Nancy was lost for words. Was Raymond de Guise admonishing her – or was there, dare she think it, some admiration in his voice? Admiration for her daring? Why would a man as entitled as Raymond de Guise admire something like that?
He smiled. ‘You were fortunate that night, Miss . . .’
‘Nettleton,’ Nancy whispered.
‘Miss Edgerton has her virtues, but generosity is not one of them. If she had kept you there, while one of the general managers was summoned – why, we wouldn’t be speaking now.’
‘I know it,’ said Nancy – but, refusing to feel ashamed, she took a deep breath and looked Raymond straight in the eye. ‘I’d wanted to see the Grand for myself. I’m not a dancer, Mr de Guise. You won’t tell it to look at me, but my leg is . . . not what it might be. And yet – just to see it, if only for a few moments. It was worth what Miss Edgerton tried to do to me. I saw you dancing with Grusinskaya. I believe I saw the air between your feet and the ballroom floor.’
Raymond de Guise’s lips parted, as if he was going to say something – but it was only the hint of the smile he was trying to suppress. ‘You liked what you saw?’
Good Lord, Nancy, why are you blushing?
‘I did.’
There was a moment of silence before Raymond finally said, ‘It means a lot to hear it, Miss Nettleton. Every night I dance in this hotel, but so many of our visitors are inured to the beauty of it. They’ve danced in too many glamorous ballrooms to remember what it was first like to step into this world. So thank you, Miss Nettleton. For reminding me how that feels.’
Nancy ventured, ‘I’d love to see it again, Mr de Guise. But I think, perhaps, that my ballroom days are over before they’ve begun. I was foolhardy.’
‘I’d say you survived it, Miss Nettleton. If old Mrs Moffatt over there hasn’t summoned you to the housekeeping office and given you your marching orders, well, you’re probably unscathed.’ He grinned, wolfishly. ‘Not that I’d recommend you tempt fate twice. You’re new here. Am I right?’
Nancy nodded. ‘Did my accent give me away? I admit I’m not altogether as polished as some, but Mrs Moffatt said it doesn’t matter where you come from, not here. Once you step through the Buckingham doors, once you wear a uniform with the silver crown embroidered on it, you’re of the Buckingham Hotel, and that’s it.’
A strange look passed across Raymond’s face. ‘There is some truth in that, Miss Nettleton.’ He turned as if to depart through the dressing-room back doors, but at the last moment something stopped him and he looked back. ‘Everyone has to know their place in a hotel like this. Not just the chambermaids and the concierges. Not just the pages and the pot boys in the kitchens. Even me. Even Archie Adams has a role to play. Why, even Mr Maynard Charles himself. The point is, if you don’t know your place here then Miss Edgerton is the least of the problems, you’ll find. I shouldn’t say this, Miss Nettleton, and perhaps I’ll live to regret it, but – stay away, wherever and however you can, from the Edgerton set. You’ll see them in the hotel from time to time. You’ll clean up after them and make tidy their beds. The Hamburg Schechts, or Mr Mosley, any of Lord Edgerton’s associates at that Fascist Union of his. They gather, sometimes, in the Grand or the cocktail lounge or the brasserie. If you cross paths with them, make sure you stay downwind, won’t you?’ He paused. ‘I don’t know why, but you stick out like a sore thumb, Miss Nettleton.’ He looked at her, his sad eyes aglow. ‘I mean that as a compliment. But sometimes, just sometimes, you might find that, in the Buckingham Hotel, being invisible is a strength.’
Nancy was about to reply when she heard her name being called out across the ballroom. Raymond nodded at her again, then disappeared back through the dressing-room doors – and she turned to see the rest of the chambermaids gathered around one of the crystal chandeliers, which lay on the ballroom floor like a shimmering giant’s crown.
‘Miss Nettleton!’ Mrs Moffatt barked as Nancy squeezed her way into the fringes of the group. ‘Good of you to join us!’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Moffatt. My head was rather in the clouds.’ Somewhere beside her she thought she heard one of the girls saying, ‘Who on earth does she think she is?’
But then Mrs Moffatt was directing them in the ways to unclasp the chandelier’s pendants and spurs, how to drain oil from its overflow cups, how to detach each branch from the miniature crown at its end, cupping it against the body to protect the crystals still glittering on its circumference – and, whatever mutterings there were about her were lost as the day’s work began.
Chapter Nine
BILLY BROGAN SLID OUT OF the Buckingham’s staff entrance and crossed Berkeley Square as the music of the ballroom faded behind him.
Sometimes it pained him to leave the hotel. In there, he felt important, a man who guests and staff relied on to get things done. Outside the hotel, he felt smaller somehow, less of a somebody. Or at least he felt that way until he hurried past the palace at Westminster and, crossing the old Lambeth Bridge, came to the terrace he had always called home. Billy Brogan might have been seventeen years old, but the pull of his ma’s home-cooked dinner still filled him with joy.
He could already hear the sounds of laughter, and his father barracking one of his younger siblings, coming through the walls. These were the beautiful, chaotic sounds of home. It was always quiet when he left of a morning, his father up and out to the fish market long before dawn, the others – his brothers and his sisters – still fast asleep, wrapped around each other in the big double beds. To come home to chaos was one of the most wonderful things of all.
This was an opportunity too good to miss, so Billy crept along the brick archway between his house and the next and, pressing his face against the glass in the back door, waited until one of his siblings cartwheeled by. Here came Patrick and Annie, here came Conor and Daniel, here came Roisin and Holly. Billy’s mother, with her flowing auburn hair and round shoulders, was too busy hunched over the cooking pot to notice – but when the smallest of all the Brogans, Gracie May, scurried by, she looked up, saw Billy’s face in the glass, and let out such a shriek of delight that it must have been heard from Crystal Palace to Parliament Hill Fields.
‘BILLY!’ she exclaimed – and, moments later, a multitude of hands were clamouring at the door to be the ones to let him in.
By the time Billy crashed through the doors and the children were upon him, his mother had put down her serving spoon, his father had come down the old creaking stairs, and the scenes of jubilation went on and on. Anyone passing by might have thought Billy Brogan had gone away to war and come back a decorated hero, such were the celebrations on South Lambeth Road.
‘What have you got for us?’ asked little Patrick, seven years old with a mop of unruly red hair.
‘Did you bring more pralines?’ asked Roisin, beseeching with her big brown eyes.
Billy picked the satchel off his shoulder and spread it open on the floor. ‘I got . . .’ From the darkness within he pulled out a package. ‘A half-rack of lamb! Here, Conor, give this to Ma, she’ll have a fit when she sees that. And I got –’ from the bag he pulled another package – ‘shortbreads, shortbreads for the lot of you. Go on, have your fill! And I got . . .’ By now his father was standing over him. William Brogan senior had a curmudgeonly look. His face had once been as cherubic as Billy’s, but age had turned it doughy, and where his hair was not thinning it had turned silver as the stars. ‘Here, Pa, this is for you and Ma.’ Out of the bag came a green glass bottle. William Brogan looked it up and down. ‘That’s good red wine, that is, Pa. Fit for dukes and duchesses. Taste it. Have yourself a glass. There’s more where that come from. And I got . . .’ The last package he drew from the bag was what Billy considered the ultimate prize. Half a gateau had been sitting on the side in the hotel kitchen all afternoon, just begging to be taken.
He could see the way his father was looking at the cake. ‘Be still my heart,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the mountainous cr
ags of whipped cream, meringue and candied lemon.
‘You oughtn’t be stealing!’ his mother called from the same kitchen where, moments ago, she had cooed with delight over the half-rack of lamb.
‘I’ve told you before. It’s not theft. It’s all piss to them that can afford better. They’d have poured that wine down the drain if I hadn’t have helped them out. That gateau was for the bins, or the chambermaids if they were fast enough. All I’m doing is a bit of . . . reorganising. Nobody’s any worse off and nobody’s any the wiser.’
Begrudgingly, his pa nodded. Then, as he always did, he muttered, ‘Mind you don’t get caught,’ and proceeded to dip his fingers in the fresh cream greedily.
Billy might have spent all day at the Buckingham Hotel, but his work was hardly done. After he had helped clear up dinner, there were seven rowdy youngsters to put to bed. He took it in shifts with his ma and pa – until, at last, not one of them was left awake.
‘It’ll be off to bed with you too, will it, son?’ his father asked finally.
‘And you, Pa. You got to be up before dawn, just like me.’
His father’s face creased. Almost three decades he’d been up long before dawn and travelling down to the fish market. Sometimes, Billy thought, he seemed to look at the things Billy brought home and wonder: was it all worth it? Surely, surely, there must have been a better way to make a living than fish? Billy remembered the first time he’d seen the look ghost across his father’s face. It was not envy, as he’d once believed. Nor was it shame – though there was certainly some shame in it, for Billy had sometimes brought home more in a day than his father could in a week. It was, instead, a kind of bewilderment that there were people out there for whom this was nothing: people like Lord Edgerton, like Maynard Charles, people who danced for a living like the debonair Raymond de Guise. There was not one world, Billy’s father understood; there were two, one for the rich and one for the poor, and by some strange magic, his son got to flit between the two.
‘That reminds me, Pa . . .’
Billy produced a small brown envelope, printed with the emblem of the Buckingham Hotel, and handed it to his father. When his father peered inside, he froze. ‘Son, we’ve spoken about—’
‘Pa, I told you. It’s because of tips. I get little gifts when I run errands for the guests, or for the concierge, or for almost anybody. You don’t get something for nothing. I provide that something. Pa, that’s what I’m there for.’
‘Yes, son. But . . . this?’
He was counting the coins and notes with his fingers, scarcely able to believe. All this? It had scarcely been a week since Billy last came home with pockets full and jangling.
‘Goodnight, Pa.’
Billy loped up the stairs to the little box room that was his own: an old mattress on the floor, a little tea chest filled with his odds and ends, a rack where his ma had laid out clothes for the morning (because, though he might have been seventeen, she was still his mother). He had already flopped onto the bed, eager for a night’s rest, when he realised his pa had followed him.
‘You’ll be watching yourself, won’t you, son?’ he said.
‘Pa, I’ve told you. It’s just odd errands. You don’t understand these folks. There’s folks who’d pay you a whole day’s rate up at Billingsgate just to get down and shine their shoes. There’s some who’ll throw you a pound note if you’re happy to wipe their arse.’
Billy’s father purpled. ‘There you go, with that smart tongue o’ yours. Just you make sure that Mr Maynard Charles doesn’t get wind of it. You lose this job, you’ll be hard pressed finding another. We need that hotel.’
Only when Billy was certain his father had gone to bed did he lie back on his cot, reach into his back pocket, and draw out the two pound notes he had secreted there. Then, reaching down into his mattress, he dragged out the little tin keepsake box he’d kept since he was young, listened to the rattle of coins and other notes inside, and slipped the new additions within. His father had no need to worry. Billy Brogan knew exactly what he was doing in the Buckingham Hotel.
And if Maynard Charles were to catch wind of it? Well, it would matter not one jot. Those two pound notes now sitting happily in his keepsake tin – they’d come courtesy of Maynard Charles himself.
Chapter Ten
RAYMOND DE GUISE WAS UP with the lark, pacing behind the locked doors of the Grand Ballroom. It seemed so much bigger during the day. When it was not thronged with dancers, and the champagne was not in full flow, the ballroom was almost ghostly. To Raymond’s mind, there was something sad about it. A ballroom was for living. A ballroom demanded people and laughter and noise. And yet . . .
He did not like the silence. When he was with a guest in the ballroom, or rehearsing the demonstrations with Hélène in the little studio behind the dressing room doors, he was spirited away to some other place, a realm where nothing else mattered but the music and movement. But when he was alone . . .
He had tried to put it out of his mind, but ever since that summer night when Mrs Adelman had whisked him back to her suite, the idea of his brother would not leave him alone. He woke, sometimes, from dreams in which his brother pitched up here, at the doors of the Buckingham Hotel. He imagined the looks on the faces of Maynard Charles and Hélène Marchmont. He wondered what would happen if his brother were to stride into the Grand Ballroom and put his arms around him. He had not appeared yet, but that did nothing to quell Raymond’s nerves. Every day he doesn’t appear is just a day closer to it happening, he thought ruefully. And then what? How would I explain a man like that to the citizens of the Buckingham Hotel?
No, there was only so long he could ignore Mrs Adelman’s appeal. He looked up at the notice pinned to the wall beside the ballroom bar: 12–19 SEPTEMBER, THE GRAND BALLROOM CLOSED FOR REFURBISHMENT. Every September the ballroom went into a week-long hibernation, reopening as radiant as the day it first opened, the air heavy with the smells of beeswax and varnish. No dancing for a week, thought Raymond, and all of these evenings to myself. Maynard Charles would make him work for those days off – the autumn season with its new debutantes, the Christmas festivities and New Year Masquerade Ball to come – but that week, Raymond decided, was when he would extinguish the kernel of fear that was taking root in his gut.
This was the week he would go and find his brother for himself.
Raymond heard knocking at the ballroom’s door. He crossed the dance floor to unlock it.
Vivienne Edgerton was standing there in her day dress, aquamarine with pleated sleeves and a single felt flower sitting over her heart. Evidently, she had been up early to prepare for her lesson, because she had painted her face as elegantly as if she were stepping out into the Grand for the night. Her lips were striking and red, and her nails were painted crimson. The elegant women of London town scarcely painted their nails, but Vivienne was a New Yorker through and through.
‘Miss Edgerton,’ he said, ‘please come through.’
Vivienne stopped to survey the empty ballroom. Her lips, which had been pursed, parted as she tried to suppress her smile. The whole of the Grand – and all to herself . . .
She turned on the spot to find Raymond closing the doors. When he looked her up and down and noticed the ball gown she had draped over one arm, he said carefully, ‘You won’t be needing it, Miss Edgerton. It is best if we are free, at least to begin . . .’
For a fleeting second, Vivienne seemed disappointed. Ordinarily she leaped upon any opportunity to wear one of the dresses she acquired in her shopping trips to Knightsbridge and Earl’s Court. The gown she had brought was a perfect replica of the one worn by the Hollywood starlet Myrna Loy; she’d appointed a couturier from Bond Street to recreate it herself. Relenting, she draped it over the balustrade and descended the marble steps onto the oak and mahogany chequered floor. ‘Shall we?’ she began – and stumbled as she attempted a spin.
‘First things first, Vivienne.’
Raymond j
oined her on the dance floor. It had been three nights since he’d had to carry her out of the ballroom. Today she barely seemed the same girl. Her eyes did not have that same glazed, faraway look. She was poised and elegant and, Raymond had to admit, quite beautiful, in her own steely way. She had a dancer’s poise, that much was certain. She held herself with a certain confidence, of the kind he’d only really seen in Hélène Marchmont. So much of dance was about confidence and approach. You could learn all of the steps, all of the movements and postures perfectly, but if you didn’t have the self-assurance to carry them through, the room would dance on without you, leaving you beached and alone.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘have you danced before?’
‘A little. There was a club in the East Village, back in New York. Daddy – that’s my natural father, you understand – was not eager for me to go there, but Michael knew the doorman and he used to take me for cocktails. Michael O’Hara – he was my . . . close friend.’
A lover, thought Raymond. But why so surprised? A girl as beautiful and forward as Vivienne Edgerton would never be short of a suitor or two. Vivienne had a way about her – a way of getting what she wanted, and it seemed to have existed long before Lord Edgerton ever made her his ward.
‘There’d be an orchestra and a dance floor, but it wasn’t nearly as grand as this, Mr de Guise. When the girls had quaffed too many cocktails, they’d be up on the tables. Nobody seemed to mind. They were jiving or they were Lindy hopping or, you know, just breaking away and moving any which way they liked.’
‘We’ll be leaving the tables alone today, Miss Edgerton.’
One Enchanted Evening Page 7