Privileged Children (12 page)

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Anatole. ‘Are you truly suggesting that relief from difficult cleaning is not worth eight shillings a week?’

‘Oh, to save our souls from the indignity of manual labour, what price is not worth paying?’ mocked Charlie. ‘Yes, Anatole, let’s carry on paying Mrs Craddock less than what you’d ever accept for anything, for doing work which you’d never do if there was any way of avoiding it.’

‘Oh, Charlie, write that down for your next article but do just be reasonable now,’ sighed Alice. ‘And I think that, as they never do any housework, the men can all shut up anyway,’ she added.

‘Surely we can afford at least
one
proper maid?’ murmured Liza.

‘The theory is quite beside the point,’ said Kate, absently stroking Charlie’s hand. ‘The thing is that we really can’t afford it unless we cut down our personal shares quite drastically.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Tuskin. ‘I suggest that we economise on food. I’ve always heard that the Irish, Miss Molloy, grew to be the strongest peasants in Europe when they lived entirely upon potatoes. Now, if we each ate three baked potatoes a day, and perhaps the occasional piece of cheese and the odd orange …’ he mused, stroking his little beard.

‘Mr Tuskin, you’re talking a lot of hot air considering that you can only live on aspirins and strong tea,’ said Alice.

‘I am trying to improve my own health and morals.’

‘Can we please get back to the subject?’ said Kate.

Finola was lying on the window seat in the kitchen, with
one of the cats on her stomach. She was sleepily watching the clear darkening sky outside and the people who walked by the window. She could hear them talking as they passed, of clothes, of politics, of India, of school. Slowly she turned her face towards the inside of the kitchen and started to listen.

‘I think you’re all being silly‚’ she said after a few minutes. ‘You’re all really quarrelling about how much money you keep for yourselves, so why don’t you just keep all your own money?’

‘All right, Fin, how do we pay the rent and the food then?’ said Alice.

‘Well — if everyone paid a quarter of the money they’ve got towards all that …’

‘But then we wouldn’t have equal shares.’

‘Why should you have equal shares if you don’t earn the same?’

‘We don’t earn the same, but we all work just as hard, that’s why,’ said Kate.

‘But Kate, you’ve just been telling Christopher and Anatole that they don’t do enough work,’ said Finola.

‘Sharp, aren’t you?’ muttered Kate. She was too tired to smile.

‘And if they don’t work as hard as you do,’ said Finola, half to herself as she turned back towards the street outside, ‘then if they had less money because of it they’d work harder. Yes, that’s right,’ she said.

‘Fin, where did you pick up all these Victorian liberal ideas?’ laughed Jenny. ‘From Caitlin?’

‘I don’t care about Victorian liberal,’ said Finola. ‘I’m talking sense.’

‘As a matter of fact she is,’ said Alice. Kate looked grateful that Alice had said it.

‘I vote against Finola’s motion,’ said Mr Tuskin.

‘Mm,’ said Anatole and Liza and Harry.

‘Look what she’s done,’ teased Jenny, ‘she’s introduced foreign principles and split us up into classes. You’re the bourgeoisie, Alice and Kate, defending your property, and the rest of you are the proletariat.’

‘I haven’t done anything,’ said Finola, getting up. Everyone was looking at her suddenly. ‘Don’t you stare at me as though I’d done something wrong.’

The guests had all gone. The Green Room at ‘Dominique’s’ nightclub, Soho, was littered with the losses of an evening’s dancing. A fan, the feather from a lady’s headband, several handkerchiefs and paper flowers, were scattered on the dance floor. Anatole closed the piano and climbed down from the platform. He found a ten-shilling note and an automatic cigarette lighter on one of the small tables round the edge of the room, and pocketed both.

‘What’s the time?’ asked Richard Charteris, who played the saxophone.

‘Half past three,’ said Anatole. ‘Have you rung for a cab?’

‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘Well, we’ll be thrown out any minute now. The old man will be wanting to lock up.’

The Green Room was got up to look like an actor’s dressing room. There were weak lightbulbs round the many mirrors, and between the mirrors hung costumes: a panniered eighteenth-century dress, a jester’s suit and a lawyer’s wig and gown.

‘Let’s get out,’ said Anatole. ‘It stinks in here. More people than ever tonight.’

‘The numbers will start to drop after Goodwood,’ said Richard.

‘Is that next month?’ Anatole remembered that the fashionable Lady Caroline, with whom he had had an affair during the war, had used to talk about Goodwood.

‘Yes, end of July.’

Richard was Kate’s lover and fiancé. He was thirty-six
years old. Before the war he had used to lead an acceptable upper-class younger-son’s life as an army officer. He had lost a kidney and a foot early in 1915, and he said he was glad of it, because he had then had to leave the army and his father could hardly disapprove. Now he was able to earn money by his hobby, playing the saxophone; and he had an army pension too.

The taxi arrived after they had been waiting outside for a few minutes. They were silent as it sped along Oxford Street.

‘What do you think about Alice’s new model?’ asked Richard.

‘She’s a beautiful girl at the stage Alice likes best. I don’t know any more about her than you do.’

‘Neither a child nor a woman,’ mused Richard. ‘Laura Jones. I really wonder what she was doing in Kensington Gardens at lunchtime on Tuesday. I’m sure she had a school uniform on.’

‘She’s nervous,’ said Anatole. ‘Alice has been doing her best to put her at her ease.’

‘Alice said she’d ring her parents.’

Anatole opened his mouth to speak but waited until they had swung round Hyde Park Corner. ‘We should not talk like this. It’s Laura’s life, isn’t it? She’s just trying to earn some money being Alice’s model.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Anatole. A kid like that, with a public school accent? In school uniform when she arrived? Alice,’ he said, watching Anatole, who was looking very tired, ‘is getting very fond of her.’

‘She likes people who have been hurt in childhood. She likes to care for them and protect them,’ replied Anatole. ‘That’s the way she expresses her maternal instinct, I’ve decided. I’m very surprised she isn’t more friendly with you.’

‘She’s got too much to do.’

Anatole laughed. ‘I forgot,’ he said, ‘she’s become too friendly with Kate — which is rather odd because they did not get on very well for years. She doesn’t like the idea of Kate joining the middle-class morality, marrying you.’

Richard stared. ‘But
she’s
married to
you
!’

‘Oh, that’s very different. She was eight months pregnant when we were married, and I insisted on it. We had a proper
contract, too, denying me any control over her life. I agree with her,’ he said, half to himself. ‘We don’t even fight much about Finola any more, though Alice worries because she reads children’s books instead of encyclopaedias.’

Over the last two months, Richard had imagined and rehearsed the scene in which he would tell his parents that he had married Kate. He was doing so now: they would probe until they discovered that their daughter-in-law was not only thirty-nine but also half Jewish, a divorcée, an ex-suffragette and a practising doctor.

At last he returned to the matter in hand.

‘Anatole — this is awfully difficult to say — but don’t you mind —’

‘That my wife chases after young girls?’

‘Well …’

‘No, I don’t any more. I always dreaded her finding another male lover whom she preferred, but since she has discovered her lesbian side she has not taken much notice of other men. And she takes these emotional and aesthetic affairs with girls quite lightly. No, it’s not that — it’s that this sort of lesbianism is not exclusive, whereas I feel that love for another man might exclude me. So I am accustomed to the situation. Anyway, I find the idea of two attractive women making love quite erotic.’

‘So Alice doesn’t actually …’

‘Oh, no,’ said Anatole. ‘I’m sure not.’

Once they were home, Anatole suddenly did not feel tired. He went into the kitchen and sat down while he boiled the kettle. He shrugged himself out of his tailcoat and undid his white tie, while with the other hand he turned over the pages of Finola’s bright school atlas. The map of Europe showed only that which had existed since 1919. Anatole looked, still feeling that this could not be an actual state of affairs, at the small Baltic republics, Poland and the Polish corridor to the sea, swollen Yugoslavia, and the diminutive Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Yet, on the other hand, the sprawling old Hapsburg empire seemed to belong to the eighteenth century rather than to 1914.

Next to the atlas there was a sepia drawing of Laura Jones. It was the best Alice had yet done. Laura had an oval
face and a creamy skin. There were small freckles under her eyes and over the bridge of her nose. She had almond-shaped green eyes and thick, coarse brown hair. She was not plump, but her figure was smoother and more rounded than the sort to which Alice usually took a fancy. Her heavy pink mouth was crooked: it was tilted up at one end and down at the other, and her lower lip was larger than the upper one. It was a face which Anatole felt ought to be sensuous, and sometimes was, yet in this portrait Alice had caught only the worried look in Laura’s eyes, and her odd mouth did not express all that it could.

*

The next day, Finola walked home from school by the Earl’s Court Road route. She paused on her way to look at a sweetshop window. She had just enough money to buy five chocolate mice, or lots of liquorice or mint humbugs, and she decided on the mice. No one stopped her eating sweets, but at home they all so disapproved of them that Finola ate them in the street. Munching, she ambled past Earl’s Court tube station. She noticed that there was a new poster up, and gave it a glance. Suddenly she stopped. It was a police notice entitled ‘MISSING PERSON’. There was a photograph below, and then some writing:

The address of the nearest police station was given. The photograph was blurred, but Laura Jones’s crooked mouth showed up well.

Finola considered going to the police. Then she remembered the real Laura, and especially her hunted look. ‘But oh, this is a real, genuine mystery!’ Finola whispered in excitement, and wished that she could tell her schoolfriends without asking Laura’s, or Miranda’s, consent.

She ran back to Bramham Gardens. She knew that Alice was out painting the portrait of some little boy who lived in South Kensington. Laura slept in Jenny’s room, because
Jenny was in Cambridge for the university term. She was not in her room, however, and Finola found her in Alice’s studio, sitting in the rocking chair, chewing a biscuit and frowning over a book. She did not seem to be concentrating very well.

‘Hello, Laura,’ said Finola.

‘Hello,’ said Laura, surprised. Finola waited for a moment, rhythmically kicking the door. ‘Yes?’ said Laura.

‘Is your real name Miranda Pagett?’

‘So I’m wanted by the police already,’ said Miranda with her twisted smile.

‘Yes, there’s a missing-person notice out for you. But none of us will ever, ever tell. Ooh,’ said Finola, ‘I really feel as though I was hiding in Boscobel Oak with Charles II!’

‘Well, you’re not,’ said Miranda. ‘Fugitives really aren’t very romantic people. They’re too frightened.’

‘Oh,’ said Finola.

‘Please go away, Finola.’

‘Oh no, please, I’m dying to hear about how you escaped.’

‘It was ridiculously and boringly easy, in the event, so it wouldn’t interest you. Go back and fantasise about Boscobel Oak if you want some fun,’ sneered Miranda. She walked over to the window. Finola looked round cautiously to see her face.

‘I’m sorry if I overheard something I shouldn’t have,’ said Alice, ‘but I could hear you clearly coming up the stairs.’

‘It wasn’t a private conversation,’ said Miranda. ‘Finola’s found out that I’m a runaway.’

Alice nodded comfortingly. ‘But you must know you’re safe as houses with us?’

‘There’s a police notice out for her,’ said Finola cheerily.

‘Finola, this is not some sort of adventure story! Get out and leave me alone with Alice.’

Finola slammed the door behind her.

‘You mustn’t take it to heart,’ said Alice. ‘She’s not really all that frivolous. She must just be assured that it’s of enormous importance that nobody knows about you. You do want to stay with us, don’t you?’

‘I’ll never go back! I’ll kill myself if I’m ever
discovered … but I’ll have to stay here for eight years, indoors all the time, if my parents are never to find me. You can’t endure me that long,’ she muttered, pleading.

‘Yes I can. Do you want to talk about what made you so miserable?’

Miranda turned round, so that Alice saw only the silhouette of her head against the sky. ‘I could never put it into words. Unless you know what it’s really like to be born rich and upper class, you’d think I was lying about how terrible it is. Look at Kate — “Underfed children in Bermondsey due to lack of socialism! People dying of damp and cold in the slums, trying to live on the dole!” she says. Well, it’s all true and all tragic. She wouldn’t listen if I told her that the upper class actually pays to keep its children locked in institutions which are always cold and damp, underfed, underclothed, bullied and bored. Why, the children in the slums are getting the best of an English education!’ She threw her hands in the air, stood still for a moment, and then crumpled up. She sat on the floor. ‘You can’t believe me,’ she said. ‘I’m just a spoilt brat, aren’t I?’

‘I believe you. I know. I spent eighteen months with an uncle in Dorset, after my mother died. The worst punishment they threatened me with, in their opinion as well as mine, was being sent to boarding school.’

Miranda nodded. ‘I don’t want to start crying, Alice, so I won’t talk about it. Not until my childhood feels really far away. But I want to know whether everyone here will understand.’

‘They’ll be full of admiration for you. All of them except me are rebelling against their backgrounds in some way. Not Liza and Jenny of course, they were born here. Not Kate either, perhaps. But don’t you worry about Kate,’ said Alice quickly. ‘Richard has taught her that you don’t have to be poor to suffer, especially if you’re young. It took Richard to do it, though, I’ll admit.’ Alice sighed. ‘Sometimes I think it’s considered a crime and a madness to be a child.’

‘Not according to British justice, Alice,’ said Miranda sweetly. ‘You don’t have to have a trial before you’re put in a boarding school or an orphanage. In pointing out the invalidity of Habeas Corpus in this case, I’m acting,
dramatising, lying, and trying to get attention, you know. Ask anyone who knows about children.’ She burst out laughing.

‘I wish you weren’t so sophisticated, Miranda,’ said Alice. ‘You’ve no need to be any more.’