Palace Circle (12 page)

Knowing such an event was likely, Delia murmured something placating and left heavyhearted, sensing that their friendship would end the day Lloyd George stepped into H.H.'s shoes.

The announcement that he was to do so came the first week in December. “Thank God,” Ivor said with relief. “The war will take a new direction. Even the King—never the most optimistic of men—believes it could well be over by the spring.”

It wasn't.

When Jerome came home on leave in March, he said, grimfaced,
“Unless America enters the war, the fighting is going to go on until there isn't a man left standing.”

He was a major now and looked a decade older than when, three years ago, he had enlisted so exuberantly. His dark hair was flecked with gray and the lines running from nose to mouth looked as if they had been carved in stone. His weariness was palpable.

“Heaven only knows what's happening on the eastern front,” he said bitterly to Ivor when he dined with him at the Denbys’. “But the western front is a stalemate of cataclysmic proportions. An entire generation is being wiped out. It's kill or be killed. God knows how I'm still alive.”

On the sixth of April, the day after his leave ended, America declared war. A month later Delia received a euphoric letter from her cousin Bella. It was addressed “Darling Viscountess,” because Bella loved to use Delia's title—however inappropriately—at every opportunity.

Delia laid the letter down, sick at heart at Bella's foolish naïveté. More than half a million men had died on the Somme alone—and that was just the published figures. She thought of the amputees she had seen. Men in their early twenties, and even younger, who would never walk again. Men who, unable
to work, would be reduced to selling matches. And to Bella the war was one of battlefields set neatly outside towns where, the fighting for the day over, gallant soldiers returned as if from the office to flirt with pretty mademoiselles.

“Don't be too hard on her,” Ivor said when she voiced her despair that Bella wasn't better informed. “Three years ago that was how nearly everyone thought. All that matters is for American troopships to reach France without being blown out of the water by German submarines.”

At the end of June the American troops reached France, but as the weeks passed, Delia could see no dramatic changes. If anything, things grew worse. The Germans began making zeppelin raids over London, involving civilians in a way no one had ever thought possible. One bomb fell on a school, killing a roomful of children. Another crashed into a railway station, hitting a crowded train.

Postcards from Jerome, written in pencil and with nearly every sentence blocked out by the censor, still arrived with thankful regularity. Though he had fought tooth and nail against accepting a staff job, a staff job behind lines was where he had now been assigned and Delia thanked God for it every night.

“Has Jerome said what he intends doing once the war is over?” Ivor asked on one of the rare evenings when they were dining together. “The world won't be the same place and knowing Jerome he'll adapt quickly.”

“He's going to enter politics. He's already spoken to Lloyd George, who has promised to put him up as the Liberal candidate for some promising constituency.”

Ivor wasn't as surprised as Delia expected. “It's something he should have done ten years ago,” he said. “He's got the right manner. I suspect people will vote for him in droves.”

If he lives
, Delia thought fiercely but she did not put the
thought into words. There was always the chance Jerome would figure out a way to return to the front.

In October, on Petra's third birthday, Delia held a party at Cadogan Square. Jack, who was now nine and at a preparatory school in Sussex, was home for half term and arrived when the party was in full swing and a conjuror was performing.

“Ooh, Jack,
Jack!”
Petra squealed, hurling herself toward him and fastening hands gooey with icing around his legs. “Come and see the man taking rabbits—live real rabbits—out of his hat. Can I have one of the rabbits to keep, Mama? Jack is going to stay, isn't he? You are going to stay, aren't you?” And letting go of his legs to grab his hands, she dragged him across the floor where a dozen children were laughing and cheering as the magician drew a live dove from his hat.

Davina, twenty-two months old, was standing as near as she could get, not clapping and cheering noisily like the other children, but simply staring at the dove in round-eyed, gray-eyed wonder.

Watching her, Delia's heart contracted with love. Where Petra was exuberantly outgoing, demanding constant attention and entertainment, Davina was quite happy with her own company as long as she had bricks or a tiny toy figure to play with. Delia bit her lip, wondering what a third child would have been like—a third child that, after Davina's difficult birth, she'd given up hope of conceiving.

Her obstetrician had told Ivor that it was unlikely she would conceive again and that, if she did, her life would be at risk. Delia feared it would mean the end of her marriage.

It hadn't.

“Divorce is simply not socially acceptable,” Ivor said, when she had voiced concern. “Not for a man in my position. Two daughters are simply what I'm going to have to settle for.”

He hadn't troubled to disguise his bitter disappointment
and she hadn't troubled to hide her vast relief. If he
had
wanted a divorce, it would have made it impossible for her to spend time with Jerome. It was only because she was safely married, and because her husband was viewed as Jerome's close friend, that regular contact with Jerome aroused no gossip.

As the conjuror began pulling colored-silk handkerchiefs from the back of Jack's jacket, Delia tried to think of life without Jerome. She couldn't. He had become her best friend and now that her inability to give Ivor a son had made her husband even more distant, Jerome had become the central person in her life.

A sudden uproar interrupted her thoughts. The conjuror had just drawn a live mouse from Jack's pocket. Nannies screamed and scattered, toddlers shrieked.

Aware that it was time she intervened, Delia walked swiftly across the floor, deciding that the instant the party was over she would telephone Fortnum & Mason's and order another food parcel for Jerome—one including his favorite Fuller's walnut cake.

Christmas was spent at Shibden, and over the holidays King George and Queen Mary paid one of their very rare social visits. It was a disruption Delia could well have done without, entailing, as it did, a menu submitted for approval in advance—ensuring that cook had hysterics—and a swarm of police outside the house. The Queen unbent enough to ask after Delia's charity work and the King discussed the difficulty of America's loan restrictions.

“The money can only be spent to pay for supplies bought in the United States.” His Majesty was so anxious that he forgot he was discussing a political subject in front of his wife and his hostess. “We don't exact similar conditions on loans that we make to our allies. Difficult though such trips now are, I
fear you are going to have to cross the Atlantic again, Conisborough. The U.S. secretary of the treasury needs to understand just how critical our financial situation is. He must be told—and in no uncertain terms—that we need a more flexible arrangement.”

Later, when their royal visitors had driven back to Sandringham, Delia knocked on the connecting door to Ivor's bedroom.

“Will you really have to risk crossing the Atlantic again?” she asked.

Though he had dispensed with his evening jacket he was otherwise fully dressed and she was suddenly very conscious of being clad only in her nightdress and peignoir.

“Perhaps. It will be up to Balfour.”

Arthur Balfour was the British secretary of foreign affairs.

“The difficulty is,” he said, talking frankly to her as he always did where his work was concerned, “America now has its own vast war needs and as a consequence, the supply of credit to Britain could well begin to dry up.”

“But not when we're allies! Surely now that we're allies we will receive increased lines of credit?”

“Maybe.” He shot her his familiar down-slanting smile. “Perhaps it's you, not me, Balfour should be sending to America. The secretary of the treasury's name is Mr. McAdoo.”

It had been a long time since, in Ivor's company, she had giggled, but she giggled now. “It sounds like something out of a comic-strip cartoon.”

His smile deepened.

Sensing his new affection and what it portended she decided she couldn't bear to have her emotions thrown into turmoil again. She said swiftly, “I'm sure if you go to America your trip will be successful. Good night, Ivor.” And before he could try and detain her she walked back into her own bedroom, closing the connecting door.

All through the cold months of the spring the fighting continued. On the eastern front, the Russian armies had been defeated. On the western front the French troops were so diminished they could no longer be relied upon for any operation that involved a major attack and the U.S. troops were still not being deployed. In March, when the Germans opened a massive offensive, King George was so fearful of a German victory that he rushed to France to bolster the flagging morale of the British armies.

Jerome's staff job hadn't prevented him from being injured again, though this time he was not evacuated to a military hospital in England. Instead, he spent several weeks recuperating near Boulogne and then, in June, suffering a permanent limp, he was back in the thick of it.

So as not to think, Delia kept herself so busy with charity work that she was in danger of collapsing from exhaustion. It was better, however, than reading the casualty lists in
The Times
or hearing that a soldier who had just been killed was the last surviving brother of three.

“Their poor mothers,” Gwen said time after time. “To lose not one boy but all their sons. What fortitude they must need to bear such unimaginable loss.”

In September it looked as if the Allies were finally winning, but just when her spirits were higher than they had been for four years, Delia learned that Beau had been killed.

The news poleaxed her. Beau had been part of her childhood; part of her youth. For weeks her thoughts were of Virginia and the carelessly happy days with her cousin.

“When the Atlantic is safe to travel again, the very first thing I'm goin' to do is visit my folks,” she said to Ivor. “My parents aren't gettin' any younger and I want Petra and Davina to remember them.”

The war ended in November. Throughout the country church bells rang and fireworks lit the night sky. Ivor had flags hung from every window of the Cadogan Square house. After
going to the House of Commons to listen to Lloyd George read the armistice terms, he took Delia to Buckingham Palace where King George and Queen Mary stood on the balcony waving to the crowds.

Delia half expected life to return to prewar certainties. It didn't. Many of their friends who had mansions in London and stately homes in the country gave up their town houses. They still entertained, but house parties were confined to weekends.

In town, the young thronged nightclubs to listen to the new jazz. American music was played everywhere. It was a social scene Ivor disliked but Delia, whose growing friendship with the Prince of Wales had become close, often partied with him and nightclubbing was Prince Edward's favorite occupation.

“And Ivor can't very well forbid me from accepting such invitations,” Delia said to Jerome in the spring of 1920 when they had escaped for an illicit picnic on the North Downs, “not when they come from the man who will be his king.”

“Edward doesn't have the look of a king,” Jerome said. He was lying on the grass propped on one elbow. “He looks like a fairy-tale prince—slender, blue-eyed, golden-haired—but he lacks gravitas and, in my book, gravitas is a necessary quality for a king.”

Delia set down her glass of white wine, smoothed her fashionable mid-calf-length skirt over her knees and circled them with her arms. “Ivor thinks it a necessary quality too. He's hoping King George will live to be ninety.”

“Which, considering how old his grandmother was when she died, he may well do.” He put a chicken leg down on a serviette and lay flat, his hands beneath his head. “Did Ivor give you any idea how long he might be in Paris?”

“No. He said the peace conference was likely to go on for months. You're an MP—what's the inside gossip?”

“That it will go on for months.” He shot her his wide, easy smile. “I don't think Lloyd George will want Ivor to stay in Paris, though. He needs your husband to focus on what is happening in the Middle East. If we grant Egypt independence— and we may have to—we still need to maintain control of the cotton trade, and of the canal. Without Suez, we lose our strategic link with India.”

Delia's conversations with Ivor were nearly always about work—which meant they were nearly always about politics. She didn't want the same situation with Jerome. Egypt didn't interest her even a little bit, and she'd no intention of wasting one of their precious afternoons together talking about it.

She lay down beside him, her head next to his. “Let me tell you about Virginia,” she said dreamily. “Let me tell you how utterly wonderful it was takin' Petra and Davina there. If only you had been with us as well everythin' would have been absolutely perfect.”

He rolled over, pinning her beneath him, his eyes hot with desire. “One day,” he said, lifting a stray tendril of fiery hair away from her face. “One day we'll go there together.”

Her hands slid into the curly thickness of his hair. She didn't want to talk about one day, because she knew that one day was never going to come. Divorce was out of the question for Jerome because of Jack. “Maybe when he's older, Delia,” he said. “But divorce while he's still at Eton would be disastrous for him.” And recently Jerome had become an ambitious member of Parliament, making divorce unthinkable for a whole set of new reasons.