‘He truly would be,’ Aunt Edna agreed, extending her arm across the table to help herself to a piece of Walkers shortbread. ‘And she’d be very fortunate. There’s a great shortage of men now due to the war, it’ll leave an awful lot of young women without husbands. She should have had the sense to hold onto hers.’
‘And the poor boy she’s in love with?’ Audrey asked in a quiet voice.
‘He shouldn’t have hoped,’ Aunt Hilda replied crisply. ‘Now, did you know Moira Philips has finally dismissed her chauffeur? I think they were right to do so considering there was a high chance that he was reporting their conversations to the government,’ she continued in a loud hiss. ‘One can only imagine the horror of it all.’
Audrey sat in silence while her mother and aunts discussed Mrs Philips’ chauffeur. She didn’t know Emma Townsend well for she was a good six years her senior, but she had seen her at the Club. A pretty girl with mousy hair and kind features. She wondered what she was doing now and how she was feeling. She imagined she was suffering terribly, as if her whole future was a bleak, loveless hole. She looked across at her sister who was now playing with her sandwich out of boredom; Mrs Philips’ chauffeur was extremely dull compared with Emma Townsend’s illicit affair. But Audrey knew that their shared interest in the scandal differed greatly. Isla was riveted by the trouble the girl had caused. The romantic, or tragic, elements of the story couldn’t have interested her less. She delighted in the fact that no one could talk of anything else, that they all spoke with the same hushed voices that they adopted when talking about death and that they devoured each sordid detail with hungry delight before passing it on to their friends. But most of all the glamour of it enthralled her. How easy it was to rock their orderly lives. Secretly Isla wished it were she and not Emma Townsend who basked in the centre of such a whirlwind. At least she would enjoy the attention.
It was a good two weeks before Emma Townsend was seen at the Club. Like a forest fire the scandal spread and grew until she was wrongly accused of being pregnant by the gossiping Hurlingham Ladies. The Hurlingham Ladies consisted of four elderly women, or ‘Crocodiles’ as Aunt Edna wickedly called them, who organized with great efficiency all the events held at the Club. The polo tournaments, gymkhanas, flower shows, garden parties and dances. They played bridge on Tuesday evenings, golf on Wednesday mornings, painted on Thursday afternoons and sent out invitations to tea parties and prayer nights with tedious regularity. As Aunt Edna pointed out, they were the ‘protocol police’ and one knew when one had fallen short when the little lilac invitation failed to find its way to one’s front door, though it was at times a relief not to have to think of an appropriate excuse to decline.
Audrey and Isla had spent the fortnight looking out for poor Emma Townsend. She hadn’t appeared at church on Sunday, which infuriated the Hurlingham Ladies who sat with their feathered hats locked together in heavy discussion like a gaggle of geese, criticizing the girl for not showing her face to the good Lord and begging His forgiveness. When Thomas Letton walked in with his family the entire congregation fell silent and followed his handsome figure as he walked up the aisle with great dignity, his impassive features betraying nothing of the humiliation that Audrey was sure burned beneath his skin. The Hurlingham Ladies nodded in sympathy as he passed, but he pretended not to see them and fixed his eyes on the altar in front of him before settling quietly into his seat next to his mother and sister. Emma hadn’t been seen at the polo either or at the picnic which followed, organized by Charlo Osborne and Diana Lewis, two of the Crocodiles, who spent the entire afternoon muttering that if she so much as showed her face at their event they would send her home in disgrace while secretly longing for her to appear to give them more to gossip about. Then finally after two long weeks she arrived on Saturday for lunch with her family.
Audrey and Isla sat in the lounge with their brothers and parents and, of course, the indomitable Aunt Edna, when Emma Townsend crept in with her head bent, staring with determination at the floor in order to avoid catching anyone’s eye. Audrey looked about as the chattering ceased and every eye in the room rose to watch the solemn procession file in and take their seats at a small table in the corner. Everyone, that is, except Colonel Blythe, who was too busy with his grey winged moustache buried in the Illustrated London News, smoking his Turkish cigarettes, to notice the silent commotion that made a small island out of him. Even Mr Townsend, a large-framed man with silver hair and woolly sideburns, seemed to swallow his indignation, choosing silence over confrontation which would normally have been his response at such a moment. He meekly ordered drinks and then turned his back on the rest of the community who were waiting like jackals to see what he would do next.