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.’