‘Only you would think that,’ he smiled. ‘You could never fail in my eyes. I think you’re—’
But she had interrupted him and put her lips on his. For one moment he leant into her, his hands on her back, feeling nothing more than the softness and warmth of her lips, the feel of her body yielding to him.
He broke away. When he spoke he felt as if his mouth was filled with cotton wool: ‘I can’t.’
She said nothing but looked bewildered.
‘I’m engaged to a girl,’ said Guy. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Louisa retreated into herself immediately, he could see that. She pulled the collar of her coat around her, almost obscuring her mouth. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I know I should have but I didn’t want to presume you wanted more than for us to be friends. I didn’t know how you felt. I’ve never known.’
‘That can remain a mystery then. You can forget about me, Guy. We shan’t be meeting in London. And you can leave me here. I know where I am, the house is only a few minutes’ walk.’
‘But, please. Louisa.’
‘No. I can look after myself.’
She left him, walking down the street, never once looking back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The following day, Guy and Mary dropped in on the Molyneux salon to enquire about Rose Morgan. As he approached the address, he half wondered if he had the right place. Although he worked in Knightsbridge in London, where some of the smartest shops in London were, Guy had never had cause to go in them and he’d certainly never minded. They had looked like haughty places with shop assistants who’d sooner scrape Guy off the bottom of their shoe than serve him. These salons looked more like houses, with discreet doorbells, but there was no friendly housewife behind the front door. When Guy pressed the one for Molyneux, he was greeted by a woman who gave him and Mary the once-over with her perfectly made-up eyes and left him in no doubt that they were not welcome. He apologized for speaking English and asked if he might see Monsieur Molyneux.
‘Have you an appointment?’
Guy had to admit that he did not.
‘Then you will have to come back. Monsieur does not see anyone’ – there was an emphasis on anyone, as if to include Louis XIV himself – ‘without an appointment.’
Guy knew his next move was not strictly legitimate but he was damned if he was going to be sent away like a stray dog. ‘We’re from the British police, madame. We’re inquiring after a missing girl, and believe she may be working here.’
It took another half an hour of waiting before the designer came to see them, impatient and distracted. ‘I’ve got a member of European royalty on the other side of that door waiting for me to fit her gown,’ he said, taking Guy by surprise with his British accent. Guy knew he intended to awe them with his words. It worked. Mary appeared to forget their reasons for being there and Guy could see her trying to work out who it could be. If he wasn’t careful, she’d slip through that door to have a look.
‘We have reason to believe that a young woman who has gone missing, Rose Morgan, might have headed here.’ Guy showed him the photograph, Molyneux looked at it briefly and shook his head.
‘It’s hard to be absolutely certain,’ he said. ‘We have plenty of girls coming through here wanting work. But I don’t think she would have been quite the right look for us. Perhaps in the backroom?’
Guy tried once more. ‘We interviewed the daughter of her former employer, Miss Muriel Delaney. We believe the child’s aunt is your wife?’
Molyneux snapped his fingers. ‘Muriel! That little girl, she was rather sweet. Is she still?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘Have you seen her recently?’
‘Not for years. She came to my wedding in 1923. But her aunt and I divorced in 1924. I have not seen her since, nor heard any more of the family, and certainly not their maid. Now, please forgive me but I am very busy here. Bon.’ He snapped his fingers again and beckoned to the assistant, who came running over. ‘Find me the yellow silk, please.’
The interview was over.
Standing in the hall by the front door, waiting for someone to fetch Mary’s hat and coat, Guy felt despondent. He had been so hopeful of a result after what Louisa had said. Another assistant came in with Mary’s things but she wore a worried rather than haughty expression on her face and when she spoke it was with an English accent. ‘I heard you were looking for someone?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Mary, and motioned for Guy to give her the photograph. ‘Do you recognize this girl?’
The assistant nodded. ‘She’s Rebecca. Monsieur wouldn’t know who she was because she worked in the backrooms, and she’s blonde now.’
‘Worked?’
‘She left yesterday.’ She looked as if she was plucking up all her courage. ‘It was very abrupt. Might she have heard you were looking for her?’
Guy thought about the waitress at the bar – she could have tipped Rose off. Damn.
‘Her family want to know she’s safe and well.’ Guy felt vexed with Rose Morgan – why was she needlessly putting them through this worry?
‘Perhaps you could tell them that she is?’ the young woman said.
‘Do you have an address for her?’ asked Mary.
The assistant shook her head. ‘She kept to herself. I didn’t know her very well but I thought you should know. I’m sorry. That’s all I can tell you.’
1930
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
To celebrate their first wedding anniversary, Diana and Bryan had accepted an invitation from Kate Mulloney, who had taken a floor at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido at Venice. Louisa couldn’t say for certain what Mrs Mulloney’s situation had been before, but as a widow she was extremely well-off. Her husband’s death had been written up in the papers as a tragedy, a fatal allergic reaction; the fact of Kate having been so drunk she had passed out and failed to call an ambulance had been successfully kept out of the reports, and she remained as central to London society as ever before. A year with the Guinnesses had given Louisa a new understanding of what it meant to be rich, as rich people saw it. She grasped now why the Mitford girls had complained of their poverty. From where she had been standing then – having grown up as the daughter of a washerwoman and chimney sweep – they had seemed to be practically rolling in money. But now, having worked for Diana for a year, she knew what that actually looked like.
It meant, for a start, having the latest fashions in one’s wardrobe instead of one’s dresses being made by the local seamstress. Let loose with a chequebook, Diana had evolved a style of her own fairly fast, one that showed off her carefully maintained figure at its best. Unfussy in silhouette, though she was fond of flounces on shirt fronts and cuffs, she tended towards rich textures of cashmere, wool, linen or silk in sharply contrasting dark and light shades; a white velvet cape over a long black coat was a favourite. Bryan was no dandy but he enjoyed complementing his wife with his own modern look. His beautiful suits were traditionally made in Savile Row, but he had certain touches – such as ties with narrow knots and jackets worn unbuttoned and loose, or off altogether, with shirtsleeves rolled up: tiny hints of his appreciation of the more artistic types.
Louisa liked her mistress’s husband; he was unassuming in many ways, modest and kind, not entirely at ease – she felt – with his position as a privileged young man. Indeed, he had tried to work: having passed his law exams soon after marriage he had joined a chambers as a barrister but soon discovered that he was given no cases, the clerk having determined that the others needed the money more than he did. So the young couple were generally footloose and fancy-free, both day and night, which meant trips to Ireland – where Bryan’s father lent them a vast house in Knockmaroon – or Paris. They had returned there at the end of the previous year with Nancy, who was now writing her first proper novel. She was a frequent visitor to their house, usually with a writer of some acclaim in tow, not least Evelyn Waugh, who seemed to think that Nancy’s career as
an author was as promising as his. Mr Waugh had only just published a new book, Vile Bodies, and dedicated it to Diana and Bryan; Louisa thought Nancy might rather have minded.
Most weekends were spent staying with friends in the country, hunting or shooting in the winter months. When in London, residing at their house in Buckingham Street (rather larger than a dolls’ house as it had turned out), Diana and Bryan went to the theatre almost every night, or Diana went to concerts with her brother Tom, as well as to dinners, clubs or dances, or gave their own elaborate parties. For Diana’s nineteenth birthday in the summer of 1929, they had held a party themed ‘1860’, with a few hundred guests and the women required to wear enormous crinoline skirts with hoops. Only a month later they held an equally extravagant ‘tropical’ party on board the Guinness family yacht, the Friendship. Every outing was followed up by a newspaper report the next day, usually with a photograph of ‘the ravishing the Hon. Mrs Guinness’. Often, but not always, the accompanying item was written by Luke Meyer.
Luke had remained a friend of both Diana’s and Louisa’s. In the wake of Guy’s shocking revelation that he was engaged, Louisa had needed that friendship more than ever. Not, she strongly suspected, that Luke would ever be a romantic attachment, but she didn’t mind that. She had sworn off that altogether. It wasn’t as if she could be married and be a lady’s maid, in any case. For while she knew she remained nothing more than a servant, there was much about the work that she had begun to enjoy. To begin with, it was not arduous. She couldn’t even complain about lack of sleep as other lady’s maids did, for although Diana often returned home late, when Louisa needed to be ready to help her undress and prepare for bed, she slept late, too. There was some work to be done in washing and ironing Diana’s dresses and keeping her shoes, gloves, hats and bags spotless, but mostly it was a very ‘upstairs’ sort of life, with the two of them frequently going to the shops together, whether to prepare for the various parties or travel. Naturally, when Diana travelled, Louisa travelled with her and was accorded her own respect at the servants’ halls of the houses they visited, often seated on the right of the butler at the staff meals; it never failed to amuse her that the servants were more self-consciously hierarchical than the people they worked for. Upstairs, Diana would sometimes tell her late at night, the young men and women enjoyed breaking the rules of their parents, eschewing the ancient rules of seating according to title – and once, Diana had snickered, a woman had refused to leave with the rest of her sex after dinner but remained with the men to drink the port.
Sometimes the younger sisters – Unity, Decca and Debo – would come to London and Louisa would take them out, which they would all enjoy. Diana adored her younger sisters and they were completely enthralled by her glamour; as a gang, Louisa enjoyed the sensation of being one of them, deep in the centre of their teasing and jokes. As for the rest of Diana’s life, Louisa knew she was not one of the players but she somehow felt in the thick of the high life, often hearing the society gossip some time before it made it to the papers. Once or twice, slightly guiltily, she had even given Luke a story but never anything about Diana or Bryan. She might not have been curing disease or running for parliament like the fearless women featured in the newspapers but compared to where she had started in life, Louisa felt she had begun to achieve something, even if it was travelling more and meeting a wider circle of fascinating people than she was sure any of her ancestors would have done.
There was just one fly in the cold cream.
Louisa didn’t like Diana.
She couldn’t put her finger on why, exactly, or even when the rot had started to set in. Diana was perfectly nice to her, never high-handed or too exacting in her requirements. The excellent cook at Buckingham Street, Mrs Mackintosh (always called ‘Mrs Mack’), was almost slavishly devoted to her mistress, as was May, the parlourmaid who had formerly worked for Bryan’s parents. Nor was her employer dull or stupid: Diana was well-read, as up-to-date with the latest artists and writers as with politics, and never short of an opinion. She was very beautiful, of course – even more so now than when she had married, having lost something of her babyish plumpness around the chin and cheekbones, even now that she was in the later stages of pregnancy. She could be stubborn, wilfully sticking to her point even when her argument had been clearly lost, but this could be said of Nancy, and Louisa remained as fond of her. It was more a certain coldness that Louisa detected, a frigidity that remained even in the face of the warmth of another’s kindness. It was possible that at the root of it, Louisa felt sorry for Bryan, who was madly besotted with his wife, to a degree that she had to admit could not be easily matched in return. More than once, Louisa had found Diana asleep on the bed in the afternoon, with rose petals strewn on the pillow by Bryan as she slept, a newly written poem left beside her. This could be loving or oppressive, depending on your point of view, but was surely kindly meant and Louisa found herself reacting crossly to Diana’s complacency about her husband’s adoration.
With Diana pregnant now and the baby due in early March, Louisa felt an obligation to remain in her employ. And truthfully, in spite of this difficulty, she was reluctant to consider seriously giving up her work: she had a comfortable room in the centre of London, a roof over her head, the opportunities of travel, easy work … When she thought back to the squalor of the shared lodgings she had had to take in the time she’d spent away from the Mitfords, let alone the long hours working at the dress shop and the wandering hands of its owner, she wanted to retch. No, she had to stay with Diana and follow her, if not quite to the ends of the earth, then at least to Venice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When Louisa had first gone to work for the Mitfords in their pretty Cotswolds house, the beauty of the English countryside had struck her, even in the depths of a frozen winter. This picturesque memory faded as quickly as ice in the sun when she arrived in Venice.
The journey had been a long one, longer even for Louisa and Turner, the chauffeur and nominal valet for Bryan (who didn’t like to say he had a valet, though he appreciated a man who polished his shoes and laid out the correct attire for a ball). The two of them had left a day earlier than Diana and Bryan, taking the train to Dover, then the ferry, and another train from Calais to Paris. Once there, they had crossed Paris – not as difficult as it might have been; Louisa was carrying the small case that contained Diana’s jewellery, so Bryan had given them the francs to pay for a taxi – and, helpfully armed with Cook’s Continental Timetable, caught another train to Venice, with one change in Milan.
Turner was not a man given much to conversation beyond the mechanics of a car or philately (he carried a red leather book of his collection with all the laissez-faire of a man in possession of the Crown Jewels), but once they had won the minor battles over which train to catch and from which platform, Louisa was content to read her book and enjoy the peacefulness of the journey. France’s landscape in January was not particularly adventurous, with large flat fields of brown earth broken only by the occasional line of tall trees. Of Milan she saw nothing but the railway station, though even the posters with Italian words were enough to give her a frisson of delight. When they arrived in Venice, Louisa was disappointed not to see any water but cars driving around as plentifully as in London; those paintings she had seen must have been exaggerations or perhaps it had all been paved over?
Only after she and Turner had met Diana and Bryan off the Orient Express and hauled their considerable luggage into a second taxi which drove for a surprisingly short amount of time, stopping at the waterfront, did Louisa understand that they had not yet reached their final destination. ‘The train was heavenly,’ said Diana, her hand resting lightly on her curved stomach as they stood by the water, ‘but I am exhausted. It was a non-stop party the entire way. I expect your journey was less tiring.’ She would have continued chatting but Bryan came up and put his arm around her: ‘My love, let me show you this marvellous city in the best way possible.’ Quietly, he steered
her away for them to stand together while they waited for the two motorboats to arrive.
Diana and Bryan went in one water taxi, Louisa, Turner and the luggage in the second, following close behind. Though the boats were low in the water and about the same size as a long car, they were carried at a sedate pace, first through a channel marked out by tall poles before they were suddenly motoring along a wide watery avenue, high Venetian palaces on either side. The buildings were enchantingly old, with faded, coloured plaster and thick, leaded windows behind open shutters; through wide iron gates, gardens could be seen, dormant in the unforgiving winter. When Louisa recognized the Rialto Bridge from paintings she had seen by Canaletto at the National Gallery, she realized they were on the Grand Canal itself. The water was as grey as metal, the sky no less impervious, and yet Louisa felt herself as exalted by her surroundings as she was on a high summer’s day. When they passed what she knew must be St Mark’s Square, she caught a glimpse of the Doge’s Palace, with its fantastical tiling and stern statues, the elegant height of the Campanile tower and even the dome of Saint Mark’s Basilica. Italians in tightly belted dark coats and hats pulled low walked along narrow pavements lining the canal and it seemed almost impossible that they should be going about usual daily business, hardly aware of the extraordinary, rare beauty they were in. Louisa and Turner were sitting in the cold open air, and Diana turned around to wave at them both, a smile on her face, mouthing: ‘Isn’t it glorious?’ Louisa could do no more than smile back and nod happily.
As they were not staying on the main island of Venice itself but on the Lido, the boats carried on beyond the neck of the Grand Canal, past other small archipelagos and drew up at a pier destined solely for guests of the Hotel Excelsior. There they were met by porters in burgundy and blue livery, their bags carried with much exclamation and fuss to the enormous lobby. Louisa and Turner stood to the side while Mr and Mrs Guinness checked in at a reception desk that seemed to be as imposing as the altar at Canterbury Cathedral. Louisa was slowly realising that the vast structure they had seen from the outside, resembling a sprawling Venetian palace, was in fact nothing but the hotel. The lobby’s ceilings were too high to be able even to discern its colour clearly, the staircases that criss-crossed from several floors down were sweeping enough for an empress in full regalia to descend and their fellow guests had all stepped straight out of the latest issue of Vogue. As admiring as she was, it was with relief that Louisa spotted Luke across the lobby, even if he did seem to be in the company of a rather eccentric-looking older woman. Luke waved at her, went across to say hello to Diana and Bryan, then came over to Louisa.
[Mitford Murders 03] - The Mitford Scandal Page 11
