a page of Punch, ‘if you stick to your misogynist principles, you won’t be able to ogle that “nice little wife” of Professor Ashworth’s at the dinner-party.’
‘Nice little wife?’ echoed my mother, sufficiently startled to forget her flower arrangement and face us. ‘Well, I’ve only met her a couple of times at dinner-parties, but I thought she was tough as nails, the sort of chairwoman who would say to her committee: “I’m so glad we’re all in agreement,” and then effortlessly impose her views on the dissenting majority!’
‘For God’s sake let’s have both Ashworths to dinner as soon as possible,’ I said, tossing Punch aside. ‘I can’t wait.’
The dinner took place a fortnight later.
III
My mother invited Primrose to accompany her father to the dinner-party, and she also extended an invitation to Aysgarth’s third son, James, who was stationed with his regiment in London. Any young man in the Guards who can look dashing on horseback in a glamorous uniform will always be popular with mothers of unmarried daughters, but twenty-four-year-old males with the cultural limitations of a mollusc have never struck me as being in the least amusing.
‘I wish you’d invited Christian and Norman as well as James,’ I grumbled, but my mother said she had to avoid swamping the Ashworths with Aysgarths. The Ashworths did have two teenage sons but at the time of the dinner-party Charley was doing his National Service and Michael was away at school.
I regretted being deprived of Christian; like every girl I knew I had gone through a phase of being madly in love with Aysgarth’s eldest son, and although I had by this time recovered from my secret and wholly unreciprocated passion for this masculine phenomenon who looked like a film star and talked like a genius, a secret hankering for him lingered on.
Meanwhile, as I hankered in vain for Christian’s presence at the dinner-party, my mother was obliged to add to the guest-list my brother Harold, an amiable nonentity, and his wife Amanda, an expensive clothes-horse. They were in London on holiday but would eventually return to Turkey where Harold had a job shuffling papers at the British Embassy and the clothes-horse fulfilled her vocation to be ornamental. Their combined IQ was low enough to lay a pall over any dinner-party, and to make matters worse my other brother – the one who on his good days could be described as no genius but no fool – had to speak in an important debate, a commitment which excluded him from the guest-list. Oliver, the Member of Parliament for Flaxfield, was also married to an expensive clothes-horse, but unlike Harold’s ornament, this one had reproduced. She had two small boys who made a lot of noise and occasionally smelled. My three sisters, all of whom had manufactured quiet, dull, odourless daughters, were united in being very catty about Oliver’s lively sons.
My eldest sister, Henrietta, lived in Wiltshire; she had married a wealthy landowner and life was all tweeds and gun-dogs interspersed with the occasional hunt ball. My second sister, Arabella, had married a wealthy industrialist and now divided her time between London, Rome and her villa at Juan-les-Pins. My third sister, Sylvia, had been unable to marry anyone wealthy, but fortunately her husband was clever at earning a living on the Stock Exchange so they lived in a chic mews house in Chelsea where Sylvia read glossy magazines and tended her plants and told the au pair how to bring up the baby. My mother disapproved of the fact that Sylvia did no charity work. Henrietta toiled ceaselessly for the Red Cross and even Arabella gave charity balls for UNICEF whenever she could remember which country she was living in, but Sylvia, dreaming away among her plants, was too shy to do more than donate clothes to the local church.
I was mildly fond of Sylvia. She was the sister closest to me in age, but since we were so different there had been no jealousy, no fights. Having nothing in common we had inevitably drifted apart after her marriage, but whenever I felt life was intolerable I would head for her mews and sob on her sofa. Sylvia would ply me with instant coffee and chocolate digestive biscuits – an unimaginative response, perhaps, but there are worse ways of showing affection.
All my sisters were good-looking and Arabella was sexy. Henrietta could have been sexy but was too busy falling in love with gun-dogs to bother. Sylvia could have been sexy too but her husband liked her to look demurely chaste so she did. They all spoke in soprano voices with the affected upper-class accent which in those days was beginning to die out. I was a contralto and I had taken care to speak with a standard BBC accent ever since I had been teased by the middle-class fiends at my vile country preparatory school for ‘speaking la-di-da’. My sisters had escaped this experience. They had attended an upper-class establishment in London before being shovelled off to an equally upper-class boarding school, but in 1945 my parents were able to reclaim Flaxton Hall, which had been requisitioned during the war, and they were both anxious to spend time in the country while they reorganised their home. I was then eight, too old for kindergarten, too young to be shovelled off to boarding school. Daily incarceration at the hell-hole at Flaxfield, three miles from our home at Flaxton Pauncefoot, proved inevitable.
Possibly it was this torturous educational experience which set me apart from my sisters, but it seemed to me I had always been the odd one out.
‘That child gets plainer every time I see her,’ said Horrible Henrietta once to Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella when they rolled home from Benenden for the school holidays. Those broad shoulders are almost a deformity – she’s going to wind up looking exactly like a man.’
‘Maybe she’s changing sex. That would explain the tomboyish behaviour and the gruff voice …’
‘Mama, can’t something be done about Venetia’s eyebrows? She’s beginning to look like an ape …’
‘Mama, have you ever thought of shaving Venetia’s head and giving her a wig? That frightful hair really does call for drastic measures …”
My mother, who was fundamentally a nice-natured woman whenever she wasn’t worshipping her plants, did her best to stamp on this offensive behaviour, but the attacks only surfaced in a more feline form when I reached adolescence.
‘Can’t someone encourage poor darling Venetia to take an interest in clothes? Of course I know we can’t all look like a fashion-plate in Vogue, but …’
‘Venetia, my sweet, you simply can’t wear that shade of lipstick or people will think you’re a transvestite from 1930s’ Berlin …’
Even my brothers lapsed into brutality occasionally.
‘Oliver, you’ve got to help me find a young man for Venetia –’
‘Oh God, Mama, don’t ask me!’
‘Harold, do explain to Venetia how ill-advised it is for a young girl to talk about philosophy at dinner-parties – she simply takes no notice when I tell her it’s so dreadfully showy and peculiar –’
‘Certainly, Mama. Now look here, Venetia old girl – and remember I speak purely out of fraternal affection—your average man doesn’t like clever women unless they’re real sizzlers, and since you’ll never be a real sizzler …’
‘Poor Venetia!’ said Absolutely-the-Bottom Arabella to Horrible Henrietta when she knew quite well I was within earshot. ‘No sex appeal.’
‘Well!’ said my father with a sigh of relief once his third daughter was married. ‘Now I can sit back and relax! I don’t have to worry about Venetia, do I? She’ll never be a femme fatale.’
‘… and I can’t tell
