‘It’s getting a little bit late in the day to be asking those sorts of questions, George.’ Clarissa stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’m going to have to teach you. Stand up,’ she ordered.
‘There are two sorts of curtsey. One’s more informal than the other. You’ll need the deep court one for presentation day. One foot behind the other, weight on the right foot and down you go.’
She demonstrated the move to perfection and Georgia copied her, her cigarette still hanging out of her mouth at right angles.
‘Not like that,’ Clarissa muttered. ‘Throw your chest out, as Madame Vacani used to say.’
‘This is silly,’ said Georgia, collapsing to the floor in laughter. ‘I’m going to ask Aunt Sybil for a drink. Under the circumstances, perhaps she’ll give me a stiff one.’
Down in the kitchen, her mother was talking to Mrs Bryant about making aspic. Interrupting them for a moment, she asked the housekeeper if she could have two glasses of lemonade. Retreating back upstairs with the drinks, she heard Aunt Sybil and Uncle Peter in the living room, her ears straining even more when she heard her own name.
‘Then I will pay for a dance,’ Peter was saying, struggling to keep his voice low. ‘We can have it in the garden.’
‘I am not having fifty, sixty youths parading through the house just because you feel sorry for your brother’s child,’ said Sybil, her reply disappearing into a hiss. ‘No one is forcing them to do the Season and they shouldn’t be doing it if they can’t afford it. I mean, whatever is the world coming to? We’ve got Khrushchev in the Kremlin, and now Estella joining the aspirational classes.’
‘I have a duty to James. A duty to his memory. I have to do this. Every girl wants to be a deb, to be a princess, and I must do everything I can to support her.’
As Georgia ran up the stairs with the lemonade, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Georgia didn’t feel any different now that she had come out. She hadn’t expected it to be momentous, of course – not in the way the whispers at the convent had suggested losing your virginity would be. But she had at least thought she might feel a little more grown-up, more sophisticated.
Still, the day hadn’t been all bad. There had been lots of waiting around, of course – waiting in the cars as they all lined up along the Mall, waiting on the spindly little chairs for their turn to curtsey. But it had been secretly quite thrilling and oh so glamorous. Despite her resistance to the entire Season, the excitement of her fellow debutantes had been infectious. She had felt quite lovely in her pale blue silk dress, the colour of a Devon summer sky, bought as a gift by Uncle Peter. Prince Philip, who had been seated next to the Queen during the ceremony, had been heart-stoppingly handsome in the flesh – thank goodness she’d had to curtsey to him after the Queen, otherwise she feared she might have been too distracted to pull the move off successfully. Plus she had been fascinated to snoop inside the Palace – they had seen the drawing rooms, the corridor and the stairways lined with Yeomen, then the main event, the Throne Room, before retiring for tea and chocolate cake in one of the dining areas.
But pulling up outside the large white house on the edge of Eaton Square, she felt a loss of whatever enthusiasm she had had for the Season. How could anyone live in a place like this? she thought, looking down at the white vellum invitation and back up towards the imposing house ahead.
‘Never knew there was a hotel here,’ said the cabbie, breaking into her thoughts.
‘It’s not a hotel,’ she said, fishing in her small handbag for a ten-shilling note, one of a hundred crisp notes that Uncle Peter had given her in an envelope to pay for the Season’s expenses.
‘Who lives here – relative of the Queen?’
‘They’re into refrigerators,’ explained Georgia; it was all Aunt Sybil had told her about the family. ‘That’s where the money comes from.’
The cabbie was still shaking his head in disbelief as he pulled away, his tail lights disappearing into the darkness, leaving Georgia all alone on the pavement. She took a deep breath to compose herself.
The volume of debutantes had necessitated three presentation days, the last of which had been two days earlier. But they represented not the end but the beginning of
the Season, and already Georgia could feel that London was buzzing with a party atmosphere that had definitely not been so palpable the week before.
Music floated from the big house in front of her as a group of young men, all dressed in white tie, like a tiny colony of penguins, approached from the south-west corner of the square.
Georgia felt intimidated. Grand houses and beautiful gowns like the one she was wearing – Estella had customised one of Clarissa’s linen dresses with her own artwork and a yard of silk – were things she was completely unused to. They felt too big for her, even if the dress had been altered to fit perfectly.
With the exception of the infrequent trips to London to see Peter, Sybil and her cousins, Georgia was not well versed in the ways of the wealthy. Her convent school had been solid, academic – used to educating the daughters of farmers and local businessmen and solicitors; her finishing school, as Sybil had pointed out, was not considered particularly elite – nothing like the Institut Le Mesnil in Switzerland.
Of course Madame Didiot had prepared her girls for being set loose on the Season and into society. She had taught them the dos and don’ts of going into the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley or the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. And she had particularly impressed on them the art of confidence in any situation. Georgia could hear her heavily accented words now: ‘Confidence can make the ordinary beautiful. Stand tall, slow down, be interested, be interesting, and if you have nothing to say, ask a question.’
But Madame’s words meant very little as she approached the house. She felt wretched and lost. It hadn’t been like this at her little fork luncheon – a surprising success once Mrs Bryant had stepped in and helped with the catering. But there she had been surrounded by people she knew: her mother and aunt, plus a smattering of friends from Madame Didiot’s.
Taking a deep breath, she proceeded up the black and white tiled path and into the house.
After the cold outside, the heat pressed against her. It was only a quarter past seven, and already the downstairs of the house was wall-to-wall with people. It had been the cocktail party that everyone was talking about – not only because it came so soon after the presentation ceremonies, but because Emily Nightingale’s family was so mind-bogglingly rich.
As her eyes searched the room, looking for someone she recognised, Georgia wished she had been a little more sociable at her fork luncheon and at the Palace. There were at least two hundred people here at Astley House, and she knew none of them.
Threading through the crowd, eavesdropping on conversations, she realised that although many of the other debutantes did not know the other young people in attendance, they all seemed to have plenty in common – boarding schools, pony clubs or family friends. Georgia, on the other hand, seriously doubted that anyone else here had gone to Sacred Hearts Convent School for Girls in South Hams.
Accepting a glass of fruit punch from a waiter, she went and stood in a corner, deciding that she would seek out the hostess, thank her for her invitation and slip out shortly afterwards. Factoring in a couple of trips to the loo and a short loiter around the canapés, she reckoned she could spin out her stay to thirty minutes without too much discomfort.