“I doubt it.” Dinah sighed. “The Great War didn’t change anything. It simply gave people something else to think about. When it was over, they rushed back to their petty little habits and rituals like curtseying to cakes.”
“I’d rather curtsey to a cake than have Joseph and Jack fight and maybe never come home,” Eunice said.
“Me too.” Dinah nodded. “I can’t bear to imagine something dreadful happening to Jakie or Michael.”
“None of us want to lose anyone or each other.” Fear struck Valerie as hard as it used to every time she’d left Aunt Anne to return to school. Their uncertainty about the future was as obvious as the paintings on the walls, but society continued on as if it would always be like this. She didn’t blame them. The tension beneath everything grew stronger each day and it was a comfort to cling to the familiar and believe that everything would be well. “Begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.”
“Byron?” Dinah asked.
“Seneca, but I believe someone of great wit and foresight once told me we shouldn’t be crepehangers.”
“I believe she did, and it’s still grand advice. We won’t mope about but enjoy ourselves and our Season as if it were the last.”
“Hear, hear.” Eunice waved the handkerchief like a flag, not caring what old ladies gave them odd looks when they passed.
“We will,” Valerie agreed, thinking Dinah might not be too far off the mark.
Chapter Fourteen
Poor Vivien.” Christian read the newspaper, shaking her head while the butler cleared the dishes from the linen-covered table in the Downing Street garden. A wide lawn stretched across the backs of No. 10 and No. 11. Their Excellencies sat under the large tree enjoying another warm spring day, the many herbs Aunt Anne had planted along the borders filling the air with the scent of thyme and rosemary. Through the small windows of the ground-floor Garden Room, the subtle clacking of typewriters carried out to mingle with the birds’ twittering. “How awful to have your own father tell the newspaper he has nothing to do with you and reveal to everyone you’re a ward of Chancery, and all because the Sunday Express wrote a glowing article about her.”
The newspaper had called Vivien The Perfect Debutante of 1939, a title Their Excellencies had laughed over during tea at Claridge’s a week ago.
“He aired all of her dirty secrets for everyone to read.” Christian handed Katherine Action so she could read the letter from Sir Oswald Mosley practically condemning his perfect debutante daughter.
“Considering how mean she’s been to Valerie and the rest of us, I think she deserves it.” Dinah lounged back to catch a bit of sunlight coming through the leaves. “Maybe she won’t be so snotty after this.”
“I don’t like her, but I wouldn’t wish that article on anyone.” It was a slight comfort to see Mavis wasn’t the only one doing all she could to embarrass her debutante relation. Apparently it was quite the trend in society, one Valerie wished she hadn’t been dragged into. After the Royal Academy showing there’d been a number of titillating mentions of Mavis’s drawing in the newspapers and it’d earned Valerie more than a few odd looks, but nothing as dreadful as Vivien’s plight.
“Maybe she’s mean because her family is so dreadful,” Eunice suggested, charitable as always. “Perhaps if we were nicer to her, she wouldn’t be so sour.”
“I doubt it. Half my family is nothing to brag about and it hasn’t made me a witch,” Valerie said.
“Lady Ravensdale took Vivien off to Paris for what she calls social obligations for a few weeks.” Katherine folded up Action and laid it on the table between her and Valerie. “Leaving for a spell so things can die down is the only way to save face.”
“It won’t help Pamela Digby. It seems she wasn’t as discreet with Lord Warwick as she thought.” Dinah leaned in with this bit of delicious gossip. “Aunt Nancy said Lady Simon caught the two of them sneaking back into a house party the morning after a very intimate night out. Lady Simon made sure everyone heard the story.”
“Pamela should’ve known better than to go off alone with him or at least been smart enough to return before breakfast.” Katherine shook her head. “Most people never recover from something like that becoming more than whispers. They spend the rest of their lives banished to the country, a social pariah.”
“At least she’ll have all those Parisian gowns Lord Warwick bought for her to wear to visit the family stables.”
The girls laughed and Marian’s head popped up in the window of the Garden Room. She waved to Valerie, who waved back before the typist returned to her work. “I think we should be a little quieter. I hate to interrupt the Garden Room Girls’ work.” Or rub their noses in the fact that Their Excellencies could lounge about in the middle of the day while they had to hunch over typewriters in a rather dingy room.
“I’ll need work when the Season is over, something respectable Mummy can’t object to, except I have no idea what.” Christian swatted at a fly before it flittered off over the wall to the training horses. “I don’t know anything except how to curtsey, and no one will pay me for that.”
“You could be a professional curtseyer,” Dinah suggested. “There’s oodles of grand old aristocrats who’d pay to have someone bowing to them every day.”
“I’m quite serious. I need to learn something useful so I don’t sink into genteel poverty.”
“What you want is the Monkey Club,” Katherine advised.
“Whatever is that?” Eunice asked.
“Don’t let the name put you off. It comes from the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys carved on the front of the building. It’s a kind of finishing school. Many of the right sort attend. They teach politics, shorthand, typing, and such. Deborah Mitford was a student for a spell, and Princess Gayatri Devi. She’s engaged to the Maharaja of Jaipur.”
“I’m not searching for a maharaja, but something more substantial than flower arranging would be smashing.”
“Aunt Nancy says I should volunteer somewhere, that us girls will have to do our part if war comes. I haven’t told her that Jakie and Michael are teaching me to drive. Her hair would turn white if I did.”
“With the way they drive, I’m not surprised.” Valerie rested her chin in her hands. “Are you going to join the London Volunteer Ambulance Service?”
“I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but I figure a woman who can drive will be more useful than one who can’t, and it gets Michael out of the house for a few hours when Aunt Nancy is after him.”
Valerie wondered what Aunt Anne would think if she asked Mr. May for driving lessons. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to learn. “I’m joining the Personal Service League in August.”
“Your interest in medicine doesn’t have anything to do with a certain doctor, does it?” Dinah teased.
“Maybe it does.” She picked up Action and tossed it playfully across the table at her friend.
“Miss Ormsby-Gore, your car has arrived,” Mr. Dobson announced, ending the afternoon.
“Come along, Excellencies. Your chariot awaits.”
Valerie saw out Katherine, Christian, and Eunice, who’d arrived together and left discussing the Monkey Club. Dinah lingered in the entrance hall in no hurry to leave and Valerie in no rush to see her off.
“Funny we should all be so concerned about the future when we didn’t give a hang about it a few weeks ago.” Dinah climbed the Grand Staircase beside Valerie, leaving the activity on the ground floor for the quiet upper reaches of the house.
“I wish I could ignore it but I can’t, not with all the beastly foreign news I hear around here.”
“Michael told me that he and Jakie are joining up.”
“Hard to imagine either of them knuckling down to military discipline.”
“It’s their chance to choose the branch they like, as you’re doing with the Personal Service League. What brought that about?”
“I need something more than all of this.” She w
aved her hands at the drawing room, the voices of Aunt Anne and whatever politician she was hosting for tea today carrying in from the Blue Drawing Room. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and Valerie’s bedroom. “I don’t want to end up a self-centered sod like my father, or my mother, for that matter.”
“I thought she was gone.”
Valerie closed the bedroom door and leaned against it. “She’s in London.”
“Good heavens!”
Dinah dropped into the chair by the window, listening while Valerie explained about the meeting with Mr. Mason.
“It isn’t right. She walks out on you, then lives mere blocks away and can’t get off her duff long enough to post you so much as a letter.”
“I’m not sure it’s her fault. Father could be beastly about Aunt Anne’s interest in me. Maybe he kept my mother away and she still thinks she can’t contact me.” The calls of the Horse Guards forced her to shut the sash. Their training had noticeably increased during the last couple of weeks. “I’m tempted to send her a note and see if there’s something there.”
“What does your aunt say about it?”
“To leave her be. She must have a reason for it, but she hasn’t told it to me. It’s always been a rather taboo subject. I don’t know what to do.”
“Your mother never should have placed you in this rotten position to begin with.” Dinah crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair. “They’re all awful, aren’t they, your parents, Eunice’s.”
“At least Mrs. Kennedy cares enough about her children to raise them.”
“I couldn’t endure that sort of scrutiny. Imagine, index cards for every child with their weight and other ridiculous things typed on them. There’s being involved with your children, and then there’s being involved.”
“It would’ve been nice to have had a parent with at least a passing interest in me.”
“I had one of those. It isn’t as grand as you think.” Dinah flicked the arm of the chair, her lips drawn tight. “They have us, then act as if we aren’t worth the bother, shipping us off to boarding school and barely hurting themselves to leave the Riviera once a year to take us to tea for our birthday. The few times Mummy bothered, I begged her not to leave, to take me home with her, but she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter how hard I cried or what I said. She always left.”
“My father was the same way. I begged him to collect me too, but he didn’t.” Valerie traced the gold trim on the old dispatch box. She shouldn’t say more, but there were no saleswomen, theatergoers, or art lovers here, simply the two of them. It wasn’t enough to be distracted from the past. She wanted to bring it into the light and let it die so it didn’t bother her anymore. If anyone could stand beside her and stare it down, it was Dinah. “Things with him were far worse than I’ve told anyone.”
“How so?” Dinah leaned forward in the chair.
“We weren’t in France for Father’s health but because he was broke, and even there he ran up debts he couldn’t pay. He was too drunk to care, willing to live in squalor rather than work or ask for help. We were on the verge of being evicted and practically starving when I went to Mr. Shoedelin and begged him to do something. He didn’t believe me until he saw how dreadful things really were.” It’d been Valerie’s weakness from the desperation of filth and poverty that’d made him recoil from her, but she didn’t say it. Some things could never be shared, not even with her closest friend. “He arranged a place for me at the school, yet it wasn’t a finishing school or a boarding school but a convent home for unwanted girls, a miserable, stinking orphanage.” Valerie lifted the letters out of the dispatch box, flicking the creased edges with her finger. “I used the few stamps I had to write to Father, begging him to fetch me or send me to Aunt Anne. I didn’t have the postage to send a letter to England. When I ran out of stamps, I begged the Mother Superior for more, but she said it was indulgent, that I was there until Father decided to remove me and I should accept it, but I couldn’t. I thought he hadn’t received the letters, but he had. They found them with his things after he died and they’d all been opened. He’d read every one of them and ignored them. He didn’t even write to Aunt Anne but left me to rot like he always did. I was there for months after he died.”
“Why didn’t your aunt come for you?”
“Because Mr. Shoedelin lied to her when he sent her the rest of Father’s things. He told her I was happy and well settled, and with the Anschluss, she couldn’t come see for herself. The only reason I’m here and not stuck in that hell is because I snuck into the Mother Superior’s office and stole enough stamps to finally write to Aunt Anne with the truth.” She flung the letters back in the box and slammed the lid shut. “I thought she’d abandoned me too until the morning she arrived and told the Mother Superior I was returning to England with her. I can’t tell you what it was like to see her and have that awful nightmare end.”
“That’s how it was the day Mummy finally came for me.” Dinah rose, tears shimmering in her eyes. “I’m so sorry you had to face it.”
“I’m sorry for you too.”
Dinah hugged Valerie tight, giving her the comfort she’d sought for years and grasped at with Nanette. Dinah understood some of what Valerie had endured and didn’t sneer at her because of it but stood with her, eager to help ease the old pain. It meant the world to her.
Dinah let go of her and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hands. “We won’t be like them when we’re parents, will we?”
“I’d rather toss myself in the Thames than be like that.” Valerie slid two lavender-scented handkerchiefs out of her dresser drawer and handed one to Dinah.
“Me too. We’ll learn from their mistakes and be real mothers, and if we ever forget we’ll be sure to remind each other. We’ll be better than them.”
“We already are.” She was no longer the abandoned and ridiculed convent girl. It wasn’t because of the dresses and where she lived but because she mattered to people who genuinely cared about her, and she refused to lose this. “We’ll marry better men too, ones worth their salt.”
“I’ll see to it you do, and you’ll do the same for me. There’s no reason why we should be the same miserable sods as our parents.”
“Or make anyone else suffer because of it. We’ll stand by each other as we do at the dances, and tell it like it is even when it hurts to say or hear the truth. Promise me we will.”
“I promise.”
Chapter Fifteen
Ever since 1927, Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball, in aid of England’s largest maternity hospital, has been an immensely important date for debutantes. In fact, to be chosen as a Maid of Honor is almost essential to a young lady’s first season success.
The Tatler, Wednesday May 24, 1939
This arrived for you, Miss Cole.” Miss Leaf handed Valerie the envelope with the Fallington family crest engraved on the flap. “The Marquess’s chauffer delivered it.”
Aunt Anne paused in drinking her coffee. “A note the morning of the ball can’t be good.”
No, it couldn’t. She tore open the envelope and her heart dropped. “It’s from the Marchioness. Elm asked her to write on his behalf to say his leave has been canceled and he can’t escort me tonight.” His leave, my eye. After the Royal Academy of Arts opening and Mavis’s ridiculous stunt, she probably thought Valerie wasn’t good enough to be seen so publicly with her son. The slight cut deeper than any Lady Fallington could’ve made in person, especially since Elm had obviously agreed to it. Curse Mavis. She’d wanted to strike at Valerie and she had.
“We can press one of the secretaries into accompanying you, Mr. Colville perhaps.”
“I won’t spend an evening with that humorless drip.” She wasn’t that desperate, but she must find someone else in a hurry, one who didn’t think the Prime Minister’s niece beneath him. They’d soon set off for Grosvenor House and the last round of rehearsals for the entrance and the grand curtsey before the cake. The final run-through had taken
up the last three afternoons, the three hundred girls drilled with the precision of the Horse Guards. She wouldn’t even come home afterward but remain at Grosvenor House to dress and have one of the hordes of Elizabeth Arden makeup artists employed for the day treat her to a special makeup session. The thought of going through all that to have the glum-faced Mr. Colville for a dance partner made her want to plead a headache and stay home. If she did, Lady de Walden would likely send footmen to drag her out of bed before she’d allow the fluid lines of debutantes to have the smallest of gaps.
“You may not have a choice but to ask Mr. Colville.”
“I have another idea. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go begging downstairs.”
This must work. Most of the private secretaries had impressive pedigrees as younger sons of lords, but everyone knew they worked here. No one would be fooled into thinking they were anything but a substitute for Valerie’s first choice and that instead of dancing with a viscount she’d been stood up by one. She hurried to the phone in the drawing room, snatched up the receiver, and asked the switchboard operator to put her through to St. Thomas’s Hospital. It took a number of connections and informing everyone along the line that there was an urgent call from Downing Street before Richard finally came on the line.
“Dr. Cranston speaking.”
“Richard, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m in an awful jam. Elm can’t get away from his regiment and escort me to the Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball tonight. Do be a dear and take his place.”
“Are you asking your second choice to save your bacon?”
The Last Debutantes Page 21