Five

Billie Walker took the stairs to the next level of the building and sauntered down the corridor to the large corner flat. The door was unlocked. Familiar as she was with it, she knocked and entered almost in the same breath and found the Baroness Ella von Hooft in her favorite spot before the large window, her lady’s maid, Alma McGuire, pouring her a sherry in a delicate crystal glass with a pair of strong, steady hands.

Alma nodded to Billie with a bob of her curled and neatly pinned silver and strawberry hair, and the ever-elegant Ella turned and spotted her daughter. “Darling, it’s been weeks since I saw you,” she exclaimed.

“Mother, it’s been since Sunday,” Billie corrected her. The baroness did have a flair for the dramatic. “And we live in the same building, after all. I’m hardly in Berlin.” She walked over to the settee and bent to give her mother a kiss on her scented cheek. As usual, she smelled pleasantly of Chanel No. 5, a staple she clearly had no intention of giving up, no matter her financial circumstances.

“Don’t call me that,” Ella said with a wave of her manicured hand. “Mother. You know how I hate it. It makes me feel old.”

Billie sighed.

Tonight Ella wore sequins and silk, her darkly dyed cropped hair set in impeccable marcel waves, tight to the head and curled gently at porcelain cheekbones. One might assume she was dressed this way because she’d come from a lavish dinner, but Billie knew perfectly well that she dressed like this for dinner every night as a matter of course, whether she had company or not. If you don’t take pride in yourself, what is the point in living? she’d often say. As a once-divorced and now recently widowed Dutch aristocrat, the third of five daughters of Baron von Hooft, a former mayor of Arnhem, Ella had grown up with wealth and had never really let go of her taste for the finer things, even when her situation had become “strained,” financially speaking.

Something of a free spirit, Ella had lived a large life, having come to Australia from Holland with her first husband, only to have him take up a rather too public affair. It was then that she’d met Billie’s father, Barry Walker, a former cop turned PI, whom she had hired to gain the necessary proof of adultery, which was rather easy, as the story goes. What she hadn’t counted on was Barry’s gallantry and charm. They’d fallen in love hard and fast. She’d had Billie out of wedlock, something a woman without a title could have barely survived. But Ella had the title and the money to support herself and her little family, and she’d weathered the scandal in the way the upper classes sometimes did. She was a savvy, determined woman. She had done her time as a good girl, and it hadn’t paid off, as she saw it, so she’d married the man she wanted, had the baby she craved, and to hell with social expectations. Ella had not changed her name, either, which was just the sort of thing she would dig her heels in about and Billie’s dad wouldn’t give a toss about. Barry Walker had been a thoroughly modern man, in his way, happy to let Ella be her own woman, an idiosyncratic and passionate “goddess,” as he’d liked to call her. They’d been a good match, Barry and Ella. Billie missed her dad keenly, and she knew her mother did, too. Since his death her mother had seemed listless, and a touch more demanding, which wasn’t something Billie felt like dealing with tonight.

“Let me have a look at you,” Ella von Hooft said to her daughter. “Give us a whirl. Where are you going tonight?”

“I’m not going to give you a whirl. I’m on a case,” Billie said, not in the mood for play.

“Being on a case doesn’t make you invisible, does it? Certainly not in that dress.”

Invisibility would be handy sometimes, Billie thought.

“Have a drink with me.” Her mother changed tack, patting the seat beside her.

Billie sat next to Ella on the plush emerald-green settee, crammed with jewel-colored cushions of ruby and emerald velvet and silk. Alma poured her a tipple, a quiet smile on her ruddy, weathered face. Against Ella’s exciting presence, Alma appeared as calm and solid as the Pyramids of Giza. An Irish immigrant, Alma hadn’t family of her own. She’d first come on to help with newborn Billie, and as Billie had grown older, Alma had taught her to sew and mend. She had patience, a steady hand, and a keen eye for details, and she’d soon made herself indispensable. The other staff had been let go over the years, but she was always there. Ella would spend her last shilling to keep Alma, Billie knew, and unlike the other tenants in Cliffside, Ella had her maid live in the flat with her. She had a fair-size room at the east end of the flat as her personal quarters, and Billie understood it housed a near library-size collection of paperback romance novels and copies of Talk of the Town and True Confessions, though the part of Alma that indulged in them remained well hidden beneath a sober surface.

There was a shared maids’ quarters at the top of the building, with beds side by side and a kitchen where the staff made meals for their various employers, but Ella wouldn’t hear of it. In truth the two women were inseparable, particularly since Billie’s father had passed on. While Billie and her mother sipped their drinks, Alma walked off to the kitchen to see to something that smelled quite divinely of sweetness and cinnamon. To add to her many talents, the woman was an impressive baker.

Ella had her eyes on Billie, thinking something over. “You know, your line of work shows you the worst of people. It exposes every nasty instinct,” she pronounced.

“Isn’t that what you found exciting about it?” Billie shot back. She leaned against the cushions and smiled, then took a sip of her sherry. This was a well-worn track for them.

Barry Walker had been charming and, behind his sometimes tough exterior, rather softhearted and compassionate, too, but that probably wasn’t all that had appealed to Ella von Hooft. Certainly he was the opposite of her first husband, if the stories were anything to go by, but it was more than that. Billie’s first and happiest memories were from the end of the Roaring Twenties, a freer time in many respects, with an aristocratic mother who was more than happy to “slum it”—as others liked to say behind her back—with her dad, the baroness painting the town red each weekend with her PI; insisting on throwing extravagant parties in her two-story home, attended by intellectuals, performers, and artists; and employing a fair-size staff, in keeping with the standards of her Dutch childhood. The fact that the disapproval of others never fazed Ella was just one more reason Billie respected her. She thought Alma, her loyal lady’s maid, felt the same, despite what Billie took to be more conservative leanings. Her mother rather had a taste for the gritty, Billie suspected, despite her protestations and fiercely glamorous exterior. She was indeed a woman of contrasts.

“What are you working on at the moment? No peeping, I hope,” her mother prodded, not taking the bait.

“A rather clear-cut case, in fact,” Billie replied. “Not at all unsavory. A mother hired me to track down her missing son.”

“There must be a lot of those at the moment.”

“Indeed, but not like this. He’s not MIA.” Billie thought of Jack again and quickly pushed the thought away. This was getting to be a quite unhelpful habit, thinking of him when her mind should be on her work. “This one was too young to serve,” Billie added by way of explanation.

“Dear goddess, tell me it’s not like the Lindbergh baby!” Ella exclaimed.

“No. More like a teenage runaway. He’s seventeen. Hopefully the boy hasn’t got himself hurt somewhere.”

“Well, you wouldn’t know what to do with one of those, anyway.”

Babies. Billie groaned softly into her glass. “As I recall, you had Alma to help you out with me,” Billie said loudly enough to include everyone in the flat. From the corner of her eye she spotted Alma’s sly grin in the doorway of the kitchen. Her mother liked to rib Billie about her domestic circumstances, or lack thereof, but Billie knew that Ella had hardly embraced the domestic life herself, and it was no accident she’d had but one child. The baroness knew about Marie Stopes and her family-planning devices and firmly believed in women controlling the fate of their wombs, despite what gray-haired men of religion had to say on the matter.

Billie rose and moved to the window, the red gown holding to her firm curves like liquid.

“That’s a lovely dress,” her mother said, and Billie thanked her. She had to admit it fitted better now that she was not as thin. Europe had taken the weight off her, and many others besides. The only people who got fat on wars were the ones who weren’t really there—weren’t on the front lines or in the factories, or starving at home, but were pushing pawns around as on a chessboard, far from the action.

“It’s for The Dancers,” Billie explained of her attire.

“Ahh,” Ella responded, understanding.

Billie looked around her, glass in hand. The baroness had a sweeping view over Edgecliff, Double Bay shimmering in the distance, in what was year by year becoming a rather too sparsely furnished apartment. What was still in place was impressive and in impeccable taste, but the pieces were gradually receding, like a glacier. There was a large space where a Steinway baby grand piano had recently stood, Billie noticed. Not that anyone had played it much since they’d sold the stately house in Potts Point and moved to Cliffside Flats. She took another sip of the sherry. If only things were going a bit better at the agency, she’d be able to support her mother as well as herself. Perhaps in time, she thought.

Her mother was giving her a look. “Where is your mind tonight? You look like you are somewhere else.”

“I’m fine.”

Ella wasn’t going to let it go. “It pains me to see you single like this, Billie my girl. Men throw themselves at you. Surely you see that? Why don’t you take one of them up on it?”

Billie put the sherry down, folded her arms, and pulled her brows together. She didn’t like this conversation. She had a puzzle to solve and it wasn’t this one.

Ella raised her eyebrows. “All I’m saying is take advantage of it, Billie. Enjoy yourself. You only live once and there are plenty of nice young men out there. They certainly notice you.”

Jack was back at the forefront of Billie’s mind now: that smile, that soft mouth, those warm, strong hands. Billie, wait for me. I want you. I want to be yours. She hungered for him, for that deep, reassuring voice, that physical chemistry, that touch her body recalled so achingly, so devastatingly well.

Her mother seemed to read her thoughts. “Darling, he’s not coming back,” she said, as gently as she could. But, of course, there was no way to say it gently. “He may have been a good man, but he’s gone.”

Billie’s whole body erupted in gooseflesh, a feeling of sickness sweeping over her, mingled with unbearable longing. She’d long suspected that Jack and his Argus camera had taken on one too many assignments. If she was truly brave, as he’d often said she was, then he was a step beyond, positively reckless in his pursuit of the Nazis and their war crimes. The two of them had played a small part in turning the tide, but a part nonetheless, Billie’s words and his photographs helping to tell a story to the world of cruelty against civilians, against children, in what had been a bold attempt at absolute and total genocide. Together they’d been part of something larger than themselves, Billie and Jack. His last assignment that she knew of had been in Warsaw in ’44, when the Polish Home Army, an underground resistance group, had risen against the German occupation forces. It had been risky for a press photographer by then, far riskier than it had been in 1938. He’d sent one letter from Warsaw—and then nothing. Word had come on the wireless that the rebellion had been crushed, the Soviet forces having failed to help. The center of the city had been razed in October of that year, with more than one hundred thousand killed. And no word from Jack. Nothing. The British paper he’d worked for had no information on his whereabouts.

He’d vanished only months after he and Billie had married, following a wartime affair of several years, broken up into romantic interludes and stolen weekends of intense intimacy. Then Jack was gone. And Billie had left Paris to return to Australia and her ailing father, arriving too late. In no time at all she had lost not one but the two most important men in her life. It had been more than two years now since she’d seen Jack, she reminded herself again, but time moved strangely after the war.

Billie looked down at the luxurious fabric of her evening gown, finding it surreal against her thoughts of the war. Everything had changed when the war began, and now it was so different again. So little was the same; her whole life before was almost like a dream. Sometimes it was as if she watched her world through the lens of Jack’s Argus, distant and somehow disconnected, everything in monochrome.

“Darling, being a spinster suits some, but not you. I know you yearn for something else,” her mother was saying.

“I made a vow to Jack,” Billie managed in a tight voice. Her mouth felt as dry as the outback. Their vows had to do with each other, but also their common cause. They would do whatever they had to in order to bring the truth of what was happening to the world, and especially to America, where isolationist public sentiment had finally turned, changing the course of the war. Hitler had wanted more than Poland and Austria, more than all of Europe. He had wanted the world reflected in his terrifying image. He had come closer than many cared to admit.

“You may well have done, my girl,” Billie’s mother said, bringing her back to the moment. “You may well have made a vow to that man, but that was the war. Things are different now. The war is over and you have no ring, no papers, and no husband. There were two witnesses and you haven’t seen them since. Such things happened in the Great War, too. No one would begrudge you moving on. He wouldn’t.”

“You never met him,” Billie said softly. It wasn’t much of an argument, but it was true. They would have got on, she thought. Both were free spirits in their own ways. Complicated. Stubborn. Exciting.

Love was often more intense in times of war, she knew. But that knowledge didn’t change the shape of it, didn’t release her from her feelings about Jack Rake, wherever he was, whatever fate he’d faced in Warsaw. It was true their wedding had been makeshift—a borrowed dress, a homemade cake—but that made it no less real to her. Their lovemaking had been real. What was still in her heart was real.

“You need to face facts, Billie. You are a war widow,” her mother said.

War widow.

Spoken out loud, the words stung, though it wasn’t the first time she’d heard them. Through her work, Billie knew the fate of war widows in Australia—some were objects of pity, others considered a threat. Widows were the common targets of gossip, thieves, and swindlers, men on the prowl, and the suspicions of married women who believed any widow was looking for a new husband and willing to do anything to get one. Society defined women with those two words, and they were stigmatized by it—until they could change their status by marrying again, that is. Though the words might be accurate, they made Billie squirm, extinguishing all hope of Jack’s return, and like Mrs. or Miss, defining Billie by her marital status. Further, despite the tireless advocacy of the War Widows’ Guild, widows with children received but a pittance, and a young civilian widow of the war, with no children, was not eligible for anything. Their sacrifices during the war were not recognized by the government, and the men in charge believed that what a charming, young childless widow needed was not a pension but another husband. If Billie wanted to remarry, she would need to seek a certificate of presumption of death, but she would have to provide evidence first, and that was not something she had yet.

“But I . . .” Billie began to protest, and her mouth closed again.

If not a war widow, what was she? If Jack was alive she would be within her rights to seek divorce on the grounds of desertion, something she had helped other women attain through her investigation agency. Unless he turned up or she could furnish more information about precisely when and where he was last seen, she could have no way of knowing what had happened to him. She didn’t want a divorce. She wanted Jack. Or at least answers.

She swallowed back the bitter taste that had settled on her tongue.

“Let’s talk about something else, can we?” Billie pleaded. She stalked off to the kitchen to get herself a glass of water. Alma was there, bent over an open oven. The air coming from it was hot and sweet.

She downed a glass of water and returned to the settee. “What can I do for you tonight? You said there was something you needed help with. Urgent, was it?” Billie watched her mother take a long, slow sip of sherry. “There’s not really anything, is there?” Billie looked at the thin watch on her wrist. “Lunch on Sunday? The usual?” She stood impatiently and gave her mother a kiss. “I have to go and fix my hair, Ella. I’m half-dressed.”

“I didn’t want to say anything,” her mother teased.

“Well now, that is unlike you.” Billie smiled. Some of the tension had dispersed. She just couldn’t talk about Jack with her mother. It wasn’t helpful.

“Your neck is too bare, my girl. Alma, could you fetch the sapphires? The drop set?” Ella called.

“No, no. I have plenty of adequate costume jewelry,” Billie protested, but it was no use. In a few moments her throat and earlobes were decorated by a stunning deep blue sapphire and diamond Art Deco set, which she accepted without further fuss. She caught a glimpse in the mirror of the coat rack at the door and did a double take. Billie had to admit her mother had picked it right. The drop earrings held ten little square sapphires in a vertical line, surrounded by small diamonds. The matching pendant drew attention to her slender clavicles and long neck. A small round diamond hung off the bottom of each earring, swaying gently and catching the light. The blue set off the dress and subtle red hues in her brunette hair perfectly and made her eyes seem larger and more striking. The jury was out on whether Billie’s eyes were blue or green, and even Jack hadn’t been able to make up his mind.

Billie laughed. “You’re right. You win. It’s perfect. I’ll return these on Sunday when I pick you up for lunch.”

“Would you like the car? Alma could drive you.”

“No, thank you,” she answered. She strode across the flat to give her mother another kiss. “I love you.”

Billie left the matriarch with her book and her sherry and Alma’s loyal company. As she retreated down the hall toward the stairwell, she heard the soft sounds of the wireless being turned on.