‘Mummy! Bridget and Janice and Peter all don’t have daddies either!’ Stella breathlessly told her mother one day soon after she started school in Kent. ‘Mrs Roberts made us all stand up and tell the class about our mummies and daddies, and lots of us don’t have daddies. Peter’s was drownded and Janice said her daddy was exploded up in a desert! When I told them my daddy died in his aeroplane Peter put his hand up and said his daddy did too. He dropped bombs on the Germans. Mrs Roberts said they were all heroes but I said I knew that already.’
Stella was ten now, but she still slept with a photograph of her father on her bedside table. In it, James Blackwell was grinning out at the world, head tipped slightly to one side in faintly sardonic style, RAF cap pushed well back from his forehead and a cigarette in his hand. The child’s grandfather had taken the snapshot on the lawn the evening before the wedding, and in the background Diana could be seen walking carefully towards the two men, carrying a tray with a jug of lemonade and glasses.
Now, whenever Diana looked at the photograph – which was every night when she tucked her daughter into bed – the same thought unfailingly occurred.
He had less than twenty-four hours to live, and none of us knew it.
Diana had only one other photograph of James. It stood on the marble mantelpiece in the villa’s main lounge, or salon. It showed him standing next to her brother. Both men had their arms draped around the other’s shoulders, and clasped brimming pints of beer in their free hands. They were in the bar of their squadron’s pub of choice in Upminster, and the flashbulb burst made the panes in the men’s beer glasses twinkle with tiny points of brilliant light. John looked as if he was in the middle of saying something vaguely insulting or challenging; his companion’s face was half-turned towards him and wore an expression of amused disbelief. Behind the men was a folded newspaper whose headline was partly obscured, but the letters NKIRK could clearly be seen. The photo must have been taken a week or two before both men were killed. A squadron pilot had given it to the Arnolds at their boy’s funeral.
Douglas had no objection to these photographs being on permanent display in his home. He was not a jealous man; indeed, he encouraged ‘my girls’ to talk about James. ‘After all, my dear,’ he told Diana when, early in their marriage, she had asked if he genuinely didn’t object to the photographs, ‘without my illustrious predecessor I would have no wee stepdaughter to love, cherish and care for, would I?’
Douglas spoke like that. A son of the Manse, his sentences were old-fashioned and over-ornate, like the heavy wooden furniture in his parents’ home outside Inverness. Plans to follow his father into the Kirk had been dissolved by the war. Douglas’s head for figures – he had won a prestigious Scottish Schools Award in the mathematical equivalent of a spelling bee – had seen him parachuted into the supplies section of the War Ministry as soon as he achieved his double-first in Mathematics at Edinburgh.
Safe in his Whitehall bunker, Douglas had swiftly risen to the top of the department. The stupendously complex business of keeping Britain’s war machine supplied and running smoothly didn’t faze him in the slightest. Where other men could spend an entire morning pondering flow charts, graphs and shipping tables, and be no closer to making a decision by lunchtime, Douglas could size up the whole multi-sided equation in the time it took for him to drink his first cup of tea of the day.
By the end of the war Douglas Mackenzie – now Sir Douglas after accepting a knighthood for services rendered to his country – had a grasp of the import-export business that was second to none. He bade farewell to the Civil Service and was snapped up by a City firm that had made a killing, in every sense of the expression, trading in metal during the war.
Inside two years he had been promoted to Managing Director, just in time for the Berlin Airlift.
The Soviet Union, in the opening shots of the Cold War, had blocked land-supply routes into Allied-occupied West Berlin, and the only way to keep the population and its garrison fed, watered and warm in one of the coldest European winters on record, was to fly everything in. Hundreds of thousands of round-the-clock flights began and there were fortunes to be made.
Douglas cornered the market in cereals, and by the summer of 1949 when the airlift ended, he had made his first million. His first two million, to be exact.
He met Diana the following year when he agreed to present the annual prize-giving at Stella’s exclusive boarding school in Kent. Eight-year-old Stella Blackwell had come up on stage to shyly accept the Most Promising Pupil of 1950, and as Douglas casually watched her skip back to rejoin her mother in the front row, he stiffened.
He couldn’t take his eyes off Diana. Douglas, still unmarried, thought he had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life. He wasn’t the only man in the room to think so. Just turned thirty, Diana had more than fulfilled the promise of her youth. She was sometimes compared to the actress Vivien Leigh, who had burst into stellar fame with Gone with the Wind ten years earlier. Douglas thought she looked enchanting in her little pill-box hat and elegant black suit. He wasn’t to know that it was the last remaining outfit Diana possessed that could possibly be described as smart, nor that she had spent the morning carefully ironing it under a sheet of brown paper and a sprinkling of vinegar, an old trick to dull the shininess of worn, ageing fabric.
Douglas wasted no time introducing himself to her at the little reception afterwards for prize-winners and their parents. He noticed her wedding and engagement rings at once, and asked politely if her husband was present.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Diana said calmly. ‘My husband died in the war. It’s just Stella and me – and my parents, of course. They’ve been wonderful; we couldn’t have managed without them.’
Douglas’s heart leaped, and then immediately he felt a wave of Calvinist guilt wash over him. It was sinful to take pleasure in the fact that this woman was a widow. But still . . .
‘So you never remarried?’ he asked her, declining a sherry offered by the headmaster’s wife.
She shook her head. ‘No.’ Diana nodded towards her daughter, chatting excitedly with friends on the far side of the room. ‘I come as a double order, you might say. Not many men would want to bring up another man’s child . . . but what about you, Mr Mackenzie? Are you married?’
Douglas smiled. ‘Dear me, no,’ he said. ‘I never found anyone who’d have me. Well, there was someone once, but she told me I was married to my job and she went off with another chap. Quite right, too, I might add.’
Diana reached inside her handbag. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘Not at all. No, I won’t have one myself, thanks,’ as Diana offered him the packet. ‘I was brought up to see it as one of the Deadly Sins. I’m afraid I still can’t quite shake that one off.’
Diana put her unlit cigarette back into the pack. ‘Then it would be rude of me to smoke in front of you. I’ll have it later. So . . . your parents were strict, then?’
‘You could say that. My father’s a Scottish Methodist, a priest, if you like. He and my mother had a . . . well, a rather straightforward outlook on life. They passed that on to me to a considerable degree, I’m afraid.’
As he told her about his upbringing, and his escape from the Manse to make his way in London, Diana relaxed. She liked his sing-song Highlands accent, the serious brown eyes set in a large face with pale, freckled skin, and his apparent lack of pushiness. He seemed solid and reassuring, and reminded her of a big shambling bear. She could tell his suit was expensively cut, but somehow it refused to co-operate with his frame, the jacket hanging from his shoulders more like a potato sack than a bespoke product of Savile Row.
There seemed to be no pretence about him. She was weary of men who, once they discovered she was a widow, ‘tried it on’ with her. This one seemed different, and when they had said their goodbyes and she drove home with Stella, Diana was surprised that she felt a slight regret he hadn’t asked to see her again. She had, she realised, felt safe with him.
Tw
o days later, a letter arrived. Written on paper embossed with Mackenzie European Trading, she read the three handwritten paragraphs beneath with an unexpected frisson of excitement.
Dear Mrs Blackwell,
It was a pleasure to meet you yesterday at your daughter’s school.
I hesitated to ask because we had only just become acquainted, but I have plucked up the courage to write to you now. The headmaster was kind enough to furnish me with your address. I wondered if you would do me the honour of joining me for dinner one evening soon?
I hope the answer will be yes.
Yours cordially,
Douglas Mackenzie
And so it began. It was an assiduous courtship, at least from Douglas’s side. He was unfailingly polite, respectful and attentive.
‘You don’t have to be quite so formal with me, you know,’ Diana teased him on their sixth or seventh date, after he had asked her for the first time – almost with a little bow – if he might kiss her goodnight.
They were outside the front door of her home in the Kent village of Hever, which stood in the shadow of a Norman castle. The house – more of a large cottage – was too big, really, for Diana and Stella, and since the day they moved in, three of the bedrooms had been left unused.
Her father had bought it for her during the war, about a year after the boys were killed. ‘I was always going to do this for you, Diana,’ he told his daughter at the time. ‘It was going to be my marriage settlement on the two of you. Well, now there are two of you again, with Stella, so you must allow me to do this.’
Tonight, Diana suffered herself to be kissed. Douglas wasn’t a bad kisser, she thought; at least he didn’t try to eat her up like some of the men she had agreed to go out with since the end of the war. It had taken her all of five years before she felt ready to do that; it was only the insistence of her mother – ‘darling, you’re still in your twenties. You have to try to start picking up the pieces, for Stella’s sake as much as for your own’ – that had made her finally take the plunge.
But each time she had driven home alone to the Dower House, to collect Stella from her mother, whose eager: ‘Well, darling?’ was invariably met with a smile, but a shake of the head.
Douglas was different. He could never, ever match James in charm and fun and wit and passion, let alone looks, and yet . . . and yet . . . he was clearly head over heels in love with her. He was kind and attentive to Stella, too, insisting that the child occasionally come with them to a restaurant or on a trip to the cinema.
And there was the undeniable fact that Sir Douglas Mackenzie was rich. Very rich. One Sunday, after he had joined Diana and her parents for lunch at the Dower House, arriving in a sumptuous Rolls-Royce which he drove himself, Gwen took her daughter aside.
‘You know he’s worth fifty times what your father is, don’t you?’ she said gently. ‘Now, I’m not saying that should directly influence your reply, but—’
‘Hang on, Mummy! What reply?’
‘To his proposal of marriage, of course. I can see he’s a slow mover, but I predict our Mr Mackenzie will be on bended knee by the end of the month. The thing is, darling . . . well, I know it’s a terrible cliché, but you could do worse. A lot worse.’
‘I realise that.’
‘Daddy’s happy to go on giving you and Stella the annual allowance indefinitely, you know that too, so this isn’t about your father and I looking to get you off the books, as it were. We just—’
Diana carefully put her fingertips over her mother’s mouth.
‘It’s all right, Mummy, I know exactly what you’re trying to say and I understand perfectly. And just so you know, I’ve been thinking about this long and hard, and . . . well, I think I know what my answer’s going to be. Don’t either you or Daddy worry about it. I’m going to do the right thing – the right thing for all of us.’
39
Diana waited for Maxine to arrive at the villa while she got ready to leave for Nice, less than twenty minutes’ taxi ride away. Maxine was Stella’s language tutor and erstwhile nanny. She lived in the neighbouring village of St Paul de Vence with her parents, and worked part-time in one of the many patisseries there, on the pre-dawn shifts helping to knead and shape dozens and dozens of croissants. She was usually finished by eight o’clock and at the villa by nine, almost always carrying a paper bag of warm, freshly baked pastries. Maxine was a natural tutor; after only a month of coaching, Stella’s French was impressive, almost as functional as her parents’.
Douglas and Diana had had intensive private lessons in written and spoken French in the months before they left England.
‘If I’m to make the most of this opportunity down there, it’s no good my relying on translators and interpreters,’ Douglas had told Diana. ‘I’ll simply be cheated blind. And you must speak the language properly too, darling, otherwise you’ll be terribly lonely. Most British expats still haven’t returned to the South of France, even though things have been getting back to normal since the war ended.’
Douglas had spotted an opening in a string of import-export markets, with Nice and Marseilles the twin hubs. He sold his British company for the kind of money that made front-page headlines in every newspaper, as well as dominating the Financial Times for almost a week, took a train to the South of France, and pounced.
Diana hadn’t needed much persuading to move to Provence. When Douglas first tentatively raised the idea with her, she had gone out and bought every guidebook to the Côte d’Azur she could find. Most of them were old pre-war editions, but she was thrilled at their descriptions of the Mediterranean coast, from Monaco to Marseilles. The climate sounded too good to be true. Mild, sunny winters, early springs with properly warm days beginning as early as March, and long, hot summers lasting all the way through to October. The coldest months were December and January, but even then there were plenty of fine, sunny days.
She lingered over photographs of orange trees lining the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, the fruit falling with casual abundance onto the pavements, while the Mediterranean surf washed the curving, scimitar-shaped beach just a few yards across the road. Diana was utterly seduced.
There was more to wonder at. Inland lay great sweeping fields of lavender, vibrant and stunningly beautiful under the almost violent summer sun. And further north and east, rising like jagged teeth towards Italy and Switzerland, lay the Alps: colossal peaks which dwarfed anything Britain had to offer, glittering white with snow in winter; bare rock flushed in the sunrises and sunsets of summer. Diana’s favourite photograph showed a grinning boy eating a freshly picked orange on the beach in Nice, with the Alps filling the horizon behind him like a chorus of giants.
The contrast between the sleepy, densely wooded countryside in which the Dower House dozed, or the flat fenlands that lay around Cambridge, could hardly have been greater. Diana was genuinely fond of the English landscape that had formed the backdrop to her youth, but they didn’t quicken her pulse as these exotic images of Provence did now.
She showed the books to Stella. Her daughter was solemn.
‘It looks lovely, but what about all my friends in Sevenoaks? I’ll miss them like anything, Mummy. And what if I can’t speak French properly? I won’t be able to make new friends.’ She sighed. ‘Do we have to go?’
Diana was ready for this.
‘No, we don’t have to go, but I think we should. It’ll be an adventure. And you will learn French; it’s much easier for children to speak another language than it is for grown-ups. I’ll make you two promises, though, Stella. First, your friends can come and stay in the holidays as often and for as long as they like. Douglas and I will arrange all of that, their trains and things . . . and two, if you really are unhappy there, we’ll come back home to England. All I ask is that you give it a try. Is that fair?’
Stella had cautiously agreed and now, six weeks after the family had arrived in a deluge, the irony of which was not lost on anyone, she seemed to be settling in. She had yet to begin s
chool but as Diana had predicted, Stella was picking up good, idiomatic French with astonishing speed. In a few months she would be fluent. Meanwhile Maxine had a younger sister about Stella’s age and the two girls had, shyly at first, become friends.
It was going to be all right.
Douglas had been up earlier that morning than any of them, and would now be sitting in his beautiful new office on the Croisette in Cannes, just a couple of hundred yards down from the Carlton Hotel. It wasn’t his main office – that was 100 miles away in the port of Marseilles – but with imaginative use of telephone and telegram, he was able to spend Mondays and Tuesdays in Cannes, Wednesdays and Thursdays in Marseilles and be home in time for dinner with his wife and stepdaughter on Friday evenings.
In any case, he loved the Cannes office, with its picture windows offering views straight out over the beaches and the sea on the other side of the Croisette. Sometimes Diana joined him there for lunch and they would eat at one of the beach restaurants affiliated to the grand hotels opposite, or even on the terrace of the Carlton, the grandest of the lot.
Like the rest of the Côte d’Azur, Cannes had had a ‘good war’. Safe in the southern de-militarised zone of Vichy, most Germans to come there were tourists, officers on leave from Occupied France to the north. Some of them even brought their families with them. France may have fallen, but it was business as usual on the Riviera. Hotels like the Carlton had thrived.
Nobody mentioned those days now.
Back at the villa, Diana let Maxine in through the heavy oak door that opened onto the shady front porch, jasmine covering the tiled roof and lemon trees in giant terracotta pots flanking the broad steps that swept up to the door.
‘Bonjour, Maxine.’
‘Bonjour, madame.’ Diana couldn’t persuade the young woman to call her by her Christian name. She was discovering just how punctilious the French could be about their social manners; Maxine, at twenty, simply felt too young to be on first-name terms with an older woman who was also her employer.
Some Day I'll Find You Page 12
