A Mother’s Spirit. Anne Bennett
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for them to want to spend some time with you now that you are finished with education. I bet that’s what they were looking forward to. Couldn’t this great declaration of your need for freedom have waited at least until you’d been home with your family a while, and then introduced it more slowly?’
‘I had to do it while I had the courage,’ Gloria said. Then, catching sight of the reproach on Joe’s face, she cried, ‘Don’t look at me that way. I talked it over with the girls and we all agreed that it was best to be straight with them from the start.’
‘Better for you,’ Joe said. ‘Sometimes you have to consider other people’s feelings too, and if necessary put them first for a change. Still,’ he said heavily, ‘I suppose the damage is done now.’
‘I suppose so,’ Gloria said, ‘though I promise that I will try and make amends, and one thing I can be grateful for anyway is that you have lost that artificial and stiff way you used to talk to me, even if you are taking me to task.’
‘Miss Gloria –’
‘Why did you change so completely, Joe?’ Gloria said. ‘I often wanted to ask you.’
Joe’s heart was hammering in his chest so loudly that he was surprised that Gloria couldn’t hear it, and the roof of his mouth felt unaccountably dry. He forced himself to speak slowly and calmly. ‘I changed because you changed,’ he said. ‘As you grew from a child to an adult, I could no longer treat you in the free and easy way that I once did.’
‘Oh, stuff and nonsense, Joe!’ Gloria exclaimed.
‘It wouldn’t have been appropriate.’
‘Joe …’
Joe knew that he had to put an end to the questions before he betrayed himself altogether and so he faced her and said, ‘Miss Gloria, do you want me to teach you to drive this car or don’t you, because we are losing all the light and there are many other things I could be doing?’
‘In other words,’ said Gloria, ‘end of conversation.’
‘Unless it concerns the motor car or driving, yes.’
Gloria had no desire to alienate Joe. To obtain true freedom she had to learn to drive the car and to do that she needed him. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘You win. Show me what I have to do.’
Gloria soon picked up how to drive the Ford, and Joe was glad, for it had been agony for him to sit so close to her, to breathe in her heady perfume, longing sometimes to kiss those luscious lips. He was often truly uncomfortable because she did use the confines of the car to ask him personal questions and tease him in the way she had used to. He was glad when he felt that she had the confidence and skill to drive the New York streets in comparative safety.
After that there was no holding her at all. She’d be off to New York on vast shopping trips, returning with her friends, the car packed to the gunnels with bags full of clothes. They would often be wearing the new creations as they sat down to dinner, dresses made by the most fashionable designers, Chanel, Lanvin and Patou.
The girls were inspired by the styles of stars of the cinema screen, such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, which they’d discuss endlessly and in glowing terms, and would scrutinise the fashion magazines like Vogue, or Queen or Harper’s Bazaar to be sure they were up to the minute.
These clothes were nothing like the conservative outfits Norah wore in mainly pastel shades. The majority of the new fashions were in vivid vibrant colours of green, blue or red, or in loud floral designs. The young were done with restricting corsets too, and instead wore silk camisoles, which flattened their chests in line with the fashion for the slightly boyish figure, suited to shift dresses with no waist and knife-edge pleats in the skirts.
‘Jean Patou has a darling little suit in wool and jersey,’ Gloria said one day, drawing the pillar-box-red illustration from her bag. ‘Just right for the cooler days of summer, don’t you think?’
‘I’d think more of it if there were more to it,’ Brian growled. ‘That skirt is far too short.’
‘Oh, Daddy, you’re funny,’ Gloria said. ‘Most skirts are short now.’
Gloria was right: nearly every outfit she owned was like that, the skirts with gathers, pleats or splits in them. She seemed oblivious to the disapproval of her parents, and the day she came home with her hair bobbed in the Eton crop Joe thought Brian was going to have an apoplectic fit, but Gloria was unabashed at the furore.
‘Stop roaring at me, Daddy,’ she commanded. ‘And stop glowering at me in that way. I don’t know why you are so cross or, indeed, what it has to do with you either. Since it is my hair on my head, surely I should be the one to decide how to wear it, and anyway, with long hair how could I put on my new cloche hat?’
‘That’s hardly a good enough reason for having all your hair cut off like that,’ Norah said.
‘On the contrary, Mother, it is a perfectly good reason,’ Gloria retorted. ‘Louise Brooks looks divine in hers and everyone wants to copy her. And she has her hair cropped too. Many girls do these days, Daddy. I am afraid you and Mother are very behind the times.’
That wasn’t how Brian saw it at all, but the deed was done now and he could do nothing about it, especially as all Gloria’s friends had had their hair bobbed too and were similarly unashamed about it. They seemed remarkable close, the friends Gloria had made at the convent, and when they weren’t meeting up, Gloria would be having long and involved conversations with them on the telephone.
Gloria’s friends’ parents seemed incredibly lax and lenient with their daughters, which Brian found hard to accept. Not that the girls cared a jot for how he felt. They visited often, and the rooms rang with their laughter, jazz would reverberate all over the house, and the girls would be dancing together or else trying out Gloria’s cosmetics. A couple of them actually took up smoking.
‘It’s so different from when I was growing up,’ Norah said one day as she sat down to dinner with Brian and Joe. ‘You had to wait first to be introduced to a young man, and then if he asked permission from your parents to walk out with you, then that was the young man that you would become engaged to and eventually marry. This way … well, there are so many men, but when I cautioned Gloria that she would make a name for herself, she laughed.’
It was the men that bothered Joe too. Brian always worked shorter hours when Gloria was at home – that is, if he went in to work at all – and so Joe often saw the young men, sometimes known to the Brannigans in only the vaguest way, who would come scorching up the drive in their sports cars. They would stop suddenly with a squeal of brakes and a spray of gravel, and Gloria would come running from the house and be spirited away to some venue or other, from which she might not return for a day or two.
But what really disturbed Joe were the languid young men who turned up to play tennis. He considered the girls’ attire almost indecently short, and these people were so easy with one another that a young man seemed to think nothing of throwing a casual arm around Gloria’s shoulders, or even embracing her if he felt they had played well together.
And yet as the summer passed, Joe sensed that Gloria was not truly happy, that her gaiety was forced. Eventually the frivolity and freedom would end, and when that happened, he imagined Gloria would probably have chosen one boy over all the others. That was the one she would marry, and the day she did that would be the day that he would leave the Brannigans’ household. He couldn’t have stayed and watched her married to another.
Summer gave way to autumn and then winter, and the dresses were swapped for thick skirts in bright colours, lurid jumpers and multicoloured scarves, which the girls wore with their ‘up-to-the-minute’ checked and baggy coats.
Joe watched Gloria anxiously. She seemed more dejected than ever. The frenetic pace of her social life had slowed somewhat as the colder weather settled over the city, but when she didn’t pick up in the early spring either, and was still listless and eating less than a bird, Brian and Norah were all for calling