Between Friends (31 page)

They faced up to one another now, exactly the same height but where Martin was powerfully built, the strength and breadth of his arms and shoulders developed in the constant wrestling with the steering wheel of the ‘Hemingway flyer’ and the boxing bouts he had fought as a boy, Tom was still slender, rangy, with the awkwardness of boyhood which he had not yet outgrown. He worked as a manual labourer and though, as Mrs Glynn put it, he ate like a horse, his body took on no weight. But his increasing strength of character, not yet completely formed and more than likely to break into helpless, youthful laughter on the slightest provocation, showed now in the truculent face he thrust into Martin’s. He was artless, unsophisticated, candid but he would not back down from anything in which he believed and now he believed there was something troubling their Meg and could hardly contain his outrage that Martin,
their
Martin who had always been the first to defend her could not see it too. Martin might be some big-shot with his growing reputation as an up and coming young racing driver but it seemed his continued absence from Liverpool, and the lives that Tom and Meg led meant he was slowly becoming cut off from the world of his two childhood companions.

‘Look here, lad,’ Martin said now, quite softly but very dangerous.
‘Are
you saying I care nothing for Meg any more because if you are you had better be prepared to back your statement up with more than just words …’

‘
You
look here,
lad
! Don’t you come the high and mighty panjandrum with me. You’ve been across the bloody ocean and played about with them motor cars of yours and might have sat down to dine with the bloody Emperor of China for all I know but don’t you tell me you give a damn about the change in our Meg. Your head might be filled with … with crankshafts and … and whatever it is you fiddle with all day long but I’d like to give you credit for seeing what’s under your bloody nose! Trouble is I can’t! You’re too full of what you’ve done to be concerned with her. Damnation Martin! Just because she sat and listened to your tales of all the wonders of
your
life doesn’t mean she’s the same girl. Can’t you see it? I agree she’s fallen on her feet and I agree she’s made a good impression on Mrs Stewart and the Hemingways an’ all but … but she’s not the same girl she was!’

They had eased away from one another in a gradual lessening of tension as Martin recognised the distress in Tom, and Mrs Whitley took her hand away from her mouth when she had held it in appalled horror.
Her
lads fighting and over something as important as their Meg who, she had been made aware herself, had altered these last few months. She was as concerned, as caring of Mrs Whitley’s comfort and happiness as she had always been, coming, she said, as often as she could to visit her but she was
not
the same and Tom was right. Some lovely sparkle in her seemed to have been quenched. The irrepressible mischief, the warm readiness to take an interest in everything about her had gone and a young lady, serious and concerned, it seemed only with her own future career had emerged. She was to ‘get on’ in the Hemingway household, Mrs Whitley could see that. Two promotions already and the mistress’ eye on her. Head parlourmaid next, perhaps Cook, if she was allowed to show what she could do or even the exalted position of housekeeper, the highest peak she could attain in Agatha Whitley’s opinion!

Tom turned away slouching to peer out of the window across to the gatekeeper’s lodge which stood on the opposite side of the long, curved gravelled driveway. His young face was set in moody lines, a far remove from its usual engaging openness but he appeared to have backed away from his confrontation with Martin.

‘I’ll have to go,’ he muttered. ‘I only slipped away while Mr Atkinson’s back was turned for a minute and if I don’t get back before he misses me he’ll have my job. Jenny said you’d told her you were coming over here so I thought …’

He turned, his face earnest and pleading. ‘Have a word with her, will you Martin? See if you can get it out of her what’s bothering her, if anything is.’ He looked confused now, uncertain, longing to be told
he
was wrong. ‘Perhaps you can see better than me, being away an’ all. Happen she is growing up and that’s all it is but she might talk to you, tell you what’s in her mind. I get no chance now what with me working outside and her indoors. The only time I get to see her is if I catch her here with Mrs Whitley and then she’s always in a dash, she says, doesn’t she, Mrs Whitley?’ He turned his worried gaze to the old lady who nodded in agreement.

‘It’s true, Martin. I know you’re to be off again soon. Scotland, is it? Oh my!’ Her face was suffused with pride in this, her cleverest chick, her expression said, who travelled about the world as though it was no more concern than a trip to the corner shop but her eyes were anxious, clouded from their usual bright gooseberry green alertness to the haze of old age and her worry over their Meg whose well-being she cared about more than anything in this world. The lads were lads and could see to themselves but Meg was nought but a lass and needed someone to look out for her. ‘Get her to go to town with you. Take her to the Music Hall and give her a laugh, there’s a good lad. She needs taking out of herself and perhaps if she was to get away from Silverdale – d’you know she’s not been off the grounds since I can’t remember when – she’d open up and tell you what’s in her mind. Dear Lord, I can remember the day when she
never
stopped talking, always at you with what she was going to do and with her nose in everything that didn’t concern her and look at her now. Scarce a word for anyone and then it’s all to do with her work!’

Mrs Whitley’s eyes welled at the fond remembrance of the past and Martin knelt at her feet as he had done so often before. Then he had been begging for a favour, an outing perhaps or an hour off to slip down to Mr Hales to see his beloved machines. Now he did it to comfort, smiling his warm, affectionate smile into her tremulous face. He sighed inwardly for he had made arrangements to entertain and
be
entertained by a certain pretty young housemaid
who
was vastly impressed, not only with his masculine charms but his elevated position in Mr Hemingway’s home. He had meant to dine her at the ‘Adelphi’ and then, when she was soft and sighing, completely enraptured as most women usually were in his increasingly experienced hands there was a certain room, above the garage, the one which was kept just for himself when he was home and in which … aah well! There would be other nights and other pretty young women …!

THEY MADE A
striking couple, very young that was obvious and the girl was wide-eyed with wonder as though she was bemused by the splendour of it but they were well dressed, both of them and not out of place.

The Adelphi Hotel, ‘the Delly’ in the idiom of the native Liverpuddlian, was the most prestigious, the most well-appointed, the most elegant hotel outside of London with a staff of over 200 to serve the 250 rooms, including private rooms, parlours, sitting-rooms and apartments, the prices for which could be as high – with food and wine and any delicacy a guest might care to order – as one hundred pounds a day! There were two chefs, one English, one French and thirty cooks, specialists most of them in the making of pastry, entrées and sauces, four bookkeepers, a housekeeper, a linen-keeper and eighteen porters.

The building was extensive, magnificent, with a restaurant which could cater for some 120 persons at one sitting, the cost, again, high for a meal. Five guineas it could amount to and that was without wine! Many of the items were wired from Paris; the strawberries, for instance which were that night on the menu, and asparagus since the untold visitors from many parts of the world who sailed in and out of the great seaport on her luxurious passenger liners, the sportsmen, the aristocracy, royalty – for had not certain members of the Royal family stayed there when visiting or passing through Liverpool – princes of foreign royal households, ambassadors from Washington, all the well-to-do who stayed in the fine hotel, demanded, simply, the best!

‘Your table is ready, sir,’ the maître d’hôtel told Martin, his face smooth and expressionless, well used it appeared to serving young men such as he and the very young but lovely girl who accompanied him. The gentleman, one supposed, was quite at home in the glittering white and gold and ruby splendour of the Drawing Room, the decorations of which were a replica of those of a similar room in the Pétit Trianon, Versailles, as he and his
companion
drank a pale sherry before dining but the young lady stared about her quite openly, her strange golden eyes drinking in every costly, elegant, comfortable detail.

She was very simply dressed, the head waiter noted in a floor length one-piece dress of pale cream chiffon over cream satin. The neckline was scooped out quite demurely as befitted her age and the sleeves were short. It had an overtunic of the same material which reached to her knees, the very
latest
fashion and just below her softly rounded breast was a narrow sash of gold satin. He would have been quite amazed to learn, had he been told, that she had made it herself, the cost with the tiny pearl buttons which flowed in a line down the curve of her back, a mere two and eleven pence halfpenny, the material a roll end from Paddy’s Market! Bon Marché sold it – the one from which she had copied it – for forty-nine shillings and sixpence! She wore no jewellery and needed none to enhance her young, undimmed loveliness.

Her escort wore a dinner jacket, double-breasted and unbuttoned, ready made, the head waiter could tell for had not he served the best dressed gentlemen of the world in his restaurant and knew the difference, but immaculate and looking quite splendid on his well-proportioned athlete’s body.

They stood up and the young man gallantly offered the girl his arm.

‘Megan,’ he said softly and she put her hand in it. They followed the important, black-suited figure of the maître d’hôtel, moving past darting, crimson coated porters and attendants in the hall, sauntering visitors come to see and be seen in their Paris gowns and glittering jewels, suave gentlemen and soignée ladies on their way from one exotic place to another and glad to find a ‘decent’ place to stay en route. The wealthy of Liverpool who, now that it was fashionable to eat out, as they did in London, rather than entertain in their own homes, had been driven in their new motor cars, leaving them in the care of their chauffeurs whilst they dined. They were floating, like fairy spirits, or so it seemed to Meg, up and down the handsome grand staircase, the lovely colour of the carpets, the furnishings, the drifting gowns of the elegant ladies all heightened by the miracle of the electric lights which gleamed everywhere.

The first Adelphi Hotel was opened in 1826, a squat, three-storeyed building in the Georgian style of architecture. It was situated in a charming residential thoroughfare, at the foot of
Mount
Pleasant, which led to the Botanic Gardens and the open countryside beyond. The great writer Charles Dickens had stayed there en route to America and was reputed to have said of the dinner he was served that it was ‘undeniably perfect’! The history of the hotel during the Victorian era might be said to be the history of Liverpool itself for as commerce and shipping increased so did the fortunes of the hotel. The railway adjacent to it, also helped to account for its unbroken record of popularity and prosperity and in 1876, to meet the ever-widening circle of its clientele the hotel was entirely rebuilt. Its magnificence was undisputed. Five storeys high with a splendid pillared entrance, its arched windows looked out on Ranelagh Place with all the superiority of a king’s palace.

Meg gasped quite audibly as she and Martin entered the restaurant. She could not have said later what exquisite pastel colours had been used to pick out the delicate carvings of acanthus leaves and garlands on the walls and high ceiling. She could not have described the richness of the light fittings and chandeliers, the sumptuous elegance of plate and silverware glittering on snow white damask cloth and napery. She had been introduced now to the luxury of the Hemingway home ‘above stairs’ and the extraordinarily beautiful, but to the family, everyday objects which crowded it but the sight of gracefully arranged, daintily set tables, decorated with flowers which had been put on display by the hand of an artist; the velvet, round-backed chairs on which gloriously gowned ladies and immaculately tailored gentleman were seated, temporarily stunned her. Everywhere was glitter and colour and movement and the murmur of well bred voices. There was the subdued chink of silver on porcelain and over all lay the delicious aroma of the finest French cuisine.

‘This way, sir,’ the waiter said politely for though he was not certain of the young lady, the young gentleman appeared to be at his ease and it did no harm, in fact it was the policy of the hotel, to show courtesy to those it served whatever their apparent station in life.

They were seated, a pleasant table for two beside a draped window which overlooked the lights and night life of Ranelagh Place before Megan could bring herself to speak. The head waiter had moved away, bowing his head and at the same time summoning another waiter with a barely perceptible movement of his gloved hand. She watched him weave his way between the
tables
, stopping to speak to one seated person and another, his smiling face begging to be told how he might make their stay more enjoyable and as he did so she began to laugh.

‘Now what?’ Martin leaned forward, beginning to smile for really she did look a ‘corker’ as the new language of ‘slang’ put it.

‘Who does he remind you of?’

Martin turned to peer at the retreating back of the maître d’hôtel, then looked into her own impish face.