The Peacock Emporium(6)
Vivi found herself moving accommodatingly sideways as several conversations continued around her. She was starting to feel discomfited by the way Xander’s hand had “accidentally” brushed her behind several times.
“Anyone seen Douglas?”
“Chatting to some blonde in the picture gallery. I gave him a wet willie as I went past.”
“Another dance, Vivi?” Alexander held out a hand, and made to lead her back on to the dance floor.
“I—I think I’ll wait this one out.” She put a hand to her hair, and realized, with dismay, that her curls no longer felt smooth and round, but had collapsed in stiff fronds.
A queue was snaking out of the downstairs bathroom, and Vivi, standing alone as the chatter and noise ebbed and flowed around her, found that by the time she’d reached its head she genuinely needed to go. Suddenly, with “Vivi! Darling! It’s Isabel. Izzy? From Mrs. De Montfort’s? Don’t you look fab!,” the now limited space between her and the lavatory door was filled.
The girl, whom Vivi only vaguely remembered, wheeled in front of her, inelegantly hoicking up her long pink skirt with one hand, and planted a kiss just behind Vivi’s ear. “Darling, I couldn’t just nip in front of you, could I? I’m absolutely dying. Going to disgrace myself if I . . . Marvelous.” The door swung open in front of them, Isabel vanished inside, and Vivi found herself crossing her legs, a vague need turning into an uncomfortably urgent one.
“Bloody cow,” said a voice from behind her. Vivi flushed guiltily, imagining this to be directed at her. “She and that Forster girl have been completely monopolizing Toby Duckworth and the Horseguards all night. Margaret B-W’s terribly upset.”
“Athene Forster doesn’t even like Toby Duckworth. She just fools around because she knows he’s going to pash on her.”
“Him and half the bloody Kensington barracks.”
“I don’t know how they can’t see through her.”
“They certainly get to see enough of her.” There was a ripple of laughter through the queue and Vivi plucked up the courage to glance behind her.
“Her parents hardly speak to her, I’m told.”
“Are you surprised? She’s getting quite a reputation.”
“You know the rumor is that she . . .”
The voices behind her dropped to a murmur, and Vivi turned back to the door lest she was thought to be eavesdropping. She tried, unsuccessfully, not to think about her bladder. Then she tried, even less successfully, not to think about where Douglas might be. She had hardly seen him all night, and when she had, he had seemed like some unreachable stranger, not like her Douglas at all.
“Are you going in?” The girl behind her was gesturing at the open door. Isabel must have vacated it without a word to her. Feeling cross and stupid, Vivi stepped into the lavatory, then swore as the hem of her skirt flushed dark with the unidentified watery slick on the marble floor.
She peed, tugged, dissatisfied, at her hair, patted her face with her compact to dull the sweaty sheen, tried inexpertly to add solid mascara to her already spidery lashes. There was nothing fairy tale about her appearance now, she mused. Unless you brought the Ugly Sisters into the equation.
The impatient knocking on the door had become too insistent to ignore; she emerged into the hallway, primed to apologize, but no one was looking at her.
The row of girls was gazing away from her toward the gaming room, where there was an obvious commotion. Vivi, along with the rest, slowly followed the sound of clattering and sporadic exclamation, feeling the air grow suddenly chill. There was the sound of a strangulated horn, and Vivi observed that the hunting-horn-blowing competition, which Xander had told her about, must have started. But this horn was not being blown with any finesse; the air was expelled in gasps, as if someone was breathless, or laughing.
Vivi stopped in the entrance to the gaming room, behind a group of men, and gazed around her. On the opposite side of the huge room, someone had opened the French windows onto the front lawns so that stray snowflakes blew in at an acute angle. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling her skin goose-pimple. She realized she had trodden on someone’s foot, but the man did not notice. He was staring straight ahead, his mouth partially open as if, in his alcoholic daze, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
For there, wheeling between the roulette and blackjack tables, was a huge gray horse, its nostrils flared and eyes rolling as it trod nervously back and forth, its hooves still covered in snow, surrounded by a sea of gleefully appalled faces. On its back was the palest girl Vivi had ever seen, her dress hoisted up to reveal long, alabaster legs, her feet still clad in sequined party slippers, long dark hair flowing behind her, one bare arm lifted as she steered the animal expertly in and out of the tables by its halter and reins, a brass horn raised to her lips with the other. Vivi noted absently that, unlike her own already mottled arms, the other girl’s did not give the slightest suggestion of cold.
“View halloa!” One of the pink-coated young men in the corner was blowing a horn of his own. Two others had climbed onto the tables for a better view.
“I don’t bloody believe this.”
“Jump the roulette tables! We’ll pull them all together!”
Vivi could see Alexander in the corner, laughing and raising a glass as if in mock salute. Beside him, several matronly chaperones were conferring anxiously, gesticulating toward the center of the room.