Some Day I'll Find You (15 page)

Diana had changed little in the past decade. She still preferred to wear her dark hair down, although instead of being swept back from her forehead, now she had a fringe. It added to her
youthful appearance; she could have passed for someone in their mid-twenties.

A casual caller at the villa coming across Diana this morning could be forgiven for addressing her in French. She looked French, her naturally olive skin darkened by the light tan she invariably
seemed to acquire after even the briefest exposure to the sun. As always, the darkened skin made her eyes appear extraordinarily exotic: at times they seemed almost to flash and flare in electric
bursts.

Her choice of clothes added to the Gallic illusion. Almost the first thing Diana had done on arriving in Provence was to shop for new outfits in the smart dress shops of Nice and in the ritzy
neighbouring port of Antibes.

She had left almost her entire English wardrobe behind. Britain still laboured under what the papers called ‘The Age of Austerity’. Everything seemed grey and drab and hopeless.
Near-colourless clothes. Weary queues waiting patiently outside almost every shop. Bombsites that seemed permanent fixtures in the urban landscape: depressing expanses of shattered brick and glass,
weeds poking through the rubble. Smashed building timbers had long since been removed for winter fuel.

Women did their best to dress well but it was difficult. Material was in short supply, and by the end of the 1940s the contents of most women’s wardrobes had been re-cut, re-sewn, altered,
mended and cannibalised to the point of exhaustion. Diana’s was no exception and it had been a relief to leave it all behind, packed into cardboard boxes she was quite certain she would never
open again.

One of the few items to remain on its hanger was the wedding dress she had worn the day James and John were killed. It was pristine: Diana had never considered altering it so it could be worn
again.

This morning she was in a simple cream short-sleeved cotton blouse matched with a pleated skirt, belted at her narrow waist. She looked like one of the smart Paris wives who had only recently
returned north, after spending Easter at their family villas in Provence. They would be back in force in August.

Diana finished her coffee, and gave a slight shake of her head. She still couldn’t quite take it all in; there had been so many changes to her life in such a short time.

It was Douglas who had made it all possible. Douglas, with his patience, his indefatigable patience, who had slowly chipped away at her defences and gently but remorselessly pulled her into his
life. And not just her.

There was Stella, too.

Stella had never known her father. Conceived the week before he was killed, for Stella, James Blackwell represented something between a legend and a fairy tale. That was
nothing particularly unusual for her generation; almost half her classmates at school in England were fatherless.

‘Mummy! Bridget and Janice and Peter all don’t have daddies either!’ Stella breathlessly told her mother one day soon after she started school in Kent. ‘Mrs Roberts made
us all stand up and tell the class about our mummies and daddies, and lots of us don’t have daddies. Peter’s was drownded and Janice said her daddy was exploded up in a desert! When I
told them my daddy died in his aeroplane Peter put his hand up and said his daddy did too. He dropped bombs on the Germans. Mrs Roberts said they were all heroes but I said I knew that
already.’

Stella was ten now, but she still slept with a photograph of her father on her bedside table. In it, James Blackwell was grinning out at the world, head tipped slightly to one side in faintly
sardonic style, RAF cap pushed well back from his forehead and a cigarette in his hand. The child’s grandfather had taken the snapshot on the lawn the evening before the wedding, and in the
background Diana could be seen walking carefully towards the two men, carrying a tray with a jug of lemonade and glasses.

Now, whenever Diana looked at the photograph – which was every night when she tucked her daughter into bed – the same thought unfailingly occurred.

He had less than twenty-four hours to live, and none of us knew it.

Diana had only one other photograph of James. It stood on the marble mantelpiece in the villa’s main lounge, or
salon
. It showed him standing next to her brother. Both men had
their arms draped around the other’s shoulders, and clasped brimming pints of beer in their free hands. They were in the bar of their squadron’s pub of choice in Upminster, and the
flashbulb burst made the panes in the men’s beer glasses twinkle with tiny points of brilliant light. John looked as if he was in the middle of saying something vaguely insulting or
challenging; his companion’s face was half-turned towards him and wore an expression of amused disbelief. Behind the men was a folded newspaper whose headline was partly obscured, but the
letters
NKIRK
could clearly be seen. The photo must have been taken a week or two before both men were killed. A squadron pilot had given it to the Arnolds at their
boy’s funeral.

Douglas had no objection to these photographs being on permanent display in his home. He was not a jealous man; indeed, he encouraged ‘my girls’ to talk about James. ‘After
all, my dear,’ he told Diana when, early in their marriage, she had asked if he genuinely didn’t object to the photographs, ‘without my illustrious predecessor I would have no wee
stepdaughter to love, cherish and care for, would I?’

Douglas spoke like that. A son of the Manse, his sentences were old-fashioned and over-ornate, like the heavy wooden furniture in his parents’ home outside Inverness. Plans to follow his
father into the Kirk had been dissolved by the war. Douglas’s head for figures – he had won a prestigious Scottish Schools Award in the mathematical equivalent of a spelling bee –
had seen him parachuted into the supplies section of the War Ministry as soon as he achieved his double-first in Mathematics at Edinburgh.

Safe in his Whitehall bunker, Douglas had swiftly risen to the top of the department. The stupendously complex business of keeping Britain’s war machine supplied and running smoothly
didn’t faze him in the slightest. Where other men could spend an entire morning pondering flow charts, graphs and shipping tables, and be no closer to making a decision by lunchtime, Douglas
could size up the whole multi-sided equation in the time it took for him to drink his first cup of tea of the day.

By the end of the war Douglas Mackenzie – now Sir Douglas after accepting a knighthood for services rendered to his country – had a grasp of the import-export business that was
second to none. He bade farewell to the Civil Service and was snapped up by a City firm that had made a killing, in every sense of the expression, trading in metal during the war.

Inside two years he had been promoted to Managing Director, just in time for the Berlin Airlift.

The Soviet Union, in the opening shots of the Cold War, had blocked land-supply routes into Allied-occupied West Berlin, and the only way to keep the population and its garrison fed, watered and
warm in one of the coldest European winters on record, was to fly everything in. Hundreds of thousands of round-the-clock flights began and there were fortunes to be made.

Douglas cornered the market in cereals, and by the summer of 1949 when the airlift ended, he had made his first million. His first two million, to be exact.

He met Diana the following year when he agreed to present the annual prize-giving at Stella’s exclusive boarding school in Kent. Eight-year-old Stella Blackwell had come up on stage to
shyly accept the Most Promising Pupil of 1950, and as Douglas casually watched her skip back to rejoin her mother in the front row, he stiffened.

He couldn’t take his eyes off Diana. Douglas, still unmarried, thought he had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life. He wasn’t the only man in the room to think so. Just
turned thirty, Diana had more than fulfilled the promise of her youth. She was sometimes compared to the actress Vivien Leigh, who had burst into stellar fame with
Gone with the Wind
ten
years earlier. Douglas thought she looked enchanting in her little pill-box hat and elegant black suit. He wasn’t to know that it was the last remaining outfit Diana possessed that could
possibly be described as smart, nor that she had spent the morning carefully ironing it under a sheet of brown paper and a sprinkling of vinegar, an old trick to dull the shininess of worn, ageing
fabric.

Douglas wasted no time introducing himself to her at the little reception afterwards for prize-winners and their parents. He noticed her wedding and engagement rings at once, and asked politely
if her husband was present.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Diana said calmly. ‘My husband died in the war. It’s just Stella and me – and my parents, of course. They’ve been wonderful; we
couldn’t have managed without them.’

Douglas’s heart leaped, and then immediately he felt a wave of Calvinist guilt wash over him. It was sinful to take pleasure in the fact that this woman was a widow. But still . . .

‘So you never remarried?’ he asked her, declining a sherry offered by the headmaster’s wife.

She shook her head. ‘No.’ Diana nodded towards her daughter, chatting excitedly with friends on the far side of the room. ‘I come as a double order, you might say. Not many men
would want to bring up another man’s child . . . but what about you, Mr Mackenzie? Are you married?’

Douglas smiled. ‘Dear me, no,’ he said. ‘I never found anyone who’d have me. Well, there was someone once, but she told me I was married to my job and she went off with
another chap. Quite right, too, I might add.’

Diana reached inside her handbag. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all. No, I won’t have one myself, thanks,’ as Diana offered him the packet. ‘I was brought up to see it as one of the Deadly Sins. I’m afraid I still
can’t quite shake that one off.’

Diana put her unlit cigarette back into the pack. ‘Then it would be rude of me to smoke in front of you. I’ll have it later. So . . . your parents were strict, then?’

‘You could say that. My father’s a Scottish Methodist, a priest, if you like. He and my mother had a . . . well, a rather straightforward outlook on life. They passed that on to me
to a considerable degree, I’m afraid.’

As he told her about his upbringing, and his escape from the Manse to make his way in London, Diana relaxed. She liked his sing-song Highlands accent, the serious brown eyes set in a large face
with pale, freckled skin, and his apparent lack of pushiness. He seemed solid and reassuring, and reminded her of a big shambling bear. She could tell his suit was expensively cut, but somehow it
refused to co-operate with his frame, the jacket hanging from his shoulders more like a potato sack than a bespoke product of Savile Row.

There seemed to be no pretence about him. She was weary of men who, once they discovered she was a widow, ‘tried it on’ with her. This one seemed different, and when they had said
their goodbyes and she drove home with Stella, Diana was surprised that she felt a slight regret he hadn’t asked to see her again. She had, she realised, felt safe with him.

Two days later, a letter arrived. Written on paper embossed with
Mackenzie European Trading
, she read the three handwritten paragraphs beneath with an unexpected frisson of
excitement.

And so it began. It was an assiduous courtship, at least from Douglas’s side. He was unfailingly polite, respectful and attentive.

‘You don’t have to be quite so formal with me, you know,’ Diana teased him on their sixth or seventh date, after he had asked her for the first time – almost with a
little bow – if he might kiss her goodnight.

They were outside the front door of her home in the Kent village of Hever, which stood in the shadow of a Norman castle. The house – more of a large cottage – was too big, really,
for Diana and Stella, and since the day they moved in, three of the bedrooms had been left unused.

Her father had bought it for her during the war, about a year after the boys were killed. ‘I was always going to do this for you, Diana,’ he told his daughter at the time. ‘It
was going to be my marriage settlement on the two of you. Well, now there are two of you again, with Stella, so you must allow me to do this.’

Tonight, Diana suffered herself to be kissed. Douglas wasn’t a bad kisser, she thought; at least he didn’t try to eat her up like some of the men she had agreed to go out with since
the end of the war. It had taken her all of five years before she felt ready to do that; it was only the insistence of her mother – ‘
darling, you’re still in your twenties.
You have to try to start picking up the pieces, for Stella’s sake as much as for your own
’
–
that had made her finally take the plunge.

But each time she had driven home alone to the Dower House, to collect Stella from her mother, whose eager: ‘Well, darling?’ was invariably met with a smile, but a shake of the
head.

Douglas was different. He could never, ever match James in charm and fun and wit and passion, let alone looks, and yet . . . and yet . . . he was clearly head over heels in love with her. He was
kind and attentive to Stella, too, insisting that the child occasionally come with them to a restaurant or on a trip to the cinema.

And there was the undeniable fact that Sir Douglas Mackenzie was rich. Very rich. One Sunday, after he had joined Diana and her parents for lunch at the Dower House, arriving in a sumptuous
Rolls-Royce which he drove himself, Gwen took her daughter aside.