After the Party by Cressida Connolly

Author:Cressida Connolly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241327746
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

10. Sussex, December 1938

The stone-floored entrance hall had four enormous arrangements of white flowers on waist-high Doric pillars made of plaster, brought in by the London florist: one to either side of the main door, with a mirroring second pair flanking the way through into the large drawing room. Each of the four arrangements occupied several yards of air, the blooms appearing to soar upwards and then to cascade extravagantly down, like a burst of fireworks. The scent from the tuberoses and lilies was sticky, intoxicating; while white freesias, tucked in low, gave off a smell half citrus, half peppery.

A tall blaze in the vast hall fireplace added to the sense of occasion. Phyllis and Hugh had been asked for dinner before the party along with other close friends of the Templetons. Some of them, having come from London, were staying at the house. Four round tables, each set with ten places, had been arranged in the smaller drawing room, so as to keep the dining room clear. There the long table and its many leaves had been taken down, and all the chairs and side tables removed and the rugs lifted so as to clear the floor for dancing, later. The Templetons were expecting more than two hundred guests. They’d had fifty more than that at their last ball without crowding, but that had been a fine summer’s evening and people had spilled out on to the lawns. On this occasion Fergus had insisted that anything less than a hundred and sixty wasn’t a proper party; the more people you invited, the more fun they were likely to have, was his view. Sarita protested mildly: there had been a lot of talk about where the coats would go. In the end it was decided to put them in the morning room, ticketed. A couple of girls would oversee the operation and hanging rails of the kind found in shop storerooms were procured for the purpose. Fergus hadn’t been happy about this – it was a private party after all, not the cloakroom of a railway hotel – but at this time of year everyone, but everyone, wore an overcoat and all the men’s were heavy dark tweed and all the women’s were heavy dark fur, so short of getting people to spend hours fishing about for their own coats at two and three in the morning, no other solution for their retrieval had presented itself.

‘Do look,’ said Patricia, coming to stand by her sister at one of the pillars. ‘How many different kinds of flowers can you count? I can see freesias and gardenia and these trailing bits are jasmine and that other wonderful smell, what do you think it is? Oh look, and stephanotis, that must be the scent. Wherever did she get them from, do you imagine? They can’t have been grown in England, surely, not even in a hot-house. They must have cost the earth.’

‘I think she said she’d had them brought down in a van from Moyses Stevens.

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