Family and Friends (5 page)

There is indeed something Bohemian about Betty although to all intents and purposes she has never been far from her mother’s house. Sofka has noted this quality and has decided that although Betty’s temperament was quite amusing in a little girl, promising those admired high spirits later on in life, it must now be supervised, rigorously controlled, and if necessary corrected. Sofka loves Betty’s fire, admires her looks but feels estranged from that perverse spirit that has always inclined Betty to moods, sulks, and screaming tantrums. She no longer screams these days, having found more subtle and effective ways of imposing herself. She will seem to withdraw her love, her admiration, her loyalty, and will be seen quite clearly to calculate her own as against her family’s chances of success. Consequently people will make more
of an effort to win Betty’s good opinion and consent than if she were polite and well behaved. Sofka is also rather unpleasantly aware of Betty’s altogether unwelcome sexuality. Of all her children Betty appears to be almost viciously in touch with her own lower instincts, and although nothing has prepared her for life in the adult world (Sofka has seen to this) she is clearly ready to test her powers on any man who might come within range. She always flirted as a little girl with those kindly uncles, and now that she is no longer a little girl she does not bother to do so; this apparent withdrawal of favour bewilders the uncles who cry, ‘No kiss for me today?’ in a hurt tone which quite displeases Sofka. And there has been a regrettable incident, the last in a series of several, when Sofka, on entering the girls’ bedroom, has found Betty trying on one of her own nightgowns, a simple voile shift in the colour known as
‘Nuage’
, which Sofka had made for a certain holiday she took with her husband in Baden-Baden. Not only has Betty taken it out of Sofka’s chest of drawers; she is peering at the piquant little body which it reveals, well aware that she is more finely made than her mother. Sofka and Betty both see this at the same time. And that nightgown has not been worn since Sofka’s husband, the reprobate, died. The conjunction of all these reflections has given Sofka a sense of grievance which is periodically mobilized into a headache, for nothing on this earth would permit Sofka to brood on certain aspects of her long and respectable widowhood.

Now Betty is demanding that Sofka allow her to have her hair cut. That beautiful hair! Sofka regards the girls’ hair as being in the nature of her own possession, something that she will hand over like a sacred torch to whomever shall claim the girls in marriage. After that they can do what they like with it, although Sofka will always hark back with a reminiscent smile to its earlier glory.
Sofka would like the girls to remain as children while they are in her care. This is, after all, only good form. Their thoughts and attitudes, if they have any – and Sofka does not see this as necessary – they must keep to themselves. It is the least they can do. Mimi shows every sign of conforming to this unwritten and indeed unspoken rule. Mimi is the girl that Sofka has always decided she should be, staid, enchanting, and naïve. Mimi’s presence in a room is registered, but not entirely noticed. Betty is a different matter altogether.

This business of the hair has been discussed, with slightly raised voices, many times. The boys have been called in to back up Sofka’s refusal. Frederick has not been entirely helpful. He tugged at Betty’s plait, and said, ‘If you only knew how much naughtier you look like this,’ at which both Betty and Sofka gave him a sharp glance, only to meet his ruefully innocent gaze. But Alfred is furious. Alfred, like Mimi, is pure, with a scornful purity that resists all advances. ‘Of course you can’t have it cut,’ he shouts. ‘Why can’t you wait until you’re grown up?’ Alfred has surrendered his own childhood so unwillingly that he cannot understand how anyone could want to get rid of such a beautiful commodity. ‘I am grown up,’ screams Betty, reverting to an earlier pattern. At which Sofka intervenes in genuine distaste. A scene in her own drawing-room is something she will never permit. She sends Betty and Alfred to their rooms and the whole question is shelved. So effectively is it shelved that Sofka can hardly complain, or so Betty maintains, when Betty returns one afternoon from Marylebone Lane with her hair shorn into a bushy triangular bob, looking more like Colette than ever.

Sofka is genuinely heartbroken. She sits down in her chair and weeps, so brokenly that even Betty is uncomfortable. Betty, in one of those brief changes of mood that
are to make her irresistible, kneels down by her mother’s chair, covers her hand with kisses, and weeps just as brokenly as Sofka; more so, perhaps, for her sobs are intermingled with cries of ‘Mama! Mama! Talk to me!’ Sofka raises haggard eyes from her handkerchief and, seeing her daughter a little girl again, bends forward to comfort her. The boys are uneasy, Frederick mildly sorry that this had to happen, and Alfred struggling over a decision never to speak to Betty again. With a desolate light dawning in her eyes, Sofka turns to Mimi. ‘You were with her. She is your little sister. You are supposed to take care of her. Why did you let her do this?’ She speaks as though Betty has sustained some terrible injury. So genuine is her grief that Mimi hardly likes to explain that Betty had slipped out of the studio while she was performing her Chopin
étude
and, guided by Frank, had commanded the nearest Italian barber to cut off her hair. Mimi would feel disloyal if she said any of this. And so the matter is laid to rest, with Sofka and Betty reconciled, and a slight animus against Mimi. The next day, Sofka telephones M. Emile, her own hairdresser, to come to the house and even up Betty’s hair. Within a few days Betty is all smiles, having got her own way. ‘Not bad,’ concedes Frederick. ‘Not bad at all.’

But of course this will not satisfy her for long, and Sofka wonders what will happen when she comes into her own money. It was decreed by their father that the girls should receive one thousand pounds each on the day that the younger reaches her eighteenth birthday. In that way there will be no envy, no rivalry. It is one of his few sensible decisions, the last he made before his relatively early demise which is usually accredited to his lavish private life and seigneurial business practices. Sofka does not have too long to wait before she finds out. On the fateful day, which happens to coincide with one of their
weekly visits to Mr Cariani’s, the girls arrive home at tea-time. Mimi has celebrated by buying her mother a large bunch of flowers. ‘Silly girl,’ says Sofka, smiling. ‘My silly girl. We have so many in the garden.’ But she takes the lovely roses and for a moment, as she looks down at them, she has to bite her lip to quell a dangerous pang of emotion. It is not the gesture that moves her so much as the spectacle of Mimi’s simplicity. Mimi is now twenty years old, her second child, and yet she behaves as if she were fifteen. So sweet, so docile: how can such goodness survive, and who will claim it? How will Mimi know who is worthy of her? How will she fare when her mother is no longer there to guide her?

She need have no such fears for Betty. Betty is celebrating by paying renewed attention to her appearance. During her attendance at Marylebone Lane Betty has taken advantage of the piano lessons and has made a tour of the nearby stores. She has returned with numerous pairs of flesh-coloured stockings, a new dress patterned with spiders’ webs of white on a navy ground, some red beads and matching bracelets, and some extremely high-heeled shoes. With this outfit, in which she looks years older than Mimi, she wears a great deal of kohl shadow on her eyelids, while her upper lip, rouged in a sharply pointed bow of Indian red, lifts slightly over her small white teeth. The weight of the shadow on her lids makes her narrow her eyes. She has also started smoking, with so little difficulty that it is impossible to believe that she has not been doing so for some time. With the ivory cigarette-holder between her teeth and her fingernails painted bright red, with her legs crossed high, her brooding eyes and her sharp teeth, Betty looks like a painting by Foujita, a native Parisian, a Bohemian, a fallen angel.

There is something about Betty’s new appearance that is so complete, so utterly thought out that, unlike her
hair, it leaves no room for modification. This gives Sofka pause. Here is the intimation of a work of art and she is quick to appreciate it. But she is also quick to see that it has been created not for her approval but to court opposition. This she withholds, merely laughing gently and touching Betty’s necklace in passing as if amused by so much artificiality. Sofka is extremely practised in these arts, which she expects from every other woman. Sofka hardly believes in the solidarity of her sex unless it is united by bonds of mutual standing: sisterhood, matrimonial status, mother love. She is well aware that Betty is one of those women, rather like herself, in fact, who is the instinctive ally of men. Gentle amusement, the lightest of touches, the merest flutter of surprise, are all that Sofka will permit herself in the course of this particularly feminine commerce. But she has it in her to fear for Mimi, who will not profit from close companionship with her sister, and will not learn from it either, and for whose sake it might be politic to separate the two girls. Sofka thinks of that little cousin, Nettie, of whom Alfred used to be so fond. So temperamental did Nettie prove to be that her mother, Carrie, had to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland to have her bad manners shamed out of her by other, more scornful girls. It might not be a bad idea, thinks Sofka, to send Betty to join her cousin in Switzerland for a while. This is under active discussion.

It is quite clear that Betty will have to go somewhere. Even Mimi is vaguely troubled by those high spirits which Betty chooses to manifest in public. The girls have taken to having afternoon tea at a
pâtisserie
in town after their lesson and on these occasions Betty reveals herself as being very high-spirited indeed. ‘Don’t look round,’ she hisses to Mimi. ‘Move your chair closer to mine. There’s a man over there who can’t take his eyes off me.’ ‘Where?’ whispers Mimi, instinctively raising her head
and meeting the eyes of a middle-aged man who is smiling in genuine admiration of Mimi’s coiled red hair. Politely, Mimi smiles back. ‘For God’s sake,’ hisses Betty. ‘Don’t encourage him. I shan’t be able to get rid of him.’ But she moves her chair slightly and, in the course of doing so, her skirt rides up a little. She appears not to notice this. The middle-aged man, however, recognizes the difference between the two sisters and adjusts his manner accordingly, turning his attention to Betty, albeit with some slight feeling of regret. Most people are aware that Betty is inferior to her sister but Betty provokes and absorbs so much attention that she is usually thought of as more interesting, more controversial, more entertaining. Betty has a trace of Frederick’s command of alluring bad behaviour. In any contest with her sister, one, to be sure, which Betty might care to avoid, there is no doubt as to which one will carry the day.

That is why there is something of a question mark over the sisters’ relations with Frank Cariani. Handsome Frank, although all too willing to make an exhibition of himself when he dances with Betty, really prefers the docile and serious Mimi, whose grave demeanour appeals to his rigorous Italian upbringing. It is Mimi whom he slips round the door of the music room to see although his visits are cut short by Betty whirling him off for a bout of passionate Latin dancing. Betty is one of those women who believe in acting out a passion before they really feel it. Maybe they are cold. Maybe Betty, for all her exacerbated appetites, suspects this of herself. Maybe she knows that Mimi, so dreamy, so passive, so correct, might, would, with the right partner, come to a deep amorous understanding, an expansive love without need of gestures, a radiant acceptance of what a man has to offer, and a joyous capacity for motherhood that Betty knows can never be hers. Perhaps that is why she starts
to try harder to attract Frank Cariani’s attention, pressing up against his body in long silent attitudes not wholly warranted by the dance, or, dropping all pretence, touching him knowingly, her sharp little tongue just visible between her sharp little teeth. Betty is not entirely bad. She wants to capture Frank Cariani before her sister comes to realize how much she cares about him. In that way, thinks Betty, Mimi will be spared what she might have felt had she, Betty, taken her time, as she would have preferred to do. It is imperative for a woman of Betty’s temperament (and high spirits) not to cede the pass to any other woman even if that other woman should happen to be her sister. Knowing so much more about men, she has found herself obliged, by a single long and entirely serious glance between Mimi and Frank, to force the issue. Regrettable, but necessary.

That is why Betty has been obliged to make certain contingency plans when her removal to a finishing school in Switzerland is under active discussion. Betty knows that without her supervision Mimi might permit herself to become seriously enamoured of Frank Cariani and he of her. Mimi is one of those women who marry early or not at all, and she is, at this moment, very beautiful. Frank Cariani, although not of an eminence to please Sofka, would make an excellent son-in-law, attentive, deferential, respectful. The Cariani academy is doing so well that Mr Cariani senior has been able to buy the freehold of the house next door, extending himself quite patriarchally along Marylebone Lane. Mr Cariani senior is more than good to his wife, his unmarried sister, and his mother, and has housed a widowed sister-in-law in another property he happens to own somewhat to the north of Regent’s Park. This is entirely the kind of benevolent and structured family into which Mimi might transfer from her mother’s house without any feeling of disloyalty whatever,
and Sofka, seeing her safe at last, could not but approve. In addition to all this, Frank Cariani is a very handsome man. For Betty, the idea that Mimi might see him naked before she herself does is simply not to be borne.

Betty’s plan is to acquiesce to the finishing school idea, to suggest that Frederick accompany her as far as Paris, and that he then put her on the train to Lausanne. Knowing Frederick and his habits, she will be able to dissuade him from seeing her to the Gare de Lyon, since she has behaved so beautifully during their brief stay at the Hôtel Bedford et West End, not screaming, not demanding to drink champagne, not wearing outrageous clothes. Having said goodbye to Frederick, Betty will lie low for a couple of days until she knows him to have left Paris. She will then – and this is the difficult part – wait for Frank Cariani to join her. She has the better part of nine hundred pounds, she is quite fearless, she believes in their future as the highest-paid character dancers in Paris, and Frank is a simple fellow who is very tired of living under his father’s thumb. He tells himself that once he has established himself as a reputable name in the entertainment world he can always go home and find Mimi again. Mimi is not the type of girl who will, or indeed, can, do anything independently. But Betty knows that her mission in life is to be a woman who prevents men from staying with their virgin loves, and she is eager to embark on this career.