Daughter of Riches (45 page)

‘Yes, you're right.' Sophia snatched up Louis, who had begun to wail. ‘Hush, Louis, hush! Your grandmama is coming home! Do you know what I'm saying? Your grandmama is coming home!' And suddenly she and Catherine were laughing and crying, hugging one another and dancing with Louis squeezed tightly between them.

The Lola who arrived on the Red Cross plane was a very different Lola to the one who had showed her defiance as the German soldiers took her away. Had there been other passengers Sophia thought she might not have known her at all. Her high cheekbones were accentuated now above the hollows of her cheeks, her face pallid, smudged with grey shadows and etched with lines. Her teeth appeared more prominent because her lips had somehow drawn away from them and her hair, though drawn back into its familiar knot, was sparse and dull. She looked not three years older but thirty, a parody of her former self. Even worse was the haunted expression in her eyes. Lola had been to hell and back and it showed.

They could understand now how it was that she had been unable for so long to tell anyone who she was. They asked nothing about her ordeal; she would tell them in her own good time – perhaps. And they certainly did not ask what had happened to Charles.

But Lola told them anyway, though with the directness and simplicity they might have expected of a child.

‘Papa died, you know. He had no coat. They made him go without his coat and it was very cold. I think he must have caught pneumonia.'

‘Mama, don't try to talk about it!' Sophia cried in distress.

But Lola seemed almost as unaffected now as if the whole nightmare had happened to someone else.

‘Oh it was a very long time ago. I missed him, of course. But at least he didn't suffer like some of the others. No, at least he didn't suffer much.'

Dear God she has lost her mind! Sophia thought. But it wasn't quite that.

From the very beginning Lola was very taken with Louis. She had far more patience with him than she had ever had with her own children, playing with him, feeding him egg yolk and mashed up rusks on a spoon, rocking his cot when he cried. Once, when he was teething, Sophia caught her mother rubbing whisky on to his gums with her little finger. Sophia was horrified. But it was impossible to be angry with Lola.

Sophia kept waiting for one of her outbursts to come but they never did though she was prone to fits of anxiety when her whole body became jittery, her mouth would work and the horror in her eyes was frightening to see. She was frail, too, and often ill that first winter, she who had scarcely had a day's illness in her life.

‘How could anyone do this to her?' Sophia cried to Bernard one night when she had settled Lola back to sleep after a distressing nightmare. ‘My God, how I hate the Germans!'

Bernard agreed with her – he hated them too. But he could not help wondering whether Sophia, when she made such sweeping statements, had forgotten that one of Hitler's robotic monsters had fathered her child. With all his heart he hoped that nothing would ever happen to give her cause to remember that.

Viv knew something was seriously amiss with her father's affairs. Although they had never been close, at the same time they shared an instinctive understanding and she had noticed over the years that the more jovial and laid-back his manner the more likely he was to be hiding something. She knew now that something was wrong and she hardly needed to be a genius to guess what it was. Only two things really mattered to her father – her mother and money. Since Loretta had been behaving herself extremely well since her artist friend had unexpectedly married a very young and very pretty girl who had modelled for him, that left money as the explanation for the shadow behind his eyes.

Not that there was the slightest indication of it yet in any material way or any noticeable change in his lifestyle. But then, Viv knew, there wouldn't be. It was terribly important to keep up the image of affluence and Adrian would continue to fly in and out of Jersey, drink fine wine and drive one or other of his fancy cars whatever the restrictions his long suffering bank manager tried to impose. ‘I have funds, it's only a temporary blip,' he would explain, airily dismissing an overdraft that would have kept many people in luxury for a year and it was certainly true that over the years no matter how many times he had appeared to be on the very brink of ruin something had turned up to put things right.

This time, however, Viv was afraid it might be different – and she was right. As a result of the war the whole of the economy was in a mess. During the dark years the only firms that had boomed were those that had ridden the wave of essential war goods – steel and munitions and the industries associated with them – and in his position Adrian had managed to do some cunning juggling with their shares and keep a reasonable income. Now he hoped to do the same with those companies whose products would be needed to rebuild the shattered towns and cities. But in the summer of 1947 he made an error of judgement. Laconic as ever he had bid heavily for shares in a construction company whose performance he was convinced would rival that of the big munition firms during the crisis. Greig International, with its building division and associated cement, timber and quarrying interests seemed a sure-fire bet for success. But something had gone wrong. Just a week after he had put down an option on the shares, word leaked out of dirty dealings and the price of Greig plummetted. By the end of the month when Adrian was due to settle up they were virtually worthless.

Adrian knew he was finished – a bankrupt stockbroker cannot be tolerated. For as long as he could he hung on, trying to clear his debts by one method or another, but in the end it was no use. There was nothing for it – the house in Jersey would have to go and with it practically everything of value which they owned.

When the news broke Loretta was hysterical but Viv was oddly philosophical. She was so used to having everything she wanted she simply could not visualise what it would be like to have no money at all. It was only when she had to face the harsh reality that she became first indignant, then incensed, at the unfairness of it.

One day in the summer of 1947 Adrian called the family together and announced that he thought they would have to leave Jersey altogether. Viv was horrified. Jersey was her home – she could not imagine living anywhere else. Then, as she thought about it, she began to think that perhaps it was not such a bad thing after all.

For some time now Viv had been feeling restless and the chief reason, she knew, was Nicky. She still loved him dearly – yes, she
did
– but it wasn't a great deal of fun being tied to a man in a wheelchair. They couldn't go dancing any more, he couldn't swim properly, they couldn't ramble along the cliff paths, even making love had become a big boring effort. In the beginning they had talked about getting married but as time passed and the first delight of having him back began to pall under the constant burden of monotony, the idea appealed to Viv less and less: Selfish she might be, impatient she knew she was, but however shameful, the fact of the matter was she simply did not want to marry a man with his disability. Worse, she did not want to marry Nicky, because he was no longer the man she had fallen in love with. All the things about him that had most attracted her were no more.

There were even times when Viv had regretted offering Nicky a home. It was such a strain, having him there all the time, and secretly Viv had wondered how she could change things. Well – here was the solution! As her father explained that they would have to live in a small suburban house from which he could commute to his new job in an estate agency, and even that might have to be rented for the time being, Viv's brain began working overtime.

‘There is something else, Vivienne,' her father said miserably. ‘I'm afraid we won't be able to afford to support you any longer. You are going to have to get a job.'

This might have been an even greater shock to Viv than losing her home. At twenty-seven she had never done a serious hand's turn in her life. She had helped out at a jewellery shop in St Helier, owned by a friend of Loretta before the war had closed it down, she had done a little modelling and promotion work. She had even, on occasions, posed for some of the artist friends of Loretta's former lover and played at being a receptionist at La Maison Blanche during the busy season. But all these things had been undertaken on an almost social basis. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she heard herself saying: ‘I know exactly what I'd like to do. I'd like to be an actress like Mummy!'

Under different circumstances Adrian might have argued. As things were he was only relieved not to have Viv making a scene. And Loretta looked positively delighted.

‘I'm sure I could get you started, Vivienne. Blake Cooper – you remember Blake? I used to play with him – has a repertory company of his own nowadays. He'd train you I know and it could lead to all kinds of success.' She broke off, radiant as she remembered her own glory days and imagined how she could relive them vicariously through Viv. Besides, Blake had been one of the most handsome of her leading men; already she was looking forward with excitement to seeing him again. ‘I'll write to Blake tomorrow,' Loretta promised and Adrian sighed with relief.

Only one member of the household remained to be told and that was Nicky. But by putting a roof over his head for so long Adrian felt he had already more than done his bit to help rehabilitate the wounded. Now he did not owe him a thing.

It was almost two years now since the evening when Sophia and Bernard had discussed the future in the garden of La Maison Blanche. Throughout that first winter they had worked on plans for the re-opening of the hotel and the tourist agency and in the spring Bernard had given notice to the electricity company and thrown himself whole-heartedly into the new venture. Soon bookings were rolling in again and the whole family, with the exception of Paul, who had decided to stay on in the RAF for the time being at least, were involved. Sophia took over the tasks that had once been Lola's domain, Lola pottered a little in the kitchen, and Nicky worked part time in the agency office. It was, Bernard admitted privately, about all Nicky could do – his debilitating injuries meant he became overtired if he worked too long at a stretch. But the office was all on one level with a flap-up counter that he was able to negotiate in his chair and Viv was perfectly willing to drive him into town each day so the arrangement served both to give Nicky an interest and a modicum of self-respect and to save Bernard having to employ a lad as Charles had employed him.

Sophia's early fears that the sight of a disabled clerk might deter potential clients had proved groundless – on the whole people were still kindly disposed towards the young men they referred to as ‘our gallant lads, the wounded soldiers', but nevertheless Nicky was not particularly happy. Whereas in the early days he had managed to look on his wheelchair as a challenge to be overcome, now it was becoming a trap from which he could not escape and he hated being forced to work indoors in a sedentary occupation. But he could see no way out and so he went on taking each day as it came and trying to do his best for the family business. At least, he thought, he still had Viv – though sometimes in black moments he even felt that she was slipping away from him. He wondered if he should tell her that she must not feel she was tied to him in any way but somehow he could not bring himself to do it. She was his whole life. Without her he did not think he could find the will to go on.

Like Viv Nicky had realised all was not well with Adrian Moran's affairs but he had assumed that they would sort themselves out just as she had. Men like Viv's father always landed on their feet, didn't they? It was only poor fools like him who started out with dreams of being invincible and ended up being tolerated and pitied. He closed his mind to any thoughts that Adrian might be in serious financial trouble, and it came as a total and terrible shock to him when one day in the summer of 1947 Viv broke the news to him that the house he had come to look upon as his home was being sold, and she and her mother were going to England.

‘I'm very, very sorry,' she said in a voice full of forced brightness, ‘but I'm afraid that's the way the cookie crumbles. We are broke, darling, absolutely totally skint.'

‘But why England?' Nicky asked. He felt stunned. ‘Why do you have to go to England?'

‘To work, of course. What on earth could I do here? And besides, it would be really rather horrid having all my old friends seeing me in my straitened circumstances. It was different in the war, we were all in the same boat, but now …'

‘What about me?' Nicky said. The moment the words were out he thought how pathetic they sounded and he began to feel angry.

‘You will be all right, won't you?' Viv said in that same bright voice. ‘You can live at La Maison Blanche. There's a lift there now, isn't there, quite big enough to take your chair and the place is practically just around the corner from the tourist agency.'

For a moment Nicky was unable to reply. The anger had become a roaring in his head, a sort of black rage which was the culmination of all the bitterness and resentment and humiliation that had been fermenting away inside him for months now. For the first time in his life he wanted to strike Viv, to hit out at her pretty, well made-up face and wipe the smile off her scarlet lips. He wanted to hurt her as she was hurting him but he couldn't do it. He was in his wheelchair and she was out of reach. He couldn't even do that.

‘I'll come over to see you as often as I can,' Viv was saying. ‘ It will be quite fun. In fact it might even be good for us, being apart for a bit. We have been living in one another's pockets rather. You don't mind too much, do you, darling?'

Nicky brought his fists down hard on the arms of his chair making it rattle and jump.