Excerpt from After the Armistice Ball

Constable & Robinson, 2005.
ISBN 978 -1-84529-341-3

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Croys is a great stone barracks of a place, thrillingly ancient in parts, built as two wings flanking a huge, square tower; a staircase with rooms, Daisy calls it. It is unusual for the Highlands in sitting balefully at the end of an avenue so that one approaches it much as one used to approach a displeased parent who had arranged himself at the furthest corner from the door, the smaller to shrink one during one’s penitent advance. Most of my favourite houses take the other tack, hiding around corners like plump and kindly aunts so that one comes upon them suddenly, close enough to see the lamplight and flowers on the tables inside. Still, I am fond of Croys, despite the glaring improvements that Silas’s business triumphs have furnished: the thick carpets laid right up to the walls, making the fine old rugs on top of them look scrawny; the bathrooms which have colonised almost all of the old dressing rooms in the guests’ wing, so that one is pitched willy-nilly into intimacy not only with one’s husband but with the full range of his ablutions too.

I sat forward eagerly as we swept through the gates, preparing to be diverted in spite of my exhaustion. Most places in this part of the world are at their best in the spring, before the midges awake and begin their savagery, but at Croys the soft uncurling leaf and the peeping primrose are drowned out by a display of vulgarity unequalled in Christendom. Daisy’s gardener, you see, the redoubtable McSween, has made it his life’s work to perpetrate upon the bank opposite the front of the house, in splendid view of all of the best rooms, a three ring circus of rhododendrons and azaleas in every shade, but with a particular nod towards coral and magenta. They jostle like can-can dancers in the breeze off the moor and can make people laugh out loud.

‘Your rhodies are a picture,’ I murmured to Daisy as she came to the door to meet us. Most hospitably, I thought, since the dressing bell must have gone. Daisy rolled her eyes at me.

‘I shall tell McSween to give you some cuttings, darling,’ she said. ‘If you’re not good.’

De-hatted, hastily washed and wrapped in a dressing gown, I sat in front of the glass and surrendered myself to Grant. She frowned lightly (my hair is a great disappointment) and got to work. I find it best to try to detach myself while she is busy about my scalp with hot tongs and rose-flower water. Any shrinking away or wincing unfailingly brings the irons near enough to scald. Accidental, I am almost sure, but still to be avoided if one can manage it. So I sat there quite docile, until she was done and then plied the brushes and puffs myself as usual, guided by her small shakes of the head and sighs, until having hovered with the rouge brush for longer than I could afford I delivered myself into her hands again.

‘Only not too much,’ I said, as I always do. Grant comes from a theatrical family and having spent the first fifteen years of her life turning her parents and elder siblings into monarchs, gypsies and the like with a smear of greasepaint and a blob of white in the inner corners, her face-painting still tends towards the dramatic. I, unfortunately for her and me both, do not have a face which easily absorbs her efforts. At rest, I must say, I have cheekbones to reckon with and a little rouge dabbed on in the fashionable place works wonders, but when I smile my cheeks make egg shapes, the pointed ends reaching almost to my hated dimples, and then the rouge is quite wrong, its position curiously unrelated to the face underneath. However if I put it, unfashionably, where my cheeks will be when I start to smile, then until I do smile, I look like a doll. Don’t smile then, is Grant’s solution, which is hardly helpful. She explained once what is wrong with my face in this respect and even fixed it for me with strips of highlight and shade which looked wonderful, but only at twenty paces.

Still, the moss green dress is something we agree on. Most flattering in shape, although it takes stitching on to my petticoat straps, and with a miraculous effect on my complexion, which can be shadowy around the eyes if I am not careful. And tomato red lipstick to finish. Grant had to get quite fierce with me over this shade of lipstick, but she was right. Blue-ish red makes one’s teeth look yellow, she explained, whereas a yellow-ish red turns them white. For the same reason, diamonds near the face are best surrounded by pearls, very few ladies of diamond-wearing age having the teeth to stand up to them otherwise. Grant and I think it a pity that more ladies do not grin at themselves in the glass before they go downstairs with pink lips and diamond clips, but I had never once smiled at my own reflection until the first time she told me to and I do not suppose it occurs to many others.

‘Uncommonly pretty frock, that,’ said Hugh, entering. Grant bowed her head in discreet acknowledgement of the praise. Hugh would never dream that I had done any more than put on a frock in the time he had spent bathing and shaving, and I mused, not for the first time, that if men believed a frock could do what had happened to me from the neck up in the last half-hour, their world must seem a magical place indeed.

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