After the Armistice Ball Read Online Free

having spent the first fifteen years of her life turning her parents and elder siblings into monarchs, gypsies and the like with a smear of greasepaint and a blob of white in the inner corners, her face-painting still tends towards the dramatic. I, unfortunately for her and me both, do not have a face which easily absorbs her efforts. At rest, I must say, I have cheekbones to reckon with and a little rouge dabbed on in the fashionable place works wonders, but when I smile my cheeks make egg shapes, the pointed ends reaching almost to my hated dimples, and then the rouge is quite wrong, its position curiously unrelated to the face underneath. However if I put it, unfashionably, where my cheeks will be when I start to smile, then until I do smile, I look like a doll. Don’t smile then, is Grant’s solution, which is hardly helpful. She explained once what is wrong with my face in this respect and even fixed it for me with strips of highlight and shade which looked wonderful, but only at twenty paces.
    Still, the moss green dress is something we agree on. Most flattering in shape, although it takes stitching on to my petticoat straps, and with a miraculous effect on my complexion, which can be shadowy around the eyes if I am not careful. And tomato red lipstick to finish. Grant had to get quite fierce with me over this shade of lipstick, but she was right. Blue-ish red makes one’s teeth look yellow, she explained, whereas a yellow-ish red turns them white. For the same reason, diamonds near the face are best surrounded by pearls, very few ladies of diamond-wearing age having the teeth to stand up to them otherwise. Grant and I think it a pity that more ladies do not grin at themselves in the glass before they go downstairs with pink lips and diamond clips, but I had never once smiled at my own reflection until the first time she told me to and I do not suppose it occurs to many others.
    ‘Uncommonly pretty frock, that,’ said Hugh, entering. Grant bowed her head in discreet acknowledgement of the praise. Hugh would never dream that I had done any more than put on a frock in the time he had spent bathing and shaving, and I mused, not for the first time, that if men believed a frock could do what had happened to me from the neck up in the last half-hour, their world must seem a magical place indeed.
    People were standing around in the gloom of the great hall waiting for their cocktails as we came down the last sweep of the stairs. Twelve or fifteen people as well as the Esslemonts: the four Duffys whom I knew, and a lot more I did not, the men splendidly anonymous in their dinner jackets but with wives who were undoubtedly the wives of bankers. Hugh blinked around for a bit then took himself off to speak to Silas and I approached Mrs Duffy like an old friend.
    She was a fair woman, slight except for an almost too splendid bosom, the type of woman one assumes must have been rather fine in her youth, but now getting raddled and colourless for want of flesh. Tonight she was dressed unbecomingly in grey silk, cut very low, drawing attention to the plain gold locket around her neck.
    ‘Simply wonderful, Lena,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Such a long time.’
    ‘What a delightful surprise,’ she cooed back.
    For want of anything as definite as a topic to converse upon, I admired the girls to her and, as I had hoped, she launched into an exposition on the coming wedding of her younger daughter.
    The Duffy girls, both of them, had rather more to recommend them in the way of looks than their mama, although they were each quite unlike the other: Clemence, the elder, tall, languid and fair, with a sharp chin and high, wide cheeks (which seemed, I could not help but notice, perfectly rouged no matter what her expression); her face overall, then, reminiscent in shape of an heraldic shield, making her almost Slavic-looking what with this and with that peculiar habit of giving an upward pinch to her full lower eyelids. Even in the dimness