Victory for Victoria

‘Well, I’m sure you enjoyed yourself, child. I must say you need the fresh air after London—why you have to work there…’ she sighed. ‘Your father could speak to—’

‘Yes, Mother dear,’ interposed Victoria hastily, ‘but I do like nursing, you know, and when the Old Crow retires next year, I’m hoping to get the ward.’

Her mother fingered the sleeve of her guernsey. ‘You’re wet,’ she said rather absently, and then: ‘Don’t you want to marry and settle down, Vicky dear?’

‘Only when I meet the right man, Mother.’ She had a peculiarly vivid memory of the man in the powder magazine as she spoke and dismissed it as nonsensical.

‘But they fall over each other…’

Her daughter smiled. ‘I bet they fell over each other for you before you met Father.’

Mrs Parsons’s composed features broke into a smile. ‘Yes, they did. Your father will be home in a minute, so you’d better go and change, Vicky—your sisters are upstairs already. They take so long to dress, try and hurry them up, dear.’

Victoria said, ‘Yes, Mother,’ and went up the stairs to a half landing which had a door on either side of it; she passed these, however, and went through the archway at the back of the landing and up half a dozen more stairs leading to a corridor running at right angles to them.

There was a good deal of noise here; her youngest sister, Stephanie, sixteen years old and already bidding fair to out-shine them all with her beauty, was hammering on the bathroom door with a good deal of strength.

‘Come out, Louise,’ she shouted. ‘You’ve been in there ages, you’re mean…’ She broke off as she saw Victoria. ‘Vicky darling,’ she begged, ‘get her out, I’ll never be ready…’

Victoria approached the door and knocked gently. ‘Louise?’ she called persuasively, ‘do come and see my dress and tell me what you think of it.’

The door was flung open and her sister sailed out. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but let it be now, this minute, so that I’m not interrupted while I’m doing my face. Where’s Amabel?’

‘Here.’ Amabel was two years younger than Victoria and the quietest of the four. The two of them followed Victoria to her room and fell on to her bed while she took the dress from her cupboard and held it up for their inspection. It was a midi dress of leaf green crêpe with a demure collar like a pie-frill above a minute bodice and a very full skirt. It was admired and carefully examined and Louise said, ‘You’ll put us all in the shade, Vicky.’

Victoria shook her head. She was a very pretty girl, but her three sisters took after their mother; they were tall—even Stephanie was five feet ten and she hadn’t stopped growing—and magnificently built with glowing blonde hair and blue eyes. Their faces were beautiful. Victoria, putting the dress away again, looked at them and wondered how it was that she, the eldest, should have copper hair and tiger’s eyes and be of only a moderate height; she was slim too and although she had a lovely face it couldn’t match the beauty of the other three girls. She grinned at them suddenly. ‘Me for the next bath—I’ll be ten minutes,’ and started for the bathroom, shedding the guernsey as she went.

They collected in her room as they were ready, squabbling mildly and criticising each other’s dresses as she sat at the dressing table putting up her hair. She had combed it back from her forehead and arranged it in three thick loops on her neck and it had taken a long time, but the result, she considered, staring at her reflection in the mirror, had been worth the effort. Rather different from her hair-style of that afternoon—it was a pity… She dismissed the thought and said briskly: ‘If we’re ready we’d better go down.’ She eyed her sisters with loving admiration. ‘I must say you all look smashing, my dears.’ And they did, with their fair hair combed smoothly over their magnificent shoulders and their gay dresses. As usual, they would create a small sensation when they entered the restaurant presently. She smiled proudly at them, for they were such splendid creatures and the dearest sisters.

Their parents were waiting for them downstairs. Victoria’s mother, splendid in a violet crêpe dress which was the exact foil to her grey, simply-dressed hair, was sitting by the small fire in the sitting room, and her father was standing at the window, looking out on to the harbour, but he turned round as they went in and crowded around him, for they hadn’t seen him since early that morning. He saluted them each in turn with a fatherly kiss and being just a little taller than they were, he was able to look down upon them with benign affection. He said now:

‘You all look very nice, I must say. Shall we walk or do you want the car?

A routine question which was merely a concession to their finery, for the hotel was only a few minutes’ walk away, but it was asked each time they dined there, and that was frequently, to mark each of their birthdays as well as the first evening of Victoria’s holidays. They chorused a happy ‘no, thank you’, picked up their various coats and wraps and left the house in a cheerful chattering group with Mr and Mrs Parsons leading the way.

The restaurant was full, but they had a table in one of the windows overlooking the harbour. Mrs Parsons, sweeping regally through the doors, acknowledged the head waiter’s bow with a gracious smile and sailed in his wake, seemingly oblivious of the four eye-catching girls behind her, and they, by now used to being stared at and not in the least disconcerted by it, followed her; Stephanie first, then Amabel, Louise and lastly Victoria, quite dwarfed by her sisters and her father behind her.

They sat down, with Victoria on her father’s left with her back to the semi-circular room, and her parents facing each other at each end of the table. They had finished their soup and were awaiting their crabmeat patties when Stephanie, sitting opposite Victoria, remarked:

‘There’s a man across the room—I’ve never seen him before.’ A remark sufficient to awaken interest in the two younger Miss Parsons, for they knew most of the young men on the island and they had deduced, quite rightly, that the man was good-looking and tolerably young—otherwise she wouldn’t have noticed him.

It was Louise, sitting next to Victoria, who asked: ‘How old? Is he nice-looking? Dark or fair?’ Before her sister could reply her mother interposed.

‘Louise, you should know better, encouraging Stephanie like that! We don’t know him, I fancy, do we, dear?’ She raised her eyebrows at her husband, who laughed.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I can hardly inspect the man without embarrassment on both our parts, but if you’ve never seen him before, then I’m fairly sure that I haven’t either.’

Victoria speared her last morsel of patty. ‘All the same, I’m dying of curiosity and I can’t turn round, can I?’ She looked enquiringly at her mother, who smiled a little and said, ‘Oh, very well, but he’s with a very pretty young woman, so it really is a waste of Stephanie’s time.’

Stephanie ignored the young woman. ‘He’s very large and he’s got dark hair and one of those high foreheads—he doesn’t laugh very much, but he looks swoony when he smiles. He’s got one of those straight noses, just a little too big for his face, if you know what I mean—he turns me on.’

This vivid description met with her sister’s interested approval, but her mother said briskly before any of them could speak:

‘That is a vulgar expression which I dislike, Stephanie, you will be good enough to remember that.’

‘Amabel says it,’ muttered her youngest born rebelliously.

‘Amabel is twenty-one,’ said her mother sweepingly as she helped herself to poached salmon, and Stephanie made a mutinous face so that Victoria said swiftly, before the mutiny should become an open one:

‘I thought of going down to Castle Cornet tomorrow to see Uncle Gardener’—the curator and an old family friend, and such a ferocious horticulturist that they had called him by that name all their lives. ‘Anyone want to come with me?’

A cheerful babble of argument broke out as she had known it would. Her holiday this time was a short one, and her family, anxious that she shouldn’t waste a precious minute of it, were full of suggestions.

‘It’ll have to be in the afternoon, then,’ said Amabel. ‘Remember we’re going to the market in the morning and you’ve got some shopping to do—if you don’t do it straight away you’re sure to forget it and go back with only half the things you want.’

‘There’s a dress in the Jaguar shop,’ began Louise. They settled down to a happy discussion as to what Vicky should do with her days and the stranger across the restaurant was forgotten—or almost. Only Stephanie glanced across at him once or twice and Victoria, eating her ice pudding with a healthy appetite, wondered if he could possibly be the man she had met that afternoon. It seemed so unlikely that she dismissed the idea from her mind and bent it instead to the conversation going on around her.

They lingered over the cheese board and the coffee; it was only when Mr Parsons suggested that they should go to the bar below the restaurant for a drink before they returned home that the family made a move. They left as they had entered, Mrs Parsons in the lead, her daughters following and Mr Parsons ambling along behind them, and this time the girls contrived to get a good look at the man Stephanie had described. Victoria, waiting for the others to file out ahead of her, had the best chance of all of them to study him. It was the man of the afternoon, this time elegantly dressed and, as her mother had remarked, in the company of a very pretty woman. He was smiling across the table at her and as she lifted her hand for a brief moment Victoria, who had excellent sight, clearly saw the rings on her left hand. His fiancée, his wife even. She felt a sudden surprising sensation of loss and after that one look followed Louise through the restaurant, aware as she went that he had seen her.

She spent the next morning shopping with her sisters, stocking up on soap and lipsticks and face powder because they were all so much cheaper in Guernsey. They were clustered round the door of ‘La Parfumerie’ arguing where they should go for their coffee when Victoria saw him again, looking exactly as he had done when she had met him, and accompanied by a man of his own age, similarly attired. He was holding a very small boy by the hand too, which substantiated her guess about the pretty girl with the rings. She stared after him and Louise, looking up, caught her at it and said at once: ‘There he is again, that man Stephanie was so smitten with—and that was a waste of time, ducky, he’s trailing a kid.’

They all laughed, and if Victoria’s laughter sounded a little hollow, nobody noticed. They went, arm-in-arm, into the arcade, to Maison Carré for coffee and enormous cream puffs, which should have spoiled their appetites for lunch, but didn’t.

As it turned out, Victoria went alone to Castle Cornet, for it began to rain after lunch and none of the others liked the idea of getting wet doing something which they could so easily do on a fine day, but Vicky, they all agreed, should certainly go if she had a mind to. After all, it was her holiday, and she, who would have gone whatever her sisters had said, agreed pleasantly to be home in good time because they were all going to the theatre that evening. All parties being satisfied, she set off, sensibly dressed in slacks and a hooded anorak, down the hill and along the Esplanade, deserted now, and along Castle Pier to the castle. Uncle Gardener would be on the battlements, brooding over his spring flowers whatever the weather.

She entered by the visitors’ gateway and waved to the woman sitting idly in the little booth where summer visitors paid their fees, and walked on to the Outer Bailey and so eventually to the ramparts, where sure enough, Uncle Gardener was working. He was at the far end and Victoria made her way unhurriedly towards him, pausing to look down to the rocks below and then out to sea. There was a wind, but it was surprisingly light for the time of year and the sea had been beaten flat by the rain. All the same, it was hardly the weather to take a boat out, she thought, watching a yacht, its white-painted hull and brown sails showing up vividly against the greyness of the sea and sky, coming out of the harbour, running fast before the wind, going south towards Jerbourg Point. She could see the orange-coloured lifejackets of the two people aboard—two men, one at the tiller, the other…there was no reason to be so sure that it was the man she had met on the way to Fermain Bay, only—even at that distance—his size.

Victoria began to run along the path beside the battlements until she reached Uncle Gardener, who looked up and smiled. ‘Uncle,’ she wasted no time in greeting him, ‘have you got your binoculars with you?’ and when he handed them to her without speaking, turned and raced back along the ramparts. It was the same man, and his companion was the man she had seen him with that morning. There was no sign of anyone else on board, but they could be in the cabin, for it was a fair-sized boat—a Sea King—built for a family, although surely he wouldn’t take his family out on a day such as this one was? She watched it pass the castle and alter course out to sea—Jersey, perhaps? She walked slowly back to where the man she had come to visit waited. ‘And what’s all that about?’ he wanted to know.

He was elderly and short and rather stout and her father’s closest friend, and like him, was one of the Jurats of the island, perhaps the highest honour a citizen of Guernsey could aspire to. Victoria had known him all her life; when she had been a small girl and his wife had been alive, they had come frequently to her home, but now he was alone and although they saw him often, he seldom came to see them any more. Nevertheless, she knew that he was always delighted to see them. She looked at him with deep affection and said: ‘Oh, nothing. Just that yacht, it seems such a daft sort of day to sail.’

‘Well, as to that, it’s a matter of who’s sailing it, isn’t it? It seemed to me that the boat was being handled by someone who knew what he was about. Do you know him?’

Victoria perched herself on the end of the wheelbarrow. ‘No—yes, well, we met—just for a little while when I was out walking. I’ve no idea who he is.’ She shrugged her shoulders and added falsely, ‘And I don’t really care.’

Mr Givaude, alias Uncle Gardener, lifted a face which bore strong traces of his Norman ancestors and stared at her rain-wet face. He didn’t answer, only made a grunting sound and said: ‘How about tea? It’s early, but I’ve finished here. Come on up to the house.’

His home was tucked away to one side of the Prisoners’ Walk, and although it was still early, as Mr Givaude had observed, his housekeeper was waiting for them, ready to take Victoria’s wet anorak and then to bring in the tea-tray with the old silver teapot and the cherry cake she made so well. Victoria ate two generous slices while she told Uncle Gardener about hospital and how she hoped to get the ward within a year, and how beastly London was except when she went to the theatre or out to dinner, when it was the greatest possible fun.

‘Want to live there for ever?’ her companion asked.

‘No,’ she sounded positive about it.

‘Then you’d better hurry up and find yourself a husband. After all, you’re the eldest, you should have first pick.’

She grinned at him. ‘And what chance do I have when the others are around?’ she demanded. ‘They’re quite spectacular, you know. I only get noticed when I’m on my own.’

Her companion took a lump of sugar from the pot and scrunched it up.