said Marjorie, ‘they no doubt gabbled away like anything. Do you think that’s a portrait of Beatrice Malaspina?’
The painting hung on the far wall on a panel between two flat fluted columns. It was a full-length portrait of a woman dressed in evening dress in the style of the late nineteenth century, her hair swept up, a black velvet ribbon at her slender throat. Her dress was black, and cut very low. Paris, thought Delia, and what a beautiful woman she must have been. No, not exactly a beauty; striking, rather, with that mass of hair and those huge dark eyes.
Benedetta hurried over to press a switch that illuminated the painting from above. In the brighter light, Delia could see that the hair of the woman in the portrait was very dark red, not unlike her own, but with glints to it that hers didn’t have. ‘And just look at that diamond on the velvet collar, what a huge stone,’ she said.
Whatever else Beatrice Malaspina was, she had been rich. Or married to a rich man, which amounted to the same thing.
Or did it? Her mother was married to a rich man, but did that mean she was too? Far from it, with every penny counted, every item of expenditure having to be justified. Delia’s own first act of financial independence had been to open an account at a different bank from the one where all the family had their business; goodness, what a storm that had provoked. Father hated not being in control of her money.
‘I think it’s by Sargent,’ she said, after staring at the picture for a while longer. ‘We have a portrait of my mother painted by Sargent.’
‘A fashionable lady,’ said George. He was doing a swift calculation in his head. ‘How old would you say she was in that painting? Late twenties? Early thirties?’
Marjorie had her head on one side. ‘Past thirty. She looks slightly younger than she is because of the way the painter has chosen to light the portrait.’
Delia was surprised at how definite Marjorie was. Was she going to turn out to be one of those assertive women who always insisted that they, and they alone, were right? If so, she, as well as Jessica, would find her a tiresome companion.
‘In that case,’ George said, ‘we may make a guess as to when she was born. That is, if one can date a picture by the clothes, which is more than I can do.’
‘About 1900,’ said Delia. ‘I know something about clothes of that time,’ she added.
‘In which case, she would have been born in 1870 or thereabouts,’ said George.
‘So she must have been in her late eighties when she died.’
‘A good age,’ said George. ‘Let us hope that we live so long.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Marjorie, but so quietly that Delia only just caught the bitter words.
Delia had been drawn irresistibly to the piano which stood close to a window. She lifted the lid and tried a few chords, then pulled a face. ‘It needs tuning, but it’s a good one; nice touch, excellent tone, I should say.’
Benedetta was beside her, gesturing and talking much too fast. Delia sat back on the piano stool and gestured to her to slow down. Benedetta tried again.
‘It was Beatrice Malaspina’s piano. I mean, of course it was hers, this was her house, but she played it. At least, I think that’s what she’s saying.’
Benedetta seized Delia’s hand in a surprisingly strong grasp and tugged her up from the stool. ‘Okay,’ said Delia, disentangling herself with some difficulty. ‘What do you want to show me? Oh, a cupboard full of music, how heavenly. Here’s the full score of The Magic Flute. Perfect; I see Beatrice Malaspina as a Mozartian.’
‘Now we’ve lost her,’ Jessica said to George.
‘I take it Miss Vaughan plays the piano?’
‘Delia is a professional singer. Opera.’
‘Then it is a shame that the piano is out of tune,’ said George. ‘Otherwise we might have had the pleasure of hearing her sing.’
Benedetta clearly considered they had spent enough time in the drawing room. She switched off the light above the painting, and went over to close the shutters.
‘It’s an evening room, with doors open on to that big terrace and a view of the sun setting over the sea,’ said Marjorie.
‘We can come in here after dinner,’ said George.
‘If Benedetta will let us,’ said Jessica. ‘She’s very bossy.’
As Benedetta led the way from the room, Delia lingered for a last look at the painting. She gazed up at it, the image of her mother’s portrait strong in her mind; one dissolved into the other, and she was back, far back in her childhood, looking at the picture of her mother while her parents had a furious argument.
She must have been very young. Three or so. Her nurse talked about it for years afterwards. She had never forgotten the day that little Delia wickedly escaped her eagle eye and scampered away, undetected, to the forbidden territory of the gate which led through into the churchyard.
The Georgian house was built, in true manorial style, next to the village church. In former days, the family would have walked to divine service along the path, through the gate and so on to church land. But her father had bought the house and not the religion. Lord Saltford had been brought up a Nonconformist, and he would have nothing to do with the Church of England, however close at hand. He even objected to the bells as being frivolous in their exuberant peals, but that was something he couldn’t fix, the village having a strong tradition of bell-ringing that no newcomer, however rich, was going to change.
So the gate was kept shut, but on the other side of the gate on that particular day was Pansy the donkey. Pansy was the love of Delia’s young life, and she considered it unfair that Pansy should be allowed into the churchyard as a neighbourly gesture to graze the grass and save the aged sexton’s labours, while she had to remain on this side of the gate.
The latch had not caught, the gate swung open, and Delia escaped through it. Wily beyond her years, she had closed the gate behind her, and it was several hours before the desperate nurse discovered her, curled up under an ancient yew, fast asleep.
The row was a distant memory, beyond her understanding then, but frightening as arguing parents are to a child, even to a child of her time who spent most of her life in the company of her nurse upstairs in the nursery. On that occasion, her nurse, distraught and sobbing in the kitchen, had left her with her mother, and there was her father accusing her mother of not caring for her at all, of deliberately letting her roam, of not immediately sending out searchers to look for her. The child might have been anywhere, could even have been abducted, held for ransom. She could, he bellowed at her mother, in a terrifying rage now, at least pretend to care for the child.
‘I care for her as much as you care for Boswell,’ had been her mother’s defiant words before she flew out of the room.
The remark hadn’t surprised Delia; even at three years old, she had known that her father didn’t like her thirteen-year-old brother, Boswell, any more than she did.
Odd, how a scene like that, from a quarter of a century before, when she was too young according to all the psychologists to have any memories of anything, should come so clearly to her mind. Buried all
