The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  “No—look!” said Gideon.

  A huge-eyed woman with the neck of a sylphide sat before him.

  “But my hair’s all gone!”

  “For the moment. I shall need to see you again in two weeks. Let me show you the back again—eyes wide.”

  Her neck looked a child’s. The ears were very neat and small. She was brought a glass of sherry and an enormous bill, and tottered off towards the Goring Hotel where a friend awaited her for lunch.

  The friend shrieked. “You look like a lesbian. Or a chartered accountant.”

  “But, you see, Rosie will—”

  “No, Rosie will not. She will not like it at all. Mothers of brides have to be nondescript. Unembarrassing. Wisps under a hat and eye shadow, and maybe highlights. Like when they were little.”

  “Rosie won’t—”

  “Yes, she will. She’ll hate you trying to look trendy. Upstage her.”

  “Upstage Rosie!” cried Eleanor. “She’s always thought I was plain and so does Nicholas and all his family, but she doesn’t want me different and I’m not. I’ve simply had a haircut.”

  “Eleanor, sorry, but wherever did you have your hair cut?”

  “Oh, just somewhere I found in a mews.”

  “Well, don’t ever go back!”

  But three weeks later she rang for another appointment. Gideon was even thinner, his eyes more hectic. Drugs, she thought, and watched his hands. But they were steady. He sat her down in a corner among potted palms.

  “It’s very hot in here,” she said.

  “Yes. Torrid. Look out for the orang-utang. You look so pretty he might eat you.”

  If this were my son, she thought, how would I feel? So thin. If this were my lover—

  “You are blushing,” he said and she said, “It’s the jungle.”

  He picked at her hair like a monkey and meditated. “We’ll give you a treatment,” he said.

  Soon she lay flat on her back on a leather day bed, her hair soaking in warm oils. Shadowy men slid by, oblivious. Again there were no other customers. Music began to play. Above her in the corners of a grubby glass roof-light she could see the undersides of pigeons’ pale starry claws. Her head at length was wrapped in a warm towel.

  “O.K.?”

  “I feel,” she said, “no guilt.”

  “Whatever you on about?”

  “This is pure, pure self-indulgence.”

  “About time,” he said. “There’s no point in guilt. Too near remorse. Remorse kills,” and he began to tell stories about his clients.

  “Where are they all, these clients?”

  “Oh, they come here after five o’clock mostly.”

  And he told her outrageous stories about weddings.

  “Do you get on?” asked Gideon on the next visit.

  “Who?”

  “You and the daughter.”

  Silence.

  “Oh, well, you know brides,” she said in one of her false voices. “They’re all awful to their mothers, so I’m told.”

  “How long has she been living with him?” asked Gideon.

  “Oh, she still has her bedroom at home.” Then she said, “Three years.”

  “Did you mind? When she went to him? My mother did.”

  “My husband minded. But she came home whenever they had ‘a break-up.’ As I’ve learned to say.”

  “Sexy is she? Goes clubbing?”

  “Oh, certainly not. She is a solicitor. She’s very sensible. She plans her holidays a year ahead and her life is all arranged for the next twenty years. Actually, men—it’s the same with all her friends—seem to be subsidiary.”

  “God,” he said, “I hate young girls. I like older women with nice houses and a couple of dogs.”

  “That’s conventional with you people,” she said.

  “‘You people’?”

  “We have a cat. It’s my husband’s. And he has a walking stick with an Airedale’s head.”

  “Sounds kinky.”

  He pulled on a suede jacket and walked with her down the road to the station. People noticed her shiny hair.

  “Bye,” he said. “Next time we’ll dye it.”

  “A few highlights?” she said.

  “No. I mean dye.”

  The days were warming. The big house was filling up with presents. The marquee people were being difficult. The caterers were all having babies and ringing up to say there would have to be substitutes. The garden, clipped and weeded to the bone, looked antiseptic. The gift from one of George’s foreign clients—a van-load of green orchids—had disappeared into the entrails of Heathrow.

  And Rosie the bride was missing too. George and Eleanor said they were forgetting her face.

  “It’s not asking much, Rosie. I’m not saying we mind doing it all alone but—”

  “I have to see Nicholas’s mother, too, Ma,” she said. “Don’t forget she’s a widow losing an only son. I have to be there a lot.”

  “I sometimes wonder,” said George in the background, stroking the cat, “if Rosie ever thinks about us at all.”

  “Your father wonders if you ever think about us at all.”

  “But I have to help her with her bag and gloves, Ma. And the hat’s so difficult.” She was on her mobile in Harrods, the mother-in-law-to-be chatting nearby.

  The days began to breathe warmth into the April house. French windows stood wide open. In Rosie’s childhood bedroom, two floors up, the wedding dress hung in its plastic cover from a curtain rail and rocked in the breeze. On one wall hung a long photograph of five hundred clever girls at a famous school and Eleanor lingered to look at it. There was Rosie in the back row giggling beside her friend, Jacquetta. Already these girls had slipped into a time gone by; their dark tunics, white shirts, unpainted faces. Rosie and Jacquetta had the faces of laughing angels, of putti. They only needed little wings.

  Oh—Jacquetta! Eleanor thought. Jacquetta had been like her own child. Jaquetta’s hippy parents had been wandering India most of her schooldays on handfuls of rice and hash, while she had eaten toast and marmalade and crumpets and boiled eggs, and stayed with Rosie for term after term. Now Jacquetta was in Peru.

  “Will there be bridesmaids?” Eleanor had asked Rosie at the beginning of all this.

  “I’m too old,” said Rosie. “My friends are all too old and their children are too young. Anyway, the only one I’d want would be Jacquetta and she wouldn’t be seen dead.”

  “But you haven’t seen her in years.”

  “She rang up the other day. She’s back.”

  “No! Did you see her?”

  “No. I said I was getting married and she said bad luck. She’s had a baby.”

  “No! What? Jacquetta?”

  “But it died.”

  “Oh Rosie! Oh Rosie! What does she look like now?”

  “How do I know? But she’s coming to the wedding.”

  “Oh, and by the way”—a week later and twelve days to go—“Ma, Jacquetta does want to be a bridesmaid so we’ll have to get her a dress. She’s given me her measurements. She’s broke. Green and white.”

  Cash and tremendous cajoling had, through Eleanor’s determination, produced Jacquetta’s long green dress with white camisole and it hung like an iris from another curtain rail near the bridal gown, one on either side of the view of the silver birches below and across the room from the school photograph.

  “My dress looks O.K.,” said Rosie. “Very nice. So’s your hair, Ma. Are you going somewhere new? Can I go there?”

  “Will you do Rosie’s and Jacquetta’s hair?” she asked Gideon, who now knew every detail of Eleanor’s life. He looked thinner than ever. “Are you ill, Gideon?”

  “No. Just have to be careful. Hepatitis. I try to keep fit. I’ll do all the hair on the day. At your house. I never charge for wedding hair, by the way. It’s one of my principles. I’ll be there, let’s see—wedding at two o’clock—I’ll be there for breakfast.”

  “You are so very kind,” she sa
id. “So embarrassingly kind. Why?”

  “Because—oh, never mind. And you are beautiful.”

  “Whatever is this?” said George when she reached home. “Is this my wife? She burns on the water. She is the star of the silver screen. The marquee’s holding up, by the way, and the orchids have arrived. They’re green and white and I’ve filled the bathtubs with them. It seems a bit soon. Still forty-eight hours to go.”

  “George,” she said, “has Rosie phoned?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “She was so quiet last time. George—”

  “She’ll go through with it. Don’t worry.”

  “I think he’s having doubts.”

  “Oh, he’ll turn up. He’s a kind man.”

  “Kind!” she said.

  “Oh, Eleanor, she’ll ring up at any moment. Hush.”

  But when the phone rang it was Jacquetta. Jacquetta’s familiar childhood voice but using a new vocabulary.

  “Jacquetta!—Oh, darling Jacquetta! Rosie’s not here yet. When do we see you?”

  “On the day. Early morning. Hitching down through the night, yah?”

  “Is that safe? Couldn’t you come down with Rosie?”

  “Not free. But I’ll be there. No worries. Might even be the night before if I get a good lorry.”

  “Lorry! Jacquetta, there’s a hairdresser coming to do you and Rosie early. For free. He’s marvellous.”

  There was a gulp that might have been laughter. “Going to be good,” she said. “Ciao, Eleanor.”

  On the Thursday evening Rosie telephoned in tears. She’d been to Gideon. She hated him. She hated the sleazy salon, she hated the hair. Nicholas was going to be livid. He would never get over it. It was all Eleanor’s fault. She wept into her mobile not at all like a solicitor.

  “Has this poofter insulted her?” asked George. “Eleanor, he fancies you. Did you tell him that Rosie doesn’t like us?”

  “Don’t! Don’t say it. We never say it. We never face it. Oh, it’s so bloody impossible being middle class. We’re too good, George, too meticulous. Oh, George, I’d never have suggested it. She’s not had her hair cut since she was eighteen. Oh, her wonderful long hair! Oh George—and it’s gone. And Nicholas loved brushing it.”

  “I don’t care much for all that sort of thing,” said George, “I’m afraid.” And he stroked the cat vigorously.

  “Well, it’s all over. There’s nothing to be done. The wedding’s a failure,” said Eleanor.

  Old Auntie Dossie who had arrived early and was polishing some family candlesticks said that it would be a very pretty and happy wedding, and it must be difficult to be the mother of a bride.

  Then, on the Friday, Rosie walked in with a huge bottle of scent for her mother, short golden curls and a glorious smile. “Look at me! Nicholas loves it.”

  “Oh!” cried Eleanor. “Oh! He said he only did straight hair. However will we get the wreath on?”

  “Are you never satisfied?” cried Rosie. “And where’s Jacquetta?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Oh, great. What’s her dress like?”

  “Wonderful.”

  And that summer evening, twenty-five years ago, father, mother and daughter had sat eating shepherd’s pie in the conservatory. Auntie Dossie and old Uncle Someone were somewhere indoors with trays. Everywhere about the Wimbledon mansion was perfect—cutlery, table linen, crates of champagne. Late daffodils shone in white clumps in the twilight. The marquee, like a grounded cloud, stood silver by the spinney under the white moon. Round the corner of the garden appeared Jacquetta, tall, skinny and totally bald.

  George at once went out to her. Rosie shouted “Hi!” and Eleanor fled.

  George found her face-down upon the bed, gulping into the counterpane. “She hates me! George—Jacquetta hates me. She hates me and Rosie hates me.”

  “Get up at once!”

  “Shaven,” wept Eleanor. “I saw it gleaming. I saw her pate! Like the moon. It’s her statement against us. Against all our suburban values. Did you see the gold safety pins through the lips?”

  “Hush.”

  “She’ll flounce down the aisle, bald, drugged and pierced. Oh, why couldn’t she have asked Julie Frobisher? Oh, and that lovely dress! And we paid for it.”

  “This is beneath you, Eleanor.”

  “Oh, I can’t bear her being bald,” she sobbed.

  Auntie Dossie called tremulously from the top-floor spare bedroom that the uncle had had a funny turn and was there any bicarbonate. Sitting beside the uncle’s bed, Eleanor heard Rosie and Jacquetta in the garden talking hysterically like schoolgirls and falling over the guy ropes of the marquee.

  “They’re drunk,” she told George when he came in with Bisodol for the uncle.

  “Oh, they always sounded drunk, the two of them, when they were together,” he said.

  “That poor little bridesmaid,” said Auntie Dossie later on. “How she’s going to miss Rosie! She’s the little friend who had the red topknot, isn’t she?”

  A cold, an icy shower engulfed Eleanor and she said, “George. Come. Please.” And he followed her out of the uncle’s sickroom.

  “George. Do you think they are lesbians?”

  He closed his eyes. “No.”

  “How can we know?”

  “We do.”

  “Should we tell Nicholas? Oh, she never sounds drunk with Nicholas. Oh—what do we know about our children? Not a thing after the first twitch in the womb.”

  “Take a bath,” roared the father of the bride and thundered up to the top of the house where the girls now were. “Rosie—the two of you. That’s enough giggling. Your mother’s going into the top-floor bathroom now. Right? The other baths are full of orchids.”

  And Eleanor in the bath listened through the wall to the two girls talking. The talk murmured on and on between them and after a long time she heard their light being clicked off. The night before her wedding and her only daughter had not said goodnight to her.

  “I must know,” she said, and in her dressing gown tapped on Rosie’s bedroom door and went in. Jacquetta lay on a mattress on the floor under the window where the two dresses hung like flags in the moonlight. Rosie lay humped in her schoolgirl bed, moonlight on her new curls.

  “Goodnight, you two,” said Eleanor, in her memsahib’s voice. “Don’t talk all night.” She could not bring herself to kiss Jacquetta and was far too shy to give Rosie, who had fed for months from her breast, more than a peck. When she did make herself bend down to the moonlit face she found it wet with tears.

  Early on the wedding morning a heat haze promised glory and Eleanor, walking in an old pink wrap, saw Gideon seated in the garden beside the conservatory, and there was something so unlikely and so comforting in his presence that she walked towards him and took his hands.

  She opened her mouth to say, Oh Gideon! Something so terrible! The bridesmaid has a shaven head and studs all over her. We don’t know—.

  But she didn’t. She remembered his wedding stories before the greenish mirror in the mews. The whisky priests. The ex-mistresses who ran weeping from the church. The lascivious mothers-in-law. She thought, And we will be the wedding where the bridesmaid turns up bald.

  She went indoors with Gideon and he did her hair first. Then, since Rosie’s and Jacquetta’s room was still in darkness, he waylaid Auntie Dossie and turned her into Princess May of Teck. Then he made inroads into the uncle’s moustache and eyebrows. George he did not approach.

  Eleanor wandered off to the church through the garden gate and found it open and empty, and shining with orchids and sunlight. She said “Thank you, God,” and wandered back again to find Rosie drinking champagne from a teacup in the company of a beauty with a red topknot. They were laughing. There were no gold studs.

  “Jacquetta! It’s lovely!”

  “It’s National Health,” said Jacquetta. “I can’t afford wigs from the likes of him.” She was laughing still, pointing at grinning Gideon.

&
nbsp; “I’ll fix it at the back, and the wreath,” said Gideon. “Come on, there’s not much time.”

  “Too true,” said Jacquetta.

  At two o’clock exactly, George, magnificent in ancient morning coat, reluctantly handing over his Airedale’s head walking stick to an usher, led Rosie down the aisle to Nicholas and behind them walked Jacquetta. Two girls like tall flowers.

  But at the reception Jacquetta was nowhere to be seen.

  “Can’t face it,” said Gideon. “Can’t face life without her Rosie. It’s love, dear.” He swigged down champagne.

  “You don’t understand anything,” said Eleanor. “Not one human thing. Except hair.”

  “That’s not nothing.”

  “Oh no. Certainly it’s not nothing. And thank you.”

  The bride was changing into Armani jeans and nearly ready to leave. “Where’s Jacquetta?”

  Eleanor stood about. “She’s flitted somewhere.”

  Rosie looked intently out of the window. “Oh, well, I’ll see to her dress when I get back. Ma, I’ll say goodbye to you here. Thanks for everything. Sorry you never liked me as much as Jacquetta.”

  “Oh, Rosie! How can you! Oh, my Rosie.”

  “And could you go in and water the plants at the flat?”

  “You were crying last night,” said Eleanor. (A bellow rose up from the bridegroom in the hall: “We’ll miss the bloody plane.”)

  “Yes. It’s Jacquetta.”

  “What?”

  “You saw her head. It’s chemo. She’s got about a year.”

  “A wonderful, a perfect, a happy little wedding,” said Aunt Dossie. “Now you and George go off by yourselves and I’ll get Uncle into bed.”

  George and Eleanor walked together in the garden, around the black mouth of the marquee. The odd white napkin lay in a flower bed, the odd wineglass glinted from the top of an urn. The daffodils whitened again as it grew dark.