Half a Crown Read online

  “Worse if the Duke of Windsor comes,” Ogilvie said, taking the paper and rapidly glancing down it. “What, the South Africans are coming after all? And President Yolen is actually deigning to care about the affairs of the world outside America sufficiently to send a representative? Wonders will never cease. Though since we’ve put his man in between the Indians and the Ukrainians, it won’t help their good opinion of us. Still, ours not to reason why, eh? Oh, what about the Met? Are they cooperating with us?”

  “As usual, they’re dragging their feet,” Carmichael said.

  “Whose side are they on, anyway?” Ogilvie asked. “When this flap is over we ought to have another go at getting a mole into their top levels. I heard that Penn-Barkis will be hiring a new secretary this year. We could try something there.”

  “Make a note of it,” Carmichael said. “But be careful. And with the procession business, be polite. They do have nominal supervision over us, after all.”

  “I’ll be polite.” Ogilvie grimaced. “Better get on with it, then.”

  He stood, nodded at Carmichael cheerfully, and went out. Carmichael stared for a moment at the print he had selected for the wall opposite his desk: Grimshaw’s painting of a deserted London street. The bare trees and single figure struck some people as bleak, but they reminded Carmichael of days investigating simple crimes with clear solutions.

  He sighed and reached for the nearest telephone.

  3

  Betsy knocked on my door on her way back from the bathroom and caught me standing in my bra and pants with all the dresses I’d brought back from Paris the week before spread out on the bed. “So you don’t know what to wear either!” she said.

  “Well, what does one wear to a rally that starts at sunset?” I asked. “An evening dress? An afternoon dress? Leni always said you should make up for candlelight by candlelight, but what about torchlight?”

  Betsy was wearing an old toweling dressing gown that had originally been pink and was now so faded as to own no color at all except at the seams. “It’s such a pity we can’t wear black,” she said. “From what I gather we’d blend into the crowd if we could.”

  “Young ladies neffer neffer wear black,” I said, but Betsy didn’t so much as smile.

  “I made you this,” she said, and handed me a blue silk lavender sachet, just the right size to go inside my bra, embroidered with an exquisite E in the style we had both acquired over many hours in Arlinghurst. Though it was only April the bag brought the faint smell of summer.

  “Thank you! But what’s it for? It isn’t my birthday until May.”

  She sat down on the end of my bed, tucking the dressing gown around her. “I just wanted to give you something. To thank you for drawing the cross fire, and for being here. And because Mummy’s a pig about me lending you jewelry, which seems so stupid after Switzerland, and well, for Zurich and everything. I just felt fond of you and—it’s only a little lavender bag, but I know you like them.”

  “Love them,” I said firmly, tucking it into my bra right away. I didn’t want Betsy to get started on Zurich and what she owed me. She needed to put that out of her mind, and dwelling on it was the worst thing. “That’s really sweet of you, Elizabeth. Thank you. Now tell me what to wear?”

  “We’ll be wearing raincoats, because it’s a chilly evening and we’ll be outside, so you want something that works under that,” Betsy said. “And we should wear comfortable shoes, because we might have to stand about or even walk. Mummy always says if you’re not sure what to wear you can’t go wrong with tweeds.”

  “But tweeds are for the day! What if he suggests a nightcap afterwards somewhere dressy?”

  “We could always say no,” Betsy said, fervently. “Besides, did Sir Alan look to you like a nightcap-at-the-Ritz sort of man?”

  “He looked like a pirate,” I said, honestly. “But if you’re so off him, why are we going again? You were the one who wanted to.”

  “I put the immediate pleasure of annoying Mummy yesterday above the disadvantages of this evening,” she said, picking up one foot in her hands and examining the sole. “I’m sorry. But it’ll be an experience, anyway.”

  “How about being twins for once and both wearing tweed skirts, with silk shirts and cashmere sweaters?” I asked. “If we go anywhere dressy later, we can take the sweaters off and leave them with our coats. And you could wear that pretty seed pearl thing you wore yesterday, and I could wear your pearls, and your mother wouldn’t know because she wouldn’t see us. You could put them in your pocket and we could put them on in the bathroom.”

  “Genius!” Betsy said.

  I picked up my pale pink silk shirt and pulled it over my head. “Do me up,” I said, turning my back to Betsy. She began to hook me, then stopped.

  “Mummy wants me to get a proper maid. She’s sick of us borrowing Olive and Nanny to do our hair or button us up.”

  “Well, you do what you like, but I’m sure I don’t want one.”

  “I don’t want to either, Mummy’d be sure to get me one who’d spy on me to her,” Betsy said, her fingers resuming their work on my hooks. “I’m better off with Nanny if I need to go away anywhere.”

  “I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know if I want to come out, really. I’m not really a deb type. It’s such a waste of time for me.”

  Betsy leapt up from the bed and came around in front of me. “You have to come out!” she said, taking my hands. “You promised. We’re doing it together! That’s the only thing that makes it endurable. Or affordable, for that matter. It’s only a week until the Court. You can’t back out now, Ellie!”

  “I won’t abandon you,” I said. Her dressing gown had fallen open, revealing one pink-tipped breast and the curve of her stomach below it. “I’ll go through with it now I’ve gone this far, have my season and be presented and all that. All the same, I’m not going to make a respectable alliance, and there’s no point pretending I am.”

  “You might,” Betsy said, letting go of my hands and refastening her shabby dressing gown. “You’re awfully pretty, and your uncle is awfully powerful. He’s part of the new nobility, practically, and that means you are too. Your parents might have been working people, but your father died a hero, almost a war hero. He got a medal, didn’t he? You’re not going to marry a duke, but neither am I, and I think there are lots of men who would overlook the disadvantages and want to marry you, especially once they knew you and saw how terrific you are.”

  “But I’m not at all sure I want to marry someone that way,” I said. “I want to graduate from Oxford and then take up a profession. But what is there? Teaching, ick, and nursing, double ick. Unless I could stay on in Oxford, or maybe become a journalist.”

  “I wondered about doing a secretarial course and then asking your uncle Carmichael to find me a job in the Watch or for the government,” Betsy said. “But my parents would have piglets at the thought of me working.”

  “I expect he’d find you a job, but it sounds deadly. Your parents would cast you out, when they saw you really meant it. The job would be nine to five, and perhaps you could afford a little flat, which would be nice, but not forever, and who would you meet? They never pay women a proper wage, to discourage us. I think I would like to marry and have children, eventually, but to marry someone I know and love, and someone who really wants me, not someone who sees an advantage in marrying me and is prepared to overlook the disadvantages.”

  “Well, me too,” Betsy said, emphatically.

  “You’re not still . . . ,” I asked, letting my voice trail off almost like her mother.

  “Not still pining for Kurt? No, I’m not. How could I be, after all the lies he told me? But the one thing Zurich has taught me is that I don’t want to go through life with my eyes closed, just accepting.”

  “That’s no way to be,” I agreed. I pulled on a slip, and then my tweed skirt over it. It fell halfway down my calves, because I’d grown since I had it made. Only my Paris clothes were the right l
ength. I hoped I was finished with growing now, at five foot ten and almost nineteen. My father had been tall, I remembered, with a child’s memory of a giant.

  “You don’t think anyone can guess, about Kurt?” Betsy asked.

  A debutante is an upper-class daughter trying out for a career as an upper-class wife. She might have a settlement, which means a dowry like a Jane Austen heroine, and in fact Betsy did, though she was by no means an heiress. While married people are allowed to be as promiscuous as they like as long as they don’t make a scandal, virginity is supposed to be a debutante’s most prized possession, absolutely the most significant thing she has to bring to a marriage. This is only for the girls. Men can have as much experience as they want, of course. The hypocrisy is shocking. “Nobody can tell,” I said, as reassuringly as I could, though of course I didn’t know any more about it than she did—less. “Try to pretend none of it ever happened. Nobody knows except you and me, and Leni, but she’d never tell because it would destroy her own reputation. Nobody need ever know.”

  Betsy grimaced and nodded. Then she took a deep breath and changed the subject. “I don’t suppose Sir Alan will take us out for drinks,” she said, getting up and drifting towards the door. “No chaperone. And he’s my father’s friend, so he’s probably frightfully proper.”

  “We chaperone each other, don’t we? And he doesn’t seem all that proper to me, not with that beard. He must be a bit of a pirate, surely?” I looked at the dresses strewn on my bed and decided to leave them for Olive to hang up.

  “Mummy says his mother says he has a skin condition which makes him get pimples when he shaves,” Betsy said. “Doesn’t sound very piratical to me.”

  We both laughed. “Come and do me up when you’re ready,” she said.

  I took my watch off the bedside table and looked at it. “I’ll come now. He’ll be here any minute.” The watch was slim, golden, and Swiss. I fastened it around my wrist. Uncle Carmichael had given me the money to buy it, and then more money when I told him it needed mending, when we’d needed money for Betsy’s operation.

  I helped Betsy dress. She gave me her string of pearls, which I slipped into my bag, while she put her chain into her skirt pocket. We both pulled on our sweaters and did our hair and our faces in Betsy’s room, where the mirror wasn’t so flyspecked as the one in my room. We were lingering over our makeup when Nanny came to say that Sir Alan was here and waiting for us. We snatched up our handbags and went down.

  “Miss Maynard,” he said, very correctly, as Betsy preceded me into the drawing room.

  “Sir Alan,” she replied, shaking his hand without undue cordiality.

  Then he turned to me. I couldn’t help noticing again that his eyes were at precisely my own level. “Miss Royston—but I will always think of you as Cinderella.”

  “It was a pair of shoes, not a slipper,” I said, disconcerted.

  “Don’t keep them out too late,” Mrs. Maynard urged.

  “All mothers have said that to young men since we were living in caves,” Mr. Maynard added, smiling.

  It didn’t surprise me that Sir Alan had his own car; it did surprise me that it was a sleek new Skoda Madame, in cherry red. “This is my new toy,” he said, opening the back door for me. “Fruits of the peace. Two years ago they were building nothing but tanks. Now the Russians are flattened, they can turn their attention to gentler things. I had a boring old Bentley until the first of these were imported.”

  He drove us smoothly through the streets of London, talking to Betsy about cars. He parked neatly in a side street near Cavendish Square. “I have a friend with a flat here with rather a good view onto Wigmore Street,” he said, escorting us out of the car and down the street. “We’ll be able to see the procession coming down Portland Place, coming round the corner, and then passing right in front of us and going down Wigmore Street, and all without being crushed in the crowd. Then we can come out, hop into the car, and drive down to Marble Arch to see the end of it—we’ll have to be in the crowd then, but that’s part of the fun. There’ll be singing and speeches and I hear there may be a bonfire!” He knocked on a door, which was opened by a footman, or manservant of some kind, who clearly recognized Sir Alan.

  “Come in, girls,” Sir Alan said, and led the way up a steep flight of stairs. “Then afterwards,” he continued, as we followed him, “I thought I might give you a spot of dinner at the Blue Nile.”

  Betsy turned around and raised her eyebrows at me. I shrugged. You can go anywhere in a silk shirt with pearls, I thought, even a nightclub more sophisticated than we’d ever visited.

  By this time we were at the top of the stairs. The footman opened a door, letting us in to what was obviously a party. The room seemed full of people—a flutter of women in jewel-colored afternoon dresses and men in tails. They were all holding glasses and talking and laughing.

  “Did your mother know?” I murmured to Betsy as a man who was obviously the host came up and shook hands with Sir Alan.

  “She can’t have,” Betsy said, then she stepped forward to be introduced.

  “Sir Mortimer, Miss Maynard, Sir Mortimer, Miss Royston,” Sir Alan said. Sir Mortimer Whatever was fat and looked a little drunk. His palm was moist and fleshy.

  “Drinks are on the sideboard, put your coats in the bedroom,” Sir Mortimer said to Betsy, and to me, “Where has Alan been hiding you?”

  “Thank you so much for inviting us,” Betsy said.

  I just smiled, and looked aside. Aside happened to be at a blond woman in peacock blue silk, who was looking at me as if she wouldn’t have offered tuppence for me. I looked back at Sir Mortimer, but he had drifted off.

  “Coats in the bedroom,” I said, grimly, to Betsy.

  “No, hold on to your coats,” Sir Alan said. “We’ll be dashing off after the parade has passed, remember. Let me get you some drinks.”

  It was the middle of April, and the bow window that gave onto the square was open, but there was a cheerful fire in the grate and I felt too warm in my sweater and raincoat. I took the coat off and folded it over my arm, with my bag dangling. Betsy copied me, grimacing. “We should have worn some of our Paris dresses,” she said, through gritted teeth.

  “They’re all strangers, it doesn’t matter,” I said. I wished we could have gone into the bedroom and put on the pearls. I felt dowdy in my mauve sweater and heather tweed skirt.

  Sir Alan returned with two drinks, cocktails. I sipped mine as he went off to fetch another for himself. I wasn’t sure what the mixture was, but I could definitely taste gin, which meant Betsy wouldn’t like it. I didn’t drink much, but I much preferred cocktails to beer. The smell of beer always made me feel slightly sick. It reminded me of the way my mother had smelled the last time I had seen her, when she had come home briefly to tell us she was leaving for good.

  “This is jolly,” Sir Alan said, coming back. “Let’s see if we can see anything yet.”

  We made our way to the window, and I leaned out. The sun had set, and presumably the parade had started off, but all I could see was the crowded pavement below, where people were waving Union Jacks and Farthing flags. People were calling out that they had candyfloss, wet sponges, marshmallows. Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark.

  “A penny for them, Cinderella,” Sir Alan said.

  “My thoughts are worth much more than a penny,” I said, flirtatiously.

  “Well, half a crown for them, then?”

  “Not worth as much as that. I was only wondering where city birds sleep,” I said.

  Just then I heard the first strains of the band, and turned to look out again. I could just see the torches coming into sight.

  “Oh look!” Betsy said, pressing forward.

  I could hardly hear t
he bands over the cheering. I’d somehow expected everyone to have a torch, but of course the bandsmen playing instruments didn’t. Torchbearers walked to both sides of the bands, making a stripe of light. Sir Alan was right that the best way to see the parade was from above, because that way you could make out the patterns, especially in the sections where people were dancing and making shapes of fire. A few celebrities rode on floats, all dressed up as famous scenes from history. There was Britannia with her shield done in flowers, Nelson with his telescope, one done up like a bowling alley, which I didn’t get at all until Betsy said something about Drake and then it was obvious. The Ironsides themselves came along between the bands and floats and shapes of flame, young men puffed up like pigeons and marching like soldiers. They carried decorated banners with the names of their local groups. The floats got the biggest cheers, especially when the people were well known. When Mollie Gaston, as Queen Victoria, threw toffees to the children in the crowd, you’d have thought she was the real queen, not just the grand old dame of British theater. Most popular of all though were the Jews, roped together in groups, who the crowd could pelt with wet sponges they’d bought for the purpose. When I was a child, people used to throw rotten vegetables and bad eggs, but that had been stopped because it made a mess of the streets. Sometimes people threw them anyway, of course. When the last of the bands passed us, playing “Knees Up, Mother Brown,” Sir Alan said it was time to go.

  I drained my glass, which was mostly ice-meltwater by now. It was strange turning from the parade back to the room. I’d been half leaning out of the window, entirely caught up in the jolly fun of it, mingled with childhood memories and general patriotic enthusiasm. Now the cynicism and sophistication of the party seemed stifling. I was glad we were leaving. These people didn’t seem moved by the rally at all, they didn’t really care. Like Mrs. Maynard, they thought it a good way of keeping people they despised occupied. I said good-bye to Sir Mortimer politely, and almost slipped in my haste to get down the steep stairs.