Park Lane (22 page)

When the music stops, he beams at her and says, ‘Miss Masters, the rumours are true.’

The compliment tightens itself around her throat.

Before the band strikes up again, she is rescued by Edward, who swoops in announcing that he needs to steal his sister. Bea looks back as he whisks her away. Mr McKenna is still looking at her. He gives a little bow, and Bea feels her insides twist. Might she have warned him? But now it is too late. Much as it is always a delight to be rescued by Edward, Mr McKenna, thinks Bea, is utterly charming, and she feels a little bereft.

Within seconds Edward has her surrounded by Edie and friends, quaffing ices at a supper table put up in the red drawing room. Edie has had more than the single glass of champagne that Miss Wolffe recommended to her pupils, and there is no sign of her husband.

‘Where’s Tony?’ Bea asks as she squashes on to the other half of her friend’s chair.

‘God knows,’ Edie replies. ‘I have successfully lost my husband, and here’s to that.’ She raises a glass. ‘Somebody else swept me on to the dance floor hours ago and I haven’t seen Tony since. No doubt he’s on the balcony flirting with the debutantes, only you haven’t a balcony, have you? Well, it’s rather twee to wonder where one’s husband is, especially at a dance. I shall simply have to hope that he’s worrying about me, and hasn’t a clue who I’ve been dancing with. Chin-chin!’

Bea wraps an arm around her friend’s back and squeezes it.

Next to Edie is a rather beautiful young man, eyes as dark-ringed as Edward’s, and on the receiving end of much attention from Clemmie, who is on his far side, and has an expression on her face that manages to combine seriousness with amazement.

‘Bea-Bea, you must let me introduce Peter. He’s a friend of Edward’s. He has been telling us how he once played cards for forty-eight hours at a stretch! Tom says he simply wouldn’t last it, couldn’t stay awake for so long.’

‘I’ll be blowed if I ever have to,’ says Tom, who is sitting beside his wife. ‘Enough to drive a chap mad.’

It is somewhere near four before Mother announces that their duties as hosts are over. Bea’s head is still ringing and she is unclear as to how the last few hours have passed. She has also waltzed, she thinks, with the newspaper baron and her neighbour at dinner. There has been a bunny hug, a grizzly, a turkey trot and the new foxtrot. The effect of the one or two extra glasses of champagne that Bea has sipped her way through over the past half-dozen hours is now fading and her feet are beginning to ache. A few guests linger, but Bea leaves them to Edward and sneaks upstairs, quite exhausted. Luckily her corset is easier to escape than pull tight. Bea unhooks her front, her eyes closing as her fingers work their way down what must be two dozen tiny hooks. She climbs into her bed. But as her head touches the pillow, she realises she cannot sleep.

15

WHEN GRACE COMES DOWN IN THE MORNING, IT LOOKS
like a riot has passed through. Candlewax has hardened on to table tops and cigarette ends have been trodden into the boards. Ashtrays, where used, have overflowed and the debris of food and stained, crumpled napkins litter the rooms. Almost every surface is packed with glasses. The rooms stink. Several chimneys’ worth of cigars and the like have been smoked in here.

It’s just as Susan, sitting upstairs with an ankle the size of a prize marrow, said. ‘It’s a rare sight; see what they really are, do you?’ Yes, thinks Grace, she can see. To clean a room is to take pride in it and now weeks of work, every stroke of her duster, all those elbow-pushes of polish have been swept aside in a few hours. As she looks around her, she wants to cry.

It doesn’t help that it’s only six, an hour earlier than usual, even though none of the family, she’s been told, will appear before noon. The orchestra broke her sleep until four, waking her each time the music started up again after a pause. Not as though she could sleep; not with Mrs Wainwright’s words yesterday evening running through her head. Inventory, she said. Make sure what should be there, still is.

Grace puts her tray down beside a regiment of glasses. All those ones half full, and more. And the cost of it, she’s heard, Lord knows
why they pay all that. She picks up a glass and the liquid in it tilts from side to side. She sniffs it: it smells sweet, and rich, like those that drink it, Michael would say. She holds it up in front of her so that the daylight shines through. Does Miss Beatrice drink this, she wonders.

Grace lowers the glass. She glances behind her. Then she raises the glass to her lips and, as she sips, the gas from the glass tickles the insides of her nostrils. Her sneezes splatter the liquid over her hands. She licks it. Nectar, yes. The room is still empty. She takes a swig now, and her mouth buzzes, her nostrils filling with gas again. She had expected alcohol to taste more bitter but this does not, and she’s thirsty, she’s had no breakfast, not even a cup of tea. As she drains the glass, she hears footsteps behind her and she swings round, forgetting to put the glass down first. It’s Mary, eyes wide open.

‘Did you?’

‘What?’

‘Drink it.’

‘Drink what?’

‘The champagne. She’ll smell it on your breath, Mrs Wainwright. They’ll all smell it on you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘They will.’

‘I didn’t drink it.’

‘You’re flushing. That’s the alcohol.’

‘I’m angry.’

‘Because I said you drank it? Well, you did. I saw the glass there. Right at your lips.’

‘I was smelling it.’

‘You wait, it’ll go to your head and you’ll knock something over. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.’ Mary leans in close. ‘I can smell it on you now.’

Grace can smell it on herself, over her hands, cuffs even, where it splattered. But who’s to say she didn’t spill it? Who indeed? In any
case, why should she care? She considers throwing a whole glass over herself, nobody would think she’d drunk some then. She laughs and the mess in this room seems bearable, the morning seems bearable.

Grace is still smiling when Joseph appears. He passes her without looking and heads straight for the doors to the saloon.

‘Joseph,’ she says. ‘Good morning.’

He slows and stops, swivelling around on his heels to face her.

‘Good morning, Grace,’ he replies. And smiles.

Something gives in Grace. Part of her just falls away and she feels as full of tears as she feels full of herself.

‘Joseph,’ she says. ‘It’s not that … It’s really not that …’

He looks back at her as though he doesn’t know what to think. So Grace finds her arm going forward, something in her pushing it out towards him. Joseph is as still as death. Then he walks over to her and puts a hand on each of her shoulders, looking like he might cry himself.

‘Do you mean that, Grace? Do you mean that?’

Grace thinks she nods.

They stop at twelve. Dinner, then they’ll have an hour after. Grace tells Mrs Wainwright that she’s not feeling well. You look a little pale, Grace, she says. Grace feels pale. The past two hours it’s felt like the ceiling’s coming down on her head. May she be excused dinner, she asks? She’d just like to put her feet up. No, she’s not hungry at all. Mrs Wainwright nods. But we can’t have this too often, she says. And I want you up again at two, we’ll be doing the inventory then.

Inventory! thinks Grace, and her heart starts beating like soldiers on the march. Lord help her, all it’ll need is for somebody to check the books, and they’ll know. No matter that there’s more taken out; she’s no room for reason right now. All she can think of is a voice saying, ‘Mrs Wainwright, one’s missing,’ and she’s near ill with the thought.

Grace runs upstairs. When she’s in her room she takes her overcoat out of her cupboard. She counts the minutes until they’ll all be at the table. Then she goes back down, soft as velvet on the wooden stairs, coat over her arm so it doesn’t look like she’s going out.

Twenty minutes it’ll take her. Not even that if she walks fast. Hyde Park Corner, Belgrave Square, along a bit and into Elizabeth Street.

It’ll still be there, won’t it, it hasn’t been so long now. Well, it has to be there, just as Grace has to get it back before Mrs Wainwright’s inventory. Grace can’t count on it, can she, Mrs Wainwright, and Lady Masters and the lot of them, thinking that a guest last night filled his pocket with an old book like that.

If the bookseller recognises her, he hides it. Lets her stand there and explain the book she’s looking for. Signed copy. Does he have one?

He hesitates, looks straight at her. Well, Grace looks straight back, doesn’t she. Then he walks over to a cabinet and takes a key out of his pocket. He brings back a book that looks the same as she can remember it, if she’s remembering quite right.

‘Careful now,’ he says, as she reaches out towards it.

She picks it up and opens the front pages and sees the signature. It’s the same book, and relief floods into Grace. Thank the Lord she hadn’t yet sent any of that five pounds home.

Tucking it under her right arm, she reaches into her pocket with her left hand and brings out the five-pound note she’s been carrying with her. She puts it on the counter and turns to go.

‘Young lady,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ Grace replies over her shoulder.

‘I think you’ll find the door’s locked. Unless you have another twenty pounds to pay for that book.’

16

GOOD GOD, THE CLOCK ON BEA’S BEDSIDE TABLE SAYS
noon. Bea thinks she can remember seeing it at six, seven, eight and nine this morning. But she must have slept better than that, for her mind is electric, not in the slightest tired, but it’s been like that since midnight.

In her head she can see a freshly dark-oak panelled and wallpapered drawing room. The sweet-smiling Mrs McKenna, who can be barely a couple of years older than Bea, is arranging her ornaments and photographs, picking up each one and admiring it before placing it. She moves on to the pale sofa, where she straightens a couple of cushions that have fallen out of place and as she walks to the door she turns and surveys the room. She nods to herself and smiles.

But the McKennas don’t live there yet. Forget about the drawing room, Bea, the place is half built, and not a soul in it. Still, there’s years of work put into it, of Mrs McKenna planning where the guests sleep, the children, how the main rooms should run into each other, but will not now. Oh, come on, put it out of your head, and think of what you are fighting for. And McKenna, last night he may have been a man as decent and kind as any other but this morning he’ll be signing a force-feeding warrant. And he’ll be ordering the release of one woman and the rearrest of another.

Bea, don’t funk it. Don’t even think of it. Just think of those bruised necks, of Emmeline and what they’re doing to her now. He is a monster, you just couldn’t see it last night. And, and, even if he isn’t, then something, something, has to change, and this is simply the only way to do it.

And she’s up, ringing the bell, striding into her dressing room. If she keeps moving then she won’t have the time to think of buckling. It would be a damn poor show, and she’d find it hard to look at herself in the glass. She’ll find it hard to look at herself either way. Get dressed, Beatrice, get on with the day.

It’s Susan who comes in, bobbing as she steps through the door. Her skin is chalk, dark smudges under her eyes. Bea’s never liked Susan that much, the woman has a hardness to her, and this morning Bea needs a gentle touch.

‘Is Grace around?’ asks Bea.

‘She’s gone up to bed, Miss Beatrice.’

‘Bed?’ Bea’s eyebrows raise.

‘Do you want me to fetch her?’

‘No,’ says Bea. ‘Let the poor girl sleep. It’s a wonder everyone isn’t back there this morning.’

If Grace isn’t here, Bea would rather do her own hair than set the other servants talking about what she might be up to on the Day After. It may not be ‘done’ to care about that sort of thing but, today, Bea doesn’t want anyone talking. And she has to get downstairs before lunch if she needs the car at three.

At a quarter to one, Bea walks to the mews at the back of the house to check on the Calcott herself before joining the others upstairs. James is in the garage; how odd. Even odder, it looks as though Summers is having a go at him. The two men, man and boy, are staring at each other. They are almost two versions of the same man: how James will be in twenty years’ time, and how Summers was twenty years earlier. Can people, wonders Bea, grow to look so similar?

Bea deliberately knocks a tin bucket sitting on the floor to draw attention to herself and the clatter breaks the conversation in front of her. James nods and excuses himself, stalking off like an animal that has lost territory. Summers brushes himself down with the relative self-composure of age. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Beatrice, good to see you here.’ And she tells him that she needs the Calcott, not on any account to take anyone in it, or let Edward or even Mother put their hands anywhere near the wheel. If necessary, say that it’s not running well.

A look of horror appears on Summers’ face.

‘Or perhaps something more believable,’ she gushes.

She turns to go, and reaches the door before she looks back.

‘It might be a good thing to give the brakes a really good go. Oh, and the car, don’t bother to wax it.’ She doesn’t want it to shine.

He shakes his head slowly from side to side, his eyebrows pushing his hairline.

Bea fidgets throughout lunch. And afterwards, as they have coffee in the still-furnished red drawing room, she is fidgeting still. For God’s sake let nobody ask her what she is up to today. In her head she practises rattling off ‘Oh, nothing much’, though replying to a real out-loud question might be a different matter altogether. However, nobody has shown a jot of interest so far. Tom is silent, smoking, head miles away, no doubt in some Gowden antechamber. Edward, goaded, Bea guesses, by a sore head, is in a merciless mood and seems to have forgotten all pledges of friendship. ‘Good Lord, Bea,’ he says, ‘you’re dressed practically. You could run in that serge it has so many folds in it. And to a funeral, it looks like. I’m on for a more dignified form of exercise – behind the steering wheel. Just a little bit of shut-eye first.’