Peacock Emporium (2 page)

And, to my shame, I remember that I had to turn my head because, as I clipped the cord and laid her on her mother’s chest, I realised that I had begun to cry, and I did not want Beatriz to give the other midwives something else to laugh about.

She appeared at my shoulder, mopping at her brow, and gestured behind her. ‘When you’re done,’ she said quietly, ‘I’m going to nip upstairs and see if I can find Dr Cardenas. She has lost a lot of blood, and I don’t want her to move until he’s taken a look.’ I hardly heard her, and she knew it. She kicked my ankle. ‘Not bad, Ale,’ she said, grinning. It was the first time she had called me by my real name. ‘Next time you might even remember to weigh the baby.’

I was about to respond in kind, elation giving me courage, for once, to speak up. But as we talked, I became aware that the atmosphere in the room had changed. Beatriz did, too, and halted in her tracks. Where normally there was the enraptured cooing of the new mother, the soft murmur of admiring relatives, there was only a quiet pleading: ‘Diego, no, no, Diego, please . . .’

The smartly dressed couple had moved beside the bed. The blonde woman, I noticed, was trembling, a peculiar half-smile on her face, her hand reaching tentatively towards the baby.

The mother was clutching the child to her chest, her eyes closed, murmuring to her husband, ‘Diego, no, no, I cannot do this.’

Her husband was stroking her face. ‘Luisa, we agreed. You know we agreed. We cannot afford to feed our children, let alone another.’

She would not open her eyes and her bony hands were wrapped round the overwashed hospital shawl. ‘Things will get better, Diego. You will get more work. Please,
amor
, please, no—’

Diego’s face crumpled. He reached over and began, slowly, to prise his wife’s fingers off the baby, one by one. She was wailing now:
‘No. No
, Diego,
please.’

The joy of the birth had evaporated, and I felt sick in the pit of my stomach as I realised what was happening. I made to intervene, but Beatriz, an unusually grim expression on her face, stayed me with a tiny shake of her head. ‘Third one this year,’ she muttered.

Diego had managed to take the baby. He held her tight to him without looking at her, and then, his own eyes closed, held her away from him. The blonde woman had stepped forward. ‘We will love her so much,’ she said, her reedy upper-class accent trembling with her own tears. ‘We have waited so long . . .’

The mother became wild now, tried to climb from the bed, and Beatriz leapt over and held her down. ‘She mustn’t move,’ she said, her voice sharpened by her own unwilling complicity. ‘It’s very important that you don’t let her move until the consultant is here.’

Diego wrapped his arms round his wife. It was hard to tell whether he was comforting her or imprisoning her. ‘They will give her everything, Luisa, and the money will help us feed our children. You have to think of our children, of Paola, of Salvador . . . Think of how things have been—’

‘My
baby,’
screamed the mother, unhearing, clawing at her husband’s face, impotent against Beatriz’s apologetic bulk. ‘You cannot take her.’ Her fingernails left a bloodied welt, but I don’t think he noticed. I stood by the sink as the couple backed towards the door, my ears filled with the raw sound of a pain I have never forgotten, unable any longer even to look at the child I had taken such joy in delivering.

And to this day I cannot remember any beauty in the first baby I brought into this world. I remember only the cries of that mother, the expression of grief etched on to her face, a grief I knew, even with my lack of experience, that would never be relieved. And I remember that blonde woman, traumatised, yet determined as she crept away, like a thief, saying quietly: ‘She will be loved.’

A hundred times she must have said it, although no one was listening.

‘She will be loved.’

Two

1963
:
Framlington Hall, Norfolk

The train had made six unscheduled stops between Norwich and Framlington, and the infinite glacial blue of the sky was darkening, although it wasn’t even tea-time. Several times Vivi had watched the guards jump down with their shovels to scrape another snowdrift from the tracks, and felt her impatience at the delay offset by a perverse satisfaction.

‘I hope whoever’s picking us up has snow chains on,’ she said, her breath clouding the glass of the carriage window, so that she had to smear a viewing hole with her gloved finger. ‘I don’t fancy pushing a car through that.’

‘You wouldn’t have to push,’ said Douglas, from behind his newspaper. ‘The men’ll push.’

‘It’d be terribly slippy.’

‘In boots like yours, yes.’

Vivi looked down at her new Courrèges footwear, quietly pleased that he had noticed. Completely unsuitable for the weather, her mother had said, adding sadly to Vivi’s father that there was ‘absolutely no telling her’ at the moment. Vivi, usually compliant in all things, had been uncharacteristically determined in her refusal to wear Wellingtons. It was the first ball she had been to, unchaperoned, and she was not going to arrive looking like a twelve-year-old. It had not been their only battle: her hair, an elaborate confection of bubble curls swept up on her crown, left no room for a good woollen hat, and her mother was in an agony of indecision as to whether her hard work in setting it had been worth the risk of her only daughter venturing into the worst winter weather since records began with only a scarf tied round her head.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she lied. ‘Warm as toast.’ She offered up silent thanks that Douglas couldn’t tell she was wearing long Johns under her skirt.

They had been on the train almost two hours now, an hour of that without heating: the guard had told them that the heater in their carriage had given up the ghost even before the cold spell. They had planned to travel up with Frederica Marshall’s mother in her car, but Frederica had come down with glandular fever (not for nothing, Vivi’s mother observed drily, was it called the ‘kissing disease’) and so, reluctantly, their parents had let them travel up alone on the train instead, with many dire warnings about the importance of Douglas ‘looking after’ her. Over the years, Douglas had been instructed many times to look after Vivi – but the prospect of Vivi alone at one of the social events of the year had apparently given this a weighty resonance.

‘Did you mind me travelling with you, D?’ she said, with an attempt at coquettishness.

‘Don’t be daft.’ Douglas had not yet forgiven his father for refusing to let him borrow his Vauxhall Victor.

‘I simply don’t know why my parents won’t let me travel alone. They’re so old-fashioned . . .’

She’d be all right with Douglas, her father had said, reassuringly. He’s as good as an older brother. In her despairing heart, Vivi had known he was right.

She placed one booted foot on the seat next to Douglas. He was wearing a thick wool overcoat, and his shoes, like most men’s, bore a pale tidemark of slush. ‘Everyone who’s anyone is going tonight, apparently,’ she said. ‘Lots of people who wanted invites couldn’t get them.’

‘They could have had mine.’

‘Apparently that girl Athene Forster’s going to be there. The one who was rude to the Duke of Edinburgh. Have you seen her at any of the dances you’ve been to?’

‘Nope.’

‘She sounds awful. Mummy saw her in the gossip columns and started on about how money doesn’t buy breeding or somesuch.’ She paused, and rubbed her nose. ‘Frederica’s mother thinks there’s going to be no such thing as the Season soon. She says girls like Athene are killing it off, and that that’s why they’re calling her the Last Deb.’

Douglas, snorting, didn’t look up from his paper. ‘The Last Deb. What rot. The whole Season’s a pretence. Has been since the Queen stopped receiving people at court.’

‘But it’s still a nice way to meet people.’

‘A nice way to get nice boys and gels mixing with suitable marriage material.’ Douglas closed his paper and placed it on the seat beside him. He leant back and linked his hands behind his head. ‘Things are changing, Vee. In ten years’ time there won’t be hunt balls like this. There won’t be posh frocks and tails.’

Vivi wasn’t entirely sure but thought this might be linked to Douglas’s obsession with what he called ‘social reform’, which seemed to take in everything from George Cadbury’s education of the working classes to Communism in Russia. Via popular music. ‘So what will people do to meet?’

‘They’ll be free to see anyone they like, whatever their background. It’ll be a classless society.’

It was hard to tell from his tone of voice whether he thought this was a good thing or was issuing a warning. So Vivi, who rarely looked at newspapers and admitted to no real opinions of her own, made a noise of agreement, and looked out of the window again. She hoped, not for the first time, that her hair would last the evening. She should be fine for the quickstep and the Gay Gordons, her mother had said, but she might want to exercise a little caution in the Dashing White Sergeant. ‘Douglas, will you do me a favour?’

‘What?’

‘I know you didn’t really want to come . . .’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘And I know you hate dancing, but if we get a few tunes in and no one’s asked me, will you promise me a dance? I don’t think I could bear to be left on the side all night.’ She pulled her hands briefly from the relative warmth of her pockets. Pearl Frost lay evenly over her nails. It glittered, opalescent, echoing the crystalline veil now creeping across the carriage window. ‘I’ve practised loads. I won’t let you down.’

He smiled now and, despite the encroaching cold of the carriage, Vivi felt herself grow warmer. ‘You won’t be left on the side,’ he said, placing his own feet on the seat beside her. ‘But yes, silly. Course I will.’

Framlington Hall was not one of the jewels of England’s architectural heritage. Its initial air of antiquity was deceptive: anyone with only a basic knowledge of architecture could deduce swiftly that its Gothic turrets did not sit comfortably with its Palladian pillars, that its narrow leaded windows jarred against the gabled roof of its oversized ballroom, that the unquiet red of its brick had not been weathered by more than a handful of seasons. It was, in short, a structural mongrel, a hybrid of all the worst nostalgic longings for a mythical time past, its own sense of importance imposing some standing on the flat countryside around it.

Its gardens, when not buried under several feet of snow, were rigidly formal; the lawns carefully manicured and dense as the pile of an expensive carpet, the rose garden arranged not in a gently tangled wilderness but in rigid rows of brutally pruned bushes, each an echo in size and shape of the next. Their colours were not faded pink and peach, but blood-bright, meticulously bred or grafted in laboratories in Holland or France. To each side stood rows of evenly green
leylandii
, preparing, even in their extreme youth, to enclose the house and its grounds from the world outside. It was less a garden than, as one visitor had noted, a kind of horticultural concentration camp.

Not that these considerations bothered the steady stream of guests who, overnight bags in hand, had been disgorged on to the salted drive that curved round in front of the house. Some had been personally invited by the Bloombergs, who had themselves designed the hall (and had only just been discouraged from buying a title to go with it), some had been invited through the Bloombergs’ better-placed friends, with their express permission, to create the right atmosphere. And some had simply turned up, hoping, astutely, that in the general scale of things a few extras with the right sort of faces and accents were not going to bother anyone. The Bloombergs, with a freshly minted banking fortune, and a determination to keep the debutante tradition alive for their twin daughters, were known as generous hosts. And things were more relaxed these days – no one was going to turf anyone out into the snow. Especially when there was a newly decorated interior to show off.

Vivi had thought about this at some length as she sat in her room (towels, toiletries and two-speed hairdryer provided) at least two corridors from Douglas’s. She had been one of the lucky ones, thanks to Douglas’s father’s business relationship with David Bloomberg. Most of the girls were being put up in a hotel several miles away, but she was to stay in a room almost three times the size of her own at home, and twice as luxurious.

Lena Bloomberg, a tall, elegant woman who wore the jaded air of someone who had long known that her husband’s only real attraction for her was financial, had raised her eyebrows at his more extravagant welcomes, and said there was tea and soup in the drawing room for those who needed to warm themselves, and that if there was
anything at all
that Vivi needed, she should call – although not Mrs Bloomberg, presumably. She had then instructed a manservant to show her to her room – the men were in a separate wing – and Vivi, having tested every jar of cream and sniffed every bottle of shampoo, had sat for some time before getting changed, revelling in her unheralded freedom, and wondering how it must be to live like this every day.

As she poured herself into her dress (tight bodice, long lilac skirt, made by her mother from a Butterick pattern), and swapped her boots for shoes she could hear the distant hum of voices as people walked past her door, an air of anticipation seeping into the walls. From downstairs, she heard the discordant sounds of the band warming up, the anonymous, hurried step of staff preparing rooms and exclamations as acquaintances greeted each other on the stairs. She had been looking forward to the ball for weeks. Now that it was here, she was filled with the same sort of dull terror that she used to feel on going to the dentist. Not just because the only person she was likely to know was Douglas, or because, having felt terribly liberated and sophisticated on the train, she now felt very young, but because set against the girls, who had arrived, stick-limbed and glowing, in their evening wear, she seemed suddenly lumpen and inadequate, the sheen of her new boots already tarnished. Because glamour didn’t come easily to Veronica Newton. Despite the feminine props of hair rollers and foundation garments, she was forced to admit that she would only ever be pretty ordinary. She was curvy at a time when beauty was measured in skinniness. She was healthily ruddy when she should have been pale and wide-eyed. She was still in dirndl skirts and shirtwaisters when fashion meant A-line and modern. Even her hair, which was naturally blonde, was unruly, wavy and strawlike, refusing to fall in geometrically straight lines like that of the models in
Honey
or
Petticoat
, instead floating in wisps around her face. Today, welded into its artificial curls, it looked rigid and protesting, rather than the honeyed confection she had envisaged. Adding insult to injury, her parents, in some uncharacteristic burst of imagination, had nicknamed her Vivi, which meant people tended to look disappointed when they were introduced to her, as if the name suggested some exoticism she didn’t possess. ‘Not everyone can be the belle of the ball,’ her mother said, reassuringly. ‘You’ll make someone a lovely wife.’