A Stairs - Eva Ibbotson

‘I really can’t see that it matters which of the chauffeurs drives us,’ replied Lavinia, tossing her head.

‘Oh, can’t you just!’ muttered Gwendolyn under her breath.

‘Mother, can I come in with you?’ asked Beatrice, quickest off the mark. ‘I’ve completely run out of wool for my tapestry cushion.’

‘Me, too,’ said Gwendolyn. ‘I want to go to the library.’

‘Well, I’m not staying by myself,’ said Priscilla. ‘Can I sit in the front, Mother? I always feel so sick in the back.’

‘You never feel sick when Hudson’s driving,’ hissed Lavinia.

‘Girls! Girls!’ The duchess held up her hand. ‘Silence, please 1 . If you all want to come we’ll have to take two cars. Gwendolyn and Beatrice can go with Hudson in the Daimler and -‘

Wo, Mother, why should we? It isn’t fair, just because we’re the youngest!’

It was at this point that the duke, though he had trained himself never to listen to a word spoken by his family, subliminally heard the warning bell which caused him to fold his newspaper and quietly steal away.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Anna had not given up her plan to cut her hair. She had received the earl’s message, duly delivered by Proom, and she had set it aside. She was leaving Mersham three days after the wedding and it was unlikely that she would see the Earl of Westerholme again. Nor did she believe that so busy and august a personage would have time seriously to concern himself with the length of a housemaid’s hair. Pinny was a more serious matter, but Pinny would be convinced when Anna swept into the little house in West Paddington, dazzling all who beheld her with her modernity and chic. And even had she felt inclined to hang back, she would have found it hard to do so in view of the support and encouragement she had received from the staff. For, one and all, the domestics of Mersham were convinced that Anna, with her dark hair cut softly to curve like a raven’s wing into her cheek, would provide a much-needed touch of below stairs glamour for the coming nuptials. It would also be one in the eye for the servants at Heslop when Anna, going over to help out at the ball, turned up with bobbed hair.

‘Because they’re a right snooty lot, I can tell you,’ said Peggy. ‘Give themselves all sorts of airs.’

It was quite a deputation, therefore, that saw Anna off on her free afternoon just a week before the wedding, clutching a whole half crown and bound for Maidens Over and the salon of Rene, Coiffeur des Dames, a young man who was reported to have trained in Paris and to be wholly conversant with the new techniques of shingling, bobbing and the rest.

Rene’s shop, painted a garish orange, was situated in the Market Square between a chemist and a fishmonger. Ignoring the churning of her stomach, which seemed not to have caught up with the New Thinking about hair, Anna pushed open the door. Inside, the shop was small and distinctly scruffy. Pieces of hair of all colours lay about as if dropped by confused and nesting birds, the washbasins were stained, the material covering the chairs was shiny and worn. It looked as though Rene’s Parisian days might be some considerable time behind him. Anna waited, examining pictures of Irene Castle with her shining bob, of Princess Marie of Roumania with her cropped fringe, trying to avert her attention from the trolley with its jumble of dirty combs and curling tongs.

‘Good morr-ninck, mademoiselle. May I assist you?’

Rene’s French accent was so strong that Anna, polite as always, felt compelled to address him in his native tongue.

‘Bonjour, monsieur. Je voudrais qus vous me coupiez lescheveux, s’il vous plait. Tres court!’

Rene’s button eyes popped. Consternation spread over his florid face. Too late, Anna perceived her gaffe.

‘I would like my hair cut short, please,’ she translated hastily. ‘Bobbed.’

Rene’s eyes lit up. This new fashion for short hair was going to make him rich. Not only were frequent visits necessary to have the hair restyled and trimmed, but nine out of ten girls who came to have their long tresses cut had no idea of the value of their discarded hair which he sold, at a most gratifying profit, to a wigmaker in London.

‘Certainly, mademoiselle. Perhaps mademoiselle would care to be seated? Elsie, come here!’

Elsie came from the back of the shop, a vacant-looking girl of about fourteen, who took Anna’s straw boater and jacket and helped her into a far from clean flowered overall.

‘Comb, Elsie,’ ordered Rene\

Elsie loped over to the trolley, rootled in the debris, and produced a comb.

‘Not that one, you foolish girl! The big one. How often do I have to tell you?’

More rootling, accompanied by nervous sniffing, and Elsie produced the big one. Ren6 began to loosen Anna’s pins and his eyes glistened. Amazing that such a slim young girl could have such masses of hair. It was soft yet heavy, with beguiling threads of chestnut and bronze highlighting the inky darkness. He should get ten shillings a pound for it if she didn’t know its value and he was sure she didn’t. Painstakingly, greedily, Ren6 combed out Anna’s hair and set it free in a mantle which covered the back of the chair, flowed down her arms, fell in rich coils on to her lap.

‘You have beautiful hair, mademoiselle. It is excellently suited to the new styles.’

Anna, watching in the mirror, was fighting a growing panic. ‘It’s only hair,’ she told herself, ‘dead stuff. No blood vessels, no nerves.’ Yet it was as if in the falling cascade that surrounded her she again read her past.

Memories crowded in on her. Herself, aged four, sitting in the huge bath in the nursery wing in Petersburg while Old Niannka rubbed her scalp with some devilish concoction which she swore would strengthen the roots and turn the fine, dusky down that covered Anna’s head into thick and abundant tresses. Any compliment to Anna’s hair in later years was always taken by Niannka as a tribute to herself and followed by a detailed account of the magic recipe which had included wolfbane and (she swore) the blood of bats. Niannka who had later betrayed them, stolen their jewels, and vanished … Petya, strap-hanging on her pigtails as he took the first, tottering steps across the limitless ocean of the bearskin rug beside his cot. And her father…Thinking of him she made a small, characteristic movement of the head, as if to shake away the pain, and Rene paused and said, ‘Am I hurting you?’ ‘No… no.’

Her father, who had come in from a day of frustration, trying to make the tsar listen to reason over some matter of policy, and gone up to say goodnight to her, plunging his hands into her hair where it lay spread on the pillow as into a cooling stream. ‘And yet it isn’t cold, your hair; it’s as warm as the rest of you. Fire water you’ve grown there, my silly Little Candle.’

More and more memories came. Sergei, pulling her out of the river by her hair when she fell out of the rowing boat at Grazbaya. The Princess Norvorad, her godmother, that formidable grande dame whom the Bolsheviks had gunned down in the cellar of her house, loosening her braids as she came with Pinny into the drawing room and saying in her exquisite, archaic French: ‘After all, ma chere, we need not despair. Something can be done with her, I think. Yes, something can certainly be done.’ And Pinny who every night, ignoring the grumbles of the nursery maid, had herself administered the three hundred strokes with the Mason Pearson hairbrush from the English shop in the Nevsky…

Am I mad? Anna now thought, as Rene, with a flourish, put down his comb. Am I completely mad to cut my hair?