And so, because I was at a card table with her sisters, I saw quite a bit of Fleur that night. Otherwise I should not have had more than a glimpse: a glittering figure dancing like a dervish; a tinkling laugh on the terrace after supper when we all trooped out to watch fireworks (an ill-advised form of celebration, which left more than one young officer white and sweating). I might not even have recognised her in the crowd. For the sweet girl of my remembered perfect summer was grown up now, her straggling ringlets coiled flat against her head, her freckles gone or at least hidden by face powder of a deathly white, like chalk dust, and as well as these inevitable if unfortunate badges of womanhood – such were the fashions of the time – changes had been wrought in Fleur that might have seen me pass her on the street without blinking.
‘She got in with a bad lot,’ Pearl was saying down the telephone line. ‘Too wild for a girl like Fleur, and whenever they were all together she became just like them.’
Only that was not quite the whole story, because that night, Armistice night, Fleur was at a party in the house of a family friend and she had come with her sisters and their husbands, yet she was the wildest thing in the room, a sparkling little tornado of kisses and giggles, sweeping up a tail of enchanted men around her as she spun. I noticed, however, that quite a few of them made the effort to break away, shaking their heads and laughing, ignoring the piping voice that pleaded with them to come back. In fact, I witnessed two getting free of her pull at once and saw the look they shared, of amusement and scorn. It made me hurt for her, with her ringlets, sitting on her sister’s broad back in the shallow salt water of the cove.
And when she visited our table as the rubber wore its weary path to the final tally (Aurora’s mother-in-law, Mrs Forrester, was the very worst kind of bridge player, both impetuous and deadly slow), as well as hanging over her sisters, wrapping her arms around their necks and swapping the endless Lipscott endearments, she also offered up a series of sharp little digs about the house and the other guests which I had to work at not countering with digs of my own.
Aurora and Pearl only tittered.
‘Now really, Floribunda,’ Pearl said. ‘Play prettily with the other children or Nanny will take you home.’
‘But honestly, Oysie,’ Fleur was saying (this nickname had stuck, as one of the many), ‘what a place. It’s like a barracks. Not right for a party at all.’
‘It’s a tower house,’ I said. Fleur turned dreamily towards me, blinking as though the movement of her head had made her dizzy. ‘A fort, rather than a barracks, actually.’
‘Although,’ she said, ‘come to think of it, I’ve been to some marvellous parties in barracks and at least tonight I won’t have to depart over the wall.’
Mrs Forrester was a woman mixed together from a bloodline reaching back to the time of the Danish kings along with a good shovelful of the Yorkshire soil where the family had always been planted, which mixture had produced a character of pure flint. She froze with a card halfway to the table.
‘She’s teasing, Fenella,’ Aurora said calmly and wagged her finger at Fleur. ‘Straight to bed with no supper unless you stop being naughty.’
‘I don’t want any supper,’ said Fleur. ‘Have you seen it? Great slices of ham as though we were ploughmen! I’m going to dance again.’ She dropped a kiss on all four of our heads and ran on light tiptoes out of the card room with the floating chiffon panels of her party frock streaming out behind her.
‘Doesn’t she look adorable?’ Pearl said, gazing after her.
‘Truly like a little flower,’ said Aurora. ‘That frock makes her look as though she’s dressed in petals.’
‘Three spades,’ said Mrs Forrester, but they were too busy gazing.
‘Mamma-dearest and the Major must have seen her whole pretty life ahead of her the day she was born to have given her that name,’ said Pearl.
‘And yours, Pearl darling,’ said Aurora. ‘You are the pearl of us all.’
‘And you were the dawn of us all, my angel,’ said Pearl. ‘What does Fenella mean, Fenella?’
‘It means my grandmother’s name was Fenella and she had her own fortune to leave as she chose,’ said Mrs Forrester, making me laugh even though I am not sure she meant to be funny.
I laughed again now, remembering.
‘Dandy?’ said Pearl down the line.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do go on. I was just thinking about Mrs Forrester on Armistice night.’
‘I must have forgotten,’ said Pearl. ‘So, dearest darlingest Dandiest, will you help?’
‘I will,’ I said, interrupting the endearments firmly. ‘Of course I will. But you’ll have to tell me a lot more about what’s wrong. Love or money? It’s usually one of the two.’
‘Not this time,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s remorse. Black engulfing guilt. I thought Fleur had put it quite out of her mind but, as I say, from her letters I think it’s taken hold of her again.’
‘Guilt over what?’
‘Nothing!’ said Pearl. ‘How could little Floramundi have anything to be guilty of? And besides, she’s done everything she can to live a different life, a glorious, selfless, saintly life.’
‘You make it sound as though she’d taken the veil,’ I said. Pearl said nothing. ‘She hasn’t, has she?’ I was not entirely joking now. ‘She’s not in a convent? Pearl?’
‘Not quite,’ said Pearl. ‘She’s in a school.’
‘What do you mean? Studying to join a convent?’
‘No, I mean, she’s teaching in a girls’ school. A boarding school. In Portpatrick, in Scotland.’ Now, I was speechless. Sweet little Fleur, pretty and rich, had become a schoolmistress? ‘St Columba’s College for Young Ladies,’ said Pearl miserably. ‘And it’s worse than it sounds. It’s run according to a nasty German theory of education – the Foible Method, or something – and the girls all go on to universities and oh… poor little Fleur.’
‘It does sound pretty ghastly,’ I agreed. ‘And so you want me to winkle her out of there? Persuade her to resign? I’m not sure I could-’
‘No!’ said Pearl. ‘She’s been there eight years and for all that time she’s been almost happy. I want you to find out what’s gone wrong with her now. I want you to stop her running away even from St Columba’s. If we lose her completely again we’ll all die of grief. Mamma-dearest, Sunny and me.’
‘There, there,’ I said. ‘Pearl, please. Of course I will, darling. Only why don’t you and Aurora hop on a train and-’
‘Banished,’ said Pearl. ‘Forbidden the house. Kept at the gates. “Miss Lipscott is not at home to callers.”’
‘Miss Lipscott,’ I echoed. Of course I should have realised that a schoolmistress could not be a married woman, but to think of that faerie-child, that glittering chiffoned girl, still Miss Lipscott at thirty gave me a pang. Add the fact of her fortune, I thought to myself, and the news would kill Hugh.
2
Of course, Alec Osborne was furious.
‘A school?’ he said. ‘A girls’ school? I thought we had decided, Dandy.’ He spiked his fork into his beefsteak and attacked it with his knife as though he were sawing through a plank. (And since the beef from the Mains is excellent, the butcher at Dunkeld a stickler for hanging and Mrs Tilling, my cook, a fiend with a tenderiser, he got clean through it in a second and the blade made a painful screeching sound against the porcelain below.)
‘How could we decide such a thing?’ I asked him. ‘We agreed that it would be fun for you if a case came in that was a little more… rugged, but we didn’t entertain the idea of turning business away. I didn’t anyway.’
‘What next?’ Alec cried. ‘A lying-in hospital? An harem?’