Julius fastened the bow of his white tie and spread the butterfly ends between the points of his starched collar. He pulled down his white waistcoat and then shrugged himself into his tailcoat. The coat had once belonged to Nathaniel, who had distinctly broader shoulders, but the length of it at least was approximately right.
Eleanor had told him to take the coat to a tailor, but Julius had answered that he was perfectly happy with it as it was, and he didn’t want to spend time waiting in a fitting room like some débutante.
‘When I make my concert début,’ he told her, ‘then you can kit me out with new evening clothes.’
He inspected himself briefly in the wardrobe mirror, noting the unfamiliarly brilliantined hair and patent leather slippers, and turned away without interest. His violin was lying in its open case on the table and he took it up and ran his finger across the strings. Julius sighed. The prospect ahead of him was less inviting than a concert. He was on his way to Clio’s and Grace’s coming-out dance at Belgrave Square.
Downstairs, at the end of the narrow brown-linoleum hallway, the doorbell rang. Julius laid his violin in its plush nest once more, draped a white silk scarf around his neck and went out, locking the door of his rented rooms behind him. On the landing he met the woman who lived opposite, a thirtyish redhead who worked at some job with very irregular hours. She raised her eyebrows when she saw him.
‘Well, look at you. Proper dandy.’
Julius blushed. The woman was always too interested in his comings and goings, but she didn’t mind his practising and he didn’t want to antagonize her.
‘It’s my sister’s dance.’ The doorbell rang again, more insistently.
‘Off you go and enjoy yourself, then.’ She watched him as he went down the stairs, admiring his height and the nape of his neck above his starched collar.
Julius’s friend Armstrong was standing on the step, and there were two other music students, Vaughan and Zuckerman, waiting in Zuckerman’s car. Zuckerman gave an impatient hee-haw on the car’s bulb horn when he saw Julius emerge. Julius and Armstrong scrambled into the back seat and they bowled away towards Belgrave Square.
There was a short line of taxicabs and chauffeured private cars outside the house. Julius caught a glimpse of Hugo limping up the steps with his friend Farmiloe, and an ancient Earley aunt moving like a tortoise in their wake. Her Victorian tiara was slightly askew on her thin white hair. He marshalled his own trio of guests with a sense of duty rather than anticipation.
Armstrong was his friend, a thin, studious and very young man with a weak chest, but he didn’t know the other two particularly well. Vaughan was much older, wore a black moustache, and had a mysterious private life. Zuckerman was a talented flautist. He had a rich father and an enigmatic expression heightened by spectacles so thick-lensed they were almost opaque. Julius had invited the three of them to his sister’s dance because Eleanor had begged him to.
‘It will be a disaster,’ she had sighed. ‘There are no young men, none at all. Whom will the girls dance with?’
‘I don’t know. Is it important?’ It seemed to Julius that a shortage of dancing partners for Clio and Grace was hardly the most serious consequence of the war.
‘Of course it is important. When your Aunt Blanche and I came out we danced with everyone, even the old Prince of Wales.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Julius had heard the story enough times.
‘Then be a lamb, and ask some of your student friends, won’t you? You must know lots of nice young men.’
He had done his best, but the forlorn group in Belgrave Square now seemed hardly adequate. Zuckerman had pulled a silver flask out of his pocket and swallowed a long gulp. He winked at Julius as he screwed the cap on again. ‘Over the top and into the fray, then.’
Blanche’s butler opened the door to them. ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he muttered with the utmost gloom. Julius gave a silent prayer of thanks that he had resisted all Blanche’s invitations to bring his friends to the family dinner before the dance, and let himself be carried forward into the ball.
As soon as they entered the ballroom Julius hesitated in the doorway and quartered the room with his eyes. He always looked for Grace first. Only then, when he had caught a brief glimpse of her, could he turn his attention to other people.
Tonight, peering through the crowd, he could only see men with red faces, dowdy chaperones, and girls in white dresses anxious with their dance cards, none of them Grace. The room was already hot, and the dancing had only just begun. Julius could feel Zuckerman and Vaughan crowding up behind him. Armstrong stood to one side, hooking his index finger down inside his stiff collar, a sure sign that he was nervous and uncomfortable. Julius couldn’t see Grace anywhere.
‘Come and meet my mother and my aunt,’ Julius said, reluctantly abandoning his search. The music students trooped after him.
Eleanor and Blanche were receiving their guests in front of the vast rust-coloured marble chimneypiece that dominated the room. Nathaniel on one side of them looked hot and rumpled, with his beard spreading over his white tie, while John Leominster on the other made an almost comical contrast in his stiffly immaculate evening clothes.
Their wives looked as alike as the men were different. Although they both had fine threads of silver in their dark hair, and their figures were now unfashionably full, they still looked the Victorian belles that Sargent had painted. Blanche was in sea-green with the Stretton diamonds glittering on her bosom and in her hair. Eleanor wore dark blue shot silk, with the more modest jewels left to her by her mother the previous year. The dance for Clio and Grace was the first big family celebration to be held since Lady Holborough’s death.
As Julius kissed them in turn he saw that Eleanor and Blanche both had the same eager, faintly anxious expression. It made them look even more the reflection of one another. He breathed in their old-fashioned flowery scents, white lilac and stephanotis.
‘Aunt Blanche, may I introduce my friends from the College?’
‘Thank you, my darling,’ Eleanor whispered while the others shook hands with Nathaniel and John. ‘Such nice-looking boys. Won’t you take them now to meet Clio and Grace? I was so afraid that there would be no young men. But now I think it will be all right.’ Her anxious expression lightened a little.
‘Of course it will be all right.’ Julius smiled at her. He saw Clio, standing to one side of John Leominster. Her rolled-up hair showed her white neck, and the bodice of her dress revealed the childish knobs of bone at the base of her throat. Her head was bent, and she was reading the little tasselled booklet in which she wrote her partners’ names as if it interested her.
‘Clio, may I introduce my friend Victor Zuckerman?’
It was then that an avenue opened through the dancers and he saw Grace. She was waltzing with a man he didn’t know. Her head was back, and she was laughing. The wide skirts of her balldress made white waves over the polished floor. There were white flowers in her hair.
Clio was thinking that it was a shame that so much hope and effort and anticipation should have been put into planning an evening that was so dull. She was aware of the apparent ingratitude of the thought; but then she decided that she was not being ungrateful, simply realistic.
A good deal of money had been spent. Uncle John Leominster probably had the money to spare, although he counted every penny that his wife was spending on Grace’s Season. Clio knew that her own father didn’t even really have the money, and wouldn’t have been able to give her a season at all if Grandmother Hirsh had not helped him. And then, once he had consented to Clio’s coming out in the year before beginning to study