The Crimson Rooms (13 page)

In our last week at Girton,
one of our sternest lecturers, a woman in her fifties dressed in the regulation soft-collared blouse, belted cardigan, and ankle-length skirt, had proposed the motion in a debate titled “The Future, My Dear, Must Perforce Be Female
.
” Until Miss Lang spoke, the atmosphere had been lighthearted. Examinations were over and we were about to graduate. Our only objection to the debate was that the subject was so tediously familiar it could hold no surprises. But we had overlooked the fact that Miss Lang had no qualms about uttering the unutterable.

“You are the first generation of young women that has ever faced a future in which you will not depend on men. This will give you extraordinary freedom and extraordinary responsibility.” We smiled and nodded, of course, and felt rather proud and excited. “For most of you this will not be a choice but a fact of life. We are missing nearly a million men and these, as you are painfully aware, were your contemporaries. I don’t want to dwell on the agony of loss, not a woman among us is unmarked. But I would argue that you are the lucky ones, because all of you have brains and some of you a private income. Pity the poor girls who have neither. I urge you, my dear young ladies, don’t waste your youth seeking out a husband who in all probability is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere in northern France. Instead, seize the opportunity of your single status to change the world.”

I had always hated prophetic statements; I suspected the ones that struck home were the ones we knew in our hearts to be true. We’d read the statistics and the evidence lay in the empty bedrooms in our family homes, the widows’ weeds in church, the cripples on the street corners, the newly built war memorials. But I can’t have been alone in thinking: It may be true for some but it won’t apply to me.

Because of that debate, the last week at Cambridge was tainted. Until then we had been studying because that was the path we’d chosen. We regarded ourselves as exceptionally clever girls with an insatiable appetite to prove ourselves capable of all that our brothers could do and more. We looked down on our mothers and their friends and neighbors, the ladies in the grand houses and the housewives in their terraces, because we thought their lives hollow. Most of us envisaged that we would have a career, yes, but we wanted to be loved as well.

And now this wretched Miss Lang had said that we wouldn’t marry. “This is it, girls, the years of expectation are over. We are sisters, and on our sisters and ourselves we must rely or we shall face a future filled with pointless yearning.”

So while some of us went into medicine, teaching, or research, Carrie Morrison and I entered the law, where, ironically enough, we met nothing but men: the aged, the avuncular, the damaged, the very youthful, the very fortunate, the very quick-footed. But on the whole these men wanted nothing to do with us. While they were fighting, they had yearned for their civilized chambers, offices, and courtrooms, and what most of them had hoped was that on their return nothing would be changed. We women were the symbol of an outcome they hadn’t looked for. They certainly would never have considered
marrying
a dowdy legal woman when they had the pick of soft-skinned girls in translucent frocks, who would grace their hearths and refrain from asking awkward questions.

The fact was that until Edmund turned up on my doorstep and Thorne touched my arm in the foyer of Shoreditch Magistrate Court, I had convinced myself that the one thing I really did not need in my life was a man. I had no intention of sacrificing years of hard work for the sake of a sickly, lascivious, fortune-hunting, or cradle-snatching type, such as Mother occasionally insinuated my way after church. I thought I was immune. I don’t believe I even saw Breen and Wolfe as men so much as accessible outposts of the law. And then Edmund turned up and I wanted a child, and Thorne poured my tea, adjusted the cup on the saucer, glanced at me with unexpected deliberation, and I wanted a lover.

B
efore leaving Clivedon Hall Gardens
for our trip to Eastbourne, we were cautioned to take umbrellas, spare woolens, gabardines, even the address of a distant cousin of Prudence’s who lived in Polegate and might be persuaded to put us up should we be stranded for the night.

“Stranded!”
exclaimed Meredith.

“You never know with trains,” said Prudence, “they can be extremely unreliable,” and it was as if each locomotive had a wicked will of its own.

“If we’re stranded,” said Meredith, “we shall bivouac on the beach. Wouldn’t that be something, Edmund?”

So I found myself on yet another unaccustomed journey, steaming through blousy late-May fields, first Surrey, then Sussex. It was hard to leave behind the
should
s, the most pressing of which was that I should have been with Mother. Although it was never stated, it was understood by the inmates of Clivedon Hall Gardens (with the exception of myself and possibly Grandmother) that my work was a matter of self-indulgence and I should be very grateful that I was allowed to do it. The fact that I worked because somebody must was too painful to voice. So Saturdays with Mother were my penance for indulging my whim the rest of the week. Sometimes we went to a gallery, sometimes I endured a tea party or an afternoon’s gardening.

And if Mother happened not to need me, I should have been reading up the case law on the custody of children and preparing a bail argument for Leah Marchant. Above all I should not be spending yet more money, this time on a day out by the sea.

My perceptions of Meredith kept shifting. In the area of money, for instance, I had no idea about her true situation. She claimed to be poor but when Edmund said he couldn’t find his bathing drawers, she told him airily that she would buy him a new pair in a shop by the seaside: “I can’t believe there won’t be mountains of bathing costumes in Eastbourne.” And he was promised a bucket and spade and an ice cream. So many treats.

And then there was the question of her clothes, which were neither practical nor cheap. Perhaps the illicit rifling through Stella Wheeler’s bedroom had sensitized me a little to the nuances of women’s fashion. Stella’s clothes, I suspected, with the exception of the nightgown, undergarments, and stockings, had been cheaply bought. The dyes had been saccharine, the fabrics creased. Most items in my own wardrobe could best be described as sturdy: skirts and jackets made to measure by Mother’s quavery prewar dressmaker, Miss Pouncett, the rest off the rack at Debenham and Freebody. All Clivedon Hall Gardens clothes were expected to last season after season. Prudence was proud to claim that she still wore boots bought in 1906, resoled three times by a favored cobbler in Buckingham but otherwise good as new.

But Meredith’s wardrobe was exquisite. The shades were subtle, the accessories carefully matched. Today she wore yet another low-waisted frock and little knitted jacket, a straw hat, yellow (of all colors) gloves, and matching bag. Prudence would never have recommended yellow. The principle by which we abided in Clivedon Hall Gardens was that each garment should match every other, so navy, beige, and especially black and gray were staples.

But the biggest mystery of all about Meredith was exactly what she was
after
, as Mother put it. How much money did she need to fulfill her plans? Where did she intend to live, long term? Had she tickets booked for a return voyage to Canada? I had been told to find answers to all these questions, but on the train journey, as we watched fields of cow parsley crushed by overnight rain, tossing hedgerows, a herd of cows each angled precisely in line with the others to face the railway line, farms tucked like models into their yards, towns and villages nestled into valleys exactly as described by a guidebook about the British countryside (according to Meredith), the sudden emergence of the sun between banks of cloud, and then the wide open plain and steeply rising down-land before the sea, we talked only of relatively neutral subjects.

“Tell me about Prudence,” said Meredith. “What is her story?”

“There is no story. She is my father’s only sister. My grandfather was a widower, so she was obliged to care for him and when he died and the family house was sold, she moved into the cottage which used to be the gardener’s at the bottom of the garden. Prudence loved that cottage but when Father’s money went, her allowance had to be reduced, so she eventually came to live with us.”

“How did he lose his money?”

“Bad investments. After James died he grew reckless, although I think he was trying to secure our future.”

“Poor Prudence for losing her home,” said Meredith. “Poor you.”

“Oh, we rub along quite well.”

“But why do you put up with it? Why do you let her dominate those dreadful meals?”

“Does she dominate? I find her amusing, actually. I’m very fond of her. She’s company for Mother, they’re roughly the same age.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that they like each other much.”

“They make the best of their circumstances.”

“Oh, dear. What a way to go on.” And she turned to the window, as if I was somehow culpable. “Everyone lives so meagerly in your house. Their lives seem so constrained.”

I was silent. Meredith was surely not being deliberately obtuse but there she sat in her buttercup-colored lambskin gloves, eyes wide with concern, apparently oblivious to the irony that part of the cause for the Giffords’ financial distress was sitting only inches away with his nose and fist pressed to the window, watching out for a first glimpse of the sea.

“What I have noticed about your house,” she added, “is that everything in it is not only old but brown. Why is that, do you suppose? You live among sepia tones. I wonder, is that why everyone seems so low in spirits?”

After a pause, I murmured: “Everything was different before James died. We cannot seem to recover from that.”

As I had somehow anticipated, the conversation was abruptly ended. Meredith put her arm around her son and said: “Look, darling, look at all these back gardens full of roses. This is Eastbourne, I feel sure. We must be nearly there.” Meanwhile, I reflected that perhaps she was right and Clivedon Hall Gardens really did have a pervasive brown hue. Only in odd little patches, other than in my imagination, did the house show a flash of color: a new pink soap in the bathroom (Mother’s birthday present from a well-to-do bridge partner), lovely crimson in the kitchen where Rose was knitting a daring tea cozy in red and royal blue, Grandmother’s collection of theatrical memorabilia, confined to her room to conceal the shameful fact that she’d once been an actress, a fistful of early sweet peas, grown by Prudence, hanging over the edge of their vase like the lilac, cream, and coral frocks of dancers.

In Eastbourne, I hovered in the doorway
of a shop crammed with mainly pointless seaside items while Meredith bought her son blue-and-green-striped swimming drawers, then a bucket and spade. Her method of spending money was a revelation. Out came a little purse (matching yellow leather) and from it a fistful of change, offered to the assistant to select and sort. “I still can’t manage these farthings and thruppences and whatnot; take what you need.” How careless it seemed not even to count what was given in change. Then at last we were safely away from the shops and high up on the promenade. “Of course there is water and to spare back home,” said Meredith. “This, however, is proper seaside. This is what I was hoping for.”

“It’s pebbles,” said Edmund scanning the row of breakwaters. “No sand.”

“When the tide goes out there might be sand,” I said. He dashed ahead down the winding path to the sea and I felt a lightening of the heart as the breeze caught my hat and the air was suddenly full of salt and memories of more than a dozen childhood holidays in Cornwall. Not that those had been filled with unalloyed pleasure. There had been so many unconquerable tensions; Mother was always too cold or too hot and had to keep shifting her deck chair while Father grew impatient sitting on the beach with no function other than to bark injunctions at James and me, and disappeared on long, mysterious walks, thereby making Mother restless and leaving us all with a vague sense of failure that we had not proved interesting enough.