Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  When I was born (Jenna had told me this) Constance had attended my christening and, like a godmother in a fairy story, had bent over my cradle to bestow a kiss. She had held me in her arms outside the Winterscombe church and had given me as a christening present a most extraordinary bracelet, in the shape of a coiling snake. This bracelet, described by Jenna as unsuitable, I had never seen; it lay lodged with my mother’s diamonds in the bank.

  After the christening Constance must have fallen from favor, for she disappeared. More precisely, she was erased. There were numerous photographs of my christening, and Constance appeared in none of them. She was never invited to stay at the house, although I knew she came to England, for Uncle Steenie would say so. The only reason I knew she was my godmother was that she told me so herself; each year at Christmas, and each year on my birthday, she would send a card, and inside them she would write: From your godmother, Constance. The handwriting was small, the strokes of the letters bold, and the ink black.

  These cards of hers were arranged, with the others I received, on the nursery mantelpiece. When the birthday was over I was allowed to keep my cards, cutting them out and pasting them in scrapbooks—all the cards, that is, except those from my godmother. Her cards were always removed.

  This tactic was designed, I expect, to make me forget my godmother. Since I was a child, it had the opposite effect. The less I was told, the more I wanted to know, but to discover more was extremely difficult. My parents were obdurate: Nothing could persuade either of them to mention Constance by name, and a direct question was met with visible displeasure. They confirmed that she was my godmother—that was all.

  Jenna had been provoked, once or twice, into discussion of my christening and the exotic bracelet, but after that I think she was warned off, for she too refused to discuss Constance again. Aunt Maud clearly hated her; on the one occasion when I risked an inquiry there, Aunt Maud drew herself up, gazed down her imperious nose, and sniffed.

  “Your godmother is quite beyond the pale, Victoria. I prefer you do not mention her to me. I cannot imagine that she would interest you.”

  “I just wondered … if she had … tempestuous eyes,” I persevered.

  “Her eyes are like two small pieces of coal,” Aunt Maud replied, and that was the end of the subject.

  William the butler claimed not to remember her. Uncle Freddie shifted his eyes about whenever I mentioned her name; trapped, alone on a walk in the woods, he once went so far as to admit that he and his brothers had known Constance as a child. She had, he said, frowning at the trees, been jolly good fun—in her way.

  “Did Daddy like her then, Uncle Freddie? I don’t think he likes her now.”

  “Maybe, maybe.” Uncle Freddie whistled. “I don’t remember. Now, where are those wretched dogs? You shout, Victoria. Oh, well done. Here they come. That’s the ticket.”

  That left Uncle Steenie. I had high hopes of Uncle Steenie, particularly if I could waylay him after luncheon, or when he was in his own room, where he kept a silver hip flask for restorative nips on cold afternoons. Uncle Steenie might not come to Winterscombe very often but when he did, he became expansive after a few nips. “Sit down, Victoria,” he would say. “Sit down and let’s have a huge gossip.”

  And so, on one of his visits, I evaded Jenna and the regulation afternoon walk and crept along to Uncle Steenie’s room.

  Uncle Steenie gave me a chocolate truffle from his secret bedroom supply, sat me by the fire, and told me all about Capri. When he paused for breath I asked my question. Uncle Steenie gave me one of his roguish looks.

  “Constance? Your godmother?” He clicked his tongue. “Vicky darling, she is an absolute demon.”

  “A demon? You mean she’s bad? Is that why no one will talk about her?”

  “Bad?” Uncle Steenie seemed to find that idea interesting. He had another nip and considered it. “Well,” he said at last, in his most drawling voice, “I can never quite make up my mind. You know the little girl in the nursery rhyme, the one with the curl down the middle of her forehead? ‘When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.’ Constance is like that, perhaps. Except, personally, I liked her best when she was bad. The great thing about your godmother, Vicky, is that she is never dull.”

  “Is she … pretty?”

  “Darling, no. Nothing so bland. She’s … startling.” He took another nip. “She bowls people over. Men especially. Down they go, like skittles.”

  “Did she bowl you over, Uncle Steenie?”

  “Well, not exactly, Vicky.” He paused. “She was probably too busy to try. I expect she had other fish to fry. She and I are almost the same age, you know, so we were always friends. We met for the first time when we were—let me see—about six years old. Younger than you are now, anyway. We’re both the same age as the century, more or less, so that must have been 1906. Lord, I’m ancient! 1906! It feels like eons ago.”

  “So she’s thirty-seven now?” I was disappointed, I think, for thirty-seven seemed very old. Uncle Steenie waved his hands in the air.

  “Thirty-seven? Vicky darling, in Constance’s case, the years are immaterial. Age cannot wither her—though it does the rest of us, unfortunately. Do you know what I saw in the mirror this morning? A most terrible thing. A crow’s footprint, Vicky. In the corner of my eyes.”

  “It’s not a very big footprint.”

  “Darling, you reassure me.” Uncle Steenie sighed. “And the reason it’s small is my new cream. Have I shown you my new cream? It smells of violets, and it’s too heavenly—”

  “Would it get rid of freckles, do you think, Uncle Steenie?”

  “Darling, in a flash. There’s nothing it can’t do. It’s a perfect miracle, this cream, which is just as well because it costs a queen’s ransom.” He smiled mischievously. “Look, I’ll give you some if you like. Pat it in, Vicky, every evening….”

  So my uncle Steenie changed the subject—more dexterously than the rest of my family, but he changed it nonetheless. That night there were storms and slammed doors downstairs, and Uncle Steenie became so upset he had to be helped up to bed by my father and William. The next morning he departed, early, so I never received my jar of violet cream, and I discovered no more on the subject of Constance.

  For several months nothing happened: Charlotte contracted measles; her party was canceled; her mother took her to Switzerland for a period of convalescence. Christmas came and went, and it was not until January of the new year, 1938, that I saw Charlotte again.

  I was invited to her house for tea, alone—an honor never accorded me before. To my surprise I was invited again the following week; the week after that there was a most pressing invitation to join Charlotte and her friends on an expedition to see a London pantomime.

  My stock had risen, it seemed, not just with Charlotte but with her parents also. I was no longer just a dull child from an impoverished background; I was Constance Shawcross’s godchild. I was about to visit her in New York. Quite suddenly I had acquired possibilities.

  At first, I am afraid, I enjoyed this very much. I was given wings by Constance’s surrogate glamour; I took those wings and I flew. Since I knew virtually nothing about my godmother, I was free to invent. I discovered the addictions of fiction.

  In the beginning I gave Constance all those attributes I myself most secretly admired: I gave her black hair and dark-blue eyes and a fiery temperament. I gave her five gray Persian cats (I loved cats) and an Irish wolfhound. I made her a superlative horsewoman who rode sidesaddle to hounds. I let fall the fact that she ordered French scent in large flagons, lived at the top of one of the tallest towers in New York, overlooking the Statue of Liberty, ate roast beef three times a week, and insisted on Oxford marmalade for breakfast. All her clothes, right down to her underwear, came from Harrods.

  “Harrods? Are you sure, Victoria?” Charlotte’s mother had been eavesdropping on these boasts avidly, but now she looked doubtful.

  “Well, perhap
s not all of them,” I said carefully, and cast about in my mind. I thought of my aunt Maud and her reminiscences. “I think sometimes … that she goes to Paris.”

  “Oh, I feel sure she must. Schiaparelli, perhaps Chanel. There’s a picture I saw somewhere—Charlotte, where did I put that book?” Charlotte’s mother always called magazines “books,” and on that occasion a much-thumbed copy of Vogue was produced. It was two years old at least. There, in my trembling hands, was the first photograph of my godmother I had ever seen. Sleek, insolently chic, she was photographed at a London party in a group that included wicked Wallis Simpson, Conrad Vickers, and the then Prince of Wales. She was gesturing, so her hand obscured her face.

  After that my lies became less pure. I had learned from that error about Harrods, and I trimmed my image of my godmother to suit the tastes of my audience. I gave Constance several motorcars (a touch of malice there, for none was a Rolls-Royce); I gave her a yacht, a permanent suite at the Ritz, a collection of yellow diamonds, crocodile-skin luggage, silk underwear, and intimate friendship with King Farouk.

  I was learning fast, and most of these details I picked up either from Charlotte and her parents or from the fat and glossy magazines that lay scattered around their home—magazines that were never permitted at Winterscombe. I think I liked this Constance less than I did the Constance of her first incarnation, who lived in a tower and rode to hounds at full tilt. But my preferences were unimportant; I could see that these new details impressed my audience. When I mentioned the crocodile luggage Charlotte’s mother gave a sigh; she herself, she said in a wistful way, had admired something very similar, just the other day, at Asprey’s.

  There were dangers—I could see that. Both Charlotte and her mother seemed alarmingly well informed about my godmother. They consumed gossip columns; they tossed the names of people my godmother seemed to know into their everyday conversation: “Lady Diana’s dress—what did you think, Mummy?” “Oh, a teensy bit dull, not up to her usual standards.” Did they know Lady Diana? I was never quite sure, but I sensed I must be careful. Was my godmother married, for instance? Could she conceivably have been divorced? If she was divorced, that might explain her fall from favor, for my mother was adamantly opposed to divorce. I had no way of knowing, but I suspected that both Charlotte and her parents might know. They also presumably knew—as I did not—why my godmother was rich, what she did, who her parents were, where she came from.

  So I spun the tales of my fabled godmother, but I spun them more warily, avoiding all mention of husbands or antecedents. In return for my inventions I gleaned certain facts, which I squirreled away. I learned that my godmother had been born in England but was now a naturalized American citizen. I learned that she “did up” houses, although no one explained what this involved. I learned that she crossed the Atlantic as casually as the Channel, and adored Venice, which she visited every year. When there, she would stay nowhere but the Danieli.

  “Not the Gritti. I told you, Harold.” We were sitting in their drawing room, on a shiny brocade sofa. Charlotte’s mother was drinking a martini in a frosted glass. She twirled the olive, set the glass down on a bright table of glass and chrome, and gave her husband a cold look. She turned back to me in her new apologetic way, as if I were an arbiter of taste, too, like my godmother. “We stayed at the Gritti last year, Victoria, because the Danieli was chockablock. Of course, if we had had a choice … but it was such a last-minute arrangement….”

  Holidays. I tensed at once, for there, of course, lay another danger: my own visit to New York. I had hoped Charlotte might have forgotten that part of my boast, but she had not. She also remembered I had given a date: this year.

  But when, this year? As the weeks passed, the questions became more pressing. Charlotte returned to boarding school but as soon as the Easter holidays came around, the invitations to tea were renewed.

  When, exactly, did I plan to leave? Had it been decided whether I should sail on the Aquitania or the Ile de France? Was I to travel alone, or was my godmother to visit England and collect me? Surely I could not be going to New York in the summer—no one went to New York then, and my godmother was usually in Europe.

  There was a brief respite that spring, due to politics: Austria was annexed by Germany, and although I had no idea what that meant I could tell it was something serious, for my father and mother had long anxious conversations, which would break off when I came into earshot. Even Charlotte’s father looked grave. Their own visit to Germany, planned for that summer, was canceled. They opted for Italy after all.

  “Things seem so very uncertain,” Charlotte’s mother said with a sigh. “I wonder if your parents will let you travel, Victoria? It would be ever so disappointing if you had to cancel your trip, but I can see …”

  “It might have to be … postponed,” I said in a small voice.

  “I can’t see why.” Charlotte, who was sitting next to me, gave me a hard look. “America is in the opposite direction. Nothing is happening there.”

  I mumbled something—something not too convincing, I think, for I saw Charlotte and her mother exchange a telling glance. Perhaps Charlotte was already beginning to believe that the visit to my godmother was a fiction; certainly she now looked at me in a measured way, with a hint of the old superciliousness. I might not have liked her, and I think I was already beginning to regret my lies. All the same I was desperate to regain her respect.

  I knew what one did when one was desperate for something: One prayed. My mother had taught me that. For many years, after they were first married, my mother and father were childless; my mother had prayed for a child, and—eventually—her prayers had been answered.

  “Did Daddy pray for one too?” I wanted to know, and my mother frowned.

  “I expect so, Vicky. In his way. Always remember, it’s important not just to pray for yourself. You mustn’t treat God like Father Christmas and ask for too many things. But if you ask for good things, the right things, then God listens. He might not always grant your wish, or”—she paused—“He might grant it in an unexpected way, but He does listen, Vicky. I believe that.”

  Was my visit to my godmother a good thing, one it was permissible to pray for? I weighed the pros and cons for some time; eventually I decided it was quite a good thing. I had been taught to be methodical, and I was methodical about this. I prayed every night and every morning; I prayed on Sundays when I went to church. I bought penny candles once a week and lit them to give wings to the prayer, and I couched the appeal politely: Please-God-if-You-think-it-is-a-good-thing-may-I-go-to-New-York-to-stay-with-Constance-if-it-is-Your-will-thank-you-Amen.

  Twice a day, every day for three months. At the end of that time, when it was high summer at Winterscombe, my wish was granted. I should have listened to my mother more carefully perhaps, because it was granted in a most unexpected way.

  Until my wish was granted, I enjoyed that summer. I remember days of sunshine and of warmth, a sensation of lull, as if the world waited and held its breath. There was calm, but it was an expectant calm; somewhere, beyond the boundaries of that safe world, something was happening, and sometimes I would fancy that I could hear it, still distant, and soft, like a great, invisible machine in gear—events elsewhere, their momentum gathering.

  For many years I had known, in a vague way, that the orphanages that took up so much of my mother’s time and ate such a worrying amount of my father’s money, had connections with their counterparts in Europe. So, that summer, when my mother took me aside and explained that plans had changed, that she and my father would be in Europe on orphanage work during July and August, I was surprised, but not greatly. Although we never went abroad for holidays, my mother had once or twice made such trips in the past, usually in the company of her closest friend, the formidable Winifred Hunter-Coote, whom she had known in the Great War. This time, she explained, my father had decided to go with them, because they were not just visiting European orphanages, as they usually did, but were seeing fri
ends in Germany who would help them to bring certain children to England. Just for a while, she explained, it would be safer for those children to be here, rather than at home in their own country. They were not necessarily orphans, she said in her careful way; they were perhaps more like refugees. It was not always easy to persuade the authorities to let them leave, which was why my father was going with her and with Winifred, for his German was fluent….

  Here, in a way that was uncharacteristic of her, my mother paused, and I knew there was something she was leaving out, something she did not want me to know.

  “Won’t their parents miss them?” I asked, and my mother smiled.

  “Of course, darling. But they know it is for the best. We shall be away quite a long time, and I shall miss you too. You’ll write, won’t you, Vicky?”

  I did write, every day, joining the letters together so that they were like a diary, and sending them off once a week to a series of poste restante addresses. To begin with, it felt strange, a summer at Winterscombe without my parents, but after a while I became used to the new quietness in the house, and besides, there were diversions. My aunt Maud was brought down to stay, and arrived with packages of brightly bound novels. She was a little frail, for she had had a mild stroke the previous Easter, but her appetite for fiction was undiminished. Uncle Freddie arrived, complete with greyhounds; they had definitely “fizzled,” I could tell, because Uncle Freddie no longer mentioned the Irish Derby. Jenna was there and William was there and Charlotte was safely distant, at the Danieli, so there was no need to worry about the lies for a while. There were strawberries to pick, and then raspberries and young peas and lettuces. High summer, and I was content, even though my parents were away. Best of all, I had made a new friend.