Saturday, June the 22nd. It was to be the last Royal Pavilion Midsummer Ball until the peace.
The atmosphere was one of rigid good cheer. If the windows of the Pavilion were necessarily blinded, the chandeliers were polished and bright, and if good alcohol was in short supply, there was always the big band to obliterate all thought.
The two couples spilled out on to the north balcony, drinks in hand. ‘I can’t see a thing!’ Sylvia protested, and Tom had to steer her from behind, his hands on her waist, following the glow of Geoffrey’s white shirt and tie.
Evelyn laughed, then sighed. Sylvia was always good spectacle. What a relief her and Tom’s company was.
Geoffrey hitched up his trousers and let the balcony’s low stone balustrade take his weight. He for one was glad of the sudden dark-ness; glad to be, for a short while, an exile from society. There was no moon, but the night was generous. It seemed to grant them a reprieve from formality; to cloak them in an easy intimacy, as if they were young again and free of the weight of the persons they were yet to become.
With a shy smile, Tom passed Geoffrey an uncharacteristically large flask of whisky. He took a grateful swig, admiring the white of his wife’s throat and her slim arms as she motioned across the dark sea of the gardens. The Theatre Royal was at that moment disgorging its crowd into the blackout. Evelyn was remarking on the sight to Sylvia. Dozens of beams from pocket-torches flickered to life, making a sieve of the night.
He took another mouthful from the flask, nodded at Tom’s measured account of the latest rumours out of the Traveller’s Club, and let his mind idle to the sound of the women’s voices and the glimmer of their smiles. They chatted, happily it seemed, and Tom was on excellent form, quiet-spoken but as solid as ever.
Had Evelyn told Sylvia about their difficulties? he wondered. Had Tom already been enlisted to ‘have a word’, and was that the reason behind the flask? He hoped not. He wanted only the respite of the evening; the chance for him and Evvie to laugh and forget. Surely that was what she wanted too? Surely it wasn’t too late for life to return to what it had been just a month ago? Might she relax enough not to turn her back to him in bed later on? For even that he’d be grateful.
Fourteen years ago, she had appeared beneath a Chinese lantern in these gardens, a girl in a thin white gown. She hadn’t accepted a cigarette or a seat on the bench beside him but she’d stayed, and her company that night had felt charmed, fleeting. Indeed it had been hard to believe she wouldn’t dissolve when they stepped beyond the light of the lantern, but instead, she’d taken form.
He knew what it was to hold her in the night, adjusting himself in sleep to her. He knew the round of her bottom as she nestled against him. He knew the curve of her hip beneath his palm and the dip of her lower back. Her laugh, bigger than she was, still surprised him, if only, perhaps, because he heard it less these days.
Behind the shutters and blackout curtains, the Midsummer Ball was in motion, a decorous secret the building kept to itself. Was it only he who felt that the collective cheer of the night was strained, that the band was too emphatically carefree? Even there, in the fullness of the evening, with the music seducing everyone beyond thought, the laughter, the bare shoulders and the toasts seemed to him a kind of mime they all performed without heart for one another. It was meant to be a final, heady indulgence, a last hurrah, and if it was not quite that, it was at least a relief to see Evvie relaxing in Sylvia and Tom’s company, to see her swaying to the music and laughing at Sylvia’s round-up of London gossip.
That night years ago, Evelyn had simply asked him the time. She had lost her cousin. She’d been lovely, awkward. He’d never seen such delicate wrists and ankles, and she had so much life, such spark and brightness in her eyes that the honesty of her gaze made their polite conversation seem a nonsense. Then she’d done that outlandish, most undebutante-like of things, poking him in the armpit, sweetly mocking the state of his tailcoat, and in doing so, she’d somehow transformed them both into their real selves. In the pulse of that moment, she’d felt like a familiar, a loved one.
Her unexpected arrival in his evening had also made the earlier ruckus with Leo’s friend seem inconsequential … As those particular tensions had mounted, it was Tom who had taken him aside to suggest he step outside to clear his head. It was true, he had started it, in the gentlemen’s smoking room, by asking Leo what he’d been thinking, bringing to the ball that night so contemptible a character. Of course Leo’s friend overheard. He had meant him to overhear.
Freddie and Art had pretended to be deep in another conversation, though Geoffrey knew they were of the same mind as he. Fitz had grabbed a drink off a passing tray and downed it before returning to the two debs, and their chaperones, who had been shadowing him all evening. Things got heated. Geoffrey spoke his mind. Perhaps he’d used some regrettable language. A bit of name-calling. He couldn’t remember. It had not been his finest hour. He’d had too much to drink.
He probably threw the first punch. He’d never asked Tom to con-firm. They didn’t remove their jackets. Hence the split seam. He remembered that much. A card table had tipped. A few glasses had crashed. Tom had taken charge of the situation – no wonder he’d ended up in the Diplomatic Service. He’d taken Geoffrey by the arm and led him to the door: ‘Of course it’s not on. Leo was a fool to bring him. But what’s to be done about it? Let’s just get through the night, shall we? Go on. Go clear your head.’
Geoffrey had come down from town to Hove the day before the ball to spend time with his father. Fitz, Freddie Vere, Art Stubbs, Tom and, of course, Leo, all of them friends at Oxford, had arrived for dinner on Saturday. No one had expected the chap from Hamp-stead. No one knew him or his family, though Leo had claimed great things on their behalf. At dinner, conversation had been strained. Freddie had thought it amusing to bring up the subject of a newly translated essay by Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’. But they’d all managed to remain civil for Geoffrey’s father’s sake, who had been bewildered, thankfully, by the speed of the repartee.
By the time they’d piled into the motors at the end of the ball, the stain of the brawl in the smoking room had almost faded, and everyone, with the exception of Leo and his friend, had driven to London – to Mayfair and the 43 Club. It was past one when they’d arrived, but Mrs Merrick and her deep cleavage still presided over the door. As usual, she welcomed Fitz to the club without charge because he was heir to a peerage, a logic that had always seemed strangely flawed to Geoffrey and the others. But if the cover charge was steep, the girls had poise. A few had been debs. One was the ex-wife of a colonel. He danced that night with a girl called Constance, whose pale silk gown fluttered under the ceiling fans. She was slight and very pretty, in spite of a lazy eye, and her hair was black and lustrous, though shorter than Evelyn’s. It was costly – five pounds – to take her back to one of Mrs M’s flats. He gave her more than that when he remembered that she would have to pay a pound for the use of the flat. She asked him if he’d brought a French letter, and he’d reached for his wallet again. Then he’d closed his eyes and tried to feel Evelyn in his arms.
In the gardens below, lilac, the last of the season, seemed to haunt the night, and she allowed herself to close her eyes, to store away, for harsher times perhaps, the surfeit of its fragrance. Then she turned again for a view of the ball through the balcony’s French doors. At centre stage, a singer sang low into the microphone, her hands imploring, her lips as bright as blood.
Sylvia slipped an arm around her shoulders. ‘I don’t know about you, but I can’t bear to be upstaged.’
Evelyn squeezed her hand. ‘You? Never.’
When Geoffrey had suggested they invite Tom and Sylvia down from London for the night, she’d felt herself brighten for the first time in weeks. Sylvia was the reminder she needed that the entire world hadn’t lost its sense of humour; that it hadn’t given in to dread. Sylvia wasn’t afraid of anything, not of Hitler or war or of any unsteadiness in herself. Tall, willowy, a natural blonde, she never failed to be noticed, but for all her glamour, she was plain-speaking and soft-hearted with it. She treated Tom’s ancient, demented mother with a kindness the old woman had never known, and, in the last year, she had turned their house into a veritable orphanage for five East End children who had lost their parents. As Tom once said, she’d give anyone the faux fur off her back. And relentless tease though Sylvia was, she adored him. Tonight Evelyn had seen her friend’s eyes fill up when, after a waltz, Tom had taken her palm and pressed it to his lips.
Admittedly, when Sylvia and Tom had announced their engagement four years before, it had seemed incredible to Evelyn that this was the woman Tom, the discreet diplomat, had finally chosen to be his wife. Even in wartime Sylvia didn’t know how not to be showy. While Evelyn, Geoffrey and Tom sipped the rough Algerian wine that all guests were doing their best to drink, Sylvia had persuaded the bartender to produce her trademark cocktail, a Sidecar, and as she danced, glass in hand, she jingled with a riot of African bangles and beads. Her lips were plump with maroon lipstick. Her plunging velvet gown clung to her – midnight blue, backless, slinky. It was unlikely she was wearing a single under-garment.
Evelyn’s own gown was also backless, though cut high across her collarbones. She’d chosen a mauve silk taffeta but tonight, as she caught a glimpse of herself in a ballroom looking glass, she wondered if the colour did her complexion any favours. She looked sallow, she thought. Middle-aged. Geoffrey had told her she looked lovely – in blue. His colour-blindness always disheartened her somehow; he would never know the full spectrum of colour and he didn’t give a jot.
‘Turn around! Turn around, Evvie! No, this way …’ Sylvia had seized her hand. Together, they peeped over their shoulders at their bemused husbands. ‘Now, Evvie. Tell the truth. Has Geoffrey had the presence of mind to compliment you on your thrift?’ She waved a hand, for Geoffrey’s information, across his wife’s naked back.
Geoffrey lowered his face and laughed.
‘I thought not. Nor has mine.’
Tom cleared his throat. ‘The nation thanks you, and I believe I speak for my old friend when I say that we are, of course, helpless with admiration.’ Geoffrey raised Tom’s flask in solidarity, and they returned to their conversation.
But Sylvia wasn’t finished. ‘Tom, tell me that you are not still talking about that old Etonian lover – oops, I mean, trouser-press – forgive me, I mean fag – of yours, James Roedale-Bugger-the-Double-Barrel. Now there’s an attention-seeker if ever there was one. For heaven’s sake, they’d might as well have let me into the Diplomatic Service.’ Her cocktail glass was empty again. She winked at Evelyn, stole a sip of her wine, and, tasting it, grimaced.
Tom leaned towards Geoffrey and mumbled into his chest, ‘I believe I mentioned him to you once. We only just managed to keep it out of the papers. Apparently, he greatly exceeded his instructions.’
‘Apparently! The man was on his way to Germany to tell Hitler we’d be happy to let him do whatever he liked with Europe as long as he left the Empire alone. The man was hopeless even at games at school, yet Lord Halifax lets him loose on an international crisis! Tom, darling, has Geoffrey told you he’s the Head of the Invasion Committee for this area and Superintendent of the local Camp? He’s keeping everyone in Sussex safe from all those alien enemies. Why can’t you be a man of action like Geoffrey?’
Tom rolled his eyes for comic effect. ‘As a matter of fact, he has mentioned it, my sweet. They’re lucky to have him.’
‘No doubt, Geoffrey, you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve weighed up the Government’s advice and I, too, have taken key decisions.’ She smiled, her eyes a-glitter.
Tom took Sylvia’s hand in his. ‘It’s true. My wife has informed me she’s having her hair waved for the invasion.’
Sylvia adopted a sober air. ‘First impressions and all that.’
Geoffrey nodded thoughtfully. ‘I knew you’d never let the side down, Sylvia.’
‘You see, Tom? Geoffrey appreciates the effort. And it’s either that or walk about with the new Unity Mitford look.’
‘Which is what exactly, darling?’
‘Why, the turban, naturellement.’
Geoffrey, Tom and Evelyn stared blankly.
‘So she can hide the shot wound, of course! Silly girl. Mind you, it is frightfully bad luck to put a gun to your own head and to, more or less, miss … No wonder her beloved Hitler shipped her back to England forthwith. I don’t expect she’s looking much like the perfect Aryan woman now. That’s the drawback of brain damage, I’m told. The vacant stare. Most men only appreciate it in the bedroom. ’
Tom fished for his handkerchief and made a show of gagging his wife with it. ‘My darling, have we told you we really mustn’t let you drink?’
She waved him off. ‘Evvie, tell him. Tell him you don’t mind me. Not very much, anyway.’
Evelyn reached for her hand. ‘Mind you? Tonight wouldn’t have been the same without you. Thank God someone still has a sense of humour these days. If I have to read even one more Government Information Leaflet, all that endlessly dreary advice, I might just have to gas myself and save the Germans the trouble!’
‘Precisely. And if only the Government, with all its advice, would bloody well advise the Jews in our part of town how to behave. Did I tell you how –’
‘Now, now, darling. This is a ball, not a Council meeting.’ Tom’s smile tensed. ‘Besides, it suddenly occurs to me that I’d like to dance with my wife.’
‘But, Tom, you know as well as I do that they’re a public nuisance. Lord knows Unity, mad thing that she is, went over the top by declaring herself – what was it? – “a Jew-hater”, but anyone with eyes to see knows they do push their way to the front of any queue, and they most certainly hoard food. You wait and see. I don’t approve of them being hounded out of their own countries – that’s not right of course and it’s unlucky to land where you’re not wanted – but they’ll be living the high life off the black market over here when the rest of us are eating our ration books.’
‘Evelyn’ – Tom had an instinct for damage limitation – ‘would you care to dance?’
But Sylvia would not be deterred. ‘Evvie, you must find the same thing here in Brighton, surely?’
Evelyn looked to Geoffrey for help, then back at Sylvia. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever met a Jew in Brighton.’
‘If only we could all say the same’ – a thought crossed Sylvia’s face – ‘although I suppose we could say it was a Wandering Jew – or at least an uninvited one – who brought you two darlings together. That’s right, isn’t it, Tom? Am I remembering correctly? We are in fact unexpectedly indebted to the Jewish race for the great good fortune that is Geoffrey-and-Evelyn.’
Evvie smiled through her confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You have a Jew to thank, darling girl, for Geoffrey here. Well, indirectly you do. Tom said as much before I met you the first time. I have got the story straight, haven’t I, Snookums?’
Tom took the glass out of her hand and shrugged his apology to Geoffrey.
Geoffrey summoned a smile. ‘You’re absolutely right, Sylvia. I’d almost forgotten.’ He turned to Evelyn. ‘Leo Hamilton turned up that night with a Jewish chap from north London.’
‘The night we met?’
‘Yes.’ He patted his breast pocket for his cigarette case. ‘He was a bit of a troublemaker. A well-heeled troublemaker, but trouble all the same. That’s what Sylvia is referring to.
‘You mean, the man with the monocle …?’
‘I say,’ declared Tom, ‘you have a remarkable memory, Evelyn. I think he was wearing a monocle.’
‘Was he?’ Geoffrey offered Tom and Sylvia a cigarette, then lit his own and drew deeply on it. ‘Leo and I fell out on account of his friend’s politics. At first, the chap had seemed to be a man of few words. Not a bad sort. However, as the evening wore on, we discovered he held some rather repugnant views. Regrettably Jewish views. He reverted to type quite quickly, I’m afraid, so, finally, rather than stand there like a hypocrite, I challenged him. Leo wasn’t too amused. His friend certainly wasn’t. I had no choice but to have it out, so to speak.’
‘So to speak?’
Tom plucked at his collar. ‘If you hadn’t, Geoff, I might have. Leo, I’m afraid, always did have a bit of the Bolshevik in him. As for his friend, Geoff could have run rings in that debate, that was clear, but people were beginning to look –’
‘They rowed?’
‘Tempers were running a little high. In the end, Evvie, it hardly amounted to more than a scuffle.’
Tom was covering. She turned to Geoffrey. ‘You picked a fight?’
‘I’d had a bit too much whisky. That’s all. You know I’m no good with drink.’
‘I thought it best if Geoff stepped outside long enough to cool his head and for Leo to tend to his friend. The Jew chap sulked. I thought it rather telling that, having caused a rift between two old friends, he suddenly had remarkably little to say.’
‘By the end of the night, we’d mostly made things up – Leo and I, that is.’
‘Indeed,’ said Tom.
Evelyn’s hand tightened on the balustrade. ‘You said you didn’t remember. Why?’
He flashed an apologetic smile at Tom and Sylvia. ‘What did I say I didn’t remember?’
‘The man with the monocle.’
‘I’m not sure I did.’
‘We even saw him the following summer – at the theatre. I asked you then.’
‘Did you?’
‘You always said you didn’t remember.’
‘He was a small man with dark hair. I’m sorry but I didn’t recall any monocle. He certainly wasn’t wearing the thing when –’ He cast his cigarette into the night.
‘When you hit him? No, I don’t expect he was.’
‘I believe,’ Tom said, ‘he’d slipped the monocle into his breast pocket prior to –’
‘Your punch.’ She stared at her husband.
She was back there, at the Pavilion again, on that night, walking up the stone stairs towards the ballroom. Geoffrey was escorting her back. He had merely been polite, she’d concluded; obliged not to walk away from a young woman who found herself alone outside without an escort or chaperone. Suddenly her embarrassment was acute. She’d wanted only to find James and to be gone. Not far from the door, a group of young men clutched their capes and canes, ready to depart. She could see them still. Tom was there, the same dear old Tom with his bright wedge of a face, and his former full head of auburn hair. Fitz was the portly one with the curly beard. Leo was fair, handsome, with a shy, endearing squint. Clearly they were waiting for Geoffrey to return so they could take their leave. He’d gone outside for a cigarette – to cool his head, as Tom put it just now – but he’d been away nearly half an hour, distracted by her of course. When he appeared at last, she was close behind. His friends were arguing loudly, drunkenly no doubt, about the General Strike. She remembered that. Four of them greeted Geoffrey as he passed, and he returned a few words in passing. Tom noticed her – a new girl with his good friend – and nodded warmly. But Leo’s friend, the man with the monocle and the intelligent face, turned and glowered at Geoffrey, who appeared not to notice and carried on. It was only good manners, she told herself then. The man looked at her too as she passed but without seeing, for behind the black-rimmed coin of glass, behind that lens with its hairline crack, a blaze still lit his eye, like the heat of noon through a magnifying glass.
‘He had high cheekbones.’
‘Did he?’
‘And deep-set eyes.’
‘Helpful if you’re the monocle-wearing sort.’
‘Why don’t you remember him? You “scuffled”, Tom says. You resented the fact you had a Jew in your party, so you rowed with him and then you hit him.’
He sighed. ‘I do remember him, as I’ve just said, but not clearly.’
‘But Tom says we met because of him.’
‘We met because you came to ask me the time.’
‘You were in a mood. You were smoking in that way of yours. That’s why you were on your own. I can see that now. You’d lost your temper.’ And suddenly it came to her. ‘The seam of your jacket was split! Under the arm.’
‘I didn’t like the man’s views. I’d had too much to drink. But this is hardly the place. Tom, Sylvia, forgive us.’
She felt her face flush. ‘Since when have you needed to approve everyone’s views, Geoffrey? Since when has a difference of opinion meant you fight with a man at a ball?’
He struggled not to raise his voice. ‘What is it, Evelyn, that you object to, precisely? The unpleasant fact that I found myself in a row the hour before I met you, or that I take issue with Jewish interference in this country’s affairs?’
‘Listen to yourself!’
‘Listen to what, exactly?’
‘I may not understand the full political argument, Geoffrey, but I recognize something ugly when I hear it.’
‘Are you quite finished?’
Her hand clenched the stem of her glass, and she lowered her voice to a fierce, intimate whisper. ‘To think our life together began’ – the stars staggered overhead – ‘to think it only began because you couldn’t stop yourself from baiting a man.’
She saw Tom and Sylvia slide through the French doors into the ballroom. Her husband’s face was a mask of grim forbearance.
She looked into the night and back again.