A Countess Below Stairs

CHAPTER SEVEN

Fortman and Bittlestone’s reputation as ‘England’s Premier Department Store’ rests on a number of specialities. On the food halls, where bowler-hatted gentlemen’s gentlemen may be seen of a morning prodding their way through a selection of exotic cheeses; on the jewellery department where maharajahs have not scorned to pick up a trinket to take back to their palaces in Rawalpindi or Lahore; on the restaurant where, in a decor resembling the bathrooms of the Topkapi Palace, ancient duchesses consume English mutton at prices so astronomical that it stills all possible criticism of the food.

But above all, on its bridal department. For over a hundred years, Fortman and Bittlestone have been making wedding dresses for the e’lite of Britain. Conveniently situated for bridesmaids’ lunches at the Ritz, there was hardly a morning when a bevy of brides and their attendants did not take possession of the opulent fitting rooms with their oyster-silk booths and draped curtains, their ankle-deep carpets and obsequious sewing girls. For here was the end of the road for those girls who, having safely weathered the storm-tossed agitations of ‘The Season’, came matrimonially to rest.

And here, at twelve noon just four weeks before the wedding, Muriel Hardwicke had arranged to meet her bridesmaids: Miss Cynthia Smythe, The Lady Lavinia Nettleford - and Ollie Byrne.

For Ollie, the proposed expedition to London was a source of desperate excitement. Not only was she to meet Muriel at last and try on The Dress, but she was also to join the two grown-up bridesmaids afterwards at the luncheon that Tom Byrne, as best man, was giving them at the Ritz. And to complete the glory of this day, Tom himself was going to drive her up to town.

Rupert, proposing to escort Muriel by train, was less enthusiastic. He had hoped to spend the day catching up on the business of the estate but, in her quiet way, Muriel had been insistent about the purchase of her sapphires, and sapphires were not to be found in Maidens Over, the local market town.

‘You know the little rhyme, dear,’ she said playfully. ‘ “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” To walk down the aisle wearing your sapphires would make me very happy.’

She was prepared to be generous over land and settlements; indeed she had taken some trouble to have Rupert financially dependent on her even before the marriage. Just in case anything should go wrong, no man of honour could possibly break an engagement to a woman to whom he was beholden in that way. But she wanted people to see that she was admired and courted and the discovery that the dowager had, over the years, quietly sold off the Westerholme jewels, in order to pay Lord George’s gambling debts, had not pleased her in the least. She was sorry, of course, that Rupert had bought a horse which was apparently very valuable, but horse riding was something she had no intention of indulging in. It was a sport which, unless begun in childhood, would inevitably set one off at a disadvantage and there was something displeasing about these prancing, perspiring animals.

One other person was travelling to London that morning. Anna had served a full month at Mersham and was having her whole day off - a day which she proposed to spend with her mother and Pinny at West Paddington.

She was walking down the village street bound for th station and the milk train to town when a loud hoot from behind made her turn round. Done up to the eyes for motoring, the Honourable Olive, in a long muffler, leant out and said: ‘Anna! I’m going to London! I’m going to try on my bridesmaid’s dress and I’m going to lunch in a restaurant and I’m going to see Muriel and—’

Tom, grinning, interrupted this spate. ‘Can I offer you a lift? Are you going to the station?’

Anna nodded. ‘Thank you, you are very kind.’

She climbed into the back, deciding on this wonderful summer morning to give Selina Strickland and protocol a rest. ‘It’s my day off,’ she said, ‘so I’m going to London to see my mother and—’ She broke off, peered at Ollie and said gravely, ‘I find you extremely elegant, Miss Byrne.’

Ollie beamed. ‘It’s my best coat. And my best gloves. And,’ she slewed round to whisper to Anna, ‘there’s real lace on my petticoat. Honestly.’

They passed the turning to the station and Tom, unconcerned, drove on.

‘Oh, please, you must put me down here!’ cried Anna.

‘Nonsense, we’ll take you up to town.’

‘Yes, you must come, Anna, because I have to tell you about the hedgehog and you promised to tell me about when Sergei was naughty and fell through the ice and the poem about the crocodile walking down that street and … Tom, can I go and sit in the back with Anna?’

Anna gave up. As for Tom, he smiled, well pleased with this development. He was the friendliest of men and would have taken Anna up to town in any case. But today Susie was working at the London Library, a place so respectable that her parents allowed her to attend it unchaperoned. If Anna should happen to be willing to take Ollie to Fortman and Bittlestone and leave her there, it would give him half an hour which he might snatch with Susie. A half hour which, in view of th bridesmaids’ lunch he would later have to endure, he felt he deserved.

----*

In the chattery of Fortman and Bittlestone, the two adult bridesmaids were eating ices and waiting for the bride.

Muriel had chosen her bridesmaids with the care and concentration which characterized everything she did. Cynthia Smythe, the only friend Muriel had made at school, had earned the honour of following Muriel down the aisle by a kind of servility and obsequiousness which made Uriah Heap look like the all-in wrestler, Hackenschmidt. She was a pale girl, long-necked and goitrous, with crimped, light hair over a low forehead and an insipid mouth. Untroubled by either intelligence or will, Cynthia had thought it ‘spiffing’ to be asked to be a bridesmaid, ‘super’ to be invited to lunch with Tom Byrne, and could generally be relied upon not to trouble Muriel with a single original remark or independent action.

The Lady Lavinia Nettleford was a different matter. The eldest of five daughters, whose mother’s attempts to marry them off had passed into folklore, she was an equine looking girl with blue eyes set close together, an expression of incorrigible hauteur and that misfortune known as the Nettleford nose. Lady Lavinia scarcely knew Muriel, with whom she’d nursed during the war, and what she did know she thoroughly disliked. Along with the other debutantes at the hospital, she’d felt nothing but chagrin and contempt for Muriel’s campaign to entice the Earl of Westerholme, severely wounded and in a state of shock, into an engagement. She herself was made of sterner stuff than Larissa Ponsonby and Zoe van Meek, who had cried their eyes out when the engagement was announced, but her annoyance was no less.

Nor did she have any illusions about why Muriel had asked her to be a bridesmaid. Muriel, whose father was, to all intents and purposes, a grocer, wanted (and Lavinia thought this perfectly natural) to be followed down the aisle by the daughter of a duke.

But though she disliked Muriel and saw through her, it had not occurred to Lavinia to refuse. For attached to every wedding is that font of hope, that potential piece of manna, the best man. She did not personally know Tom Byrne for the Nettleford seat, Fame Castle, was on a distant, wave-lashed Northumbrian shore but, though heir to a mere viscountancy, he was reputed to be both personable and rich. Lavinia, pursued by the hot breath of her four sisters Hermione, Priscilla, Gwendolyn and Beatrice, had been seventeen times a bridesmaid. This time, the charms of the new chauffeur notwithstanding, she intended to become a bride.

‘Ah, there you are!’ Muriel had left Rupert at the Flying Club and now strode confidently into the chattery. ‘You’ve introduced yourselves, I see.’ Her appraising deep blue eyes raked the bridesmaids and she nodded, well satisfied. The girls were of roughly equal height and similar colouring and would make a well-matched pair to follow her up the aisle. If Ollie was half as sweet and pretty as Rupert made out, the procession ought to be a great success. ‘Come along,’ she continued, Ve won’t wait for the little girl, she’s coming up by car.’

Followed by her bridesmaids, Muriel charged, unseeing, past the world’s most impressive cheese counter, through ‘handbags’ and ‘haberdashery’ and was wafted in the lift to the sanctity of the bridal department, where Madame Duparc, whose varicose veins were stabbing like gimlets, schooled her face into a welcoming smile and, flanked by Millie and Violet, the underpaid and undernourished sewing girls, gushed her way towards Muriel.

‘Everything is ready, Mees Hardwicke and I think you will be very, very pleased. With one fitting, we should complete. Of course mademoiselle’s measurements are so satisfying… the perfect figure…’

Soothing, flattering, joined now by the chief vendeuse. Miss Taylor, Madame Duparc led the entourage towards the three luxurious fitting booths at the far side of the room with their omate mirrors and plush-lined stools.

Into the centre booth there now vanished Muriel Hardwicke, to be followed by Madame Duparc herself. Into the right-hand booth passed the Lady Lavinia Nettleford, humbly accompanied by Millie. Into the left-hand booth, its curtains held aside by the obsequious Violet, stepped Cynthia Smythe. From a mysterious upper region there now appeared three more girls in the Fortman uniform of pale.green carrying, in swathes of tissue, the bridesmaids’ dresses and the wedding gown itself. Directed by the chief vendeuse, they vanished into the appropriate booths, from which came twittering noises of admiration as the little seamstresses pinned and flattered, measured and soothed.

Meanwhile Anna and the Honourable Olive had arrived downstairs and were wending their eager and interested way through the food hall. Tom’s plan had succeeded. In exchange for a promised taxi afterwards to take her to West Paddington, Anna had expressed herself delighted to deliver OHie at Fortman’s. Now the two girls were sniffing their way appreciatively between jars of Chinese ginger, beribboned chocolate boxes, marzipan fruit…

‘Isn’t it a lovely shop, Anna!’

‘Beautiful!’ said Anna, her eyes alight. ‘How many things can you smell, Ollie?’

The little girl wrinkled her nose. ‘Cheese and coffee and a sort of sausage-ish smell and soap …’

‘And freesias and cigars and duchesses …’

Ollie giggled. ‘Duchesses don’t smell.’

‘Oh yes, they do,’ said Anna. ‘It’s a very rich smell with fur coats in it and lap dogs and blue, blue blood.’

They were still laughing as they went up in the lift, but as they approached the opulent silence of the bridal department and passed an amazingly disdainful looking dummy swathed in white tulle, Ollie suddenly became quiet, overcome by the importance of the occasion.

‘Could you… stay till Tom comes back?’ she asked, letting her hand creep into Anna’s.

Anna nodded, glad that she had not given Pinny a definite arrival time.

‘But of course. \

Madame Duparc, momentarily relegating Muriel to two minions, now came forward to welcome them. ‘Ah, this is the little flower girl for whom we have been waiting,’ she said, smiling down at the child with her flame coloured curls and brave limp.

‘Come, ma petite, your dress is ready. The others are next door so we will go into this room and give them a surprise.’ She turned to Anna, in no way deceived by the plainness of her clothes and said: ‘You will wish to ac company your little friend, mademoiselle?’

‘Thank you.’

Ollie stepped into the booth. Anna helped her out of her coat, her dress. Very small, utterly expectant, wearing her petticoat with real lace the Honourable Olive stood and waited.

Then they came, two girls, ceremoniously carrying the ensemble that for weeks now had been the stuff of Ollie’s dreams. They carefully unwrapped the rose pink dress, the velvet cloak, the pearl-encrusted muff.

‘Oh, Anna, look! said the Honourable Olive, holding her arms up. ‘Oh, gosh…’

----*

Next door things were proceeding less smoothly. Cynthia Smythe, it was true, oozed meekness and gratitude as she turned and twisted at the fitting girl’s behest and the Lady Lavinia, in her booth, staring over the heads of the assistants with the bored hauteur of a thoroughbred being decked out for a minor agricultural show, gave relatively little trouble.

The same could not be said of Muriel Hardwicke. Muriel had the clearest possible ideas about the way her dress and train and veil should look and these ideas, though she expressed them forcibly, the staff of Fortman and Bittlestone were failing to realize.

‘No, no … that dart is in quite the wrong place. And the sleeves are much too full at the wrist.’

‘But when mademoiselle has her bouquet—’

‘I’m not carrying a bouquet,’ snapped Muriel, ‘flowers are far too unreliable. I’m carrying a gold-bound prayerbook, so please don’t use that as an excuse.’

The girls grew hot and flustered, Madame Duparc’s varicose veins throbbed and pounded across her swollen legs… But at last, though grudgingly, Muriel declared herself reasonably satisfied.

‘If the others are ready, tell them to come out, please. I want to see the effect of the whole ensemble.’

The door of the left-hand booth now opened and there emerged, like one of the puppets in Petroushka, the apologetic and slightly goose-pimpled figure of Miss Cynthia Smythe.

The door of the right-hand booth followed - and the Lady Lavinia Nettleford, lofty and indifferent in her eighteenth bridesmaid’s dress, stepped out.

After which Madame Duparc, the little sewing girls and the chief vendeuse gave the same experienced and slightly weary sigh.

For her bridesmaids Muriel had chosen identical dresses of rose pink satin with a bloused bodice, a pink velvet sash and the three-tiered skirts which the great Poiret had just introduced in Paris. A wide frill of pink accordion-pleated chiffon lined the hems, encircled the cuffs of the short sleeves and edged the square neck -and dipping low on their foreheads like inverted tea cups, the girls wore close-fitting, pink satin-petalled caps.

Pink is a lovely and becoming colour and the image of a rose is never far from the minds of those who contemplate an ensemble of this shade. Unfortunately, there are other images which may intrude. Cynthia Smythe, emerging soft-fleshed, goitrous and apathetic from her ruffles, suggested a prematurely dished-up and rather nervous ham. The Lady Lavinia had other troubles. Though the bodice was generously bloused, the Lady Lavinia was not. With her stick-like arms, jerky movements and the tendency to whiskers which has been the Nettleford scourge for generations, she relentlessly reminded the onlookers that pink is not only the colour of budding roses, but of boiling prawns.

But now the door of the centre booth was thrown open and there emerged - to the sound of imagined trumpets - the bride herself.

Muriel had chosen not white, but a rich brocade of ivory which better took up the colour of her creamy skin. Cleaving to her magnificent bosom, clinging till the last possible moment to her generously undulating hips, the dress fanned out dramatically into a six-foot train, embroidered with opalescent beads and glistening pailettes. Richly elaborate threadwork also spangled the bodice and, eschewing the simple white tulle so beloved of ordinary brides, Muriel had set her diamond tiara over a veil of glittering silver lace.

And seeing her, Madame Duparc and her staff broke into the expected applause, but half-heartedly for weddings were their business and Muriel, in her metallic splendour, looked more like some goddess descending from Valhalla than a bride.

A very small noise, like a cricket clearing its throat, caused them to turn their heads.

In the doorway leading from the other fitting room stood a tiny figure in rose pink satin - and pushed gently forward by Anna who then stood aside - the Honourable Olive, en grand tenue, began to walk across the deep pile of the dove grey carpet towards Muriel and her retinue.

And as they watched her the tired sewing women began to smile, remembering suddenly what it was all about. The sheer joy of a wedding: the sense of wonder and humility and awe… the newness of it and the hope … ail were there in this child, limping with a shining morning face towards the bride.

Holding in one reverent hand the flounces of her dress, clutching in the other the pearl-encrusted muff she had not been able to relinquish, Ollie advanced. Apart from a head-dress of fresh flowers for which Minna had begged, Ollie’s outfit was the same as the other bridesmaids’, but her radiance and delight had transfigured it. The pink ruffles nestled beguilingly against her throat; she listened with parted lips to the rustle of her skirt as if it were the sound of angel’s wings. One of the fitting girls, forgetting her place, had sent downstairs for rosebuds which by some alchemy blended, instead of clashing, with her flaming hair.

Now Ollie was close enough really to see Muriel and the blue eyes widened behind the round glasses. Ever since she had heard Muriel spoken of, Ollie had seen her as a fairy tale princess. Here in reality, she surpassed all Ollie’s dreams. Untroubled by considerations of suitability or good taste, Ollie gazed at the glittering, shimmering figure with its diamond crown. And forgetting about herself completely, she came to rest in front of Muriel, looked up adoringly, and said:

‘Oh! You do look beautiful!’

Muriel seemed not to have heard. Ever since Ollie had appeared in the doorway she had been staring in silent fascination at the child. Now she drew in her breath and as Anna, guided by some instinct, stepped forward and Tom Byrne entered to fetch the bridesmaids, she hissed, in a whisper which carried right across the room:

‘Why did no one tell me that the child was crippled!’