Sylvie in furs, contemplating her reflection in the bedroom mirror. Holding up the collar of a short evening cape to frame her face. A critical examination. The mirror was once her friend, but now she felt that it regarded her with indifference.
She put a hand up to her hair, her “crowning glory,” a nest of combs and pins. Old-fashioned hair now, the mark of a matron being left behind by the times. Should she have it cut? Hugh would be bereft. She had a sudden memory—a portrait in charcoal, sketched by her father not long before he died. Sylvie Posing as an Angel, he called it. She was sixteen years old, demure in a long white dress—a nightdress actually, rather flimsy—and was half turned away from her father in order to show off her lovely waterfall of hair. “Look mournful,” her father instructed. “Think of the Fall of Man.” Sylvie, the whole of a lovely unknown life before her, found it hard to care very much for the subject but nonetheless pouted prettily and gazed absently at the far wall of her father’s enormous studio.
It had been an awkward pose to hold and she remembered how her ribs had ached, suffering for her father’s art. The great Llewellyn Beresford, portraitist to the rich and famous, a man who left nothing but debts upon his death. Sylvie still felt the loss, not of her father but of the life he had built on what had unfortunately turned out to be baseless fabric.
“As you sow,” her mother wailed quietly, “so shall you reap. Yet it is he who has sown and we who have reaped nothing.”
A humiliating bankruptcy auction had followed his death and Sylvie’s mother had insisted that they attend, as if she needed to witness every item they had lost pass in front of their eyes. They sat anonymously (one hoped) in the back row and watched their worldly goods being paraded for all to see. Somewhere towards the end of this mortification the sketch of Sylvie came up for sale. “Lot 182. Charcoal portrait of the artist’s daughter” was announced, Sylvie’s angelic nature now lost apparently. Her father should have given her a halo and wings and then his purpose would have been clear. As it was she merely looked like a sullen, pretty girl in a nightdress.
A fat man with a rather seedy air had raised his cigar at each round of bidding and Sylvie was finally sold to him for three pounds, ten shillings and sixpence. “Cheap,” her mother muttered. Cheaper now probably, Sylvie thought. Her father’s paintings had gone quite out of fashion after the war. Where was it now, she wondered? She would like it back. The thought made her cross, a frown in the mirror. When the auction had finally limped to an end (“One job lot comprising a pair of brass fire-dogs, a silver chafing dish, tarnished, a large copper jug”) they had bustled out of the room with the rest of the crowd and had chanced to overhear the sleazy man saying loudly to his companion, “I’ll enjoy myself looking at that ripe young peach.” Sylvie’s mother shrieked—discreetly, she was not one to make a fuss—and pulled her innocent angel out of earshot.
Tainted, everything tainted, Sylvie thought. From the very beginning, from the Fall. She rearranged the collar of the cape. It was far too hot for it but she believed that she looked her best in furs. The cape was Arctic fox, which made her rather sad as Sylvie was fond of the foxes that visited their garden—she had named the house for them. How many foxes would it take to make a cape, she wondered? Not as many as for a coat, at least. She had a mink hanging in her wardrobe, a tenth-anniversary present from Hugh. She must send it to the furriers, it needed to be remodelled into something more modern. “As do I,” she said to the mirror.
Izzie had a new cocoon-shaped coat. Sable. How had Izzie come by her furs when she had no money? “A gift,” she said. From a man, of course, and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something in return. Except for one’s husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.