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  My father, she belittled regularly. ‘Of course,’ she would say, vigorously brushing my hair, ‘Peter was there for only half of the Somme. Gervase was in right at the terrible beginning,’ or ‘Really the things Peter has told you, Lucy! He’s so insensitive. Of course – Gervase was a poet …’

  There was no real fight for possession. At the first signs of a struggle – not weakly but out of pride I think – my father must have stood back. Now, we weren’t friends at all: it seemed I had taken sides, had made a choice, and that I couldn’t remember doing so consciously was no help whatsoever.

  Whenever I thought about the situation now, it was with a sullen, half-hearted sort of anger. But that was seldom. Worrying for and about my mother was a full-time occupation.

  Gathering up from the carpet and the sofa all her scattered memories – the letters, the photographs, the cuttings – I pushed them back into the Box, shuffling and pressing to make them fit. When I’d done this, I thought, I would go up and see if she was awake.

  The front door banged suddenly, and I sat up, guiltily.

  Pugin got down from the armchair and as the door opened and my father came in, he padded over to him, rubbing his head and ears against his trouser leg.

  By now I was standing at the cupboard, flipping through an old magazine I’d hurriedly snatched up. My father shook Pugin off.

  ‘My God, it’s hot,’ he said, still in the doorway, mopping his brow.

  I asked: ‘How was the fishing?’

  ‘Frank felt dizzy. He drank a couple of pints too fast in the heat. We called it a day,’

  Neither of us moved. I glanced across at him: he was standing very squarely, not looking at me at all but at some point beyond. His face, always tanned in summer, was flushed; his dark hair, thick, greying slightly now, damped down by the heat.

  He was still a very attractive man (Elizabeth, and three others in my class who’d seen him, thought him smashing). Now, my recent session with the Memory Box had prompted me to play an old game. Screwing up my eyes, I stared hard: trying to catch a glimpse of the young officer of Patmore, Spring 1918. I was successful. Through my half-closed eyes I saw a man thirty years younger…

  ‘What’s up?’ He moved suddenly. ‘Something wrong with your eyes?’

  ‘Nothing – no. The sun –’

  ‘I wish to God you’d get something to do. Mooching about the house all day. Have you been out at all?’

  ‘Yes.’ I heard my voice sounding sullen. ‘I did the shopping –’

  ‘How’s Winifred?’

  I said that she was asleep. He shrugged his shoulders: ‘I’ll not disturb her then. I’ll have a bath and be off.’ He turned: ‘London go all right?’

  I nodded; feeling sick at the thought of the White Rose. But he had already turned to go out:

  ‘Why don’t you get yourself a boy-friend?’ he said from the doorway, pulling hard on the knob, narrowly missing Pugin.

  Shaken – his coming, and his going, had upset me – I put the magazine back, closed the cupboard door with difficulty, then took down a book from the shelf above.

  Gervase’s poems. (Mauve binding, handmade deckle-edged paper – a few pages foxed; fading silk ribbon markers, and a curious smell or scent – redolent I supposed, of Patmore.) Inside: nothing to startle.

  When dusk with milky wings unfurl’d

  The crimson of the sunset reaves …

  or

  … my travail o’er

  Were 1, benumbed, to rest by Stygian shores …

  Once, several years ago, dreaming of him as a father I’d tried to make something of them, but now I seldom opened them. Not that there was anything there to tax the understanding; even from the little I knew, they didn’t seem to me very good.

  Hushed now the reedy stream’s lament

  The owl’s nocturnal call, the nightingale …

  or, a change of tone, this:

  Now you see her, now you don’t!

  That’s my girl playing hide and seek.

  There’s a cloud about her. Whitest gold …

  ‘He adored my hair, Lucy,’ said my mother. Upstairs, secreted away, she kept a second copy, which she read often.

  ‘It’s a very great experience, Lucy. Being loved by a poet.’

  Standing at the sink a little later, filling a kettle to make tea for her, I thought: I shall have to go to the White Rose.

  Although on the surface she often made me impatient, I was bound to her, enchained by my pity. If she wanted the White Rose, I must want it too; for, my mind full of the Memory Box, I thought: trailing clouds of borrowed glory, hadn’t I come into this world to make her happy?

  Chapter Four

  Two weeks later, I was called to the White Rose for an interview. The principal, Miss Metcalfe (the ‘dragon’ described by Elizabeth) was abroad and I saw only her assistant, Miss Laycock. A small, faded woman, nearly as shy as I was, she invoked Miss Metcalfe constantly; beginning and ending each sentence with ‘Miss Metcalfe says,’ or ‘Miss Metcalfe thinks’. But to my surprise, she told me that I was accepted, ‘subject to confirmation’. I hadn’t thought it would be so simple; and my mother, who would have liked to be invited along to the interview (‘I would have liked, Lucy, to have been able to explain some of the background’) seemed disappointed almost that there hadn’t been more to it. ‘I suspect of course,’ she said afterwards, ‘that if one can pay the fees, one is admitted. As simply as that. But then, up here,’ she wrinkled her nose, ‘it’s brass that talks.’

  She took this opportunity to make one of her attacks on my accent. She’d heard, she said, of a Miss Lister who taught voice production in Harrogate, ‘A drama teacher, I believe – there are excellent reports of her anyway.’ She was going to write to Gervase about it. ‘If this Miss Lister could even get you to hear yourself, Lucy!’

  But all these horrors lay several weeks ahead, and in the meantime I had to fill in the days: an old problem, made more difficult this year by Elizabeth’s having started work. As a family we’d never gone in much for holidays and the War when it came provided the perfect excuse. Before that my mother had taken me a couple of times to some great-aunts in Wiltshire, sisters of her mother, where I’d been discussed a great deal, and disapproved of even more. (Small wonder that I’d forgotten the details: the only relic an unreasonable dislike of the soft, rich landscape.)

  This holiday, my idleness irritated her. Girls in her day.. . Why for instance didn’t I go out and sketch? Hadn’t I once been rather keen? she asked, speaking of something she herself had killed many years ago; when, sitting in the kitchen I’d drawn huge, crude imaginary monsters, crayoning them in violent reds and purples. ‘They’re unnecessary,’ she’d said of them angrily, muttering once or twice ‘Peter is behind this’; and bringing me home instead a Toytown colouring book. I’d soon lost interest: regaining it only for a little while around thirteen, when I fell in love with the art teacher.

  Now, to please her, I went off for long bicycle rides in the warm afternoons, taking a book in the basket: all childhood favourites (I wasn’t a great reader outside of school) and all in old editions which had belonged originally to Gervase, and then to my mother. The Red Fairy Book, Three Men in a Boat, The Prisoner of Zenda. Their fly leaves inscribed in fading ink: ‘Gervase Tinsdale from his loving godfather, September 1900.’ ‘Gervase Tinsdale, Patmore 1899.’ Sometimes a Latin tag: ‘Est multi fabula plena joci. Ovid,’ in the Jerome K. Jerome, ‘Decet verecundem esse adolescentem. Plautus,’ in the Anthony Hope. I read and re-read them all, the musty smell of their pages an evocation of Patmore. But that summer, although I was seventeen now, it was the fairy tales which I took most often. The beauty of their shape, their blend of excitement and security, the way in which impossible odds were overcome, was a combination I found irresistible, consoling, apt.

  I heard nothing from Elizabeth. I didn’t want to bother her, because I supposed she was spending all her free time with Andrew. Once or twice, I wondered vaguely
about the dance she’d mentioned.

  Then, with only a week or so to go before the White Rose term, she rang me late one evening, shouting excitedly down the phone, ‘It’s tomorrow that dance, Lu! Long dresses and all.’ And then, as if I’d been refusing invitations for weeks, ‘Your last chance to meet Andrew, Lu!’

  What it was in aid of or who was giving it, I never found out. But it began at seven-thirty and was thoroughly respectable with only orange squash to drink. The hall was very shabby. It had been a rainy day and the warm damp brought out the smell of San Izal on the dusty unpolished floor. Together with a lot of other girls, I sat on a bench at the side.

  My appearance was giving me little confidence. As usual, I’d had nothing suitable to wear and earlier in the day had had to borrow a dress from Elizabeth. It was very frilly, in worn blue taffeta, and when I’d come down, ready to set off, my mother who hadn’t been keen I should go in the first place had said disapprovingly, ‘Lucy, that dress shrieks Elizabeth Horsfall.’ There was a quantity of bead embroidery round the neck which was beginning to come away, but Elizabeth wouldn’t let me remove it. ‘You’ve just not an idea,’ she said despairingly, ‘what boys really go for, Lu.’

  She herself was dressed in tight-fitting red sateen with an outsize bow on her bottom. Looking radiant, clasped tightly by an adoring Andrew, she sailed past me continually. I sat on; my bead embroidery didn’t seem to be giving me any advantage – unfair or otherwise. Once or twice Elizabeth pulled a face at me as she passed, but on the whole she seemed to be disowning me.

  At last a Paul Jones was announced.

  We twirled round to ‘A life on the ocean wave’. Whenever the music stopped there were two or three girls to one boy and each time I was jostled out of the way. Until on the last gallop round, I noticed a boy skip deliberately to one side, to land exactly opposite me.

  ‘Alan Holdsworth,’ he said, leading me at once into a waltz. ‘And I’ve been wanting to ask you all evening.’

  He had dark hair smoothed down shinily, and thick hornrimmed glasses, and as he danced he pumped my left arm up and down, up and down. He was rather shy, he explained. ‘But I’m grand when I get going.’ He was training to be a salesman in shoes: ‘I’ll have to get over this shyness though.’ He’d been with the Koylis, for his army service, ‘But even that didn’t help, really.’

  I warmed to him at once. We danced together the next number, and then the next and the next – Elizabeth frowning and winking at me every time we passed. Later in the evening, I met her in the dimly lit ladies’ room at the back of the hall.

  ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘He’s no Gregory Peck, Lu, but at least he’s in trousers.’ She peered into the fly-blown glass. ‘I thought you were never. Sitting there like a sunk Yorkshire pud.’ She rubbed at her nose with a grubby powder puff. Sounds of ‘The lady is a tramp’ were coming from the dance floor.

  ‘Oh heck, Lu,’ she said. ‘I’m going to die when Andrew goes. Isn’t he wonderful, Lu? Don’t you think he’s smashing?’

  Back in the hall, both boys were waiting for us. The four-man band struck up ‘Jealousy’, and Elizabeth, the red sateen bow askew now, set off at once. Alan, tangoing with surprising competence, asked did I go often to the pictures? It appeared that we’d seen and liked most of the same films. Brief Encounter was coming to Harrogate, he said: would I like to see that? We made a date to go together, in a fortnight’s time.

  At ten-thirty, Mr Horsfall came to collect us. Elizabeth wasn’t at all pleased; Andrew, she told me, lived in quite the other direction.

  ‘Next thing, they’ll be looking to see I’ve my knickers on. It’s her,’ she said. ‘She sent him.’

  The White Rose was in a small crescent, two floors up above a shop selling homemade chocolates. That first morning, the sight of the violet and rose creams, the truffles, the chocolate ginger and the brazils nauseated me, as I hurried breakfastless and apprehensive through the side door with its White Rose emblem, and then up the dark narrow stairway into the school itself.

  No one saw me arrive; and remembering where the cloakroom was I went and hid in there, pretending to fiddle with my hair while girls came in and out noisily. I looked carefully at their clothes, uncertain of my own. Predictably, there’d been a last-minute rush to get me ready, my mother’s enthusiasm not stretching to the practical aspects, her mind already leaping ahead to the time when the course would be over and, superbly qualified, I would begin my real life. She was never anyway very helpful over dress – although generous enough with her coupons when she hadn’t mislaid them. With this, as with so many other things in life for her, if one couldn’t have the best then the matter was of no more interest. ‘Of course even the worst clothing can’t disguise breeding, Lucy. But I find it very hard to accept the sort of illmade rubbish foisted on us nowadays.’ The inevitable rayon, which she still called ‘art silk’, came in for her special scorn, as did the Utility label, and nylon from parachutes. ‘Quality was something I just took for granted, Lucy. I had a whole drawerful of gloves, as a girl. All real. Leather, silk, cotton, full-length kid. I remember especially a pair of grey doeskin ones – I wore them for tea at Gunter’s, that last visit before the Great War.’

  I would determine then, to return her one day to the world of real silks, real skins; but at the same time I was impatient; rationed from the moment I’d taken any interest in clothes I felt starved of glamour, the New Look my particular worry. In the spring, inspired by the velvet rings – first three, then four – which Princess Margaret had added to her coat, I’d sewn a horrid multicoloured frill round the bottom of an old summer dress; but the shape had been wrong, and Princess Margaret had by then become bouffant-skirted.

  ‘Eighteen coupons for a New Look suit,’ said my mother. ‘And the most flimsy material. What’s wrong with a tailor-made?’ But money had been short also, and we were too proud to ask my father. (‘This legacy, now, Winifred? It’d better cover the lot.’) The end product had been depressing: a still serviceable school blouse topping an old Gor-Ray pleated skirt, but a sensible enough choice as it turned out.

  Most of the girls seemed to know each other already, and there were cries of recognition. All of them seemed self-possessed (a familiar first-day illusion I’ve had several times since, as if an inner eye shuts out the lost-looking, the pale, the nervous). A few minutes later a bell rang loudly and, some of the girls exclaiming ‘Gosh, is this it?’ we all crowded into the typing room.

  For the price asked, I’d imagined an array of gleaming new machines, but each desk held only a very old upright, docketed with a student’s name, so that a noisy giggling search began at once. Miss Laycock scurrying in, begged us almost frantically to be a little quieter. ‘Miss Metcalfe is coming!’

  When the principal made her entrance a few moments later, the silence was immediate. Saying loudly, ‘Good morning, Ladies !’ she walked up on to the dais, and from there looked down on us all, searchingly. I’d found to my dismay that I had a central front row desk; and afraid to look about me, I tried to gaze at her with what I hoped was an alert yet humble expression. She hadn’t turned out to be at all what I’d pictured – which for no particular reason had been someone rather spiky. She was big, like my mother, but more solid; and she seemed to be uniformly bust all the way down. Dressed in navy blue with touches of white, her thick legs stockinged in dark brown lisle, the whole tree trunk was topped by a Roman emperor’s face, and tightly curled, greying hair.

  Her voice was penetrating. When after a nervous silence someone tittered at the back, she remarked coldly, ‘I had hoped, Ladies, that you would have left your giggles with your gym tunics.’ Then almost immediately, she launched into what must have been the set speech for every first day of the Course:

  ‘Here at the White Rose,’ she began, her hands folded in front of her, ‘here at the White Rose, we are dedicated to one task, and one task only. The making of reliable, responsible, resourceful secretaries. Secretaries capable of filling posts
anywhere in the world. Indeed,’ and here she paused for effect, ‘indeed, were I to tell you where some of my former students have been, you would all be out with your atlases at once!’ She looked around her. ‘Reliable, responsible, resourceful,’ she repeated. ‘These are the “three ‘R’s’” of the White Rose.’

  Her voice boomed on: speaking of rich opportunities, of satisfactions, wide horizons, devotion to work, integrity, absolute discretion. My eyes glazed with over-attention; my mind wandered.

  ‘And in conclusion,’ I heard her say at last, as I returned with a jerk, ‘I would like to draw your attention to a few minor points. The first being clothes. Exaggerated fashion has no place in the business world. I hope I shall not have to say this again. For office wear, I would suggest a blouse, a skirt, a cardigan – a tailor-made perhaps; I should like also to suggest a tie, but here perhaps I am not completely up to date.’ She smiled stiffly. ‘And lastly, Ladies, language. The use of colloquialisms and slang can only debase our glorious inheritance, the English tongue, so that we shall not, on any occasion, use them here. The Americans may have won the War, but we are still a free nation!’ Two girls laughed nervously. ‘We shall never, for instance, speak of a “boss”, but always of an “employer”, never of a “job”, but always of a “post”. We shall never, even amongst ourselves, substitute “OK” for “all right”…’

  It was over at last; and calling ‘hard work, hard work, Ladies, is the secret’ as she went, she left us to Miss Laycock, and our first typing lesson. Open manuals at the ready, keys and clumsy fingers hidden by a guard we began a supervised assault on our uprights. When at midday we were released, I heard all about me, often in reassuring Yorkshire accents, a buzz of complaints.

  ‘This place might as well be school…’