The Villa on the Riviera: A captivating story of mystery and secrets - the perfect summer escape

The blue-eyed soldier was waiting for her when she had finished for the day. Helen had wanted her to wait, she was only going to be another half hour or so, seeing everything was put away, and then they could go home together. But Cynthia, who was usually the most obedient of girls, had demurred. ‘I want to get home,’ she said. ‘I’ve things to do. I can go on the Underground by myself, I’ll be perfectly all right.’

A woman came up with news of a malfunctioning tea urn, distracting Helen’s attention, and Cynthia had slipped away.

They walked to the Underground together, and he got on the train and sat beside her. They didn’t speak much, but laughed together as a child in the seat opposite, cuddling a shabby toy rabbit, pulled faces at them.

Cynthia knew the minute he opened his mouth that Ronnie came from quite another world to hers. His was a London accent. ‘Cockney, born and bred,’ he told her. Common, her mother would have said, with infinite, dismissive scorn, but Cynthia liked it. Just as she liked everything about Ronnie.

She sat back in the wicker chair and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted into the air. His young body. When they first went to bed together, she had been amazed by his lithe beauty. He was pale and smooth, with long limbs; she loved the small of his back, just above his muscular buttocks, and those, too, once she had got over her initial astonishment at seeing a man naked, she loved, holding them tightly to her after they had made love, lying her hands on them, soft and drowsy with pleasure. The weight and hardness of his penis had filled her with a kind of awe, such an astonishing thing, a man’s penis, she had no idea, she said, brushing it with her lips. No idea at all.

She hadn’t been Ronnie’s first girl. He told her that, and she felt a stab of jealousy; who was this Ruby to roll under the hedge with Ronnie, the times he was staying on a Shropshire farm with his auntie’s family?

He felt nothing for Ruby, it had been lust and curiosity, he told her, raising himself on one elbow so that he could kiss her.

He had run away from home two years earlier, scraping a living for himself in a hostile city. He signed up because he wanted to do his bit, and because you got three meals a day, he told her. His mother sounded, to Cynthia’s innocent ears, a terrible woman, but Ronnie seemed to take the clouts and blows she and his less forceful father dealt out to him as just part of life.

‘When I come back from the war, I’m going to make something of myself,’ he had told her. ‘You’ll see. And we’re going to have four kids at least, and be the happiest married couple in England.’

The steward was back, all attention. ‘Are you warm enough, madam? Would you like me to bring you a rug?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Cynthia. ‘I shall be going in shortly.’

He went away on light, silent feet. Cynthia slid back the door that led on to the open deck, and the bitter cold of a winter’s night in the Atlantic hit her in the face. She tossed her cigarette over the side, the glowing tip almost immediately extinguished by the wind and rain. Then, shivering, she retreated back inside to the never-never land of soft lights and thick carpets and columns and gay chatter, shutting out the stormy weather.

She didn’t feel inclined to play cards or gamble or dance or drink. She was too wrapped in her own thoughts to want company. So she made her way down the wide stairs to B deck, her reflection gleaming back at her from the mirrors, and went to her stateroom. The stewardess was surprised to see her, was she feeling seasick, could she bring her anything?

‘No, thank you,’ Cynthia said. ‘I’ll have breakfast at half past eight. Orange juice and a poached egg on toast. Coffee, and Cooper’s marmalade, please, not jam.’ She had grown to like the American habit of having orange juice at breakfast.

‘You aren’t travelling with your maid?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll be back in a little while to collect your things.’

Cynthia’s maid, Rose, was glad to be left behind. Not that she wouldn’t have liked to see America, where the film stars came from, she told Cynthia, ‘But I couldn’t do with all those days at sea, madam, I really couldn’t. Crossing to France is bad enough. I’m afraid if you’d asked it of me, I’d have to give in my notice.’

So Cynthia had lent her to an American friend who was spending a couple of months in London, and found that she rather liked doing without a maid; it gave her a sense of independence and a kind of freedom.

There was nothing of the ship’s cabin about her stateroom, no narrow berth beneath a porthole and space-saving cupboards. It had a wide, comfortable bed with an ornate headboard, and elegant furniture of the velvet and boudoir kind. Ordinary, curtained sash windows looked out on to the deck, only used by the passengers in those staterooms. There was a marble basin, and a dressing table with three mirrors.

The stewardess had laid out a satin nightie and negligée, matching satin slippers tucked beside the bed. Cynthia undressed slowly, laying her dress over a chair and dropping her underwear into the linen basket. She put on the nightie and, sitting at the dressing table, began to cream her face, not looking at her reflection, but still thinking about her life. Her life then, when she had been no more than a girl and yet a wife, and her life now, an utterly adult woman, mother of a nearly grown-up daughter, divorced wife, fiancée — dreadful word — of a man who —

Who what? Compelled her admiration, suited her sexually, was more than her intellectual equal.

And of whom she was afraid.

The thought popped into her head unbidden, and so startled her that she dropped her hairbrush. How absurd, Walter could be overbearing, he was certainly a commanding man who expected to have his own way, but he was courteous and had never come near to threatening her — why should he?

So why had that unpleasant little idea popped into her mind? She shrugged and resumed brushing her hair with steady even strokes, a hundred a night, as her nanny had taught her.

The stewardess had unpacked for her, and had propped the one photograph in a leather frame that she had with her on the dressing table. Harriet’s eyes looked out at her. She had her father’s eyes. Then the words of the Gardner girl came back to her. It was hard on Harriet, having to leave her school.

‘I do understand, Mummy, but it’s a bit thick. I mean, you went there, you’d think they’d care about that kind of thing, instead of booting me out as though I’d been caught smoking in the lavs.’

‘Darling, I do hope you don’t …’

‘Just a figure of speech,’ said Harriet quickly. Then, seeing the look of distress on Cynthia’s face, she had said. ‘Actually, I don’t mind so much, it isn’t a very good school. It might have been once. It probably was when you were there, but it’s all manners and flowers and things which are rather boring. The modern woman has more to her life than arranging flowers and knowing how to address a duchess or a bishop. I’d like to go to a school where you can learn something, properly. Languages, for example, the French teacher is hopeless, and Frau Passauer, who teaches German can’t keep order, she gets dreadfully ragged, so we end up not learning to speak a word of German.’

‘Why do they employ her if she’s so hopeless?’

‘I’ll tell you why, it’s because she’s the impoverished cousin of some Princess whatsit und thingie, you know. That’s why half the teachers are there, because they’re fearfully well-bred or well-connected. Only most of them can’t teach for toffee.’

‘I had no idea. When I was there, the teachers were dull but competent.’

She had looked forward to the day when she would present Harriet at court, during her first season. Now she wouldn’t ever travel up the Mall with her, dressed in a white dress with feathers, sitting for hours to reach the palace and then, finally, to make her curtsy to the King and Queen.

Divorced women weren’t permitted to present anyone at court. Fuddy duddy, old-fashioned, but it was an absolute rule.

Her sister Helen would have to do it. It had been one of the facts Helen had thrown at her when she was trying to persuade Cynthia not to get a divorce. ‘It may not be the happiest marriage on earth, but there’s more to marriage than happiness.’

‘Like what?’

‘Duty and responsibility and shared interests. You have a daughter, you seem not to care about the effect all this will have on her. Divorce is a social stigma in our world, Cynthia. Humphrey’s not at all happy about it.’

Humphrey, Helen’s husband, was a distinguished lawyer.

‘It affects us all.’

‘Oh, come on, Helen, you aren’t trying to say that Humphrey won’t make the bench because I’m divorced? Good gracious, he was born to be a judge, I dare say he wore a little wig and a robe when he was in his cradle.’

‘People like us …’

‘Oh, bother people like us.’ And then, ‘I am sorry for Harriet, but she understands.’

‘How can she understand? A girl of sixteen, I hope she doesn’t understand. I suppose it’s all about sex, and it would be shocking if a girl of that age knew anything at all about sex. I certainly didn’t.’

No, thought Cynthia, and I bet your wedding night was a horrid shock, imagine knowing nothing about sex and having a naked Humphrey advancing on you.

She finished her strokes, and laid down the brush as the stewardess came back, to gather up her clothes. She smoothed down the wrinkleless sheet, and said that she hoped Cynthia would sleep well. ‘You do look tired, madam,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to bring you a tisane? A warm drink can help you get a proper restful night’s sleep.’

Cynthia accepted the tisane. She lay back on the pillows, sipping the hot drink, a book open on her knees, face down, unread. Harriet would be all right, she told herself. She was a sensible girl, resilient. Thank goodness the child had no idea. She moved restlessly, rustling the sheets. Should she tell Harriet the truth? No, she’d kept that secret all these years, and it would remain a secret.

Was Walter the best stepfather for a sixteen-year-old girl? Would he lay down the law, which would inevitably lead to dreadful rows, Harriet being a young lady with decided opinions of her own?

He had said Harriet should call him Uncle Walter, but she told Cynthia that it was silly. ‘He’s not an uncle. If you marry him, I suppose I’ll have to call him Father or something. Why can’t I just call him Walter?’

‘He thinks that’s too informal, with your being only sixteen.’

Cynthia noticed that Harriet got round the problem by not addressing Walter at all, by any name.

Cynthia couldn’t talk about Walter with Harriet, for the simple reason that Harriet refused to discuss the subject. ‘You’ve got to do what you want. It’s not as though I’m a child, I’m nearly grown up. Whether or not I like Walter isn’t the point, really.’

Harriet had, on the surface at least, taken the divorce calmly. She didn’t resent Walter for breaking up a happy marriage, that was one good thing. Her clear way of looking at life meant that she accepted that her parents had drifted irrevocably apart.

Although her honesty about her father startled Cynthia, when Harriet, watching her doing her face before going out for the evening, said, ‘It’s not as though I got on well with Daddy.’

‘Harriet! How can you say such a thing? You know he loves you.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean we like each other, does it? Love’s obligatory, but liking’s different. When I was little, I used to pretend I was a changeling. As one does, when one’s reading nothing but fairy stories. I’d imagine that I wasn’t Harriet Harkness at all, but an orphan baby left in a basket on the doorstep.’ She grinned at her mother. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Mummy, children all tell themselves stories, I bet you did, too.’ She wound an arm round her mother’s neck, in a rare gesture of affection, and looked at their twin reflections in the mirror. ‘Only it’s not likely, given that I look so much like you, is it?’

Cynthia woke in the early hours, to find the bedside light still on, and her book on the floor. She lay in a strangely peaceful state of neither being awake nor asleep. The man going up the gangway had brought back such a flood of memories, and now another memory came vividly into her mind.

Another dock, another ship, but this one wasn’t an ocean liner sailing serenely across peaceful seas in comfort and ease. Ronnie’s ship had been battle grey, battered-looking after three years of war, a troop-carrier, taking another batch of fresh-faced young men across to the killing grounds of France, to the misery of trenches and mud and barbed wire, to horrors unimaginable to the wives and girlfriends and sisters and mothers left behind.

Cynthia had driven Ronnie down, strictly against orders. He should have been on the train, but his mate had said he’d fix it with the sarge, pretend Ronnie was in the lavatory, stomach problems. Cynthia had borrowed her brother’s car; he had taught her to drive when she was thirteen, on the quiet roads around Winsley, the house in the country where they had all grown up.

The sergeant, usually eagle-eyed, must have had other things on his mind, because the ruse worked, and by the time he was growing suspicious, there was Ronnie, mingling with the others in his platoon. ‘Just a case of something I ate last night, Sarge, I’ll be right as rain in a day or two.’

The sergeant didn’t know the meaning of the word sympathy. ‘A case of bleeding cold feet, more like it. Don’t think you can get out of it that way, short of being dead, you’re going on that boat, and if you was dead, you’d go just the same so’s we could toss you overboard and save ourselves the bother of troubling the padre. Now, get a bleeding move on.’

And Cynthia, tears gracing her cheeks, had stood beside a bollard, a wan and wretched creature, wondering how Ronnie could look so cheerful as he went up the gangway. He ran his fingers through his short hair, a habit from pre-army days, and then he saw her. His face broke into a broad smile, and he waved and gave her the thumbs up before he was lost in the tide of khaki.

Cynthia stayed on the dock to watch the ship until it was no more than a speck on the horizon. Then she drove slowly back to London, only stopping on the way to find a bush she could be sick behind.

She had been pregnant, of course, pregnant with Harriet, and feeling sick from the word go.

‘Gastric flu,’ Helen had pronounced, in her know-it-all fashion, and packed Cynthia down to Winsley, where Nurse would look after her.

Nurse had known what was wrong with her five minutes after she arrived, and Cynthia wept desperately on her comforting bosom, while the elderly woman stroked her hair and murmured soothing, meaningless words.

Before Cynthia slipped back into a deeper sleep, she thought of Harriet. Term would be over by the time she got back. She had been worried about what to do with Harriet. Helen said she would have her, she would enjoy being with her cousins; Cynthia knew that Harriet would rather stay on at school, alone, than have to spend time with her cousins.

Her brother Max, the brother closest to her in age and the one she felt the closest to, had come to her rescue.

‘I’ll pick Harriet up,’ he’d said in his casual way. ‘Tell me where and when, and I’ll drive down and collect her. That is, if you haven’t sent her to school in the Highlands of Scotland or anything like that.’

‘Dorset,’ said Cynthia. ‘Would you really do that?’ Urbane Max and a girl’s boarding school didn’t seem to go together.

‘She’s my goddaughter, didn’t I say in church when she was christened that I would pick her and doubtless several trunks and a hockey stick up from whichever educational establishment she was at?’

Cynthia laughed. ‘One trunk and an overnight case. I’m not sure about the hockey stick, I think it’s a lacrosse school.’

‘Nonsense,’ cried Helen, breaking into their conversation. ‘Harriet must catch the train. What, pray, would you do with her if you did collect her, Max? I know you’ve got nothing better to do than drive around the country, with the idle life you lead, but Harriet can’t expect to be collected. She must come on the school train like everyone else, and I’ll send Thrush to pick her up at the station — Waterloo, I suppose.’

‘I’ll drive her up to London and take her out for a good meal,’ said Max, ignoring his elder sister’s instructions and addressing Cynthia. ‘She’ll be all right at your house for a couple of days, surely. Won’t that maid of yours be there, if she’s not going with you? Surely Harriet will be better off in her own home.’

‘A girl of that age, in London, on her own? I never heard of such a thing,’ cried Helen. ‘She’ll be up to all kinds of mischief.’

‘She won’t be on her own if there’s a house full of servants,’ said Max.

‘Quite unsuitable, nonetheless. I certainly wouldn’t allow any of my girls to stay alone like that. In London!’

‘If you can’t trust your daughters, that’s your problem,’ Max said. ‘I’ll take her out to a show. Several shows if need be. What does she like, Cynthia?’

‘Take her to the opera, and she’ll be your friend for life.’

‘Opera?’

‘Quite unsuitable,’ Helen said again.

‘Wagner, for preference, I’m afraid,’ said Cynthia.

‘Good heavens,’ said her brother. ‘I’m more of a Mozart man myself, but I’ll see what I can do.’

Max, thought Cynthia through a haze of sleep, was reliable, whatever Helen said about his frippery ways. And was he as frivolous as he seemed? Cynthia had long suspected there was a lot more to Max than met the eye, but he was a cagey man, slippery as an eel when it came to any questions about himself. Harriet would be all right with him, he’d take good care of her. And Cynthia realized, with a pang, that she was looking forward to seeing her daughter again. Almost more than I am to seeing Walter, she muttered to herself. Any problems with Harriet were practical, and time would resolve them. Whereas Walter …

EIGHT

Polly worked at the Rossetti Gallery workshop three days a week. It was a job that had started when she was still an art student on slender means, keen to earn any extra money she could. It had seemed heaven-sent, a job working with pictures, rather than waiting on tables or cleaning houses or collecting debts or any one of numerous jobs that she and her fellow students took to make ends meet.

Rossetti Gallery, with its entrance in Cork Street, was smart, but the premises behind it in Lion Yard were anything but smart. Lion Yard was a narrow, cobbled cul-de-sac, and few of the well-heeled customers who bought at the gallery ever ventured down it. The gallery itself and the main restoration studio, with a discreet entrance further down Cork Street, were forbidden territory to the students, and there was no way into them through their dingy yard. Dickensian, Sam called Lion Yard, and Polly could well imagine some of the novelist’s grimmer characters lurking in the shadows there.

The workshop was a lofty, barn-like-place, redolent of linseed oil and turps and oil paint. Situated above a storage area, it was reached via a rickety wooden outside staircase. Students were taken on to touch up and improve unsaleable old pictures and canvases that the gallery had bought in job lots at country sales, or for a few shillings in the minor London auction rooms.

The truth was, Polly soon realized, that there was an awful lot of dull and downright bad art around. Yet even the most dismal picture, by a hopeless artist, could be made to look much more desirable with careful, skilled work and a sense of what was in fashion.

Polly was started on flower paintings, which always, so her boss, Mr Padgett, told her, found a steady market. Dreary collections of tired-looking blooms in frames that were often worth more than the paintings arrived at the back of the Rossetti Gallery premises, and were taken, minus their frames, up to the workshop to be stacked in daunting ranks on wooden pallets all along one wall.

Mr Padgett, who was quick to weed out those workers he considered would never make the grade, had watched Polly for a few days, and then told her that she would do. ‘Unlike a lot of art students, you can paint. I don’t know what they teach you at these colleges these days,’ he grumbled. ‘Some of you don’t seem to know how to hold a brush or draw a curved line.’

‘Modern art isn’t about painting or drawing curves, Mr P, ’ retorted Sam Carter, a cheeky young student with a lock of hair falling over his forehead. ‘Times have changed, you’ve got to keep up. Anything is art now, if you say it is.’

‘Maybe to you it is, but it’s not to our customers, so just you hurry up and finish that landscape before those cows there die of old age.’

Sam, a student at the Academy, could draw or paint almost anything, and Polly envied him his facility. Under his skilful hands, landscapes bloomed, animals looked as though they belonged to a known species, ships sailed and fought as though they meant it, and faces changed from blurred ugliness to beauty, which was why, despite the avant-garde nature of his own work and his scorn for all old-fashioned representational art, he was kept on at the workshop while others came and went.

Mr Padgett, seeing Sam idly sketch a Quattrocento face, or draw a detail of a hand in the style of Rembrandt, had wanted him to move on to the main restoration studio, where the fine and valuable paintings were dealt with. ‘You’d work on old masters there, national treasures even. Mr Dinsdale has a top reputation, you couldn’t learn from a better man. It’s a good, steady career for an artist of your talent.’

Sam had laughed and said he’d rather be poor and do his own work, thank you, and stayed on at the workshop.

Meanwhile, Polly’s work turning dreary flowers into skilfully and pleasingly-coloured flower paintings such as would adorn any home, gave satisfaction. She did some work on landscapes, adding various animals on Mr Padgett’s instructions. ‘Buyers go for cats,’ he would say. And he approved of her horses, which, added to another blank country scene, made an uninspired picture much more interesting.

Polly had her doubts as to the strict legality of what she was doing, but Mr Padgett assured her that since these works were almost all by unknown artists, and no pretence was made that they were anything else, where was the harm in making an unsaleable picture into one that a buyer was happy to hang on his wall?

‘Artists don’t always know best. If I had the painter of that landscape here, look at it, a few desultory hedges, a river going nowhere, a broken down bit of fence, I’d soon tell him what it needed to make a proper composition. And he’d be glad to learn, and wouldn’t make the same mistake again.’

Polly had gradually been allowed to pep up some portraits, giving some worthy gentleman or prosperous paterfamilias more appeal and a touch of style lacking in the mostly very wooden portraits that came through her hands.

‘People prefer not to have ugly or unpleasant faces looking down on them from their dining-room walls,’ Mr Padgett told her. ‘Of course, if they happen to be your ancestors, and your ancestors happen to be a lantern-jawed, disagreeable-looking lot, well, that’s one thing. But if you’re paying good money, then you want something more pleasing. A pretty woman will sell, where an ugly or even just a plain one won’t. And of course, if one of our pictures turns out to be of someone well-known, an admiral or a statesman or an actress, so much the better.’

‘Who buys these portraits?’ Polly said to Sam. ‘If you don’t know the person, and it’s not a wonderful painting, what’s the point?’

Mr Padgett, who was passing behind her, paused to give her question his usual careful consideration.

‘Sometimes a buyer wants to pass a painting off as an ancestor. Other buyers feel that having a few portraits hanging above the stairs adds a bit of class. And we sell a lot to hotels, of a certain kind, new places where they want to make foreign visitors feel they’re staying in a bit of Old England.’