After dinner, the girls were told to go to bed. Rest was the most important thing. Louise stuck a photo of Hugh, a real lock of his blonde hair glued to it like a toupee, in the middle of the dog and horse collage. “He has more dogs and horses then all that,” she said.
Louise’s hands were surprisingly dainty and pudgy, with expensive feminine rings, including her engagement ring from Hugh Orville. Her nails were polished, red and sharp like vole’s teeth.
Hugh Orville turned up the next day. Madame Flora wouldn’t let him visit, but he left gifts for Louise with her—a stuffed swan toy, a box of chocolates. He drove around the hotel in his motor car playing a popular song Louise loved called Tinky Tinky Too Too, a duet between a trumpet and a theremin. Louise moved from window to window, waving and dancing. Hugh was stunningly handsome. He wore a blue kerchief and a fur coat like Louise’s, flashing his new teeth from Fairy Palace. Louise told everyone he was a duke.
Eliza had several black dresses, all velvet or silk, they all looked similar but she wore the same one every day until it smelled, as well as to bed, merely changing her stockings and bustle, discreetly in the morning. Matilda’s dresses were exceptionally ugly, Louise told her. They were of calico, brown, mustard yellow, pink.
Each girl had her own way of taking Madame Flora’s, of standing the nasty taste. Eliza liked to mix Madame Flora’s with black tea, Matilda with tonic water, so it was weakened, she only put a drop or two in. Victoria copied her. The girl who slept behind the curtain and wouldn’t say her name put it in milk, so that it was a pink colour. Many in the dining room put it in their porridge.
Louise took a straight teaspoon in the morning, with lunch and before bed, without complaining or grimacing.
She had an iron ball which she licked and threatened to throw at the other girls. Her nanny at home had given her the ball as an anemia cure and she was addicted to it, but Madame Flora took it away, saying it was bad for her, as were greens. “Spinach is poisonous. My tonic is the only safe source of iron for women.”
Each evening, a maid came and took away their bustle diapers and dirty laundry in a cart, and examined the bed sheets and blankets for stains. It didn’t feel as cruel as when Nanny did it, tuttering and sighing. There were so many girls at Madame Flora’s. It wasn’t personal.
Louise, who wore trouser pajamas to bed, talked into the night. There was nothing else to do, besides reading magazines.
“I saw a man eating a boiled egg, he grinned at me as he done so.”
“I sniffed a rasher of bacon, once, in the kitchen at home.”
“Hugh killed eight pheasants and a fox last spring.”
There was a middle-aged woman who sat herself in the lift and wouldn’t come out. Others squished buns through the brass grating, to make her eat, but she wouldn’t let anyone pour any Madame Flora’s in, she called it devil’s juice. She wasn’t married. Madame Flora put some of her concoction in a spray bottle and sprayed the woman with it but she turned around and crouched in a far corner of the lift. Madame told them to ignore her and look away when they passed. There were queues for the one elevator left. The woman screamed and shook the lift during the night and silently paced during the day. Louise spat orange pips at her whenever she passed by the lift.
One morning they came down and the lift was empty and clean again.
On his second visit, Hugh brought Louise a miniature golf set, which she set up in the parlour.
“Exercise is the enemy of your flowers, Louise,” Madame Flora said, taking Louise’s golf club as she took a swing. Louise was so despondent that Madame Flora made an effort to provide entertainment. Victoria couldn’t see how Louise could be bored. There were so many ladies’ magazines to read at Madame Flora’s—The Modern Priscilla, Dainty Day, News for Ladies—in big stacks everywhere. Victoria’s nanny had sent her some popular poems written out on card paper, she had written them herself in brown ink. Victoria ripped them up. She was scared of Nanny visiting Madame Flora’s like Hugh did, of Nanny circling the hotel crying Victoria Victoria.
The town was full of hotels, shopping arcades, stalls selling postcards, seashell art (“Don’t touch the seashells girls!” said Madame Flora) and novelty tea sets with the royal family on them. There were rides and other amusements. Madame Flora hired a long, covered rickshaw pulled by two cyclists to bring the girls around. The seats were very small, and metal, Louise struggled to fit in one, so she balanced herself on the back of the seat, her legs hanging down the arms. She harassed the cyclists, telling them to go faster, or slow down when she saw something that looked amusing, especially the butchers’ shops which had striped curtains covering the windows and signs that said ‘Gentleman Only’. “What do they sell eh?” She muttered, “Sausage. Eggs. Snouts.”
Victoria half-covered her ears to make herself look good, but was intrigued by what Louise was saying. Louise could only be distracted from the butchers’ shops by a carousel on one of the piers.
Madame Flora said yes to a ride on it, and made one of the maids run back to the hotel and get some soft paddings to put on the fake animals before the girls sat on them. “Sideways, girls, sideways, like you do properly on a horse.”
She nodded to the carousel owner once she checked all the girls were rightly seated, but after it had gone round a few times, Louise changed positions on her zebra, so both legs hung down different sides. She had taken her bustle off and sent it flying. It resembled a swan as it fell into the seawater. Madame Flora shouted for the carousel to stop. By the time it did, Louise had wrapped her legs around the pole of the zebra, laughing wildly.
Madame Flora didn’t let them go out anymore after that, saying it would use up the energy needed to restore their flowers. Someone came and gave a lecture on ferns, bringing samples in misty glass jars.
“I don’t want my flowers again, ever, I just want out of here. I never want babies,” muttered Matilda, touching one of the glass jars.
Madame Flora could tell at a glance the difference between menstrual blood and blood from a wound. When Matilda told the maids she had her flowers again, and held up her sheets, Madame Flora came in and pulled up Matilda’s nightgown, exposing her diaper bustle. Her legs and stomach were covered in small cuts.
“How could you do this to yourself, sweetest of hearts? We just want to help you get better, don’t we treat you well?” asked Madame Flora. They examined her for cuts each week. They put bandages over the ones she had and checked to make sure she didn’t rip them off and reopen the wounds.
As Louise continued to act restless, Madame Flora hired two performers: a couple with their small dog, who wore fancy hats and sang and danced and were popular in all the seaside towns. Madame Flora placed a velvet railing to separate the girls from them. Louise made them sing “Tinky Tinky Too Too” twice, stomping her foot along so loudly the floor shook. Everyone was relieved to see Louise entertained, but the couple’s dog went missing by the end of the show and they caused a fuss Madame Flora thought to be upsetting to her clients.
“Doggy, doggy!” they cried. “Where is our Doggy!” The man begged Madame Flora to let him carry around a piece of cheese to lure it out from wherever it was hiding. Madame Flora told them they were disgusting and made them leave without payment.
“Must have gotten out,” said Louise. “Must have drowned in the sea.”
Victoria thought once they were in their bedroom Louise would pull the dog out from under her dress, but she didn’t. “I’m not interested in mutts,” she said. Hugh had Bassett hounds, corgis, and Dutch partridge dogs he imported from the Netherlands despite the heavy taxation. They could hear the couple shouting outside the hotel. “Where is our doggy! Bitch, Bitch!”