A Royal Affair Read online

  “We are seriously considering it,” she said. “Would the desks inside be part of the price?”

  “Desks?” he replied in puzzlement.

  “There were a pair of desks still there,” she said nonchalantly, not wanting him to investigate it any further. “We thought we could take them over with the office. It would save us some bother.”

  “Oh, those bloody things,” he said, remembering. “Makes no difference to me. They were more trouble to move than to leave, so we left them. They’re not moveables if you can’t move them.”

  “Did you know the previous tenants?” asked Gwen.

  “I’ve been in this building thirty-five years,” said Mr. MacPherson, taking a sip from his thermos and exhaling in satisfaction. “I knew them.”

  “How long have they been gone?”

  “Ah, that would be end of thirty-two, wouldn’t it? Or maybe thirty-three. Or thirty-one.”

  “And no one has occupied it since?”

  Mr. MacPherson shrugged.

  “Well, then I would think that Mr. Maxwell would be glad to have us in there,” said Gwen.

  “Mr. Maxwell will barely even notice as long as the rent gets paid on time,” said Mr. MacPherson. “Let me know if you’re moving in, and I’ll have some more keys made up.”

  “Will do,” said Gwen.

  She walked up to Oxford Street and purchased a sandwich and a plum from a tea shop. It was abysmally hot, and she could feel the sun burning into her fair skin. She walked quickly back to the office, put her lunch on her desk, and heated up the tea kettle on the hot plate on top of the old filing cabinet.

  It was churlish of her to whine about her lack of education when she had so much of everything else, she realised. She had been so accustomed to the aristocratic life that it never occurred to her that she was missing anything of importance. The whirlwind of the seasons, the thrill of romance—and then the bloody war had to come and destroy everything.

  Could she go back to school now? Did people do that?

  Did women do that?

  Could Gwen herself do that, tied up as she was with running a struggling business while fighting to regain full custody of her son?

  No, she thought. There isn’t enough time. She’d have to settle for holding Iris to her offer of informal tutelage.

  Library skills and martial arts, the beginnings to a proper education for every postwar widowed mum in her late twenties.

  She would start a movement once she had Little Ronnie’s status secured, she decided. She’d round up all the girls who had found new purpose during the war and then were kicked out once the men got demobbed and came back to their old jobs.

  Yes, and she was exactly what they would not be looking for in a leader, having spent her war either in her titled in-laws’ country estate or the sanatorium.

  She finished her sandwich, then bit slowly into the plum, tilting her head back to let the juices flow across her tongue. It was her first of the summer, and between rationing and her time in treatment, there hadn’t been many over the previous six years. She ate it slowly, concentrating her entire being on each bite, making them small so that the simple experience of eating a plum would last as long as it could.

  When it was down to the pit, she wiped her mouth and fingers carefully, then wrapped the remains in the napkin.

  Like a corpse in a shroud, she thought, looking at it mournfully.

  Stop it, Gwennie. Those thoughts will take you down a dark corridor.

  She quickly tossed it into the wastepaper basket, then stared at her desk. She spent the next hour comparing notes from her two boxes of index cards, coming up with matches that she wanted to run by Iris before sending letters on to the bachelors. Always the bachelors, so they could make the first contact, as gentlemen should. Whether they were gentlemen or not.

  Gentlemen, she thought suddenly.

  She picked up the receiver from the telephone and rang home.

  “Bainbridge residence,” answered Percival, their butler.

  “It’s Mrs. Bainbridge, Percival,” she said. “I would like to speak to Ronnie, if he’s not busy. And Agnes when he’s done.”

  “Master Ronald is in the playroom,” he said. “I will summon him for you.”

  “Thank you, Percival.”

  She waited, then smiled as she heard a clattering of rapid footsteps coming towards the telephone. She held the receiver away from her ear.

  “Mummy!” shouted Little Ronnie.

  “Indoor voice, please,” she admonished him. “Hello, my lovely boy. How are you?”

  “Agnes is teaching me how to make large numbers,” he said. “We got all the way up to five hundred!”

  “What fun! Do you have a favourite number?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Really? Why seventeen?”

  “I don’t know, I just like it the best.”

  “Then seventeen it shall be. I was thinking—would you like to go to the Natural History Museum on Saturday?”

  “It’s Tommy’s birthday party. Grandmother is taking me.”

  “Ah yes,” said Gwen, her heart sinking slightly. “Well, we’ll go together some other time. Anyhow, I wanted to remind you that Mummy will be going out later, so I won’t be able to kiss you good night tonight.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To a play reading.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, our friend Sally has written a play, and we’re going to read all the parts out loud so he can hear what it sounds like and decide what he needs to change.”

  “Is it a panto?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Are you going to wear costumes and sing? You could dress up like Puss in Boots!”

  “Oh, that would be fun,” laughed Gwen. “But I’m afraid it’s a play for grown-ups, so we won’t be doing any of those things.”

  “It doesn’t sound like much fun without songs and costumes,” said Ronnie.

  “You have different kinds of fun when you’re a grown-up.”

  “Then I don’t want to grow up,” he declared.

  “Well, that’s fine with me,” said Gwen. “You’re absolutely wonderful the way you are right now.”

  “But I want to be taller!”

  “You will be, my darling. Now, blow me a kiss, and I shall blow you a kiss.”

  She heard a loud smack, and matched it in volume.

  “Good night, my lovely boy, and let me talk to Agnes for a moment.”

  “Good night, Mummy!”

  There was a rustling, then a woman’s voice came on the line.

  “Hello, Mrs. Bainbridge,” said Agnes. “Little Ronnie has been very good today.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” said Mrs. Bainbridge. “Agnes, would you do me a favour?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Bainbridge.”

  “Could you go downstairs to the library? I’d like you to look something up for me.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Sally lived in a bachelor flat in Soho, on a block largely occupied by actors and musicians because of its low rents and its tolerance for odd noises at odd times of the day and night. Before the war, Gwen would have been appalled at the idea of going to such a place unaccompanied, when even a hint of scandal might get one struck from the invitation lists to all the better parties. But the war happened, she was now a working widow, and invitations to parties were few and far between.

  She looked at her directions and verified the flat number for the fifth time, then walked up the stairs to the third storey. She needn’t have checked—a group of rowdy but well-trained voices could clearly be heard through one of the closed doors. She walked to it, summoned up her courage, and knocked.

  It opened a second later, and Sally filled the doorway.

  Sally was a large man. Large to the point that other large men looked at him with respect and awe. Large enough that, were one possessed of a classical education and versed in the tales of the Greek gods defeating the Titans, then encountered Sall
y, one might think, Oh, they missed one.

  Sally was possessed of a classical education. When his classmates at Cambridge nicknamed him Titan, he’d immediately say, “Clever. Which one?” And before they could wonder why they could never remember those names, he would quickly rattle them off, complete with citations to Hesiod, and be sure to mention that one of them was mother to the Muses, from whom all art derived. By that point, his nicknamers would realise they were not quite as clever as they initially thought. Nevertheless, the nickname stuck.

  Gwen knew this from Iris, who had been at Cambridge with Sally. Gwen suspected some other details about Sally, stemming from his months behind enemy lines in Italy. In her imagination, these alternated between detonating explosives that brought down bridges and silently dispatching Nazis and Fascists with his bare hands or a knife. Sally acknowledged the explosions, not the dispatchings. He had a knack for appearing suddenly in places without any prefatory footsteps. Sally was whom The Right Sort called upon when they needed to collect a debt from a pair of recalcitrant newlyweds. There was no violence involved. There was no need for it. People would take one look at Sally and feel compelled to adopt a peaceful resolution to their disputes.

  But that was not the Sally who loomed over Gwen in happy welcome. This was Sally, the aspiring playwright, his smile beaming down from on high. He took Gwen’s hand in his massive one.

  “Mrs. Bainbridge,” he said, raising it to his lips.

  “Mr. Danielli,” she returned.

  “So good of you to come,” he said, leading her inside. “Be careful, it’s somewhat crowded tonight.”

  “Somewhat?” she said as he parted a path for her through the mingled assembly.

  The parlour was filled with folding chairs, and what furniture had originally been there had been shoved against the walls or, in the case of some low tables, stacked to make more room.

  The guests were mostly men in their twenties or thirties, some still in uniform. A dozen conversations were already in progress, as was the smoking, evenly divided between cigarettes and pipes. The windows were fully open, which did nothing to cool down the room.

  There was a long, threadbare, overstuffed green sofa at the far end of the room, and it was towards this that Sally guided her.

  “Make way,” he proclaimed. “Make way, good people. Our leading lady has arrived.”

  “I thought I was your leading lady,” said Iris, who was already on the sofa, her legs curled up under her.

  “In your universe, always,” said Sally. “But tonight, you are in mine, and I determine who is who.”

  “I don’t believe in a deterministic universe,” declared Iris. “I believe in chaos.”

  Then she sneezed abruptly, clutching her handkerchief to her face.

  “Oh dear,” said Gwen sympathetically as she sat gracefully next to Iris. “Ran into some dust somewhere, I gather.”

  “When you put a curse on someone, you mean business,” muttered Iris, wiping her nose.

  “Right,” called Sally. “Places, please.”

  A man sat in the space remaining on the sofa next to Gwen and offered his hand.

  “George Weatherby,” he said. “Looks like we’re in for it now.”

  “Terrifying, isn’t it?” said Gwen as she shook it. “Gwendolyn Bainbridge. This is—”

  “Oh, I know her, don’t I, Sparks?” he said, grinning. “We climbed the wall after curfew more than once.”

  “Behave, George,” Iris admonished him.

  Sally stood in front of them, as a man and a woman pulled chairs up on either side.

  “Good evening, and thank you for coming tonight,” he said. “This is the first reading of my play, The Margate Affair. That’s a working title, by the way.”

  “What works about it?” called a man sitting in the back.

  “Save the comments for after,” said Sally. “Let me introduce the cast. That’s George on the sofa, playing Bill. Next to him is Gwen, playing Lydia, and rounding out the central cast, which is why I, in a brilliant directorial touch put them in the center, is the one and only Iris Sparks as Muriel. Loretta, in the chair on the right, will be playing all the secondary female roles, and Alec, on the left, will be playing all the male ones.”

  “I wanted to play the women, but you are so damned conventional,” said Alec dolefully.

  “Alec’s a ringer, by the way,” said Sally. “He’s going to be in the new Priestley play this autumn, so keep on the lookout for that.”

  The assembly applauded politely.

  “The cast, with the exception of Sparks, hasn’t read the play,” continued Sally as he handed them their scripts. “I let them know the basics of each character, but I didn’t send them copies in advance.”

  “That’s because you were afraid we’d lose them,” said George.

  “In your case, a definite concern,” said Sally. “But more because I wanted to give one tiny hint of direction: speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you—”

  “Trippingly on the tongue!” chorused the room.

  “Yes, like that,” said Sally. “I’m joking. No, I’m not. We’re in a living room. Speak like we’re all here, talking to each other in a living room, not projecting to the top of the balcony. I didn’t give anyone a script because I want you to discover what you’re saying as you say it, not as if you’re expecting to say it. Does that make sense? Let yourselves invent the words as they happen, as if they were emerging naturally from your thoughts. I’ll call out stage directions at the beginning of each scene just for clarity, but don’t worry about any bits of business with imaginary props. And don’t bother with the kissing, of course.”

  “Damn the luck,” said George.

  “Let’s begin,” said Sally, taking a seat in the corner. “Act One, Scene One. A bar in a middle-class seaside hotel in Margate. Bill is seated at a table, nursing a scotch and soda. The bartender comes over to him.”

  “Will you be having another, sir?” said Alec.

  “I’ll wait, if it’s all right with you,” said George.

  “Expecting someone?”

  “My wife’s coming by the later train. She should be here shortly.”

  “What does the lady drink?”

  “Ah,” said George, hesitating. “Gin and tonic, I should think.”

  “Does she?” said Alec, smirking. “Gin and tonic? You’re certain about that?”

  “Of course I’m certain.”

  “Very good, sir. I’ll be sure to have one ready.”

  Gwen uttered a silent prayer as George read her cue.

  “Ah, there you are, darling,” he said brightly. “Good trip?”

  “Awful,” she said, her voice quavering slightly. “The train was beastly crowded.”

  “I’ve got us a table by the window. Come sit and have a drink.”

  “Here you are, ma’am,” said Alec. “Gin and tonic for the lady, scotch and soda for the gent.”

  “But I don’t—Oh, yes. Gin and tonic,” said Gwen. “Lovely, thank you.”

  She paused, pretending that the bartender was walking away.

  “Why on earth did you order me this?” she hissed. “I detest gin.”

  “Sorry, I panicked,” said George. “He asked me what you drank. I had no idea. I had to come up with something or he’d be suspicious.”

  “He’s suspicious anyway.”

  “Any trouble getting away?”

  “None. I told Arthur that I was visiting my friend Carol for the weekend. He was going out to his club. I don’t think he even absorbed the information.”

  “What if he calls Carol?”

  “She’ll cover for me. She owes me a few.”

  “Nice friend.”

  “How’s the room?”

  “Adequate. Couldn’t get one with a view of the beach, unfortunately. We overlook Dreamland.”

  “How poetic.”

  “We could ride the Scenic Railway tomorrow, if you like. Or go for a swim—I’ve brought my trunks
.”

  Gwen turned to look at him steadily.

  “Did you actually think I would come all this way to this wretched place to waste my time swimming?” she asked.

  This brought a laugh from the room, and the knots inside her began to loosen.

  Iris’s Muriel entered halfway through the third scene, and things became complicated. Things always get complicated when Iris enters the scene, thought Gwen. The interplay between her Muriel and George’s Bill were laced with genuine vitriol, the snappish rhythms coming from somewhere deep inside. Rooted in the past, guessed Gwen.

  Another ex? She wouldn’t put it past Sally to cast them according to their histories. All those young Cambridge pals grown up, clinging to those memories, with an overlay of war distorting them now.

  There were some lags in the latter portion of the first act, but the second, which they continued after a brief break, raced along, eliciting some surprised gasps from the audience.

  The final scene was between Muriel and Lydia, Bill having met an unfortunate end at the hands of Arthur, who proved to be not so oblivious after all, and powerful enough to avoid any legal consequences. The two women read their lines glancing at each other while still playing to the audience.

  “It’s horrible to say, but I miss the war,” said Gwen. “I miss working in the factory.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Iris.

  “I’m not. I had a sense of direction for perhaps the only time in my life. Then the men came home and took it away from me. They had seen battle; I hadn’t. I couldn’t begrudge them that, but it’s all so empty now.”

  “What will you do?” asked Iris.

  “My choices are limited,” said Gwen. “Maybe I never really had any. I could jump off a cliff, or I could go back to Arthur. Both are suicide. One takes longer.”

  “We could run away,” offered Iris.

  “No,” said Gwen. “Not with the way things are. He’ll find us. There are no more hiding places. They’ve lit up Dreamland with carbon arc searchlights and surrounded it with barbed wire, and no dreams can escape it anymore.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know, Muriel. I don’t know.”

  “And curtain!” called Sally.