‘York Minster,’ Vee said suddenly.
‘What?’ Perdita looked up from her plate. ‘What about York Minster?’
‘That’s where I’ve seen you before. Just before Christmas, 1936. The carol service, for the Yorkshire Ladies’ College. It was held in the cathedral every year.’
* * *
‘Don’t forget you’re due in the Minster at twelve-thirty for the rehearsal,’ Mummy called after Vee.
‘I won’t.’ She wrapped a muffler tightly about her throat, and pulled on fur-lined leather gloves. Under her warm tweed coat she was wearing a woollen suit over vest and jumper; how cold it was in Yorkshire, and it would be icy, as usual, inside the cathedral. No power of God or man could warm that cavernous interior.
She crossed the yard where two stonemasons were surveying a large block of limestone with ropes looped round it, ready to be hoisted up to some distant place above one of the great flying buttresses. Keeping the cathedral in a state of even moderate repair was a year-round task. The masons recognised her, the Dean’s daughter, and touched their caps as she went past.
Vee pushed open the door and went in. Mary Becket and Mrs Lancaster were in the flower room, snipping and cutting and sorting a pile of Christmas foliage. They looked up and called out a greeting; they had known her since she was a little girl, running in and out of the cathedral and the stone yard, fascinated by the Minster’s immense size, the glowing colours of the windows, the stone statues of the kings of England, the carvings and effigies on the silent tombs, the memorial slabs underfoot, the crypt, with the stream running far below. How odd to build over a stream, she always thought. One of the masons, bent from years of labour, told her that it was because streams were sacred for the old folk, and that was where they put shrines, and then, when the Christians came, they built their churches in the same places.
She’d told her father about that, and he’d frowned and said that was pagan nonsense and she shouldn’t gossip with the masons, they had a job to do.
She believed the mason, though. It was obvious the building went back a long time – there were Roman walls under there as well, the vergers had told her, in answer to her questions. And once, they said, the whole cathedral would have been painted and gilded in reds and golds and blues. It was hard to believe, when you saw the austere Protestant stone soaring up into the tower and along the great nave.
‘Idolatrous,’ her father said, dismissively, when she said how wonderful it must have looked, glowing with colour. With the cynical eyes of her grown-up self, she saw it all as part of a centuries-long endeavour – a very successful one – to dazzle and oppress the lower classes; to keep them in awe of their betters, fearful of this life and doubtful of the next, to allow them a glimpse of a more glorious world while teaching them their place in this one.
The sound of a choir reached her ears. ‘Are the boys practising?’ she asked Mary Becket, who came past with an armful of greenery.
‘They aren’t the choristers,’ said Mary Becket scornfully. ‘It’s girls, an end of term service.’ She gave a sniff, and went back to beating a stiff sprig of holly into submission.
Vee slipped into the side aisle of the choir and walked towards the transept, treading softly because of the service in progress. She caught a glimpse of a sea of grey hats, familiar hats, with the purple initials – YLC – embroidered above a purple grosgrain riband. A uniform that was utterly familiar to her. This was her old school, Yorkshire Ladies’ College, in its habitual act of carols and collective worship at the end of the Christmas term.
A senior girl was reading the lesson. ‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child …’
The carol service came to an end with the thundering chords of ‘Hark the Herald Angels’. The congregation knelt for final prayers, and Vee noticed a tall man in a tweed coat who had ignored this ritual and was edging his way along the row of seats. Eager to escape, probably. No, he was heading up towards the choir, engulfed in a swelling crowd of schoolgirls in their grey uniforms, he was searching for someone. There, he’d spotted her, a lanky girl coming out of the choir, a surplice draped over her arm.
‘Perdita,’ he called out. She was his sister, that was evident; with those bones, she’d grow out of her plainness and be a beauty by her twenties.
The habitual sound of the upper classes let out of church sang about Vee’s ears: greetings, enquiries, exclamations, farewells. The congregation moved like a sluggish river out of the great west doors, until only a few lingerers were left: a girl, the choir prefect, checking the hampers containing the choir gowns, a chubby, pink-cheeked girl dashing back in to retrieve a glove, a mistress stopping to talk to a verger.
‘You were in the choir, and a young man had come to meet you.’
‘That’s right. Goodness, how clever of you to remember me, I don’t have a very distinctive face. That was my brother Edwin.’
‘I was at Yorkshire Ladies’,’ Vee said, helping herself to more coffee and reaching out, without thinking, for a piece of toast. ‘You’re Perdita Richardson. I was Verity Trenchard then, and when I was in the sixth form, you were a first-former, all round cheeks and pigtails.’
‘Not round cheeks,’ said Perdita. ‘I’ve never had round cheeks. I grant you the pigtails, though. What a coincidence. Did you hate it there? Lots of people did.’
‘Did you?’
‘Not really, home was pretty ghastly a lot of the time, and so I didn’t mind too much.’
Vee laughed. ‘Snap! I couldn’t wait to get back to school after the holidays. Although it was rather awful there. I minded the cold most, in winter, that window open five inches rule.’
‘I took the nail out of the window in my bit of the dorm,’ Perdita said. ‘Or rather, loosened it, so matron wouldn’t find out. Then after lights out, I’d close it. Only I had to wake up before she came clumping round and whip it up again.’
‘Did you never get caught?’
‘No, never,’ said Perdita with pride. ‘With my family, you had to do things for yourself and do them discreetly. I had – well, have, only I don’t see her any more – a ferocious grandmother. More or less everything I did was wrong, so I learned cunning.’
Vee took another piece of toast. Cunning? No, she hadn’t learned cunning from her family, she had simply learned to be self-contained, to pretend that all was well, that she was a member of a normal loving family. Reserve was natural and native to her parents’ generation and class, no one need ever know that the reserve and cool well-bredness was more than skin deep, that beneath the unruffled surface there were no depths of affection or feeling of any kind: nothing but indifference and dislike, at least for their daughter.
Perdita finished her substantial breakfast, wiped her mouth, gave a satisfied sigh and stood up. ‘That was wonderful,’ she said to the hovering steward. ‘Goodbye for now, Mrs … I say, I am sorry, I don’t know your name. It isn’t Trenchard any more, is it?’
‘Hotspur. I’m Mrs Hotspur.’
‘I’m glad we’re at the same table, Mrs Hotspur. Anyhow, I must push off, I’ve got to practise.’
‘Nice to see a young lady enjoying her food,’ said the steward. ‘Is there anything else I can get for you, madam?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Vee. She lit a cigarette and sat there, gazing out over the almost empty dining room, a field of white linen and silver cutlery, flowers at every table – where did they get flowers when they were further out at sea? She had no idea, she realized, of how a ship like this functioned. She knew it had a gymnasium, and a swimming pool – that was a joke in this weather – and a beauty salon and library. And the crew