Foibles
Those endless, draughty winters in Surrey! One can almost smell them now—the mingled perfume of polish, lavender, and slightly decaying roses—all hovering in Aunt’s drawing room like the ghost of some timid housemaid. There was always a fire attempting to roar but rather wheezing instead, and a clock that, despite striking every quarter hour, never seemed to keep time. Aunt, you may recall, was an enthusiastic believer in the moral purpose of discomfort—she thought draughts built character—and would sit, like a heroine from a Victorian sermon, in a chair positioned directly between two opposing gales. She called it her “air cure.”
Under the window seat, which was perpetually piled with outdoors cushions and the occasional desiccated dog biscuit, there lived the famous dust-coloured trunk. Enormous, unlovely, and dignified, it bore the family’s entire sense of history in its cracked leather sides. I can still see the flaking brass corners, dull as old butter, and the peculiar little key tied to its handle with a ribbon so faded that one could not tell whether it had begun life as rose or carnation pink. One didn’t really open it so much as unearth it, the way explorers disinter relics of lost civilisations and pretend not to mind the dust.
Inside, of course, lay The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles—always spoken of with capital letters, as if the words themselves demanded curtsies. Aunt regarded it with a piety otherwise reserved for either religion or royalty (and I am not entirely sure which she believed in more). She would draw it out with infinite ceremony, as though handling a sacred object which might, if mishandled, summon either family ghosts or the solicitor. The table would be cleared of tea things and gossip, and with a sigh that was half reverence, half stealthy satisfaction, she would fit the tiny key into the ornate clasp—silver, though tarnished, of course.
When the lock gave that unmistakable little sigh and click, I always had the sense that something unseen had also been freed—a whiff of history’s long temper, or the escape of tales that had been waiting all year for their annual airing. Even the room seemed to hush, the air trembling with the delicious boredom that precedes family storytelling.
I remember one such story particularly—though it had nearly slipped away from me until quite recently. It concerned a Duchess—whose exact territories were never specified, but in our family one learns not to be pedantic about such trifles. A Duchess was all anyone needed. She had, according to Aunt (and Aunt never qualified her sources), vanished one night without farewell, taking with her the entirety of her jewel cases, her collection of hats, and, most curiously, her milliner, a nervous little man from Bath who was said to faint at abrupt noises.
This tale, though told in tones of profound authority, was clearly one of those hereditary myths that start as gossip, ripen into history, and end as family virtue. For years we believed her disappearance to have been an act of either high romance or high treason—or both, which is of course the ideal. I recall an argument between Uncle Bertie and Aunt over whether she had absconded to Constantinople or Cathay, which to them were interchangeable words describing anywhere east of France. For myself, I preferred to imagine her in the Orient—reclining in rich brocades, playing cards with diplomats, and sending letters in a handwriting so slanted and extravagant it resembled trelliswork. It is perfectly possible, of course, that she is still there—preserved by scandal and good lighting—sipping something pink and perilous beneath a paper parasol.
The story stood, as all our family stories did, upon one excessively romantic detail. In this case, it was the sapphire. Aunt relished the word, letting it glint upon her tongue: sapphire, thick, vivid, impossibly blue. I would listen, transfixed, as if the very syllables were carved from crystal. Even now, saying it inwardly, I can feel the cool shimmer of its vowels and the precision of its consonants—the whole word shaped like light through glass.
In the family version, the stone was as large as a robin’s egg and equally alive, “set,” said Aunt, “in gold and temperament”. We never learned whether it was stolen, promised, or cursed—though given our family’s history, all three seem plausible. Some said the Duchess’s milliner ran away with it; others that she had swallowed it whole, as queens and tragic opera heroines are prone to do.
After these stories, tea would follow. Aunt invariably poured with the same air of final authority, saying, “Of course, we’ve always had adventuresses in the family,” which was true only in the moral sense. Our adventures were mostly emotional or financial—rare were those who got as far as India, jewels in tow. Still, none of us ever doubted that the Duchess existed. “After all,” Aunt once said briskly, “the Mallards never invented something they couldn’t have done”. Which, you must admit, remains the most convincing argument for hereditary imagination.
And so, whenever the winter winds rattle against my windows in London, I find myself thinking of Aunt’s lavender-scented drawing room, that faded ribbon tied to the ancient key, and the lovely, audacious Duchess who sailed eastward into legend. Somewhere, far beyond reason or Surrey, I like to believe she still lives—perfectly dressed, faintly notorious, and ever so slightly late for tea.
You are here: States of Grace > Fables