Croys is a great stone barracks of a place, thrillingly ancient in parts, built as two wings flanking a huge, square tower; a staircase with rooms, Daisy calls it. It is unusual for the Highlands in sitting balefully at the end of an avenue so that one approaches it much as one used to approach a displeased parent who had arranged himself at the furthest corner from the door, the smaller to shrink one during one’s penitent advance. Most of my favourite houses take the other tack, hiding around corners like plump and kindly aunts so that one comes upon them suddenly, close enough to see the lamplight and flowers on the tables inside. Still, I am fond of Croys, despite the glaring improvements that Silas’s business triumphs have furnished: the thick carpets laid right up to the walls, making the fine old rugs on top of them look scrawny; the bathrooms which have colonized almost all of the old dressing rooms in the guests’ wing, so that one is pitched willy-nilly into intimacy not only with one’s husband but with the full range of his ablutions too.
I sat forward eagerly as we swept through the gates, preparing to be diverted in spite of my exhaustion. Most places in this part of the world are at their best in the spring, before the midges awake and begin their savagery, but at Croys the soft uncurling leaf and the peeping primrose are drowned out by a display of vulgarity unequalled in Christendom. Daisy’s gardener, you see, the redoubtable McSween, has made it his life’s work to perpetrate upon the bank opposite the front of the house, in splendid view of all of the best rooms, a three-ring circus of rhododendrons and azaleas in every shade, but with a particular nod towards coral and magenta. They jostle like can-can dancers in the breeze off the moor and can make people laugh out loud.
‘Your rhodies are a picture,’ I murmured to Daisy as she came to the door to meet us. Most hospitably, I thought, since the dressing bell must have gone. Daisy rolled her eyes at me.
‘I shall tell McSween to give you some cuttings, darling,’ she said. ‘If you’re not good.’
Grant, my maid, had come sensibly on the train with Hugh’s valet and most of the luggage (the dickey of the two-seater being full of fishing rods) and so, refreshed first by a pleasant journey and further no doubt by a leisurely tea, she had my evening clothes ready and was on her marks. De-hatted, hastily washed and wrapped in a dressing gown, I sat in front of the glass and surrendered myself to her. She frowned lightly (my hair is a great disappointment) and got to work.
I find it best to try to detach myself while Grant is busy about my scalp with hot tongs and rose-flower water. Any shrinking away or wincing unfailingly brings the irons near enough to scald. Accidental, I am almost sure, but still to be avoided if one can manage it. So I sat there quite docile until she was done and then plied the brushes and puffs myself as usual, guided by her small shakes of the head and sighs, until having hovered with the rouge brush for longer than I could afford I delivered myself into her hands again.
‘Only not too much,’ I said, as I always do. Grant comes from a theatrical family and having spent the first fifteen years of her life turning her parents and elder siblings into monarchs, gypsies and the like with a smear of greasepaint and a blob of white in the inner corners, her face-painting still tends towards the dramatic. I, unfortunately for her and me both, do not have a face which easily absorbs her efforts. At rest, I must say, I have cheekbones to reckon with and a little rouge dabbed on in the fashionable place works wonders, but when I smile my cheeks make egg shapes, the pointed ends reaching almost to my hated dimples, and then the rouge is quite wrong, its position curiously unrelated to the face underneath. However if I put it, unfashionably, where my cheeks will be when I start to smile, then until I do smile, I look like a doll. Don’t smile then, is Grant’s solution, which is hardly helpful. She explained once what is wrong with my face in this respect and even fixed it for me with strips of highlight and shade which looked wonderful, but only at twenty paces.
Still, the moss green dress is something we agree on. Most flattering in shape, although it takes stitching on to my petticoat straps, and with a miraculous effect on my complexion, which can be shadowy around the eyes if I am not careful. And tomato red lipstick to finish. Grant had to get quite fierce with me over this shade of lipstick, but she was right. Blue-ish red makes one’s teeth look yellow, she explained, whereas a yellow-ish red turns them white. For the same reason, diamonds near the face are best surrounded by pearls, very few ladies of diamond-wearing age having the teeth to stand up to them otherwise. Grant and I think it a pity that more ladies do not grin at themselves in the glass before they go downstairs with pink lips and diamond clips, but I had never once smiled at my own reflection until the first time she told me to and I do not suppose it occurs to many others.
‘Uncommonly pretty frock, that,’ said Hugh, entering. Grant bowed her head in discreet acknowledgement of the praise. Hugh would never dream that I had done any more than put on a frock in the time he had spent bathing and shaving, and I mused, not for the first time, that if men believed a frock could do what had happened to me from the neck up in the last half-hour, their world must seem a magical place indeed.
People were standing around in the gloom of the great hall waiting for their cocktails as we came down the last sweep of the stairs. Twelve or fifteen people as well as the Esslemonts: the four Duffys whom I knew, and a lot more I did not, the men splendidly anonymous in their dinner jackets but with wives who were undoubtedly the wives of bankers. Hugh blinked around for a bit then took himself off to speak to Silas and I approached Mrs Duffy like an old friend.
She was a fair woman, slight except for an almost too splendid bosom, the type of woman one assumes must have been rather fine in her youth, but now getting raddled and colourless for want of flesh. Tonight she was dressed unbecomingly in grey silk, cut very low, drawing attention to the plain gold locket around her neck.
‘Simply wonderful, Lena,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Such a long time.’
‘What a delightful surprise,’ she cooed back.
For want of anything as definite as a topic to converse upon, I admired the girls to her and, as I had hoped, she launched into an exposition on the coming wedding of her younger daughter.
The Duffy girls, both of them, had rather more to recommend them in the way of looks than their mama, although they were each quite unlike the other: Clemence, the elder, tall, languid and fair, with a sharp chin and high, wide cheeks (which seemed, I could not help but notice, perfectly rouged no matter what her expression); her face overall, then, reminiscent in shape of an heraldic shield, making her almost Slavic-looking what with this and with that peculiar habit of giving an upward pinch to her full lower eyelids. Even in the dimness of Daisy’s candelabra, she looked as though she were squinting against light coming from below, as one does wading at noon in the bright sea.
Then Cara, the younger, smaller by half a head; she had always made me think of a woodland creature, a changeling. Not a goblin exactly – she was a pretty thing, after all – but certainly nothing so pink-and-white as ‘fairy’ or ‘pixie’ suggests; a velvety little elf perhaps, for although her hair too was fair her general complexion was dark and her brown eyes had a soft twinkle which echoed the upward curl of her lips. Hers was an expression which brought an answering grin from anyone who saw it, having about it none of that insolence which in life or in oils can sometimes make a permanent smile look so very smug and annoying. There was, I thought, something almost simian about this smile. The upper lip had a downy softness to it, as did indeed the whole of her face so that her dark brows seemed merely an intensification, rather than looking like the two worms painted on to the fashionable nakedness of her sister’s skin or, I feared, my own. Was she pretty? I think so, but it is hard to know where looks stopped and personality began. Cara Duffy, you see, was what disapproving matrons used to call a hoyden, which is to say she was always in the highest of spirits, burbling over with jokes and giggles and seeming, even when just sitting quietly, to be surging with fun like a child’s balloon tugging harmlessly at its string. So perhaps this is where one’s pleasure in her sprang from, since on paper, I must admit, a furry little creature with velvety eyes does not sound half so alluring as an alabaster vision such as Clemence. Even tonight, though, when Cara seemed unnaturally subdued, standing beside her father and not speaking, one knew where one would rather rest one’s eyes. And she was subdued, poor thing; marriage and womanhood looming, I supposed, and hoydenish girlhood almost gone. Such a pity it has to come to that.