Eva Ibbotson: A Company of Swans

‘I want to go to the lavatory,’ announced the ancient Mrs Transom in a surprisingly loud, firm voice.

‘No, you don’t, Mother,’ hissed her daughter. ‘Not now, you don’t — you’ve been.’

‘What do you mean, no, I don’t?’ said the old woman angrily. ‘I may be old, I may be useless, I may be someone whom everyone would like to see dead and laid out on a slab, but I still know when I want to go to the lavatory and I want to go to the lavatory now .’

A hurried consultation followed. The butler, more bored than pained, issued instructions, holding out his mottled hand in case the information rendered might produce a tip. Mrs Transom was led away on the arm of her unfortunate daughter — and the party trooped into the Library.

Oh, the poor books, thought Harriet, running her handkerchief surreptitiously along the dusty, calf-bound volumes on an open shelf. Here was Horace who had so loved the foolish Lesbia and Sappho who had turned loneliness into the most moving verses of the ancient world — and here Harriet’s own special friend, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations she now pulled out and opened at random, to read:

Live not as though a thousand years are ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

Only, what is good? wondered Harriet. She had thought of it as submission, virtue, not setting up her will against others. But might it mean something else? Might it mean making yourself strong and creative? Might it mean following your star?

The butler glared at her and she replaced the book. However poor I was, reflected Harriet, I would always dust the books. And I would always find flowers, she thought, remembering the drifts of wild narcissi she had seen as they came up the drive. And once again she wondered what ailed this marvellous house.

They trooped up the grand staircase, admiring the carved newel posts, while from below came the anguished baying of Mrs Transom’s daughter, who had taken a wrong turning and lay becalmed in a distant hallway. Here were the private apartments of the family — the upper Drawing-Room, the bedrooms — past which the cadaverous Mr Grunthorpe, enjoining silence, now led them bound for the Long Gallery on the top floor.

Harriet had fallen a little behind the others, weary of the absurd antics of her ‘bodyguard’ and planning, if a side staircase could be found, the rescue of the Transoms.

She was thus alone when a door was suddenly thrown open and a woman’s voice, high and imperious, cried out, ‘No! I don’t believe it! It cannot be as bad as that!’

Involuntarily, Harriet stopped. The luxurious room thus revealed, framed in the lintel of the door, might have come from a painting by Titian. There was a four-poster hung in blue silk, a dressing-table with a silver-trimmed mirror, a richly embroidered chair… The covers of the bed were thrown back and beside it stood a woman in a white negligée with a river of dark red hair rippling down her back. She had brought up one of her arms against the carved bedpost as though for support, and a little silken-haired papillon lay curled on the pillow, looking at her with anxious eyes.

‘Even my idiot of a husband could not have gone as far as that,’ she continued. ‘You are trying to frighten me.’

A maid moved about the back of the room, laying out clothes, but it was to someone unseen that the woman spoke — a man whose low-voiced answer Harriet could not make out.

‘Oh!’ The rapt exclamation came from Louisa, who had returned to admonish her loitering niece. Her long face was transfigured; her mouth hung slightly open with awe.

A sighting! Here without a doubt was the lady of the house, Isobel Brandon, in whose veins flowed some of the bluest blood in England. For while Harriet saw a beautiful and imperious woman driven to the edge of endurance by some calamity, Aunt Louisa saw only the grand-daughter of the Earl of Lexbury whose wedding some ten years earlier at St Margaret’s, Westminster, had required a double page of the Tatler to do it justice.

But Mrs Brandon now had seen them.

‘For God’s sake, Alistair, shut the door! You can’t go anywhere until those wretched women have stopped trooping through the house. And anyway, I sent all the documents to—’

The door closed. Harriet and her aunt joined the others. Mrs Transom’s daughter had discovered another stairway and pushed her mother up it — and the party entered the Long Gallery.

A long, light room with a beautiful parquet floor… The walls nearest the door were taken up by family portraits of the Brandons. Among the dull paintings, varnished into uniformity, only two caught Harriet’s attention: a likeness of the old General, almost comical in the obvious boredom and irritation shown by the sitter at being compelled to sit thus captive for the artist; and one of Henrietta Verney, who had linked the Brandons to her illustrious house — a vivid intelligent face defying the centuries.

‘Is there no portrait of the present owner?’ enquired Mrs Belper.

‘No, ma’am. The present owner is abroad a great deal and has not yet sat for his portrait.’

And is not likely to either, thought Mr Grunthorpe with gloomy satisfaction as he pointed out a view of Stavely’s west front by Richard Wilson.

Harriet wandered for a while, not greatly interested in the conventional landscapes and battle scenes. Then right at the end of the gallery she came across an entirely different group of pictures — chosen, surely, by someone outside the family. Light, sun-filled modern paintings: a Monet of poppies and cornflowers; a Renoir of two girls in splendidly floral hats sitting on a terrace… and one at which she stood and looked, forgetting where she was, forgetting everything except what she had lost.

No one has understood the world of dance like Degas. The painting was of two ballet girls in the wings of the Paris Opéra: one bending down to tie her shoe; the other limbering up, one leg lifted on to the barre , her head bent over it to touch her ankles. This painter who all his life was obsessed by the beauty of women at work had caught perfectly the weariness on the girls’ faces, the pull of their muscles, the fierce, unending discipline that underlies the tawdry glitter of the stage.

And even Edward, coming up to Harriet with his usual proprietary air, saw her face and left her alone.

Ten minutes later the tour was completed and the ladies back in the entrance hall. It was here that Mr Grunthorpe met his Waterloo. Aunt Louisa, the Circle’s secretary, advanced towards him and thanked him on behalf of her group for showing them round. Mr Grunthorpe, his rapacious hand curved in expectation, murmured that it had been a pleasure. He was still staring at his empty hand in total disbelief as Louisa, following the other ladies, disappeared through the front door.

There now followed the selection of a suitable site for the picnic. This was not a simple matter, but at last they were settled in a sheltered spot in the sunken garden, the hampers brought from the charabanc, rugs spread and parasols arranged, and the ladies fell to.

Edward was at first pleased to sit beside Harriet enjoying the excellent food they had prepared. Though exceptionally quiet even for her, she looked very pleasing in her blue skirt and white blouse and he particularly liked the way she was wearing her hair: taken back under a velvet band and loose on her shoulders. But after a while he grew restive; he was, after all, an entomologist and here not only for pleasure.

‘Come, Harriet,’ he said presently. ‘I want to replenish the laboratory teaching specimens. Will you help me?’

She nodded and rose and they moved off in the direction of the croquet lawn, while at a discreet distance the stalwart Millie Braithwaite, eschewing her after-luncheon nap, pursued them.