A Stairs - Eva Ibbotson

Yes, he would go to the wedding. It was, when all was said and done, a religious ceremony. But not to the ball. People might really think it was odd if he came to the ball in a black armband. And in any case a black armband would not go at all well with the white tunic, the golden circlet of laurel leaves and the lyre of Apollo. Sighing, the doctor moved over to the wardrobe and opened it. Nathaniel and Gumsbody had done him proud - the outfit was extremely becoming, simple yet regal, and they had thrown in, at half price, a bottle of liquid make-up for his arms and legs. He had tried a little on his knees last night and the effect was excellent: sportive yet glowing. But of course a black armband would kill that. It was impossible.

For a while he stood looking at the white folds of the chiton, the finely wrought sandals. Was he perhaps being rather selfish, obtruding his grief like that? Why wear a black armband at all? Why, in fact, tell anyone that Doreen had died? To go, keeping to himself this bereavement, to pretend to laugh and dance and be merry when his heart was breaking - was not that the noble thing? Was that not what Apollo himself would have counselled? To dance with Miss Hardwicke, to hold in his arms her full-breasted, white skinned loveliness, to remind her, under cover of the music, of her procreative duties, was that not a worthier task than to sit here mourning and grieving, a victim of self-pity and despair?

Of course there was the funeral. But Doreen’s parents, with whom she had never quite cut off relations though he had begged her to often enough, would be only too happy to organize all that without interference. And a thoroughly lower-class business it would be - but that was their affair. The actual interment, after all, wouldn’t be for at least a week and he’d be back by then.

Yes, it was a hard choice, a task that would take all his self-control but he would do it. He would go to the wedding and the ball - and somehow contrive to enjoy himself. In which case, as he was going to see the florist anyway about a suitable wreath, he’d better enquire about a white carnation to go with the morning clothes he’d hired. Or would a gardenia be better? That is, if gardenias were worn at country weddings before lunch…?

- - - -*

The Herrings, meanwhile, had perfected their plan for getting to Mersham with a minimum of financial outlay. It was a complicated plan and though Melvyn had explained it several times to Myrtle, she was having trouble with it, her physical endowment, though generous, not being of the kind that extended to the grey matter of the brain.

‘Look, it’s like this,’ Melvyn explained patiently. ‘I buy one ticket for the two of us, see?’

‘What with?’ asked Myrtle, unhooking her corsets, for they were preparing for bed.

‘Just leave that to me, will you? I buy a return ticket, see? Then you wait till there’s a good crowd pushing round the barrier an’ you go through and give up your half of the ticket all properly like, and as soon as you’re through you push the return bit of the ticket back in my hand. Then I come along and the inspector says, “Tickets, please” and I say, “I’ve already given it to you…”’

‘But you haven’t,’ said Myrtle, rubbing the weals the whalebone had left in her burgeoning flesh.

‘No, Myrtle; I know I haven’t. Because you have. So then I say, all innocent like, “But I gave it to you” an’ he says, “No, you didn’t” and I say “Yes I did an’ if you look you’ll see I have because ‘ere’s the return half with the number on it and if you look you’ll find the same number on one of the tickets in your hand.” And then ‘e looks and sure enough, there it is.’

‘What about the twins?’ asked Myrtle, slipping back into the black crepe de Chine petticoat that did double duty for a nightdress. That was what she liked about black undies; there wasn’t all that bother about washing them.

‘We’ll do the same with the twins. Buy one ticket between the two of them.’

‘All right. Only you go and explain to them what they’ve got to do.’

Melvyn rose and opened the door of the adjoining room. Owing to an unfortunate spot of bother with the bailiffs, the twins were sleeping oir a mattress on the floor. Dennis was lying on his back; his full-lipped mouth hung open and, as he breathed, the mucous in his nose bubbled softly like soup. Beside him lay Donald, apparently overcome by sleep in the act of eating a dripping sandwich, the dismembered remains of which lay smeared across his face.

Melvyn stood looking down at the swollen cheeks, the pendulous chins and bulging arms of his offspring and his fatherhood, never a sturdy plant, wilted and died.

‘Meat,’ he said wearily to himself. ‘That’s all they are. Just blobs of meat.’

He went out and closed the door. ‘They’re asleep,’ he said to Myrtle. ‘I’ll tell them in the morning. But it’ll work, you’ll see. It wouldn’t have done if we were going all the way to Mersham, but they’re sending the car to Maidens Over. There’ll be enough of a crowd there.’

Myrtle got into bed and reached for the cold cream. ‘I suppose it’s better than being locked in the lav,’ she said. ‘But your Aunt Mary’d better come up with something good once we’re there.’

‘She will. She’s got a soft spot for me on account of I look like her Rupert. I’ve got the Templeton eyes, see.’

Melvyn, for once, was not boasting. Both his own features and the twins’ dough-like countenances, wer unexpectedly pierced by the wide, grey eyes^ with their gold-flecked irises, which the dowager had bequeathed to her son.

‘Mind you, I’ll have to get past that old sod of a butler,’ said Melvyn, remembering Proom’s unequivocal stand over the gold sovereigns and the Meissen figurine. ‘He hasn’t half got it in for me.’

‘Oh, leave ‘im to me,’ said Myrtle. ‘If ‘e’s a man I’ll ‘andle ‘im,’ and began to giggle, delighted at her double entendre.

Melvyn was less sanguine. From what he remembered of Cyril Proom, Myrtle was on a losing wicket there.

- - - -*

Prince Sergei Chirkovsky, sitting in his neat, grey uniform at the wheel of the huge, plum coloured Daimler with the Nettleford Arms (a serpent extended in fess, the head raised …) embossed on the door, steered his way expertly between the carters’ drays, the buggies and dawdling delivery vans of the interminable stretch of road between Darlington and York and wondered how long he could endure his present post.

He was the most easy-going of men, his incredible good looks reinforced by a serene and undemanding acceptance of what life brought. ‘God was in a good mood when he made Sergei’, the matrons of Petersburg used to say, looking fondly at the charming, handsome, unassuming boy. But Sergei, who had accepted without complaint the hardship of exile from the land he deeply loved, was fast meeting his Waterloo at the hands of Honoria Nettleford and her ‘gals’.

The duchess’ snobbery and meanness, her rudeness to him as an underling, were deeply unpleasant but not unexpected. It was what he had to put up with from Hermione and Priscilla, from Gwendolyn and Beatrice and the equine and haughty Lady Lavinia, all of whom he was now conveying southwards to the Earl of Westerholme’s wedding, that made Sergei wonder how much longer he could hold out.

All his life, Sergei had been pursued by women. He was six years old when the tiny, dimpled Kira Satayev, eluding the vigilance of his Miss King, had ambushed him behind the Krylov Monument in the Summer Gardens and informed him that he found favour in her eyes. The peasant girls on his parents’ estates, the gypsy dancers on the islands, the ingenues in the ballrooms of Petersburg and their worldly mothers in its salons -all had made it clear to him, in their different ways, that they were his for the asking. He had learnt very early to accept with gratitude and pleasure where acceptance was appropriate, to refuse with tact and gentleness where acquiescence might involve impropriety or pain. But never in all his life had he encountered anything as crude and displeasing as the advances of these snobbish and lascivious girls.