War Damage (3 page)

Noel Valentine came out onto the lawn, and she drew him into their conversation. He at least wasn't full of dismal political views. Unlike Hilary, whose sweeping statements brooked no denial, Noel always saw the detail. Detail is everything, he said. That's what's wrong with Arthur Carnforth's painting, he'd once said to Regine. He's not good enough on the detail, fuzzy impressionism just won't do.

Once he and the Jordans were safely talking about the Van Gogh exhibition, Regine returned indoors. She was looking for Charles. I think I've fallen for him, she thought. ‘Mad about the boy' – that song Freddie used to sing. But after all, she'd been so good for so long … a fifteen-year-old, well, nearly sixteen; it reminded her of the Colette novel she'd read on the boat home.
Chéri
. Darling.

three

T
HE PARTY HAD MOVED
into a different phase, her guests gelled in conversational groups. She was free to go in search of the boy. She returned to the library, but Charles was no longer there and she was ambushed by Ian Roxburgh. She hadn't seen him arrive – it certainly hadn't been while she was in the garden – but there he was now, with his ginger hair and neat moustache and the pale, pale blue eyes she found slightly disturbing. He was leaning against the desk next to Neville, who looked a bit squiffy in his armchair.

‘I was telling your husband about my contacts in Hong Kong. There's a lot of good stuff coming out of China now. With the civil war it's all chaotic. The communists are winning. Some say there'll be no hope of anything after that, but I don't know … and then there's Formosa … impossible to know, really.' He was looking at her all the time. ‘You were with Freddie in Shanghai before the war, weren't you?'

‘Yes. I was there for two years.' Ian knew that already, but he always asked about it, as if there was something more he wanted to know.

Neville laughed. ‘Oh, tell him the story.' Regine smiled, shook her head. ‘You see,' said Neville, ‘my wife came from the best society in Dublin and her family had her educated in the best convent in Brussels. I think they hoped she'd become a nun, didn't they, Reg, because there were five sisters, a lot of girls to launch onto the marriage market.'

He knew it embarrassed Regine to talk about her childhood, but seemed to take a malicious delight in her unease. If only when they first met she hadn't told him that yarn about her family in Dublin. But it was much too late – years too late – to contradict him, although these days she stuck to the part that was nearest the truth. ‘I was the ugly duckling, red hair, you see, considered rather common.' And she touched her wild halo. She loved her red hair now, the growing up being teased laid to rest, almost, but never quite forgotten.

Neville went on: ‘Failing the nunnery, she was to be trained as a teacher and sent out to educate the heathens. But she arrived – you tell him, Reg.'

‘Well, I met this wonderful man, at least I thought he was wonderful then – and in a way he was, at first, he was a charmer … anyway, within three weeks we were married. I wired the convent to say I wasn't taking up the post. There was nothing they could do about it. I behaved rather badly,' and she smiled, not truly penitent. ‘Still,' she added, ‘my husband turned out to be a gambler, and a bit crazy really, so I suppose it served me right. I came back in 1938, when things got really difficult, the situation, I mean, the war, not Eugene. I never heard from him again. He was killed when the Japanese took over.'

‘I see.' Ian Roxburgh stared at her as he flipped cigarette ash into the fireplace. ‘I envy you. I'd have loved to see Shanghai as it was then. It's too late now, of course.' He looked at her, with curiosity she felt, but there was also something calculating in the insistence of his pale eyes. ‘Yes, I can't see you as a teacher.' His speculative glance and foxy half grin remained just this side of suggestive. ‘But didn't your family object to your going out there on your own?'

She felt herself blushing. That was the weak link in the story. Yet it wasn't a crime, was it, to reconstruct a different past from the one you'd been landed with? To pretend that she'd come from one of the best families in Dublin, when in fact she had been the daughter of the cook, well, what harm did it do? She'd hated the way they'd
pitied
her as her mother took to drink, but she'd had to be grateful, because they'd paid for the convent in Brussels. They'd meant it for the best, but she was sure they'd basked in their own generosity and boasted of their kindness to their friends. They couldn't have realised – hadn't had the imagination to understand – that to be banished from all things familiar had seemed like the end of life itself, with her mother left in an asylum never to be seen again, while she was put on a ship to the end of the world, Ostend.

Now, Kathleen, you'll be good, so you will, I know it. The nuns'll be the making of you, they'll train you up. It's a great opportunity, darling. But they'd never invited her back for the holidays. The convent had been her life and it had been assumed she'd take her vows.

You have no vocation, Kathleen. The Mother Superior's clear eyes had stared coldly, her words dripped like water on marble. The fear – she was about to be cast from their doors, thrown on her own devices, abandoned in the world; and then the reprieve on account of her gift for languages. There were Catholic schools in China; you didn't have to be a nun to teach out there. You could be a lay assistant.

She thought she'd cast it all aside when she'd married. Kathleen Roisin O'Kelly became first Rosheen Smith and then – better still, because no longer Irish, but French – Regine. By the time her passport had expired she was back in England and about to be married for a second time, so she'd just told them she'd lost it in the Blitz and got a new one with her new name. Regine – it was so elegant. But then Neville had started calling her Reggie, which sounded like some beefy, golf-playing businessman. She'd resented that, but – it's so bloody pretentious, kitten, he'd said, and shamefaced she'd had to swallow her hurt and smile at her own pretensions.

Freddie was the only one who knew about her past. I haven't told Neville, she'd said to Freddie. Neville was rather a snob, after all. Freddie had winked. Your secret is safe with me, darling. It was their secret, hers and Freddie's; it was part of their special relationship.

‘Shanghai was just extraordinary.'

‘You must come round to dinner,' said Neville, ‘we can talk about it then. But now I want to introduce you to Noel Valentine. He's an art dealer.'

Now
she was free to search for Charles again. He was talking to Dorothy Redfern in the dining room. Dorothy worked with children and adolescents all the time, so she knew how to draw them out: all those children so damaged by the war – Jewish orphans, refugees – and Charles was almost animated now, talking about the girl, Lally, he'd known in New York. Perhaps he'd been a bit in love with her.

Freddie surged towards them, heaved himself down on to a fragile Regency dining chair next to the boy and embarked on a furious argument with Dorothy about Freud. ‘Spewing out your emotional guts to someone who just sits there and says damn all! Emotional diarrhoea! Stick to the stiff upper lip, my boy. Always the wisest course. I mean, what is the use, Dorothy, if you'll forgive me for saying so, of maundering on about one's childhood?'

Dorothy took his aggression in good part, hardly bothering to argue, but that seemed to irritate Freddie almost as much as the thought of psychoanalysis itself. It was as if he was trying to goad Dorothy into losing her temper. ‘Turning sex into an illness,' he boomed, ‘and criminalising desire.'

This last jibe hit the mark. Dorothy started to speak, but Charles butted in. ‘The Denton-Bradshaws and their friends all had – “shrinks”, they called them. They talked about it all the time. It was an essential part of living in Manhattan.' Regine was sure he'd said it in an attempt to take the conversation in a different direction. And up to a point he succeeded, for Freddie laughed and said: ‘Just as opium was an essential part of living in Shanghai.'

Regine frowned. Surely Charles was too young … she said quickly: ‘
I
never set foot in an opium den – I think all that was exaggerated – perhaps the Chinese …'

‘Didn't your—' Freddie broke off, then started again. ‘You were more of a cocktail girl, eh? D'you remember the cocktails at the Pacific Cathay, weren't they
marvellous
!'

‘Oh,
yes
! Martha and I used often to go for pre-lunch drinks there. That's where we met our admirers. We stayed in the Park Hotel at first and I realised quite soon that Eugene was always in debt – we owed them so much, we couldn't leave. That's where I met Martha Strang, my American journalist friend, she introduced me to the international crowd. She got me a job on the French newspaper. The editor thought my story was amusing, so he sent me to report on a local Catholic school. Soon he had me writing the gossip column – it was all about our social life. I paid off the bill and Martha and I set ourselves up in a cheap flat. I didn't see Eugene for weeks on end. And you turned up, didn't you, Freddie, with that ballet company, and became a sort of impresario for that little theatre, the Far Eastern Grand Opera Company – what a grandiose name! It was such fun.'

The stories of that legendary Shanghai to which Freddie so often treated his friends had quite removed it from the realm of normal morality. ‘Living in Shanghai,' he said now, ‘was like … it was like skimming the surface of the black lagoon.' And as Freddie reminisced Regine was seeing again the seething crowds of Chinese workers, coolies, hustlers, and beyond them the shabby, desperate worlds of refugees and emigrés, white Russians, old Bolsheviks, Soviet agents, Germans, Jews, Armenians, British intelligence, American adventurers … and beyond them again the shadow world of the Green Gang and the warlords and the Kuomintang.

‘In a way it wasn't quite real,' said Regine.

Each different world pursued its course parallel and invisible to the others, yet achieved the impossible in bending these parallel lines so that they twisted together at certain points, where the tracks crossed and the points changed. And everyone came to Shanghai sooner or later, so that it was not so much a city as a huge swarming beehive of passions and appetites, plots and conspiracies, a rotting compost heap generating the fermenting gases of every possible human need, desire and transgression.

‘So many different worlds,' she said. Regions that became ever more phantasmagoric and obscure, shady realms in which personalities were dissolved and reconstituted and every individual was a master of disguise, identity as fleeting as a fancy dress costume, to be put on and discarded at will. Shanghai was an ever-expanding multiple
scape
, fanning out in all directions. It was a series of interlocking rooms, each leading further into the labyrinth; a Chinese puzzle; a succession of spectacles and transformations, a Japanese lantern show, a pantomime, each scene as fantastical as the previous one, which yet coexisted, impossibly, across the same space.

Freddie told – for the hundredth time – the story of the fake Indian princess and they laughed about the days at the races and their life in the little flat with the bamboo furniture and the green walls painted with parakeets, with Eugene coming and going, no one ever quite knew where to or what he was doing.

‘And now here we all are, back in bombed-out London,' said Charles, then stood up abruptly and left the room. When he returned he looked at Freddie. ‘I think Vivienne is ready to go.'

How odd to call his mother by her first name! Regine hastened away to talk to Vivienne before it was too late. How could she have neglected her so! Was it because she felt the tiniest bit of rivalrous resentment at Freddie's other ‘best girl'? She hoped not.

Freddie walked the ballerina and her son to the gate and returned, to Regine's surprise, with Edith Blake, the power behind the throne at her publishers, Crispin Drownes. A late arrival, when the others were beginning to drift away, she stood in the doorway looking disconcertingly like Queen Mary the Queen Mother. Regine hoped she wouldn't be bored; only a handful of guests remained for her to talk to. Drownes fils, hovering behind her, was very much her adjutant. About Regine's own age, or – no – a few years younger, probably in his late twenties, William Drownes seemed pleasant and carefree. She knew it was in her interest to be as nice as possible to both of them, for she was serious about her translating and hoped for more work, so she exerted all her charm, settling Edith Blake in a tête à tête with Freddie while William gravitated in the direction of Alan, Noel and Clive, Neville's colleague from the museum.

Freddie was the last to leave, lingering after the others had departed and Phil was unobtrusively gathering up the used glasses and ashtrays. ‘One for the road, eh, darling, if you can spare it, that is.' When she'd refilled his glass, he said: ‘Please be friends with Vivienne, she needs someone to take her out of herself. That dismal husband of hers …' His leg jiggled, as it did when he was tense or anxious. ‘I don't see so much of her as I used to … I feel a bit guilty about it to tell you the truth … and now I hear she's taken up again with bloody Arthur Carnforth.'

‘Was that who you wanted to talk about? We haven't seen him for months – oh, longer than that. After he and Neville quarrelled …'

‘No, it was something else.' Freddie looked suddenly sombre. He straightened his shoulders. ‘Anyway, you will make her your friend, won't you, sweetie. Take her out of herself. She just sits moping about in that ruin they've bought. And the boy – he's almost like my nephew – or a godson, y'know. Of course he can't
actually
be my godson, because I'm a Pape like you, but I feel I have a duty of care towards the lad. His father gives him a hard time. Her too. She's not happy.'