“I’ll miss her dreadfully,” thought Nan. “She was the only one with any warmth or life. The rest are just bodies for the clothes.” To hell with it. She would telephone Lola, the friend who had sent Shirley to her in the first place.
“Listen, Lola, this sounds trivial, but you know that nice Shirley who worked with you…”
“Shirley Green? Yeah, what about her?”
“No, her name is Kent, Shirley Kent.”
“I know it used to be till she married Alan Green.”
“Married?”
“Nan, do you feel okay? You made her wedding dress for her, about a year ago.”
“She never told me she got married. Who’s Alan Green? Her husband?”
“Well, he’s my boss, and was hers. Nan, what is this?”
“Why do you think she didn’t tell me she got married?”
“Nan, I haven’t an idea in the whole wide world why she didn’t tell you. Is this what you rang up to ask me?”
“Well have a guess. Think why she mightn’t have told me.”
“It might have been because you and Colin weren’t getting married. She’s very sensitive, old Shirl, and she wouldn’t want to let you think she was pitying you or anything.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Anyway, it was the most smashing wedding dress—all that ruffle stuff and all those lovely blues and lace embroidery. I thought it was the nicest thing you’ve ever made.”
Green Park
T
hey had both sworn that they would not dress up. They had assured each other that it would be ridiculous to try to compete with Jane after all these years and considering all the money she had. Very immature really to try on fine feathers and glad rags—like children dressing up and playing games. Yet when they met at the station they were almost unrecognizable from their usual selves.
Helen had bought a new hat with a jaunty feather, and Margaret had borrowed a little fur cape. Both of them wore smart shoes, and their faces, normally innocent of powder, had definite evidence of rouge and even eye shadow. After much mutual recrimination they agreed that they both looked delightful and settled themselves into the train to London with more excitement than two schoolgirls.
How extraordinary to be heading off for tea at the Ritz with Jane. Helen whispered that she would love to tell everybody in the railway compartment that this was where they were heading. Margaret said it would be more fun to let it fall casually in conversation afterwards: “How nice you look today, Mrs. Brown, what a sensible colour to wear, lots of people in the Ritz last week seemed to be wearing it.”
And of course they giggled all the more because, in spite of sending themselves up, they actually were a little nervous about going to somewhere as splendid as the Ritz. They were overawed. The very mention of the Ritz made them nervous. It was for perfumed, furred people, not people who had dabbed some of last Christmas’s perfume behind the ears and borrowed a sister-in-law’s well-worn Indian lamb.
In some way both Helen and Margaret feared they might be unmasked when they got there. And they giggled and joked all the more to stifle this fear.
None of their fear was directed towards Jane. Jane was one of their own. Jane had trained to be a children’s nanny with them all those years ago. You don’t forget the friends made during that kind of apprenticeship. It was far more binding than the services were for men. It was almost like having survived a shipwreck—the eighteen girls who survived that particular obstacle race in the school for nannies, which had long since closed down, had forged a friendship which would last for life. Some of them had gone to the Gulf states and they wrote regular newsletters saying how they were getting on. Some, like Helen and Margaret, had married and applied their nanny training to their own children; only Jane had become spectacular and famous. But because she was Jane from the nanny training school it didn’t matter if she became head of the United Nations, Helen and Margaret would never be in awe of her.
They changed trains, twittering happily at Euston, and took the underground to Green Park.
“Perhaps people think we are career women, dropping into the Ritz for a business conference,” whispered Helen.
“Or wealthy wives up for a day’s shopping,” sighed Margaret.
Neither Margaret nor Helen were wealthy. Margaret was actually married to a vicar and lived in a draughty vicarage. She was so much the vicar’s wife now that she felt quite guilty about wearing the Indian lamb in case any of her husband’s parishioners saw her and wondered about her showiness. Helen, too, was far from wealthy. Jeff, her husband, had a flair for backing things that went wrong and that included horses. Yet never had a hint of envy been spoken or indeed felt by the two women about the wealthy friend they were en route to meet.
Jane was the mistress of a very eccentric and extraordinarily wealthy American industrialist. He had bought her many gifts, including a ranch and a small television station; she was one of the world’s richest and best-known kept women.
For the twentieth time Margaret wondered if Jane could possibly look as well as she appeared in the photographs, and for the twentieth time Helen said it was quite possible. If you didn’t have to do anything each day except make yourself look well, then it was obvious you could look magnificent. Suppose each day when Margaret got up she didn’t have to clean the vicarage, take her children to school, shop, cook, wash, go to coffee mornings, sales of work, cookery demonstrations, and entertain the doctor, the curate, the headmaster—think how well she could look. Margaret had a very good bone structure, Helen agreed grudgingly, she could look very striking if only she had time to lavish on herself. Margaret felt a bit depressed by this; she knew that Helen meant it as a compliment but it left her feeling as if she were in fact a great mess because she didn’t have this time, and that her good bone structure was wasted.
As they came up from Green Park tube station into the sunlight of Piccadilly the two women giggled again and reached for their powder compacts before they crossed the road to the Ritz.
“Aren’t we silly?” tittered Helen. “I mean we’re forty years of age.”
“Yes, so is Jane of course,” said Margaret as if that was some kind of steadying fact. Something that would keep their feet on the ground.
Jane had been attractive twenty years ago, but she was a beauty now.
“You look ridiculous,” gasped Helen. “Your face, your whole face, it’s the face of a twenty-year-old. You look better than when we were all teenagers.”
Jane gave a great laugh showing all her perfect teeth.
“Aw, for Christ’s sake, Helen, I bought this face, and bloody boring it was, I tell you. It’s easy to have a face like that. Just give it to someone else to massage it and pummel it and file the teeth down and put caps on, no the face isn’t any problem.”
Margaret felt that she wished the foyer of this overpowering hotel would open and gulp her into the basement area. She had never felt so foolish, in her ratty, overdressed, overdone bit of Indian lamb.
“Come on, we’ll go to the suite,” Jane said, an arm around each of their shoulders. She noticed how impressed Helen and Margaret were with the tea lounge and the pillars and the little armchairs beside little tables where only the very confident could sit waiting casually for their friends. She knew they would love to sit in the public area and drink it all in with Jane herself there to protect them.
“We’ll come back and do the grand tour later, but now we go and meet Charles.”
“Charles?” Both women said it together with the alarm that might be generated at a dorm feast if someone mentioned that the headmistress was on her way. It was obvious that neither of them had thought that the ordeal of meeting Charles was included in the invitation to tea.
“Oh yeah, the old bat wants to make sure I really am meeting two old chums from the college. He has a fear, you see, that I’ll have hired two male go-go dancers from some show. I want him to get a look at you so that he can see you are the genuine article, not something I made up. Come on, we’ll get it over with, and then we can settle down to cream cakes and tea and gins and tonics.”
Because Jane had shepherded them so expertly towards the lift, Margaret and Helen hadn’t even had time to exchange a glance until they found themselves outside a door where two tall men stood.
“Are they bodyguards?” whispered Margaret.
“They speak English,” laughed Jane. “I know they look like waxworks, but that’s part of the qualifications. If you came in here with a machine-gun to kill Charles you wouldn’t get far.”
They were nodded in by the unsmiling heavies at the door, and Charles was visible. He stood by the window looking out at the traffic below. A small, old, worried man. He looked a bit like her father-in-law, Helen thought suddenly. A fussy little man in an old people’s home who didn’t really care when she and Jeff went to see him, he only cared about what time it was, and was constantly checking his watch with clocks.
When Charles did give them his attention he had a wonderful smile. It was all over his face, even his nose and chin seemed to be smiling. Margaret and Helen stopped being nervous.
“I’m a foolish old gentleman,” he said in a Southern States drawl. “I’m jes’ so nervous of my Jane, I always want to see who she goes out with.”
“Heavens,” said Margaret.
“Well, I see, how nice,” stammered Helen.
“You ladies jes’ must understand me. I guess you know how it is when you only live with someone, you aren’t so sure, it’s not the same binding thing as marriage.” He looked at them winningly, expecting some support.
Margaret found her vicar’s wife’s voice: “Honestly, Mr.…er…Charles…I’m not in any position to know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any couples who live together who are not married.”
She couldn’t in a million years have said anything more suitable. Jane’s mouth had a flicker of a smile and in two minutes Charles had taken his briefcase, his personal assistant, and his bodyguards and, having made charming excuses, he left for a meeting that had been delayed, presumably until he had satisfied himself about Jane’s activities and plans for the afternoon.
“Is the place bugged?” Helen whispered fearfully when he had gone. Her eyes were like big blue and white china plates.
Jane screamed with laughter. “Darling Helen, no of course not. Hey, I’m really very sorry for putting all that on you both but you see the way he is.”
“Very jealous?” suggested Helen, still in a low voice.
“A little paranoid?” Margaret offered.
“No, dying actually,” said Jane flatly, and went to get a jeweled cigarette box. “Yeah, he only has two months, poor old bat. He’s half the size he was six months ago. They said well under a year, now it’s getting quicker.”
She sounded as if she were talking about a tragedy in some distant land, a happening in a country where she had never been. Everyone is sad about far floods and droughts but they don’t concern people like near ones do. Jane spoke of Charles as if he were a figure she had read about in a Sunday paper, not a man she had lived with for ten years. She seemed neither upset nor relieved by his terminal illness, it was just one of the many sad things that happen in life.
“I’m very sorry,” said Margaret conventionally.
“He doesn’t look as if he had only a short time to live,” said Helen.
“I’m sure that if he’s not going to get better it’s all for the best that it should happen swiftly,” said Margaret, being a vicar’s wife again.
“Aw shit, that’s not what I wanted to see you about,” said Jane. She looked at their shocked faces.
“Look, sorry, sorry for the language, and this, well, lack of feeling. I
am
sorry for the old bastard, he’s been very brave, and he’s very frightened, you know. But hell, Margaret, Helen, we are not fools. I mean, be straight. He’s hardly the love of my life.”
There was a silence. Whatever they had expected from afternoon tea with Jane in the Ritz, it certainly was not this.
Jane appealed to them: “I thought that being in the nanny school was blood brothers, you know, for life? I thought that those of us who survived could say anything, anything, and it wasn’t misconstrued.”
Margaret said, “Jane, of course you can say anything to me, but remember we’ve all lived a life since we came out of nanny school. Mine has been very sheltered. I’m a vicar’s wife for heaven’s sake. What can be more sheltered than that? I ask you. It’s the kind of thing people make jokes about, it’s so, well, so different from yours. Can you really expect me to take all this in my stride?”
“All what?” Jane wanted to know.
“Well, your wealth, your life-style, the fact that your husband, your common-law husband, is dying of cancer and you say awful words and…” Margaret looked genuinely distressed. Helen took up the explanation:
“You see, Jane, it’s not that either Margaret or I are trying to be distant. It’s just that we don’t really live in the same world as you anymore and I expect after a few minutes or an hour we’ll all settle down and be the same as we used to be. It’s just hard to expect us to act on your level.”
Jane walked around the room for a moment or two before she replied:
“I guess I was taking things a bit too much for granted. I guess I was reading too much into all that solidarity we had twenty years ago.”
She was silent, and looked perplexed. She looked young, beautiful, and puzzled, the two matrons stared up at her from their sofa in disbelief. It was as if they were watching a film of their youth where only Jane had stayed young. She used to look just like that when she was nineteen and thinking of a way to avoid detection by the nanny college principal.
“You needn’t think the friendship isn’t there,” said Helen. “In fact it is, enormously. I can tell Margaret things about my private life, my worries with Jeff and money. Susie was back from Kuwait and when we met she was telling us all about how she discovered she was lesbian and she could tell nobody.” Helen looked like a big innocent schoolgirl trying to join the senior girls by revealing secrets and showing herself to be mature.
“Oh I know, Susie wrote to me,” said Jane absently.
“I feel we’ve let you down, Jane,” said Margaret. “I feel there was something you wanted us to do for you, and just by racing the wrong way at the outset we’ve made that impossible.”
Jane sat down.
“You were always very astute, Margaret,” she said. “There was indeed something I wanted to ask you. But now I don’t know whether or not I can. You see I can only do it if I am utterly frank with you. I can’t go through any charade with anyone from nanny college. There are rules I break in life but never that.” She looked at them.
“Of course,” said Helen.
“Naturally,” said Margaret.
“Well, you see, I wanted to stay in England until Charles kicks it. No, sorry, if we are going to be frank, I simply will not use words like ‘passes away,’ he’s dying, he’s riddled with cancer, he’s not going to see Christmas. I don’t wish him any more pain, I wish he were dead. Dead now.”
Their faces were sad, less shocked than before but still not understanding.
“So if we stay here till the end, I want Charles to see that I have friends, good decent normal friends like you two. I want to take him to your homes. He’ll probably insult you and buy you new homes but we can get over that. I mean he’ll buy you and David a new parsonage certainly, Margaret, possibly the bishop’s palace, and as for Jeff, he’ll either buy him a book-making business or he’ll send him to a Harley Street specialist to have what he will consider compulsive gambling cured in some clinic at three hundred quid a day.”