Chapter Seventeen

ON THE PLATFORM OF KING’S CROSS STATION, Emmeline Moffatt waited in trepidation. As the doors opened and a clerk began checking the tickets of all the travellers who bustled aboard, she stood there, incessantly turning a barley sugar between her teeth, obsessively scrunching her hand around the little bundle of Manila envelopes that she’d collected all summer long. Minutes seemed to stretch into hours. More than once, her nerves failed her. More than once, she stepped backwards, as if she might turn and run away.

But each time she faltered, there was a hand in the small of her back, and a whispered word to tell her that everything was going to be all right.

‘Come now, Emmeline.’ Archie smiled. ‘I’ll be with you all the way.’

So, together, Mrs Moffatt and Archie climbed into the smoky carriage and settled down with a flask of hot tea and two cream buns.

*

It was Archie who had persuaded her she ought to write.

At first, Mrs Moffatt was uncertain. She had tried to put pen to paper, and found that all language failed her – though she was never lost for words in front of her girls. It was easier to imagine going back to Mildenhall and spending seven days camped in that café than to dream up the words that might follow Dear Malcolm .?.?.

But every evening, before he went out on stage, Archie took to visiting the housekeeping lounge and sat with her as she teased out her thoughts. It was Archie, too, who walked with her down to the hotel post room, who made sure her courage did not fail her before she handed her letters over to Mrs Farrier for onward delivery. Then he would waltz off, while Mrs Moffatt retreated into her inventories and lists, that safe little space where she need not think too often about the past.

But one night, as they’d parted ways, he’d said something that had stuck with her, dogging her across the days and nights to come.

‘There are many things to regret in life, Emmeline. But better that we regret the things we’ve done, rather than the things we didn’t do. I should know.’ He’d paused, then, and she thought she detected in Archie, for the very first time, a kind of sadness. ‘I missed my chance at a family of my own. Well, I had my music, and that was where all my passion lay. But musicians get old. They forget to have romances. They forget to have families. There’s my regret. I regret that I did nothing, when I had my chance. Perhaps, my dear, you should not be the same.’

Those words, she reflected now, were the reason she was here. They were the reason he was here, too, looking at her across the table, with crumbs from his cream bun sticking in his whiskers. He’d done it deliberately to make her laugh. She had not known, until the weeks gone by, what an impish sort of humour Archie could have.

By the time the train reached Mildenhall, the morning was already old, and the nerves were coursing through her again.

‘I’m going to be with you the whole time,’ Archie began, taking her arm.

Out here in the countryside, September had bite. The wind flurried after them, and the high road was flecked with rain.

‘I’ll be right there in the café, diligently reading my magazine.’ He’d brought with him three copies of TheEtude and two of Melody Maker. ‘All you’ll need to do is call, Emmeline, and I’ll come running.’

‘Like a knight in armour.’

Archie grinned. ‘Like a loyal servant.’

She’d chosen the same café she’d sat in last time, and they were approaching it now.

Dear Malcolm,

she’d written.

Perhaps you can imagine how many times I have tried to write this letter, only for my hand to give up on me, or my mind to lose the thread of any sentence I began to compose. Please don’t take my tardiness in replying as a failure of my heart, but only as the explosion of feelings that have been rocking me these past weeks and months – both good, for you, dear Malcolm, and ill, for me, your mother who abandoned you. There are bound to be ghosts at the back of your cupboard, no matter how long you live. But you, my dear boy, are a ghost I have been living with for all thirty-three of your years. You may not know this, but I was married to a wonderful man, who perished during the Great War, and though he was as close to me in heart and soul as any other human being I ever met, not once did I tell him about you. So, when your first letter arrived, it punctured more than three decades of silence. I was undone. But I am writing to you, now, to ask for a second chance .?.?.

There had been other letters, after that. He’d written back almost straight away, filled with zeal that she’d taken the time to respond, and reiterating that he sought nothing from her.

You write that you are sorry, but I did not come looking for an apology. That is not how my ma and pa raised me. I am grateful for what I have had. But I do wish to look upon your face, and see from whom I came .?.?.

Well, he’d see it soon enough. Mrs Moffatt and Archie had reached the café windows – and there, sitting alone at a table within, was an airman in navy uniform, with hair the colour of sand and eyes that mirrored her own.

‘Archie, I can’t feel my knees. I can’t go in.’

But it was too late. Through the window, the airman had already seen them.

Almost as soon as he laid eyes on her, he got to his feet. His eyes creased, as if to ask her a question – but, when no answer was forthcoming, he stumbled over himself to reach the door instead. Soon, he was pulling it open, and a voice she did not recognise, in an accent she had so rarely heard, was saying, ‘Emmeline?’

Mrs Moffatt was still. Time seemed to slow down. Or perhaps it was only the world that was expanding, rushing away from her in a riotous blur, so that she felt herself stranded and alone. It was Archie, at her side, who gave her the courage to say, ‘Michael?’

The airman paused. He looked her up and down. He heard the unfamiliar name and, when it occurred to him why she might have said it, he smiled in a way that brought both sadness and delight together. To Emmeline, the whole world was in that smile. The same smile as his father – the way it reached into his eyes, and made them glow. A smile that was both the past she had buried, the present in which she now lived – and the future it was suddenly possible to have.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it’s Malcolm.’

He reached out a hand and, when she was too stunned to take it, swooped to the side so that Archie could take it instead.

‘G’day,’ he said, ‘I’m Malcolm Brody.’

He gave a mock shiver, as if the wind that whipped around him was chilling him to the bone.

‘It’s nicer in there,’ he said. ‘They have hot tea and currant buns.’

Currant buns.There was something magical in the way he said it.

‘I like currant buns,’ was all Mrs Moffatt could say.

Then she felt ridiculous, and wanted to run – but Archie’s arm was around her, and he was shepherding her forward, and before she knew it they were through the doors, in the warmth of the café, and sitting down.

‘I’m with you all the way,’ he whispered – and he would be, she knew. She could feel it, deep in her very bones.

*

There was already tea at the table. Soon, there were current buns and hot buttered crumpets and a pot of gooseberry jam.

‘You don’t get gooseberries down under,’ Malcolm began.

His voice was deep and rich – like honey, thought Mrs Moffatt – and his accent as bright and broad as she’d imagined. There weren’t often Australians in the Buckingham Hotel.

She still hadn’t taken her coat off, though she’d been sitting there for five minutes already, while Malcolm chatted with the girl at the counter and sorted out their order. Archie had taken a table in another corner, and though he’d opened his Melody Maker magazine, Mrs Moffatt was quite certain he wasn’t actually reading. His eyes kept flitting up, to check she hadn’t fainted clean away.

When Malcolm returned and settled his big, burly body into the seat opposite her, he said, ‘Shall I let you into a little secret?’

Mrs Moffatt nodded, with the desperation of a baby bird.

‘They let you take your coats off in here.’

It took her a second to realise he was jesting. But there was power in that joke. She briskly shook off her overcoat, draping it over the back of the chair.

‘You must think me addled.’

‘I didn’t think you were addled,’ Malcolm went on, pouring the tea – and asking, with his eyes opened mischievously, if she might like a huge dollop of thick cream stirred into the mix. She very much did. ‘You look a little frightened of me, that’s all.’

Frightened wasn’t the right word either, but a cocktail of emotions like this had no true name.

In the end she said, ‘It’s all so new,’ and Malcolm seemed to understand.

‘I’ve been thinking about this for nearly two years, Emmeline. All you’ve had is a few weeks.’

‘We should drink some tea.’

‘We should,’ Malcolm agreed.

So that was exactly what they did.

Tea did not just slake a thirst; tea restored the soul. She allowed its warmth to radiate inside her (the extra three spoonfuls of sugar she stirred in helped too), and somehow the silence started to seem comfortable instead of awkward – so much so that, when Malcolm said, ‘You know, I’m nervous too,’ she was quite startled, as if coming out of a slumber.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that you weren’t! What you must be thinking.’

Her hands had started trembling. She navigated the teacup carefully back to its saucer. She had to face this as she would any other problem, she decided. As if she was not Emmeline, anguished mother, sitting in a café in Mildenhall – but Mrs Moffatt, mother to all her girls in the housekeeping lounge at the Buckingham Hotel. That thought gave her some steel, even as it anguished her further – for this wasn’t a problem, was it? This wasn’t a scandal that had to be tidied away. This was her world.

This was her son.

She found her pluck, at last.

‘Your letters caught me quite out of the blue. It’s been a great many years since I held you in my arms. By the end of today, I shall have been with you much longer, even, than I was back then. I didn’t get to hold you for long, Malcolm. I didn’t get to feed you, or bathe you, or play with you or watch you grow. You must think I’m a very foolish old woman – and grown from a selfish, selfish girl. I suspect, in many ways, I was .?.?. but I want you to know. You’ve been in my head, every single day. You’ve been the voice in my ear, guiding me ever onward. You’ve been .?.?. a little spark in me, day and night, ever since the day they took you out of my arms. I’ve dreamt about you. You’d be four or eight or twelve years old, and I’d wake up certain you were happy in some English field – or, on my blacker nights, that you were sitting in some impoverished hovel, with parents who’d never loved you, or .?.?.’

Words failed her.

She drank more tea.

‘I thought about looking for you so often,’ she said. ‘They swear you off it, of course. The Sisters tell you – you’ve been in a different world for nine months. Now, go back to your life. But I couldn’t. They looked at me differently, after that. My mother and father. My own sister. I’d become a shadow. They didn’t mention you. Didn’t ask what I’d called you, or what I’d felt as they swaddled you up and took you away. Well, they don’t, do they? It’s like the mistress my father had, or the times he’d slap my mother. It just gets brushed under the carpet, so that life can carry on regardless. I haven’t seen them in decades. Not even after my Jack passed on at Passchendaele. But I got up and got on every day – and I sometimes think the only reason I could do it was because you were there, a little flame in me, keeping me alive.’ She cracked. ‘Even if I knew I’d never see you again .?.?. And here, here you are!’

No tea could hold at bay Mrs Moffatt’s emotions any longer. She stirred in more sugar, feverishly adding spoonful after spoonful, as if it might help.

‘Have you been happy?’ she finally whispered.

‘I have,’ Malcolm returned, and the breathlessness in his voice told her that even he – all six foot seven of him – was racked by emotion as well. ‘I wanted you to know it, the moment my first letter landed. I don’t want to see you cry. It makes me think I shouldn’t have—’

‘Oh, but you should!’ she cried, and grappled for his hand across the table.

‘Ma and Pa, they told me where I came from when I was ten. By then, we’d been living outside Perth in Western Australia for eight years. I never knew any other life. So the idea I’d come from rainy, grey England, on the other side of the world – England, with its kings and queens and castles high on the hills – well, that was an adventure to me. The other boys were playing at being bush rangers. Me, I wanted to be a knight.’

‘Why did they tell you at all?’ Mrs Moffatt whispered.

‘Oh, gee, you don’t know my ma and pa!’ He paused. ‘They’re both gone now, of course. I think that’s what set me off looking. Before Ma passed, she sat me down and said – she’s out there, somewhere, if that’s what you want. If you want to know where you came from – deep in here.’ He clasped his hand over his heart. ‘She was just like that, my ma. The Sisters picked a good one. She’d been adopted too, you see. Having me had been like the fulfilment of her own life story, and I reckon she’d always planned on setting me on the course to find you one day. That meant something to her. She’d never found her own mother, not even after years of looking. Well, doors close, don’t they? But my ma, she remembered the name of the sister at St Maud’s, the one who arranged the new home for me. And when I knew I’d be coming to England on service, well, it seemed like the stars were lining up.’

He stopped. Then, with a smile, he called over his shoulder, ‘Two more currant buns, please!’ He turned back to her. ‘I don’t want anything, Emmeline. I haven’t come looking for money. I’m not even sure I came looking for love – though I’d take it, if that was what I found. You can never have enough love – not in days like these! There’s no hiding it – I’m in merry old England in case there’s a war to come. But I don’t need it, Emmeline. I just wanted to .?.?. know you, for a time.’

Mrs Moffatt said, ‘I thought you might be angry.’

‘Angry?’ His face creased up like a crumpled newspaper. ‘That’s what the sister from St Maud’s, when I finally found her, said as well. That you might be angry. People didn’t like being reminded of their shame, she said. Some things were best forgotten. Dig up the past, she told me, and you’ll find bodies. But, pah! Start digging, I told ’em, and you might find gold.’

Mrs Moffatt was caught off guard.

‘I’ve had the best life,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’m living it right now. That’s the life my ma and pa gave me – but it’s the life you gave me too. If you hadn’t have been you, if you hadn’t had to do what you did, why, I’d hardly be the person I am today. And, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty happy with that person.’

With a flourish, he took a bite out of his currant bun.

‘I’m pretty happy with that person too,’ she whispered.

‘Well, good.’ Malcolm guffawed. ‘Then it’s set. We’re all happy. The world might be about to end, there might be about to be the war to end all wars, but at least we’ll die happy. Can’t say fairer than that!’

Mrs Moffatt’s jaw had dropped open. Startled, Malcolm took her hand.

‘Sometimes I forget I’m in England,’ he said. ‘It was a joke.’

‘Then perhaps we could .?.?. ?’

‘Meet again?’

Mrs Moffatt nodded, over and over again.

‘I should like it.’

‘And write?’

Malcolm nodded. ‘I’ve even heard about these things called telephones as well.’

*

Afternoon was turning to twilight when the train deposited Mrs Moffatt and Archie Adams back on the concourse at King’s Cross Station. With Mrs Moffatt still stunned by the day’s unfolding events, they picked up a taxi cab on the bustling pavement outside.

‘I’ll have to go the long way,’ the driver said. ‘You won’t believe the roads they’ve got closed.’

The driver wasn’t joking – but even ‘the long way round’ seemed to be thronged as well.

‘It’s all the way from Holborn into Trafalgar Square,’ he said, as they wended their way through the backstreets. ‘If you wanted to get to Westminster tonight, you’d be better off walking – though the streets down there are clogged just as bad as the roads.’

They’d been idling at a junction for too long, without hope of picking a way further ahead, when Archie said, ‘What is all this? I’m meant to be on stage in an hour.’

‘Stage, is it?’ The taxi cab driver leaned back to appraise his passengers. ‘I’ll get you there, son. Don’t worry.’ Wrenching the cab around, he peeped on his horn – ‘You see, I’m musical myself!’ – and searched valiantly for another route ahead.

‘I’ve never known London like it,’ said Archie.

‘It’s these protests, that’s what it is,’ the driver said. ‘They’ve congregated in Trafalgar Square, pouring all down the Horse Guards Parade. It won’t make the blindest bit of difference, not to the nobs in Westminster, but they’ve got to do it, haven’t they? The common man deserves a say.’

‘But what the devil are they protesting about?’ Archie asked.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ the driver snorted. ‘Lord, where have you two come from? It’s Mr Chamberlain! It’s all over the evening editions. Landed back from Munich today. Marched straight out of his plane at the Heston aerodrome and declared he’d done it. Shaken Mr Hitler’s hand. Agreed a sworn peace. Told ’em all there’d be no war.’

‘And they’re protesting .?.?. that?’

‘Aye, well, it’s what he did to win the peace, isn’t it? The Germans are taking half of Czechoslovakia, and we’ve just stood back and let them. All because of promises on a piece of paper.’

Oxford Circus was a tangle but, once they were across it, the streets of Mayfair were calm. At last, they approached Berkeley Square, and the great white face of the Buckingham Hotel hanging above.

‘But .?.?. peace for a generation!’ Mrs Moffatt finally exclaimed. ‘That’s good news, surely!’

She could feel the lightness of it and, as they wheeled around the square to pull up to the hotel’s grand white colonnade, she realised why. Malcolm had come to Great Britain, anticipating a war. Now, though he might fly in training and on parades, he wouldn’t be soaring in the skies above Berlin. How cruel the thought of losing him, having just discovered him, had been – and how beautiful the knowledge he’d be safe.

‘Well, that lot out there don’t think so. It’s that Mr Churchill that’s got ’em wound up, if you ask me. They reckon he’s been outsmarted, that Mr Chamberlain doesn’t have what it takes up here’ – he tapped the side of his head, knowingly – ‘to do His Majesty proud. Peace for a generation? Pah! I’m sorry, miss, but I’m with them marching on Downing Street right now. My lad, he was being picked on at school. Spat on. Called names. Wasn’t until he boxed one of them in the nose that they laid off the poor mite. And here’s the most elevated man in Great Britain, not brave enough to do the same.’ The driver stopped. Too late, he realised he’d already reached the colonnade and the Buckingham’s doorman was waiting to attend to the door. ‘Listen to me, prattling on! I’ll stick this one on the Buckingham account, should I?’

Archie escorted Mrs Moffatt through the tradesman’s entrance and to the door of the housekeeping lounge. For a time, they lingered in silence together. Her hand was on his arm, and she slid it down, gingerly, until it was almost at his hand. There, for propriety’s sake, she stopped.

‘Thank you, Mr Adams – Archie. You won’t know how today feels. I’m not certain I’ll ever have the words myself. But I know how it would have felt if I’d never done it. It would feel grey. And it would feel wasted, and old, and like I was just sleepwalking – sleepwalking until the end. But now .?.?. I don’t feel any of that. And I wouldn’t have dared, Archie, if you hadn’t come.’

She shuffled a little closer to the tall bandleader and, rising on the tips of her toes, planted a single kiss on his whiskery cheek.

Archie was surprised. But what astounded him most was that the ballroom no longer seemed to be calling out for him as it had before. He would be quite content if he was told he was to remain in Mrs Moffatt’s company all night long.

‘Look at us.’ She laughed. ‘It’s been eight years since you joined the Buckingham, eight years since the Grand opened its doors, and I must have spoken to you more in the past ten weeks than I have in all those seasons before.’

‘Then perhaps,’ Archie stuttered, ‘I might come again soon. For a cream tea.’

Mrs Moffatt smiled. ‘I should be delighted.’

After he had gone, she ducked into the housekeeping lounge and into her own darkened office. For nearly thirty years she’d been keeping this kingdom. She hadn’t realised, until today, why she loved this place so much, nor why she’d thrown her heart so passionately into it. She’d needed something to love. If it wasn’t to be a child, it needed to be this world.

She thought of Hélène Marchmont. She’d had so little to do with the Queen of the Ballroom over the years, but, she decided, she should seek her out soon. Every life mattered.

It was as she was pondering this thought that she heard a knocking at her door. Tentative at first, she almost mistook it for the rattling of one of the hotel’s ancient pipes – but, when it came again, she knew she was not mistaken.

‘One moment, dear!’ she called out.

Probably it was one of her girls, with her heart broken by some young rascal. Or one of them, having grown homesick, who needed some mothering. Well, Mrs Moffatt thought, she could provide them with that. Now, perhaps, more than ever.

She opened the door.

‘My dear,’ she began, her eyes roaming up and down the girl who stood outside. ‘Oh, my dear.’ She stepped back to allow the visitor inside. ‘Quickly now, before anybody sees.’

Moments later, once the tea was brewed, once the shortbread fingers had been lined up on the plate and the girl settled into a seat, Mrs Moffatt said, ‘Now, my dear, shall we begin?’ She settled herself down. ‘You’ll have to tell me what’s wrong, dear. I can’t see inside that head of yours. But whatever it is, we’ll put it right. You can count on me for that.’

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

If it was the first time Mrs Moffatt had heard those words, she might have been completely unprepared. But three decades in the Buckingham Hotel had presented her with more than one frightened girl bearing a child. Things barely changed, from one generation to the next.

After a day when she herself had felt so in need, it felt good to help somebody else. So she told her how it was going to be. How they weren’t going to panic. How what was needed was friendship and solidarity – and, yes, a little resilience and courage along the way. How she wasn’t the first and she wouldn’t be the last, and how these stories sometimes ended in sadness – but how they could end in love, and hope, and good cheer, if only the will was there.

‘You and me, my girl, we’ll work out a plan together. You might think Mr Charles, our esteemed hotel director, is the only one adept at tidying up the little dramas of our fine establishment – but you’d be wrong. I’m a dab hand at sorting out our little mysteries myself. Well, I might even have one or two of my own!’ From somewhere deep inside, Mrs Moffatt found the strength of mind to smile. ‘So let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? That’s the only way to get to the end, you see. Why don’t you tell me where it all began?’

The girl squirmed. Mrs Moffatt wanted to reach out, put her arms around the girl – but something stopped her.

This girl, after all, was not one of her own.

‘I suppose I fell in love,’ the girl sobbed. ‘I didn’t mean to. Lord knows, I didn’t want to! But it happened and, Mrs Moffatt, it was like I’d been missing it all my life. Like I was suddenly whole. I haven’t dared tell him yet. But he’s an honourable sort – though you wouldn’t believe it, not if you heard the stories about what he used to be like. Well, that’s how I met him, you see .?.?.’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. It’s just .?.?. I needed to tell somebody. And I thought, if anyone in this hotel might help me, it might be you, Mrs Moffatt.’

‘Oh, my dear, there isn’t a single soul in this hotel I wouldn’t help.’

Mrs Moffatt pitched forward and, taking the hem of her dress, dried the girl’s tears from her face.

‘I’m here for you, and always will be.’ She paused. ‘That’s my solemn promise to you, Miss Edgerton, and it’s not ever going to change.’