had frowned at but was too sweet, with a sort of kick pleat in the back and satin bindings.
Her mother had taken her to a powder-puffy little salon in Beauchamp Place that Tor’s mother had recommended, all ribbons and chandeliers and flattering peach lights. They’d bought her trousseau there: thirteen pairs of cotton drawers; a corset that laced at the back; nainsook bloomers; two silk petticoats, and then the long peach silk negligee with a lace trim that made her feel like a glamorous stranger. After Madame had taken her measurements and complimented her on her “perfect proportion,” Rose had looked at her reflection in the mirror.
Her shoulders, her waist, even the small buds of her nipples seemed on display and scandalous. The next time she wore this, she’d be in Jack Chandler’s bed. Mummy, whose face had suddenly swum into view behind her in the glass, must have been thinking along these lines, too. She’d given a funny little grimace and shut her eyes. This was all so new for both of them.
That might have been the best time to have asked her about the bedroom side of things, but she’d been too shy. All that had happened in that department was a hot-making visit to Dr. Llewellyn, an old family friend who hunted with her father and had offices in Harley Street. Blushing furiously and avoiding her eyes, he’d fished around inside her, hurting her horribly, and then handed her a small sponge. He’d said she was to use it when she was no longer a virgin. “You put it in like this.” The back of his tweed suit had strained as he’d creaked into a squatted position and poked it between his legs. He’d given her a little cloth bag, into which it must be returned, washed and powdered, when it wasn’t in use.
She longed to ask her mother for more information about the terrifying event that would bring this thing out of its cloth bag, but her mother, who’d left her at the gate of the doctor’s surgery almost scarlet with embarrassment herself, had said nothing. She wanted to ask Tor, in fact had asked her one night, when they were joking about kissing boys, but Tor had been irritatingly vague in the way she was when she knew nothing.
And now, her enormous new Viceroy trunk stood in the corner of the room. Earlier in the day she’d half packed it, clothes carefully wrapped in sheets of tissue paper with heavy things at the bottom; she was trying now to learn to be sensible and womanly like Mummy. She got into bed with the pile of women’s magazines that had been her constant companions since Mrs. Sowerby had handed them over. Mummy, who subscribed only to Horse and Hound and Blackwood’s Magazine, thought they were a frightful waste of money, but she found them her only source of information on “it.” On the problem pages of Woman’s World a writer named Mary said her readers could ask her anything.
“Dear Mary,” one girl wrote. “I am getting married shortly and have asked my mother to tell me the facts of life. She says I am thoroughly nasty and morbid and shall find out soon enough.” It was signed Ignorant Betty.
Mary had written back: “Send a stamped addressed envelope and I will tell you all you need to know.”
Rose had thought, several times, of sending her own letter to Mary and enough stamps to get any reply to Bombay, but the thought of Ci Ci Mallinson, or her husband Geoffrey, opening it by mistake was too mortifying. She also hoped there would be time to find out on the voyage, not in a practical way of course, but because there were bound to be lots of parties and older people.
She turned to an article about how men simply love women who are a little bit secretive. “Keep him guessing just a little bit,” said the writer. “Besides, you will be much more appealing if, instead of telling him all your hopes and fears, you ask him about himself.”
She’d met Jack at her friend Flavia’s twenty-first, at the Savile Club in London; he’d told her he’d been asked along as a spare man and he had seemed so much older and more experienced than the other silly boys. He was handsome, too, with his fine tall physique and blond hair. He wasn’t at all a good dancer, and at first they’d both been hopelessly flustered and tongue-tied bouncing around