a couple of issues of Vogue with the girls, and if it’s not too much of a bore, one of those divine silk tea roses—mine was munched upcountry by a horde of hungry bog ants!”
“Quinine,” her mother was ticking away furiously, “face cream, darling, don’t forget, please. I know I nag about unimportant things, but there really is nothing more ageing and you are already quite brown.” This was true; Tor had her ancestors’ smooth olive-brown skin. “Eyebrow tweezers, darling, I am going to take off your own caterpillars before you go.” Eyebrows were an obsession of her mother. “Evening dresses, a camp stool—oh, for goodness’s sake! I think that’s too Dr. Livingstone…I’m going to strike that—and…” she lowered her voice, “she says you’ll need packets and packets of you-know-whats. They’re wildly expensive there and I—”
“Mummy!” Tor frowned at her and moved away; any moment now she felt her mother would blight her beautiful morning by talking about “Dolly’s hammocks,” her code for sanitary towels. “Mummy,” Tor leaned across the table, “please don’t cross out the camp stool. It sounds so exciting.”
“Oh, how pretty you look when you smile.” Her mother’s face suddenly collapsed. “If only you’d smile more.”
In the silence that followed, Tor sensed a series of complicated and painful thoughts taking place under her mother’s hat; some of them she was all too familiar with: had Tor smiled more, for instance, or looked more like Rose, all the expense of sending her to India might have been saved; if she’d eaten less cake; drunk more water and lemon on Tuesdays; acted more French. Her mother seemed always to be adding her up like this and coming to the conclusion she was a huge disappointment.
But now, how strange, an actual tear was cutting a channel through the loose powder on her mother’s face and had lodged in her lipstick.
“Hold my hand, darling,” she said. When she took a deep sobbing breath, Tor couldn’t help it, she moved her chair away. Her mother in this mood seemed horribly raw and human, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was too late; the harm had already been done.
It was impossible to find a taxi that day, and even though they weren’t normally bus people, an hour or so later Tor was on top of an omnibus, looking down on drops of rain drying on the tops of dusty trees in St. James’s Park. The bus swept down Piccadilly toward Swan & Edgar, and Tor, feeling the perfumed bones of her mother sitting so unusually close to her, was surprised to feel another stab of sorrow.
This felt so exactly like the kind of outing a happy mother and daughter might have had, if she hadn’t been so difficult; a father left at home with a plate of sandwiches, the “girls” up in town for the day.
From the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people—already a much bigger world.
Bars of sunlight fell across her mother’s face as she leaned to look out of the window. The blue feather in her hat wiggled like a live thing.
“Darling, do look!” she said. “There’s the Ritz—oh God, I’ve missed London,” she breathed. And all the way down Piccadilly she pointed out what she called “some smart waterholes” (when Mother got excited her English let her down), places she and Daddy had eaten in when they had money, before Tor was born: Capriati’s, the In and Out—“dreadful chef”—the Café Royal.
Tor heard a couple of shopgirls behind them titter and repeat, “dreadful chef.”
But for once, she told herself she didn’t give a damn—she was going to India in two weeks’ time. When you’re smiling, When you’re smiling, The whole world smiles with you.
“Darling,” her mother pinched her, “don’t hum in public, it’s dreadfully common.”
They’d arrived at the riding department at Swan & Edgar. Her mother, who prided herself on knowing the key assistants, asked for the services of a Madame Duval, a widow, she explained to Tor, who’d fallen on hard times and whom she remembered from the old days.
“We’re looking for some decent summer jods,” her mother had drawled unnecessarily to the doorman on the ground floor, “for the tailors in Bombay to copy.”
Upstairs, Tor mentally rolled her eyes as Madame Duval, removing pins from her mouth, complimented Mrs. Sowerby on how girlish and slim she still looked. She watched her mother dimple and pass