Charles had not grown used, over the years, to missing Nicole’s actual presence. The loneliness he had expected to experience on that day he had seen the liner slip off into the mist of Southampton had actually been worse than he feared, sometimes a physical ache, rather like that which afflicted his wounded leg, and, like it, did not go away. He had busied himself as best he could, but even the pleasure of an occasional weekend at Dencote was now not his. He had rented the lodge soon after Nicole had left when he discovered that he really could not bear its emptiness when there was no hope that she would join him. These were the times he acknowledged his jealousy of Lloyd Fenton, as jealous as he would have been of any man Nicole might have married. But the renting of Dencote had had a more practical side. He found he needed even the little it brought in so that he might have extra money for the gifts he wanted to shower on Nicole’s children, and in his frustration, could not. He found himself, almost from the beginning, practising little economies ‒ going less often to his clubs to save the expenses of drinks and meals, taking an extra year out of a suit until Iris protested that it had begun to look shabby, taking a bus or the underground when before he would have used a taxi. He stored up the money saved as a small child with a money-box, and his reward had been three visits to Boston, and Nicole’s joyful welcome. For nothing in the world would he have accepted help from Iris to pay for these journeys ‒ but then, none had ever been offered.
Each time he had announced he was going, she had merely shrugged and asked what period of time he would be away. Never once did she mention Nicole’s name. In the years since Nicole had left, Iris, oddly, without seeming to try, had achieved the height of an ambition Charles had always known was present, but which, through years of striving, had still evaded her. With Nicole’s departure, Iris had seemed to relinquish the approach to the world she had so desired to be recognized in. With this she had grown bolder, more daring, more ready to take risks. Charles had to acknowledge that it seemed ridiculous that a woman dedicated to charitable fund-raising would be thought to take risks, but Iris, in her anger and bitterness over Nicole, had finally shaken off any remaining timidity. She didn’t any longer care that people might mention her Yorkshire mill-owning father, that they might say her money was in city blocks and steel mills, rather than in shooting moors and country acres. With Nicole’s going, she had seen all that swept away, and she then had nothing to lose. The result was that she had become one of the most prominent women in London. She very loosely involved herself in politics, but only when the presence of a great name would help one of her charities. Three permanent secretaries now inhabited the library, and Lady Gowing’s was a name to be courted for the list of any charitable venture. It was a pity, Charles thought, that her success didn’t seem to give her more satisfaction. As night after night he attended charity balls and functions with her, he wished that just once her face might have relaxed into the smile of triumph which she had earned. But she never did relax. He had sat with her through ballet and opera and concert and after-dinner entertainment, and he knew that she was mentally planning the activities of the next day, how to focus her soliciting letters more accurately, how to snare a bigger and ever bigger name as guest speaker, or comedian, or whatever was needed, for her next dinner. She seemed never to rest; she seemed never to tire. Charles himself, at times, felt very tired.
At these times the great refreshment had been to look at the photographs of Nicole, from which he had made an album, to re-read her letters, to summarize in his mind what the pictures conveyed ‒ that, and to plan the next journey to Boston.
‘You must come in the fall,’ she had written the first year of her marriage. ‘You can’t even imagine what the colours are like here.’ He had sold some of his few remaining shares, found an inexpensive, slow steamer that would land him in Boston, and had gone. She had greeted him, laughing and with her eyes bright with tears, hugging him with a fierce strength, and she hadn’t needed to tell him she was pregnant. ‘When I knew you really were coming, I thought I’d surprise you …’
‘If I’d known I might have cancelled … Shouldn’t you be resting? … and all that.’
‘What nonsense. My doctor says I’m as healthy as a horse. Everything’s going beautifully.’
He had gone back to the rambling frame house, in a modestly affluent street in Cambridge, and had never before realized that Nicole lived almost on the campus of Harvard College. ‘I always thought it was out in the woods somewhere,’ he confessed.
‘That,’ she said, ‘was back in the time when Paul Revere took his ride. Oh, but we’ll go to all the places. Concord … Walden Pond. I remember you like Thoreau …’
It had been very American, in a special way. She gave dinner parties to introduce him to all the Fentons, and others to introduce him to the medical people that were Lloyd’s world. In between, they had driven together to all the places she had promised, and he had witnessed the splendour of a New England fall. And he had witnessed the shared happiness of two people who loved each other almost to the exclusion of everyone else. He was pleased in what he found in Lloyd Fenton, a steadiness which had a balancing effect on Nicole’s intensity. Sometimes he watched her as she in turn watched Lloyd, and he saw again the radiance he had once so briefly glimpsed in London. He welcomed what he witnessed between them, and yet he was somewhat afraid of it. Was it possible to love too much? He feared a little for Nicole should anything flounder, and yet who, once having seen the full expression of such a love as she appeared to have for Lloyd, would have wanted to deny it to her? She had experienced what few people had experienced, and that, whatever happened, could never be taken from her. It pleased him to see that Lloyd Fenton seemed to realize this. Without appearing to coddle Nicole, he tried to protect her, and yet to draw her out into a world that was not wholly centred in himself. It seemed to Charles an eminently sensible, tender approach, and he felt a new respect for this quiet, but rather tough-minded man.
The Fenton family, he had noticed, had played its own part in drawing Nicole into the centre of its life, and therefore the life of Boston. She had arrived, new to the city, and unknown to them. In a family fashion, they had closed ranks around Lloyd, and treated his bride gently, but still had given her an eagle-eyed scrutiny. Most of them liked what they saw, some reserved judgement. Then inevitably, shortly after Lloyd and Nicole had arrived, the stories had followed them across the Atlantic. The knowledge of her jilting a young man called Lord Ashleigh two days before her wedding did not help her, until they could see for themselves that she did not live except through Lloyd Fenton, and were, in a back-handed fashion, complimented that her choice should have been this man whose family was part of the history of the city. Then, people who had been visiting England that summer returned and told the stories of an expected engagement to the elder son of a duke. The young girl who had turned down both a marquis and a viscount became an object for speculation, especially since it was known that the only money Lloyd Fenton had was what he earned from medicine, and a very small income which was all that was left of the family fortune. Boston society began to feel protective of Nicole, especially when it was conceded that she could not possibly have put on such a show of being in love if that were not the truth. Unexpected offers to help finance the mortgage of the house in Cambridge came to Lloyd, which he accepted. They were asked to dinner parties which might have taken a young married couple years to achieve. Charles even found out that the thing that really swayed the most proper dowagers of Boston, who he saw had made rather a pet of Nicole, was her ability at the piano. For years all these ladies had religiously attended the Friday afternoon concerts of the Boston Symphony. They recognized and respected a professional standard when they heard it. They even, tactfully, some of them, asked Nicole if she would consent to give piano lessons to their grandchildren. The word went through Boston society. Lloyd Fenton’s young bride, who seemed to have come out of nowhere, had been presented at the Court of St James, her English was of the st
andard rarely heard, even in Boston, and lacking its hard vowels, her manners were impeccable, except when someone else’s demands crossed the wishes of her husband, and then she was a tigress in not allowing one to conflict with the other. Boston society decided that Nicole Fenton would more than suit them. They admitted her.
Charles, seeing her through that October of the brilliant flaming leaves which drifted before his face, and rustled beneath his feet, the month when Nicole’s pregnancy advanced until she moved clumsily, knew that Nicole herself did not care whether Boston accepted her or not. What she did care for was that Lloyd should have not been hurt by his marriage. He had not been, and her satisfaction lay there. She continued to play her scales, the sonatas, the etudes, the ballads and waltzes and nocturnes, and laughed with Charles that her swelling belly was pushing her too far from the piano. On Thursday nights she played with an amateur chamber music group who met for the simple and complex pleasure of making music together. She wept a little when she saw Charles off at the end of his visit, but he knew there was no real sadness in her. She had so much to return to when she left the dock. And he was returning to the brisk efficiency of the house in Elgin Square which was organized to accommodate Iris’s activities, and to the November fogs of London.
The child was due about Christmas. Before that, Charles, through means he didn’t altogether approve but which his determination drove him to, raised some extra money. He did it by a combination of putting Dencote even further into debt, and by implying to his bank manager that naturally his wife would see him through any contingency. This part was not the truth, but not everything was known to bank managers. All they knew was that Iris Gowing was a rich woman, and these lean years had, by sound investment, made her richer. So Charles made his plans, and the letter came back from Nicole.
‘I opened the door one morning, and there was Henson! She had even found her way to the house without telephoning, and had paid off the cab. She was there, bag and baggage, and she simply said, “Well, Miss Nicole, I’ve never been a nanny before, but I’ve worked in nurseries, and I know how things should be done. You can trust Baby with me.” Uncle Charles, dear, you shouldn’t have done it, but it’s nice to have her to lean on. I’m afraid I shall be such a fool with a young baby …’ Charles had sought Henson out in her present employment with the Honourable Mrs Robert Maitland, tempted her with the thought of being with Nicole again, paid her passage, and guaranteed three years’ salary, paid quarterly. By that time, he knew, Nicole would have control of her own money, and Henson would either be a fixed object in the Fenton household, or she would have long before returned to England. As he sat there on that last day of February writing his letter, Henson was still with the Fentons, the second son was almost two years old, and Henson continued to write her rather laborious letters to Sir Charles, detailing each stage of both children’s growth and progress, the older one now being referred to as Master Daniel, and the younger had taken the name of Baby.
But Charles didn’t really need the reports, though he savoured each detail as much as Henson liked to write it. He was like a man who suddenly had grandchildren, when he had expected none, and it grieved him that Iris refused to share this peculiar pleasure with him. He wished she knew what she was missing. He had even, tentatively, rather diffidently, suggested she accompany him on his second visit to Boston, in the summer of 1936, when Nicole was twenty-one. Iris had stared at him and he had watched her lips tighten. ‘I thought I made it perfectly clear to you, Charles, that what becomes of that girl is a matter of complete indifference to me. I do not wish to discuss it further.’
So he had gone and spent the summer mostly with Nicole, the children and Henson at the small, rather shabby beach house out on Cape Cod, a house whose redwood shingles the salt and weather had faded to marvellous, silvery hue. The house was one of a cluster of houses that belonged to the Fenton family, some grander and kept in better trim, others with slightly sagging porches and old basket-work chairs. It was a good reflection for Charles on how each member of the family had come out of the 1929 crash, or how their wives’ fortunes had fared. But beyond everything else, they were a family, visiting back and forth, enjoying both companionship and small feuds, the children learning the rough and tumble of a life lived among a swarming mass of cousins, children whose names Charles never did entirely sort out. Lloyd visited at weekends, and was grateful for Charles’s presence as company for Nicole. To Charles the life had a beguiling simplicity. He read, sitting on the porch, walked the deserted beaches and sand dunes with Nicole. At one memorable time she managed to tell him what it had been like when she had walked the beaches of Maine with Anna, and how fiercely she had envied the privacy and privilege of the rich. Most of the Fentons were no longer rich, but they enjoyed the privileges that went with being long-established; they had bought empty acres of beach and dune-land when it had been cheap. There were few, in those depression years, who would have offered them anything for it now. Nicole, Charles could see, gloried in the isolation of the Cape. She walked on Fenton land, on Fenton beaches, and she never got over the seeming miracle of it.
She talked to him frankly about money. When she had reached twenty-one, she had come into control of what had been left to her by the Yorkshire mill-owner. It had been skilfully invested, and the capital had grown. ‘We don’t touch that,’ she said. ‘We want to spruce up the Cambridge house a bit, and then of course we’re saving for the boys’ educations. We’ll want them to go to Groton and Harvard, like Lloyd ‒ and I expect there’ll be more kids …’ She spoke with the confidence of one who had borne her children with surprising ease, considering the slightness of her frame, and looked forward to more births. ‘We’ll probably have to buy a larger house in Cambridge. We’d like to stay there. It’s nice being near the campus …’ Lloyd’s practice as a neurosurgeon was growing steadily, and he lectured at Harvard. So she made her plans with a wonderful sureness that she had at last found her proper place, and that life could only grow richer and fuller, friendships deepen, family matters more absorbing. She wanted nothing else. ‘If I don’t watch out, Uncle Charles,’ she had said one day as they walked the beach in the early morning, ‘I’ll become fat and complacent and, I suppose, even dowdy!’
And Charles, looking at her, knowing that she wore her simple, rather inexpensive clothes with some undeniable chic which might have been learned in Paris, but was decidedly not Bostonian, had simply laughed.
That summer, when they had so much time together, when he had walked as he hadn’t done for years, his face tanned by the sun and salt wind, and sailed with those Fentons still affluent enough to have boats, when even his bad leg had seemed to strengthen from the hard exercise of the sand dunes and the stingingly-cold rush of the water as they walked the tide’s edge, that summer Nicole had told him more things about her mother. ‘The day I turned twenty-one Lloyd telephoned Fairfax & Osborne,’ she had said. ‘We hoped they might be holding a letter from Anna, that some message had been sent, but there was nothing. I honestly ‒ Uncle Charles, I have to say it this way because I’m finished with all those lies and cover-ups, all that sort of thing that nearly let me miss having Lloyd ‒ well, honestly I didn’t know whether to be sorry or relieved. I didn’t want to think she’d vanished for ever, and yet I didn’t know how I’d feel about trying to get to know her. Anna was ‒ well, she was a formidable sort of woman. There’s no woman I’ve ever encountered who had so much self-discipline, such control over herself. I tried to remember exactly what it was like when we used to have those holidays together. Was it just because I was a kid and didn’t understand her, that I felt slightly afraid? ‒ well, not afraid of her, but afraid of letting her down in some way. She was ‒ is ‒ a very special woman. I don’t think I could ever measure up to her, or what she wanted me to be. Well, there was no message from her, Fairfax & Osborne had no address, but a week after my twenty-first birthday, the watch arrived ‒’
She had brought it with her to the Cape because
she had meant to tell Charles this, had wanted to share it with him. ‘There was a note in Anna’s handwriting.’ She held the slim gold pocket-watch with fob and chain reverently. ‘We had the best jeweller in Boston examine it. He said it came from the workshops of Fabergé ‒ the gold and enamelwork is typical. And look here, the inscription … I had it translated …’ It was engraved within the lid in Russian characters. ‘It says “To my dear friend Nicholas Mikhailovitch Tenishev in gratitude. Mikhail Ovrensky. 1907.” That would have been the year my grandfather left Russia. Just imagine Prince Ovrensky giving him this when he was already bankrupt! It’s …’ she closed the lid gently. ‘It’s very Russian somehow, isn’t it? Making such a grand gesture. Making my grandfather a friend when he was only the music and French teacher.’
‘I think we have a lot yet to learn about the Russians,’ Charles said, attempting not to show her how much moved he had been by the sight of this obviously treasured object. ‘What was in the note?’ he asked.
‘Almost nothing.’ She recited it, its sparse, bare wording. ‘It was your grandfather’s. I would like your son to have it. I am glad you have returned to America. I hope you are happy. Love. Anna.’ Nicole had raised eyes that shone with tears to Charles. ‘That was all. Not another word. Of course she had not been able to send it when Dan was born ‒ that would have been breaking the agreement she made. But it came so soon after my birthday, and to the exact address, that we sensed that she knew everything about us. It sent Lloyd nearly wild that he couldn’t trace her. The first money we spent from the income was on trying to find her. The watch had been posted in Chicago, at one of the central post offices. The agency pointed out that Chicago is one of the easiest cities in America to reach from anywhere. All sorts of railroads go there. She could have come from the South, the East or West Coasts, or she could just be living in Chicago itself. Well, they didn’t find her. We advertised. The agency made up a list of every important paper in the States. I remembered that she always took the Wall Street Journal and we ran an ad every day for three months. They even got the list of mail subscribers but that didn’t help much. We would have had to check up every one of them, and even then, still might not find her. You wouldn’t think it was possible for someone just to disappear ‒ especially someone who must have kept a pretty close check on me, however she did it. But we couldn’t find her. Obviously she intended that we shouldn’t find her. Since then, there’s been nothing ‒ nothing at all.’
The Lynmara Legacy Page 31