Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [47]
She dressed in the fine stockings and the beautiful grey satin slip. She had rejected Penelope’s offer to oversee her wedding clothes, and had gone, on a series of unaccustomed buses, to an elderly Polish dressmaker in Ealing with some fine blue-grey material in a mixture of silk and wool. And here she was, dressed in a very creditable Chanel copy, the jacket bound with a dark blue and white silk braid. Mme Wien-awska had also made her a plain round-necked blouse, which she wore with her Aunt Anna’s pearls, her only dowry, the only token of her family’s presence. Her shoes were blue and white, and, she thought, a little too high in the heel, and she carried her white gloves. She had refused to wear a hat, but had twisted her hair up a little higher than usual, and when she looked in the glass she was pleased with herself. She looked elegant, controlled. Grown-up, she thought. At last.
A faint sensation of pleasure, the first she had felt that day, began to suffuse her, and her face wore a welcoming and naive smile as she descended the staircase. Sarah and her friends (Kate? Belinda?) had no time for her, and Mrs Dempster was engaged in meaningful conversation with Penelope at the kitchen table. Penelope, Edith was interested to see, was wearing an obviously expensive dress of printed silk and an enormous red straw hat, the brim of which curved round her head and skimmed down the side of her face nearly to her shoulder. A strong smell of scent emanated from her many pleats and folds, and Mother’s famous diamond earrings were in place, touched from time to time by fingers with long scarlet nails. This outfit had Mrs Dempster’s full approval; it was indeed radiantly nuptial, although it formed a strange contrast to the hefty denimed haunches of the girls intently rolling almond biscuits round the handles of wooden spoons. Whatever Penelope had been discussing with Mrs Dempster was instantly abandoned and Edith found herself the object of their stern and almost disembodied scrutiny. Who would carry the day? she wondered, with almost equally disembodied interest. Penelope, with her emphatic knowledge of what a man really likes, or me, blessed only by the genius of my Polish seamstress? If there were a man here we could re-enact the Judgment of Paris. Except that if that man were Geoffrey (and now it could be no-one else) he would find something acceptably gallant to say to all of us.
The silence was broken by one of the girls who were turning out her wedding breakfast with surprising speed. ‘Oh, jolly nice,’ she said. ‘Look, would you mind moving, only we want to be out of here pretty sharpish and we’d like to clear up. Good luck and all that,’ she added.
So Edith had been reduced to walking round the garden, while Penelope and Mrs Dempster continued to oversee the girls in the kitchen and to hope that Edith realized how lucky she was, working on the mutual understanding that, in her case, such luck was not to be taken for granted and was not even all that deserved. ‘In a dream, half the time,’ observed Mrs Dempster, ‘making up those stories of hers. I sometimes wonder if she knows what it’s all about.’ Penelope laughed, and Edith, seeing this through the open kitchen door, wondered if she might be allowed in to share the joke. ‘My dear, I’m the one with all the stories,’ she was in time to hear Penelope say. ‘I wonder she doesn’t put me in a book.’
I have, thought Edith. You did not recognize yourself.
But she was tired and chilled and even rather hungry. She felt as if she were emerging