The Proposal (10 page)

‘Why? Saving it for your wedding day?’

‘Fat chance,’ she said, taking a deep inhalation of smoke.

Georgia opened the wardrobe and gasped. It was fit to burst with shoes, coats and gowns. She opened a huge hatbox and pulled out sheaves of white paper that showed the first signs of colouring with age.

‘Are you sure you want these, George? They’re a bit fuddy-duddy, you know. It’s all about the oval silhouette these days.’

‘Stuff that – these are gorgeous.’ Georgia trailed her hand across the satin and tulle. ‘Look at this,’ she said, pulling out a deep jade dress with a full skirt. ‘It’s the colour of a mermaid’s tail.’

‘I wore it for Fiona Meadows’ cocktail party at Claridge’s,’ said Clarissa, balancing her cigarette on an ashtray she had pulled out from under the bed.

‘Put it on.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

With little more encouragement, Clarissa stripped to her bra and pants and slipped into the dress.

‘You look lovely.’

‘Fat lot of good it did me,’ Clarissa said, sinking to the floor, the yards of fabric spilling across the carpet like a pool of Caribbean water.

‘So how are things in the love department?’ said Georgia, sitting down next to her and grabbing a cigarette from the packet on the bed.

‘A very handsome Coldstream Guard asked me out the other day.’

‘Are you going to go?’

‘Of course I am.’

The two girls giggled.

‘Are you looking forward to it? The Season, that is.’

‘No. Did you enjoy it?’ Georgia turned away and blew a smoke ring.

‘I loved it. But don’t make the same mistakes I did.’

‘Which are what?’

An expression of grave wisdom clouded Clarissa’s face.

‘The Season isn’t about having fun, George. This isn’t about parties or dresses or table manners. It’s a competition. Don’t ever forget that.’

Georgia gave a loud snort.

‘A competition? So what’s the prize?’

‘The best man,’ Clarissa said bluntly. ‘The good ones get snapped up early. Apparently the Duke of Kent has already got a girlfriend, which is rather annoying. And avoid the Cirencester lot. You’ve got to jostle hard for position, for status,’ she continued, enjoying her role as experienced sage, even though her advice was falling on deaf ears. ‘I mean, do you think girls get chosen for the Queen Charlotte’s, the Berkeley Dress Show, Deb of the Year by accident? You’ve got to watch some of the mothers, too – they can be the worst. This isn’t polite society. It’s a jungle in tulle. And believe me, because the Queen is abolishing the curtseying, the competition is going to be especially tough this year. Did you see the portraits in
Tatler
? There are some very beautiful girls.’

Georgia was laughing.

‘Clarissa, I don’t want to be Deb of the Year – I don’t even particularly want to be a deb.’

‘Well, you’re about to be presented in front of the Queen, so I would say it’s a little late for second thoughts. Have you been to see Madame Vacani?’

‘Who’s she?’

‘An old lady based in Kensington. Former dancer – apparently she taught the Queen and Margaret how to foxtrot, plus she is the Curtsey King. Been doing it since before the Great War, and has taught it to anyone who’s anyone.’

‘Well, she hasn’t taught me.’

‘Then how are you going to do it properly?’

‘You mean there’s a proper way to curtsey?’ Georgia was dimly aware of a curtseying lesson at Madame Didiot’s, but she clearly hadn’t being paying attention.

‘It’s getting a little bit late in the day to be asking those sorts of questions, George.’ Clarissa stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’m going to have to teach you. Stand up,’ she ordered.

‘There are two sorts of curtsey. One’s more informal than the other. You’ll need the deep court one for presentation day. One foot behind the other, weight on the right foot and down you go.’

She demonstrated the move to perfection and Georgia copied her, her cigarette still hanging out of her mouth at right angles.

‘Not like that,’ Clarissa muttered. ‘Throw your chest out, as Madame Vacani used to say.’

‘This is silly,’ said Georgia, collapsing to the floor in laughter. ‘I’m going to ask Aunt Sybil for a drink. Under the circumstances, perhaps she’ll give me a stiff one.’

Down in the kitchen, her mother was talking to Mrs Bryant about making aspic. Interrupting them for a moment, she asked the housekeeper if she could have two glasses of lemonade. Retreating back upstairs with the drinks, she heard Aunt Sybil and Uncle Peter in the living room, her ears straining even more when she heard her own name.

‘Then I will pay for a dance,’ Peter was saying, struggling to keep his voice low. ‘We can have it in the garden.’

‘I am not having fifty, sixty youths parading through the house just because you feel sorry for your brother’s child,’ said Sybil, her reply disappearing into a hiss. ‘No one is forcing them to do the Season and they shouldn’t be doing it if they can’t afford it. I mean, whatever is the world coming to? We’ve got Khrushchev in the Kremlin, and now Estella joining the aspirational classes.’

‘I have a duty to James. A duty to his memory. I have to do this. Every girl wants to be a deb, to be a princess, and I must do everything I can to support her.’

As Georgia ran up the stairs with the lemonade, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Georgia didn’t
feel
any different now that she had come out. She hadn’t expected it to be momentous, of course – not in the way the whispers at the convent had suggested losing your virginity would be. But she had at least thought she might feel a little more grown-up, more sophisticated.

Still, the day hadn’t been all bad. There had been lots of waiting around, of course – waiting in the cars as they all lined up along the Mall, waiting on the spindly little chairs for their turn to curtsey. But it had been secretly quite thrilling and oh so glamorous. Despite her resistance to the entire Season, the excitement of her fellow debutantes had been infectious. She had felt quite lovely in her pale blue silk dress, the colour of a Devon summer sky, bought as a gift by Uncle Peter. Prince Philip, who had been seated next to the Queen during the ceremony, had been heart-stoppingly handsome in the flesh – thank goodness she’d had to curtsey to him
after
the Queen, otherwise she feared she might have been too distracted to pull the move off successfully. Plus she had been fascinated to snoop inside the Palace – they had seen the drawing rooms, the corridor and the stairways lined with Yeomen, then the main event, the Throne Room, before retiring for tea and chocolate cake in one of the dining areas.

But pulling up outside the large white house on the edge of Eaton Square, she felt a loss of whatever enthusiasm she had had for the Season. How could anyone live in a place like this? she thought, looking down at the white vellum invitation and back up towards the imposing house ahead.

‘Never knew there was a hotel here,’ said the cabbie, breaking into her thoughts.

‘It’s not a hotel,’ she said, fishing in her small handbag for a ten-shilling note, one of a hundred crisp notes that Uncle Peter had given her in an envelope to pay for the Season’s expenses.

‘Who lives here – relative of the Queen?’

‘They’re into refrigerators,’ explained Georgia; it was all Aunt Sybil had told her about the family. ‘That’s where the money comes from.’

The cabbie was still shaking his head in disbelief as he pulled away, his tail lights disappearing into the darkness, leaving Georgia all alone on the pavement. She took a deep breath to compose herself.

The volume of debutantes had necessitated three presentation days, the last of which had been two days earlier. But they represented not the end but the beginning of the Season, and already Georgia could feel that London was buzzing with a party atmosphere that had definitely not been so palpable the week before.

Music floated from the big house in front of her as a group of young men, all dressed in white tie, like a tiny colony of penguins, approached from the south-west corner of the square.

Georgia felt intimidated. Grand houses and beautiful gowns like the one she was wearing – Estella had customised one of Clarissa’s linen dresses with her own artwork and a yard of silk – were things she was completely unused to. They felt too big for her, even if the dress had been altered to fit perfectly.

With the exception of the infrequent trips to London to see Peter, Sybil and her cousins, Georgia was not well versed in the ways of the wealthy. Her convent school had been solid, academic – used to educating the daughters of farmers and local businessmen and solicitors; her finishing school, as Sybil had pointed out, was not considered particularly elite – nothing like the Institut Le Mesnil in Switzerland.

Of course Madame Didiot had prepared her girls for being set loose on the Season and into society. She had taught them the dos and don’ts of going into the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley or the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. And she had particularly impressed on them the art of confidence in any situation. Georgia could hear her heavily accented words now: ‘Confidence can make the ordinary beautiful. Stand tall, slow down, be interested, be interesting, and if you have nothing to say, ask a question.’

But Madame’s words meant very little as she approached the house. She felt wretched and lost. It hadn’t been like this at her little fork luncheon – a surprising success once Mrs Bryant had stepped in and helped with the catering. But there she had been surrounded by people she knew: her mother and aunt, plus a smattering of friends from Madame Didiot’s.

Taking a deep breath, she proceeded up the black and white tiled path and into the house.

After the cold outside, the heat pressed against her. It was only a quarter past seven, and already the downstairs of the house was wall-to-wall with people. It had been the cocktail party that everyone was talking about – not only because it came so soon after the presentation ceremonies, but because Emily Nightingale’s family was so mind-bogglingly rich.

As her eyes searched the room, looking for someone she recognised, Georgia wished she had been a little more sociable at her fork luncheon and at the Palace. There were at least two hundred people here at Astley House, and she knew none of them.

Threading through the crowd, eavesdropping on conversations, she realised that although many of the other debutantes did not know the other young people in attendance, they all seemed to have plenty in common – boarding schools, pony clubs or family friends. Georgia, on the other hand, seriously doubted that anyone else here had gone to Sacred Hearts Convent School for Girls in South Hams.

Accepting a glass of fruit punch from a waiter, she went and stood in a corner, deciding that she would seek out the hostess, thank her for her invitation and slip out shortly afterwards. Factoring in a couple of trips to the loo and a short loiter around the canapés, she reckoned she could spin out her stay to thirty minutes without too much discomfort.

‘You’ll never meet your future husband in the toilet. I mean loo,’ said a voice to her right, as if it were reading her thoughts.

She turned and saw a pretty blonde, her hair scooped up in a chignon, voluminous breasts spilling over her dress like party balloons.

‘It is loo, isn’t it?’ added the girl, frowning. ‘Not bathroom. I can never remember which is U and non-U.’

‘Non-U?’ said Georgia, grateful for someone to talk to.

‘Upper class. Non-upper class,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a long list of stuff I’ve got written down in my handbag. Sofa, not settee. Writing paper, not notepaper. What, not pardon – although I think that sounds frightfully rude, don’t you?’

‘Well, I always say loo. What does that make me?’

‘Posh, of course. I love your dress, by the way. Do you mind awfully if I ask whose it is?’

‘It’s mine,’ said Georgia, feeling herself flush. The last thing she wanted to admit in front of this highly groomed girl was that she’d had to borrow her cocktail dress.

‘I mean, whose is it? The designer?’

Georgia looked down and brushed her hands modestly over the linen skirt. She had to admit that she had been delighted when Estella had unveiled it. She had taken Clarissa’s pale pink dress, made a few alterations to the bust and sleeves and, recognising that the fabric made the most wonderful canvas, painted peonies all around the hem.

‘It’s a one-off,’ she said, smiling to herself.

‘Well, I love it,’ replied the blonde. ‘When they announced that it was going to be the last of the presentations, Mum pulled me straight out of school and took me to Paris. Dad’s a wizard in business and said you have to speculate to accumulate, so we had to get the best wardrobe we possibly could for the Season.’

‘You were pulled out of school to go
shopping
in Paris?’ Georgia didn’t know whether to be horrified or madly jealous.

‘Well, my parents were desperate for me to do it. All a bit of a rush, though. Thank goodness Mum had already sorted out a sponsor for me.’

‘Sponsor?’

‘We paid someone to present me to court,’ she said without guile. ‘Some old biddy who makes a tidy living out of her aristocratic credentials.’