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Overview
The fourth child born to a struggling musician and a mother who’s an incurable romantic, Lavinia lives an unremarkable existence. But a visit to a sprawling country estate transforms her world and becomes the touchstone for the rest of her life.
Lavinia is sixteen when she’s invited to a house party given by distant acquaintances. It’s her first trip away from home, and she’s instantly mesmerized by her beautiful and lush new surroundings. Days are filled with delectable meals and skating and riding lessons; nights with parties and dancing. Lavinia adores her hosts, Lucy and Gerald Lancing, and their boisterous extended family—and the mysterious, conceited Rupert Laing, with whom she shares her first kiss. But the visit can’t last forever. Soon after she returns home, the First World War breaks out. As Lavinia matures, and other people pass through her life—including Ian Graham, the soldier who loves her yet doesn’t expect her love in return—she continues to view things through the prism of that unforgettable Christmas with the Lancings.
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s debut novel about a young girl’s spiritual and emotional awakening, the painful pride of youth, and female emancipation, The Beautiful Visit is a moving montage of English life at the beginning of the last century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504035347 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 06/07/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Beautiful Visit
By Elizabeth Jane Howard
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1950 Elizabeth Jane HowardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3534-7
CHAPTER 1
I was born in Kensington. My father was a composer. My mother came from a rich home, and was, I believe, incurably romantic. She married my father, despite the halfhearted protestations of her family, who felt that to marry a musician was very nearly as bad as to marry into trade, and far less secure. I imagine their protestations were half-hearted, because she was, after all, their seventh daughter; and if they had been at all vehement in their disapproval I cannot imagine my mother sticking to her decision. At any rate, her family, after attending the wedding (there are pictures of all my aunts looking sulky, righteous, and incredibly tightly laced, on this occasion), washed their hands of her, which was far the cheapest, and from their point of view, the most moral attitude to adopt. It was certainly the cheapest. My father was not a good composer, he was not even successful; and my mother had no idea of money (or music). She had four of us in as many years, and I was the fourth. We would all wear passed on clothes until our nurse would no longer take us near the shops, and our contemporaries laughed at us; and then suddenly, in the drawing-room, would hang rich fiery brocade curtains; or perhaps there would be a party, and we would have new muslin frocks with velvet sashes; worn for that one occasion, and outgrown long before the next. I always remember my mother as pretty, but ceaselessly exhausted by her efforts to keep the increasing number of heads above water.
We had the usual childhood, with governesses, and interminable walks in Kensington Gardens. We soon learned that most people's fathers were not composers, and we boasted about ours to the other children we met on our walks: affected a knowledge and love for music which we did not feel, and held prearranged conversations about it for the benefit of these richer and generally more fortunate friends. We were intelligent, and they were impressed. It all helped us to bear the lack of parties, seaside holidays and expensive toys.
Eventually, of course, my two brothers went away to school, and I was left at home with my sister. In all the years we grew up together, only two things stand out in my mind. The first was our poverty. I do not think we were exactly poor, but we had, as we were continually told, a position to keep up. I think the situation was complicated by the fact that my father and mother had quite different positions in mind; with the result that we oscillated hopelessly just out of reach of either.
The second was music. Music dominated our lives ever since I can remember. We were forced to listen to it for hours on end in silence; sometimes for a whole afternoon. My garters were often too tight; I used to rub under my knees, and my father would frown, and play something longer, and even less enjoyable. He was a tired, disgruntled little man; ineffectually sarcastic, and haunted by a very bad digestion, which made him morose and incapable of enjoying anything. I think even he got sick of music sometimes, but not until he had left it too late to start anything else: and my mother, I think, would have been finally shattered if he had presented her with any alternative.
Occasionally, his work would be performed; we would all go and there would be desperate little parties in the Green Room afterwards, with a lot of kissing, and frenziedly considered praise.
We were all made to learn the piano; but I was the only one who survived the tearful lessons with an enormous woman, who lisped, adored my father, and ambled into unwieldy rages at our incompetence. Also the chill, blue-fingered hour of practice before breakfast, choked the others' less dogged aspiration. After some years, my father suddenly added another hour on to this practice, and began to superintend it. He used to stand over me while I raced through easier passages of Mozart, or perhaps exercises of Bülow, asking me difficult questions which were larded with sarcastic similies I was far too resentful and afraid to comprehend.
I remember us getting steadily poorer. There were eventually no parties, except at tea-time, when my mother would perforce entertain her more distant relations, who patronized her, and suggested alterations in the household which she had neither energy nor means to allow.
The house smelt of dusty carpets and forgotten meals; of grievance and misfortune. There was cracked white paint on all the windowsills, and there were slimy slips of soap in the basins. The drawing-room degenerated to a dining, living and schoolroom; with the remains of furniture for all three purposes. There were yellowing pictures of us on the mantelpiece; languid, and consciously cultivated. The glass bookcase with cracked panes held rows of dull dark volumes which nobody wished to read. I remember the sunlight, sordid and unwelcome on my mother's sofa; and her head drooping over the arm. Her hair was always parted in the middle, strained back, and escaping in brittle strands round her ears. She seemed perpetually struggling with an enormous round work basket, writhing with grey and brown socks which gaped for attention. I can remember no colour that I can describe: no change of tempo. In the studio, the pianos stopped and started with monotonous regularity when my father resorted to teaching. For several years there was a great jar of dusty crackling beech leaves. I remember odd ends of braid round the piano stools, which shivered when pupils banged the door, as they invariably did. It was a very heavy door. Upstairs there were wide draughty passages covered with small faded mats over which one slid or tripped. My mother's bedroom was filled with huge and reputedly valuable pieces of furniture: but her remnants of jewellery winked sadly in worn white velvet; her silver-topped brushes were always tarnished; there were innumerable bent hairpins in cracks between the floorboards; and the whole room was impregnated with the brisk improbable smell of my father's shaving soap (there was always a soft grey foam on his brush). There were a great many gilt mirrors about the passages, all spotted and blurred with damp, like the passages themselves. We had a tiny garden, surrounded by black brick walls, filled with straggling grass and silent fleeting cats. I do not recall anything else very much.
My elder sister put up her hair, and began going down to dinner. The boys were always away, and I did not, in any case, like them very much. I was horribly lonely. I read everything I could lay my hands on, which was little; grew too fast; and, above all, longed for something to happen.
My sister began going to church a great deal and I found a purple Bible with silver clasps in her bedroom. She was out and I was amusing myself with her room and private things. There were a crucifix, a rosary and a few books on religious subjects smugly bound in red and gold. Was she a Roman Catholic? I didn't know anything about her; if I caught her eye at meals or in the evening she would smile, remotely gentle, and go on eating or sewing, delicately withdrawn. Her speech was carefully non-committal and she didn't talk to me much beyond asking me if I was going to wash my hair or telling me to help our mother.
I opened the drawers of her dressing-table. Her underclothes were beautifully embroidered, all white and folded, made by herself. Her boots were polished, with no broken laces. Above them in the wardrobe her dresses hung wasted with waiting; with no one to take them out into the air. They were chiefly white, mauve, dark blue and grey, with shoulders flopping sulkily off the hangers. The mauve was pretty: I had never worn mauve. It had hundreds of little buttons made of itself. I took it out of the wardrobe. It swayed a little, and suddenly I was unhooking my skirt, tearing my blouse under the arms as I wrenched it over my head, my long hair catching on the hooks, and then standing in my petticoat looking down at my ugly black shoes and stockings. I laid hands on the mauve frock. The buttons were awfully difficult to do up. I couldn't manage the one in the middle of my back at all. I twisted like a flamingo and heard the taut cotton cracking. Just about to crack I hoped. Not actually torn. I turned to a long thin mirror by the bed. My petticoat was not long enough and there was a line like a let-down hem. The dress fitted me. How clean and trim and old. I looked into the glass and said: 'I love you, Edward,' several times. My hair was wrong; he would laugh. I rushed to the dressing-table, the tight mauve skirts primly resisting, and succeeded after some agonizing moments with hairpins in twisting a bun at the back of my head. 'Good afternoon, Lavinia,' I said, advancing on the mirror. 'Good afternoon.' And I curtsied. At that moment my sister came into the room. I saw her face in the mirror. I turned round quickly so that she should not see the gap with the undone buttons. I was very frightened and afraid the gap would make her more angry. I hated her for coming in. No harm, I kept repeating to myself, only one frock, no harm.
'I hate my clothes,' I said. 'I didn't choose this house. I can't start life in it. This is so pretty.'
She shut the door, and began taking off her gloves from slim smooth white hands, fingers unpricked because she always wore thimbles when she worked.
'Will you take it off now? I don't want it too crushed,' she said.
I was struggling with the buttons when she glided forward and I felt her fingers regularly neat, releasing them, down to my waist. I pulled the dress over my head. She took it from me in silence and replaced it on its hanger in the wardrobe. I reached for my skirt and she said, 'Have you been trying on all my clothes?'
She saw the drawers open. I bent over my skirt ashamed. She sat down and talked. She would not have minded me trying on her clothes with her there, she said. But did I not feel it a little wrong to come to her room when she was out, to play with her private possessions? 'If I had known you were going to do that I should have asked you to wash your hands.' And she laughed pleasantly.
I looked at my hands. They were grey and clumsy. I felt they had only become dirty for her to see.
'We must try and remember that things don't matter.' She was leaning forward. 'I know jealousy is hard. I have suffered from it myself' (with a weary reminiscent little smile). 'But there are other things so much more important and so little time to set sufficient values. Life is hard for us all in different ways.'
She talked for a long time in the same quiet assured unemotional voice. There was a lot about God and trying to live a good life, peace of mind, acceptance of what was given, examples, final reward, and back to not prying un-asked into other people's things: and an absolute passion of disagreement grew in me.
'I split the frock,' I said.
'That is a pity. But I expect it can be mended. I am not angry. It's quite all right.'
'I've got to go. I promised to sort the laundry,' I said. I couldn't bear her voice any more.
'Well we'll say no more about it. Agreed?' And she rose suddenly and kissed my cheek. I left her room quickly and ran into mine. 'Don't forget the laundry.' I heard her voice daintily energetic as I shut my door.
My passion broke and I sat on the floor clutching my knees and repeating her words so that I could fight them more clearly in my mind. Things must matter. Everything existed because someone had once thought it important. Nobody gave me this house, nobody could love it; if you were peaceful you never wanted to change. I wanted every single simple thing to be different. I should not mind people looking at my clothes if they were nice. There wasn't anyone to help. If helpful people didn't care about beautiful stuffs and colours, sounds and more people, then they weren't any use to me. But there was nobody to help me here. Hot resentful tears fell down into my hands. Everything was dirty, dusty and grey; no clear colour; no piercing sound; and at tea everything would be the same. Nobody worth their salt ever had much peace of mind. I wasn't jealous of her. Good Lord no. And I repeated 'Good Lord' aloud in a pompous self-satisfied manner enjoying its rounded scorn. It was a mistake to put me in this house. I wasn't suited to it. I couldn't even cry any more, but my nose was hot and full: horrid. I got up to search for a handkerchief and rooted for hours among bits of string; postcards; a broken watch; a ring out of a cracker; a musty lavender bag, all dust and spikes; a shoelace; elastic; a ninepenny Nelson; a little pink china pig with a chipped ear; a balloon, soft, and curiously unpleasant to touch; an envelope bursting with stamps; a penwiper; and, at last, a handkerchief, grey, but folded. I shook it out, and it smelt of dolls' houses and the water out of their tea cups. I blew my nose and sat down.
'I am against everybody,' I said.
Nothing changed.
'Everybody and everything. I don't like it, I'm going to change.' The gaping drawer reminded me. A lot of those things were too childish to keep. I had outgrown them. I would throw away everything I hated. Everything in my room.
But it was tea-time.
Two days later I was still in the midst of my private revolution. My room was chaotic and each night when I went to bed the bloated waste-paper basket reminded me of more to purge. The family took no notice of me, which was comforting as there would only have been an incredulous banality about their comments. I eventually made my room unsentimentally bare; hardly belonging to me, and only resentfully part of the house. All the books and toys that had verged on grown-up possessions were gone, and it took me no time to find a handkerchief. That was not as enjoyable as I had expected; but I persevered and sorted my clothes into heaps of the unwearable, mendable, and usable. The mending took several days; I got bored and relegated many garments to the first heap.
The next thing was to find new people. I started walking in Kensington Gardens by myself, watching the people, and trying to find someone to suit my needs. This accomplished, I intended taking the person home to tea with me. The Round Pond seemed the most likely spot, because people stopped to feed the birds, or watch the yachts, or simply the minnows. I was afraid to speak to anyone. Each day I resolved to take the plunge but I was determined that it should be thoroughly done and there was a private rule that the person had to be taken to tea. I saw one girl: very pretty, carrying a little blue book, and gazing at the swans. She sat down on a seat and I watched her, fascinated. She had enormous brown eyes with very long lashes and moth-like eyebrows. She opened the little blue book, and a stupid duck which was walking on the grass and gravel, moved, hasty and eager, like a shop attendant, thinking about bread I suppose. It waited, then walked to the water and slid in, swimming smugly away as though it never hurried greedily up to seats at all. The girl stopped reading and looked up pensively. The sun was setting, and gold was slipping uncertainly off the trees and water and her hair. It was very calm; the yachts were lying on the pond, with their sails shivering still; and the gardens were blue in the distance with the tree trunks dark, like legs seen from a basement window. On the Broad Walk a leisurely stream of perambulators rolled homewards; stiff gaiters to unbutton and peel off fat frantic legs and square white feeders to be tied round hundreds of warm pink necks. A clock struck four, and the swans arched their necks for the sound to pass through. A minnow floated on its side in the water, its mouth opening: it was going to die. The girl shut her book and walked away, and I had not spoken to her. I imagined her walking back to a neat beautiful home with friends all coming to a wonderful tea. She did not walk towards my gate. 'She would never have liked me,' I said. 'She would not have come home.' The thought cheered me for the loss of her. She was only a speck among the trees already. It didn't matter, there were so many people. It was just a pity to let anyone go. All the way home I imagined her walking with me, telling me many new and exciting things about how to live, so that tea with the family would be a waste of her. It was cold by the time I reached home; the lamps were being lit in the streets, and the piano sounded in petulant bursts as I stood on the door step. My father was giving a lesson. My sister was wearing her mauve frock. After tea I darned black stockings and ironed my hair ribbons.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Copyright © 1950 Elizabeth Jane Howard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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