She coaxed him to sit up and it helped her to be strong. ‘Peter, come on. Your tie’s all crooked – there. Let’s go down, then, well, maybe you would take me in to supper.’ She’d said she’d go with Rafe, but Rafe would surely understand.
When they got downstairs, it was as though someone had turned on a bright light and she saw everything more clearly. She realized that her hostess and Brent Jarvis Esquire kept a too deliberate distance from each other, that Mr Wincanton had disappeared altogether. As for Angie, Rafe came up, full of apologies. ‘I waited a bit for you, then Angie asked me to take her in for supper. I hope you don’t mind.’
Beatrice shook her head dumbly.
After supper, Peter drank glass after glass of wine and shadowed Beatrice like a silent black dog, though hanging back from the dancing and the carol-singing round the piano, which was played by Jarvis. She was glad when midnight came and the car arrived to take them home. In the back seat, Rafe held her hand all the way and talked about the Wincantons, how pretty Angie had grown and what a good chap Ed was. On and on. Beatrice could hardly bear to listen.
Everybody was going away. After Christmas, Rafe travelled to Southampton to meet his mother off the ship, then accompanied her to London. On the first day of 1939, Beatrice walked up to Carlyon Manor to say goodbye to the Wincantons. The household was in a flurry of packing up. Angie, after much debate, was to return to Paris for a short time at least, Peter was set for school, Ed for Oxford. Only ten-year-old Hetty and her mother would remain, and they, too, would be moving to London in March for the start of the season. Beatrice wandered through the untidy rooms, sensing that a whole era of her life was coming to an end.
There was her own packing up to do, her mother furiously sewing name-tapes on the blouses, tunics and cardigans that arrived in the post. Two days into January her father drove her to his parents in Gloucestershire – the first time she’d met them for several years. In their lovely house of golden stone also lived her uncle and aunt and three younger cousins. Her grandparents’ household was a formal one, Mr and Mrs Marlow growing elderly now, and Beatrice’s Uncle George, Hugh’s elder brother, had taken over the management of the estate. She liked the gentle rolling countryside and the villages of mellow stone, liked being part of a busy family household and being treated as a grown-up, dressing for dinner every night and being introduced to guests as though she were a young woman, no longer a child. The cousins were rather sweet, twin girls of eight and a younger brother of six. Their mother, Aunt Julia, was Uncle George’s much younger second wife, his first, Sylvia, having caught tuberculosis and died around the time Beatrice was born. Julia was a jolly, friendly woman with a passion for hats and days out. She immediately took Beatrice under her wing, taught her to style her hair more fashionably and gave her face powder and lipstick.
Several days later, her father drove her to Larchmont, a girls’ school twenty miles from her grandparents’, and for the first time in her life she was left alone amongst strangers.
Larchmont was not one of those schools designed to teach genteel young ladies accomplishments. Rather, its Headmistress had founded it shortly after the Kaiser’s war to give girls who might need to earn a living an academic education.
Beatrice was relieved to find that although she was a little behind in geometry and algebra, Miss Simpkins had served her splendidly in all the other subjects she must take for her School Certificate. Lessons in a class of intelligent girls, mostly eager to learn, were a delightful new experience. The boarding, however, she hated.
The school was situated in a converted mill, and a very long narrow room under the eaves held the forty boarders in a single dormitory with no privacy but the blankets under which they slept. The bathrooms, too, were communal. Whilst in many ways enlightened, the Headmistress had no truck with individualism. Solitude, apart from the rule of silence in the library to foster private study, was deemed unhealthy, and once studies were over, the girls were expected to play team games in all weathers, or to join in the weekly cross-country runs. Beatrice, because of her illness, was excused all these, but since to be different at Larchmont meant social ostracism, she quickly became determined to drive the weakness from her limbs. This didn’t stop a small group of girls seeing her as odd and freezing her out of their activities. In time, she found her place, swimming in the middle of the shoal, determined to be no different from the other nervous fish swimming about her. It was to be another lesson in survival and she learnt it well.
She and Rafe wrote to one another regularly. He was happy that his mother was home, but the first surprise of the year was that he gave up Oxford, which seemed to be down to difficulties with money. My stepfather has arranged for my inclusion in the next intake at military college. There’s nothing I can do.