‘Mmm,’ said Letitia thoughtfully. ‘Just. Yes, I suppose so. But I do keep telling you, darling, the very best cosmetic chemists are in New York. You really should think about finding some people over there. Next time you go I might come with you and talk to a few, if you won’t.’
‘Well, maybe I will – when I go,’ said Julian, ‘and I’d love to have you with me. But I honestly don’t think you’re going to find anyone better than Sarsted. The man’s a genius.’
‘No, he’s not a genius,’ said Letitia, ‘he’s a very good chemist and that’s all. He hasn’t got any creativity. He isn’t inspired. He doesn’t have any ideas.’
‘Mother, darling, we have enough ideas between us to keep a dozen cosmetic companies afloat. Stop fussing. What do you want to drink?’
‘Gin and french. And I’m hungry. Do let’s order quickly. Last time we had dinner here I seem to remember eating so much melba toast I scrunched when I moved. So common, nibbling.’
‘Mother,’ said Julian, laughing and signalling at the waiter, ‘you could never look common. However much you nibbled. Not in that dress, anyway.’
‘Do you like it, darling? Good. Cavanagh. Such a clever man.’ She glanced over her shoulder into the mirror behind her and smiled briefly at her reflection; white crepe dress, accordion pleated from the shoulders, swathed across the bosom and drawn into a tiny waist with a narrow, pale suede cummerbund; her dark hair was swept back, around her neck she wore the fabled treble-stranded Morell pearls given to her by her mother-in-law on her wedding day, and the overtly fake cluster of beads and diamante in her ears gave a style and wit to the discreet taste of the rest.
‘Where on earth did you get those Christmas trees?’ said Julian, touching one of the earrings. ‘I’ve never seen anything like them in my life.’
‘I’m very glad to hear it. I’d have thought it was a fearful waste of twenty pounds if you had. I got them at the Dior boutique in Paris. It’s a heavenly place. Full of all sorts of wonderful things. Next time you want an amusing present for someone, I suggest you go there.’
‘Ah,’ said Julian, ‘I’ll remember. Thank you. It’s no use looking at me in that hopeful way, Mother, you’re not going to get any gossip out of me about anyone I might or might not want to find an amusing present for. Now just tell me what you want to eat.’
‘I’m not looking hopeful,’ said Letitia, ‘quite the reverse. I find it much more restful when you aren’t in love with anybody. I just thought it must be about time, that’s all. Quails’ eggs, I think. And the turbot. Lovely. Lots of potatoes and spinach. To give me strength for tomorrow.’
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’
‘Meeting the accountants.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about, is there?’ said Julian sharply.
‘No, of course not. Don’t fuss. You’re more of an old woman than I am, Julian, when it comes to money. It’s just that I dislike the new man rather, and I know they’re going to query the investment budget.’
‘Are you sure it’s the right way to go? Should we talk about it?’
‘Absolutely, and no we shouldn’t. We’ve talked about it quite enough already. We need the new factory and we need a complete new range of filling machinery. Don’t worry about it, I’ll deal with them. That’s my department, you stick to cosmetic concepts.’
‘Don’t patronize me, Mother. I don’t like it.’ The lighthearted look left his face briefly; his eyes grew darker and he pushed his hair back from his forehead with a rough, impatient gesture. It was an act that his fellow directors and his mistresses came to know swiftly; it meant trouble and got him his way. ‘Do you want another drink?’
‘Yes, please. And I’m not patronizing you. The secret of success, as you’re so fond of telling everybody else, is knowing what you’re good at and doing it. I’m good at sums. You’re good at concepts. Although . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, that brings me back to the chemist. Julian, you really do need someone better than Sarsted. The truly great cosmetic chemists are artists as well as scientists. They think laterally. They don’t just look at a formula and mix it; they look at a formula and dream or they dream and then look at formulas.’
‘So where are we failing, Mother?’ said Julian, pushing his hair back again, crumbling a bread roll to pieces and pushing it round his plate. ‘Just tell me that. Everything seems fine to me. We’re doing brilliantly. Snapping at Arden’s heels, worrying Rubinstein. I had lunch with Norman Parkinson yesterday. He said that every model he’s worked with for the past three months was using Juliana make-up. Audrey Withers told me only last week they keep permanent sets of it in the Vogue studios. We can’t meet the demand for Je. I just can’t see what basis you have for criticism.’
‘Julian, do calm down,’ said Letitia. ‘I’m not criticizing you. I’m simply saying we could do even better with a truly inspired chemist.’
‘And I’m saying we’re quite inspired enough,’ said Julian, ‘I don’t want any more creativity in the company.’
‘No,’ said Letitia tartly, ‘you wouldn’t like the competition. Now get on with your food. Perhaps it’s time you did have a new girlfriend. It might improve your temper. Or even,’ she added, looking at him thoughtfully, ‘a wife. Thirty-two is far too old to be a bachelor.’
She looked at him with amusement as he tried not to show how ruffled he was; pushing his food around his plate just as he had when he was a small boy and she thwarted him taking huge gulps of milk – rather as the hugely expensive sancerre was going down now.
Letitia had always loved Julian in a curiously unmaternal way, and they had both of them known it; his elder brother James had been the perfect textbook little boy, exactly like his father, serious, quiet, blue-eyed, fair-haired, fascinated by farming as soon as he could walk, tramping round in his wellington boots after the cowman, up at dawn with his father every day, keeping logbooks of milk yields and stock prices as soon as he could write.
Julian, three years younger, was extraordinarily different; with his dark hair and eyes, his passion for reading, his sociable nature (at five he was already pinning party invitations on to the wall in his bedroom and counting the days to each one). He took a polite interest in the farm, but no more; he was more likely to be found reading in the drawing room, or listening to the radio, or best of all chatting to anybody at all who was prepared to listen to him, than outside or in the barns, or even the stables. He did have a considerable passion for his pony, and rode her extremely well, if rather showily: ‘Like a girl,’ James said more than once rather scornfully, and indeed he was far more likely to win the show classes than the children’s gymkhana games like Walk, Trot and Gallop or an Obstacle Race. He was clever, quick and very funny, even as a small boy, full of amusing observations and quick sharp comment; he and his mother became very early friends, companions and confidants. His father, Edward, kind, good-natured and absolutely conventional, adored James, but found Julian hard to understand.
The difference between the two little boys was the subject of much gossip in Wiltshire; and nobody ever understood in any case why a nice, straightforward man like Edward Morell had married someone as patently unsuited to the life of farmer’s wife as Letitia Farnworth, but there it was, he had brought her down to meet his parents, having met her at a party in London, quite literally blushing with pride, in 1915, and married her a year later.
The reason for that was perfectly simple and straightforward, of course: he had fallen deeply in love with her, and remained so until the day he died. The real puzzle, and one recognized by the more discerning, was why Letitia should have married Edward; beautiful, sparkling, witty as she was, and he so quiet, so shy, so modest. It was on Julian’s twenty-first when, given that this was London in 1941, she still managed to orchestrate a very good birthday party for him (supper and dancing at the gallant Savoy, which like most of the great London hotels was resolutely refusing even to acknowledge that the war was much more than a m
inor inconvenience), that she told him: ‘You’re old enough to know now, my angel, and I don’t want anyone giving you a garbled version.’ She had been engaged to and much in love with a young officer in the Guards, Harry Whigham, who had gone to France, and been blown to pieces before even her first letter had reached him. Confronted by this and the almost equally appalling fact that virtually every other young man in England was facing the same fate, and terrified at seventeen by the prospect of spinsterhood, she had seen salvation in Edward Morell. He would not be going to France because he was a farmer; he was good-looking, he was kind, and he was modestly well off. Still in shock from Harry Whigham’s death, she accepted Edward’s proposal of marriage only three months later; they were married two months after that, this being wartime and the normal conventions set aside, and it was only after the birth of James that she properly realized what she had done.
‘But Julian, darling,’ she said, filling her champagne glass and raising it to him for at least the dozenth time that night, ‘I don’t want you to think it was a bad marriage. I made Edward, your father, very happy, he never knew for an instant that he wasn’t the great love of my life, and to the day he died I was certainly his.’
She said this not with any kind of conceit, but a serene conviction; Julian looked at her and leant forward and kissed her on the cheek.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what about you? Were you happy? It sounds like hell.’
‘Oh, not at all,’ said Letitia lightly, ‘I’m not the going-through-hell sort. You of all people ought to know that. Positive, that’s what we are, my angel, both of us; I made the most of it, and I was perfectly happy. There was you, and there was James, and Edward was the sweetest man on God’s earth. The only really sad thing was when your little sisters died. But you know all about that, and you were a great comfort to me at the time. Even though you were only two. Now let’s dance, this is getting maudlin, and then we’d better – oh, hell, there’s the siren. Shall we go to the shelter or dance?’
‘I’d like to dance,’ said Julian, slightly reluctantly, for he had often longed to talk to her about the death of his small twin sisters, and had always been briskly discouraged, ‘with the bravest and most beautiful woman in the room.’
Edward Morell had died in 1939. For the duration of the war, James ran the farm, while Julian enlisted in the Signals (rejecting the infantry regiments as too predictable), and spent a frustrated two years in England, rising to the rank of captain; finally by a combination of shameless string-pulling on the part of Letitia’s cousin, a colonel in Intelligence, and some sheer bloody-minded persistence on his own, he managed to gain an interview with the SOE, the Special Operations Executive directing the British leg of the Resistance movement.
Julian had a considerable talent for languages, he was a brilliant radio operator, and he was immensely self-confident; he was sent for the preliminary selection for F Section, and passed with distinction. He then went to Scotland where he learnt such assorted skills as living off the land, handling explosives, dropping off a train moving at 40 mph and killing competently in a wide spectrum of ways. His instructor in this was a venerable-looking, white-haired gentleman who looked like a particularly benevolent academic; he personally taught Julian a Chinese method of stifling a man to death, leaving no traces whatsoever of violence. A pamphlet was produced by the Germans in 1942 describing this and some of Syke’s other methods, the ultimate tribute to their efficiency.
Finally Julian was sent to an establishment in the New Forest where he was trained in the more conventional skills of espionage, ciphers, secret inks and, perhaps most crucially, of withstanding interrogation.
He was one of the youngest men on the course; permanently under suspicion because of it, he never cracked, never did anything remotely to suggest that he would be unable to deal with any of the demands made of him; he was just twenty-two when he was finally sent to France after a personal interview with the famous commander of F Section, Maurice Buckmaster.
He was not required, to his inevitable disappointment, to set lines of explosives across the Normandy countryside, or personally scale the walls of German prison camps in order to free his comrades, but what he did have to do required in its own way as much courage, as much ice-cold determination and steadfastness, and it was certainly as essential.
His task was to gather information – perfectly basic, simple information in the area around Chartres – about such unremarkable things as bus and train routes, and timetables, stamp prices, curfew regulations, and relay these things, so crucial in the planning of covers and escape routes, to SOE in London by radio. His cover was as tutor to the small son of a French countess, herself an extraordinarily brave member of the Resistance; her husband had been a colonel in the French artillery and killed in the first three months of the war. Julian’s code name was Philippe Renard, his age on his forged papers given as eighteen; the image he set out to project was of someone effete, a little fey, possibly homosexual, certainly timid. It was the first time in his life that he could give rein to his considerable talents as an actor, to display his ability to climb inside another person’s skin, however briefly, and he played the part brilliantly; even Amelie Dessange was half inclined to believe in it, and regarded him with a mixture of tolerance and contempt. Her small son Maurice, on the other hand, adored him and was permanently tagging along behind him, a small devoted slave. This provided further useful cover; it was easy to stand unsuspected in shop queues, at bus stops and in post offices, chatting pleasantly to the locals and asking them how best to reach such and such a place on which bus or train, with a small boy clinging to his hand.
His radio transmitter, smuggled into the Comtesse’s house in the gardener’s wheelbarrow, was kept in an upper attic; the door to the tiny room, leading out from one of the servants’ bedrooms, was covered by a huge trunk, filled with the dead Comte’s uniforms, medals and sword. Every night Julian would read to Maurice until he fell asleep, dine alone in the kitchen and then climb the stairs for his appointment with London. Sometimes there was little information, sometimes a lot; in any case he had to make contact to let them know he was safe.
He lived with Amelie Dessange for over a year, in a curious mixture of closeness and detachment. She was to him a remote, unsmiling figure, who occasionally asked him if he had enough to eat, or how Maurice was getting along with his lessons, always hurrying about the house, leaving it for brief spells, supposedly to visit her mother in the next village, or to take some of her garden produce to the market. He did not like her particularly, but he knew how brave she was, and how clever, and he admired her; she was not exactly beautiful, she had rather strange, strong colouring, very dark red hair and white, immensely freckled skin; her eyes, which snapped at him impatiently while she talked, were brown, dark dark brown, without a fleck of green, and her mouth was narrow and tense. But she had a certain grace, and a tension which made him very aware of her sexually; in other circumstances he would have talked to her, made her laugh, flirted with her, as it was he kept quietly to himself and allowed her to think of him whatever she wished.
One night, the Germans had come to call, as they put it, a routine visit; he was passing along the upper landing on his way to his room, and he heard them come into the hall. They meant no great harm, and there were only two of them, they were simply obeying orders and making sure nothing overtly out of order was taking place at the chateau, but Amelie was exceptionally rude that night; she shouted at them to leave her house, and when one of them put his hand on her arm, she spat at him. The other grabbed her, shouting at the old man who had opened the door to fetch the boy; Julian, racing down the stairs, watched her, panting struggling in the soldier’s arms while little Maurice was led down from his bedroom in his nightgown. For a long time they all stood there; nobody spoke, nobody moved. Then the soldier tipped his gun under Maurice’s chin, his eyes on Amelie’s face. ‘You should learn some manners, Madame la Comtesse,’ he said, ‘otherwise we may have to t
each some to the boy.’
He flung her aside, motioned the other soldier to release Maurice, and they left, clanging the door shut behind them. Julian moved towards Amelie as she stood weeping quietly, held out his arms; she moved into them. Maurice joined them, and they stood there, the three of them holding one another in the cold dark hall, for a long time.
‘Come, Maurice,’ she said in the end, ‘you must go back to bed. The Germans have gone, they did us no harm, and you were very brave. Jean-Michel,’ she added to the old man, who was sitting silent and shaking on the stairs, looking at her helplessly like a child himself, ‘you too, are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ he said, getting wearily to his feet, ‘I’m all right. Let me take you up to your room, Maurice.’
‘Maman, you come with me, please.’
The boy was white-faced, sobbing quietly, shaking with fear and cold.
‘It’s all right, Jean-Michel,’ said Amelie, ‘I’ll put him back to bed. Go and take a brandy for yourself and try to sleep.’
They started up the stairs together, and Maurice looked back, holding out his hand to Julian. ‘Can Philippe come too, Maman, and read me a story?’
‘Of course, and I will come and hear the story too.’
Julian was reading a translation of the Just So Stories to Maurice. He found the stories soothing, their humour refreshing, and when he was homesick comforting, and Maurice adored them all. Tonight he read the story of The Elephant’s Child, for a long time, unwilling to relinquish the mood of closeness and tenderness that bound them together; finally Maurice fell asleep and Amelie led Julian out of the room and into her sitting room.
‘Brandy?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Thank you for all you did tonight. You are so good for Maurice. I should have said so before. I’m sorry. And I’m glad you are here.’
Old Sins Page 4
