第13章

They passed a pleasant day in London.

Flora first took Elfine to Maison Viol, of Brass Street, in Lambeth, to have her hair cut. Short hair was just coming back into fashion, yet it was still new enough to be distinguished. M. Viol himself cut Elfine’s hair, and dressed it in a careless, simple, fiendishly expensive way that showed the tips of her ears.

Flora then took Elfine to Maison Solide. M. Solide had dressed Flora for the last two years and did not despise her as much as he despised most of the women whom he dressed. His eyes widened when he saw Elfine. He looked at her broad shoulders and slim waist and long legs. His fingers made the gestures of a pair of scissors, and he groped blindly towards a roll of snow-coloured satin which a well-trained assistant put into his arms.

‘White?’ ventured Flora.

‘But what else?’ screamed M. Solide, ripping the scissors across the satin. ‘It is to wear white that God, once in a hundred years, makes such a young girl.’

Flora sat and watched for an hour while M. Solide worried the satin like a terrier, tore it into breadths, swathed and caped and draped it. Flora was pleased to see that Elfine did not seem nervous or bored. She seemed to take naturally to the atmosphere of a world-famous dressmaker’s establishment. She bathed delightedly in white satin, like a swan in foam. She twisted her neck this way and that, and peered down the length of her body, as though down a snow slope, to watch the assistants like busy black ants pinning and rearranging the hem a thousand feet below.

Flora opened a new romance, and became absorbed in it, until Julia arrived at one o’clock to take them to lunch.

M. Solide, pale and cross after his orgy, assured Flora that the dress would be ready by tomorrow morning. Flora said that they would call for it. No, he must not send it. It was too rare. Would he post a picture by Gauguin to Australia? A thousand evils might befall it on the way.

But, secretly, she wished to protect the dress from Urk. She was sure that he would destroy it if he got a glimmer of a chance.

‘Well, do you like your dress?’ she asked Elfine, as they sat at lunch in the New River Club.

‘It’s heavenly,’ said Elfine, solemnly. She, like M. Solide, was pale with exhaustion. ‘It’s better than poetry, Flora.’

‘It is not at all like the sort of thing St Francis of Assisi wore,’ pointed out Julia, who considered Flora was doing a lot for Elfine and should be appreciated.

Elfine blushed, and bent her head over her cutlet. Flora looked at her benignly. The dress had cost fifty guineas, but Flora did not grudge the sum. She felt at this moment that any sum would have been sacrificed by her to score off the Starkadders.

This feeling was increased by the pleasure she felt in the casual yet delicate appointments of the New River Club. It was the most haughty club in London. No one with an income of more than seven hundred and forty pounds a year might join. Its members were limited to a hundred and twenty. Each member must be nominated by a family with sixteen quarterings. No member might be divorced; if he or she were, membership was forfeited. The Selection Committee was composed of seven of the wildest, proudest, most talented men and women in Europe. The club combined the austerities of a monastic order with the tender peace of a home.

Flora had engaged rooms for Elfine and herself at the club; it was necessary for them to spend the night in Town as they had to call for Elfine’s dress the next morning. Flora welcomed the opportunity to indulge herself in some civilized pleasures, from which she had long been absent, and, accordingly, went in the afternoon to hear a concert of Mozart’s music at the State Concert Hall in Bloomsbury, leaving Julia to take Elfine to buy a petticoat, some shoes and stockings and a plain evening coat of white velvet. In the evening, she proposed that the three of them should visit the Pit Theatre, in Stench Street, Seven Dials, to see a new play by Brandt Slurb called ‘Manallalive-O!’, a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a man employed as a waiter in a restaurant who dreams that he is the double of another man who is employed as a steward on a liner, and who, on awakening and realizing that he is still a waiter employed in a restaurant and not a steward employed on a liner, goes mad and shoots his reflection in a mirror and dies. It had seventeen scenes and only one character. A pest-house, a laundry, a lavatory, a court of law, a room in a leper’s settlement and the middle of Piccadilly Circus were included in the scenes.

‘Why,’ asked Julia, ‘do you want to see a play like that?’

‘I don’t, but I think it would be so good for Elfine, so that she will know what to avoid when she is married.’

But Julia thought it would be a much better idea if they went to see Mr Dan Langham in ‘On Your Toes!’ at the New Hippodrome, so they went there instead and had a nice time instead of a nasty one.

In that entranced pause when the lights of the theatre fade, and upon the crimson of the yet unraised curtain the footlights throw up their soft glow, Flora glanced at Elfine, unobserved, and was pleased with what she saw.

A noble yet soft profile was lifted seriously towards the stage. The light wings of gold hair blew back from either cheek towards the ears; this gave the head a classic look like that of a Greek charioteer pressing his team forward to victory in the face of a strong wind. The beautiful bones, the youth, of the face were now revealed.

Flora was satisfied.

She had done what she had hoped to do. She had made Elfine look groomed and normal, yet had preserved in her personality a suggestion of cool, smoothly-blowing winds and of pine-trees and the smell of wild flowers. She had conceived just such a change, and M. Viol and M. Solide, her instruments, had carried it out.

An artist in living flesh could ask for no more, and the auguries for the evening of the dance were good.

She leaned back in her seat with a contented sigh as the curtains parted.

*

The cousins reached the farm about five o’clock on the evening of the next day. Much to Flora’s surprise, Seth had been at the station to meet their train with the buggy, and he drove them back. They stopped at a large garage in the town on the way home to arrange for a car to call at the farm on the following evening to take them to Godmere. It was to be at Cold Comfort at half-past seven, but first it was to meet the six-thirty train and pick up a Mr Hart-Harris, who was arriving at that time.

Having made these arrangements, Flora hopped cheerfully back into the buggy and settled herself into her own black-and-green plaid rug at Seth’s side. Elfine tucked her in. (By this time Elfine was quite devoted to her, and divided the time between devising schemes for Flora’s comfort and looking with delight at the picture of her own altered head in the shop windows which they passed.)

‘Are you looking forward to it, Seth?’ asked Flora.

‘Ay,’ he drawled softly, in his warm voice, ‘’twill be th’ first time I’ve ever been to a dance wheer all the women wasn’t after me. Happen I can enjoy meself a bit, fer a change.’

Flora doubted whether he really would, for the county would probably fall for Seth as inevitably as did the villages. But there was no point in alarming him beforehand.

‘But I thought you liked having girls after you?’

‘Nay. I only likes the talkies. I don’t mind takin’ a girl out if she will let me be, but many’s the girl I’ve niver seen again because she worrited me in the middle of a talkie. Ay, they’re all the same. They must have yer blood and yer breath and ivery bit of yer time and yer thoughts. But I’m not like that. I just likes the talkies.’

Flora reflected, as they drove home through the lanes, that Seth’s problem was the next one to tackle. She thought of a letter in her handbag. It was from Mr Earl P. Neck, and it said that he would be motoring down within the next few days to see some friends who lived at Brighton, and he proposed to motor over and see her, too. She was going to introduce Seth to him.

*

It was five o’clock on the afternoon of the next day. The weather had favoured the cousins. Flora had pessimistically presumed that it would be pelting with rain, but it was not. It was a mild, rosy spring evening in which blackbirds sang on the budding boughs of the elms and the air smelled of leaves and freshness.

The cousins were having a fiendish business getting themselves dressed.

The intelligent and sensitive reader will doubtless have wondered at intervals throughout this narrative as to how Flora managed about a bathroom. The answer is simple. At Cold Comfort there was no bathroom. And when Flora had asked Adam how the family themselves managed for baths, he had replied, coldly: ‘We manages wi’out’, and the vision of dabbings and chillinesses and inadequacies thus conjured had so repelled Flora that she had pursued her enquiries no further.

She had discovered, however, that that refreshing woman, Mrs Beetle, owned a hip-bath, in which she would permit Flora to bathe every other evening at eight o’clock for a small weekly sum, and this Flora did, and the curtailment of her seven weekly baths to four was by far the most unpleasant experience she had so far had to endure at the farm.

But this evening, just when baths were needed, baths were impossible. So Flora put two enormous noggins of water on the stove in the kitchen to get hot, and hoped for the best.

Her absence from the farm with Elfine had not been commented upon. She doubted if they had noticed it. What with the bull getting out, and Meriam, the hired girl, having so far got through the spring without entering upon her annual interesting condition, and the beginning of the carrot harvest which was even longer and more difficult to do than the swede harvest, the Starkadders had enough to absorb them without noticing where a couple of girls had got to. Besides, it was their habit to avoid seeing each other for days at a time, and the absence of Flora and Elfine seemed fortunately to have coincided with one of these hibernations on the part of the family.

But Aunt Ada – did she know? Elfine said she knew everything. She shuddered as she spoke. If Aunt Ada found out that they were going to the ball …

‘She had best not pull any Cinderella stuff on me,’ said Flora, coldly, peering into the nearest noggin to see if the water were done.

‘It is just possible that she may come downstairs one of these evenings,’ said Elfine, timidly. ‘She sometimes does, in the spring.’

Flora said that she hoped it kept fine for her.

But she did rather wonder why the kitchen was decorated with a wreath of deadly nightshade round the mantelpiece and large bunches of the evil-smelling pussy’s dinner arranged in jam-jars on the mantelpiece. And round the dim, ancient portrait of Fig Starkadder, which hung above the fireplace, was a wreath of a flower which was unfamiliar to Flora. It had dark green leaves and long, pink, tightly-closed buds. She asked Elfine what it was.

‘That’s the sukebind,’ said Elfine, fearfully. ‘Oh, Flora, is the water done?’

‘Just on, my dove. Here, you take one,’ and she handed it to Elfine. ‘So that’s sukebind, is it? I suppose when it opens all the trouble begins?’

But Elfine was already away with the hot water to Flora’s room, where her dress lay upon the bed, and Flora must follow her.