Maynard Charles bristled, glaring straight through his unwelcome guest. The waiter was despatched to bring back a dry Martini, ice on the side.
‘There, that’s better, don’t you think?’ Mr Moorcock took a slow sip. ‘I hear things tick along merrily in your fine establishment, Mr Charles. You had the pleasure of Graf and Gräfin Schecht, did you not?’
So, thought Maynard, he’s seen the register. He made a mental note to speak to whoever had been manning the front reception. All it took was a moment’s distraction for somebody to reach over the desk, steal a look at the check-in book, and memorise all its names. Hotel discretion mattered – for all their guests, no matter who they were or what they’d done.
‘They stayed in the Continental, but I’m quite sure you already know. Listen, Mr Moorcock, the clock above your head is ticking further and further towards ten. The longer I sit here enjoying this scintillating battle of wits with you, the less time I have to attend to my actual duties in this hotel.’
‘It is always amusing to see how you try and set the terms of our meetings, Mr Charles. But you and I know that I alone set these terms.’
Maynard Charles glowered. Of course, Moorcock was right. Mr Moorcock was always right. And yet . . . there were things he wanted to know too. Things he needed to know. ‘What word from the Palace, Mr Moorcock? The last time you came, you promised me—’
‘I don’t make promises, Maynard.’
‘The good King was to take afternoon tea here in July. He was to bring Mrs Simpson. When he didn’t keep his appointment, the society pages began to say he had, perhaps, moved on. That Mrs Simpson, perhaps, isn’t as enamoured by the Buckingham Hotel as the King is. You know how much we rely on the associ-ation of His Majesty, Mr Moorcock.’
Mr Moorcock nodded.
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘We might be in ruder health now, but the winds change so quickly in a hotel like this. The King and his entourage are due to spend New Year’s Eve with us here, in our hotel. The Masquerade Ball we are, even now, readying for is a celebration of the fact. It will be the event of the season. And yet . . .’ Maynard was struggling with what to say next. I’m twice your age, Mr Moorcock. How can it be that you make me so fearful? ‘We allied ourselves with His Majesty. Our reputations are entwined, one might say. I scarcely think we’d have made it through the Depression if the King hadn’t deigned to make us one of his regular haunts. It brought so many new guests. It restored our reputation. It’s what brought you here too, remember?’
Mr Moorcock remained silent, impassive – but Maynard Charles knew he had struck a blow. When the King had begun coming to the Buckingham, a wealth of new aristocratic patrons had followed.
Of course, it brought unsavoury types too – the type of men Maynard Charles would rather didn’t use his hotel. He was staring into the eyes of one of those men right now.
‘The King. Is he to . . . ? That is to say, that The Times has speculated that . . .’ Maynard Charles clenched his fist, found his courage. Why do I find it so hard to speak to this man, this stranger who comes to my hotel and makes his insidious demands? ‘Is he to abdicate, Mr Moorcock?’
For a time, Mr Moorcock said precisely nothing. Then, pointedly ignoring Maynard’s nervous request, he said, ‘Enough chatter, Mr Charles. Shall we dispense with the pleasantries and exchange gifts?’
‘It matters, Mr Moorcock. You think a hotel like ours is an ocean of riches? Well, it isn’t. The riches it takes to keep our ship afloat are counterweighed almost exactly by the riches we make. Were the King to abdicate and his followers abandon us . . . I don’t need to remind you how the shock waves of that might be felt. It takes a thousand people and more to keep our hotel afloat. The good King is our reputation, Mr Moorcock. When our reputation suffers, so too does our profit. And if our profits suffer, the members of the board grow agitated. A hotel like ours is a luxury for them, where their money might better be invested in iron and steel – armaments, even, if what is happening in Spain is any indication of our future.’ He paused, trembling. ‘If you know anything, Mr Moorcock, I implore you to tell. I mustn’t let my people down. I cannot send a hundred chambermaids back into poverty. A hundred porters, two hundred kitchen staff and waiters. They are the life’s blood of the Buckingham, but they are dependent on . . . our reputation. If our reputation falters, so too do a thousand lives and all the lives that depend on them.’
‘Your gift, Maynard. Must I ask you a second time?’
Maynard reached into his evening suit and produced an envelope, sealed with the stamp of his private office.
‘A little weighty today, Mr Charles. Am I to assume this is a bountiful month?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Do you care to elaborate?’
‘I do not. You have everything you need, right there in your hands.’
Mr Moorcock smirked. ‘All of it verifiable, of course.’
‘I trust all of my sources.’
‘Then we won’t have a problem.’
Maynard stiffened. ‘There’s no need to belittle me, Mr Moorcock. I know how this works. I’ve been dealing with men like you almost all of my life. I know you, sir.’ He paused. Then, he dared to venture, ‘You said this was an exchange of gifts?’
‘Ah, yes,’ replied Mr Moorcock. By now he was on his feet, replacing the Bollman trilby on his head. ‘My gift is this, Mr Charles: your secret kept, for your continuing co-operation.’
Maynard Charles quaked in his seat.
‘We’ll be checking the veracity of these claims, of course, just as we check the veracity of everything you acquire for us. You do know what would happen were we to believe you were lying to us, don’t you, Maynard?’
Maynard uttered, ‘Yes, Mr Moorcock. We’ve had the conversation often enough.’
‘Good. Because, you know, I could have no greater pleasure than revealing what really happens behind the doors of your beloved Park Suite. All I’m really waiting for is the appropriate moment. But you keep on doing as you’re told and your secret’s safe with us.’
Maynard found that he was trembling. He gripped his knees beneath the table, gouging the half-moons of his fingertips into them until he found the strength to utter, ‘You have my word, Mr Moorcock, as a gentleman.’
‘Gentleman?’ Mr Moorcock mused – and there seemed to be something particularly amusing in this. ‘Oh, Mr Charles, you could hardly be called a gentleman now, could you?’
Then he was gone, off into the Candlelight’s crowds – while Maynard Charles sat alone, waiting for the shaking to subside.
Chapter Six
FOUR WEEKS HAD PASSED IN a whirlwind of beds changed, floors swept, and one particularly galling occasion in which, quite by accident, Nancy had stumbled in on M. Zweig, the widower in room 114, as he prepared himself for his morning ablutions. Tomorrow was to be her first morning off since she’d arrived in London – and privately Nancy admitted that she could hardly wait. Being a chambermaid was exhausting.
The staff quarters at the Buckingham Hotel were secreted around a corner of the third storey where no guest ever had need to go. Up narrow stairs beyond a locked door, the bed-sitting rooms were arranged in a horseshoe around a kitchen where the chambermaids gathered nightly to drink tea and share meals and trade what gossip they had gleaned from the hotel floors. To Nancy, it felt like the boarding schools she’d read about as a girl – and, indeed, Mrs Whitehead, the housekeeper who lived in the same quarters, played the part of housemistress to perfection. Nancy’s mother had had a trunk of books at the bottom of her closet and, if Nancy was good, her father would let her trawl through it, breathing in the scents of the same stories her mother had loved, wondering at the little missives and messages of love inscribed in each one. What it would have been like, Nancy often wondered, to have had a mother!
Tonight, when she climbed the old servant stairs, she could hear Rosa and Ruth already clucking around the kitchen. She paus
ed at the top of the stairs, but did not go in. Nancy had never known that the soles of her feet could hurt as much as they did right now. Looking after her father had been one thing, but six days of waking at dawn to follow Mrs Moffatt and Mrs Whitehead around the hotel was quite another. And Lord, the things she’d seen . . .
It took concentration to steal past the kitchen doorway and reach her own bedroom. If Ruth were to see her, there’d be no escaping; it would be a long night, filled with stories of the time Ruth spied the Dowager Countess of Mazovia in a tryst with a wealthy hotel patron quite evidently not of the same social stratum – or of what Rosa swore she saw the Right Honourable Freddie Prince doing with Lord Hoxton’s son in the bedroom of the Livingstone Suite. ‘Nancy!’ they would cry out, and then that was it; the night would be lost.
Weeks had passed but she could still hear the echo of that saxophone playing in her mind. Twice now she had dallied by the doors of the ballroom as the demonstrations went on inside, mindful of the way Mr Simenon glared at her from the reception desk when he happened to look up. The gramophone records she’d play for her father as she sat by his bedside had brought him such comfort in those final months. And yet, to hear it played by real musicians, to catch glimpses of the dan-cers crossing the ballroom so elegantly – that was something of which she had barely even dreamed! When she had first come here, she had thought of the Buckingham’s Art Deco doors, with their bronze revolving frames, as the entrance to another world. Listening to the music she understood there were yet more worlds inside the hotel. The music could carry you there.
Somehow she made it past the staff kitchen. A single bed sat under a window in her room, which looked out only on to other windows across a narrow yard, and beside that was a small wardrobe with space enough to hang her uniform, and a bedside table where three candles had already guttered to stubs. She had a pile of Harper’s Bazaar magazines she’d taken from the staff kitchen. The girls said that Hélène Marchmont, who danced daily with the debonair Raymond de Guise, was once a regular feature of these types of magazines – draped in the latest ball gowns, adorned with jewellery so fine that only princesses and starlets ever wore it – that, by the time she was Nancy’s age, she was being courted to cross the oceans to California, where a dozen different directors said she would become a star. The legend went that Hélène had fallen in love with the ballroom instead, when one of her suitors dragged her along to a tea dance in Kensington. Some of the magazines were snide about that – why forsake the glamour of Hollywood for a ballroom? But Nancy, who had only caught the merest glimpses of the ballroom, believed she could understand.
There was little space to sit down and write, but Nancy cleared an area upon the bedside table and, using her bed as a chair, set herself up with inkpot, pen, and a leaf of paper she’d purchased from the hotel store. She’d been putting it off too long already. So she began:
Dearest Frank,
I hope you know how much I have been thinking about you! I keep thinking of you in front of a roaring fire, with a mug of Cadbury’s cocoa, something sweet to send you off to sleep. But I wonder if it is like that, now that I’ve gone off to London and you are left to fend for yourself? I hope that you’re not in the Green Man most nights, and that you haven’t forgotten the little pleasures of life. An early bed. Toast and fresh butter for breakfast. The tin bath filled to the brim in front of the fire . . .
I am ashamed that almost a month has passed and I haven’t written. But Frank, life at the Buckingham Hotel takes over every inch of you! This is a different world. You couldn’t even imagine anything as posh as the grandest Buckingham suites that Mrs Moffatt, our head housekeeper and a lady, has shown me. Can you believe that every Buckingham suite has its own bathroom, its own electric lights, its own telephones? I can’t begin to say! Grandest of all is the Atlantic Suite. There’s a Russian man, Nikolai Alexeev, so wealthy he’s called the suite his own for seven long months! In fact, Mr Alexeev lives his whole life in hotels like the Buckingham, ever since his exile from the revolution in Russia. From one hotel to the next, he crosses the continent and pens his romances from the typewriter he sets up on its stand. Such a life, dear Frank! Here at the Buckingham he lives with Grusinskaya, a ballerina who has become his wife. This morning she caught my eye as Mrs Moffatt and I came to attend to the suite. To be lost and beautiful is such a sad thing.
There are others. One of the girls I work with, Ruth – you would like her, Frank – says she’s seen queens in their under-drawers. We are all waiting on King Edward himself. Rosa – she’s Ruth’s friend – says she passed him once in reception, because he has been bringing his Mrs Simpson to dine here since before he was King. The hotel is throwing a masquerade ball in his honour for New Year. I hope I get to catch a glimpse . . .
I wonder if Father would have found a way to be proud of me. I think perhaps he wouldn’t have believed what his little girl was doing! Do you remember, Frank, his final words? ‘It is hard to make your way in the world,’ he said, ‘but make your way you must’.
Frank, I know by now you will be staying with Mrs Gable and that, perhaps, your new home is not as comfortable as my own, but I hope I have not bored you with my stories. One day, when I can send for you, we can be together again and I will look after you like always.
Your loving sister,
Nancy
Nancy put her ink pen down and read the letter back. In truth, she doubted that Frank would read it. Her brother had never been good with words. She remembered him as a boy, how he’d refuse to hold his pencil, no matter how fiercely she tried to instruct him in his letters; how he wanted nothing more than to run wild with the other miners’ sons. Nancy had often wondered how different her brother might have been if he had had a mother, instead of an elder sister just trying to do her best.
Perhaps Frank might have Mrs Gable read the letter to him – but first, of course, he would wait until the other miners he was lodging with were away, or out of earshot, for fear of being called a pansy, a mummy’s boy, or worse. Yes, Nancy decided, Frank might have been a mummy’s boy – if only he’d got the chance.
Thoughts like this could make her maudlin. She didn’t like to think of the old Nettleton cottage with a new family in it, nor of her brother stuck following the same path through life as their father, who had been taken from them far too young when his lungs – diseased after so many years in the mine – could go on no more. One day, she hoped, she would be able to send for Frank and they might have a new kind of life together. But not today. Today was for her. Life had been about them for so long. She was twenty-four years old and she deserved a little something for herself.
Nancy opened her wardrobe. Her feet were still aching, but what did that matter? If I don’t dare do it, if all I do is curl up and go to sleep, what use is there in living? Nancy, you’ve got to be brave . . .
In the wardrobe hung the uniforms Mrs Moffatt had provided. Nancy had had to pay for them, of course, with coupons to be deducted from her future wages, but she didn’t mind – for there, nestled among them, was the gown she’d brought, neatly folded up in the bottom of her case. Now that she’d seen the gowns the guests of the Buckingham wore, she was aware of how paltry it seemed. It had been the dress in which her mother was married – but, of course, it had been cut and remade countless times as the years passed by. It would not pass as elegant in these surroundings, but perhaps it did not need to. All she really wanted was to step through the ballroom doors while the evening was in full flow. All she really wanted was to breathe in the music for a few moments, to stand by the balustrade and watch the fabulous Hélène Marchmont turn a two-step across the ballroom on the arm of whichever dignitary she’d been promised to for the evening. Perhaps if she didn’t linger . . . she did not have to stand out. Perhaps it would not be such a crime to bring a pinch of magic into her own little life . . .
Chapter Seven
THE BAND STRUCK UP. THE chandeliers were aglow. The smoke of the fi
nest cigars rose up to make great reefs in the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the ballroom. Somewhere, a cork popped, in time with the beating of the drums in the orchestra. And on the edges of the ballroom floor, Raymond de Guise – a vision of elegance in his glistening dinner jacket, his hair newly cropped by Harrison, the hotel barber – approached a lady in a gown of flowing chiffon and lace, her neck adorned with pearls the size of robins’ eggs, the tiara in her hair encrusted with diamonds and a single sapphire that glared out like an extra eye, and offered her his hand.
‘Shall we?’
‘Mr de Guise,’ she replied, her voice half a whisper, and passed her cigarette holder, still smoking, to the hotel page at her side. ‘You are as handsome as I was told, though you do not look so very French.’
‘It is in my blood, Grusinskaya. On my father’s side.’
Grusinskaya, the exiled ballerina, spoke with a faraway voice, a voice that told of magnificent Russian palaces, cities frozen for winter, the Imperial court where she had once danced for the last of the Russian Tsars. Grusinskaya was fifty years old, but she looked much younger. Her dark hair flowed around her slender shoulders and her eyes, blue as the sapphire in her tiara, had a bewitched kind of cast. She looked longing. She looked . . . lost.
Raymond took her by the hand to the dance floor and, while the other couples sailed past, he put his right arm around her waist and pressed his left palm against hers. ‘In your old world, you needed no man to lead. But perhaps you would do me the honour of allowing me to lead you tonight?’
They were already stepping together onto the dance floor, pivoting once as the rhythm of the music found them.
Grusinskaya smiled. ‘The body aches for it sometimes. To be on the stage again. Holding my arabesque. Turning a grand jeté. And yet . . . there are other enchantments in dance, are there not, Mr de Guise?’
One Enchanted Evening Page 5