by Josa Young
With a niggle of guilt, she had a vision of herself moping dowdily dressing-gowned in the cabin while he went to the main deck looking eager in black tie. She imagined him wading into a sea of coiffed women with bright red lips in strapless frocks with great ration-defying swathes of skirt below and little or nothing on top. She saw their ankles in her mind’s eye taut and tiny above very high heels. It was so vivid that it made her gasp. What on earth did she think she was doing, preparing to let him venture among the serpents all alone in that paradise?
‘There are some lovely dress shops on board,’ Andrews was saying. ‘Lots of leisure to titivate your wardrobe.’ Sarah would like to present her own naked shoulders like a bouquet bursting from strapless silver satin. She wasn’t at home any more, she had three days on board and then a month with Arthur in America. It was up to her to make sure he remembered their wonderful time together while they were apart. That decided her. With a great tearing wrench inside, she said, ‘Yes, darling, that does sound fun. Now, Melissa, you go to Andrews, and you can get to know each other a bit better.’
The baby whimpered, her blue eyes filling with tears. Treachery, Sarah’s mind screamed, but she knew she would have to be brave. She handed her over, detaching miniature fingers that snatched at her like brambles on a country walk, and turned away when the small face went red with indignation and the rosebud lips opened to wail.
She said, ‘Shall we go and have a stroll on deck, Arthur? See the last of England?’
She saw the delight in his face, and he made a comic little caper, taking her arm and leading her from the cabin. She decided not to look back, whatever the roaring, over which she heard Andrews saying, ‘There there poppet, they’ll soon be back, but we must let Mummy and Daddy have some fun too.’
Indeed we must.
She’d been very foolish to try Arthur’s patience for so long, often sleeping in the nursery instead of with him. Being cool and unfriendly, making excuses about not trusting babysitters when he had tried to suggest going out dancing, or for dinner or even just to the local cinema. And he had gone to parties without her, his exasperation not always perfectly hidden.
Well, Melissa could manage without her, but Arthur wouldn’t have to any more. The baby would have her mother to herself soon enough. There was warmth in the pit of her stomach, such as she had not felt for years, at the thought of what was to come. She welcomed it and strode forth laughing into the chilly January air at her husband’s side.
Later that evening the ship began to roll, gently at first and then quite vigorously. Their table in the empty Balmoral Restaurant had a dampened cloth and raised sides to prevent their dinner from taking flight. The wine was served in a decanter with a broad, stable bottom. The menu was lengthy and in French, and Sarah enjoyed every mouthful. The wine warmed her.
Back in their cabin, they found Melissa fast asleep in her sea cot that swayed like a hammock with the movement of the vast sea, as Andrews sat in one of the armchairs knitting, oblivious to the rough weather. The stewardess rose to greet them and reassured them that Melissa had settled soon after they had left.
The bunks were as wide as a normal single bed, one above the other. Sarah lay waiting for her husband in one of her silk trousseau nighties. The winceyette would not see the light of day again until after he had gone back to England. After cleaning his teeth in the little bathroom, he checked that Melissa was asleep, before coming across and slipping off his dressing gown. She saw his body in the faint light of a shaded lamp, and wanted him with an intensity of love and desire that surprised her. He slipped in beside her and began to kiss her. Memories of how it had been – before the tension of her failure to conceive immediately had spoilt their love making – flooded into her mind.
‘Darling, I think we shouldn’t risk a pregnancy, do you mind?’ He dealt with the French letter, and then he was within her where he belonged and her body folding around his like a flower around a bee.
The ship lurched. They had failed to put up the safety rail and rolled right off the bunk on to the bedside rug with a thump. She gasped at the impact and froze, expecting Lissy to wake and wail but all was quiet. Arthur seemed unperturbed by the change in altitude, and they were together, riding the waves until she was trembling, feeling deep within a rolling boil of tingling bliss. Arthur held her tightly, sighing with relief that he had his wife back at last. They lay cooling on the shifting deck, legs tangled, arms flung out. Then they turned to face each other, laughing and kissing.
‘Better get you back into bed,’ said Arthur.
‘Stay there, please, just for a moment.’
She wrapped her arms around him, looking into his grey eyes. ‘I love you, Dr Reeves,’ she said.
‘And I love you too, Mrs Reeves.’
Five
Albert
March 1954
The letter arrived on Monday morning while Albert and his mother Pearl were having breakfast, before she went to work and he to school. It was official looking, and addressed to Albert Hayes Esq. Mrs Hayes suspected it was for her late husband, who had also been called Albert, as her son was only thirteen.
‘Open it for me, would you, Bert? I think it’s probably meant for your father.’
She pushed herself up from the table and walked across to the sink, looking out of the window over their small garden. Bert noticed that she moved more slowly than usual.
He tried to push his thumb under the envelope flap, but found it so stiff that he picked up a knife from the table to slit it open instead. Inside was a letter topped with the engraved name and address of a solicitor’s partnership in Belgravia, London. This meant nothing to Bert, so he scanned down to see what it said.
‘Who’s it from?’ his mother asked, still with her back to him.
‘It says Jenkins and Jenkins, solicitors, at the top.’
She turned around, making as if to snatch it from him, and then hesitated. ‘No,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘You read it to me.’
Dear Mr Hayes,
We are the solicitors and trustees for the title and estates of Baron Mount-Hey of Hey in the County of Sussex, and we wish to disclose some important information pertaining to yourself, following the death on the ninth of June 1953 of Baillie John Hayes, thirteenth Baron Mount-Hey.
As the situation is complicated and delicate, we would like you to attend our offices in London at your earliest convenience. Please telephone or write for an appointment.
If you have any family papers such as birth, marriage and death certificates to hand, please do bring them with you if it is not inconvenient.
I remain yours sincerely
C. Jenkins
Senior Partner
Bert glanced up at his mother, who looked pale. It must be because the letter was addressed to his father, who had died when he was a baby.
‘Well,’ she said, slowly. ‘That is the most extraordinary thing. I knew Albert had grand relations. But I never heard of any lords, or at least he never mentioned any.’
‘What shall we do?’ Bert was bewildered. He lived with his mother in Eastbourne, where he went to the local grammar school, pedalling around the town on a heavy old butcher’s bicycle delivering groceries on Saturdays and in the holidays. They kept very quiet. Even though she had been widowed for more than ten years, Mrs Hayes had never looked at anyone else and their social life was confined to the family and her fellow employees at her parents’ grocery business.
‘I suppose we’d better go up to London. You must come with me as you’ll be the person they want to see. Get me the writing paper and my pen, and I’ll reply for you.’
Bert went over to the little desk and fetched his mother’s fountain pen and some sheets of blue Basildon Bond. As she used the hand-held press to indent their address into the top of the paper, he went and fetched his satchel, kissed his mother’s cheek and left for school.
Mrs Hayes, left alone, wrote a brief note informing Mr Jenkins that her husband Albert had died in a bombing
raid on Eastbourne on 8 December 1942. She explained that he had left a son, also called Albert, who was now thirteen. She added a convenient date and time that they could both come, once the Easter holidays had started, and that she would bring the family certificates with her.
Grief ambushed her when she remembered him dying like that. Albert, who worked as a buyer for her parents, had taken a day off to do the family’s Christmas shopping. She was due to go with him but little Bert had the croup, so she was at home in the kitchen holding him near a steaming kettle to soothe his seal-like bark. When the sirens wailed there was the familiar hollow fear and then the sound of bombs falling. Grabbing the kettle, she had hurried her son and herself under the Morrison shelter that doubled as their dining table.
The police came after the all-clear had sounded. Her Albert was one of nineteen killed. She had collapsed. And now this, a voice calling out to her from an unknown family hinterland. People she had never met and knew nothing about, but clearly very different from anyone she had ever imagined. Could it be an unexpected legacy? Pearl felt pleased on behalf of her son. She herself would be provided for by her parents.
Her Albert had just been a nice eligible man as far as she was concerned. Privately educated, but not too smart to court the grocer’s daughter. His parents had lived in India, his father managing a tea plantation in Darjeeling. He’d been sent back to England to school, before returning to live in Calcutta, working as a trainee tea trader. But he’d become ill with tuberculosis and returned to England to be treated at the South Downs Sanatorium in the clean, salubrious air above Eastbourne. Pearl had met him at the annual Sanatorium Christmas dance before the war. While he was recovering in England, his parents had both died, leaving enough to buy the newly married couple a decent house in a nice area. He had been a kind man and Pearl Hayes had loved him dearly, but that was long ago now.
A week later, mother and son were on their way by train to London as early in the morning as they could manage. They walked up from Victoria to a tall white stuccoed house in Elizabeth Street. The brass plate on the area railings told them it was the offices of Jenkins & Jenkins, Solicitors. They went up the steps and rang the bell. A young woman dressed in a smart navy costume answered the door. Pearl gave their names and they were asked to wait in a room to the right of the hall.
After about ten minutes, during which Bert just had time to take The Golden Hawk out of his satchel and read a couple of pages, and Pearl had a flick through Modern Woman, the young woman came back and said, ‘You can come up now.’
They both stood and followed her up the stairs into an office that occupied the first floor front room. Pearl had always imagined a lawyer’s office to be dark and full of old books, but this was quite different. The curtains were a bright abstract pattern of yellow, blue and white, and there was a warm blue fitted carpet covering the floor. A sea-green linen-covered sofa and armchairs were grouped around a coffee table in front of the white marble fireplace. The solicitor was a surprise too. Pearl saw a woman wearing tortoiseshell spectacles, elegant in a fitted black dress, her violet-rinsed grey hair smoothed into a French pleat, who rose from behind a modern desk of light-coloured wood. Picking up a file, she approached, smiling warmly.
‘Mrs Hayes? Albert? I’m Mrs Jenkins. Good morning, do please come over and take a seat.’
Pearl led Bert over to the sofa. Mrs Jenkins waited until they were comfortable and then seated herself on one of the armchairs.
‘Would you like tea, Mrs Hayes? And Albert? A soft drink?’
They nodded, and the young secretary who had been waiting by the door left the room.
‘Now, Mrs Hayes, do I understood from your letter that you were not aware of your late husband’s Mount-Hey connections?’
‘No, Mrs Jenkins, I had never heard that name before. I met Mr Hayes in 1937 at the South Downs Sanatorium. He was one of the lucky ones who recovered from his TB. His parents were both dead by the time we married, and he never talked about his wider family. It didn’t seem important.’
‘I understand, and in fact if this century had not been plagued with war, you would have lived out your lives unaffected by his family connections in any way. But two wars in rapid succession decimated many of the old families, particularly ones like the Hayes which don’t seem to have been good at producing male heirs in the direct line. Surprisingly common, I’m afraid.’
The secretary came in with a tray, and put it down on the low table in front of Pearl and Bert. There was a pot of tea, milk jug and one cup, and a glass bottle of Coca Cola with a straw sticking out of it.
Mrs Jenkins indicated that Pearl should help herself to tea and opened the file on her lap.
‘Thank you for coming to see me today. I’m sorry for approaching you out of the blue like that, and I hope it hasn’t been inconvenient to come to London, but I felt we needed to proceed quickly.’
Pearl murmured, ‘No, it’s fine now it’s the holidays, thank you.’
Mrs Jenkins smiled again and consulted the notes in the file: ‘Now this is a bit complicated, so bear with me.
‘I mentioned in my letter that your husband was related to Baillie John Hayes, thirteenth Baron Mount-Hey? He died unmarried and in extreme old age last year having inherited the title during the war when his much younger cousin Robert Langdon Hayes, twelfth Baron, was killed at the Café de Paris in 1941. You may remember the case? A bomb came down through the ventilation shaft and exploded on the dance floor. Everyone believed they were safe underground. So sad.’
Pearl nodded.
‘Anyway, the twelfth Baron had been young and was expected to marry and take over the house and estate, having inherited as a child during the Great War from his second cousin Robert Baillie Hayes, eleventh Baron Mount-Hey, who was killed at Arras in 1917. Robert’s brother and heir, John Francis Hayes, was killed before him in 1916, during the Somme offensive. Neither of them had time to marry or have any children.’
Pearl nodded again, and Mrs Jenkins continued, ‘Now, as far as we have traced it back, and as trustees we have been in touch with the College of Heralds, your husband was a distant cousin of the late Lord Mount-Hey, and almost definitely his heir by descent from a second son of the eighth Baron.’
‘That’s dreadfully sad, so many men being killed in one family. But how on earth do they work out who is related to whom and who gets the title?’ Pearl asked.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Jenkins. ‘The original Baillie Hayes was one of the people who helped Charles II escape after the battle of Worcester. The Royalists passed the young king between them like a hot potato until he managed to get across to France. He never forgot the experience, and any of his rescuers who were still alive in 1660 when he returned to the throne were rewarded with titles, coats of arms and so on. But not money, sadly.
‘It’s a good story. Albert might like to hear it?’
‘Albert? Listen to Mrs Jenkins, please.’ She could see that he wasn’t paying attention but she knew he liked history stories as he borrowed them from the library all the time.
Mrs Jenkins continued: ‘On his last night in England, Charles stopped at the village of Hey, a few miles inland from Shoreham where a boat was waiting to take him to France. A troop of Parliamentary soldiers arrived at the inn where the King was hiding disguised as a servant. Baillie Hayes, who’d been wounded early in the war fighting as a Royalist, recognised the King while he was unsaddling his “master’s” horse in the stables. He couldn’t go back inside, so Baillie took him home to what was then Hey House, dressed them up as maidservants, and got him away to the sea both riding one of Baillie’s cart horses to disguise their height. They couldn’t stop laughing at each other which nearly got them caught.’
She paused while Bert snorted into his drink, and then continued, ‘The Mount-Hey coat of arms includes three petticoats – the King liked a joke.’
She extracted a piece of paper from the folder and passed it to Pearl and Bert. ‘Look, you can see it here.’
> They looked at the picture of a shield with three stylised white petticoats on a blue background, two above and one below, separated by a silver chevron. Above the shield, there was a knight’s helmet with a silver horse’s head on top.
Pearl looked up, bemused. ‘But how does all this concern Albert?’
Mrs Jenkins carried on explaining: ‘It works like this: when a peer dies without a male heir of his own body, you hop back up the generations to see if any previous holder of the title had second or third sons with legitimate male descendants, and that’s how we traced your husband. Although I do just need to see his birth certificate and also his parents’ and your marriage certificates.’
‘They should all be in this folder. These are the documents that Albert brought with him when we married, including papers sent back from India.’
Mrs Jenkins took the folder. ‘Do you have any questions at this point?’
Pearl said, ‘What does all this mean for us?’
‘Well, as your husband is deceased, we believe your son Albert may be the fourteenth Baron Mount-Hey of Hey, which is important for two reasons. First, he will have a seat in the House of Lords, and secondly, and less usually, the estate goes with the title as there are no closer male heirs currently living, although the law of entail has changed and I will need to check everything very carefully.’
Pearl digested this, and then said, ‘You mean Bert is a lord?’
‘In effect, yes. But I’m afraid there is no fortune as such. The main problem with all this was the repeated death duties as one heir after another died unmarried. There were few or no concessions in tax law for death in war, so all the outlying farms and some other property had to be sold off to pay them.’