Nicole rubbed her face with a handkerchief, and buttoned her coat. ‘I’m going now. I don’t know why I came. There’s nothing here ‒’
‘There used to be quite a lot here for me.’
‘You! If it hadn’t been for you ‒’
‘If it hadn’t been for me you’d have been growing up like all the other kids in your neighbourhood. Don’t forget it. The bad comes with the good, kid. I guess we’ll both miss Anna …’
She banged the door behind her and rang impatiently for the elevator. The man talked to her all the way down, and she didn’t hear a word he said, didn’t understand it. The driver was sitting in the lobby. ‘It got cold out there, Miss. You said only a little while.’ He opened the door for her. She didn’t make any reply, and she bent her head so that perhaps the red puffiness of her eyes wouldn’t be seen. All the way back to Connecticut she was silent. She decided that if William Osborne had telephoned Mother Mary Helena about her abrupt departure, and they wondered why she was so delayed, she would tell the truth, but only to Mother Mary Helena. She would say where she had been, but no more. Nothing and no one was going to make her talk about Lucky Nolan.
5
Anna Rainard moved on quickly from Chicago. She knew the letter to Lucky had been strongly worded, and that he usually respected what she said she must do. But there was a chance that this time he would not. So she moved on as far as San Francisco. She found a one-room efficiency apartment, put her savings into a chequeing account, sent a post office box address to William Osborne, and settled to wait until Henry Rainard’s estate should be probated and the promised money sent to her. It would not be long, William Osborne had said; the payment to Anna Rainard was one of the first expenses the estate had to settle. She did not take or look for any sort of a job. Instead she enrolled at a secretarial school and dutifully spent half her day learning to type, which she found easy, and the other half struggling with the crypsis of shorthand, which she found extremely difficult. Most of the evenings she spent reviewing and trying to memorize what she had studied that day. It was a lonely existence; she was at least twenty years older than any other student taking the course. She ate her lunchtime hamburger alone, and fended off questions about herself. Wanting to be alone, she was left alone. Sometimes, as the spring advanced, she rode the ferries on the bay, revelling in the sight of what she thought was a beautiful city, liking, strangely, the patches of fog that came down suddenly, wetly, loving the eerily mournful sound of the fog horns. She would have liked to stay in San Francisco; but she was afraid that she might be traced there. So when in May the money came through from William Osborne, in the form of a treasurer’s cheque, she paid her few bills, cashed the cheque which was in the name of Anna Rainard, and received in one-hundred-dollar bills from the hands of a vice-president of the bank, the price that Henry Rainard had been willing to place on her co-operation. The man was shocked that she took the money in cash and warned her about the dangers. She listened to him, nodded, and left. He sighed and supposed she was yet another whom the depression had taught to mistrust banks, and that it would go into shoe-boxes in a closet somewhere.
Anna moved on to Los Angeles, found another one-room efficiency apartment in a small apartment block in Santa Monica and set about enrolling in another secretarial school. Under the name of Anne Maynard she opened small accounts in banks scattered widely through Los Angeles, dividing up the money in amounts that would cause no particular attention to be paid to her. While she finished her secretarial course, she lived very economically, very sparsely. In San Francisco she had known the money she had saved would only hold out another few months. It had been a worrying time, when every job had hundreds of applicants, and the only thing she knew how to do was play the piano in some bar or nightclub ‒ the sort of place where people who had ever seen her at Lucky’s might recognize her, and report back to Lucky. So she held on to her money, and slaved at the shorthand. She finished the course first in the class in typing, and near the bottom in shorthand. Then she went looking for an office job. She found one, not very well paid, in the office of a small real estate broker who was just scraping by in these times when not many people were buying houses. She discovered the first day that no one was going to dictate at the rate of one hundred words a minute, and that the typing was minimal. She was left to mind the office and the telephone while her employer, Frank Hayward, was out driving round prospective clients. ‘I need a neat, smart-looking woman like you, Mrs Maynard,’ he had said frankly. ‘This town is full of kids who want to be in the movies, and I don’t want anyone like that in this office. Times are hard enough without having young chicks screw up the works getting messages wrong. Oh, and say, can you make any sense of cheque books? The office one’s in a mess, and so is my personal one. There’s a bit of back filing to be done when you can get around to it.’
She sat quietly day by day, taking what enquiries came in her correct shorthand, and typing them afterwards for Frank Hayward’s attention. In a little while she was able to read the listings of the houses for sale as well as her own notes, and to turn them up while she held a person on the other end of the telephone line. She studied the map of Los Angeles so that she knew every district as if she had to fight a battle across its terrain. She asked Frank Hayward questions, drawing on his twenty-odd years in this still-infant city. The day that Frank Hayward sold an expensive house in Bel-Air which she had first recommended to a client as ideal for his needs, he gave her a slice of the commission. ‘You’ve damn well earned it, Anne,’ he said. He looked around the office, now as neat as the woman sitting at the typewriter. ‘Don’t know how I managed to get anything done without you. Listen, I’m taking the wife to dinner tonight to celebrate. You come along. Time you met her …’
She went, but unwillingly. The darkly subdued restaurant on Sunset Strip depressed her, reminding her too much of what she had left behind at Lucky’s. She was uneasy, and the evening wasn’t much of a success. Frank Hayward’s wife, scrutinizing her, decided that it was a pity Mrs Maynard didn’t make more of herself. She talked to her husband in the car on the way home. ‘She could be stunning-looking if she tried. You know ‒ go to the hairdresser instead of dragging her hair back that way. Wear a bit of make-up.’ And then she added, ‘Oh, hell, what am I saying? Who wants you shut up in an office all day with some siren?’
‘Listen, honey,’ he replied. ‘I know a treasure when I’ve got it. I don’t want to do anything to disturb that lady, and I don’t want any distractions, either. Just thank your lucky stars.’
Anne Maynard, with the piece of the commission Frank Hayward had paid her, went and put a down-payment on a second-hand Ford. Then she needed to be taught how to drive it, so she hired the young boy who helped out at the used-car sales lot to give her lessons on Saturdays and Sundays. At first it was as difficult as shorthand. She began to realize that her time for learning such things was almost gone. The boy in the seat beside her winced as she crashed and scraped through the gear changes, shuddered as she went sailing through intersections, blushed when she held up traffic by stalling. But she did learn, eventually, and got the courage to drive by herself. The boy by then liked her and missed the lessons as much as the money. And Anne Maynard started on her deliberate, methodical search and scrutiny of every district of Los Angeles which until now she had only known on a map. Her weekends were spent on the road, driving at a sedate speed, only occasionally now crashing the gears, watching and noting the changes as she entered each neighbourhood, filing the knowledge away in her memory, making notes when she got home in the evening. It was a year before she had the courage to make her first purchase, a vacant lot on a corner of La Cienega Boulevard. In the meantime she continued to read the Wall Street Journal and to make very small purchases of very cheap stocks. ‘Stocks!’ Frank Hayward shouted at her when he discovered this. ‘You’re out of your mind! The market’ll never recover, Anne. You’re just wasting your money, pouring it down a hole.’
‘Perhaps
,’ she said, ‘perhaps …’ And she returned to her struggle with the office accounts. After a while she looked across the office at Frank Hayward. ‘Mr Hayward, I think I should take one of those night courses in accounting. I wouldn’t ever pass the exams, but I might know the right column to post the figures in.’
He shook his head. ‘Crazy, Anne, crazy. What do women need accounting for? And for heaven’s sake, just about everything in this country is going to be posted in red ink for a long time yet.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s your time …’ Then he added in an undertone, ‘I can’t understand why a woman like you isn’t married.’
‘I’ve been married, Mr Hayward.’
6
In the months between March and June, Mary Helena was often troubled about Nicole Rainard. A kind of fierce energy seemed to burn in the girl; she worked as if she were possessed, as if entrance to a college would be her only salvation, and yet they all knew that in June, after her examinations were finished, she would go to England, and it wouldn’t matter what her record was. At one time when Nicole had a cold, Mary Helena called the doctor. He spoke to her afterwards. ‘There’s nothing physically wrong with the girl except a bad head-cold. But she is in a fever over something. Whatever it is she wants, if it’s in your power, give it to her. She’s literally burning for something.’
There was a kind of anticlimax when she was accepted by Vassar, Radcliffe and Bennington. ‘And I can’t go to any of them,’ she said when Mary Helena gave her the news.
‘I didn’t withdraw the applications,’ Mary Helena said. ‘I thought you’d want to know how you stood academically.’
Nicole shrugged. ‘And in England they won’t have heard of any of them. Well, it doesn’t matter.’ The fever was gone, replaced by a kind of apathy which made Mary Helena anguished to witness. Nicole Rainard was on her record one of the best students they had ever had at St Columba’s. And still she was one of the most disappointing. Mary Helena had seldom witnessed a pupil leave with such misgivings. Perhaps her music professor had expressed it best. ‘Technically, she’s brilliant. But where is the heart? At the heart she seems dead.’
Mary Helena and another nun drove with Nicole down to the pier on 57th Street where the Cunard liners berthed. They saw her and her luggage aboard. They kissed her and there were small gifts exchanged. Mary Helena’s to Nicole was a montage of the small spring flowers of the wood around St Columba’s pressed and framed. ‘Mine seems so unimaginative,’ Nicole said as she passed over a specially-bound volume of the psalms. The flowers in the glass entranced her and kept her from thinking of the moment of leave-taking. So many springs at St Columba’s. What was an English spring like?
She waved to the two dark-garbed figures on the dock as the tugs pushed and pulled the Cunarder out of dock. She had almost expected that somewhere, somewhere in the background, she would see the figure of her mother, also dark-garbed, but splendid with a kind of rare beauty. But she was not there.
She went down to her stateroom. It symbolized the beginning of a new life because she was travelling first-class, and had a cabin to herself. She had two long dresses to wear to dinner, and she didn’t know what to do with her hair.
A cabin-boy brought a huge vase of red roses, long-stemmed, the traditional American gift. ‘The instructions were not to give it to you until after we’d sailed, Miss.’ Nicole remembered to tip him, that also was part of the new life. Then she read the card.
‘Good luck, Lucky.’
The thorns pierced her hands as she gathered the flowers savagely from the vase and carried them to the porthole. As she was about to thrust them through, she paused. ‘Good luck, Lucky.’ What was the sense in throwing out good luck? She took them back to the vase and carefully rearranged them.
She brushed her hair and tied it in a loose knot, not chic, but something better than a schoolgirl. Then she went upstairs to arrange her place in the dining-saloon with the Head Steward. He had a note about Miss Nicole Rainard, travelling alone, but loosely under the supervision of a lady who was a friend of William Osborne; she was a niece of Sir Charles Gowing. He had been prepared to give her a pleasant, but fairly obscure table with the lady travelling companion. But when she stood before him, quietly asking where she would be seated, he swiftly rearranged his plans, so that she could be in the centre of the room. It would be a fairly dull crossing, and she would help to decorate the space.
On the way back to her cabin Nicole carefully watched to see what people were wearing. They said you didn’t dress the first night out, but she wasn’t sure. She had a lot to learn.
PART TWO
NICOLE
Chapter One
Iris Gowing was a plain woman, who had never become reconciled to her plainness. In an effort to make people overlook her plainness, she had striven all her life to make them notice her in other ways, respect her, obey her. Too conscious that she was only one generation removed from the mill town her grandfather and father had created, she had put as much distance between it and herself as possible. She had been given as much education as her father had thought reasonable for a woman, she had been taught to arrange flowers, to manage a staff of servants, but she had not needed to be urged to climb the social ladder. Money had been her means: her father had made a generous settlement on her before she had married, another when her only brother had died, and she herself had found the men who could make more money for her. Her father had also advised her to get out of the market at the time he had sold his mills. He had never explained why, but she had obeyed him and the money was still intact. She now owned stretches of land under crops in the Midlands which she had never seen, streets of terraced houses in Manchester whose names she didn’t know. She had shares in safe things which returned a safe income: she had three times the capital which her father had first settled on her, and a few good pictures she had been advised to buy. In her years of climbing away from the mill town in Yorkshire she had, through grinding hard work and single-mindedness, fought her way on to the committees of important charities. These absorbed most of her time. She sometimes forgot she was married to a quiet man with a limp, and when she did remember, it was with a shrug of impatience. Charles Gowing had been the last desperate straw at which she had clutched at the end of several seasons during which she had been mostly ignored by London society. She had suspected that he had married her because her money could help him to keep the place in Hampshire that he had inherited and which he could not any longer afford. It had given her a kind of satisfaction over the years to see that as little money as possible was spent on that small estate, until he had finally been forced to let the beautiful fourteenth-century house on a long lease, and retain only one of the lodges for his own retreat. Iris herself never went near the place; she had acquired a late-Georgian house in Surrey, conveniently close to London for weekend parties and just enough acreage to qualify as a country house. It was used only on weekends when she entertained. Charles’s presence was then demanded, as it was when she gave dinner parties in London, or attended charity balls. The rest of the time she noticed him only in an absent-minded fashion; Charles was not a notable social asset. Like many other things in her life, and they included her own self, he had disappointed her. They rubbed along together, neither seeming to seek any alternative. It was a marriage not terribly different from many marriages she saw about her. The worst disappointment of all she never even discussed with her husband; she had no children.
It was with mixed feelings then that she waited for Charles to return from meeting the ship at Southampton which had brought her niece to England. She had learned long ago from her father that her brother Stephen had made a ridiculous match with some Russian in New York; there was one child he had never seen. And now this child was being thrust on her, this grown child who was not her own. As chairwoman of the committee of a well-known London society to aid orphans whose Patroness was a member of the Royal Family, she could not refuse what her father’s will had thrust upon her. An unknown child w
as coming into her house, but the child was not her own. An American child, or that polyglot mixture which passed for American, would now be her responsibility. She hardly let herself remember how much she had wanted her own children as she filled the hours of waiting for the boat-train to come up from Southampton. She made telephone calls and worked steadily with the meek, dowdy, efficient little woman who came three times a week to help answer her mail. She asked the butler to wait when four-thirty came and Charles and the girl had not yet arrived. They would keep tea for an extra half-hour, she said, and went back to answering her letters.
It was over tea in the elegantly formal drawing-room, with its two Renoirs, at No. 14 Elgin Square that Iris Cowing first attempted an assessment of her niece. She was surprised, as she asked the usual questions about the crossing, the journey up to London, to find a faint stirring of jealousy in herself. It was unexpected. Who could be jealous of a child of seventeen? Not Iris Gowing, for so many years now secure in her social niche. And why? Was it because she herself wanted to be seventeen again, and most of all to look as this child did? Or was it because she had wanted so much to see her own daughter ‒ or better, her son ‒ sit where this stranger now sat?
What did she see? A girl, not a child. A girl with delicate but severely-cut features, strong eyebrows, and eyes which fitted no colour Iris could describe to herself. Not pretty, certainly not pretty. What else was there Iris preferred to leave unstated. But looking at her, observing her neat, confined movements, ambition which she had thought long dead began to grow again in Iris. ‘Well, now, we must see what is to be arranged,’ she said.
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