After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Two

Looking at the map, one might imagine that the Esslemonts’ place is at one end of a good straight road, the other end leading right to us at Gilverton, and Hugh can never resist this notion. So while there is an excellent train from Perth to Kingussie taking the lucky passengers within five miles, there never has been and never will be the remotest chance of my finding myself on it. As I expected, I found Hugh poring over his Bartholomew’s half-inch at tea-time on the day the invitation came. He started slightly as I happened upon him, but thrust out his chin and prepared to convince me. Poor thing, I can see how irritating it must be; the road on the map marches across the countryside like a prize-winning furrow, cleaving forests and moors with an almost Viking-like forthrightness, but there are a good many features in each actual mile which cannot be packed into those neat little half-inches. The real mystery is why Hugh should imagine, having found out the first time how great the discrepancies were, that it might be the road which would change before next time, bringing itself in line with the map. Suffice to say that once again we arrived dishevelled and wretched after slightly more than twice the length of time he had calculated, and several hours after the other guests had stepped down from the train and been whisked five little miles in the greatest of comfort in Silas’s Bentley.

Croys is a great stone barracks of a place, thrillingly ancient in parts, built as two wings flanking a huge, square tower; a staircase with rooms, Daisy calls it. It is unusual for the Highlands in sitting balefully at the end of an avenue so that one approaches it much as one used to approach a displeased parent who had arranged himself at the furthest corner from the door, the smaller to shrink one during one’s penitent advance. Most of my favourite houses take the other tack, hiding around corners like plump and kindly aunts so that one comes upon them suddenly, close enough to see the lamplight and flowers on the tables inside. Still, I am fond of Croys, despite the glaring improvements that Silas’s business triumphs have furnished: the thick carpets laid right up to the walls, making the fine old rugs on top of them look scrawny; the bathrooms which have colonized almost all of the old dressing rooms in the guests’ wing, so that one is pitched willy-nilly into intimacy not only with one’s husband but with the full range of his ablutions too.

I sat forward eagerly as we swept through the gates, preparing to be diverted in spite of my exhaustion. Most places in this part of the world are at their best in the spring, before the midges awake and begin their savagery, but at Croys the soft uncurling leaf and the peeping primrose are drowned out by a display of vulgarity unequalled in Christendom. Daisy’s gardener, you see, the redoubtable McSween, has made it his life’s work to perpetrate upon the bank opposite the front of the house, in splendid view of all of the best rooms, a three-ring circus of rhododendrons and azaleas in every shade, but with a particular nod towards coral and magenta. They jostle like can-can dancers in the breeze off the moor and can make people laugh out loud.

‘Your rhodies are a picture,’ I murmured to Daisy as she came to the door to meet us. Most hospitably, I thought, since the dressing bell must have gone. Daisy rolled her eyes at me.

‘I shall tell McSween to give you some cuttings, darling,’ she said. ‘If you’re not good.’

Grant, my maid, had come sensibly on the train with Hugh’s valet and most of the luggage (the dickey of the two-seater being full of fishing rods) and so, refreshed first by a pleasant journey and further no doubt by a leisurely tea, she had my evening clothes ready and was on her marks. De-hatted, hastily washed and wrapped in a dressing gown, I sat in front of the glass and surrendered myself to her. She frowned lightly (my hair is a great disappointment) and got to work.

I find it best to try to detach myself while Grant is busy about my scalp with hot tongs and rose-flower water. Any shrinking away or wincing unfailingly brings the irons near enough to scald. Accidental, I am almost sure, but still to be avoided if one can manage it. So I sat there quite docile until she was done and then plied the brushes and puffs myself as usual, guided by her small shakes of the head and sighs, until having hovered with the rouge brush for longer than I could afford I delivered myself into her hands again.

‘Only not too much,’ I said, as I always do. Grant comes from a theatrical family and having spent the first fifteen years of her life turning her parents and elder siblings into monarchs, gypsies and the like with a smear of greasepaint and a blob of white in the inner corners, her face-painting still tends towards the dramatic. I, unfortunately for her and me both, do not have a face which easily absorbs her efforts. At rest, I must say, I have cheekbones to reckon with and a little rouge dabbed on in the fashionable place works wonders, but when I smile my cheeks make egg shapes, the pointed ends reaching almost to my hated dimples, and then the rouge is quite wrong, its position curiously unrelated to the face underneath. However if I put it, unfashionably, where my cheeks will be when I start to smile, then until I do smile, I look like a doll. Don’t smile then, is Grant’s solution, which is hardly helpful. She explained once what is wrong with my face in this respect and even fixed it for me with strips of highlight and shade which looked wonderful, but only at twenty paces.

Still, the moss green dress is something we agree on. Most flattering in shape, although it takes stitching on to my petticoat straps, and with a miraculous effect on my complexion, which can be shadowy around the eyes if I am not careful. And tomato red lipstick to finish. Grant had to get quite fierce with me over this shade of lipstick, but she was right. Blue-ish red makes one’s teeth look yellow, she explained, whereas a yellow-ish red turns them white. For the same reason, diamonds near the face are best surrounded by pearls, very few ladies of diamond-wearing age having the teeth to stand up to them otherwise. Grant and I think it a pity that more ladies do not grin at themselves in the glass before they go downstairs with pink lips and diamond clips, but I had never once smiled at my own reflection until the first time she told me to and I do not suppose it occurs to many others.

‘Uncommonly pretty frock, that,’ said Hugh, entering. Grant bowed her head in discreet acknowledgement of the praise. Hugh would never dream that I had done any more than put on a frock in the time he had spent bathing and shaving, and I mused, not for the first time, that if men believed a frock could do what had happened to me from the neck up in the last half-hour, their world must seem a magical place indeed.

People were standing around in the gloom of the great hall waiting for their cocktails as we came down the last sweep of the stairs. Twelve or fifteen people as well as the Esslemonts: the four Duffys whom I knew, and a lot more I did not, the men splendidly anonymous in their dinner jackets but with wives who were undoubtedly the wives of bankers. Hugh blinked around for a bit then took himself off to speak to Silas and I approached Mrs Duffy like an old friend.

She was a fair woman, slight except for an almost too splendid bosom, the type of woman one assumes must have been rather fine in her youth, but now getting raddled and colourless for want of flesh. Tonight she was dressed unbecomingly in grey silk, cut very low, drawing attention to the plain gold locket around her neck.

‘Simply wonderful, Lena,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Such a long time.’

‘What a delightful surprise,’ she cooed back.

For want of anything as definite as a topic to converse upon, I admired the girls to her and, as I had hoped, she launched into an exposition on the coming wedding of her younger daughter.

The Duffy girls, both of them, had rather more to recommend them in the way of looks than their mama, although they were each quite unlike the other: Clemence, the elder, tall, languid and fair, with a sharp chin and high, wide cheeks (which seemed, I could not help but notice, perfectly rouged no matter what her expression); her face overall, then, reminiscent in shape of an heraldic shield, making her almost Slavic-looking what with this and with that peculiar habit of giving an upward pinch to her full lower eyelids. Even in the dimness of Daisy’s candelabra, she looked as though she were squinting against light coming from below, as one does wading at noon in the bright sea.

Then Cara, the younger, smaller by half a head; she had always made me think of a woodland creature, a changeling. Not a goblin exactly – she was a pretty thing, after all – but certainly nothing so pink-and-white as ‘fairy’ or ‘pixie’ suggests; a velvety little elf perhaps, for although her hair too was fair her general complexion was dark and her brown eyes had a soft twinkle which echoed the upward curl of her lips. Hers was an expression which brought an answering grin from anyone who saw it, having about it none of that insolence which in life or in oils can sometimes make a permanent smile look so very smug and annoying. There was, I thought, something almost simian about this smile. The upper lip had a downy softness to it, as did indeed the whole of her face so that her dark brows seemed merely an intensification, rather than looking like the two worms painted on to the fashionable nakedness of her sister’s skin or, I feared, my own. Was she pretty? I think so, but it is hard to know where looks stopped and personality began. Cara Duffy, you see, was what disapproving matrons used to call a hoyden, which is to say she was always in the highest of spirits, burbling over with jokes and giggles and seeming, even when just sitting quietly, to be surging with fun like a child’s balloon tugging harmlessly at its string. So perhaps this is where one’s pleasure in her sprang from, since on paper, I must admit, a furry little creature with velvety eyes does not sound half so alluring as an alabaster vision such as Clemence. Even tonight, though, when Cara seemed unnaturally subdued, standing beside her father and not speaking, one knew where one would rather rest one’s eyes. And she was subdued, poor thing; marriage and womanhood looming, I supposed, and hoydenish girlhood almost gone. Such a pity it has to come to that.

I brought my attention back to Lena Duffy’s voice.

‘… should have opened Dunelgar if home was too far, but her father was fully determined on St George’s or St Giles’, and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. Anyway, now, under the circumstances -' She broke off and stared at me, fingering her necklace chain and apparently waiting for some response. ‘Under the circumstances, none of us has the heart for a lot of fuss and commotion, so she will be married at home as she should be. Not much of a silver lining though, is it?’

Lena Duffy’s purr had coarsened. To be honest it always had something else in it besides the comfortable chuckle that was its main ingredient, something more rasping, as though a single crow had got into a chorus of pigeons. Now though there was a note of real spitefulness. I have already touched on the subject of my feminine intuition. At this moment it stretched just far enough to tell me I was supposed to understand something here, but it went no further.

‘I don’t think I’ve met the young man,’ I said, making what I hoped was a harmlessly general remark, ‘although Hugh tells me he was once in a coxless eight with a brother.’

‘Elder brother,’ said Mrs Duffy. ‘But he died at Arras.’ One thinks one is tired of the euphemisms and casual endearments, but this bald statement in place of the ‘lost at Arras, poor sweet’ was shocking. It was only too clear, even to me, that it was meant to convey not even the mildest of honours to a hero, nor a warning that there was a dead brother to be tiptoed around should I find myself in conversation with the young man later. It was quite simply a point of information: Mrs Duffy had done nothing so lax as let her daughter become engaged to a second son without any prospects. The brother was dead and thus the engagement was a triumph. I turned away slightly to hide the expression I could not bring under control and wished that someone might come up and save me replying.

‘So a younger son for your younger daughter,’ I said at last, no saviour having appeared. This was inane even for me, but I was surprised to see from the corner of my eye a sour kind of twist wrench at the woman’s mouth. My mind raced. Did it sound as though I was putting a gypsy curse on her other daughter? This was surely too fanciful. Should I not have made such outright reference to his changed status? Why on earth did I not learn simply to keep my mouth shut? Or if it was too late now for such a wholesale transformation, at least drink a little more and talk a little less.

Daisy’s butler was circling with two trays balanced on his fingers like a waiter in a Paris restaurant. Sherry glasses on one and cocktail glasses on the other, he swooped amongst the guests proffering a tray to each and seeming always to guess which one was wanted where. I muttered an excuse to Lena and bore down on him, not caring how unseemly I appeared so long as I escaped her. The butler, who knew me of old, held out the cocktail tray, but from sheer perversity and temper I reached for sherry. His face fell, and we parted, he a disappointed man who feels he is losing his touch, and I a disappointed woman who fears she is becoming curmudgeonly with age and has only a quarter pint (it seemed) of nasty, oily sherry for comfort.

I scanned the room for an empty perch, but apart from Lena sitting alone on a sofa large enough for two and staring at me coldly, all I could see in every direction were settled clumps of people chatting amicably and sipping huge drinks. Daisy’s drinks before dinner always go on for an age.

Just then Daisy herself peeled off from the group around a stout dowager ploughing through a long story and ignoring the fidgets of her listeners the way old ladies do.

‘What on earth were you saying to the hag?’ Daisy whispered. I was unable to answer; I did not know. ‘Talk about sucking on a lemon,’ she went on. ‘And have you seen what she’s wearing? How could you not? She’s twirling it like an old man with a new watch chain. A gold locket! I’ll bet she had to borrow it from her parlour maid. How I have managed not to kick all of their bottoms, I cannot tell you. Even one of the Mrs Bankers is wondering aloud.’ I said nothing (for the usual reason) and Daisy rejoined the circle of listeners just in time to join in with gales of relieved laughter as the dowager’s saga wound to its close.

I drifted, trying to look self-contained, if not quite inscrutable.

‘You look heavenly, Dan,’ breathed Clemence Duffy as I passed her, her face more mask-like than ever and her eyes blinking sleepily as she glanced down at herself waiting, I supposed, for the return of the compliment. Despite the fact that there is nothing so very dignified about the name Dandy I dislike being called Dan by girls fifteen years my junior, and I bristled just slightly, before looking her up and down for something to praise. She was dressed in a black shift, chiffon over a plain slip, and wore a small cameo on a black velvet ribbon around her neck, which looked as all cameos always do as though it might have come from Woolworth’s. Just then I noticed that her ear-lobes were bare of any decoration. They were pierced for earrings and the little naked clefts looked hardly decent against her painted face. She arched her brows at me, staring hard at my choker.

‘But you look heavenly,’ she said again. ‘Beautiful emeralds. Very loyal, I must say.’ She turned away, and I caught sight of Mrs Duffy fingering her locket chain again. At last light began to dawn on me and I took a few steps and craned to look at Cara Duffy. Dressed in a shimmer of pale blue silk, she wore a gold cross on a fine chain around her neck, slim hoops in her ears and nothing on her wrists at all, only her engagement ring to show that she was not just wearing rather an odd frock to a tennis party. All three of them on parade, ostentatiously bare of jewels, screaming that they dare not wear anything but trinkets here. How dared they! They certainly did need a kick on their insolent bottoms, and I was ready to oblige. I caught Daisy’s eye and saw that she had been watching my realization. She mimed my stupidity briefly, eyes crossed and tongue lolling out, thankfully unseen.

Mrs Duffy still sat alone on her sofa. Very well, then. I should employ the tactics for which Daisy had sought me – the Cuthbert Dougall strategy, one might call it – of discussing loud and plain what everyone else is thinking about but dare not mention. I marched back over to Lena and sat beside her.

‘My dear,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just heard your dreadful news. About the diamonds, I mean. What a thing to happen.’ She intensified the stare and spoke again in that horrid murmuring way of hers.

‘It has been a great blow to us,’ she said. ‘Almost like a death. A dreadful loss for Clemence.’ This was a strange thing to say. Why so much more to the elder girl? Except perhaps that Cara had her fiance to distract her. Unless the diamonds were intended for Clemence in the long term, as the elder child. But would not ‘The Duffy Diamonds’ have to stay in the Duffy family, entailed on some male somewhere? Even I couldn’t ask any of this.

‘And have the police got anywhere yet?’ was what I settled for.

‘The police?’ she said, with a slight shriek. Clemence raised her head on the other side of the room and gave me a very fair copy of her mother’s basilisk stare, a look which belied her friendly words of minutes before. What was wrong with these people?

‘Of course, it must be horrid for you to have them tramping around,’ I said, smiling across at Clemence and keeping my voice low, ‘but think how wonderful, if they got to the bottom of it all.’

‘The police,’ said Lena Duffy again, quieter but no less witheringly, ‘have not been called in. And I very much hope that they never will be.’ I could quite concur with this, for with the police tends to come the press and no one welcomes the indignity of having their misfortune devoured by the jealous and therefore triumphant masses. But I knew enough to know that unless the police were called to investigate there was no way the insurance company would pay up and so… My thoughts snagged as an idea spread through me. Could someone be so desperate to avoid publicity that she thought it worthwhile to coerce Silas and Daisy into making good her loss, instead of just going to the police and claiming the insurance? Could anyone be so selfish? The Duffy jewels were fabulously, spectacularly precious, worth more than the rest of Mr Duffy’s estate put together we always believed, and there was no way on earth that Silas and Daisy, rich though they were, could afford to replace them. I could think of nothing to say, but some of my incredulity must have shown in my face and she spoke again.

‘Naturally we assumed that Silas meant to do the right thing. That is why we came today. It is galling indeed, then, when I hoped that my husband and he might talk things over in peace and quiet, to find ourselves being expected to help entertain these persons. We of all people who put our faith in him, to be asked to aid Daisy in providing a pleasant visit for these financiers, to support Silas in his pursuit of even further success for the very institution which will not honour its commitments. I know the world has changed, my dear, but it is a great shock and a sadness to my husband and me to find out how much.’ It took me a minute or two to digest all of this and even when I had, I could not believe I understood her.

‘Do you mean to say that the jewels were insured with Esslemont Life?’ I asked, knowing my voice had risen to a squeak. Mrs Duffy inclined her head.

‘And I was naïve enough to believe that might make a difference,’ she said.

I do not know that I should ever have called her naïve, but I could sympathize. Even if no member of the Esslemont household had actually stolen the jewels, Silas could surely have smoothed things through. He must own Esslemont Life outright since the death of his father, although I had a vague notion that owning companies was not like owning farms and woods. I had heard Hugh huffing on about something called limited liability which he appeared to think of as a kind of swindle and I had inhaled a morsel of watercress sandwich once when Daisy had said that Silas’s sisters were his sleeping partners, and had had to be banged on the back. So my understanding of high finance was uncertain, but I was sure that if you owned the company you could do more or less whatever you liked. The only possible reason for Silas to insist on the police – if indeed he was insisting – would be if he hoped to wriggle out of paying at all, and even if he felt no personal obligation over the theft, surely he had too much honour for that. And why had Daisy not told me this? Did she know herself? I suddenly hoped not.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said at last to Mrs Duffy. ‘I can’t believe it of Silas. Even on his own terms, as a businessman I mean, surely he can see that this will destroy him. A theft in his house is bad enough, but this!’

‘The theft in this house is not the half of it, Dandy dear,’ said Lena. ‘And Silas knows that. Not that the evidence isn’t clear on that point. It is, as I could tell you in plain words if propriety did not demand otherwise. Very clear. But even setting that aside, there are other things I happen to know, which I am sure Silas wishes I didn’t.’ Her voice had sunk to a spiteful mutter, and I squirmed.

‘There’s no need to say anything more,’ I said, praying that she would not. I loathe confidences. ‘No need for plain words. What you’ve told me already would sink Silas for ever with anyone who matters.’

She turned to me, turned fully, and it was perhaps owing to old-fashioned corsetry but it nevertheless gave the impression that she was sizing me up. Then she seemed to soften.

‘Who matters to you and to me, my dear,’ she said, with a significant glance at Daisy and a shake of her head, ‘may not be anyone who matters to others.’

‘Well, then you shall just have to be businesslike and call the police in,’ I said. ‘Even though it will be beastly. And you can pack your things and leave here in the morning. Tonight even. There is no earthly reason for you to feel you should have to stay. Unspeakable cheek.’

She hesitated then, just for a moment. ‘There is an irregularity,’ she said. ‘With the paperwork. Nothing that Silas could not put right had he sufficient will to do so. But enough of an irregularity to mean that unless this can be handled as a matter of honour between friends then it cannot be handled at all.’

‘Oh, but paperwork!’ I said. ‘How could that matter?’

Mrs Duffy looked discomfited and chewed her lip for quite some time before she answered. When she did it was with the distant chilliness of one who feels her dignity will not withstand her words.

‘It is possible that a back-dated premium payment now could be misconstrued,’ she said.

I groaned to myself. So Mr Duffy had allowed the insurance to lapse. It was hard to believe when one thought of the staggering value of the diamonds, but then I suppose that was rather the point. The premium must have been vast and the Duffys were in the same boat as we all were, with two of their houses closed despite all their ships and their forests in Ontario. Still, as she said, between friends it should make no difference at all, and if Silas traded on friendship to his own benefit as he most certainly did – this house party being just one example of it – then friendship, if not common decency, should see to it that he did what was not to his own advantage too.

‘Would you like me to speak to Daisy?’ I said. ‘Perhaps if just one of her friends makes it clear how shockingly we think Silas is behaving? Perhaps they are sunk so deep in with bankers and accountants and goodness knows what grubby little moneybags, that they can’t see what this would mean.’ I was quite sincere. My view of the proceedings had shifted one hundred and eighty degrees and I was very angry. I had been taken advantage of and Daisy had barely even bothered to hide it. She had said quite openly it was my denseness and resulting artlessness that were what she needed. Lena Duffy was smiling at me and nodding. It was the calmest and least complicated expression I had ever seen on her face, and I swelled slightly with righteous pride to think that I had put it there.

‘You are very good, my dear,’ she said. ‘But, if you do, please make it plain that we are not expecting an instant payment of the whole amount. That would be far too much of a strain, even for the Esslemonts. Something now, and then a regular sum… I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.’

I wavered on hearing this. A something now, and then a regular sum, because Lena had proof and could harm Silas? That arrangement could be called a very plain word indeed.

Lena was still watching me intently and I imagine that my thoughts were clearly painted on my face, for her chumminess started to chill again and she drew herself up and away from me. Before I could summon my wits to speak though, the gong sounded, at last.

‘I’ve put you beside Cara Duffy’s intended deliberately, darling,’ said Daisy, as we shuffled about, pairing up to go in. I said nothing to her; now was not the time to launch into it. ‘And since she’s on his other side, I fear you’ll be looking at his back all evening, but it’s not because I’m a slave to sentiment, nor because you’re dear to me and so beyond protocol, it’s all in aid of your investigation. It gives you old Gregory Duffy on your other side, you see. Plenty of scope for grilling and snooping there. Bonne chance!’

My shoulders drooped. It is perfectly all right, of course, to sit an engaged couple side by side even if it is rather sickening to watch, but it is hard on the other neighbours and I feared I could make no use at all of Daisy’s gift. I knew I should not dare to grill Gregory Duffy. He is not a fearsome old gentleman, but silent, with a vague sadness about him. It could be no more than an unsatisfactory marriage, for I am sure that a man of his stamp must be unhappy with such a wife even if her faults are as vague as his virtues. However, if a lack of bliss in marriage was enough to settle such a shroud around the shoulders, the whole nation would be sunk in permanent gloom and I have always thought there must be something more to it. Perhaps the lack of an heir, but then he always seemed much fonder of his younger daughter than his elder and it would surely be the second child, the last one, whom he would loathe for her femaleness, if he harboured such unfair grudges against either. Anyway, wherever the sadness sprang from, it drew out of one a kind of respectful pity, or perhaps a wariness is a better word for it; wariness that if one were not respectful he would only seem the more pitiful and then it would be embarrassment all round.

This was my usual attitude to Gregory Duffy, then, and it was not affected by any current anger towards him regarding the diamonds. There was only pity there too, for I was sure the ‘arrangement’ Lena hoped for with Silas was her idea alone. I was sure too that she must have made her husband’s life a perfect misery over the lapsed premiums. How dreadful it was of Silas not to do the decent thing, not to feel enough respectful pity for this man.

I felt I could not possibly broach any aspect of the subject during dinner, but as Daisy had predicted, my view of Cara’s young man was restricted to the broad stretch of his coat shoulders and I foresaw a very dull time for myself unless I made some effort, so I cast about for something else to say Mr Duffy, and eventually found it.

‘My congratulations. For your daughter, I mean.’ His eyes flicked towards his wife at the other end of the table then rested on the dark back which hid Cara from view, warming as they did so, melting I should almost have said.

‘Yes,’ he said, and went on softly with a steady, falling cadence, ‘yes, indeed, sometimes, most unexpectedly, matters resolve.’ With this he turned his attention to his plate, and I put my head down too, puzzled. I knew he was very fond of Cara, his favouritism was famed, but how he could look around him and call matters resolved just at that moment was beyond me. (The store of things beyond me was bigger every time I looked.) We drank soup in silence for a while until a combination of grumpiness at being neglected and recklessness, for which I can only blame the enormous sherry glasses, loosened my tongue.

‘I was very shocked indeed, though, to hear about your diamonds.’

‘Were you?’ he said, quietly, his eyes swivelling again between Clemence, her mother and Cara’s fiance’s back. ‘Were you indeed. I can’t say I was, but my wife appears to have taken it very hard.’ His voice and face were calm and unreadable, just the constant swivelling eyes, reptilian between wrinkled eyelids.

‘Yes. She called it “a death in the family”,’ I said, suddenly remembering this.

At that, he turned his benevolent gaze upon me and watched me with one eyebrow slightly raised, almost smiling. I was in far over my head again, my feet tangled in weeds and no use thrashing. No use either fighting the sensation of foreboding creeping through me again. What was it? Perhaps just the sherry wearing off. I took a gulp of water and when I looked up he had withdrawn into himself in some way quite indefinable but as clear as though he had walked out of the room.

I amused myself as best I could during the rest of soup and through fish, by studying the bankers’ wives, storing up details with which to regale Grant later. They all wore such similar art silk dresses that it might have been a uniform, and one had to assume these dresses were the very latest fashion since they were so ugly – with the cut and colour of old bandages – that they could not possibly have been selected on any aesthetic grounds. Grant would know. Indeed, if this was to be the next fashion, she would no doubt soon be campaigning for me to buy some old bandages of my own.

Unexpectedly, the lure of young love proved to be more resistible than either Daisy or I had imagined and at the proper moment, my neighbour turned away from Cara and smiled at me.

‘Alec Osborne,’ he said. ‘We ’ve not met.’ His tone was like a cold splash of water on my face after all the undercurrents and intrigue and I felt my shoulders unbunch immediately. He was a young man of close to thirty, I supposed, striking to look at, of an unusual type for this part of the world, and my mind went back fleetingly to the brother at Arras, wondering if he had been the same. He had tawny hair, that is the only word for it, silly as it may seem, for it was not fair and not red. Blond I suppose would cover it, were not that word faintly disreputable and, for a male, ridiculous. His eyes were almost the same colour, and his skin was from that palette too. Golden without being sun-tanned exactly. I took a closer look. It was as though a great intermittent freckle covered him. Most unusual, and I wondered if it was just his face and hands, before I caught myself mid-wonder and blushed.

‘Have you been abroad or are you always so burnished?’ I asked and immediately felt my little store of social pride begin to wither at yet another ludicrous remark. Alec Osborne, however, threw back his head and laughed. An artless peal of sound, which drew startled looks from up and down the table. I was aware that Mrs Duffy’s attention did not quite return to her neighbour afterwards.

‘And you are Mrs Gilver,’ he said, instantly making me feel like his grandmother.

‘Dandy,’ I said, and understandably he did not at once perceive that I was offering my Christian name. ‘Dandelion Gilver,’ I explained and his lips twitched just once before he organized his face into an expression of interest.

‘My mother and father were great devotees of William Morris,’ I said. ‘And in the spirit of the times, they honoured me with the name of one of our most beautiful and unfairly neglected wildflowers.’

‘Very trying for you.’

‘Typical, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘They also did great work in the house – much ripping out of Adams plaster and substitution of greengrocery in bog oak. My brother is only now beginning to put matters right again.’

‘They’re no longer with us then?’ he said, and as I shook my head he went on: ‘Let’s hope then, Dandy, that heaven is less baroque in reality than it’s usually rendered in paint, or they will not find it much to their liking.’

I think it would have been at that moment, if I were the type to fall in love, that I should have fallen in love with Alec Osborne. It would have been the first and last time in my life (and of course I should not have admitted it to myself) but, despite the presence two feet away of the girl he was to marry, as he teased me so very gently and said my name, that is when it would have happened.