The Peacock Emporium(4)
He smiled now and, despite the cold of the carriage, Vivi felt herself grow warmer. “You won’t be left on the side,” he said, placing his own feet on the seat beside her. “But yes, silly. Course I will.”
* * *
—
Framlington Hall was not one of the jewels of England’s architectural heritage. Its initial air of antiquity was deceptive: anyone with only a basic knowledge of architecture could deduce swiftly that its Gothic turrets did not sit comfortably with its Palladian pillars, and that the unquiet red of its brick had not been weathered by more than a handful of seasons. It was a structural mongrel, a hybrid of all the worst nostalgic longings for a mythical time past.
Its gardens, when not buried under several feet of snow, were rigidly formal; the lawns carefully manicured and dense as the pile of an expensive carpet, the rose garden arranged not in a gently tangled wilderness but in rows of brutally pruned identical bushes in a blood-bright shade meticulously bred or grafted in laboratories in Holland or France. It was less a garden than, as one visitor had noted, a kind of horticultural concentration camp.
Not that these considerations bothered the steady stream of guests who, overnight bags in hand, had been disgorged onto the salted drive that curved round in front of the house. Some had been personally invited by the Bloombergs, who had themselves designed the hall, some had been invited through the Bloombergs’ better-placed friends, with their express permission, to create the right atmosphere. And some had simply turned up, hoping, astutely, that in the general scale of things a few extras with the right sort of faces and accents were not going to bother anyone. The Bloombergs, with a freshly minted banking fortune and a determination to keep the debutante tradition alive for their twin daughters, were known as generous hosts. And things were more relaxed these days—no one was going to turf anyone out into the snow. Especially when there was a newly decorated interior to show off.
Vivi had thought about this at some length as she sat in her room (towels, toiletries, and a two-speed hairdryer provided), at least two corridors from Douglas’s. She had been one of the lucky ones, thanks to Douglas’s father’s business relationship with David Bloomberg. Most of the girls were being put up in a hotel several miles away, but she was to stay in a room almost three times the size of her own at home, and twice as luxurious.
Lena Bloomberg, a tall, elegant woman who wore the jaded air of someone who had long known that her husband’s only real attraction to her was financial, had raised her eyebrows at his more extravagant welcomes, and said there was tea and soup in the drawing room for those who needed to warm themselves, and that if Vivi needed anything at all, she should call—although not Mrs. Bloomberg, presumably. She had then instructed a manservant to show her to her room—the men were in a separate wing—and Vivi, having tested every jar of cream and sniffed every bottle of shampoo, had sat for some time before getting changed, reveling in her unheralded freedom, and wondering how it must be to live like this every day.
As she poured herself into her dress (tight bodice, long lilac skirt, made by her mother from a Butterick pattern) and swapped her boots for shoes, she could hear the distant hum of voices as people walked past her door, an air of anticipation seeping into the walls. She had been looking forward to the ball for weeks. Now that it was here, she was filled with the same sort of dull terror that she used to feel when going to the dentist. Not just because the only person she was likely to know was Douglas, or because, having felt terribly liberated and sophisticated on the train, she now felt very young, but because set against the girls, who had arrived, stick-limbed and glowing in their evening wear, she seemed suddenly lumpen and inadequate. Glamour didn’t come easily to Veronica Newton. Despite the feminine props of hair rollers and foundation garments, she was forced to admit that she would only ever be pretty ordinary. She was curvy at a time when beauty was measured in skinniness. She was healthily ruddy when she should have been pale and wide-eyed. She was still in dirndl skirts and shirtwasters when fashion meant A-line and modern. Even her naturally blond hair was unruly, wavy, and strawlike, refusing to fall straight like that of the models in Honey or Petticoat, instead floating in wisps around her face. Today, welded into its artificial curls, it looked rigid and protesting, rather than the honeyed confection she had envisaged. Adding insult to injury, her parents, in some uncharacteristic burst of imagination, had nicknamed her Vivi, which meant people tended to look disappointed when they were introduced to her, as if the name suggested some exoticism she didn’t possess. “Not everyone can be the belle of the ball,” her mother said, reassuringly. “You’ll make someone a lovely wife.”
I don’t want to be someone’s lovely wife, thought Vivi, gazing at her reflection and feeling the familiar drag of dissatisfaction. I just want to be Douglas’s passion. She allowed herself the briefest rerun of her fantasy, now as well-thumbed as the pages of a favorite book—the one in which Douglas, shaking his head at the unexpected beauty of her in her ball gown, whirled her on to the dance floor and waltzed her around until she was giddy, his strong hand placed firmly on the small of her back, his cheek pressed against hers . . . (It owed an awful lot, she had to admit, to Walt Disney’s Cinderella. It had to, as things tended to get a bit blurry after the kissing.) Since arriving here, her daydream kept being interrupted by slim, enigmatic Jean Shrimpton lookalikes, who tempted him away with knowing smiles and Sobranie cigarettes. So she had started a new fantasy, in which, at the end of the evening, Douglas escorted her back to this huge bedroom, waited longingly at the open door, and then finally, tenderly, walked her over to the window, gazed at her moonlit face, and—