Chapter Six

ALL OF THE OLD CLICHéS are true, thought Hélène as she stepped through the back door of the little Brixton terrace and saw Sybil standing on a wooden stool, stirring cake mixture at the kitchen counter.

My, how she’s grown.

‘Mama! Mama!’

Sybil dropped her spoon, smearing cake batter all down the cupboard door, and tumbled off the stool to reach her. At three years old, with her father’s eyes and her mother’s smile, she was steady on her feet, but still plummeted and plunged in moments of high excitement.

‘Mama, I’m making cake!’

The figure standing at the stove, who had been watching Sybil erupt with excitement with a smile on her own face, was Noelle Archer – Sybil’s grandmother. Nearly sixty years old, she was settling into her elder years with a dignity Hélène rarely saw among the lords and ladies of the Buckingham – who, more often than not, refused to accept the limitations of their bodies, eating and drinking themselves into corpulence and disease. Noelle had tight white curls and a kindly smile, and the lines that were deepening around her eyes were more the result of a lifetime of laughter than the signs of a woman past her prime.

Besides, thought Hélène, Noelle is in the second prime of her life.

Having raised three children of her own, she had spent the last three years devoted to the little girl who was now scrambling into Hélène’s arms, leaving dollops of cake batter all up her green woollen coat. At first, Hélène had worried that she was asking too much of the Archer family. But the love of a child brings out the very best in people – and Hélène had seen for herself how Sybil had brought the light back into Noelle and Maurice’s eyes, how caring for her went some way to healing the wound of Sidney’s sudden demise. They said that the Grand Ballroom was a place of starlight and love, but you didn’t need expensive chandeliers and a resident orchestra for that. Here in this cramped Brixton terrace, love was all around.

‘I keep thinking she’ll forget about me.’ Hélène laughed, straining to keep hands covered with cake mixture out of her hair. ‘But every time I arrive—’

‘A daughter never forgets her mama, Hélène. She talks about you every day. Come on, come through. I’ve a pot of tea already made.’

The narrow kitchen opened up into the Archers’ living room, where a fire crackled in the grate and the radio was buzzing with the BBC News: more talk coming out of Austria; Mr Hitler on a tour of the Italian provinces, being met everywhere with rapturous applause. The world was such a divided mess, thought Hélène – and sometimes, she feared, it was the same in her own life as well.

Noelle helped her out of her coat, promising to brush it once the smears of batter were dry, and settled her at the table in front of the fire, where the Archers ordinarily took their meals. The tea was still hot, so Noelle poured it into cups, setting a glass of milk aside for Sybil, and left mother and daughter to get reacquainted while she busied herself in the kitchen.

It was good to have some time alone with Sybil. Hélène craved it, all week long. She supposed that there were mothers out there who’d tell her she was abominable for leaving her daughter to the care of somebody else, but none of those mothers would ever understand the sacrifice she’d had to make. How else was she to provide for Sybil, if she gave up the dance floor?

‘Have you missed your mama, Sybil?’

‘I made biscuits.’

She reached for one now, from the plate by the teapot. Ugly and misshapen, and yet each one concocted with a child’s love. Hélène accepted one. Dunked in tea, it was a chewy, over-treacled delight.

‘I danced with a prince this week, Sybil. Prince Gustav, son of the Crown Prince of Sweden. Also named Gustav.’ Hélène whispered into Sybil’s ear, ‘It gets confusing with princes.’

‘Are you a princess, Mama?’

‘Not quite, little one. But you – you’re my princess.’

‘No!’

Hélène’s fingers were creeping under Sybil’s arms, and the fits of laughter that filled the room were a music so much more enchanting than anything the Archie Adams Orchestra could ever create.

Sybil was laughing, still, when Noelle returned, poured herself a cup of tea, and sat down. By the look on her face, she was grateful to be off her feet – and, in this, she and Hélène completely agreed.

‘It’s getting harder,’ she said.

‘Rushed off your feet again, are you?’

‘Not that,’ said Hélène – though she was; ever since the Grand had reopened, Maynard Charles had been exacting in his demands from his dancers. There was time to make up for. Profits to recoup. ‘I meant .?.?. this.’

Sybil, who had stopped laughing and was only now gathering her composure, dived back for another biscuit and proceeded to make a calamitous mess as she dunked it in her glass of milk.

‘I don’t know why,’ said Hélène, ‘and it’s nothing you’ve done. You’re doing everything right. I just think it’s that, now that she can speak, now that she’s – why, now that she’s a person .?.?.’ It seemed ridiculous to express it like this, and yet somehow it fitted. ‘It feels like I’m missing so much more. She’s taking in so much more of the world around her. The world that, day after day, I’m not in.’

‘Many mothers see their children less, Hélène. The folks you’ll dance with, up at the Buckingham Hotel. They don’t put their children to bed at night. They’re not the ones their children run to when they graze their knees. They have nursemaids and governesses.’

A look ghosted across Hélène’s face. ‘Nursemaids and governesses,’ she said. ‘That’s what it was like when I was a girl.’

It’s time, she thought. There were no secrets between her and Noelle – so she set Sybil down on the floor and produced from her clutch bag the letter that she’d returned to, time and again, in the past days.

Noelle read it carefully.

‘I remember you speaking of your Aunt Lucy,’ she finally said.

‘She’s the only one I remember with fondness in my heart. Oh, Noelle, it’s been eating me up. I’ve put pen to paper three times, thinking I’d write back – but not once having anything to say. Louis said that, if I was truly finished with them, I’d have shredded the letter already. And maybe I would have done, if it was anyone but her. But Aunt Lucy .?.?. She’s the one who was there for me, every night, while my parents were off gallivanting. We wrote to each other, back and forth, for a little while after my parents .?.?.’ She did not finish that sentence, and Noelle did not ask her to, for the pain was written in lines across her face. ‘I can still smell Aunt Lucy. She smelled of apples and blackberries, from when she took me picnicking in the orchards on my father’s estate. I always felt terrible that I’d—’

‘Walked out on her?’ asked Noelle, with an air of incredulity.

Hélène nodded. ‘But she didn’t follow, did she? When it came to it, she needed my father – or, more properly, she needed his money. Being disowned was all right for me, but not Aunt Lucy. She was too scared.’

She slumped in her seat and sighed. It was so unusual to see Hélène losing her elegant posture that it nearly broke Noelle’s heart.

‘What do you want to do, Hélène?’

‘I think .?.?.’ She reached down and hoisted Sybil back onto her lap. ‘I think that to go back there now would be a betrayal.’

She’d said it with such fire that Noelle rocked back in her seat. Even Sybil must have felt it, for she strained to wriggle out of Hélène’s arms, then came on hands and knees across the table, sending biscuits and sugar cubes clattering all over, until she plopped onto Noelle’s own lap.

‘Sybil has but one family, Noelle.’

For the first time, Hélène was speaking with passion, certain at last of the words to which she gave voice. She did not take a breath, not even as the door opened into the kitchen and the sound of tramping feet announced the arrival of Maurice Archer, Noelle’s husband.

‘She has me, and she has you, Noelle – and you too, Maurice,’ she added as he appeared from the kitchen door. ‘She needs no other family. They had their chance, four years ago. To go to them now? Why, Noelle, it would be to betray everything you did for her. Everything you did for me.’

Maurice, whose face had fallen to confusion and concern, tramped a little further into the room. When Noelle realised he was leaving muddy boot prints behind him, she leaped up to lay down a trail of newspapers over which he might walk. This he followed to the table, where, sitting down – and blowing a raspberry at Sybil, who took joy in blowing one in return – he read Aunt Lucy’s letter.

After some time, Maurice brandished the note aloft and said, ‘This is a love letter.’

Hélène stared at him.

‘Well, it is, isn’t it, Noelle?’

Noelle came to his shoulder.

‘It’s an act of love,’ Maurice declared. ‘I know why they denounced you, Hélène. I know they couldn’t stand the thought of their perfect daughter being sullied by the likes of us. By the good Lord above, I’ve been hearing such things half of my life. I still do. I was in the Coach and Horses, right now, on Coldharbour Lane and there were boys in the corner, kept looking at me like I ought to have been doffing my cap and shining their shoes. I feel all that, and it hurts – yes, it still hurts, even now. But, Hélène, this is a message from the other side. This is somebody’s hand, reaching out for yours from some dark and lonely place. Death is coming. What’s to say your Aunt Lucy hasn’t been waiting for a chance, any chance, to cry out for you? If there wasn’t love in it, why, she’d hardly have written at all.’

‘So what am I to do? Go to them and put my arms around them and tell them I .?.?. forgive them? Or, worse, ask them to forgive me – when there’s not a thing I’ve done on this earth that I’d take back? When there’s not a thing I’ve done wrong? Only to fall in love and have a beautiful baby and—’

‘Oh, Hélène!’ Maurice laughed. ‘I’m not saying go there and grovel. What I’m saying is Death’s riding in. I’ve seen enough of it. We all have.’

He closed his fists and she imagined, in that moment, that he was not only thinking of Sidney – but of all the many deaths of his life: the deaths he’d seen at sea in the Merchant Navy, and the deaths that stalked the land in those first years after they came to England, with the Great War just gone and the Spanish Influenza striking down so many.

‘I’m not thinking of them, Hélène. I’m thinking of you, and what it might feel like to wake up one morning and receive a telegram to tell you your father’s passed away – and to know, in your heart, that you might have given him one more chance, one last chance, to put right what he did so wrong. I’m thinking about regret, Hélène, about that kind of regret that can last a lifetime.’

For a time after that, they sat together. Noelle came to pour more tea, Sybil came to help – and then, once she’d finished tidying up the not inconsiderable spillage her daughter had made, Hélène whispered, ‘You wouldn’t be angry, if I was to see them?’

‘Hélène.’ Maurice laughed. ‘You’d have to hardly know us at all, to ask such a question! Our love for you is not conditional. We wouldn’t dream of asking you not to go. It’s a question for your heart alone – and we’ll be here, right where we are now, whatever you decide.’

‘I’m not sure I could go back to Rye. The streets are too full of ghosts.’

‘Then don’t,’ said Noelle. ‘Write to them. Tell them you’ll meet them, but not in Rye. Your mother and aunt could come to you – it’s the least they owe you. Dinner at the Buckingham. Or, better yet, somewhere else in London. A café. A restaurant. Somewhere you can leave any second, if it gets too much for you.’

Hélène exhaled. Somewhere in the midst of the conversation, a decision had been made.

*

That night, back in her quarters at the Buckingham, Hélène could still taste the vanilla of her daughter’s cake. She breathed it in, remembered its textures, the way it had ended up smeared all around Sybil’s face, and somehow found the courage to put pen to paper for the final time. Then, before her courage deserted her, she took the service lift down into the Buckingham basements, and into the post room itself.

After that, though the tension did not leave her, somehow Hélène felt in control. This thing that was happening in her life, she was the one in command of it – and, wherever it took her, whatever happened next, it would not be done with bitterness and regret hanging over her. It would be done with decency and poise – and yes, even elegance. The world could throw all manner of madnesses at you, but if you had your poise – well, perhaps things would turn out right.