Abdication A Novel

Chapter THREE





As Miss Evangeline Nettlefold reached across the dining room table for a second piece of toast, she felt the seam at the side of her woollen dress give way.

Despite her size, Evangeline often surprised her friends with her stylishness, particularly when everyone knew she was all but penniless. Her often admired hats, the straw boaters, berets and feather-decorated combs, changed as frequently as those pictured on the pages of fashionable magazines and were thought by some to be a little jeune-fille for a woman who had just entered her fifth decade. Beneath the hats were a variety of wigs that cunningly concealed the ravages of alopecia and gave Evangeline a little of the confidence she craved. However, the current trend for close-fitting clothes was not making her life easy. She wished she had been born in an earlier era of flamboyant, floaty gowns, which must have conveniently masked the evidence of too many rich desserts. She had registered with a wince that the American fashion pages had pronounced waistlines to be “in” in 1936 and had been debating silently whether the discomfort would be worth the effort.

She reflected with some regret on how she had indulged herself royally in the ship’s first-class dining room on the way across the Atlantic. And now that she was here in England, those pounds continued to amass in the most disconcerting manner. She comforted herself that what might look like a small lapse of self-discipline was often beyond her power to change. How was she expected to refuse the exquisitely rolled balls of butter that the British invited their guests to unfurl onto a piece of bread? What control did she have over the volume of cream-filled pitchers they stirred into their puddings? She remembered with nostalgia how in the summer they served a particularly delicious cream-and-fruit-based dessert that resembled melted ice cream. Fool, they called it, but there was no fooling Evangeline with the amount of calories it must have contained. Calories interested her. Back home she had been following reports of some scientific experiments with rats whose lifetimes had been significantly extended when their calorie intake was reduced. Something to bear in mind for another day, perhaps, Evangeline thought as she buttered her toast. She had recently become aware of her zipper catching the small but disturbing pinch of flesh beneath her armpit and had prayed that the already weakened stitching would hold up—at least until after breakfast.

She had an inkling of what it might feel like to be slim. She had once been left alone in a fitting room when the dressmaker had gone to fetch a measuring tape. Seizing her chance she had run her hands along the sides of a small-size tailor’s dummy, beginning just below the bust and travelling all the way down past the neat indent at the waist and further on to the pleasing gentle swell at the hips, closing her eyes as she did so. Her hands encountered no lumps or rolls, simply smooth, straight lines. That, she thought to herself with envy, is what it must be like. The evidence of her ill-fitting clothes was becoming impossible to ignore, even though the height that she had been lucky enough to inherit from her father helped to spread some of the extra weight across a larger area. Such a bonus would not have been hers if she had been born with her mother’s diminutive stature. Even so, there was no avoiding the truth: several of the dresses she had brought with her from Baltimore would soon have to be altered. Altered? Dear God! What was she thinking? If she was being truthful what she meant was they would have to be let out. Evangeline felt sure that Wallis would be able to give her the name of a good English dressmaker.

Evangeline shifted uncomfortably in her seat, wondering whether to help herself to another sausage from the silver dish sitting on the hot plate. She felt a fleeting but familiar shiver of self-loathing. She knew that her public excuse for eating too much was that the curves were part of her character: rounded, jolly, up for a laugh, not in the least bit sensitive about the odd tease. But the secret truth was that Evangeline had no expectations that her status as a forty-year-old virgo intacta would ever change. So what difference was the odd fleshy roll here or there going to make to her solitary progress through life?

Sometimes she felt like a caricature of a middle-aged spinster. She wondered for the hundredth time when real life—by which she meant happy real life—was going to begin. As she scooped out a dollop of marmalade from the pot, whose label confirmed it came from Oxford and must therefore be the best of its kind, she reminded herself that at least for now during her time here in England she had a purpose. Ever loyal to friends that needed her and indefatigably romantically optimistic, she often felt sure her luck would change.

She could hardly believe that it had only been a matter of days since Wiggle had been squirming in discomfort beside her on the floor. After an initial flash of fury at the stupidity of the sweet young chauffeur, she had forgiven May. After all, pekineses, like their mistresses, were often choosy about their food, and the chopped-up kidney in thick gravy that the London cook had prepared for Wiggle had been causing havoc with his digestion. There had never been any question of leaving Wiggle back at home in Baltimore. Besides, who else would have shared the lonely nights with Evangeline? The ever-present warm body at her feet had been almost the only nocturnal companionship she had ever known. Admittedly she had taken a gamble with the quarantine laws and had been careful not to produce Wiggle too often in public places. Before leaving Baltimore, she had persuaded herself that at least his dear little bark would not betray an American accent. And when the customs officers had waved her through at the dock she had been relieved that the capaciousness of her coat ensured there was ample room to hide a small dog within its folds.

Evangeline debated for a moment whether to have a third and definitively final slice of toast to go with the sausage. Joan had already left the table and there was as yet no sign of that tiresome Rupert in his absurd lacy cravat or of his captivating young friend Julian. She was alone. No one was here to count.

She had been delighted, if surprised, to receive the first letter from England. Although it felt like much longer ago—my, oh my, didn’t time play tricks—only six weeks earlier she had been at home, helping her sister-in-law with preparations for the family Christmas. Her mother’s death and the consequent terms of the will had left Evangeline without a home or any independent means and she had come to live with her brother Frank and his family at their invitation. Evangeline’s father, an affluent businessman, had died so soon after his daughter’s birth that Evangeline had no memory of him. A large man, fond of his food and drink, he had suffered a heart attack after breakfast when his wife was out shopping. Mrs. Nettlefold had returned to the house to find the barely warm figure of her husband spread out on the dining-room floor, a buttered roll lying, as if tossed away in overdue disgust, a yard or so from his rounded face.

During the subsequent years Evangeline had served as companion to her cantankerous widowed mother, putting up with an endless succession of Mrs. Nettlefold’s “suitors,” the covetous glint of her inherited wealth in their eyes. Evangeline’s filial devotion had gone quite unrewarded. Mrs. Nettlefold rarely failed to draw a visitor’s attention to Evangeline’s size and had long made it clear that she considered her big-toothed, accident-prone, spinster daughter to be a disappointment. Since the age of twelve, her pubescent breasts evidence of approaching adulthood, Evangeline had dreamt of the day she would be set free from her mother’s critical presence.

“How many times have I told you to sit up straight? No man wants to marry a humpback,” Mrs. Nettlefold would say, producing a pencil from nowhere as if it were a magician’s wand, and prodding it deeply and painfully into the small of Evangeline’s back.

Once when Evangeline had already embarked on the hairpin bends of puberty, she overheard her mother on the telephone to a friend. “Evangeline reminds me of a tombstone. She is huge, grey and lifeless. She might as well be in the ground beneath that stone right now for all the trouble she causes me.”

A few days later Evangeline had woken to find her pillow covered in hair. Putting her hand to her head a whole section of pale brown fluff came away as if she were scooping up a field of dandelion clocks.

“Has your daughter had a recent shock?” the doctor asked Mrs. Nettlefold.

“Nothing that I know of, doctor,” Mrs. Nettlefold replied. “She leads the care-free life of a cosseted child.”

But Evangeline had experienced a shock. If pressed, the doctor might have confirmed that a declaration of lovelessness delivers a severe shock from which it is difficult to recover. But the doctor was not consulted again and the hair on Evangeline’s head had never grown back. For several months her mother’s friends, ignorant of the real reason why Evangeline always insisted on wearing a hat, even at mealtimes, had talked among themselves of how such an attractive mother did not deserve such a plain child. Hats became a passion for Evangeline. And ever since the shock she had paid extra attention to any outfit on the street that was topped off with a cloche or a bonnet.

No one was more aware than Evangeline herself that Mrs. Nettlefold felt cheated. Where was the vivacious elegance that would have ensured Evangeline’s inclusion in the society magazines? The Great War had obliterated so many of America’s eligible bachelors that Mrs. Nettlefold had joined a band of socially ambitious and avaricious mothers who escorted their unmarried daughters across the Atlantic to England. There they hoped to take advantage of a country that had proved until recently to be a reliable source of rich and titled young men. But the British upper classes had suffered still worse wartime casualties, and while second sons had become an acceptable second-best in the bazaar for upper-class husbands, in desperate cases third-borns had come to suffice. However, despite some of the very best introductions effected by her well-connected English godmother Joan, no one had so much as invited Evangeline for a cup of tea, let alone lavished upon her dinner, candlelight, romance and a seat as the châtelaine of a decent Georgian rectory. Well before Evangeline’s twenty-fifth birthday Mrs. Nettlefold gave up all hope of her daughter ever marrying, concluding that the root of the problem was not a scarcity of candidates but a matter of size. Evangeline was just too fat.

In her twenties Evangeline had read Michael Arlen’s bestselling, romantic novel The Green Hat. A passage about discomfiture, nothing in fact to do with hats, struck a note of empathy. Searching for something to fill the void created by a dissatisfaction with life, Iris Storm, the heroine, rejects cigarettes, cocaine, sex and even chocolate.

“Yes,” Evangeline said aloud in recognition of herself. That is how she spent her time: searching for the elusive something to banish the feeling of emptiness. On countless occasions she had thought chocolate might be the answer, but the relief the sugar brought her was evanescent and the emptiness invariably returned. Every day of her life Evangeline Nettlefold battled to suppress the bitterness that threatened to consume her. Jealousy and resentment remained her most pernicious enemies. She was jealous of people’s looks, of their popularity, of their self-confidence, of the loyalty they received from others and above all of their apparent ease at attracting love. All her life Evangeline had felt unregarded, unimportant and unloved. And all her silent resentment was directed at the woman who had caused this state of affairs.

Evangeline’s brother Frank had long been distressed by his mother’s victimisation of Evangeline but, like everyone else, was too wrapped up in his own life to do anything about it. However, he was grateful to Evangeline for accepting almost single-handedly the nursing of their mother, who rarely spent a week without discovering she was suffering from some new ailment. She was plagued by aches and pains in every part of her body and Frank and Evangeline joked behind her back about their mother’s tedious “organ recital.” Eminent specialists had been unable to make a diagnosis. They could find no explanation for the intermittent fainting fits, shortness of breath and trembling limbs that could confine Mrs. Nettlefold alternately to the sitting-room sofa or, more extremely, to a demanding existence tucked for several days into her bed, waited on by her daughter. Evangeline felt persecuted, throttled and trapped and there had been occasions when she prayed her mother would not recover from her latest affliction.

In the end, for the first time in Evangeline’s life, a wish came true and a weakened heart was given as the medical consensus of the cause of Mrs. Nettlefold’s eventual death. Seeing his sister homeless and, valuing the uniqueness of a sibling bond, Frank and his wife had offered Evangeline board and lodging. Because of her generally cheerful and phlegmatic presence, and despite her occasional clumsiness, her dependency never felt like an imposition.


Six weeks ago, when the Baltimore morning post had been placed on the hall table, Evangeline had turned to the small pile of envelopes and the new Christmas issue of Good Housekeeping magazine, the publication that was her single, modest flash of self-indulgence. Most of the envelopes contained Christmas cards and shop catalogues filled with pictures of tempting seasonal highlights. She had saved the best for last. The sight of the stamp with its crowned head in profile always brought her a little lift of pleasure, for she knew who had placed that stamp on the envelope.



Cuckmere Park, Near Eastbourne, Sussex

10 December 1935



My dear Evangeline,

We have not seen you for so long. Our plans to come over to the United States keep on getting interrupted by Philip’s demanding parliamentary schedule. But recently I was at a dinner party and found myself talking to an old schoolfriend of yours. I believe you knew her as Wallis Warfield, although you may not have heard that since leaving school she has been married (twice in fact!). Miss Warfield became Mrs. Spencer and then not long after her divorce (most painful I believe, as he drank) she married an Ernest Simpson who is half-American and has an English mother. So now your friend is Mrs. Simpson.

Although Wallis and Ernest settled here a few years ago, I do not know them well. During our chat the other night, I got the impression that Wallis, although devoted to her husband, was a little lonely, and would, I am certain, be much comforted by the presence of one of her countrymen here in England. In fact when I mentioned your name as a long-standing friend of our own family she lit up!

I wondered, dear child, if you might make two lots of people happy by agreeing to come over for a lovely long visit? Of course I do know how tight money is. Perhaps that final illness took its toll on your mother’s mind? I do hope you can manage to join me in blaming ill health for her otherwise inexplicable failure to remember you in the will?

Anyway, my dear, I am enclosing a small cheque that might help persuade you to book a passage on the first ship to England to sail after Christmas. That way you could be here with us at the beginning of the New Year. I can already hear your protests, but you must know that it is actually an act of pure selfishness on my part as the pleasure of having you here will be mainly mine. And if you stay with us long enough you will be in time to travel home on the new Cunard liner in the summer. I hear that RMS Queen Mary is even to have a dog-walking deck so perhaps (if we are careful to avoid any nasty quarantine rules—a convenient blanket could be readily to hand!) you could bring Wiggle with you too? And, if I dare suggest that you might discover you are enjoying yourself, you might even extend your stay beyond the summer season. There are always so many jolly parties to go to and you would be welcome to join in everything as an honorary member of the Blunt family.

I know you will keep it to yourself when I tell you that I have been suffering one of my worst glooms recently. Philip says that another war is a distinct possibility and I do not think I could manage to go through it all again, especially with Rupert leaving Oxford this coming summer and being the right age for being called up. I am praying it will not happen. But if you write and say yes to coming to see us, you will be giving Philip and me the very best of belated Christmas presents.

This comes, as always, with a kiss from us both.

Your loving godmother,

Joan



Joan’s family and the Nettlefolds had known each other for as long as Evangeline could remember. Her mother and Joan had met in England one summer while Queen Victoria was still on the British throne, two reigns ago. Mrs. Nettlefold had been visiting London on a sightseeing visit to Europe, or what she later referred to as “an eye-opener” (named after her favourite cocktail). In the summer of 1894 she had met the eighteen-year-old debutante Lady Joan Bradley (as one of three daughters of an earl the title had been hers from birth). They had been seated on adjacent gold chairs at a fashion show at the Maison Lucile in Mayfair, a new salon to which society flocked in the wake of the patronage of the elegantly bustled Lillie Langtry, the Prince of Wales’s favourite. That day when they had each bought a daringly diaphanous tea gown, and had marvelled at Lucile’s crêpe de Chine and rose silk underwear, a friendship had begun to develop between the young society woman and the socially ambitious American tourist. A year or two later, after Evangeline’s mother had found herself a rich suitor willing to play the several roles of banker, husband and father, she gave birth to Frank and then to Evangeline. The two godmothers selected to take care of Evangeline’s spiritual well-being were Madame Lucile, who gave Evangeline her love of fashion, and Joan, who instilled in her a hesitant affection for England. Charming as the country was, Evangeline always felt that the weather and an occasional propensity for unfriendliness let the place down.

The Blunt and Nettlefold families had remained in touch by letter and through occasional visits across the Atlantic, although the fortunes of the two godmothers had not prospered during the war. Madame Lucile, the one-time queen of the fashion world, found herself reduced to bankruptcy, her wafty Edwardian tea gowns no longer fashionable, and she died alone and poverty-stricken in a one-room flat in South London. Misfortune had struck Evangeline’s other godmother far earlier. At the beginning of the war, at the late age of thirty-eight, Joan married a successful politician, and soon afterwards became the mother of first a son, Rupert, in 1915, and then a daughter, Bettina, the following year.

But only a month before the Armistice was signed in 1918, a monstrous stray shell had torn with annihilating force into the body of Joan’s beloved younger sister Grace, a nurse stationed right up at the front line at Ypres, and despite a desperate search by her medical colleagues, no remains were found. This loss had permanently fractured Joan’s emotional equilibrium. Nearly twenty years later, and at sixty years old, Joan continued to suffer bouts of deep depression. Sometimes her husband, Sir Philip Blunt, was at his wits’ end trying to bring his wife back to the state of capable sunniness that had first prompted him to fall in love with her.

Evangeline also knew what it was to question the point of getting out of bed in the morning, and whether it would be worth the bother of dressing, washing, brushing her hair or speaking to a living soul. But through the dulling agents of food and shopping Evangeline taught herself to force the immediacy of the pain to recede and to diffuse her propensity to despair by making it a habit to think of the welfare of others. Pursuing responsibilities made Evangeline feel needed and worthwhile.

But should she go to Joan? England in the winter was hardly an enticing prospect. Her last trip had been five years ago during one of her mother’s visits to Royal Ascot and had proved most unenjoyable, what with the lack of male company and the incessant drizzle. Despite Joan’s generous invitation, Evangeline was doubtful if there really was anything worth going to England for.