The Doll (15 page)

‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I hate to see a man kowtow to a woman. Especially when the man has the brains. It’s laziness, that’s all. One of these days you’ll find the
ke
dropped out of Rosanke, and you’ll only have yourself to blame.’

Believe it or not, he took me out to dinner, and I heard the whole story of his childhood and how Rose and his mother had always preyed on him. They were devoted, of course, but, as I pointed out, the very devotion was the worst part about it. It had turned possessive.

‘What you need,’ I told him, ‘is to stand on your own and beat the big drum.’

The result of that dinner was rather extraordinary. Kenneth had a big row with Rose. It was the first they had ever had, he told me afterwards, but it must have cleared the air, because things were on another footing inside the business from that time, and Rose realised that she hadn’t got it all her own way. Some of the model girls said that the atmosphere had changed and was spoilt; but that was just because discipline was tightened up and they had to work longer hours.

Kenneth proposed to me in a traffic jam. He was driving me home after a party – I still had the house in Victoria, Aunt Madge had left it to me in her will. We came to a block where the lights had stuck. There must have been something wrong with them.

‘Red for danger,’ said Kenneth. ‘That’s you.’

‘You flatter me,’ I told him. ‘I’ve never thought of myself as a
femme fatale
.’

‘I don’t know about
fatale
,’ said Kenneth, ‘but here we are stuck, which is pretty much the same thing.’

Of course he had to kiss me – there was nothing else he could do. Then somebody must have cleared the lights from a main switch. I saw them first.

‘You know what green stands for, don’t you?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘all clear. Go ahead.’

‘Well, I’m not married either,’ I said. ‘The way’s clear.’

To be perfectly honest, I’m not certain that he wasn’t the teeniest bit taken by surprise. You know how cautious some men are, and maybe he wanted another day or two to bring himself to the point. However, of course word got round in no time that we were engaged, and once that kind of thing creeps into the papers it’s so difficult to deny. As I told him, it makes a man look a cad and it’s very bad for his business. Besides, it gives people all sorts of ideas when a dress designer is a bachelor. So we were married, and I had a lovely dress on the firm. The only unromantic thing about the wedding was having to become Mrs Sawbones.

Kenneth and I were very much in love, but I had an uneasy feeling, right from the start, that the marriage wasn’t going to work out. For one thing, he was so terribly restless, always wanting to move on from one place to another. We had flown to Paris after the wedding, intending to stay put, but when we’d been there a day he said, ‘Dilly, I can’t stand this. Let’s try Rome.’ So off we had to go, there and then, and we hadn’t been in Rome two days before he suggested Naples. Then he had the wild idea of wiring for Rose and his mother to come out and join us. On the honeymoon! Naturally I was hurt, and I told him that if it got into the press that he’d had to take his family on his honeymoon, Rosanke would be the laughingstock of London. I suppose that shook him, because he didn’t suggest it again. But we didn’t stay in Italy long, because the rich food disagreed with him.

Married life . . . what I could say about it, from within! I don’t suppose I remember one night, during the six years we were together, that Kenneth didn’t have too much to drink. He got so that he couldn’t stand and he couldn’t speak. He had to go off on a cure three times, but they never did any good. He would seem quite all right in the Home – he tried a different one each time – and then, as soon as he got back to me, off he would be on the bottle again. What I suffered!

No, it didn’t make much difference to the business of Rosanke, because once Kenneth started drinking Rose dropped him from the partnership and put a paid accountant in his place. She made Kenneth an allowance – she had to – but it wasn’t safe to let him have anything to do with the finances.

I had given up my job, naturally, when I married, but with Kenneth always in and out of nursing homes I had to do something towards expenses, so I kept in touch with my friends in Fleet Street. Nothing official. Just snippets now and again. It helped, being sister-in-law to Rose. You wouldn’t believe how much goes on in the fashion world. The buyers hear a lot of backstairs talk, and the model girls too. If customers only realised that every little slip of the tongue gets repeated, they’d cover their lips with sticking plaster every time they went near a fashion house. Anyway, I knew several of the buyers, and most of Rosanke’s model girls too. Rose herself wasn’t particularly discreet when she was discussing customers inside the family, so I heard a number of stories one way and another that afterwards broke in the press and made headlines. I can’t bear gossip, but whispers have a knack of coming true. What’s wish fulfilment today is fact to-morrow.

‘I think you’re a saint,’ my friends would say, ‘keeping up a home for Kenneth Sawbones, when he’s an alcoholic. Why don’t you divorce him?’

‘He’s my husband,’ I told them, ‘and I love him.’

I believe I could have kept Kenneth off the bottle if only we had had a family. It was not for want of trying, heaven knows. Each time he returned from the Home I would do my best. But it never worked out . . .

Finally, and this was the heartbreak of the whole tragedy, he wrote from the nursing home he had gone to for a fourth cure – away up in Yorkshire it was, too far for me to go and see him on a day trip – and said he loved one of the nurses there, and she was pregnant already, and would I divorce him?

I went straight away to Rose and his mother with the news, and they said they were not surprised. They had felt something of the sort was bound to happen in the end. They said Kenneth was not responsible for his actions and it was very sad, but the best thing for all concerned was to let him go.

‘How am I going to live?’ I said. I was nearly out of my mind, as you can imagine. ‘Six years I’ve been a slave to Kenneth, and this is his return for all I’ve done.’

‘We know, Dilly,’ said Rose. ‘It’s been hard on you, but then it’s a hard world. Of course, Kenneth will have to pay you an allowance, and I’ll look after you too.’

She couldn’t afford to quarrel with me, you see. I knew too much about her private affairs and the affairs of Rosanke.

‘Very well,’ I said, wiping my eyes, ‘I’ll put a brave face on it, but it comes heavy to get all the kicks in life and none of the sweets.’

There was Rose, rich and famous, fêted by everyone, and I was only Dilly Sawbones, who had helped to put her and Kenneth on the map. It was a hard world, as she said, but she seemed to ride on top of it all right. A penthouse in Mayfair, and lovers by the score, that’s what came through being the first half of Rosanke. The second half, or what was left of it, had to make do with a few shabby rooms in Victoria.

Naturally I didn’t see so much of Rose once my divorce came through, though she kept her word and made me a titbit of an allowance, enough to redecorate my poor old house. I always got my clothes free, too. After all, everyone knew I’d been married to Kenneth and he had treated me shamefully, and it wouldn’t have done the name of Rosanke any good if I’d gone about in rags.

She had a bad streak in her, though, just like Kenneth, and these things always come out in the end. Although I was careful never to say anything against her, she began to lose popularity about that time – there were a fair number of digs at her in the press – and word got about that the fashion house of Rosanke was not what it had been, that it had had its day.

Of course I had to find myself a job. Rose’s allowance and the alimony from Kenneth weren’t enough to keep me, so I pulled a few strings, and the next thing I knew I was working for the Conservative party before the General Election. I doubt whether the member for South Finchley would ever have got in but for me. You see, I knew a thing or two about his opponent. He used to go about with one of the models from Rosanke, and if there is one thing South Finchley hates, it’s promiscuity in a member. I felt it my duty to drop a hint here and there, and our man got in with a slight majority. I’m a great patriot, and I put Queen and country before sentiment or any kind of personal considerations.

Anyway, working hard at the Conservative office helped me to get over losing Kenneth, and it was at one of their meetings that I met Lord Chichester.

‘Who’s that stiff-looking man with the eyeglass?’ I asked someone. I was told at once he was Edward Fairleigh-Gore, whose father had just died, which meant that he had gone to the Lords.

‘One of our ablest executives,’ said my informant. ‘In the running for Prime Minister if the rest of the Cabinet die.’

I managed to get on the fringe of the group surrounding Lord Chichester and was introduced to his wife, a grey-haired woman who looked several years older than he did. It seemed that she was very fond of hunting, never out of the saddle if she could help it, so I asked her what on earth she did about clothes when she came to London, and wasn’t it a nightmare wondering if she looked right. Lady Chichester seemed rather surprised, and admitted that the dress she was wearing was two years old.

‘You ought to go to Rosanke,’ I told her. ‘She’s my sister-in-law. You need never worry again, once you’re in her hands.’

‘I don’t think I do worry,’ said Lady Chichester. ‘What about your husband?’ I said, and raised my eyebrows. I didn’t emphasise the point, and moved out of the group soon afterwards, but what I had said must have made an impression, for I saw Lady Chichester glance in the mirror once or twice, which, without wanting to be unkind, was probably a thing she didn’t often do.

The upshot was that I got Rose to send her a card for her next show. The fish were biting that spring, and Lady Chichester went. I was there. I sat beside her and advised her what to order, as she had no sort of taste herself.

I telephoned her every day for a fortnight after that, and finally she invited me to lunch. Lord Chichester came in late, and I only got a word with him when we had coffee afterwards in the drawing-room, but I made myself felt.

‘Did you see the bit about you in last night’s
Courier
?’ I asked him.

‘I can’t say I have,’ he said. ‘I never read gossip.’

‘This wasn’t gossip,’ I told him. ‘This was the truth, or, if you prefer it, prophecy. “There’s only one man who can make the Conservative party into a Fighting Force, and that’s Lord Chichester.”’

It’s a funny thing, but even the most intelligent men fall for praise. It doesn’t matter how thick you lay it on, they revel in it. Lord Chichester smiled and made a sort of brushing gesture with his hand, to pretend it was all nonsense, but I pulled the clipping out of my bag and gave it to him.

That was the start of our affair. It took him over a year to admit that he was lost without me, and when he did he broke down and cried, but then he was not very fit just then and had only recently got over a bad attack of shingles.

‘What you need,’ I told him, ‘is feeding up.’

He was at my house in Victoria at the time. Lady Chichester had broken her leg in a fall out hunting and was laid up in Warwickshire, so Edward – we were Edward and Dilly by then – was on his own in their London house. I was worried that he wasn’t feeding himself properly, and it was the worst possible thing for his digestion, as I told him, not to eat, especially after shingles. So one day I waited for him in a taxi outside the Lords and insisted on taking him home so that I could cook him a decent meal. And that was how he came to spend the first night in my house.

‘Now, don’t worry,’ I told him next morning. ‘No one will ever find out what’s happened. It’s between you and me. Of course, if those sharks in the press should get hold of a story it’s all U.P. with your career,’ I went on with a laugh. I’ve never seen a man look so frightened – but then, a sense of humour was never his strong suit.

Poor darling Edward . . . Looking back on those years we had together, I realise that I was the great love of his life. I persuaded him that being married to Mary Chichester was no life for a politician; he might as well be married to a horse.

‘It’s not fair on you,’ I said, ‘all that stable talk. It won’t help you to be Prime Minister.’

‘I don’t know that I want to be Prime Minister,’ he said. ‘Sometimes all I feel like is going down to Warwickshire to die.’

‘You’ll have to take me with you if you do,’ I said.

I don’t know how it was, but he never seemed to pull his weight in the Conservative party as he should have done. He reminded me at times of Father in the old Eastbourne days. He looked hag-ridden, and when I tried to make him talk about what went on behind the scenes in the House of Lords – because, of course, I still kept contact with my friends in the Press and supplied them with news from time to time – he would try to change the subject and talk about his wife’s horses instead.

‘You ought to see Ginger,’ he would say. ‘She’s a wonderful mare. And Mary has the lightest hands of any woman I’ve ever known.’

‘The trouble with you is that you’ve no ambition,’ I told him. I couldn’t help being bitter at times. There I was, cooking delicious suppers, putting myself out to look after him, and all he could do was to complain of indigestion and rave about his wife’s horses.

I never said a word against his wife. After all, she had the money, and it was only a matter of time before she would break her back out hunting, and then darling Edward would be free. It worried me that he made such a fetish of Warwickshire, neglecting his work in the Lords.

‘You ought to get the farmers to build their fences higher,’ I would tell him. ‘If your wife’s horses are as good as you make out, they’d leap a haystack.’

And then I’d try to change the subject, get away from Warwickshire, and put out a feeler or two about his brother peers, or better still the real bigwigs in the Cabinet. It seemed such a waste to have Edward coming round to see me, when it would help him so much to discuss foreign policy and what the Government intended to do about the Middle East, if his brain was going to soften, as it looked like doing. A word or two from me in the right quarter, and the political repercussions might be staggering.