A Girl’s Guide to Kissing Frogs. Victoria Clayton

Dumbola Lodge. ‘Love is a state of madness. If money comes into it I doubt if there’s much passion.’

      I wondered if Rafe was speaking from experience. He was thirty-two. Naturally there must have been attachments. I felt something wet and hot in my ear. It was a long tongue.

      Rafe turned to reprove Buster. ‘Bad boy! Down, sir.’

      ‘I don’t mind.’

      ‘He mustn’t be allowed to lick people’s faces. What bothers me,’ he went on, ‘is that this fellow means nothing more than an escape route to Isobel. It’s hardly a sound basis for marriage.’

      I was flattered that he should take me so thoroughly into his confidence. During all those years that he had been a fixed star in my imagination, he could only have thought of me as a silly little girl. If he had thought of me at all. ‘What’s she escaping from?’

      Rafe was silent for a time. ‘From home …’ He spoke with an air of reluctance as though the words were being forced out of him. ‘From Evelyn …’

      ‘But surely that wouldn’t need something so drastic as marriage? She could go back to London. She had a job, didn’t she?’

      ‘Yes. But she wasn’t happy.’ He turned off the engine. ‘I don’t know why I’m boring you with my family’s concerns when you ought to be tucked up in bed. Come on, I’ll help you in. And perhaps we’d better clear up the mystery of the telephone that didn’t ring in the night-time.’

      ‘There’s only one in the house, in my father’s study. He sleeps there when he’s on call. The ring’s always switched to low so you can’t hear it from anywhere else except the drawing room if both the doors are open.’

      ‘That’s very considerate of him.’ Rafe got out of the car and leaned into the back for my crutches. Buster gave me a farewell lick.

      The truth was, this arrangement was entirely in my father’s own interest. Even when he was not on duty, patients tended to ring him in the small hours of the morning to say that they had felt a slight twinge on bending over to pick the milk bottle from the doorstep that morning and might it be a heart attack? Or the cough which they had had for several weeks might be cancer and ought they to have an emergency chest X-ray? It was perfectly reasonable not to want to be dragged from sleep in order to prescribe aspirin for someone with thumb-ache, but the telephone had always been the cause of much vexation in our household. When my father was at home he guarded the privacy of his study with ferocity, as though it contained a treasure chest and he was the dog with eyes as big as millwheels, so we could only use the telephone when he was out.

      We tiptoed into the hall. At least Rafe did, and I swung my leg and crutches with careful deliberation. A soft light shone through the open drawing room. We went in. A table lamp illumined the sorry scene. My mother was stretched out on the sofa, her neck crumpled against one arm of it, her bare feet projecting over the other. A glass and a bottle stood on the table beside her. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing slowly and heavily.

      ‘I’d better wake her,’ I said. ‘She’ll get terrible cramp with her head at that angle.’ I shook her gently, then quite roughly, but she pushed away my hand and muttered something incomprehensible. ‘I’m afraid she’s had a very tiring day. I’d better put some blankets over her. She’ll be cold when the fire goes out.’

      ‘Tell me where they’re kept. I’ll fetch them.’

      I gave him directions to the airing cupboard. While Rafe was upstairs I tried to move Dimpsie on to her side in case she was sick and choked on her own vomit, as I’d heard people sometimes did. But she was too heavy. When Rafe returned he had a go, but she lashed out at him with her fists so we tucked the bedclothes round her, turned out the light and crept back into the hall.

      In the gloom I could see not much more than the whites of his eyes.

      ‘Thank you so much for bringing me home.’

      ‘I told you, I liked doing it. Come and see us again soon.’ He paused and smiled, his teeth shining in the dim light. ‘Give my love to Dimpsie,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m very fond of her, you know. A sympathetic soul.’

      ‘Thank you. I will. Good night.’

      I offered him my cheek. He gripped my shoulder in a friendly, man-to-man sort of way and left.

      ‘Of course Conrad isn’t a bit the sort of person Mummy wants me to marry,’ said Isobel.

      Two days had passed since the dinner party. We were in the morning room at Shottestone but it was afternoon. The morning room was charming, with walls of green silk, curtains patterned with honeysuckle and plenty of books. A large desk where Evelyn did her accounts and telephoning stood in the window, and in front of it was the sofa on which Isobel and I were sprawling. On our plates were crumbs of Mrs Capstick’s orange cake, just as good as I had remembered it.

      ‘You mean because he isn’t English?’

      ‘He isn’t English, he hasn’t a title, he doesn’t know any of the people we know and he isn’t even a Christian.’

      ‘Your father hasn’t got a title.’

      ‘No. But then Mummy’s father made his money in cotton mills. That had to be lived down. An untitled landowner was quite good enough for her.’ I remembered Dimpsie telling me years ago that Evelyn had confessed to her father being in trade and had sworn her to secrecy. I had wondered at the time what the fuss was about. I could see nothing wrong with being a daughter of the loom. Now I was older and wiser I understood that to Evelyn it was a shameful blot. ‘She thinks because I’ve gentle blood in me I ought to aim higher. She’s got Lord Dunderave’s son in her sights.’

      ‘How do you know?’

      ‘She’s been dropping his name – it’s Ronald, can you believe it? – into the conversation whenever possible. Apparently he can play polo, waltz, carve, help a woman on with her coat, open champagne without spilling it and he changes his underpants daily. Also he’s a bruising rider to hounds, a brilliant shot and the salmon he catches are so enormous they have to be brought home by Carter Patterson.’

      ‘Really?’ I envisaged a salmon as big as a whale, quivering with harpoons.

      ‘No, you clot! But that’s the gist of it. What she really means is he’s a bit thick and never opens a book but he’s a guaranteed, true-blue, copper-bottomed member of the English upper classes. He’s just got back from Cirencester – he’s been doing a course in land management to equip him to run the ancestral acres – so she’s going to ask him to dinner. Meanwhile she’s been lushing up to Lord Dunderave like mad. She had him to dinner yesterday. He’s a pig of a man. Bad-tempered. And he was rude to Daddy when he repeated himself.’

      ‘Honestly, Isobel, I think you’re awfully hard on your mother. She’s always been angelically kind to me and it can only have been out of genuine good-heartedness. I’ve never been able to give her anything in return.’

      ‘When we were children it suited her to have someone around for me to play with. It saved her the trouble of finding things for me to do.’

      ‘Yes, but she took the trouble to be sweet and generous to me when she needn’t have bothered. Now you don’t need entertaining and she’s just as warm and hospitable.’

      I had met Evelyn in the hall that afternoon as she was on her way to a meeting of charitable people busy raising funds for impoverished war widows. She had looked stylish as usual, a fur coat over her tweed suit and shining crocodile shoes. She had stopped to ask me about my foot, my mother, my diet and my prospects, and she had pressed me to come to Shottestone whenever I wished. I only had to ring and Spendlove would come with the car.

      ‘She wants to get you on her side over the business of Conrad. She thinks you might be a good influence on me. She sees you as serious and hard-working and brainy.’

      ‘No!’

      ‘Oh, yes. She