The Second-last Woman in England

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Oh, I doubt that very much,’ said Valerie in a bored voice. ‘What would all you boys do if you weren’t playing at war games?’ and she whipped out her powder compact and flipped open the lid with a single, practised move. ‘Harriet,’ she said a moment later in an aside, and Harriet moved closer, sensing gossip. ‘You saw Peter Goodfellow resigned his seat?’

  Harriet moved away again and looked off towards the far side of the auditorium. No, she had not seen that. She had stopped reading the paper and if Cecil had read it he had not mentioned it.

  ‘No, I’ve not seen the paper,’ she murmured with a shrug, hoping Valerie would take the hint. But Valerie was not one for hints.

  ‘It was in this morning’s Times. He’s stood down. All this stuff about the blasted nephew. It’ll be a divorce now for sure. Daphne won’t stand for it. Poor Peter. I always rather liked him.’

  ‘You did not! You always described him as “widely disliked”!’

  ‘Quite possibly. But now that this has happened one can’t help but feel dreadfully sorry for him. I mean, it’s not his fault his blasted nephew did a bolt in the war, is it?’

  Harriet looked helplessly at the queue of people standing at the bar and could summon no reply. Valerie knew nothing about Freddie’s desertion; no one did aside from herself, Simon and Cecil. As far as anyone knew, Freddie had emigrated. Indeed, it was quite possible most of her old friends had forgotten she had ever had a younger brother.

  Except that her younger brother was, at this minute, standing in the crush at the bar ordering a glass of champagne.

  ‘What is it, darling? Champagne not agreeing with you?’ said Valerie, at once sensing her disquiet. ‘It’s a Montaudon ’38, I saw the man pour it from the bottle myself.’

  ‘No, it’s divine. But I think I need a glass of water.’

  ‘David will get you one—’

  ‘Don’t bother, I can get it myself. Oh, Cecil, you heard David and Valerie sat next to Princess Margaret at the van den Berg’s charity lunch a couple of weeks ago?’

  And with Valerie thus distracted Harriet slipped away and forced her way into the crowd at the bar.

  ‘Harriet! Thought it was you. Marilyn, look who it is!’

  A hand had reached out and fingers had closed around her forearm. Harriet turned around to see a haze of faces leering at her. The hand and the voice belonged to Montgomery Pine and standing beside him was Marilyn, his wife. Montgomery, an octogenarian whose grip on her arm belied his frail and wasted body, had been a contemporary of Father’s, serving with him in the Indian Civil Service. Beside him were Eustace and Phyllis Bing—he had been a member of Simon’s squadron during the war and she had debuted the same year as Harriet. They all knew Freddie, of course, every single one of them, and they encircled her now, pressing in on her from all sides with their greetings and their enquiries and their entreaties. Harriet grinned at them wildly, kissing and simpering and trusting that what felt like panic might somehow manifest as unbridled enthusiasm.

  ‘Marilyn, Monty. How lovely. Yes, I’m well. Phyllis, you’re looking marvellous. Eustace, how are you? I’m sorry, you must excuse me.’

  They would think she had an assignation but there was nothing to be done about it. Unbridled enthusiasm had been a mistake. Now they would know for certain something was up. Blast Freddie!

  She plunged once more into the crowd at the bar but now she could no longer see him and perhaps, after all, she had been mistaken? What could Freddie possibly be doing—

  But there he was, off to the right, trying to get the barman’s attention, dressed in an evening suit, his hair brushed a little differently, but Freddie, nonetheless, right there at the bar, at Sadler’s Wells on opening night just as though it was still 1938 and the last fourteen years had never happened.

  Harriet seized his arm so that he swung around in alarm. When he saw her, his alarm diminished only slightly.

  ‘What the devil are you playing at?’ she hissed. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Steady on, Harri!’ he protested as she bundled him out of the queue and they finished up in a far corner behind a vast rubber plant, away from curious eyes. ‘Oh well, that was subtle! If no one had noticed me before they jolly well have now!’

  ‘But what are you doing? This is madness!’

  ‘It’s Don Giovanni. I always rather liked Don Giovanni.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it? Why don’t you put an advertisement in The Times? “Freddie Paget, back from Canada, still on the run, still officially wanted for desertion. All enquiries care of Her Majesty’s Prison, Brixton”.’ She regretted it as soon as she had said it. ‘I’m sorry, that was cruel.’

  ‘No matter,’ said Freddie and gave a slight shrug.

  ‘But what are you doing here? You’re taking a dreadful risk.’

  ‘Simon’s not here, is he?’

  ‘No, but just about everybody else is. How did you even get a ticket?’

  ‘Oh, through the job,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘I’ve found some casual work doing the books for an actor’s agency in Kilburn. It’s rather squalid, but it has some perks. And frankly, I’m tired of all this skulking about.’

  Harriet gripped his arm even more tightly and before her the crowd of jostling faces swam in and out of focus.

  ‘But. You. Don’t. Have. A. Choice. Do you want people to know you’re back? Freddie, you don’t seem to realise there’s still a great deal of anger and resentment, even after seven years.’

  ‘Look, I’m not the only chap who did a bunk. And I’m not the only one in my platoon, for that matter—’

  ‘I don’t care about them. You could still be arrested.’

  ‘Stop being so absurdly melodramatic, Harri. Don’t I deserve some fun?’

  She could see a gleam of excitement in his eye. Could he have forgotten? Did he no longer remember that day in the tea room at Harrods? Eight years on the run? Was it all so quickly dismissed? She looked at him helplessly.

  ‘I don’t know. I just—’

  ‘Harri, do you remember that production of Tosca?’ He took her arm, laughing.

  Harriet did remember and despite herself she smiled. ‘Tosca ran up the castle steps to chuck herself off the ramparts and tripped over her dress—’

  ‘And fell flat on her face! And some chap in the front row jumped up on stage to help her up and she had to shake him off so she could hurl herself to her death. Priceless!’

  ‘And Cecil had dozed off and missed the whole thing.’

  ‘That’s right, I’d forgotten that. Woke up to find the entire house in hoots of laughter and he with not the foggiest idea what was going on.’

  They both shook with laughter but at that moment Harriet saw Montgomery Pine looking in their direction. Montgomery put his head on one side, frowned and took a step towards them and Harriet gripped Freddie’s arm again.

  ‘Freddie, you can’t stay. There are too many people who still know you.’

  ‘Oh relax. I’m not to going to run into some chap from my platoon here, am I?’

  ‘How do you know you’re not? I would have thought this was precisely the sort of place you would run into someone.’

  She thought at first he hadn’t heard her, for he made no reply. But when she looked at him the gleam had gone, replaced by a look she couldn’t read, and her stomach dropped.

  ‘Because most of them were killed, Harri, that’s how I know,’ he said.

  The bell sounded to indicate the second act was about to commence. They stood silently and watched as the crush at the bar became a crush at the doorways leading back to the stalls and circle.

  ‘Cecil will be looking for me,’ said Harriet, without moving.

  She saw him a moment later, standing some distance off, tapping his rolled-up program impatiently against his thigh. Freddie spotted him too, and his head went back defiantly.

  ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen Don Giovanni. I know what happens in the second act. I suddenly find
I have no desire to see it again. Give my love to old Ceec, won’t you?’ and with that he squeezed her arm and went quickly down the stairs and was gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DECEMBER 1952

  Somewhere in the distance a single bell was tolling. It was the bell from the church off Queen’s Gate on the other side of Old Brompton Road and it was heralding in Christmas Day.

  Cecil opened his eyes. It was still dark, just a hint of greyish-yellow light through the curtains. And that was probably as light as it was going to get. The pea-souper that had descended on the city in early December looked set to continue until spring.

  Christmas morning. He lay perfectly still, listening to the bell and to the distant traffic on Fulham Road.

  And then he thought: has it snowed? Could it snow with all this smog?

  He felt a thrill of excitement: Christmas morning and the promise of snow. Extraordinary that he could still feel it in middle age; that he could be rendered instantly a small boy excitedly opening his stocking. In those days, during and just after the First War, the stocking would have been one of Father’s old military socks and it would have contained an orange, some nuts … What else? Some coins, yes, a few pennies or whatever was appropriate. It would have been presented somewhat formally over breakfast, rather like a diploma at a graduation. Father hadn’t gone in for hanging the things at the end of one’s bed and there was never any suggestion of a chap on a reindeer delivering said stockings. Nowadays it was all Father Christmas this and Father Christmas that so that the real value of Christmas seemed muddied. Father had done the presentation, of course, and Mother—or would it have been Nanny?—had said, ‘What do you say, Cecil?’ And what he had said was, ‘Thank you, Father’. And then Father had presented Mother with something—one never really knew what—and Mother would dutifully open it and say, ‘Thank you, dear’, and then the whole thing was reversed as she gave her present to Father. And that was the main part of Christmas over and done with.

  One Christmas morning Mother had not appeared until late in the afternoon and Father had said she was ill. When she had finally appeared, flushed and sleepy, she had lain as though exhausted on the chaise longue near the hearth and Father had sat rigidly in his armchair, his hands gripping the arms and his knuckles white. When Nanny had said it was time Cecil return to the nursery Mother had called him over and held his chin. She had called him her little man and kissed him on the lips and her breath had smelt of brandy. Nanny had said what a shame it was that Mrs Wallis was unwell, and on Christmas Day, too.

  And where was Felicity during all this? Perhaps she had not yet been born. The Great War had come and Father had been away with his regiment until the first Christmas after the Armistice. By then Mother had been dead nearly a year. Felicity must have been two, three years old by then and Nanny would wheel her out every now and then, like a thoroughbred at a show.

  Nowadays no one wanted oranges and nuts in their stockings. They wanted train sets and bicycles and dolls and guns and cowboy hats and complicated board games and Lord knew what else. The children told you what they wanted and where was the spirit of Christmas in all this? Where was the innocence? Anne hadn’t believed in Father Christmas since she was three. Julius had at least pretended to believe until he was about nine.

  What would Christmas morning be like when the children had gone? Himself and Harriet in the house alone. Presumably they would still go to church. Leo and Felicity would still come over for an afternoon drink. What would they all have to talk about, after so many years? What would he and Harriet have to talk about?

  He stirred uneasily. His feet felt like blocks of ice and the hot-water bottle at the bottom of the bed was an unwelcome cold, rubbery presence. The grey light at the window had become brighter and the traffic heavier. The bell still tolled, urgent and mournful.

  It hadn’t always been like this. That first Christmas together, the Christmas of ’38, they had been married less than a year. They had walked to the top of Primrose Hill and watched Christmas morning from the summit, and the city had been theirs and no one else’s, and it would always be like this.

  His father had died—quite suddenly in the end—soon after his and Harriet’s wedding in the late spring of ’38. A stroke. The housekeeper had found him face down on the lawn in the early morning as though he had taken an early morning stroll and simply given up all of a sudden.

  They had been in New York at the time, he and Harriet, almost at the end of the honeymoon, and the news had meant they had cut short their trip and brought forward their homeward passage. It had been a nuisance, he recalled, and he felt guilty even now for feeling so. One ought to have been sad, but the only things one had felt sad about were the closing of a part of one’s life, the end of the old house, the selling of furniture he had grown up with. The servants were barely a skeleton staff by that stage, whose names he had hardly known, and Nanny had long since passed away. Mother was buried in a graveyard beside the village church and he had not visited it once in twenty years. He wondered if Felicity had ever visited. He could not imagine ever asking her.

  Father’s house had been sold by an agent to an American couple from Wisconsin and by Christmas he and Harriet had purchased the house in Athelstan Gardens and stuffed it full of father’s old furniture. Rococo armoires, oak bureaux, rosewood piano stools, a Thomas Brooks centre table that completely blocked the entrance hall. They had stood it for a fortnight then they had passed most of it over to Sotheby’s and lived in a virtually empty house for, oh, months it had seemed. And it had been glorious! Liberating! Hilarious! To have such a place, all to themselves, to roam about sleeping in one room one night, another the next, sometimes on the bed, sometimes simply on a mattress, sometimes on the landing just because one could. And none of it had mattered! No one had bothered them for weeks on end. They had needed no one else.

  By that Christmas of ’38 Harriet must have been carrying Julius, though they hadn’t realised it—or he hadn’t—until late into January, February. That time, then, the time they had had together before the children came, had been short, so very, very short.

  That Christmas morning in ’38 they had still been free. Father was dead. For the first time ever there was no need to go down to the family house in Sussex. They had the day to themselves. Had they bought each other presents? He had an idea Harriet’s present had been something silly—yet with more meaning than any present he had received before or since. A paper hat, that was it—just a silly paper hat, handmade out of bright wrapping paper, that Harriet had plonked on his head, laughing when it had fallen down over his ears. And he had presented her with a Christmas cracker that he had laboriously opened the night before and resealed so that, when she pulled it, out fell a heart. A red, paper heart.

  Incredible.

  They had taken a cab to Regent’s Park and walked through the frosty grass hand in hand. They had crossed the canal and climbed up Primrose Hill and sat on the bench at the top watching the city glisten in the frosty morning.

  Christmas Day and they had had the city to themselves.

  Had there been snow? He couldn’t remember. When one looked back at any Christmas, it was always snowing. On this Christmas Day the snow must have been thick and fresh and bright on the ground. Their footsteps must have squeaked and crunched and left a trail. How could it have been otherwise?

  They had gone to her father’s flat in Belgravia.

  It was hard to recall the flat as it had been then when the old man was still alive; they had only visited a handful of times. Cecil had had an impression of tiger-skin rugs, romanticised Victorian landscapes crowded on the walls showing Indian scenes of men pigsticking or troops of red-coated soldiers defending some mountain pass. There had been a hideous elephant’s foot umbrella stand. And the whole flat heated to such an unbearable temperature that he had felt he was suffocating. Old Mr Paget had been well into his seventies by then, brown as a walnut from all those years in India, but frail and querulous, bitte
r with the way his life had ended. He’d been dead within the year.

  They had gone to the flat at lunchtime on Christmas Day; no way out of it, really. His own father was gone, but hers was still alive. And the visit would not cut into their day too much: just a light lunch prepared by the woman who did for him, nothing too rich, nothing too strenuous, a sherry or two and then they would be off. The rest of the afternoon, the evening, was still theirs.

  Freddie had been there.

  Always Freddie. Even then. Had they known he was going to be there? But why wouldn’t he be—it was Christmas Day, after all—though Cecil was fairly certain Simon hadn’t been there. And there had been a suggestion, even before this, that Freddie and the old man didn’t get on. Freddie would have been twenty-two or thereabouts, and recently come down from University College. Lord, Mr Paget must have been into his fifties when he fathered the boy. No wonder they didn’t see eye to eye, they were separated by two generations. And University College—not Cambridge like his father and elder brother. Not even Oxford, but University College, London.

  Freddie had been a good-looking fellow, perhaps a little cocksure, not as bad as some, but worse than others. And there was something—what? How did one characterise it?

  But no, that was absurd. People didn’t have signs on their foreheads marking them out as deserters. And Freddie wasn’t a deserter, not then. It was the war that had made him a deserter.

  There had been barbed comments, he recalled, over the sherries. Why had the boy gone to that university? Why had he studied modern subjects, literature, the arts? Why had he come down six months ago and yet failed to secure a place in a firm? In a law office? In a Ministry? In the armed forces?

  Harriet had become increasingly restless and Cecil had thought, perhaps we will leave soon? She had snapped at the old man, at her own father, and Cecil had been surprised. Freddie had been unconcerned, both by the old man’s jibes and by Harriet’s increasing annoyance. And Cecil had thought, perhaps this was how such things played themselves out in this household. He only had his own household to compare it to and there no one had said anything of consequence, good or bad.