The Rose in Winter Read online

  He could easily still be out there, but all was locked and made safe and Maureen’s chirpy no-nonsense presence, even at the other end of the house, was like a talisman warding off bad spirits. Tomorrow the comforting Dexter, Mr Prayle’s successor, would be back, taking charge over the garden. She would have people around her.

  She was not alone.

  In the middle of the night, her eyes snapped open. She lay motionless, with the eiderdown pulled tight around her cheeks, trying to identify the small, careful sound that had woken her.

  In a second, she identified it. The metal latch of the gate being raised, then replaced softly – so softly – on its notch. Whoever had been in the garden all this time had, at last, gone.

  Eight

  1930

  The shorthand and typing course took only three months. She was surprised at how quickly she picked things up and how much she enjoyed it – not just the learning but the company of the other girls. They were a thoroughly mixed bag, some of them there for fun or to kill time, others to make a living until they married. They were the dedicated and ambitious ones.

  Barbara supposed she belonged to the second group. She wanted to work, because she needed something to do. Marriage certainly didn’t feature in her immediate future, but it was out there somewhere, not as Barbara’s goal, but it was inevitable. No one else in her cohort had done the season and she kept quiet about that for fear of appearing different.

  The secretarial school was in West Hampstead, so while she was studying she lived at the Regents Park house (another cause of secrecy). Ardonleigh, to her great sadness, was to be sold. Conrad and Julia, city people at heart, spent less and less time there and were understandably inclined, now that their daughter had been launched (after a fashion), to spend their time and money on matters other than the upkeep of a large, country establishment. Barbara was forced to recognise that if she wanted independence, she could not have her cake and eat it too. But the imminent loss of her happy, childhood home made her determined to find a place of her own.

  She had no idea how to go about finding such a place and didn’t want to ask her parents’ advice for obvious reasons. Discreet enquiries among her classmates revealed that some were still at home like her (though not, she inferred, in such comfort) and a large group were disseminated among various respectable hostels near the Euston Road. Three shared a flat in West Hampstead and suggested she look for advertisements in local papers and newsagents’ windows. Acting on this advice, she used her two free afternoons to look at ‘flats’ in the area. They turned out to be no more than bedsits, about as bleak and lonely as could be imagined. One in Kensal Rise had a rancid smell, as if something had died in there and the place had been only inadequately cleaned since. The room reeked of the last sad, solitary life that it had contained. She fled.

  It was Molly Kidd, the Libertine herself, who came up with a solution. Molly (whose own family and upbringing were a mystery, about which one didn’t enquire) was working as a publicist and occasional model for a small but recherche fashion house off Berkeley Square. When congratulated on her stylish appearance, her reply was always,

  ‘I’m an advertisement for Maison Luce – do you think I could afford these things myself?’

  Barbara bumped into her at a bus stop on Finchley Road. Or, at least, Barbara was at the bus stop when a black cab pulled up alongside and the door was pushed open.

  ‘Can we give you a lift?’

  She peered in and saw Molly, elegant in black and white, surrounded by canvas bags.

  ‘Thanks – anywhere near the Park.’

  ‘Jump in.’ As the cab pulled away, she said, ‘Sorry about all this stuff. I’ve been showing some of our new designs to a client in Golders Green.’

  ‘And did she like them?’

  ‘She did, poor thing. They’d need to be three sizes bigger, but we can do that.’ She rested an arm along the back of the seat to better study Barbara. ‘How about you? I haven’t seen you since that ghastly weekend at Gerry’s. And I must say the last place I expected to find you was at a bus stop on such a filthy afternoon.’

  Barbara told her about the course. Molly was a good listener, who gave you her full attention, while giving the strong impression that everything you said was being filed, sorted and cross-referenced, to be processed with advantages on some future occasion.

  ‘So you’re going to be a working woman?’

  ‘If I can find the right thing.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ Molly waved a hand. ‘Take it from me, you’ll be snapped up. And where are you living at the moment?’

  ‘With my parents. Near the park.’

  ‘Very nice!’

  ‘It is,’ she agreed, but Molly had noticed her hesitation. ‘But lacking privacy, I suppose?’

  ‘Rather. I’m welcome to stay there till – well, for ever – but I’ve started to look around for somewhere I can rent once I have a job.’

  ‘Seen anything that took your fancy?’

  ‘Frankly, no. They’ve all been extremely depressing.’

  ‘I bet they have. Believe me, I know. I’ve lived in some absolute horrors in my time. The reason I worked so hard was to spend as little time as possible in my digs. And no, it’s not like that anymore. I have my very own little place in Marylebone, I can’t swing even the smallest cat, but it’s pretty and comfortable, for me to do just as I like in.’

  ‘It sounds like heaven,’ admitted Barbara. ‘Look – don’t go out of your way, you can drop me off anywhere here.’

  Molly leaned forward and slid the shutter back. ‘We’re enjoying this so much; please can you take us once round the inner circle?’

  ‘Whatever you want, miss.’

  She closed the shutter. ‘This is so cosy and convenient, why not?’

  ‘I’ll pay for the extra.’

  ‘Well naturally … Of course you won’t! My boss is paying and she can well afford it. Now listen, because I’ve just had one of my brilliant ideas.’

  It turned out that Molly knew of a flat off Edgware Road, bigger than her own, but for two. Both the present occupants were friends of hers and one of the girls was moving out – ‘going to stagnate in Tonbridge Wells with her soon-to-be husband’ was how Molly put it – so there would be a vacancy and she could guarantee Barbara first refusal.

  ‘Would you like to look? I swear even your parents would approve.’

  Four weeks later, Barbara had found employment, and moved out of the Regents Park house into 21b Sussex Court, sharing with a girl called Cecily, who worked at Liberty’s. Her mother had vetted the premises and her father had paid the required month’s rent in advance. In truth, Julia had been vetting Cecily too, albeit covertly, but could have found no possible fault. Cecily was a few years older, sensible to a fault, and wedded to her work. One never heard her so much as mention marriage and her ambition was to manage a department in the store.

  Molly, of course, had her views about this, ‘Thwarted in love. Either that or she’s one of those women who’s genuinely not interested.’

  Barbara reserved judgement. She had found a job surprisingly easily, as an editorial assistant on The Countrywoman. The magazine was designed, if not for farmers’ wives, at least for provincial ladies (she had been right in assuming that in this context her experience of being presented would do no harm). The office was in Maiden Lane, close to Covent Garden.

  There were five other members of staff: Mr Danby the editor; his secretary Miss Bell; chief ‘reporter’ Daphne Elliot; advertising manager Colin Arch; and Terry, the office boy. Mr Danby’s background was in local newspapers, but he affected a patrician manner and wore a black jacket and pinstriped trousers to the office, as though editing The Countrywoman were an exalted professional calling. Daphne herself had joined the magazine in the same lowly capacity as Barbara and moved up the pecking order. Miss Bell (generally reckoned to be a Mrs, either actual or widowed) might almost have been CW’s ideal reader – neat, well bred and with unfai
lingly pleasant manners – except that she lived in Camden Town. ‘Arch’ was the oldest member of staff, former sub-editor on a national paper, some way past his prime but unable to ‘let the typewriter go’ as he put it. If even some of his bibulous anecdotes were to be believed, pulling in advertisements for weatherproof clothing, gardening equipment and sciatica remedies for CW must have been very small beer after the heady brew of Fleet Street, but he appeared perfectly happy with his lot. His chief delight was to tease the others, especially Mr Danby, by referring to ‘scoops’, ‘straplines’, ‘doorstepping’ and so on, as if the magazine were an unscrupulous, popular daily instead of the genteel organ it actually was. Terry was a sharp-witted lad, smart as paint in his crisp shirtsleeves and waistcoat, who worked hard and who Arch assured them was destined for greater things. He could whistle any popular tune beautifully; it was like having a resident dance band.

  Barbara loved all of it – from her bus ride and walk to work, to the shabby, cosy office, the foibles of her fellow workers and the work itself. No two days were the same. She knew from listening to Arch that this was the softest, smallest journalistic environment imaginable, but to her it was thrillingly new and different. Mindful of her new and lowly status, she was always in a few minutes early and preceded only by Terry with his ‘Morning Miss, like a cuppa?’

  The Countrywoman was a monthly magazine, so they were not governed by what Arch called ‘the tyranny of the deadline’. The content consisted of interviews, accounts of seasonal occasions (such as hunt balls, country fairs, agricultural and flower shows) and ‘regulars’ (like the letters and etiquette advice, recipes and occasional fashion of a sturdy sort). The advice column, in a question-and-answer format, was sent in by someone known as Lady Fayne (also the magazine’s owner), who had never been seen so, for all any of them knew, the writer might not have been female, let alone titled. Recipes were strategically-edited versions of ones appearing elsewhere. These, and the readers’ letters, were Barbara’s preserve.

  She particularly enjoyed sifting through the letters, of which there were over a hundred a week. In fact, for the first few days, she became so absorbed in her task that a backlog built up and Daphne advised her to ‘buck up or give up’. Who knew that the wives and mothers of provincial England had so much to say about their homes, their families, their pets, their husbands, in fact the whole weave of their everyday (but not commonplace) lives? You could never guess the subject of a letter from the tone of its opening sentence. Barbara’s task was to reduce the monthly intake to a number – ten or twelve – which, after judicious editing, formed a page near the start of the magazine.

  Another regular feature was the Editor’s Letter penned by Mr Danby in an impeccably ladylike style. For this purpose his byline (and handwritten signature) was ‘Anne Montgomery’ and a postage-stamp-sized photograph showed his alter ego complete with confiding smile, marcel wave and pearls; even allowing for some photographic enhancement there was no mistaking Miss Bell. When Barbara mentioned the possibility of Mr Danby’s being unmasked, the others laughed.

  ‘Our readers, god bless ’em, never come here,’ Arch told her. ‘We wouldn’t let them. They think we’re all sitting around in jodhpurs and tea gowns, writing with quills on the finest vellum.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Daphne, ‘that’s not quite true. Remember last year that woman turned up, grousing about the pineapple upside-down cake? She wanted her moment with the editor, so there was nothing for it but for Mr Danby to send Miss Bell into the fray.’

  Arch nodded appreciatively. ‘She did a terrific job. Breeding will out, you could take her anywhere.’

  Barbara was impressed. ‘And the reader didn’t suspect anything?’

  ‘Of course not, why would she? She met the woman in the photograph, she lodged her complaint, Miss Bell said we’d print a correction and an apology with her name on it, and took her to tea at the Strand Palace.’

  There’s no doubt about it, thought Barbara, I’m seeing life.

  Still, by the time she’d been at The Countrywoman six weeks, she was getting a little tired of the readers’ letters and was monumentally sick of scavenging recipes – particularly because she herself barely cooked and the magazine’s readers had experts who could, and would, sniff out errors. She lived in dread of causing another upside-down cake incident and was envious of Daphne, going out and about, meeting people, attending functions and events and writing things up.

  It was Terry who encouraged her to spread her wings one morning, when he brought her a cup of tea.

  ‘You should write something Miss,’ he told her. ‘If it’s any good he’s not going to turn it down, is he?’

  ‘I’ve never done anything of this sort. I don’t want to tread on anyone’s toes.’

  ‘You won’t be. You’ve seen what it’s like round here, easy come easy go. You should try, Miss. Go on.’

  There was one disobliging thing about her place of work. Now that the nights were drawing in, she didn’t care for the entrance to the building. The door, which served two other premises as well, was down a narrow dead-end alley off Maiden Lane. The alley was unlit, so in the evening (and even in the early morning now) you had to dive into the dark, enclosed space, with high, blind walls on either side. It wasn’t often that she arrived or left on her own, but there were occasions when this was unavoidable. One night there had been someone there, a bearlike mass emerging from the blackness and weaving unsteadily towards the road. A tramp, the worse for drink and although he was no threat, he had taken her by surprise. She’d nearly bumped into him, feeling the gritty texture of his coat, the greasy tendrils of beard and the stink of his skin and breath. Probably as startled as she was, he had roared something at her in a loud, wild voice and for a second had blocked her path. Her back was against the door and the lighted pavement only just visible beyond his looming bulk.

  ‘Please …!’ she began, but he was already back in his own world and shuffling, muttering away.

  When she mentioned this to Daphne, she was bracingly unsympathetic.

  ‘He’s there from time to time, it’s a sheltered spot. We’ve stopped mentioning it to the bobbies, they come and move him on poor chap, but a few days later he’s back. Arch gives him a tanner from time to time. Did you see the medals?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘He’s got a few. Fancy coming through the whole show and finishing up like that.’

  Over those early months of independence, through the first winter of the 1930s, Barbara’s life changed out of all recognition. The rhythm and texture of work, the small and diverse group of people with whom she spent most of every day, the different London of which she was now part, all contributed to a feeling of exhilaration. Apart from her colleagues and less frequently her parents, the person she saw most of these days was Molly, who for some reason was taking a lively interest in her. The year of the Season and debutantes, of dances and parties and social ‘friends’, whom she scarcely knew, was like a bright, impersonal room which she had left behind. She had not seen Ros or Lucia since then, nor any of the young men except for Gerry, whom she had encountered en passant one evening in the Strand. They were both rushing, but there was one question she’d felt compelled to ask.

  ‘Did Marjory like her painting?’

  Gerry pulled a face. ‘You had a sneak preview I believe – what do you think?’

  ‘It wasn’t much good.’

  ‘That’s the understatement of the year. I reckon I could have done better! What a bloody travesty, pardon my french!’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Not much. There wasn’t a lot to say. Paid for it though – two guineas! The parents know nothing about art and care less, but even they were appalled. Marjory may not look like a soft touch, but when it comes to a lame duck, she’s hopeless. She felt sorry for the blighter, just as long as he doesn’t expect any references!’

  On the bus, Barbara remembered Johnny Eldridge’s declared and not wholly un
serious ambition to become ‘portraitist to the county set’. She experienced a pang of sympathy – for Marjory, and also (she knew it was wrong) for Eldridge himself. But he had his money, so perhaps that was all that mattered. Anyway, she asked herself, why was she troubling her head for a single second about Johnny Eldridge, or his awful picture?

  But he was like one of those tunes you got on the brain. Once in there, he was hard to shake.

  Nine

  After a damp, windy autumn and a rain-soaked Christmas, the new year saw snow and plenty of it. Barbara, used to the opulent warmth of home, discovered that it wasn’t only country piles like the Gorringes’ which were hard to heat. The Sussex Court flat was freezing and the small, blue flames of the gas fire caused condensation to pour down the ill-fitting windows. It added to the sticky rim of mould already gathered at the bottom of the frames. The office was slightly better on account of a motley array of paraffin burners which took the edge off the cold, but gave off a strong pervasive smell that could make you feel nauseous, if you sat too close to one for too long. At lunchtime, Barbara took to going for a walk to clear her head, returning with her hands and feet hurting from the cold.

  It was on one such walk that she saw them. The day was particularly bleak, the pavements cobbled with dirty, hard-packed ice and a gunmetal sky loaded with more unshed snow pressed down on the rooftops. Vehicles had their lights on, even at this time of day, and tyres hissed and threw up spatterings of freezing sludge. Barbara chose a route that took her over the Strand and down to the Embankment, where she could walk along by the river for a few hundred yards and turn back up one of the side roads that came out near Trafalgar Square.

  They were standing close together by the embankment wall. She recognised Molly first – tall and strikingly dressed in her persian lamb-trimmed coat and a hat with a brim that swept down on one side. She was talking animatedly, intensely, to her companion, her head tilted slightly as if trying to catch his eye. He was thin and looked downcast, his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed in the pockets of a jacket, with the collar turned up. His clothes looked cheap and inadequate in the bitter cold. As Barbara watched, he drew his right hand from his pocket to take a cigarette from Molly’s case, and something about the hand, the glimpse of profile as he leant towards Molly’s proffered lighter, sparked a memory.