Chapter Twenty-one

VIVIENNE LOOKED INTO THE ORNATE mirror in the office behind the Daughters of Salvation, and decided there was no longer any way of denying it. Her body had changed. During the first months it had been easier to conceal. Now, though, her body was giving quarter to the new life growing inside her. Her cheeks, she felt certain, were becoming more rounded. Her ankles swelled further the longer she was on her feet. And the plumpness in her belly, which was once so easy to hide beneath the dowdy gowns she’d adopted recently, was growing rounder by the day.

At least she didn’t feel sick anymore. That, perhaps, had been the hardest thing to conceal. Like that time when, out browsing bridal gowns with Nancy and her fellow chambermaids, she’d felt it come upon her – and had to take herself away, sipping at water from the lavatory tap, until the feeling had passed. She was quite certain Nancy suspected something. She’d wanted to tell Nancy, she really had. But Nancy had other things on her mind this year. She was allowed to have a few months to think about herself for once, to luxuriate and enjoy the time before her wedding. Nancy had done so much for Vivienne. Troubling her now would be the worst thing Vivienne could do.

In her heart, Vivienne would have liked to have been her bridesmaid as well. Had things been different, she would have accepted in an instant. But the thought of ruining Nancy’s day with all the gossip and tittle-tattle had made her demur. She only hoped that, some day soon, Nancy would understand.

At least Mrs Moffatt had been kind. It was clear why all of the chambermaids loved her so.

She was still standing there, studying herself in the mirror, when there came a tap at the door, and Warren Peel appeared, quite uninvited.

‘Vivienne, you’ve been in here a while. Mary’s started to think you’re .?.?.’ He stopped. ‘Are you feeling unwell again?’

Warren had changed too. The year since they’d met had hardened his face, and though the cornfield gold of his hair was the same vibrant hue, these days Warren kept it trimmed neatly. He was even beginning to show signs of stubble. He’d come later to it than most – at nineteen years of age, he was almost as old as Vivienne – but she had often thought he was growing into a handsome man.

‘Not unwell,’ Vivienne said. ‘I think all that’s passed.’ She had been looking at him in the mirror, but now she turned around. ‘You’re sweet to keep asking, Warren. I’m sorry. I’m not used to it. But .?.?. thank you.’

He came to her side – and, had anyone been there to see it, they would have seen the easy familiarity between them.

‘I need to go,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Warren.’

‘Don’t be. Between Mary and the girls, it’s plain sailing tonight. And Artie’s still on the door.’

Guarding us all. Guarding me, thought Vivienne. Like he always is.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and kissed him on the cheek before she took off into the night.

I have to tell him soon, she thought. It isn’t right. He ought to know. They all ought to know.

The taxicab was idling at the end of the cobbled row when Vivienne clambered in. Soon, they were coursing along the Embankment and, from there, up through the palaces of Westminster, bound for Berkeley Square.

To Vivienne, it was like passing from one world to the next – like stepping through a magic door, from the poverty of the Daughters of Salvation, to a world where what mattered most was not how you kept your belly full each night, but how priceless the diamonds were that dangled from your neckline. Only a precious few people passed from one world into the other. Vivienne supposed she was special to be one of those people – but, as she stepped through the hotel’s famous revolving doors, she knew it was not to last. She’d been living on borrowed time, ever since she stopped spending her stepfather’s allowance on champagne and opiates, and started spending it on the Daughters of Salvation instead. And now her days here were numbered: every day that her baby grew within her was another day closer to the end.

In the reception hall, the night managers were on shift, and Billy was nowhere to be found – which was certainly a blessing, because there was nothing he liked more than to engage her in idle chit-chat. And tonight was not for light-hearted nothings. Tonight she was to go back to Mrs Moffatt, and finally work out what she intended to do.

Mrs Moffatt was the light by which she’d steered her life, these past few weeks. Mrs Moffatt hadn’t judged. She hadn’t condemned. She had barely told her what to do, just sat there and listened and made tea. There had been something about Mrs Moffatt that night, as if all the world’s wisdom was being channelled through her.

‘There’s something I learned today,’ she’d said, ‘something that will stay with me forever. The one thing you should never regret is doing the right thing, no matter how hard it is.’

‘But what’s the right thing?’ Vivienne had asked.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Moffatt, ‘that’s the hardest question of all.’

Perhaps, Vivienne had thought, until Mrs Moffatt had posed her another one.

‘And the father, Vivienne?’

The father. The father. The father.

Taking one last breath for courage, Vivienne disappeared into the housekeeping hall. There, at the door to the housekeeping lounge, Mrs Moffatt was waiting once more.

‘I was nearly ready to give up on you, dear.’

Vivienne whispered, ‘I’ve been ready to give up on myself as well. But, Mrs Moffatt, I believe I know what I must do.’

‘Come on, then, dear, let’s get you sorted. I’ve a pot of tea already brewed, and lemon tart from the kitchens. That’s a treat I’m sure your baby will thank you for.’ Her hand was balanced on the Housekeeping door, when she looked back and said, ‘My dear, there’s somebody I think you should talk to.’

She opened the door – and there, at the table where the chambermaids would, in only a few short hours, congregate for breakfast, sat Hélène Marchmont.

Vivienne froze. Perhaps she might even have beaten a retreat, if only Mrs Moffatt hadn’t already taken her hand, and led her inside.

‘You have every right to be cross with me, Miss Edgerton,’ she said, as she rattled the teacups and saucers and arranged shortbread biscuits in a fan around each. The lemon tart that was sitting in the middle of the table was a huge, glistening affair of crystallised lemon and cream. ‘I didn’t mean to break your confidence. But you know the stories, just like everyone. Miss Marchmont’s been where you’re standing. I thought she might help.’

‘Come, sit down,’ said Hélène. The chairs were already waiting. ‘You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t wish to, Miss Edgerton. But all I can say is that, if there was somebody I could have spoken to after Sidney died, somebody who’d been in my shoes .?.?. Perhaps things wouldn’t have turned out differently, but they’d have been different in my heart. I know how you’re feeling now. You’re feeling pent-up. You’re feeling alone. You’re .?.?.’

Mrs Moffatt carved out slices of tart, an extra thick portion for Vivienne, and settled herself at the table.

‘How have you been, Vivienne?’

‘I’m showing too much, Mrs Moffatt. I’ve had all the looks, down at the Daughters. I’m yet to tell Mary Burdett. I’m yet to tell the father. But I’m .?.?.’ She shook her head. ‘I listened to everything you said, and I feel better for it. I feel stronger. You keep a secret, and it hardens in you. It becomes like rock. You have to carry it around.’

Hélène knew this feeling only too well.

‘Carry it for too long and you turn to rock,’ she said. ‘But, Miss Edgerton, this isn’t a secret you can carry for much longer – not without a plan. Do you have a plan?’

Vivienne said, ‘I’m going to keep my baby.’

The silence was perfect. A smile touched Mrs Moffatt, and she nodded her head.

‘But how do I do that?’ said Vivienne. ‘I hardly know what lies I could tell to make this easier.’

‘Perhaps that’s as well,’ Hélène said. ‘My story’s a little different from yours, Miss Edgerton. I married Sidney, without a soul knowing except his parents. We would have raised our daughter together, if he’d lived. But, when he died, I had to make lies and plans of my own. They lasted for a time – but secrets and lies have a habit of breaking free.’ She folded her arms. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll last here, Miss Edgerton. I feel the walls bearing down on me. Even when I’m out on the dance floor, even when I’m dancing with Raymond or Gene or some guest, I’m not really there. At first, I thought it was the gossip. But the truth is – it’s been crashing down, since the day I discovered I was pregnant. All my concoction of falsehoods and misdirections did was delay this moment. It .?.?. robbed me of any control. That’s why my head hasn’t been in the ballroom for years. That’s why I’ve been spinning, spinning away from this place.’

And now, Hélène thought, this thing from Archie Adams – though she dared not say it, for she still hadn’t made sense of it in her own mind. Chicago: the great unknown. It hadn’t left her thoughts in weeks. Three nights ago, she’d been brave enough to sit down with Noelle and Maurice, while Sybil cavorted around them, and told them what Archie had offered. The look on their faces had destroyed her more than the tittering of a few kitchen porters and concierges ever could. The way they kept the hurt inside, and told her she should do it – that for Sybil and Hélène to live a life together, even if it meant they rarely saw the granddaughter they doted on ever again, was the most important thing.

Some people were selfless. Others were selfish. Most of humanity lived somewhere in between. But the Archers had given Sybil and Hélène more than anyone else in the world, and Hélène was not sure she would ever be able to repay them. If she took Sybil to Chicago, to begin a new life together as mother and daughter, it would be like telling them she wasn’t even going to try.

‘What I mean to say,’ Hélène went on, ‘is that, however high you build the walls now – some day, they’re going to crash down.’

Mrs Moffatt nodded. ‘And if you turn those walls into great fortifications, great castles, well, they’ll crash harder still.’

There was silence in the room. From the other side of the table, Vivienne and Hélène looked at her with searching eyes. There was something in this thing she’d said, something in her faraway tone, that spoke of yet more secrets. But Mrs Moffatt wasn’t sure she was ready to spill them. In her heart, she knew she ought to. These girls – both these girls – were crying out for understanding. She realised, now, how they’d been crying out for it all along.

And she was damned if she wasn’t going to help them. Even if it meant risking everything she had.

‘Girls,’ she ventured, ‘you’re not alone.’

So she told them everything. She told them about her grand romance, how it had all been the foolishness of a young woman old enough to know better. She told them about the moment she revealed her pregnancy to her mother. She told them about the Sisters at St Maud’s, and of how she’d named her baby Michael. She told them how he’d smelt in those few brief moments she got to hold him close, before he was swaddled up and whisked away. She told them about the emptiness of the weeks and months that followed; about running away, devastated in the knowledge that her family no longer knew her for who she really was – and devastated, too, by the knowledge that she had stopped loving them. She told them about the long years. The not knowing. The days when she could almost forget. The weeks, wondering who he was, where he was, if he still survived. The days she had longed to – and failed to – tell Jack.

And then she told them about a man named Malcolm, and how she’d set eyes upon her son for the first time in thirty-three years.

As her tale came to an end, Mrs Moffatt took in the two faces staring into hers and smiled.

‘Shocked, I see. Miss Marchmont, you’re not the first in this hotel to turn her life into a lie. Miss Edgerton, the road you’re about to travel has been travelled by many hundreds before.’

‘Mrs Moffatt,’ Hélène began, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘I’m quite well, dear,’ Mrs Moffatt said.

And she was. She’d felt lighter, freer than she had in years. It was in part down to Archie Adams, the way he kept coming down to the Lounge when things were quiet to partake of a pot of tea and a blackberry slice; but the truth was, she hadn’t known she was carrying such weight around with her. Telling Archie everything had changed her in ways she hadn’t, at first, understood. There was such loneliness that came with keeping secrets. It was little wonder that she’d never found love, not since her Jack was taken so cruelly away. Secrets cocooned you. They kept others at bay.

‘You’ve got to share it,’ Mrs Moffatt finally said, ‘so the secret doesn’t fester. So you don’t live a life full of lies. That’s why I asked you here, tonight, Vivienne. It’s why I asked you, too, Miss Marchmont. Now, you’re both grown women. Admirable and proud and single-minded, the pair of you. My goodness, what the two of you have already achieved! What the two of you could do, if only the world was a little different. I dare say we wouldn’t be talking about war at all this year, not if we had good, dependable ladies like you in charge. We’d sit around a table and thrash it out and we wouldn’t have to dream of all these ways to kill each other at all.’ She paused. ‘But that isn’t the world, and here we are. You have lives ahead of you, full, rich lives to lead. So I’m imploring you both. It won’t be easy. These are roads most of us don’t have to travel. They’re roads peopled by shame and gossip. But we should walk those roads without fear. We should walk them, dare I say it, with pride. We are who we are, and there’s no changing that. Let’s not waste another second. I’m writing, tonight, to my son to invite him for Christmas dinner, right here at the Buckingham. Write your own letters, girls. Tell the people you feel you can tell. Tell friends. Tell family. Break down the secret, Miss Edgerton, before it hardens around you. Even if it’s only to tell a friend, don’t bottle it up and keep it inside.’

‘I’ve been longing to tell Nancy. I had to tell her I couldn’t be her bridesmaid, and I’m quite sure she thinks it’s because I’m a terrible snob. But .?.?. I couldn’t possibly tell her. She knows the father too well, and .?.?.’ Vivienne stopped. ‘I’ve a friend in New York, though. Miriam. She won’t be surprised. She always thought me too wild. Maybe I’ll write to her tonight.’

And Hélène said, ‘There are people I should talk to as well, though the secret’s already out for me.’

She was thinking of her mother, her aunt, her father on his sickbed. It was the last thing the Archers had said to her, after she’d broken the news: that perhaps, before she set sail, she might give them one last chance. One last chance to make amends, before the end times truly came.

Mrs Moffatt extended a hand across the table, and soon the fingers of all three ladies present were intertwined.

‘We must be here for each other. We women of the Buckingham, we deserve a little fortune in our lives, do we not?’