Authors: Kate Beaufoy
The letter was dated 13 June 1919, and it had been posted from San Gimignano in Italy.
Last evening our friends the foreign artists – of the real bohemian type who go without collars and drink nearly all day long – took us along to a low-down Café, to a Socialist meeting. The Frenchman called for a guitar, and we sang the most glorious songs – and they were the most disreputable, dirtiest, down-and-outest sort of looking men you ever saw, and
never
have we spent such a ripping evening . . .
The idea of her mama, young, carefree, fraternizing with socialist types in a low-down café astonished her. Any memories of Mama were fixed in her mind in that beautiful villa in the South of France. This girl of the letters was a free-spirited hellion.
Rummaging among the envelopes, she picked out another.
I’ve never told you about our Greek count. He is an art dealer and has been living here in the pension with a little girl of 6 whom he has adopted. She is the most charming little creature – a little fairy – so small and dainty and just pure spirit – you can’t describe her anyhow else. In fact, she is so ethereal that it makes you frightened she’ll never grow up. She has had an awfully sad history, but was rescued by our Greek and he has brought her up here for the last 5 years as his own child – he is a most efficient nurse and he dresses, washes and altogether looks after her. All men she likes she calls Naughty Boys, in the sweetest accent. We play innumerable games of pretending – she puts a little statue we have to bed, and calls Scotch –
Scotch?
Her father!
– and she calls Scotch the Fly Man because he chases her when he has a campaign against the flies which swarm in our room.
Scotch. The ‘Fly Man’. Lisa felt jealous, so jealous of this fairy-like six-year-old who had spent time with
her
father larking and joking and playing make-believe. She, Lisa, didn’t even know what ‘Scotch’ looked like . . .
As she sorted randomly through the letters, trying to make chronological sense of them, she worked out that the very first one had been written shortly after her mama had arrived in Rouen, where she was on active service with the British Expeditionary Force:
We little lot – 7 of us – live in a hotel, each have our own room and have a small sitting-room. One man is an artist, with one arm, the other withered or something. He is very ‘alive’, and is always racing about somewhere – he has a perfect knowledge of the town, knows all the streets and buildings, shops and cafés. This afternoon we went to the Opera together – good way of starting war-work in France, eh? I think I shall like the whole thing – so don’t worry about me, darlings. And everybody looks after me – I think they imagine I am too young to be out alone!
From reading between the lines it was clear to her that her mama had fallen in love at first sight. No wonder Grandma had worried about her so. To let her only daughter go off on her own to France in wartime, and to realize that she was falling for an artist – a ‘Scotch’ artist at that, an amputee, and probably penniless – must have alarmed her terribly.
Lisa put the fragile pages back in their paper cocoon, then picked up another envelope, and another. She sifted through them all, fascinated, mouthing the words as she read them, devouring letter after letter then discarding them until she was the centre of a little reef of envelopes. Some of the letters were full of a wild, gay abandon, some were wistful and a little homesick, but all of them were resonant with the love her mother had felt for the man she called Scotch.
And, as she read, bit by bit she managed to construct the story of Mama before she became mama to Baba. As far as she could tell, the last letter had been written in August 1919 on a beach in Finistère. It made her cry because she felt as if her mother was talking directly to her across a gap in time of nearly a quarter of a century.
Why had Scotch left her? It seemed impossible that the strength of the love Mama had felt for him had not been reciprocated. What had she done when she found herself alone on the north coast of France? Why had she not returned home to London? Lisa’s birth certificate told her that she had been born in Paris. Had her mother been on her own then? Had she been friendless? When had she travelled to the Riviera? How had she ended up in that beautiful villa, surrounded by bright young things, leading such a hedonistic lifestyle?
But Lisa knew that it hadn’t always been a rainbow clutter in that house. There had been dark times, too, when Lisa would wake late at night and find her mother hunched over her desk, sobbing and scribbling frantically – not on writing paper, but in books with hard red covers – and in the mornings the books would be gone. What had she been writing? Who had she been writing to? Was that where the secrets were kept – between the pages of those red books? Because Lisa sensed that her mother had been keeping secrets, and there was something that did not add up. It all came back to Scotch. Why had he abandoned the love of his life; why had he abandoned his child?
At the very bottom of the box she came upon a photograph: a studio portrait of Jessie in a simple wooden frame, signed by the photographer and dated Rouen, 1918. It showed her mother in sepia, her shoulders bare, her abundant hair twisted into a loose chignon, tendrils of which skimmed an elegant neck. It was, Lisa thought, not unlike the head shot that Myra had organized for publicity purposes, the one that she signed routinely and put into SAEs for fans. It was the only photograph of her mother that she had ever seen.
Lisa recovered the tissue paper in which the French soap had been wrapped, and carefully swathed the photograph in it. Then she put the letters away – but not in the dilapidated hatbox. Instead she fetched a biscuit tin up from the pantry – one with a pretty pattern of peony roses on the lid. She didn’t want to run the risk of another accident happening to those precious souvenirs.
Later, in the kitchen, Lisa helped Great-Aunt Eva prepare the evening meal, chopping potatoes and parsnips, and sloshing gin into glasses.
‘Gin! Real Tanqueray gin!’ said Eva, adding a few drops of Angostura Bitters and taking an appreciative sip. ‘There’s been nothing but synthetic since the distillery got shelled. I wish I had a slice of lime, and lots of ice cubes. As for quinine tonic! I dream of it, sometimes.’
‘I’m so spoiled in LA,’ said Lisa, apologetically. ‘I have a bar fully stocked with all the liquor you could ever want.’
‘How gloriously vulgar, darling.’ Eva pulled a gas mask from a box, and started fiddling with the straps.
‘Why are you putting that on?’ asked an alarmed Lisa. ‘Is there an emergency?’
‘No, no,’ Eva assured her. ‘But it’s jolly handy when you’re chopping onions. I was lucky to get one – they’re scarce these days.’
‘Gas masks?’
‘No. Onions.’
‘How long did you have to stand in line for?’
‘Stand in line?’
‘I mean, queue.’
‘Of course – you’re American now. Over two hours.’
‘For a handful of vegetables? Oh, Eva – that’s shocking!’
‘It’s commonplace, darling. Welcome to wartime Britain.’
It felt utterly bizarre to Lisa to stand in the kitchen of her childhood home, conversing with a once sophisticated woman who was wearing a gas mask, a baggy tweed skirt, an Aran cardigan and matching tam o’shanter. She had still been an elegant woman in her early fifties when Lisa left London: her farewell present to her grand-niece had been a chamois leather jewellery roll. But now Eva had joined the legions of women who valued warmth and comfort over high fashion.
‘Have you seen anything of the Napiers?’ asked Lisa. ‘I noticed their house was bomb-damaged.’
‘Oh, my darling.’ Eva reached up and unfastened the mask. Her face, when revealed, was ashen. ‘When did you last hear from Richard?’
‘Not for ages. Sea mail takes months sometimes, you know – they say that half of it ends up on the ocean floor – and telephoning’s just impossible.’
‘Richard joined up, Lisa,’ Eva told her.
‘But he was working in the diplomatic corps!’
‘It was considered a soft option, rather, when so many able-bodied young men were enlisting. He kept getting white feathers sent to him anonymously. In the end, he couldn’t take the shame. He went off to France.’
Lisa knew at once. She set down the kitchen knife. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. He was shot down over Antwerp during his first week on duty.’
Lisa gripped the edge of the table and looked down at the solitaire diamond set in gleaming platinum that Richard had given her on one of the last occasions they’d met, in the Palm Court of the Ritz a whole wartime ago. She remembered his expression, of such puppy-dog hopefulness that she hadn’t been able to turn him down. Sliding the ring off her finger, she pressed it to her lips.
‘Are his parents alive?’ she asked Eva.
‘Yes. They’re living next door, still.’
‘This belongs to them,’ said Lisa.
Then she took a hit of gin, untied her apron, and made for the stairs.
Later that evening, Lisa took herself up to the room that had been hers until she had gone sailing off to Hollywood with the
Thief of Bagdad
. It was still redolent of her former life – a trunk full of old toys and back issues of
Film Pictorial
, a set of Arthur Mee’s
Children’s Encyclopaedias
, her swimming trophies, a box that played ‘The Sugar Plum Fairy’ when you opened the lid.
Inside the box were amassed trinkets: a coral necklace, a cameo brooch, an enamel buckle, a set of carved ivory buttons, a tiny porcelain monkey. She remembered the jewels she’d been loaned in Hollywood, the collars and cuffs of glittering gemstones, the heavy chandelier earrings that had tugged at her earlobes, the Cartier diamonds she had been terrified of losing.
Alarmed suddenly that she might not find the item she was searching for, she riffled through the contents; but there it was, nestled into the padded satin lining: the ring that her miscreant father had given her mother on Christmas Day 1918.
The stone was a polished cabochon sapphire. What excellent taste Scotch had had! It had come with her from France when, as a tiny child, she had been delivered to her grandparents in Dover. The small suitcase that had accompanied her had also contained clothes quite unsuitable for autumn in England, along with her birth certificate and the little porcelain monkey. The ring had been far too big for her, of course, and had been consigned to the music box with the monkey, which had since lost a paw.
It fitted her now. She slid it onto the third finger of her left hand, covering the white strip left by Richard’s diamond. Then she set the framed photograph of her mother upon her bedside locker, and beside it one of Richard, which he had given her before she had left for Hollywood. She had neglected to pack it; it had gathered dust in her bedroom ever since.
It had been taken at his graduation. Wearing his cap and gown, he was regarding the camera with an expression she knew well: an expression that could be construed as complacent, but that Lisa knew was simply that of a person who believed he was – like Voltaire’s Candide – living in the best of all possible worlds, an eternal optimist. She hoped he had never suffered disillusion, she hoped that Richard Napier had believed until the very end that the war he was fighting was good and true and just.
Lisa turned off the nightlight, and then she slid beneath the eiderdown and started to cry.
In the morning she awoke feeling tired still, wiped out by the demands of her growing baby and the endless travelling, and a night spent half awake, waiting for air raid sirens to sound. But after a breakfast of porridge, dried egg and tinned tomatoes, she pulled on a smile and set about visiting neighbours with Eva, filling everyone in on life in America, and answering their questions about Hollywood. She was glad she’d come home, even though she suspected that Gramps was anxious at her being here rather than in the comparative safety of Los Angeles. But she had had to come. Gramps was the only family she had.
She’d had an idea that she could make herself useful here doing some kind of war work, but she felt as redundant in London as she had in Hollywood. Dorothy had gone off to Ceylon, with rumour rife that her work for the Field Ambulance Service was a cover for Special Operations. Special Operations! Lisa might as well resign herself to the fact that she could not make any kind of contribution to the war effort until after her baby was born. And then what?
She knew of course that thousands of brave women had lost their husbands since the beginning of the war, and were rearing their families single-handed. But Lisa had no husband, dead or alive, and she was not brave enough to face the opprobrium of the Legion of Decency in America, or the censure of the Hays Office, or the poison pens of Louella and Hedda. Lachlan had been right about one thing: it was professional suicide to have a baby outside wedlock. If she kept her child, she would never, ever be able to go back to her old life in LA. Lisa did not especially want to go back to her old life, but she had no choice. She needed to earn a living, she needed to be self-sufficient. She had no room in her life for a baby just yet – but Róisín did.
Before Lisa left for Connemara, Pawpey and Eva took her to dine in the Savoy Grill, where, despite its restricted wartime menu, the dress code was still formal. Wishing to remain as anonymous as possible, Lisa insisted on a corner table, and sat with her back to the restaurant. Eva gave her a running commentary on the various celebrities, who were dining as insouciantly as if the war was not happening. ‘Goodness – it’s Mr Churchill! Is that Lady Diana Cooper? Oh, look! There’s one of the Mitford girls!’ Lisa resisted the impulse to turn around and stare, and, once the meal was finished, she tried to make her exit as unobtrusively as possible.
But somebody must have seen her, because
The People
duly reported that: ‘Miss Lisa La Touche, Britain’s latest export to Hollywood, was seen dining in the Grill Room at the Savoy Hotel last Saturday. Miss La Touche was the personification of elegance in a clinging, dove-grey bias-cut cocktail dress.’