The Second-last Woman in England (10 page)

What if the police returned while they were out?

Beside her, David drained the last of his champagne and reached for two fresh glasses.

‘Harri, what the devil’s going on over at Emp and Col?’ and Harriet froze, a cigarette halfway to her lips. ‘The share price is wobblier than a bowl of raspberry jelly. Is Cecil at all concerned?’

‘He’s not concerned, no,’ Harriet replied. ‘The share price always goes up and down. That’s what share prices do.’

David had said that himself at some function or in some interview. But it seemed to Harriet that Empire and Colonial’s share prices tended to go down while David’s company’s share price went up.

‘Sounds like time to get out of the shipping business,’ David remarked as casually as one’s nanny might suggest it was time to get out of the bath.

And for someone like David it
was
as easy as getting out of the bath. But for Cecil—no. She could no more imagine Cecil working in some other office, in some other industry, than she could imagine Queen Elizabeth landing a job at a Lyons tea shop. She could see Cecil through the French doors, standing with the Hensons in the garden, making some point, putting his glass down to make the point better—some voyage he had been on, some new ship about to be built. Or not built. It seemed embarrassing suddenly to have a husband who was unable to get out of shipping.

‘He likes shipping,’ she said, because that was the truth. ‘Oh, is that Princess Margaret?’

She hadn’t spoken in a particularly loud voice yet at her words every conversation halted, every raised glass hung suspended in midair and hands in the act of reaching for a morsel of smoked salmon froze as a room full of people far too well bred to do anything as crude as stare, were, nonetheless, instantly alert.

Royalty was in their midst.

‘Oh, no, my mistake,’ murmured Harriet as a rather large young girl in a last-season Dior frock and clutching an ugly red handbag came into the room. There was a general sort of sigh and the talking and drinking and nibbling resumed.

‘It’s Stella,’ said Valerie, obviously disappointed. ‘David’s niece. They live in Bromley.’ She sighed and reached for another cigarette. ‘Oh, how’s that dashing brother of yours, Harri?’

There was a pause. Valerie frowned and leaned closer.

‘What is it, darling? What have I said?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Harriet brightly. She took a mouthful of champagne. ‘As a matter of fact I saw Simon yesterday. At Leo Mumford’s. And he was with some deb fifteen years his junior!’

‘Not really!’

‘Yes. Can’t say I conversed with her. Cecil did and reported that she seemed rather idiotic.’

‘Oh well, one tends to be at that age. Lord knows, we were.’ Valerie laughed.

Harriet was silent. She remembered her debutante year and the years immediately afterwards as being a constant, anxious round of parties and luncheons and balls that everyone had tried so hard to enjoy, but underneath it all there had been that constant, panic-stricken fear:
What if I don’t find a husband? What if no
one wants me?
Most of the girls had had their mothers, of course, to see them through it. She had had father once or twice until he had become too ill; Simon on occasion, when she had begged him. In the end she had learnt to do things on her own. Indeed, she had done so since she had come to England as a twelve-year-old. It had been a watershed. In India she had still been a child. If she had appeared idiotic after that it had, she realised, been a front.

‘I’m rather afraid it looks as if Princess Margaret isn’t coming,’ she observed.

‘Was that Peter Goodfellow I saw talking to David?’

Harriet nodded. ‘Yes, I expect so.’

It was almost four o’clock. They had left the Swanbridges’ and Cecil had suggested they walk the short distance northwards to Athelstan Gardens instead of hailing a cab.

‘I understood he was tipped for a Cabinet post, but nothing happened in the reshuffle.’

‘No.’ Harriet slowed her pace as she was already a step ahead of Cecil. Why had he insisted on walking? Hadn’t he said he was going to the office?

Kings Road was quiet and sultry in a summer Sunday afternoon way. Few cars drove past and the only people out walking were nannies with small children and a scattering of elderly Eastern European migrants dragging reluctant pugs.

Perhaps Cecil was no longer thinking of going to the office? Perhaps he had decided the Rocastle thing was not an urgent matter? So far he had said nothing about the policemen who had come to the house the day before. After dinner the previous evening he had retired to his study and had not emerged until after she had gone to bed. This morning over breakfast the talk had chiefly been of the televising of the Coronation—Julius had overheard something yesterday at Leo’s. Cecil had had plenty to say on the matter and a rather tense exchange had followed, resulting in them all finishing their breakfasts in silence. Cecil had retired once more to his study. Did he think she had simply forgotten? Did he think she would accept no explanation? It was a man’s prerogative, he would have said, had she questioned him, to keep his business to himself.

Well, it was a wife’s prerogative to assess and, if need be, repair the damage one’s husband had got them into.

‘Cecil, I was thinking we ought to invite Jeremy Rocastle and that lovely wife of his—Jenny, is it?—over to lunch one weekend. They seem like such a nice couple.’

Beside her, Cecil had fallen silent. He walked stiffly, upright, no creases spoiling the line of his Sunday blazer, but she didn’t need to look at his face to picture the furrow between his brows that her words had invoked. One did not argue in marriage; one never created a scene. One merely forced the issue in a calm and polite fashion.

‘I don’t believe that will be possible,’ he replied and he might have been discussing the possibility of a day out at Ascot rather than an ex-employee who had absconded in the dead of night with the entire contents of the firm’s safe.

‘Really? Why not?’

Cecil paused. And no wonder—he could hardly say: because I was wrong about Rocastle. He turned out bad. We have been taken for a ride, ripped off, duped. Swindled.

‘Rocastle no longer works at Empire and Colonial.’

‘I see. And where has he gone?’

‘I am not at liberty to say.’

‘Why not? Have the police told you not to?’

They continued to walk in silence, turning left into Portchester Crescent. Many of the houses along this street were now owned by embassies—East European, Middle Eastern—and the faces that one occasionally saw at the windows were dark and bearded, sometimes in white suits or sporting strangely shaped black hats and the occasional turban. Cecil paused beside the first house and adjusted his cufflinks. They were silver, a present from her on his fortieth birthday.

‘Harriet.’

She waited.

‘I met the new nanny this morning. A Miss Corbett. She appeared to be taking Anne to church.’

Harriet neither confirmed nor denied this statement.

‘I never question your decisions,’ he continued, ‘where matters of the house or the children’s well-being are concerned.’

Ah, now she could see where this was going.

‘And by the same token I don’t expect to involve you in matters of business.’

She said nothing. It was as close to an argument as Cecil would allow himself to get, this putting his foot down, this principled stand. If he found out about the telephone call she had received on Thursday she knew he would make a fuss about that too. Well, she would not give him the opportunity.

‘All I ask, Cecil, is that you tell me if it will be in the newspapers.’

He paused. A wood-pigeon cooed loudly overhead and, further away, a small terrier yapped excitedly then fell silent.

‘I can’t say … It’s possible,’ he conceded at last. ‘But it’s poor Mrs Rocastle who will bear the brunt of it, I’m afraid. Thank God they have no children.’

They resumed walking.

‘This man, Rocastle. He reported directly to you, didn’t he?’

Cecil took a deep breath.

‘Yes, that’s so, but—’

‘So it’s inevitable that questions will be asked. That your name will be linked with this scandal. That the police will return and make enquiries—’

Cecil turned to her indignantly.

‘What are you suggesting, Harriet? This man broke into the safe and absconded with a large amount of company money—do you think I had any idea of what was he was planning? That I was aware—?’

He paused as a door opened in the basement of one of the houses and a young man in a dark suit came up the steps to the street, glancing at them as he passed.

No, she did not think he had had any idea. That was not Cecil’s way. If he had suspected he would have acted at once. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself.

‘I shall speak to Sir Maurice this afternoon,’ Cecil said when the man had gone.

And, in his eyes, that was the matter closed. Yet the police would make enquiries; they were bound to.

‘Mother, I’ve been blessed,’ Anne announced, pausing dramatically on the stairs.

Harriet stood in the hall and regarded her younger child. She was wearing her school hat, a hideous wide-brimmed straw thing with a red ribbon that went under the chin.

‘Have you, dear?’

‘Yes, the man put his hand on my head and said “Bless you, my child” and I hadn’t even sneezed. It was terrifically funny!’

Behind Anne the new nanny appeared, tall and gaunt and her face like thunder and Harriet thought, oh they’ve been to church. And Anne had behaved—well, like Anne, by the sound of it. Harriet experienced a flash of annoyance that the new nanny—a mere girl of twenty—was standing there scowling at her daughter as though Anne had used the wrong knife at dinner.

‘Perhaps he thought you were about to sneeze,’ she suggested. ‘Was it very dusty in the church?’

Anne gave this question some thought. ‘It was a bit, I suppose. And I went out without my handkerchief, too.’

She came clattering down the remaining stairs, the nanny following two steps behind her at a more sedate pace, her face stony, but rearranging her features as she reached the bottom stair so that her face became that of an East End girl once more.

‘We’re off to the garden, Mrs Wallis,’ she announced, and it seemed like a challenge thrown down. ‘As you suggested,’ she added, as though this gave her immunity to criticism.

‘Don’t go to the garden over the road,’ Harriet instructed. ‘Take the children to Kensington Gardens, it’s better exercise for them. Take Julius with you.’

Harriet went into the drawing room and picked up yesterday’s
Times
and skimmed the headlines:
La Bohème
was playing tonight at Sadler’s Wells, there was talk of tea being de-rationed, the War Office had provided its daily list of casualties in Korea. Her eyes skipped over the page and refused to settle long enough to take in more than the headlines.

There were footsteps in the hallway and the front door opened.

‘I can walk down the steps backwards with my eyes shut!’ called Anne from outside.

‘She likes to throw stones at the squirrels, you know,’ were Julius’s parting words and a moment later the front door shut.

Downstairs in the kitchen Mrs Thompson could be heard slamming baking trays around. Cecil was at the office. He had gone straight there in a cab after their return from the Swanbridges’, though what exactly he hoped to achieve there was unclear. Harriet imagined him at his desk surrounded by his ships and an empty safe, the outer office silent and deserted, everyone at home for the weekend and his secretary, Miss James, tending her elderly mother in Rickmansworth or Norwood or wherever such people lived.

It was almost half past four. Harriet stood at the window. Athelstan Gardens was still and silent. She stood up, reaching for a scarf to cover her hair and a pair of sunglasses and, after a moment’s hesitation, her handbag. She wasn’t sure if she would need it, if she might need some money or not.

Outside the sky was clear and a pale blue; the sun was still high and she felt it slowly warm her arms. The house was cold; even on the hottest summer day its high ceilings and narrow windows were an effective defence against sunlight.