– No, I said. But in a way yes. The fellow with the most money has his choice of woman.
– And what will his choice be, she said, then answered her own question. A rich woman, or a good-looking one. Not us on either score.
I heard a noise from her, was it a laugh or a sob?
– They look at us, Bridie said. Up and down, and most especially at our…charms.
– And what of us, I said, do we look at their charms?
For there was the way men stood, an elbow on the mantelpiece, in their tight pale trousers, with the relevant part of themselves framed between the dark wings of their jacket.
– I watch a man’s face, Bridie said. Looking for…I know not what. Attention to something other than my charms? Perhaps an interest in myself?
– An interest in yourself! I repeated.
I felt the bed tremble with her laughing, then tremble more with mine too. A man interested in yourself! It was amusing enough to set the bed shaking so hard it might be heard below us in the room where Mr and Mrs Kingdon lay in connubial intimacy, and that thought was enough to stop us.
A father—one less remote than Mr Kingdon—might have done better. A father might have been able to find the blunt words for it. They will flatter you, a father might have said. They will sigh over your loveliness. A father would say, Do not even for one moment believe them. Do not, on any account, allow that penetration of your person that is the true goal of all those blandishments. Laugh, such a father would say. Do it kindly, by all means, but laugh him to scorn.
VIPER’S FESCUE
I met Mr Macarthur on the day I stood godmother to the Kingdons’ newborn, a sweet babe they named after myself. That was good Mrs Kingdon’s idea, to draw me a further degree into the safety of her family, give me a little more substance to bolster my prospects. Bridie and I were twenty-two. Mrs Kingdon could see what we could not: that the years were beginning to race by.
Captain Moriarty walked over from the Holsworthy Barracks with his friend Ensign Macarthur to join us for the baptismal celebrations. Captain Moriarty was a fair smiling man with a distant family connection to the Kingdons, and it was clear that he was there that day for Bridie. Like me, she was no beauty, but Mr Kingdon would make a useful father-in-law. He struck me as pleased with his magnanimity in offering the gift of himself to plain Miss Kingdon.
I saw how close his chair was to Bridie’s, how he hitched it closer on the pretext of clearing the edge of the rug. Watching Captain Moriarty looking at her, the way the men came and sized up Grandfather’s rams, I had to accept that Bridie and I would not be together for much longer.
Mr Macarthur was there to give his friend a chance with Bridie, and it was up to all of us to give them some air. Mrs Kingdon poured tea and managed what she did so well: the dance of conversation.
– Miss Veale is making a little study of our grasses, our pastures, she said and smiled at me, but then glanced uncertainly at Mr Kingdon. I could see she was wondering whether the study of pastures—less ladylike than other studies—might give the wrong impression of Bridie’s friend, and therefore of Bridie herself.
So I smiled at this Captain Moriarty and this Mr Macarthur, not because I liked the look of either of them, but because I wanted to reassure kindly Mrs Kingdon.
– Yes, I said. But of course it is only our local domestic Devon grasses, sheep’s fescue and the like.
Then I was concerned that might seem a mild rebuke to Mrs Kingdon, as if I were backing away from her pride in me, and the dance was in danger of becoming a stumble. But my scruples and doubts, and Mrs Kingdon’s scruples and doubts, were swept away by Captain Moriarty, who, it transpired, knew more about grasses than anyone else in the room.
Legs astride as if addressing a public meeting, he held up a finger.
– Ah yes, Miss Veale, very interesting, he said. Festuca ovina, sheep’s fescue. And I wonder if you are familiar with the somewhat rarer viper’s fescue?
Well, naturally I had never heard of viper’s fescue, and said so. Whereupon Captain Moriarty gave us the benefit of his considerable knowledge on the subject, and Mr Kingdon and Mrs Kingdon and Mr Macarthur and Bridie and I all nodded, and by the time Captain Moriarty had finished enumerating the points on his fingers, Miss Veale’s little study of the local grasses was a speck on the conversational horizon.
There was a small pointless pleasure in exchanging a glance with Bridie. What a windbag! But then she smoothed back her hair, the lock that sprang out from her temple like a cheeky rejoinder, replaced the teacup in the saucer without a sound, and in placing it on the side table turned herself a fraction further towards Captain Moriarty.
The glance was a consolation, but I knew a great loneliness in that moment, and from that day something awkward fell between myself and Bridie. We had shared that glance, but we could not say aloud what we both knew: Captain Moriarty might be a tedious know-all, but Bridie would say yes if he asked. No more than any other woman could she afford to wait for Troilus or Romeo.
OF COURSE A GENTLEMAN
So, while Bridie and Captain Moriarty sat in the parlour, or took a turn about the garden, Miss Veale and Mr Macarthur were there too, engaging in lively conversation with each other, behind the screen of which our friends could make their way towards an understanding.
Mr Macarthur was an ugly cold sort of fellow. There was nothing smiling or pleasant about him. A sullen bottom lip gave him the look of a petulant child, and he was badly marked by the smallpox. His eyes looked not quite right, as if they’d been put in carelessly, too far apart and one higher than the other. He was haughty too, glancing around with his curled lip as if finding Mr Kingdon’s parlour wanting.
But he was hardly in a position to be superior. He was the cheapest rank of officer, ensign, in the cheapest regiment, old Fish’s that had been hardly raised before it was disbanded, the war finishing too soon and leaving him stranded. Everyone in the room could do the sum: four hundred pounds tied up in his commission and nothing to show for it. An ensign on half-pay. The phrase was a byword for failure.
There was no question of him setting out to charm me in the same way Captain Moriarty was laying himself out to charm Bridie. An ensign on half-pay was in no position to lay claim to a woman with no portion. Added to that was his youth: he was only twenty-two, my own age. Or perhaps twenty-one. He was a little cagey about his age, as about many things.
– Oh yes, he announced, I am considering the Bar, for all the world as if the Bar was beating a path to his door.
He was of course a gentleman. At least had the manners and education of a gentleman, rode with the hounds when he had the chance, he said, and could quote Horace and knew a little Greek, which reassured Mr Kingdon that he was a person worthy to take tea with his family.
But it came out that his father was in trade. Was—to put it bluntly—a draper. The way Mr Macarthur put it, his father was in a big way, his business no hole-in-the-corner affair of a half-yard of ribbon. He supplied the army and navy with the cloth for their uniforms, and it was not to be thought that Mr Macarthur senior stood behind a counter with a tape measure around his neck. Still, it was undeniable that Mr Macarthur junior’s commission had been paid for out of the profits from shirts and underlinen. It was clear how much these facts pained the son, a man whose every fibre was held together by pride.