The Violin

by Lindsay Pritchard

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The child of Nancy and Henri Ladouceur – Harriet – was bound for the Coram’s Orphanage in Redhill. Eve Crostwick asked her husband Norman to reconsider.

  “We can look after her. We got plenty compared to some. Wouldn’t she be better with us than with some strangers in a home? Or maybe we could find someone local who’s looking for a child?”

  “No, that wouldn’t do at all. Imagine what people would say. Everyone would know she was a war baby. That’s no start in life. We’ve got to send her somewhere where she’ll stand a chance.”

  Harriet was taken to a forbidding old Victorian convent building on the outskirts of town. The Crostwicks, plus the baby in arms, were shown to the office of the Matron, Miss Plant, formally dressed in a starched cap and uniform. After some documents were explained and signed, Miss Plant outlined Harriet’s future.

  “With luck, we can get the National Child Adoption Agency to find her some parents. She starts with the advantages of being a baby, healthy and white. You did say that both parents were English?”

  “Well, no. Our daughter is a Sussex girl, but the father is a Canadian soldier.”

  “White?” asked Miss Plant. “I mean the child doesn’t look mixed race?”

  “Yes, white,” said Eve. “He was a gunner in the infantry, lost in Dieppe. No word for nearly a year now.”

  “Good,” said Miss Plant. “You’ll understand that there are few takers for mixed race babies, particularly the ones that are mostly black. And we do have some with disabilities who need much more looking after than most adopting parents can manage but…?” indicating the child.

  “Harriet,” said Eve.

  “Yes, Harriet. A fine-looking, healthy white child. She should stand a chance.”

  “What if you can’t find parents? What happens then?” asked Norman.

  “Well,” said Miss Plant, “we will hope to place Harriet within a year or so. After that, unfortunately, they do get less appealing the older they get. They are assured of care here in the orphanage and we will keep trying for adoption or perhaps foster care. When they reach school age, there are children’s homes run by the council where they will be fed, clothed and educated. But I must emphasise that by signing Harriet over to us, that must be the end of your connection with her. I am sure you understand that it is in the child’s best interests?”

  Eve and Norman agreed with rueful nods.

  *

  About the same time, in a private hospital in central London, Claudette Villiers, Lady Clanricarde, was recovering from her third miscarriage. A beautiful B-list actress from 1930s films, she had married the Earl of Clanricarde as a prime example of social equity. Claudette brought to the bargain a little fame and the advantages of youth and striking beauty. The Earl, a tall, spare, patrician man in his late forties contributed an ancient title, created in 1335, a stately pile in County Galway, a fine Regency house in central London and a substantial income from his family trusts. His ancestral duty required that he should produce an heir, which thus far Claudette had been unable to provide.

  Following this latest miscarriage, Claudette, traumatised – all the miscarriages had been well advanced in pregnancy – said that she could not put herself through that all again. After a heartfelt discussion the Earl, Charles Villiers, agreed to contemplate the possibility of adoption. In order to pre-empt any unnecessary gossip their plan was to adopt a newborn and then spend a year or two in Ireland, under the radar, eventually returning to society with their new child, avoiding the necessity of elaborating on such details as pregnancy and childbirth, and sparing their now legitimate child the stigma of being born out of wedlock, an object of curiosity.

  The Clanricardes were advised to visit the orphanage in Redhill, away from the prying eyes of the press who found the liaison between the Earl and the actress fine copy for the more scurrilous columns.

  Their family secretary secured a private meeting. They were shown round by Miss Plant. The Earl had voiced his preference for a boy, but Claudette had said, “Trust in my intuition. When we see the child, be it a girl or boy, we’ll know.”

  Around a dozen cots were arranged in one room as if in a hospital ward.

  “And these are the newborns,” said Miss Plant, waving around the room.

  Claudette inspected each child, Miss Plant giving a short potted history akin to the lineage of a horse, and holding them up for examination.

  She came to Harriet’s cot.

  “And this is Harriet. Just six weeks old. Born of an English mother and a Canadian infantryman father. Perfectly formed and healthy as you see and a very sound child.”

  Claudette was instantly smitten.

  “Oh look Charles! Isn’t she just beautiful? Look at her little fingers and toes. And look at those long eyelashes. She’s going to be a beauty! Can I hold her?”

  Miss Plant agreed and at that moment of transfer, the die was cast. Claudette smelt the fragrance of the baby and felt the gentle weight in her arms. Some atavistic connection was made. Obligingly, Harriet opened her eyes and locked on to Claudette.

  “Look Charles, look! She’s smiling at me! Oh, this is my baby!”

  “Shouldn’t we just have another look at the boys before we make a final decision?”

  He abandoned the thought when Claudette, now in firm possession of Harriet, gave him that look which brooked no opposition.

  The formalities were swiftly concluded back in Miss Plant’s office.

  “Totally discreet and absolutely confidential of course,” she assured them.

  *

  Back in London, a nanny was engaged and shortly thereafter, in April 1943, the Villiers household decamped to the ancestral manor house, bordering the River Shannon, well away from wartime London.

  Harriet Villiers began her gilded life amongst the echoing halls, cavernous rooms, back stairs and overgrown gardens of the Irish seat of the Earl of Clanricarde. The child, now styled the Honourable Harriet Villiers, integrated fully and unconditionally as a child of the family.

  Towards the end of the war in mid-1945, the Villiers entourage returned to the Hampstead property with their new child and positioned themselves back in society as a family.

  At the age of five, Harriet was taken along to the Knightsbridge Preparatory School in Ennismore Gardens. Mrs Butterworth was delighted to welcome this child of the London elite. The social cachet of the daughter of an Earl and a well-known actress was not to be underestimated.

  “She is already reading and writing,” enthused Claudette, “so I am sure you can introduce her to literature as well as, you know, arithmetic and the like. And…” she paused for emphasis and angled her head the better to make the point, “there is no doubt that she is musical.”

  “That will be your background!” said Mrs Butterworth. “Artistic!”

  “Yes, I do think that a girl needs the accomplishment of music. Such an important factor, don’t you think?”

  Mrs Butterworth agreed.

  “We like to think that we turn out well-rounded girls and she will be taught to read music and to play. We have a very talented piano and violin teacher who is getting marvellous results with the girls.”

  *

  Harriet dutifully attended Knightsbridge, showing diligence and application in ‘learning her letters and numbers’ as Mrs Dixon called it.

  However, her especial enjoyment, she could not call it learning at all, was her time in music tuition with the patient and softly spoken Ruth. To Harriet, learning musical notation was not a chore when explained by the gentle lady, now losing her German accent. Harriet practised the piano and showed enough promise to feature in the end of term concert given to parents. She also loved to play the violin. At first she had been daunted by her discordant scratchings on her half-sized trainer violin. However, Ruth comforted her.

  “Listen, ch
ild. I will play you something. You may see then what can happen when someone with passion in their heart writes music. The music is put into the violin player’s hands and the violin picks up the enchantment. And it tells a story. It can be a story of love, loss, happiness, sadness. When a great musician’s talent combines with the beauty of the instrument through my poor hands, it will express better than words the pain or the loveliness of life. And, while life is fragile, the music and the violin play on.”

  Ruth played some Bruch while Harriet, now just a girl of seven, sat transfixed and enchanted. Through the tone of the violin, she understood that Ruth was, somehow, expressing something of her own life.

  At the conclusion of the piece, Harriet went over to Ruth and clasped her round the waist.

  “I can feel it. The story. The violin told it.”

  *

  Later, in her lodgings, Ruth remembered herself being a child of seven with all of life in front of her, with a strong family in a happy, secure house. Then she recalled the shadows of the camp and the suffering she had seen. She wept. The child and the music had stirred up memories she had not allowed herself to dwell on. Her dead family. Her meagre life. The warm smell of her mother. Her father’s strong hands holding hers as they went into Emil Hermann’s shop in New York.

  With the stoicism of a survivor, she eventually told herself that she should be ashamed of crying. There were many thousands of others who had been dealt a far worse fate, even death. At least she had her life and the ability to transcend the more mundane elements through music. She told herself that she could not indulge in nostalgia and self-pity. That was the road to nowhere.

  *

  Harriet was a model pupil at Knightsbridge, becoming a very passable musician. She also attained a good grounding in all the other building blocks needed to function competently and confidently in her expected role in life. Her accent and behaviour now blended with the social milieu that her parents inhabited. Her pretty looks and dark hair were a passable amalgamation of her parent’s features. Nothing was ever spoken about adoption, as by now it was an irrelevance.

  Then one day, in 1953, a tragedy occurred that was to impact radically on Harriet’s young life. Her mother, Claudette, perhaps becoming a victim of passing time and fading looks, had become dependent on alcohol. Rising in the early afternoon and hiding behind sunglasses, Claudette would steadily drink herself into daily oblivion. Gin, wine, champagne, the taste was immaterial. She could not stop until her demons were assuaged and, on the verge of passing out, her husband would help her to bed. Once or twice he watched her, forbidding drink until she was passably sober. But all attempts to wean her away or to get her to seek medical help were rebuffed and Claudette would return to a fog of alcohol fumes and cigarette smoke, exclaiming, “It’s up to me. You can’t stop me. It helps me get through the day.”

  They went to fewer social occasions and their friends stayed away. The Earl despaired. Unbeknown to him, Claudette also began seeking stronger medicine. In his absences tending the family estates, Claudette had inveigled herself into a circle of drug users who introduced her to cocaine. Already unstable with alcoholism, she began to attend parties organised by a social climber called Reginald de Veulle.

  Held at secret locations amongst like-minded celebrities and aristocrats, Claudette’s use of drugs was effectively normalised. Bound by a collective need for total discretion, no word leaked out to the press or families. Claudette, now disinhibited by heavier and heavier consumption, began to have random couplings with passing acquaintances and sometimes strangers in bedrooms, bathrooms and even gardens as her sense of propriety disappeared. She began to need higher intakes to produce the effects that she had first experienced when introduced to drugs by de Veulle. Almost inevitably, with reason and logic suspended on a dark December night in 1953, Claudette made a fatal error, ingesting a cocktail of cocaine, cannabis and alcohol that began to shut down her internal system, knocked out by the assault. With Charles away, she had been helped back to her house by de Veulle. Aroused by cocaine, he had splayed her across her bed, semi-comatose, and had sex with her before leaving her to sleep it off.

  Around lunchtime the following day, Harriet knocked on her mother’s door. She had become accustomed to her mother’s increasingly erratic behaviour but was trying to maintain some air of normality. Harriet drew back the curtain, saying that lunch would be in three quarters of an hour. As the light streamed in she turned and saw her mother, naked from the waist down, collapsed, half on and half off the bed.

  Staff were summoned. The family doctor appeared. After looking for any vital signs, he shook his head and announced that Claudette was dead and had been for some hours. He rang a shocked Charles in Galway who made immediate arrangements to return while ordering that the matter should not be made public until he had returned and would be able to manage the publicity and the aftermath.

  *

  Claudette’s death was attributed to a ‘tragic accident’. The family doctor, at the request of the Earl, liaised with the police and the coroner.

  “We don’t want any speculation in the press. We must think of the girl.”

  The death was attributed to an accidental overdose of sleeping tablets, which the press respectfully accepted as the truth although not without making some mileage out of it.

  EARL’S FAMOUS FILM STAR WIFE FOUND DEAD

  For a while Harriet grieved for her mother, although, having seen her mother in drink and with a maturity beyond her years, she realised that her death was probably a merciful release.

  With her mother dead, no living grandparents and her father a somewhat distant figure with the aristocratic inability to relate to their children, Harriet was left to her own devices in the Hampstead mansion. Aged eleven, she had now left Knightsbridge Preparatory School having said a tearful farewell to Ruth, her surrogate school mother.

  Various boarding schools were suggested and rejected vehemently by Harriet. Eventually in September 1954, she moved to the London Ladies’ College in Pimlico, a private fee-paying establishment with few academic pretensions. The College traded on its reputation as a repository for the children of the upper classes. Girls were not expected to strive for qualifications, but emphasis was put on deportment, elocution, home-making, perhaps a little French in order to be able to read menus and basic musical appreciation. The College’s success lay in the exclusivity of being able to afford eye-watering fees and to mention the well-known parents who patronised the establishment.

  Away from the kindness, discipline and rigour of Knightsbridge, and without any parental guidance or interest, Harriet’s bearings began to be lost. There were also cliques and hierarchies at the school which led to social exclusion and bullying. Harriet, despite her willingness to try and fit in, made few friends as a group of malevolent senior girls actively tarnished her character and background.

  By the age of fourteen, on the cusp of developing into a young woman, Harriet found herself adrift. School was a social trial but lacked any intellectual challenge or satisfaction. At home her material needs were catered for by the staff the Earl employed but there was no affection. Unsurprisingly, Harriet began to compensate herself for her chronic loneliness by overeating. Although the country was still coming out of a period of rationing, food was available for those with money.

  For breakfast she would devour cereals, eggs and bacon, rounds of toast and marmalade. Obligingly close to the College was a confectionery shop offering sweets in jars: toffee; pear drops; barley twists; chocolate bars; dolly mixtures. Harriet would eat on her way to school, at break time when biscuits and sugary tea were served, and then at lunchtime when the school prided itself on being an oasis of plenty in a land that had become lean and sparing as a result of the war. Mashed potato, suet dumplings, meat pies, jellies, fruit pies and custard, rice pudding. The country was making up for its famine and Harriet was making up for a lack of love.

&nb
sp; The elite clique at the school noticed her increasing bulk and she was unmercifully singled out as different at a time when children were almost universally thin. Unhappy with this, it only made her eat more. At home the head housekeeper, Mrs Phillips, a kindly woman, attempted to gently point out the problem to Harriet, whilst staying on the right side of caution for reasons of job security.

  “You are getting to be a bonny girl, Miss Harriet and we shall have to revisit Brannigans to get a new school uniform. Would you like me, perhaps, to serve more salads and fruit?”

  Over-sensitive and irritated, Harriet responded.

  “I’ll thank you to keep your remarks to yourself, Phillips. I think I will decide what is and what is not good for me. You know the list of meals that I like so please stick to that if you don’t mind.”

  By the age of sixteen, on the verge of leaving the London Ladies’ College, any vestiges of the former pretty Harriet were difficult to discern. Ruddy, rounded cheeks merged with neck rolls of fat that disguised her fine cheekbones and chin line. She had taken to wearing dark, looser-fitting clothes to mask her expanding form. There was a spiral downwards. The unhappier she was the more she ate. The more she ate the greater the vituperation from her classmates, which precipitated yet more eating.

  Then, as is often the case, something happened which prompted a volte-face. One evening, she was taken to the cinema by her father during one of his infrequent visits home. Harriet sat watching the film whilst steadily eating her way through a number of chocolate bars.

  The film was Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn. The story was that of a bored and sheltered princess escaping her guardians and meeting and falling in love with a handsome American newsman in Rome.

  Impressionable, Harriet noted the slender, elfin, wistful beauty of the young Hepburn and she was struck by the publicity still of the gamine actress with bobbed hair, black turtleneck and ballet flats.

  Harriet knew that to escape, be desired, and fall in love, she would have to emulate Audrey Hepburn.