The Flower Garden

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘An outrage,’ the viscount was saying as he paced the sumptuous drawing room. ‘A desecration! A profanity!’

  There was no sign of the viscountess.

  ‘What,’ Nancy asked, taking a steadying breath, ‘has happened?’

  There was no sign of blood. No sign of violence.

  ‘My wife has been insulted, ridiculed, humiliated …’

  Nancy marvelled at the string of adjectives. She had never heard him utter more than two consecutive words before.

  ‘May I see your wife, please?’

  ‘See her! See her! Everyone will see her! There’s no avoiding it! We’ve tried everything! Soapflakes, shampoo, even bath cleaner! Nothing will move it!’

  Nancy decided that there was no point in waiting for the viscount to calm down sufficiently to be understandable. She marched across the pale lilac carpet and knocked on the bedroom door. She was rewarded by a piercing scream. The scream shook her more than any of the servants’ histrionics or the viscount’s wrath. Such a scream could never have come from the icily cool, blonde and soignée, utterly detached Serena, Viscountess Lothermere. It came again. Nancy felt perspiration break out on her palms as she ruthlessly turned the knob and pushed open the door.

  Two terrified maids were filling a hand basin with soap-sudded water. From the dampness of their uniforms it was not the first time they had done so. Water swamped the floor of the en suite bathroom. Towels lay squandered. The viscountess sat erect on her dressing stool, her eyes glazed. Her hair was a rivetting, shimmering, awe-inspiring emerald green.

  Nancy faltered and grasped the door for support. ‘What the …?’

  ‘It was the shampoo, madame,’ one of the maids said timidly.

  ‘Her ladyship’s maid shampooed her ladyship’s hair and …’

  ‘I shall sue!’ The words were cracked and brittle, a travesty of her usual languid speech. ‘I shall sue!’ She seemed unable to utter anything else.

  Nancy was ordering a maid to Sanfords’own hair salon for the advice of the resident hair stylist. She examined the shampoo bottle and saw all too clearly that it had been tampered with and that the colour was not the manufacturer’s fault. She uttered soothing, calming words to the viscountess. They fell on stony ground.

  ‘I shall sue!’

  Serena, Viscountess Lothermere, was like an automaton. Sanfords’ appalled hair stylist hurriedly arrived, shampooed and rinsed, shampooed and rinsed. The more he shampooed the more irridescent the green became.

  The viscount sought help elsewhere. The Aquitania had sailed but the Carringtons had not. Their yacht still graced the harbour. The Carringtons rose to the occasion. Of course they didn’t mind curtailing their vacation. Of course dear Serena must be transported immediately to London.

  The eighty pieces of luggage that had accompanied the viscountess were packed with trembling speed. The French maid, still in the throes of hysteria, proved of little use. Sanfords’maids dressed her ladyship and searched frantically for a suitable head covering. The cloche hats that the viscountess favoured were unequal to the task of containing the hair that had not only taken on the colour of jungle green, but also the texture. The tiny pill-boxes, so fashionable, were utterly useless, as were the flower-laden picture hats. In the end a deep-crowned, broad-rimmed hat in the manner of Greta Garbo was unearthed and hid all but the merest wisp of verdant green.

  ‘I shall sue,’ the viscountess said again as, physically supported by her husband and the gallant Victor Carrington, she made her way from her suite to the Carringtons’Armstrong-Siddeley. ‘I shall sue.’

  Despite Nancy’s orders and Villiers’vigilance, her route was lined by awestruck maids and valets, footmen and waiters. Prince Vasileyev watched with wicked amusement; Countess Szapary with anguished sympathy; Madeleine Mancini, maliciously; Lavinia Meade unbelievingly. Maria watched complacently. Now there was only Mrs Peckwyn-Peake.

  ‘I shall sue,’ the viscountess was heard to say as the doors of the Armstrong-Siddeley were briskly closed by a stunned chauffeur.

  Maria turned and returned to the Garden Suite. Mrs Peckwyn-Peake was made of sterner stuff than the countess and viscountess. She would have to think of something truly dreadful in order to drive the formidable American from Minnesota away. She permitted herself a small smile. She would succeed. The prize was worth all the effort. Luis might not be perfect husband material but Maria had decided she was going to marry him. He would need careful watching, but then any man worth having always did. She sang to herself as she began to sew a hem of fine French lace on to one of Nancy’s petticoats.

  ‘It’s as mad as a wake with no whisky,’ Seamus Flannery said glumly as he hung over the deckrail of the Ile de France.

  Chips tossed the butt of his cigar into the creamy waves. ‘It’s a vacation. Even a mayor is entitled to a vacation.’

  ‘Not when he needs re-electing,’ Seamus said like a prophet of doom.

  Chips turned up the collar of his astrakhan overcoat. ‘The election is sewn up good and tight. There isn’t even an opposition.’

  ‘There is, and he’ll be rubbing his hands in glee at this very moment. I can just hear him asking who it is that pays for the mayor’s trips to Europe; or for a first-class state room on a ship that’s a floating palace …’

  ‘I pay,’ Chips said complacently. ‘He can dig and dig until he reaches Australia and he’ll never find any different.’

  ‘Madness,’ Seamus uttered again.

  Chips was uncaring. His political sixth-sense never let him down. He had wanted to come to Europe and he had seen a way of doing it to his advantage. His PR men would talk of his meeting with British members of parliament: would talk of his personal assessment of the work of the League of Nations: would talk of anything as long as it gave Bostonians the clear impression that their mayor was a man of worldly affairs as well as civic ones. And if he did, by any remote miracle, lose the election, then he’d use his European trip to stand him in good stead when he entered the running for governor. It was all a perfect cover-up for seeing Zia and his daughter. Madeira would feature nowhere in official press-releases. He would only spend a week there. It would be enough. His parting with Nancy had been agonizing. She had been distraught – he had been ill. He had handled the whole affair with the delicacy of a bull in a china shop. He wanted her back home. She was the pivot around which his life revolved. Her place was in Boston, Hyannis or Washington. Anywhere as long as it was within a telephone call and a fast motor car ride. Her behaviour on the day she had left Boston had frightened him. It had no longer been his little girl he had been talking to. It had been a woman with tortured eyes and a detachment that had terrified him. The Sanford affair may have been fleeting, but it had hit her hard. It was as if her whole personality had disintegrated and reformed into that of a stranger.

  ‘Can you tell me any reason why a man should want monkeys in his bathroom?’ Seamus asked, after an extended silence, when it was obvious he would get no political sense from his hero.

  ‘Living or dead?’ Chips asked, sloughing off his despondency at the traumatic goodbye between himself and Nancy and regaining his usual good spirits at the prospect of a reunion.

  ‘Neither. They’re painted on the walls where any right-thinking man would have seagulls or fish. God have mercy on my mother,’ Seamus crossed himself reverently, ‘but she’d turn in her grave if she could see me in my birthday suit surrounded by a pack of monkeys.’

  ‘Progress, dear boy,’ Chips said indulgently to his loyal aide, who bordered on the ripe old age of seventy. ‘If Vincent Astor can bathe with monkeys, why shouldn’t Seamus Flannery of Hanover Street?’

  ‘Because it seems to me there’s a great deal more sanity in Hanover Street. Give me a tin bath in front of a roaring fire any day.’

  Chips guffawed. ‘Progress, dear boy, has left you far behind. How would I get votes if I offered the honest citizens of the North End nothing but tin tubs in front of the fire?’

  ‘
You’d get a fine sight more than if you offered them monkeys staring at them whenever they took their trousers down,’ Seamus said darkly.

  Chips slapped him on his back and resumed his leisurely stroll along the deck. ‘So you’re not impressed by your venture into the world of the rich?’

  ‘I’m impressed by the bar,’ Seamus said grudgingly. ‘Twenty-seven feet, it is. Longer even than Paddy Murphy’s.’

  ‘The French Line will be most gratified at that comparison,’ Chips said gravely, reflecting that it would need a good deal of sawdust on the floor and several gallons of poteen instead of twelve-year-old Chivas Regal to make the transition from the panache of the Ile de France to the squalor of Murphy’s downtown bar.

  ‘As it seems the only place aboard to meet with your approval, let’s adjourn there and reflect on the desperate measures Sean O’Flynn will be driven to in trying to make capital of my absence.’

  ‘It’s not O’Flynn we have to worry about,’ Seamus said, mollified at the thought of endless drinking hours. Prohibition had left a mark on him which would never be erased. He still downed his Scotch with the speed of a man who constantly expected to have his glass forcibly removed. ‘It’s the blue-eyed boy exuding honesty and fair play. No more graft. No more patronage. No more helping immigrants in return for votes. He’s appealing to a whole new section of the electorate.’

  ‘He’s wet behind the ears,’ Chips said comfortably, ‘and his supporters are a bunch of chowderheads.’

  Seamus was unconvinced but the Scotch in his glass was as smooth as a baby’s bottom and diluted only by ice cubes. If a man had to travel, and Seamus had never seen any reason to, then it was comforting to do so facing a well-stocked bar. He began to discuss how they could best exploit Chips’ slum clearance programme, but Chips was no longer listening to him. The last few weeks had been harrowing.

  He had expected abuse from Gloria after her banishment to Jamaica plain. He had not expected her to telephone him every hour of the day, at home and at the office, sobbing uncontrollably. He had refused to see her. He wouldn’t divorce her. It wasn’t worth his while. But neither would he share his roof with her. Not until it was expedient for him to do so. He had taken her from obscurity and moulded her into a woman fit to be a mayor’s wife. She had never once made a faux pas in public. Her accent had acquired flat Bostonian vowels that equalled those of a Winthrop. She had carried out her duties perfectly. She was pretty and full of life and the press loved her. She had been as big an asset to him in her own way as Seamus was in his. At civic receptions he was proud of her, enjoying the envious glances of men young enough to be his grandsons. At home he enjoyed her. She made him laugh. She made him feel young. She brought a dimension into his bedroom activities that enabled him to face the end of each day with undiluted pleasure.

  He had never said he loved her because he hadn’t believed it was true. They had an arrangement, an understanding. Faithfullness on her part had formed its basis. He was too old to suffer the indignity of being cuckolded. Her purpose was to shore up his image. To make sure the electorate saw their mayor as a virile, energetic, vigorous go-getter more than capable of serving another four years in office. In return he gave her social status: a house in Beacon Hill; a mansion in Palm Springs; a thirty-acre retreat in Rhode Island.

  It had been a comfortable arrangement, one that had been negotiated in far-away Los Angeles in a bar of dubious reputation and over a magnum of champagne. Later, on their honeymoon, she had said she loved him. He had patted her bottom and been pleased but had not believed a word of it. She would have said the same to Bela Lugosi if he had rescued her from her former life and transported her to a world of furs and jewels and gossamer silk stockings.

  No one expected the marriage to last six months; not the gossip columnists, not Seamus, not even Nancy. But it had. Gustily so.

  He remembered coming home exuberantly from a meeting and bursting in on Gloria as she wallowed shoulder-deep in perfumed bubbles.

  ‘God, how absolutely super,’ she had said at news he could no longer recall. He had stripped off his clothes with the eagerness of a seventeen-year-old boy faced with his first mistress and Gloria had squealed with delight as he jumped into the bath with her, water swirling and swamping the rose-pink carpet. There was no coyness, no inhibition, no restraint about Gloria’s lovemaking. After the darkened fumblings his first wife had reluctantly allowed him and the nameless string of pliant, empty-headed women that had followed, Gloria had been like a tonic.

  Not only did he enjoy making love to her, he actually enjoyed talking to her. It had been an unsought bonus – one that was now denied him. His Beacon Hill home had taken on a museum-like atmosphere without Gloria’s sun-gold shingled curls and risqué conversation. No longer did he look forward to leaving City Hall for the regal drive home. He told himself that he had not spoken to her because her adultery with Sanford had placed her beneath his contempt. He was man enough to know that it was not the only reason. It was because he did not trust himself not to weaken if he once heard her voice.

  The previous Friday she had ordered her flamboyant white Rolls to City Hall and physically assaulted his outer office, demanding to see him. Seamus and his aides and secretary had seized hold of her before she could hurtle into his inner sanctum. He had sat at his massive desk, his hands clenched on the tooled leather surface, his mouth a thin, almost invisible line, his face grey as he heard her anguished cries.

  ‘Chips! Please! Chips! Chips!’

  They had taken her away and he forbade entry to anyone, even Seamus, for the next hour. At the end of that hour he had written a letter without the aid of his secretary. He told Gloria she had no need to fear a change in her lifestyle. She could still be his wife. She could reign over their Palm Beach mansion and Rhode Island home just as she had previously done. Only Beacon Hill would be barred to her.

  Her answering letter had been hand delivered. There were smudges that looked like tear marks on the back. Her usual flowing handwriting was uneven. He had burnt it unopened. The next morning he had booked himself and Seamus aboard the Ile de France, and to the utter stupefaction of his aides and colleagues left the maintenance of municipal order to them.

  He was no longer sleeping, no longer eating. He was behaving like a man who had discovered that the woman he loved had been unfaithful. Before he succumbed to that illusion he was going to beat a retreat: back to the woman he did love – the woman he had always loved. It was the only way to clear his mind. To regain logic before he so lost command of himself that he hauled Gloria from her banishment at Jamaica Plain, beat her black and blue, demanded apologies and promises and made love to her with a violence indecent and unhealthy in a man of his advancing years.

  The last thing he had seen, as the pride of the French Line slid away from her berth and towards the Narrows, was an unmistakable white Rolls Royce careering to a stop and a hatless, frantic figure running and waving. Her curls had glinted gold in the cold winter sun. As the passengers lining the deckrails shouted goodbyes to relatives and friends, Chips stood mute, his collar high against the bitter wind, his fists clenched deep in the pockets of his coat.

  Her hand faltered and fell. She had not been waving goodbye, but beckoning desperately for his return. She stood small and desolate amongst the fur-wrapped throng around her.

  He turned abruptly and made his way to his state room and a bottle of bourbon. She had deceived him once and she was deceiving him again. Her despair was only for the things she thought she stood in danger of losing. His despair was so deep it could not be openly acknowledged, even to himself.

  ‘Then you will marry me?’ Luis’long-lashed eyes were urgent.

  ‘I will think about it,’ Maria said demurely.

  ‘Mae de Deus! I’m offering you my hand, not a bunch of flowers!’

  ‘I like flowers,’ Maria said serenely.

  Luis prayed for strength. ‘Then I’ll give you armfuls of them. A roomful.’

  Maria,
remembering Prince Vasileyev’s gift to Nancy, suppressed a shudder. ‘One flower will do.’

  ‘One flower, a hundred, what difference does it make? I’m asking you to marry me.’

  They were far from the hotel, where the gardens overflowed and drifted off into a fragrant wilderness.

  ‘I could not marry a man who would not be faithful to me,’ Maria said, her eyes lowered so that she could retain her self-control and not throw herself into his arms.

  ‘I shall be faithful until death!’ Luis felt physically faint and wondered if it really was his own voice he was hearing. ‘I promise by the Virgin Mary and all the Saints. Please, Maria. Marry me.’ Something caught in his throat. ‘I love you, Maria.’

  Great dark eyes looked up at him slowly. ‘And I you,’ she said softly.

  His lips met hers and his fate was sealed. He made her an engagement ring of tiny yellow flowers.

  ‘And the ladies?’ Maria asked.

  Luis had long abandoned any attempts at trying to deceive Maria as to his relationships with the ladies.

  ‘Countess Zimitsky and the English viscountess have left, there is no one else, I promise you.’

  Maria suppressed her disappointment at this lie, but was determined not to spoil the evening of her wedding proposal. She wound her arms around his neck and, to his immense satisfaction, let him kiss her with a passion she had previously forbidden.

  Minnie Peckwyn-Peake was as aware of Maria as Maria was of her. She had noted not only the way that the Czech countess’eyes slid constantly in Luis’direction, but also how often glances were exchanged between Luis and Mrs Nancy Leigh Cameron’s spectacularly pretty maid. Minnie Peckwyn-Peake was not disturbed. When one door closed another opened. She had watched in admiring amusement as first the Czech countess and then the English viscountess had been obliged to leave ignominiously. By the law of averages she would be next on the spirited little Puerto Rican’s list. Minnie waited in pleasurable anticipation. Nancy Leigh Cameron’s maid had finally met her match. Minnie was quite happy to relinquish Luis in the cause of true love. Besides, she liked a fighter and the dusky-skinned maid was certainly that. She would not, however, be driven from Sanfords as Luis’other two mistresses had been. Minnie Peckwyn-Peake never left anywhere until she chose to do so. She wondered when Maria would strike. She did not have long to wait. When she returned to her suite after sunbathing with the Michaeljohns and a rather interesting encounter with Mr Luke Golding, it was to find her maid in tears.