Pearls Read online

  Having conducted this delicate conversation with his usual panache, James stepped out and into the Bentley, and ordered his driver to take him on to London, leaving Miss Sharpe with the afterglow of his smile and a sense of obligation towards both his daughters.

  ‘God, another term in this bloody hellhole!’ Monty flopped down on her bed with a screech of springs, and scowled across the stack of luggage at two of the girls who shared her dormitory. One of Benenden’s idiosyncrasies was that girls were quartered in small dormitories of three or four, and their ages were mixed. The fifteen-year-old Monty found herself billeted with Frances Graham, the timid twelve-year-old daughter of a British Ambassador, and Camilla Carstairs, a devastatingly pretty blonde who was school captain of lacrosse, the apple of the English mistress’s eye, and the daughter of a judge.

  ‘Do you have to swear?’ Camilla demanded in her strangled drawl. Monty ignored her.

  ‘Whose is all this stuff?’ Monty pointed at six pieces of matching, white leather luggage stacked higgledy-piggledy by the unoccupied bed.

  ‘The new girl’s, I suppose.’ Camilla took her brown canvas lacrosse boots, temporarily clean of the mud that would cake their studded soles for the rest of the term, out of her much-mended case and put them into the bottom of her cupboard. Most of the girls at Benenden had luggage which was good quality but old, handed down by their parents. The heap of white cases, however, was obviously brand new and each gleaming side was embossed with the gilded initials R. E. E.

  Monty sauntered across the room and ran her finger over the monogram on the smallest case.

  ‘Her parents must be loaded.’

  ‘Of course they’re loaded, they’re Jewish. Don’t you remember Miss Sharpe giving us a pi-jaw about her at the end of last term?’ Swallow Lamotte, skinny and tousle-haired with thick lips like a goldfish, came in and sat on Monty’s bed.

  ‘They own half of P & G, don’t they?’ Pearce & Goldsmith, or P & G for short, was a rapidly growing chain-store selling cheap, serviceable clothes of remarkable quality, considering their price.

  ‘She won’t be short of anything, anyway. Did you bring any chocolate?’ She rummaged in Monty’s tuckbox.

  The porter struggled through the doorway with the last and largest of the white cases. Monty lethargically snapped open her own case, a scuffed, pigskin legacy from James, and began stuffing away her clothes.

  ‘Why are they making such a fuss about her, anyway? She can’t be any different from the rest of us.’ She tossed her newly acquired black stockings on to a high shelf, followed by the ferocious girdle which held them up. It was a surgical greyish-white, with a flat satin panel in front and wide flanges of rubbery elastic around the sides. Monty was grateful for the way it flattened the obstinate curve of her stomach, but loathed the way it imprinted hideous red weals on her body. To add what the manufacturers hoped was a feminine touch, the suspenders were veiled with scraps of satin ribbon which frayed unattractively.

  ‘I see your mother bought you a bra at last.’ Swallow opened a packet of biscuits.

  ‘She made enough fuss about it.’ Monty showed them the heavy contraption which, she hoped, flattened her breasts back to nothing.

  ‘She’s the first Jewish girl they’ve had since the war, and they’re afraid she’ll be bullied – that’s why they’re making all this fuss.’ Camilla closed her suitcase and pushed it under her bed, then dragged her trunk towards her and began opening its brass locks. Inside were books, supplies of jam and chocolate, and the filthy, one-eared teddy bear she placed proudly in the centre of her pillow. ‘She’s seeing the housemistress now and I’ve got to go and fetch her at half past and show her round.’ Vigorously, Camilla brushed specks of fluff off the long navy cape the girls wore outdoors in winter, and hung it on the rail of her washing cubicle.

  ‘Look here, Monty, this won’t do at all,’ she said with irritation. ‘I’m dormitory monitor, I’m responsible for keeping the place decent and I’m not having you turn it into a pigsty on the first day of term. You can jolly well take all those down again and fold them up neatly.’ She pointed at the crumpled mess of shirts, vests, and underwear in Monty’s cupboard.

  With bad grace, Monty pulled down the mass of tangled clothes and began folding each garment as slowly as she could.

  ‘Camilla, why do they think she’ll be bullied because she’s Jewish?’

  ‘Some people are a bit funny about Jews, that’s all.’

  ‘But why? Hitler hated the Jews, and we fought Hitler so why do we hate the Jews, too?’

  ‘We don’t. They’ve just come over here from Europe and made a lot of money and some people don’t like it, that’s all.’

  ‘But if they were going to be put in concentration camps to die it was sensible to come over here, surely?’ Monty knew perfectly well what Camilla was going to say next; she was hoping that by spinning out the conversation she could postpone the job of tidying her cupboard. The plan worked. Camilla suddenly checked her watch and jumped up.

  ‘Cripes – I’ll be late!’ She sprinted off down the corridor on solidly muscled legs.

  Swallow pulled back Camilla’s bedcovers and sprinkled some biscuit crumbs between the sheets.

  ‘Sweet dreams, Sergeant Major,’ she said, punching the teddy bear in its stomach.

  Monty shoved her clothes back and wondered what the new girl would be like. She didn’t know any Jewish people, or anything about them, except what she remembered from her lessons; they had read The Merchant of Venice in English, and in history lessons had learned that Disraeli bought the Suez canal for Britain with the Rothschilds’money. All Monty really knew about Jewish people was that they were different, and she knew, too, that she was different; she was beginning to look on herself as a lonely, misunderstood figure, forever alienated from quiet sleek-haired girls like Camilla or Cathy, whose souls were as well-ordered as their cupboards, with no tangled masses of doubt shoved away out of sight.

  It was easy for the other girls to keep to the school rules, to be quiet, tidy, hardworking and obedient, but Monty found all that impossible. The rules were stupid, she thought and the teachers were, too; and what was the point of tidiness as long as you could find your clothes when you needed them?

  Half an hour later Camilla returned, bringing with her the new girl. ‘This is Rosanna Emanuel,’ she said formally, as Monty and Swallow looked up.

  ‘How do you do.’ Rosanna advanced and shook hands with each of them in turn, stepping around her white mountain of luggage as she went. Her face was fine and delicate, with a fierce beauty which made Camilla’s Anglo-Saxon prettiness look suddenly insipid. Her hair was curly and the weight of it was drawn into a ponytail of glossy ringlets, while curly tendrils framed her face.

  Her clothes, however, were unlike anything that Monty, Camilla or Swallow had ever imagined. They watched in fascination as Rosanna methodically opened her cases and took possession of the modest allocation of space Benenden offered each student.

  From the biggest case came an immaculate array of school uniform, the tunics altered by her mother’s dressmaker to fit and flatter. In fact, when Monty looked closely, she saw that the plain, navy pinafore had been copied in fine wool gaberdine, instead of the standard-issue serge from Debenham & Freebody. Rosanna had a crisp, white poplin blouse for every day of the week, and these too had been made for her. The next case held her cape, and ‘flaps’ – an immense circular skirt in the house colour which was worn for the weekly dancing class. Never had Guldeford orange seemed so bright.

  ‘Do we really have to wear these?’ she asked Monty, holding up the hideous jelly-bag hat that went with the outdoor cape. Monty nodded.

  Next came the velvet dress the girls wore for church on Sundays. This had a half train at the back, and a silk collar. The dresses came in harsh blue, red or green, and most girls had only one. Rosanna had three, one in each colour, and the hues were considerably more subtle. All in all, Rosanna’s uniform was perfectly in accordance wi
th the school list, but not quite right. It was better. According to the arcane conventions of the British upper class, better was wrong.

  ‘Did you get all that at Debenham & Freebody’s?’ Swallow asked out of curiosity.

  ‘Oh no – we hated their things. Mummy bought one of everything and then gave them to her dressmaker to copy. Where do we put empty cases?’

  ‘Under the bed. You can put some of yours under mine, if you like.’ Monty swung aside her legs and drew up her bedcover.

  ‘That’s terribly kind of you.’

  It was all wrong – not wrong as it would have been if Rosanna could not have been expected to know any better, as if her father were a workman or a foreigner or something. It was wrong because one shouldn’t say ‘dressmaker’but talk about ‘this little woman who makes my mother’s frocks’; neither should one display emotion, even a mild emotion such as gratitude. ‘Terribly kind’was incorrect. The right way was to mutter ‘thanks’and get on with unpacking. It was wrong to be effusive, wrong to exaggerate, wrong to mind so much how you looked that you took care and spent a lot of money and were not ashamed to say so.

  Monty, Swallow and Camilla had been brought up in the curious way the English aristocracy raised their children. All but their most basic needs would be ignored until they were old enough to be mated. They had eaten in the kitchen or the nursery with their nannies, seldom in the dining room with their parents; they had been dressed in ugly, practical clothes, some of which were expensive, but none of which were stylish or pretty. Vanity was discouraged as an unnecessary vice, and in some nurseries looking in the mirror was not allowed. There was no question of girls wearing what they wanted; they had to have roomy heavy shoes, stout tweed skirts and shapeless heavy coats.

  For entertainment they were simply turfed out of doors, and for company they had been left to their parents’servants. The girls were encouraged to lavish their emotions on dogs and ponies, thus ensuring that boys and sex were excluded from their interests. At the age of seventeen these ugly gauche grubs would be brought indoors, washed, taught the rudiments of social skills, kitted out in adult finery, told that they were butterflies and released to mate in the desperately short debutante season, after which their parents would give them no more money or attention.

  ‘When are you going to wear that?’ asked Camilla with a sneer. Rosanna hung up a full-skirted, strapless cocktail dress of black grosgrain.

  ‘The opera. My father’s coming to take me to the opera on my first weekend out. Mummy’s sure I’m going to be terribly homesick.’

  ‘Gosh, you lucky thing.’ Now Monty was frankly envious. ‘I’ve never been to an opera. Is it nice?’

  ‘Some of it is. I like Mozart best, but the singers are all so fat and ugly that I usually end up watching with my eyes shut.’ Monty laughed, the others did not.

  ‘Is that your fiddle?’ Monty indicated the black violin case, the only item among Rosanna’s luggage which was not spanking new.

  ‘Well, sort of. I’m not terribly good. I don’t practise enough.’ Rosanna stowed another empty case under Monty’s bed and turned to the next full one, which contained only her underwear, packed in crisp sheets of blue-white tissue paper. First came knitted wool vests and long, matching camiknickers, trimmed with pink lace.

  Swallow snorted. ‘You’ll certainly need them.’

  ‘Is it very cold here?’ Rosanna’s eyes widened, fearful of discomfort.

  ‘Bloody arctic,’ Monty confirmed.

  ‘And is there a lot of lacrosse? We didn’t play games much at my last school.’

  ‘You haven’t missed a thing, I promise. We’ve got lacrosse every day this term. It’s called lax, actually, not lacrosse.’

  Rosanna smiled, grateful for this tiny measure of initiation into the school customs. ‘Does everybody have to play?’

  ‘Everybody. Camilla’s the school captain. They let you off if you’re injured, though.’

  ‘What about if you’re having a bad period – I have awful periods, absolute agony and they go on for days.’

  ‘No good, they still flog you out into the mud.’

  Rosanna shuddered, and put away three matching sets of white lace, French brassières, panties and garter belts. The brassières were daringly wired to make her already full breasts look even more luscious, and had pink satin rosebuds with green satin leaves sewn between the cups.

  Next out of the case was a long, white lace corselette, with bones from breast to hip level, and dangling suspenders.

  ‘Gosh, that’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like that except on Brigitte Bardot posters.’ Monty fingered the outrageously adult garment gingerly. ‘Are you really going to wear it?’

  ‘Of course I am, I need it. I’ve got a horribly fat stomach and no waist at all.’ Rosanna pulled in her uniform to show them.

  By the time the supper bell rang at 7.30 Rosanna had also unpacked thick, black stockings of pure silk, not of itchy cotton like Monty’s, and an ivory-handled manicure set in a white leather case. In her washing cubicle was her pure bristle toothbrush and a tiny tube of red toothpaste which was supposed to make her teeth sparkle. Across the greyish-yellow candlewick bedspread lay a thick, red merino dressing gown and a Swiss cotton nightdress.

  Camilla treated each item as a personal insult. Swallow sulked with jealousy. Monty felt as if someone had raised the corner of the dust sheet which had been draped over her future.

  They trooped down to the oak-panelled dining hall, each girl carrying her own napkin in a napkin ring. In keeping with the rest of their possessions, the Benenden girls’napkins were frayed damask squares belonging to long worn-out sets of their parents’ table linen, and they were rolled lopsidedly into rings of painted wood or scratched horn.

  Miss Sharpe was clearing her throat to say grace as Monty and Rosanna slipped into the last two places at their table. ‘Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum,’ she finished, as, one by one, the pupils standing with bowed heads stole furtive glances at the new girl.

  Rosanna’s napkin was of new Irish linen, with an elaborately embroidered R in one corner. Her napkin ring, on which her initials were engraved, was thick and heavy, and it gleamed with the unmistakable soft intensity of solid silver.

  There was a hostile silence at Rosanna’s table as the other girls appraised her prettiness, her elegance and her obvious wealth.

  ‘I say,’ brayed a voice from the table’s end, ‘I thought all Jews had horns.’

  Rosanna looked up and smiled.

  Chapter Two

  Every marriage has a secret contract between wife and man which has nothing to do with any of the purposes of matrimony set out in the prayer book. The unwritten contract between James Bourton’s parents required his father to provide the means for his mother to satisfy her ambitions. She wanted to be a successful woman, a great society beauty around whose feet the most powerful men would grovel in adoration.

  Since love affairs were the prerogative of married people, Lady Davina chose her husband without delay. The young Duke of Witherham could give her everything else she needed – entrée to court circles, political contacts, several impressive houses and the wealth to create a lavish backdrop for her personal pageant. She swiftly overpowered him with a barrage of flattery and flirtation, which he accepted as no more than his due.

  After their marriage, however, Davina discovered that her husband would not fulfil his part of the matrimonial bargain because he did not understand it; he had no appreciation of the importance of flowers, jewels, love-letters and clandestine trysts which would be common knowledge from Piccadilly to Kensington the next day. He rightly assumed that his wife had no intention of rejecting him, his wealth and his title, and was therefore deeply puzzled when she solicited the advances of other men. He did not realize that his wife was an ambitious but cowardly woman who was unable to seek fulfilment outside the traditional arena of feminine manipulation.

  The women in her circle understood perfectly the kind o
f supremacy Davina was trying to establish, and counterattacked in the same style, with more outrageous clothes, more notorious exploits and more scandalous liaisons.

  The Duke turned mulish, and rejected the London social scene for the enjoyment of his country estates. Davina detested the country. She became cold and waspish, and distracted herself by refitting his country seat, Bourton House, at terrifying expense. When his wife pushed him towards public life, the Duke resisted with oxlike cussedness. With the perverse cunning of a man who chooses to escape his wife’s dominion by assuming dullness, he scotched her ambitions by sticking at the social level of a country squire. When she began to launch herself at their male weekend guests in a flurry of seductive sweet talk, he took it as permission to begin an affair with the wife of the local hunt-master.

  To these injuries, further insult was added on a blustery, autumn afternoon in 1918. Davina had been convinced that her second child would be a girl. Her Grace at once directed that her second son be dressed in petticoats, and referred to him thereafter as Jane. From the cradle, James Bourton’s sexuality was warped.

  ‘I shan’t waste any more time having children,’ Davina told her husband. ‘We shall just have to make do with what we’ve got. I’ve far more important things to think of than babies.’ She never considered divorce; divorced women were not received at Court. Divorce was for Americans. Davina was determined to shine in society in spite of her husband.

  Lord James Bourton joined his brother Hugo, the three-year-old Marquess of St Elians, in the nursery, where the younger boy became highly popular. As a baby he was plump and smiling; as a toddler he was an irresistible little animal, winning all kinds of concessions from the nurserymaids with his sweet ways. As a small boy, with a gold watchchain gleaming across the little waistcoat he could wear when his mother was absent, he was the personification of masculinity in miniature, and the stolid Hugo watched with envy as James was bounced and tickled and drawn into romps which grew increasingly less innocent. Virginity was something he never knew about until many years after his own had been debauched by a succession of bored, simpleminded servant girls.