‘How did it go, darling?’
Jane was still so full of how the mink hat had gone down in the Nelson Hotel that her brain had to work fast to find the right answer. The right face to wear.
‘She’s quite poorly. They won’t really tell me anything but I think it was some kind of stroke.’
A look like pain winced through Suzy’s eyes but a jerk of her chin and a tiny sniff soon wiped it clean. She leaned across and took Jane’s hand.
‘Poor you. Daddy had something like that.’
But not quite like that. Daddy, who could walk into any half-decent bar in the West End and safely order ‘the usual’ (double brandy, easy on the ginger), bled to death internally in a small flat in the Pimlico Road.
‘Will she get better, do you think?’
Tricky one. On balance Jane thought it would be easier for all concerned if June rang (while Suzy and Annie were out, obviously) to say that her aunt had passed away and let that be the end of it. Otherwise they’d be offering her rides to bloody Norbury once a week: the dutiful niece, all that rubbish.
‘She’s in a rather bad way. I think it’s only a matter of time.’ Then she (bravely) changed the subject. ‘Looks like you had fun this morning.’
The sitting room was still prettily littered with monogrammed tissue paper.
‘Henry didn’t think I had enough day clothes. He’s taking me to Paris on Thursday to get some things for the Grand National. We’re going to be spending the weekend with some people he knows up north somewhere. He’s told them about me so I’ve got to look decent. Nothing too popsified.’
Henry was married and until very recently had always looked like staying that way. He’d never made any promises about divorce. He never even said his wife didn’t understand him.
Penelope Swan met Henry at a golf-club dance in Sunningdale just before the war when he was twenty-four and she was a sort of sub-deb, programmed to go to dances and tennis parties, meet eligible young men and bang one up for life in a six-bedroomed stockbroker Tudor detached in the right part of Berkshire.
Penelope (and her beady-eyed mama) wasted no time at all. She was pretty, she played tennis and bridge very nicely, she had a fetching wardrobe of dresses that artfully supplied whatever her figure was missing (Don’t, for goodness sake, let yourself appear flat-chested) and her father owned the best part of Staines – if Staines had a best part.
Two babies and a reasonably safe corner of Virginia Water meant that Penelope had a fairly quiet war, while Henry – ‘a born leader of men’ – worked his way up to captain in a uniform exquisitely remodelled by his man in Savile Row (who actually farmed out this sort of thing to a jobbing tailor over the butcher’s in Brewer Street). After three years’ active service, Captain Swan came home with a dozen pairs of nylons, two bottles of Mitsouko liberated from a passing brothel and a nasty dose of the clap.
It was separate bedrooms after that but Penelope was a good hostess (six months being finished by the Swiss had taught her to manage menus and servants in a grand, bland manner). She was a good mother (or Nanny was, anyway) to the boy, Peter, and to Samantha, a sullen, overdressed blonde two years older than Suzy.
Samantha Swan was useful cover, Henry thought. Any present he bought Suzy (give or take the odd pair of baby dolls) could be ‘for my daughter’s birthday’. He didn’t see the salesladies’ smiles. Daughters never got nice presents like that.
Very, very occasionally someone would take Samantha out to dinner somewhere decent – as opposed to a dinner dance in some god-forgotten Berkshire country club. Her favourite places ‘up in town’ were Simpsons-in-the-Strand or the RAC Club in Pall Mall then Edmundo Ros for dancing afterwards so Henry was pretty safe but he and Suzy did once bump into her in the White Tower. Henry handled it very smoothly, introducing Suzy as ‘Miss Massingham from the Paris office’ but this was obviously codswallop, particularly as Samantha had spent most of her own dinner date clocking the pair of them, watching Suzy’s whole glorious repertoire of hand-holding, fag-lighting and head-tossing, aching with envy at the way her father laughed out loud at yet another funny story. How could he? Cheap little tart – only, of course, Samantha could see that whatever kind of tart she was, she didn’t come cheap. Samantha stole another glance at that ravishing gown – strapless faille with a jet-embroidered lace overblouse – at that tiny waist (twenty-one inches in a brand-new killer waspie) and Suzy herself: as lovely and confident and pettable as a pretty young cat.
Samantha, despite six months’ hard finishing in Montreux and three years on the Berkshire circuit, still just looked stuck-up and sex-starved. She did get dates – Henry owned most of Hammersmith, for Christ’s sake – but it was bloody hard going.
She decided not to tell Mummy. It would break Mummy’s heart, she thought. She thought wrong. Mummy’s main concern was that no one in Virginia Water should get wind. She knew Henry would never divorce her. It was Just Sex, she told herself, with the misplaced confidence of a woman who Just Hated It.
Nobody really liked Penelope – apart from her friends, obviously, who never actually thought about whether they liked each other or not. If you kept the talk small enough – children and delphiniums were safest although it was best to go easy on the children – she could get through a dinner party and she could complain about servants with the best of them but she had no real conversation any more and she thought the property business was a tiny bit vulgar (her mother was from Cirencester). She didn’t even talk about clothes. After the pre-war mantraps by Molyneux and Schiaparelli had done their work, she retreated to her mother’s dressmaker who had a rare gift for turning handsome lengths of silk and worsted into mumsy little frumps and who thought any sort of padding was common.
Just the same, Samantha did quite fancy a scene with Daddy after that chance meeting in the White Tower. She practised her lines in the dressing-table mirror, modelling herself on Deborah Kerr in Beloved Infidel, or possibly Jean Simmons in Elmer Gantry. But Henry wouldn’t play. He just told her she was being cheap and provincial, that her mother knew all about it and that it was none of Samantha’s bloody business.
She cried a lot, then blew her nose on Daddy’s handkerchief before finessing a cheque for fifty guineas. Enough for one of those new velvet evening dresses from Debenham and Freebody and a nice suede jacket from Simpsons. Twenty-three pounds – a month’s wages for the girl who sold it to her.
The velvet – they only had butterscotch left in a size fourteen – was one of eleven identical ‘speciality model gowns’ to pitch up at a Valentine’s Day ball in some Park Lane hotel (there was quite a large party down from Manchester). Samantha was mortified and Lawrence Green was in big, big trouble with half the buyers in the West End.
So. Henry hadn’t planned to marry Suzy but the Evening News business had rattled him. She’d seemed terribly brave and matter-of-fact about it but then he’d woken up to find her crying and decided that they weren’t going to kill any more babies. Fuck Penelope. Suzy reckoned that the invitation to the National clinched it but Jane couldn’t believe he’d really go through with it.
‘He’s not really going to marry you, is he? I thought they never did. That’s what you told Lorna.’
She couldn’t quite read the angry little look in Suzy’s eyes. She wasn’t sure she wanted to read it.
‘They don’t marry Lornas,’ and Suzy leaned back against the sofa cushions and raised her chin to the afternoon sunlight, a smug little smile pinching those pink, unpainted lips.