Raymond thought: I could tell him that it wasn’t nearly as sleazy as he thinks. That they jumped on me because of what I am, what my real family are. But that would mean telling him that all of the magic we’ve been spinning in the Grand, it’s all been horse shit. It would almost be worth it, to see the look on this face. But . . .
I don’t want to be Ray Cohen, Raymond thought. Ray Cohen’s gone. I buried him, didn’t I? Why can’t he just stay six feet under?
Maynard Charles continued. ‘You understand what you’ve done here, don’t you? The ballroom – my ballroom, lest you forget – demands you down there. Christmas is coming, not to mention New Year. You know what this season means to us, Raymond. You know the peril we’re in! Put the Buckingham on the society pages for the spring and we may yet survive. But to do that we need this Christmas. We need the Masquerade Ball at New Year to leave whatever they have planned over at the Imperial and the Savoy and the Ritz in the shade. I’ve been planning this season since the last one ended – and now it’s to go to waste, because of one drunken night by my principal dancer? They’re coming to see you, Raymond. The King himself is gracing us with his royal presence. You’re to dance with the Queen of Norway, with Märtha, her crown princess. Lord Edgerton will be in attendance. All of the board.’ Maynard Charles’s face was purpling with rage. He looked like an incandescent beetroot. ‘Your responsibility here extends much further than your own little world, Raymond. You are part of a much bigger whole. Raymond de Guise, the lovelorn aristocrat dancer and his glacial beauty of a partner, Hélène Marchmont. You remember what happened when Hélène took her leave of us for a year? Finding a replacement for somebody as popular and loved was near impossible. And now I have to do that for you with only weeks before the Christmas season begins.’
‘Mr Charles, if you’ll let me speak—’
‘I don’t want to hear another word!’ Maynard Charles thundered. ‘When this gets out, what do you think is going to happen to our ballroom? They’ll be laughing at us, Raymond. Laughing all over London! At the Savoy and the Imperial and all those other parochial little palaces. The King coming to a ballroom where the principal dancer is a bloody mess. A bloody fool!’ Maynard Charles stopped to catch his breath and, the moment he did so, another thought, even worse than all these, occurred. ‘I’ll have to explain this to Lord Edgerton. There’ll be questions from the board. Why the gentleman dancer I insisted we pay for is spending the Christmas season lounging in bed. What these mysterious bills are. Doctors and dentists.’ He spat the word with such opprobrium it might have been the most unutterable curse under the sun.
Instinctively, Raymond tensed. Perhaps the adrenaline was still coursing through his body, but for a passing moment he wanted nothing more than to drive his fist into Maynard Charles’s angry face. But no, he told himself. That’s Ray Cohen talking. Not the debonair gentleman Raymond de Guise.
He composed himself. ‘I can still go to the ballroom. I can still fraternise with our guests—’
‘I don’t care if you can fly. I don’t care if you can foxtrot on air. I don’t care if you move like a Greek goddess. Not when you have a face like that. Raymond, it’s time you understood your worth. It’s beauty I want in that ballroom.’ He turned on his heel, pointedly ignoring Raymond and turning to Doctor Moore. ‘Patch him up. Send for your orthodontist. Fill him full of whatever potions you have. Just get him ready for the battle.’ Maynard marched to the door, and there he stopped. ‘Raymond, you’re to rest. I’ll have one of the chambermaids come and turn this room over. We’ll send up food – soups, I should think, looking at the state of you. But, heaven forfend, if I see you out of this room looking like that, there’ll be no place for you at the Buckingham Hotel. I want to contain the rumours. Do you understand?’
Raymond nodded. ‘I understand, sir.’
Then Maynard Charles was gone, leaving a fuming Raymond de Guise behind.
*
On the ground floor, as the day manager welcomed a party of guests up from the Côte d’Azur, Maynard Charles slammed the director’s office door and threw a wild kick at his leather chair. Then, still purple with fury, he opened his cabinet and drew out one of the many card indexes inside. To a man in charge of so many different departments, so many moving pieces, a card index was a priceless resource. Maynard Charles sometimes thought that his card indexes were like little pieces of his brain carved out and filed away – and, ordinarily, the thought gave him enormous pleasure.
Not now. Now, there was too much anger pumping through him to make room for any pleasure at all. This particular card index categorised all the many dancers who had auditioned for a place in the Grand’s demonstrations over the years. But, more than that, it detailed all of the dancers at the Savoy, the Imperial, all of the other ballrooms across London where dancers were perfecting their art – and drawing in business for their establishments. Maynard Charles was a man of many talents, and the most important talent of all was self-preservation. The indexes in this office afforded him recourse in almost any situation. He had always known he would need to replace Raymond de Guise sooner or later. Gentlemen dancers got bored. They disappeared on midnight trains across Europe, or fell in love with an aristocrat who’d partnered with them on the ballroom for the night – or they got themselves embroiled in some scandal involving a minor royal, or a notable member of society. When that happened, Maynard Charles would need to know who the best dancers were in the other ballrooms across London. It would not do to merely promote somebody from the ranks. No. He needed to make a statement – and he needed to make it fast.
He had barely begun to consult the oracle that was his index when there came a knocking at the door. Scrabbling to put it away, he barked, ‘Enter!’, and looked up to see Mr Simenon guiding Vivienne Edgerton through the doors. This morning Vivienne was dressed in a burgundy house dress, with a single pin in her hair. Her lips were painted with a striking lipstick and there seemed something strange about her eyes; she had the look of a lady who had spent all night in the cocktail lounge, being indulged by her various suitors. Her pupils were big and round and she seemed to glare.
‘I’m in the middle of something quite important, Miss Edgerton. Might this wait?’
‘Mr Charles, I believe I know your predicament. And I believe I may have a solution.’
‘My . . . predicament?’ So, thought Maynard Charles. The manic look in her eyes was evidently not because she was still riding the waves of last night’s Cointreau and vermouth. ‘Tell me, Miss Edgerton, what do you know of my predicament, and how do you know it?’
Maynard Charles hardly needed an answer to that question. Mr Simenon was, even now, bowing his head and sloping backwards through the door, off to offer his services to the party from the Côte d’Azur. He was indispensable with his knowledge of London, its theatres and galleries, its private parties and invitation-only boutiques, but his thirst for all knowledge extended too far in this hotel. One day soon Maynard would have to put a stop to that wagging tongue of his.
‘I have a suggestion, Mr Charles. You might laugh, and you might think it not my place, but . . . When my stepfather was here, he had in his company a dancer of the most superlative talent.’
Maynard Charles sank back into his seat. Why did he feel, suddenly, like a fly caught in a spider’s trap? It was not only in the words Vivienne was speaking. There was something about the confidence with which she said it. One might almost think it was Vivienne herself who had laid waste to Raymond de Guise.
‘Miss Edgerton, there are a hundred talented ballroom dan-cers across this city, and every last one of them is champing at the bit to come and dance for me in my ballroom. I’ll consider your suggestion, but perhaps you might leave this matter to those of us more . . . capable?’
He ought not to have said it. Immediately, and in spite of the petty thrill it gave him, he regretted it. Seeing Raymond this morning had inflamed him. It had addled his mind. He knew better than to speak to Lord Ed
gerton’s stepdaughter like that. He watched as the anger that erupted on her features settled into a kind of knowing glee. For Vivienne was certain, now, that she would get what she wanted.
‘Nathaniel is everything Raymond de Guise is and more.’ Was Maynard Charles mistaken, or did he detect some bitterness in Vivienne’s voice as she said Raymond’s name? ‘He has demonstrated at the Imperial, but I know for a fact he’d drop everything in a second if the Grand opened its doors to him. You said you wanted something special, Mr Charles. Well, believe me – Nathaniel is special. He is –’ she hesitated before using the word – ‘beautiful, Mr Charles. And, you must understand, he is the son of one of Daddy’s colleagues . . .’
Daddy, thought Maynard. She uses it so easily when she wants something – and yet, in private, she seethes at even calling him her stepfather.
‘He would be an excellent replacement for Mr de Guise. Dare I say it . . . but I believe he might even surpass him for elegance on the dance floor.’
‘You’ve been to the Imperial, have you, and seen his work?’
Vivienne’s eyes flickered at him. ‘I’ve seen all of his work,’ she said with a vaguely licentious air. ‘He moves like an angel.’
Every muscle in Maynard Charles’s body was suddenly rigid. ‘I’ll consider it, Miss Edgerton.’
After she was gone, Maynard returned to his cabinet and reached for his index. Flicking forward to the cards that were marked IMPERIAL HOTEL, he picked out the one for NATHANIEL WHITE. Twenty-three years old. Champion of Blackpool and Edinburgh. He’d danced a season at the Café de Paris, then taken himself to Europe for a tour of the palaces. Yes, Maynard thought, perhaps a boy like this might be a draw. Something to bring extra magic to the world of their beautiful ballroom. But he was also one of . . . them. There was nothing here to indicate that Nathaniel White belonged to the British Union of Fascists like the other men who’d come to meet with Lord Edgerton – but he was a blood relation, and blood did flow thicker than water.
When you ran an enterprise as vast as the Buckingham, you had to be willing to make sacrifices to your honour. The gold coins of a fascist were worth every bit as much as the gold coins of a man of absolute morality. You could not deny any man a bed for the night, not if he had the means to pay for it. But the thought of inviting somebody like that backstage at the Grand? Maynard Charles had spent the best years of his youth on the battlefields in France. To court men who would make war again was one of the bitterest pills he had ever been asked to swallow.
Maynard Charles turned the card over and over again. The simple truth was that the decision had already been made. He fancied he could still smell Vivienne Edgerton’s perfume lingering in the air – and he wondered, not for the first time, how much of this hotel he really ran at all.
October 1936
Chapter Nineteen
THIS MORNING, AS BILLY SIDLED in along Michaelmas Mews and through the passageway behind the reception hall, where the deputy night manager was compiling his list of the evening’s occurrences, he kept his head bowed down and scurried onward. He’d heard the concierges talking about Mr Simenon, and what he’d done to the poor girl caught sneaking in after hours, and in the week that had passed since then a kernel of guilt had been hardening in his breast. He’d brought Nancy Nettleton back to the doors of the Buckingham, ensured her safe passage across Soho after dark, and the moment he’d let her go (taking her coat no less!), she’d walked straight into the oldest trap of them all.
In the reception hall, Maynard Charles was attending to a new guest. Cormac E. Colby was fresh off the plane out of New York, but had arrived on the Buckingham steps with not a hair out of place. Billy stopped as he sidled by. Ordin-arily, guests arrived at the Buckingham trailing enough suitcases and trunks to make a boy like Billy believe they were transporting a small country behind them. Rupprecht, the Crown Prince of Bavaria, had been just like that – last week he’d appeared, a vision of old-world elegance, through the revolving doors and waited as a procession of servants and hangers-on brought through so many trunks, cases and smaller valises that the other guests must have thought he was here to fortify a castle. But Cormac E. Colby, with his slicked-back hair and pinstriped suit, arrived with only a small black leather bag and the golden pen with which he was now signing his name on the hotel manifest.
In his hands Billy held a brown paper envelope, brought to the staff door and delivered to him by name. The name on the front of the letter said RAYMOND in big black letters. That was all. There was no address, no surname, nothing else to indicate who it was for. But Billy knew only two Raymonds at the Buckingham Hotel – and Raymond Owen, the garage mechanic, was not the sort to receive mysterious letters before break of day. Besides, the first thing Billy had done upon receiving this letter was sneak into the kitchen behind the Queen Mary and steam the envelope open. It was there, lurking between the industrial pot wash and the roasting oven, that he first knew for certain this letter was for Raymond de Guise.
Raymond had not been seen in the ballroom for seven days and seven nights. The rumour circulating around the hotel was that he’d been laid low with a particularly virulent strain of measles. In a place like the Buckingham, this was the sort of news that the management would keep hidden by any means necessary – for any inkling of pestilence in the hotel, and the veneer of glamour they worked hard to cultivate would vanish in an instant. Billy had heard Rosa and Ruth tittering that it was, inevitably, some other kind of pox that Raymond de Guise had fallen ill with – for wasn’t Raymond known to be a gigolo as well as a dancer? One of the concierges had posited that de Guise was actually holding Maynard Charles and the hotel board to ransom, refusing to come out of his chambers until a new, elevated contract was signed. This was the sort of thing that fallen gentlemen like Raymond de Guise did.
Alone among them, only Billy knew the real reason Raymond was confined to his chambers. The memory of him, spread-eagled on the floor of the Midnight Rooms as the mob surged, remained vivid in Billy’s mind.
Billy rode the service lift up to the staff chambers and knocked on Raymond’s door. When no answer was forthcoming, he knocked again. ‘Raymond!’ he called out. ‘Raymond, open up. It’s Billy.’
When the silence lingered, Billy lit upon a brilliant idea. He was proud of this; it would get him a reaction for sure. ‘I got a letter for you, Raymond. Courtesy of your . . . mother. But if you’re not here to take it, well, I s’pose I can always leave it with Mr Charles and you can collect it later—’
The door was wrenched open. There he stood, his face still swollen and marked with bruises, which had once been purple, but were now fading to yellows and tan browns. He was holding himself awkwardly, one hand braced against the door jamb, the other gripping the cane on which he held himself aloft. At the end of his right leg, his foot was encased in a thick bandage.
‘Get in here, Brogan,’ he snapped, and Billy was happy to oblige.
*
On the edge of the bed, Raymond’s eyes scanned over the letter: three-and-a-half pages of words scribbled in fury and haste.
‘You’ve already read this, I presume?’
Billy’s face opened in horror. ‘The thought of such a thing! Mr de Guise, what do you take me for?’
‘Maynard Charles has his fingers in every letter and package that goes out through the hotel post room. Don’t deny it for a second, Billy. You know it’s true. So why on earth would a letter enter this hotel that didn’t have his eyes on it?’
Billy paused as if to concoct some elaborate lie, thought better of it, and finally said, ‘I know better than to show something like that to Mr Charles. It’s worth more as a secret than it is shared.’
Raymond shook his head wearily. Then he stood up, ferreted in a drawer for a single pound note and pushed this into Billy’s hand. ‘There’s a couple of crowns on the dresser. Take them, Billy. They’re yours.’ Raymond sank back to the bed. ‘You’re the only one who’s read this?’
&nbs
p; ‘I am.’
‘Then, anyone else hears about this, I’ll know it comes from you. Understand?’
‘I understand, Mr de Guise. You have been very charitable.’
Charity, thought Raymond. Charity and blackmail, they’re all the same to lads like Billy Brogan. But I’d be doing the same in his shoes. Getting something out of nothing, that was always my father’s way too. And the boy’s got family to take care of. Billy Brogan’s doing nothing that the Ray Cohen of old wouldn’t do.
His eyes scanned over the letter:
Dear Ray,
I know you said not to contact you, but you left us the name of your boy, so perhaps you did not mean it. In any event, there are things you should know. No doubt you’ve been too caught up in your palaces with your princesses to know what happened on these streets. But 4 October 1936 is a date that will echo loud through the years.
As Raymond read on, a sick feeling curdled in his stomach.
They were calling it a battle. Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists had marched into Whitechapel and Stepney Green. They called themselves patriots, but that wasn’t what they were: they were just common thugs, Blackshirts every last one of them. They’d been marching east. It was all over the daily news sheets – and at least Raymond had been able to read these, while locked away in his tower all day and night. It was just like that man in the Midnight Rooms had said. Even now, Raymond could hardly remember who he was. Just another one of those thugs from the streets where he grew up, just another man full of hate. Raymond was probably not the last person who’d felt the fire of his fists.
They’d come to – what? Demand a cleansing of the streets? Show their allegiance with the National Socialists in Germany, who were putting bricks through Jewish shop fronts at night and daubing crude yellow Stars of David over every Jewish door? Or just to lash out, at something they didn’t understand?
One Enchanted Evening Page 17