Rosie Thomas - All My Sins Remembered

One night Eleanor asked impulsively, ‘What are you going to do, Blanche? About Sticks, I mean?’

‘Don’t call him that. I can’t do anything. I have to wait for him to offer, don’t I?’

Eleanor stared at her. Until that moment she had not fully understood that her sister meant to accept him if he did propose marriage.

‘Oh, Blanchie. You can’t marry him. You don’t love him, do you?’

Blanche pulled out a long ringlet of hair and wound it round her forefinger. It was a characteristic mannerism, familiar to Eleanor from their earliest years. ‘ I love you,’ Eleanor shouted. ‘I won’t let him take you away.’

‘Shh, Ellie.’ Blanche was deeply troubled. ‘We both have to marry somebody, someday, don’t we? If I don’t love him now, I can learn to. He’s a kind man. And there’s the title, and Stretton, and everything else. I can’t turn him down, can I?’

Eleanor shouted again. ‘Yes, you can. Neither of us will marry anyone. We’ll live together. Who needs a husband?’

Slowly, Blanche shook her head. ‘We do. Women do,’ she whispered.

Eleanor saw that her sister was crying. There were tears in her own eyes, and she stood up and put her arms round Blanche. ‘Go on, go on then. Make yourself a Countess. Just have me to stay in your house. Let me be aunt to all the little Strettons. Just try to stop me being there.’

Blanche answered, ‘I won’t. I never would.’

They cried a little, shedding tears for the end of their childhood. And then, with a not completely disagreeable sense of melancholy, they agreed that they had better sleep or else look like witches in the morning.

There came the evening of an informal dance held in the wooden hall of the village next to Holborough. The twins dressed in their rose pink and silver, and sighed that Beecham village hall was a long way from Norfolk House. But there was a large contingent of whooping army officers at Beecham, and there was also John Leominster. While Eleanor was passed from arm to arm in the energetic dancing, Blanche agreed that she would take a respite from the heat and noise, and stroll outside the hall with her partner.

Lady Holborough inclined her head to give permission as they passed the row of chaperones, and Blanche knew that all their eyes were on them as they passed out into the night. It was a mild evening, but she drew her fur wrap tightly around her shoulders like a protective skin. She was ready, but she was also afraid. They walked, treading carefully over the rough ground.

‘Blanche, you know that I would very much like you to see Stretton, and to introduce you to my mother.’

Blanche inclined her head, but she said nothing.

John cleared his throat. She was irresistibly reminded of Eleanor’s mimicry, but she made herself put Eleanor out of her mind, and concentrate on what was coming. It was, she knew, the most important moment of her life. If it seemed disappointing that it should have come now, outside the barn-like hall at the end of a rutted country lane, then she put her disappointment aside and waited.

‘I think you know what I want to say to you. Blanche, my dear, will you marry me?’

There was nothing more to wait for. There it was, spoken.

‘Yes, John. I will,’ Blanche said. Her voice sounded very small.

He stopped walking and took her in his arms. His lips, when they touched hers, were soft and dry and they did not move. That seemed to be all there was.

‘I shall speak to your father in the morning,’ John said. He took her hand and they turned to walk back towards the hall. ‘You make me very happy,’ he said.

‘I’m glad,’ Blanche answered.

After the engagement was announced, his lordship seemed to become aware of the bond between his fiancée and her twin sister. It was as if he could safely acknowledge its existence, now that he had made sure of Blanche for himself. He reminisced about how he had first seen them, coming arm in arm into the drawing room at Holborough.

‘As lovely as a pair of swans on a lake,’ he said, surprising them with a rare verbal flourish. Blanche smiled at him, and he put his hand on her arm. He took the opportunity to tell the sisters he wished to have their portrait painted. The double portrait would mark his engagement to Blanche, but it would also celebrate the Misses Holborough. He had already chosen the artist. It was to be Sargent.

When the spring came, Lady Holborough and her daughters removed to London. Blanche’s wedding clothes and trousseau needed to be bought, and there were preparations to be made for Eleanor’s second Season. They settled at Aunt Frederica Earley’s house, and in the intervals between shopping and dressmakers’ appointments the twins presented themselves for sittings at Mr Sargent’s studio.

They enjoyed their afternoons with the painter. He had droll American manners, he made them laugh, and he listened with amusement to their talk.

The portrait, as it emerged, reflected their rapport.

The girls were posed on a green velvet-padded love seat. Blanche faced forwards, dressed in creamy silk with ruffles of lace at her throat and elbows. Her head was tilted to one side, as if she was listening to her sister’s talk, although her dark eyes looked straight out of the canvas. Her forefinger marked her place in the book on her lap. Eleanor faced in the opposite direction, but the painter had turned her so that she looked back over her own shoulder, her eyes following the same direction as her sister’s. Their mouths were painted as if they were on the point of curving into smiles, the eyes were bright with laughter and the dark eyebrows arched questioningly over them. Eleanor wore sky-blue satin, with a navy-blue velvet ribbon around her throat.

Their white, rounded forearms rested side by side on the serpentine back of the love seat. It was a pretty pose.

The girls looked what they were, identically young and innocent and good-humoured. There was no need for Mr Sargent to soften any of the sharpness of his vision with superficial flattery. He painted what had first attracted him in the ballroom at Norfolk House, twin images of lively inexperience.

‘You have made us look too pretty,’ Eleanor told him.

‘I have painted you as I see you,’ he answered. ‘I can do no more, and I would not wish to do less.’

‘We look happy,’ Blanche observed.

‘And so you should,’ John Sargent told her, with the advantage of more than twenty years’ longer experience of the world. ‘You should be happy.’

Even then, the girls understood that he had captured their girlhood for them on canvas, just at the point when it was ending.

The Misses Holborough was judged a success. John Leominster paid for the double portrait, and after the wedding it was transported to Stretton where it was hung in the saloon. Blanche sometimes hesitated in front of it, sighing as she passed by.

Eleanor was often at Stretton with her, but she could not always be there. Blanche missed her, but she was also occupied with trying to please her husband, and with the peculiar responsibilities of taking over from her mother-in-law as the mistress of the old house. The separation was much harder for Eleanor.

The dances and dinners of the second Season were no longer a novelty. They were also much less amusing without Blanche, who was away in Italy on her wedding journey all through the height of it. A small compensation for Eleanor was a new friendship with her cousin Mary, the younger daughter of Aunt Frederica Earley. Mary had married a languid and very handsome man called Norton Ferrier, and the Ferriers were part of a group of smart, young, well-connected couples who prided themselves on their powers of intellectual and aesthetic discrimination. They called their circle the Souls, and they spent weekends in one another’s comfortable houses in the country, reading modern poetry and writing letters and diaries and discussing art.