He ought to have known about de Guise before Brogan spoke up. Somewhere along the way, his eye had been somewhere else – and he’d overlooked every sign that the dancer was not truly who he said he was. Thank the Lord that Billy Brogan had the good sense – or was it self-interest? – to have copied down the contents of that letter. A hotel director had to know every secret, every skeleton in every cupboard, because there was only one thing that could fell him: scandal. He had to know what scandals were coming and contain them.
De Guise – he would continue to call him de Guise; it would pay to buy into the legend – was right, of course. The Buckingham could be an unseemly place. When Lord Edgerton descended with his pack of fascist friends, his cousins in high society and their associates from overseas, something had changed. But he was in no position to ask anybody to leave the hotel; to do as much would have been unthinkable – even if it hadn’t been for Mr Moorcock and the other spooks like him who had found, in Maynard Charles, the perfect tool.
He didn’t realise until he spilled brandy above the rim of his glass that he had started shaking. Just the idea of Mr Moorcock’s threats was enough to make his blood boil. He drank what brandy remained in the glass and left the office, locking it behind him. Not that this had done any good once the Cohen boys had wandered into his hotel. He would not be able to reprimand the boy who’d let them in – to do so would have risked exposing the pact he’d made to keep Raymond here – but he would make certain, from now on, that he was not left alone at the staff entrance. Weak boys could be bought. He was sick and tired of people being bought and sold, traded like pawns, in this hotel. He was sick and tired of being the one doing the buying and selling.
But then he thought of Mr Moorcock again, and the only thing that could stop him screaming out loud was the walk he took, up through the housekeeping halls, into the service lift and up, up, up – not to his own quarters, but to the sixth storey and the unmarked door of the Park Suite.
Maynard had no need to knock. He kept a key on a silver chain in his pocket. He slipped it into the lock and, opening the door just enough to squeeze through, he entered the suite.
The smells hit him at once, as always they did: the light and woody oriental smell of cologne imported from the East; the smell of roast coffee beans and peppermints in the silver bowl on the dresser.
He stood for a moment and took in the suite. No, he thought, all the brandy in the world couldn’t have the same effect as simply standing here, breathing it all in. Just stepping through the doors made him feel lighter, freer, as if Mr Moorcock and all of his MI5 acolytes didn’t exist at all. If only he could stay here . . . and not have to march out each morning to battle with the Buckingham, nor retire each night to his own quarters, just in case he was seen creeping around and questions started to be asked. There were already enough rumours about the permanently locked abandoned suite on the sixth floor. One day soon he would have to perform an elaborate act of misdirection and silence them all again.
The suite’s lounge room was small but cosy, with an ornamental fireplace around which three armchairs were arranged, and a wireless which ordinarily buzzed with news from the BBC. Radio was a godsend; it opened one up to so much of the world. These newfangled television sets might be a novelty, but they would never replace radio in Maynard Charles’s view. Who would want a pair of eyes staring back at you from a little box in the corner, as they read out the news? But the radio – the radio could be a comfort, through the long, lonely days.
The trolley was still waiting, where Mrs Moffatt had left it, ready to be picked up in the morning. The grouse they had eaten for dinner had been superb, and the spiced plums for pudding had made Maynard think of Christmases in long gone, happier times. He fancied he could taste them even now, as he crossed the little lounge and went through the archway into the bedroom.
The wheelchair was up against the wall, where he had left it. Two single beds dominated most of the room; by the side of the bed closest to him was the medicine cabinet and, by that, an oxygen tank, now spent, that Doctor Evelyn Moore routinely delivered. The sounds coming from the first bed were only gentle snores, and this made Maynard’s heart soar – because it meant that everything was all right.
Quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeper, Maynard Charles took off his dressing gown, crossed the room, and climbed under the covers of his own bed. Moments later, the figure in the bed alongside him startled. Inwardly, Maynard cursed. He himself had long been a light sleeper, after the years he had spent sleeping in foxholes in the earth. He hadn’t slept a night uninterrupted since the Somme in 1916.
The figure picked himself up, as if expecting attack.
‘Shhhh,’ Maynard began. ‘It’s only me.’
‘What happened?’ said a voice.
‘Oh, Buckingham business. Another fire that needed extinguishing. It’s—’
‘Not Moorcock again?’
‘Not this time,’ whispered Maynard. He leaned across and kissed the figure on the forehead. Then, ‘Aubrey, get your rest. You’ll feel hellish in the morning if you don’t sleep on.’
But the figure beside him was restless now. He reached out for the cord that dangled at his bedside, drew on it, and a lamp illuminated the room.
Aubrey Higgins was several years older than Maynard Charles. Almost entirely bald, he nevertheless had a beard of striking silver. Though he had once been broad and powerful, now his body was slight; he appeared to sink into the bed sheets, and the ribbon that dangled around his neck was attached to a mask that was itself attached to the oxygen tank at his side. He paused to put the mask over his lips, drew in deeply, and then removed it again.
Maynard sat up and looked at him fondly. ‘You’ve been doing so well.’
‘I can smell brandy, Maynard. You haven’t been having a little tipple without me, have you?’
‘I needed it, Aubrey, like you wouldn’t believe.’
Maynard climbed out of his own bed, crossed the room to perch on the other and touched his companion’s shoulder. Aubrey Higgins: the secret of the Park Suite.
They’d met in ’15, that summer when the entrenchment was hardening across the Western Front and what had been thought of, the year before, as temporary measures were rapidly becoming permanent constructions. Both were Warrant Officers, both old in the regiment. Maynard had signed up in 1914. At the age of thirty-nine, he might have avoided the front altogether if he’d played his cards cannily enough – and at the time, night manager at a Bristolian hotel of some growing renown, there was even a chance he could call it a reserved occupation. And yet . . . Maynard had no family, no wife and children and no prospect of either to keep him in England. He was a man of principle and a man of duty and, when people asked him why a handsome, well-to-do, esteemed fellow like him had not yet dignified the holy seat of marriage, he had any number of tactics to evade the question. Love had not found him, he was fond of saying, but the fact was that love had found him several times over, but Maynard consistently pushed it away – whether out of shame, or propriety, or fear, he had never been able to say.
Yet when he met Aubrey Higgins, all of that changed. It happened in stages, as all the best love stories do – and, though it had crept up on them both, there was no less passion in it for that. Aubrey was the first man whom Maynard Charles had outwardly admitted he loved; Maynard the first for whom Aubrey would surely have lain down and died. Later, Maynard had told Aubrey that it was because he expected to die out there – that it freed him enough to live his life the way he wanted to live it, for he knew it would not last long. For Aubrey it was different – the culmination of a lifetime seeking someone worthy enough.
They made it, together, as far as Passchendaele in that bitter year of 1917. It was in that blasted landscape, shorn of all life, that Aubrey had fallen. First, his lung punctured; then, corroded by the reefs of acrid yellow gas that floated over the battlefields. He was invalided home and nobody expected Aubrey to live. Maynard had made his goodbye
s, right there in a hole in the earth, before the Red Cross crews fought their way out to bear him away. And yet, in 1918, when the Armistice came, Maynard Charles was repatriated to Britain to discover that Aubrey still lived, bedridden, but in the care of an elder sister. One of his lungs was ruined, the other under enormous strain, but by the sheer fortitude of his heart he survived.
When Maynard got the job at the Buckingham, a plan was hatched: the Park Suite, smallest of the Buckingham’s suites, was closed for refurbishment – and never reopened. It was a simple thing to smuggle Aubrey and his cases within. And here he had remained ever since. Aubrey had once spoken of himself as a princess locked in a tower – but, oh, what a tower! In springtime he could look down on the verdant green of Berkeley Square. In winter, the fire roared. The hotel provided all that he needed, in life and in love. Here he lived and here, when the time came – as surely it would soon – he would die. It did not matter to him, as long as Maynard was at his side.
Aubrey leaned over and snuffed the light again. ‘It will all look better in the morning, dear Maynard.’
‘I have asked Raymond de Guise back to the Buckingham,’ Maynard said, into the dark. It seemed something of a confession.
‘You have?’
‘I told him,’ Maynard said. ‘About Mr Moorcock. About what I do here, in the Buckingham.’
Aubrey Higgins tensed. ‘My dear, is that wise?’
‘I had no choice, Aubrey. I won’t be called a fascist in my own hotel. I won’t be a sympathiser. You recall the last time I met with Moorcock, down there in the Candlelight Club?’
‘I do.’
‘The Schechts are still hoping to meet Mr Chamberlain here, in our hotel. They’re still planning on bringing over what dignitaries they can from Berlin. They want to engineer peace – a peace with that monster in the Reichstag. There’s a war coming, Aubrey, and they’re using our hotel to help Britain choose a side that will keep her out of the way of the aggressors’ progress. Well, I want to be on the right side of history. I fought for Britain once. We both did. Look what it did to you, Aubrey. All of that will not be in vain. So I’ll fight them again, here in my hotel.’
For a time there was silence – until finally Aubrey asked, ‘Did you tell him . . . about me?’
Maynard reached over and took his hand. ‘I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. Raymond is a good soul, but if he were to know the real reason I’m in Mr Moorcock’s pocket, why, I’m not sure he’d understand. Much better, I think, that he thinks me a rabid man of principle, one of the last upstanding men.’ There was some element of joke in this; Aubrey laughed in return. ‘I can’t risk you, Aubrey. You need a roof over your head. You need somewhere warm and safe. And I need to be close to you. I won’t have you living in any less than this.’
Moorcock – that bastard . . . He’d appeared in the Candlelight Club one evening in ’32, while the sale of hotel stock to Lord Edgerton was still going through, and insisted on buying Maynard Charles a drink. He’d detailed his interest in certain guests at the Buckingham and had passed Maynard an envelope crammed with notes of various denominations. Maynard handed it straight back. But all that changed in the Christmas of 1932, when Mr Moorcock settled himself in the Pacific Suite for an evening – the bill settled, of course, by the Ministry itself – and, in the evening, placed a phone call to reception, requesting to have a private dinner with the hotel director himself. When Maynard Charles appeared in the Pacific, all it took were two words to change the complexion – and the very direction – of his life. ‘Park Suite,’ Mr Moorcock had intoned. ‘What do you think might happen, dear Maynard, were your new lord to realise what goes on in the Park Suite? Why, this sort of thing – appropriating hotel accommodation for your own illegal pleasures – might count as scandal, mightn’t it? How might that fall out for you, dear boy?’
From that moment he was theirs. There was nothing more important in this world than making sure Aubrey was tended to, that Aubrey had a safe place to live. Nothing more important than making sure Aubrey was loved.
‘You’ve done the right thing,’ said Aubrey, distant now as sleep came back to whisk him away. ‘By your very nature, Maynard Charles, you’ve done the right thing.’
But long into the night, Maynard Charles wondered: have I? How long can I keep up this dance? How long can England? We’re all waltzing, waltzing like they do down there in the ballroom, waltzing while the world around us teeters on the brink. How long can any of this go on?
For long hours he lay awake, safe in his secret world, and listened to the rattle in Aubrey’s lungs – while, outside the Buckingham Hotel, the snow continued to fall.
Chapter Twenty-nine
ANOTHER NIGHT HAD FALLEN BUT, in Vivienne Edgerton’s suite, it did not matter if it was night or day. She had spent the first day after that fateful night in bed; the second she had pottered around the room, staring glassily out of the windows and nibbling at the platters of food the housekeeping staff had arranged for her. It wasn’t until the third day, when her body was beginning to feel robust again, that the boredom had truly set in – but, when it did, it was more powerful than any drink or drug that had ever flowed through her system. She tried on every one of her ball gowns. She summoned room service to bring her a collection of the latest Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She put countless records into her gramophone. Sometimes the snow fell so thickly that it completely occluded the world outside and it was then, a prisoner in her lonely tower, that Vivienne Edgerton truly began to feel like a captive.
She tried the door, but it was still locked.
She dozed and, some time approaching midnight, she saw the door open – and in slipped Nathaniel White. He had come last night too, the key procured for him by no less than Billy Brogan himself. Resplendent in his evening suit, his hair perfectly coiffured, he came to sit beside her on the bed. Still reclining, she reached out a hand.
‘You came.’
‘I promised I would.’
‘How was the ballroom tonight?’
‘In true flight,’ said Nathaniel joyfully. ‘The Christmas guests are in full attendance. Archie Adams played a list of classics. They jingled all the way.’ He paused. ‘I would have come sooner, Vivienne, but Hélène and I spent today choreographing our new routines to launch the masquerade ball next week at New Year. I have a spectacular planned, if only Hélène can learn it in time. Sometimes she seems so reluctant. And I am told she is not to be here, in the hotel, for four days over Christmas. Why Maynard Charles might acquiesce to such foolishness, only the heavens know. If Hélène is not here to take my instruction, then how are we to provide a night to remember at New Year?’
‘Is it the same without me, Nathaniel? I mean . . . down there in the ballroom?’
Nathaniel paused. ‘It’s been mere days . . .’
‘But even so. I hate the thought of you facing them alone. The only saving grace is that Raymond de Guise is gone and never to return.’ Vivienne did not notice the look that flickered across Nathaniel’s face – or, if she did, she was so wrapped up in herself that she thought nothing of it. ‘I’ll be back soon, Nathaniel. I could have danced with you tonight, if they’d let me out of this damned room. They think I’m some delicate flower but . . .’ She would have gone on, but her throat was parched and suddenly she was racked with coughs. Nathaniel poured her water from the glassware on the room service trolley and helped put it to her lips. ‘They’ll have to let me out at Christmas. My stepfather is sending a car for me. I’m to have Christmas dinner in Suffolk. With my mother.’ She used the word like a curse, because that was what it was. How long had she been in England, and how often had she seen her mother in this time? The two were so far apart that it seemed a vast chasm yawned open between them. ‘When I get back, they won’t be able to confine me again. Not when my stepfather finds out—’
‘You can hardly speak with your father of this, Vivienne. Mr Charles is doing what he can to protect you—’
‘Prot
ect me?’ Vivienne protested, hoisting herself up.
‘What do you think Lord Edgerton would think if he knew his daughter—?’
‘Well,’ Vivienne snapped, finding her fire at last, ‘the first thing he’d do is ask who joins me in my . . . indulgences. And who might that be, Nathaniel?’
For a time, Nathaniel was silent. Then, thinking twice, he wrapped his arms around Vivienne and kissed the nape of her neck. ‘I’m only thinking of you, Vivienne. What if something worse had happened to you? Where would I be then?’
The words made Vivienne soften; it was exactly what she’d wanted to hear. ‘I took it too far, Nathaniel, that’s all. We can still have a good time, can’t we?’
His lips on her neck had stirred something in her. She drew back from him, just enough for there to be air between them, and tried to kiss him full on the lips.
Nathaniel turned his head.
‘Nathaniel?’
He hesitated. If Vivienne had had more wits about her, perhaps she would have seen the scorn in his eyes. It was the scorn a boy has for a plaything he no longer needs, a toy tarnished and best left forgotten. ‘You’re not . . . strong tonight, Vivienne. You need your rest. If you’re to dance at New Year, you should recuperate properly. Don’t push your body.’
‘I just wish I had a little something to take the edge away. Good God, even a cocktail would do. A gin rickey or a bee’s knees, one of those I used to drink with the girls back in New York. Or . . . I need Mr Simenon. I wouldn’t have to indulge. Just a little sugar so I can sleep.’ Vivienne paused. ‘But if I can’t have that, well . . .’ Her fingertips ran up Nathaniel’s thigh, closer and closer to his body – until, at the last moment, he got back to his feet.
‘Get your rest, Vivienne. I’m glad you’re still among us.’
One Enchanted Evening Page 28