Daisy (16 page)

“Are we inviting Oxenden?” asked Angela, becoming suddenly interested in a papier-mâché powder box.

The Earl gave her a quick look. “Well, we usually do. Though I can’t see why he accepts. I would swear that man despises us.”

“He despises all of us,” said Angela lightly. “Then we’ll ask him. And who else?”

“Don’t know. Someone who is a bit of fun. Clive Fraser’s a good sport. And what about Ann Gore-Brookes?”

“What about her, tee-hee?” said his wife maliciously.

“Oh, you’re always sneering at her. But she’s a good sport. Got a good seat on a horse.”

“What on earth has that got to do with it?” said Angela pettishly. “Oh, ask who you want.”

Bertie replied to the invitation in the manner expected of him, but did something that no one in London society would have credited him with having the courage to do.

He went to see his father.

Sir Gerald Burke lived in an enormous Palladian mansion in Berkshire, entirely alone—that is, if you discounted a whole army of servants. In an age of eccentrics he still managed to be outstanding. He shared his meals in the enormous dining room with his horse, and the horse and he often sat through the long reaches of the night sharing the port decanter, Sir Gerald with a heavy silver goblet, the horse with a flower bowl. The beautiful cornices, mouldings, and wainscoting were peppered with shot. He had a horror of bugs and would let fly with a blast at a cockroach with enough shot to paralyze a whole warren of rabbits. He was immensely rich, but even the most determined of toadies and gold diggers had ceased to call. If a fly buzzed over the dinner table, Sir Gerald would seize his gun and blast off in all directions. There had been, in the past, several distressing accidents, although the horse remained miraculously unharmed.

Sir Gerald was also famous for his frequent choleric rages, when he ran through his mansion dismissing all the staff. But since he could never remember any of their faces, they simply rehired themselves the next day. Unemployment in England was at a peak and the servants would rather take their chances of dying from a stray bullet than from starvation outside.

Bertie was terrified of him and hardly ever went near him. In fact, his father paid him a generous allowance to stay away.

“Hullo, hullo, McWhirter,” said Bertie breezily, handing his hat and cane to the burly Scotch butler. “Father home?”

“Aye, that he is,” said McWhirter gloomily. “But it’s a rare fine day for the flies. Ye’d be better to leave, Mr. Bertie.”

A sound of a shot reverberated around the hall. “There you are,” said McWhirter with a kind of gloomy relish. “Flies.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” said Bertie with an airiness he was far from feeling. “I grew up with it, you know. Well, here goes.”

He strode into the drawing room and promptly dived under a coffee table as another blast nearly punctured his eardrums.

His father’s scarlet and broken-veined face appeared upside down in Bertie’s range of vision. “What’ye doin’ under there?”

“Saving my life,” said Bertie, getting up and brushing down his trousers.

The French windows were standing open showing a summer vista of rose arbors and cool green lawns. Bertie had a sudden impulse to take to his heels and run, but the thought of Daisy kept him where he was. A bee was hesitating on the threshold of the windows. If it entered the room all conversation would be killed… and perhaps Bertie as well. He plunged in.

“Look here, father. I’m going to get married.”

Sir Gerald actually put down his shotgun. “
You…
” he said slowly. “Married?” Then he began to laugh with great wheezy gulps until he sank down exhausted on the chesterfield. “Who’s the gel?” asked Sir Gerald when he could speak.

“The Honorable Daisy Chatterton.”

“Chatterton!” howled Sir Gerald. “How dare you, sir. How dare you try to drag down the name of Burke by marrying some cardsharp’s bitch.”

“Oh, I say,” bleated Bertie.

“The Madeira, sir,” said McWhirter at his elbow.

“You—what’s your name?” roared Sir Gerald.

“Grange, sir,” replied the butler. Every time he was fired, McWhirter changed his name and re-hired himself.

“Don’t dare interrupt me when I’m havin’ a family powwow, or you’ll end up in the street with all them other cheeky butlers.”

“Very good, sir,” said McWhirter, relieved that he would not have to think of a change of name for the time being anyway.

“Now, look here,” said Sir Gerald. “You marry that gel and I’ll cut you off without a penny.”

“Then cut me off,” said Bertie, made cool-headed by desperation. “I’ll earn my living.”

“Pah! Utter twaddle. Earn your living, you spineless fool. At what?”

“I’ll become a cardsharp,” said Bertie, studying his nails. “I’d better hoof off to France and ask her pater for some lessons. Then,” he replied, warming to the subject, “I’ll set up a house in London and call it Burke’s Baccarat… no, no, Burke’s Bohemia… or maybe Burke’s…”

“Burke’s Backside’s more like it,” snarled his parent. “You wouldn’t anyway.”

Bertie had burned his bridges and felt about ten feet tall. “Oh, yes I would, you horrible old man. And the only thing I’ll take from you are a few photographs of yourself to terrify m’children.”

He marched to the door, but was stopped by the sound of his father’s voice, “I’ll double your allowance.”

“You’ll
what
?”

“You heard me. Never thought to hear you standin’ up to me. Gel’s made a man out of you. Got m’blessing.”

Bertie’s sentimental soul was touched. He was about to stay and thank his parent in the warmest terms possible, but the bee made a suicidal lunge into the room. Before his father could reach the shotgun, Bertie was out of the room and running hard. Just wait till he told Daisy!

It was then he remembered that he hadn’t even proposed.

Everything from the government to the Boers had been blamed for the freakish unseasonal summer that year, but as Daisy’s train steamed into Brinton it seemed as if all the year’s storms, fogs, and clouds had rolled away, leaving nothing but an endless blue, pristine sky. The small station was set on a rise above the town and as Daisy waited on the platform for the arrival of the carriages, she was able to see the whole of the resort spread out at her feet.

The old town huddled at one corner of the cove as if crouching at the feet of the aristocratic villas which lay spaced along the long line of the beach. The sea was as blue and as perfect as a painting, with little white sails dotted here and there on the horizon.

There was a fresh scent of pine and roses mingled with the smells of new-baked bread and strong tea from the stationmaster’s cottage.

The villas were set back behind a row of white sandy dunes topped with sharp razor grass, looking in the distance like tiny strokes of an artist’s brush.

Daisy stood enchanted, feeling the warmth of the sun through her striped cotton blouse and the light breeze tugging at her boater.

“You look most awfully pretty.” It was Bertie at her elbow. Daisy turned and smiled at him indulgently, the way one does at the friendly importuning of a pet dog.

“Thank you, Bertie. Oh, look at that darling little cottage over there.” Bertie sighed and looked and then looked at Daisy again. He tried to work up his courage to make another gallant remark, but Daisy was now in ecstasies over a row of brightly painted bathing machines. She had never seen the sea before. Could she bathe? Would the water be cold? Of course Bertie would know. And Bertie puffed out his thin chest and answered her questions and felt like a god.

It was a cheerful, frivolous party which finally debouched from the carriages outside the Nottenstones’ villa. It was more of a mansion with wooden balconies and towers and a long colonnaded terrace running along the front of the house.

The Earl and Countess, when informed that the Duke of Oxenden had already arrived, looked at each other in some surprise. “Really, my dear,” said Angela to her husband. “We must have charms we did not know of.” She gave a silly little laugh and blushed and her husband colored angrily, and pinched the bottom of the between-stairs maid as soon as ever he could.

Daisy, Bertie, and Amy went off to explore the town and the little pier. When Bertie was hanging over the pier to see if he could spot any fish, Daisy put a halfpenny in a machine called What the Butler Saw and began to crank the handle. She took her head away from the machine with her face flaming. Those had been photographs. That meant a real live woman had taken off most of her clothes in front of a photographer. How on earth could anyone…? Then she remembered her adventure in the cellar and felt an unmaidenly pang of regret. She would never be on such terms of intimacy with the handsome Duke again. She had met him briefly on the stairs and had been treated to his best bow. Bertie had been treated in exactly the same way. But Bertie had merely laughed and called the Duke a stuffed shirt.

They pottered about the shops stocked with musical boxes made of shells, brightly colored postcards, and buckets and spades. Little eddies of sand twisted over the cobbles of the main street. Somewhere in one of the flats over the shops a child was thumping out “Nola” on the piano, an old man was selling whelks and cockles from a barrow with a sign that read
PLEASE RETURN PINS
in curly script, and at the corner of the street the town drunk was roaring out “Bobbing Up and Down Like This” to the vast entertainment of a group of street urchins.

Bertie bought them a bag of whelks, but Amy ate the most. Daisy extracted one small creature with her pin and popped it into her mouth, but it tasted like salted rubber. Amy had stopped “walking out” with her young man some weeks before and now her large brilliant eyes were ever on the flirtatious alert for fresh game. She popped the shellfish into her mouth, tossing back her long curls and giving many sidelong glances toward a group of young men on the corner.

Bertie whispered to Daisy, “I say, Daisy, can’t you keep that maid of yours under control? She’s attracting the attention of that group of mashers.”

Daisy began to explain that Amy was really more of a friend than a maid, but the sharp Amy had already caught Bertie’s reproving look and immediately became the epitome of the respectable lady’s maid, freezing the mashers with a disdainful stare.

Harmony restored, the threesome headed down to the beach and all social conventions were forgotten as they became schoolchildren again, searching for shells and ferreting in the small rock pools. Bertie had never been happier in his life. He was alone—well, nearly alone—with the girl he loved on this jolly beach, with no horrible society peers around to poke fun at him and make him feel like a fool.

With his hair hanging over his eyes, he gazed at Daisy with utter devotion and Daisy thought for the hundredth time how like a nice dog he looked and longed to scratch him behind the ears.

Sandy and happy, they rolled back to the villa in time for tea.

Angela and the Duke were seated alone at a white cane table in the garden. The Duke was impeccable in blazer and flannels and Angela managed to look incredibly seductive in a loose, flowing tea gown of sulphur yellow with a pattern of bronze flag iris. One of her long sleeves trailed over the Duke’s arm. Daisy could not remember seeing him more amused and felt dusty and grubby.

“There you are, my children,” cried Angela. “Leave your buckets and spades in the hall and go upstairs this minute and wash behind your ears.”

She then turned and looked full into the Duke’s eyes, cleverly establishing an intimacy that did not exist. Her husband, who had been about to join them, caught the look and retreated into the house instead where he bestowed a golden guinea on the buxom betweenstairs maid in the hope of favors yet to be received.

Daisy dressed for dinner with elaborate care, in a scarlet- and black-striped dinner gown, cut very low on the bosom, with enormous frilled and ruched sleeves. There was to be dancing after dinner and Angela had hired the minstrel band from the pier especially for the occasion.
Perhaps
, Daisy thought,
she would feel the Duke’s arm around her again.

But it seemed that the only arms she was going to feel about her were Bertie’s. With no little irritation she noticed that everyone expected them to spend their time together. Really, how could one take Bertie seriously? And the Duke, noticing Bertie’s shining face and shining eyes, hoped that Daisy knew what she was doing.

A little dance platform had been raised under some weeping willows beside an ornamental pool. A willow pattern bridge spanned the pool and Japanese lanterns were strung through the trees.

Ann Gore-Brookes was wearing an elaborate kimono and the Honorable Clive Fraser, a quilted mandarin coat. He had waxed his mustaches into two long curves, but little tendrils of luxuriant British mustache kept escaping, so that he looked as if he had two hairy caterpillars crawling up either side of his mouth.

Bertie, much to Daisy’s mortification, had decided to appear as that well-known aristocratic tramp of the music hall, Burlington Bertie. His evening dress was flawless, his silk hat shining, but his fingers were sticking out of his gloves and his toes out of his shoes. And he had a monocle stuck in his eye. Daisy was just beginning to wonder whether or not she should be in fancy dress when the Duke appeared, impeccably elegant in formal evening dress. Angela was hanging on to his arm, a vision, in pale-gold tulle of a deceptively modest cut. Daisy felt overdressed and blowsy in comparison.

The Duke disengaged himself from Angela and crossed to Daisy’s side at a moment when Bertie was talking to the band. “I think your young man is about to perform for us,” remarked the Duke.

“He’s
not
my young man,” said Daisy crossly.

“Then may I point out that you are giving him a great deal of encouragement. While you are going ’round searching for true love, you seem to be forgetting that someone might fall in love with you and get badly hurt in the process.”

“
Bertie!
” said Daisy in amazement. “Don’t be so silly. Why, just look at him.”