The Haldanes

by Jessica Stirling writing as Caroline Crosby, Roline Crosby, Caroline Crosby

Genres: Sagas; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

A compelling, beautifully-observed story of growing up, of anguish and
friendship, true and false, set in London, Scotland and the Peak
District. The Haldanes were her mother's family. Not that Pauline had much to do
with them after her mother Barbara deserted her husband and child. But
the Haldanes had money, and money is power. So when, soon after the end
of the First World War, her father goes broke, they are prepared to help
- but at a price. Set in London, Scotland and the Peak District, The
Haldanes is a compelling, beautifully-observed story of growing up, of
anguish and friendship, true and false, during the Twenties when all the
old values and rules are under attack. 'She writes in bright colours
with bold, confident strokes' Glasgow Herald

Release date: August 16, 2012

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

For a full generation it had been the fashion in the Haldane family to send the girls to school in Scotland. Grandpa Haldane would have it no other way. It was the done thing and old Donald Haldane was, and always had been, a great one for doing the right thing. Besides, he owned shares in the school company and, while giving his girls a sound education in manners and deportment, he reaped a little profit on the transaction and got to consort with gentlemen whose style and breeding he had always admired.

Pauline’s Aunt Bea seemed to have enjoyed her years at St Austin’s. But Barbara, Pauline’s mother, had not been at all enchanted. She looked back upon her schooldays with uncharacteristic bitterness. She had no good word to say for Miss Aitken or Miss Gaylord or any of the other little tin gods who had been empowered to smother her youthful exuberance and stamp out her wilful tendencies by every conceivable sort of punishment, short of beating and expulsion.

Amid the piles of junk in the glory hole in the Veritys’ London flat were precious few remains of Mother’s girlhood and none at all, save an empty wicker trunk, to commemorate her eight years at St Austin’s. In vain Pauline rummaged in boxes, suitcases and hampers for a letter or postcard, a faded photograph, an inky primer or battered hockey stick, something to indicate that schooldays had left Mummy with even one fond memory.

The little that Pauline had learned of St Austin’s derived from a few half-remembered stories told to her at bedtime long ago – before Mummy went off with Captain Tiverton, even before the war – and from the photographs in a blue morocco album that Aunt Bea had produced during Pauline’s one and only visit to Flask Hall, in Derbyshire, in the summer of 1915.

Pauline had been eight at the time and quite old enough to realise that something unpleasant was happening at home. She’d had a sense of disharmony in the household long before the day when her mother, without a word of farewell, had finally gone away for good. The following morning Pauline had been packed off to stay with Aunt Bea and Uncle Lewis Jackson in their big house near Matlock. Mrs Dobbs, the Veritys’ housekeeper, had taken her up by train but had returned at once to London to look after Daddy.

Pauline retained only fragmented impressions of her two-week exile. High cliffs, steep brambly trails, caves she was supposed to wonder at, iron bridges over a river in a gorge. And Uncle Lewis’s dogs, black Labradors that had the run not just of the gardens and stable yards but also of the hall’s echoing corridors and gloomy public rooms. She only vaguely recalled her first encounter with cousin Stella who, advantaged by home territory and two months seniority, lorded it over Pauline and patronised her dreadfully.

The one episode that stood out clearly took place in Aunt Bea’s private sewing room at the top of the house. Stella had not been present. The boisterous Labradors had been left to scratch and whine at the door. Aunt Bea and she had been alone, seated together on an old chintz-covered sofa. Aunt Bea had put a plump arm about Pauline’s shoulders, had untied the album’s silk tapes and opened the precious book across their laps. “Now tell me, dear, do you know who this is?”

“Mummy.”

“She hasn’t changed much, has she? And the girl lolling on the grass?”

“You.” Steely summer rain had pattered on the lead-paned window. Aunt Bea had exuded a strange odour of babies and green soap and her gown, too heavy for a humid afternoon, had felt like sealskin against Pauline’s bare arm.

“Goodness, wasn’t I a proper little porker in those days? Who’s this hanging up holly?”

“Mummy again.”

“Well done, Pauline. Have you seen these photographs before?”

“No.”

Aunt Bea had sighed. She’d squeezed Pauline’s waist consolingly and had gazed out of the window at the gritstone sky for several seconds before turning the brown-card pages again. “Ah! The infamous tennis team. Did you know that your Mama had played tennis for school?”

“No.”

“She was very agile, even in that ridiculous skirt. It’s all uniforms now, of course. We must blame the war for that. Or the grammar schools. In my day tunics were not obligatory, except for games. Blouses and tight belts made us seem quite grown up, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“What age was I when that was taken? Let me see. Look, I’m wearing my monitor’s armband, so I must have been seventeen. Seventeen! Where do the years go to?”

“There’s Mummy.”

“In her straw hat. What a spring we had that year, so dry and hot. Even the well failed. There was talk of water having to be carted from the dam and boiled for consumption. Baths were prohibited and we were obliged to share wash-basins. Your Mama was furious, I remember. She wrote a stern letter to Papa and was all for leading a march on Kingsford House to protest to the Harveys. As if the drought was their fault.”

Aunt Bea had chuckled and given herself a shake, the way Mrs Dobbs did when a joke went against her. She had hugged Pauline close, as if to impart a measure of St Austin’s mettle or to explain, without having to frame it in words, that Mama had always been impulsive and must be forgiven for it.

“Is that where Mummy’s gone to?” Pauline had said.

“What?”

“Has she gone to stay at St Austin’s?”

“No, no. Mama’s just gone away – for a rest.”

“Is she coming back?”

“Of course. She’ll come to visit you. She’ll take you out to tea. And to the zoo, I expect.”

“Has Daddy gone for a rest with her?”

“Oh, my heavens! No, Pauline, Daddy will be here to collect you just as soon as he can. You’ll still be living in Weymouth Street. Daddy and Mrs Dobbs will look after you.”

“Where’s my Mummy?”

“Pauline, I told you. She’s had to go away.”

“To stay with Jesus?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“When Pamela’s mummy went away, she went to stay with Jesus. And she didn’t come back. Not ever.”

“No, no, dear, your Mama isn’t dead. She’s just – gone.”

“To another school?”

“Really! I should not be obliged to do this,” Aunt Bea had said in the sort of voice that had reminded Pauline very much of her mother. “Papa – your daddy – will explain it to you. And when you’re older you’ll understand. Now. Look. Here’s the school in winter. Did ever you see so much snow? Papa, our Papa, used to tell us that Scotland was next door to the North Pole.”

“Will I have to go to school there too?”

“That’s certainly your Grandpapa’s intention. You’ll go up with Stella in three years time, when you’re eleven.”

“Will I be allowed to play tennis?”

“If you wish.”

“Will I play tennis with Mummy?”

At that point Aunt Bea had put a hand to her brow and had wept. It had taken Pauline by surprise. She had been so embarrassed and so filled with guilt that she had wept too, let her tears fall, crinkling, upon the photograph of snowbound St Austin’s and the high wooded hills beyond.

Pauline did not go off to boarding school at the age of eleven. Instead she continued to live in Weymouth Street with Daddy and Mrs Dobbs and to attend Glades Road Day School for Girls. Tucked away in a cul-de-sac off Marylebone High Street, Glades Road catered for the daughters of prosperous tradesmen and ambitious artisans and offered a polite ladylike education, without frills, at affordable rates.

Harry Verity seemed quite happy with his daughter’s progress from junior to secondary school. He was not in the slightest concerned that she had not been blessed with a more exclusive education. He studiously ignored Grandpapa Haldane’s threats and Aunt Bea Jackson’s predictions that Pauline would be ruined without a taste of St Austin’s esprit de corps to steer her through life. Pauline saw little of the Haldanes. She saw even less of her mother who, she gathered, had spent the best part of the war years in Truro with Captain Tiverton’s sister until Captain Tiverton was killed. After that Mama had moved away to stay in a house near Chichester with someone else.

Life with Daddy was orderly and secure and not at all dull. He took her out to the great public parades that celebrated the end of the war and led her gradually into the joys that London had to offer once the capital slipped back into mufti. And he had brought her the cats, two half-Persian females, mother and daughter. Portia and Dorothea – Pots and Dots – had accomplished more by way of healing than all Dad’s assurances that he was not going off to fight the Germans and that there was nobody in the wide world that he preferred to his little Pauline.

At that stage, soon after Pots and Dots had arrived, Pauline had been rapturously in love with them. They would rub against her legs when she got home from school, would sit on the table and dab at her pen while she did her homework and, when Mrs Dobbs wasn’t looking, would slither into bed and lick her nose and ears and purr philosophically.

Mummy did not like cats. The very idea of cats running loose about a house that, curiously, she still considered to be her property, had filled her with dismay.

“Who bought you these creatures?”

“Daddy.”

“He would! They’re tabbies, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Dirty beasts,” Mummy had said. “I do hope you don’t let them near the beds?”

“Oh, no.” Pauline had already learned guile. “They sleep in a basket in the kitchen.”

“What does Mrs Dobbs have to say to it?”

“She doesn’t seem to mind,” Pauline had said. “She pets them when she thinks I’m not looking.”

That particular conversation had taken place on the fourth or fifth occasion that Mummy had called to take Pauline out to tea. Intelligent communication had been impossible during the first three visits. Pauline had clung to her mother and wept, had promised to be good, had begged her to come home. And, because they’d been sitting in the window of the Parisian Tearooms in Oxford Street, Mummy had found Pauline’s behaviour frightfully embarrassing.

There had been a long gap between that visit and the next. Crocuses were on display in the parks before Barbara Verity called upon her daughter again. By that time Pauline was reconciled, and had begun to learn some of the rules of the game. She must not talk about Daddy, must not complain about anything, must not touch Mummy, except for a goodbye kiss, and must try to be as polite and distant as Mummy wanted her to be. It did not take Pauline long to become quite good at it.

“One’s called Portia, and the other’s Dorothea.”

“Oh?”

“They’re Persians.”

Barbara Verity had had enough of cats.

She’d blown a plume of smoke from her cigarette, had cradled her glass in both slender hands. “I really don’t know why Harry bothered when you’ll soon have to leave them.”

“Why?” Pauline had been puzzled.

“When you go off to school.”

“I go to school already.”

“To a proper school, I mean.”

“I don’t want to go to St Austin’s.”

“Nonsense!”

“I thought it was a horrid place?”

“Who on earth told you that?”

“You did.”

Babs Verity had inhaled more tobacco smoke, had imbibed more lemon tea. She’d worn a real fur set over a day dress. The fox head and paws were too realistic for Pauline. The fox’s sharp little teeth and black nose reminded her disconcertingly of Portia. But the face that rested against her mother’s powdered cheek had been quite tame and lifeless.

“Well, you will have to go, Pauline,” Mummy had told her. “Your cousin goes up next September, so I expect you should do the same. I’ll speak to Grandpapa about it.”

Pauline had opened her mouth to protest but had thought better of it. She had felt the gulf between her and her mother grow wide as a lake. She would have to depend upon Daddy who, in all things, was on her side. “If you like,” Pauline had said.

It was two years before she saw her mother again.

By which time Captain Tiverton was dead, the war was over, and Pauline had gone on to senior school at Glades Road and fondly imagined that she was old enough to take care of herself.

Harry Verity had always regarded himself as a sort of boulevardier manqué, a man who, when the war was over, would strut with the smart set and have a whale of a time with the ladies now that he was shot of Barbara Haldane. In fact, he had not been shot of Babs at all for, beneath his arrogance, he had been badly hurt by her desertion and had refused outright to concede to her demands for a divorce. He had been furious at Babs for taking off with Tiverton and leaving him stuck with a girl child. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his little Pauline – of course he did – but rather that he saw in Babs’ flight from domestic responsibility a wilfulness that he knew in his heart he could never emulate.

The differences between Harry Verity and Barbara Haldane were that he had always had to work for his money and had no family name to live up to. He had been born and raised in Islington, second and final son of a small-time solicitor so dry and diffident of manner that neither Harry nor his brother George were tempted to follow into the suburban partnership by reading for the law. An education at Deanswood, a modest academy in Cornwall, had hardly equipped the Verity boys with much by way of ambition and neither of them had gone on to university. In fact George had packed his valise and had headed out for the United States of America about ten minutes after he had reached his majority. He was settled now, with a wife and family of his own, in Rhode Island where he owned a chain of drygoods stores and, last Harry had heard, was doing quite nicely, thank you.

Death came unexpectedly early to the upright terraced house in Islington. It took Harry’s mother and, less than a year later, tugged away his father too. Harry had been twenty-four years old at the time, clerking for the old boy for a pittance while he studied the noble art of accountancy at nights and boned up for examinations. Old Harry Verity’s legacy was divided equally between his sons, home and abroad. Sensible George put his share into the purchase of his first little store on the North American seaboard, while Harry, striving to become a grasshopper, sold up the Islington property and took off for a summer on the Cornish Riviera and his first adult encounter with the leisured classes.

It had been a wonderful summer. He had put up at a cottage near Stratton and had spent several weekends as a guest at Nick Goodchild’s father’s house. There he had met up with all the little sisters who, it seemed, had grown in stature and worldly wisdom since Harry’s last term at Deanswood. He’d had a fast and furious flirtation with middle sister Sarah, who was so notoriously wild that she had three broken engagements behind her. Harry had not lost his virginity. He had almost lost an eye instead.

Cycling was all the craze. Wheelers and Flyers and Peddlers and impromptu all-day treks were quite the rage and Harry was not about to be left behind. He had hired an Ajax from a tiny store in Stratton and had flung himself into showing-off with the best of them. He had an aptitude for it and was soon proficient enough to attempt certain acrobatic tricks which, egged on by Sarah, resulted in Harry falling head-first into the Ajax’s front wheel and sustaining permanent damage to the retinal muscles of his right eye.

It was all terribly dramatic. And Harry was terribly brave about the whole thing and, before the injury required him to return to London, he cracked all sorts of jokes and was definitely the hero of the hour. The eye, thank God, was saved. Damaged, defective in function, painful as hell, but saved. Harry even managed to convince himself that the puckered scar at the corner of the lid and the gradually-increasing opacity of the old brown orb gave his saturnine good looks a final sinister twist. It bothered him enough, though, to make the winter’s final cram for accountancy examinations doubly difficult. He was living like a monk in a rooming house in Holborn to preserve what remained of his cash for another fling in Cornwall in the summer of 1906, the year he first met the Haldanes and fell for little Babs like a ton of bricks.

If Sarah Goodchild had been wild she had never been reckless. That could not be said for elfin-faced Barbara Haldane. Babs had just been released from penal servitude in some awful boarding school in Scotland and was busy making up for lost time. In a matter of weeks Babs had used the Goodchilds to infiltrate the county set and had embarked on a passionate pursuit of a thirty-three-year-old bloodstock owner named Fletcher who, it seemed, had neither the scruples nor the sense to turn down what was so patently and temptingly on offer.

From the wreckage of that disastrous affair Harry Verity patiently picked up the pieces. He was in no position to be snooty about damaged goods. He was crazy about the girl. He was too relieved to be given a reluctant nod from Donald Haldane to enquire too deeply into just what he was taking on and what would be expected of him as a member of the Haldane family. He had Haldane’s influence to thank for his post with Ostermann’s Fire & Accident Insurance Company, and for the flat in Weymouth Street. But Harry’s gratitude was swiftly tempered by the realisation that there was no satisfying little Barbara. Being loved devotedly by one man, in and out of the bedroom, was not enough for the child-woman who was now, under law, his wife. As Babs had turned against Harry so he had turned against the Haldanes who, in Harry’s opinion, had spoiled her and allowed her to grow up twisted. By 1919, however, he was free of Babs and free of his obligations to the Haldanes, or so he thought.

The damaged eye – a blessing in disguise – had kept him out of uniform. Though Harry was as patriotic as the next man he saw no reason not to continue in his chosen profession, particularly as Ostermann’s, a Dutch-owned, non-tariff company, were going through hard times. The company had lost its European base and with it the capital necessary to underwrite the industrial machinery that had been its speciality. Extensive offices in the Baberton building in Holborn had been reduced to a single small suite on the fifth floor, and the staff to a handful of decrepit old men and skittish girls. Harry’s team of six eager young men-in-the-field had vanished in a puff of military fervour. Harry was spending more time on the road than ever before, travelling to industrial towns in the north and Midlands, away for three or four days at a stretch. He was, however, still alive, which was more than could be said for many of his former colleagues.

Harry had been celibate since Babs had walked out on him. He was far too sensible to associate with street women and far too wary to begin an affair with some little office bunny. He would give Babs and the Haldanes no opportunity to force him into a divorce that might wrest Pauline from his keeping. It was his one true piece of power over Barbara Haldane and he exercised it patiently.

“No divorce, dear heart,” he’d told her. “If I live to be a thousand, no divorce.”

For Pauline, however, the post-war years were one long treat. Not for her an annual outing to a pantomime or the ballet. Just as soon as she was old enough to exchange ankle socks for stockings Daddy whisked her on to a roundabout of plays and musicals and visits to the cinema. Daddy was a splendid companion. He cared not a hoot for the snooty looks and disapproving stares that the presence of a child at some of the heavier dramas brought him. Now and then Mrs Dobbs would accompany them to a matinée, particularly if it was a John Barrymore film, but Pauline preferred it when Daddy and she were alone. She had grown tall for her age. She was not petite like her mother. Her impersonation of an adult was aided by the fact that every fashionable female in London was striving to appear like a schoolgirl. By the summer of 1921 Pauline did not seem out of place in the dress circle of the Adelphi or at a table in a Corner House.

It was not Harry Verity’s intention to furnish his one and only with a precocious education. He did not regard himself as eccentric in taking her out and about with him. He would admit that it wasn’t usual but he saw no harm in it. And Pauline showed no signs of moral or physical degeneration. She was quite capable of separating fantasy from everyday reality, safe in the rooms in Weymouth Street with Daddy, Mrs Dobbs and the cats, with cocoa and buttered toast and fleecy cotton knickers drying on the rack before the kitchen stove.

When postcards arrived from her mother in Deauville or Montreux Pauline scanned them without anguish and just a tiny flicker of envy, as if they came from an older and more sophisticated sister. Daddy did not take her abroad. Holidays were not for him. He was frightfully busy with the insurance business. He was frequently out of town for two or three days at a time, trekking off to Glasgow or Derby or Belfast. Pauline fell into a kind of limbo when he was away and had to content herself with magazines and novels, walks in the park and having her special chums, Andrea and Katy, round for tea.

Perhaps it was the increasing frequency of his absences but now and then Pauline felt that there was something transient about her father, something that could not be marked like the milestones in her mother’s life, stuck like postcards round the edges of the mirror or propped against the costume dolls on the dressing table.

Daddy remained adamant in refusing to grant Mummy a divorce. For that reason, perhaps, it had been simply ages since Mummy had called at Weymouth Street. Cards and gifts arrived from time to time but there were no real letters and no telephone calls and this lack of contact transformed Barbara Haldane Verity into a free spirit and, in Pauline’s eyes, added romantic lustre to her mother’s wanderings.

Daddy had given no hint that trouble was brewing. True, he had been grumbling of late about the speed with which Pauline grew out of her clothes and at the voraciousness of her appetite. There had been fewer theatre evenings and a tendency not to be able to acquire tickets for the circle but to wind up in the gods. Pauline thought nothing of it. Schoolyard conversations led her to believe that all fathers went through fits of economy now and then and that, as Andrea loftily put it, stinginess was endemic to the species.

Certainly Daddy’s invitation to take dinner with him in the regal splendour of the Savoy Hotel did not augur impending disaster. It was to be a very special evening and Mrs Dobbs helped Pauline dress for the occasion. Summer taffeta, hair licked into something resembling a bob, a tight little hat and a powder blue coat; Mrs Dobbs, on her knees, made final adjustments to seams and hems and then, rising, gave the excited young girl a hug.

“You’re a picture, dear,” the woman said, in a queer, choked voice. “Just remember how growed up you are. An’ how good your father’s been to you all them years.”

“Yes, Mrs Dobbs,” said Pauline airily. She was trying to be suave about the treat in store but was not quite up to it. “Do hurry. Mr Williams will be here at any moment and I don’t want to keep Daddy waiting.”

Pots and Dots were lurking in the long hallway to chase Pauline’s shoe-laces and receive a parting tickle but the girl rushed past them with just a flutter of the hand and a cry of “Goodbye, all.”

Mr Williams, who was her friend Katy’s blacksheep uncle and ran a motor-taxi business, had come up in the lift to collect Pauline and escort her down to the street where his vehicle was parked at the kerb. The inside of the cab smelled of leather, sweet petrol and the fumes of a cigar which a previous passenger had discarded. The aroma was not yet stale and seemed suitably rich to Pauline as she sat back, crossed her legs and sighed with happiness.

She loved riding in taxi-cabs. She loved the London summer evenings, buildings sharp as chrome against a lilac sky and the streets, even at that early hour, changing from workaday to glamorous. She did not notice the inconveniences of scaffolding and deep ditches dug across roads, the scars of bombing and redevelopment. To Pauline these were passing signs of progress and rejuvenation, as fructifying as Nature. So, too, were the motorcars and taxis that swarmed round Oxford Circus, Piccadilly, Haymarket, pouring out cosmopolitan crowds, in fading July sunshine, on to the famous thoroughfare of the Strand.

The cab swung into the courtyard entrance, under the arch on which stood the gilded figure of Peter, Count of Savoy, and glided to a halt before the hotel’s bustling doorway. Spendidly arrayed in dinner jacket and black tie – he had changed in the office – Daddy awaited his princess by the step. Pauline restrained herself. She did not rush from the cab. Mr Williams opened the door for her and she advanced with an affected little swagger towards her father who, playing his part to perfection, graciously kissed her hand. With a wave to Mr Williams, who had already been paid his fare, Pauline was led through the swing doors into the glittering hall.

Ushered on by undermanagers, who were all as handsome as matinée idols, Mr Verity and his daughter descended through the vestibule to the Babylonian foyer and thence into the restaurant which was the most enormous room that Pauline had ever seen. It was like an opulent cathedral, or an ocean liner brought to berth by the bank of the Thames. She was courteously relieved of her coat and hat and assisted to sit at the table for two that Harry had reserved in advance. It was the quiet hour, quiet for the Savoy that is. Later, about eleven, restaurant and grill would be packed with celebrities. Harry would have preferred to bring her here then, but not even he had enough nerve, or gall, to crash that fast and frivolous society with a young girl in tow.

Pauline seemed to grow taller. She sat up straight in her gilded chair. Harry had deliberately placed her with her back to the window so that she could gaze into the room itself. He was no habitué of the Savoy and had no idea who might be nibbling on a little something at that early hour. In any case, he had no stomach for star-gazing tonight. He had eyes only for his daughter, for this was her show, sugar-icing on a bitter pill.

“Daddy, don’t look round,” Pauline confided in a stage whisper. “But I’ll swear that’s Somerset Maugham.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” said Harry. “Is he alone?”

“No, there’s a woman with him. I don’t recognise her, though.”

“And what’s young Somerset doing?”

“Eating soup,” Pauline, round-eyed, reported. “Oh, look! That’s Evelyn Laye, I’ll swear it is.”

Harry glanced with exquisite casualness towards the palms by the main entrance and caught a glimpse of the lady in question just before she vanished. He was not at all sure that his daughter’s guess was correct but said, nevertheless, “So it is. Isn’t she a peach?”

“I just knew you’d say that. You are fickle, Daddy. I thought Winifred Barnes was your one and only.”

“Winifred Barnes?”

“You know,” Pauline sang softly, “Bells in my heart are ringing, Out of the sky above, Voices of dreams are singing—’”

“Ah, yes,” said Harry. “’Love, love, love.’”

“Why didn’t you marry an actress, Dad?”

“Never met one who’d have me,” Harry said. “Besides, I met your mother.”

“And fell instantly in love with her?”

“Oh, yes.”

Pauline hesitated. She so rarely mentioned her mother that Harry wondered if she had deduced the point of the dinner.

“Are you still in love with her?”

In view of what he would have to tell her in the course of the next hour or so he had to be careful how he answered. With an apologetic shrug, he said, “I honestly don’t know. I think of her rather a lot, and wish that she hadn’t decided to leave us.”

“Don’t you wish she’d come back?”

“No, sweetheart. I don’t think I’d want her back.”

“Because of the other men?”

“Because of a lot of things.”

With a gesture too hasty to be suave Harry summoned a waiter with the menus.

Nothing was too good for young Miss Verity. The Savoy’s kitchen would not let her down. What did she fancy, snails, frogs’ legs, caviare? Plovers’ eggs, cygnet pie, braised foie gras? A whole bullock, lightly browned? Pauline sensibly chose melon, sole, chicken, and meringue. Each dish was perfectly prepared and presented in crystal or on silver. Harry ordered a bottle of Hock to wash it all down and gave Pauline a little in a glass, well mixed with iced water.

During the course of the meal the restaurant gradually filled with sportsmen, financiers, politicians, brash American entrepreneurs, their sweethearts and wives. Outside, stealthily, the Thames grew dark and lamps came on along the span of the Waterloo Bridge. Harry ordered strong coffee, declined brandy, lit a cigarette. His eye ached. He felt almost queasy with apprehension. He dabbed his brow with the back of his wrist.

Filled with food and sated with excitement, Pauline was relaxed almost to the point of drowsiness. Her posture was no longer ladylike but had regressed into an adolescent slouch, her arms hanging loosely by her sides.

“Phew!” she said, in stage Cockney. “Whatter buster, eh?”

Harry was taken aback b