The Second-last Woman in England

by Maggie Joel

  Cecil shook his head to clear it.

  ‘Certainly. Though I should warn you, Miss Paget, the paperwork is rather lengthy in these situations. Any shipboard incident when one is, shall we say, in terra nullius, always results in a great deal of bureaucratic and diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing. I’m sure you understand? But we shall endeavour to make it as speedy as possible.’

  He opened another drawer and began to assemble the various forms that Miss Paget would be required to complete.

  ‘Diplomatic?’ exclaimed Miss Paget, rather indignantly. ‘Surely you are joking, Mr Wallis? I hardly see what there is of a diplomatic nature about this.’

  Cecil smiled sympathetically. Most young ladies, in his experience, had little understanding of the machinations of State and Commonwealth, of the intricate nature of bureaucracy—indeed, they rarely needed to know. It was a pity she did not have a husband to accompany her in this unpleasant task. Then he sat up. She had not brought a husband. Had not, in fact, mentioned a husband—was in fact, a Miss. Somehow this seemed … miraculous.

  He realised he was leaning forward and smiling in a way that was neither friendly nor comforting, but eager, bordering on fervent.

  ‘Please do not distress yourself, Miss Paget. I am entirely at your disposal and we shall navigate the treacherous waters of international diplomacy together!’

  This was intended to sound heroic. Instead it sounded a little gushy. He hoped he wasn’t going to blush.

  Miss Paget held her cigarette a little distance from her lips and regarded him silently; regarded him—it had to be said—a little warily.

  ‘It’s really just the insurance I’m concerned about, Mr Wallis,’ she said.

  She really was a cool one! Had the father been a tyrant? Somehow one couldn’t imagine anyone tyrannising Miss Paget …

  ‘Of course, all such matters must be attended to—I commend your practicality, Miss Paget. Let us start with the general release form. I would be honoured to complete it on your behalf,’ he announced, brandishing his engraved fountain pen in what he hoped was a official manner. ‘Shall we begin?’

  She nodded her assent.

  ‘Now, then. When and where exactly did the … unfortunate incident occur? You see, if we can establish that, it may save a great deal of paperwork further down the line.’

  Again she paused with the cigarette poised before her lips. She really was quite striking.

  ‘Well, it was evening. Our last evening at sea. Must have been around ten o’clock, as we had all finished dinner. I had been in my cabin but it was dreadfully stuffy, there was no breeze at all, so I went up on deck. I suppose I wandered about a bit on the pool deck. A pair of young men were trying to play quoits but it was far too dark and really they were quite drunk so it was just a bit of silliness, really. They asked me to join them but I didn’t feel like it, so I stood a little further away, near the rail, and watched the stars and … whatnot.’

  She paused and drew on her cigarette and it was almost as though she was a little embarrassed at having to admit to such a thing. But where was the father during all this? In his cabin having a fatal heart attack, one presumed. Poor girl, no doubt she was experiencing a little guilt—people generally did, in Cecil’s experience.

  ‘What happened then, Miss Paget?’ he prompted gently.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s rather hard to explain really. I wasn’t wearing my gloves, you see—well, it was an unseasonably mild evening—and one doesn’t follow all the usual rules on board ship, does one? You must have noticed.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And all I can say is, I was twisting my ring round and round on my finger—it’s just a habit one has. And—well, the next moment it had gone. Fallen over the side.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I … see. How unfortunate.’ Cecil nodded to give himself time to phrase his next question. ‘And your father …?’

  Miss Paget blinked at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Your father. Where was he during this time?’

  She gave him the oddest look. ‘At his home in Belgravia, one would imagine. Why on earth would you need to know that?’

  This time the silence lasted a great deal longer. Cecil reached discreetly into a different drawer and pulled out another form.

  ‘You said it was an insurance claim?’

  ‘Yes, of course. My engagement ring. It was diamond. It was fully insured, naturally, but the insurance company are demanding I obtain a form from you before I proceed with the claim.’

  There was a discreet knock and the elderly Miss Clough appeared around the door.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, Mr Wallis, but a Miss Hatchett has arrived—it’s about her father.’

  ‘A Miss Hatchett?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Wallis.’ Miss Clough returned his gaze expressionlessly.

  ‘Ask her to wait outside. I shall be with her directly.’

  Cecil sat back in his chair. Miss Paget had lost an engagement ring. Not her father, just a ring. An engagement ring. She was engaged.

  ‘I’ll take this with me, shall I?’ she said, indicating the form, and he nodded, summoning a weak smile. Then he watched silently as Miss Paget opened her handbag, folded the form and placed it inside. She took a final pull on her cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray and stood up. ‘Goodbye, then, Mr Wallis. And thank you for your assistance. I shall certainly know where to come the next time I mislay an engagement ring.’

  And she had gone. Off, no doubt, to get married to some fabulously rich New York businessman.

  But the odd thing was that Harriet hadn’t married some fabulously rich New York businessman—she had married him.

  And they had honeymooned on board the Swane. He smiled, remembering.

  He was disturbed by a soft tap on his office door. A moment later the door opened and Miss James appeared.

  Cecil felt a slightly uncomfortably constriction in his chest. What on earth was it now? Ever since the Rocastle affair one felt like one could count on nothing; there were no certainties any longer.

  ‘Just your morning tea, Mr Wallis,’ she said, pushing the door open with her foot and sliding soundlessly into the office with the silver tea tray.

  Tea. Of course. Everything settled once more into calm order. The silver Victorian tea tray and the elegant Royal Worcester tea set, more than fifty years old now, salvaged from Father’s house, its red and gold rim decoration as fresh now as the day it left the factory. Miss James placed the tray on his desk and departed, returning a moment later with a tea plate containing two biscuits—one digestive, one garibaldi—resting serenely on its cool china surface.

  ‘Mr Wallis, a Miss Corbett just telephoned. She seemed most anxious to talk with you. I didn’t put her through because I knew you were very busy.’

  ‘Miss Corbett? The nanny?’

  ‘So I am led to believe.’ Miss James never took anything at face value. She placed the teacup on Cecil’s desk. ‘Should be nicely brewed now,’ she observed, as she always did.

  ‘What did she want?’

  Miss James paused to consider. ‘She didn’t indicate, other than to request that you telephone the house as soon as it is convenient.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss James,’ and as she retired to the outer office, he reached for the digestive and broke the biscuit in two with a satisfying snap. But it wasn’t satisfying. The biscuit may as well have been stale for all the enjoyment he was going to get from it. He lay both halves down on the plate. The nanny had rung. Something, clearly, was amiss and one couldn’t simply ignore it.

  He picked up the telephone receiver and dialled the number. The telephone rang once and was picked up.

  ‘Kensington 8578,’ came Miss Corbett’s oddly formal voice.

  ‘Ah, Miss Corbett. It’s Mr Wallis. Miss James said you had telephoned me. Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not sure, Mr Wallis. I thought it best to telephone. Anne is unwell, you see, and Mrs Wallis has gone
out, and Dr Rolley is out on call and cannot be contacted.’

  He was baffled, then remembered that Anne had not come downstairs this morning to see him off.

  ‘I’m not entirely certain I follow you. Is Anne at home from school?’

  ‘Yes. She is unwell. A headache—of course, it could well be nothing, children get all sorts of aches and pains all the time, but I remember a girl in our street before the war who had a headache, and in three days she was down with the scarlet fever.’

  ‘Well. But I’m sure you are over-reacting, Miss Corbett. And you say Dr Rolley is unavailable?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Of course, I would have consulted Mrs Wallis, but she went out early. To an appointment.’

  What appointment? Harriet had mentioned nothing over breakfast. No doubt it was her hairdresser or something. Well, then, obviously Harriet did not deem it to be too serious.

  ‘I feel sure if Mrs Wallis thinks it is all right—’ ‘I’m afraid Mrs Wallis left before.’

  ‘Before? Left before what?’

  ‘Before things took a turn for the worse. I believe it would be best if you were to come home, Mr Wallis.’

  Cecil was nonplussed. Yet the girl’s calm insistence was unnerving.

  ‘Exactly how sick is she, Miss Corbett?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. You can never tell, can you, with children?’

  ‘I can’t very well simply drop everything and come home. Now, listen, I want you to telephone Dr Rolley’s surgery again and find out when he will be available. Mrs Wallis is likely to return home soon, in any case. I shall telephone you again in an hour to ascertain further developments.’

  Afterwards he sat at his desk while the tea grew cold and a skin formed over its surface. Scarlet fever? The woman was hysterical. He picked up the pile of papers in his in-tray and began to sort through them. After ten minutes he pushed himself up from his chair, grabbed his coat, hat and umbrella and left the office.

  ‘I shan’t be going to my club for lunch, Miss James; I shall be going home. I shall return sometime around two o’clock,’ and Miss James signalled her total astonishment at this unprecedented turn of events with a brief nod of her head and returned to her typing.

  The traffic along Piccadilly was like a funeral procession and the cab crawled along at barely five miles an hour before coming to a complete halt at Hyde Park Corner. Cecil peered out of the window to take his mind off his growing frustration.

  The day had begun unpromisingly when a low and menacing bank of apparently unending grey clouds had settled over London. Now, seemingly against all odds, the sky had brightened and, as the cab slunk through Knightsbridge, a shaft of sunlight shone down in a way that made one suddenly appreciate being alive, and made Cecil glad he had abandoned habit and decided to come home for lunch.

  ‘Just drop me here, driver,’ he called, leaning forward to tap on the glass. An impulse (the second impulse in an hour!) urged him to quit the cab and walk the remaining distance in the sunshine. It would probably be quicker, in any case. ‘Thank you, my good man,’ and he threw in a small tip.

  He rarely walked along Old Brompton Road and certainly never found himself in Old Brompton Road at lunchtime on a Monday. The road was busy with late morning shoppers, mothers with smart prams and smartly turned out babies, neatly attired shopgirls on their lunch breaks, bank clerks carrying packets of sandwiches in search of benches to sit on. It was perfect. London functioning exactly as London had for two millennia: mothers and babies, commerce, life. It made him proud to be a functioning part of a functioning city.

  He turned left into Palmerston Terrace, then into Athelstan Gardens with a pleasant sense of homecoming just as the sun slid beneath a large bank of dirty brown cloud and a few spots of rain began to fall. But he would make it home before the shower took hold. The private garden was deserted, as though everyone had anticipated the turn in the weather. Not even the wretched elderly couple, who seemed as permanent a fixture as the pigeons, were there.

  I ought to have telephoned ahead, Cecil realised, the awkwardness of arriving home unannounced and unexpected in the middle of the day striking him keenly. His pace slowed. Harriet would think it very strange. But Harriet was out. And damn it, it’s my house, he reasoned.

  He picked up his pace again and began to cross the road, seeing for the first time a couple standing just inside the padlocked gate. So the garden had not been empty; the privet hedge had simply obscured them, and indeed one of the two people in the garden appeared to be Harriet.

  And the other person was Freddie.

  Cecil paused, forgetting for one dizzying moment how to walk. He willed his legs to move onwards and they jerked forwards stiffly. It could not be Freddie. Freddie had gone abroad.

  The man said something indistinctly and repositioned his hat. It was Freddie. No question about it.

  Keep moving. Don’t let them see you.

  Cecil continued walking yet it was impossible not to look back. They hadn’t moved. Harriet was saying something with a frown, looking off behind her—not this way, thank God. Something final had been said and now they were embracing, briefly, almost bitterly.

  Keep walking, eyes straight ahead. Don’t look back.

  When he turned again Harriet had come through the gate and was walking briskly across the road towards the house without a backward glance, apparently not having noticed him. Freddie, too, had crossed the road but was walking in the other direction, back towards Old Brompton Road, his head down, thoughts somewhere else.

  Cecil kept on walking, past the house and round the corner into Fulham Road. He ought to have telephoned first.

  Chapter Eight

  OCTOBER 1952

  Jean watched from the window of her room as three storeys below, on the far side of the street in the enclosed confines of that unwelcoming and closed-off garden, Mrs Wallis embraced the young man. Then she strode from him with her head held high as though she had no conscience at all. And the man stood and watched her go, then he too left.

  Mrs Wallis wore a spotted black and white head scarf, the sort of head scarf the new Queen wore at Sandringham, and a large pair of sunglasses and a long raincoat that covered her from neck to mid-calf. She was dressed like someone who did not wish to be recognised. But someone had recognised her. Two people, in fact. Herself and another—and it looked very much like Mr Wallis.

  She had watched him as he drew almost level with the two lovers and began to cross the road. His step faltered, then he continued on his way, though now his head was bowed.

  Was it Mr Wallis? All the men in this street wore identical raincoats and hats and brandished the same rolled umbrella. But something about the way he walked, the angle of his head, the curve of that slightly beaked nose, told her it was him. She recognised him even from three storeys up. And she had summoned him.

  Just as God had summoned her here.

  She had gone to the Festival of Britain—and so had a great many other people that day.

  It had been a hot and dry Saturday in early August, last year, and she had gone with the O’Riordans—Eddie and his brother, Liam—and Liam’s girl, Maureen. The O’Riordans were Mrs McIlwraith’s sister’s boys and Jean had had misgivings right from the start.

  They were Catholics, of course, and Dad did not approve of Catholics. One of the O’Riordan sisters was an unmarried mother and the older boy was on remand at Brixton. But what had it mattered by then, by that hot Saturday in August when Dad had been gone six years already?

  Liam’s girl, Maureen, had said, ‘Come with us, Jean. Us girls, we got to stick to together’. What Maureen had meant by this was hard to say, but Jean had agreed, because it was the Festival and she was a little excited, though she made it clear it was with Maureen that she was going.

  And so it had turned out … as far as the bus stop on Commercial Road. As soon as the number 11 turned up Maureen and Liam had hopped down the back and made it pretty clear they didn’t need any company.

  ‘
Back seat for us then, Jean?’ Eddie had asked her with a wink and she had glared at him and taken a seat directly behind the driver.

  ‘You can forget any of that funny business, Eddie O’Riordan. I’m not interested. I’m just here to see the Festival.’

  And so, it turned out, was everyone else. The Festival site was heaving that Saturday; they seemed to have chosen the most popular day of the year for their visit.

  ‘Right then, where’s the beer tent?’ said Liam, standing on the riverbank and staring all about him as though he expected to see a large sign that read: Welcome to the Festival of Britain—beer tent this way.

  There hadn’t been a beer tent. Instead there had been striped umbrellas and open-air cafés. There had been a funny little railway and a Mississippi Showboat and a spindly metal spiral staircase that went up and up but didn’t go anywhere. And a vast silvery pointy thing hanging in the air, pointy-end downwards, so that you wondered how it stayed up. Everyone ate ice-cream and strode about in 3-D Polaroid spectacles, wandering in and out of the pavilions. One pavilion showed you what the world would be like in the future. It had a car from the future which made Eddie whistle appreciatively and Liam said, ‘It ain’t no good, Eddie, me old son—ain’t got no back seat’, and he and Maureen had giggled.

  ‘Ships and Sea Pavilion,’ read Eddie as they stood outside the next hall. ‘Sounds boring.’ He paused to light a cigarette.

  They had eaten their ice-creams and worn their 3-D Polaroid spectacles until the cardboard had rubbed a sore spot on the bridges of their noses. They had drunk four pints of Bass at the Festival Bar (well, Eddie and Liam had—Maureen had had a gin and orange, thank you very much, and Jean had had a cup of tea), they had ridden on the paddle steamer and Liam and Eddie had taken turns seeing who could spit the furthest over the side, and now Eddie was getting restless.

  ‘Where them other two got to, then?’ he had muttered, irritably thrusting his 3-D spectacles further up his nose, then pulling them off and tossing them into the river. Liam and Maureen had had a row outside the Dome of Discovery. Something to do with a girl in a red hat and a man whom Liam had thought was the girl’s father and who had turned out to be her fella.