The Mitford Trial

by Jessica Fellowes

  Nancy’s five-year engagement to Hamish St Clair Erskine showed no sign yet of coming to its natural conclusion. Whether that was marriage or a break-up was anyone’s guess. Louisa knew what the family wanted for Nancy – and it wasn’t to see her walk down the aisle towards him.

  Louisa had eaten all her cake some time ago and was appalled to feel her stomach rumble. She’d worked through her lunch hour in order to leave early to make this appointment with Nancy. She thought perhaps she would stop off at the butcher’s on the way home and surprise Mrs Sullivan by cooking everyone’s supper that evening.

  ‘Lou-Lou?’ Nancy clicked her fingers. ‘You went off somewhere else there.’

  Louisa snapped into focus. ‘Sorry. You were saying?’

  ‘I think you should accompany my mother on the cruise. I know you’re not Diana’s lady’s maid any more, but perhaps as a sort of paid holiday you could be one for Lady R for a few weeks? It’s simply too much to ask for her to manage Diana, Unity and Decca. You know how they can be.’

  Louisa looked out of the window; the sky was overcast and people walked past pulling their collars up against a wind that appeared to have got up.

  ‘I believe they’re taking the train from Victoria to Paris, then on again to Venice, where they’ll meet the boat. It stops at various places in Italy and Greece before it comes back to Venice three weeks later for the Orient Express home. What do you say?’

  Louisa regarded Nancy’s pleading expression, her well-coiffed curls that framed a heart-shaped face, her silk shirt and light woollen skirt, her fashionable square heels. She thought of her own shabby coat hanging in the hall and a hat that hadn’t been replaced for three years (she couldn’t wear her wedding hat every day). Louisa had avidly pored over books of maps and paintings in the Asthall library when she first went to work for the Mitfords, dreaming of what she would do before she began to think of settling down with a family of her own. The fact was, for all of the changes in the world in the last decade alone – the Amy Johnsons who co-piloted planes and Roald Amundsens who explored the Arctic – the chance to go abroad for any length of time, in a degree of comfort, was beyond reach for the likes of her. The Mitfords had taken her to Dieppe, and she had been to Paris and Venice when Diana’s lady’s maid. She yearned to feel the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on her face again but she bore the guilt of Guy’s salary reduced by the cost of her training.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Nancy, it’s kind of you to think of me,’ said Louisa carefully. ‘But no, I’m afraid I can’t. It would be a wonderful opportunity for someone but not, this time, for me.’

  She was as polite as she could be, but she had to be firm. Louisa wouldn’t ever be a servant again. Never, not for a thousand pounds a day, not for all the olives in Italy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After Louisa had turned down Nancy’s request, there had been an awkwardness between them that could not be quickly resolved, and Louisa made her excuses. She left through the front door, the same maid showing her out, and as Louisa descended the steps she saw a maroon-coloured motor car pull up. A Jaguar? She was never too sure of cars, but it was what she knew anyone would call ‘a beauty’. Diana was in the passenger seat, dressed in black, a black slouch hat pulled down to shield most of her face, but there was no disguising her now-famed beauty. The driver was a man Louisa recognised as Diana’s friend Cecil Beaton, a raffish type who took endless photographs of their crowd, often printed alongside Nancy’s anonymous party reports for the Tatler. Not wishing to see Diana today, given the conversation with Nancy, Louisa hurried off down the street. As she did so, she noticed another car pull up a hundred yards on. This driver looked familiar too, but she couldn’t be sure if she knew him or if he had the sort of face that could have belonged to a number of men. He returned her glance, but he did not show that he knew her and she thought she must have been mistaken as she hurried down to her bus stop at Scotch Corner.

  At Hammersmith, Louisa got off earlier than usual, making a detour to the butcher’s only to find that it was shut. Early closing on a Wednesday. She hadn’t realised. The thought flashed through her mind that her mother-in-law wouldn’t have been caught out in the same way. Perhaps Mrs Sullivan had been doing more than her fair share of the cooking. After all, she spent her days looking after her fading husband, an exhausting and never-ending task. Louisa sympathised. In spite of her training and the licence it gave her to get out of the house, there was a monotony to the family’s routine that she wanted to interrupt. Determined to see the thing through, Louisa went into the grocer’s instead and picked up two tins of corned beef, potatoes, carrots, a cauliflower and half a pound of Cheddar cheese. A treat. Mrs Sullivan might have some of these ingredients at home already, but she wanted Guy to know that she had planned and prepared the supper herself to give him something special. Or as special as she could make it, anyway. Half the problem was that all those years with the Mitfords had eroded what little ability she’d had to cook, what with Mrs Stobie sending up every meal to the nursery. Diana always hired extremely competent cooks too, giving the servants a taste for fine food. When living alone, Louisa had subsisted off toast and tinned soup.

  But opening the door of the brick terrace, Louisa heard shouting from the front room and stopped. Something told her that she should interrupt, before she heard something she wouldn’t want to hear. Still, she hesitated, her ear at the door.

  Mrs Sullivan’s voice was shrill. ‘I notice she’s quite happy to call herself your wife when it suits her. Not so much when it comes to her duties.’

  Guy’s reply was quieter, firmer, nevertheless edged with exasperation. ‘It’s 1933, Ma. Wives don’t have duties.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ his mother fired back. ‘When I married your father, I was happy to cook and clean. I was proud to be Mrs Sullivan.’

  ‘Louisa is proud.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not good enough for her, the honest work of a housewife. She has to go out to work, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Ma…’

  ‘Even then’ – Louisa could picture her mother-in-law wagging her finger at her son, a good six inches taller than her – ‘she says she’s going out to work, but she’s not bringing any money in! She’s training. You, poor boy, must support all four of us—’

  ‘That’s enough…’

  Louisa decided she agreed, and pushed the door open.

  Mrs Sullivan glared at Louisa and, without saying hello, walked into the kitchen, where she could soon be heard banging pots and pans as she took them out of the cupboard. Guy, flushed, looked at Louisa sorrowfully.

  ‘Why are you home early?’ She was annoyed to have been caught with her bag of shopping, as if he’d see how the magic trick worked.

  Guy looked in the direction of the kitchen, where the sound of the tap running at full steam could be heard. ‘I got a telephone call from Ma.’

  ‘A telephone call?’ The house didn’t have a telephone. It would have meant Mrs Sullivan going to the post office or walking three streets away to use the phone box. Neither of which seemed likely unless it had been a dire emergency. Louisa almost dropped the shopping as a thought occurred to her.

  ‘Your father? Where is he?’

  ‘He’s fine. At least, he is now.’ The last of the fight puffed out of Guy and he slumped into the chair by the fire, swept clean of its ashes, the grating efficiently blacked. ‘He’s upstairs now, but he went missing earlier. Ma had gone next door to talk to Mrs Ratchett and she thinks she must not have closed the door properly. She was going frantic looking for him and telephoned me rather than calling the police.’

  ‘You are the police.’

  Guy took his glasses off to clean them. ‘Yes, I was able to tell Stiles what had happened and he was most understanding.’

  ‘Where was he, then? Your dad?’

  ‘In the pub, nursing a pint of bitter. An old pal of his recognised him and stood him the drink. If you ask me, he was enjoying feeling like his old self again. But it r
attled Mother, she was frightened by it and…’

  ‘What?’ Louisa kneeled down beside Guy and put her hand on his arm. ‘I heard something when I came in. You can tell me.’

  ‘No, I shan’t. Fear makes people angry. Whatever you heard, she didn’t mean it.’

  At that second, there was a loud crash that sounded like a wrecking ball coming through the kitchen window but was probably only a roasting tray dropping on the tiled floor.

  ‘I see.’ Louisa leaned back slightly on her heels. Her thighs were aching and the room was too warm. She thought of the cheese sweating in its brown paper wrapping.

  ‘She’s old, she’s tired and she’s afraid. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen to Dad; doesn’t know what will happen to her when he goes.’

  Louisa knew he was right, but she felt humiliated. She gestured to the shopping bag, which had slumped over, the cauliflower peeking out of the opening, like a tease, threatening to roll out through the front door and into the freedom of the streets. She knew how it felt.

  ‘Look. I’ve bought supper. I was going to cook it for you tonight, as a surprise. A treat.’

  Louisa saw Guy consider his reply, which irked. ‘Thank you. You don’t have to make these gestures. I know when your training is done you’ll earn good money. I am proud of you.’

  She knew he meant it.

  ‘It’s only…’ He glanced at the kitchen door. ‘I’m trying to keep the peace here.’

  ‘You want me to apologise to her?’

  ‘No. Yes.’ Guy took her hands. ‘Talk to her. She likes you, you know she does.’

  ‘I’ve done my fair share of hard work.’ She was defensive, but Louisa thought of her own mother, her back straining under the loads of laundry she carried from the big houses she worked for, the sheets that would be strung up in their front room.

  ‘I know you have,’ said Guy. ‘Like I said, I’m proud. I married you because I believe in you and I know we want the same things. I’m sorry we have to live here, with my parents. I know that’s hard on you. I promise we’ll be a family of our own, soon.’

  Louisa took her hands from him and stood up. Her thighs were burning. ‘Is that what this is all about?’ She looked at him as if trying to read behind his eyes. ‘I don’t want to have a baby.’ She stopped. It wasn’t quite what she meant, but she knew it was too late.

  ‘You don’t want children?’ Guy stood up too, somehow taller and thinner than ever, a balloon with no air.

  Louisa looked at him sadly. ‘I do, Guy. I do want children, but not now. I don’t see the rush, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re thirty-two years old.’

  ‘Does that make me over the hill?’

  ‘No, my darling, no it doesn’t. But it makes it more difficult.’ Guy was whispering now, though Mrs Sullivan had at last had the tact to close the kitchen door. The row was no longer about her. ‘I want us to be a family. That’s all. I love you.’ He pulled Louisa towards him and she didn’t resist, but she didn’t put her arms around him either. She felt flat, and sad.

  ‘What if I can’t?’

  ‘Then we’ll be together and we’ll love each other. But I’m sure you can.’

  He kissed her on the forehead and Louisa closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The following morning, Guy left the house at seven o’clock as usual, kissing Louisa goodbye in the kitchen, where she was finishing her toast and marmalade. He bore his usual cheerful demeanour and they had chatted lightly about the case he was on – a burglary interrupted by the house’s owners. Louisa listened and asked questions. When she heard the front door close, her shoulders slumped a little. It wasn’t that she had changed her mind about any of the fundamentals of her life, far from it: she loved Guy, she wanted a family with him, she looked forward to a long future together. It was only that she was unsure how she could get them both back on the same path again. For weeks there had been a feeling of discontent that she couldn’t shake, a feeling that only dissipated when she sat at her desk at the London School of Stenography.

  Sitting on the top deck of the bus, Louisa leaned her forehead on the cool of the glass window, admiring the occasional late bursts of blossom she could see below. Every year it happened, and every year it charmed anew. The clouds of pink and white that settled on the trees, transforming the greyest streets in London to something out of a child’s drawing. She thought again about Nancy’s offer yesterday but gave it only the briefest reflection. She was grateful to the Mitfords for everything they had done for her, but she owed them no more.

  By the time Louisa got off at her stop outside the school in Fulham, she was feeling a little more light-hearted. She resolved to try again with supper that night for Guy, perhaps see if they couldn’t get out of the house for a walk, to talk through how they were going to map out their future. There was time to complete the training, get her feet under the courtroom table, as it were, and after she’d had a baby or two, she could go back to work. Stenographers were allowed to be married – it wasn’t like the police service. She thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t got into the police when she’d tried a few years ago: she’d have had to choose between her career or Guy. In some ways, that meant thanking her roguish uncle Stephen, who had led her down the wrong side of the pavement and gained her a minor record or two, enough to have her police application rejected. But she didn’t like thinking about Stephen and she wasn’t sure she could go as far as to thank him for anything, even that.

  Besides, she knew she could look at the road she’d travelled since then with pride. She gazed across the street at the stenography school – nothing more than a terraced building with its name engraved on a gold square plaque at the side of the door. Yet this was enough to represent freedom and a future for her. Glancing left and right before crossing, Louisa saw a man further along on the opposite side, apparently reading the collection times on a postbox. He was wearing a trilby hat and a dark suit, in itself unremarkable, but there was something about his profile, plus the suspicion he was watching her, that unsettled Louisa. Ignoring him but feeling him there, like an actor who has mistakenly made himself visible in the wings before coming on the stage, she walked across and quick-stepped up to the front door of the school. It was only as she pushed it open that she remembered where she had seen him: in the car parked near the house at Rutland Gate yesterday, shortly after she had finished her interview with Nancy. It must be a coincidence, or he was another man altogether. She dismissed it and went through the entrance.

  At lunchtime, Louisa usually went to a greasy spoon down the road with Tessa, but today she told her that she needed to swot up on the technical terms they’d been learning. There was a test the next week, so it was only half a lie. If this man was still there, she’d ask him who he was.

  When Louisa went out, the sunshine after the gloomy classroom making her squint, she hesitated on the step and looked up and down the road, almost disappointed to realise that he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it had only been a coincidence. Or she had mistaken two men as the same. She walked on down to the café anyway, holding her book in one hand, her grey handbag in the other.

  The café she favoured on North End Road, Gerry’s, was like any other to be found on almost every high street in Britain. The windows were permanently steamed up and a smell of stale, hot fat mixed with tobacco hit as soon as you opened the door. Tables were screwed to the floor and wiped down frequently with a filthy rag by the waitress, Kay, who reliably looked as pleased to be working there as a pig would to find itself in an abattoir. At any one time, several places would be occupied by men who spoke little but concentrated on shovelling their fried eggs and ham into their mouths or reading the newspaper as they smoked their postprandial cigarettes. It was, however, one of the few places a woman could eat alone, and though she suspected the daily diet might not be the healthiest of choices, Louisa took it in exchange for the chance of solitary peace. Everyone in there ignored her and she liked it that way.r />
  Today would be different.

  Louisa settled into a seat close to the wall, her back to the window, opened up her book before her and gave her usual order to the waitress: a mug of tea – milk, no sugar – two fried eggs, fried bread, a ham slice and fried potatoes. Apart from the occasional noise from the kitchen and a shouted order between Kay and the ambitiously titled Chef, there was little to distract and she set to revising ab initio and sub judice. When a shadow crossed her table, she assumed it was Kay about to put her plate of food down and she pushed her book to the side, only to realise that the man she had seen in the car yesterday and on the road today was now sitting down in the seat opposite. He removed his hat and undid the buttons of his suit jacket, looking steadily at her all the while as if he already knew her. She thought about protesting that the seat was taken, but she knew he’d know it was a lie. And besides, she was curious.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Sullivan,’ he said. ‘Sorry to disturb your lunch hour.’

  She assessed his face. A long chin, straight nose and near-black eyes, his skin had the yellow tones of one that had been tanned for many years then faded in British winters. His voice was posh but soft, not domineering. A memory flashed up: the man in the pub in the trench coat.

  ‘Was it you at my wedding?’

  He didn’t answer this. ‘I’m Iain, that’s all you need to know.’

  Kay came over and put the plate down, giving Iain a quizzical glance, but as she was not one prone to much intellectual curiosity, she soon pushed off after he’d asked her for a cup of black coffee.

  He gestured to her food. ‘Please, don’t let me stop you from eating. Do you mind?’ He pulled out a silver cigarette case and opened it without waiting for her answer.