O Caledonia

Vera was planning to launch Janet into society that winter. To this end she had arranged a fearsome programme of subscription dances, commencing unfortunately with the event which should have been its climax; the hunt ball. Janet was appalled; she had looked forward to spending the holidays in her room with her books and her jackdaw. To her huge relief Claws had not been seduced by the charms of Rhona’s room, where he had been an unwelcome and unwilling lodger during the term. By day he had been thrust out of doors, and at night when he flew back, always to Janet’s room, he had been shut firmly in his villa. “You see,” said Vera, “it’s perfectly simple to keep a bird and still have a fresh, pretty room.” Janet ignored her. 8, Belitha Villas resumed its role as a place of safety in the dismal event of outings by car. Claws roosted on Janet’s bed by night and kept her company by day. Sometimes, when the wind was wild and other jackdaws flocked and shrieked across the racing clouds, he flew out to join them. They drove him off and sent him plunging headlong back to the battlements and Janet’s window. She was glad that he, too, was an outcast. “Nos contra mundum

, Claws,” she told him. She wondered whether she could teach him to say this. But first he must learn to say “Nevermore.” If she were given any money for Christmas, she planned to spend it on lengths of purple taffeta which she would nail to her walls as a start to redesigning the room in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe.

Vera declared that Rhona should also go to the hunt ball. There had been trouble over Janet’s choice of an evening dress. She had refused to be guided by her mother or by the lady in Watt and Grants. When they had peeped into the fitting room to see how she was faring in the white chiffon they had selected, they found her sitting on a chair, sucking her thumb. She had not even taken off her coat. With the thumb hovering a fraction outside her lower lip she announced, “It’s no good. It doesn’t fit.” Vera was speechless, doubly mortified by the thumb and the blatant lie. The thumb was about to be reinserted. Hastily she said, “Well, have you seen anything you really like?” Janet brightened. “Yes,” she said, “the purple one.” Vera had also noticed the purple dress; it was uniquely hideous, festooned with massive bows and encumbered by a bizarre scalloped train like a dragon’s tail. It might be worn with panache by a mad old person whose brains had been jumbled by hunting accidents, and who was indulgently regarded as “game,” but by a young girl never. “Never. Never. Never,” she said aloud, surprising herself. Janet leered at her. “Tricolonic anaphora,” she remarked in her most irritating, pedantic voice. The familiar sense of numb despair began to creep over Vera. “Oh, all right then, try it on.” Surely even Janet would see how monstrous it looked. Janet emerged from the fitting room with flushed cheeks and shining eyes; she looked almost pretty for a moment. “It’s absolutely beautiful. Exactly right.” It was then that Vera decided to take Rhona to the ball. At least she could find pleasure in the appearance of one daughter. And although Rhona really was too young, she was tall for her age and naturally elegant. She would look delightful in the white chiffon, a winter rose. And Francis was always presentable, if annoying.

In view of the great frozen distances to be covered, from diverse directions, they were to meet with the rest of their party at the ball itself. Hector and Francis were resplendent in kilts and jabots. “I shall be fiendishly handsome,” Francis had prophesied. “Like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind. There will be quite a flutter in the dovecotes.” Gone With the Wind: Janet could only remember the piled dead and litter of wounded in the great square of Atlanta, and far up against the blue sky the Southern flag flickering in the breeze like the tongue of a snake. Rhona looked like a nymph from a Greek vase. She was incandescent with excitement. Vera and she had spent the whole day in girlish conspiracy. Janet was envious and contemptuous; she wished them to know of her contempt. “What is the late November doing, with the confusion of the spring?” she asked Vera. Vera paid no attention. She was sorting through boxes of old lipsticks, sharing secrets of the past with Rhona. “And can you imagine, this is the colour we all wore in 1946.” Janet slunk off to her room.