Half a Crown (4 page)

“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 length. 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 your

“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 the 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.

The main streets were crowded as the spectators followed after the parade, but Sir Alan knew the backstreets and raced along them. “What did you think of it?” he asked.

“I thought it was great fun,” I said, when Betsy hadn’t answered after a moment.

“I didn’t like the Jews,” she said. “That family they had in the last group upset me. I could see the little girl bleeding.”

“You have too tender a heart, Betsy,” Sir Alan said, condescendingly. “They’re only Jews. A little water doesn’t do them any harm, and nor do a few shouted names. Even if people throw the odd stone or rotten tomato, it’s much less than they deserve. Think how they sabotage the economy when they get the slightest chance, and what they’d do to us if they could!”

There was a huge bonfire outside Marble Arch, and I could already hear the bands playing in the distance. “I hope you girls aren’t too tired,” Sir Alan said.

“Will there be speeches?” Betsy asked cautiously.

Sir Alan laughed. “Not very many, don’t worry.”

He parked the car and we made our way through the cheerful crowds. There was a bonfire, there were torches, there was band music, I could smell candyfloss and wished we could have some, though I knew it would be impossibly lower-class of me to ask for it. I was
lower-class, and I knew it. I felt a deep camaraderie for all these people, marchers and watchers, the barefoot children cheerfully begging. London had not changed much since Dickens’s day, I thought, giving one of them half a crown.

And that’s how it was; we were walking through the crowds and the people all seemed to be smiling. Sir Alan said something to Betsy that I didn’t catch, and then we were in front of a rostrum next to the bonfire. “This is where the singing will be,” Sir Alan said. I could hear band music in the distance, and nearer, an orator addressing part of the crowd from another rostrum.

There was a group of Jews directly under the rostrum; two men, four women, and a little girl. They might have been the ones Betsy had seen before, because the child had blood running down her face from a cut on her temple. They all looked terrified. The ones I’d seen earlier had looked a little resigned to what was happening, and even exchanged some banter with the crowds. These kept looking from side to side and flinching, though nobody was taking any especial notice of them.

“What happens to them after?” Betsy asked.

“Mostly they’re let go again, sometimes they’re handed over to the police to be sent off to the Continent where they know how to deal with them,” Sir Alan said.

Just then a young man in a black shirt jumped up onto the rostrum and shot out his hand in the Continental fascist salute. The crowd responded, of course, copying him and cheering. He was very good-looking, with such an air of health and vitality that you didn’t really notice the details of his appearance. He seemed very young. I thought him my own age and the age of the young men I was used to dancing with at parties. There was something appealing about that. “Are you proud to be British?” he called. He had an unusual accent; not a foreign one, but not London either. The crowd roared. He leaned down into the crowd and took something from
one of the men to the side of him, then straightened up again with a guitar. He started to play almost immediately, not waiting for the crowd to quiet, so I didn’t catch the beginning of the song. The tune was lovely, but the words were the usual stuff about patriotism and motherland, with a chorus we soon started singing along to that went “Power, power, British power.”