After Clare Read online

  It was she who spoke first, the jacket no doubt reminding her. ‘You’ll have to wear proper togs for the wedding.’

  He laughed shortly. ‘Apart from my demob suit, what do you suggest? The one bought when I left school? Since when my measurements have altered considerably.’ Which was true enough. Although he was not tall, his shoulders were broad, and in the last few years he had become muscular and athletic.

  She began to apply more lipstick to her already vivid mouth, as poppy-red as her name, startling against her white skin and black hair. She was dressed for the evening in a narrow, waistless number in sea-green and silver, her skirt short enough to show several inches of leg above the ankle, silver shoes with a double strap and a three-inch Louis heel, shiny nude stockings and a silver slave bangle set with glassy green stones high on her bare, rounded upper arm, others circling the opposite wrist. It was a get-up altogether too studied and sharp, too contrived, Val considered, remembering the warm, spontaneous little sister she had been not so long ago.

  ‘Well?’ She turned and he let his hand fall from her shoulder. He threw himself down on the sofa and put his feet on the canary-yellow lacquered coffee table.

  ‘Weddings are not my forte. Especially big ones, like this.’

  ‘Not so very big. It’s only a country wedding, after all.’

  ‘Big enough.’

  ‘Archie Elphinstone’s going to be best man. He’ll give us a lift down there, and as for a morning suit . . .’ Calculation sharpened her features as she thought about ways one might be obtained for him at this last minute. She had not told him that she had already sent an acceptance for both of them.

  He chose not to answer, but lifted his eyebrows and squinted at the invitation again: Diana Margaret (Dee) Markham, daughter of Mr & Mrs Gerald Markham . . . to Hamish Erskine, son of Sir Trumpington and Lady Erskine of Kinmoray, Scotland . . . St Phillip’s church, Netherley, Hertfordshire . . . June seventeenth . . .

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought Gerald could afford such a do. The Markhams must be as hard up as all the rest of us nowadays.’

  ‘Maybe, but he can’t let it be seen that he isn’t up to providing the necessary for his daughter’s wedding to old Trump’s son either, darling. Besides, Hugh will be doing most of the paying, I dare say. He’s very fond of his granddaughters.’ She laughed in the tinkling way she had adopted lately, then said, with stubborn intent, ‘I really want to go, Val.’

  Green was not a colour she should wear; her eyes, grey like his but paler and cool, had taken on a greenish cast from the dress. They narrowed like a cat’s as she watched him.

  ‘One of life’s hard-earned lessons, my dear, is that we don’t always get what we want.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I generally manage it, don’t I?’

  It wasn’t always as true as she might like to think but, courageous and daring, she’d always had a knack of manoeuvring things her way. Yet how happy was she when she’d achieved her aim? Like all her friends, Poppy projected a relentless brightness and glitter – but happiness?

  He lit a cigarette and leaned his head back on the sofa, more comfortable than the lumpy one in his own seedy bedsit, to which he must presently repair. They each had their own place; there was no room for two in this tiny, one-bedroom flat, and their lifestyles were too dissimilar, anyway, for either of them to want to share. For the moment, however, Val was happy enough to loll back on her sofa, feet up, head back against the cushions.

  Through half-closed eyes he noticed that where the palest of grey walls met the ceiling of the same shade, Poppy, who was clever and artistic, had recently stencilled a geometric border in mauve and purple, with the same motif repeated around the grey-tiled fireplace, the colours echoed in the curtains. The paintwork was smart navy blue and there were touches of canary yellow here and there. She and a woman called Xanthe Tripp ran a little interior decorating shop in Knightsbridge, to Val pretentiously and incomprehensibly named XP et Cie (X for Xanthe, P for Poppy and Cie for Company) – ‘so French, so chic!’, said Mrs Tripp.

  They were not, however, making much money. Their clients were mostly friends, or friends of friends, and paying bills was not high on the list of their priorities, especially when they came as high as Mrs Tripp’s bills did. She was a divorcée in her forties with a racy lifestyle, and was consumed by the necessity to get enough money for its upkeep. Valentine had met Xanthe Tripp only once or twice and had no desire whatsoever to meet her again, and although Poppy seemed happy enough with the set-up for the time being, he gave it another six months at the most and was not unduly perturbed at the prospect of its demise. Poppy might be upset at the failure of yet another venture, but not unduly, he hoped. Where once it had all been ‘Xanthe this, Xanthe that’, now when her name was mentioned it was sometimes followed by a slight pause or a frown.

  Although at the moment he devoutly wished her way of life different, Val did not like the idea of Poppy being unhappy. They were alone in the world, poor as church mice, and he felt responsible for her. As for himself, he didn’t see how anyone who had spent two years in that hellish show over the Channel could have a right to expect true happiness ever again. A company officer leading his men over the top, a young sprig straight out of school, by the skin of his teeth he had missed being killed, or even injured, not once but several times. He had gained a reputation for bravery, when he knew it was sheer luck – and plain fear of being seen to be in a funk. Luck had followed him most of his life – apart from the disaster that was their parents. Lucky Val Drummond: scraping through his exams, batting the winning innings at the inter public school cricket match in his last year; lucky to be the brother of Poppy Drummond, many of his acquaintances would no doubt say.

  Lately, however, that luck seemed to have deserted him. He was recently down from Oxford, where he had gone straight from the trenches because he couldn’t think what else to do in the sombre hiatus, the anticlimax after the last dark, adrenalin-fuelled years, when all the world had teetered on the edge of catastrophe. He had easily obtained one of the many places available – all those young hopefuls gone west – and in the same haphazard way had chosen to read English. He hadn’t yet lost the wild air of the undergraduate, and was apt to wear a college scarf wound around his neck, even when it was not strictly necessary.

  This train of thought brought him back to the wedding. Oh, God! Bad enough being seen as the poor relations, but there was another, even more cogent reason he did not feel inclined to go. Reading English had given Valentine literary aspirations, but no one, it seemed, wanted to publish, much less read, the kind of novel he had recently surprised even himself by producing: angry, declamatory, accusing. They said everyone had had enough of that kind of angst; amusement was what the world wanted now, this fast and light-hearted world determined to forget the recent past and its horrors in the hectic whirl of nightclubs, fast dancing, jazz music, cocktail drinking – and perhaps more – as Poppy and her friends did.

  If he went to the wedding he would have the embarrassment of facing Gerald Markham, who in his professional capacity had just turned down his novel. Gerald, conscientious and well-intentioned Gerald, whose own war had been spent at the War Office, was once more running the Markham Press, while old Hugh, who had emerged out of retirement to fill the breach for the duration of his absence, had gracefully stepped back into it once more.

  Poppy picked up her black figured-velvet wrap with its white swansdown collar. ‘You can stay here for a bit if you wish, Val, but I don’t want you camping out on my sofa all night. For one thing, my landlord wouldn’t like it.’

  He swung his legs to the floor. ‘No fear, I’m off now. Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She avoided his eyes. ‘Maybe the Blue Bird. With Xanthe and a few others.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Poppy.’

  He’d heard of the Blue Bird of Happiness and what went on there. He caught hold of her wrist to emphasize his point. Her bracelets jangled. ‘Let go, you�
�re hurting me,’ she said pettishly. ‘I know what I’m doing, I am not a child.’

  No use telling her not to act like one, then. There was no coping with Poppy lately. He dropped her wrist and picked up his scarf. Before he could say anything else, she added, ‘By the way, Dee tells me Lady Fitzallan is coming home for the wedding.’

  ‘What, the Female Fitz? After all these years?’

  ‘The rich Female Fitz.’ Shortly before he died, their father, Jack Drummond, had extracted a promise from his older friend, Sir Patrick Fitzallan, to keep an eye on his boy, should anything untoward happen. A reluctant promise, Val was sure, for he and Sir Patrick had never met, although he had sometimes received gifts at birthdays and the like which he suspected had not come from him – or not without prompting.

  Now, remembering this generosity, he felt ashamed of using the absurd nickname he and Poppy had once thought so amusing – why, he could not now recall.

  ‘Paddy Fitzallan did promise to look out for you, remember, even though he seemed to find it convenient to forget more often than not,’ Poppy reminded him, ‘so you see why I think we might even have to consider hiring a suit for you, dear brother, so that you can be at the wedding. Just a jog to the memory.’

  ‘You are the giddy limit sometimes, Sis.’

  ‘Well, since he died without seeing fit to leave you anything – or scarcely anything . . .’

  ‘Maybe he hadn’t anything more to leave?’

  ‘But she has, hasn’t she?’

  His expression as he stared at her turned to pity. It hurt Poppy more than it hurt him to be poor. What, in the ultimate, did it matter, as long as you ate and had somewhere to sleep? But sometimes he thought Poppy would do anything to be free of the worry about money. He said softly, ‘Don’t be like this, Pops. It’s twisting the way you are, as if you didn’t care any more, though I know you do.’ He paused. ‘You’ll have to get over him some time, you know, but this isn’t the way.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Poppy.

  Rosie stood in the middle of Dee’s bedroom for her last fitting, feeling a fool in pale primrose crêpe-de-Chine. Yellow – it was yellow, whatever Dee liked to call it – was positively the last colour she would have chosen for herself, though she felt there was probably nothing else that would suit her either, not with this gingerish hair and pale skin. She was certain it would make her look washed-out, or jaundiced, and cruelly emphasize the band of freckles across her nose.

  ‘Do pull your shoulders back, for goodness’ sake, Rosie,’ her sister said impatiently. ‘It doesn’t make you look one inch shorter to hunch up like that.’

  Rosie tried to do as she was bid. It was Dee’s wedding, after all, and she knew that it was useless to try and make herself look inconspicuous, since that was something she would never achieve, however hard she tried. Having been told decisively that no, she could not wear flat shoes, she was going to tower even more over them all, especially over Dee, who took after their mother, and not after their father’s side of the family, the tall Markhams. But yellow! It was all right for the other five bridesmaids, most of whom came in varying shades of brunette, and it was, of course, all part of the colour scheme, everything designed to complement the bride’s flaxen hair and Dresden-china complexion. Not that Dee would be wearing primrose – ivory slipper satin for her, orange blossom circling her brow and holding down Great-grandmother’s cherished Valenciennes lace veil, a single string of pearls round her neck, her bouquet a sheaf of pale roses and lilies, dripping with maidenhair fern and, tucked in for luck, a sprig or two of Scottish white heather. The white heather would also feature in the flower arrangements around the church, as a gesture to all the Erskines who would have made the long journey down from Scotland. There was going to be a lot of tartan, too, at this wedding. Rosie suppressed a giggle at the thought of Hamish with bare knees and a kilt.

  For the bridesmaids, there were to be posies of cream moss rosebuds, a fillet of gold leaves across their brows, buckled black satin shoes and the black and gold enamelled pendants the bridegroom was going to give all of them, and of course the wretched primrose dresses.

  ‘Ouch!’ Rosie winced as a pin stuck into the fleshy part of her hip.

  ‘Sorry, Miss Rosie, but you’ll have to stand still while I mark where this seam needs a little – er – release. Just a teeny-weeny little bit, that’s all it needs.’

  That meant she hadn’t lost the five pounds she’d been determined to shed before the wedding, even though Miss Partington from the village, who was making all six of the bridesmaids’ dresses, was notorious for erring on the generous side with regard to measurements. Her usual customers were robust country ladies, not the fashionably thin clients of the London couturier who had made Dee’s dress, an extravagance dear old Dad hadn’t batted an eyelid over. Gerald had even offered to pay for Dimitri to make Mother’s outfit for the occasion as well, but she had raised her eyebrows and said no thank you, she would go to the same little woman in London who always made her clothes, an impoverished Frenchwoman who sewed beautifully, entirely by hand. Well, who could blame Stella for not wanting to change? Her clothes were never anything but a perfect, immaculate fit.

  ‘There, that should do,’ Miss Partington said, rising triumphantly and flush-faced to her feet and standing back to allow Rosie to admire the effect in the long pier glass.

  Maybe she hadn’t done such a bad job, after all. Apart from the colour, Rosie was surprised at how well the dress looked. Perhaps she was a few pounds thinner. She still wished she had won the battle over the shoes.

  Miss Partington, who wore a handkerchief scented with Phul-Nana tucked into the vee of her brown moiré silk dress, a little pincushion strapped to her wrist with elastic and a tape measure around her neck, watched her walk across the room and then darted in to mark another ‘teeny-weeny release’, plus an adjustment to the handkerchief points of the skirt. Rosie sighed, but she knew that the dress-maker had put her heart and soul into this most important commission of her life, working her fingers to the bone for weeks so that there would be no room for supercilious comments from any of the London guests. ‘Thank you, Miss Partington, that looks really lovely,’ she said, and Miss Partington blushed a dusky red, captivated, as everyone always was, by Rosie’s smile.

  Dee sat at the dressing table applying nail varnish while all this was going on, making the most of it while she could. Whatever she wanted, she wouldn’t be allowed to walk down the aisle with painted nails – or lips. Mother, so chic, never behind the fashion herself, was adamant about that. ‘No,’ she had said, and because Stella so rarely bothered herself to forbid anything, Dee knew there was no room for argument. Mothers had to be especially vigilant nowadays – no one wanted to be left with spinster daughters on their hands, which was more than a possibility when so many young men, eligible or otherwise, had been lost forever – and Stella was not about to allow anything to mar this brilliant marriage one daughter at least was about to make.

  Dee herself was euphoric at having caught the eye of the heir to a Scottish whisky fortune, especially one who was not mean, as Scotsmen were reported to be. Freezing to death in a dreary old castle or tramping about in the damp heather, eating nothing but porridge and making babies to continue the Erskine dynasty didn’t appeal much to her. But that wouldn’t happen until old Trump retired (an event not likely in the foreseeable future) and Hamish became head of the Erskine whisky-distilling firm, rather than just managing its London affairs as he did now. Meanwhile, Hamish was prepared to give her anything she asked for, and more. She already had a twenty-one diamond bracelet, a fabulous fur and the divine little house just off Sloane Square, furnished in the very latest style on the advice of Poppy Drummond and Xanthe Tripp, and just waiting for them to move into.

  Oh yes, Poppy.

  Dee picked up the guest list and saw that she had accepted, after all. So she hadn’t taken the huff at not being asked to be a bridesmaid, though she was supposed to be one of
her best chums and an old school friend. Dee felt a tiny twinge of remorse about that, but with Poppy’s looks . . . well, she would have been a fool to risk having her thunder stolen on her big day, wouldn’t she?

  Three

  He was a virtual stranger to Emily – Dirk, this cousin who was more than twenty years her junior. Unknown to her apart from that short, very surprising visit he had made to her in Madeira, the year before the war, and by the few brief letters which had since passed between them.

  It was the spectacles, though, that made him virtually unrecognizable. Heavily horn-rimmed, with thick lenses, they drew attention to themselves and disturbed her almost as much as the exaggeratedly careful way he walked. She followed his tall figure into the library where he said tea was waiting, and once there, he slumped clumsily into a chair. He couldn’t be drunk, surely? At five o’clock in the afternoon? She thought not; his speech was in no way slurred when he introduced his stepsister Marta – a name evidently more acceptable to English tongues than Maartje, the one she had been given at birth – and he was taking his teacup from her easily, heaping jam onto a scone without any trouble.

  Emily’s aunt, Florence Vavasour, had not married until late in life, after accepting a proposal from a prosperous Dutchman called Kees Heeren, a widower with a young daughter. She had gone off with him to Holland, expecting to live happily ever after, but her hopes had been brought shockingly to a halt by his sudden and unexpected death after barely two years. The shock was not lessened by finding he had not been the well-to-do man he had led her to believe. She was left alone in Utrecht, with very little money, to bring up both his daughter, Maartje, and her own child, Dirk, who was still little more than a baby, whereupon her brother, Anthony, had invited Florence and the children to move back into Leysmorton, her childhood home. It would alleviate his own lonely existence – his wife dead, Emily already married and beginning to live that new, peripatetic life in various distant parts of the world. While as for Clare . . . it was best not to speak of Clare.