CHAPTER ELEVEN
Anna had not given up her plan to cut her hair. She had received the earl’s message, duly delivered by Proom, and she had set it aside. She was leaving Mersham three days after the wedding and it was unlikely that she would see the Earl of Westerholme again. Nor did she believe that so busy and august a personage would have time seriously to concern himself with the length of a housemaid’s hair. Pinny was a more serious matter, but Pinny would be convinced when Anna swept into the little house in West Paddington, dazzling all who beheld her with her modernity and chic. And even had she felt inclined to hang back, she would have found it hard to do so in view of the support and encouragement she had received from the staff. For, one and all, the domestics of Mersham were convinced that Anna, with her dark hair cut softly to curve like a raven’s wing into her cheek, would provide a much-needed touch of below stairs glamour for the coming nuptials. It would also be one in the eye for the servants at Heslop when Anna, going over to help out at the ball, turned up with bobbed hair.
‘Because they’re a right snooty lot, I can tell you,’ said Peggy. ‘Give themselves all sorts of airs.’
It was quite a deputation, therefore, that saw Anna off on her free afternoon just a week before the wedding, clutching a whole half crown and bound for Maidens Over and the salon of Rene, Coiffeur des Dames, a young man who was reported to have trained in Paris and to be wholly conversant with the new techniques of shingling, bobbing and the rest.
Rene’s shop, painted a garish orange, was situated in the Market Square between a chemist and a fishmonger. Ignoring the churning of her stomach, which seemed not to have caught up with the New Thinking about hair, Anna pushed open the door. Inside, the shop was small and distinctly scruffy. Pieces of hair of all colours lay about as if dropped by confused and nesting birds, the washbasins were stained, the material covering the chairs was shiny and worn. It looked as though Rene’s Parisian days might be some considerable time behind him. Anna waited, examining pictures of Irene Castle with her shining bob, of Princess Marie of Roumania with her cropped fringe, trying to avert her attention from the trolley with its jumble of dirty combs and curling tongs.
‘Good morr-ninck, mademoiselle. May I assist you?’
Rene’s French accent was so strong that Anna, polite as always, felt compelled to address him in his native tongue.
‘Bonjour, monsieur. Je voudrais qus vous me coupiez lescheveux, s’il vous plait. Tres court!’
Rene’s button eyes popped. Consternation spread over his florid face. Too late, Anna perceived her gaffe.
‘I would like my hair cut short, please,’ she translated hastily. ‘Bobbed.’
Rene’s eyes lit up. This new fashion for short hair was going to make him rich. Not only were frequent visits necessary to have the hair restyled and trimmed, but nine out of ten girls who came to have their long tresses cut had no idea of the value of their discarded hair which he sold, at a most gratifying profit, to a wigmaker in London.
‘Certainly, mademoiselle. Perhaps mademoiselle would care to be seated? Elsie, come here!’
Elsie came from the back of the shop, a vacant-looking girl of about fourteen, who took Anna’s straw boater and jacket and helped her into a far from clean flowered overall.
‘Comb, Elsie,’ ordered Rene\
Elsie loped over to the trolley, rootled in the debris, and produced a comb.
‘Not that one, you foolish girl! The big one. How often do I have to tell you?’
More rootling, accompanied by nervous sniffing, and Elsie produced the big one. Ren6 began to loosen Anna’s pins and his eyes glistened. Amazing that such a slim young girl could have such masses of hair. It was soft yet heavy, with beguiling threads of chestnut and bronze highlighting the inky darkness. He should get ten shillings a pound for it if she didn’t know its value and he was sure she didn’t. Painstakingly, greedily, Ren6 combed out Anna’s hair and set it free in a mantle which covered the back of the chair, flowed down her arms, fell in rich coils on to her lap.
‘You have beautiful hair, mademoiselle. It is excellently suited to the new styles.’
Anna, watching in the mirror, was fighting a growing panic. ‘It’s only hair,’ she told herself, ‘dead stuff. No blood vessels, no nerves.’ Yet it was as if in the falling cascade that surrounded her she again read her past.
Memories crowded in on her. Herself, aged four, sitting in the huge bath in the nursery wing in Petersburg while Old Niannka rubbed her scalp with some devilish concoction which she swore would strengthen the roots and turn the fine, dusky down that covered Anna’s head into thick and abundant tresses. Any compliment to Anna’s hair in later years was always taken by Niannka as a tribute to herself and followed by a detailed account of the magic recipe which had included wolfbane and (she swore) the blood of bats. Niannka who had later betrayed them, stolen their jewels, and vanished … Petya, strap-hanging on her pigtails as he took the first, tottering steps across the limitless ocean of the bearskin rug beside his cot. And her father…Thinking of him she made a small, characteristic movement of the head, as if to shake away the pain, and Rene paused and said, ‘Am I hurting you?’ ‘No… no.’
Her father, who had come in from a day of frustration, trying to make the tsar listen to reason over some matter of policy, and gone up to say goodnight to her, plunging his hands into her hair where it lay spread on the pillow as into a cooling stream. ‘And yet it isn’t cold, your hair; it’s as warm as the rest of you. Fire water you’ve grown there, my silly Little Candle.’
More and more memories came. Sergei, pulling her out of the river by her hair when she fell out of the rowing boat at Grazbaya. The Princess Norvorad, her godmother, that formidable grande dame whom the Bolsheviks had gunned down in the cellar of her house, loosening her braids as she came with Pinny into the drawing room and saying in her exquisite, archaic French: ‘After all, ma chere, we need not despair. Something can be done with her, I think. Yes, something can certainly be done.’ And Pinny who every night, ignoring the grumbles of the nursery maid, had herself administered the three hundred strokes with the Mason Pearson hairbrush from the English shop in the Nevsky…
Am I mad? Anna now thought, as Rene, with a flourish, put down his comb. Am I completely mad to cut my hair?
One last memory rose before her: not of Russia, not of her childhood. A recent one… by the lake at Mersham … of herself standing in the water desperately shaking out her damp locks so as to cover her naked shoulders, her breasts…
And with this image came courage and determination. She lifted her head.
‘I am ready, monsieur,’ said Anna. ‘Please begin.’
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Anna was not the only person from Mersham visiting Maidens Over on the Wednesday before the wedding. Rupert, who had business with his solicitor, had driven his mother over so that she could visit Mrs Bassenthwaite in hospital and purchase some trimmings for the wedding outfit which Mrs Bunford was excitedly savaging in honour of The Day. Now, her tasks completed, she sat in the comfortable, chintzy lounge of the Blue Boar Hotel taking tea with her great friend, Minna Byrne.
‘So everything’s going splendidly, Mary?’ asked Minna Byrne, wondering why the Dowager Countess of Westerholme, with her fine bones and inherent elegance, should so resemble, a scant week before her son’s wedding, the hungrier kind of alley cat.
‘Oh, yes; quite, quite splendidly,’ said the dowager brightly. She closed her eyes for a moment as though to banish the spectre of Uncle Sebastien, sitting caged and shamed in the east wing with that unspeakable nurse; of Rupert, who had returned from Cambridge only to ride off at daybreak to the furthest corner of his estate; of Cynthia Smythe who had arrived the previous day and whose idea of making herself useful was to follow Muriel from room to room, obsequiously repeating her remarks. The servants, too, all seemed to be going mad, knocking on her door one by one and begging her to take them to the Mill House at half their wages to do work that was grossly beneath them. James asking to be a handyman, Mrs Park offering to be a cook general and to scrub1. Only she couldn’t take them, how could she? There wasn’t the money or the room. And Mrs Bassenthwaite really had lost her memory; she’d remembered nothing, just now, about the arrangements made for Win. ‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ the dowager repeated - and launched into a description of the menu for the wedding breakfast, an inventory of the presents received, an account of the trousseau for the honeymoon which was to be short and spent in Switzerland. ‘And Muriel has been marvellously efficient. She’s dealt with everything. You can imagine what a comfort I have found it’