A scene! A scene at the dinner-table. Overwhelmed by this ultimate in disasters, Louisa bowed her head over her plate.
‘You will drop this subject immediately, Harriet,’ barked the Professor. ‘You are embarrassing our guests.’
‘No. I won’t drop it.’ Harriet had become very pale, but her voice was steady. ‘You have always thought dancing was frivolous and silly, but it isn’t — it’s the most marvellous thing in the world. You can say things when you dance that you can’t say any other way. People have danced for the glory of God since the beginning of time. David danced before the Ark of the Covenant… And this journey… this adventure…’ She turned imploringly to Edward. ‘You must know what a wonder it would be?’
‘Oh, no, Harriet! No, the Amazon is a most unsuitable place for a woman. For anyone!’ From the plethora of dangerous diseases and potentially lethal animals, poor Edward — meaning only to scotch this dreadful topic once and for all — now had the misfortune to select the candiru. ‘There is a fish there,’ he said earnestly, ‘which swims into people’s orifices when they are bathing and by means of backwards pointing spines becomes impossible to dislodge
A moan from Louisa brought him to a halt. Orifices had been mentioned at dinner, and before ladies. Orifices and a scene in one evening! Casting about in her mind, she could not see that she had done anything to deserve such a disgrace. And as poor Edward flushed a deep crimson and Mrs Marchmont suppressed a nervous giggle, the Professor rose and faced his daughter.
‘You will leave the table immediately, Harriet, and go to your room.’ And when she did not rise instantly: ‘I think you heard me!’
‘Yes.’ But she remained perfectly still, looking at her father, and in a moment of aberration he had the mad idea that she was pitying him.
Then she gave a little nod as though some transaction was now completed, and with the fluid grace that was her legacy from that damnable dancing place, she rose, walked to the door and was gone.
Everyone now made Herculean efforts, but it had to be admitted that even by Morton standards the dinnerparty was not proving a conspicuous success. Edward, torn between fear lest Harriet after all should turn out to have ‘ideas’, and regret that she had been punished like a naughty child, was not his usual self. Mrs Marchmont in her thin dress was so busy trying not to shiver that she contributed little. It was left to valiant Mr Marchmont to sustain the conversation, which he did heroically until, biting into his mutton, he inexplicably encountered a lead pellet and broke a tooth.
Alone in her attic, Harriet threw herself down on the bed. Growing up in this gloomy house, she had taught herself a discipline for survival in which the weakness of tears played no part.
Yet now she cried as she had not cried since her mother’s death. Cried for her lovely, lost adventure, for the unattainable forests and magical rivers she would never see; cried for the camaraderie of fellow artists and a job well done.
But her real grief lay deeper. She was honest enough to admit that few girls in her position would have been allowed to travel to the Amazon. It was not her father’s refusal that so devastated her now; it was his bigotry, his hatred, his determination not to understand. And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt.
It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.
2
Harriet had always loved words: tasted them on her tongue, thought of them as friends. The word serendipity was one she valued especially, its meaning rooted in the world of fairy tales: ‘The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.’
It was this word she thought of later when she remembered her encounter with a small boy called Henry in the maze at Stavely Hall. All her subsequent adventures stemmed from this one meeting and from the trust she saw in the child’s eyes; nothing she experienced afterwards was more unlikely or more strange.
The visit to Stavely, which occurred a week after the ill-fated dinner-party, was the climax of the year for the ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle. Weeks of preparation had gone into the expedition, for Stavely was forty miles to the west in the rolling Suffolk countryside and had awaited the benison of motor transport to make it a comfortable day’s outing. Letters had been sent, the substantial fee mentioned by Mrs Brandon for a tour of the house and permission to picnic in her gardens had been agreed. Now as they waited outside the house of their president, Mrs Belper, for the arrival of the charabanc, the ladies found it necessary to remind Harriet again and again of her good fortune in being included in the party.
These ladies of the Tea Circle had presided over Harriet’s young life like a flock of black birds in a Greek play. There were some thirty of them who had met originally in the home of Hermione Belper, the full-bosomed wife of St Philip’s meek and undersized bursar, in protest against the carryings-on of the Association of University Wives, which not only admitted coloureds, foreigners and Jews, but had raised money — in a series of coffee mornings — for the purpose of enabling the Fitzwilliam Museum to buy a painting which had turned out to be of a lady not only nude, but crudely and specifically naked.
Mrs Belper had proposed the formation of a new Tea Circle to uphold the values of old-fashioned womanhood and of the Empire, and since her house — only a stone’s throw from Louisa’s — was named Trumpington Villa, the unsuspecting suburb of Trumpington found itself lending its name to the new association.
It was the Tea Circle ladies who, through Louisa, decided what Harriet should wear, which families were suitable for her to visit and where she could go unchaperoned; it was they — scattered like an army of secret agents through the town — who reported to Louisa when her niece removed her gloves in public or had been seen talking in far too friendly a manner to a shop assistant.
In the eyes of these ladies, Harriet’s good fortune was all the greater because Edward Finch-Dutton, too, was to come to Stavely Hall.
The decision to include a man in the party was one which Mrs Belper and Aunt Louisa had debated for hours. The advantages of inviting Edward were clear: his mother had been on visiting terms with old General Brandon (the owner of Stavely) when he was alive and this fact, if mentioned in advance, would greatly increase their chances of being welcomed in person by his daughter-in-law, who in the continuing absence of her husband was Stavely’s reigning mistress. Both Mrs Belper and Louisa were passionate visitors of stately homes and lived in constant hope of converting a mere ‘sighting’ — that of a distant marquis crouched over his herbaceous border or a viscountess entering her carriage, for example — into an actual meeting during which sentences were exchanged. And Isobel Brandon, a grand-daughter of the Earl of Lexbury, was rumoured to be red-haired, beautiful and elegant beyond belief.
As against this, there were the obvious dangers of allowing the ‘young people’ to get out of hand. Stavely was reputed to be the most magnificent and romantic of East Anglia’s great houses and the thought of Edward and Harriet disappearing into some impenetrable yew arbour or lingering behind a carved oak screen was too horrible to contemplate.
‘But we shall be able to prevent that, Louisa,’ Mrs Belper had decided, coming down in favour of Edward. ‘After all, there are more than thirty of us. I shall talk to the girls.’
So Mrs Belper had talked to them — not to eighty-seven-year-old Mrs Transom, the widow of the Emeritus Professor of Architecture, a ‘girl’ of whom little could be expected, but to Millicent Braithwaite, who single-handed had pulled three drunken undergraduates from a high spiked wall as they tried to climb into Trinity, and to Eugenia Crowley, who was amazingly fleet-footed from cross-country running with her pack of Guides — and they had promised that the young couple would never be out of sight.