Dolly was genuine enough not to reach out and offer mock sympathy. She looked at Posie carefully and lit a cigarette slowly.
‘He’s very lucky, you know.’ She exhaled, her eyes never leaving Posie’s face for a second.
‘Not the other way around. So don’t you ever make yourself feel small compared to him. I know he’s famous, but so are you now, lovey. And you earned it all yerself. You’re funny, and clever. Not to mention flippin’ beautiful: half the men I know would gladly become Mr Posie Parker; the Chief Inspector included. I’ve seen the way he looks at you with those great green eyes of his. With a sort of longin’ in them.’
‘Rot! He’s happily married. You’re just trying to make me feel better!’
Dolly shrugged. ‘It’s the truth. I swear it. And don’t let’s start on Len: that idiot knows what a fool he was, lettin’ you go. It’s written plain as anythin’ on his face every time he even so much as sees you! No, mark my words, Alaric’s a lucky man havin’ you. Besides, he’s onto a very good deal, here.’
‘What do you mean – a deal?’
Dolly nodded, warming to her theme. ‘Financially, I mean. Don’t get me wrong, Alaric’s wonderful. But it seems to me he takes more than he gives. He lives here rent-free, doesn’t he, when he’s in town?’
‘Well, that’s right. But we’re engaged, aren’t we? I can hardly ask him for money, can I? It would be odd…’
‘Pah! Fellas like Alaric always fall on their feet. I know he gave up his aristocratic title and his great house in Oxfordshire and all that, but that was out of choice, wasn’t it? And he has a good income from all the talks and books and things he does, doesn’t he? Not to mention that Trust Fund you told me about…’
‘Mnnn.’ Put like this, Posie saw Dolly’s point. ‘But his travelling and exploring take up nearly all the income he has! He’s quite broke much of the time,’ she protested.
‘Don’t you believe it.’
‘I swear, he’s not just trying to get a cheap room out of me.’
‘If you’re sure, honey, then all well and good. But it might not be such a bad thing that you’ve had a few months as an engagement, you know. Gives you both a chance to think about what you really want. If you really want him or not.’
‘I do want him! But right now I feel like he’s out of my grasp,’ wailed Posie. ‘I want him more than anything. I have a tendency to go for elusive men, always chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, and Alaric’s a case in point. He’s a wanderer. And I’m not.’
‘Mnnn.’ Dolly carefully stubbed out her cigarette on Posie’s plate of half-eaten toast. There was a far-away, longing look in Dolly’s heavily-painted eyes. ‘I might know how he feels. I’m a wanderer at heart myself, you know.’
Posie frowned, looking at her friend intently. ‘Dolly? What do you mean?’
Just then there was a ring of the doorbell.
‘Who on earth can that be?’ Posie checked her wristwatch and saw that it was coming up for midnight.
More than a bit worried, she got to the front door at the same time as Constable McCrae, who had evidently just been nodding off, still in his full policeman’s uniform, despite Posie’s insisting he borrow something more comfortable of Alaric’s. She placed a finger to her lips, hushing the policeman, and looked through the fish-eye spy-hole.
She needn’t have worried. It was only Ted, the trusty and unflappable Porter at Museum Chambers.
‘It’s all fine, Constable. We can relax. For now.’
Breathing a sigh of relief, Posie opened the front door.
‘Ted! It’s a bit late, isn’t it? Is something the matter?’
Ted tipped his cap at Posie and then goggled at the sight of the blue-uniformed policeman lurking behind her.
‘So that’s your police motor parked up outside the front door, is it?’ he asked, curiously. McCrae simply nodded.
‘Couldn’t it have waited until the morning, Ted?’
Ted pulled his eyes away most reluctantly and proffered a silver salver with a cream card upon it, a trick he had learnt from a Butler somewhere, and one he always used to full advantage when he was after a tip or two.
‘’Fraid it couldn’t wait, Miss. This ’ere telegram is marked “URGENT” and “PERSONAL”. I only saw it just now, as I’m newly-arrived for the night shift and I’m going through all the evening post. This telegram obviously arrived earlier tonight and the Duty Porter just put it aside when you weren’t in. I hope all is in order, Miss.’
He mock bowed. ‘Here you go.’
‘I’m much obliged, Ted.’ Posie scrabbled around in the bowl of change on the hall table for a tip and passed it across. ‘Good night.’
When the door was closed and Constable McCrae had withdrawn to Alaric’s room again, Posie sunk down on the vivid green Lloyd Loom chair in the hallway and opened the telegram, her heart in her mouth.
It was two lines long, and it was from Alaric. The telegram had been sent from Paris, at six o’clock.
DARLING. COMING HOME.
WE MUST TALK ABOUT SOMETHING QUITE URGENTLY. AL.
****
Twenty-Two
Posie went hot and cold and shivered all over. She tried to calm herself, but the butterflies in her stomach were fluttering up in great gangs into her throat, making her gag. And so her horrible dream had meant something; the ominous feeling she had carried around for days now really did spell out trouble.
It could only mean one thing.
The end of it all.
At least he was coming home to tell her in person, she supposed. She rubbed at her eyes, but they were gritty and dry. She was too scared to cry. She wanted to scream, but that would have been unladylike and undignified, and besides, she had guests.
A quick movement at the door and a soft step on the shining parquet flooring of the hallway, and Dolly hung in the doorway like a little ghost.
‘What’s that?’
Taking the telegram from Posie’s hands she read and re-read the message. Dolly made a moue of distaste and cast the card aside on the hall table.
‘Men!’ She disappeared back into the living room for a couple of seconds, then re-emerged, hauling Posie up out of the wicker hall chair.
‘You know, he probably dashed that off in an instant at some tiny Post Office in the station. Didn’t have time to think about the words he was using.’
‘You agree, then? It looks bad?’ Posie gulped, blindly following Dolly through into the living room. She noticed with only a smidgen of surprise that Dolly was dragging along the wicker chair behind her.
‘If I was to get telegrams from Rufus I’d have my heart in my mouth most of the time. He’d use the wrong words, or no words at all, come to think of it. Fortunately, we never need to write to each other.’
Dolly had now placed the green wicker chair by the window, where the wind was still blowing.
‘Sit here,’ she commanded. Posie did so unquestioningly, in a daze, her mind a racing whirl of unhappiness.
‘Look, two good things,’ continued Dolly resolutely. ‘First, he called you “darling”, and second, he’s coming home. Right? So stop pondering. It won’t help anything. Now, wait here a minute.’
Dolly had run off, and Posie thought she heard her in the bathroom. Sure enough, Dolly was back within seconds carrying an armful of fresh fluffy white towels.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Well, Alaric will be back tomorrow night, won’t he? Maybe tomorrow evening, even. Why don’t we give him a nice surprise, show him how fashionable and gorgeous you are. Still.’
‘Dolly?’
Posie saw a washing-bowl of water on the floor, together with a china cup and a spoon, and Dolly’s big purple bag, propped open. She also spotted one of Alaric’s Penhaligon’s shaving brushes. She gestured at the floor.
‘What’s all this for?’
Dolly sighed, as if Posie had just pricked her party balloon. ‘I thought we’d turn you blonde. Just for a few days. I can change it back
if you don’t like it.’
‘A BLONDE?’ Posie almost squeaked and her hands went up to her short, dark-brown hair almost involuntarily.
Dolly nodded. She was pouring something from a paper twist into the china cup, and now taking out a tiny corked vial, opening it and counting out drops.
‘One, two, three. Perfect.’ She was mixing up her solution, her face determined, a mask of concentration. A sharp chemical rush hit them both and both women nearly gagged.
‘Hold on, I haven’t said you can do anything yet, Dolls. Hold your horses.’
Dolly grinned. ‘But you haven’t said I can’t, have you? Just think, it will be lovely to have a new look. Especially for this glamorous party tomorrow. It will give Alaric something to think about, won’t it? Show him you can still run with the bright young things.’
Posie had never been part of that fashionable, dare-devil crowd who lurched around London from nightclub to nightclub, buoyed up on a fuzz of drugs and drink and gossip, but she thought suddenly of the crowds of pastel-coloured girls she had passed on the Aldwych earlier, flitting around in the bars like throngs of hummingbirds.
Dolly frowned, as if reading her thoughts. ‘You don’t want to be a frump, darlin’, do you? And while we’re on the subject, I didn’t like that yellow dress today or that black thing you were wearin’ earlier. They make you look old. Where have your fun clothes gone? You’re only just thirty.’
Posie almost gasped. She had actually turned thirty the previous year, in the autumn of 1922. She was closer to her thirty-first birthday now, and she wasn’t in a mad hurry to mark the occasion.
She made her decision in a split-second.
‘Fine.’ Posie nodded. ‘Go ahead. As long as you know what you’re doing. Why have you got that stuff here, anyhow? Is it the same stuff you use?’
‘Nah, I wish,’ said Dolly, rigging up a towel around Posie’s shoulders and then checking the time on her diamond watch. ‘This is superior stuff, from America. Costs an arm and a leg. But I’ll see how it goes on you and then I might place an order myself. It should turn your hair a real movie star silver blonde.’
Dolly had made a fluff of white in the cup, rather like an egg white, and was now coating Posie’s hair with the stinking stuff using Alaric’s shaving brush. She slavered it on quickly. The smell hurt Posie’s eyes.
‘I borrowed this, today, from Silvia Hanro. She keeps a stack of it in her dressing room. I asked her if I could try it and she said I could take some. She uses it once a week.’
‘Goodness, what a lot of work!’
‘Worth it, though. She looks a dream. So you’ll be the exact same colour as Silvia. Like two peas in a pod!’
Posie laughed uncertainly. Dolly seemed to have finished and was checking her wristwatch again.
‘Now we have to wait exactly ten minutes.’
Dolly started dabbing frantically at the green chair, where Posie now saw a big dollop of the white hair dye had landed. It had burned through the laquer on the chair and turned the green colour a horrible orange. Posie gulped, thinking of her scalp.
‘You never liked this chair anyway, did you, lovey?’ asked Dolly breezily before flitting across to the window seat and taking great gulps of fresh air. Posie could have done with some, too.
‘You stay where you are. Don’t move.’
Posie looked at her friend. She was sitting with her eyes closed for a second, and she looked tired and drawn, despite her constant action.
It was now or never.
‘I know about the baby, Dolly. The new baby. Rufus told me.’
Dolly opened her eyes and stared at Posie in a blank, unreadable way. She didn’t say anything at all.
‘Is that what’s wrong? Only you don’t seem yourself much lately. For all your carrying on as if nothing were the matter today.’
Dolly sighed and pulled herself up into a tight ball on the window seat. She looked out, longingly. When she looked back into the room her face was filled with sadness.
‘I wish I could have a smoke,’ she said quietly. ‘But that stuff on your head is flammable, and we’ll both go up in flames in an instant.’
‘Better not, then. Don’t change the subject, either.’
Dolly gripped herself. ‘If you wanna know the truth, lovey, it’s a bit unpalatable. It’s the sort of thing I feel, but I shouldn’t feel. It’s not an acceptable thing to feel, or to say aloud. Not conventional.’
‘Since when were you conventional, anyway?’
Dolly paused. The light seemed to have gone out of her eyes.
‘Don’t get me wrong. I love being Rufus’s wife, and I know I’m a sort of Cinderella story: there’s hundreds of girls would change places with me in an instant.’
‘But?’
‘But I’m not cut out for it. And what I’m really not cut out for is being a mother. I love my girls, of course I do. But I’ve spent more than a year, since they were born, in a sort of dull fug. A sort of sadness has hung over me all the time.’
Dolly wrung her hands in barely-contained misery. ‘I love visitin’ them in the nursery, but I love closin’ the door on the nursery even more. And walkin’ away. And I feel horrible sayin’ this, but I don’t long for them and want to be with them every second. If I’m honest, apart from the occasional party and theatre trip, this last year has been hell. A living hell. I’ve had a great black cloud hangin’ over my head for fourteen months now. I’ve felt a terrible failure. Sometimes I wanted to run away.’
‘Goodness, Dolly. Why didn’t you say anything? It sounds terrible. You should have spoken up before.’
Dolly shrugged. ‘Oh, I put a brave face on it, and I just kept thinkin’ it would get better, that it would pass, that I would suddenly love being a mother. And now I’m goin’ to have to go through it all again! The birth; the same performance of pretendin’ to be a good mother. All the while hatin’ every minute of it. I can’t bear it.’
‘Have you spoken to Rufus about how you feel?’
‘How can I, lovey? He’s almost never home, always at the House of blimmin’ Lords! And then when he’s not there he’s up and down to Rebburn Abbey, worryin’ about his father.’
‘I heard things aren’t so good there.’
Dolly shook her head. ‘He’s not got much longer, poor devil. The irony is that I used to hate the Earl and we still rub each other up the wrong way. But since the babies were born we’ve become quite close. He’s been terrific with the twins, much better than me, in fact. Loves them to bits: spoils them rotten. He’s an old softie underneath, and I’ll miss him terribly.’
Posie nodded sympathetically. Dolly was looking out of the window again, lost in thought. Posie looked around the room, and noticed without knowing quite why that something significant had changed. She saw now that the engagement party photograph on the lacquered table had been removed.
Dolly must have hidden it out of sight when the telegram had come, fearing bad news. Looking over to the dining table Posie saw that the wedding dress box, too, had disappeared out of sight. This hiding of things depressed her wholeheartedly: Dolly was not one for meddling, and it was indicative of the fact that she obviously thought things were beyond repair.
Posie was jolted sharply back to the present by Dolly’s voice, sounding sad:
‘Do you know, I think I only got through this last year because I had the most wonderful nanny lookin’ after the girls. She was French, her name was Violette. She was from Paris, as it happens.’
‘Ah, that must have been nice for you,’ said Posie, remembering that Dolly’s own dead mother had been French, and that Dolly was fluent in the language, but that she never made a big deal of it; scarcely mentioned it, even.
‘It was nice.’ Dolly nodded. ‘We’d chat away merrily. And of course just recently the girls have started to talk too, in French. Only a few words, of course.’
‘Ah.’
Dolly looked at Posie imploringly. ‘Can you believe I’ve never been to Paris, despi
te the fact my mother was from there? Violette told me all about it. We’d even planned a weekend away there, so she could show me the sights.’
‘So what’s happened to Violette? You’re speaking in the past tense.’
Dolly got up, checking the time. She nodded and dragged Posie through to the bathroom where she proceeded to pour buckets of cold water swiftly over Posie’s head. Quite roughly.
‘Rufus sent Violette away. About a month ago now.’
‘I see,’ said Posie, between having her head drenched and then pummelled by scratchy towels. She thought about the timing: about how the French girl had been kicked out and the nannies who were really watch-dogs had been brought in to make sure nothing untoward happened to Dolly. It must have been a month ago that Rufus had received threats, and he had realised that the French-speaking nanny was no help at all when it came to protecting his family from the worst sort of danger. Not that she could tell Dolly that.
‘I think it was when the babies began speaking in French. He hated that.’ Dolly threw the towels in a big heap in the bath and looked at Posie quizzically.
She took a step back.
‘It looks good,’ Dolly said. ‘But you’ll need to wear a tad more make-up to pull it off. Bright red lipstick, perhaps. You’ll look washed out otherwise. Now, where are your curling tongs? Let me do you a nice Marcel wave. Don’t look in the mirror yet.’
Posie sat quietly, curiously uncaring, having her hair crimped.
‘Of course,’ said Dolly with a mouthful of pins, ‘what Rufus was really worried about is that French would become our family language. And if we have a boy next, which is what he really wants, he’s terrified that little Lord Cardigeon will be speakin’ froggy-froggy.’
Posie laughed. ‘Oh, come on! Rufus doesn’t care about that, and still less if you have a girl or a boy. Besides,’ she added, but less certainly now, thinking of his surprising conduct with the street urchin earlier, ‘he’s not like that.’
Dolly gave her friend a serious look with raised eyebrows. ‘Pah! Don’t you believe it. He’s only concerned that this baby is a boy. This baby must be a boy for Rufus. What with his father dyin’ I think it’s really brought it home to Rufus what will happen when he himself dies: who will become the next Earl, and who will take over Rebburn, and such like.’
Murder of a Movie Star Page 21