Her Ladyship's Girl (31 page)

‘With the sad demise of your husband, the inheritance from his father’s last will and testament passes to you.’

‘To me?’

‘Yes, you.’

‘What about his mother and sister?’

‘They have independent incomes from the estate. Mr Lane junior’s inheritance passes to his next of kin, which is you, Mrs Lane.’

He explained that the terms of the will ensured that Alan could only take his inheritance as a monthly allowance and not as a lump sum. On his death, however, those terms altered and I could
either continue to receive the monthly allowance or take the entire amount of the legacy.

‘How much?’

‘The monthly allowance is, at present, fifty pounds.’

‘How much is the lump sum?’

‘Twenty-five thousand pounds.’

It was a fortune!

‘I’ll take it all.’

Thank you.

I skipped out of the solicitor’s office in Chancery Lane and did mental somersaults along the street. I was rich! My skivvying days were over. I could get a new premises and kit it all out
as a proper launderette and let the people do their own washing and drying and I’d pay someone to do the ironing. I’d be a lady of leisure at last, like Miranda Bouchard and Monica
Reynolds and all the others I’d slaved for over the years. I opened a business bank account and employed an accountant to look after all the paperwork. The children and I moved into a
three-bedroom house in Holborn, like the ones I used to clean a few years earlier. I opened my first Wash ’n’ Dry shop in Ilford Street in July 1953 and I sold my old Vauxhall Velox and
bought a brand-new Humber Hawk.

But there was still one other thing I had to do.

I drove along the quiet street in Hampstead until I came to the house. I got out of the car and walked up to the front door. Mr Ayres didn’t answer it this time, but another, younger
butler. And he wasn’t wearing the usual butler’s attire, just an informal-looking suit.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m Mrs Lane. I’d like to see Mr Harding.’

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘No, but I’m sure he’ll see me. Tell him it’s Anwyn.’

I looked down the flight of stone steps behind the black railings that led down to the basement at the side of the house. And I remembered coming here on that first day I arrived in London with
all my naive hopes and expectations. The butler came back.

‘Follow me.’

I didn’t need to follow him. I knew every inch of this house, from top to bottom. He showed me into the library and I ran my fingers across the leather bindings while I waited. They were
still there, the books on history and politics and exotic places around the world, the books about philosophy and gold mining, the memoirs and encyclopaedias and novels and volumes of poetry. I was
still in love with this room. The dark reddish stain on the bookcase hadn’t come back – or maybe it had and been removed again several times since I came to clean it.

I turned and he was there.

‘Do you remember, Anwyn?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

He came closer, until I could feel his breath on my face, smell the scent of sage and cedarwood. I took an envelope out of my pocket.

‘I’ve come to return the money you loaned me.’

‘Can you afford it?’

‘Yes.’

He took the envelope and put it into his pocket, without counting the money, then he went over to the library door and looked back at me.

‘Should I lock the door, Anwyn?’

‘In case someone should come in?’

‘Precisely.’

I nodded my head. My legs felt a little trembly as he turned the key in the lock and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he came back across the room – slowly, deliberately –
smiling with the same straight teeth and seductive scent and the words that were blown like kisses. And I felt like I was beautiful and glamorous and drinking from a stemmed glass with a green
berry and smoking a cigarette from a long black holder and he was seduced by the situation – entranced by my aura – overcome by my all-pervading presence. Then his hands cupped my face,
gently, caressingly. His green eyes looked deep into mine, and mine looked back and into his soul. His lips were as gentle as before, barely touching mine, brushing mine, while his right hand moved
slowly down my body to my breast. His left hand moved to the nape of my neck and then down along my spine to my waist. I whispered something he didn’t understand and had no need to –
words that meant the same thing in any language.

William Harding was in his mid-fifties now, but he still had a powerful presence and I wanted him to know me, who I had become – better than all the others. He made me feel those emotions
again that I’d felt for the first time back then in this library. I felt alive – really alive, not just going through the motions. I felt eternal – part of everything, here in the
library again with him.

He was less of a man than before – slighter, and without the light that shone from his eyes back then. He seemed to be carrying some sorrow and I knew it was for the loss of Miranda
Bouchard. But he was still more of a man than any other I’d met and I was now a real woman. Not a fragile, incomplete avatar of someone I once was, but a woman with a more profound identity,
with a soul that any man could float away on. A woman who needed no man to make her complete.

Despite the years, there was still something about him, not just the charisma or style or charm or the scent of sage and cedarwood – something else. I couldn’t put my finger on what
it was exactly but he had it and I wanted it. Or maybe it was just my fantasy and there really was nothing for him to give – nothing
of
him to give. Just something in my mind, what I
wanted him to be. Was he nothing and was I something? What could there be between us, apart from a memory? I tried to tell myself that, not to be stupid, to push him away and remind him he was
married. But I couldn’t. I wanted to be here with him because there was nowhere else worth being right then. I knew of his erstwhile reputation – the old rumours. But there had to be
more to a man than his reputation – maybe he didn’t even know what he was himself any more. And that didn’t make it any less there. The thing about him.

He moved his left hand inside my blouse and across my bare back. I closed my eyes. He kept speaking all the time as if to reassure me and his voice was like velvet as he lowered me down to the
carpeted floor. This time there was no apprehension. I wasn’t drowning in expectation and my breath didn’t come in short gasps and my voice sounded calm and self-assured.

It was growing dark in the library as the evening closed in and William Harding removed my clothes and I removed his. No sounds came from outside the locked door – it was as if there was
nobody else in the whole house except the two of us. His hands retraced the patterns they’d made before and his body seemed to know mine from the first time they’d met. All thoughts of
who we once were flowed away on the tide of sensuality that washed over us – embraced us – in its egalitarian grip. And, when it was over, he rose and lit a cigarette and poured two
glasses of sherry from a decanter on the table. We sat opposite each other in the high-backed, studded leather chairs and sipped the sherry without speaking for a long while.

Then he asked me how my little shop was doing and I told him about Alan being killed and me inheriting his money and how I’d opened my first launderette.

‘First?’

‘Yes. I want to own a chain of them.’

‘How ambitious.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be ambitious? It’s not the preserve of the rich and titled any more, you know.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’

He leaned over to pour more sherry, but I placed my hand over my glass.

‘I’m driving.’

Then I stood up and we shook hands. He gave me the key and I walked to the door. I turned and took a last look back – at a man who represented so much to me once, but who now looked rather
forlorn. Like his world that was fading into the past.

I unlocked the door and stepped out into the future.

I never saw William Harding again.

T
he Wash ’n’ Drys went from strength to strength in the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s. I opened a chain of eight launderettes all around London and I worked
in the business doing service washes and ironing, even though I said I wouldn’t and I’d let someone else do the slogging. I suppose I was never cut out to be a lady of leisure. My
children grew up and went to college and I found myself alone again. I still limped badly and the girls in the shops called me Limp Along Leslie after the character in the
Wizard
comics
who had one leg longer than the other. I didn’t mind, they didn’t mean it in a nasty way – more a term of endearment. And I had many a nickname for the people I’d come into
contact with over the years.

One of the launderettes was next to an Italian restaurant in Islington and, whenever I went up there, the Italian owner would pester me to go out with him. He’d sometimes sneak up behind
me and put his arms round my waist – and that was all right until once when I was standing there daydreaming and he did it and, for a split second, I thought I was back in Finsbury and it was
Alan. So I reached back and grabbed him by the goolies and he howled his head off. He left me alone after that.

I was what they called a wealthy widow and still only forty-two in 1960 and many’s the man who tried his luck with me and got nowhere. I was spoiled for them all by the two men who
influenced me most – Alan Lane, who made my life a misery, but who gave me my beautiful children and then left me everything I needed to achieve my goals. Ironic, eh? And William Harding, who
introduced me to a deeper passion and knowledge of who I was capable of being – until I realised that it wasn’t him at all. He was the catalyst, but ultimately he was an ineffectual man
and the true measure of me lay within myself. Both these men contributed in their own very different ways to the woman I had become. Maybe if I’d met another man who was truly genuine, he
might have changed me again. But I didn’t. They were all just cyphers with no substance. So I stayed on my own.

My sister Gwyneth emigrated to Australia in the 1960s and my brother Walter went to Canada. Bronwyn continued to teach in Maesteg and live in our house in Llangynwyd until she got married to an
Irishman and moved to County Cork with him. The house went back to the council and I don’t know if it’s still there or if it’s been demolished to make way for modernity. I never
went back to Wales because there was nothing there for me any more. The rest of my life was pretty uneventful. My daughter Charlotte went to university and became a doctor of some ology or other.
She lives in America and has grandchildren now.

I went to that estate agents in Maesteg some years later and found out that Monica Reynolds divorced her husband Arthur and went back to America. She lived in New Jersey until she died at the
age of eighty. On a visit to Charlotte and her family in 1979, I took a trip down to Philadelphia and found her burial place in a memorial garden. It had a headstone with the simple inscription:
Thank God I wasn’t sober when I died
.

And I smiled. It was Monica.

Daniel joined the army in 1961 and he was killed in a helicopter crash three years later. He was buried with full military honours and the army gave me a medal to commemorate him and I always
keep it close to me, wherever I go. When I die, I want it to be buried with me. Estelle went into the music business and I hardly knew where she was half the time. She moved to Australia in 1972
and she lives close to my sister Gwyneth out there. They’ve asked me to come live with them in New South Wales, would you believe? But I don’t want to live in old South Wales, so why
would I want to live in New South Wales?

Charlotte asked me to go live in America too, but I don’t want to.

I’d rather stay here.

During the 1980s, when I was well into my sixties, I read a piece in one of the upmarket magazines I always kept in the launderettes to remind me of my days as a hat-shop girl and the
inspiration and education those 1930s fashion magazines gave to me when I was so young and impressionable. Anyway, it was an article about the Earl and how he’d passed away at the good old
age of eighty-nine. He died childless, even though he was married for a number of years to a woman who’d died tragically thirty years earlier. The Earl had been heartbroken and never
remarried and now there was no heir to the title and it would expire. The woman fell from the top of the family home in Wiltshire. Nobody knew what she was doing up there and there were rumours
back then of suicide. But the coroner returned a verdict of death by misadventure, due to the state of disrepair of the balustrade where she was accustomed to walking. She’d had several names
during her short life – Miranda Brandon and Miranda Bouchard and Miranda Fitzroy when she married the Earl.

But never Miranda Harding.

I felt so very sad.

I kept going in the launderette business until I retired in 1990, then I sold the shops and moved out of London to Hertfordshire. The people who bought them turned them into coffee shops, I
think – so they’re not there any more. I bought a nice house with a garden and that’s what I do, a bit of gardening. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to see me
sometimes when they’re over on holiday from Australia and America and I enjoy having them. I read a lot because I always loved books.

And now I’ve written one of my own.

I hope you like it.

END

1
. English trans: bustle, or toil

2
. Lit. trans: ‘Earl’s Land’ and traditional name of an area of Glamorgan, which had a long-held resonance in Welsh culture

3
. Lit. trans: ‘The Fair Men’. Teachings evolved from an oral Faerie Tradition

4
. Spiritual path of the ‘cunning ones’ of Wales

5
. monsters that live in lakes and marshes

6
. ghosts, spirits or night-wanderers

7
. the water-leaper