The Major had spent a great deal of time at his Highland lodge, even when alive, and so was not much missed when he died. His death was one of glory at Spion Kop, on that fatal night of pass the parcel, gamely taking command for half an hour or so after the last available colonel perished before handing on to the next major in line; but from the easy circumstances of his widow and orphans, tucked up in that cosy old house of theirs with loyal servants all around, one would have thought he had expired at eighty after six months’ advice from good lawyers about his arrangements. Of course, none of this occurred to me that summer, not at eighteen; it was my husband Hugh – much later, when George at the club had regaled him with news of Aurora’s engagement – who spent a bitter evening mulling over the settlements of these three girls and lamenting that not even Fleur was young enough ever to make a lucrative wife for one of our sons.
‘Oh Hugh, for goodness’ sake!’ I said at last. ‘The boys are two and one. They’re babies!’
‘And she’s fourteen,’ said Hugh, misunderstanding completely. ‘I know. By the time Donald is twenty-one she’ll be thirty-three. It would cause comment. No, I’m afraid I can’t see my way clear, Dandy. You shall just have to put it out of your mind.’
‘I give up,’ I said. ‘I really do.’
‘Although if this Aurora one is your sort of age, they obviously don’t marry young.’
For a moment, I almost wished that I had taken Nanny’s gentle hints about how nice it would be for Mother to have nursery tea with the boys now they were sitting up in high chairs and using spoons since, although they were noisy and messy as dining companions go, they had not yet developed a capacity for active rudeness. I glared at Hugh and consoled myself with a sip of wine and a mouthful of devilled mushroom (Nanny would never admit either of these treats to her nursery, I knew).
He had, however, made a point worth making. Aurora, newly betrothed to Drew Forrester, was twenty-nine, and even Pearl had held out much longer than I should have dared, only succumbing at almost twenty-five, and what with their dowries and their beauty, the world at large was puzzled by the delay. I was not, knowing that had I lived in that house with Mamma-dearest and Batty Aunt Lilah I should have been in no hurry to leave it either.
For it was a house without horsehair, without porridge, a house where carbolic soap was unknown and dinner gongs went unstruck. At Pereford, we slept on featherbeds and breakfasted on peaches. The maids scooped great handfuls of pink salts into our bathwater and dinner was heralded with a carillon upon a little glockenspiel of the sweetest tone.
Furthermore, Mamma-dearest’s greatest delight was to lie in a hammock strung between two plum trees and spin tales for her girls, never forgetting me, and so a good part of what I remembered of Pereford was not Pereford at all but pictures from my mind’s eye of her girlhood in Haryana where her hammock was hung from banyan trees and her linen was scented with patchouli mint; pictures of the endless fairy tale she wove of our delightful futures, of heroic suitors and the balls at which they would sweep us up in their arms and tell of their love, and all with the dappled sunlight winking through the leaves of the plum tree and the hammock strings creaking like the rigging of a clipper as she rocked to and fro.
I was only ever there in the summertime, starting with that first summer on the way home from Paris where I had met Pearl and made friends with her. In winter it might have been different, I suppose, but I doubt it, for the fireplaces – filled with flowers in July – were enormous and the white muslin curtains which billowed at the open windows, wafting the scent of roses into the rooms, were hung from mahogany curtain rods as thick as telegraph poles which hinted at a high measure of velvety sumptuousness in the colder months of the year. Then, in an attic where we went to play hide-and-seek (humouring Fleur, although we were much too old for it), there was the clincher: great squashy bales of calico – the sumptuous curtains stitched up tight for the summer against the moth – stacked on top of log-piles of rolled Turkey carpets and, all around, a veritable souk of coal scuttles, log baskets and peat barrels.
‘Heavens, what a lot you’ve got,’ I said to Pearl.
‘One for each fireplace,’ she said, and began counting: ‘The outside hall, the inside hall, the upstairs landing. The far end of the drawing room, the near end of the drawing room. This little one is for Mamma-dear’s bathroom and isn’t it lovely. She always has cherry logs in there and the time it took her to teach the fire boy to tell the difference!’
‘You have a boy just for that?’ I could not help boggling, having been brought up in a house where the maids set the fires in the morning and one held off and held off lighting them since to ring for more coal was such extravagance that we often found ourselves going to bed just to avoid it, cursing that reckless moment at seven o’clock when we had thought we were cold, which we now knew was nothing compared to the shivering that set in at eleven when the embers were growing grey.
‘Mahmout,’ Pearl said. ‘Dearest Mamma-darling brought him home with her. He was the son of her ayah and she says he’s the perfect fire boy because he’s always trying to get Pereford as warm as Haryana.’
‘He’ll set the place alight or die trying,’ said Batty Aunt Lilah, who was playing with us, or at any rate was pattering around in nearby rooms while we played, not ever getting quite to grips with the rules.
‘I haven’t noticed him about,’ I said, feeling sure that an Indian in a white loincloth (for thus I had imagined him) would have stuck out enough to be noticed in Somerset.
‘Oh, no, he’s not here now,’ Aurora said. ‘He’s on his summer holidays. Mamma-dearest sends him to London every year where he has some family connections. She says he’d go into a decline if he didn’t get to speak Hindustani and eat spices for a while.’
Mrs Lipscott, it will be understood, was never likely to suffer from ‘the servant problem’. My own mother did not even allow her daughter to go to London every year, never mind her servant boys.
‘He sits in the palm house at Kew,’ said Lilah. ‘Warming his bones.’ Then she let herself fall backwards onto one of the stitched-up calico bundles of winter curtains, landing with a pouf! and lying there staring up at the joists of the ceiling.
‘You’ll have to find a better hiding place than that, Batty Aunt,’ said Aurora. ‘I can hear Fleur coming already.’
‘Throw a sheet over me and if she looks my way I’ll freeze,’ said Lilah. Then the rest of us huddled behind the enormous log boxes, breathing in quietly the scent of cherry wood and that of the resinous green pine branches used for kindling.
‘Once upon a time,’ Fleur said, opening the attic door and coming inside, ‘there was a beautiful little girl named Flower or Flora or Fleur. And she lived in a fairy castle with her two beautiful sisters, Aurora or Sunrise or Dawn and Pearl…’ The three of us held our breaths, trying not to giggle. Fleur’s Fairy Tales were held in high regard in the Lipscott family, even against the general background of delighted appreciation of absolutely anything, and they were the reason we all hid together (lest one of us miss something).
‘… Pearl,’ Fleur said again, ‘or Grit or Dirty Oyster.’ At this Batty Aunt Lilah snorted and Fleur lifted the sheet and pounced on her.
‘You forgot all about me, you little brigand,’ Lilah said, tickling Fleur. ‘What about the beautiful aunt?’
‘There isn’t an aunt,’ Fleur said. ‘But help me look for the others and I might add you in.’