Ladies of Lyndon Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Kennedy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  The Virtuous Stepmother

  CHAPTER 2

  The Florentine

  CHAPTER 3

  The Kind Companions

  CHAPTER 4

  The Braxhall Frescoes

  CHAPTER 5

  The Fools’ Progress

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Agatha is aware of an intensity, a powerful storm of emotion briefly awakened by a shortlived love affair with her cousin Gerald, that is entirely lacking from the successful marriage on which she is about to embark. Beautiful, young and carefully brought up, Agatha knows she is securing a perfect and luxurious future in marrying handsome John Clewer and becoming Mistress of Lyndon, and she soon becomes the perfect country house hostess. But when Gerald reappears and war in Europe disturbs the sheltered comfort of Lyndon forever, Agatha is once again haunted by the idea of a different life.

  About the Author

  Margaret Kennedy was born in London on 23 April 1896, the eldest of four children. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, then went on to study history at Somerville College, Oxford. Her first book, a study of modern European history, was published in 1922 and was soon followed by her first work of fiction, The Ladies of Lyndon (1923). Her second novel, The Constant Nymph (1924), became a worldwide best-seller, and with it Kennedy became a well-known and highly praised writer. The following year she married David Davies, a barrister like her father; they lived in London and had three children. Kennedy went on to write fifteen further novels, many of which were critically commended – Troy Chimneys (1953) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She also wrote plays, adapting both her novels The Fool of the Family and The Constant Nymph into successful productions. The latter opened in the West End in 1926, starring Noël Coward and John Gielgud, to great acclaim. Three different film versions of The Constant Nymph, featuring stars of the time such as Ivor Novello and Joan Fontaine, were equally popular, and led to Kennedy’s engagement in film work for a number of years from the late 1930s. She also published a biography of Jane Austen (1950) and a work of literary criticism, The Outlaws on Parnassus, in 1958. In 1964 Margaret Kennedy moved from London to Woodstock, Oxfordshire, where she lived until her death on 31 July 1967.

  ALSO BY MARGARET KENNEDY

  The Constant Nymph

  Red Sky at Morning

  The Fool of the Family

  Return I Dare Not

  A Long Time Ago

  Together and Apart

  The Midas Touch

  The Feast

  Lucy Carmichael

  Troy Chimneys

  The Oracles

  The Wild Swan

  A Night in Cold Harbour

  The Forgotten Smile

  TO MY MOTHER

  1

  The Virtuous Stepmother

  1.

  In the first decades of the twentieth century, London contained quite a number of distinguished, grey-headed bachelors who owed their celibacy to Mrs Varden Cocks. In her youth she had refused offers of marriage from most of them and they found themselves unable to choose again when she tardily but finally dashed their several ambitions by selecting Varden. Indeed they almost gloried in their shackles, for this lady had reached, at forty-seven, the very zenith of her attractions. She was excessively handsome in the liberal style of the First Empire, and endowed with a wit in keeping with her appearance. She talked a great deal, in a rich, temperamental contralto, and had fine eyes which spoke for her in her rare silences. Her photographs were seldom successful since few of her friends were acquainted with her face in repose.

  The fatigued erudition of her husband set off her animation with an especial piquancy. He had been a distinguished scholar when she married him and was, subsequently, never heard to speak. At intervals she would discuss with her friends the advantages of a political career for him, but his views on the subject were not known. He was, fortunately, very tolerably well off.

  They had one child, a beautiful but silent daughter, who accompanied them to most places of entertainment and whose wardrobe was a perpetual testimony to a mother’s taste. It was generally believed that Agatha Cocks was a very nice girl and everyone was pleased when she became engaged, a few months after her introduction, to an entirely suitable young man, a baronet, wealthy, and devotedly attached. Mrs Cocks, who believed in early marriages for young women, was overjoyed. The bridegroom had an additional advantage; he possessed a most exceptional stepmother. Mrs Cocks was accustomed to point out that a stepmother-in-law, of the right kind, is so much easier for a young bride to get on with than the usual mother-in-law. She is less likely to interfere; she has fewer claims. The dowager Lady Clewer was this kind of stepmother. She was a perfect monument of tact. ‘I had thought,’ Mrs Cocks would say in her rapid, vibrant voice, ‘I had thought it to be impossible for a widow and a widower, each with children, to marry and produce a third family without a certain amount of storm and stress. But the Clewers have undoubtedly done it! There they all are, his sons and her daughter, and their child (I forget its sex), living together in perfect peace and amity. But then of course she is unique … and he died pretty soon….’ One evening, about ten days before the wedding, this paragon gave a dinner party to which Mrs Cocks took her family. None of the trio anticipated a very pleasant evening, but only Mrs Cocks said so, since she alone could talk audibly and without discomfort while driving through London traffic. Her gloomy forebodings enlivened the entire journey from South Kensington to Eaton Square. This sort of party, she said, was apt to be trying. ‘It isn’t as if you didn’t know all your in-laws already,’ she complained. ‘You’ve met them all by now, haven’t you? Except the mentally deficient one. To go on meeting in this way is quite unnecessary, I don’t gather that anyone will be there in the least congenial to me. Or to your father. Only Clewer relations, I expect. I shouldn’t wonder if there aren’t enough men to go round. That’s what people generally mean when they call a dinner “quite informal.” I hate a superfluity of women. Even dull men are better than none.’

  Agatha sighed. She was disturbed by the tinge of petulance in these remarks. She had never supposed that the vogue of John’s stepmother would last for ever, since Mrs Cocks was very variable in her friendships and, before the engagement, had been accustomed to remember that Lady Clewer’s first husband had been some kind of successful Northern manufacturer, that the upholstered prosperity which her money had brought to Lyndon gave it a very odd look, and that Lois Martin, the manufacturer’s daughter, was rather a second-rate little person. All this she had, for the moment, comfortably forgotten, but Agatha had little doubt but that the Martin vulgarity must be, eventually, disinterred. Only she had hoped for fair weather until after the wedding, and she sighed because she feared that a dull dinner at this point would be most inopportune.

  It was, unfortunately, very dull indeed. Besides Varden there were but two men present—Sir John Clewer, the host and bridegroom, and a sadly stolid Major Talbot, his uncle. These failed to inspire the ladies with any sort of liveliness. Depression, like a murky fog, hung over the tasteful brilliance of Lady Clewer’s table and barely lifted with the appearance of dessert, when the company rallied a little, sustained by the prospect of release. Mrs Cocks, with some show of animation, embarked upon the conquest of Major Talbot and was soon discoursing fluently to him about the government of India. At the other end of the table old Mrs Gordon Clewer, John’s great-aunt, was making her neighbours laugh. Her butt was probably the rising generation, a topic upon which she w
as in the habit of being funny in the epigrammatic style of the early ’nineties. The sulky face of little Lois Martin suggested that some shaft had gone home. Lois did not know what to make of Mrs Gordon Clewer. Against old ladies who were not thus entirely surrendered to age she had the weapons of youth and personal attraction. But this small, terrifying woman, with her sharp tongue, her arrogant dowdiness and her quaint curled fringe, was invulnerable. She was securely entrenched in the past and made Lois feel disconcertingly raw: mere prettiness went for nothing with her, she had seen so much of it in her time. Her high incisive tones rang out in a sudden pause while Mrs Cocks was eating a marron glacé:

  ‘… a whole roomful, I assure you, all dancing in this concentrated, painstaking way; all with this stupefied air. No conversation, you understand; almost like convicts taking exercise. “Good heavens, my dear!” I said to Lady Peel. “What has happened to them all? Surely the ventilation is insufficient? The children appear to me positively abrutis! And why do they never change their partners?” “Oh,” she said, “it isn’t the ventilation. They always look like that now somehow. And they can’t change their partners. You know it’s this new American dance, the … the Tango, and it’s very difficult….”’

  Lois decided that Youth must speak; an attack like this could not be endured in silence. She leant across the table and inquired rather aggressively, in a voice loud enough to be generally heard:

  ‘I say, Agatha, don’t you think those old Victorian times, when they danced nothing but stupid old waltzes, must have been perfectly beastly?’

  ‘Perfectly beastly!’ murmured Mrs Gordon Clewer joyfully, as though committing the phrase to memory for some future narrative.

  It was an unhappy expression: everyone was acutely aware of its stark unsuitability. Poor Lady Clewer, crimson with mortification, was but too sure of the manner in which Mrs Gordon Clewer would tell the tale:

  ‘… That Martin child, Marian Clewer’s daughter by her first marriage. A really horrid memorial of poor Marian’s remoter past. One wonders so what the father was like. Of course, one always thinks, looking at the girl, that Martin isn’t a Jewish name. Marian is so clever with her—dressing her rather inconspicuously in pale pink, don’t you know? But what was it she said? Oh, yes! … Perfectly beastly!’

  The unhappy mother plunged into a general discourse upon dancing in a vain attempt to cover her daughter’s lapse. Was it true that the Queen disapproved of these new American dances? But Mrs Gordon Clewer was too much pleased with the situation to destroy it.

  ‘Well, child?’ she demanded sharply of Agatha. ‘What do you think? Do you consider the customs of your elders … er … perfectly beastly?’

  The entire table waited to hear the young bride’s opinion.

  Agatha hesitated, not liking her position. Under her mother’s quelling eye she dared not agree with Lois. But to disagree would be a sorry course and hardly sincere in a person of her years. With all the courtesy due to John’s great-aunt she must make a stand for her own generation. So she smiled very prettily at Mrs Gordon Clewer and said:

  ‘You know, I can never quite make out what the customs of my elders were exactly. There are such discrepancies in the accounts one gets. This matter of partners, for instance! I’ve been told that nice girls never danced more than three times with the same man. But … I find it very difficult to believe. Because once I was tidying an old bureau for my mother, and I came upon some of her dance programmes….’

  ‘Never tell me I danced the whole evening with one man!’ broke in Mrs Cocks.

  ‘No, Mother! With two.’

  They laughed, and she felt that she had not done badly. She had been a little impertinent, but they apparently forgave her for it. Catching the sparkle of approval in her lover’s eye, she felt her heart leap with pleasure.

  ‘No good, Mrs Cocks,’ Major Talbot was saying to her protesting mother, ‘you should have burnt ’em, y’know.’

  Lady Clewer, however, did not look pleased. Scarcely recovered from the irritation of her daughter’s exposure, she found nothing soothing in the spectacle of Agatha’s discretion. Ill-temper was written clearly upon her smooth, fresh face, furrowing her still youthful brow, and emphasizing the massiveness of her jaw. She had the air of rehearsing to herself all the caustic reproofs which Lois should hear when the company departed. She glanced round the room, preparatory to rising, and her little blue eyes were ominous—hard as pebbles. The five women left the dining-room in an atmosphere of heavy displeasure.

  Upstairs they found Cynthia, the youngest of the Clewers. This was the solitary child of Marian’s second marriage. At fourteen she did not dine downstairs but came into the drawing-room for a short time after her schoolroom supper. She was an exquisite creature, slim but well grown, with a mane of shining hair the colour of honey. She had her mother’s flawless skin, but her sharp eyes were dark and set rather close together in the creamy oval of her face. She advanced and made her civilities to the guests with cool self-possession. Lady Clewer immediately demanded, with unconcealed impatience, where James might be. Cynthia replied that he would not come, though Miss Barrington had said that he ought. Lady Clewer’s jaw became grim and she was preparing to send for James on the instant when Cynthia demurely added that he had gone to bed. He had further threatened to come down in his pyjamas if anyone bothered him. Lady Clewer sharply bade her daughter to have done, and Cynthia was silent, her keen eyes flitting from face to face. She secretly enjoyed these trying situations invariably created by James; they gave variety to a monotonous life.

  The guests were embarrassed at this exposure of the family skeleton. James, the younger brother of John, was supposed to be a little queer in the head. This was due to nothing ‘in the family,’ as his stepmother had carefully explained to Mrs Cocks when the engagement was pending. She believed that she had traced it to an injury to the brain received by James at the age of seven months. The first Lady Clewer had died at his birth and he had not acquired a stepmother until he was almost six years old; it must have been during the period when he lacked a mother’s care that the harm was done. The servants, who had tended him, could at first remember no accident and indignantly denied Marian’s accusations of neglect. But under her astute cross-examination they contradicted themselves and each other, and it became established that there had been a fall. Marian, who had thought the child alarmingly backward, discovered that her worst fears were confirmed. She consulted a specialist immediately; he looked grave but would say nothing save that the child was abnormal. This abnormality became more marked as James grew older. Nothing, it seemed, could be done. At twenty-one he could not be depended upon sufficiently, in the matter of table manners, to dine with the family. He shared Cynthia’s schoolroom meals, and his stepmother, always anxious to make the best of him, had decreed that he should be in the drawing-room every evening after dinner.

  He had but recently come up to town with Cynthia and the governess, and Agatha had hitherto escaped the introduction. She dreaded it, fearing that she would find him very disagreeable. His future was, she knew, uncertain. Hitherto the whole family had lived at Lyndon, John’s property in Oxfordshire. But, upon his marriage, the dowager intended to settle with her daughters in the Eaton Square house which had been left to her by her second husband. She had offered to warehouse James for a time until the young couple, comfortably settled at Lyndon, could make up their minds what to do with him. Agatha had a secret fear that they might have to invite him to live with them.

  She had never seen Lyndon, but she understood it to be an imposing mid-Georgian affair, well stocked with the proper sort of furniture and portraits. Sometimes she wondered whether Marian had been able to impose as much of her essential mediocrity there as in Eaton Square. She had such a faculty for making nice things look insignificant, to all her possessions she seemed able to impart a hard, shining newness. Old things looked quite modern when she got hold of them. And her rooms were always so very full of chesterfields; they h
ad struck Agatha’s attention when calling in Eaton Square for the first time, and were all she could remember of the drawing-room when she was not in it, save perhaps a portrait of the mother of James and John which hung over the fireplace.

  This picture had interested her. The sheen of the green velvet gown, cut in the aesthetic style of the ’eighties, toned well with the green Sèvres on the chimneypiece and was painted with unquestionable ability. The brooding peevishness of the face, however, gave food for reflection. It was a discordant note in a complacent room, suggesting a hidden, bygone rebellion, beyond the power of time to cancel. Glancing towards it, Agatha perceived with surprise that it was gone. A large looking-glass hung in its place. Lady Clewer, observing the direction of her eyes, became extremely benevolent and important:

  ‘Ah, the portrait! Yes, it’s gone. I’ve sent it down to Lyndon. Oh, yes, it’s always hung here … But I thought … John’s mother … he ought to have it….’

  Everyone felt how right this was and Mrs Cocks warmly said so. Marian, beaming, said that it must hang in John’s study. Agatha murmured something pretty, but she privately believed that John would not want it in his study. She happened to know that he hated it. He had a photograph, which he much preferred, in which his mother was wearing the clothes he best remembered, a little sailor hat, a blouse with full sleeves and a broad, tight belt. She was sitting on the south terrace at Lyndon between two dogs. The portrait was certainly less cheerful.

  Mrs Gordon Clewer, who had been clucking to herself, now startled Agatha by observing:

  ‘If John takes after his father he won’t want it. My poor nephew couldn’t do with it at all. That’s why he wouldn’t have it at Lyndon. It was a great deal too good. And that gown was symbolical of so much in poor Mary that he couldn’t abide. She got the greeny-yallery craze very badly and would go about looking like an invertebrate Burne-Jones. That’s a little trying, you know, for a man who likes his wife to be well corseted. Smart women in those days had waists. Nowadays we condemn waists as artificial; but a man like John appreciates a certain amount of artificiality in a woman as a tribute to civilization, you understand. And, if I’m not mistaken, his son takes after him.’