When Louisa, Nancy and Guy returned to the waiting area at the front of the station, Lord Redesdale was pacing up and down. Luke was sitting on a hard chair, his legs crossed, his foot twitching. He leapt up when the three of them entered the room. ‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘thank goodness. I wasn’t sure if—’
Nancy cut him off. ‘Thank you for what you did, Luke. I think.’ Then she turned to her father, who had stopped pacing and was watching the group, stupefied. ‘Dear old human, could you take me home now, please?’
Lord Redesdale took his daughter’s arm, then gave Guy a stern look. ‘This nasty business had better all be over now.’
‘It is for Miss Mitford, my lord,’ said Guy.
‘Humpf, what?’ But Lord Redesdale thought better of enquiring further. He wanted the hell out of there. The two of them left without saying goodbye.
Louisa, Guy and Luke were left staring at each other. She knew that she should return to work, but she also knew that Diana wouldn’t necessarily be aware that she had been released as yet. And she needed a grown-up drink, even if it was only the afternoon. Luke looked as if he felt the same.
‘Mr Meyer,’ said Louisa and he looked at her with confusion.
‘Why aren’t you calling me Luke?’
Louisa flicked her eyes towards Guy, who shuffled uncomfortably. Good.
‘I think the two of us should go out for dinner,’ she continued, with a confidence she did not feel, and Luke exhaled a large sigh of relief.
‘Yes, and a huge brandy.’
Guy started to say something then stopped, but just as they had said their goodbyes and Luke was walking out of the door, he touched Louisa lightly on the arm. ‘Can I see you again?’
Louisa looked into his kind face. His eyes blue and large behind their thick glasses, his fine nose, his mouth so full of sincerity with its nervous smile. She wanted, so much, to see him again.
‘I don’t think it does either of us any good, do you?’ she said and left. But this time, she turned around when she got to the pavement and Guy was still watching her.
‘I think this deserves the Ritz,’ said Luke as they walked along the street. He had perked up tremendously. His face somehow rearranged back into its usual harmonious good looks, the curls of his hair adding to the general buoyancy. Only his crumpled shirt and lack of a tie revealed the earlier harried state in which he had had to leave his aunt’s house.
‘No, Luke. There’s nothing to celebrate. Can we just dive into the nearest pub and hide for a while?’ She was regretting not saying that she would go back to Diana immediately, where she might have been able to lie down on her bed and try to think through everything that had happened. She felt the hurt she had inflicted on Guy as if she had stabbed her own heart.
It didn’t take them long to find a pub, the Rose and Thorn, hidden away in a mews and once the drinking hole of coachmen after they had put away their horses for the night. It was perfect for her mood: dark, low-ceilinged, a surly barmaid. They tucked themselves into a booth with a brandy each. It would knock her out but that might bring blessed relief. The first sip burned her throat and brought a numbness that was the panacea she sought.
Luke gave a deep sigh. ‘That’s better. I’m not sure which was worse today, the police interview or telling Aunt that I had been called in. She was much more upset than I was.’
‘Did you tell her why?’
‘No, I hardly knew myself. I had a summons from Diana to meet her at the police station. I was feeling pretty desperate as it was. I had been up until the small hours drinking whisky with disreputable types in Soho.’ He barked a short laugh.
Louisa studied Luke for a second or two. His dark brown eyes were hard to read. Was the hangover the reason for his trembling hands earlier? She always had the sensation that he was hiding something but could say with no certainty what that was. That he was a homosexual was understood by all the group, and though the likes of Nancy and Diana would make reference to this in passing with coded phrases – ‘he wears lavender’ – it would nonetheless be something he had to conceal from most of the world, most of the time, she knew that. Hiding a part of yourself was exhausting. Louisa knew that, too. But there was another danger: it could make deception a habit, something that came as easily as tying your shoelaces.
‘Are you going to ring the newspaper?’
‘About what?’ Luke swallowed this question with another mouthful of brandy.
‘You know what. Clara. Nancy.’
Luke shook his head. ‘But I can’t deny that I wouldn’t like to eventually. If it became a proper story, I mean. I don’t want to live in the gutter of the diary, I promise you that. I’d like to be a real journalist.’
‘Hmm.’ Louisa drank the last of her brandy. It cleared her head. ‘Why are you sitting here with me now, Luke?’ It gave her a small thrill to call him by his first name. Almost everyone in her daily life had to be addressed formally, apart from May the parlourmaid. But the kitchen maids had to call her ‘Miss Cannon’. She’d liked it initially but it created a distance that soon became too wide to cross.
‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, but you’re also friends with Mrs Guinness. The woman for whom I am a lady’s maid. It is unusual.’
Luke’s response was warm. ‘I am unusual, and I have a feeling you are too. Perhaps more accurately, we’re both outsiders. I know I am a friend of Diana’s, but only up to a point. I am not one of them – I don’t have their money, their background, their confidence. They accept me as an amusing pet. Some might say it was pathetic of me but because it lets me in, I put up with it.’
‘What do you want to be? Where are you going to go in this life?’
‘Goodness,’ said Luke. ‘You are in a philosophical mood. I think we need another drink.’ He signalled to the barmaid for more of the same. Her response was to throw a dishcloth over her shoulder but then she pulled out two more glasses. Luke took a minute to think, giving the question proper consideration and as he did, Louisa tried to think what her own answer might be. ‘I keep hoping we’re living in a new and different world,’ he said at last. ‘Different to our parents’ world, that is. Since the war, so many things have changed. All the cars, the telephones, the radio. Women are voting.’
Louisa raised her glass. ‘Hurrah to that.’
Luke clinked his and then winced. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Nancy told me once not to do that.’
‘Carry on, I’m enjoying this.’
‘I feel as if there’s a chance for anyone to do anything, in a way that wasn’t possible before. I’m lucky, I’ve had a good enough education and I have my aunt supporting me. But she and I are not the same. She fiercely disapproves of modern life and would like the world to go back to the way it was.’
‘Where people knew their place?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Where you and I would not be sitting together, having a drink in a pub.’
Luke burst out again, and this time Louisa joined in. The brandy on an empty stomach had relaxed every muscle from her shoulders to her scalp and she was enjoying the pleasurable sensation of almost melting into her seat. She never wanted to leave the safety of the booth.
‘Clara was having an affair with Kate Mulloney’s husband,’ she said, rather abruptly. Her mind had skittered back there inevitably, like a bagatelle ball on a slope.
Luke put his drink down on the table. ‘I know.’
‘I guessed that from your diary piece.’ Louisa gave him an arch look. ‘But how did you know?’
‘There were rumours.’ He gave her a wide-eyed look. ‘You don’t think Kate…?’
‘It’s possible,’ said Louisa. She knew she was saying things she wouldn’t have said if she wasn’t two brandies down but she couldn’t quite stop herself either.
‘Can it be proved?’
Louisa shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We don’t know if Mrs Mulloney knew for certain that Clara was, well…’
‘What if there was proof for that?’
‘Proof Mrs Mulloney knew what her husband and Clara were doing behind her back?’
‘Yes,’ said Luke.
‘I’d say it wouldn’t help her case, but it would help the police’s.’
‘Then I think you’d better come back with me to my aunt’s house.’ Luke stood and paid the bill and inside of five minutes, they were in a taxi to Wilton Crescent.