October 1936
The London Lawrence returned to was grimy, damp and cold, a world away from the golden city he remembered. Time and distance had made him sentimental, he supposed, and memory was unreliable. During the eleven years he had spent in America, when he had thought of England it had been as it was that summer, before he left.
He hadn’t allowed himself to think of it very often.
But it was impossible not to now, as he walked down Oxford Street towards Marble Arch, pausing outside Selfridges to look in the window as they had done on that rainy July night. There was a display of winter coats now, artfully staged against a backdrop of bare branches, but he saw the Ascot fashions of 1925 with a vividness that made the world tilt and rush. It seemed as though, if he peered closely enough at the glass he might see the reflection of a glorious blonde girl in a stolen frock coat and a scruffy, half-naked artist, holding hands and passing a bottle of champagne between them. Perhaps if he searched in the litter of dead leaves and discarded cigarette ends at the edge of the pavement he might discover the remains of his heart still lying there. It was probably somewhere around here that he lost it.
He walked on. These days he could easily afford a taxi, but it was pleasant to be out in the chill air after two hours in the editor’s office at the Spectator, where the air was opaque with cigarette smoke and the smell of deadline pressure. He had deliberately extricated himself with plenty of time to spare before he was due to meet with Polly Davies, to allow a little thinking space. Once the time and place for this meeting had been arranged, an instinct for self-preservation had made him put it from his mind. With some reluctance he turned his thoughts to it now, and felt a sense of unease.
Her initial letter, forwarded on to him by the editor of the Sphere, had been vague. I used to work for the Lennox family at Blackwood Park, she had written in a schoolgirlish hand. I left their employment following Miss Selina’s marriage but due to unfortunate sircumstanse I have returned to Blackwood recently to look after Miss Selina’s daughter.
Seeing Selina’s name on paper after all these years had made his heart turn over. The lines that followed had chilled it.
I know a little of what you and Miss Selina were to each other before her marriage and there are matters that I would like to discuss with you, should you still hold any regard for her.
He combed his memory for what he knew about Polly, searching for clues. He had never met her, but he must have come very close that summer at Blackwood. She had been the invisible presence who had left the supplies for their glorious makeshift picnics (sometimes, dining in an upmarket restaurant, he would suddenly recall the scrambled eggs he had made in the kitchen on that first night and lose all appetite for the elaborate dish in front of him), their secret accomplice and Selina’s trusted ally. Had something happened between them to change this? He couldn’t imagine what ‘matters’ Polly Davies might wish to discuss, but instinct told him the conversation wasn’t going to leave him with a warm glow. ‘Blackmail’ was a melodramatic word, but his best guess was that Polly had hit hard times and discovered somehow that the second-rate artist her mistress had had a secret dalliance with over a decade ago was now worth tapping for some cash.
Maybe he was too cynical. Even so … even though his head had told him not to respond, his heart hadn’t been able to resist. Selina’s name was a siren call that he was compelled to answer. Even after all this time.
He hadn’t told Edith about the meeting with Selina Lennox’s erstwhile maid, only warning her that his appointment with the Spectator editor might extend into the evening, and not to expect him home for dinner.
When he had first returned to London he had stayed in a suite at The Langham, which Edith had declared a vulgar signal of his new wealth and an insult to their old friendship, and insisted he come and stay with her instead. She had got married – quite suddenly and unexpectedly – a year after Lawrence left England, to a distinguished naturalist fifteen years her senior, called Peregrine Hesketh. They lived, with their wild brood of children (two boys, two girls, not always possible to tell which was which) in a gothic folly of a house on the edge of Regents Park, close to the zoo, where Hesketh held a senior position. In many ways Lawrence would have preferred the freedom and tranquillity of the hotel to the eccentric chaos of the Hesketh household, but he appreciated Edith’s kindness as much as he had ever done. And it was only temporary. He just needed to finalize plans for his next project and he would be off again, to Spain, where simmering unrest had lurched into civil war. These plans had dominated the conversation in the Spectator editor’s office.
Outside Maison Lyons a pack of grubby children tussled with each other around the grotesque figure of a bonfire guy slumped on the pavement; a parody of the veterans he’d once photographed on these streets. They were early – bonfire night was still three weeks away – but he had to admire their enterprise in getting ahead of the competition and their shameless exploitation of the season’s earning potential. At any other time he would have slipped the compact camera from his pocket and taken a series of shots, but today he flipped a sixpence at them and went into the restaurant.
He had suggested this place because of its ubiquity. He knew that it was likely to be busy, but there was a certain safe anonymity in that. He was enveloped by a humid fug of steam and humanity as the door swung shut behind him; the mixed aromas of coffee, stale smoke, fried eggs and damp tweed. A pianist was fighting a losing battle to be heard above the clamour of conversation.
A waitress in a cap that had almost slid down over her eyes directed him to the restaurant on the second floor, where tea was being served. It was quieter up there, which meant the piano music was almost too invasive. He asked to be seated as far away from it as possible, and was shown to a table half hidden by a marble pillar. He chose the seat that gave him a view of the stairs.
He wondered if he would recognize her. In his head he pictured someone quick and dark and slight, though he had no idea why. The mental image was strong enough that he didn’t register the woman weaving her way through the tables until she was a few feet away.
‘Mr Weston?’
He got hastily to his feet, caught off-guard. She was as plump and rosy as a Renoir, with a fringe of wheat-coloured hair visible beneath her rather severe hat. She had also, very obviously, been crying.
‘Miss Davies.’
She nodded and pulled out the chair opposite, depositing her belongings (a battered handbag and umbrella) on the floor and scrabbling in the pocket of her coat for a handkerchief. He watched helplessly, unsure how to go about comforting a weeping woman he’d only just met. His mind raced and his eyes moved down to the buttons of her coat, as the blackmail theory reasserted itself. Surely Selina would help her old friend if she found herself in that sort of trouble though? Polly scrubbed at her nose with the handkerchief and gave him a watery smile.
‘Sorry, sir. What must you think of me?’
The smile encouraged him. Ignoring the question, he took his own clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her, recalling another time, another handkerchief, another woman.
‘Please, call me Lawrence. Or Mr Weston if you prefer. I’ve spent the last eleven years in America and been called sir so much that I’ve almost forgotten my own name.’
He caught the eye of a passing waitress, who diverted her course through the tables to take their order. He sensed Polly’s hesitancy and guessed that she was thinking about the expense, so asked for a selection of cakes to be brought over. (If his suspicion was correct he imagined she’d be hungry.) By the time all this had been done and the waitress had retreated she seemed a little more composed.
‘So…’ A mixture of curiosity and impatience made him keen to get straight to the point. ‘You were very clever to find me. I haven’t been back in England for long.’
‘It was luck, really.’ She spoke haltingly, and her accent conjured images of Blackwood in summer; lush parkland, grazing cows, and the cool, creamy milk she used to leave on the slate in the scullery. ‘I’d come to London on the train one day, and on the way home someone had left a copy of that magazine, the Sphere, on the seat. I picked it up to pass the time. The photographs of that new picture studio caught my eye and I thought to take it with me to show to Ellen and Ivy – the maids, at Blackwood. It was only then that I noticed the name at the end of the article.’ Colour crept into her cheeks. ‘I thought there couldn’t be too many Lawrence Westons around, especially not taking photographs, and – well, it just seemed like a sign.’
‘A sign?’
It took him by surprise. The woman sitting opposite seemed practical and level-headed, not one for signs and superstitions and magic.
‘Yes.’ She took a breath in, and straightened her shoulders, reinforcing the impression. ‘You see the reason I’d been in London was to visit Miss Selina. In hospital.’
The waitress was making her way towards them, carrying a tray of tea things. Behind her, another trundled a trolley displaying an array of cakes and pastries. The room was suddenly very hot. The piano music was jangling and jarring. He fought the urge to stand up and shout for it to stop, to tell the waitresses to push off and not interrupt until he’d cleared this up.
Hospital?
Girls like me have been put in asylums for less.
In a painful pantomime of politeness the waitresses set the tea things on the table and invited them to choose from the trolley. Polly pointed apparently at random to a Madeira cake, stammering her thanks. Lawrence dismissed them with a curt shake of his head.
‘Selina – is she unwell?’
Perhaps the piano masked the tremor in his voice. If that bastard Carew had beaten her down … If he’d broken her beautiful, brave spirit and pulled strings with his eminent, influential medical friends and had her locked up in some god-forsaken institution …
Polly held herself very still, very stiff, and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again fresh tears wobbled on her lower lashes.
‘Yes. That’s why I had to get in touch. I’m afraid she is.’
Lying in her narrow bed in the night nursery, Alice watched the sky change from school uniform grey to paper white, and back again. If she stayed very still the pain in her tummy was easier. She had begun to think of it as a savage animal that must not be woken.
The hours dragged. Polly, she had been told, had left Blackwood early to spend another day in London, visiting her poorly friend. Hearing this from Ellen when she came to wake her up made Alice burst into tears. She was tired from another night of fitful sleep and had decided, in the long hours of darkness, that she would have to tell Polly about the tummy ache. ‘I’m poorly too,’ she had blurted out to a bewildered Ellen, and then cried harder with embarrassment and fury – at Polly for not being there, and herself for being such a baby.
At least the secret was out now, she thought, watching a ragged black bird flap across the blank sky. Ellen was the last person Alice would have chosen to tell, but she had been surprisingly kind, ordering her to get back under the covers while she went down to get a hot water bottle and see Grandmama. Alice had begged her not to do the latter, but Ellen had been firm. ‘I can’t telephone for Dr Pembridge without her say so, can I? Now, get back into bed and keep warm. Cold feet make a fever worse, you know.’
Alice was sure she didn’t have a fever. She had had measles when she was six and remembered the cycle of burning and shivering, the sense of being adrift from reality, as if her soul was a balloon, tugging at the string that tied it to her body on the bed. She felt nothing like that now. Reality was all too … real. The day crept by, made up of minutes that were ten times longer than usual. Ellen brought her some soup at lunchtime and said that Dr Pembridge would call when he could, though he was attending a lying in so who knew when that might be? (Alice didn’t know what a lying in was so couldn’t begin to guess the answer to that.)
In the afternoon the beast in her tummy slumbered, lulled by the warmth of the hot water bottle and Mrs Rutter’s chicken soup. Alice would have liked to slip down to her usual place on the back stairs and listen to the goings on in the kitchen, but she didn’t dare. Ellen would be cross if she found her there, and think she had been making it up about feeling poorly. Instead she slid the Maison D’Or box out from beneath the bed and lifted the lid.
She had kept all Mama’s letters in there, and all the clues from the treasure hunt. She got them out now and spread them across the candlewick cover, in the order in which she had received them. Seeing them like that, the contrast between the handwritten ones of the early months and the more recent black type was very marked.
The beast stirred and stretched its claws.
The last letter had arrived over a month ago. It had made Alice happy to read that it looked like Papa’s business was finally coming to an end and that he would soon be making arrangements for their return voyage. I had almost given up believing that this time would come, Mama had written – or rather, typed, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll be back together in Onslow Square soon. The moment I find out when that might be, I’ll write and let you know.
But no more letters had arrived. Alice knew what Mama meant about giving up believing.
Dark things scuttled and scratched at the edges of her thoughts, like the beetles that hid under the pots in the kitchen garden, darting away when they were exposed to the light. She tried to follow them, determined to clear away the confusion and evasion and find the truth. Like solving a clue without knowing what it was.
The letters were of two types, and she began to separate them now, putting the ones Mama had written on the journey to Burma and from the house in Maymyo in one pile, and all the treasure hunt clues in another. Those ones, when pieced together, told the story Mama had mentioned at the beginning, in one of her earliest letters … the story of how you came to be, she had called it, with the happiest ending of all.
Inside her, the beast snarled. Alice tried to ignore it and focus on grasping at the threads of information that kept slipping through her fingers. She hated the small, spoiled part of her that felt cheated; Mama was usually brilliant at telling stories, but this one seemed unfinished and full of holes. She knew there would be no more instalments because she had found the ‘treasure’ – Mama’s beloved aquamarine pendant – and while it was lovely to have it, she felt cross and resentful. She hadn’t found out how she came to be at all, and there had been no happy ending. Only that bit about Alice teaching Mama how to love properly, or whatever it had said.
She picked out the last letter from the treasure hunt pile and pulled it from the envelope.
Darling Alice,
So here it is, the final clue and the last bit of the story. How clever you are to have found them all, and the ‘treasure’! I’m sure you’ll have no trouble recognizing this pendant, but you perhaps don’t know that it was given to me for my twenty-second birthday, by someone incredibly special – someone I loved very much.
It was the happiest of birthdays. I met Theo and Flick for tea at Claridge’s and they gave me the beautiful tortoiseshell box, which clever Theo had spotted in an antique shop in Venice during his Italian summer. (He lives in Italy all the time now, as you might remember. A few years ago he sent me that little porcelain cherub that sits on the chimneypiece in my bedroom from the very same shop. Dear Theo – I do miss him.) The pendant was given to me later that evening, by someone else I miss very much. He was called Lawrence Weston and he taught me more than anyone else had ever done. Until you came along, my darling.
Life is full of upsets that feel like endings, and that autumn of 1925 was one of those times. It was the end of the summer, and the end of my carefree youth, because not long after that lovely birthday tea at Claridge’s my darling friend Flick died very suddenly and everything changed.
It felt then as if I’d never be happy again. I truly believed it. Everything felt horribly dark and frightening, like a nightmare that kept going on. I couldn’t believe that Flick – who was so sweet and funny and full of mischief – was gone because it seemed so absurd, like God had made a terrible mistake. I was furious at the injustice and the lack of sense, and terrified that it would happen again. I had lost my beloved brother and my best friend and I didn’t think I could bear losing another person I loved. And so I decided that it was safest not to love anyone very much. Isn’t that an awful thing to admit?
And that is where you saved me, you see. You taught me how to love deeply and unstintingly, and how to embrace the fear and pain that goes with it. I had been too afraid before. I wanted to protect myself from being hurt. I wanted a life that was comfortable and safe. I refused to believe then that such a thing is no life at all and I told myself –
Alice suddenly became aware of voices, getting louder. Grandmama was talking to someone as she came up the stairs and along the corridor. In a panic she swept all the letters back into the box and shoved it under the bed.
‘Unfortunate that Polly isn’t here,’ she heard Grandmama say as she came into the day nursery next door. ‘She would be able to answer your questions more easily than I.’
Alice collapsed back onto the pillows and hauled the blankets over her. Her heart was galloping and sweat prickled under her arms. The nursery floorboards creaked and a second later Dr Pembridge appeared.
He was tall and angular, and the overwhelming impression Alice got of him at close quarters was of some large, ungainly bird; a heron, perhaps, like the one she used to see on her miserable walks with Miss Lovelock. He put his bag down on the chair and came forward, rubbing his hands together heartily.
‘So, young lady. Your grandmother tells me you’re not quite the ticket. Feeling a bit off colour. Pain in that tummy, eh?’
Alice nodded, wishing she could pull the covers over her head and hide. For ages she had longed to tell Dr Pembridge about the pain, but now he was here she just wanted him to go away. He loomed over the bed, blocking out the light, slipping a thermometer under her tongue. He smelled of disinfectant. As he removed the thermometer and examined it she saw grey bristles on the lower half of his face.
‘Let’s have a little feel, shall we? You tell me where it hurts.’
There was a smudge of blood on the front of his shirt. She kept her eyes fixed on it as he folded down the blanket and pulled up her nightdress. She stiffened with shame. His fingers were cold and hard, but the pain darted away from his touch, always elusive. As he probed he asked questions about Alice’s appetite and awful, embarrassing things about the lavatory, which made her want to hide even more. He pressed his fingertips hard down beside her tummy button and looked at her expectantly, as if she were a teddy bear and he was anticipating a growl. She kept silent. Eventually he tugged down her nightdress and stood up.
‘Well, that all seems to be as it should be. Nothing to alarm there, and nothing to keep you in bed. Best to get up and keep busy, I say – read a good book or play with some of those splendid toys in the nursery, eh? Too much time to mope never did anyone any good.’
He thought she was making it up, she could tell. Before she could find the words to explain he had retrieved his bag and gone back through to the day nursery, with the cheery advice that once she was up and about she’d be feeling better in no time. With tears burning at the back of her eyes Alice scrambled out of bed, not wanting to let the chance she had waited for slip away. Going into the day nursery she was just in time to see Dr Pembridge’s tweed shoulders disappearing through the doorway.
‘No sign of appendicitis,’ she heard him say. ‘She doesn’t have a fever and everything appears normal.’
‘I’m sorry for wasting your time, Doctor.’
‘Not at all. I believe the pain is quite genuine. As a matter of fact I was reading an interesting paper on this just last week. Psychosomatic illness, it’s called – symptoms that have a hysterical cause rather than a physiological one. Children are particularly susceptible apparently. Especially those of a sensitive disposition.’ A pause. A discreet clearing of the throat. ‘Have you told her about her mother?’
‘No.’
Alice stood perfectly still at the nursery door, listening with every atom of her being.
‘I’d hazard that she may have picked up that things aren’t quite as they seem,’ Dr Pembridge was saying. ‘She might have overheard something – servants’ gossip, perhaps.’
‘They were given strict instructions to be careful. She thinks her mother is abroad with her father on a business trip. Selina was most insistent she shouldn’t know about—’
There was a rushing in Alice’s head, and a surge of fiery heat, all through her body. The floor felt like it was turning to quicksand beneath her feet as she staggered out into the corridor. Grandmama and Dr Pembridge looked round with identical expressions of alarm as she started to scream.
‘No! No, no, no!’
‘I say, are you all right?’
Lawrence straightened up and opened his eyes, to meet those of a stranger in the mirror. He nodded mutely, noticing that his face was the same shade of green as the ceramic tiles around the walls. He cupped his palms together and splashed it with cold water again, then moved across to the stiff roller towel to scrub it dry. When he turned round the stranger was gone and the cloakroom was empty.
He wasn’t all right at all.
He fumbled for a cigarette (Murad these days, not Woodbines) and lit it with an unsteady hand. He had seen Polly off already, flagging down a taxi and paying the driver way over the likely fare to get her to Waterloo in time for her train. Before she’d got in they had clasped hands tightly and looked at each other in helpless despair. Thankfully he had managed to get himself back inside Maison Lyons and find his way to the gentlemen’s cloakroom before he fainted or threw up or wept out there on the street.
He smoked the cigarette in rapid, desperate drags, leaning against the tiled wall, head reeling. The door swung open and someone else came in, so he stumbled out and made his way back through the restaurant, a different person to the one he’d been an hour ago.
A father.
Christ. He couldn’t take it in, any of it. He was dazed and nauseous – numb, for the moment, though he knew that wouldn’t last. Outside the restaurant the children with the guy were trying to organize themselves to get home, squabbling and scuffling as they loaded their cumbersome creation onto a set of pram wheels. Lawrence stared at them, wondering how old they were. She was nine, his girl. Alice. Dark eyes, dark curls – the image of him, Polly said; it was quite uncanny.
One of the older girls scowled at him and put her arm roughly around a smaller one, who gave a squawk of protest and wriggled free. Lawrence backed away, cannoning into a woman carrying a large carpet bag. He stuttered an apology and walked on, the image of his unknown daughter evaporating, leaving only Selina.
He quickened his pace. The blood was pulsing loud and hard through his body, making him too hot in spite of the chill of the afternoon. The pavements of Oxford Street were crowded with people at this going-home hour of the day and he loathed and resented them all for being unhurried and unaware. For being well enough to walk down Oxford Street when the glorious girl who had danced through puddles with him on this very pavement was in a hospital bed that she wouldn’t now leave.
Jesus.
His eyes stung and his throat was raw. He stepped out into the road, holding up his hand to halt a furious delivery boy on a bicycle and dodging in front of a motorbus, to a cacophony of horn-blasts. The hospital was in Marylebone, Polly said. Beaumont Street – not far. It had taken her a quarter hour to walk.
He started to run.