The Other Guinness Girl: A Question of Honor

by Emily Hourican

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

Honor Guinness is rich, aristocratic, shy and awkward -- nothing like her glamorous cousins Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh.
But when she marries charming and ambitious American, Henry 'Chips' Channon, together they make the perfect couple at the heart of the most elite social circles -- including a close friendship with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Wallis Simpson. But within the marriage, all is less than perfect.

Meanwhile, Honor's best friend, the beautiful, enigmatic Doris, is set on establishing her place in London society. But, as tensions rise in 1930s Europe, Doris, born to a German-Jewish mother, hears troubling accounts from her cousins in Berlin. Will she be able to secure the right marriage to protect her family, and her future?

Set against the rise of Nazism, the abdication of a king, and the slide into World War II, The Other Guinness Girl is a sweeping novel of love, desire, friendship and self-discovery.

Release date: September 22, 2022

Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland

Print pages: 464

Sample

London, summer 1930

‘I heard you come in.’ Lady Iveagh crossed to the windows and twitched apart the heavy green silk curtains. The sharp sunlight of the June morning flooded the room and Honor struggled upwards in bed to meet it. She propped herself against a stack of pillows as her mother tugged impatiently at a high-backed armchair, dragging it closer to Honor’s bed, and sank down into it. ‘After four, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. About that.’ Honor rubbed her eyes, which felt dry and heavy. She looked at the tiny gold and white marble clock by her bedside. It wanted two minutes to eight o’clock. No wonder she felt tired. But her mother had been up, no doubt, for several hours already, and eager to wake Honor for at least the latter half of that.

‘Amusing evening?’

‘Not very.’

Lady Iveagh laughed, a sharp bark. ‘No. I imagine not. Lady Meredith doesn’t much go for amusing. Well, worthwhile, then?’

‘Not that either.’ Honor stretched, or tried to. The raising of her arms above her head was cut short by the bunching of her heavy cotton nightgown under her.

‘You stuck it out a jolly long time.’

‘What is one to do?’ Honor shrugged. ‘One must make some kind of effort.’

‘Certainly one must,’ her mother said energetically. ‘Who was there?’

‘The usual crowd.’

‘Your cousins?’

‘Yes.’ Honor gave a gurgle of laughter and sat up straighter against the pillows. ‘Mamma, I must tell you, Maureen wore the most outlandish costume. She said it was because she was going on – some costume party or other, you know how she likes to go about – so she was dressed as a circus performer. One of those that wears tights, and not much else.’ She laughed again, and began describing the costume.

‘Certainly there doesn’t seem to have been very much of it,’ Lady Iveagh agreed when she had finished. ‘Oonagh?’

‘Also there. And going on to the same party, but dressed meanwhile in a perfectly charming but simple evening dress. Marriage has steadied her, I think.’

‘And perhaps will steady Maureen too,’ Lady Iveagh said. ‘Although I wouldn’t bet the Elveden silver on it. Duff himself, I sometimes think, for all that he is brilliant, is not exactly dependable.’

‘I can’t see much steadying Maureen,’ Honor agreed.

‘Who brought you home?’

‘Freddie Birkenhead.’

‘Any good?’ Her mother looked at her, round, bright eyes quizzical for a moment.

‘None.’

‘No. I imagine not.’ They both laughed at that and Honor thought what a relief it was to have a mother who understood that one couldn’t make oneself like Freddie Birkenhead, simply because his father was an earl and he would one day inherit, and who didn’t care at all that one didn’t. ‘Here’s tea now,’ Lady Iveagh said, as a housemaid came in with a tray. Then, ‘Will you come with me to the Women’s Institute? They meet at half past nine.’ She poured out two cups, handing one to Honor.

‘Of course. What is it today?’

‘Relief for those left destitute by the crash.’

‘Still?’

‘Yes. If anything, the poverty is getting worse. What began with large fortunes disappearing on the stock market has run off so that there is now hardly a household in the country that does not feel the pinch. Those who were rich are poor, and those who were poor are starving,’ she said briskly. ‘We cannot expect Ramsay MacDonald’s national government to do so very much. And so, where they are ineffectual, we aim to be efficient. I’ll order the motor for nine. Better get on.’

She left, closing the door gently behind her, and Honor sank back onto her pillows and finished her tea. She yawned. These first moments were the worst, she knew. Once she was up, and about, busy with her mother and her mother’s many plans, the tiredness would abate.

How many years now had she done the London season? Four? Five? Too many, anyway. But she had learned how to manage it so that it was far less of an inconvenience than it might have been. She had friends – not many, not in the way her cousins had; crowds of people to call them ‘darling’ and insist they were ‘too funny’ – but enough. She didn’t go to the ‘unnecessary parties’, as she thought of them, by which she meant the parties that happened with only young people, no chaperones, where jazz was played and shoes kicked off so that beautiful girls, and boys, might dance until dawn and beyond. Where cocktails were drunk in abundance and, if the whispers were to be believed, other things, too, fuelled the energy and abundance.

Honor’s name rarely appeared in print, for all that she was the daughter of the Earl of Iveagh and heiress to a fortune so large she had no real idea of it. ‘Do not be thinking about that,’ her mother said, the only time Honor had ever asked how much money there was. ‘Better to learn to live as the wife of a poor man.’ Her mother disapproved of spending that was indulgent: ‘You will have jewels fit for a queen, and the habit of never taking taxis when you can walk,’ she would say. And so she had brought Honor up as she had been brought up – to save a penny whenever possible.

But things were different that year, Honor thought, lying against the feathery bulk of her pillows, staring out at the tree-tops of Buckingham Palace Gardens, which lay opposite number 5 Grosvenor Place. She was 21 now. And even though her mother would never look for a different answer to the question of whether young men like Freddie Birkenhead were ‘any good’, Honor was conscious that her marriage – the when and the whether of it – was something her parents had begun to discuss quietly together after dinner. Lady Iveagh, who always had plans for every possibility, had begun to make plans for Honor in the event that she did not become a wife and mother.

For herself, she didn’t care, Honor thought. Or not very much. Somewhere, the not caring worried her a little. She knew that the girls of her acquaintance – daughters of men like her father, born to the life Honor lived – did care. Very much. They talked of the husbands they wanted, the houses they hoped for, their plans for futures that included children, servants, other domestic responsibilities. Honor never talked of those things. Nor did she think of them. In everything she did, she was diligent and conscientious, but nearly always without any very great investment of herself. Secretly, that bothered her. What was the point of her? she sometimes wondered.

In any case, she hadn’t met any young men that she liked, she thought. Although, maybe there was more truth in the thought that she hadn’t met any young men who liked her.

Young men took her too seriously. She was too serious for them. And too serious a prospect – her money, her position, her eccentric father and brilliant mother. Her own thoughtfulness. Sometimes she wished she was more like her cousins – those glittering Guinness girls, Aileen, Oonagh, and especially Maureen. She knew well that when London society talked of the ‘Glorious Guinness Girls’, as they so often did, they did not number her among them. She was, if she was anything, the Other Guinness Girl.

But she never wished it for very long. An hour in their company – increasingly, less – was enough to remind her of all the ways she didn’t wish to be like them. But all the same, she longed for a joke, a quip, some piece of dashing irreverence to bring forth, the way Maureen would, when yet another fair, dull young man asked did she enjoy hunting and had she been to the Royal Academy show yet.

But nothing ever came to mind, and so she would respond as politely, as desperately as they had asked, and then that topic would be used up and they would have to find another. Except that more often, the young man would find an excuse to leave her side, and go and flock around Maureen or Oonagh or their friends. And then, Honor would see that in their company, his dullness would fall away and he would become witty and daring, so that she knew it was she who had made him dull.

They didn’t find her attractive, these young men. Honor wasn’t slight and boyish and straight. She was large, with a face that she knew was inclined to be heavy. Her figure was womanly, her mother said. She said it approvingly. Lady Iveagh was far too much her own person to mind that her daughter was too. Then there was ‘the eye’. A slight cast in her left eye that her parents had worked hard to correct. She remembered the black patch she had been forced to wear over the other eye, the ‘good’ one, in an effort to force the lazy one to correct itself. As though, she always thought, she were a horse with only one blinker. The efforts had been partly successful, thanks to a nanny who had followed her about the house like a gun dog, discovering her in whatever corner she had hidden with a book, and forcing her to put the patch back on. But there was still the slightest something off about that eye. ‘It makes one wonder what, exactly, you mean sometimes,’ her friend Doris said. ‘Or rather, who you mean it to,’ adding stoutly, ‘and that’s a jolly good thing!’

Sometimes, Honor wondered what it might be like to be vivid and outrageous and quick-witted, full of daring; willowy and shimmering in something silvery and brief, her face painted to look like a surprised doll, the way all the popular girls were now. The way Doris and her cousins were.

And then she would catch sight of herself, in a looking glass or window, and she would find herself laughing at the idea that the figure before her, so solemn and stately, like, she sometimes thought, a well-stuffed feather bed, could ever be transformed into someone gay and slender and quick.

Anyway, she thought now, pleating the embroidered white cotton counterpane, 21 wasn’t so very old. Except that behind her were two little sisters, Patricia (Patsy) and Brigid, still in the schoolroom but growing up fast, as well as her brother Arthur – Lump, as they called him. And there was Oonagh, married at 19 and with a baby; Aileen also, and now Maureen, with a wedding just a month away at St Margaret’s.

They may have the looks, but we have the title. Wasn’t that what her mother had said, firmly, on a day when Honor, then maybe 15, had come back from a dancing party held at her cousins’ house down the road at number 17 Grosvenor Place, and run up to the school room to cry. It had been a party at which no one had danced with her, or not without being coldly required to by Aunt Cloé, who gave the impression that she expected to find Honor’s hand dirty when she had taken it and led her over to a young man with a sniffly nose, who was the only other person not dancing.

‘Would you be so good?’ Aunt Cloé had asked, handing Honor over as though she were a string bag of something uninteresting.

The young man had sniffed hard and surreptitiously wiped his nose on his sleeve before taking Honor’s hand, so that for the entire dance – a polka – she had been achingly conscious of where his sleeve brushed her bare wrist above the white cotton gloves she wore like all the girls.

Later, while tea was served, she had seen Maureen – a deadly mimic, and never more so than when Honor was her target – imitate the way she danced, making her as clumsy as a bear. ‘They may have the title, but we have the looks,’ Maureen had said in what pretended to be a whisper. Cloé, Honor noticed, had permitted herself a small, chilly smile.

But that evening, when she’d told her mother – as she told her everything – even though she had hidden her face in mortification while she’d said it, Lady Iveagh had given a shout of laughter.

‘Oh, that’s very good,’ she had said, after laughing heartily. ‘Very good indeed. Almost, one admires Maureen.’ And then, at Honor’s baffled face, ‘Don’t you see? It’s exactly the other way around. They have the looks – I agree that seems clear enough – but we have the title. Oh yes,’ nodding her head decisively, ‘we have the title.’

Not that titles seemed to be much use after all when doing the season, Honor thought then. Not the way they used to be. Titles no longer attracted men. Or not the way girls like Maureen, Oonagh and Aileen attracted men.

For just the briefest of moments, Honor allowed herself to think what it would be like to be loved by a man like Basil Blackwood. Duff, as Maureen called him with smug familiarity. To be watched the way she had seen Duff watching Maureen. To be touched the way he touched her – a hand on her arm, an arm about her shoulders, always as though his whole self was in that point of contact. She remembered the dark inward look he had when he watched Maureen, and the way Maureen, always, was conscious of him looking, no matter what she pretended. Honor shivered a little.

‘Honor!’ She heard her mother’s voice, which carried effortlessly across the many rooms of Grosvenor Place. ‘Don’t dawdle. We must get on.’

‘What you need is a love affair,’ Doris said, scratching the top of Mimi’s head so that the little dachshund stretched out on her lap, writhing and twisting this way and that like a piece of shiny black liquorice.

‘Why do I need a love affair?’ Honor asked, amused.

‘To take your mind off things. All that good work is really becoming too dreary.’

‘So I need a love affair to distract me from charity work?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Isn’t it usually the exact opposite?’

‘Only for those lacking in imagination,’ Doris said, taking a cigarette from her crocodile skin bag and fitting it into a long ivory holder. She rummaged in the bag again, found a heavy gold lighter, and lit the cigarette with a snap loud enough to make Mimi twitch.

Honor got up to open a window. Lady Iveagh disapproved of smoking. She said it made the house ‘smell simply filthy, no matter what the servants do’. She disapproved of Doris too, Honor knew. But that, she felt, was because her mother didn’t know Doris the way she did. At least, hadn’t known Doris for as long as Honor had.

‘Shut that window,’ Doris said, placing her cigarette in the heavy crystal ashtray that sat on the table beside her and catching up the glossy fur coat she had thrown onto the chair next to her. She draped it over her shoulders and shivered, exaggeratedly.

‘But the smell …’

‘Never mind the smell. Now come and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself. And I don’t mean visiting slums. Any fun parties? You cannot imagine how long it felt, to be away.’

‘You were gone for less than a month,’ Honor said with a laugh.

‘Yes, but to Dorset …’ Doris shuddered again, blowing twin streams of smoke through her nose, and widened her enormous black eyes in a show of horror. ‘They tried to make me go on a visit to Germany. To my mother’s people. They are even richer than Father’s lot. Factory owners. Intellectuals. Peculiar altogether.’ It was the sort of thing she always said about that side of her family. As though to put distance between herself and them. ‘I said I would love to, of course, but that it simply couldn’t be, because’ – she lifted the little dog high off her lap – ‘Mimi would find it too terribly hard. Wouldn’t you, darling?’ And she laid her cheek against the sleek curve of the dog’s head. ‘But it is only a matter of time before they simple force one …’

Honor, stifling a laugh, thought back to the first time they’d met, at a boarding school in Eastbourne, run by Miss Jane Potts, who had once been governess to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Alice, and who began almost every sentence with a reference to ‘dear, dear Princess Alice …’

Doris had arrived the same day as Honor, both of them new into a classroom of 14-year-olds who had all had a year together already. As the two ‘new girls’, they had stuck together, at first out of necessity but soon from affection. Doris had a wan, pale, clever face, with those enormous dark eyes, beneath which were permanent charcoal smudges that gave her a weary, sophisticated air. She was slender and elegant even at 14, even in the lumpy skirt and cardigan they all had to wear, and generally exuded, Honor thought, a kind of drooping hothouse flower fragility. In those first days, Honor had worried that Doris would not survive the spartan regime of the boarding school. Feeling protective, she had given Doris one of her two blankets, and even half of her bread and jam supper. These, Doris had accepted with a remote gratitude, as though doing Honor a favour.

In fact, Honor soon learned, Doris was strong, energetic, almost hearty. She loved hockey, lacrosse, hunting and the outdoors. It was Honor who felt the cold, Honor who crept into Doris’ bed after lights out and pressed close against her. Because Doris, thin as she was, radiated heat with an intensity that was, Honor said, like the iron bar of the heater in the nursery at Elveden: ‘straight and hard and not terribly cosy, but glowing red hot’.

Doris came from a family of Dorset merchants: ‘Quarries,’ she explained, ‘Portland stone and marble. Now factories too.’ She pulled a face.

‘You could say your father built this country,’ Honor said kindly, because she could see Doris was embarrassed. Even more so than by her mother.

‘You could.’ Doris smiled. ‘Although really, he built his fortune, and a large, quite ugly house.’ She had been sent to school ‘to get me out of the way’, she cheerfully said, because her parents found her to be ‘too much’ now that there was a baby brother as well as two little sisters.

‘Just like me,’ Honor had replied, ‘two sisters and a brother. But you can jolly well give me back my blanket. I don’t believe you feel the cold at all.’

‘Hardly ever,’ Doris had agreed in a husky voice, handing back the blanket.

Doris, from the start, was determined to ‘do better’ than her parents, as she put it. ‘Say it again,’ she would implore Honor, of certain particularly tricky words, such as ‘cup’ and ‘supper’, and she would practise and practise, imitating Honor until no trace of Dorset – or the funny lilt that Honor assumed must come from the German side, her mother’s people – remained. By the time they finished school, and Doris came to London with Honor, she had refined herself into someone impossibly weary and ennuyé so that Honor, laughing, had said, ‘Anyone would swear that the exhausted blood of generations of decadent European royals ran through your veins …’

‘Rather than that of sturdy Dorset merchants and a lot of German burghers,’ Doris agreed, adding complacently, ‘I’m a better match for father’s money than he or Mother could ever be.’ In fact, she did her job so well that Lady Iveagh, on meeting her for the first time, later told Honor abruptly, ‘I don’t like that girl. She’s empty-headed and indolent.’ And when Honor tried to explain that, no, Doris just pretended to be, her mother had looked more astonished than Honor had ever seen her, and said, ‘But that’s worse. Much worse!’ She did not forbid Honor to see her, because that was not her way, but Honor soon realised that any time Doris called, her mother was quick to find a reason to leave them. And quicker then to return with a reason why Honor must leave too.

‘So, that love affair …’ Doris said now, putting Mimi down and snapping her fingers so that the dog danced lightly on its hind legs. ‘You must choose carefully. Ideally, he must be married already, because you don’t want to find yourself married in a hurry just to pay for a little fun.’ She raised her eyebrows at the look on Honor’s face. ‘Shocked?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you should be.’ Doris laughed at her.

‘I’m just not sure why I need this love affair.’

‘It’s to give you an element of tragedy. That’s what you lack, you know. It’s why you don’t take. So much money, and the title. This beautiful house,’ – she gestured around the first-floor drawing room that glowed with the careful certainty of its own perfection – ‘Elveden. Your societies and causes and distressed mothers. It’s all much too … well, healthy and happy. There’s nothing interesting there. Nothing to capture the imagination. And men are creatures of imagination.’

‘What do you know of men? You barely have more experience of the world than I do, for all that you carry on as though you had knocked about forever. Less, even,’ Honor said smartly, ‘for I have several seasons more than you.’

‘Ah, but I had a year in Paris.’

‘To learn French. Staying with a family of merchants so respectable they never let you out without some mademoiselle in tow. I know, because I visited you.’

‘And yet I know plenty,’ Doris said. ‘More than you ever will, I suspect. It’s from being on the make. No, don’t—’ She put a hand up to silence Honor. ‘We both know I am. And that’s perfectly alright. But it means I must spend longer thinking about what people really want and mean and puzzling out the little tricks of their personalities. Men are so much simpler than women, but women somehow never see that.’

‘I do not at all know what you mean. But you think a hopeless love affair would help me to be less happy, and therefore I will take better?’ Honor laughed, but she hoped Lady Iveagh wouldn’t choose that moment to come back into the drawing room.

‘Oh yes.’ Doris opened her black eyes so wide they almost swallowed her entire face. ‘It would show that you are human, after all. And that you have … you know, that side to you, as well as the capable, managing side. Plus,’ she looked sly for a moment, ‘it would get you away from your mother.’

‘But I don’t want to be away from her.’

‘I know that, but must the whole world? What man falls in love with a girl who is always attached to her mother, and in such perfect harmony that there is no room for anyone else between them? No, it’s simply not appealing … But a love affair, especially one that can never be – that will take the hearty sheen off you. Now, I wonder …’ She looked at Honor for a long moment, then, ‘Yes. I have it. Duff.’

‘Duff?’

‘Your cousin Maureen’s Duff. Nothing could be more perfect. So impossible. So tragic. So perfect in every way. And he is so very …’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Honor snapped, face flushing brick red. ‘That’s the silliest idea I’ve heard. Anyway, why don’t you organise your own love affair?’

‘Oh it’s not the same for me,’ Doris said.

‘Why isn’t it?’

‘Well, first of all, I don’t need to add hints of tragedy.’ She smiled. ‘My cheekbones do that for me.’

‘You do look positively ghastly,’ Honor said enviously.

‘Yes, isn’t it lucky? Now, second, I’m not the daughter of an earl. Not to mention the hint of something foreign … It wouldn’t have the same effect at all if I did it. What would be interesting in you would be simply déclassé in me. No, I must remain perfectly virtuous and without even a whiff of scandal, and then I may marry well. And then, well, then I can have as many love affairs as I like.’

‘Absurd,’ Honor said vigorously. ‘I won’t listen to another word of it.’

‘So, Duff …?’

‘Stop, Doris. Anyway, shouldn’t you be getting back to poor Mrs Benton?’ Mrs Benton was a respectable widow with a house on Curzon Street where Doris lived. It was an arrangement that meant her own mother, who hated London, didn’t have to accompany Doris through the season. ‘Thank God she hates London,’ Doris liked to say, ‘because certainly London would hate her.’ Honor disliked it when she talked like that.

‘Oh very well.’ Doris pouted. ‘Only don’t blame me if we are still here a year from now, and you still have had no offers. Now, are you going to the Chadwicks’ this evening? I have a new way of doing my hair …’

Honor tuned her out and, when Lady Iveagh put her head around the door some minutes later and said they must be off, she rose obediently and submitted to being kissed goodbye by Doris. She found the kissing exaggerated, given that they were to meet again in a few hours, but to say so would only have made Doris wrinkle up her nose and smirk at her. Doris knew very well Honor disliked such demonstrations. That didn’t stop her.

‘Curzon Street, please,’ Doris said, tapping the glass twice with a gloved hand to show the cabbie she was ready to go.

As the taxi drove away from Grosvenor Place, she turned to look out the back window at Honor and Lady Iveagh getting into a long silver motorcar that waited at the bottom of the front steps. The street was empty and she watched them until her taxi turned onto Hyde Park Corner. Then she turned to the front again and ignored the cabbie, who showed signs of wanting to chat. She stroked Mimi’s smooth head and let the dog worry the seams of her leather gloves. Mimi seemed to think they were living creatures still, to be fought and subdued.

It was obvious to anyone who looked that Honor had a crush on Duff, Doris thought. But then, she doubted anyone except herself much looked. Lady Iveagh, for all her bounty, thought mostly about herself and her own projects. It would simply never occur to her that Honor might fall in love where she shouldn’t. And no one else cared enough.

But it was also obvious that it wasn’t Duff himself who she was in love with, so much as the idea of being in love. It was the idea of romance that drew Honor. Ideally romance for someone she couldn’t possibly marry. How unfair, she thought, that someone who looked so unromantic – solid, sensible, rather plain – should be the type to yearn secretly, while she, Doris, apparently perfectly made up for romantic yearning, should be so very matter-of-fact. Or maybe not unfair. Maybe very fair. If she wasn’t matter-of-fact about her prospects, if she allowed herself to be dazzled by romance, she would never be able to arrange her life the way she needed to.

Anyway, Duff was an entirely safe crush. A luxury, Doris thought, permissible only to girls like Honor who had everything stacked in favour of their marriages so that it was only a matter of time, for all that Honor seemed chagrined by her lack of popularity.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Doris had tried to tell her, ‘you are not the kind to be flavour of the season. It’s all long term with you.’ But Honor didn’t understand. She took terribly to heart the balls where she wasn’t asked to dance as often as other girls. She had withdrawn into herself since school, finding the larger stage of London society harder to manage than the easy routine of Miss Potts’.

Honor was much too nice to be jealous, but she clearly couldn’t help comparing the way Doris was greeted with her own reception – ‘I am as invisible as though made of a pane of glass; something to look through, not at,’ she would say.

‘You’re wrong,’ Doris tried to say. But all Honor could see were the throngs of young men who sought Doris everywhere she went, who vied to fetch her champagne, cocktails, her fur; who bought gifts for Mimi because they couldn’t properly buy for Doris herself, so that the dog had an absurd selection of jewelled collars and trinkets to wear around its neck.

‘If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have a soul to talk to at these things.’

‘You would have your cousins …’

‘Who despise me.’

‘… and anyone else lucky enough to discover how nice you are.’

Honor had said she was grateful, but the truth was that Doris needed Honor far more than Honor needed her, although she couldn’t see that. So assured was her position, she was barely aware of it; saw not the advantages of money and name, only the drawbacks of a lack of beauty and whatever it was that made girls like Doris so popular.

The taxi drew to a halt outside Mrs Benton’s and Doris let herself in with her key. The hall was quiet and dim, spotlessly clean but somehow withdrawn, with that feeling places get when they are forever used by different people – as though hesitant to be any more than impersonal. I’m not for you, it seemed to say in the steady beat of the grandfather clock that stood under the stairs and in the fuzzy thump of a bluebottle that beat at the half-moon-shaped pane of glass above the front door. You are not ours.

She went to her set of rooms on the first floor – a bedroom, bathroom, dressing room and sitting room – where she had lived for the last year. She poured water from a jug into Mimi’s enamel bowl, and began to look out her clothes for the evening. Her father had offered to send her maid with her but Doris had refused. The idea of being responsible for someone else, alone and new in London, was too much. As long as she had a generous allowance for clothes and regular visits to the hairdresser, she said, she could manage. She had learned to do her hair in Paris, and had practised enough in the time she had lived at home in Dorset, where there had been little else to do.

The rooms were lavish and comfortable, and Mrs Benton was respectable and rather jolly, but even so, Doris’ arrangements meant she was considered odd. The fact that no one ‘knew’ her family made her odder again. Perhaps, she thought, she should let her mother come to London after all? They could take a house and her mother could come about with her. But that would be worse. Because then her background would no longer be mysterious. It would be known.

Her mother’s accent would invite speculation. Her English was perfect, but it was too