her wrath presently on her secretary.
The fact that Beulah did not arrive in Charles Street until ten o’clock furnished her with an excellent excuse for verbally blistering the girl. That she had herself ordered Beulah to go first to Covent Garden market that morning, to buy flowers for the party, she at once acknowledged and dismissed by saying acidly that she would have supposed Beulah to have had time to have gone there twice over.
‘Don’t stand there making excuses, but go downstairs and fetch me my address book! I’m a man short tonight! And when you’ve done that you’ll have to go to Fulham and get hold of Miss Spennymoor, and tell her I want her to come here today to alter Miss Haddington’s frock. Why the wretched woman isn’t on the telephone is more than I can fathom! She doesn’t deserve to be employed at all when she makes things as difficult as she can. You can do the flowers when you get back.’
By the time Beulah returned from her errand to the little dressmaker in Fulham, Mrs Haddington had been driven into the last ditch, and forced to fall back, for her substitute guest, on the one person she had vowed never to invite again. Rather than include herself amongst the players, an arrangement which she considered detri mental to the smooth running of the party, since a hostess’s eye (she said) should be everywhere, she had unbent towards Mr Sydney Butterwick, who was providentially free that evening. By rearranging the tables, so that he and Dan Seaton-Carew should play in different rooms for as long as was possible, she hoped that he might be deterred from giving expression to the jealousy he suffered every time Mr Seaton-Carew bestowed his favours elsewhere. Mrs Haddington was even broader-minded than young Mr Harte, but she had the greatest dislike of shrill-voiced, nail-biting scenes being enacted at her more select parties.
The intelligence, brought by Beulah, that Miss Spennymoor would, as she herself phrased it, do her best to fit Mrs Haddington in during the course of the afternoon, brought a slight alleviation of the morning’s ills, but this was soon dissipated by an unnerving message from the chef that no lobsters had as yet reached London, and that as none of the fishmongers whom he had personally rung up could give him any assurance that the dilatory crustaceans would arrive in time to appear at the party, he would be glad to know with what alternative delicacy Madame would desire him to fill one hundred patties. Hardly had Mrs Haddington dealt with this difficulty than her attention was claimed by Thrimby, her extremely supercilious butler. Since she paid him very handsome wages, and always supported him in any quarrel he might have with the other members of the staff, he had been in her service for longer than any of his colleagues, having been engaged when she first moved into the house in Charles Street eighteen months earlier. He was always very polite, for this was something which he owed to himself, but he deeply despised her, and frequently regaled such of the upper servants as he honoured with his patronage with odious comparisons drawn between her and his previous employers. The economies which Mrs Haddington practised behind the scenes, and, too often, at her servants’ expense, never failed to mortify him, for Such Ways, he said, were not what he had been accustomed to. He was in the present instance offended by his mi
stress’s refusal to employ outside labour to assist him in his duties that evening, and had already conveyed by a stiff bow, and perceptibly raised eyebrows, his opinion of those who were content to see at least half their guests waited on by a secretary and parlourmaid. This affront to his dignity made him disinclined to be co-operative, and led him to lay before Mrs Haddington a number of difficulties and obstructions which, in any other household, he would quietly have overcome. He was also annoyed with Beulah, whom he disliked at the best of times, because she had dumped an armful of foliage in the basin in the cloakroom, left several shallow wooden boxes containing hot-house flowers in the hall, and adjured him not to touch any of them; so he wound up his speech to Mrs Haddington by asking her, in a voice of patient long-suffering, whether Miss Birtley would finish the flowers before luncheon. He added that if she intended to arrange the bowls in the cloakroom it seemed a pity that he should not have been warned of this earlier, since this apartment had already been swept and garnished, and would now have to be done again.
This gave Mrs Haddington an opportunity to say that the flowers ought to have been arranged hours earlier, which made Beulah lose her temper, and retort that so they would have been had she not been sent off on an errand to Fulham. She then stalked off, determined to scatter as many leaves, stalks, and scrapings of bark as possible all over the cloakroom floor, and peace reigned until Cynthia Haddington, no early riser, erupted from her bedroom with a loud and insistent demand that everyone should immediately abandon his or her task to search for her favourite powder-compact, which she had mislaid. This appalling loss seemed likely to embitter her whole life, and at once rendered the house hideous. Her temper, never at its best in the morning, grew steadily worse; and after exasperating everyone by insisting that all the unlikeliest places should be searched, reiterating passionately that she knew she had had it when she went to bed the previous evening, she nearly provoked a domestic crisis by asserting her belief that someone had stolen the compact.
Mrs Haddington, who had not till then accorded the disaster more than a perfunctory interest, rather hastily intervened, telling her daughter not to talk nonsense, and reminding her that she had at least four other compacts at her disposal.
‘But this was my favourite one!’ Cynthia said. ‘I can’t bear it if it’s lost! It’s the round one, covered with petitpoint, with –’
‘Yes, darling,’ interrupted Mrs Haddington, with careful restraint. ‘We all know what it looks like. It’s the one Dan gave you for Christmas, isn’t it? I expect it’ll turn up. Just don’t fuss!’
But this advice fell on deaf ears. Cynthia went on drifting from room to room, leaving chaos in her wake, and maintaining a maddening flow of complaints and conjectures, until she was forced temporarily to abandon her search by the realisation that since it was now one o’clock, at which hour she was pledged to join a luncheon-party at Claridge’s, she would obviously be rather late unless she left the house at once.
Mrs Haddington had also a luncheon-engagement, but found time, before departing to keep it, to condemn Miss Birtley’s arrangement of the flowers, characterising the bowls as messy.
‘Well, I know they aren’t good,’ said Beulah, sighing. ‘It’s a bit difficult, with so little choice, and carnations will flop so!’
‘Anyone with a grain of sense,’ said Mrs Haddington, ‘would have used tangled wire to hold them. It seems to me I have to think of everything! They must all be done again – and do please use your intelligence!’
‘I haven’t any, so would you also think what kind of wire, and where I can find it?’ snapped Beulah.
Mrs Haddington’s eyes narrowed. ‘My good girl, if you speak to me like that you will have considerable cause to regret it,’ she said. ‘Ask Thrimby for some picture-wire, and if he has none you have plenty of time to go out and buy some!’
She then walked away; and Beulah, knowing that Thrimby would derive a subtle pleasure from disclaiming all knowledge of the presence of picture-wire in the house, once more sallied forth on an uninspiring errand.
The rearrangement of the flowers, accompanied as it was by a good deal of walking up and downstairs with the various bowls and vases, left Miss Birtley feeling decidedly limp; nor was the tangling of rather thick and ropy picture-wire unattended by difficulties. A guilty suspicion crossed her mind that picture-wire was not really what was wanted, but by dint of much labour and ingenuity she did succeed in using it to some advantage. The bowls were replaced, the floor of the cloakroom once more swept, the spare wire neatly coiled, and left on the shelf against a future need; and Beulah was just wondering whether she dared snatch half an hour’s respite, when the front-door bell rang, and, a few minutes later, Thrimby came to inform her that the dressmaker had arrived, and would like to know what she could be getting on with until the return of Miss Cynthia from her luncheon-party.
Well aware that her employer would acidly resent any idleness on Miss Spennymoor’s part while she was under her roof, Beulah climbed the stairs again, this time to Cynthia’s bedroom. This apartment, which was at the back of the house, on the second floor, was a triumph of the decorator’s art, and might well have been called a Symphony in Satin. Satin, of a ravishing shade of peach, covered the window, all the chairs, the kidney-shaped dressing-table, and had even been used for the padded head and foot boards of the bed. Several rather grubby dolls were propped up in dejected attitudes on various pieces of furniture, one being used to cover the pink-enamel telephone by the bed. The room was in its usual state of disorder, the combined efforts of one personal maid and two housemaids being insufficient to keep pace with Cynthia’s habit of having discarded clothing on the floor, and littering the dressing-table with powder, haircombings, and dirty face-tissues. According this uninviting table no more than one disgusted glance, Beulah pulled open a drawer in a large chest, and extracted from it a tangle of stockings. It was safe to assume that they all stood in need of repair, so she bundled them under her arm, and mounted yet another flight of stairs to a small room set apart for Miss Spennymoor’s visits. This boasted a chair, a table, a sewing-machine, an electric iron, two ironing-boards, and an antiquated gas-stove which made up in fumes and hissing what it lacked in heating-power.
Miss Spennymoor, who was known to her many patronesses as ‘a little woman who comes to me’, was a small and spare spinster, who eked out a precarious livelihood by trotting cheerfully all over London to sew in other people’s houses. She called herself a dressmaker, but this was a slight misnomer, only the most unexacting customers employing her in this rôle. She was an excellent needle-woman, but, as she herself was the first to acknowledge, an indifferent cutter. But her mending was faultless, and not merely could she alter garments to fit their wearers: she would never have dreamed of telling her clients that the task set her would take at least three weeks to perform. Above all – and this was a virtue much extolled by her patronesses – she charged very little for her services. ‘For,’ as she frequently pointed out, ‘I generally get my dinner, which has to be taken into account, and is a great saving. Of course, sometimes I’m unlucky, some of my ladies not having what I should call a proper meal midday, but one has to take the rough with the smooth, dear, and often there’s a cup of tea in the morning, which I must say I do appreciate, not that it is a thing I would ever expect, if you understand me.’
Miss Spennymoor’s life might have been thought to have been as drab as it was lonely, but she would have been greatly surprised at such a mistaken judgment. Not only were the lives of her clients a constant source of interest to her, but her own life had not been without its romance. As a much younger woman, she had been a theatrical dresser, and although she had never risen in this profession above the dressing-room inhabited by the ladies of the chorus, this period in her career was one which she looked back upon with pride and pleasure, and her album, with its faded portraits of forgotten beauties, was a solace that never failed her.
She received the stockings from Beulah with
her usual cheerfulness, for she would have thought it quite as shocking as Mrs Haddington that she should be idle. ‘Well, it wouldn’t be right, would it?’ she said. ‘For she pays me for my time, and it’s only to be expected I should be working while I’m here. It was lucky you caught me this morning, Miss Birtley, for I was just about to pop on my things and go to one of my ladies that lives in Hampstead. Oh, dear, what a nasty hole in the toe of this lovely stocking! More like a potato than a hole: it does seem a shame, and quite new, I should say. I never think a darned stocking is the same, do you, dear? I’ll lay it by until my regular day next week, for I daresay Miss Cynthia will come in, and I wouldn’t like to leave it with the needle stuck in it, as I should have to, because it wouldn’t hardly be reasonable to expect Miss Cynthia to wait. Very much surprised she would be if I was to suggest such a thing, which, of course, I shouldn’t dream of doing, not for a moment! I’ll just be getting on with this little hole in the heel. Is it a big job Mrs Haddington wants me to do for Miss Cynthia?’
‘I don’t think so. Apparently, André sent home the frock she means to wear tonight with a crease across the back.’
‘Tut-tut, that’s very bad!’ said Miss Spennymoor, shaking her grey head. ‘A firm like that, too! Really, one would hardly credit it, but since the War I don’t know how it is but no one seems to care how they do their work as long as they’re paid for it. And what they charge! Is it a grand party tonight, dear?’