Weyward — Chapter 20: Violet

20

VIOLET

Violet studied her reflection as she dressed for dinner. She tried to work out if she looked different now that she had been kissed. But she was still the same old Violet – with maybe a new touch of redness around her mouth.

She put a hand to her face. The skin there felt tender and sore, as if it had been scraped by sandpaper. She wondered if anyone else would notice.

She picked a stray twig out of her hair and combed it. The dark strands shimmered in the low light of the room, making her think of her mother.

She had the same dark hair.

Violet was reminded of the conversation she’d overheard between the servants when she was younger. What was the word Nanny Metcalfe had used for her mother? Uncanny.

What on earth did that mean? Her stomach churned as the awful image came back to her: her mother, wild and pale, trapped in a room. Mad.

Perhaps that was why everyone lied about what had happened to her.

Although, when she came to think of it, Violet couldn’t remember anyone ever telling her that her mother had died giving birth to Graham. Instead, Nanny Metcalfe and Mrs Kirkby had said things like ‘Your brother survived, thanks to Jesus’ and ‘The doctor did his best’.

Violet’s fingers went to the pendant around her neck, the way they often did when she was worried, tracing the delicate W. Her head was beginning to ache: there was a tightness to her forehead and a thudding at her temple.

She was still very thirsty after the kiss (how was it that something so wet could make one so parched?) and a little faint.

She had the queer feeling that she was looking at something so closely that she could not yet make out its full shape. Frederick’s words echoed in

her mind.

Your father would have to take her back to her room … Lock her in.

The gong rang for dinner, reverberating through the house like a call to battle. She looked in the mirror one last time, trying to ignore the throbbing in her skull. She was wearing the green dress again, same as last night.

Suddenly, she noticed how short it was: her knees were perilously close to exposure. She couldn’t decide if she looked like a child or a strumpet (‘strumpet’ was the word Violet had heard Mrs Kirkby use to describe Penny after she’d kissed the under-gardener).

Violet tried to see the dining room through Frederick’s eyes. It was a rather grand room, and in the candlelight the slight grubbiness that had set in since the start of the war was barely noticeable. The space was dominated by an enormous mahogany dining table that Father referred to – inexplicably – as the ‘Queen Anne’. (Had Queen Anne sat at it, Violet wondered?) Long-dead Ayreses looked out from the gilt frames on the walls with a melancholy air, as if they regretted not being able to sample whatever meal was being served. A stuffed peacock – which Violet had secretly nicknamed Percy – perched atop a Georgian sideboard, once- glorious tail feathers hanging limp to the floor.

This evening, Mrs Kirkby served a roast pheasant which Father had shot a few days prior. Violet could see the bullet hole in the pheasant’s neck, a dark smudge in the golden flesh. The sick feeling in her stomach returned.

As she cut into her serving, she was horribly aware of poor Percy watching from the other side of the room. One day, when Violet was grown up and had become a biologist (or a botanist, or an entomologist), she would eat only vegetables.

There seemed to be little chance that Frederick shared such dietary aspirations, Violet noted as he tucked into his roast pheasant with relish.

There was a hungry look to him, she thought, as he surveyed the things in the dining room: the Queen Anne, the musty old portraits, her. It didn’t go away, even though he’d eaten rather a lot of pheasant already.

Father and Frederick were having a long conversation about the war.

Violet was distracted, haunted by what Frederick had said about her mother, until Graham kicked her under the table. She set her mouth into a prim smile and tried to focus on what Father was saying.

‘Can’t say I’m a huge fan of General Eisenhower,’ he said. ‘Do we really need all this help from the Yanks?’ He spat the last word out violently, as if he were still smarting from American independence. ‘We need all the help we can get, Uncle,’ Frederick said. ‘Unless you want the Hun sitting here eating pheasant with your daughter. He’d make short work of both, I expect.’ The wave of heat again. Violet wasn’t exactly sure what Frederick meant, but she thought unaccountably of the pulsing swarm of mayflies; the roughness of Frederick’s mouth on hers. Next to her, Graham was watching Father, his eyebrows raised.

But Father hadn’t heard: Mrs Kirkby had come to ask if they were ready for the pudding. Violet saw a flash of gold out of the corner of her eye. It looked as though Frederick had put something in his drink. They were drinking claret, like they always did at dinner. It was watered down, so that Graham and Violet could ‘get a taste for it’. There was the Christmassy smell again. Violet remembered the word for the substance Mrs Kirkby had deployed to make the Christmas pudding go up in blue flames. Brandy.

That was it. It lived in a beautiful crystal decanter on Father’s drinks trolley.

Violet had never seen anyone drink it – Father preferred port after dinner.

She looked at Frederick more closely. There was a glassiness to his eyes, she saw, and his fingers shook when he reached for his claret.

Was he drunk? In the same way that she’d read about kissing long before she’d actually kissed someone, her reference points for drunkenness also came from literature – Falstaff being ‘drunk out of his five senses’ at the start of The Merry Wives of Windsor. She’d read rather a lot of Shakespeare – not that Father knew this, of course (he hadn’t noticed that his Complete Works had been missing from its rightful place in the library for the past two years).

Frederick was now attacking the pudding – a rather pale spotted dick, doled out generously by Mrs Kirkby – so the retention of at least one of his senses wasn’t in doubt. Violet looked down at her bowl. The pudding glistened with fat. She ate the thin custard around it instead. Her headache was gathering strength, like a summer storm. ‘Good heavens,’ Father said. ‘Suet! Mrs Kirkby must have been saving some up.’ Violet couldn’t remember Father commenting on Mrs Kirkby’s cooking before the war. She suspected that Father’s war (against a scarcity of his

favourite port, a shipment of which had been bombed crossing the Atlantic) was rather different to Frederick’s.

Violet wondered if Frederick was thinking this too, from the forceful way he clasped his goblet (part of a set given to the First Viscount by Elizabeth I, or so Father claimed). ‘Delicious,’ he said, attacking the spotted dick once more. ‘Don’t think I’ve had pudding that didn’t come from a tin since 1939. My compliments to Mrs Kirkby.’ The conversation returned to the war. Frederick was telling Father about the sort of guns his regiment used (‘Howitzers for tanks and Colts for close range’) and Violet let her thoughts drift again as Mrs Kirkby came to take away the plates. She could still hear the crickets chirping outside. Actually, it sounded like just one cricket – which made Violet feel rather sorry for it.

Perhaps something had happened to its mate. Or perhaps there had never been a mate at all.

She wondered what it would be like, to live out one’s days alone, without having someone to love and be loved by. She thought of the Virgin Queen again, the illustrious donor of the goblets. She had never married, of course.

Perhaps no one would ever marry Violet, either. Father would be most put out by that. Miss Poole, too – Violet imagined her bemoaning the waste of a perfectly good trousseau.

Violet had never much liked the idea of being married. She would have been quite happy to pursue her ambitions alone, like Elizabeth I – though Violet’s ambitions were rather more prosaic than victory against the Spanish and conversion of the nation to Anglicanism.

She thought, with powerful longing, of the giant moths and scorpions from Father’s atlases. She pictured herself bending to stroke a scorpion’s glittering head, the desert heat pressing against her skin … perhaps discovering a new species, being the first to decipher the secrets of its cells … Might it be possible to have both things? Love and insects? Perhaps Frederick would fall in love with her, and then, once they were married, would be quite happy for her to become a world-travelling scientist. But even as these thoughts made her feel warm and light inside, doubt rolled in like a dark cloud.

She remembered the way that her heart had punched in her chest while Frederick kissed her. There was that feeling again, of being pulled by a tide.

Her lungs tightened. She hadn’t expected that love – if this was what she felt – to be so similar to fear.

Truthfully, she wasn’t sure that anyone had ever loved her in her life, apart from Graham perhaps, in an irritable sort of way. Violet supposed that her mother must have loved her, but other than the faint memories triggered by the discovery of the handkerchief and feather – now somewhat tarnished by Frederick’s story – it was impossible to imagine what this might have felt like.

It was hard to tell if Father loved her. Often, it seemed that all he cared about was whether or not he could mould her into something pretty and agreeable, a present to be given away to some other man.

Though Violet wondered if there wasn’t another layer to her father’s feelings about his daughter – sometimes, she thought she could see regret cloud his face when he looked at her. Perhaps it was because – according to Frederick, anyway – she looked so much like her mother.

Now, Father was pouring three glasses of port to take into the drawing room. Graham was staring at the third glass with an expression of mingled terror and pride.

She cleared her throat. Father looked up at her and frowned. ‘Violet,’ he said, looking at her and then the grandfather clock opposite the door. ‘It’s late. You should be getting to bed.’ It was half past eight. Shafts of pink light patterned the staircase as Violet made her way back to her bedroom. As she passed the window on the second floor, she realised that she could no longer hear the chirp of the solitary cricket. Perhaps it had given up.

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