‘But we’re fine, we’re fine,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘We feel the loss of poor dear Fielding not least as a Latin mistress, never mind how we all treasured her, but the vicar at St Ninian’s is helping and the girls all ado- I mean they’re very satisfied with his- and I’m taking PE myself. Dorothy and Barbara have shouldered some extra load, Mrs Tully in the village is an excellent piano and violin teacher. All we need is the right French mistress and we shall be fine. Absolutely fine.’ But she did not sound absolutely fine, or even one good French mistress short of it. She sounded, as her voice rose and her cheeks grew hot, as if she were about to let off steam like a tea-kettle. Miss Lovage took a step away from her side to avoid being scalded, but Miss Barclay put out a hand and said a faint there-there.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I shall take my leave, if you’re sure Gilver and Osborne can be of no assistance to you. Now, just before I go I wonder if you could tell me the way to Miss Lipscott’s private room.’ The Misses Christopher and Barclay turned wary eyes on Miss Shanks, who spoke up stoutly.
‘Miss Lipscott’s ‘private room’ is just that, Mrs Gilver. I’m afraid-’
‘But we’re old friends,’ I insisted. ‘I used to know her family.’
Miss Shanks redoubled her efforts.
‘Miss Lipscott seems to have made it perfectly clear-’ she began.
I put on a guileless look and interrupted her. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she? She was always a shy one, but I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t want to see an old friend of her family. If she’s one of the Somerset Lipscotts, that is. Is she?’
A few of them nodded, but I had not fooled Barbara Christopher, not nearly. No one inhales their coffee because they have suddenly seen an old family friend. Luckily, however, the mood in the room was one of desperation to be rid of me before I asked any more awkward questions about their growing misfortunes and my demand for directions, at last, carried the day.
It was a large house, and after climbing to the second storey I walked for quite five minutes through long corridors where the sound of gossiping, giggling, Latin-memorising, violin-practising girlhood squealed and droned away before I found her room, well into the other wing, on the landward side.
She answered before I even knocked, quietly drawing the door just wide enough open to show her face.
‘Dandy,’ she said. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I said. I was searching her for the girl I had known, the gleaming flaxen hair, the flashing blue eyes, the quick dimpling grin of mischief, but I found none of them. The bones were still there, as how could they not be, but she was more changed in ten years than some fortunate women change in fifty, as though the girl had been rendered by Rubens or Botticelli but the woman was a work by Augustus John, a pale oval lozenge of a face with loops of hair drawn back to the nape and a figure which hardly made so bold as to show against the draping of her clothes.
‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘May I come in?’ I glanced up and down the corridor. It was silent and absolutely empty, but who could say whether interested ears were at the many closed doors I saw? Fleur hesitated and then stepped back.
I entered her room thinking only of privacy and a chance to talk, but stopped amazed at the sight that greeted me.
That summer at Pereford we were never out of one another’s rooms. It was part of the wonderful air of Liberty Hall (compared with most other houses where the children were not allowed in their own bedrooms during the day and were certainly forbidden to enter any but their own). We lazed on the beds flattening out the feather quilts, borrowed hairbrushes, tried on clothes and dried our hands with any old towel that was nearby, in a way that would have given Nanny Palmer fits if she had seen me. The nanny and nurse at Pereford sat in the shade of the upstairs verandah and did the mending – or rather flipped through the pages of film-star magazines with the mending undone on their knees – and could not care a fig what any of their charges were up to.
So I was quite familiar with them alclass="underline" the blowsy, rosy confusion of Mamma-dearest’s boudoir; the satins and scents of Aurora’s lair which was going through a dramatic season just then; the bookish, boyish campground that was Pearl’s particular sanctum, with brown bags of apples for midnight snacking and an army cot under the window for reading in. And little Fleur’s room was of all the most exuberant and endearing. She had inherited all the grown-out-of toys of her sisters, leaving her shelves and cupboard-tops stacked three deep with elderly dolls and decrepit bears and then she could never be persuaded to leave the treasures of the day outside in the garden at bedtime, so that her room was full of wildflower posies in jam jars and the floor was covered in watercolour sketches, spread out to dry half-finished and never to be finished since the next new day brought its fresh demands and adventures. There were bowls and teacups – doll-sized – she had made from river mud and transported home and in the corner on a piece of board there was a sandcastle made at Watchet which Fleur could not leave behind when the rugs were rolled and the flasks tipped out at the end of a picnic. She had brought it home and tried to keep it damp with an orchid pump full of water before more treasures claimed her. So there it sat, a heap of yellow sand with shells and feathers still adorning it and all her sisters ever said if they strayed too close and felt the crunch under their bedroom slippers was:
‘Isn’t she a poppet? Isn’t she a love? Shall we take it back to the beach, Florissima, and let these grains see all the other grains in their family?’
‘I shall rebuild it one day,’ Fleur said, very grandly. ‘I have that snap of it, remember. And I did sketches too.’ Then she turned back to her dolls’ house and continued with the endless renovations she was undertaking there.
The study-cum-bedroom of the English mistress at St Columba’s shared only the features of having four walls, a window and door. The narrow bed was covered with a plain woollen blanket and the bedside table held only a glass and a Bible. The desk was bare, the dresser top bore not so much as a hairbrush. I thought again of the convent I had imagined, but here was not even a cross on the wall as there might have been there.
Fleur – and I still had to work to convince myself that it really was Fleur – drew out the hard chair from under the desk and bade me sit down. She leaned against the windowsill and I thought of her as she had been, sprawled on her bed in her outdoor shoes, eating bread and jam and sharing it with her angora rabbit, who often slept there.
‘Did they send you?’ she said. Her voice was without inflection, no way of knowing whether she feared or welcomed or even cared what had brought me there.
‘Pearl asked me to come, yes.’
‘And how did you get past- I mean, how did you end up having dinner with the girls?’
‘Miss Shanks got the idea into her head that I was a French mistress and somehow I was swept up in things.’
‘You’re not, are you?’ said Fleur, her eyes wide, looking very stark suddenly in her pale face.
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course – silly. Only all sorts of people are doing all sorts of things these days.’
She was right; but I chose, for the moment, not to tell her. She was studying me very speculatively.
‘Miss Shanks doesn’t know you’re not, though, does she?’ she said. ‘And she doesn’t know you came to see me? That’s good. That’s something anyway. And so, please, Dandy, just go. Before she finds out.’
‘But Fleur – why shouldn’t you have a guest? Pearl told me she couldn’t gain admittance – or Aurora – but she didn’t tell me why and I don’t understand.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fleur. She was speaking in an urgent whisper. ‘Please just go.’