I brought my attention back to Lena Duffy’s voice.
‘… should have opened Dunelgar if home was too far, but her father was fully determined on St George’s or St Giles’, and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. Anyway, now, under the circumstances -' She broke off and stared at me, fingering her necklace chain and apparently waiting for some response. ‘Under the circumstances, none of us has the heart for a lot of fuss and commotion, so she will be married at home as she should be. Not much of a silver lining though, is it?’
Lena Duffy’s purr had coarsened. To be honest it always had something else in it besides the comfortable chuckle that was its main ingredient, something more rasping, as though a single crow had got into a chorus of pigeons. Now though there was a note of real spitefulness. I have already touched on the subject of my feminine intuition. At this moment it stretched just far enough to tell me I was supposed to understand something here, but it went no further.
‘I don’t think I’ve met the young man,’ I said, making what I hoped was a harmlessly general remark, ‘although Hugh tells me he was once in a coxless eight with a brother.’
‘Elder brother,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘But he died at Arras.’ One thinks one is tired of the euphemisms and casual endearments, but this bald statement in place of the ‘lost at Arras, poor sweet’ was shocking. It was only too clear, even to me, that it was meant to convey not even the mildest of honours to a hero, nor a warning that there was a dead brother to be tiptoed around should I find myself in conversation with the young man later. It was quite simply a point of information: Mrs Duffy had done nothing so lax as let her daughter become engaged to a second son without any prospects. The brother was dead and thus the engagement was a triumph. I turned away slightly to hide the expression I could not bring under control and wished that someone might come up and save me replying.
‘So a younger son for your younger daughter,’ I said at last, no saviour having appeared. This was inane even for me, but I was surprised to see from the corner of my eye a sour kind of twist wrench at the woman’s mouth. My mind raced. Did it sound as though I was putting a gypsy curse on her other daughter? This was surely too fanciful. Should I not have made such outright reference to his changed status? Why on earth did I not learn simply to keep my mouth shut? Or if it was too late now for such a wholesale transformation, at least drink a little more and talk a little less.
Daisy’s butler was circling with two trays balanced on his fingers like a waiter in a Paris restaurant. Sherry glasses on one and cocktail glasses on the other, he swooped amongst the guests proffering a tray to each and seeming always to guess which one was wanted where. I muttered an excuse to Lena and bore down on him, not caring how unseemly I appeared so long as I escaped her. The butler, who knew me of old, held out the cocktail tray, but from sheer perversity and temper I reached for sherry. His face fell, and we parted, he a disappointed man who feels he is losing his touch, and I a disappointed woman who fears she is becoming curmudgeonly with age and has only a quarter pint (it seemed) of nasty, oily sherry for comfort.
I scanned the room for an empty perch, but apart from Lena sitting alone on a sofa large enough for two and staring at me coldly, all I could see in every direction were settled clumps of people chatting amicably and sipping huge drinks. Daisy’s drinks before dinner always go on for an age.
Just then Daisy herself peeled off from the group around a stout dowager ploughing through a long story and ignoring the fidgets of her listeners the way old ladies do.
‘What on earth were you saying to the hag?’ Daisy whispered. I was unable to answer; I did not know. ‘Talk about sucking on a lemon,’ she went on. ‘And have you seen what she’s wearing? How could you not? She’s twirling it like an old man with a new watch chain. A gold locket! I’ll bet she had to borrow it from her parlour maid. How I have managed not to kick all of their bottoms, I cannot tell you. Even one of the Mrs Bankers is wondering aloud.’ I said nothing (for the usual reason) and Daisy rejoined the circle of listeners just in time to join in with gales of relieved laughter as the dowager’s saga wound to its close.
I drifted, trying to look self-contained, if not quite inscrutable.
‘You look heavenly, Dan,’ breathed Clemence Duffy as I passed her, her face more mask-like than ever and her eyes blinking sleepily as she glanced down at herself waiting, I supposed, for the return of the compliment. Despite the fact that there is nothing so very dignified about the name Dandy I dislike being called Dan by girls fifteen years my junior, and I bristled just slightly, before looking her up and down for something to praise. She was dressed in a black shift, chiffon over a plain slip, and wore a small cameo on a black velvet ribbon around her neck, which looked as all cameos always do as though it might have come from Woolworth’s. Just then I noticed that her ear-lobes were bare of any decoration. They were pierced for earrings and the little naked clefts looked hardly decent against her painted face. She arched her brows at me, staring hard at my choker.
‘But you look heavenly,’ she said again. ‘Beautiful emeralds. Very loyal, I must say.’ She turned away, and I caught sight of Mrs Duffy fingering her locket chain again. At last light began to dawn on me and I took a few steps and craned to look at Cara Duffy. Dressed in a shimmer of pale blue silk, she wore a gold cross on a fine chain around her neck, slim hoops in her ears and nothing on her wrists at all, only her engagement ring to show that she was not just wearing rather an odd frock to a tennis party. All three of them on parade, ostentatiously bare of jewels, screaming that they dare not wear anything but trinkets here. How dared they! They certainly did need a kick on their insolent bottoms, and I was ready to oblige. I caught Daisy’s eye and saw that she had been watching my realization. She mimed my stupidity briefly, eyes crossed and tongue lolling out, thankfully unseen.
Mrs Duffy still sat alone on her sofa. Very well, then. I should employ the tactics for which Daisy had sought me – the Cuthbert Dougall strategy, one might call it – of discussing loud and plain what everyone else is thinking about but dare not mention. I marched back over to Lena and sat beside her.
‘My dear,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just heard your dreadful news. About the diamonds, I mean. What a thing to happen.’ She intensified the stare and spoke again in that horrid murmuring way of hers.