At one o’clock in the morning, Diana returned home to the house in Buckingham Street. Louisa was waiting up in the kitchen, drinking warm milk and talking to the parlourmaid, May. The household had grown a little now that there was Jonathan, almost two years old and adorable with it, plus Desmond, a perfectly plump six-month-old baby. Bryan had brought in his own Nanny Higgs to look after the boys. She was old and old-fashioned, approving of Diana’s preference to clothe the boys in dresses (‘so much prettier,’ said Diana) and marching them around Kensington Gardens on strictly timed outings in a vast Silver Cross perambulator. However, she did not allow Diana to spend much time with the babies – ‘she seems to think they should be admired from a distance,’ Diana said plaintively. Nanny Higgs and Louisa did not see eye to eye, and Louisa had learned that any suggestions about what the boys might want or need had to be done with tact. Being not overly fond of the nanny either, Diana liked Louisa to be her spy, and so Louisa had taken on some of her former nursery maid duties again.
But even without a cosy companionship with Nanny Higgs, Louisa had the company of May, and they both enjoyed their late-night talks, having become friendly, particularly when the family were at Diana and Bryan’s country house, Biddesden in Wiltshire, bought the year before. There, Louisa had immersed herself happily in the landscape, in the quiet beyond the city where the evenings consisted of little more than helping Nanny put the boys to bed then reading by the nursery fire. Even the days frequently left plenty of time to contemplate the miracles of the garden, where Louisa could pretend she no longer cared about the hustle of London. She was encouraged in this by her renewed friendship with Pamela Mitford, too. After Pam’s engagement to Oliver Watney had been broken off, not long after Kate Mulloney’s suicide, Pamela had been invited by Bryan to come and live at Biddesden and run the dairy farm for them, overseeing the herd of four hundred and fifty Jerseys. Louisa had never seen the young woman as happy as she was when she chatted to the cows in the daisy fields or when she oversaw the skimming of the milk for the yellow cream and the churning of the butter that would both later make their way to the Guinness dining table. All these things had made Louisa’s dislike of Diana a little more bearable.
Her equilibrium was only disturbed by the arrival of Diana and Bryan’s regular house parties. These groups were noisy, extravagant and, to Louisa’s mind, stiff with unbearable showoffs. That some of them were genuine talents could not be denied. Louisa had read Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies almost undercover, so darkly true was it of the life that her mistress led. She told herself she should not be so damning. Diana was still only twenty-one years old, with two small children, and naturally had a youthful desire to indulge in the things good fortune had sent her way: money, fashion, the attention of the newspaper diarists and grand society hostesses. Bryan seemed to see it differently. He had all these things at his disposal too, but was most content when he dined alone with his wife or went on long walks with his dogs and a gun. Though he was infinitely more gentle, and possessed no temper, Louisa did wonder at the irony that in her bid to escape her parents, Diana appeared to have married her father.
The shadow that fell across their green and pleasant lands was the Depression that had bloomed in America and spread over Europe like mould. Louisa had had letters from her mother detailing the ever-increasingly poor fortunes of some of their relatives. (Another good reason Louisa did not dare to quit her job.) On the radio, she heard news programmes about the long lines of starving men and women queuing for bread from Chicago to Seville. But although there were many long nights in the dining room at Biddesden, when the port was drunk dry by the men arguing about what the solution might be – Bryan and Tom had visited Austria together the year before and there was general agreement that the Nazi party had transformed the country’s economy for the better, though no one could see them attaining any real power (‘a murderous gang of pests,’ Lord Redesdale called them) – there was little change to be detected in the general behaviour of the rich and their friends.
On this particular night, Diana had gone to Barbara St John Hutchinson’s twenty-first birthday party. Louisa knew that whatever was happening in the world that day – The Times had run another story on the rising unemployment figures across Europe – Diana would have been served champagne and oysters, fine steak and chocolate cake. (Luke had told Louisa this was the fashionable menu and that even he had become ‘heartily sick of oysters’.) Louisa and Luke had remained friends, bonded even more closely after Kate’s body had been discovered with the note confessing to the murders of Shaun and Clara. It had been a relatively neat ending to a messy time, and she had been grateful that at least there were no children left behind by the tragic Mulloneys. The three dead – Clara, Shaun and Kate – had been young and indulgent when alive, seen now as relics of the Bright Young Things that had since become outmoded: the mood of the newspapers had been that they had more or less deserved what had happened to them, Luke’s voice amongst them. He had graduated at last to writing full-length articles, though they were mainly about the interior designs of the rich and infamous. His frustrations were still apparent, but it nonetheless niggled Louisa now and then that Luke had done so well out of others’ misery.
Louisa got up to wash her cup and as she did so the bell rang indicating that Diana was home and back in her room. ‘Good night, May,’ said Louisa and went up the stairs in a reasonably peaceful mood. Diana was sitting at her dressing table, already wiping off her make-up with cold cream and cotton wool. Louisa came up behind her and pulled out the hair pins before she started to brush her mistress’s short golden hair. ‘How were the boys tonight?’ asked Diana.
‘Good little things as always,’ said Louisa. She really did love them.
‘Desmond doesn’t sleep as well as Jonathan did at that age.’
‘Maybe not but Nanny gave him his milk and he seemed to go off without much fuss. Nanny let me read Jonathan a story at bedtime. You know how he loves Winnie-the-Pooh.’
‘I am glad,’ said Diana. She was alone tonight, Bryan having opted to stay at Biddesden; Louisa believed he was attempting to write another novel, though he never attained anything like the success of his friends.
Her hair brushed, Diana stood and as Louisa was unbuttoning her dress at the back – a slightly complicated concoction of a column of tiny pearl buttons that ran from nape to waist – she asked if there had been anybody interesting there that night. It was their usual conversation. ‘Not especially,’ said Diana. ‘I spent most of the evening talking to Victor Rothschild. On my other side, Barbara put me next to a man you might have read about in the newspapers, Sir Oswald Mosley.’
‘The politician?’
‘Yes, he used to be quite high up in the Labour Party, practically PM-in-waiting, then he resigned and left to form his own – the New Party. Now he sits behind the Tories. I told him I was a Lloyd George Liberal and I don’t think he was terribly impressed. One’s heard all sorts of scandalous rumours about him.’
Louisa was careful not to press on this. She had learned that a servant was better protected not stirring up gossip with their masters; although, it almost went without saying, there was an underground grapevine that rivalled anything Luke’s former column could have ever dug up. Occasionally, when they stayed in other houses, Louisa would pick up stories from the other lady’s maids she was seated beside in the servants’ hall for their supper. She’d heard of this Oswald Mosley, too, and not from the newspapers, but wasn’t going to say anything now.
‘He’s married to a very sweet little mouse, Cimmie Curzon. She was there tonight, too. Everyone says he’s a lady-killer who has torrid affairs with just about any woman who crosses his path.’
‘Better be careful then, ma’am.’
Diana dismissed this. ‘No danger there, I promise you. He is rather dark and good-looking, I suppose, but his magic didn’t work on me. He told me that he’d spotted me in Venice and at a ball last summer but he could easily have made that up.’
‘It’s possible.’ Louisa took Diana’s clothes and went to the dressing room next door to hang them up, while Diana took her underclothes off and slipped her nightdress on. ‘Would you like some milk tonight?’
‘No, thank you, Lou-Lou. I’m going to go right off to sleep now. You know, Sir Oswald said he had some very certain ideas about how to fix things. He says he knows how to cure unemployment.’
‘I see. Good night, ma’am.’
Louisa closed the door with the feeling that something was scratching at her below the skin, a niggling discomfort that something had got in that would not now leave them alone. A portent that the settled routine of the household was soon to be fatally disrupted. She was right.