The Villa on the Riviera
Elizabeth Edmondson

COPYRIGHT

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2014

Copyright © Elizabeth Edmondson 2014

First published as The Art of Love in 2008 by HarperCollins

Cover images © Shutterstock.com Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Elizabeth Edmondson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007283705

Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780008104153

Version: 2016-02-17

DEDICATION

For Rosie Buckman

With love and gratitude

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Keep Reading

Also by Elizabeth Edmondson

About the Publisher

PART ONE

ONE

‘If I’m not Polly Smith, then who am I?’

‘What a profound question,’ said Oliver Fraddon.

The two of them were standing side by side in a gallery at Somerset House, home of the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths for all the counties of England.

‘The world in little, one might say,’ Oliver went on, looking along the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with thousands of large red ledgers that contained the transitions of millions of lives, present and past. ‘All of us written down here, captured, immortalized. Volumes full of names and identities, A to Z, plain and extraordinary. We’re born, we marry — or some of us do — and we die, and each time we are set down on a page in here. A frightening thought.’

‘Never mind the frightening thought, what concerns me is that I’m not among those immortalized here,’ Polly said.

‘Very true. I suggest we go back to the desk and ask the recording angel for help.’

He led the way down the metal spiral staircase, warning Polly to watch her step. ‘Or you’ll end up as a new entry under Deaths.’

The clerk standing behind the long wooden length of the main counter had not a touch of the angelic about her. She wore pince-nez attached to a thin chain and had a harassed air. Oliver addressed her. ‘This young lady seems to have gone missing.’

The clerk looked at Polly with worried, faded grey eyes, eyes that were kinder than her pinched mouth. ‘Oh dear. Can’t find yourself? Not where you should be? Your name is Smith, you say. Well, there are rather a lot of Smiths, but in the end there’s only one of you. It comes down to having the right dates and the right address. Once we’re sure of that information, we can find you. Unless,’ she added, her voice sharpening, ‘unless you’re a foreigner.’

‘Do I look like a foreigner?’ Polly asked, indignant, not because she minded being taken for a foreigner, but because she wanted to assert her rightful place, numbered among all her fellow citizens here, in those large red books.

‘No, but if you were born abroad, even if you were as English as me and Mr Grier over there, then you wouldn’t be in the main part of the registry, but in the records we keep elsewhere.’

‘In the nether regions?’ suggested Oliver in Polly’s ear. ‘The brimstone section, with devilish clerks scurrying to and fro.’

‘It doesn’t arise,’ said Polly, ‘I was born in Highgate. 11, Bingley Street, off Archway. My mother still lives there. On May the first, 1908.’

‘Only there is no entry for her in the relevant volume,’ Oliver said.

The angel was impressed by Oliver, Polly could see that. If it had just been her standing at the desk, in her old mac and wine-coloured beret, she’d still be waiting for the clerk to look up from her card indexes and paper. It had been Oliver, every inch the gentleman in his tailored suit, who had commanded her immediate attention. Just by being there. It was unfair. But useful, she told herself. And of course, the minute he opened his mouth, there was the accent, proclaiming him a product of the upper classes, with all the easy authority that Eton and Oxford gave to the Olivers of this world.

So the woman in the pince-nez had been helpful. Had gone back with them to the red books, had found the one that should have contained the entry for Polly. ‘Polly’s short for Pauline,’ she told the woman, but it made no difference. There was no female Smith, initial P, born in Bingley Street, Highgate on the first of May, nor indeed at the end of April or the middle of May. There was a Thomas Smith, born in Priory Gardens on the second of May; that was as close as she could get.

The clerk closed the book, and Oliver courteously took it from her to replace it on its shelf.

‘You’ll have to get the correct details from your parents,’ the clerk said. ‘If you were born in a nursing home, perhaps in the country, you might have been registered there. I expect your father registered you, and he mightn’t have realized he should have done it where you lived, and not where you were born. Ask him.’

‘I can’t, he’s dead.’

‘In the war?’ the clerk said, with a sudden and unexpected flash of sympathy. ‘I’m sorry. But your mother will know. And doesn’t she have the original certificate?’

‘Good question,’ Oliver said, as they came out of the grandeur of Somerset House into the noise and bustle of the Strand. ‘That would solve all your problems.’

Polly grinned. ‘I dare say in your stately home everything is in perfect order, but Ma’s not very organized with papers. They’re stowed away in boxes, only not so you can find anything. She takes care with her music, she can always find a piece of music she wants. Papers are different, and after all, it was more than twenty years ago. I asked her, of course I did, but she got into such a fret, positively alarmed when I said I’d look through all her stuff, that I thought it would be easier just to come here and get a copy. They don’t need the original for a passport, do they?’

‘A copy from Somerset House passes all scrutiny,’ said Oliver. He drew her to the side, out of the way of passers-by. ‘So what now? Honeymoon cancelled? Come to think of it, wedding off, I’m sure you need a birth certificate to get married.’

‘The wedding isn’t cancelled, because no date has been fixed. Just January.’ Which was now only a few weeks away. ‘Roger told me to see to the passport so that there wouldn’t be any hold-ups. He likes to be ahead of himself. And what I’m going to do now,’ she said, suddenly decisive, ‘is catch a tram and go home and interrogate my mother.’

‘Then I shall escort you to the tram stop.’

They walked along the Strand towards Aldwych, Polly thinking, Oliver watching her. A pigeon landed in front of them and then took off with a whirr, the colour and shape of the grey wings catching Polly’s eye. Grey, but so many shades of it, from almost white to rich purple. And the energy of the movement, effort blending into the smooth ease of flight.

A grey bird on a grey day, but the dismal skies above them had no colour nor shape nor energy. There was the hint of sulphur in the air that warned of approaching fog; the crisp autumn days of October were over and now London had descended into the sullen dreariness of a damp and cold November.

‘The dark days do make me miserable,’ Polly said, as they crossed the road. ‘I spend most of the winter pining for spring and longer days. I never feel really happy in the winter. It’s the cold and the general dimness, I suppose.’

Polly and Oliver went down the steps to the tram station at Aldwych. Oliver took her hand and kissed it, as was his habit, then saw her on to the waiting tram, raising his hat as she climbed on. Oliver always wore wide-brimmed hats in soft browns and greys. She ran up the stairs to the upper deck and snatched a window seat from a burly man with a brown parcel. As the tram rattled off and emerged into Kingsway, she saw Oliver walking back towards Aldwych. Among the hurrying crowds, heads down, faces red from the cold, clad in drab coats and suits, his exquisitely tailored figure and hat made him stand out, as did his languid stride.

The tram plunged underground into Kingsway tunnel.

Polly both loved and hated trams. The clatter and banging and restless swaying disturbed her, but there was a comfort in travelling on a vehicle that ran on its tracks so purposefully and undeviatingly through the chaos of all the thick London traffic. And this particular tram, the Number 35, was part of her life. She had travelled on it every school day to and from her school, and then later on, when she won a scholarship to art school, had ridden on it into the heart of London to her college.

The journey to her old home took forty-five minutes, through the streets of northern London and up into Highgate. She got off at Archway, just as she always did; she could have walked blindfold from the tram stop to her house, and in fact, more than once, going home in a bad fog, she might as well have been blindfolded.

Polly hoped that they weren’t in for one of those terrible pea-soupers, which caught in your throat and always made her feel sick and headachy. She loathed the days when it was as if the sun never rose, and the sounds of London — traffic, voices, street criers, bells — were muffled by the smoke-laden, noxious greenish-yellow air.

She walked along Bingley Street to number 11, pushed open the gate and climbed the steps up to the front door, which was painted a dark green colour and sported a brass knocker in the shape of a pixie. From the window to the right of the front door, she heard the wavering sounds of a piano scale. Her mother had a pupil. She looked at her watch. Ten to five, so the lesson would probably finish in ten minutes. The front door was on the latch, and she opened and shut it behind her quietly. Inside, she took off her mac and beret, unwound her woolly scarf and hung them up on the hook behind the door. Then she walked down the hall and into the kitchen, warm from the stove which her mother kept going all the time in winter. She put the kettle on, and sat down at the scrubbed wooden kitchen table, her feet automatically curling round the legs of the chair as they had done since she was a little girl.

The kitchen overlooked their small garden, a constant affront to the neighbours, whose neat herbaceous borders, squares of lawn and regimented vegetable patches tucked away at the bottom of each matching garden proclaimed the right horticultural instincts. The garden was the one place where Dora Smith’s restrained nature seemed to give way to something more reckless. She packed the space with plants, not in neat lines, but more, Polly always liked to imagine, as a jungle would be. Dense and profuse, and nothing small except the soft swathes of violas and the snowdrops which nestled under the overhanging branches of shrubs and bushes.

But no London garden looked inviting in November. It had a forlorn, end-of-season look to it. The piles of crisp autumn leaves had vanished, leaving just a few soggy remnants on the ground or clinging to the twigs of the trees. The evergreens added a touch of colour and life, but even they had a grey tinge, as though the misty air had got to them as well.

The kettle came to the boil in a flurry of steam. Polly warmed the brown teapot, spooned in the tea, and left it on the stove to brew. The door to the front room opened: voices, thanks and goodbyes, the front door opened and shut, and Polly’s mother came into the kitchen.

‘I heard you come in,’ she said. ‘You’ve made tea.’

‘Have you got a five o’clock?’

‘No. I should have, little Sally Wright, but she has a bad chest, and she isn’t allowed out when the weather’s like this. Just as well, for if she did come, it would be half an hour of cough, cough, cough. She’s a musical child, though,’ she added, wanting to be fair. ‘But I’ve another pupil at half past. Pour the tea, Polly. Do you want a biscuit?’

Polly took a biscuit and chewed it absent-mindedly, for a moment at a loss as to how to broach the subject of the birth certificate.

Then she plunged in, what was the point in beating about the bush? ‘I went to Somerset House today, to get a copy of my birth certificate.’

Dora Smith put her cup down so hard that it rattled the saucer.

‘You aren’t still set on going abroad for your honeymoon, are you?’ she said. ‘I don’t advise it, you’ll catch some dreadful disease, it’s not very clean over there.’

‘How do you know? You said you’d never been abroad,’ Polly said, rather crossly.

There was a pause. ‘My … It’s what people say happens to everyone who goes. And you don’t speak any foreign languages, at least if you do, your French teacher never found out about it, your French reports were always shockers.’

‘Roger speaks German and French. Besides, even if we weren’t going abroad, I have to have the birth certificate to get married. That’s what he says.’

‘I really do not see why you’re in such a rush to get married. Roger still has to finish qualifying, and — ’

‘He is qualified.’

‘Then why is he taking more exams?’

‘You have to, if you want to be a hospital doctor.’

Polly felt she hadn’t got to the bottom of her mother’s ambivalent attitude to Roger and her engagement. Dora Smith was a woman with two distinct personalities. The one Polly knew best was the sensible, practical woman, who shared her neighbours’ attitudes and opinions, among which was the certainty that the main purpose of a young woman’s being was to find herself a good, reliable husband, in a respectable way of life, and settle down with him to be a good wife and mother. Within this conventional scenario, Roger was a gem. A doctor was better than the daughter of Ted and Dora Smith might have hoped for, and a catch to brag about to her friends, if Dora were given to bragging, which she wasn’t.

But Dora Smith had another side, the side that had been dismayed at Polly’s precocious artistic talent, that had refused to praise her exceptional promise, yet who had fiercely asserted the need for Polly to do her art as well as she could. ‘If you’re an artist, then you have to be trained properly, to become as good as you can be. It’s not the same as having art as a hobby. One’s professional and the other’s amateur.’ And it was that Dora Smith who had said, clearly and unexpectedly, ‘If you marry Roger, the light will go out of your painting.’

To which Polly might have replied that the light had already gone out of her painting, and so what difference would it make, but that wasn’t an acknowledgement she was going to make to anyone.

‘Can we get back to the birth certificate? Are you sure you can’t find the original? I don’t see how it can be lost, one doesn’t lose something important like a birth certificate.’

Dora Smith didn’t answer, but took a sip of tea, her gaze wandering away from Polly as she looked out of the window. The clock ticked, the stove gave its familiar creaking sound as it cooled, the cat flap on the back door rattled and a large tabby cat slid through it. He gave Polly an uninterested look with his round, golden eyes, swished a stripy tail and went to investigate his food plate.

Still Dora said nothing.

‘I’m not there, in Somerset House,’ Polly persisted. ‘There’s no Pauline Smith registered, not on that date, not anywhere in Highgate. Was I born somewhere else? In a nursing home?’

Her mother sighed, and Polly saw that her eyes, when she looked back from the window, had a glisten of tears in them.

‘Ma, I’m sorry. What is it? What’s the matter?’

The words came out in a rush. ‘You weren’t born in Highgate, you were born in Paris. I haven’t lost your birth certificate. I burnt it.’

‘Burnt it?’ Polly couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Burnt it? Why? When? Just to stop me going abroad? And how could I possibly have been born in Paris? You’ve never been to France, you said so yourself.’

‘I burnt it when you were a baby,’ said Dora Smith, with a sigh. ‘Oh, dear, why did this wretched man want to take you abroad. Or marry you at all? Bringing it all up. I had hoped …’

‘You had hoped what?’ Polly felt a cold sensation in her stomach. Paris?

‘You’ll need all the details if you really must have a passport. I’ll write them down for you.’

Polly watched her mother as she got up and went to the drawer where she kept scraps of paper. She smoothed out the back of an envelope, and wrote in her clear italic hand. Then she passed it to Polly, and went over to stand at the sink.

Polly stared down at the elegantly inscribed words.

‘This makes no sense,’ she exclaimed. ‘Who’s this — I can’t even pronounce it — this Polyhymnia Tomkins?’

‘That’s your real name,’ Dora said, leaning on the sink and running the tap, so that Polly had to raise her voice to be heard.

‘Tomkins? I’m Polly Smith. How can I ever have been called Tomkins? And Polyhymnia? That’s not even a proper name.’

‘I’m not your mother,’ Dora said. ‘And Ted Smith wasn’t your father.’

TWO

On the tram back into the centre of London, Polly sat unseeing, not noticing the people around her, or hearing the grumbles of two women in the next seat about the weather, not aware of the bell clanging, the swaying as the tram went over points, oblivious to everything outside herself, as she tried to make sense of what her mother — who was not her mother, after all — of what Dora Smith had told her.

What kind of a mother could she have been, this woman who had abandoned her so casually into the care of her sister when she was only weeks old, and never saw her again, who clearly didn’t care whether she were alive or dead?

What kind of a mother would call her daughter Polyhymnia?

‘Polyhymnia’s one of the muses,’ Dora Smith told her. ‘The muse of sacred song.’

Sacred song indeed. Well, no one could have been more wrongly named, because, to Dora Smith’s dismay, Polly had no ear for music at all. She had ground her way through piano lessons until both of them had given up with relief, and she couldn’t hold a tune; singing at school had been a case of miming and mumbling, under the constant frowns of the singing mistress.

Dora Smith had been less than forthcoming about her sister, Thomasina. That was another ridiculous name. ‘We went our separate ways,’ was all she would say. ‘We weren’t at all alike.’

‘Where is she? Is she still alive?’

‘I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth.’

‘How could you lose touch with a sister? If I had a sister …’

Which was an unkind thing to say. Of course, if she, Polly, wasn’t the Smiths’ daughter, then Dora Smith had never had children of her own. Polly had asked, when she was a little girl, why she didn’t have a brother or sister, and Ted had put down his newspaper and frowned at her, saying that wasn’t a suitable question to ask. Later, when she was in her bath, being soaped and flannelled from nose to toe by her mother, Dora Smith had said with a sigh that she wished Polly did have a little brother or sister, but fate had chosen for her to be an only child.

I couldn’t have had better parents, Polly told herself fiercely.

Dora Smith had said, with a world of sadness in her voice: ‘You are my daughter, Polly. You’re the only daughter, the only child I had. Ted loved you as if you were his own, and well, a niece is close. A sister’s child. You’re my blood, that counts for a lot.’

Only it didn’t seem to count sister to sister, not if Thomasina had walked out on her sister and her baby’s life with never a backward glance.

‘Why Paris?’ Polly wanted to know. ‘What was she doing in Paris?’

There it was again, Dora’s obvious reluctance to answer questions. ‘She was a bit of a gadabout, restless, never happy in one place. She had friends in Paris, I suppose.’

Illegitimate. Polly stared out into the chilly darkness, vaguely lit by the headlights of cars and streetlights gleaming dully through the thickening fog. She was illegitimate.

‘What you’re saying is that I’m a bastard,’ she had said, raging at Dora.

‘Don’t use that word. Not ever.’

‘It’s the word other people will use. Didn’t that ever occur to my mother?’

‘Your mother … your mother was an unconventional person. She wouldn’t — that is, what people in general might consider a stigma, wouldn’t be to her. I remonstrated with her when she arrived on our doorstep with you in her arms. I said she should marry your father, so that you wouldn’t have the disgrace of illegitimacy, but she said no healthy baby could be any kind of a disgrace.’

‘That was big of her.’

‘They’ll give you a short birth certificate at Somerset House,’ Dora said. ‘One that doesn’t have any blank spaces. Thomasina refused to fill in any details for your father.’

‘It was an English birth certificate, though? I am English?’

‘Of course you are,’ said Dora, shocked. ‘As English as a Chelsea bun. At least she had the sense to register you at the consulate there, that’s what you do, for English babies born abroad. Go back to Somerset House with those details I’ve written down, and they’ll find the entry all right.’

It was extraordinary to think that all these years she’d lived as Polly Smith, and in fact she was no such thing. Her passport would proclaim to the world that she was Polyhymnia Tomkins. A stranger. She couldn’t think of herself as any such person. Polyhymnia Tomkins was the fabrication, she was the person who didn’t exist, not Polly Smith.

‘You always said Polly was a pet name for Pauline.’

‘Ted said we couldn’t have a girl called Polyhymnia. He said you’d be teased at school, and the neighbours would think it odd.’

‘Did you live here when I was born?’ Polly had asked her mother. ‘Here in Bingley Gardens? You told me you’d always lived here.’

‘We didn’t. We lived in South London, in Putney, when Ted and I were first married. When you arrived, Ted said we’d have to move. He’d been with the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, but he didn’t mind moving to north London because he’d applied for a better job, with the Great Northern. It was a promotion, so he was pleased about that, only it was a long way to travel right across London to Kings Cross every day. So we moved to the other side of the river, where no one would know that you weren’t our child.’

No parents could have done more for her than Ted and Dora Smith had done, Polly knew that. It was unreasonable and ungrateful of her to be angry with Dora for never telling her who she really was, but she wasn’t feeling reasonable or grateful.

‘I knew I’d have to tell you one day, only the right moment never seemed to come. And I came to forget that you weren’t really my daughter.’

And to all intents and purposes, Polly was their daughter. She didn’t remember Ted Smith very well; she’d been seven when he went away to fight in France, and nine when the telegram came saying that he’d been killed. What with the savings he had left and what Dora had made with her piano lessons, she had never lacked for anything, and she hadn’t lacked for love, either, Dora was lavish in that commodity.

Dora had seen to it that Polly worked hard at school, found the money for extra art lessons when it became clear how gifted she was, and instead of having to leave school at fourteen to earn her keep like several of her friends, she was allowed to stay on and try for the scholarship to art college. Dora Smith had paid for the extra that the scholarship didn’t cover, making sure that Polly had everything she needed.

Not for the first time, Polly found herself wondering about Dora and her mother’s family. There had been two sisters. Did she have any uncles? What about her grandparents? Dora had always been reticent about her family. ‘My parents were quite old when they had me, and they’re long since dead,’ was the sum of the information she was prepared to give Polly. Where had they lived, where had Dora — and, of course, Thomasina — grown up?

‘Oh, various places,’ was the evasive answer to that question.

Polly came to with a start. The tram had reached Kingsway, and everybody except her had got off. ‘Hurry along there,’ the conductor said, his face pinched with cold. ‘Haven’t got all day, you know.’

Polly felt strangely discouraged as she walked through the Georgian streets to the house in Fitzroy Street where she lived. She let herself in, the familiar smell of wet shoes and overcooked cabbage washing over her. Her landlady was mean with light bulbs, and the light in the stairwell was almost as dim as the foggy world outside the door. Polly climbed the four flights of stairs to the top floor. She opened the door to her attic room, took off her mac and hung it on the back of the door. Then she removed her damp beret and ran her hands through her hair.

Did she want to bother with a passport at all? Not to have one would mean she couldn’t go abroad. Nor, according to Roger, could she get married. Was that true? Vague ideas of special licences flitted through her head, but Roger would expect her to produce a birth certificate in any case, he’d want to file it away with all his other documents.

The moment she had a passport, it was hullo, Polyhymnia Tomkins, goodbye Polly Smith. Yet, legally, she supposed, she was already Polyhymnia Tomkins, always had been Polyhymnia Tomkins. It was Polly Smith who did not exist.

What’s in a name? she said to herself.

A lot. A name wasn’t just a series of letters arranged in a particular way. A name was a person. It could be more than one person, there were probably dozens, hundreds of Polly Smiths up and down the country. But each one was identified by her name. Without a name, you weren’t a person. It would be impossible to be truly human without a name. You gave a pet a name, a cat, a horse, a tamed magpie, even, was marked out from others of its kind by its name. Although animals were different, a new owner might change a creature’s name. It was a mark of humanity that your name was an integral part of you.

What about orphans, who were adopted and given a name by their new parents? Or, for women, marriage changed your name, you became Mrs Roger Harrington, or even — since she had noticed that the servants in Bryanston Square called Roger ‘Mr Roger’ — Mrs Roger.

Spies changed their names, and so did criminals on the run. Authors wrote books under pseudonyms. Actors and actresses had stage names, look at her friend Tina Uppershaw, born Maureen Scroggs. Film stars who started life as a Mavis or a Ken became a Carole or a Ronald, with a new surname that would look good in lights.

For Polly, names had a special dimension. She saw letters in colour, and words and names were a glowing blend of those individual colours. Polly was slate blues and greens with flashes of light and yellow. Pauline was another colour, a darker one, but since she never used it, it didn’t bother her. Smith was brown and maroon with touches of grey. Whereas Polyhymnia was a much more complicated palette of light and dark, warm and cold colours making an intriguing but unfamiliar whole. Tomkins was a grey and pink name, with a touch of wine at the edges.

Polly sighed. This was making her head ache even more, she must stop these thoughts going round and round in her mind. She made herself focus on her surroundings, she had long ago discovered that to live entirely and intensely in the present moment was a cure for most ill moods and worrying times.

Polly’s room was perfect for an artist. It had a north-facing skylight and a dormer window looking out over a parapet to the smoky chimneys of London. Her narrow bed, covered in a blue and yellow cloth, was set under the eaves, which meant that she had to sit up carefully in bed, so as not to crack her head on the sloping ceiling. Her clothes hung on a rail behind a curtain and she kept the rest of her things in a large chest of drawers set against another sloping ceiling, which left space behind it for her suitcase and various other possessions. The floorboards were uncovered, except for a small blue rug beside the bed. By the door was a washbasin, a great luxury. The bathroom was two floors down, and shared with the other occupants of the house: her landlady, Mrs Horton, her daughter, who was a nurse and kept odd hours, and three other lodgers.

Polly looked around her room, seeing it not as the haven it had been to her, a haven and a workplace, with her easel set up in the centre of the room, her paints and tools on a table beside it, not the place where she lived and worked, but a place inhabited by a stranger.

She crouched down beside the gas ring on which she boiled her water and did all her cooking, turned on the gas, which came on with a hiss, and struck a match. The burner lit with a soft popping sound. She had a saucepan with soup she’d made the day before and she put it on to heat.

This room belonged to Polly Smith. Only she wasn’t Polly Smith.

She sat down at the table and opened a sketchbook. She unscrewed the cap of her favourite fountain pen, and with a few swift strokes, drew herself. A realistic self portrait; this was the face that looked out at her from the mirror, was caught in snapshots or, looking severe and criminal, the face in the photo which she had had taken for her passport.

Then she drew another figure, a faceless young woman, dressed not in a limp skirt and jumper, but in a trailing robe. She added a sleek hairdo and whorls of smoke rising from a cigarette in an absurdly long holder.

Polyhymnia Tomkins, sophisticate.

Now her pen was working rapidly, and more featureless figures danced off the page. A Grecian woman, in flowing robes, swirling down on a parson sitting at an organ. Polyhymnia, Muse at work. Next came a woman dressed in breeches and a pith helmet who was gazing at a supercilious camel. Beneath that she wrote, Polyhymnia Tomkins, explorer.

Then a woman in a sensible tweed suit pushing a pram with a felt hat on her head. That was Mrs Roger Harrington. Of course, when she married Roger, she wouldn’t be Polly Smith in any case, she would lose both Smith and Tomkins, for ever. And as to the Polly, she would just go on being Polly as she always had done.

This prospect didn’t cheer her up as much as it might have done. She would have to tell Roger, of course. Tell him that he wasn’t marrying respectable Polly Smith, daughter of the respectable Mr and Mrs Smith of Bingley Street, but Polyhymnia, bastard daughter of Thomasina Tomkins, father unknown.

Father unknown. Was there any way you could discover who your father was, when your mother vanished without saying? Why hadn’t Ma — who wasn’t her mother, but her aunt, how could she ever get used to that? — questioned her real mother more vigorously, insisted on being told who was the father of her child? Or made an effort to find this out, while the trail was still hot and it might have been possible to discover who Thomasina’s friends were, and who among them had been more than a friend?

Of course, her mother might have had dozens of lovers. Might even have been — no, she wasn’t going to think that for a moment. There had been an exasperation in Dora Smith’s voice when she reluctantly spoke of her sister, but no moral disapproval. She wasn’t much given to moral disapproval, which was another thing that singled her out from her neighbours.

A married man, probably, thought Polly with all the cynicism of her twenty-five years. An old story, and a simple one: an affair which could never end in marriage. The man refusing to acknowledge a child, or maybe Thomasina too proud or too kind to threaten her lover’s marriage. France was a Catholic country, if the father were a Roman Catholic, then the situation would be hopeless, even if her father had wanted to marry her mother.

Could she find out more about her mother, somehow? She wouldn’t have Ma’s help if she tried to, that was clear. ‘I’m not going to say another word about Thomasina, and that’s final. It’s all over, it’s all in the past, and that’s where it will stay. No good ever came of delving into the past.’

There was no arguing with Ma when she had that look on her face. The Inquisition wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of Dora Smith once she’d made up her mind.

Wild thoughts of employing a detective flitted through Polly’s head — only how could she possibly afford a detective? She could try herself to find out more, but where would she begin? Tomkins was such an everyday name, not quite as ordinary as Smith, yet there must be thousands of Tomkins in the British Isles. Since she hadn’t the slightest idea what part of the country Dora or her family came from, it would be pointless trying to find out more.

The soup bubbled and rose to the top of the pan, and Polly only just whipped it off before it dribbled down the side of the saucepan. She poured it into a bowl, spread a thin layer of margarine on a slice of bread and, pushing aside her sketchbook and pencil, set the soup on the table.

She ate slowly, looking into the distance, not seeing her familiar surroundings, but a strange place, full of people she didn’t know. A world to which she was connected, but one where she had no presence or substance. She shook her head. Then she glanced at her wristwatch. Oh, Lord. Ten past eight, and she was supposed to meet Roger at twenty past, when he came off duty at the hospital. She gulped down the last of the soup, dumped the bowl and spoon in the basin, pulled on her mac, rammed her beret on to her head, picked up her shoulder bag and ran out of the room.

THREE

Dr Roger Harrington was waiting at the corner as Polly came panting up. Sturdy, good-looking, he had an air of competence and a cleft to a strong chin that betokened a firm if not obstinate nature. This evening there was a weary look about his eyes, not surprising when he’d been on duty for more than twelve hours.

‘Really, Polly, you must try to be more punctual,’ he said, as she put up her face for a kiss.

‘Sorry,’ said Polly.

‘I thought we’d go to the pictures, but we’ll have to buck up if we’re going to get there on time.’

Polly had to jog to keep up with him. ‘What’s on?’

‘We’re going to see The Mayor of Hell. James Cagney.’

Polly sat through the film with the action on screen barely registering in her mind. Somehow, that evening, she must tell Roger what she had discovered: that she wasn’t who he thought she was, that he was engaged to a woman who didn’t exist, and instead had attached himself to the illegitimate offspring of Thomasina and God knew who.

It was made worse by the fact that Roger, after the film was over — a film that he said he’d really enjoyed — was full of his latest medical interest. ‘Heredity is the key to everything,’ he was saying. ‘That’s what makes us what we are. There’s no getting away from it. Just like with racehorses, who your parents and your grandparents and great-grandparents are determine just who and what you are.’

‘I don’t know much about my grandparents,’ Polly began, seeing an opening.

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen photos of your father, a fine, upright man, and he died bravely, so he clearly had a good character. That’s what counts. And there’s nothing wrong with your mother, she’s healthy and reasonably intelligent. Hardworking, responsible, look what a good job she’s made of bringing you up single-handed, there’s no reason why you won’t be the same. And she’s artistic, and so are you. With her it’s music, with you it’s paint, but it’s all the same. Temperaments and choices are predetermined you see, by our genes.’

Polly wasn’t sure what genes were, and felt that she’d rather not know.

‘And here I am, a doctor and the son and grandson of doctors. It’s in my blood.’

Polly could see a number of objections to this. There was Shakespeare, the son of a glover, or had his father been a butcher? No literary genes there, unless his mother had been a poet in secret, but she had a suspicion that the female line didn’t count as much in Roger’s thinking as the male one. ‘What about someone like Leonardo da Vinci?’ she said, tucking her hand into his.

‘What’s he got to do with it?’

‘His parents weren’t artists. He was illegitimate, you know.’

They were under a streetlight, and Polly could see the frown on Roger’s firm brow.

‘Was he? That’s something that we, as a nation, are going to have to be very careful about, now that all this new stuff about heredity is being discovered. It’s too risky having children growing up who don’t know who their fathers were. Besides, the chances are that the children of a woman who isn’t married will inherit her lax morals, and will go the same way themselves.’

No, this wasn’t the moment to tell Roger about Polyhymnia Tomkins.

At Polly’s house, he took the key from her and opened the front door. Then he gave her a chaste kiss and walked briskly away. Polly stood for a moment in the doorway, watching his upright retreating back.

He never came up to her room with her in the evening. The only time he ventured there was in broad daylight, at teatime, and then he left the door open. ‘You don’t want to get a bad name with your landlady or your fellow lodgers,’ he told her.

What if he was right, like mother like daughter, and she was destined for a wild life of immorality instead of a safe marriage to a good man? Yet her life so far had hardly been characterized by sexual recklessness.

Polly’s first fling had been a minor one, a step taken in a spirit of determined curiosity with an older man, a friend of Oliver’s who had invited her into his bed when she was spending a weekend in the country, a bohemian household ruled over by a famous painter, where it seemed that bedroom doors opened and shut as a matter of course. He was an attractive man, but she hadn’t enjoyed the experience greatly, He had laughed at her and said that the worst was over, and once she lost her heart to a man, she would find sex exciting and ecstatic.

Then she met Jamie, a fellow artist, and she discovered that Oliver’s friend had known what he was talking about. Jamie; no, she wasn’t going to think about Jamie, brilliant, erratic, blissful in bed, funny — and, like so many of his contemporaries, with his soul scarred by four years of war that he’d been lucky to survive.

Polly pulled the pillow over her head to shut out her thoughts as well as the sounds of the dachsund on the other side of the street, who barked every night until his mistress came home, and she felt nothing but gladness that the day, a day which had held such astonishing revelations, was over.

Tomorrow, she would go first thing to Somerset House and get that damned birth certificate.

Polly Smith was a sound sleeper, oblivious to the world almost the moment her head touched the pillow.

Polyhymnia Tomkins, it seemed, was troubled with insomnia. Polly woke at four in the morning after several restless hours. She slid out of bed, pushing damp hair back from her forehead, why was she so hot? She drank a glass of water, and looked around for something to read, anything to take her mind off the thoughts that were driving round and round in her mind.

Her eye fell on her passport photo, clipped to the passport application form. It was waiting for the birth certificate, so that she could take it to the Passport Office in Petty France.

What was it that it said on the accompanying instructions? The photograph had to be signed by an MP, a JP, a solicitor, a member of the medical profession, a clergyman. Who had to declare, in solemn words, that the photograph was a true likeness of … of whom?

How could anyone declare that the photograph was a true likeness of Polyhymnia Tomkins, when no one in the whole wide world knew or had ever known Polyhymnia Tomkins?

She’d intended to go to her old school to ask the headmistress to sign it. How could she look Miss Murgatroyd in the eye and say, ‘Actually, I’m not Polly Smith, and the woman you knew all the years I was at school as my mother is no such thing. I’m her sister’s illegitimate daughter.’ Polly grew pale at the thought. Who could she ask to sign it? Could anyone sign it, given the circumstances? What would people think of Dora Smith if word got out that the girl everyone knew as her daughter was in fact her niece, father unknown?

The feeble grey light of a November dawn was spreading across the sky before Polly fell asleep again, and when the alarm clock went off with raucous enthusiasm, she felt as though she’d had no sleep at all.

Well, she might as well get the birth certificate, she told herself as she washed in the basin. After that she would have to tackle the problem of the photograph.

This time, she went alone to Somerset House. Last time — was it only yesterday? — she had gone with a light heart, a sense of being on her way to the excitement of going abroad. Oliver had been with her, now, on her own, she found the imposing eighteenth-century building had a sinister air to it.

She hoped, unreasonably, that there would be a different clerk on duty, but no, the woman who was sitting at the enquiry desk was the same one, grey hair twisted into a severe bun, grey eyes enlarged by the pince-nez, eyes that didn’t look at all kind this morning, but full of suspicion.

‘You were here yesterday,’ the clerk said accusingly.

‘I was, but it’s a different name I’m looking for now.’

Polly hoped she was speaking with calm self-assurance, but the woman’s eyes glinted with malicious understanding.

‘Not who you thought you were? We get that all the time. They say it’s a wise child who knows its own father, don’t they? If you’ve got the details right this time, you should have no trouble.’

She went back to the cards she was filling in.

Polly cleared her throat and waited.

The woman looked up. ‘Well?’ she said sharply.

‘You said yesterday that people born abroad weren’t in these books.’

‘Are you now saying you were born abroad? Are you sure you’re English?’

‘Quite sure.’

The woman banged her hand down on the bell on the corner of her desk, and after a short pause, a lugubrious individual in a brown linen coat appeared.

‘Mr Grier will show you where to go.’ And, to Mr Grier: ‘Foreign.’

She bent her head again, and Mr Grier looked at Polly. ‘Which country?’

‘France.’

‘This way.’

They went out of the big room with its serried ranks of ledgers and along a corridor, then out into the central square. ‘It’s in a different section,’ he said, pushing open a door and standing back to let her through. They went along another passage, and he stopped at a door with a single word written on it: ‘Miscellaneous’.

It was a small room, with more of the red bound ledgers, but only a handful of them compared to the room they had left. ‘France,’ he said, hauling a volume down and laying it on the high wooden stand, which stood against one wall in a narrow gap between the shelves. ‘Leave the volume here when you’ve finished, I’ll put it back.’

Miscellaneous. That was what she was, miscellaneous. Wasn’t there a famous aristocratic woman in the eighteenth century who’d had so many children by various fathers that they were given the surname Miscellany?

The book opened at the year 1920 — how few English people seemed to have been born in France. After the war, they would mostly have been diplomats’ children, she supposed. Perhaps, being so close to England, women preferred to come back home to give birth. She turned back the pages until she came to 1908. And there, halfway down the page, she found the entry. Polyhymnia Theodora Tomkins.

She had a middle name; Dora Smith had never mentioned that. Theodora, Dora’s own name. Perhaps the sisters hadn’t been quite so estranged, after all.

She copied the details on to one of the slips of paper provided in a wooden box on the stand, and retraced her steps to the main desk. She handed the slip to the clerk, signed the form, which was filled in with firm, clear letters, and wrote her address.

‘It should arrive within the week,’ the clerk said. ‘You want a short certificate, do you? I see.’

Polly felt her colour rising, she resented the clerk’s knowing look. A short certificate, proclaiming her illegitimacy to the world, was to be despised.

That’s that, she said aloud as she stepped out into the Strand. The first step had been taken to bring Polyhymnia Tomkins to life.

Perhaps as Polyhymnia she would turn out to be quite a different creature from her old self. Even if she were Polly Tomkins — and no one would use a name like Polyhymnia on an everyday basis, for heaven’s sake — a Polly Tomkins must be a different person from a Polly Smith.

Or was that so? If Polly Smith married a Mr Tomkins, would she be different from when she used her maiden name, was a Tomkins in essence different from a Smith? Would she become a different person when she was Polly Harrington?

Yes, she would be different, because she would be a wife, and in due course a mother.

The thought depressed her.

The last traces of the previous day’s fog had been blown away by the brisk westerly wind that brought instead gusts of rain sweeping across the city. People walked quickly, heads down, black umbrellas held aloft. Polly didn’t have an umbrella, she had given up on umbrellas a long time ago, since, unless it was raining and the brolly in her hand, she invariably left it somewhere. She turned up the collar of her mac and stood for a moment in a tobacconist’s doorway, out of the rain, while she decided what to do.

She could go back to her studio and work. No; the painting on her easel at the moment wasn’t coming out as she wanted it to, and it grew more unpleasing by the day. Figures on a street, but as Oliver remarked, it looked like the worst excesses of the industrial revolution, with gaunt figures against a backdrop of chimneys.

‘It’s London.’

‘Never. It’s undoubtedly some dreary northern street, you’ve caught the spirit of disillusion and hopelessness wonderfully well.’

‘It’s meant to be Russell Square in the rush hour.’

‘One day, Polly, you’ll find what you really want to paint, and it won’t be rat-coloured figures in a dismal landscape, no, nor those fetching but trivial book jackets you do for WH Smith. Nor touching up flower paintings in Rossetti’s workshop.’

‘The jackets and the flowers make me money.’

‘Of course, and even an artist must live, if only on eggs and soup. I daresay you could make an excellent career out of nothing but the book jackets; they have a charm which is, you don’t need me to tell you, quite lacking in your paintings.’

His words had stung Polly. No artist himself, he chose to find his company among artists, and was renowned for having an eye and an unerring instinct for putting his finger on the weakness in any artist’s work. And Polly, honest with herself, had to admit that her art was never going to please her or anyone else unless it changed dramatically.

Her friend, Fanny Powys, happy in her own work of silkscreen printing, had tried to cheer Polly up.

‘Oliver doesn’t bother to make his sharp remarks about painters he doesn’t think have any talent. If he’s polite, you know that artist’s a no-hoper.’

And Fanny should know, for it was at the private view of an exhibition of her prints that she had introduced Oliver to Polly. Polly, her attention entirely on a vigorous design taken from the whorls of oyster shells, had paid scant notice to the tall man who remained standing beside her.

‘It’s a matter of patterns,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes Fanny’s work different from most of her kind.’

And Polly had found herself drawn into a lively discussion about silkscreen printing, which led to wider topics of contemporary art. Polly was amazed that Oliver, who was, he had at once told her, not an artist, should have such an eye, such a quick appreciation of what artists such as Fanny were about.

‘I grew up surrounded by paintings and works of art,’ he explained. ‘My father is a collector, and very knowledgeable. He’s always been interested in the artists of the day as much as in past masters, and so I follow in his footsteps.’

Polly disagreed with Oliver about the work of several painters, and the argument was continued over supper at Bertorelli’s, the restaurant that was to become their favourite eating place.

Polly had taken an immediate liking to Oliver. ‘We are snip and snap,’ she explained to Fanny. ‘Oh, it’s not sex, although I suppose … No, it really isn’t. Affinity, that’s the word.’

‘A strange affinity,’ Fanny said drily. ‘Polly Smith and the Hon. Oliver.’

‘Hon.?’

‘His father’s a lord. Didn’t he tell you?’

Polly pondered on this piece of information. Did it make a difference? No, Oliver was Oliver. Of course he had another life, far removed from the impecunious day-to-day existence of artists like herself. Yet he was, in his way, one of them. ‘He’s a friend,’ she told Fanny. ‘We like one another’s company. Our minds are in harmony. That’s enough for me, his being an Hon. is neither here nor there.’

A man in a dark coat said, ‘Excuse me,’ in affronted tones, as though Polly were standing there with the express intention of keeping him from his tobacco, and she moved out of the way, back into the full force of the wind and the rain.

She made up her mind. She would go back to Highgate, and consult Ma about the passport photograph. Maybe she could suggest who could sign it for her.

Dora was at her piano; even on her busiest days, she never did less than two hours’ practice. In the kitchen, Mrs Babbit, the char, was singing loudly to herself as she turned out a cupboard.

‘How can you play with that noise going on?’ Polly said, as she always did.

‘Focus,’ said Dora, as she always did. Polly, somewhat hesitantly, because she didn’t want to sound accusatory, explained her problem.

‘I never thought of that.’

‘If I’m illegitimate, which I am, then that’s a fact, and there’s no point denying it,’ Polly said.

‘And no need to go broadcasting it from the rooftops, either. I’ve protected you from that all these years.’

‘And it wouldn’t be good for you if word got around. I don’t live here any more, but you do. I’ve been racking my brains, but I simply don’t know these professional kind of people, except the vicar here, and Miss Murgatroyd.’

‘It’ll have to be Dr Parker,’ Dora said. ‘He knows you aren’t my daughter, and he’ll sign it for you.’

‘You told him?’

‘When Ted and I were still hoping for children. He’s never said a word to anyone all these years, he won’t say a word now. Go along right away, and you may catch him before he sets off on his rounds.’

Polly arrived at the doctor’s house just as he was putting his medical bag into his black Wolseley. As she called out to him, he looked up with the long-suffering expression of a doctor trying to get away, but he smiled when he saw who it was.

‘I thought you were another patient.’

‘Well, I am, I suppose, but I’m not ill. I’m never ill.’

‘So what can I do for you?’

‘It’s a photograph, for a passport. It needs a signature. I thought … Ma said …’

Dr Parker was suddenly alert, and he drew his bushy brows together. ‘Passport, eh? So Dora’s had to come clean at last, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

He ran his eyes down the form. ‘I’ve done this often enough before.’ He opened the car door. ‘Can’t do this standing in the rain.’

The car smelled musty and leathery. Comforting, somehow. He rested the photo on the steering wheel and took a fat black fountain pen out of his inside pocket. He unscrewed the cap and turned the photo over. ‘Read out the exact words, Polly, and then you can tell me who you are.’

‘Polyhymnia Tomkins, I’m afraid.’

‘Good God. Let’s hope I can spell Polyhymnia.’

‘P-O,’ began Polly.

‘It’s all right, I can remember enough of my classical education to cope with that. One of the muses, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Tomkins was Dora’s maiden name. You’re her sister’s child.’ And then, catching sight of the bleak look on Polly’s face. ‘Cheer up, young lady. As a doctor, I could tell you, if I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut, how many people even in this small part of London aren’t quite what or who they think or say they are.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Daughters who are actually granddaughters, sons who were born a year after their named fathers went away to the war, married couples who never went before a priest or a registrar. Your secret’s perfectly safe with me, Polly. Besides, you’ll soon be Mrs Harrington, and no one will know or care what your name was before that.’

‘No,’ said Polly, as he wrote on the back of the second photograph and handed it back to her.

‘Tuck those away safely, or the ink will run in the wet and it’ll be all to do again. Are you going abroad for your honeymoon?’

‘Roger likes mountains, so it’s to be the Alps.’

‘The mountain air will do you good, bring some colour back to your cheeks. As your medical man, I can tell you that you’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘I don’t like the winter. And I’m not sure about mountains. It’ll be cold.’

‘But bright.’

The birth certificate arrived in a brown envelope, stamped OHMS. Polly hesitated, then pulled it out and read it. Brief was the word. Name, place of birth. She would go today to the Passport Office; if she put it off, she might never do it, but once she’d handed over the form and the photographs and the birth certificate, it would be out of her hands.

What would Roger say when he asked for the birth certificate? Would he ask why she didn’t have a full one? Could she pretend she asked for a short one because it cost less? That wouldn’t be quite honest, she must pluck up her courage and tell him the truth about her parentage.

With this uncomfortable thought in her mind, Polly went off to Petty France, to wait on a hard wooden bench before being called up to show her papers, hand in the forms and address an envelope to herself. The passport arrived three days later, dark blue, embossed in gold with the royal coat of arms, and filled with stiff empty pages.

And there, written in an official hand was her new identity, Polyhymnia Theodora Tomkins. Born Paris, May 1, 1908.

FOUR

As a child, and indeed until she left her home in Highgate, Polly had disliked Sundays. Not because the Smiths were tyrannical Sabbath-keepers, but because of the general dreariness of the day. Almost, she wished Dora had been a churchgoer, since friends and neighbours who did attend divine service on Sunday mornings seemed to enjoy their day much more than the Smiths did.

Dora, however, was an agnostic. ‘I’m not saying there is or isn’t a God,’ she told Polly. ‘That’s for everyone to decide for him or herself. On balance, I’d say there’s more to life than what we can see, music is proof of that.’ Dora had a fine contralto voice, and sang with the London Bach Choir; they had just given a performance of the St John Passion, ‘And I defy anyone to listen to Bach and not be touched by a greater spirit. One thing I’m certain of, which is that any God there happens to be isn’t in attendance at St Jude’s on a regular basis at eleven o’clock on Sunday mornings. Nor at any other time. I shouldn’t have any respect for a deity who chose to be in that place in that company.’

So Dora spent Sundays catching up with herself, as she put it. She took in a Sunday paper, which she read in the morning. In the afternoon, she listened to the wireless and did some mending. In the evening, she usually went round to the Mortimers at number 19, to play cards. All of which, to the young Polly, spelled boredom. Sunday was a tedious day, twice as long as any other day of the week, a day when she felt caged and confined. By Sunday evening, she was longing for the day to be over and for Monday to come.

Once she had left Bingley Street, Polly’s Sundays improved. She often spent the day with friends, discussing Life and Art, and, in good weather, going on the river or borrowing a bicycle and going for long rides into the country. On Sunday evenings, there was always a group of convivial souls gathered at one or other of the pubs they patronized.

All that changed once more when she met Roger. In fact, her more cynical friends claimed that it was because of Sundays that she had got engaged to Roger. Roger was at his best on Sundays, more relaxed, warmer, his mind not so engaged with his work. However, he was still a punctual man, Sunday or no Sunday, and Polly cursed when she looked at the clock and saw the time. Twenty-five past ten. That was the penalty for idling in bed, but on a winter morning it took a lot of effort to leave the warm covers and get dressed in a room so cold that the windows were still frosted over halfway through the morning.

Damn, there was a hole in her lisle stockings. Would it show? Yes, it would. She had approximately five minutes before Roger would draw up outside the house and give three short blasts on his horn, expecting the front door to open at once.

Too bad, he’d have to wait. She found her sewing kit, and with the stocking still on her leg, cobbled the edges of the hole together. It didn’t look good, but it was better than a patch of bare leg showing through. Toot, toot, toot. There was Roger. She dragged a comb through her hair; she had slept on a lock which now jutted out at a strange angle, well, it couldn’t be helped. She tucked her hair up into her beret, grabbed her handbag, and hurried down the stairs.

Roger was standing beside his MG, looking at his watch. ‘Really, Polly, I don’t know why you can never be ready on time.’

‘Good morning, Roger,’ she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. He held the car door open for her and she got in. ‘I found a hole in my stockings, I had to mend it, imagine what your mother would think.’

He glanced down at her leg. ‘Those are terrible stockings, anyhow, why don’t you get yourself some decent ones?’

‘I’m broke.’

‘I don’t know what you do with your money, you never have a penny.’

‘I don’t have many pennies to start with.’

‘When we’re married, I’ll give you an allowance, but you’ll have to keep track of where it goes, keep accounts and so on.’

The sun had straggled out after days of greyness, and Polly felt too cheerful to let the thought of keeping accounts daunt her. ‘I expect I’ll manage. And I’ll have my money from the workshop as well, besides what I earn from …’

‘The workshop?’ said Roger, accelerating with a throaty roar of the car engine. ‘Certainly not. I can’t have my wife going out to work, let alone in a place like that.’

Now the sun seemed much less bright. ‘But Roger …’

‘No buts, Polly.’ He turned his head and gave her a warm smile, that particular smile was one of his most likeable features. ‘Come on, Polly, you know it isn’t the thing. Not for a doctor’s wife. Of course you must keep up with your art, do those book jackets and so on, and you said you were hoping to get some illustrations to do, that’ll bring you in a bit of pin money. That’s quite different from going out to work at that place. If you want to fill in your time to some purpose, I’m sure we could find you a suitable position at the hospital, at the welfare section, perhaps.’

There were, Polly realized with a sense of apprehension, a lot of things she and Roger had never talked about. Not because he found it difficult, but because he didn’t think there was anything to discuss. So much for Roger’s vaunted socialism, so much for equality. The Rogers of this world were a great deal more equal than the Pollys, that was the fact of the matter.

Roger took a sharp corner with a screech, and Polly clung on to the door. Behind the wheel of his car, Roger changed from a sensible, almost cautious man into a daredevil; thank goodness on a Sunday morning there wasn’t much traffic about. ‘I don’t want to give up my work.’

‘Polly, be reasonable. You’ll be starting a new life, you’ll be a new person, Mrs Roger Harrington. It wouldn’t be at all suitable for you to carry on — it’s not really the kind of job that — well, it isn’t suitable, that’s all. Besides, we’ll want to have children, a baby will put a stop to all that kind of thing.’

Roger hadn’t been impressed by the workshop on the one occasion he had been there. He’d come to pick up Polly, and Sam, spying him in the yard below, had called to Polly that her young man was here, and shouted to him to come up.

Roger hadn’t taken to Sam — ‘What an extraordinary young man, I’m not sure it’s quite the thing, Polly, you working up there alone with him.’

Sam hadn’t been any more flattering about Roger. ‘Can’t you do better than that, Polly? Look at his mouth, he’s quite handsome now, but that’s going to get more and more rigid as the years go by. I smell a disapproving man, you want to watch out, it’ll be disastrous getting hitched to a man who disapproves.’

‘What rubbish you do talk,’ Polly had said, annoyed, but then, at Roger’s remarks, she had had to swallow her amazed laughter. ‘I’m perfectly safe with Sam, I assure you. And mostly Mr Padgett’s there as well, and other assistants who come and go. Honestly, what do you imagine? Wild lust among the paint tubes and the canvases?’

‘I do wish you wouldn’t say things like that.’

Polly usually found Roger’s prim ways rather endearing, but this time it annoyed her. ‘Oh, Roger, can’t you see at a glance that Sam’s as queer as a square button?’

‘No, I cannot, and I don’t like to think that you could. Do you realize what you’re saying? Do you realize that it’s a criminal offence? Never mind. I put it down to naivety. As a medical man I have some understanding of such people, but it’s wholly inappropriate for you to make such remarks, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She wasn’t going to argue, not now, not this morning, and here they were, in Bryanston Square, and there was Roger’s sister, Alice, waving at them from behind the wrought-iron railings of the first-floor balcony.

Roger screeched to a halt in front of the large terraced house, and went round to open Polly’s door. The front door of the house was already open, and Dr Harrington, Roger’s father, came down the shallow steps, smiling a welcome. ‘Come in, my dear, come in, you must be freezing, driving in that open car of Roger’s, really, it’s high time he bought a saloon.’

And up the stairs to the drawing room, where one of the other Drs Harrington, Roger’s mother, sat in a comfortable chair with her youngest grandchild on her lap, looking pleased, and telling Alice to ring for Foster to bring fresh coffee.

Polly let out a sigh of pure pleasure. The Harrington family were, to her, like something out of a book: read about, dreamed about, but known not to exist outside the pages of a story. But they did exist, here they were, and what was even more wonderful, she was part of the family, or soon would be.

The drawing room was large, with tall sash windows that looked out over the green garden of the square. It had a formal marble fireplace in which a substantial fire was blazing. Everything in the room that could shine, shone: the brass fire surround, the window panes, the large mirror on the wall, the polished surfaces of the tables.

Roger had an older brother, Edward, another Dr Harrington, a rising man in his field of eye surgery, who was married to Celia, herself the daughter of a distinguished consultant. She was a qualified pharmacist, and an asset to her husband. Alice was Roger’s younger sister, still a schoolgirl, she rather frightened Polly with her ferocious personality, and it always surprised her when Alice expressed admiration for her calling as an artist.

‘It’s a vocation, isn’t it? Just like my family think medicine is. I mean, you have to do it, whether you want to or not,’ she had said to Polly the first time Roger had brought her home to meet his family. ‘Writers are the same, they get twitchy if they don’t write. Does Roger understand that, I wonder?’

Celia came and sat on the sofa opposite Polly. Polly braced herself, for although Celia was always kind and polite, Polly knew quite well that Celia felt it her duty to fill Polly in on various matters of life that would be important for any woman married to a Harrington. ‘You’ve had your hair cut, I see,’ was her opening gambit.

No, strictly speaking that wasn’t true. Polly had cut her own hair. Thick, straight and heavy, she trimmed it into an approximation of a bob, leaving it long enough to pin up if she wanted it out of the way.

‘I can recommend my hairdresser, Miss Lilian, at the Westbury Salon.’

‘Thank you,’ said Polly, hating the sound of Miss Lois, but having to admit to herself that Celia’s sleek cut was a delight.

Lunch was announced, and they went downstairs to the dining room, a handsome panelled room on the ground floor, with portraits of earlier Harringtons looking benignly down from the walls.

Sunday lunch at the Harringtons was always the same. Soup, a joint and a pie.

Always plentiful, always beautifully cooked, always delicious. Today it was a thick leek and potato soup, followed by roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, with roast potatoes, buttered parsnips and cabbage.

Edward turned to Polly as she was about to take a mouthful of Yorkshire pudding smothered in rich gravy.

‘Have you and Roger settled the day yet? January’s not far away now. Then off to the Alps, how I envy you.’

Roger wiped his mouth and laid his napkin beside his plate. ‘Slight change of plan, actually,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Polly, I’d meant to tell you before, but I thought I might as well tell everyone at the same time. I only heard on Friday. The fact is, I’ve been offered a chance to go to America — you remember, Father, I told you I might apply for one of the Leadenhall Awards? Well, I’ve got it.’

A minor uproar broke out around the table, with mingled congratulations and questions. A success for any one of the Harringtons was felt by them to reflect well on the whole clan.

‘What does it entail?’ Dr Harrington senior asked.

‘I get six weeks in Boston, all expenses paid, and a chance to work with some of the top men in the field.’

Polly said nothing. Alice too was silent, and she looked directly at Polly. ‘You don’t mind a bit, do you?’ she said in a soft voice.

‘No,’ Polly whispered back.

‘I am sorry, old thing,’ Roger was saying to her. ‘I didn’t tell you I’d even applied, because of course I never expected to get a scholarship, the competition’s fierce.’

‘Why don’t you get married at once and go to America for your honeymoon?’ said Celia brightly.

Polly looked at Roger, alarmed. Of course, she’d love to go to America, but …

‘Impossible, I’m afraid. It’s definitely just me, there’s no provision for wives. You won’t mind, Polly, will you? After all, since we’ve been engaged for more than a year, two or three more months are neither here nor there.’

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Polly murmured, trying to hide her relief. For goodness sake, what was the matter with her? She was genuinely fond of Roger, if not exactly passionately in love; he represented stability, security, safety, and when she was married, she would acquire what she’d never had: a family. A brother and a sister, and Dr Harrington the father she didn’t have. If Roger’s mother was a trifle too austere to count as the maternal type, well, she had a mother of her own. Two, in fact. Quite enough for anyone.

That brought her up short. Could it be that Polly Smith, daughter of Ted and Dora Smith, was perfectly ready to marry Roger, but that Polyhymnia Tomkins, daughter of Thomasina Tomkins, would rather marry quite a different sort of person — or not get married at all?

At least this meant that she could postpone the day when she had to come clean to Roger — and to his family, he shared everything with his family — about who she really was. How would they react when she revealed that, instead of being the daughter of respectable people, not on a par with the Harringtons as to background and wealth, of course, but just about acceptable, she was illegitimate? What would they say to a bastard in the family? Dr Harrington liked to think of himself as broad-minded, but Polly had an idea that Roger’s mother might have been happier if Roger had become engaged to another Celia.

Polly had never subscribed to the school of getting unpleasant things over with; she always lived in hope that if you put off what was disagreeable, it might go away, and she had found this was often the case.

‘When do you go?’ Mrs Harrington was asking Roger, and Polly knew she was thinking of suitable clothes and packing. ‘Isn’t Boston terribly cold in the winter? Did you order a new overcoat? Will it be ready in time?’

‘I sail on Saturday. On the United States.’

Should she be wrinkling her brow and worrying about whether Roger would have enough warm socks? Polly asked herself. Bother socks, let him worry about them himself.

‘I’ll be back by the end of January, so we can get married in February. Which reminds me, you’ll need a passport.’

‘I got it,’ said Polly. Oh, God, Polyhymnia Tomkins; surely her duplicity, her new identity must show in her face; go away, Polyhymnia Tomkins, she said inwardly; you aren’t wanted in Bryanston Square.

Roger raised his eyebrows to heaven. ‘I know what you’ve done, you’ve got one in the wrong name.’

‘What?’ Polly said, her voice squeaky, how did he know?

‘You’ve got a passport in your maiden name, haven’t you? Whereas you need one in your married name. What a nuisance, but you can turn it in and I’ll put you on mine. I thought it would be advisable for you to have one for yourself, in case we have to travel separately at any time, but I don’t suppose that will ever arise. Meanwhile, you’d better give it to me, I’ll see to it, and I don’t think that room of yours is a safe place to keep valuables.’

‘I left it at home. In Highgate. With my mother,’ Polly said swiftly and untruthfully, shocked at how easily the lie sprang to her lips. She dug her spoon into the apple pie which had been set in front of her. It was covered in clotted cream sent up from Devon, where the Harrington family came from and had a holiday house, and she rolled the food around in her mouth, barely able to swallow it.

‘A walk in the park?’ Dr Harrington suggested when they had had coffee upstairs in the drawing room. The walk was part of the ritual, and today Polly, sleepy and disturbed, was more than willing to get out of the house and walk herself back into a good humour.

The park in question was Regent’s Park, looking rather forlorn in the fading light of a winter’s day. Polly linked arms with Roger, and Celia walked on her other side, talking across her to Roger about Alice. ‘I’m pleased to see her take her school work seriously. She needs to buckle down to her books and really apply herself if she’s going to get a place to study medicine.’

Roger nodded.

‘Does she want to be a doctor?’ Polly asked.

Celia had a particular laugh which had nothing to do with mirth. She laughed now. ‘Of course she wants to be a doctor. She’s a Harrington. She’s lucky, she’s got the brains for it, and of course the family will help her get a place, only she must get good results in her exams. Women can’t get in on rugger and good humour, they have to be twice as good as the men on the academic side.’

‘What would she do if she weren’t a Harrington?’

‘Don’t be tiresome, Polly,’ said Roger. ‘She is a Harrington, it’s irrelevant.’ And then, with a flash of irritation, ‘I suppose she’s been going on to you about how she wants to be an actress. It’s nonsense, childish fantasy, there’s no question of it. Wanting to go on the stage, I ask you!’

A chill came over Polly that was unconnected with the icy wind that had sprung up and was blowing the last leaves of autumn across the path. A squirrel ran down a tree, and sat upright, looking at them with beady eyes before springing away.

‘Does Alice have no say?’

Roger looked at her in surprise. They were much of a height, for he wasn’t a tall man, and Polly was tall for a woman. ‘A say? Of course she has a say. She has plenty of say, it’s impossible to shut her up.’

‘No, a say about being an actress.’

‘I’ve told you, it’s just a silly idea she has. She’ll grow out of it. She’s got too much sense and too good a brain to go in for anything so foolish.’ Roger put his arm round her waist and gave her a squeeze.

‘If we had a daughter, wouldn’t you let her do what she wanted?’ Polly said, looking at the ground as she walked.

‘Parents know what’s best for their children, and I’d hope that any daughter of ours would be too sensible not to want a decent profession, at least until she married, and medicine, if a woman chooses the right field, general practice or paediatrics, can be combined with marriage and even motherhood. Don’t worry about Alice, Polly. She’ll want to be a dancer or some such rubbish next week, and I dare say a balloon pilot the week after. You know how girls are at that age, all this acting business is just a passing fad.’

Polly remembered how she was at that age, absorbed in her painting and drawing, fascinated by colour and line and perspective, spending all her spare time in galleries or looking at pictures and sculptures in books, intoxicated by the beckoning world of the artist.

Polly had got engaged to Roger on the way home from a Sunday spent with his family. Warm and secure, she had wrapped herself in Roger’s embrace, welcoming the tweedy solidity of his arms, the lingering scent of pipe tobacco. Now she suddenly felt she was looking at him and his family as though through a shattered pane of glass, with the tranquillity and security distorted and broken into a thousand pieces.

FIVE

‘Happy families! You’ve too much sense to be taken in by a happy family,’ Oliver said to Polly that evening, as they sat side by side on a settle covered in faded red velvet in the Nag’s Head. Polly, who had drunk two glasses of burgundy at lunch, was drinking lemonade, while Oliver had a whisky and soda. It was quiet, on a cold Sunday night. A fire burned in the old-fashioned grate, and the pub cat, a large ginger tom, was curled up on the chair opposite.

Oliver had come round with uncannily good timing, to find Polly sitting on her bed in something like despair.

‘Come on, Polly, it’s not like you to be down. What’s amiss? No, don’t tell me. Put on your coat and hat, and we’ll go for a drink. Then we can share our tales of sorrow.’

Polly looked gloomily into her glass of lemonade. ‘It’s just that life’s a bit fraught at the moment,’ she said finally. ‘Why share our sorrows? What’s up with you?’

Oliver was an equable man, who took life lightly, often amused, sometimes sarcastic, inclined to be free with his tongue and opinions, but always in a slightly detached way.

I feel closer to him than I do to Roger, Polly said to herself. Roger’s a fiancé and a lover, but he isn’t a friend. I don’t think he ever will be a friend.

‘Bertram — well, Bertram and I are washed up, that’s all,’ said Oliver. He took a big swig of his drink. ‘I think I need another one of these.’ He got up and went over to the bar and sat down again. ‘Sorry, Polly. I don’t think you need to hear about other people’s problems.’

‘You aren’t other people,’ said Polly.

Polly had discovered that Oliver was a homosexual by the merest chance; that is, she had gone to his flat, at his request, and had found him in bed with a man. Both of them naked, Oliver’s friend severely embarrassed, snatching up the cover to conceal himself, Oliver stark naked and still aroused, laughing at her expression as she tried to back out of the door.

‘Oh, come in, Polly, and don’t be missish. Bertram, come out from under that sheet, for Christ’s sake. This is Polly, not the police come about the vice.’

He had lazily put on a silk dressing gown. ‘I quite forgot I asked you to bring those prints round, Polly.’

Bertram, his face scarlet, came out of the bedroom tucking his shirt into his trousers. ‘For Christ’s sake, Oliver.’

‘Polly, this is Bertram. An old, and as you can see, a very close friend. We were at school together. A long time ago, but affections can linger. Now, don’t get worked up, Bertram. One thing about Polly here is that she is utterly discreet and completely trustworthy. There are few people I would trust not to spread this delicious piece of scandal around London, and lucky for us, Polly is one of them.’

Polly sat down on Oliver’s elegant sofa with a thump. ‘I’m so sorry. What an awful thing to do. I didn’t realize …’

‘Is it so much worse than finding me in bed with a woman? Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘You do understand, don’t you?’ Bertram said, sitting down on the matching sofa opposite and gazing solemnly at Polly. ‘You do understand that if this ever got out — well, it mustn’t for both our sakes. Oliver simply can’t take any risks, not after—’

A warning look from Oliver silenced him for a moment. ‘Well, I won’t go into the reasons. And as for me, no one has any idea. That I — that I’m … You do see, don’t you?’

Polly did. Some queers weren’t bothered one way or the other, such as Sam, who was quite open about his inclinations. That worried her, because you read in the papers about people, even famous people, being had up for accosting other men.

‘It’s a private affair,’ said Oliver, watching her. ‘Not like picking up guardsmen or boys in the park, you know. Think of us as a couple, but a couple who have to keep their relationship secret.’

‘If my family ever knew …’ said Bertram. He took out a silk handkerchief and passed it across his brow. He was a good-looking man, with light brown wavy hair and deep, dark blue eyes. He smiled at her, his face relaxing for the first time, and she smiled back.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world, but your secret’s perfectly safe with me. Truly it is.’

She rose, wanting to get away.

There had been a time, when she first met Oliver, when she might well have fallen in love with him. She had never felt such a rapport with a man; she felt utterly at ease in his company, even when she barely knew him.

And now Oliver had lost Bertram? ‘That’s dreadful, Oliver.’

His mouth trembled, and he bit his lip to control it. ‘It is, rather. When you love someone as much as I do Bertram, one can’t imagine life without him.’

‘But why? Has he found someone else?’

‘He’s getting married,’ Oliver said flatly. ‘He’s decided to put what he calls “all this” behind him, and he’s marrying a nice girl. A friend of his family. Suitable in every way. His family are thrilled. He wants me to be best man.’

‘He wants you — oh, Oliver, no! He can’t ask that of you.’

‘It seems he can. However, since he’s getting married next month, and I plan to be in France for the whole of January, he will have to look elsewhere for a best man.’

‘You sound bitter. I’m not surprised.’

‘No, I’m not bitter. In a way, I always knew it would end like this. Bertram has never liked the cloak and dagger side of such a friendship, the secrecy, the effort to keep it all hidden. Some of us thrive on it, he doesn’t. He yearns to be respectable, like everyone else. Sad to say, he has an essentially bourgeois nature.’

‘But if — if he’s the way he is, how can he marry? The poor girl, she doesn’t know about you and him?’

‘Good heavens, no. I don’t suppose she even knows that such relationships exist. No, she doesn’t know, and Bertram is definitely not going to tell her. He’s going to walk down the aisle with his radiant bride on his arm, and from then on, he’ll be a normal man. He wants children, of course. That’s a strong pull. That’s one thing we can’t give each other. Oh, hell, Polly, why is love so beastly? You’re so fortunate, with your staid Roger and the whole world beaming approval, you don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘I thought so, but I’m not so sure.’

‘Lovers’ tiff?’

Polly pulled a face. ‘Can you imagine having a lovers’ tiff with Roger? Arguing with him is like disagreeing with a brick. No, it’s just that I saw a side of him today that I didn’t know about, and I didn’t care for it much. He’s going to America, sailing at the weekend. To spend time with American doctors in Boston.’

‘Is he? How long for? I thought you were all lined up for a wedding in the new year.’

‘Not any more. It has to be postponed until he gets back, sometime in February.’

‘And you aren’t upset?’

‘No, not at all. I don’t mind being engaged, there’s a comfort in it, and I’m happy enough when I’m with Roger. But marriage is a bit of a step.’ Polly twisted her glass round in her hands. ‘He maintains I can’t go on working once we’re married. In fact, I think he expects me to give up my painting altogether. Which is all a bit of a wrench, I like what I do at the workshop.’

‘I saw that coming, even if you didn’t,’ said Oliver. ‘You do sound dreary, ducks. All this and the art not going too well.’

‘Don’t say that!’ said Polly, roused out of her glumness by his unexpected attack.

‘My dear Polly, your paintings are getting smaller and dingier by the week. Whoever is going to buy them? They’re technically very good, but if you go on the way you are, you’ll end up painting miniatures.’

‘Canvases of a decent size cost money.’

‘Come on, that’s not the reason, and you know it. Life’s boxing you in, that’s what’s happening to you. Time to burst out, Polly my dear.’

‘Do you think one can do that? Change one’s life? Leave the old one behind like a snake shedding its skin? I don’t. I think however hard you tried, you’d still be the same old snake, hissing and coiling in the same old way. Even if you did have a shiny new shape, all green and gold and glistening …’ The snake was there, in her mind’s eye, or perhaps green and gold was more appropriate for a dragon. The creature morphed instantly into a beast with snorting, fiery breath and huge wings, and Polly laughed.

‘That’s better,’ Oliver said. ‘I’ve an idea. Come and spend a few weeks at my father’s house in Cap Rodoard, in the south of France, where the light will dazzle your eyes, even in the depths of winter. It’s a strange place, my father’s house, but there’s quite a community of artists in the village, plenty of kindred spirits for you. I think the dim dreariness of a bad London winter is seeping into your soul. Over there you can throw open the shutters in the morning, and there’s the sun pouring in to lighten your life. Palm trees outside the window, colour everywhere to lighten your darkness.’

His father’s house. Oliver never spoke about his family, he might have been an orphan or one of ten children for all Polly knew. ‘Does your father spend much time in France?’

‘He lives there.’

‘Why? Doesn’t he like England? Or is he French?’

Oliver looked amused. ‘Good Lord, no. As English as they come, bad barons going back through the centuries.’

‘So why France?’

Oliver went quiet, then lifted his glass and finished his whisky. ‘He prefers it,’ he said.

‘Do you have other family over there? Is your mother …?’

‘My sister might be out there for the winter, with or without her husband, but she needn’t bother you.’

Polly sighed. ‘It’s kind of you to ask, Oliver, and I should love to go to France, but it’s impossible.’

Polly had suggested to Roger that they go to France for their honeymoon, Paris, she said, thinking of that city so redolent of artists, of galleries crammed with wonderful paintings, of la vie bohème. Then they could go down to the south for a few days, perhaps …

Roger had shaken his head. ‘I don’t care for France, and you wouldn’t like the south of France, it’s a frivolous place, if you mean the Riviera. No, mountains are better. Lots of clean, good air, and I might get some climbing in. Switzerland might be best, or Austria.’

‘Why impossible?’ said Oliver.

‘Oh, too expensive, and no, before you offer, I won’t let you fund me, and no, you don’t want to buy one of my pictures. Come on, Oliver, you and I have always been honest with one another.’

‘Have we?’ said Oliver. ‘I suppose so.’

One says these things, Polly told herself. But it isn’t true. Oliver keeps most of his life to himself, I only ever get a glimpse here and there, when he comes out of his own world to come visiting in mine. And what about me? I haven’t told him about Polyhymnia, and I don’t know why not.

‘Besides, Roger wouldn’t care for my going. I’ve got to consider his feelings.’

‘Surely he isn’t jealous of me?’

‘No, but …’ Polly didn’t want to tell Oliver that Roger disapproved of her friendship with him. He probably knew it already. Was that something else that would be cut out of her life, once she was Mrs Harrington? No, it wasn’t. Her days would be her own, Roger couldn’t keep tabs on her for every hour of the day, she wasn’t entering a harem, for heaven’s sake.

‘Live a little, before you get shackled for the rest of your life, I can’t see a woman like you ever leaving her husband. Shake the savings out of the piggy bank, and splurge it all on a ticket. Away with the gloom of an English winter, a month in the sun, what could be better for you? Bring some colour back into your cheeks.’

His words echoed those of Dr Parker, was she really so pallid? ‘I don’t believe it’s sunny anywhere in January. I bet it rains there too.’

‘Oh, it does, and snow has even been known to fall, every twenty years or so, but mostly it’s far warmer, and always brighter. It’s the light, Polly, that’s why artists love the south of France. Now, finish your lemonade, and I’ll take you to Bertorelli’s for supper.’

‘I had a huge lunch.’

‘Yes, but emotion is very draining, you need to keep your strength up.’

He said goodbye to the luscious Irene, the bosomy barmaid who presided over the bar at the Nag’s Head, and they went outside.

‘Touch of frost, tonight,’ said Oliver. He lifted his hand as a cab came in sight, and opened the door for Polly.

Sitting in the dark, slightly smelly interior, Polly asked, ‘How much does it cost to get to France? Oh, I suppose that’s a silly question. You’d travel first class.’

‘Third class would be about ten pounds,’ Oliver said. ‘Having second thoughts?’

‘I haven’t got ten pounds,’ Polly said regretfully. ‘Having ten shillings to spare at the end of the week would be a minor miracle.’

‘Get some more of those book jackets you do.’

‘And there’s my work in Lion Yard to consider. I don’t want Mr Padgett finding someone else to take my place.’

‘It seems that you’ll have to give it up in any case, so why not a month sooner?’

‘No, Oliver. It’s tempting, but I can’t come, and that’s that.’

SIX

Max Lytton arrived at the Feathers Inn before Inspector Pritchard. It was an old-fashioned pub, not so very different from when it was built in the seventeenth century, with its polished wooden boards and a warren of narrow passages and staircases that led into unexpected rooms or out into one of its several yards. It had been a haunt of highwaymen in its heyday, and it was easy to imagine booted and cloaked men lurking in dark corners or in the cobbled courtyard, where the stables had been turned into a bar.

Max went into the downstairs dining room, a discreet place, with the tables set against the walls and screened by high-backed wooden seats. A perfect place for private conversation, which was what Max wanted. A log fire burned in the wide stone fireplace, and there was sawdust on the floor. He found an empty table and sat down with a tankard of the pub’s famous ale.

‘I’m waiting for a friend,’ he said to the waiter who was hovering to take his order, and as he spoke, he saw Pritchard standing at the door. Pritchard hesitated, looking round and then, as Max rose, lifted a hand in greeting and came over to join him.

A pint of bitter was brought for Inspector Pritchard, and the waiter came back to take their order. He could recommend a cut off the joint of Welsh lamb, excellent today or, of course, there was the inn’s renowned steak and kidney pudding.

‘They make it in the traditional way, with oysters,’ Max told Pritchard.

‘I’m not a great man for shellfish,’ Pritchard said in his lilting Welsh voice. ‘I’ll have the lamb, since it comes from my country, and our sheep are the best in the kingdom.’

The waiter went away, and the two men regarded one another in silence. They had met two years before, when Inspector Pritchard was a detective sergeant, hoping for promotion. He had been working on a murder case, and Max, obtaining information that the police had no access to, had passed it on to the eager policeman. The case had been solved, a very unpleasant criminal brought to justice, and Pritchard had got his promotion.

‘I take it this is a professional meeting,’ said Max.

Pritchard’s soft brown eyes were guileless, but Max knew better than to take the look of sleepy indifference at face value. Pritchard was a wily man, who possessed a strong moral sense coupled with a healthy cynicism as to the essential evil dwelling within his fellow beings.

‘Professional, yes, but a matter best not tackled through the usual channels, do you see?’

‘Unofficial business? That doesn’t sound like your outfit.’

‘Not precisely unofficial, just best if the details are kept between the two of us. You have your masters and I have mine. And yours are happy for me to talk to you about this. They, too, want to keep it unofficial for the time being.’

To his friends and relatives and to the closed world of London society, Max Lytton was no more than a man about town. An attractive man, surprisingly still a bachelor, despite the best efforts of debs and their mamas. He came from an old family, had considerable private means — a fortune inherited from a great aunt had come as a surprise to a younger son and a source of discontent to his father and older brothers. Because of this, he could live the life he wanted; a life to which his father took endless exception. ‘Didn’t fight for your country in the war, now you live an idle life, of no value to yourself nor anybody else. We weren’t put upon this earth to be comfortable, but to leave it a better place, I don’t see you doing that.’

Max knew there was no point in remonstrating or arguing with his father, who knew perfectly well that it was lameness from a childhood dose of polio that had prevented him being butchered in the trenches. The fact that he had spent a hardworking and successful war in Military Intelligence meant nothing to his father, a retired general. ‘Desk job, waste of time, the place for cowards and men too old or effeminate to fight.’

Nor did his father have any idea that he had been one of the few men from his department kept on after the war ended, when the intelligence services were largely wound up, with the remnants tucked away in a forgotten corner of Whitehall, starved of funds. Although recently, things had begun to change, the situation in Russia was ringing alarm bells, and to the knowledgeable men who had experience of Germany, so were the repercussions of the Treaty of Versailles.

‘Excuse me, sir.’ The waiter put plates down in front of them, and then returned with a steaming pie which he set in front of Max. Another waiter arrived with a trolley, to cut thick slices of the succulent lamb for Pritchard. Dishes of potatoes, carrots and cabbage were placed on the table, and the waiters withdrew.

Pritchard spooned redcurrant jelly on to his plate beside his lamb. Max plunged a spoon into the golden crust of his pie and transferred a generous portion to his plate.

‘If it’s a police matter, I don’t see what it has to do with us,’ Max said.

‘Then you haven’t heard that I was transferred last year,’ said Pritchard. ‘To Special Branch.’

That surprised Max. The soft-spoken Welshman had a keen mind and that extra grain of intuition that singled out the exceptional policeman from the ordinary. But Special Branch? Perhaps it was a sign of the times, an indication of how alarmed the powers that be were about the rising anger and intensity of those who felt life hadn’t offered them a fair deal. Which, in many cases it hadn’t. Extremism was on the rise, certainly in continental Europe, possibly now even in England.

In which case, Special Branch would need capable officers like Pritchard. There was, after all, more to maintaining the peace of the realm than catching criminals.

Special Branch and the intelligence services worked in an uneasy alliance, with some bitter spats about territorial demarcations. If Pritchard’s and Max’s superiors were working together on this, it would mean that they were after someone who had dealings that went beyond the merely local and criminal.

‘Out with it,’ he said. ‘What particular game is afoot?’

‘I don’t see you as Watson, nor myself as Sherlock Holmes,’ said Pritchard, spearing a roast potato and chewing it carefully. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and took a draught of beer. ‘I believe you know Sir Walter Malreward?’

‘Ah,’ said Max. ‘Malreward. Yes.’

‘By reputation, in the way of business, or personally?’

‘He is a man much in the public eye, and I have a slight personal acquaintance with him. As to his business affairs, no, I have nothing to do with them.’

Pritchard was playing with him. Pritchard must know perfectly well who Sir Walter’s constant companion was, to use the coy words of the lower kind of newspaper. Mrs Harkness. Cynthia Harkness, recent divorcée, and Max’s sister.

‘Surely he isn’t up to any mischief? He runs what passes for a reputable publishing empire, gives money to the poor, is active in middle-of-the-road politics, keeps his nose perfectly clean.’

‘Do you like him?’

Max took refuge in his tankard of beer. Like, dislike, what did that have to do with it? ‘If your lot are interested in Malreward, it’s hardly relevant how I may or may not feel about him. I don’t go in for feelings.’

‘I know that. But you’re a fair judge of a man, for all that.’

‘I wouldn’t climb a mountain with Malreward on the other end of the rope, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I didn’t know you went in for climbing,’ said Pritchard, glancing down involuntarily to where he knew Max’s bad leg would be stretched out beneath the table.

‘I speak figuratively.’

‘He is said to be tough but honest in his business dealings.’

‘In which case you need to examine your sources more carefully,’ said Max. ‘No one gets to be as rich as Sir Walter is without being ruthless and sailing pretty close to the wind somewhere along the line. Risks are how fortunes are made. If you believe any businessman as successful as Malreward got there in any other way, I have some fairies at the bottom of my garden that I’m willing to sell to you for a reasonable sum.’

Pritchard smiled. ‘Leave the fairies to us Celts, Mr Lytton. No, but Sir Walter’s record appears to be cleaner than most. Which makes him a sensitive subject, which is why we’re here and not in my or your office. Our lords and masters like Sir Walter. There’s talk of him being offered a junior post in the government.’

Max frowned. It wasn’t unusual for there to be some official vetting of a man’s background before he was recommended for a difficult post or high honours, but it was hardly his line of work. ‘Surely they went into his habits and antecedents before he got his knighthood.’

He fell silent as the waiter appeared to scoop up the empty plates and dishes.

‘Very good, the lamb,’ Pritchard said to him.

‘Thank you, sir. Apple pie to follow? With cream or custard?’

The apple pie duly arrived, and Max poured cream over his portion. ‘What’s Sir Walter been up to that’s caused these twinges of alarm? It can’t just be the possibility of a government position.’

‘We found out about it quite by chance. As you know, we take an interest these days in some of the smaller political groups. Both left-wing and right-wing outfits.’

‘Trotskyists and Marxist Leninists on the one hand, and the blackshirts and others of a fascistic tendency on the other, you mean.’

‘You’d know more about the fascists than I would, you’ve been in Italy recently, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, and although quite a few of the great and the good hold that fascism is our only bulwark against a Bolshevik takeover, my superiors are suspicious of any group that wants to overthrow society, challenge Parliament, or generally go in for rabble-rousing.’

‘There’s a group of anarchists we at the Special Branch are keeping our eye on, too, since we don’t want to see any trouble from that direction, either.’

‘You’re hardly going to tell me that Malreward is a secret anarchist or Leninist?’

‘No. It’s stranger than that, and therefore possibly more sinister. He’s given quite a substantial sum of money to the Communist Party, but also to several groups of quite a different persuasion. And to the aforesaid anarchists.’

‘It doesn’t smack of intense political conviction.’

‘It does not. And it doesn’t fit in with the reasonable, moderate Conservative person he appears to be.’

‘It sounds to me as though he’s intent on stirring up trouble. Of one kind or another.’

‘Exactly. And the sums involved are quite large, and we’d like to know where they’re coming from.’

Max shook his head. ‘That’s no mystery. He’s a very rich man.’

‘Yes, and we have access to his accounts and to his bank, and these funds haven’t passed through any of what you might call normal channels.’

‘That just means he’s had the sense and know-how to cover his tracks.’

‘We have reasons to believe that Sir Walter has sources of income other than those arising from his perfectly open and respectable business dealings.’

Max’s heart sank. He didn’t like what he was hearing, not one bit. What had Cynthia got herself into? ‘Out with it. Drugs?’

‘It doesn’t look like it, although that was our first thought. Yet he is up to something crooked, I’m convinced of it, and when you read the file, you’ll come to the same conclusion.’

‘It seems incredible to me. Why should a man who has built himself a large fortune and reached the position Sir Walter has feel a need to have any underhand or criminal dealings? Why jeopardize the chance of a post in the government?’

‘Then tell me why, if he’s an honest and upright citizen, does he pour large sums of money into subversive organizations?’

‘Perhaps he feels this country needs a wider political base, so that matters are more thoroughly debated from both sides of the political divide.’

‘And perhaps a flight of purple pigs are going to sail past the window,’ said Pritchard.

Coffee was brought, and Pritchard lit a pipe. Max gazed into the fire, watching as flames licked round a new log and another log broke and fell into the grate in a shower of sparks.

Pritchard took a good draw on his pipe, then removed it from his mouth and let out a stream of smoke. ‘This comes close to home for you. Your sister, now …’

‘Yes.’ If Sir Walter were revealed to be up to anything dangerous or crooked, the repercussions for Cynthia would not be pleasant. She had suffered a certain amount of vilification over her divorce, coming as it did after her flagrant flaunting of herself in Sir Walter’s company, and among her set, her husband was very well liked.

He wasn’t going to pass judgement; he had wished Cynthia would be more discreet, but it wasn’t her way. On the other hand, it might turn out that Sir Walter was not up to anything illegal, let alone criminal. A man could choose to give money where he wanted, there was no law against handing over sums of money to any political movement that wasn’t actually banned. It could be a quirk in his character, there could be a dozen reasons for such behaviour, although Max felt in his bones that there was more to it than the whim of a rich man.

‘I took the liberty of mentioning the circumstances to my superiors,’ said Pritchard. ‘And — ’

‘If this is a job assigned to me, I’ll do it,’ said Max without hesitation. ‘If my sister ends up made uncomfortable by it, well, that’s too bad. One can’t let emotional and personal ties get in the way of what has to be done. I take it my brief is to find out if Sir Walter is making money on the side, if he has ties to any foreign political groups — that’s what your lot are really afraid of, isn’t it? — and what else he might be doing with his money.’

‘You’re very brutal about it. Mrs Harkness — ’

‘Is a grown-up. If she plays with fire, she may get burnt. What background information do you have on Sir Walter?’

‘I brought the file with me.’ Pritchard dug into his brown leather briefcase and pulled out a buff folder, stamped Secret. He passed it to Max. ‘Knighthood three years ago, member of the Conservative party, everything above board. He owns a house in London, another one in Wiltshire. There are gaps, however. He came to England before the war, from France, where he has another house.’

‘As does my sister,’ said Max. ‘In the same place as Malreward, that’s how they met. I wonder if she’s going to France for Christmas …’ His voice tailed off, and he was silent for a while, thinking about what Pritchard had told him, turning possible approaches over in his mind. ‘If she is, I can invite myself to spend Christmas with her there. Although she might, of course, be staying at Malreward’s villa.’

‘Isn’t that mixing your personal and professional lives rather too closely?’

‘No, I don’t think so. It could be useful in both ways.’ Max gave Pritchard a direct look. ‘I’m fond of my sister. She might not thank me for it, but if Malreward turns out to be a crook of some kind, the sooner she finds out the better.’ He didn’t add, preferably before she marries him and finds herself in God knows what kind of a mess.

‘Is it a very strong attachment?’ Pritchard asked. ‘With society ladies, it’s not always easy to tell.’

‘Is that a polite way of asking if she likes his wealth rather than the man?’

Pritchard looked taken aback by the coldness in Max’s voice. ‘It is not. It is only that women of her — of your — class live according to a different set of rules than those which apply where I come from.’

Max raised a hand to acknowledge the rebuke. ‘True enough. However, I believe women generally find Sir Walter an attractive man. He has a masculine energy about him, and the aura of success has its own appeal.’

‘A virile man,’ Pritchard agreed. ‘And a forceful one. I shouldn’t like to cross him.’

‘That’s exactly what you’re proposing I do, however.’

‘He won’t be aware that you have any interest in him, not the way you work. Your sister doesn’t know what you are, what you do?’

‘No,’ said Max.

Which was probably true inasmuch as he had never told her; on the other hand, he had a suspicion that, unlike the rest of his family, she had a good idea that his apparently idle life wasn’t entirely what it seemed.

Max paid the bill after a mild protest from Pritchard, and the two men walked out into the pale sunlight which was just filtering through scudding clouds. They stood on the corner of Kettle Street, watching the traffic in Holborn rushing past, red buses the only patches of colour among the cars and wagons and drably coated pedestrians.

‘I may call in Lazarus,’ Max said, as they parted.

Pritchard, about to head for a bus stop, paused. ‘You take it that seriously?’

‘Yes,’ said Max, and watched his companion dive through the traffic and board his bus just as it was drawing away. Yes, he took it that seriously.

SEVEN

Every time she walked up the gangway of an ocean liner, crossing the symbolic boundary between land and sea, Cynthia Harkness felt she could happily spend all her days on board ship. Although in truth, it was the limited number of days that made a voyage so appealing. Five days lay ahead of her, five days when she wasn’t in England or in America, but caught in a floating world that had no existence beyond its railings, a ship that might, it seemed, sail for ever on the surging grey ocean.

‘Perhaps we all have a bit of the Flying Dutchman in us,’ she said to her neighbour at dinner on the first night out.

The man, a stolid American, looked at her in some surprise, and then smiled. ‘I know you English people are renowned for your sense of humour,’ he said. ‘My business would surely fail if I were trapped on a vessel doomed to sail the seas for ever. And I guess the company on board wasn’t any too good, didn’t the guy lead a solitary life? For myself, I prefer company.’

The Aquitania, the Ship Beautiful as she was known, on account of the sumptuousness and extravagance of her fittings, was Cynthia’s favourite ship on the Atlantic run. This trip, she had made the booking herself, which meant that she could travel in a pleasant stateroom instead of in a suite, which would have been far too large for her needs, and which would have drawn the attention of everyone on board, exactly what she didn’t want. Mrs Harkness, with a stateroom on B deck, was an anonymous creature. Whereas if Walter had made the booking, she would be sitting at the Captain’s table, not where she was on the other side of the huge dining room, again quite anonymous, among less favoured passengers at a table hosted by a much more lowly officer. An attractive young man, dark and well groomed, but then the Cunard officers were in general a very creditable lot.

The man sitting beside her introduced himself as one Myron Watson, travelling to England on holiday with his wife, Lois. A woman of about her own age, with a smooth helmet of dark hair, and wearing a pale pink silk frock, smiled at Cynthia across the table

‘I do like the way you make friends on board,’ she said, her voice unexpectedly husky for one who had chosen pink. She wasn’t pretty, nor even handsome, but she had sex appeal, Cynthia decided. There was something about the tilt of her head and her mouth that would interest more men than Myron, her big, bland, genial husband. No doubt a rich man; no doubt one of those who had been lucky enough not to see his business wiped out in the Depression.

A courteous enquiry brought a flood of information about ball bearings. Apparently, the world couldn’t get enough of ball bearings, even in these sadly hard times.

‘There are those, ma’am, I regret to say, who see War on the horizon.’ Mr Watson was the kind of man who spoke in capital letters. ‘And where’s there’s War, or threat of War, or even suspicion that one day there might be War, why, there is Opportunity.’

The dining room on the Aquitania was a glittering sea of mirrors and pillars and white napery and silver and crystal. It was an absurd great room, with its panelling and decorated ceiling and Louis-Seize furniture and paintings. The decor of the vessel always made Cynthia smile, the mad medley of English and French architectural styles: Grinling Gibbons carvings here, Palladian pillar there, Louise-Quinze sofas and mirrors, Elizabethan and Jacobean and Georgian features and fittings all represented in the public rooms.

‘It’s all so Olde Englande,’ said Lois with enthusiasm. ‘I just love everything old, and here on board, I feel I get an extra five days’ worth of all the sights I’ll be visiting when we get to London. The Tower of London, Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Abbey …’

‘Cathedral,’ Cynthia couldn’t help murmuring.

‘Cathedral? Oh, yes. It’s Westminster Abbey, and St Paul’s Cathedral.’

‘There is a Westminster Cathedral as well,’ Cynthia said.

‘Is that so?’ Lois pursed her vivid lips. ‘That wasn’t on the list the travel bureau gave us.’

‘It isn’t very old. A lot of people think it’s ugly, it’s built of red brick. Victorian, you see, and then there are the smells and bells inside.’

‘Pardon me?’ said Lois, looking affronted.

‘Incense and so on. It’s a Roman Catholic cathedral. The others are Protestant. Anglican.’

‘That’s our Episcopalian, Lois,’ said Myron. ‘We’re Baptists ourselves, Mrs Harkness, but I confess I’m looking forward to seeing some of your great English churches, which people say are most impressive edifices.’

Cynthia was beginning to feel that a little of Lois and Myron Watson would go a long way, but that was the joy of shipboard company; it was only five days, you could endure a lot worse than the Watsons for five days, and then, when you stepped ashore, you need never set eyes on them again.

She escaped from them after dinner, with some difficulty, and retreated to the garden lounge. It was deserted, not being a popular spot at this time of day on a winter crossing, with the glass flinging back dark reflections instead of the light that shone through to the trellis work and imitation stone in the daytime to give the illusion of being in a garden.

Cynthia sat in one of the wicker chairs, and an attentive steward appeared to offer more coffee, liqueurs, brandy.

Cynthia asked for another coffee, she was feeling so sleepy that it wouldn’t keep her awake. It had been a busy couple of days, packing, paying farewell visits, writing letters. She had been in the States since the beginning of September, and she found she was looking forward to getting back to England. She hoped the fuss would have died down, it was ridiculous the interest the press and that amorphous thing, the public, took in divorce cases. At least they hadn’t had the pleasure of any sensational details, indeed, her divorce would hardly have been noticed if it hadn’t been bungled so that the first judge had thrown out the evidence from the hotel, knowing the lady in question and the chambermaid far too well. The next time, her husband had managed it better, paying more for a less well-known woman willing to spend the night in a hotel room with him. ‘Playing cards all damn night,’ he had told Cynthia irritably. ‘And hopeless with it. When she suggested a round or two of snap, I nearly lost my temper. However, we came out of it all right, and thank God I wasn’t up in front of that sarky old number of a judge like the one I had first time.’

Then it had been Cynthia who had put the divorce in jeopardy, when an eager press photographer, who had no business being at a private dance, had snapped her dancing very closely with Sir Walter Malreward — a man much in the news for his wealth and influence, a Member of Parliament, a man who didn’t care to have scandal associated with his name. Whispers of collusion were heard.

Sir Walter was annoyed. ‘If it comes to the judge’s ears, there’ll be the devil to pay, and of course those damn reporters are watching your husband like a hawk, he’ll do well to keep away from that woman of his, what’s her name?’

‘Sally Lupin,’ said Cynthia.

‘Otherwise you’ll have to start the whole damn process again. You’ll have to go abroad for a while. We can’t risk it. The decree nisi should be any day now, if you stay away until the decree absolute, they can’t touch us. I suggest America. I shan’t be going over myself until next year, no danger of any prying pressmen getting more illicit shots. And I’ll deal with that bloody photographer, make sure of that, he won’t be taking any more spiteful shots of us or anybody else. I shall miss you, of course, but it can’t be helped.’

Cynthia had wanted to demur at this high-handed arrangement of her affairs, but it was Walter’s way, and her husband accepted the news of her departure with some relief. ‘Best thing. You’re newsworthy, now your name’s been publicly linked with Sir Walter, and it makes me look a bit of a fool, really, I’d be glad if you felt like going.’

Walter set to work, booking the best suite on the next boat to sail, rather to Cynthia’s dismay, and all set to despatch telegrams and letters to his numerous acquaintances and business contacts in America.

‘There’s absolutely no need,’ Cynthia said crossly. ‘As it happens, I have family in America, my first cousin is married to an American and lives in Virginia, I can stay with them as long as I want. And I have a friend from my schooldays who lives in Boston, and friends in New York, I shall do perfectly well, thank you, Walter. Indeed, I don’t suppose I’ll have enough time to see all the people I want. I’ll have some clothes made as well,’ she added. ‘I’ve seen some lovely designs by Mainbocher worn by American women in London, I plan to give him a try.’

‘You could order your wedding dress. Blue, I like you in blue.’

That was going too far. She would choose her own dress for that ceremony, in a colour of her choosing, and it would come from Paris, not from America.

She stirred in her seat at the sound of voices. An English family had ventured into the garden lounge, a father and mother and two young women who must be their daughters. They were laughing and talking, but then one of the girls caught sight of Cynthia. Her clear young voice floated through the air.

‘I say, Mummy, isn’t that Mrs Harkness? The one who …’

Her mother sshed her.

‘Don’t you know them? Isn’t she some kind of relation of Daddy’s?’

The younger girl was staring with unabashed curiosity. ‘I tell you what, she’s Harriet Harkness’s mother. Harriet was in my form at Rhindleys, but she had to leave the school last term, Mrs Youdall made her parents take her away, because of the divorce. They’ve sent her to St Monica’s.’

And then the mother’s voice rang out, with the sharp arrogant edge that marked the self-righteous, indignant Englishwoman of her class who knew she held the moral high ground.

‘It’s a shocking way to behave, and her husband a war hero …’

Cynthia remembered the woman’s name. Gardner, that was it. Rosemary Gardner. Dreadful woman. She turned her head and smiled at the little party. ‘Good evening, Mrs Gardner, isn’t it? Won’t you come and join me?’

Without replying, the woman gave Cynthia a furious look and hustled her girls away, her husband following, after pausing briefly to give Cynthia a wry and apologetic smile.

The cut direct, Cynthia said to herself, as she settled back in her seat. Was that what she could expect when she was back in England? In which case it wouldn’t be pleasant, either for her or for Harriet.

Her mind floated back to thoughts of her wedding dress. How different her wedding to Walter would be from her first one. With Walter it would be the Ritz, no doubt, with lavish refreshments, and guests summoned from his parliamentary colleagues and those who had too much to gain from his acquaintance to snub him on account of his marrying a rather notorious divorcée. The fuss would die down soon enough, Cynthia was old and wise enough in the ways of society to know that. The faint stigma would remain, but as the wife of an immensely rich and successful man she need care little for that.

As she looked out through the glass to the dark seas beyond, her mind took her back to the tiny, cold church, where she and Ronnie had plighted their troth. They had been married by special licence. She had scraped together the money for it from her Post Office savings, and told Ronnie how to set about getting the licence. He had no money at all, there was no question of a reception at the Ritz or Savoy or anywhere else. No guests to cheer the young couple — the very young couple, for they were both only sixteen — on their way to their new life. The witnesses were a friend of Ronnie’s, a tongue-tied lad, a fellow soldier, ill at ease in his boots, who looked horrified at the whole affair, and, since the other witness who had promised to come never turned up, an obliging passer-by, who had consented to act as witness for the princely sum of half a crown.

‘I had to tell such lies to get the licence,’ Ronnie said as they came out of the church, the priest’s unconvinced-sounding blessing ringing in their ears. No church bells, no kisses and congratulations, just a street with indifferent passers-by, never a glance for the newlyweds. Ronnie was in uniform, she had worn a grey woollen frock; she couldn’t risk wearing anything less ordinary or she would have attracted the attention of her mother or her older sister.

They had gone straight back to Ronnie’s digs. An attic room, where they had fallen into bed, hungry again for each other’s bodies, lips, arms, hands legs entwining, desperate to lose themselves in one another.

What had brought all this back to mind? It wasn’t just the thought of the wedding that lay ahead of her, no, there was more to it than that. These were memories that had been locked away in her mind, memories from half her lifetime ago. Why should they surface now?

It was that man going up the gangway. The tourist-class gangway. He was hatless, and halfway up, he had pushed his hair away from his forehead with the back of his hand, a gesture that brought back with extraordinary resonance the young Ronnie, who used to smooth his hair back in exactly that way. This man was rather like Ronnie, come to think of it, very much the same type. What a wonderful body Ronnie had had. Unscarred by the battles he was going off so blithely to face.

‘I wouldn’t have signed up if I’d known I was going to meet you,’ he’d said. He lied about his age at the recruiting office, just as he had lied to obtain the special licence. But by that stage in the war, with a desperate need for men, and with Ronnie being big and tall and looking older than he was, no questions had been asked.

‘If you hadn’t been a soldier, we would never have met.’

Cynthia had been helping Helen, her much older sister, with her voluntary work, making and serving tea to the troops. Cynthia had poured out a mug of hot strong tea, stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar and handed it down to the handsome young soldier who’d told her that he liked his tea strong and very sweet.

Cynthia looked into a pair of the most astonishingly blue eyes, and was transfixed. The whole of her being vibrated with entirely unfamiliar sensations, and then the spell was broken, Helen sharply telling her to stop daydreaming, and another soldier jostling the blue-eyed man aside and demandingly holding out his hand for his mug of tea.

The blue-eyed soldier was waiting for her when she had finished for the day. Helen had wanted her to wait, she was only going to be another half hour or so, seeing everything was put away, and then they could go home together. But Cynthia, who was usually the most obedient of girls, had demurred. ‘I want to get home,’ she said. ‘I’ve things to do. I can go on the Underground by myself, I’ll be perfectly all right.’

A woman came up with news of a malfunctioning tea urn, distracting Helen’s attention, and Cynthia had slipped away.

They walked to the Underground together, and he got on the train and sat beside her. They didn’t speak much, but laughed together as a child in the seat opposite, cuddling a shabby toy rabbit, pulled faces at them.

Cynthia knew the minute he opened his mouth that Ronnie came from quite another world to hers. His was a London accent. ‘Cockney, born and bred,’ he told her. Common, her mother would have said, with infinite, dismissive scorn, but Cynthia liked it. Just as she liked everything about Ronnie.

She sat back in the wicker chair and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted into the air. His young body. When they first went to bed together, she had been amazed by his lithe beauty. He was pale and smooth, with long limbs; she loved the small of his back, just above his muscular buttocks, and those, too, once she had got over her initial astonishment at seeing a man naked, she loved, holding them tightly to her after they had made love, lying her hands on them, soft and drowsy with pleasure. The weight and hardness of his penis had filled her with a kind of awe, such an astonishing thing, a man’s penis, she had no idea, she said, brushing it with her lips. No idea at all.

She hadn’t been Ronnie’s first girl. He told her that, and she felt a stab of jealousy; who was this Ruby to roll under the hedge with Ronnie, the times he was staying on a Shropshire farm with his auntie’s family?

He felt nothing for Ruby, it had been lust and curiosity, he told her, raising himself on one elbow so that he could kiss her.

He had run away from home two years earlier, scraping a living for himself in a hostile city. He signed up because he wanted to do his bit, and because you got three meals a day, he told her. His mother sounded, to Cynthia’s innocent ears, a terrible woman, but Ronnie seemed to take the clouts and blows she and his less forceful father dealt out to him as just part of life.

‘When I come back from the war, I’m going to make something of myself,’ he had told her. ‘You’ll see. And we’re going to have four kids at least, and be the happiest married couple in England.’

The steward was back, all attention. ‘Are you warm enough, madam? Would you like me to bring you a rug?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Cynthia. ‘I shall be going in shortly.’

He went away on light, silent feet. Cynthia slid back the door that led on to the open deck, and the bitter cold of a winter’s night in the Atlantic hit her in the face. She tossed her cigarette over the side, the glowing tip almost immediately extinguished by the wind and rain. Then, shivering, she retreated back inside to the never-never land of soft lights and thick carpets and columns and gay chatter, shutting out the stormy weather.

She didn’t feel inclined to play cards or gamble or dance or drink. She was too wrapped in her own thoughts to want company. So she made her way down the wide stairs to B deck, her reflection gleaming back at her from the mirrors, and went to her stateroom. The stewardess was surprised to see her, was she feeling seasick, could she bring her anything?

‘No, thank you,’ Cynthia said. ‘I’ll have breakfast at half past eight. Orange juice and a poached egg on toast. Coffee, and Cooper’s marmalade, please, not jam.’ She had grown to like the American habit of having orange juice at breakfast.

‘You aren’t travelling with your maid?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll be back in a little while to collect your things.’

Cynthia’s maid, Rose, was glad to be left behind. Not that she wouldn’t have liked to see America, where the film stars came from, she told Cynthia, ‘But I couldn’t do with all those days at sea, madam, I really couldn’t. Crossing to France is bad enough. I’m afraid if you’d asked it of me, I’d have to give in my notice.’

So Cynthia had lent her to an American friend who was spending a couple of months in London, and found that she rather liked doing without a maid; it gave her a sense of independence and a kind of freedom.

There was nothing of the ship’s cabin about her stateroom, no narrow berth beneath a porthole and space-saving cupboards. It had a wide, comfortable bed with an ornate headboard, and elegant furniture of the velvet and boudoir kind. Ordinary, curtained sash windows looked out on to the deck, only used by the passengers in those staterooms. There was a marble basin, and a dressing table with three mirrors.

The stewardess had laid out a satin nightie and negligée, matching satin slippers tucked beside the bed. Cynthia undressed slowly, laying her dress over a chair and dropping her underwear into the linen basket. She put on the nightie and, sitting at the dressing table, began to cream her face, not looking at her reflection, but still thinking about her life. Her life then, when she had been no more than a girl and yet a wife, and her life now, an utterly adult woman, mother of a nearly grown-up daughter, divorced wife, fiancée — dreadful word — of a man who —

Who what? Compelled her admiration, suited her sexually, was more than her intellectual equal.

And of whom she was afraid.

The thought popped into her head unbidden, and so startled her that she dropped her hairbrush. How absurd, Walter could be overbearing, he was certainly a commanding man who expected to have his own way, but he was courteous and had never come near to threatening her — why should he?

So why had that unpleasant little idea popped into her mind? She shrugged and resumed brushing her hair with steady even strokes, a hundred a night, as her nanny had taught her.

The stewardess had unpacked for her, and had propped the one photograph in a leather frame that she had with her on the dressing table. Harriet’s eyes looked out at her. She had her father’s eyes. Then the words of the Gardner girl came back to her. It was hard on Harriet, having to leave her school.

‘I do understand, Mummy, but it’s a bit thick. I mean, you went there, you’d think they’d care about that kind of thing, instead of booting me out as though I’d been caught smoking in the lavs.’

‘Darling, I do hope you don’t …’

‘Just a figure of speech,’ said Harriet quickly. Then, seeing the look of distress on Cynthia’s face, she had said. ‘Actually, I don’t mind so much, it isn’t a very good school. It might have been once. It probably was when you were there, but it’s all manners and flowers and things which are rather boring. The modern woman has more to her life than arranging flowers and knowing how to address a duchess or a bishop. I’d like to go to a school where you can learn something, properly. Languages, for example, the French teacher is hopeless, and Frau Passauer, who teaches German can’t keep order, she gets dreadfully ragged, so we end up not learning to speak a word of German.’

‘Why do they employ her if she’s so hopeless?’

‘I’ll tell you why, it’s because she’s the impoverished cousin of some Princess whatsit und thingie, you know. That’s why half the teachers are there, because they’re fearfully well-bred or well-connected. Only most of them can’t teach for toffee.’

‘I had no idea. When I was there, the teachers were dull but competent.’

She had looked forward to the day when she would present Harriet at court, during her first season. Now she wouldn’t ever travel up the Mall with her, dressed in a white dress with feathers, sitting for hours to reach the palace and then, finally, to make her curtsy to the King and Queen.

Divorced women weren’t permitted to present anyone at court. Fuddy duddy, old-fashioned, but it was an absolute rule.

Her sister Helen would have to do it. It had been one of the facts Helen had thrown at her when she was trying to persuade Cynthia not to get a divorce. ‘It may not be the happiest marriage on earth, but there’s more to marriage than happiness.’

‘Like what?’

‘Duty and responsibility and shared interests. You have a daughter, you seem not to care about the effect all this will have on her. Divorce is a social stigma in our world, Cynthia. Humphrey’s not at all happy about it.’

Humphrey, Helen’s husband, was a distinguished lawyer.

‘It affects us all.’

‘Oh, come on, Helen, you aren’t trying to say that Humphrey won’t make the bench because I’m divorced? Good gracious, he was born to be a judge, I dare say he wore a little wig and a robe when he was in his cradle.’

‘People like us …’

‘Oh, bother people like us.’ And then, ‘I am sorry for Harriet, but she understands.’

‘How can she understand? A girl of sixteen, I hope she doesn’t understand. I suppose it’s all about sex, and it would be shocking if a girl of that age knew anything at all about sex. I certainly didn’t.’

No, thought Cynthia, and I bet your wedding night was a horrid shock, imagine knowing nothing about sex and having a naked Humphrey advancing on you.

She finished her strokes, and laid down the brush as the stewardess came back, to gather up her clothes. She smoothed down the wrinkleless sheet, and said that she hoped Cynthia would sleep well. ‘You do look tired, madam,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to bring you a tisane? A warm drink can help you get a proper restful night’s sleep.’

Cynthia accepted the tisane. She lay back on the pillows, sipping the hot drink, a book open on her knees, face down, unread. Harriet would be all right, she told herself. She was a sensible girl, resilient. Thank goodness the child had no idea. She moved restlessly, rustling the sheets. Should she tell Harriet the truth? No, she’d kept that secret all these years, and it would remain a secret.

Was Walter the best stepfather for a sixteen-year-old girl? Would he lay down the law, which would inevitably lead to dreadful rows, Harriet being a young lady with decided opinions of her own?

He had said Harriet should call him Uncle Walter, but she told Cynthia that it was silly. ‘He’s not an uncle. If you marry him, I suppose I’ll have to call him Father or something. Why can’t I just call him Walter?’

‘He thinks that’s too informal, with your being only sixteen.’

Cynthia noticed that Harriet got round the problem by not addressing Walter at all, by any name.

Cynthia couldn’t talk about Walter with Harriet, for the simple reason that Harriet refused to discuss the subject. ‘You’ve got to do what you want. It’s not as though I’m a child, I’m nearly grown up. Whether or not I like Walter isn’t the point, really.’

Harriet had, on the surface at least, taken the divorce calmly. She didn’t resent Walter for breaking up a happy marriage, that was one good thing. Her clear way of looking at life meant that she accepted that her parents had drifted irrevocably apart.

Although her honesty about her father startled Cynthia, when Harriet, watching her doing her face before going out for the evening, said, ‘It’s not as though I got on well with Daddy.’

‘Harriet! How can you say such a thing? You know he loves you.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we like each other, does it? Love’s obligatory, but liking’s different. When I was little, I used to pretend I was a changeling. As one does, when one’s reading nothing but fairy stories. I’d imagine that I wasn’t Harriet Harkness at all, but an orphan baby left in a basket on the doorstep.’ She grinned at her mother. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Mummy, children all tell themselves stories, I bet you did, too.’ She wound an arm round her mother’s neck, in a rare gesture of affection, and looked at their twin reflections in the mirror. ‘Only it’s not likely, given that I look so much like you, is it?’

Cynthia woke in the early hours, to find the bedside light still on, and her book on the floor. She lay in a strangely peaceful state of neither being awake nor asleep. The man going up the gangway had brought back such a flood of memories, and now another memory came vividly into her mind.

Another dock, another ship, but this one wasn’t an ocean liner sailing serenely across peaceful seas in comfort and ease. Ronnie’s ship had been battle grey, battered-looking after three years of war, a troop-carrier, taking another batch of fresh-faced young men across to the killing grounds of France, to the misery of trenches and mud and barbed wire, to horrors unimaginable to the wives and girlfriends and sisters and mothers left behind.

Cynthia had driven Ronnie down, strictly against orders. He should have been on the train, but his mate had said he’d fix it with the sarge, pretend Ronnie was in the lavatory, stomach problems. Cynthia had borrowed her brother’s car; he had taught her to drive when she was thirteen, on the quiet roads around Winsley, the house in the country where they had all grown up.

The sergeant, usually eagle-eyed, must have had other things on his mind, because the ruse worked, and by the time he was growing suspicious, there was Ronnie, mingling with the others in his platoon. ‘Just a case of something I ate last night, Sarge, I’ll be right as rain in a day or two.’

The sergeant didn’t know the meaning of the word sympathy. ‘A case of bleeding cold feet, more like it. Don’t think you can get out of it that way, short of being dead, you’re going on that boat, and if you was dead, you’d go just the same so’s we could toss you overboard and save ourselves the bother of troubling the padre. Now, get a bleeding move on.’

And Cynthia, tears gracing her cheeks, had stood beside a bollard, a wan and wretched creature, wondering how Ronnie could look so cheerful as he went up the gangway. He ran his fingers through his short hair, a habit from pre-army days, and then he saw her. His face broke into a broad smile, and he waved and gave her the thumbs up before he was lost in the tide of khaki.

Cynthia stayed on the dock to watch the ship until it was no more than a speck on the horizon. Then she drove slowly back to London, only stopping on the way to find a bush she could be sick behind.

She had been pregnant, of course, pregnant with Harriet, and feeling sick from the word go.

‘Gastric flu,’ Helen had pronounced, in her know-it-all fashion, and packed Cynthia down to Winsley, where Nurse would look after her.

Nurse had known what was wrong with her five minutes after she arrived, and Cynthia wept desperately on her comforting bosom, while the elderly woman stroked her hair and murmured soothing, meaningless words.

Before Cynthia slipped back into a deeper sleep, she thought of Harriet. Term would be over by the time she got back. She had been worried about what to do with Harriet. Helen said she would have her, she would enjoy being with her cousins; Cynthia knew that Harriet would rather stay on at school, alone, than have to spend time with her cousins.

Her brother Max, the brother closest to her in age and the one she felt the closest to, had come to her rescue.

‘I’ll pick Harriet up,’ he’d said in his casual way. ‘Tell me where and when, and I’ll drive down and collect her. That is, if you haven’t sent her to school in the Highlands of Scotland or anything like that.’

‘Dorset,’ said Cynthia. ‘Would you really do that?’ Urbane Max and a girl’s boarding school didn’t seem to go together.

‘She’s my goddaughter, didn’t I say in church when she was christened that I would pick her and doubtless several trunks and a hockey stick up from whichever educational establishment she was at?’

Cynthia laughed. ‘One trunk and an overnight case. I’m not sure about the hockey stick, I think it’s a lacrosse school.’

‘Nonsense,’ cried Helen, breaking into their conversation. ‘Harriet must catch the train. What, pray, would you do with her if you did collect her, Max? I know you’ve got nothing better to do than drive around the country, with the idle life you lead, but Harriet can’t expect to be collected. She must come on the school train like everyone else, and I’ll send Thrush to pick her up at the station — Waterloo, I suppose.’

‘I’ll drive her up to London and take her out for a good meal,’ said Max, ignoring his elder sister’s instructions and addressing Cynthia. ‘She’ll be all right at your house for a couple of days, surely. Won’t that maid of yours be there, if she’s not going with you? Surely Harriet will be better off in her own home.’

‘A girl of that age, in London, on her own? I never heard of such a thing,’ cried Helen. ‘She’ll be up to all kinds of mischief.’

‘She won’t be on her own if there’s a house full of servants,’ said Max.

‘Quite unsuitable, nonetheless. I certainly wouldn’t allow any of my girls to stay alone like that. In London!’

‘If you can’t trust your daughters, that’s your problem,’ Max said. ‘I’ll take her out to a show. Several shows if need be. What does she like, Cynthia?’

‘Take her to the opera, and she’ll be your friend for life.’

‘Opera?’

‘Quite unsuitable,’ Helen said again.

‘Wagner, for preference, I’m afraid,’ said Cynthia.

‘Good heavens,’ said her brother. ‘I’m more of a Mozart man myself, but I’ll see what I can do.’

Max, thought Cynthia through a haze of sleep, was reliable, whatever Helen said about his frippery ways. And was he as frivolous as he seemed? Cynthia had long suspected there was a lot more to Max than met the eye, but he was a cagey man, slippery as an eel when it came to any questions about himself. Harriet would be all right with him, he’d take good care of her. And Cynthia realized, with a pang, that she was looking forward to seeing her daughter again. Almost more than I am to seeing Walter, she muttered to herself. Any problems with Harriet were practical, and time would resolve them. Whereas Walter …

EIGHT

Polly worked at the Rossetti Gallery workshop three days a week. It was a job that had started when she was still an art student on slender means, keen to earn any extra money she could. It had seemed heaven-sent, a job working with pictures, rather than waiting on tables or cleaning houses or collecting debts or any one of numerous jobs that she and her fellow students took to make ends meet.

Rossetti Gallery, with its entrance in Cork Street, was smart, but the premises behind it in Lion Yard were anything but smart. Lion Yard was a narrow, cobbled cul-de-sac, and few of the well-heeled customers who bought at the gallery ever ventured down it. The gallery itself and the main restoration studio, with a discreet entrance further down Cork Street, were forbidden territory to the students, and there was no way into them through their dingy yard. Dickensian, Sam called Lion Yard, and Polly could well imagine some of the novelist’s grimmer characters lurking in the shadows there.

The workshop was a lofty, barn-like-place, redolent of linseed oil and turps and oil paint. Situated above a storage area, it was reached via a rickety wooden outside staircase. Students were taken on to touch up and improve unsaleable old pictures and canvases that the gallery had bought in job lots at country sales, or for a few shillings in the minor London auction rooms.

The truth was, Polly soon realized, that there was an awful lot of dull and downright bad art around. Yet even the most dismal picture, by a hopeless artist, could be made to look much more desirable with careful, skilled work and a sense of what was in fashion.

Polly was started on flower paintings, which always, so her boss, Mr Padgett, told her, found a steady market. Dreary collections of tired-looking blooms in frames that were often worth more than the paintings arrived at the back of the Rossetti Gallery premises, and were taken, minus their frames, up to the workshop to be stacked in daunting ranks on wooden pallets all along one wall.

Mr Padgett, who was quick to weed out those workers he considered would never make the grade, had watched Polly for a few days, and then told her that she would do. ‘Unlike a lot of art students, you can paint. I don’t know what they teach you at these colleges these days,’ he grumbled. ‘Some of you don’t seem to know how to hold a brush or draw a curved line.’

‘Modern art isn’t about painting or drawing curves, Mr P, ’ retorted Sam Carter, a cheeky young student with a lock of hair falling over his forehead. ‘Times have changed, you’ve got to keep up. Anything is art now, if you say it is.’

‘Maybe to you it is, but it’s not to our customers, so just you hurry up and finish that landscape before those cows there die of old age.’

Sam, a student at the Academy, could draw or paint almost anything, and Polly envied him his facility. Under his skilful hands, landscapes bloomed, animals looked as though they belonged to a known species, ships sailed and fought as though they meant it, and faces changed from blurred ugliness to beauty, which was why, despite the avant-garde nature of his own work and his scorn for all old-fashioned representational art, he was kept on at the workshop while others came and went.

Mr Padgett, seeing Sam idly sketch a Quattrocento face, or draw a detail of a hand in the style of Rembrandt, had wanted him to move on to the main restoration studio, where the fine and valuable paintings were dealt with. ‘You’d work on old masters there, national treasures even. Mr Dinsdale has a top reputation, you couldn’t learn from a better man. It’s a good, steady career for an artist of your talent.’

Sam had laughed and said he’d rather be poor and do his own work, thank you, and stayed on at the workshop.

Meanwhile, Polly’s work turning dreary flowers into skilfully and pleasingly-coloured flower paintings such as would adorn any home, gave satisfaction. She did some work on landscapes, adding various animals on Mr Padgett’s instructions. ‘Buyers go for cats,’ he would say. And he approved of her horses, which, added to another blank country scene, made an uninspired picture much more interesting.

Polly had her doubts as to the strict legality of what she was doing, but Mr Padgett assured her that since these works were almost all by unknown artists, and no pretence was made that they were anything else, where was the harm in making an unsaleable picture into one that a buyer was happy to hang on his wall?

‘Artists don’t always know best. If I had the painter of that landscape here, look at it, a few desultory hedges, a river going nowhere, a broken down bit of fence, I’d soon tell him what it needed to make a proper composition. And he’d be glad to learn, and wouldn’t make the same mistake again.’

Polly had gradually been allowed to pep up some portraits, giving some worthy gentleman or prosperous paterfamilias more appeal and a touch of style lacking in the mostly very wooden portraits that came through her hands.

‘People prefer not to have ugly or unpleasant faces looking down on them from their dining-room walls,’ Mr Padgett told her. ‘Of course, if they happen to be your ancestors, and your ancestors happen to be a lantern-jawed, disagreeable-looking lot, well, that’s one thing. But if you’re paying good money, then you want something more pleasing. A pretty woman will sell, where an ugly or even just a plain one won’t. And of course, if one of our pictures turns out to be of someone well-known, an admiral or a statesman or an actress, so much the better.’

‘Who buys these portraits?’ Polly said to Sam. ‘If you don’t know the person, and it’s not a wonderful painting, what’s the point?’

Mr Padgett, who was passing behind her, paused to give her question his usual careful consideration.

‘Sometimes a buyer wants to pass a painting off as an ancestor. Other buyers feel that having a few portraits hanging above the stairs adds a bit of class. And we sell a lot to hotels, of a certain kind, new places where they want to make foreign visitors feel they’re staying in a bit of Old England.’

There were times, however, when a portrait or a flower painting would come into the workshop only to be whisked away before it was passed over to Sam or Polly.

‘Hold on, Mr P,’ she had cried on more than one occasion. ‘That’s a promising bowl of fruit and flowers, I can do something with that.’

To which Mr Padgett, frowning, had said, that, no, this picture was staying as it was.

These, Polly found out after a while, were the older canvases. Mr Padgett, in an expansive moment, showed her how, under close scrutiny of the back of the canvas, it was possible to see whether the canvas was hand-made, meaning it dated from the eighteenth century or earlier, or was machine-made. ‘Machine-made canvases didn’t come in until the very end of the eighteenth century,’ Mr Padgett told her.

Of course if a picture had been ruined, then it was extremely difficult to judge whether the canvas had the irregularities that marked it out as hand-made, but Mr Padgett had an eye, and after putting his nose so close to the canvas that Polly thought he must make a dent in it, he would pronounce on its age and the picture would be handed over to her or her fellow assistants in the studio, or whisked away to the main studio.

Presumably Rossetti’s had scruples about refurbishing genuinely old paintings; well, she respected them for it, although a bad painting was still a bad painting, whatever its age.

Polly liked the work, and it certainly allowed her to pay her rent at the times, more and more frequent, when she could make no other money from her drawings or paintings. She’d had a run of luck earlier in the year with book jackets, for which WH Smith paid two guineas apiece; these had recently dried up, and so the twelve shillings a day she earned at Rossetti’s was a godsend.

That Monday was another wet day, the kind of day when the atmosphere became a grey cloud of drizzle, with the wetness creeping under collars and into shoes. Polly felt damp inside and out when she arrived in Lion Yard, she climbed the stairs with extra care, as the steps were always slippery in the rain, and pushed open the door to the workshop.

She was starting work on yet another flower painting, a small canvas, circa 1855, Mr Padgett had said. ‘Believe it or not, the Victorians loved those vivid colours. So did the Georgians, but taste today won’t stand for that kind of thing.’

So, under his watchful eye, Polly had applied his patent varnish-removing fluid, made up to a secret formula, and then the painting had been left out in the yard in the rain for a week, to fade the colours and leave a matt surface for her to work on.

It had dried over the weekend, and now her first task was to alter the colours to give a more realistic representation of the blooms in question. Then, she decided, looking at the picture through narrowed eyes, she would change the balance, to make the design less stiff and formal and give the flowers a more natural, relaxed look.

She took her tattered smock from the hook behind the door, and put some coffee on to brew, warming her fingers at the gas ring; she couldn’t paint with fingers numb from cold.

Sam came up the stairs and into the room. ‘Late again, Mr Carter,’ said Mr Padgett, but without rancour.

‘Sorry, Mr P, ’ Sam said, not sounding in the least apologetic.

Sam was working on what had been a battered seascape. He had a particular knowledge of ships which came from his belonging to a naval family; he had grown up in various ports around the world, and as a boy, he had spent hours out and about in boats. He pulled his easel round to get a better light, and, wiping a fine sable brush on an old rag, he set to work, painting delicate cotton wool puffs from the cannon he had added to an otherwise uninteresting sailing vessel. A man of war gave extra value to a painting, Mr Padgett said, and the more warlike violence a canvas contained, the more easily it would find a customer.

Sam was in a talkative mood when he and Polly were alone later that morning, Mr Padgett having gone off with a delivery of paintings.

‘Of course,’ Sam said, ‘we should go into this business on our own account, make ourselves more than the miserly pay we get here.’

‘What, set up on our own, touching up bad paintings?’

‘Why not? We could buy them up at country house sales and auctions just as Padgett and his scouts do. Cut out the middle man.’

‘Would you want to?’ said Polly, adding some blue dabs to a flat green leaf. ‘What about your own work? What about all that stuff about preferring to be poor, when Mr Padgett wanted you to train properly as a restorer?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sam. ‘One says these things, and one bangs on, in the name of art, but is one getting anywhere? I doubt it.’

‘You’re still studying.’

‘Yes, but you aren’t, and where’s your own work going? Do you sell it? Do you think your painting is improving, are you getting down the visions in your head? Is anyone remotely interested? I sometimes think I’ll end up painting Christmas cards, more jolly naval scenes. Robins, too, perhaps, I might have a go at robins.’

‘Could one give it up, just like that?’

‘Dunno. I suspect it gives you up, you wake up one morning and realize that you’ve nothing more to say. Look at you. Mr Padgett raves at your sense of colour, yet your own painting is all dreariness.’

Polly had invited Sam round for tea one Sunday and regretted it ever since. He, with all the braggadocio of a promising student, hadn’t been able to hide his lack of enthusiasm for Polly’s canvases. ‘Why are they all so small?’

‘Small canvases cost less and you use less paint.’ Polly had replied, but it wasn’t the entire truth.

‘They all look as though you’ve been painting what you can see through a windowpane in the fog. I like this, though,’ he had said, crossing the room to look at a canvas Polly had painted for her final show at college.

It was of three of her friends, students on the same course, a much larger picture than anything she had done recently. A red-haired, wild-eyed, hung-over young Irishman; she’d lost touch with him. Dark, sultry, soft-mouthed Fanny Powys, blowing rings of smoke into the air. The third grace, for that was how she had arranged her figures, was an ethereally fair and fragile girl, who was now living and working in New York. It was a good painting, and it was true, she hadn’t done anything half so good since she left college. Polly hated Sam for being so breezy and gung-ho about losing one’s artistic voice. Easy to talk about it when you hadn’t lost your way and had utter confidence that you never would.

They went back to their easels, and worked steadily, until Sam drew back from his canvas, put down his palette and brushes, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

Smoking was forbidden in the studio, which was full of inflammable materials, not to mention the canvases stacked up against every surface of the room. But Sam squeezed himself up to the skylight and pried it open, so that he could blow the smoke out into the already smoky London atmosphere.

Sam pulled a magazine out of his pocket. He read all the gossipy papers he could get his hands on, and knew all about the goings-on of anyone in the public eye. ‘My cousin in America sent this to me. Look, pictures of Mrs Cynthia Harkness, dancing at the Columbo Club. Don’t you love that dress?’

Polly took her attention off a strange-looking flower that seemed to be a cross between a blowsy rose and a chrysanthemum. She’d make it a rose, it was a better shape, she decided. She wiped her fingers on a rag and took the magazine Sam was holding out to her, turned back to a page of photographs shot in a nightclub. She looked at the slim figure with the perfect hair and beautifully made-up face, then at the dramatic close-fitting dress, which billowed out in a froth at ankle level.

‘I bet Sir Walter Malreward won’t be pleased if he sees that picture,’ said Sam. ‘He’s going to marry her, you know. Do you think he has a press agency sending him any pictures of her that appear in the press?’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Keeping tabs on her.’

Sam had followed every step of Cynthia Harkness’s well-publicized divorce, and he followed the progress of Sir Walter’s latest amour with keen attention. ‘It won’t last,’ he had predicted. ‘He rarely keeps his women for more than a year. Then he trades them in for a new model, randy chap that he is.’

Now Sam had changed his mind, and was inclined to think it might be different with Mrs Harkness. ‘He wanted her to get the divorce, that’s what it looks like. Mind you, is she wise? I think her husband looked rather a pet.’

‘Well,’ said Polly, as she squeezed a dollop of orange on to her palette, ‘no one could call Sir Walter a pet.’

‘No,’ agreed Sam. He tossed his cigarette butt out of the window and closed it with a bang. Then he returned to his easel, looked at the picture with pursed lips, and painted a pennant on to the eighteenth-century man-of-war with a dramatic flourish. ‘I’ve told Padgett that this is hopeless. There’s a raging sea, lashing waves against the cliffs, and he wants this ship of the line to be coasting along — as if any captain in his right mind would be so close inshore in a blow like that.’

‘Artistic licence,’ said Polly, and then, ‘oh, damn!’

‘What?’

‘I’ve used chrome orange, and this is a picture from the 1850s, it’s a mite early for it.’

‘As if anyone will notice. My ship caught on a lee shore is far more of a faux pas than a bit of anachronistic colour.’

‘I like to get things right.’

They were paid on Mondays, and at five o’clock Polly tucked into her purse the thirty-six shillings which Mr Padgett had counted out and given her. She’d pay her rent, which would take twenty-five shillings of it. Then, unless, miraculously, another book jacket came in, she’d have to last the rest of the week on the remaining eleven shillings. Which meant another raid on her almost empty piggy bank.

Sam walked beside her as they left Lion Yard. He’d noticed the way Polly had put her money away, and with sharp, inquisitive eyes, had seen the emptiness of the purse into which she had put it.

‘Care for a flutter?’ he said. ‘I’m going to the races with Larry tomorrow, he’s got a hot tip for the two-thirty.’

Sam’s friend Larry was a bit of a wide boy, in Polly’s view, and certainly not a likely companion for an admiral’s son. But Sam had had some remarkably lucky bets through him, and imagine if she won! She shook her head. ‘I’m broke, and they say if you’re broke, never put any money on a horse, because it will always cross its legs and fall over, or come last, or both.’

‘I don’t think your two bob is likely to make Amarantha trip up. Larry knows one of the stable lads, he’s sure she’s a winner.’

‘Oh, go on, then,’ said Polly, recklessly handing over a precious half-crown coin.

Mrs Horton was at home when Polly went to pay her rent. Which was a pity; Polly preferred to put the money in an envelope and thrust it under the door. She didn’t like Mrs Horton, who had hard eyes and was mean with everything to do with her tenants, from hot water to the cheap, low wattage lamps that so often burned out, leaving the staircase plunged into dangerous darkness.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ Mrs Horton said, drawing the shawl she always wore about her thin shoulders. ‘I wanted to have a word with you. You’d better come in for a moment.’

Polly’s heart sank. What had she done now? Left the front door ajar? Neglected to hang the bathmat over the bath? Forgotten to avoid the creaking floorboard on the landing when she came in late? She stepped gingerly across the threshold, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the pervading aroma of tomcat and boiled cabbage.

Unlike the Spartan rooms she let out, Mrs Horton’s quarters were almost sumptuous. Thick rugs were laid on the floor, overlapping in order to fit in. The sofa, a red velvet affair on stout legs, was piled high with plump cushions, and the lampshades always reminded Polly of a tart’s knickers, since they were pink and black with lace trimmings. It had crossed her mind that scrawny Mrs Horton, who did so well out of the several properties she owned in Fitzroy Street, might have started her career in quite a different profession.

‘I’m giving you notice,’ said Mrs Horton.

‘Notice?’ Polly stared at her, hoping she had heard wrongly.

‘Notice to quit. I want you out by the twenty-fourth of December.’

‘Oh, but Mrs Horton, why? What have I done?’

‘I’m not saying you’re a bad tenant, because I’ve had worse, but I want the room. My son’s coming home for a while, he’s quitting the merchant service and wants to look about for some new line of work. So I’ll be needing the room for him. His ship gets in on the second of January, and I want you out by Christmas, to give me time to clean the room. So you’ll have to move all your stuff out, and don’t go leaving it until the last minute.’

Polly opened her mouth to plead with her landlady. Why her? Why couldn’t one of the other tenants be turfed out? But she knew the answer to that, and knew that there was no point arguing. Her room was the smallest and cheapest in the house, and naturally, Mrs Horton would want to keep her higher paying lodgers on for preference.

‘That isn’t much notice,’ Polly said. ‘Can’t you give me time to find somewhere else?’

‘No, dearie, that’s the way it is. If I were you, I’d get your fiancé to name the day, you’ve been hanging about long enough, you’ll lose him if you carry on that way. A man gets tired of waiting when he’s decided to marry, even,’ and she gave Polly a sly glance, ‘even if he’s doing a bit of anticipating on the bed front. You get hitched in January, that’s my advice, and then you’ll not have to worry about finding a new room for yourself, will you?’

Polly positively stamped up the three flights of stairs to her room, working herself into a thorough temper. Damn Mrs Horton. Damn everything. She looked around at her familiar room, and sank down on the bed. All right, it wasn’t much, but to her it was home. She suddenly remembered the pictures Sam had shown her in a copy of Country Life, of the interiors of that Sir Walter Malreward’s recently built country house, and she sighed. Then she laughed at herself. She didn’t aspire to any such modern, chic opulence; she was content with her chilly and inconvenient attic room, which, compared to some of the places she had lived in before coming here, was almost luxurious.

With no money to pay a deposit, she’d be back in one of those dreadful places, like the room on the third floor of that house in Pimlico, which had peeling damp patches on the walls and where the nearest supply of water was down in the basement, and that a solitary tap. Moreover, the basement had had its own tenants, an impoverished, elderly artist and his wife — dear God, was that how she would end up, if she didn’t marry Roger?

She shook herself into sense. It didn’t arise. She was going to marry Roger, and besides, she wasn’t the kind of person who ended up in a damp and dingy basement, painting rural scenes on stones as Joseph Forbes, the inhabitant of that dank region, had done.

She must be practical. How could she find a new room at this time of year, one that she could move into before Christmas? Drat Mrs Horton and her son, she couldn’t have sprung this on her at a worse time.

Roger would be pleased. He would point out that she didn’t need to look for a new place to live, given that they would be married so soon. Why did that depress her so much? She looked at the ring on her finger, the neat hoop with a sapphire nestled between two diamonds. Not a flashy ring, but a good one, made from stones reset from one of his mother’s brooches. ‘No point splashing out on tawdry jewellery when you can have something decent,’ he had said.

She loved Roger, she admired him, she knew that he was the perfect balance for her: his intellect as against her emotional approach to life — so why did the prospect of their marriage make her more and more dispirited as the actual day grew nearer? She’d welcomed the brief postponement, but the weeks would fly by, and that would be that. Hitched. It was such a big step, marriage. They had discussed living together; Roger was quite keen on that, since as a good socialist, he considered marriage by and large an outmoded and bourgeois institution. His parents, however, although modern in their outlook, weren’t impressed by his idea of him and Polly living in sin. ‘The hospital won’t like it,’ his father had said.

Polly had raised the subject with her mother, and been surprised at her response.

‘No, dear, it would never do. It can work for some people, but Roger’s people wouldn’t like it, and there’d be all kinds of inconvenience. It’s one thing to have an affair’ — this with a sideways glance at Polly, what did she know about her and Jamie? — ‘but living together, setting up home together without being married, it won’t do, not for a man in Roger’s position. He’d feel it in the end, and then there are always problems with the income tax and landlords and so on. I dare say he’d end up blaming you, men tend to do that.’

How could she know about that, for heaven’s sake?

In the end, Polly knew, she would have to throw herself on Ma’s mercy, and stay in Highgate while she waited for Roger to get back from America. The prospect filled her with dismay. Perhaps Oliver knew of some artist who was going to be away for a few weeks, who would be glad of someone who would look after their studio and in return pay a modest rent. Unlikely, and what most people considered a modest rent would probably still be beyond her present resources, but still, she would ask him.

That night her sleep was haunted with dreams. She was watching Mrs Horton, improbably attired in Cynthia Harkness’s lovely frock, dancing with Sir Walter Malreward, who was wearing the brown overalls Mr Padgett put on while attending to the messier business of the workshop. Then the image faded, and she was standing on the doorstep of Sir Walter’s white country house, at the bottom of a flight of steps flanked by two creatures out of ancient Egypt. She had a suitcase in her hand, and was explaining to a lofty personage dressed in a black uniform that she was Polyhymnia Tomkins, come about the room.

To which he had replied in a resonant voice that there was no such person as Polyhymnia Tomkins, and so certain had been his utterance, that Polly woke up in a cold sweat, to find herself exclaiming out loud that it was true, Polyhymnia Tomkins did exist, there was indeed such a person.

She sat up in bed, too unsettled to want to go back to sleep yet. Her eye fell on the table where she had left some sketches she had done before going to bed. She had drawn a caricature of Mrs Horton, complete with sequinned slippers and shawl and expression of long-suffering weariness, and, peeping out from a battlement of cushions and frilly lampshades, the heavy features of Eric Horton, her son, whom Polly had met on the stairs some months previously and taken an instant dislike to. She hated the thought of him taking possession of her room, and, by the dim light of the bedside lamp, she glared at his exaggerated features as though she could compel him to change his mind and go back to sea, preferably to be wrecked and cast up on a desert island on the other side of the world.

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