Judith Allnatt - The Moon Field

‘I shan’t let you go before you promise me the first dance,’ Lucien insisted, and Violet had to agree gracefully.

Later, when Violet had rested and bathed, instead of ringing for Elizabeth’s maid, she dressed herself with great care, choosing her pale lilac, an evening frock with tiered layers of flimsy lawn. She turned back and forth in front of the cheval mirror by the window to see how it would accentuate her movements when she danced. Tonight, she wanted everything to be perfect.

As she opened the domed lid of her Noah’s Ark trunk to search for her best ivory evening comb, there was the tiniest tap on the door. Thinking it was Elizabeth, and with her head in the depths of the trunk, she called out, ‘Come in,’ but no one entered. She found the comb and put it on her dressing table; then she went to the door. There was nobody there. A row of closed doors stretched the length of the landing and the sweeping stairs at the end were deserted. From other rooms, faint noises of girlish voices, running water and clinking china suggested that others were rising but there was no sign of the person who had knocked, not even the distant footsteps of a disappearing maid in the hall below. As she stepped back to close the door, she glanced down and saw on the floor, pale against the rich reds and blues of the silk hall runner, a beautiful corsage: a perfect cream rose and two tiny buds against a wisp of maidenhair fern. Delicately, she picked it up and took it inside. Turning it in her hands, she found that there was a tiny scrap of paper behind the pin. She took it to the window to decipher the minute lettering and read:

For a glimmering girl …

She instantly recognised it as Yeats and knew it was from Edmund. She called to mind the verse from the mysterious poem:

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Flushing with pleasure, she hid the note in her jewellery case and pinned the flower carefully to her dress, the heady champagne of hope rising in her that Edmund meant this as a precursor to a declaration. Her heart quickened; it must be tonight. He knew that she was to stay with the family only a few days longer. He had said that he wanted to speak to her alone …

There was a brisk knock at the door and Elizabeth bustled in, resplendent in pale blue silk. ‘Are you nearly ready? Didn’t Mary come to do your hair? Shall I help you with it?’ She was fizzing with excitement. ‘Aha,’ she said, noticing Violet’s corsage, ‘I see you have an admirer.’

Violet, still half in her dream world of anticipation, visibly jumped in alarm. ‘Sorry?’

‘I see Lucien continues to pursue you at every turn,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes, Lucien,’ Violet said faintly. ‘He’s a little overwhelming, don’t you think?’ She sat obediently at the dressing table and let Elizabeth tackle her hair.

Elizabeth brushed it smartly until it became flyaway and static, talking nineteen to the dozen all the time. ‘Lucien is rather pressing, I must admit, and when it comes to dancing he’s got two left feet, but he’s clearly rather taken with you so don’t be too hard on him, poor boy. He was positively dogging your heels this afternoon, wasn’t he?’ She wound and pinned strands of Violet’s hair up into a soft arrangement of piled twists, and held it there while Violet anchored it in place with the ivory comb. ‘If he gets too much for you, Edmund or I can always rescue you,’ she said. ‘Edmund’s quite a good dancer. Well, I taught him actually, so at least he can waltz without tripping you up or standing on your dress.’ She teased out a wisp or two at Violet’s temples. ‘There, you’ll do,’ she said, picking up her gloves and handing them to her. ‘Shall we go down?’

As they passed through the hallway, thumps and male voices came from the music room where some of the young men were rolling back the carpet in case it should rain and the party be forced to come indoors. Outside, Edmund and his young cousin, Samuel, were carrying the gramophone between them. Violet, suddenly shy, hung back behind Elizabeth. The men set the machine down on a table, its brass trumpet gleaming in the hazy evening light. Immediately, the young men and women gathered round, pulling out records from leather carrying cases, peering at titles and exclaiming over their favourites. Edmund took charge, winding the handle and carefully placing the needle. The strains of ‘Dreaming’ wavered into the still air, the tenor voice lifting over the sweet sound of the strings as the music poured out and over the velvet lawns to lose itself in the trees and formal gardens beyond.

‘This is for our hostess,’ Edmund said. His mother looked pleased as his father stepped out and took her hand to lead the first dance. For the first few bars they danced alone, Mr Lyne ramrod straight with his chin held high, Mrs Lyne with a long-fringed shawl elegantly draped around her shoulders. Then others followed and the space between the great trees filled with moving figures, chattering voices and bursts of laughter as the twirling couples circled in a river of pale silks and evening suits.

Edmund was explaining the operation of the gramophone to Samuel so that he could take over. Violet hovered at the edge of the dancing crowd, beginning to despair as, one after another, friends of Elizabeth asked her to write their names on her dance card. She saw Edmund look towards her and his expression softened but then Lucien was beside her, saying, ‘I trust you wrote me in for this first one as promised?’ and whisking her into the dance.

As she danced with a succession of young men who led her rather over-enthusiastically and asked her the same set of predictable questions, to which she gave polite but less enthusiastic answers, she looked for Edmund. She feared that, as the son of the household, he might feel obliged to dance with every relative who was left sitting out a while but there was no sign of him among the dancers. He was no longer at the gramophone; neither could she see him in the groups gathered around the tables where refreshments were laid out: poached salmon and game terrine, cordials and champagne.

By the time Lucien returned and claimed his second dance, the shadows were deepening under the trees, stretching across the lawns like the fingers of long black evening gloves, and Violet felt taut with anxiety.

In the middle of the throng, Edmund suddenly appeared and tapped Lucien on the arm. He pointed over to the trees, saying, ‘Do excuse me, but as Miss Walter is interested in matters of illumination, through her photography, I think she might enjoy lighting-up time.’ Before Lucien could remonstrate, he had taken Violet in his arms and danced her away, moving lightly and swiftly with the flow of the crowd but guiding her expertly between the dancers so that as the music finished they found themselves at the edge and stepped out as if alighting from a carousel.

He placed her hand on his arm and walked her away from the milling crowd and over to the nearest cedar where Violet saw that under the spreading hands of the branches Chinese lanterns had been tied: white papery spheres, waiting to be lit, they hung like huge fruits.

‘Do you like them?’ Edmund asked. ‘I thought we’d never get them all up.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ Violet said.

‘Would you like to light them? Here, look, I have tapers.’ He picked up a long thin stick, struck a match in a splutter of flame and a smell of saltpetre and lit the end of it, which glowed a soft orange. He handed it to her and steadied her as she climbed on to the crooked roots and reached up to guide the flame carefully inside the lantern to the candle within. The flame caught and grew, filling the sphere with light that cast a pool of radiance over their upturned faces and the gnarled and shining roots below, and faded into shadows beyond them.