The Black Panther E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 434

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Lady Gwendolyn Sherbrooke always felt she didn't belong, until a chance encounter with the brilliant Sir Philip Chadleigh changes everything. From the moment they meet she is strangely drawn to him, and him to her. Yet Sir Philip is a man tormented by the ghost of a lost love, one that binds him deep into a despair that he cannot escape. Or can he? Drawn into a world of haunting memories and forbidden passion, Gwendolyn discovers a chilling truth: the woman he lost died the very night she was born. Is the supposed connection they have together a coincidence or just her imagination? Is she simply a new love caught in the shadow of the past, or could she be something more? Could love, long lost, truly return? The answer is found in this spellbinding tale of reincarnation, mystery and romance that shows that some destinies can't be denied, and some love never dies.

Leseprobe

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To MISS EDITH E. GREAVES

Matron for twenty seven years at the City of London Maternity Hospital, in deep admiration of her unfailing sympathy, efficiency, and understanding.

And after death, through the long To Be

(Which, I think, must surely keep love’s laws),

I, should you chance to have need of me,

Am ever and always, only yours.

INDIAN LOVE LYRICS

1

It is difficult to know where to start this story. Birth is the obvious beginning of anyone’s history, just as death must be the end. And how can I tell the story of these last dramatic months without including the years of development, the slow awakening to realisation, that preceded them?

They were dull years, yet now they seem to me to have had a purpose, to fit neatly into the pattern of things, so that in their greyness I can perceive an occasional golden thread, a note of colour that synchronises with the whole. I can never escape from them, they are with me, just as my body is with me, altering, developing, ageing, but indissolubly part of me and of my life. And so they must be included here if I am to give a coherent as well as truthful account of myself.

All my life I have tried to escape from a consciousness of myself – perhaps I was instinctively afraid of learning too much, or it may have been a deliberate attempt to avoid emotion.

In adolescence most human beings shrink from the natural emotions – they sense their strength and try vainly to stem the rising flood. Most schoolboys have no use for girls and little girls go through a phase of hating boys.

I hated myself. I remember the moment when I first saw my face clearly. I can’t recall the room, the occasion, or the actual mirror into which I looked but I can still see my reflection staring back at me. The plump pink and white cheeks, the pale corn coloured hair, the half angry, half startled expression in my blue eyes. I loathed what I saw. I must have been very young – there was a blue satin bow at the side of my head and a frilled collar of white muslin round my neck.

Another moment in my childhood is even more vivid. There was a garden party or a fête in the grounds of our home, I forget which. I cannot remember the setting – I only recall the band playing on the lawn. The music thrilled me – certain music has always conjured up strange feelings in me – and I started to dance. For the first time in my life, I was aware of other people. I wanted them to applaud me. I believed that I could float gracefully over the grass before them. I thought of myself as a swallow in flight, I had a definite idea of what I could do, of how I would appear. Suddenly – I can experience it again now – I saw my knee. It was fat and naked, rising awkwardly from among the frills of my starched frock. I stopped dancing and ran away. I ran and ran, where to, or for how long, I do not know, but the misery of my flight remains.

Yet I have always admired my mother whom I resemble, and I think at sixty she is still one of the loveliest women I have ever seen. She is taller than I am and has more dignity than I shall ever have. Perhaps her loveliness lies in her serenity. Nothing seems to trouble her. She goes through life like a ship in full sail, taking everything as it comes. I have never heard her complain – and as long as I can remember she has never expressed any desires or wants beyond those of daily necessities.

As a child, I realised that my nature should in all justice have been like hers, but I have never had anything in common with her, unless it be the large bones, characteristic of her family, the classical features, and her golden hair, which earned her the description as a girl, of the ‘English rose’.

It was popular, in the Edwardian days, when the Jersey Lily was claiming the King’s attention, for beauties to be described as flowers. It was obvious, I suppose, that Mother should have been written up in the press and talked of as a ‘rose’. Yet I remember how nauseated I used to feel years later to hear people speak of me as a ‘rosebud’. I longed to look like Angela. It was inevitable that I should passionately admire my only sister. She was so much older than I, nearly eleven years, and David was only three years her junior.

I was an afterthought. Father has often referred to me as that, and on more than one occasion Mother has told me how much she disliked having to start a nursery all over again, just when she thought she had dispensed for ever with nurses and all the difficulties that they entailed in a household.

When parents are old they are supposed to spoil their children. At the same time I think they find it very difficult to have to enter into their children’s thoughts and feelings, to feel much sympathy with the years of youth, which are so far behind them.

Certainly as a child I felt terribly alone. Angela was in the schoolroom with a very superior Governess who didn’t get on with my nanny. David, I very seldom saw. He went to his preparatory school soon after I was born and by the time I was old enough to be aware of him in the holidays, he had reached the stage when he had no use for girls.

Angela was dark with thin, pointed features and a slim, almost willowy figure that was characteristic of my father’s family. I used to long to be like her. When I was about eight, I was severely punished for blackening my hair with coal dust to see what the effect would be. Angela went to school when she was sixteen and after that time I saw very little of her. When she came out, mother and father gave her a short season in London. I was still a little girl, but old enough for lessons, and Nanny used to teach me reading and writing every morning while she washed and ironed my dresses.

It is funny how, as a child, one never realises what money means or its importance. Each year as I grew older, more rooms were shut up in my home, fewer servants were employed and the times when mother or I had new clothes became increasingly less frequent. I used to hear father talking, planning economies on the estate, saying at meal times that it was impossible for him to fulfil all the demands that were being made on him. It made no impression on me because my idea of poverty was the children I would see playing outside the cottages in the village, or at harvest time working with their parents in the fields. Now I understand how really difficult those years were – David was at an expensive public school and Angela was anxious to have a good time like other girls of her age.

It was funny that I was not happier, for after all, the usual child’s dream of bliss is a huge garden in the country, a pony to ride and very little supervision. I remember sitting, staring out of the window in my nursery, feeling a kind of misery, which now I can best describe as homesickness – I know no other feeling which approaches that I experienced so often as a child. I was subject to nightmares, too, and fits of crying that bewildered my mother, for they were quite out of keeping with the placid, contented temperament she expected from a child who looked the spit of herself. Later I had a Governess – she was shared with two children in the neighbourhood and Nanny stayed on to look after me and my clothes.

I was backward for my age and I hated learning. I found that all they wanted to teach me was dull and uninteresting. I daresay I was badly taught. Our Governess was a harassed genteel little woman, who found three girls of different ages far more than she could cope with, and she made little attempt in the hours we spent with her to do more than recite a wearisome repetition of dates and facts.

Yet strangely enough it was through her that one tremendous interest came into my life.

We had a gramophone at home – an old, rather creaky affair that had been given to David when he first went to school. The records were old too – they were mostly of the comic variety, songs or jazz pieces that made the maximum amount of noise. For my birthday in the summer Miss Jenkins bought me two records. I was disappointed at the present, thanked her politely, and forgot all about them for nearly a fortnight. Then one Saturday when it was raining, I played them. The moment the first one started a new world was opened to me a world of sound. I had never expected anything like it. I had never experienced before such feelings as those that rushed over me as I listened. I played those records again and again until they were almost worn out – I have them still.

When I was sixteen there was talk of sending me to school, but it came to nothing for father decided he could not afford it. Actually, I believe my parents, thinking that I was pretty and likely to be a great deal prettier by the time I had grown up, concluded that an extensive education would not be necessary. After all, they argued, Angela had married exceedingly well in her first season. She had met Henry Watson, only son and heir of one of the richest brewers in the country. Of course, it was not an ideal match – the Watsons were not the family that my father would have chosen for one of his children to marry into – but he was delighted at the prospect of Angela being rich, rich and free from all the problems that had beset her family ever since she was born.

Henry Watson was nearly thirty-seven when he married her. He was stockily built, slightly pompous, but pleasant. He was Member of Parliament for a north country seat and very anxious to have a wife to entertain for him in his constituency and in London. I have no doubt that Angela filled the bill admirably – when I grew to know my brother-in-law better, I was soon aware that he enjoyed both Angela’s title and the status that his marriage gave him in society.

We were all brought up to realise that in his own way, which we shouldn’t underestimate, father was important. After all, the earldom dates back to the seventeenth century and Maysfield had been in the family for nearly a century before then. When he was a tiny boy, David had had drummed into him that the most important fact in his life was that he would inherit both Maysfield and father’s name. The worst father could ever say to us when we had been naughty was “I don’t expect one of my family to behave like that”. He said it with a kind of sternness that was far worse than if he had been angry. It made us feel completely unworthy of being his children.

I was only eight when Angela got married, so except for the excitement of being a bridesmaid and walking behind her up the aisle, I remember very little of the ceremony or of Henry Watson and his relations. Five years later when Mother and Father went up to London to stay with them for Ascot, I remember hearing on their return, Father make a somewhat disparaging remark about Henry’s father, and Mother saying, “One can’t expect everything, Arthur, after all, Angela has a lovely home”. I thought about that and wondered why Mother had not said a nice husband, or nice children, because Angela had two by then. But she hadn’t, and when I tried to ask her about Angela and Henry, she was noncommittal and insisted on telling me about Ascot instead.

I saw my sister two or three times in the passing years, but not more. She and Henry would come down for the weekend, or sometimes stop for luncheon or tea, on their way to stay with other people in the neighbourhood. When I was sixteen she greeted me with “Darling, how terribly fat you’ve got”, and I almost disliked her at that moment. She was looking so lovely herself. Beautiful clothes and good jewels are shown at their best on Angela and she had the right figure for the modern square-shouldered fashions. She was bright and vivacious, too, but with an almost feverish manner as though she were frightened of missing something, and had to go on ceaselessly striving towards some goal which she could never reach.

Henry used to watch her when she was talking. Once I saw an expression on his face that made me shudder. I got the idea that he was like some circus proprietor watching an animal he was very proud of, at its tricks. I didn’t like Henry. He used to patronise me in the wrong sort of way. I know now that it was just that he was naturally awkward with children, but somehow the ten shillings that he used to give me when he went away, never meant as much as the half-a-crown, or even the handshake, from some of our other guests.

So I grew up at Maysfield. There was never a lack of things to do, but I did them almost automatically, just as one can eat a meal and not taste it. I was not living, I was dreaming. Perhaps it was just a usual stage in adolescence.

I had one friend, the Vicar. He was an old man, well over sixty, but he had an understanding and a sympathy that drew people of all ages to him and made him their confidant. His daughter, who did lessons with me, was a weak, rather whiny child for whom he had endless patience and affection, which, I believe, was based more on duty than on spontaneity.

He was always nice to me. He was a great admirer of Father’s, but I think also he was more than a little relieved to find that the expense of his daughter’s education would be shared by myself and another neighbour’s child. He lived a frugal life at the vicarage and he must have been lonely, for his wife had been dead for some years. The Governess who taught us, who also took charge of his household, was a distant relative of his.

We had lessons in the vicarage in the big, cold schoolroom, which was originally intended as the dining room of the house, and as soon as they were over we used to rush into the garden, the two other girls off to whisper secrets and eat sweets, and I off to find my host. I would generally find him gardening. He loved his garden – it was his only passion in life. It was he who made me understand flowers, how one could group colours to make a pattern of beauty when the time for blossoming came, and how a small delicate plant in a rockery could be made to glow like a jewel.

But we did not always discuss flowers. He talked to me of people, of events, of history, geography and literature. Every word he said remained in my mind, while my lessons were forgotten as soon as they were finished. At last he introduced me to his library. He had a miscellaneous collection of books, mostly tattered and dirty, for he bought them second-hand in the Charing Cross Road or picked them up at sales where they had been too dilapidated for other collectors. There were whole shelves of biographies and of memoirs. They appealed to him the most – the stories of people who had led full lives, those who had lived, perhaps, the quietest, most humdrum existence it was possible to imagine.

At first it was more to please him than to please myself that I borrowed a volume. I suppose it was inevitable that after that the desire to read more should possess me. I couldn’t put a book down once I had started it. If I had to go to bed, I used to creep onto the landing outside my bedroom and sit reading by the light of the chandelier in the hall. I didn’t dare switch on my own light – the old motor, which snorted and clunked through the day making the light for the house, was woefully inadequate. The light grew dimmer and dimmer every Sunday evening, when the gardener who attended to it was off duty. On ordinary weekdays in the summer it would just last out, but in the winter we often had to grope our way to bed. When I was too sleepy to read more I used to go back to bed, often shivering with cold. I used to crawl under the bedclothes to try and get warm again. I would often wake at five or six in the morning, driven by an urge to continue reading where I had left off.

Perhaps that was when I was conscious of being really happy – when I was lost to the world I knew, following some explorer across the Sahara, indulging in the intrigue at the Court of Louis XIV, or weeping at the death of Mary Queen of Scots. I seemed to be able to live the lives of these people with them. I concentrated on a book so fiercely that if anyone spoke to me I did not hear them. Often I would be roused by someone who I had no idea was in the room with me.

My parents mildly teased me about it. “I must say I never expected to have a child who was a bookworm,”Father would say. Having spent most of his life out of doors, he had little use for books and The Times was about all he could manage in the evening before his eyes drooped and he dozed in his chair by the fire.

I seldom saw my Mother read. She would sew and knit innumerable garments for the Personal Service League. When she wasn’t doing that she would be writing letters. Mother belongs to the old school who keep up a frequent, and I imagine, animated correspondence with all their relatives. Even friends whom she has not seen for years, she will regularly write to, although what she has to tell them in her closely written sheets of notepaper, I cannot begin to imagine. She writes to David, who went out to India with his regiment when I was eighteen, once a week. I watch her cover page after page, while I, who write irregularly, wonder what on Earth to say that would be of the slightest interest to him.

When I was eighteen, Father’s brother died and we went into mourning for six months, so that it was quite impossible for me to ‘come out’ while we were all wearing black and unable to accept any invitations. As my birthday is in June, it meant a whole year wasted, and although I didn’t expect a season in London as Angela had had, I hoped that Mother would arrange for me to stay with various people who would make some effort to do their best for me. It was disappointing, because I had looked forward for some time to getting away from home. I had visited relations once or twice in the past years, but it seemed ridiculous to think that I had never been abroad, that I had never stayed in London for more than one night, and I knew practically nothing of the world, or even of the country in which I lived, beyond thirty miles of my home. Father and Mother were not the sort of people to whom one could ever complain, or even try to put into words thoughts of that sort. I had hoped that my coming out would mean a change, if only for a short while.

When they told me that Uncle Granville was dead, I sat down and cried. I think Father was rather pleased at my grief as Uncle Granville had always been his favourite brother and he had spent a lot of time at Maysfield. He was a High Court Judge, personally I found him a dull, pompous old man, entirely self-centred as old bachelors are apt to be. I couldn’t explain that I was mourning, not for him, but for my own hopes, and my tears remain a tribute to his memory.

2

My whole life changed on that May morning when mother called “Gwendolyn!” as I was doing the flowers in the housekeeper’s room. Mother is the only person who calls me by the name I received at my baptism – it was her mother’s name and she has, naturally, an affection for it. Everyone else has always said how awful it sounds, and so since a baby I was called “Lyn”. Mother, however, is never swayed by other people’s opinions.

“Gwendolyn,” she called, “come here.”

I put down the flowers with a sigh. It is impossible to get a job done at home before one is called to do something else. There is so much to do in the morning – the dogs to be brushed and combed, the flowers to be rearranged, the china dusted in the drawing room, innumerable messages to be carried backwards and forwards between the kitchen and the morning room, as well as the food to be ordered from the village. There was only me to do it all, for Mother had suffered from arthritis all the winter and had been told to keep her leg up as much as possible. Once she got down to the sofa in the morning room she seldom moved from it, except for meals, until it was time to go to bed.

“Coming!” I shouted and I ran across the hall and up the short flight of steps that led to the morning room.

Mother was in her usual place in the big bow window. The sun was shining on her hair, which even now retains much of its lustre, she looked at me with such a radiant smile that I said to myself, ‘How pretty she is!’

“I have got news for you, Gwendolyn,” she said.

“News for me?” I questioned.

She held up a letter and I saw it was in Angela’s writing.

“Angela wants you to stay with her in London,” she said. “Would you like to go?”

I felt my heart leap with excitement.

“When?” I asked.

“As soon as we can spare you,” Mother replied. “She says that she had meant to ask you last year, only, of course, Uncle Granville’s death made it impossible. But she feels now that we are out of mourning that you must have some kind of coming out. She has written and asked if she might present you and has received her command for the third Court.”

“Oh Mother!” I said.

Mother put on her spectacles. She always has to wear them to read.

“She adds that you needn’t worry about clothes. ‘Henry has been very nice about it,’ she writes, ‘and when I explained that things were a little difficult for you now, he said he would stand Lyn a trousseau, so that’s that!’”

“When can I go, when?” I asked.

Mother took of her spectacles again and looked at me.

“I shall miss you,” she said gently.

“But, Mother, I must go, I must.”

“Of course, my dear,” she answered. “I want you to go and I want you to have a good time. I often feel very guilty that we didn’t send you to school. Angela enjoyed her year at Mademoiselle Jacques’, but you do understand, that income tax is so much worse now than it was then. We can’t afford to do anything nowadays.” She gave a sigh.

“I’m not complaining, Mother, but I would like to go to London.”

She looked at me with a smile.

“I hope you won’t be disappointed,” she said. “I remember hating my first season.”

“But you had a wild success,” I said.

“Afterwards, not the year I came out. But then, girls are so different now. I was shy, desperately shy and I knew so few people.”

“Well, I shan’t know anybody,” I said, “except Angela and, of course, Henry, but in a way that makes it all the more interesting. It will be like going off on a voyage of exploration. Can’t you see me, Mother, a traveller in a strange land?”

“Oh Gwendolyn, your imagination!” Mother laughed. “I am afraid that one day it will get you into trouble.”

“My imagination?” I questioned. “You make it sound like a deformity.”

Mother looked up at me with a quizzical expression in her eyes.

“Ever since you were tiny,” she confessed, “I have wondered how much you have realised of what is going on around you and how much you have lived in a world of your own.”

I laughed, almost in a shamefaced way. It is always disconcerting to find that other people have noticed things about one, when one has hardly been aware of them oneself.

“I will keep my imagination severely in check,” I promised. “How long will Angela keep me?”

“She doesn’t say,” mother replied. “But I suppose that the Third Court is hardly likely to be held before the middle of July.”

“Over two months!” I cried. “Oh, how exciting! Can I go at once – tomorrow?”

“There’s the Sale of Work on Saturday,” Mother said. “You must be here for that, you promised the Vicar.”

“Sunday, then?” I asked.

“Angela is certain to go away for the weekend. You had better go on Monday and arrive about teatime.”

“I can catch the 2.45,” I said, remembering the many times I had driven our guests down to catch the London train and watched it steam out of the station, waving them goodbye as they journeyed away into the unknown world outside.

“What shall I wear to go to London? What can I wear?”

“What have you got?” Mother asked.

I knew that she could not remember – Mother never was interested in clothes, either for herself or for us. I can hear Nanny now in my childhood saying, “But, My Lady, the child hasn’t got a rag to her back and her shoes are right through at the toes.”

Mother would stand and listen, a vague look of anxiety on her face.

“How distressing, Nanny,” she would answer. “Well, I am afraid you will have to write to London for some patterns.”

When the patterns came, Nanny would take them triumphantly in to Mother, only to be met with surprise.

“Clothes! Surely Gwendolyn doesn’t need anything more? I thought it was only a month or so ago that she had something new.”

“It will have to be the blue serge,” I said. “It is frightfully shabby, but I am thinner, aren’t I, Mother? And it might be possible to get into something of Angela’s until we have time to shop.”

I walked across the room and looked at myself in the long Queen Anne mirror, dark with age, that hung between the two big bookcases. I was a little thinner, but my figure seemed to me voluptuous. Looking at it I thought of Nanny saying, “She is beautifully covered, My Lady, and firm as anything – it is muscle, not fat!”

I was still beautifully covered, there was no getting away from it. There was no pretence of my having the slender hipless and chest less outline that was fashionable and which Angela had managed to attain and keep ever since she was seventeen.

I was so big – my feet were well shaped, but I took sixes. My neck was white and firm but almost, well Junoesque…

I hated myself and I turned away from the glass.

“I hope Henry is prepared to spend a good deal of money on me,” I said sharply. “He will need to if I am to be anything like fashionable enough for a London Season.”

‘Supposing I’m a failure?’ I thought. ‘Supposing I disgrace them?’ I felt almost terror at the idea. Supposing after a few weeks they suggested that I should come home, that I needn’t wait for the Third Court? Wouldn’t it be better not to go, not to risk humiliation?

I tried to shake myself free of my fears, but I knew they would pursue and terrify me, circling around me like ghouls and giving me no peace, I should lie sleeplessly tossing hour after hour at night, or wake before day to find the question still irritating, still unanswered.

“You are quite certain that Angela wants me?” I asked Mother desperately.

She looked startled at the tone of my voice.

“But of course she does,” she said, “why, she says in her letter” – she picked up her glasses again and turned over the pages – “yes, here it is,

‘You know how much I would like to have Lyn, Mother dear, and how carefully I would look after her. I promise you that she shall have a lovely time, so don’t have a moment’s anxiety about how she will be getting on.’”

“She really is an angel, isn’t she?” I cried in a tone of relief.

“I will write and accept,” Mother said. “The 2.45 on Monday! You are sure it is running?”

“Quite certain,” I answered, “but I shall call in at the station this afternoon to make sure.”

I went towards the door. When my hand was on its handle, Mother said,

“I will lend you my small row of pearls, Gwendolyn, while you are away, but you will be careful of them, won’t you dear?”

“Oh Mother, how sweet of you!”

Her small row of pearls that she wore more often than the heavy family jewels, was a particular treasure. I knew that it had been given to her by her father when she came of age. The pearls were well matched, slightly pink with diamond clasp. Angela had borrowed them for her coming out dance – now I was to be allowed to wear them.

I love jewels, I always have. When I was a small child I used to creep into Mother’s room when she had gone to do dinner and look into the jewel box that was left out her dressing table. I would try on the heavy diamond rings and clasp her bracelets round my wrists. Once I was caught, for Father came back to the room for something that Mother had forgotten. I was too terrified to move and only stood staring at him with frightened eyes, the diamonds glittering on my arms and round my neck. But he laughed, said I was a little peacock, and picking me up in his arms, carried me downstairs to show me to Mother. She too had laughed at the time – there were people there – but next morning she had told me that I must be very careful, that all the jewels had been in the family for a great many years and they were a trust that each generation handed on to the next. One day David’s wife would have them all.

It seems ridiculous to think of Maysfield with its family treasures, pictures and tapestries, which are mostly National Treasures, and Mother’s jewellery, all worth hundreds and thousands of pounds, and nothing cashable. When I think of the local girls we have to train as housemaids, rough-handed, willing enough, but far too few to begin to keep that vast place clean. When I think of the food, thin, meagre little cutlets for dinner, coming up in the heavy crested silver dishes which were kept polished by old Grayson, who has been with father for over fifty years, I want to laugh and to cry. There are empty stables and the gardens going to rack and ruin for want of money, with only one gardener and the fruit garden let out to a local man who sells back to us at cost price our own vegetables and potatoes. And what is so terrible is that its only hope of survival lies in David’s marrying money.

Of course we never mention the fact – that would be a vulgarity of which Father and Mother are quite incapable, but we all know it in our innermost hearts, and I suppose David does too. When Father dies and the heavy death duties have to come from the estate, it will be quite impossible to keep even two housemaids and old Grayson, unless more money is found from somewhere. Perhaps David will find an heiress in India, perhaps he will be lucky like Angela. If he doesn’t, that is the end of Maysfield. I suppose it will be sold as a school and David will try to cram the pictures, the tapestries, and the silver, which are entailed on to his son, into a small villa at Aldershot, or into a low-ceilinged modern flat in London.

It was only when I came to leave Maysfield that I found how much it meant to me.

All through the preceding days I had been buoyed up with excitement – I had been unable to concentrate on anything. I had forgotten duties that had become so much part of my routine that ordinarily I could have done them in my sleep.

The Sale of Work in the village hall, which the Vicar had held to wipe off the debt on the church, was its usual social success and financial disappointment. We cleared only fifteen pounds where we had hoped for at least thirty, but everyone in the neighbourhood had come in during the afternoon to gossip and enjoy a cup of tea. I found myself for once the scene of attraction.

“I hear you are going to London,” everyone said to me the moment we shook hands. Needless to say, the news had spread all over the county by that time. And more than one neighbour added, “We shall miss you, Lyn. The Court won’t seem itself without you.”

I felt flattered. I had grown so used to taking a very second place to Father and Mother that it was surprising to find that I was noticed at all, or that people minded whether I was there or not.

Then came the one goodbye I minded saying – to the Vicar. I went down after tea on Sunday for a last farewell. We had had people at the house who had motored over unexpectedly to see mother, so I was late in getting away and only arrived when the church bell had begun to peal for evensong.

I did not go to the front door. I walked straight into the garden where I knew I should find the Vicar walking up and down on the lawn, thinking out his sermon.

“I have come to say goodbye,” I said.

He held out his hands and took both of mine in his.

“Lyn, my dear,” he said, “I hope you find great happiness and that you come back to us safely.”

“You say that as though I was going on a long voyage,” I said. “That’s how I feel myself. It is all very strange and almost frightening.”

“Of course it is,” he said gently. “You have lived such a very quiet life here, but I don’t think you need be frightened. It is extraordinary how easily we all get used to wider horizons.”

“I’ve wanted to go away so much,” I said, “but now I am afraid – perhaps really I’m only frightened something will stop me.”

“I will come to the station, and wave goodbye to you tomorrow,” he said, “to make quite certain that you go.”

“Will you?” I asked. “I would love you to. I shall feel rather lonely otherwise, because Mother, of course, can’t come to see me off and father has a Hunt meeting at two o’clock?”

“I promise you I will be there. Bless you my child?”

The bell had begun to toll the five minutes to half-past. Picking up his books, he walked through the little door in the wall that led from the vicarage garden into the churchyard. With a final wave of his hand, he disappeared.

When he had gone I sat down on the wooden seat and looked at the garden around me. How dear it all was, the rockery, which I remembered being started nearly ten years ago, the stump of a tree that had fallen down in a summer thunderstorm and which was now a mass of Paul Scarlet flowers, the sunken lily pond, which had taken nearly six months to make and had threatened to be a failure because the water wouldn’t run away – it was all so familiar, but for the first time I seemed to see it clearly, as a part of myself.

It was there, where the lupins were just breaking into blossom, that I had heard the story of the taking of Quebec. The Vicar made Woolfe with his irritability, his frenzy, his impatience and his genius, seem a living person, as when we were nailing up the honeysuckle on the summerhouse, he had made me feel the same about Clive of India. We had sat together for the first time in that summerhouse to read Browning, and here on the seat where I was now sitting, I had begun Childe Harold and read it right through in the afternoon, while the Vicar mowed the grass, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in front of me. Yes, the mellow red brick walls enclosed not only the garden but also my education.

After a long while I got up and walked slowly into the house and into the library. I looked along the untidy shelves. The books were badly kept, for the one daily maid at the Vicarage had little time for dusting. I wanted something to take to London, something I thought that I could read if I wanted to escape, as I might, from levity and excitement. I opened one or two of the books. Which should it be? I knew most of them so well. They were my friends, the real friends that I was leaving behind me.

I heard the front door slam, a voice speaking in the hall. I had no desire to see anyone else, not even the girl with whom I had shared my lessons for so many years. I picked up the book that was nearest to me, walked quietly through the French-window that led into the garden and crept away as I had arrived.

3

Angela’s house was quite overwhelming. I had expected something very luxurious and grand, but it exceeded anything I could possibly have imagined. Henry had apparently employed all the most expensive decorators in London and they had really let themselves go. There were tapestries, period furniture, pictures of everyone’s ancestors except Henry’s, statues done by the latest and most sensational sculptors, chandeliers glittering and shining and filled with real candles that were changed every day.

It was not surprising that I felt overawed and tongue-tied when I arrived.

Luckily there weren’t many people to meet and Angela was lying on the sofa looking, as usual, exactly like a picture in Vogue. Henry was standing in front of the fireplace which – being the summer – was massed with all sorts of expensive flowers, and Henry’s mother, Mrs. Ernest Watson, was sitting in an armchair looking far too young, I thought on my first glance, to be his mother.

This first impression, I soon found, was only an illusion. Mrs. Watson was about the most synthetic woman of her age it was possible to meet. She had a good figure, but that was the only thing about her that was her own. Her hair, her teeth and her complexion were all bought, and although she looked a passable forty in electric light, at any other time of the day she quickly disillusioned one.

I kissed Angela and shook hands with Henry before Mrs. Watson exclaimed,

“Gracious, Angela, I had no idea that your younger sister was going to turn out a beauty! She certainly won’t be in your hands for long this Season.”

Her remarks somehow broke the rather awkward moment of my arrival.

“Wait until I have finished with her!” Angela said, looking at me affectionately and slipping her arm through mine.

“I have made appointments with hairdressers and dressmakers and goodness knows what else. Tomorrow morning we are going to have a lovely time. Henry will faint when he gets the bill, but otherwise everyone will be pleased.”

“Thank you,” I said shyly to Henry, trying to smile gratefully at him.

He patted my shoulder awkwardly, just as he did when I was a child.

“That’s all right,” he said. “In for a penny, in for a pound. You deserve a good time and it is nice for Angela to have someone to take about with her – getting a bit too keen on running around on her own.”

There seemed to be a double entendre in his words, for Angela gave an uneasy laugh.

“You flatter me,” she said. “Come, Lyn, I want to show you your bedroom.”

She led me out of the room and we walked across the landing to the lift. As she shut the door and pressed the button, she said,

“I am sorry, Lyn, but Henry’s like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Oh don’t you realise,” she said irritably, “he can’t help labouring the point when he pays for anything, but unless one coaxes money out of him one doesn’t get any.”

The lift stopped before I could think of any reply and we got out at the third floor. I followed Angela down the passage wondering what I ought to say, wondering also whether she was happy as Father and Mother had always believed.

She led me into a large room with two big windows overlooking the square. There was a bathroom leading out of it and twin beds covered in quilted pink satin.

“Darling, it is heavenly!” I said. “But surely this is your best spare room – won’t you want it for somebody else?”

“There are two other rooms,” Angela said. “As it is we have Henry’s mother here incessantly – I am getting sick of it, I can tell you.”

She walked to the looking-glass and patted her hair,

“How do you think I am looking?” she asked.

“Lovely,” I answered. “I have never seen you look better, really I haven’t.”

“You really think so?” Angela questioned anxiously as though she valued my opinion.

“Of course I do,” I said. “You are doing your hair a new way, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“You don’t think it makes me look a little older?” she asked.

I laughed.

“You talk as though you were a hundred,” I said. “After all, you were only twenty-nine last birthday.”

“Don’t,” Angela said. “It sounds awful – I never tell anyone my age, it is such a mistake, for even if you are honest they always put you on five years.”

“I shouldn’t have thought you wanted to look as young as all that,” I said without thinking. “After all, Henry must be forty-five, or is it forty-six?”

“Oh Henry!” Angela said with a shrug of her shoulders and turned away from the glass. “The maid will unpack for you, and tomorrow we will have to get you something to wear. We’ll burn that terrible coat and skirt. Where did you get it?”

“I’ve had it three years,” I answered.

“It looks like it,” Angela said. “I am sure Mother chose it for you – it is just the type she made me have when I was eighteen.”

“I think she did,” I answered.

“Darling Mother,” Angela said, “she has got absolutely no taste.”

I felt almost shocked. I was so unused to hearing Mother and Father criticised. While I suppose I knew that Mother was a bad dresser, who never worried about her own clothes or mine, I had never dared to put the criticism into words, even to myself.

Angela was scrutinising me.

“You know, Lyn,” she said, “Margaret’s right, you are going to be a beauty.”

“Margaret?” I asked.

“Henry’s mother,” she explained. “You don’t suppose we are allowed to call her anything so ageing as ‘Mother’, do you? Christian names, dear, every time. She likes to think she is still thirty-five. She’s got the most terrible gigolo whom she insists on taking out every evening to dance. He’s a wretched little boy of about twenty-five who, I am sure, loathes the sight of her.”

Quite suddenly I sat down on the bed and started to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” Angela asked suspiciously.

“I was laughing at how far I had to come from Maysfield,” I answered. “Can you imagine Mother’s face if you talked like that I don’t suppose she has ever heard of a gigolo.”

“You will hear of them here, all right,” Angela answered. “And a good many other things too. I’ve thought sometimes that I am wrong to bring you up to London, Lyn. One is much happier, really, at home, knowing nothing, meeting nobody, not getting mixed up in all the intrigues and difficulties of this social hell.”

“What’s the matter Angela?” I said. “Aren’t you happy?”

“Happy?” she echoed. “Is there such a thing? Well, perhaps there is, but not for me at any rate.”

“But darling...” I began.

“No, Lyn,” Angela said turning away. “You will see, hear, and understand quite enough if you stay here a month or so and if you take my advice, you will just be discretion itself and not take sides.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“It isn’t important, anyway,” Angela said wearily. “Take off that awful hat and come downstairs and have a cocktail. There are some men coming in later, friends of Henry’s from the House of Commons. We will try you out on them before we put on the finishing touches.”

I looked down at my coat and skirt and homemade blouse.

“I can’t come to a party like this,” I said.

“Well, I can’t lend you anything,” Angela replied. “You really ought to plan things better, Lyn. You must be at least thirty-eight inches round the hips – and I’m just thirty.”

“Well I will stay up here,” I said, “and wait until tomorrow when I have some decent clothes.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll find you something. Come down to my room and have a look.”

I don’t think I ever hated my appearance so much as when I stood in front of Angela’s long fitted mirrors in my old, faded camiknickers and found that dress after dress wouldn’t go over my shoulders, let alone my hips.

“It is hopeless,” I said eventually.

So I put on my own clothes again and because she insisted, went downstairs to the drawing room, feeling hot, ruffled and exceedingly irritable.

Actually the cocktail party went off far better than I had expected. The men were cither contemporaries of Henry’s who wanted to talk politics and who were, therefore, not interested in women, pretty or otherwise, or Angela’s intimates, who being full of the latest gossip about people of whom I had never heard, ignored me. Mrs. Watson’s boyfriend duly arrived and I must say he seemed to me far better than Angela had led me to expect. He was a thin, rather intelligent-looking young man, with a high forehead and a nervous habit of flicking his fingers together whenever he was not talking. He was quite pleasant to me and I was just beginning to enjoy our conversation together, when I saw Mrs. Watson glowering at me, and realised that I was being tactless.

I moved away from him across the room to where Henry was standing. Jovially my brother-in-law put his arm round my waist and said to the man standing next to him,

“What do you think to my little sister-in–law? She only arrived this evening from the wilds of the country – she is going to stay with us for the Season.”

“I hope you enjoy yourself,” Henry’s friend said.

“I mean to,” I answered.

My words were trivial, but at that moment they meant something to me, and they were almost in the nature of a vow. Already I saw difficulties ahead, but I meant to circumvent them. I had come to London for a good time and I had every intention of having it. My visit to Angela wasn’t going to be anything like I had anticipated – I saw that. But I could at least make the best of everything that presented itself. I had always thought of Angela as ideally happy with her husband, getting everything she wanted from a man who adored her. Already I had learnt that was not a true picture and I was almost afraid of what else I might discover.

Yet, I told myself fiercely, it should not affect me. I had my own life to lead! I was going to meet people – I was going to see places and things that in the past had been only names to me. I had so much to do and such a short time to do it in, and I vowed that come what may I would live fully every moment of my new life.

I woke in the morning with the same determination. Everything came flooding back to me after the first sensation of wonderment as I opened my eyes. Where was I? I wondered. Then I remembered. I got up and drew back the curtains. It was only eight o’clock but I was used to getting up early, although Angela had told me that I mustn’t think of being called until half-past nine.

Outside in the square gardens a few wood pigeons were cooing, and, they reminded me of home, but they did not make me feel homesick. I felt on tiptoe for the adventure that was before me.

Last night we had dined quietly in the house – then we had gone to a cinema. There were just six of us, Mrs. Watson and her young man whose name was Peter Browning, Henry, Angela, and a man who arrived for dinner, and who, from the way that she introduced him, I sensed instantly was of importance. His name was Captain Douglas Ormonde. He was tall and fair, good-looking in a somewhat conventional ‘Brigade of Guards’ manner. The moment he arrived Angela was a different person. Gone was her air of weariness, of restlessness, of irritability. She literally sparkled – her eyes were shining, amusing witticisms came quickly to her lips, one after the other. It was so obvious that she was delighted with Douglas Ormonde’s presence that more than once I glanced nervously at Henry, wondering what he thought about it. This, of course, was the explanation of Angela’s unhappiness – the reason why she wished to be young and beautiful, the reason why she was finding her present married life difficult.

It would hot have taken a very imaginative person or a very sensitive person to understand that here, just in front of me, was what is known as the eternal triangle – Henry, old for his young wife but rich, Angela infatuated with a man of her own age and someone who, I gathered from the conversation, was not well off.

Henry, I thought too, was at his very worst. He seemed to enjoy embarrassing his guest on the question of money. During dinner he said to Captain Ormonde,

“Aren’t you playing polo this summer – I thought your regiment was so keen?”

“I am afraid I can’t afford to,” Douglas Ormonde answered with a laugh. “It is an expensive pastime, you know, Watson.”

Henry raised his eyebrows.