London - Edward Rutherfurd [541]
Yet Violet had still been obstinate. Unlike the other Bull children, who all had fair hair and blue eyes, Violet’s wide-spaced eyes were hazel and her brown hair had a white flash in it. “I’ve no wish to marry a man who’s afraid of intelligent women!” she retorted. For the last two months, she had been impossible. There was not the smallest possibility of Edward Bull giving way, nor the least chance that Violet would back down. The atmosphere in the house had been like a perpetual thunderstorm. Most irritating of all had been Violet’s attitude to her. “I know you wouldn’t understand,” she would tell Mary Anne with a note of contempt in her voice. “You’re perfectly happy doing whatever papa says. You’ve never wanted anything else in your life.”
And how, her mother thought to herself, would you know? Her thirty years of marriage to Edward had not been so bad. He could be obstinate and overbearing of course; but most men were. If sometimes she might have wished for something more – that his friends’ senses of humour were a little lighter, that at least one of them had read a book – she kept it to herself. If perhaps there had been moments when she felt like screaming with boredom and frustration, those moments had passed. Marriage was about not screaming; and the rewards of marriage – the comfort, the children – had been blessings indeed. So if I could get through it, Mary Anne thought grimly, then so can she. “Life isn’t the way you think it should be,” she told the girl bluntly. “And the sooner you realize it the better.”
Thank God there was at least one piece of neutral territory where, by unspoken agreement, these hostilities ceased. Every Wednesday afternoon without fail Mary Anne and Violet got on the train into London and, taking a hansom cab, rattled over to Piccadilly. That broad street had kept its fashionable eighteenth-century character. New mansions, fronting the street, were taking the place of the grand old palaces of the former age, though Burlington House – it was the Royal Academy now – remained in splendour behind its walled courtyard. Fortnum and Mason was still there. And a few doors further down, the sanctuary where even Violet would forget their differences.
On a cold December afternoon three weeks before Christmas, Mary Anne and Violet made their usual expedition. They had not let the weather deter them, and just as they were crossing Westminster Bridge, with the House of Parliament and the high tower of Big Ben looming above them, it started to snow. Passing up Whitehall and skirting the edge of Trafalgar Square, it was not long before they reached Piccadilly and the best bookshop in Victorian London, Hatchards of Piccadilly. Indeed, it was more than a bookshop: it was almost a club. There were benches outside where servants could rest while their employers browsed inside. There was a snug little parlour at the back, where regular customers could chat and read the paper in front of the fire. Royalty came to Hatchards; the grand old Duke of Wellington had loved it; the political rivals, Gladstone and Disraeli, both went there; Mary Anne had once even found Oscar Wilde, who sent his plays to Hatchards for their opinion, standing just beside her, and had received a charming smile.
For both Mary Anne and her daughter Hatchards was a place of escape. Edward had no particular objection to Mary Anne reading; her most prized possessions were the sets of Dickens and of Thackeray she had purchased there. A friendly assistant had encouraged her to try Tennyson’s poems too, and she was quite in love with the splendour of his verses now. As for Violet, she used to buy works of a philosophical nature, from Plato to such modern British thinkers as Ruskin; which Mary Anne, with some misgivings, used to conceal among her own books in case Edward should see them.
Today, however, they were searching for Christmas presents; and Mary Anne had just found a book on shooting which she thought might amuse her eldest son, when she became aware that a tall figure across the table was