The White Dove

Amy was panting slightly from her climb when someone stepped squarely out in front of her.

‘Hello, miss.’

She stopped at once, and smiled.

There was the answering brilliant flash of white in the dark face, and the black eyes shining at her. Now that she had met him, Amy could admit to herself that the real purpose of her walk had been to find Luis and say goodbye to him properly. Luis was the waiter from the hotel who looked like a clever, humorous monkey. The two of them had struck up a tenuous, exciting friendship based on smiles exchanged when Luis served the two girls at their decorous lunches in an obscure corner of the great dining room. When Lord and Lady Lovell were present the head waiter himself served them, and Luis was relegated to distant duties with the trolley. Amy and Luis had talked for the first time when he brought her a glass of fruit juice on the terrace, and they had met once on the beach. Luis had been swimming, and he was wet and shiny like a dark brown seal. He was always looking over his shoulder for his superiors, and then he would melt away into nowhere while Amy was still talking. He was very lively, quite unlike anyone she had ever met, and Amy was fascinated by him.

Luis was Spanish, but they spoke in French. His was very heavily Basque-accented and it bore hardly any relation at all to Amy’s polite English version. Sometimes they used the broken English he had picked up at the hotel. Amy felt that he was the very first friend she had made for herself in the real world, and then yesterday he had whispered that they could not meet again because today was his day off and he would not be in the hotel. So she had set off on her solitary walk, without even admitting to herself that she wanted to say goodbye properly to him.

‘You are walking?’ he asked her now. ‘Without your sister or your maid?’

‘I’m not supposed to leave the boardwalk when I’m by myself,’ Amy answered. ‘But …’ she shrugged in imitation of Luis’s own expressive gesture, and they both laughed.

‘I will walk with you, then. In case of kidnap.’

Still laughing, they turned to walk on up the hill together. Luis was pointing into the shops, explaining to her about the people who lived and worked there. At the corner of the street they came to a cave-like little shop full of rainbow-coloured sweets and tiny, unfamiliar-looking pastries. An ancient woman in a rusty black dress was selling a handful in a twist of paper to a little boy, who was carefully counting out the centimes as he handed them over.

Amy stopped to watch and Luis asked, ‘You would like?’

‘I would love.’

He spoke rapidly in Spanish and the old woman twisted a paper cone for Amy too, scooping one or two of each variety into it. Luis paid her and they walked on, sharing the sweets between them. They were almondy, delicious.

‘If you would like,’ Luis said with sudden gravity, ‘we could visit my family.’

‘Yes, please,’ Amy said.

One street further on they came to a row of houses so steeply perched that they looked as if they were about to topple over. A little girl was sitting on the step of the end house, playing with a stick and four stones. When she saw Luis she jumped up and ran down to him, calling out in Spanish.

‘This is my smallest sister, Isabella.’

Isabella had tight black ringlets and the same eyes as Luis.

‘You have the very same name as my sister,’ Amy told her. Isabella took her hand and pulled her towards the house.

‘Come in.’

Amy followed Luis up the steps and in through the door. The small room was square and windowless. It was cool beyond the shaft of light that fell in through the doorway. When her eyes got used to the dimness, Amy saw that the room seemed full of people. There was an old man with an immense, drooping white moustache, and an equally old woman with a black headdress pulled tight over her head. There was a square-built, strong woman who must be Luis’s mother, and children of all sizes. Luis drew Amy forward. My friend, she heard him saying proudly, over and over again.

Do they all live here? Amy wondered. Where do they sleep? Through the opposite door she could just make out the shape of a big bed covered with a bright blanket.

The little house was scrupulously clean, but almost completely bare. The only ornament was a dim, oily picture of the Holy Family with a little light burning in front of it. Amy thought fleetingly of the suite at the Hotel du Palais with its soft cushions and pretty covers.

She shook hands gravely with each member of the family and felt them touching her gloves gingerly, looking at her pleated dress and her white shoes and stockings.

The señorita was asked if she would take a refreshing drink, and they gave her a coloured glass full of a very sweet, reddish liquid that she drank with difficulty while they watched her.

When it was gone, Luis stood up and said that now he must see his friend back to the safety of the hotel. At once they all stood up, shaking hands once more and smiling now. They ushered her the few feet to the door and watched as she walked down the hill with Luis. At the corner Amy turned back and waved.

When they were finally out of sight, Luis said, ‘Thank you. You did us a great honour.’

That made Amy angry. ‘Don’t say that. I didn’t do anything of the sort. They did me the honour, taking me in, didn’t they? Thank you for letting me meet them. I wish we could have talked to each other. Perhaps next time I will know some Spanish.’

Luis looked at her, drawing his eyebrows together.

‘I like you,’ he said.

‘I like you, too.’ She was silent for a moment and then she said, very tentatively, ‘Your family, are they … do they have what they need?’

He was still looking at her, and she saw that he was amused now. He knew exactly what she was trying to say.

‘If you mean much money, no, none. Not like the people you know. But my father has good job, and I have good job. We are lucky ones.’

Not like the people you know. If you are lucky, Luis, what am I? Amy felt her face going red, hot all the way up into her hair.

They had almost reached the sea front again. Luis took her arm and guided her into a little blind alleyway.

‘I will come no further,’ he said.

‘No. I just wanted to say goodbye, you know. Properly, not like yesterday at the table.’

‘Of course. I understand that.’

Luis came close to her. She looked up and saw his smile, and then he kissed her, a proper kiss. She was still thinking a proper kiss, and how soft his mouth was against hers, when it was over.

‘Perhaps you will come back.’

‘I hope so. I’ll come one day, somehow. Goodbye, Luis.’

‘Goodbye, Amy.’

She walked out of the alley, to the end of the street, and back to the white walk outside Fendi’s. She felt as if she was flying, with wings on her heels. Not only had she made a real friend, but he had kissed her. She wasn’t a little girl any more.

Biarritz, I love you.

It would be thirteen years before she saw it again.

That night, in the Paris sleeper, Amy whispered to Isabel in the bunk below, ‘Are you asleep, Bel?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know, I went up into the town this morning, while you were packing.’

‘I wondered where you’d slipped off to. What were you doing?’

‘I met Luis.’

There was a moment of startled silence. Amy smiled in the darkness.

‘What happened?’ Isabel was intrigued, and envious of the adventure.

‘Oh, he took me home to meet his family. He’s got about a dozen brothers and sisters. The smallest is a little girl called Isabella. Then he walked me back down to the sea front, and he kissed me.’

‘Where?’

‘On the lips, of course.’

Isabel choked with laughter. ‘Oh, of course. Actually I meant where was it, in front of Fendi’s with everyone looking on over their ices?’

‘No. In an alleyway.’

‘Amy, you are priceless. Kissing waiters in alleyways. I’m two whole years older than you, and no one’s ever kissed me.’

‘I expect your turn will come,’ Amy said airily.

When they stopped laughing Isabel said, ‘So, what was it like?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth it was so quick that I hardly realized it was happening.’

‘Mmm.’

They lay in silence for a while, listening to the clickety-clack of the train. Amy liked to think of all the towns and villages they were sweeping past, full of darkened houses and sleeping families.

‘Amy, do you think we’ll always tell each other things?’

‘I hope so. Sisters are closer than friends, aren’t they? I can’t imagine telling Violet Trent about it, for example.’

‘I suppose we should be grateful for that. Good night, little sister.’

‘Not so little, Isabel dear. Good night.’

Even to Isabel, Amy had not mentioned the smallness and bareness of Luis’s home, so full of so many people, or the way he had said We are lucky ones. That was something she wanted to think about for herself.

*

Back at the house in London, Bethan’s weekly letter from her mother was waiting for her. Once the trunks had been brought safely in, the clamour of arrival had died down, and Lady Lovell had gone to her room to rest, Bethan took the letter out of her apron pocket and went upstairs to her room at the top of the house to read it.

The letters were a lifeline, stretching between the valleys and her life in service, holding her to the tight, united community even though she could only spend her two weeks’ holiday a year as a real part of it.

They have had the Inquiry, such as it was. The Mines Inspector found negligence, and Peris and Cruickshank were prosecuted all right. The magistrates fined them the Great Sum of £5.10s. Half-a-crown a man’s life, they’re saying here. There’s terrible feeling about it, but the pit’s still closed and there’s talk that Peris won’t ever open it no more because it costs him less just to run seams in other pits. Those who are in work like your dad are all with them that aren’t but it’s hard to think of another strike coming. Nick Penry from Glasdir Terrace and them are all behind it. Your dad says they’re right, but I can’t see further than no money coming in for weeks on end, myself. Nick Penry’s marrying that Mari Powell that came up from Tonypandy, all in a hurry it seems to me. I don’t doubt I’ll be called up there at the end of six months or so.

Bethan smiled over the cramped, hurried handwriting. Her mother had three men down the pit on different shifts, each one wanting hot water and hot food at different hours of the long day. The tiny back kitchen was steamy with the big pan of water on the fire and the potatoes boiling. In the short night between the end of the last shift and the beginning of the next, an anxious father would often come knocking at the door and Bethan’s mother would struggle out of bed and collect her midwife’s bag. She had no proper training, only what she had learned from experience and her own mother, but she was vital in Nantlas where no one could afford the doctor.

The letter went on. Bethan was frowning now as she read.

Bethan lamb, when will it be your turn? I know you said you never would after Dai was killed, but it’s seven years since 1917. Write and tell me you’re walking out with some nice young man and make me happy. We need some happiness, God knows. Well, cariad, I must close now. William will be back up just now. God bless you. Your loving MAM.

There never will be anyone else, Bethan thought. She had only wanted to marry Dai, and he had died at Pilckheim Ridge, a year after Airlie Lovell. No. She would stay with Amy and Isabel as long as they needed her, and after that, well, she would find something.

Bethan folded her letter carefully into four and replaced it in her apron pocket. Then she went downstairs where thirty-two pieces of luggage were waiting to be unpacked.

PART TWO

FOUR

London, February 1931

Amy was wandering listlessly around the room, picking up a crystal bottle and sniffing at the scent before putting it down again unremarked, then fingering the slither of heavy cream satin that was Isabel’s new robe waiting to be packed at the top of one of the small cases.

It was peculiar to think that tomorrow night Peter Jaspert’s large, scrubbed hands would probably undo this broad sash, and then reach up to slip the satin off his wife’s shoulders. Isabel would be Mrs Peter Jaspert then. Amy wondered whether Isabel was thinking about that too. Didn’t every bride, on the night before her wedding? But it was impossible to judge from Isabel’s face what she was thinking. She looked as calm and serene as she always did. She was sitting patiently in front of her dressing-table mirror while her maid worked on her hair. Isabel had her own maid now, who would travel with her on the honeymoon, and then they would settle into the house that Peter Jaspert had bought in Ebury Street.

Amy and Bethan would be left behind at Lovell House in Bruton Street. The town house didn’t feel as cavernously huge as it had done when Amy was a child, but it could be very quiet and empty, and faintly gloomy. It was all right now, of course, because it was full of preparations for the wedding. But once that was over, what then?

‘I’ll miss you so much, Bel,’ Amy said abruptly. Isabel looked at her sister’s reflection in the glass beside her own. She thought that you could tell what Amy was like just by watching her for five minutes. She was so restless, incapable of keeping still so long as there was any new thing to be investigated or assimilated. When there was nothing new or interesting, she was stifled and irritable. Her face reflected it all, always flickering with naked feelings for anyone to read. Isabel herself wasn’t anything like that. Feelings were private things, to be kept hidden or shared only with the closest friends. Amy didn’t care if the taxi driver or butcher’s boy knew when she was in the depths of despair.

She needed a calming influence, and a focus for her days, Isabel decided. A husband and a home would give her that, when the right time came. She smiled at Amy.

‘I’m hardly more than a mile away. We’ll see each other every day, if you would like that. And I’ll be a married woman, remember. We can do all kinds of things together that we couldn’t do before.’

Amy dropped the robe back on to the bed. ‘Go to slightly more risky restaurants for lunch, you mean? To the theatre unescorted? Will that really make any difference? You’ll be gone, and you can’t pretend that anything will ever be the same. That’s what I’m worried about. You’ll be too busy giving little dinners for Peter’s business cronies and his allies from the House, and going to their little dinners, and whenever I come to see you I’ll be just a visitor in your house …’

‘That’s what wives do, Amy,’ Isabel said quietly. ‘You don’t understand that because you’re not ready to marry. And I’m sorry if you feel that my house, and Peter’s house, won’t be just as much a home to you as this one is.’

Amy was contrite immediately.

‘Oh darling, I’m sorry.’ She knelt down beside Isabel’s chair. ‘I shouldn’t go on about my own woes when it’s your big day tomorrow and you’ve got enough to think about. They’re such little woes, anyway.’ She forced the brightness back into her face and hugged her sister. ‘I shall love to come to see you in your pretty house, if Peter will have me, and of course we’ll do all kinds of things together. I hope you’ll be very, very happy, too. If anyone deserves to be made happy it’s you, Isabel Lovell. Mrs Jaspert-to-be.’

Bethan came in, her arms full of the freshly ironed pieces of Isabel’s complicated trousseau. It had taken two months to assemble it. Bethan’s eyes went straight to the robe on the bed.

‘The creases! Amy, is this your doing? Isabel will be taking it out of her bag tomorrow night looking like a rag.’

‘All my doing, Bethan. I’m sorry. I just looked at it. I’ll take it down now and press it again myself.’

Bethan took it out of her hands at once. ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. A nice scorch mark on the front is all it needs. Just go and get yourself ready for the party.’

‘Do, Amy,’ Isabel said. ‘They’ll need you.’ Her maid had finished wrapping the long red hair up in tight papers, and now she was methodically stroking thick white cream on to the bride’s face. Amy nodded. Isabel meant Gerald and Adeline. Amy blew a kiss from the door and went next door to her own room, wondering if she looked as heavy-hearted as she felt. If she did, she was not going to be a great asset at the pre-wedding party.

Bethan had laid her evening dress out on the bed for her, and in the bathroom across the corridor that she shared with Isabel everything would be put out ready for her bath. But instead of beginning to get ready, Amy sat down in the chair at her writing desk. The curtains were drawn against the February dark, but she stared at them as if she could see through and into the familiar street view. She was thinking that for nineteen years, ever since babyhood, she had shared a room with Isabel, or at least slept in adjoining rooms as they did now. They had hardly ever been separated for more than a night or two. And now they had come to the last night, and tomorrow Isabel would be gone.

It was going to be very lonely without her. It had started already. Usually Isabel and Amy would have prepared for a stiff evening like this one together, and then afterwards they would have laughed about it. But tonight the guests were elderly relatives and old family friends who had come up from the country for the wedding, and the party was to be their introduction to the bridegroom. Because Peter was to be there, the bride had to stay hidden. ‘What archaic rubbish,’ Amy had said, but nobody had paid any attention. The bride was to have a tray in her room, and Amy would have to go down and go through the smiling rituals and the interminable dinner afterwards on her own. There would be Colonel Hawes-Douglas, and the local Master of Foxhounds, and numerous old aunts and second cousins. There wasn’t even Richard to help her out. He was supposed to be coming home from Eton on twenty-four hours’ leave, but he hadn’t put in an appearance yet.

‘Bugger,’ Amy said. ‘Bugger it all.’

She went across the landing and ran her bath, then she plunged into the water and topped it up until it was as hot as she could bear. It would make her face as red as a boiled beetroot, but that was too bad. Perhaps the heat would sap some of the loneliness and frustration and irritation out of her.

If it had been different with Mother and Father, Amy thought, perhaps losing Isabel would have been easier to bear. But it wasn’t different. It was exactly the same as it had been for years and years.

Hugh Herbert had been the first of Adeline’s lovers. It had all been conducted with perfect discretion, and with never a whisper of scandal, but it had been the end of her marriage to Gerald. There could be no question of divorce for Lord and Lady Lovell, but they had simply arranged their lives so that they didn’t meet. When Adeline was in London, or staying in a house party where Hugh was tactfully given a bedroom close to hers, Gerald was at Chance. When Adeline entertained one of her carefully chosen gatherings of amusing people at Chance, Gerald was in London or shooting in Scotland. They were only obliged to meet each other on rare, formal occasions such as family weddings or the girls’ presentations at Court. They were always rigidly polite to one another, as if they had just met, and they would be just the same tonight. It was just that sometimes Amy saw her father look at her mother with a kind of baffled, suppressed longing, and Adeline never noticed it at all. She would say, ‘Gerald, do you think we should move through into dinner?’ but she would never see him properly.

Amy could remember exactly when she had recognized the truth. They had been sitting on the lawn at Chance, under the cedar tree, and a man called Jeremy had been leaning over her mother’s shoulder, pointing to something in the magazine she was holding. His hand had brushed her shoulder, and Adeline had smiled like a young girl. They love each other, she thought, and suddenly she understood the succession of special friends, always men, who took up so much of her mother’s time. She had confided in Isabel, and Isabel had nodded gravely. ‘Yes. I think you’re right. But you must never, ever mention it to anyone.’

That night Amy had committed it all to her journal, under the big black heading PRIVATE. She was fifteen.

Amy sighed now in her over-hot bath. It was making her feel sadder instead of soothing her, and the prospect of the evening was growing steadily blacker. She stood up to break the mood and rubbed herself ferociously with the big white towel that Bethan had put out for her.

Perhaps Richard would have arrived.

It would help to have him here, even though it was Richard who chafed the soreness between their parents. Amy had witnessed it dozens of times, first seeing Gerald flare from silence into scornful rage at some refusal or attitude of Richard’s, and then watching Adeline leap to Richard’s defence. They were the only times that her languid, social mask dropped in family gatherings. Gerald would frown angrily and walk away, but there was something in the way he carried himself that betrayed loneliness to Amy. She had tried sometimes to offer him her company, but he always said something like, ‘Shouldn’t you be in the schoolroom?’ or, more lately, ‘Haven’t you got a party to go to?’

Back in her room Amy put on her dress without enthusiasm. Adeline’s taste in her own clothes was impeccable, and so simple as to be almost stark. Her utterly plain sheath dresses worn with a sequinned blazer were much copied, as were her dramatic strokes like wearing a necklace of wildflowers when every other woman in the room was loaded with diamonds. Adeline always had the best idea first. But she preferred to see her daughters in what she called ‘fresh, pretty clothes’. Isabel would have looked ravishing in these sweet ruffles, but against Amy’s rangy height and firm, high-cheekboned face they were less successful. She hooked the dress up and stared briefly at her reflection.

‘Oh God,’ she said, and then smiled. Well, the effect wasn’t quite so bad when she smiled.

In the long drawing room on the first floor a handful of elderly guests were already peering mistrustfully into their cocktail glasses. A trio of red-faced men were standing with Gerald in a semicircle around the fire, and their wives were perched with Adeline on the daringly modern white-upholstered sofas. Adeline had had the drawing room done over, and had banished all the glowering family portraits and brocaded covers in favour of pale polished wood and white hangings. In the middle of it, in her plain black crêpe, Adeline looked stunning. Amy kissed her cheek.

‘Darling, such a pink face,’ Adeline murmured. ‘Thank God you’re down. Is Isabel all right?’

‘Cool as a cucumber.’

‘That’s something. Where is Richard, the little beast?’

‘I haven’t seen him. He can’t have turned up yet.’

‘That means utter destruction of the dinner placement. I was counting on him to talk nicely to Lady Jaspert.’

‘Probably exactly why he isn’t here. I shouldn’t worry about the table. It’s only family, isn’t it? It’s not as though we’re expecting the Prince of Wales.’

‘No, unfortunately.’

That was a sore point, Amy recalled. Adeline moved on the fringes of the Fort Belvedere set, but HRH had declined the wedding invitation. The Yorks would represent Their Majesties at St Margaret’s, Westminster, tomorrow, but it wasn’t quite the coup for Adeline that the presence of the Prince himself would have been.

‘Do go and talk to people, Amy, before Peter gets into completely full flood.’

Isabel’s fiancé was a bulky, handsome man with a high, English county complexion, very sleek blond hair and bright, shrewd eyes. As the eldest son he would inherit in due course, but he was not attracted by the prospect of following his father into obscurity as another country peer. Peter Jaspert was an ambitious City man. (‘Metals. Manganese or aluminium or something,’ Adeline would say with deliberately affected vagueness. She had long ago given up the cherished dream that Isabel might make the grandest match of all, but still Peter Jaspert wasn’t quite what she had hoped for. There were no possible grounds for objecting to him, but Adeline was faintly disappointed. ‘Her happiness is all that matters. Anything else is up to you now, darling,’ was the only oblique reference she had ever made about it to Amy.)