Eva Ibbotson

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 granddaughter of the Earl of Lexbury, was rumored 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 arbor 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 favor 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-handedly 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.

Edward accordingly had been invited and now, sensibly deciding to mix business with pleasure, he stood beside Harriet, dressed for the country and holding his butterfly-net, a strong canvas sweep-net for those insects which preferred to hop or crawl along the ground, and a khaki haversack containing his pooter, his killing bottle and his tins.

The omnibus arrived; rugs, parasols and hampers of food were loaded on. Miss Transom climbed aboard and began to heave her aged, cantankerous mother on to the step. Eugenia Crowley, twitching with responsibility, and Millicent Braithwaite—a deeply muscular figure in a magenta two-piece and kid boots—performed a neat pincer movement, placing themselves one in front of and one behind the seat which contained Edward and Harriet—and the bus set off.

Harriet had not wanted to come; she could imagine nothing less enjoyable than trailing round a great house in the company of the Tea Circle ladies, and Edward’s presence was an added burden for present always in her mind was the dread that one day she would be driven to yield—to accept, if it came, his offer of marriage. If she married Edward, she could have a garden in which flowers actually grew; a dog; a pond with goldfish. She could sit in the sun and read and have her friends. But at this point always she stopped her thoughts, for somewhere in this imagined garden there was a pram with a gurgling baby: her baby, soft and warm.

But not only hers. And as so often before Harriet gave thanks for Maisie, the melancholy and eccentric housemaid who had given her, when she was six years old, such a comprehensive and unadorned account of what people did to bring babies into the world. Harriet had lain awake in her attic for many nights trying to comprehend the complicated unpleasantness of what she had heard, but now she was glad of Maisie’s detailed crudity. Too easy otherwise, when she read of Dante’s sublime passion for his Beatrice or (in melting and mellifluous Greek) of the innocent Daphnis’ pursuit of Chloe, to imagine love as some glorious upsurge of the human spirit. It was of course, but not only, and now as she gently drew away her arm from Edward’s—which was growing warm in the crowded bus—she knew that that way out was barred.

But what way was open? Her father, the night after the dinner party, had himself gone to Madame Lavarre and stopped her dancing lessons once and for all. There was nothing left now: nothing.