Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [8]
“That’s my home,” she had announced to the self-confident English girl, “and those are my friends.”
“Oh, you live at the seaside. How lovely.”
The simple generosity of Lucy Hoggs-Mallett’s acknowledgement of Venetia’s world had been endearing, and Venetia had smiled at her, feeling better. Sensing her opportunity Jenny had disappeared to talk once more to the headmistress and then in a flurry of quick good-byes and kisses she had departed. Apart from holidays Venetia Haven never again lived at home with her mother.
Birch House had been run with a light hand and close to the concepts of the names of its dormitories, and the fifty little girls who inhabited those dorms lived in a world of small wooden desks and firm schooling during the day, but by three-thirty they were free. Free to ride ponies, to look after the piebald guinea pigs and flop-eared rabbits who, like them, were freed from their cages and allowed to lollop across the broad lawns and rustle around the undergrowth followed by the crashing, clumsy feet and tender hands of their owners. Birch House acres spread down to the banks of the River Thames, and sometimes in summer they were allowed to swim in its greenish waters whose chill was so different from the Hollywood swimming pools Venetia had once known.
In the long summer holidays she went home to Jenny, but the shorter holidays were a problem. Sometimes she would be put on a plane at Heathrow and met in Geneva or Rome or Nice by a limousine, to be swept off to join up with her older sisters in some grand hotel. Then Jenny would arrive and they would all be together. And life was completely different. She and Paris and India would be treated like princesses: gentlemen from movie companies would demand to know their dearest wishes so that they might grant them, hotel managers gave them the run of the place, room service waiters served extra scoops of ice cream, and Jenny’s latest boyfriend would do his best with his charm to overcome their resentment. It wasn’t until she was almost thirteen and had her first crush on a boy herself that Venetia had understood what Paris had meant when she said, “We mustn’t be jealous of Jenny; after all, if she didn’t have boyfriends none of us would be here.”
Paris had been seventeen then and Venetia and India had felt she must surely know what she was talking about. She seemed so much older, and so worldly wise. “Was that what a Swiss boarding school did for you?” Venetia had wondered enviously, admiring Paris’s spare, taut, small-breasted figure and polished black hair. Anything Paris wore looked good, and as she didn’t have to wear a school uniform she had acquired a motley wardrobe, mixing Californian throw-away sporty chic with French style and an Italian way with color that turned heads wherever they went. She made her young sister feel lumpy and dowdy, and though Venetia vowed to give up puddings at school the following term, on those cold winter days that followed, Paris and her slender chic seemed light years away and school food was all there was. The pudding satisfied some urge other than just a sweet tooth. It was comforting, Venetia supposed, and it was what she needed until she began to take an interest in the opposite sex, and then puddings and puppy fat fell behind her in a forgotten haze and her bones emerged from her plump sweet face, turning her, too, into a more angular, delicate replica of Jenny Haven.
It hadn’t been too bad at half-terms at Birch House, where most of the girls came from military or diplomatic families whose work kept them in far-flung places, but when she had moved on to Hesketh’s, life and holidays became a more serious problem.
Her first half-term was spent in the headmistress’s house on the grounds, and kindly though Miss Lovelace had been, the long weekend alone had been interminable. Besides, it meant the other girls thought she was a spy with a direct