Chapter Three

THE DARKNESS OPENED UP. Lightning split the sky. On the beach below the old manor house at Rye, waves crashed against the cliff face and outcrops of stone.

But in the old manor house itself, a storm of an altogether different nature was being played out.

The doctor had made haste by bicycle along the country lane out of town, up into the rocky heights where, once upon a time, the medieval fortifications used to stand. Now, drenched to the skin, he was following the homeowner’s unmarried sister up the stairs, passing portraits of the family from times gone by, heading towards the master bedroom at the end of the landing. The big windows here overlooked the rolling green splendour of the Sussex Weald – but all of that was invisible tonight, lost beneath the churning storm.

In the bedroom, an old man lay in bed, his wife in a wicker chair by his side. The coughing that racked his chest was not the only sign that something was terribly wrong in this room. The smell hit the doctor as soon as he entered the chamber, and it was one he knew well. He’d been around death since he was himself a young man.

‘Sir Derek, you old devil, what have you been playing at?’

The doctor wore his most fraudulent smile as he came to his patient’s side, and began to listen to his breast with the stethoscope around his neck. Pulses were checked, tiny torchlights shone into eyes, a little thermometer tucked beneath the tongue – drawn back, some moments later, with a muttered oath.

‘Sir Derek, can you hear me?’

‘By God, I can!’ the old man seethed. ‘I’m not gone yet, Ignatius.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. You’re a lion, sir.’ He paused. ‘But even lions get infections, and I’m afraid this one has taken hold. And you haven’t yet shaken the pneumonia, I’m afraid. These are the perils of a life well lived, Sir Derek. How old are you now?’

‘I’m seventy-eight, but I’ll live to see a hundred.’

At this, the doctor remained silent. Then, he said, briskly, ‘There’s something new we can look to. It’s one of the “sulphonamides”, but this one’s barely been used as yet. MB 693 – that’s the scientific classification. But what you need to know is it’s an antibiotic drug – it can help you beat this infection.’

‘I don’t need drugs,’ the old man wheezed.

‘That’s as may be, but your dear wife here might like to be indulged. Mightn’t you, Lady Marchmont?’

The lady at the old man’s bedside nodded. She was younger than her husband by a quarter of a century at least.

‘Come,’ the doctor said. ‘I left my case downstairs.’

In the shadowy hall, with the old man still straining for breath in the bedroom above, the doctor rifled through his valise and produced a small pot of pills, which he placed carefully on the sideboard. Nervously, Sir Derek Marchmont’s wife, Marie, and his sister, Lucy, ten years his junior, looked on – neither one of them yet daring to ask the question on their lips.

‘Doctor,’ Marie began, ‘what hope is there?’

The doctor steeled himself. ‘Only God may tell when he is calling each of us forth,’ he said, with the gravity that the occasion demanded. ‘Lady Marchmont, he is old. His body fails him. It isn’t one thing. It’s many. What takes him, when it comes, will be incidental to the cause of his death.’

‘And that is?’

The doctor shrugged, not unkindly. ‘A life lived to the fullest, and a handsome number of years.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Lady Marchmont. It will be over all too soon. Treasure what days you have left.’ There came a deep rumbling from upstairs, and the ringing of a bedside bell. ‘If the old devil permits you to, of course!’

After the doctor was gone, Marie put one foot back on the stairs, the little phial of pills in her hand.

‘Pray for him, Lucy,’ she said. ‘If he’s to leave us soon, pray for the Lord’s forgiveness.’

‘It isn’t God who ought to be forgiving him, is it, Marie?’

Marie’s face, creased with lines already, hardened further.

‘Not now, Lucy!’ Then she disappeared, up the darkened stair.

Alone at the bottom of the steps, Lucy watched her sister-in-law vanish. For some time, she simply stared. So, she thought, there is to be another death in the family manor. How many of her ancestors had lived and died here? All of them leaving their memories behind. All of them leaving their regrets. All of them, their ghosts.

And this one more so than any.

Something took hold of her. Anger, a hunger to set things straight. What did it matter if Marie disapproved? What did it matter if the old man, her brother, would rant and rave when he found out? By God, he’d hardly have the breath to barrack her. Yes, thought Lucy, she was going to do this. The fact was, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if the old man passed on and she hadn’t at least tried.

She marched down the hallway and into her brother’s study. It hadn’t been used in months and, when she lit the lamps, the shadows unnerved her. So too did sitting at the old man’s desk. It dwarfed her as she reached for his ink pots. She thought she heard the scurrying of mice as she found a leaf of paper, headed with the manor’s own crest. Now all she had to find were the words. The words to put right a terrible wrong .?.?.

But Lucy was good with words.

So she started to write.

In the morning, if the storm had passed, she would head down into Rye and deliver it directly to the hands of the postmaster. Then Lucy would pray her words got through.

*

Watch that letter .?.?.

Delivered to the postmaster in Rye, bundled up with half a hundred others in a sack bound for the Sussex sorting offices; soon it finds itself in a postal truck heading north, into the outer sprawl of London. There, in another sorting office, it is shuffled along the long trestle tables – until, at last, it is dropped into a postman’s sack for delivery on the morn. Up and down the streets of Mayfair it goes. Into every arcade along Regent Street, around the town houses of Berkeley Square– until, at last, it is clasped in the hands of Mrs Farrier, head of the post room at the Buckingham Hotel.

*

It was Frank Nettleton’s job, every morning, to collect letters from Mrs Farrier and deliver them diligently around the hotel. This morning, as every morning, the pile he took from her was heavy with communications for Mr Charles, and these he delivered promptly to the hotel director’s office. There were scattered other communiques for Mr Bosanquet, the head concierge, and for Archie Adams – who often received enquiries from budding musicians – and, this morning, a most unusual occurrence, one for Mrs Moffatt, down in Housekeeping. By the time Frank arrived, the chambermaids were already gathering for breakfast, and he had to keep himself from blushing when some of Rosa’s friends started whispering and pointing as he stole into the lounge. His sister Nancy was nowhere to be seen – off-shift, Frank thought, and probably in the company of Raymond de Guise – but he hurried through the bustling lounge and delivered the letter personally to Mrs Moffatt’s hands.

He wasn’t there to see her open it. By that time, he’d already hurried on. But the girls in the housekeeping lounge would later remark that they had never seen Mrs Moffatt look as pale as she did, in the moment she opened that letter. Not one of them had ever seen her blanch and tremble, nor have to reach out and steady herself against the wall as she took in the letter’s contents. Nor had any of them ever seen her drink her morning tea with quite so many lumps of sugar. It was unlike her. Mrs Moffatt was almost sixty years old, but she was still as strong as ever. What she’d read in that letter, not one of them could say.

Finally, Frank arrived at the Grand Ballroom – where the finishing touches were being made in preparation for reopening night. He entered by the ornate ballroom doors and box-stepped a little as he crossed the freshly sprung dance floor, making for the archway by the stage. Some of the carpenters looked up from their work and gave him quizzical stares – but if Frank noticed at all, he didn’t mind. He was far too lost in imagining a world in which he, humble Frank Nettleton, might tango across the ballroom floor to care what the gruff tradesmen had to think of him.

Frank crossed the dressing rooms, and sneaked through the back doors into the rebuilt studio – the same studio where he took his lessons with Raymond de Guise. The music coming from the new gramophone in the corner was not one of Frank’s favourites, but he had always appreciated its stately elegance: ‘The Kiss Waltz’, that the American sweetheart Ruth Etting first made famous in 1930. Frank himself preferred the modern music, the jives and jitterbugs that were coming out of the New York Bowery. They were faster and looser and altogether more untamed than the older waltzes like this. Frank could feel music like that. But as he stepped into the studio and saw the graceful Hélène Marchmont tutoring her protégé, Mathilde, in the finer points of this piece, he knew he could appreciate the classics as well. All dances had one thing in common: you had to let the music live in you.

Mathilde was elegant, but Miss Marchmont was positively angelic as she danced. If he was honest, Frank felt nervous just standing here – he always did – and, for a moment, he was certain that the stutter he’d been plagued with since birth was sure to come back. Miss Marchmont was thirty years old, but something in her seemed timeless; her white-blonde hair was cropped short in the modern style, revealing her swan-like neck and accentuating the glacial beauty of her eyes. Mathilde, too, had a grace about her, but there was nervousness in her too. And no wonder, thought Frank, for she was only eighteen, scarcely Frank’s own age – and, although she was the winner of last summer’s junior championship at Brighton, her new career at the Buckingham Hotel was daunting still.

Hélène’s eyes fell on Frank. Instantly, his cheeks flushed crimson. Perhaps he’d been staring too long. Eyes nervously darting around, he rushed forward, handed Hélène the letter, and scurried off, back into the wide open expanse of the Grand.

He did not see the look of absolute horror that sapped Hélène of all strength, that caused her to tell Mathilde to take a break from their rehearsals, that sent her hurrying for the dressing room. Frank Nettleton was far too lost in grand daydreams of his own to realise that, all around him, with the letters he’d helped deliver, lives were being undone.

*

Late that night, Hélène Marchmont waited at the Ambergris under Charing Cross station, as the little dance hall emptied of all its revellers. She hadn’t come for the music, though tonight she’d liked it well enough. The band, an eleven-piece orchestra with too many trombones, led by the infamous Amor Whitehall had played a set of swing standards, livened up by blasting trumpets, striking French horns, and the sound of a single saxophonist. Amor Whitehall’s was the only orchestra in London populated entirely by black musicians but, as remarkable as this was, it was the daring and originality of that saxophonist that the reviewers wrote about in the Evening News and Melody Maker. His name was Louis Kildare, and at the end of the night, he sashayed across the bar to where Hélène was sitting.

‘Hélène Marchmont.’ He grinned. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Louis, I need your help.’

It was the severity of her voice that stopped him in his tracks. Theirs was a friendship that stretched back years – for Louis Kildare was, by profession, the starring saxophonist of the Archie Adams Orchestra. His stint at the Ambergris was nothing more than a way to bide the time, and fill his pockets, while the work on the Grand was completed. But Louis knew Hélène better than any, and the tone of her voice filled him with disquiet. In the Buckingham, the chambermaids and younger concierges called Hélène Marchmont the Ice Queen, but the truth was much richer than any of them understood. Louis had never met a woman as strong and capable as Hélène. To see her trembling now, her hands kneading an envelope inscribed with her name, set his mind racing.

‘Read it,’ she said, and thrust the letter into his hands.

Dearest Hélène,

Perhaps you will not welcome this letter, but I fear I must take that risk and send it regardless. Hélène, your father lies dying. His doctor instructs us that the remainder of his life is to be counted in months, not years. How long precisely, he will not say. Your father is an ox and has defied his naysayers throughout his life. But no Christian soul defies his Lord and God for long. He is soon to embark on his final adventure.

He is too stubborn to reach for you himself, so I am reaching for you with this letter. Let him not go to his end under the shadow of what he has lost. Let him not breathe his last breath without laying eyes on his only daughter once more. The past is the past. But your father is not to have a future.

Come home, Hélène.

Your loving aunt, always,

Lucy

Louis must have read the letter three times before he dared look at Hélène. Now he knew why she was so pale.

‘Hélène, what can I do?’

‘I don’t know, Louis,’ she said, and as she stood all the fury she’d been holding within seemed to be unleashed. She turned in a circle, like a trapped animal. ‘Sir Derek Marchmont, on his deathbed and summoning me for forgiveness. Well, Louis, what am I to think? What’s supposed to be in my head, my heart, right now? You tell me, because I can’t, by God above, hear my own thoughts.’

‘When did the letter come?’

‘I’ve had it in my hands scarcely twelve hours.’

‘Well, perhaps that’s it, Hélène. It’s so fresh. You don’t have to do anything right now.’

‘Don’t I? Because that’s what she’s asking, isn’t it?’ Hélène sank back into her seat. ‘I loved Aunt Lucy.’ She sighed. ‘It would have to be her who wrote, wouldn’t it? Knowing I couldn’t just .?.?. ignore her.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Aunt Lucy never had children of her own. She used to come to the manor twice a week. She’d take me picking apples. We picnicked on the lawns. She made an amazing high tea – for me and my bears .?.?.’ All at once, Hélène seemed a little girl, and Louis could quite imagine how she’d been, back before the world had taught her she had to be strong. ‘I miss her the most, I think. But .?.?. she went along with them, didn’t she? When they told me I wasn’t their daughter anymore, that there’d be no inheritance, that I’d brought shame to the Marchmont name.’

Louis stepped forward, then faltered. He wanted, more than anything else, to put his arms around his old friend.

‘What do you want to do, Hélène? What does it say in your heart?’

‘My heart says they can go to hell.’

For a time, Louis was silent. Then:

‘Truly, Hélène?’

‘They disowned me, Louis, and all because I fell in love with a black man. Because their grandchild’ – she cupped her hand around her belly – ‘was going to be born black. They threw me out and, when they found out my new husband had died and it was just me and my daughter left in the world, did they come and find me? Did they ask me to come home? No, Louis. There was only silence, long and empty and lonely while I found a way to make life work, to provide for Sybil. All their money, all their influence, all their time – was I worth any of that, to them? Was my daughter? No. So I kept dancing for my weekly crust. I kept doing whatever Maynard Charles asked of me, just so I could put a roof over Sybil’s head. And now they come to me, after all of that, and ask me to go to his bedside, just so he can die a happy man?’

‘Hélène, forgive me for what I’m about to say. You’re my closest friend. Sidney was like a brother to me. You’ve honoured his memory in everything you’ve done for Sybil. He would have been proud beyond measure. But .?.?. if your heart’s truly telling you they’re dead to you, like they once said you were dead to them, then tell me, Hélène, why can I still see the torment on your face? What are you doing here if your mind’s already made up?’

For the longest time, Hélène remained silent. Sybil lived with her husband’s family now. For three years, Hélène’s daughter had called their little terrace in Brixton home, seeing her true mother only when her schedule at the Buckingham allowed. The cost of keeping a secret this vast was severe. It coloured everything Hélène did. Every word she spoke. Every thought that flitted through her mind. That was life, now, and Hélène had long ago come to terms with it. Sybil: the centre of her world, the anchor that held her in place, the thing that gave every dance she danced real meaning. Her mother and father hadn’t wanted any of that. The shame of their daughter being touched by a black man had been too much to bear. So Hélène had built a different life. Flawed and compromised, yes – but it was hers, and she was proud of it. No mother in London could have done more.

And yet .?.?.

She thought of Aunt Lucy, and those picnics in the grounds of the old manor house.

She thought of the day trips to London with her mother and their housekeeper, clinging to her mama’s hand as she trotted from one department store to the next.

She thought of sitting on her father’s knee when she wasn’t much older than Sybil, listening to the old man tell stories of his time in India. All those fanciful tales of faraway places, keeping her rapt long after bedtime.

It was then that she crumpled.

‘Damn it, Louis, why is it never so simple?’ she whispered. ‘I thought I was done with them. I thought I knew what life was.’

‘Life always hits an off-note, once in a while.’ Louis hesitated. ‘The only question is: what can you do to put things right, to make the melody sing true? Answer that, Hélène, and all of life’s mysteries will suddenly be solved.’