Chapter Twelve

SUMMER HAD brOUGHT FRESH COLOUR to Berkeley Square. Behind the railings of the town houses, terracotta pots erupted with carnations and marigolds in a myriad colours. The manicured lawn of the square was a verdant dell, across which the midday sun shone like molten gold – and, twice a day, the Regency Florists sent their finest artists up from the Regent Street arcades to furnish the Buckingham suites and restaurants with bouquets of wild indulgence.

But none of that compared to the riot of colour exploding in Mrs Emmeline Moffatt’s heart as, begging reprieve from her duties for the day, she crossed London by Underground train, emerging to stand at the bustling ticket desk tucked inside King’s Cross Station.

‘Madam?’ the ticket clerk ventured, when she finally reached the head of the queue.

Mrs Moffatt shook herself out of her thoughts. The ticket clerk was a young man, still carrying the gangliness of his youth. She looked at his face, framed in curls of red hair, and thought: you’re half as young as he’ll be. You’re a babe in arms. The years of my life have been flickering by, all bound up in the Buckingham Hotel, and I’ve been letting them go, one by one .?.?.

‘Where can we send you, madam? What train are you boarding?’

Here it was. She took a deep breath.

‘I’d like a ticket to Mildenhall, please.’

The ticket clerk screwed up his face, then consulted a chart on the wall behind him.

‘You’ll have to change at Cambridge. Single journey, is it?’

Time seemed to stand still. All the hustle and bustle of the busy concourse faded into silence, until finally she stuttered, ‘Return, please. Yes, yes, I’ll need to return.’

She might have been coming back on the evening train, she realised, but that was the only way in which this journey could ever be called a ‘return’. For what she was about do was not something that could be undone. Once she stepped onto that train, there would be no turning around.

*

It took over three hours for her to reach the station at Mildenhall. As she stepped down from the train platform, Mrs Moffatt nervously asked one of the porters, ‘The air base, sir. Is it far?’

The porter gave her a look of surprise. ‘I should think it’s a couple of miles at least, love. There’s a bus service, but that’s just to ferry the lads in and out.’ He stopped. ‘You looking for somebody, are you?’

Mrs Moffatt clutched her bag tight to her chest.

‘I am not,’ she declared, and hurried fitfully out of the station.

It took her a little time to orient herself. Mildenhall was a small parish, sprung up around the grounds of an old manor house, but she soon understood its true purpose. The village square was full not only with shoppers and market tradesmen, but men in the blue-grey uniform of the Royal Air Force. Mildenhall market was not as vast as the markets she’d visited in London but this far from the Buckingham Hotel, she felt quite untethered. She needed something to anchor her.

A nice pot of tea might do.

There were cafés aplenty on the corners of the market square. She chose the quietest one, and took a seat in the window, where a waitress brought her a scone with clotted cream and jam of such tartness that it startled her back into life. She sat there, watching the market go by, until the tea was cold, then ordered another pot, with a cosy in case she wanted to linger even longer.

Then she opened her bag, and took out the sheaf of letters she’d folded within.

Dear Emmeline,

said the first.

Dear Mrs Moffatt,

said another.

I have not heard from you, but perhaps it does no harm for me to continue to write, all the same. I have always liked writing letters. I believe I wrote my first to you when I was twelve years old, and kept it under my pillow for I knew not where to send it, nor even your name.

She kept having to stop. When she could not read on, the tea sustained her until she could turn back.

Your son, Malcolm

the letters ended –

or, Yours, in hope, Malcolm Brody

All in all, there were eight of them now. Each one of them written with painstaking care – she could tell in the quality of the penmanship – with each word laboured over lovingly, as if the writer was some poet of great renown and not a simple, solid airman, stationed here in this unassuming country town.

He had written:

Please write back, if only to tell me you would like me to desist. I am a grown man now, nearly thirty-three years of age, and I am happy. How few of us can say that, in this day and age? I have health and I have heart. I have had two parents who loved me. The hole in my life is you and, should you not wish to fill it, you can rest assured that I shall carry on with my head held high, and make the mother and father who raised me proud, and serve my king and country. But write to me and tell me, so that I might carry on. The years of our life are so fleeting, and I am in England, I fear, in preparation for a war to come. I should not like to waste any more of this passing time.

It was these last words that had made her get on the train. Mrs Moffatt, too, could feel the years slipping through her fingers. It was twenty-one years since her husband had died. One war was slowly being forgotten, even as the spectre of another reared its ugly head. She was being given a chance, wasn’t she? A chance to reclaim some of those lost years?

A bell rang, and Mrs Moffatt started.

A blast of warm summer air told her the door was open and, when she looked that way, three airmen in their navy-grey uniforms walked in. Each one of them was tall and lean, with perfectly cropped hair – two of them chestnut brown, one a copper blond – and each smiling from ear to ear. Casually, they walked up to the counter, talked quickly with the waitress, and then sauntered back to the door, meaning to take one of the tables on the pavement outside.

Mrs Moffatt’s heart skipped a beat. The teacup, which she’d been clinging to, rattled so fiercely that tea sloshed over its rim, staining the letters on the tabletop underneath – and drawing the attention of the airmen standing in the door.

‘Georgia,’ the copper-blond one called out, ‘fetch us a cloth, won’t you?’

‘Are you all right, love?’ asked the second.

‘Let me assist,’ said the third, as he took a dishcloth from the waitress and set about cleaning the table.

Just in time, Mrs Moffatt scrabbled her letters together and folded them safely inside her magazine.

‘Just a bit of a wobble,’ she said, not catching the airmen’s eyes. ‘It happens now and again.’

‘Georgia,’ the copper-blond man called out, once everything was clean, ‘get a new pot, won’t you?’ He smiled, sweetly. ‘These are on us, love. Why don’t you get yourself an apple tart too? Georgia’s mum out back – she makes the best apple tarts.’

For the first time, Mrs Moffatt dared to look up. The three airmen were looking at her sympathetically, like they might an out-of-sorts grandmother, and she flashed them a smile in return.

‘Thank you so much, dears,’ she said – but this time she didn’t stutter at all. As each of them had spoken, a revelation had hit her, and all the panic she’d been feeling had fluttered instantly away.

The three airmen – they were all Englishmen, through and through. Not one of them spoke with an Australian accent.

*

Mrs Moffatt didn’t stay for her final pot of tea, though she was grateful to take a slice of apple tart away with her, wrapped in a piece of greaseproof paper. She nibbled at it as the train chugged her slowly back into London. By the time she’d arrived at King’s Cross, there was only a crust of pastry left, and this she broke into pieces and ate on the Underground train that took her back to Oxford Circus.

It was six o’ clock. By rights, she ought to have only just been boarding the train. By rights, she ought to have pottered out to the airbase itself, asked somebody where she might find a Mr Malcolm Brody, or at least watched from afar until she heard Australian voices.

But her heart was simply not ready for it.

She started to feel restored as soon as she came to the oasis of Berkeley Square, where the grand white fa?ade of the Buckingham looked down upon her like a long lost friend. Entering by the tradesman’s door on Michaelmas Mews, she wended her way through storerooms and back corridors until, at last, she approached the hotel director’s office. She’d listened to Maynard Charles so many nights across the years. She’d borne his secrets and carried them with her. And tonight the thing she needed more than anything else was somebody to listen.

She knocked on the door.

‘Enter,’ came Maynard’s grave voice.

Inside, he presided over a desk strewn with papers, while Billy stood to attention, like a soldier on parade.

‘Off with you then, Brogan. I’ll speak with you later.’

‘Yes, Mr Charles.’

The young concierge nodded, seemingly dropping his voice an octave to match the old hotel director. Then, he slipped past Mrs Moffatt and into the corridor beyond.

As soon as he was gone, Maynard looked around, distracted.

‘Emmeline, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Are you quite well?’

‘Maynard.’ She trembled, eyeing the decanter among the papers on his desk. ‘Might you pour me a glass?’

Maynard’s eyes opened fractionally wider, for this was a sentence he had rarely heard from Mrs Moffatt’s lips. More often, she’d been known to put the stopper back in the decanter, to repeat her mother’s favourite mantra, that ‘moderation made men magnificent’.

‘Emmeline, I can’t stop. I’ve a situation in the Queen Mary. The Hamburg Schechts are checked in to the Atlantic Suite, but I’m afraid they’ve rather caught me on the hop. I hadn’t known, until right now, that they’re dining with Lord Adlington. He’d normally be staying with us, but for a reason I can’t quite fathom he’s up at the Imperial. Were I a suspicious man, I might suggest I’d been tricked.’

Mrs Moffatt nodded. Lord Adlington was cousin to the Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall and, as such, had been schooled with King George himself.

‘You know what this means,’ said Maynard wearily.

She supposed she did. Those Nazi sycophants, creeping closer to the good King George. She knew there were games at play, here in the Buckingham Hotel, of which she had no part. Quite frankly, that was the way she liked it. The games and counter-games of politicians and kings were not for her. And yet she needed him tonight. She needed someone, just to listen.

‘Maynard, there’s something I’ve got to .?.?. That is to say, something weighing on me. I’m afraid I find myself in a bit of a pickle and – oh dear, I hardly know where to begin, but .?.?. I’m a good person, Maynard. You, of all people, know I’m a good person, don’t you?’

But Maynard Charles was straightening his waistcoat and manoeuvring past her, out into the hall.

‘Emmeline, I’ll find you soon. I promise. It’s the Schechts, my dear. You understand, I have to be there for the Schechts.’

What a faraway feeling this was, to be standing on her own, wanting only to talk. She tried to follow, crossing the reception hall and watching him vanish through the Queen Mary doors. Maynard Charles had a role to play in all of this that was so much greater than hers. He served unknown men – she understood this, at least – and the imperious faces of the hotel board, and sometimes, as he navigated his way between them, he could forget that other worlds revolved around him as well.

Through the restaurant doors, she saw the Austrian exile, Tobias Bauer, sitting at a table on his own, reading one of his pocket novels, and the loneliness of it struck her, deep inside. The world was too full of lonesome people.

Hundreds of us, she thought, right here in this hotel – and not one of us daring to reach out for another.

No matter, she thought. She’d been keeping this secret alone for half of her life. It shamed her to acknowledge, even now, that not even Jack had known. She wondered if she’d have told him, in the end, if he had lived. She liked to think he’d have wrapped his arms around her and told her he understood, and that their love would not have been diminished, but enhanced greatly instead. Such foolish dreams! But she chose to believe in them now.

At last, she turned from the doors of the Queen Mary, meaning to make for the housekeeping lounge and catch up on all of the paperwork she’d missed out on across the day – and there she saw another lonesome soul, waiting at the concierge desk. Archie Adams was decked out in his resplendent white dinner jacket, his hair neatly trimmed and his silvery moustache waxed to perfection. They said he’d never wed for he was married to his orchestra, the real love of his life. But band members came and went and this had always seemed, to Mrs Moffatt, a peculiar kind of existence.

‘No more peculiar than mine,’ she muttered out loud, and tottered across the reception hall.

‘Emmeline?’

It was Archie’s voice. She had almost disappeared into the Housekeeping hall but, by instinct, she looked back and saw the look of concern creasing his face.

He had seen the tears glimmering in her eyes. She was certain of it.

‘I’m quite well, Mr Adams. It’s been a long day, that’s all.’

She turned again, meaning to repair to the housekeeping lounge and compose herself, but Archie followed.

‘And my day’s just beginning.’ His voice was light, but she knew he could be commanding when he needed. His boys in the orchestra were slavish in their loyalty; he’d brought most of them up out of nothing. ‘I need to be backstage in an hour, Emmeline, but perhaps .?.?.’

An invitation was being proffered. She wanted, more than anything, to accept it – but another part of her, the part used to dealing with other people’s problems, was suddenly flustered.

‘Oh, Mr Adams,’ she said, ‘I’m being a silly old mare. I’m tired, that’s all. I’ll be—’

‘Emmeline, do it for me. I’m nervous. In scarcely two hours’ time, I’ll be up on stage in front of every notable in Mayfair and beyond.’ He smiled. ‘I think I’m going to need a barley sugar to get me through.’

*

In the housekeeping lounge, there were barley sugars aplenty, but what Archie really had in mind was a hot toddy – and, just this once, Mrs Moffatt was happy to oblige. Without any of her girls to set a bad example to, she mixed up hot water and lemon, ginger root and whisky from the cabinet, and added a healthy teaspoon of brown sugar each. After that, they repaired to the armchairs in her office and sat in the lamplight together.

‘You must think me a fool,’ Mrs Moffatt began, ‘to be whimpering like that.’

‘Lord knows, I whimper enough!’ Archie declared, though Mrs Moffatt hardly believed it. Archie Adams seemed to emanate calmness. It was, she decided, what she needed tonight. ‘Something’s happened?’

‘It’s been preying on me for weeks, Mr Adams.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘call me Archie.’

‘My girls know it, Archie. I’ve been short with them – even Nancy Nettleton, and she’s such a sweetheart, living out her dream. But I’ve been abrupt with them all and they’re starting to notice.’

‘I daresay not a soul among them thinks sorely of you, Emmeline. We’re all entitled to an ill-tempered day here and—’

‘It’s more than that.’

She’d said it with such force that Archie, at first taken aback, spluttered with laughter.

‘Now I see.’ He smiled. ‘Old Mrs Moffatt has a temper.’

‘Less of the old!’ She laughed, and Archie was pleased to see her smile. ‘I must be three years your senior, if at all.’

When the laughter had subsided and an awkward silence prevailed, Archie Adams said, softly, ‘Tell me, Emmeline,’ but still Mrs Moffatt said nothing.

After that, the silence continued, filling the air between them, swelling and swelling further until it was almost too much to bear. Mrs Moffatt had started fidgeting in her seat and, when she reached for her toddy, her hand was trembling more violently than it had in Mildenhall that afternoon.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. I thought it might help. The old talking cure, like they said after the Great War. To keep it in, that’s to bed down with the devil. When you let it all out, you let the angels in.’

Suddenly, Mrs Moffatt was on her feet. She marched to her desk, where she’d left her handbag, and from it withdrew her pile of letters. These she deposited on Archie’s lap.

She couldn’t say it, but Archie could read it – every last word.

‘There,’ she said, bringing her hand to her mouth. ‘It’s all there.’

Archie took the letters in, one by one. As his eyes scoured each page, Mrs Moffatt turned away, turned back again, paced one wall and then another. The clock on the wall was advancing – first five minutes, then ten – but inside her heart an ice age was thawing.

It must have taken Archie twenty minutes to finish the last letter.

‘My dear Emmeline,’ was all that he said.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me?’ she whispered. ‘What happened? What kind of a person I could be to have done what I did?’

‘I should think you’d tell me, if you wanted. And I should listen, if you so desired.’

She told herself to keep quiet. But she’d been silent all of her life, and the walls were crumbling, now. Why not kick them down herself? They were her walls, after all. She was the one who’d built them. They’d been meant to protect her but, too late, she realised they’d been keeping her in. Instead of building a fortress, she’d built a prison.

‘I called him Michael,’ she ventured, timidly at first.

‘It’s a fine name.’

‘But now he’s Malcolm.’

Archie Adams nodded, but said nothing. This was not the sort of story you coaxed out of someone. There was a thing he had learned through all his long years playing with orchestras: sometimes, the only good thing you could do was to listen.

‘I was twenty-three. Old enough to know better. Already an old maid, by some accounts. That’s what my sisters and cousins all made of me. Still lived at home, while they were off getting married. Still took my mother strolling by the seafront each day, down there in sunny Southend. But .?.?.’ She stopped, shaking her head sorrowfully. ‘He was older. A gentleman. I wasn’t the first to fall for those charms. Full of wild tales of his days in India, or of leading the charge down in the Transvaal. An old soldier, I thought. Nearly twice my age! And there was I, immature for my years. Na?ve, they later said – and, what’s more, they were right. He used to take me for evening strolls. Or we’d go picnicking down on the sands. And then he said, “Why, Emmeline, light of my life, you’ve changed my very soul.”’ She winced. ‘I believed him. I was a romantic at heart, you see. So when we started taking hotel rooms together, well .?.?.’ She stopped. ‘I’m ashamed, Archie.’

He said, sternly now, ‘You’ve no need to be ashamed.’

‘As soon as I knew I was pregnant, I rushed to tell him. I knew there’d be obstacles. Gossip, perhaps, and rumour. But we’d spoken of being married already and I thought, if we did it there and then – eloped, even, though it would have broken my dear mother’s heart – nobody need know what we’d been doing.’ She hesitated. ‘Only, he didn’t want to marry me. After I told him, I never saw him again. The last I heard, he’d gone to Clacton and met a girl there. I’d hazard she heard all the same stories I did.’

‘He was a deplorable man, Emmeline.’

‘But where did that leave me? Well, I’ll tell you, Archie. It left me at St Maud’s. I’d confessed to my mother, eventually. Three months, I was able to keep it a secret. By the fourth, I was showing and the secret had to end. So I broke her heart after all. But she sorted things, quietly and efficiently, as was her way. A cousin had a cousin who knew about St Maud’s, up on the Norfolk coast. They took in girls like me and sorted us out, and after our babies were born, they sent us back to the world, as if none of it had happened.’ Her voice broke at last. The wall had crumbled to the earth. ‘I saw my son for a few short hours. Then they wrapped him in his swaddling and took him away.’

Archie Adams stood, took two strides towards her and, quite unbidden, folded his arms around her.

‘I’m a devil, Archie,’ she wept.

‘You’re nothing of the sort,’ he whispered in return.

‘I ran away to London, after that. Wrote letters to my mother and father as if none of it had ever happened. But I do believe they stopped loving me, after everything I’d done. So after a little while, the letters just stopped. I didn’t mind. I found my new family, right here in the hotel. I was happy and I was strong. And then I met Jack and .?.?.’ She was so quiet now that Archie could hardly hear. ‘I thought Jack and I might have children. I longed for it. I’d show the world what a good mother I could be. But then Jack didn’t come home from that dreadful war, and I never did get a chance to show myself I could do it, that I was better than I’d been.’

Archie stepped back, braced Mrs Moffatt by the shoulders, forced her to look into his eyes.

‘You’ve been a mother to more girls than you know, here in this hotel. They think of you like that, Emmeline. You must believe it.’

‘The only chance God gave me to have a child of my own, and I gave it away. I watched them wrap him up, even though he was crying for his mama, and they put the pencil in my hands – and I signed my name on their paper. I couldn’t even bring myself to read it. I already knew what it said. That he wasn’t really mine. What kind of mother does that make me?’

‘Mothers do the most wonderful things for their children, Emmeline. And this boy in these letters – look at the good life he’s lived. Look at the love he’s had, and the opportunities, and the success. An airman, come across the world to serve with the RAF. That childhood he speaks of, running wild under an Australian sun! What you did broke your heart, but it wasn’t your choice – and maybe, just maybe, he got the best of it, in the end.’ He stopped. ‘I was thinking of Miss Marchmont, of whether she’ll dance for us ever again. Louis Kildare knew, of course. He kept the secret for her. We had a drink together the other night, after the band had played, and he told me all about it. I should like to find a way of helping Hélène Marchmont. She took the hard road, the better to provide for her child – and you, Emmeline Moffatt, you did the same.’

Something in the words was drying her tears.

‘I don’t know what to do, Archie. I went there today, thinking I might catch just a glimpse before I said hello. But I didn’t have the courage, even for that. I tried, but I failed.’

‘Emmeline, I’ve lived an unusual life. I was there, in Flanders, like everybody else. Most of those who came home wanted nothing more than sweethearts and families of their own. Well, the war made me realise what I wanted as well. I wanted laughter. I wanted music. I wanted song. I bent my life about it. I’ve loved every second, but perhaps it’s protected me from some of life’s hardest edges. Music does break your heart’ – he smiled – ‘but it heals it again. There’s one thing music has taught me, Emmeline, that might be useful to you now. Because when I play a bad note, when the band falls out of rhythm and we send dancers frolicking in a dozen different directions – well, I know it isn’t the end of the world. We’ve failed, but we can always pick up our instruments and try again.’

‘Archie, you’re talking in riddles. I’m not sure I understand.’

‘What I’m saying is that just because you lost your courage once, doesn’t mean you’ll lose it again. We pick ourselves up, we dust ourselves off, we march back to the music and the fray. Life isn’t finished, yet. So we’re past our prime! We still have hearts, don’t we? We get to choose the course of our lives, take our happiness where we can.’ He laughed. ‘Listen to me! Maybe it’s all this talk of war in the air again, addling my mind. But none of us are here forever. It’s down to us to make the best of the years given to us. And I say – if your faith deserted you once, there’s no reason you can’t recapture it again. No reason you can’t go back to Mildenhall and meet this brave, decent, happy young man who has your own blood pulsing in his veins.’

He paused, if only for breath, and was delighted to see the look of hope that had come flickering back to Mrs Moffatt’s face.

‘And if you like,’ Archie declared, ‘I shall come with you. There’s courage enough between us, Emmeline – of that I’m sure.’