Charles tried. ‘My dear, if only you could realize how worthwhile you are yourself. All the things you do … People will never laugh at you, Iris.’
She gestured to indicate her contempt for such naivety. ‘A lot you know about people, Charles …’
And then she went to her desk to draft the notice which she later telephoned to The Times. ‘The marriage will not now take place …’
Very early the next morning she called in the packers and began the enormous task of sending back the wedding presents which threatened to swamp the house in Elgin Square. She was at her desk, working on the lists, when Charles came to tell her that he was going down to Fenton Field. ‘She will need permission to marry, as she’s under age. As her guardian …’
Iris did not raise her head. ‘Do as you please. I have no further interest in that girl.’
7
They were married three days later by special licence at Stokeley, the village near to Fenton Field. Nicole had read none of the newspapers in that time, nor cared to. She had written one brief note to her aunt, and ended by telling her where she would find David’s ring, which was to be returned. She also wrote to David, a letter almost as brief as to Iris. There was no way to write it all down.
She gave to Charles the pearls and earrings, the diamond and sapphire brooch which had been Iris’s presents to her. She shook her head when he suggested that she might keep them. ‘No ‒ I can’t take any of that with me. There’s only one thing I’d like you to send. Would you have them pack my music …?’ She gave him the address of Lloyd’s brother in Boston. ‘That’s just until we find a place of our own …’ She added a little wistfully, ‘You will come and see us, Uncle Charles? You won’t let Aunt Iris …?’
‘I’ll come,’ he said, and meant it. He had, in these few days of waiting with them at Fenton Field, seen that quality of luminous happiness return to her face, the kind of radiance which he had glimpsed so briefly, and which transformed her. He knew the kind of trouble she had caused; he felt very deeply for the hurt which David Ashleigh would suffer; he knew the kind of humiliation which Iris would have to endure. But when he looked at Nicole’s face, he was grateful that an equal knowledge of these things had not turned her back from what she was now doing. Charles knew that his own life with Iris was going to be hellish for as long into the future as he could see, for she would find no compensation for the fulfilment of pride and ambition which Nicole’s marriage to either David Ashleigh or Harry Blanchard would have given her. Through Nicole, a new life had opened for Iris. It might have been possible for her, one day, to mellow in the light of what she had accomplished through her niece. Now the door to that life had closed, and he didn’t doubt that an already bitter woman would become more bitter still. Nicole had come, and gone. Charles grieved at his own loss, but looked at her face once more, and knew that he should not grieve.
Nicole and Lloyd shopped for a few pieces of essential clothing in Brighton. She was married in Margaret Fenton’s wedding dress and veil ‒ the dress had to be shortened a little, and a few tucks taken in it. ‘We’ll let it down again when Judy needs it,’ Margaret said. She and Charles signed the register as witnesses. Judy was there, and Richard, and Ross and Andrew Fenton. To everyone’s surprise, Gavin McLeod came down from Cambridge. For the first time he looked on Nicole with approval. ‘Only sensible thing I’ve ever known you to do,’ he said bluntly.
Charles drove them to Southampton and waited on the dockside until the liner sailed. Nicole and Lloyd stood on the deck in the rain, the dog, MacGinty, which they were taking with them, at their side, until the mist obscured that tweed-coated and hatted figure. ‘I’ll miss Uncle Charles,’ she said. ‘Next to you, I love him more than …’
Lloyd’s hand closed over hers, her hand which wore the gold wedding band, and a very simple diamond ring, bought also in Brighton. ‘As long as I come first, you can love anyone you like.’
Nicole smiled, and fingered the new golden band. Then she put her hand to her neck, and felt for the slender golden chain, the chain with the little upturned horseshoe in its centre. It was the first time she had worn it since the day she had dutifully put it on when Anna had handed it to her. It, and the golden band, and the single diamond, were the only jewellery she owned. To herself she recited the little legend engraved on the inside of the horseshoe. ‘Good luck. Lucky.’
They arrived in Boston to the wondering, bemused welcome from the Fenton family, and the first chill of the fall, the first gold and scarlet in the trees of this graceful but hard city, this centre of New England, which had nurtured and carved and chiselled men like the Fentons since they had fled from the old England she also had left behind her. There was a characteristically reserved welcoming dinner at the house on Beacon Hill. The reserve did not frighten or worry Nicole. It was to be expected of New Englanders. She felt she had come home. Though she had come to the symbols of wealth which had almost vanished, she knew she would never again stare at a notice on a beach which said ‘Private’ and feel shut out. She held Lloyd’s hand, and she was afraid of nothing, not of the elderly aunts who asked questions about her family, nor of the old gentlemen who seemed to be waiting for the return of a better day. The depression was all about them, and she and Lloyd, by the standards of Boston wealth, were poor. She thought of Anna, and wished desperately that somehow she could know of these hours of splendour in an impoverished house on Beacon Hill.
A cable reached them at the house on Beacon Hill. Nicole never knew how the address had been obtained, but the method was typically efficient. ‘Damn good show.’ It was signed: Gerry Agar.
8
The news came to Anna in painful dribbles. She read about Lord Blanchard, the heir to the Duke of Milburn. She saw photographs of Nicole with him. Then there was nothing. Weeks passed before the next mail from Europe came in. This time there was nothing printed in the fashionable magazines, but there was a burst of speculation in the newspaper columns. Nicole Rainard was a guest at Lynmara, having just left the Scottish estate of the Milburns. Since it was still summer and the passenger liners on the Atlantic were still plentiful, the next clippings came more rapidly. She saw the multiple coverage of her daughter’s engagement to Lord Ashleigh, the heir to the Earl of Manstone.
The day those cuttings came she telephoned Frank Hayward and said she was taking a few days off. He mentally shrugged. ‘So … OK. Business is slack. When is it ever any different? So, take a few days off …’
She went with Mike in the old Ford out into the desert. She sat too late among the rocks and pools of the oasis, until the chill of the desert night hit her, and Mike’s nudging nose reminded her that neither of them had eaten. The desert stars were cold above her and she was shivering as she fed him from the cans she carried in the car. Then she went to the cluster of cabins where she always stayed, booked in, and went along the road to a hamburger stand. She pretended she kept a great discipline about feeding Mike, but she bought him a hamburger there also. Then she went back to the cabin, went to bed, and for the first time in many years, she wept. She couldn’t have said exactly why she wept, but the pictures of Nicole had been less than right. There was a falseness about them that disturbed her. Never before had she seen Nicole look at the camera as if she were trying to get beyond it to reach someone else. Nicole was not absorbed in the handsome young man beside her, but in the impression she was creating. For a very long time she had studied that picture of the Countess, John Ashleigh and his son, David, and Nicole in the Great Saloon of Lynmara. There was an expression on Nicole’s face that troubled Anna. She stood there, in the room which had seen her, Anna’s, humiliation, and she was both triumphant and defiant. Anna remembered the night at Lucky Nolan’s when she had told Nicole about John Manstone, and now she wept with regret. She had tried to remove herself from Nicole’s life, and in leaving this deadly seed, she had failed. It was a kind of torment then, to lie alone in that bed, to feel the stillness and silence of the desert about her, and for once
, Mike’s untiring efforts to comfort her, to lick her hand, to try to get on to the bed beside her, were of little help. As she had wept so little in these past years, so she had felt little need for human comfort. But this once, her own self and this animal comfort would not do. She learned that she was not quite self-sufficient. At last she slept, and when she woke it was already hot in the last days of a desert autumn.
The next time she went to the post office box in Santa Ana there was the notice from The Times: The marriage will not now take place …
In the same clutch of press clippings was the news that Nicole Rainard had that day married an American doctor, Lloyd Fenton, of Boston, Massachusetts. They sailed for Boston immediately after the wedding. It had been a quiet ceremony in the village of Stokeley in Sussex.
She drove along the road, and at the first hamburger stand she and Mike ate ravenously and in a kind of rapture of relief. ‘She’s going to be all right,’ she said to the dog as she fed him chunks of the bread and meat. ‘All right.’
The next day Anna, as if in celebration, went to a Ford dealer on Wilshire and asked about a second-hand car. She wanted to trade in the old one for a slightly newer model. The salesman looked doubtfully at the old one, tried it out on the road, and shrugged, ‘I can’t allow you much on it ‒ it’s pretty well had it. Now, if you were to trade it in for a brand new one, I could maybe sharpen my pencil quite a lot, and give you a real good deal.’
Anna shook her head. ‘I can’t afford a new one. It’s as simple as that.’
The salesman nodded. It was the usual situation. Most people couldn’t afford new cars in these times. The boss, he thought, took crazy risks stocking so many new and rather expensive models, on the hope that he would make sales to members of the thriving movie industry ‒ which seemed to be the only industry which could be said to be thriving. ‘OK ‒’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to the boss. He’ll give you what he can, and we’ll fix you up with the best used job we’ve got, for what you can pay.’
The boss was a man in navy grease-stained overalls, whose hands looked as if they daily lived in contact with the engines of the cars he sold. He grinned at Anna from under thick straight dark brows and a shock of greying black hair. ‘Well, the old one’s pretty well had it,’ he said. ‘But I think I can sweeten her up a bit, and maybe some kid getting his first car will take it as a bargain. Now let’s see what we can fix you up with in place of the old jalopy …’
He toured the lines of his stock of used cars, going from one to the other, selecting at last three which he insisted Anna take out on the road before making her choice. He said little to influence her in the selection, but nodded gravely when she finally made it. ‘That’s the one I would have picked for you, but I wanted you to feel you’d made the decision. Listen, Mrs … Mrs …’
‘Maynard.’
‘Mrs Maynard, my opinion is the carburettor needs a bit of work done on it. No extra charge. Just give me till tomorrow, and I’ll have her all sweetened up. How about if I put on a new muffler? Only cost a few dollars, and I won’t charge for labour. I do it myself in any case.’ He grinned at her again. ‘The boss always works hardest in these outfits …’
She paid the deposit, and went back to the old Ford. They made arrangements about what time she was to pick up the other one the next day. ‘Listen, Mrs Maynard, don’t ever let anything go on it, will you? I can see you’ve tried to take care of this job, but they’ve only got so many miles in them. But if there’s anything wrong, you bring her back to me. Bring her in for regular servicing, and I’ll promise to keep her running sweet and pretty for quite a while yet …’
As she got into the Ford, Anna paused, and then said to him, ‘Why do you take so much trouble, Mr …?’
‘Name’s Mike. Just ask for Mike.’
‘Mike … why do you take so much trouble? My business is worth what? … a very few dollars to you.’
He shrugged, and grinned again, and looked almost embarrassed, ‘Well, I figure it this way. Some day, perhaps, you’re going to want a brand new car. You’ll come to Mike’s. Someday, I aim to be the biggest Ford dealer in L.A. This is a city made for automobiles.’ He looked, for just a second past her, to his lines of used cars, and to the three expensive new models sheltered in his small showroom. There was something almost wistful in his expression. ‘You know, Mrs Maynard, to some people an automobile is a beautiful thing. Lovely to listen to her running sweet and clean. I like to work with automobiles. So you have any trouble, any trouble at all, you come back here and I’ll put her right. Just ask for Mike …’
‘Mike,’ she repeated. ‘That’s the name of my dog.’
He tore his eyes away from the contemplation of his stock, to the dog seated beside her in the old Ford. ‘You look nice and safe and cosy with him beside you. The way a lady should. S’long, Mrs Maynard. See you tomorrow.’
In the rear-view mirror she watched his diminishing figure as he once again surveyed his line of cars waiting for the customers he visualized in the future. She hoped he’d get them. When he had talked of automobiles, for a second his face had flickered with the passion of a monomaniac. His speech had been the ordinary speech of every American, but overlaid with a faint remnant of an accent ‒ French, perhaps, but no, not really she decided. It was heavier than that. The brave pennants fluttered in the breeze. MIKE’S NEW AND USED CARS. Then she turned into the darkening streets of the city. And she had an odd feeling that she had met him before, or was it just that she recognized someone who had the same feeling as she had for this place? He thought of it in terms of automobiles to traverse its endless miles of almost rural sprawl. She saw it in terms of real estate, in terms of sunshine and climate to be sold to people who fled the winters of the East and mid-West. These were lean times for people like herself and this Mike to dream grandiose dreams, but she felt warmed and comforted by a rare sense of companionship.
The next day he had the car ready at the agreed time, the old bodywork as shining as hands could make it. He smiled as he listened to the engine when she turned on the ignition. ‘Hear that? Sweet as sugar … sweet as sugar.’ And he passed a grimy hand over his chin, transferring some grease to it, and grinning at her with the pleasure she might have expected if he had just sold one of the showroom models. Whatever else he loved, this Mike loved automobiles.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Maynard. Take care now.’
‘Goodbye … Mike.’
The post office box at Santa Ana yielded only one clipping on Anna’s next visit. It was an item from a gossip column of a London paper giving the information, tinged with a little malice towards the girl who had shaken the London social scene that season, that the former Nicole Rainard, now Mrs Lloyd Fenton, had left England for Boston with her husband, who was about to take up practice there. Lady Gowing had not been available for comment on any of her niece’s proposed future plans.
Anna then wrote and closed the account she had had with the London press clipping service. From the telephone book she selected a firm of Santa Ana attorneys, one with whom she had never done business, and giving the post office box as her address, asked them to write to a New York clipping service and take out a subscription for clippings dealing with Dr and Mrs Lloyd Fenton, or Nicole Fenton, and that they should concentrate on the papers of Boston, Massachusetts. She paid in cash for the services of the attorneys, and they in turn paid the clipping service with their own cheque. They didn’t ask questions of the woman for whom they performed this routine service. The world was full of such people, those who wanted to remain hidden, but wanted information. They would have been ready, if she had requested it, to recommend the services of a private investigator, but apparently that was not required.
She asked them to let her know, through the post office address, when the subscription expired. She would renew it regularly, she said.
Thereafter she received at Santa Ana sealed envelopes from the New York clipping service, resealed in the envelopes of the attorneys. Each year she renew
ed the subscription, paying in cash, and paid the few dollars extra charge they made for postage and handling. They never learned any more about the woman with the post office box, and she did nothing to make them curious.
PART THREE
LYNMARA
Chapter One
FEBRUARY 28TH, 1939
My dear Nicole. Tomorrow is your twenty-fourth, birthday, and I send you … Charles Gowing paused in his writing. What did he really send her that she didn’t know she had in abundance? London that evening was shrouded in fog, and as always some of its choking, sulphurous mass had seeped in at windows and doors, an acrid, unmistakable smell. It had been dark since three o’clock. The fire that burned in the grate did little to lighten Charles’s mood. He looked for a long time at the photograph in the silver frame which was the only one on the desk in this room which Iris had fashioned into a bedroom-study for him in the year that Nicole had spent her one brief summer flaming brilliantly on the London social scene, and then disappearing into what, if anyone now thought of her at all, was thought of as obscurity. He looked long and closely at the features he so often studied, the once too-delicate features which now were more slightly rounded, at the smile that was not forced or coy, but natural, as a happy woman smiles. He looked at the two young children ‒ one seated beside her, one on the lap, her arms closely about him. An ordinary enough picture, but to Charles, one infinitely precious. It didn’t matter that Lloyd Fenton himself was not in the picture; not only had he fathered these sturdy, good-looking boys, but it was he who was responsible for the air of calm serenity, for the naturalness of the smile that Nicole wore. If Charles sometimes cursed Lloyd Fenton for having taken her away from England, much more often he was profoundly grateful to him for what he had fashioned of this young woman whom Charles loved so much.
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