by Rhys Bowen
“Well, blow me down with a feather,” he said, flinging the door wide open. “This is a turnup for the books. I didn’t expect to see you in a month of Sundays. How are you, my love? Come and give your old granddad a kiss.”
I suppose I should have mentioned that while one of my grandparents was Queen Victoria’s daughter, my only living grandparent was a retired Cockney policeman who lived in a semidetached in Essex with gnomes in the front garden.
His stubbly face was scratchy on my cheek as he planted a kiss and he smelled of carbolic soap. I hugged him fiercely. “I’m well, thanks, Granddad. How are you?”
“Can’t complain. The old chest ain’t what it was, but at my age that’s what you expect, isn’t it? Come on in. I’ve got the kettle on and a nice bit of seedy cake, made by the old bat next door. She keeps sending round food, in the hopes of showing me what a good cook she is and what a good catch she’d make.”
“And would she make a good catch?” I asked. “You have been living on your own for a long while now.”
“I’m used to my own company. Don’t need no meddling old woman in my life. Come on in and take a pew, ducks. You are a sight for sore eyes.”
He beamed at me again. “So what brings you to this neck of the woods? In need of a good meal, by the look of it. You’re all skin and bones.”
“As a matter of fact, I am in need of a good meal,” I said. “I’ve just come from the palace, where tea consisted of two slices of brown bread.”
“Well, I can certainly do better than that. What about a couple of poached eggs on toasted cheese and then some of that cake?”
“Perfect.” I sighed happily.
“I bet you didn’t tell that lot at the palace where you were coming afterward.” He bustled around the meticulously neat little kitchen, breaking two eggs into the poacher. “They wouldn’t have liked that. When you were a little girl, they used to intercept the letters we sent you.”
“Surely not.”
“Oh, yes. They didn’t want no contact with us poor folk. Of course, if your mum had stuck around to do her duty and bring you up proper, we’d have been invited to stay or she could have brought you to see us. But she was off flaunting herself somewhere. We often worried about you, poor little mite, stuck in that big drafty place all alone.”
“I did have Nanny. And Miss MacAlister.”
He beamed again. He had the sort of smile that lit up his whole face. “And you turned out a treat. I’ll have to admit that. Look at you. The proper young lady. I bet you’ve got the boyfriends lined up and fighting for you, haven’t yer?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “In fact I’m rather at a loose end, not quite sure what to do with myself. My brother’s not giving me an allowance any longer, you see. He claims abject poverty.”
“The dirty rotter. Do you want me to come up and give him a piece of my mind?”
“No, thanks, Granddad. There’s nothing you could do. I think they are genuinely hard up, and I’m only a half sister, after all. He told me I was welcome to stay on at Castle Rannoch, but having to amuse little Podge and help Fig with her knitting was really too dreadful. So I bolted, just like my mother. Only not as successfully. I’m camping out in the London house. Binky is letting me live there for the moment but it’s freezing cold without the central heating on and I have no servant to look after me. I don’t suppose you could show me how to light a fire, could you?”
My grandfather looked at me, then started laughing, a wheezy laugh that turned into a nasty cough. “Oh, you’re a proper treat, you are. Teach you how to light a fire? Bless your little heart, I’ll come up to Belgravia and light your fire for you, if that’s what you want. Or you can always come and camp with me.” His eyes twinkled with glee at the thought of this. “Can you imagine their faces if they knew that the thirty-fourth in line to the throne was living in a semidetached in Hornchurch?”
I laughed too. “Wouldn’t that be fun? I might just take you up on it, except that it would only make the queen speed up with her arrangements to ship me to some royal aunt as a lady-in-waiting. She thinks I need training in how to run a great house.”
“Well, I expect you do.”
“I’d die of boredom, Granddad. You can’t imagine how dreary it is, after all the excitement of a season, all those coming-out parties and balls, and now I’ve no idea what to do next.”
The kettle started to whistle and he made the tea. “Get yourself a job,” he said.
“A job?”
“You’re a bright girl. You’ve been well educated. What’s to stop you?”
“I don’t think they’d approve.”
“They’re not supporting you, are they? And they don’t own you. It’s not like you’re taking public money to carry out royal duties. You go out and have fun, my girl. Find out what you’d really like to do with your life.”
“I’m sorely tempted,” I said. “Girls are doing all kinds of jobs these days, aren’t they?”
“Of course they are. Only don’t go on the stage like your mum. She was a nice girl, properly brought up, until she got those stars in her eyes and went on the stage.”
“She certainly made a success of it, didn’t she? Bags of money and married a duke?”
“Yes, but at what price, ducks? At what price? Sold her soul. That’s what she did. Now she’s clinging on to those good looks for dear life, dreading the day that no man is interested in her anymore.”
“She bought you this house, didn’t she?”
“I’m not saying she hasn’t been generous. I’m just saying it changed her whole personality. Now it’s like talking to a stranger.”
“I agree,” I said, “but then I never really knew her. I gather she’s with a German industrial baron now.”
“Ruddy German,” he muttered. “Pardon my language, love, but just talking about them gets my goat. And that new chap, that Hitler. He’s up to no good, I can tell you. He’ll want watching, you mark my words.”
“He may be a good thing for them. Help get the country back on its feet again,” I suggested.
He scowled. “That country deserves to stay where it is. It don’t need no encouragement. You didn’t serve in the trenches.”
“Neither did you,” I reminded him.
“No, but your uncle Jimmy did. Only eighteen he was and he never came home.”
I hadn’t even known I had an uncle Jimmy. Nobody had ever told me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was a horrible war. Let’s pray there will never be another one.”
“There won’t, as long as the old king stays alive. If he kicks the bucket, all bets are off.”
He put a large plate of food in front of me and for a while I was silent.
“Blimey,” he said. “You can certainly knock that back. You been starving yourself?”
“Living on baked beans,” I confessed. “I haven’t found a grocer’s shop yet in Belgravia. Everyone has things delivered. And frankly I don’t have any money.”
“Then you’d better come down here and have Sunday dinner with me. I expect I could manage a roast and two veg—got lovely cabbages in the back garden, and of course later in the summer there will be beans. Can’t do any better than that, even at your fancy posh restaurants in the West End.”
“I’d love to, Granddad,” I said and I realized that he needed me as much as I needed him at the moment. He was lonely too.
“I don’t like the thought of you living in that big house all on your own,” he said, shaking his head. “Some funny types up in the Smoke these days. Not quite right in the head after the war. Don’t you go opening the door to any strangers, you hear? I’ve a good mind to get out my old uniform and patrol up and down outside your front door.”
I laughed. “I’d like to see that. I’ve never seen you in uniform.” I knew that my grandfather had been a policeman once, but he’d given it up long ago.
He gave a wheezy laugh. “I’d like to see it too. My jacket would never button up around my midd
le these days, and my old feet would never hold up in those boots. But I still don’t like the thought of you trying to survive in that big place on your own.”
“I’ll be fine, Granddad.” I patted his hand. “So teach me how to light a fire. Teach me how to do the washing up. I need to know everything.”
“Lighting a fire starts with going down the coal’ole,” he said.
“The coal’ole?”
“Yes, you know. They pour in the coal from a manhole on the street and you shovel it out through a little door at the bottom. I’m sure you’ll find that’s the way it’s done at your place. But it’s usually dark and dirty and there are bound to be spiders. I can’t see you wanting to do that.”
“If it’s a choice between getting dirty and freezing, I’ll choose getting dirty.”
He turned to look back at me. “I must say I like your spunk. Just like your mother. She’d let nothing stand in her way either.” He broke off with another fit of noisy coughing.
“That cough sounds terrible,” I said. “Have you been to a doctor?”
“On and off all winter,” he said.
“And what does he say it is?”
“Bronchitis, love. All this smoke in the air and the winter fogs are bad for me. He says I should give myself a nice holiday at the seaside.”
“Good idea.”
He sighed. “It takes money to go on holiday, sweetheart. Right now I’m not exactly flush. All those doctor visits last winter. And the price of coal going up. I’m trying to live off the little bit I’ve got put by.”
“You’re not getting a police pension?”
“A very small one. I wasn’t on the force long enough, see. Got meself involved in a little bit of a fracas, coshed over the head, and then I started getting dizzy spells, so that was that.”
“Then ask Mother to help you out. I’m sure she’s got plenty.”
His face hardened. “I’m not taking German money. I’d rather starve first.”
“I’m sure she has money of her own. She’s been with an awful lot of rich men in her time.”
“She might have managed to put a bit away, but she’ll need that for herself when her looks finally go and she’s on her own. Besides, she was good enough to buy your grandma and me this house. She don’t owe me nothing. And I’m not asking anyone for charity.”
I noticed as I carried my plate across to the sink that the kitchen did look bare. An awful thought struck me that he had given me his last two eggs.
“I’ll get a job, Granddad,” I said. “And I’ll learn to cook and then you can come to dine with me at Rannoch House.”
That started him laughing again. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.
I felt terrible as I rode the train back to London. My grandfather needed money badly and I couldn’t help him. Now I’d have to get a job in a hurry. It seemed that it wasn’t as easy to escape from family as I had thought.
It was a bright, warm evening and I was loath to go back to that dreary, empty house with the furniture covered in dust sheets and rooms that never warmed up enough to be comfortable. I got off at South Kensington and started to walk up the Brompton Road. Knightsbridge was still bustling with elegant couples on their way to an evening’s entertainment. You’d never know that there was a depression and that a good portion of the world was lining up for a bowl of soup. Having grown up in such privileged circles, I’d only just become aware of the terrible injustices in the world and they worried me. If I’d been a lady with a comfortable private income, I’d have volunteered at those soup kitchens. However, I was now also one of the unemployed poor. I might be needing that bread and soup myself. Of course, I realized that it was different for me. I only had to agree to go and live with an elderly princess and I’d be dining well and drinking the best wines, without a care in the world. Except that now the thought was creeping into my consciousness that one should care. One should be doing something worthwhile.
I paused as I passed Harrods’s windows. All those stylish dresses and shoes! My only attempts at keeping up with the latest fashion had been during my season, when I had received a meager clothing allowance, studied magazines to see what the bright young things about town were wearing this season, and then had the gamekeeper’s wife run me up copies. Mrs. MacTavish was good with her needle but they were poor imitations at best. Oh, to have the money to sail into Harrods and choose an outfit, just like that!
I was lost in reverie when a taxi pulled up at the curb, a door slammed, and a voice exclaimed, “Georgie! It is you. I thought I spotted you and I made the taxi driver stop. What a surprise. I didn’t know you were in town.”
There before me, looking dazzlingly glamorous, was my former schoolfriend Belinda Warburton-Stoke. She was wearing an emerald green satin opera cape—the kind where the sides are joined together to make the sleeves, thus making most people look like penguins. Her hair was styled in a sleek black cap with a jaunty hair ornament on one side, complete with ridiculous ostrich feather that bobbed as she ran toward me.
We rushed to embrace. “How lovely to see you, Belinda. You’re looking fabulous. I would have hardly recognized you.”
“One has to keep up appearances or the customers won’t come.”
“Customers?”
“My dear, haven’t you heard? I’ve started my own business. I’m a fashion designer.”
“Are you? How is it going?”
“Frightfully well. They are positively fighting to have the chance to wear my creations.”
“How wonderful for you. I’m envious.”
“Well, I had to do something. I didn’t have a royal destiny, like you.”
“My royal destiny doesn’t seem too promising at the moment.”
She pulled out some coins to pay the taxi driver, then linked arms with me and started to march me up the Brompton Road. “So what are you doing in town?”
“I bolted, taking after my mother, I suppose. I couldn’t stand Scotland a minute longer. ”
“Nobody can, darling. Those awful loos with the tartan wallpaper! I have a permanent migraine when I’m there. Were you on your way somewhere? Because if not, come back and have a drink at my place.”
“You’re living near here?”
“Right next to the park. Terribly avant-garde. I’ve bought myself a dear little mews cottage and done it up and I’m living there alone with just my maid. Mother is furious, but I am twenty-one and I’ve come into my own money so there’s not much she can do, is there?”
I allowed myself to be swept up Brompton Road, along Knightsbridge, and into a cobbled back alley where the former mews were now apparently transformed into living quarters. Belinda’s cottage looked quaint on the outside but inside was completely modern—all white walls, streamlined, Bakelite and chrome with a cubist painting on the wall, possibly even a Picasso. She sat me on a hard purple chair, then went across to a generously stocked sideboard. “Let me make you one of my cocktails. I’m famous for them, you know.”
With that she poured dangerous amounts from any number of bottles into a shaker, finished them off with something bright green, then poured the shaken result into a glass and dropped in a couple of maraschino cherries. “Get that down you and you’ll feel wonderful,” she said. She took a seat opposite me and crossed her legs, revealing a long expanse of silk stocking and just a hint of gray silk petticoat.
The first sip took my breath away. I tried not to cough as I looked up and smiled. “Very interesting,” I said. “I don’t have much opportunity to drink cocktails.”
“Do you remember those awful experiments creating cocktails in the dorm at Les Oiseaux?” Belinda laughed as she took a long drink from her own glass. “It’s a wonder we didn’t knock ourselves out.”
“We almost did. Remember that French girl, Monique? She was sick all night.”
“So she was.” Belinda’s smile faded. “It already seems so long ago, like a dream, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” I agreed. �
�A beautiful dream.”
She looked at me sharply. “So do I gather that life isn’t too wonderful for you at the moment?”
“Life is pretty bloody, if you really want to know,” I said.
The cocktail was obviously already having an effect. “Bloody” wasn’t a word I habitually used. “If I don’t come up with something to do with myself soon, I’ll be shipped out to a stately home in the country until the royal kin come up with some awful foreign prince for me to marry.”