The gods whom Janet had chosen played tricks on mortals for their pleasure; this she had not considered. She believed that she could control her destiny. She dreamed of unutterable, unearthly love, passion of the spirit, not of the flesh, a pure and searing fire. She did not expect to find an object. She brooded upon poets distanced by death, heroes of legend, demon lovers, powerful yet insubstantial.
Her life seemed to have entered a period of calm, a stretch of slow, clear-flowing water, illuminated by her love for her jackdaw and quickened by her apprehensions of romance. It was her last year at school and she was able to spend most of her time in the library, an ancient building overlooking a garden of weeping trees and lavender. The scent of rainy leaves hung in the mild air. Another window looked down onto the street. On the sill stood a wide glass carafe, half full of water, and in the water she could see the miniature and upside-down reflection of everything that happened far below and out of sight. Columns of girls passed through it, hurrying to their houses. They looked like swarms of midges. Once a bride and her attendants came from the church and drifted like petals across the greenish depths. When dusk fell, the street lamps were golden sea anemones. Janet was happy there, working on into the evening. When she came out, the frosty night sky filled her with excitement; she felt intensely alive. Her hair had now grown long enough to touch her shoulders, and it crackled and stood on end as she brushed it; electric sparks whirled about her head.
Vera was planning to launch Janet into society that winter. To this end she had arranged a fearsome programme of subscription dances, commencing unfortunately with the event which should have been its climax; the hunt ball. Janet was appalled; she had looked forward to spending the holidays in her room with her books and her jackdaw. To her huge relief Claws had not been seduced by the charms of Rhona’s room, where he had been an unwelcome and unwilling lodger during the term. By day he had been thrust out of doors, and at night when he flew back, always to Janet’s room, he had been shut firmly in his villa. “You see,” said Vera, “it’s perfectly simple to keep a bird and still have a fresh, pretty room.” Janet ignored her. 8, Belitha Villas resumed its role as a place of safety in the dismal event of outings by car. Claws roosted on Janet’s bed by night and kept her company by day. Sometimes, when the wind was wild and other jackdaws flocked and shrieked across the racing clouds, he flew out to join them. They drove him off and sent him plunging headlong back to the battlements and Janet’s window. She was glad that he, too, was an outcast. “Nos contra mundum, Claws,” she told him. She wondered whether she could teach him to say this. But first he must learn to say “Nevermore.” If she were given any money for Christmas, she planned to spend it on lengths of purple taffeta which she would nail to her walls as a start to redesigning the room in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe.
Vera declared that Rhona should also go to the hunt ball. There had been trouble over Janet’s choice of an evening dress. She had refused to be guided by her mother or by the lady in Watt and Grants. When they had peeped into the fitting room to see how she was faring in the white chiffon they had selected, they found her sitting on a chair, sucking her thumb. She had not even taken off her coat. With the thumb hovering a fraction outside her lower lip she announced, “It’s no good. It doesn’t fit.” Vera was speechless, doubly mortified by the thumb and the blatant lie. The thumb was about to be reinserted. Hastily she said, “Well, have you seen anything you really like?” Janet brightened. “Yes,” she said, “the purple one.” Vera had also noticed the purple dress; it was uniquely hideous, festooned with massive bows and encumbered by a bizarre scalloped train like a dragon’s tail. It might be worn with panache by a mad old person whose brains had been jumbled by hunting accidents, and who was indulgently regarded as “game,” but by a young girl never. “Never. Never. Never,” she said aloud, surprising herself. Janet leered at her. “Tricolonic anaphora,” she remarked in her most irritating, pedantic voice. The familiar sense of numb despair began to creep over Vera. “Oh, all right then, try it on.” Surely even Janet would see how monstrous it looked. Janet emerged from the fitting room with flushed cheeks and shining eyes; she looked almost pretty for a moment. “It’s absolutely beautiful. Exactly right.” It was then that Vera decided to take Rhona to the ball. At least she could find pleasure in the appearance of one daughter. And although Rhona really was too young, she was tall for her age and naturally elegant. She would look delightful in the white chiffon, a winter rose. And Francis was always presentable, if annoying.
In view of the great frozen distances to be covered, from diverse directions, they were to meet with the rest of their party at the ball itself. Hector and Francis were resplendent in kilts and jabots. “I shall be fiendishly handsome,” Francis had prophesied. “Like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind. There will be quite a flutter in the dovecotes.” Gone With the Wind: Janet could only remember the piled dead and litter of wounded in the great square of Atlanta, and far up against the blue sky the Southern flag flickering in the breeze like the tongue of a snake. Rhona looked like a nymph from a Greek vase. She was incandescent with excitement. Vera and she had spent the whole day in girlish conspiracy. Janet was envious and contemptuous; she wished them to know of her contempt. “What is the late November doing, with the confusion of the spring?” she asked Vera. Vera paid no attention. She was sorting through boxes of old lipsticks, sharing secrets of the past with Rhona. “And can you imagine, this is the colour we all wore in 1946.” Janet slunk off to her room.
Now as Hector drove them northwards, sipping occasionally from his hip flask, Janet was in good spirits, for she felt like the queen of the night in her purple dress. The queen of air and darkness. Perhaps she would meet a kindred spirit: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” This was just what she wanted. But how did anyone recognise a pilgrim soul? She had sat for a long time in front of her mirror turning her head about and twisting her features into soulful expressions. Nothing was quite right. Face turned to three-quarter profile, raised chin, and upturned eyeballs gave an impression of an ecstatic pre-Raphaelite maiden, but she could hardly walk around like that. Vera had once said that in infancy Janet had beautiful eyelids. She felt that little could be made of this. She recalled that one of the bad-tempered Greek goddesses shared this meaningless asset with her. Hera probably, the worst of the lot. Calliblepharous; an unappealing adjective. And there had been the occasion when a friend of her parents had told them she thought Janet had a lovely face. Vera had reported this in accents of astonishment. Janet’s delight had rapidly turned to fear. She must never again meet this woman in case she changed her mind.
“And don’t forget what I told you about your gloves,” said Vera suddenly from the front of the car. Janet could remember nothing of the decorum and etiquette of these gloves, long, limp, and white with exasperating tiny pearl buttons. She resolved that she would lose hers as soon as they arrived. She began to feel nervous. Francis was silent, doubtless brooding on his conquests. “You’d better not talk the way you usually do; they’ll think you’re mad. Or showing off,” she advised him, from bitter experience. “Nonsense,” said Francis. “They’ll love it. They don’t like it when you go on about things because you’re a girl. And of course you are extremely boring. Girls need to know when to keep their mouths shut.”
The hunt ball was held in the Master’s house, enormous and Georgian, surrounded by rolling acres of snowy lawn and cedar trees. “More like an English country house,” said Vera approvingly, and certainly it was unusually well heated. On each side of the lofty entrance hall were vistas of long rooms opening into one another, each with a blazing log fire. The ballroom lay beyond the hall, brilliantly lit by chandeliers, pillared and mirrored. The Master, clad in hunting pink, greeted them warmly and seemed not to notice that Janet gave him both her hands to shake, having entangled the buttons of her gloves in her desperate attempt to get rid of them. They found the rest of their party. The grown-ups greeted each other with ecstatic cries, kisses, and handshakes. The young exchanged muttered introductions and eyed each other in silence. Janet had met two of the three girls before, but she knew only one of the boys, from long ago at Auchnasaugh. Francis and the boys moved off towards a drinks table. Vera watched them with narrowed eyes. The girls studied one another’s dresses. Janet was pleased to see that these were all rather similar, demurely pretty pastels with full floating skirts. “Very jeune fille,” she thought. She wriggled her hips so that her dragon tail swished from side to side. The shiny purple bows trembled like gigantic moths. Quite a few people were staring at her. She felt elated. Each of the boys, except for Francis, and each of the fathers asked her for a dance. Carefully she pencilled their names into her tiny pink programme book; she noticed that there were still a great many dances left to be filled in, but no doubt her partners would return to her. Or of course she might meet her demon lover.