Last Nocturne (2 page)

Despite his pompousness, Grace was beginning to feel that perhaps she had behaved badly in not having acquainted him with Mrs Martagon’s letter the moment it had arrived. She was, after all, engaged to be married to him (when he considered the time was ripe; when he had established himself, as he put it. Meaning, Grace assumed, when his father had retired from the medical practice they shared, an event which did not seem at all likely in the foreseeable future), so he did have the right to know. On the other hand, if she had told him, she knew with certainty that he would have dismissed the matter out of hand before she’d had time even to consider it, as he was all set to do now.

‘I think you owe me an explanation,’ he asserted, reasonably enough. He never made a diagnosis until he was fully in possession of all the facts, and now he led her to the rather uncomfortable wrought-iron bench between a bank of ferns and a glossy aspidistra, and took her hands, which were trembling and cold even now, and still bore the engagement ring on her finger.

Grace was afraid her explanations weren’t going to satisfy him. Even her mother was against her only child committing herself to what was being suggested, despite – or more likely because of – her long acquaintance with Edwina Martagon.

The letter had come out of the blue. Mrs Martagon had written to ask if her dearest friend Rosamund would be prepared to let Grace help her out over the period of the next twelve months: she was in need of someone of good family, nicely brought up, who wouldn’t be an embarrassment living in her house in London, to assist her with her voluminous correspondence and keep track of all the details of her extremely busy social life. Especially would this be necessary over this coming year when she was already making preparations for her daughter Dulcie’s coming out, next year. Such help as Grace would be required to give would not be onerous, Mrs Martagon had assured them, and though one didn’t wish, naturally, to dwell on such things, there would of course be a small remuneration – a delicate reference to Rosamund Thurley’s reduced circumstances after the death of her husband. And perhaps Grace might also act as companion to Dulcie until she came out and found a suitable man to marry, which occurrences, Mrs Martagon confidently implied, would be simultaneous. And all this, of course, would also mean the opportunity for Grace to get about in society and become acquainted with people…and perhaps to find a suitable young man for herself. Mrs Martagon had allowed her correspondence with ‘her dearest friend’ Rosamund to grow desultory over the years, and she didn’t yet know of Grace’s recent engagement.

‘All the same, you can’t possibly do it,’ said Grace’s mother, quite sharply for her. ‘I know Edwina. What she really means is that she wants you to run after her and pick up the pieces and deal with all the boring things, like addressing her envelopes and sorting her stockings. I never knew a more disorganised girl – how she managed to be always so well turned out was the greatest mystery – and I don’t see why she should have changed.’

‘Doesn’t she have a maid?’

‘Now, now, Grace, you know perfectly well what I mean. Of course she has a maid. Edwina has never had to lift a finger for herself in all her life. The only reason she’s written now is because she can’t find anyone else…you’d never have a moment to call your own. Her last secretary – for in plain words that’s what you’d be – went downstairs one morning with her bags packed and a taxicab waiting, and smashed all the china in the breakfast room before she left for ever. Nervous breakdown, poor thing. Don’t forget, I’ve known her a long time, since we came out together, when she was still Edwina Chaddesley.’

To prove her point, Mrs Thurley lifted the plum-coloured, velvet-covered, seed pearl-embroidered album from the sofa table and opened it at a photograph of two eighteen-year-old girls taken in the dresses they had worn to their first ball: both in white, of course, Rosamund fair and sweet, with a chaplet of roses on her head, her companion a proud-looking beauty even then, with a glorious mass of wavy hair, a firm chin and a determined lift of the head. Yet, of the two, Rosamund had been the first to marry, and it had been for love. Only a younger son who had gone into the Church, alas, and one, moreover, who was never destined to reach high clerical office, but it had been a love which lasted all their life together. Whereas Edwina, who had been expected to marry into the aristocracy at least, had not received any such offers and had eventually settled on Eliot Martagon, the scion of an undistinguished family. There were compensations, however, which presumably made up for her disappointment. Eliot’s father, as a young man, had gone out to South Africa for a spell and had made a great deal of money in the goldfields.

New money of this sort paved the way to a life of idleness for many a young man, but it did just the opposite for Eliot, freeing him to pursue more seriously his particular interests, which lay in the visual art world. Eliot was an artist
manqué
, but he was honest enough to see and admit soon enough the gap between his ambitions and his capabilities. Although frustrated, he hung around the fringes of the art world for a while, until eventually he found he did have a gift after all – one which lay in discovering and promoting those more talented than himself. He had begun by making a modest but interesting collection of pictures on his own behalf, which led to commissions to do the same for friends and acquaintances. After his father died, he had been able to buy a small and exclusive gallery, the Pontifex, just off Bond Street. As his knowledge increased, the scope of his enterprise widened considerably, necessitating much time spent in the various capitals of Europe and later in America, where he found patrons with wealth enough to buy what they wanted and what he could supply. After that, there had been no stopping him.

‘I suppose they complemented each other,’ said Mrs Thurley, closing the album. ‘Edwina is asked everywhere – perhaps not into the very grandest circles, but by people with the right connections, you know – which cannot but have helped him. And she’s always been known as a brilliant hostess.’ She mused on this for a while. ‘She would make a slave out of you.’

‘Only if I let her,’ Grace had replied coolly.

‘Dearest, I really don’t believe I should give this idea my blessing,’ Mrs Thurley said, though not quite as firmly as she might have done had she not been thinking of the opportunities such a sojourn in society might open for Grace…if only she hadn’t already been engaged to be married, that is. ‘Besides, there’s that other matter.’

‘Mama, that was something Mrs Martagon couldn’t possibly help.’

‘Of course not. But it leaves a stain on the family.’

There had never been any satisfactory explanation for why Eliot Martagon, a man in excellent health whose private life was beyond reproach, his business flourishing, his affairs in perfect order, his wife and children excellently provided for, should have shot himself dead six months ago. To be sure, his business assistant had stated at the inquest that he hadn’t seemed quite himself for some little time, though he couldn’t specify in precisely what way, and could offer no explanation of anything that might have been troubling him. He’d left no note behind him to explain why such a good-humoured, popular and kindly man at the height of his success should have taken this terrible step, and a verdict of accidental death while cleaning his gun – more acceptable than suicide – had eventually been given.

‘It’s only for a year, Mama.’ Grace, for all the level-headed self-control she tried so hard to maintain, couldn’t keep a trace of wistfulness from her voice. That one year beckoned so very enticingly: twelve months in a world far removed from her placid, uneventful, boring existence here, largely bounded by church activities, arranging the flowers, doing a little shopping, and passing a feather duster over her mother’s more cherished ornaments. A life which would be replicated a hundredfold when she married Robert.

Rosamund sighed as she met the blue, direct and sometimes incomprehensible gaze of her only child. She and Grace were very close, but there were times when she failed to understand her daughter. She took her face between her hands and kissed her forehead. ‘Dear child, I’m very aware you haven’t had the chances you should have had in life. But you’re a good daughter, and I wouldn’t want to see you making mistakes. It’s your own decision, of course, but do think very carefully about what it will mean. To you – and to Robert,’ she added, hesitating slightly. ‘A year can be a very long time.’ She was determined to like Robert and always tried to be fair to him, since Grace had accepted to be his wife.

So Grace had agreed dutifully to consider before making a decision, and now that she had, she’d made a fudge of it, in telling Robert so baldly. And here he was, standing in front of her, arms folded, tapping his foot, still waiting for her reply.

He drew in his breath and she felt him taking hold of his temper. ‘Come, Grace, this isn’t at all like you. What can you be thinking of – putting yourself at the beck and call of this woman? What on earth is it all about, hmm?’

Surely one should be able to confide one’s deepest feelings to the man one had, until half an hour ago, been about to marry? Goodness knows, Grace had tried, so many times before, but any attempt to do so invariably brought a frown of embarrassment to Robert’s face. At the beginning of their acquaintance, she’d hoped for so much. Just after her father had died, she had been sad and lonely, eager for affection, and Robert had been kind and, at first dazzled and admiring of someone so different from himself and his sisters, only too willing to give it. They’d played tennis together and shared country walks, bicycle rides and lectures at the Margaret Street Institute… Robert took himself and his pleasures seriously. They saw each other constantly. Only gradually did she face the fact that he automatically decried the things which amused and interested her…books, concerts, theatres or art exhibitions, all of which he regarded as frivolous; when he couldn’t avoid them, he gulped them down as if they were some of the nastier medicines he doled out to his patients. Once or twice lately, it had occurred to her that their paths were running on parallel lines which would never converge. She had pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. Now, she couldn’t help being thankful that her eyes had been opened in time, before either of them had truly committed themselves, finally and irrevocably, to a marriage that could only in the end prove stale and unprofitable.

‘Plunging into this without thought,’ he was continuing, his tone appreciably colder at her failure to reply, ‘I regard it as an irresponsibility. You are considering no one but yourself in this matter, Grace.’

That wasn’t quite fair. Her mother, and the difference it would make to her, had been a very real factor in Grace’s decision. The ‘small remuneration’ Mrs Martagon had offered was in fact extremely generous and would relieve Rosamund of responsibility for Grace and enable her to go and live at Frinton-on-Sea with her sister Lettie, also widowed, which was what she wanted above all things. Mrs Thurley had always disliked Birmingham.

‘You must think again,’ Robert commanded, ‘but I have to say, Grace, as the man who is shortly to be your husband, I think you are being extremely selfish.’

‘Perhaps I am, in a way, but please don’t be bitter, Robert.’ She was very distressed at having hurt him – and he hadn’t yet heard the worst of it. She breathed deeply. ‘I – don’t believe either of us has been very wise to think of marrying each other.’

‘What?’

‘I think – I must ask you to consider our engagement at an end, Robert.’

‘What?’
he fairly shouted.

The stiffly formal words had come oddly from Grace, but she’d chosen them deliberately as being the only ones likely to convince Robert she was serious. ‘We’re too different,’ she went on bravely, ‘tonight has surely convinced you of that?’

‘You might have thought of that before you said you would marry me!’ he returned with a fine show of petulance, beginning to pace about, the heels of his boots ringing on the Minton tiles.

Speaking from the depths of her own troubled state of mind, she burst out, ‘But do you imagine for one moment I would have agreed if I hadn’t thought I loved you?’

‘There! You’ve admitted it. If you really loved me, you would have had no need to think about it.’

‘Well then, perhaps I didn’t, enough.’

‘Perhaps not yet. But you will, Grace, you will. I won’t accept my ring back. You must keep it, until you come to your senses.’

The ring, a half-hoop of opals alternated with brilliants, still lay on the palm she stretched out towards him. Perhaps Edith had been right when she said opals were unlucky. Robert shook his head, his lips stubbornly closed, his hands clenched behind his back, and she looked helplessly at him, but she would not be forced to keep the ring simply by default, and in the absence of anything else to do with it, she leant forward and laid it on the wrought-iron table.

Her judgement this evening was not at its best. The ring fell between the metal openwork leaves of a curved acanthus and onto the floor, rolled a little and fell through the iron grating where the heat from the hot pipes came through.

With a cry she dropped to her knees, but of course she couldn’t retrieve it. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m—’

‘Oh, to the devil with the dratted ring, Grace!’ Robert’s disregard of the ring was splendid, though the effect was spoilt by his adding that the gardener would take up the grille first thing tomorrow morning and get it back. ‘More to the point is – what am I to tell everyone about this business – my father, Edith, the girls?’

‘Really, Robert!’ Half-laughing, despite her distress, Grace scrambled to her feet, brushing down her skirt. ‘What does that matter? Tell them the truth, that it was all my fault. Edith at least won’t be surprised.’

She shouldn’t have said that. Robert really had little sense of humour, and Edith was his favourite sister, the eldest of the family who, after their mother had died, had brought them all up – Robert, Dolly, Mary-Alice and Louie – but he scarcely noticed: she knew him well enough to see that he was already calculating the explanations he would give in order not to lose face, conscious as he was of his standing in the community. Difficult though the rejection might be for him, his pride was more bruised than his heart.