The Fox in the Cupboard by Jane Shilling

Author:Jane Shilling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

RATHER IN THE teeth of experience, I was looking forward to the hunt ball. Single motherhood, invariably coupled by people like John Bull with the adjective “feckless,” had turned out, during the ten years I’d been doing it, to be an education in Victorian standards of virtue and duty. I never went out in the evenings, and when I moved a friend who was helping me gave all the old evening dresses I’d kept since university to the thrift shop, on the grounds that I wouldn’t be needing them anymore because they “didn’t fit in with my lifestyle.”

Overcome with excitement at the prospect of an evening spent dancing in a long frock until late (“carriages at 2 A.M.,” it said grandly on the ball invitation), I had bought a new ball gown. It was black velvet, with a cyclamen silk flounce around the bottom and a bodice held up with the slenderest of cyclamen silk straps, draped at the bosom and lined in the same color silk. I thought it looked like the scandalous black velvet ball dress painted by John Singer Sargent and was enchanted with it. Even the girls in the shop went “Oooh!” when I came out of the dressing room.

We met for drinks beforehand in someone’s converted barn (open fire, milling Labradors, soaring glass roof through which the stars shone coldly, the Ashford Valley men looking constrained in their black ties), then set off for Hollingbourne in a rented limo with a world-weary driver who seemed already to be anticipating the state of joviality or collapse in which he’d have to take us all home again.

They were still vacuuming the swirly carpet in the entrance lobby of the Ramada Hotel when we arrived, a good twenty minutes ahead of the official start time. Heavy metal grilles were pulled down over the bars, the door to the cloakroom was uncompromisingly shut and the girl with the key nowhere to be found. We stood in our coats making conversation at the tops of our voices while the vacuum roared around us. Eventually a harassed-looking manager came with a great bunch of keys like a prison guard and opened up the cloakroom and the shuttered bars.

By the time we got back from fussing with our hair and trying to check our back views in the cloakroom mirror, horribly lit with a fluorescent glare like a supermarket fish counter, the men had a row of drinks lined up along the bar and the place had begun to fill up. I was growing more used to the sight of the Ashford Valley en fête, but was still struck by the extraordinary mermaid silhouette of the women, emphasized this year by a fashion for evening gowns crocheted from skeins of gold or silver thread with fish-scale sequins, which stretched like fishing nets over arms and torsos rippling with bodybuilders’ muscle from years of grappling with pulling horses, then dwindled from the waist down into ordinary human proportions.

To my dismay I found when

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