I was a puzzle to my parents. Only my cousin Queenie really understood. Once when we were all together at our grandfather’s, she told my fortune, using the latest fad, phrenology, to read my character from the bumps on my head. Meanwhile, she helped me do my hair, putting it up for the first time. It was that sad, lost Christmas when my mother was quite ill, and so I had gone to Queenie for help. She was the girl cousin closest to me in age, one year older but much more experienced. She lived in London, and she went to parties all the time.
I can remember the feeling of her brushing and brushing my unruly hair, and then she surprised me by her comments, saying I had an interesting head, and that she could read my character from its shape and its various bumps.
I held very still, and she moved her soft, delicate hands through my hair, gently massaging and talking in her beautiful, low voice.
“Dora, I can feel that you are jealous and a flirt.”
“I don’t believe you.” She was right, but still I had to act sceptical. “How can you tell that?”
“No, wait, I can do more. You are generous, sulky . . . you have no religion but some affection.”
I knew she was even more correct, at least about being sulky, as my poor father could attest, and about having no religion; I thought of all the missed Sundays, the giggling through chapel. I relaxed even more into the wonderful feeling of her hands.
And certainly I was a flirt—ask my friends from Cheltenham Ladies College, that very particular finishing school my parents had, with great hopes, sent me to. Sometimes we would have a dance with ourselves, no men, after a formal dinner in the Great Room at Holyon House, and we would all dress up in our long white gowns, practising with each other the different steps. I loved to dance, and I went from girl to girl, wanting to dance with everyone. During our secret cocoa parties, after the lights were supposed to be out, going to each other’s rooms, I would go to so many different rooms that my friends would tease me about being an outrageous flirt. But I liked being friends with all the girls. I did not mean to flirt; it’s that I have always been curious about other people. I want to understand what they are really like.
I suppose Queenie was right. I did want to be generous and affectionate, but then that jealous part would come in and make everything complicated. I remember wailing to Queenie, “Why do my friends not like each other, too, as I like them? Why do they always want to have me all to themselves?”
Her only answer was to continue her report: “And you are very independent in some things.”
I liked to hear that; I knew I was named after my father’s father, Theodore Whatman Bosanquet, but I used to pretend I was like Empress Theodora of Constantinople, that brilliant strategist famous for her bloodthirsty appetite.
I asked Queenie, “Do you think I’ve had too much freedom? I sometimes behave as if I were a boy, but I’ve been alone so much, I don’t know. I wonder if deep down I’m not all mixed up. Maybe I really don’t care about what people think about me and how I act. I’ve always liked being odd, liked being the one to fix machinery, and to be really good at cricket when girls are not even allowed to run. I like to write my own bloody adventures.”
Queenie went on touching the surface of my head and along the ridges behind my ears, then moving up to the tender area along the temples. “I can feel that you are artistic and not at all practical.”
How could she have thought that? Whenever I tried to draw, it came out looking strangely flat and dead—like my old fossil-rock drawings from the Lyme Cliffs or the sketches of dissections I used to do with my father. I have always wanted to be around people who are artistic, but until recently I was a little afraid of them, too. Where do they find their ideas? They seem so self-sufficient, so centred on themselves.
I wanted Queenie to go on, and I asked her if those two characteristics, being practical and being artistic, had to be opposites. I certainly felt practical, if being practical meant keeping track of the details of daily life, such as knowing how much money was left in our household account when my father left me in charge. To my mind, being practical meant listing the pantry order perfectly before the household ran out of things and before my father shouted at me again for forgetting. But being practical also meant teaching myself to refrain from turning silly and sentimental about my feelings, such as missing my mother, or my pashes at school, or worrying over whether anyone really cared for me.
But by then, Queenie had finished pulling my hair up into an elegant French twist. She shook her head at my questions, and with a hug, she gave me one of her own black velvet bows to cover all the stray wisps that still escaped from the combs no matter how hard we tried. And so, beautifully together, we went down to join the family.
Now, standing before that impossible mirror on Mermaid Street in Rye, how I wished Queenie were nearby or at least that I had one of her clever velvet bows with me. What a struggle it was to put my hair up into a simple twist that day, when I was to dress for my first rather large-scale social occasion in Rye, a literary tea-party given by some woman I had not yet met, a friend of a friend. I certainly did not feel very independent or flirtatious. Instead, I felt nervous.
I wondered if I might see Mr. James there, and as I pulled and smoothed my hair tightly back, I had to laugh at the sudden thought of his broad forehead, his smooth skull—What would Queenie have made of his character? I never could induce her to say whether someone could be artistic and practical at the same time. I certainly was learning about Mr. James and his practical, methodical approach to his writing with each new day, but I was not seeing much of what I would have called his artistic side.
I wondered about his other characteristics. I knew Mr. James did not go to church, because he expected me to work on Sundays. I had seen him being quite affectionate with his little dog, Max, worrying over every whimper and squeak. I suppose the world saw Mr. James as a famous man. His books had made him wealthy and independent, but of course he’d had no contrary expectations to fight off, as I had with my family. He seemed quite settled and happy in his successful literary career. And sulky? When things did not go right for Mr. James, like that morning when Mrs. Paddington kept interrupting with one household problem after another, I had seen him annoyed, but with good reason. I could imagine him as a good, devoted friend but not as a flirt, not as a jealous lover. I was quite sure that, at age sixty-four, he must have been too old to feel any of that.
That afternoon tea was my first such invitation, sent by a Mrs. Dew Smith, a friend of my old friend Nora Wilson’s family—and therefore she was probably very rich and very well-placed. I wanted to make a good first impression, and part of me was also nervous about the possibility of meeting my august employer there; it might be the first time Mr. James and I would meet socially, outside of our working arrangements.
I carefully chose my deep blue cashmere because it was almost clean and the colour would set off my eyes. I laughed to think of Mr. James noticing the colour of my eyes—Had he ever yet really looked at me? I hoped to impress him that I, too, could be a part of Rye’s social scene and prove to him that I was more than the body behind the typewriting machine.
As I walked down the hill and across town, following Mrs. Dew Smith’s instructions, I felt again the conflict between my two sides—hard, ambitious, and practical or tender, creative, and passionate. Which was I?
What was I doing in sedate little Rye, pretending to Mr. James that I was a competent, self-possessed working woman, quietly and calmly sitting before him at his typewriting machine? What did he know of me? Only what Miss P. had told him, and what did she know? I had hidden my wild nature from her as well, combed my unruly hair up into rolls and pins. I had worn a tidy skirt and shirtwaist to work in her establishment and had kept to myself, never talking with her about my real life with my friends, Nora and Clara, reading each other’s writing, sending off our hopeful stories and poems signed with made-up names.
As I had learnt from Mr. James’ prefaces, he prided himself on his sensitive consciousness and might have missed nothing in his apprehension of other people, but I liked to think that I had fooled him, at least before that afternoon.