Lights, Laughter and a Lady. Barbara Cartland
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it used to be and she had worn her hat at a very elegant angle on her golden hair.
“Connie has grown very pretty, Papa,” she had said, slipping her arm through his.
“Very pretty!” he had agreed.
She had given a little sigh.
“I often used to beat Connie at lessons,” she had said, “but she beats me when it comes to looks.”
Her father had suddenly turned round to stare at her as if he had never seen her before.
He seemed almost to scrutinise her and then he had said,
“There is no need for you, my poppet, to be jealous of the Connies of this world. You have the same loveliness that I adored in your mother. You are beautiful and at the same time you look a lady and that is so important.”
“Why, Papa?”
“Because I would not have you taken for anything else!” her father had said fiercely.
Minella did not understand, but because she was so closely attuned to her father that she knew he did not wish her to ask him any questions. At the same time she was very curious to know what he had promised to do for Connie.
Now, feeling somehow that she was intruding and yet as if she could not resist it, she opened Connie’s letter and read,
“Dear, wonderful Lord of Light and Laughter,
How can I ever thank you for your kindness to me? Everything worked out exactly as you thought it would and I have been given the job and also I have moved into this very comfortable little flat which again thanks to your ‘pulling the right strings’ I can now afford.
I have always thought you wonderful but never so wonderful as you have been in helping me when I really needed it.
One day perhaps I will be able to do something for you.
Until then, thank you. Thank you.
Yours,
Connie.”
Minella read the letter and then read it again.
Then as she wondered what her father could have done to make Connie so grateful, she read for the third time,
“One day perhaps I will be able to do something for you.”
It was in fact too late for Connie to do anything for Minella’s father, but supposing, just supposing, her gratitude might extend to her?
Connie might find her some employment that would save her from having to accept the only invitation she had received from anyone, which was to live with her Aunt Esther.
She looked at the address on the top of Connie’s letter, but as she did not know London, it meant nothing to her, although she had the idea that Connie would be living somewhere in the West End.
‘If I was in London, there must be dozens and dozens of jobs I could do,’ Minella told herself. ‘I could look after children, teach them or even, although Mama might disapprove, serve in a shop.’
She had an idea, although she was not quite certain if it was not just her imagination, that shop girls were very poorly paid and had to work very long hours.
That might be true of the large shops that sold cheap goods and catered for the masses.
But there must be better class shops that would be pleased to employ somebody ladylike.
Minella smiled to herself.
‘I am sure Papa never envisaged that that attribute would be commercially useful,’ she told herself.
But why not? Why not indeed?
It was surely better to be employed because one looked like a lady rather than common, brash and perhaps not very prepossessing.
She went to the mirror to look at her face, thinking as she did so how very pretty Connie had looked when she had visited them nearly a year ago.
‘Pink, white, and gold!’ Minella reflected to herself.
Then she looked at her own reflection critically.
Her face was the perfect oval that her mother’s had been. Her eyes were very large and, because she was so slender, they seemed to fill her whole face and it was difficult to look at anything else.
Scrutinising herself as if she was a stranger, she felt that her eyes were unusual, perhaps even strange, because they were grey.
That was in some lights, but now they just seemed to take on the colours round them, especially when the sun was shining and there was a glint of gold in them.
At other times they were grey, the grey of a raincloud, except when her pupils expanded, and then her eyes would look dark or rather a deep shade of purple.
‘I wish I had blue eyes like Connie,’ Minella muttered to herself.
She looked instead at her small straight nose and the curve of her lips and decided that she did look very very young.
‘Perhaps nobody would give me a position of responsibility,’ she thought.
She wondered if there was anything she could do to make herself look older.
The way she did her hair was very simple. It was the fashion to heap the long tresses that every girl was very proud of on the top of her head in a riot of waves and curls.
Minella was aware that these styles were very often artificially contrived with hot curling irons and an elaborate arrangement of curling rags took their place at night.
She, however, had no need of such aids, for her hair waved naturally and curled at the ends, which almost reach her waist.
Because it was far too much bother to do anything else when she was busy or was with her father, she merely brushed her hair, as her mother had taught her to do, a hundred times.
Then she twisted it into a chignon at the back of her head and, having pinned it firmly into place, forgot about it for the rest of the day.
Her father was punctilious about her hair when they were out riding.
“I just cannot bear a woman to look untidy on a horse,” Lord Heywood had said over and over again.
To be quite certain that she did not upset him, Minella not only used dozens of hairpins to. keep her hair tidy out riding but also wore a hairnet.
Her hair was not the same vividly gold colour that made Connie’s hair catch the eye, but instead was as pale as the first rays of the dawn.
Sometimes it appeared silver, as if it had been touched by the moon, but in the sun it was the faint gold of newly ripening corn or of the first primroses peeping beneath their leaves in the hedgerows in spring.
‘I may look like a lady,’ Minella whispered to her reflection in the mirror, ‘but rather a dull one and I doubt if anybody in London would look twice at a little ‘country mouse’.’
Then, as if she could not bear to be depressed even by her own verdict on herself, she laughed.
As her laughter seemed to ring out in the empty room, her whole face was transformed.
Her eyes shone brightly and she looked, although she was completely unaware of it, very enticing. It was difficult to explain, but there was something exciting about her as there had been about her father.
It was the excitement that Pan might have had or perhaps one of the Fairies who Minella had always believed as a child lived in the garden amongst the flowers.
It was an excitement that was as ethereal as the trees in the woods, the mists over the streams and the stars when she could see them shining in through her window at night.
The stars had always had an attraction