“Like what, dear?”
“Mathematics, geography, English, history. Miss Milne was ever so keen on history. My mother was, too. She knew a lot about what happened in the past and she used to talk to me about it. It was very exciting. Once I went to Holyrood House.”
“What’s that?”
I was astounded.
“Surely you know. It’s the old palace. Mary Queen of Scots was there, Rizzio was murdered there. And then there’s the castle where King James was born … the Sixth of Scotland and the First of England. His mother was Mary Queen of Scots.”
She was almost asleep. Then suddenly she began to sing:
Wasn’t it pitiful what they did to Mary Queen of Scots?
Of her emulsion I have taken lots and lots and lots.
They locked her up in Fotheringay,
Fotheringay was not so gay,
Mary, Mary, Hanover Squarey, Mary Queen of Scots.
I listened in amazement. Then I thought: she is drunk.
How COULD MY FATHER, who was so stern and so conventional, allow such a woman to remain in the house, and moreover to have brought her in in the first place?
Of course, he had never seen her lying on her bed singing “Mary Queen of Scots.” She changed her personality when he was there. She wore the black dress often. It seemed to me that she could adjust herself to fit the occasion.
She did refer to that afternoon.
“I don’t know what I said, dear. You see, I had been to lunch with a dear friend. She’d been in trouble … it was a love affair and suddenly everything came right. I was so happy for her. She wanted to drink. She told me what had happened … how it had nearly gone wrong and then come right. And there was champagne … to celebrate, you see. She made me drink with her. Well, I’m afraid I’m not used to it.”
I thought of the brandy in the locked cupboard and she must have guessed my thoughts for she went on quickly: “I just keep a little something in case I’m off-colour. I know I look robust, but I have my little weakness. Internal, dear. I get quickly upset if something doesn’t agree with me and a spoonful always puts me right. I had to drink with her. It would have been sort of unkind not to. You understand?”
“Oh, yes,” I reassured her.
“I must have said a lot of silly things, did I?”
“You sang a song about Mary Queen of Scots.”
“It was … awful?”
“Well, it was joking about Fotheringay, which was very sad really, and something I didn’t understand about ‘hanover squarey.’ I didn’t know what that meant.”
“It’s a well-known place in London. Hanover Square, actually Squarey, to rhyme with Mary. That’s why that’s there. It was silly. An old music hall song. Was that all? Did I say anything else?”
“Only that you used to be with the Jolly Red Heads.”
She looked a little grave. “People talk a lot of nonsense when they have been so foolish as to be persuaded to drink too much. I’m sorry, Davina, my dear. Forget it, will you?”
I nodded again and she swept me into her perfumed embrace.
“I’m getting very fond of you, Davina,” she said.
I felt a sense of uneasiness and a desperate longing came to me for the old days with Lilias.
Soon after that we were in Princes Street shopping and she said to me: “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Doesn’t the castle look grand? You must tell me about all that history sometime. I’d love to hear.”
Certainly she was the most unusual governess any girl ever had.
She bought a dress that afternoon. It was green with the tightly fitting bodice which she favoured and the skirt billowing out from the nipped-in waist. It was piped with ruby velvet.
She tried it on and paraded before the shop girl and me.
“Madam is … entrancing,” cried the girl ecstatically.
I had to admit that she looked startlingly attractive.
Before we went down to dinner that night she came into my room wearing the dress.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“You look beautiful.”
“Do you think it’s suitable for dinner tonight? What do you think your father will say?”
“I don’t suppose he will say anything. I don’t think he notices one’s clothes.”
She kissed me suddenly. “Davina, you are a little darling.”
A few nights later she wore the dress again and during dinner I noticed that she was wearing a very fine ruby ring.
I could not stop looking at it because I was sure I had seen it before. It was exactly like one my mother had worn.
The next day I mentioned it to her.
I said: “I noticed that lovely ring you were wearing last night.”
“Oh?” she said. “My ruby.”
“It’s a beautiful ring. My mother had one just like it. It’s going to be mine one day. My father just didn’t think I was old enough to wear it yet.”
“Yes … I see what he means.”
“I don’t suppose it’s exactly the same. But it is very like it.”
“I suppose one ring can look like another. There are fashions in rings, you know.”
“Are there?”
“They were probably made about the same period.”
“It is lovely anyway. May I see it?”
“But of course.”
She went to a drawer and took out a case.
“The case is like my mother’s, too,” I said.
“Well, aren’t all those cases rather alike?”
I slipped the ring on my finger. It was too big for me. I remembered there was one time when my mother had been wearing her ruby ring. I had admired it and she had taken it from her finger and slipped it on mine. “It will be yours one day,” she had said. “Your fingers will be a little fatter perhaps by that time.”
Miss Grey took it from me and put it back in the case.
I said: “The ruby matched the piping on your new dress.”
“Yes,” she said. “I thought that. It was the reason why I wore it.”
She shut the drawer and smiled at me. “I think we should practise our dancing,” she said.
The next time she wore the dress I noticed that she did not put on the ruby ring.
THERE WERE TIMES when I felt that I had been thrust into an entirely different world. Everything had changed so much since my mother’s death. The servants were different; they were aloof and disapproving. When my mother was alive it had seemed as though life went on just as it had been doing for generations. Now it was all changed.
Lilias’ departure had helped to change it. Lilias had been what one expected a governess to be. She and I had had a close friendship, but that did not mean that our lives had not been conducted in a strictly conventional way. When I thought of the old days … Sunday church … Sunday lunch … prayers … the amiable but regulated relationship between the upper and lower sections of the house … it was all so natural and orderly … just as it must have been for generations.
Now it was as though a whirlwind had struck the house and left the old order in ruins.
There were prayers every morning; the whole household attended, Miss Grey, discreet and demure, praying with the rest of us. But it was different. My father went to church on Sundays and I went with him, Miss Grey—as Lilias used to—accompanying us. But there was no chatting outside the church, only the occasional “How do you do” from my father and myself.
There was smouldering resentment in the kitchen, often openly displayed by the Kirkwells. They did not understand, any more than I did, why Miss Grey was allowed to remain in the house, or why she was chosen in the first place. She was a disruptive influence, not so much because of the manner in which she behaved—indeed she seemed to want to be on good terms with all of us—but because she was so different and people are suspicious of anything that does not conform to the rules.