‘Thank you.’
‘It would be terrible to think I had a plain daughter. Though no one must know you are my daughter, of course.’
‘Why not?’
The woman laughed. ‘My dear, I am twenty-nine. Far too young to have a daughter of nineteen.’
‘Twenty-four,’ said Sophie.
‘Oh, so much worse. A cousin perhaps, from Australia? Your accent is good,’ she added. ‘But one can still hear you are from Sydney. The French are good at sensing these things.’
‘What do I call you?’
‘Madame Higgs? No, too formal. Cousin Emilia.’ She looked at Sophie critically. ‘You have my eyes. But you have had too much sun, my dear. You must be careful about the sun.’
Sophie glanced back at the maid. The woman — impossible to think of her as ‘mother’, much less Cousin Emilia — laughed. ‘Oh, she knows everything.’
‘And your friends here?’ Sophie asked.
The woman smiled. ‘If they care, they can find out that I was married, that my husband is in Australia. But why should they be interested? Coffee, please. Now,’ as the maid left, ‘tell me about yourself.’
‘I have been running two hospitals and —’
The tiny woman held up a hand. ‘No, no, not about the war. I have had too much of war! Tell me about parties. Your father said you were presented. Tell me of your young men.’
‘You hear from my father?’ The world was cracked.
‘But of course. He sends me money, and sometimes a note.’
She had expected … What had she expected? That her mother was a friend of Gertrude Stein, even an artist. Someone whose very life had been squeezed out of her by Sydney respectability, by life with her father.
My father knows, she thought. Yet never told me. Has he told Miss Thwaites?
‘Why did you leave me?’
‘Oh, pouff, how boring. How long ago.’ It was a child’s pout, a child who wanted to be happy, and entertained. ‘I left because I was bored. Sydney, after all! It is the end of the world! And your father can afford for me to be happy.’
‘But you left in your nightdress. You left your clothes, your jewels …’
Her mother — no, that word would never fit — looked shocked, then amused. ‘Your father drove me to the ship himself. A friend in India had told me that to have fun in England you must have a husband as well as money, but in Paris these things are understood.’
‘He knew you weren’t coming back?’
She worked out how her father could have hidden a body — yes, she had denied it, denied he could even have considered it, but of course it would have been easy for him. And just as easy to take a living wife to board a ship, with a trunkful of clothes.
‘Of course. I promised that if he sent me money I would not contact you,’ she said. ‘That year I lived with him! It wasn’t at all what I had expected when I agreed to go out and marry him.’
‘I thought you came out as a governess.’
She laughed, a perfectly practised cadenza of sound. ‘Oh, how wonderful. Of course I was not. I was not born to teach children! No, the marriage was arranged between your father and the colonel, my employer. I needed a wealthy husband. Your father wanted a wife who knew how things should be done, a beautiful wife to have on his arm to show he was a gentleman now. And I really did think I would stay with him. But no one had said how terribly dull Sydney was. And babies! Oh!’ She leaned over and patted Sophie’s hand. ‘But you are much improved now. That dress is good.’
She sat back, her eyes sparkling. ‘I will take you to my dressmaker. We have the same colouring — she will know exactly what you need. You must come again tomorrow — no, on Thursday. Then we will have coffee, and ice cream too. I love ice cream! I know a café where we can have the most divine pineapple ice. I will even take you to my milliner. But not to dine together, or to parties.’ A whisper, and a smile. ‘It is not good to have a friend … or even a cousin … who has the same beauty as oneself.’
‘Did Miss Lily teach you that?’
‘Miss Lily?’
‘The Earl of Shillings’s cousin.’
She shook her head. ‘There are so many men. But I would have remembered an earl.’
‘You never wondered about me?’
‘No,’ she said frankly. She smiled. ‘But you are very nice now. It would be fun to have a daughter, I think — well, a cousin, but you know what I mean.’
The door opened. The maid appeared, but not with tea.
‘The Comte de Longueville, madame.’
‘My very dear Comte.’
He was fifty, perhaps. He had the wit to clasp his hostess’s hand and kiss it before he looked at Sophie.
I could conquer you, Sophie thought. I only need to smile, to hold my head a certain way. My mother pretends to be young, but I am young. And I have been trained by Miss Lily.
She couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to do it. Knew, suddenly, that it might even be a vain attempt. Miss Lily had taught her well, but this woman had lived her whole life on instinctive charm. And her mother was younger than she was, after nearly five years of war.
‘My darling Comte, this is my cousin, Mademoiselle Sophie Higgs, from Australia. Sophie, darling, this is my very good friend, the Comte de Longueville. Though he has deserted me shamefully far too often.’
He smiled down at her. ‘Madame, there has been a war.’
‘Pouff.’ The gesture was French. ‘There is no war in this house. I have forbidden it. And now the war is nowhere, so you have no excuse.’
Sophie stood up, smoothly, elegantly. ‘Thank you so much, Cousin Emilia.’
‘Must you go?’ There was no real reluctance in the voice. ‘But we will meet on Thursday? For lunch here first.’ The smile this time was for the man, not for her daughter. ‘We will tell each other all our secrets.’
Did you ever think of me? thought Sophie. For as much as three minutes at a time?
The realisation that she probably — no, definitely — hadn’t was so strong she felt dizzy. Dad kept you secret for me, she grasped, endured all the years of gossip and suspicion. A rich man, deserted by the wife he had bought … The world might snigger, but not for long. But how do you tell your daughter that her mother doesn’t care?
She would have to write to him. Saying what? Divorce her, and tell those who snigger to go to hell. Marry Miss Thwaites.
She smiled, the first true smile since she had been in that house. Dear Miss Thwaites. A man as rich as her father would have a wide choice of wives, but Miss Thwaites would always be the woman he felt comfortable with. Of course I had a mother, thought Sophie. Many mothers: Miss Thwaites, Miss Lily, Her Grace, even those hours at Thuringa, the cicadas singing, with Bill. I have been so rich in mothers.
She looked at the woman again, the tiny fascinating woman. I am glad you left me, she thought. If you had stayed, I might have learnt to charm men as you do, without empathy or compassion. My real mothers taught me well.
And now she would see Miss Lily again.
By evening the concierge had booked tickets for the next day’s train and ferry to Dover.
Chapter 65
Never weep for lost love, my dear. Weep that more cannot be shared, perhaps. But rejoice that you have had it.
Sophie, 1958
Sophie took a suite at the Ritz in London too. Stinkers had invited her to stay. Emily, too, had sent a card. The duke’s town house was still staffed. But she could not face Ffoulkes. Besides, she’d had enough of other people’s houses — even of talking, for a while. The Ritz offered her time to think.
James Lorrimer came to tea. He also came to propose, now that his affairs and the world’s were partly tidied away, at least until the next crisis. Sophie liked that in him: his sense of place, and duty. They matched hers. And love?
She thought that in a strange way perhaps the war had cured her of wanting love. War was … passionate. She had had too much of emotion.
She refused him. He nodd
ed, sitting next to her on the sofa in her suite — no bended knee for James Lorrimer. ‘Would it have made a difference if I had been Australian?’
She almost did accept him then. She so deeply wanted, needed, her own land again. James understood her. Their political ideas matched. But she would always be an appendage to James’s life — a good life, a rich and intelligent life, but still just part of his. She could never be content now with organising his household, so that he could organise England. But she only said, ‘Yes. If you had been Australian, it would have been different. But if you had been Australian, you wouldn’t be James Lorrimer.’
He lifted her hand and kissed it. It was the first time she had felt his lips. ‘I hope we can still be friends, even if it is from across the world.’
She suddenly wondered why he had never kissed her. She was, after all, eminently kissable. What had his first marriage really been like? Was James capable of passion? Did he even wish it, so distracting from one’s duty? But today she had refused him. She did not need more than that, today. ‘I hope we can be friends too. If I write to you sometimes, will you give me advice?’
‘About corned beef?’
‘I have yet to convince my father to let me be part of his empire. Nor am I sure that I want to merely inherit something someone else has made. Advice about politics, perhaps. About the world.’ She smiled. ‘You are an expert on empires. I may need your expertise.’
‘Of course.’ He looked at her, again with perfect understanding. ‘And, just possibly, when you have felt the earth of your homeland beneath your feet, but begun to feel its society confining, I will ask you the question again, and you might answer differently.’
‘Perhaps.’ They both knew she did not mean it. She might have chosen life with him, if there had been no war. In another world she could have been his lovely lady, charming politicians and bureaucrats, changing governments behind the scenes, and been content.
But that was then and this was now.
Chapter 66
True duty isn’t what you force yourself to do; it is what you accept with a full heart.
Miss Lily, 1919
Sophie arrived at Shillings at a quarter to four. Teatime, she thought as the driveway gravel crunched under the tyres of the car Mr Slithersole had bought for her in London, which she could now drive herself.
This time there was no Jones waiting, or even Mrs Goodnenough. Instead an elderly man dressed like a farmhand ambled around the corner of the house. ‘Luggage, miss?’
‘Thank you.’ Ah. Samuel was dead.
The man touched his cap to her as she walked up to the door. It opened as she approached, revealing a maid. The face at least was familiar, though it was still strange to see a maid, not a butler, at the front door of a house like this. ‘Good afternoon … Jane, isn’t it?’
‘Miss Higgs.’ She gave a bob. ‘It’s good to see you, Miss Higgs.’ Jane took her coat and scarf, hung them up then led the way to the library. ‘They are in here, miss. They said to show you in when you arrived.’
Who were ‘they’? But Jane was already opening the door. ‘Miss Higgs,’ she announced.
The room smelled the same as the first time she had come here: apple wood and beeswax. The candles were burning already, for the day was clouded, although the curtains had not been drawn.
Sophie looked instinctively at Miss Lily’s chair. It was empty.
Someone moved: a slight gesture, but enough to draw her eyes through the dimness to the sofa on the other side of the fire. Two figures sat on it side by side. Jones, she saw with a shock: Jones not as a butler at the front door to greet her, but sitting in a roll-necked fisherman’s jersey and grey corduroy trousers. Next to him a slight figure regarded her steadily, though he did not rise either.
The Earl of Shillings.
‘Good afternoon, your lordship. I thought I was to meet Miss Lily.’
The earl smiled. ‘Hello, Sophie,’ said Miss Lily.
Chapter 67
Can you imagine a world in which you cannot kiss the cheek of someone you love, or even hold his hand, without so many false and varied assumptions? Try, and you might catch a glimpse of the world in which I have lived for forty years.
Miss Lily, 1919
‘Won’t you sit down?’
Sophie sank into the chair — Miss Lily’s chair — and stared at the two men. Jones stood. ‘I’ll fetch tea. It’s good to see you, Miss Higgs,’ he added.
‘It’s good to see you too, Jones. Good to see you so well.’
‘Old soldiers never die,’ said Jones. ‘They just complain about the tea. Speaking of which …’ He tactfully left the room.
The figure opposite smiled at Sophie. His face was drawn, grey around the mouth, dark below the eyes. His hair was short, grey at the temples, but the smile was Miss Lily’s.
‘What do I call you?’ asked Sophie.
He nodded, as though he had expected her acceptance. ‘At the moment I am the Earl of Shillings, on a fortnight’s compassionate leave from the army.’
‘Compassionate?’
‘A fortnight in which to explain to the parents and wives and children of the men I led away why eighty-seven of them will never return, why nearly two hundred are blind, crippled and beset with screaming nightmares. A most compassionate leave. The war is over,’ he added. ‘But a mountain of paperwork remains.’
‘So I call you “your lordship”?’ She should be trembling with shock. But she never could do what was expected. And, at some deep level, she realised she had known … not this. She never could have known this. But that her relationship with Miss Lily was not quite that of a young woman and an older one.
‘Or Colonel, these days. Or Nigel. I would prefer Nigel.’ He sat back against the sofa, shutting his eyes briefly. ‘So far I have visited thirty-eight families. Another fourteen to go. Some of the men,’ he added, ‘were brothers. The Smiths lost four sons. The fifth, I profoundly hope, will be back with them in a few weeks.’
‘Nigel …’ She tasted the word.
He opened his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t how I hoped you and I would finally meet.’ He speaks as if there are two of him, not one, thought Sophie. ‘I am … preoccupied,’ he added. ‘Explaining death to the living is not easy, especially when the death is useless and tragic. All one can say is, “He didn’t suffer.” Which is a lie, of course. Eighty-seven deaths and none of them suffered? Yet each parent accepts it, the last vain hope they have, that their son did not die screaming, watching his arm bleed yards away in the mud …’ The soft voice faltered. Still Miss Lily’s voice. The hair, the clothes, the faint stubble on the chin were different. But not the voice.
‘Why did you go? You were so against the war.’
‘The men would have marched anyway. The most I could do for them then was to lead them, to try to make things better. And I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. Not one thing I did made any difference at all, not in stopping the war, not in lessening the horror once my men were there.’ He made a steeple of his hands and peered at her over them, exactly as Miss Lily had done in that room more than five years earlier.
‘You did what you could,’ said Sophie gently. ‘But why on earth did you ever enlist for the North West Frontier? For the same reason that you are a colonel now?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I enlisted to outrun Miss Lily. As far back as I can remember, every time I looked into the mirror, it was a shock to see she wasn’t there. My duty as my father’s second son was to …’ he shrugged ‘… to do what the first earl was given his lands for. To serve the Crown in battle, not for my glory, but for my people. How many times have you heard the expression “The army will make a man of him”? I thought it would, of me. Does that sound too impossibly naïve?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you, my dear.’
‘I was taught by Miss Lily.’
‘Yes, you’re right. We are one person, Miss Lily and the earl. I was deluded ever to think that we were two.’
> And yet he had seemed to refer to himself as separate. She gazed at him: Miss Lily’s grace, but clutching his arms about himself in memory, in a way Miss Lily never would have.
‘You said you started your group of women because you were raped yourself. Was that a lie?’
‘No. I have never lied to you. Nor told you the whole truth, of course. I was attacked as a young man. For a while I despised myself almost too much to live. It was Jones who convinced me that what had happened to me had nothing to do with who I am, that rape under certain circumstances is as common for boys as girls.’
‘Jones?’
‘Jones was my batman, as he has been my batman in this war. If he had been another officer, he could have been my friend. An earl, and even the cousin of an earl, cannot have a man like Jones as a friend, so he became my butler. A butler has charge of the entire household, and we arranged it to suit my needs.’ He smiled. Miss Lily’s smile. ‘“Friend” is not a euphemism, by the way. I will answer the question you are too kind to ask. I’m not a homosexualist. I am not anything particularly strongly, which is perhaps why I was able to see how others’ urges could be used.’
‘That sounds so cold. And you’re not cold.’
‘Thank you, my dear, but don’t confuse sexual desire with love.’
Had he shut away his sexuality after the rape? She could not ask. One day, perhaps. Not now.
‘I have loved four people deeply in my life,’ he added gently. ‘One is Jones, the friend of both Nigel and Miss Lily. The second was Misako, a Japanese woman who helped Miss Lily become herself, the year I fled the army. The third is Isobel, the first friend who knew me only as Lily, although she was aware of Nigel too. I taught her the manners of an aristocrat, and the charm that Misako had taught me. Isobel showed me how I might find meaning in my life as a woman.’
Suddenly Sophie was afraid to ask the name of the fourth person he loved. ‘And Jones?’ she asked instead.
‘There was a Mrs Jones. She died bearing their first child.’ He met her eyes. ‘The rest is his to tell, not mine.’ Which implied, perhaps, that Jones might have wished for more than friendship. But as Nigel said, that knowledge belonged to Jones.
Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies Page 49
