The Magic Hour Read online

  Dinner was served by a new, younger woman, and she certainly did not have Mavis’s touch with pastry, or anything else for that matter. Nevertheless the dinner was delicious, because all the produce came from the farm, and yet Alexandra could not wait to leave, could not wait to drive off to the old coaching inn, be on her own, think everything through.

  ‘You should have stayed with us, really you should,’ her father protested.

  ‘I would not want to put Kay out, not with little Arthur teething and everything, and Kay having the decorators in.’

  ‘Little Arthur’s History Book, remember that? Your grandmother liked to read you that,’ her father mused.

  They both smiled.

  ‘Sorry you missed seeing the little chap, but you know … bedtime is bedtime, and poor Kay is pregnant again, probably why she’s a bit scratchy.’

  ‘It’s been lovely, thank you, Pa.’

  ‘Come again soon, won’t you, Alexandra?’

  He leaned forward and slipped her something in an envelope.

  ‘The key to Pear Tree Cottage. We got the tenant out at last, and it is yours whatever Kay says; and it was always meant to be yours. Sell it, do what you want with it, it is yours. You understand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She gave her father a quick peck on the cheek and fled down the front steps to her car. On the way back to the inn she paused yet again outside the churchyard, but because it was dark she did not get out of the car, but only wondered why it was that the past sometimes seemed more complicated, more dangerous, more threatening than the future might possibly be?

  And then the answer came to her. It was because there was nothing you could do about it. What was it that Mrs Chisholm had used to say to her? ‘Just kick on, just kick on.’

  Sweet and Low

  As soon as the ship docked, on Alfred’s advice, Tom booked them both into the Plaza for a few nights. Equally soon, within hours, Tom found that a whole new love by the name of New York had taken over his life. Just to walk with Alfred down the spring-lit streets with the skyscrapers towering above him, to feel the exuberance of the place, was more than a tonic, it was a lifeline. Here was something not just beckoning to him, but pulling him forcefully towards it: not just a new life, but also a new way of being. Here he could learn to be a new person, someone who did not have to be grateful, who did not have to aspire to a new or different class, or have a particular accent. He had to do only one thing. He had to succeed.

  With the money that Florazel had left in a New York account for him, with his new wardrobe and his new business partner, he was certain that he had only to work hard and life would reward him. But first they had to find an apartment, not to mention business premises.

  Alfred whistled incredulously, sweet and low, when Tom told him the amount of capital that they now had at their disposal.

  ‘This woman must have done more than love you, Thomas O’Brien, she must have adored you, my friend.’

  ‘Not really,’ Tom stated, after a few seconds. ‘No, what she felt for me, was … I don’t know: what do rich, older women feel for you when they enjoy you and then tire of you?’

  ‘Not having your gorgeous looks, I couldn’t say. I’ve never had that privilege, Thomas, my son.’

  ‘In that case, don’t let’s go in to it, shall we?’

  Tom looked uncomfortable, and felt ashamed.

  Every time he looked back at his relationship he felt shattered at how much he had loved Florazel, ashamed at just how much he had believed that she loved him. Embarrassed at how one part of him had believed and yet not believed Bob Atkins’s warning that she was a woman of a certain reputation, managing to persuade himself that every other man had meant less to her than himself, that what they had was something out of this world, a love that few could have enjoyed, or might ever know.

  ‘I was young, in some ways,’ he muttered finally to Alfred who was still staring at him with an over-interested expression. ‘I was young, and – very stupid, and finally very hurt.’

  ‘She must have known that, Thomas, that’s why she’s made it up to you, funding you this way, that is making it up to you, and some. How, though, am I going to make it up to you, Tom? I can’t match your investment.’

  It was Alfred’s turn to look suddenly helpless and vulnerable.

  ‘You don’t have to, Al. In all sincerity, you don’t have to make anything up to me. Your friendship is more than enough. We will work together, and we will grow rich together, and …’ Tom paused.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Yes, at least – no, that is enough, for the moment. No your friendship, as I have just said, is more than enough. I honestly think if you had not been standing smoking that sick-making cigar of yours by the ship’s rail that night, if you hadn’t have joked with me when you did, such was my foolish despair, I might well have thrown myself over.’

  Alfred whistled again.

  ‘That bad, huh?’

  ‘That bad.’ Tom nodded. ‘So now, Alfred Bodel and Thomas O’Brien are going into business together and we’re going to be a formidable duo, do you know that?’

  ‘Is that all? A mere nothing, my friend.’

  ‘No, there is one more thing.’

  ‘Yes, my friend?’

  ‘With your help I shall fulfil my one ambition.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To go back and buy Knighton Hall.’

  ‘Knighton Hall, huh? Is that where the Queen lives? Might not she mind?’ Alfred joked.

  ‘No, the Queen does not live at Knighton Hall, but a man by the name of James Millington does.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And …’ Tom paused. ‘It has long been my dream to stand in the hall of that house and watch him go down the front steps and drive off down that drive, and know that I have booted him out, the way he booted me out, and I don’t think I will be happy until I have done just that.’

  ‘That bad, eh, Thomas? The old worm of revenge eating into you, is it? Made a hole right through you, has it?’

  Tom smiled although his eyes remained less than amused.

  ‘Yes, my friend,’ he said, mimicking Alfred back to him. ‘Quite that bad. And I’m afraid to say it is not something that will go away.’

  Alfred nodded.

  ‘Well,’ he said judiciously, ‘there is much we can say on the subject of revenge, but little that has not been said before. For myself becoming eaten up with a desire to pay someone back is not something in which I wish to indulge.’

  ‘Goody goody.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort, no. It is simply because I love life too much. Like enjoying myself far too much. Don’t want to miss the sunrises or the sunsets of my life; and I always think that if I were preoccupied by some feeling such as you have, understandable as it is, I would fail to notice the beauty of what lay around me. But if you are intent on getting your own back …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, in Italy they say revenge is like lying on a garden pea, and no amount of feather mattresses thrown on top of it will ever stop you feeling its hard little presence in the small of your back.’

  ‘No,’ Tom agreed, after a while. ‘There isn’t a mattress made that will stop me feeling what I feel for James Millington, until I can do back what he did to me.’

  ‘Well, all to the good, I suppose. Make you work harder and faster to achieve what you want.’

  ‘And you? What do you want?’

  ‘Me?’ Alfred laughed. ‘My tastes are simple my friend. All I want out of life is a beautiful girl, a fast boat, and a house on Long Island, that will do for me, you can keep the rest.’

  He clapped his arm around Tom’s shoulders.

  ‘Onwards and upwards, my friend, onwards and upwards.’

  Alexandra was standing at the window of the cottage that she now knew was hers. As she did so she remembered how her grandmother had sat, day after day, in that same room, unmoving, declining to go on living. She opened the door with the key that her father had sur
reptitiously slipped to her with such a set expression, as if he knew that he would have to pay for his action, but thought it quite worth it.

  She would sell the place, if only because she knew that her father would expect her to do so. He would not want her living too near to himself and Kay; he would not want her to witness his daily humiliations at the hands of his new wife; he would want to think that he had done something for her, helped her to a more secure future.

  The idea of how much the cottage might fetch only came to Alexandra slowly, once she had shelved the memories of herself, now seeming so much younger, so naïve compared to how she was now. These were swiftly followed by a resolve to spend what the sale would bring. Once Bob was out of the Army they really could be married. But first she had to go to London, to visit her Millington cousins.

  The address to which she had been directed by Tasha Millington was well away from the normal stamping grounds of the kind of people that Jessamine and Cyrene would have been brought up to believe that they were. The flat was just one of hundreds in a large, dull, badly painted square. Outside what had once been grand privately owned houses were a few shabby cars, alongside which Alexandra now carefuly parked Bob’s car. She stepped out onto the pavement and from there up to the badly painted front door with its row of bells beside which names were scrawled in a mixture of pens and handwritings. Beside the topmost bell was written ‘Millington’. She rang the bell for a few seconds, and then, seeing that there was no hall porter, she pushed the front door open and was instantly assailed by the smell of dull cooking, as dull as the paintwork within, the taste doubtless as dreary as the stair carpet.

  ‘Ah, there you are, dear Alexandra.’

  Alexandra had been called Minty for so long now whenever anyone said ‘Alexandra’ she was hard put not to look behind her to see whom it might be that the person was addressing.

  Tasha leaned forward and kissed her warmly on both cheeks.

  ‘My dear, dear, Alexandra, so lovely to see you after all this time. We have lost touch for so long I honestly had the idea that we might never see you again, as we have not seen so many of our friends.’ She stopped, a sad expression coming into her eyes. ‘You know how it is when one is down on one’s luck: so few people want to know one any more. It is quite shattering how few people want to know one, once the ball is over, as it were. Still, you certainly discover who your true friends are. Come in, come in. The girls will be back from their little jobs soon.’

  Alexandra followed Tasha into the sitting room, and immediately felt a pang of nostalgia for so much of the furniture and fittings, which had once seen more glamorous days, was now set about the little yellow painted room. The button-backed chair that had once stood in the corner of Tasha’s elaborate bedroom at Knighton Hall, the wing chair that had once been in the library, the silver boxes that had been scattered about tables in the saloon at Knighton: they were all there. But now that they were all crowded into one little top-floor London flat, they had a disconsolate air, as if they were so many passengers in a crowded train carriage, unused to and unwilling to being huddled together in a close situation.

  ‘Will you have a sherry, Alexandra?’

  Alexandra nodded. In the old days Tasha always said she loathed sherry and only drank champagne and French wine. She had obviously decanted some cheap sherry into one of the old decanters and was now pouring it with the same care that Janet Priddy had poured Alexandra’s tea from her silvered teapot.

  ‘Cheers!’ There was a pause. Tasha frowned. ‘So funny to say that, but everyone round here does, you know!’

  ‘Cheers.’

  They both sipped at their tiny, cheap glasses, and fell to silence, and as they did so Alexandra found herself hoping against hope that Jessamine and Cyrene would be coming back from their work soon, that there would be some other distraction, because she had never really had much to do with Tasha, and when she did have, it was always to listen. She remembered how much Tasha had enjoyed talking about her clothes. She remembered how she had enjoyed walking about her dressing room trying on hats and jackets and evening tops and every other kind of paraphernalia, but now that there were no such things, and she would have no dressing room, it seemed that Tasha had run out of subjects.

  ‘I’ve just been to see my father and Kay,’ Alexandra finally stated.

  ‘Oh yes? I’ve never heard from them, you know, not since the divorce. Well, I never did anyway except at Christmas, but certainly not now.’

  Tasha sighed and taking out a cheap packet of small cigarettes from a worn handbag, she lit one.

  ‘But there you are, once you are a divorcee, even if you are the innocent party, you find yourself ostracised.’

  It was terrible to see the bitter look in Tasha’s eyes and watch how slowly she smoked her cheap cigarette, and notice how now that she could no longer afford to have her hair styled by a top hairdresser, it sat too flat and too square on her head, and how grey it was compared to the colour it had been before. Her dress too was cheap and there was a ladder in one of her stockings that she had stopped with red nail varnish, which looked strange.

  ‘Ah, there they are!’

  Tasha sprang to her feet as if she knew that Alexandra was having as much trouble as she in keeping up a conversation, so changed were her circumstances.

  Jessamine and Cyrene walked into the sitting room looking as different from their mother as it was possible to be. In contrast to Tasha they were dressed to the nines in the latest fashions: long full coats with three-quarter sleeves, worn with long gloves and small hats from under which showed short elfin-styled hair; seamed stockings, high heels and crocodile handbags completed their elegance.

  While Alexandra was by no means shabbily dressed, her life at Deanford would never require her to look as her cousins did now, older and more sophisticated than she would have thought possible, particularly given their mother’s appearance. They made her feel as shabby as Tasha must feel set beside her daughters.

  ‘Why, Alexandra, how lovely to see you.’

  ‘Alexandra.’

  They both kissed her, smelling strongly of French scent, and as they did so Alexandra noted how beautifully made up they were, and how long and red their immaculately varnished nails, once they had removed their fine expensive suede gloves.

  ‘Mummy given you a sherry, has she? Bless her, she is good, isn’t she?’

  They both removed their coats and sat down, leaning their backs against the faded chintz of the chairs while their mother fussed round them, bringing them glasses of sherry and consoling them with the idea that they had after all come to the end of a long hard day, and that they must now relax and let their mother take over.

  Alexandra stared at them. She knew that after the dreadful incident of Jessamine throwing her drink all over Jennifer, that they had been cut off without a penny by her uncle; that he now didn’t mind what happened to them, because when it first happened they had both written to tell her so, after which she had not heard from them, except, inevitably, from Tasha at Christmas.

  What she did not know was how they came to be dressed as they were, how they came to be so sophisticted, so elegantly turned out: but for a change of address card, she would long ago have lost touch with them.

  ‘I shall just pop out to the kitchen and warm up some cutlets for us all.’

  Tasha left the room and Jessmine watched her dully.

  ‘Not cutlets again, can’t she learn to do anything but grill?’ She looked at Alexandra and remembering her cooking she smiled. ‘Couldn’t you take over?’

  Alexandra smiled.

  ‘I could, if you like.’

  ‘It’s all right, she’s only joking,’ Cyrene put in quickly.

  They all three sipped their drinks rather too fast, and then sighed.

  ‘So how’s sleepy old Deanford?’

  ‘It’s fun. We’re very busy at the moment. We do lunches and dinners, it’s hard work, but it’s all going very well.’

  ‘Good
show.’ Jessamine leaned forward and reached into her mother’s handbag. Pinching her packet of cigarettes, she lit one, swiftly followed by Cyrene. They both puffed together for a second or two, inhaling sharply and efficiently.

  ‘Yes, but what do you do when you’re not cooking and so on?’

  ‘Nothing really, except I have a sort of fiancé now. He’s called Bob.’

  ‘Oh I say. Well done.’

  ‘Let’s see the ring?’

  ‘He hasn’t bought me one yet—’

  ‘Too poor, is he? What a shame.’

  ‘Goodness no, he’s not poor, just young. We’re only starting out. He’s doing his National Service.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop him being rich.’

  ‘How much does this old bag in Deanford pay you?’

  When Alexandra told them they both made shocked noises.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Mean old bag.’

  ‘It’s all she can afford at the moment. Her husband’s company went bankrupt.’

  ‘Never mind what she tells you, she should be paying you acres more than that. You’ll have to come to London. You’ll get much more than that in London.’

  ‘I don’t think I could at the moment.’

  ‘You can hardly have your hair done for that.’

  ‘We could hardly have our nails done for that.’

  Tasha came into the sitting room carrying a tray with which she staggered to the window. She laid it on a pre-prepared table.

  ‘Here we are, darlings, a nice mixed grill, and then some cheddar and biscuits.’

  They all sat round the small table feeling and looking absurdly self-conscious, as if Alexandra’s advent had forced them to remember their former circumstances, the long dining table at Knighton, the library where the drinks had been served, the butler who had served them.

  ‘How’s Douro?’ Alexandra asked brightly.

  ‘Oh, Douro is fine—’

  ‘Don’t listen to Mummy, he’s a mess.’ Jessamine snorted lightly.

  ‘He drinks a little too much,’ Tasha conceded. ‘I say, Alexandra’ – she leaned forward quickly, too obviously trying to steer the subject away from Douro – ‘if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s lovely to hear that your nervous hesitation has disappeared. You must be very happy in your new life, for it to disappear like that.’