She shrugged. ‘I don’t much. Who told you I’d asked him first?’
‘He did. Why? Was it a secret?’
‘No.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I should have invited you before him. I must have assumed you’d already be going.’
I nodded genially. ‘That’s all right. Don’t apologise. Why shouldn’t you ask him first? He’s much better looking than I am.’ Which annoyed her as I intended that it should, but the opportunity for rebuttal was gone. We were back with their party and Lady Dalton was pointing us to our allotted chairs. I had been placed between Carla Wakefield and Candida.
During the first course I talked to Carla about whom we both knew and where we’d both studied, about our plans for the summer and the sports we enjoyed, until the half-eaten salmon was taken away and the inevitable chicken was brought in and I turned to my other neighbour. I could see at once that more of the same would not quite answer.
‘You’re very good at this, aren’t you?’ she said and, while it was not exactly voiced in a hostile manner, it wasn’t all that friendly, either.
‘Thank you,’ I replied. She had not, of course, meant it as a compliment, but by taking it as one I hadn’t left her any room for manoeuvre. She glowered at her plate. I tried a more honest approach. ‘If you don’t enjoy it, why are you doing it?’ I asked.
She stared at me. ‘Because my aunt arranged the whole thing before I was given a choice. Because she is the only relative I have who cares whether I live or die. Most of all, because I don’t know what else to do.’ As usual, when discussing her family arrangements she spoke with a kind of ill-repressed fury. ‘My stepmother has had charge of me since I was fourteen, and as a result of her bizarre requirements when it comes to female instruction, I am uneducated, untrained and completely unequipped for any productive work. Now I am supposed to “make a life for myself,” whatever that means. My cousin Serena tells me that things would improve if I knew more people in London. I do not dispute this – only these are not the sort of people I want to know more of.’ With a dismissive snort she indicated the body of the room.
It did seem very hard to have lost both parents by the time she was eighteen, even if Oscar Wilde would have thought it careless. ‘Where were you at school?’
‘Cullingford Grange.’
I had vaguely heard of it. ‘Isn’t that in Hertfordshire?’
Candida nodded. ‘It’s the kind of place where they worry if you’re reading too much, instead of being out in the nice fresh air.’ She rolled her eyes at the strangeness of her stepmother’s choices. ‘I could recite the rules of hockey in my sleep, but unfortunately nothing was taught about literature, mathematics, history, art, politics or life.’ I believed her because her account was only too familiar.
I think, I pray, I come from the last generation of the privileged to pay no attention to the education of their daughters. Even in 1968 there were women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, but they were, as a rule, filled with the daughters of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Posh girls were an oddity and indeed almost the only one I can remember from my own year left after one term to marry a man with a castle in Kent. There were exceptions, but these generally came from families who were known to cherish an eccentric tradition of educating their women, rather than from the run-of-the-mill squireachy. For the rest, parents would scrimp and save to send the boys to Eton or Winchester or Harrow, while their sisters were put into the charge of some alcoholic, Belgian countess, whose main instruction was not to bother the parents.
After leaving, a girl might spend a year at a finishing school where she could polish her languages and her skiing, then another year would pass in coming out, after which she would get a job arranging flowers in the boardroom or cooking lunches for directors or working for her father, until she had discovered Mr Right who, with any luck, would be the heir to Lord Right. And that would be that. Hopefully, the Hon. John Right would be right for Mummy and Daddy, too, since they, like their own parents, would expect to approve the choice. Our mothers may not have been pushed into their marriages in the Thirties and Forties, but they had certainly been kept out of any marriages their parents disapproved of. We all had stories of aunts and great-aunts who had been sent to study painting in Florence, or to live with a grandmother in Scotland, or to improve their French at some mountainous chateau in the Swiss Alps, to break them of a bad love habit and, lest those Barbara Cartland addicts think differently, usually it worked.
I do not mean to imply that all who followed this path were wretched. Lots of them were as happy as clams. They spent the early years of marriage in some part of London their mothers found unlikely, then, if they’d chosen well, they might move into the big house on their father-in-law’s estate (‘Fizzy and I were just rattling around and we thought it was time to let the kids have a go’). For some the father proved stubborn and wouldn’t move out, and for most there wasn’t a house to inherit, so the young couple would generally buy a cottage or a farmhouse or, if things were going really well in the City, a Queen Anne manor house in Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire or Suffolk. After that, he would shoot and complain about politics, they’d both ski and worry about the children, and she would work for charity, entertain and, if things were going less well in the City, sell artificial jewellery to her captive friends. Until the children grew up and it was time first to downsize and then to die. All of which, lest we forget and before we feel too sorry for them, was a lot better than scratching for a living in the dirt of the plains of Uzbekistan.
But where did it leave someone like Candida Finch? She was obviously clever but her appearance and her manner would not help to offset her lack of qualifications to say the least. Nor would I have thought there was any certainty of a husband coming up on the next lift. And there wouldn’t be much money. What were her options? ‘Do you know what you’d like to do?’ I asked.
Again, she rolled her eyes in exasperation. ‘What can I do?’
‘I asked what would you like to do.’
This was enough to soften her a little. It was, after all, a genuine enquiry. ‘I think I might have liked to work in publishing, but I have no degree. And before you suggest I take one now, we both know that won’t happen. It’s too late and I’ve missed it. I thought I might squeeze a few quid out of a godparent and push into a vanity publishing firm, but they’d have to accept they’d lose every penny, and all to buy me the right to talk about publishing at dinner parties. Which is the most I’d achieve.’
‘Be careful you’re not determined to fail in order to annoy your stepmother. It doesn’t sound to me as if she’ll care much either way.’ I nearly didn’t say this, since our very brief acquaintance did not at all justify it, but she laughed.
‘Well, that’s true anyway.’ Her voice was warmer than it had been. ‘You know, you really are quite good at this.’
