The Last Dance of the Debutante, page 20
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said.
“It would be my pleasure. If you’ll follow me,” said the housekeeper.
Lily and Mrs. Kent climbed the stairs to the second floor. As soon as they were on the landing, Lily could hear the scream of Little Richard singing “Tutti Frutti” on the record player. A bubble of laughter spilled out from a half-open door.
Mrs. Kent seemed to hesitate, looking askance at the door as though approaching a tiger’s cage.
“I’m sure I can find my way from here,” Lily said.
The housekeeper shot her a grateful look. “I will send one of the maids up with your dress shortly, Miss Nicholls.”
Lily thanked her. As soon as Mrs. Kent beat a fast retreat down the corridor, she pushed open the door.
The room was an explosion of tulle, chiffon, and satin in a rainbow of colors. A large wardrobe stood with its doors hanging open and hangers half-empty. Its contents seemed to have taken over every surface, with Doris holding a teal dress up to her chest and spinning around. Her eyes landed on Lily and she grinned.
“She’s here!” Doris called.
The other girls whipped around, and Lily was greeted by a chorus of cheers.
“It took you long enough,” teased Katherine, who stood up from the dressing table where she’d been spraying on perfume with an atomizer.
“I told you I could have walked,” she protested with a laugh.
Katherine kissed Lily on the cheek. “No, we’ll have none of that. Tonight we’re going to go in style. Did Mrs. Kent take your dress away to press?”
“Yes, she seemed happy to have an excuse to run away from here,” she teased.
“I think I horrify her more than I do the matrons at all of those cocktail parties,” said Katherine with a grin.
“Look at all of you, you already look beautiful,” said Lily, smiling at the sight of her friends.
“I can’t wait for dinner,” said Doris. “Mrs. Groves has promised to find us all escorts for tonight.”
“Philippa phoned earlier to let us know that all of them are good dancers, but she won’t say who they are,” said Katherine.
“Then I suppose we’ll have to hurry over to hers and find out,” she said.
Ivy rushed up, breathless as she held a bright yellow dress with a gold sunburst pattern that fell into contrasting box pleats in the skirt across it up to her chest. “Lily, Katherine wants to lend me this tonight.”
“She’s unsupervised, so she can wear what she likes,” said Doris, grabbing Ivy’s shoulders and dropping a kiss on her cheek. “We’ll have none of grandmother’s white for you, darling.”
“It’s beautiful. I think you should do it,” Lily said definitively.
“Will it fit?” asked Ivy.
“A needle and thread and we’ll make it fit like a dream,” she said with a firm nod.
Ivy gazed down at the dress longingly, her hand playing over the pleats. “Grandmama will be so angry.”
“How will Grandmama ever know?” Doris asked as she dropped onto the tufted stool in front of the mirror and began rummaging through a scattered collection of lipstick on the vanity.
“Oh, she’ll know.” Ivy grinned brightly. “But I don’t care.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Katherine. “Try it on.”
Ivy scuttled off behind a screen, and Lily and Katherine exchanged a look.
“You’re a terrible influence,” said Lily in a low voice.
“I think I’m the best influence. She’ll be happier in that dress than yet another white frock with bows and frills. You should see what she arrived with,” whispered Katherine.
Lily gave a laugh just as Doris turned around and fixed her with a stare.
“Lily Nicholls, we’ve been wondering about something,” said Doris.
“Yes!” cried Ivy from behind the screen.
Katherine smiled slyly. “Do spill.”
“Spill what?” she asked as she sat down on the edge of Katherine’s high bed.
“Well, I couldn’t help but notice at Queen Charlotte’s Ball that a certain gentleman seemed to seek you out before we were even seated and then danced with you three times after the cake cutting,” said Doris.
“I danced with a lot of men that evening,” she said, looking down at Katherine’s cream satin duvet and drawing a finger over its quilted pattern.
“Don’t play coy,” said Katherine.
“Yes, that’s usually Philippa’s job. She won’t tell me a thing about David, even if he is my brother,” said Doris.
“That’s probably the very reason,” said Lily.
“Oh, put them out of their misery,” said Katherine with a sigh. “They want to hear about Ian Bingham. He’s all they’ve been able to talk about.”
“That’s not true,” protested Ivy from behind the screen so quickly that Lily knew it probably was true.
“You’ve been just as bad as Philippa,” muttered Doris.
“I resent that on behalf of Philippa, but also agree with the spirit of it,” said Ivy, who had emerged from behind the screen.
“Oh, Ivy,” Lily breathed. “You look lovely.”
“It is a good dress, isn’t it?” Ivy asked, spreading her hands over the fabric of the skirt. “The color is so rich.”
Lily came up behind her friend, assessing the fit of the dress with an experienced eye. “It needs to come in a little here at the bust. Just a few stitches should do it for tonight, since it’s only meant to be temporary. Katherine, is there a sewing basket somewhere in this mess?”
Katherine opened a drawer and began to rummage through it. When she handed over the needle and thread, Lily set to work. “Stand still, Ivy, otherwise I’ll skewer you.”
“I feel like a Georgian lady being sewn into my dress,” Ivy said with a giddy laugh.
As Lily set to work, she said, “I did dance with Ian a few times the other night. I like him, but you already know that.”
“But do you like him or like him?” Doris asked, cutting straight to the chase as usual.
She laughed. “I don’t know yet. I don’t know him well enough to tell.”
“What do you know?” asked Katherine.
She paused her sewing a moment, running through each of their encounters in her head. “He’s intelligent, and he speaks to me as though I actually have something between my ears. He’s a little bit serious, but not so much that he isn’t fun. He must be observant, because he always seems to know when I’m uncomfortable or uncertain. I think to myself, ‘I don’t know what to say or who to talk to,’ and if he’s at a party, he’s there.”
“And he’s good-looking. That can’t hurt,” said Ivy.
“And tall,” said Doris dreamily.
She laughed. “And he’s good-looking and tall. But mostly, I like that whenever he speaks to me, I don’t feel as though I’m competing with every other woman in the room for his attention. He listens to me, and he seems to really want to know what I have to say.”
“I can’t even imagine what that must be like. Last Friday at Madeline Cargrew’s drinks, Robert Bellingham called me Debbie twice in the space of a single gin and orange,” said Doris.
“Why didn’t you correct him after the first time?” asked Katherine.
“I did,” Doris insisted.
“Do you think Ian likes you?” Ivy asked as Lily tied off a knot and clipped the string before starting to alter the other side.
“He likes her enough that he sent her flowers for her drinks,” said Katherine slyly.
“Lily!” shouted a chorus of voices.
“He sent me flowers because he was being polite. He couldn’t come,” she said.
“Twenty-year-old men at university don’t do anything just to be polite. He likes you,” said Katherine with a look.
Perhaps a little part of her hoped that was true. Yet she hadn’t wanted to examine it too closely for fear that it would all disappear like a wisp of smoke.
“I wonder what Gideon thinks of that,” said Doris with a grin before slipping behind the screen herself.
“Who’s Gideon?” Katherine asked, pretending to swoon. “There’s only Ian now.”
“You are being absurd,” said Lily.
“And don’t you love me for it?” Katherine asked.
“Goodness knows why, but I do,” said Lily.
The door opened, and a maid came in carrying Lily’s freshly pressed gown. The appearance of another garment distracted the other girls as they cooed over it with even Doris sticking her head out from behind the screen to nod approvingly.
“Thank you,” said Lily, and the maid ducked out with a little nod of her head.
“It’s lovely,” said Ivy, running her hand over the edge of the mint split skirt that showed off an ivory underskirt.
“Did you make this?” Katherine asked, examining the notched detail at the center of the white band that made up the strapless neckline.
“I did,” she said. “Audrey Hepburn wore something like it in Sabrina and I wanted to try to re-create it.”
Katherine threw her head back. “Only you would see Givenchy and think, ‘I could make that.’ ”
“You made this?” Doris asked in disbelief.
Lily nodded.
“Madame Benum, my dressmaker, told me it was a shame that Lily’s a debutante. She would hire you on as an assistant in a heartbeat,” said Katherine.
“Madame is flattering me,” she said.
“Madame flatters no one, and I should know,” said Katherine.
“Could you imagine what would happen if I told Mummy that I wanted to give up my Season and become a seamstress? She’d probably lock herself in her bedroom and refuse to leave for a decade,” she said.
And Grandmama would disown us all.
“Plenty of debs have opened their own dress shops over the years,” said Katherine.
“After their Seasons were done,” said Lily.
“Or after their divorces were finalized,” said Doris, stepping out and turning to Ivy for help with her zipper.
“Well, that is something that we don’t have to worry about tonight,” said Katherine. “Lily, you and I should dress.”
Lily hurried behind the screen, pulling on her dress over her girdle. She didn’t need petticoats for this gown, something that she was sure she would be grateful for after hours of dancing.
When she stepped out to show her friends, Katherine smiled warmly and said, “Perfect.”
When Katherine went to change, Lily touched up her carmine-red lipstick and then moved to pull her evening gloves out of her train case.
“Here, let me help you,” said Doris, holding out her hand.
Lily handed the gloves over, and her friend helped her ease the right one up her arm and button the small row of buttons at the wrist.
“These are beautiful,” said Doris.
“They were my mother’s from before the war,” she said.
“It’s a wonder they’re in such perfect condition. All these years and not a stain.” Doris looked up in horror. “Oh, Lily. Me and my big mouth. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said, but her mood had suddenly deflated a little. Doris was right. The gloves were perfect because they hadn’t been used. They were the artifacts of Mummy’s old life. Before the war. Before Papa’s death. Before everything had changed.
Mummy had loved Papa so powerfully that when he died, she’d nearly broken. Lily had once resented that—and perhaps she still did because her mother had been broken for so long that Lily had been forced to be an adult long before a child should have to worry about such things. But now she found herself wondering at how powerful a love must be to so devastate a woman so bound up by tradition that she refused to engage with a world without that love.
She was afraid of the intensity of that love and its ability to destroy, but she also knew that there was another side. A joyfulness that she didn’t know if she would ever experience.
You could if you would let yourself.
Doris stepped back, releasing her left hand. “There, you’re all done.”
Lily looked down at her left hand all done up in its glove. She hadn’t even realized that Doris had finished her right.
“Here, let me help you,” she said, returning the favor for Doris as Katherine appeared resplendent in spangled silver, and the room once again descended into the cacophony that was debs in preparation.
Twenty
Dinner was a resounding success with even Philippa’s taciturn father joining in on the laughter that had begun as soon as Katherine, Doris, Ivy, and Lily arrived. As promised, Mrs. Groves had found escorts for all the girls. Lily had sat next to one of Philippa’s brother’s friends, an Irish horseman named Brian Walsh with a wicked smile and a shock of blond hair that couldn’t quite be contained by pomade, and he spent the dinner teasing her—and the rest of the guests.
It was on Brian’s arm that she walked into the ballroom at the Savoy.
“Look at all of these people,” Lily said, gazing around at the girls in a wash of hues and the gentlemen in stark white and black.
“And it’s only just half past ten. It’s bound to become more crowded before the evening’s over,” said Brian.
“Clearly, this isn’t your first debutante ball,” she said.
Brian sent her a crooked smile. “Guilty as charged. My twin sister came out last year, although she’s serious enough about riding that she put her foot down and declared she’d only do the balls around the Dublin Horse Show. Do you ride?”
“Very poorly,” she said. “We went around a rink on a pony a few times at school, but I’m afraid that was years ago.” Riding—let alone keeping a pony of her own—was an expense that Mummy would never have indulged. “My cousin Georgie rides, though.”
“Well, we’ll have to see you on a horse when you come to Dublin. I’ll mention to my cousin, Margaret, that we’ve met. She’s out this year as well,” he said.
She glanced at him, knowing that a mention to Margaret would likely mean an invitation to Margaret’s ball. If she accepted, it would fall to the Walsh family to provide her with a place to stay—often the home of a generous family friend who would no doubt ask for the favor to be returned when their own daughter or niece held her own coming-out ball. However, the way that Brian was looking at her made her wonder if she would perhaps be given the honor of staying with the family in hopes of giving them more time together.
She tried for a moment to imagine what a future as Mrs. Brian Walsh would be. He was a hardy-looking man, a little tanned and ruddy from all his time spent working with horses, but in a pleasant, healthy sort of way. From what she’d gathered at dinner, the Walshes still lived at Glen Dara, the eighteenth-century family seat just outside Dublin. The respectable work of breeding and training horses ruled their lives, and with that would come horse shows, hunts, and hunt balls. She would go from a London girl to a country woman, dressed in tweeds and riding boots. She would no doubt learn to ride properly because it would make Brian happy, and she might even learn to enjoy it herself. She didn’t think that she was flattering herself in thinking that they would make a handsome couple, both blond and tall with a healthy red to their cheeks. Grandmama and Mummy probably wouldn’t even complain that he was Irish, and her life would move from the familiarity of England to the strangeness of Ireland. Instead, they would be happy to see Lily so efficiently settled.
The only problem was that the thought of her life taking that path left her feeling strangely detached.
“Shall we dance?” Brian asked.
“The song’s not over yet,” she said as Joe Loss and His Orchestra reached the second chorus of “It Had to Be You.”
“Why wait?” he asked, looping his right arm around her back and scooping her free hand up.
With a laugh, they plunged into the fray, Brian expertly spinning her away from a couple who came careening from their right, the deb’s delight diligently counting steps while his partner squealed with glee at every spin.
“That was close,” he said, pulling her into him.
She tried to relax into his embrace, closing her eyes and letting the light citrus-and-wood scent of his Floris No. 89 cologne wrap around them. He was a nice man. Most of the deb’s delights were, at least when they were in female company.
She thought back to earlier that evening when her friends had interrogated her about Gideon and Ian. Gideon was undoubtedly the prize that Mummy wanted her to pursue—and likely he would be Grandmama’s choice as well. If her life with Brian would be one of horses and country pursuits, a life as Mrs. Gideon Moore would be filled with society. That was Gideon to a T—a man with an easy laugh who was always game for dinner or dancing, a bottle of champagne close at hand. Yet there was a depth there. She’d seen it herself in the moments he’d stepped up to help her.
Ian, on the other hand, felt utterly decent, deeply reliable. He held himself at a little bit of a remove, as though he was assessing the situation and trying to understand how all of it fit together. He may not have had the flash and dash of a soldier with a sports car, but there was weight to him, and she couldn’t help but feel as though every moment he spent with her was fully her own. He was a serious man who took her seriously, and she enjoyed the novelty and comfort of that.
Almost as though her thoughts had summoned him, Gideon stepped into her view. She started when he tapped Brian on the shoulder. She and Brian stopped swaying, and he tucked her protectively under his arm.
Gideon offered an apologetic smile. “Sorry, old boy, but do you mind terribly if I borrow your partner? There’s a bit of a situation, and I suspect that Lily’s the only sensible one in this entire room.”
There was that word again. Sensible.
“A situation?” she asked.
His expression turned grim. “Leana.”
“But she’s barely spoken to me since Queen Charlotte’s. Why would she need me?” she asked.
