Park Lane (7 page)

It’s three in the afternoon and they’ve only an hour off today, too much to do for any longer. The dance is a month away but the invitations have just gone out and so they must, says Mrs Wainwright, start to prepare. Grace doesn’t point out that the house is spotless enough for royalty every day of the week.

Mary wants to go for a walk. She’d rather, she says, that Grace came with her, good for Grace, too. ‘That’s living like a princess to see all that green across the road, asking for a visit.’ Grace doesn’t want to go out. She sits on her bed where the mattress dips, snug between the mounds on either side. Boots off, feet on the edge of the mattress, her fists are on her knees. Her thumbs press into the sides of her forefingers, twisting the near-translucent paper that she is squeezing between them. A neat script is inked across the page. Not a smudge, Ma never smudges, never let Grace either, one blob spread in the wrong page and she’d send Grace back to the kitchen table to do her lessons again, whatever the cost of the paper.

After Grace had finished her homework, Ma would give her an apron and a pair of old leather gloves to wear – you don’t want
skivvy’s hands, Grace, you won’t get into an office like that. That’s my life’s work, Grace, Ma’d say. She has a funny smile, Ma, all bright and shiny so’s you can’t tell whether she’s teasing.

The letter came two days ago and Grace slipped it straight into her pocket. For two days it’s been in her drawer, burning a hole in her clothes. How can you not read a letter somebody has written you?

When you’re only going to make the lie worse.

5th February, 1914

Dear Grace
,

How happy your letter made us. It is wonderful news and makes everything worthwhile. A private secretary is grand. Is board still taken out if you are living with the family? Still, it’s certainty, isn’t it. How much can you send home? Twenty-five shillings a month I expect, with what you must be earning! Or thirty, if you’re careful. If we can we’ll put it by up here
.

My Grace, what sort of man is he you are working for? If he bothers you in any way, you must leave, promise me that. It’ll all be fine if your name’s still good and a girl can lose her name by being bothered. Does he have a wife and children in the house? A housemaid, too? You mustn’t let them ask you to do even light dusting. Or that will be the start of it
.

Don’t go out after dark unless you must. Miss Sand says she can send you some books for the evenings
.

Your father and I are glad you go to church with Michael on Sundays
.

  
With my love
,

  
Your Mother

I’m proud of you, girl. Best love, Da
.

Thirty shillings a month. That’s as much as she earns and half again.

Grace pushes so hard on her thumbs that the paper begins to tear.

6

BEA IS LYING ON HER BED WITH JOHN’S VOICE FILLING
the room. She didn’t hit her head, he is saying, just slumped … shaken … carried her back … I’m so sorry.

‘Sorry for what, John? You’ve been a hero,’ says a female voice.

‘Oh, I can’t imagine being that.’

More female voices are saying that what she needs is rest, and she wonders how many of them are in the room. Thank God you found her, John … But until she’s better … She’s fine … Thought you said earlier you had to go back up to town … Don’t get into trouble … We’ll cable you. A few minutes later she hears his footsteps leave the room, in that oh so measured pace.

Only they’re not John’s footsteps, it’s a servant knocking at the door, and she’s not down in the country at Beauhurst, she’s in Park Lane. Her room is empty; she must have fallen asleep again after ringing the bell, if it can be called sleep when your dreams are memories, not good ones at that. Oh, Beatrice, it’s February, she tells herself. That’s two months, and you still can’t get that man out of your head.

They’d been down at Beauhurst, Bea had invited a crowd for a few days and they were in the drawing room with the dregs of coffee after lunch. Bea was sitting on one of the window seats with John, looking over his shoulder as he made cartoons of their friends
around the room. Halfway through one of Edie, he put his pencil down and turned around to look at Bea. Let’s go for a walk, he whispered, his eyes full of something he wanted to say. Yes, she replied, her heart in her mouth. She stood up, excused herself from the room on the grounds of needing a nap, and near dashed upstairs to change into a walking dress. She pulled a couple out on to the bed but they looked such passion-killers, so she took a coat better suited to Mayfair than the country, but at least she looked like the girl of someone’s dreams.

She met him at the gate to the walled nursery garden and he led her away up into the woods and pine air, their feet sinking into the dead leaves underneath as they walked. For five beautiful minutes they walked hand in hand until they came to the curved white lovers’ seat by the little waterfall. They sat on either side of the bench, leaning across the divider so that their noses were almost brushing. John took her hand again, and squeezed it.

‘Beatrice,’ he said, ‘I’ve something I want to say to you.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, wondering why he was saying and not asking.

‘Beatrice, I can’t marry you.’

She remembers feeling as though she were a stone that would sink into the earth if she didn’t stand. So she did, and moved away from him, she thinks, and then she fell.

It is Susan who comes into Bea’s room in Park Lane. Good Lord, Bea isn’t sure she’s up to Susan this early. Right now she’d like a tender hand, not one that looks as though it would sooner whip your face.

She has pointed this out to Mother, who pooh-poohed her. ‘She’s first housemaid. If anyone should help you dress it should be her. At least she’s honest; it’s such a bore when servants steal. You feel you never know where you’ve put something and that you must be going insane. Then there’s the residue of guilt for God knows what becomes of them without a reference. Really, I don’t mind a rocky countenance if you can find things where you set them down last.’

It isn’t, thinks Bea, Mother who has to have her scalp jabbed by the Woman with Iron Fingers. Mind you, with Suthers as a benchmark, Mother would be unlikely to notice.

Susan is fast. Bea will give her that, and Bea is still ahead of the others when she comes down to breakfast. She noses her way along the sideboard of poached eggs, kidneys and half a dozen other offerings. She takes nothing. At the end the newspapers lie folded like fallen dominoes. She takes one and makes for a chair, not seeing Joseph until he slides it in behind her.

‘Miss Beatrice?’

‘Oh, coffee, please. And maybe toast.’

He nods, and vanishes.

The usual silversmith’s window of sugar shakers and coffee pots squat on the white tablecloth in front of her. She pushes both them and the empty place settings next to her out to the side and spreads the newspaper flat.

The announcement is easy to find:

Mrs Pankhurst, who has returned to England in order to resume her work for the vote, has taken up residence at Campden Hill Square, where she will address a public open-air meeting tonight, at 8.30.

Bea glances over her shoulder. There’s nobody to see her. The box around the notice and the letters themselves seem to thicken and darken before her eyes. Keep away from it, she tells herself. You’ll only find yourself caught up in something and everyone will think all that business with John has gone straight to your head. At least, that is no doubt how Mother would present it, as the only explanation why her daughter could have joined ‘a bunch of half-crazed lunatics’.

It was hardly an invitation to a riot, though. ‘Address a public open-air meeting …’ It is, on the face of it, no different to the summons to Mother’s meetings and it’s not as though Bea would be taking a bat with her.

The alternative is another dinner in another hotel, another show, and the familiar recipe of whiskies and the gramophone after, all of which suddenly sound dull.

The person she wants to talk to, perhaps even reveal her plans to – for he is always on her side – is Edward. But he will not emerge until noon. Mother is, in the circumstances, perhaps not the best conversational foil. That leaves Clemmie, who was back in the house last night. Tom has stayed down in the country and, in a surprising gesture of sentimentality, Clemmie declared she didn’t want to hear her voice echo around her and Tom’s London home and she would prefer to stay at Park Lane, in her old room.

Clemmie must be awake, should jolly well be awake and ready for talking, if, Bea pauses, if she is speaking to Bea yet. She could go around to Edie’s but Edie won’t be up for hours. She has recently joined the ranks of those who don’t see the morning sun. Bea starts to push back her chair and it is now Bellows who gently moves it out of her way as she pulls herself up and her skirts down, and strides out of the room taking the newspaper with her.

Clemmie is sitting at her old dressing table, silver-topped glass jars opened, cream thick on her face, wrestling a hairbrush through her waves. Bea flops down across her sister’s bed. Clemmie’s room is lighter and brighter than Bea’s and decorated in a rather gloriously feminine lilac and white. Bea is more than a teeny bit envious of this, especially since, if Clemmie keeps returning to claim it, Bea will never be able to move in, which is jolly unfair because Clemmie rather owes her the room now she is married. After all, it was Bea who orchestrated the ‘inexplicable’ flood in one of the bathrooms above so that Clem’s room would be redecorated for the first time in half a century. Short of a house fire, Bea’s room will remain looking as if Queen Victoria still had decades to reign.

Bea speaks to the back of her sister’s head. ‘I’m sorry about Sunday.’

‘It’s all right, but don’t blame me if you’re still living here at fifty.’

‘It won’t be here, Clem.’

‘Then where would it be?’

‘Oh, New York.’

‘Do you still miss it, Bea, America? Even after living there only a year?’

‘It was rather exciting leaving so suddenly, on some whim of Mother’s.’

Clemmie hesitates. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘On some whim of Mother’s.’

‘Once we were there, it felt as though we could do what we liked, rather than being locked in by all these silly rules. We just ran wild on the banks of that river. Life’s different there, Clem. There’s more, more’ – Bea searches for the word – ‘possibility.’

‘You talk about it as if it is some sort of Promised Land.’

Bea pauses.

‘In a way, Clem, I think it is.’

Clemmie turns around to face her. ‘Why don’t you go over? You could have a glorious dance.’

‘On the Hudson? Only our neighbours would make it that far. It’s in the sticks, Clem. That was the heaven of it.’

‘Not bad neighbours, Bea. But I meant in Manhattan, silly.’

‘Yes,’ says Bea, ‘in Manhattan.’

John is there, she is thinking. Maybe she could so dazzle him with a dance in her mother’s family house on Madison Avenue that he would come running back to her. She imagines herself dressed up, flowers all over the hall, her standing at the foot of the wide wooden staircase, John approaching her with a pleading expression on his face.

However, that is exactly why she cannot go. You can’t chase a man across the Atlantic. In fact Bea can’t go there until he is back. Damn you, John Vinnicks, why couldn’t you have gone to Africa instead of heiress-hunting … and as this last thought comes into her head, Bea feels slightly sick.

Clemmie’s voice is back in Bea’s ears. ‘Now, Bea-Bea, help me choose what to wear tonight.’

Beside her on the bed are two dresses: one black and white satin, with a jacket designed to tie around the waist. The other, a pale grey net tunic embroidered with a vast beaded butterfly that must be nearly a foot across.

‘You’ll take off with those wings. Are you dancing?’

‘Just dinner.’ Clemmie twists to look at Bea. ‘It is being given for me. And Tom. He’s coming up this afternoon.’ She quickly turns back to her dressing table, her eyes away from Bea as she clips out, ‘Sorry, don’t mean to brag.’

Brag, thinks Bea, brag? She rolls on her back and studies the pale lace canopy strung over Clemmie’s bed. Brag about the dinner, or the husband? She envies neither. She can think of little she would like less to do this evening. Was that what her life was to be, dinners, shows and gramophones, and then, then what? A ruddy-faced sportsman with a decaying house in the country?

‘Wear either.’

‘But I’ve hardly been in town since Freddy was born. Rural hibernation really, and one is so
examined
when one reappears. Is she still attractive, did she hook above her weight, et cetera? Whether it was just for the money.’

Bea sits up and swivels around.

‘Clemmie, you don’t think that?’

‘Not on the dresses …’

‘Clemmie, please. Do you think that Tom married you for your money?’

‘No, no, of course not. He’s mad about me.’ Clemmie pauses. ‘But, you know, it could happen to any of us.’

‘There’s not much money. Not for us girls.’

‘That’s not what people think, unless they dig around.’

‘Because of the railways?’

‘And because of Mother’s mother being American. Countless pots of gold, people reckon. I mean look at …’ Bea feels as though
a vice is tightening around her stomach, and decides that she will not spend this evening with the people who must have been examining her.

Celeste responds to Bea’s note, her maid addressing the envelope, as ever, to disguise it from Mother. She says that she will come by in a taxi, and be waiting in it just to the right of the front door at half past seven. Bea has told Mother she’s going with Edie to a musical recital at the Bechstein Hall, which leaves her with a niggling uncertainty as to whether Mother’s and Edie’s paths might cross elsewhere that evening. Mother at least does not come downstairs to notice that Bea is heading out for the evening in a public taxi.