‘Don’t be so negative, Carrie. I will get to meet them – and they’ll all be massively useful to me. As today is our last regular day here, have we to finish off with a fresh pot of tea and some vanilla slices?’
She nodded and smiled, and hoped he wouldn’t see how very much she was going to miss him.
He did see, though. Not for the first time he wondered if Carrie had secret hopes that one day he would propose to her. It was, he knew, what the villagers of Outhwaite expected him to do. Sometimes he almost expected it was something he would do, but although she was an integral part of his life and he loved her dearly and knew he’d be capable of killing anyone who harmed Carrie, he didn’t love her in the sexual, all-consuming, gut-wrenching, soul-destroying way he loved Thea.
Thea.
Trying not to think about her was an impossibility. He thought about her all the time. Even Rosie, at her glorious, sexiest best, hadn’t obliterated Thea from his thoughts; and moving to London – where he would be nearer to her – certainly wasn’t going to do so. Somehow, though, he was going to have to maintain the stand he had taken up the night of her coming-out ball – which was that the class divide between them was too deep to be overcome. It was something common sense had told him, even before passion had sprung up between them like a forest fire, but until the night of her coming-out ball it had been something he’d preferred not to face.
He pushed his cup and saucer away. If he wanted to reach London in time to sleep at the Fleet Street pub that was to be his address until he found a more permanent one, he had to set off now.
‘I have to be off, Carrie.’ He dug a piece of paper out of his pocket with the name and address of the pub on it. ‘I’ll write, and you can write to me here.’
She took the piece of paper and put it in her handbag.
‘Any problem you have, love – anything, at any time – let me know and I’ll be back in Yorkshire as fast as light to deal with it. Understand?’
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, knowing that if she did her voice would be unsteady.
He didn’t wait for the waitress to come with the bill. Pushing his chair away from the table, he simply put more than enough money down on the table and rose to his feet.
Carrie followed him out of the cafe and into the market place. Hal’s little car was parked where he always parked it and, as they approached it, she could see a shabby suitcase on the rear seat. It had been secured by a leather strap and the initials HC had been painted in white near the handle.
Her heart felt as if it was being squeezed very tightly.
‘Is that all you are taking with you?’ she asked, trying to sound jolly and teasing, and not let her true feelings show.
‘It’s all I have and all I need.’
He opened the car door. This was it. He was finally leaving Yorkshire behind him. Though Hal knew he shouldn’t be, when his leaving would make such a large hole in Carrie’s life, he was exultant. He was going to wring the last drop of political gossip out of the contacts he had, and he was going to use those contacts to make even more influential contacts. One day he wouldn’t be pussyfooting around the Evening News’s political editor. One day he would be the political editor. He was going to make a name for himself. Most of all, when it came to socialist politics, he was going to make a difference to the world. Come hell or high water, he was going to do his best to make it a place where equality counted.
Before getting into the car he gave Carrie an almighty bear-hug. ‘I’m only a day’s drive away, Carrie love. In a few days’ time Thea, Olivia and Violet will be at Gorton Hall and Roz will have joined them.’
He didn’t say goodbye. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
Neither could Carrie.
He slid behind the wheel and switched on the ignition.
With a bright, strained smile she stepped away from the car. ‘Look after yourself, Hal. Don’t be too naughty with the Fleet Street barmaids.’
He cracked with laughter, put the car into gear, gave her a goodbye wave and drove off. In the seconds before he turned out of the market place he looked in his driving mirror for a last glimpse of her.
She was standing in front of the market cross, holding a handbag that had once been her granny’s. Now that she thought he could no longer see her, her smile had died and, though he couldn’t be sure, he was almost certain there were tears in her eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
Zephiniah was sitting at her kidney-shaped dressing table in the master bedroom at Mount Street. In forty minutes’ time she and Gilbert would travel the short distance in the Fenton Rolls-Royce to 10 Downing Street, where they were to dine with the prime minister and his wife. It would be her first visit to Number 10 and her sense of satisfaction was dizzying. Among the other guests at dinner would be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, and his wife, Clementine; Lord and Lady Dalwhinnie, whom she had already met; Viscount Hubholme; the Dowager Duchess of Merion, a relation of Mrs Baldwin’s; and an American, Mr Maxwell Bradley, a member of the House of Representatives.
When Gilbert had told her an American would be one of the guests she’d quirked a sleek, interested eyebrow.
‘Max is aide to one of America’s two representatives on the Dawes Reparation Commission’s Committee,’ he’d said. ‘It’s something both Hubholme and I have a deep interest in.’
He had kissed the nape of her neck and then said, ‘Max is also acquainted with Rozalind. I rather think wedding bells will be ringing before the end of the year.’
Zephiniah’s scarlet-painted fingernails clicked like castanets as she tapped the glass-topped surface of her dressing table. She hadn’t yet met Rozalind, who would be arriving in London in a few days’ time, but she was fervently hoping that when she did, she would find her to be far more like Olivia than like Thea and Violet, both of whom she found incomprehensible. Violet, being only sixteen, she could handle. Though Violet didn’t know it yet, she was about to be sent to a finishing school in Switzerland. No such easy solution was available where Thea was concerned.
Zephiniah continued drumming her fingernails on the glass surface. She wasn’t a woman who was easily shocked, but when Thea had announced baldly that she was a socialist who believed that all hereditary titles, such as her father’s, should be abolished, Zephiniah had been astounded. How on earth could she subscribe to such preposterousness, when her father was both a viscount and a minister in Mr Baldwin’s Conservative government? And why hadn’t Gilbert thought to tell her of his daughter’s radically eccentric political views?
‘Surely it must be damaging to your career to have a daughter who is a member of the Independent Labour Party and goes to meetings and sings the Internationale?’ she had said, unable to understand why Gilbert hadn’t put a halt to Thea’s idiocy when it had still been in its early stages. ‘It’s the kind of thing that could put an instant stop to you being talked of as a future prime minister.’
‘There are quite a few men ahead of me in that race,’ he’d said, both amused and pleased that she thought such a thing a genuine possibility. ‘And I respect Thea’s passion for what she believes in. Tolerance in all things is one of my watchwords.’
It wasn’t one of Zephiniah’s watchwords, but she’d had more sense than to say so.
Her mouth, painted the same searing scarlet as her nails, tightened. The problem with allowing her true feelings to show, where Thea was concerned, was that the Prince of Wales counted her a personal friend – and Zephiniah had no desire to fall out with a stepdaughter who was on such close terms with Prince Edward.
Olivia, too, of course, had an ‘in’ where royalty was concerned, but her friendship was with the less glamorous Duke and Duchess of York. As a stepdaughter, Olivia had so far presented her with no unwelcome surprises. She was gratifyingly presentable and stylish, her only concern her forthcoming wedding to Dieter von Starhemberg. Olivia wanted it to be as lavish as possible, and as Zephiniah – mindful that society’s
eyes would be on her as well – wanted exactly the same thing, the two of them were getting along remarkably well.
Thinking about her stepdaughters brought another thought to mind, and she stopped drumming her nails. The indisputably good thing about Thea, Olivia and Violet was that they didn’t have a brother. Gilbert had no male heir. When they had a son – and she was determined that she and Gilbert would have a son – their son would inherit both Gorton Hall and the title.
There was a perfunctory tap on the door and Gilbert, dressed for the evening in white tie and tails, entered the room. She didn’t turn her head, and he smiled at her through the looking glass.
‘I’ve never known any woman look so ravishing in black,’ he said with stark truthfulness.
‘Thank you, darling. I dismissed Angelique without asking her to fasten my necklace. Would you mind?’
She wore a rich black satin gown, very décolleté and lavishly trimmed with black lace. Her hair was the same gleaming black and framed her face in fashionably rigid waves. Her skin was, thanks to rice-powder, breathtakingly white, her eyes night-dark. The effect was purposely dramatic. Zephiniah liked there to be a concerted intake of breath when she entered a room, and knew exactly how to ensure there was one.
Still seated and with her back to him, she handed him the diamond necklace that had been his wedding gift to her.
Carefully he slid it around her neck and fastened it. Then, with quickening heartbeats, he rested his hands gently on her shoulders, holding her gaze through the looking glass. The diamonds glowed like live things against her flawless skin, drawing his eyes down to snowy breasts lapped by tantalizing froths of black lace.
He wasn’t a lascivious man. He had been nineteen when he had married Blanche and his sexual experience before marriage had been limited. It was almost obligatory for a young man of his class to be initiated into the mysteries of sex by a prostitute, and his initiation had taken place in Paris, when he was eighteen. He had been grateful for the experience, but by then he had already met Blanche and, wanting to keep his body clean for her, had made no return visits.
Never once, not even during the war when he had been in Flanders and any diversion from the hell of the trenches would have been welcome, had he been unfaithful to her, and for a long time after her death he had been faithful to her memory.
The spasmodic affairs that had then followed had been discreet and never earth-moving. No one had replaced his beloved Blanche, and he’d believed that no one ever could. Then, on a brief visit she had made to Britain after her husband’s death, he had met Zephiniah.
For the first time in his life he’d understood what the phrase coup de foudre truly meant. It had been like stepping off a cliff edge. Though no one could have been more different in personality from Blanche, Zephiniah’s hourglass figure, exoticism, vitality and sheer sexual allure had mesmerized him. Even before their formal introduction was over, he had been her willing prisoner, totally in thrall to her. It had been like nothing he had ever previously experienced – and he’d been determined not to let her slip through his fingers.
His intimate life with Blanche had been perfect and passionate – but it hadn’t been charged with Zephiniah’s effortless eroticism. Every married woman he knew had a black lace-trimmed evening gown in her wardrobe – and never before had he regarded the lace as being erotic. Now, though, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it.
Zephiniah knew very well what he was feeling and thinking. Slowly, knowing how it would shock and arouse him, she slipped her hand inside the neckline of her low-cut gown and lifted the heavy, full lushness of her right breast free.
Her nipple was large and dark and silky.
He sucked in his breath, desire flooding his eyes, as she had known it would.
There was no time to take advantage of his arousal. She wasn’t going to arrive at Number 10 with mussed hair and surrounded by the scent of recent sex.
‘We haven’t time,’ she said firmly, adjusting her clothing as his fingers dug deep into her shoulders.
Always a gentleman, Gilbert gave a heavy sigh of acceptance.
Aware that his being so easy to handle could easily become boring, and wondering what she would do when it did, Zephiniah rose to her feet.
‘I think we’ve just time for a very quick cocktail before we leave, darling. What would you like? A whiskey sour or a gin-and-French?’
Later that evening the talk across Number 10’s dinner table ricocheted from the faults and failings of the former prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to the present state of Russia and the danger posed by the Bolsheviks; from the Prince of Wales and speculation as to whether his relationship with Mrs Freda Dudley Ward had finally petered into nothing more than friendship, to the identity of her possible successor.
‘An American?’ Viscount Hubholme suggested as a footman refilled his glass of hock. ‘The Prince of Wales likes Americans.’
‘But then so do we all,’ Ottoline Dalwhinnie said, with a naughty look towards Maxwell Bradley.
A ripple of laughter ran around the table.
Mr Baldwin, whom Zephiniah found to be less imposing than she had expected, said drily, ‘He’s certainly always trying to go to America. And Americans love him. Isn’t that so, Max?’
Max gave a wry smile. ‘It certainly is, Prime Minister. New York is still recovering from its euphoria over his last visit, two years ago.’
Zephiniah hoped the euphoria she was experiencing would last just as long. For the first time in her life everything was going just as she wanted it to. She was married to a man who was not only of her own class, but was a leading political figure; a man spoken of as being a future prime minister. Her past mistakes were behind her, buried deep in Austria and Argentina.
The conversation around the table had moved from the Prince of Wales to Italy and Mussolini.
‘Of course, the woman who attempted to assassinate him is being deported back to Britain,’ Mr Baldwin was saying, in a voice that indicated how much his patience had been tried by the recent events in Rome. ‘Why a fifty-year-old Irish woman would want to shoot him in the head, I can’t imagine.’
‘Mad, I expect,’ Lord Dalwhinnie said. ‘I understand Il Duce was most put out when he discovered it was a woman who had tried to kill him. Felt it insulting, I shouldn’t wonder.’
There was more laughter.
Zephiniah’s thoughts were on neither Mussolini nor mad Irish women. They were on a registration-of-births vault in Vienna. Over the last fifteen years she’d often thought of how the notification of her illegitimate daughter’s birth – and her daughter’s subsequent adoption certificate – might be removed from Austrian public records. No method had ever occurred to her and, until now, she had never perceived it as being a pressing problem.
Only two people had ever known of the disaster that had ruined her life when she’d been a debutante – and that had been her mother, and the aunt who had taken her to Vienna and lived with her there throughout seven months of her pregnancy and for two weeks after her daughter’s birth. Both her mother and her aunt were now dead and, although the father of her child wasn’t dead, he had simply been relieved at the outcome and didn’t count. Her secret was safe – unless someone should trawl through the registration of births in Vienna in 1911, looking for a certificate bearing her name as the mother of the registered child. And who would do that? The answer was that nobody would. What was past was past and would never resurface.
‘Someone should shoot that upstart ruffian Hitler,’ Viscount Hubholme was saying. ‘He may still be virtually unknown outside Bavaria, but mark my words, I’ve heard the man address a public meeting and he’s Trouble with a capital T.’
‘He’s not so much trouble that he can’t be contained,’ Winston said phlegmatically ‘His party can only come to power if he gets enough votes – and the German people aren’t going to vote for an Austrian you so well describe as being an upstart and a ruffian. He’s tried a putsch once, and it failed. A seco
nd attempt at an armed overthrow of the rightful government will get him nowhere. From now on, if he’s ever going to come to power, he’s going to have to rely on votes, and outside Bavaria no votes will be forthcoming.’
It occurred to Zephiniah that if she was ever going to be able to take part in the kind of conversations now taking place, she was going to have to become much more knowledgeable about the current political situations in France, Italy and Germany.
As the present conversation was one she couldn’t yet take an intelligent part in, her thoughts slipped back to the ghastly hideousness of the summer of 1911.
When she had returned to England with her aunt, leaving behind her a baby girl who had been adopted by a childless Viennese couple, she had done so believing she would be able to pick up the threads of her life as if they had never been broken.
Her mother had instantly put an end to that daydream. ‘You’re damaged goods,’ she had said harshly. ‘Don’t think that just because no one knows about the child, the child’s father hasn’t boasted about how easy a conquest you were. Every deb’s delight of the Season will know by now, and there will be no marriage proposals coming your way. Not one.’
To her incredulity, her mother had been proved right. No debutante of that year’s Season was more popular with the opposite sex, and no debutante was more obviously destined to remain very firmly on the shelf.
Then she’d met Reggie. Reggie Pyke was the middle-aged youngest son of the Earl of Warham. The family was from the Scottish Borders and, when Zephiniah met him, Reggie, who had sailed financially too close to the wind just once too often, was about to emigrate to Argentina, where he intended breeding polo ponies.
‘I intend mixing thoroughbreds with Criollas, the local horses,’ he’d said enthusiastically. ‘They have the best endurance of any horse breed in the world. I’m on to a sure-fire winner. I can feel it in my blood and in my bones.’
A Season of Secrets Page 21