Voyage of Innocence. Elizabeth Edmondson
go. And I should think that once your old snob of a grandfather knows you can’t do the season, he’ll have to let you go to Oxford.’
Not without a tremendous argument and more dreadful scenes, he hadn’t. In the end, he washed his hands of her, furious that his daughter-in-law’s grand connections should have come to nothing. ‘She’d better stay in York with you, Anne, there’ll be dances and so on here. You must know everybody who matters.’
‘I think you’d better go to Oxford,’ her mother said to her.
‘I can’t. I can’t afford it on my allowance. Not the fees and everything.’
‘I’ll pay.’
‘You?’
‘I have a little money of my own. And don’t feel you have to come back home for all the holidays,’ she went on. ‘You young people like to spend time abroad. Or with your friends. Like Hugh does.’
‘Hugh has a generous allowance.’
‘I’m sure Grandfather will come round in the end. Now he knows the season isn’t a possibility. After all, most of the young men who go to all the London parties and dances are at one of the universities. You’ll meet plenty of eligible men at Oxford, I’m sure.’ She paused, searching for words. ‘I gather Claudia is very smart and extravagant. When your grandfather finds out, he won’t want you to be short of money and not be able to keep up with her.’
Which seemed pretty unlikely to Vee, since smart and Yorkshire school and Deanery hardly went together.
‘Of course, he won’t give you as much as he gives Hugh, young men are always more expensive at university.’
Her mother agreed to pay her first term’s fees, and Hugh made Daddy give her a small allowance.
‘Mummy’s right,’ he said. ‘Grandfather will see sense in the end. If Oxford’s OK for Claudia, why should it be so wrong for Vee? I’ll drop a few hints when next I see him.’
Vee was too warm in her thick winter coat. When she’d left York that morning there had been frost on the tracks, and she was grateful for her wool coat and gloves and scarf. Now they seemed out of place and uncomfortable.
A bell clanged, and the signal at the far end of the platform clattered down. The porter stood up and straightened his cap. More porters began to trundle their trolleys across the line. Even the station cat woke up and flicked her tail round herself.
The track hummed, then Vee heard the train, the shrill sound of a whistle, a cloud of smoke in the distance. With a roar and a grinding of brakes, the engine was alongside her, then past, coming to a snorting, squealing halt almost at the end of the platform.
Gone was the tranquil peace of a few minutes before. Heads appeared at windows all along the train, doors were flung open, people poured on to the platform.
She felt a sudden panic. Would she recognize Claudia – or would Claudia recognize her? When they last saw one another, they’d been schoolgirls, clumsy and at that awkward age, neither children nor adults. Pupae, in fact. Had Claudia turned into a radiant butterfly, or a dreary moth? Had she grown much? She’d been shorter than Vee then, and Vee had always been small for her age.
Her eyes darted here and there among the faces in the sea of humanity. Youthful humanity, she noticed, which lifted her spirits; young men and women of her own age. More men than women, which she supposed was only natural – inevitable, if they had parents and a grandfather like hers. The men were casually dressed in tweeds and flannels, and had an astonishing array of bags and suitcases and golf clubs hung over shoulders and held in masculine hands. They greeted one another with loud good humour and waves and claps on the back. A group of them clustered around the luggage van as bicycles were wheeled down the ramp.
However would she find Claudia in this throng? She heard a shriek in her ear and whipped around to come face to face with her cousin.
It was as well Vee hadn’t changed that much in the intervening years, for she would never have recognized her. How could this willowy, exquisitely groomed creature be her dumpy, toothy cousin? Her smile was immaculate now, and those blue eyes were huge and ravishing.
‘Good gracious,’ Vee said. ‘I’d never have known you.’
‘Well, I’d have known you, with that discontented look on your face and that air that northerners have when they come south.’
‘Air? What do you mean?’
‘Oh, a tinge of hay bales and beer and clogs, you know.’ Claudia glanced down at Vee’s overnight case. ‘Is this all you’ve got? What a mêlée! Are they all university people?’
‘My trunk came on ahead. I was looking out for you, I never saw you get off the train.’
‘I wasn’t on it. I came in the motor car, I had too much luggage to come on the train.’
‘I didn’t have any choice. Can you imagine anyone offering to drive me from York?’
‘Doesn’t Hugh have a car?’
‘He can’t even drive.’
Claudia glanced up and down the platform. ‘You didn’t travel down together on the train, though, not unless he’s got the gift of invisibility.’
‘He came up last week. Some work to catch up on, he said, but I think he just wanted to get away from the Deanery.’
‘Could be an advantage having a brother up at the same time as you. He’ll have heaps of men friends for you to meet.’
That made Vee laugh. ‘You’ll get to meet all the men you want, I feel sure.’
‘No, it’s going to be like a convent, being at a women’s college, don’t you think so? We go this way, the car’s over at the other side of the station. Oh, Vee, aren’t you happy? Aren’t you just brimming over with being here?’
Vee thought about it as they went up the steps and across the footbridge. ‘I don’t feel it’s real yet.’
‘I know what you mean. Pinch yourself, and you’ll wake up in the usual old bed. I’ve been saying to myself all the way here, I’ve made it, I’ve done it, it’s happening, and nobody can stop me now.’
They went down the steps to the other platform, and out on the north side, where a gleaming motorcar was waiting, a liveried chauffeur in attendance. Vee had forgotten just how rich her Vere cousins were.
‘Do you remember Jenks?’ Claudia said with a wave of her hand towards the chauffeur. ‘My ally, aren’t you Jenks?’ and she gave him an enormous wink before pushing Vee into the car.
Vee sat down on the sumptuous leather seat and stared at Claudia, who had produced a ridiculously long cigarette holder and was fixing a cigarette into it. ‘I shan’t offer you one, coz, because I know that coming as you do from the Deanery, you won’t touch drink or tobacco.’
‘I do smoke, as it happens, and I’d love a cigarette.’
‘We’ll have to get you a holder, nothing less chic than stubs with lipstick all over them.’
‘I’m not wearing any lipstick.’
‘That’s too obvious, but you’ll have to start. I’m not going to become known as the one with the dowdy cousin, I assure you.’
The car purred down to the Botley Road and turned under the railway bridge. The main entrance to the station was thronged with students and taxis and porters and luggage.
‘Stop, Jenks,’ Claudia said suddenly, and even before the car halted, she had the door open and was hurtling through the crowd towards the taxi rank.
What was she up to? Vee dived out of the car after her cousin, who had gone up to where an astonishingly beautiful girl was standing amid a helpful crowd of young men.
‘Are you for Grace?’ Claudia