Miss Grey came to me and kissed me.
“Dear Davina,” she said. “We have always got on so well. It is going to be wonderful.” She turned to my father. “Wonderful for us all,” she added.
She held out her hand and he took it. He was looking at me rather anxiously I thought.
“The wedding will not take place for another three months,” said my father. “We must wait the full year … and a little more, I think.”
I wanted to laugh at him. I wanted to cry out: “But you did not wait. This is a pretence. It’s all a pretence. There is sham everywhere.”
But “I see” was all I could manage to say.
“I am sure,” he went on, “that you will realise this is the best thing possible. You need a mother.”
And I thought, you need someone … as Hamish did.
It was disturbing how I heard myself speaking inwardly … saying things which I would never have dared say aloud, things which I would never have believed possible a year ago.
How I hated them standing there, pretending … both of them. But I hated him more than I did her.
“There will be a wedding,” I heard myself say stupidly; and that other voice within me said, of course there will be a wedding. A quiet one … all very right and proper … just as it should be … and no one will know.
“A quiet one naturally,” said my father.
“Naturally,” I repeated and wondered whether they noticed the sarcasm.
“Are you going to congratulate us?” asked Miss Grey archly.
I did not answer.
“It is something of a surprise, I have no doubt,” said my father. “But it will be the best thing possible … for us all. You will have a mother …”
I looked at Zillah Grey. She grimaced and somehow I liked her for that. She was not the hypocrite he was, whatever else she might be; and I think at that time it was the hypocrisy which was the greatest sin in my eyes.
“Well then,” said my father. “I want us to drink to the future.”
He opened a cupboard and took out three glasses and a bottle of champagne.
There was a little for me, less than half a glass. I kept thinking of Miss Grey lying on her bed singing “Mary Queen of Scots”; and I began to laugh.
My father smiled quite benignly, not understanding. When had he ever? I asked myself. But I think Miss Grey was aware of my feelings.
AT FIRST the news was received with dismay throughout the household, but after a few days they all seemed to accept it.
Mrs. Kirkwell had a little talk with me.
She said: “A lot has happened in this house lately, Miss Davina. Mr. Kirkwell and I were beginning to look on you as the mistress of the house. Of course, you are young as yet. We had thought that Mr. Glentyre might marry again, but we hadn’t thought it would be so soon.”
“It will be a year since my mother died when they marry.”
“Oh yes. Well, they couldna very well do it before. That wouldn’t have been right and Mr. Glentyre, he’s one who’ll always do what’s right. It’s soon … but it will be the full year. And we shall have a new lady of the house.” Mrs. Kirkwell wrinkled her brows. I knew she was thinking that it would be difficult to imagine Zillah Grey as the mistress of a staid Edinburgh residence.
“There’ll be changes,” she went on. “I’m sure of that. Well, we must take them as they come, I suppose. A man needs a wife … even a gentleman like Mr. Glentyre, and having a daughter to bring up.”
“I think I am brought up by now, don’t you, Mrs. Kirkwell?”
“Well, there’ll be things to arrange and a woman’s best for that even if …”
“I am glad you and Mr. Kirkwell are not too upset by all these changes.”
She shook her head sadly and I guessed she was thinking of the days when my mother was alive. I wondered if she were aware of Miss Grey’s nightly excursions. Mrs. Kirkwell was shrewd and she had always liked to be aware of what was going on in the house.
I imagined she and Mr. Kirkwell might have decided that when there were certain “goings-on” in a respectable house— men being what they were—it was as well to have them legalised.
And so the house settled down to a mood of greater serenity than it had enjoyed since my mother died.
Later I heard Mrs. Kirkwell’s comments on the mistress-of-the-house-to-be. “She’s not the interfering sort. That’s the kind neither Mr. Kirkwell nor me would work for.”
So, unsuitable as the match might seem to outsiders, it was— if somewhat grudgingly—accepted in the house, largely because it was recognised that a man needed a wife and the chosen one in this case was “not the interfering sort.”
THE WEDDING was, as had been decided, quiet—just a simple ceremony performed by the Reverend Charles Stocks who had been a friend of the family all my life.
There were few guests, chiefly friends of my father. Aunt Roberta did not appear, for the feud between her and my father continued. There were no friends of Zillah Grey present. The reception at the house was brief and very soon my father, with his bride, left for Italy.
THE GOVERNESS
I went at once to my room to write to Lilias.
“I have a stepmother now. It seems incongruous. So much has happened in the last year. Sometimes I wonder what is going to happen next …”
Jamie
WHEN THEY HAD GONE the house seemed very quiet and the strangeness of everything that had happened struck me afresh. I could not get out of my mind the fact that just over a year ago my mother had been alive and Lilias had been with me.
I had reached my seventeenth birthday in September and had left my childhood behind me—not only because of my age. I had learned so much—chiefly that people were not what they seemed to be. I had learned that a man like my father—outwardly a pillar of virtue—was capable of urges as powerful as those which had lured Kitty to abandon herself recklessly to disaster. They had carried my father so far that he had not only brought a woman like Zillah Grey into the house but had actually married her. So there was no doubt that I had grown up.
A sense of aloneness came over me. I had lost my best friends. There was no one now. Perhaps that was why I was so ready to welcome Jamie into my life.
I found a great pleasure in walking. In the old days I should not have been going out alone, but now there was no one who could stop me. In the absence of my stepmother I was the mistress of the house. I was on the way to becoming eighteen years old … an age, I supposed, when one could, in some circumstances, take charge. Mrs. Kirkwell had made it clear that she would rather take orders from me than from the new Mrs. Glentyre.
It will be different when they return, I reminded myself.
There was comfort in exploring the city, and the more I saw of it, the more captivated I became by its inimitable charm.
I was struck by the Gothic buildings which had been infiltrated with a touch of the classic Greek which gave an added dignity. In the first place, the situation was impressive. From one point it was possible to overlook the estuary of the Forth flowing into the ocean, and away to the west were the mountains. Such a superb position must be paid for, and the toll demanded was the bitter east wind and the snow from the mountains. But we had grown accustomed to that and it made our warm houses the more luxurious.
The coming of spring was particularly welcome and it was during that delightful season when I was able to indulge in my explorations. How beautiful it was then, with the sun shining on the tall grey buildings lighting them to silver. Sometimes I would sit in the gardens looking up to the castle or along Princes Street; and at others I would wander into the old town and listen for the bell of the university which rang out every hour.
It was a revelation to discover what a great divide there was in our city between the comfortably situated and the wretchedly poor. I suppose it is so in all big cities, but in ours it seemed more marked, I think, because the two were so close together. A few minutes’ walk could take one from the affluent to the needy. One could be in Princes Street where the carriages rolled by carrying the well-dressed and well-fed, and very soon be in the wynds, where dwellings huddled together, where many lived in one small room, where the lines of pitiful garments hung out to dry and bare-footed, ragged children played in the gutters.