The Richmond Diary

by Peter Rawlinson

Genres: Legal Thrillers

Synopsis

When aesthete and society snob Francis Richmond died, he believed that no one would ever remember him. But he left behind him a diary, and when his heir, a young out- of-work actor, comes across it, he takes it to the newspapers.

Digby Price, owner of News Universal, wants revenge. He wants to destroy the Minister for Defence Procurement, Richard Tancred - and Richmond's diary tells of Tancred's involvement with a millionaire industrialist.

Price publishes. Tancred sues. As Price's council, Mordecai Ledbury QC prepares to meet his thrusting young opponent Patrick Foxley in the libel court, the industrialist commits suicide. Tancred's fate seems sealed.

But Tancred is planing his own courtroom exposure. What he has to reveal is more tragic than the political shame Richmond thought he had stumbled across.

Impossible to put down, this is brilliant courtroom drama with a plot that moves like clockwork and an ending that has a real sting in its tail.

Release date: December 7, 2001

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 288

Sample

Part One
Chapter One
Bolton Gardens, London. Tuesday, 16 April
Tomorrow I lunch with Kitty McClaren. Or Peregrine, as now his friends must call him. It is many years since he answered to the name of Kitty and certainly not these days – when he is a Right Honourable with a government car, an office in Whitehall and a Diary Secretary to organise his engagements. The voice on the telephone said ‘One o'clock, lunch at the Garrick Club, 17 April', indicating how fortunate I was to have been granted an audience. ‘The Minister', the voice went on, ‘must leave at two fifteen for the House. I trust that won't be inconvenient.'
He trusts right. An hour of Kitty will be quite long enough to get the gossip. When we meet I shall, of course, formally call him Perry. But it is as Kitty that I shall think of him, the undergraduate whom I used to visit at Cambridge thirty years ago. We'd take a punt on the river in the Backs behind King's, he and his friends, with their shining young faces. Then he had the profile of a young god, golden hair falling over his forehead, startling blue eyes. Now he has thickened and his hair is receding.
I myself have retained a full head of hair. I am told it makes me look much younger than my years, those years that, alas, advance so inexorably. Within weeks I reach the biblical three score years and ten. And lately I have not been feeling well. I am getting pains in the chest. I should see my quack, Peter Webster, but I am a coward and I keep putting it off.
Wednesday, 17 April
I was early at the Garrick. I am not a member, so I stood waiting for my host in the hall at the top of the steps within the swing doors.
I saw the terrible Mordecai Ledbury struggling with his sticks up the steps. I thought of the friends that brute of a QC has bullied and insulted in the Law Courts, one a dear, close friend. He was halfway up the steps, so I fled to the loo. By the time I emerged, happily he had disappeared into the dining room.
Kitty, of course, kept me waiting. He was twenty minutes late. The modern manners of our modern masters! Eventually I saw him emerge from a large black car. He bounded up the steps and flung his arms round my shoulders as though I were some constituent whose vote he was soliciting.
At lunch he was as indiscreet as I hoped he might be. (How distressed he'd be to know that I am recording all he said. But he'll not know. I write my journal for my own amusement and read it now and then as I lie in bed, and chuckle. When I am tired of it I shall destroy it. A bonfire of the memories!)
Kitty declared that he likes government, especially now that he is in the Cabinet. He claimed that he gets on famously with the PM. He said that he liked the old man's style, so much more patrician and elegant than any of his immediate predecessors, a welcome reversion to times past, before the modern ‘Cool Britannia' men and women invaded Downing Street. Now this PM, Kitty said, has restored the place and the office. Kitty also enjoys listening to the old man's stories, and the PM knows it and often takes him upstairs to the flat for a whisky and soda after an evening meeting in No. 10, and gossips about his colleagues. The Home Secretary, she of the populist style, is quite out of favour – confused performances in the House, too loquacious in Cabinet, while the Home Office resent her vulgar husband, who keeps dropping in.
The Foreign Secretary, sharp, supercilious, dozes through Cabinet meetings and Tancred, Kitty suspected, was drinking rather heavily. However, Tancred has the ear of the PM who regards him as his political heir. I'm not sure exactly what is Tancred's post in the Ministry, something to do with the Services. I asked about Tancred's life, and Kitty shrugged and said he knew nothing. Tancred was a loner, solitary. A man of mystery. Kitty added that nowadays ministers have to be very careful, what with the media snooping and bribing, and the Cabinet Secretary and the M15 boys watching. ‘So continence,' he said, winking at me, ‘rigorous continence, that's the order of the day. You wouldn't last long in government, my dear Fanny.'
This irritated me. ‘Francis,' I replied tartly, ‘Francis. Unless you wish me to call you Kitty.' He has become more common since he has become important. I suppose it's the company he keeps. But I shall stay in touch. The gossip amuses me.
I passed the Dell where Nanny used to take me nearly seventy years ago. I remember the rabbits and the squirrels while she gossiped about her employers with her friends in their smart uniforms of grey or navy-blue. There are no nannies now in the Dell. Nor rabbits. In my childhood we had servants – a butler, a chauffeur, a cook, two parlour maids – and, of course, Nanny. Today, in my house off the Little Boltons with the studio used by Millais, I have only Mrs Evans and a daily, although, thank heaven, I am not poor.
Wednesday, 24 April
Reception at the Italian Embassy for their visiting PM, a dapper little man who looked like the maître d' in an inferior restaurant. I suppose I'd been asked because I'd written an article about Etruscan figurines for The Connoisseur last January. It caused quite a stir among the cognoscenti and at Sylvia Benedict's a month ago the Cultural Attaché at the Italian Embassy complimented me.
Amid the scrum I ran into Emerald Cunliffe, her lips as scarlet as a Rank starlet's in a Forties movie. She said she was just back from spending Easter with Franco and Serena Pallocinni in Umbria. Such dears, she said, sighing. As though I didn't know that she's been sleeping with Franco for years. Or rather, was. I'm told she's switched to the new Italian ambassador who arrived a month ago. But perhaps she's enjoying both at the same time? Her appetite is insatiable.
I have known her since she was a child when I was at Balliol with her much older half-brother, Bolton. She was then a scrubby little girl with braces on her teeth and from that moment for some reason she made me her confidant. I've seen her through affairs without number and through her marriage to the wretched Willie, whom she killed through sheer exhaustion. Now in her late forties, she is still remarkably handsome under the layer of paint – and still indomitable in her lusts. Or passions, as she would term them. But her skin is turning leathery – light tan colour under the powder – and her mouth much puckered, the result of her annual ‘lift'. But I am fond of her. Gallant is how I think of her.
While we were talking, or rather she was talking, I saw the dark head and face of Tancred. He was talking to a tall, fleshy man with a sensuous mouth. At first I couldn't place him. Then I remembered. Oscar Sleaven, the billionaire head of a vast manufacturing and property empire, one of whose companies, incidentally, pulled down the houses next to me and developed the site as a block of luxury flats. During the rebuilding I wrote, complaining about the noise and the dust, and received a very cool reply from a firm of lawyers called Levitt and Sleaven. The Sleaven is, I assume, some relation of Oscar Sleaven. I wrote again but got no reply. Typical!
On my way out of the Embassy I ran into the young George Templeton, looking very bronzed and athletic. Why was this young man invited? For the Ambassadress?
Friday, 3 May
Kitty McClaren is in trouble! At least, his government is. If it falls he would be stripped of his official car and Diary Secretary – and I should lose a source of amusing gossip. Apparently the son of Kitty's friend, the PM who takes him up to the flat in No. 10 and feeds him whisky, has been involved in some trade machinations in Japan and the Opposition are alleging improper influence for personal gain. The newspapers, especially the News and the Telegram, are full of it. There is to be a motion of censure next week. I tried to get hold of Kitty – to gloat, I'm afraid – but he's gone to ground. Anyhow, I never got further than the superior young man in his Private Office. If the government falls and Kitty leaves office, and I lose what access to the few crumbs of insider gossip that Kitty condescended to fling me, I shan't be too sorry, for Kitty has been corrupted – by the little power that the modern politician enjoys. He has become conceited to compensate, I suppose, for his loss of hair and swelling waistline. When we lunched together I sensed that he had coarsened. It is odd that political power, so transient and meretricious, can turn the head of even so basically harmless a creature as Kitty. Of course, he was always weak. It is his charm that got him where he is.
Thursday, 16 May
Dinner at Sylvia Benedict's. Another female sexual athlete to whom I am also close, a great friend of Emerald Cunliffe. They hunt in pairs, searching out their prey.
But I had quite a shock when I entered the salon: Mordecai Ledbury, sitting in a chair, looking as ugly as sin, his two sticks obscenely poking up between his legs, talking to a woman I didn't know but who seemed oddly taken by him. I have heard it said that, despite his hideous appearance, some women actually like him! Why I cannot imagine. It is rare to see him in society, so how dare Sylvia invite him! She should know what her friends think of him. Fortunately it was a large party and I managed to avoid him.
Royalty was present – but I was not presented, which was rude of Sylvia. Food as inferior as ever. On my left, Sylvia's daughter-in-in-law, the wife of the young earl. She talked about children and the school run. To me, of all people! As though I could conceivably be interested. I endured her, just, through the fish and when the overdone tournedos arrived I turned thankfully to the woman on my right – handsome, with masculine features, a creamy white skin and a mole beside her mouth. She seemed to think I should know who she was but I didn't. After some fencing I discovered she was a journalist, Julia Priest, who has a column in Ogilvy Grant's Telegram and does political ‘pieces' on TV. She seemed very taken by some woman minister in the government called, I think, Patsy Something who, the journalist said, wrote poetry. She waxed quite enthusiastic about this political poetess. Both Sapphics, I assume. She enquired if I knew any of the Ministry. I said only Peregrine McClaren – and Tancred slightly, once upon a time. I hadn't seen anything of him for some years. She asked what I thought of Tancred. He's said to be very able, I said. And honest? I suppose so, I replied flatly. But I did not say it convincingly. I kept thinking of seeing him talking with the vile, unspeakable Sleaven. Radical? she asked. No, said I, not radical. Promiscuous? I don't think so, I replied. Celibate, monklike, I have been told.
After dinner I was cornered by Emerald until the odious Digby Price, the proprietor of the other newspaper group, News Universal, joined us. He ignored me and talked to her in his grating South African accent. He lives in Paris with, I believe, some Hungarian woman. But he changes his women as often as he changes his vulgar ties and I am told that the Hungarian is on her way out.
I moved on and talked a little with Sylvia and a military man with a military moustache whose name I did not catch. I assumed they were lovers. Or had been lovers for, like Emerald, she changes her men so often that the body language may only have been a farewell salute – to a former love. What she could see in the stupid fellow I do not understand.
Later Kitty arrived from the House, jubilant. He said the motion of censure had been easily defeated, the government won the vote – and the debate. The Opposition had been crushed. Tancred had made a brilliant speech, without a note, defending the PM. ‘He's a clever devil,' Kitty said proudly. But is he honest? I thought to myself, echoing the woman journalist as again I thought of his intimacy with Oscar Sleaven. However, I said nothing. Kitty looked so pleased with himself. He was almost affectionate. So my small window into the shabby world of politics remains ajar.
Saturday, 1 June to Sunday, 2 June
On the Saturday morning I drove to Wainscott for a weekend with Sylvia and arrived just before lunch. A large house party including a charming and handsome young actor called Job Streatley and, to my surprise, Tancred. Later, to my increased surprise, the awful Oscar Sleaven and his wife Ethel arrived. After luncheon I noted that the young actor was in the garden alone so I joined him. He said his ambition was to play Richard II at the National. I told him he'd make an excellent Richard. He took me by the arm. ‘Do you really think so?' he said. I was quite affected.
After changing for dinner I came across Tancred with Oscar Sleaven, both as yet unchanged, in the library. Tancred had a sheet of paper in his hand. When they saw me Sleaven said, ‘We must be late' and they hurried off to change. As they passed I couldn't resist saying to Sleaven, ‘How's business?' He smiled, or rather leered, but said nothing. Tancred yet again with Oscar Sleaven! Why? What have they in common? What are they up to?
At dinner I was next to Henrietta Plaistow. She is the kind of Englishwoman who doesn't bathe sufficiently and it is noticeable. Like Sylvia and Emerald, she is voracious sexually. How her lovers stand the body odour I cannot imagine.
Next morning, just before lunch, Tancred and Sleaven came in – from a stroll, they said.
Emerald brought over her house party from The Waves for lunch. The Italian Ambassador, of course, and his wife; the journalist Julia Priest and another woman of about forty with short hair and a clever, interesting face. I sat next to her. She said she had been a don at Cambridge but was now in the Lords and the Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office. Not many decades ago, I thought, she'd have had the Metropolitan Police enquiring into my then illegal activities. Not that there's any activity now!
I asked if she had much to do with Perry McClaren and she said she did. She found him very agreeable. Trust Kitty, I thought. What exactly is Tancred's post in the Ministry? I asked. He's Minister for Defence Procurement, she said briskly, and in charge of defence exports. Is that, I thought, Sleaven's interest? Is that why the pair are so intimate?
While we talked I saw Julia Priest looking at us across the table and smiling. So my luncheon neighbour must be the Patsy of whom the journalist had spoken so fondly at Sylvia's dinner party. An improbable poetess, I thought. But then, lovers rarely see the beloved as he or she really is.
In the afternoon I overheard Job tell Sylvia that he had to get back to London for an interview with a producer. I pretended I had a dinner engagement and gave him a lift.
2 July
Some weeks ago I accepted an invitation to dine at the Inner Temple with my brother-in-law, Henry Baines, at one of their Private Guest Nights, black tie.
Henry is a bore, a Chancery Judge, very much the Learned Friend, but he was kind to my disagreeable sister Eileen who died two years ago after twenty years of marriage. How they tolerated each other I never understood but they seemed reasonably content and, to give Henry his due, he was bereft after her death. I do not willingly endure the company of lawyers but I feel obligated to dine with him from time to time.
Quite an interesting collection of guests. Tancred was one, the guest of the Lord Chief Justice who, I later noticed, is very fond of port. Henry introduced me to a youngish middle-aged man who, Henry said, wanted to meet me. He had apparently read my small book on fourteenth-century Chinese porcelain and shared my enthusiasm. He was very complimentary but, I thought, oleaginous. At dinner Henry told me he was the solicitor, Sebastian Sleaven, younger brother of Oscar. His must have been the firm that wrote such a disagreeable reply when I complained about the noise and dirt when they were building next to me. I imagine he's as sharp as his brother, although not so gross. He has not his brother's sensual mouth. He looked, indeed, the kind of lawyer you need if you are really in trouble.
Before this conversation I had an unpleasant shock. Ledbury again! I've now seen him three times in the past month. Of course, I should have anticipated that he would be there. After all, it is from the Temple that he makes his forays to bully people in the Law Courts. Yet somehow it had not occurred to me that he would be. I'd been too busy gloomily contemplating the company of my brother-in-law. Fortunately Ledbury was in a corner of the room; sitting as usual, making the most of his disability while everyone else was standing. I prayed I would not be near him at dinner. As it happened I was not but I could see him for he was further down the table on the opposite side. With his twisted face and humpback he looks what he is – a monster. He was drinking, I noticed, none of the excellent white burgundy or claret but champagne from a silver tankard and eating very little. Next to him was a severe-looking, rather prim woman in her early fifties. At first I saw her looking at him with distaste. I sympathised, but later I noticed she was smiling as though she were enjoying herself. Why? What could there be to smile about in the company of that brute? I asked Henry who she was. ‘A new judge,' he replied. ‘Mordecai only takes trouble with the women judges, never the men.'
I snorted.
We retired to another room for dessert. Candlelight and port, and puerile legal anecdotes. I saw Tancred talking with the smooth lawyer, the younger Sleaven. He is certainly very close to that family.
I managed to get away at half past ten, exhausted.
3 July
I had a bad night after the dinner in the Temple. Severe pains on my way home in the taxi. The food? I wondered. But I knew it was not. When I got home I didn't trouble Job. I looked into his room. He was asleep, on his back, his head on his arm, looking suspiciously innocent. He's not often in the house. He's usually in the studio annexe where he takes his friends.
At about midnight I began to feel seriously ill. The attack was bad, worse than ever before. I grew increasingly worried. I really must see Peter Webster. He's an excellent doctor but when I consult him he gives me the impression that he rather enjoys my ailments. He says they're always so interesting. But these attacks, I know now, are serious. However, I'm such a coward I don't think I shall see him – not yet. Not until I must. I don't want to know the worst, if the worst it is. It's surely better not to know, not to have formal sentence pronounced. If these attacks signal the approaching end, it is better to go suddenly rather than waste away, poisoned by drugs – which, I understand, make your hair fall out – a humiliation I could not bear. I'd prefer to go suddenly rather than drift off into senility.
Looking back over my life, as I do now more and more frequently, I am struck by how pointless and useless it has been. I've made no stir in the world, even in the world of the collectors of ‘virtu'. Who will remember Francis Richmond for his two slight volumes, his minuscule success as a minor scholar and writer? Never.
4 July
I am feeling better today but I have resolved to take it more quietly for the rest of the summer. This last attack has given me a nasty turn. I ought to get away and fortuitously this afternoon I had a letter from Dolly Partiger in New York, inviting me to stay at Euston Farm at Oldhaven in New England in the first week in August. I think I shall go. I like Oldhaven, with its ‘Robber Baron' palaces and their turn-of-the-century opulence – although the ‘cottages', as they call the vast Edwardian mansions, have now mainly been turned into apartments. But not Euston Farm. That remains, an enclave outside the suburban quaintness of the town, an enchanting house, a little inland, set in proper grounds, unlike the meagre strips around the palaces nearer to the ocean. And I like Dolly. She's kind – vulgar, of course, but hospitable in the way that only Americans are – and I like her house, which is comfortable in the way only American houses are. I expect she'll have the usual stagy crowd down from New York, actors and songwriters and so on. They are always amusing and it might help Job to meet them. But I'm afraid he won't come. He's not very kind to me.
15 July
As I thought, Job won't come to Oldhaven. He says he'll be on tour. He has a small part in an Ayckbourn play. Silly boy!
Euston Farm. 6 August
I haven't written this journal for several weeks for I had little to write about in London in July. I thought I should abandon the Season on account of my health, except for special occasions with special friends. So there has been little to record. Except that one day about a fortnight ago I had a curious sighting. It was lunchtime and I took myself to the Tate, and in a distant corner of the room with the Impressionists I saw Tancred and that gross Oscar Sleaven, once again engaged in intense conversation. Then I watched them part, Sleaven looking about him furtively as they wandered around separately, pretending to look at the pictures before they separately disappeared. How odd, I thought, to see Tancred at a gallery. Tancred was never a man for art or culture. On the other hand, a gallery or a museum is a convenient place for a discreet meeting. In my day it certainly was for lovers. But this was no lovers' meeting. What can they be up to? The Minister and the industrialist talking so secretively?
Anyhow, here I am at Euston Farm, in my attractive room overlooking a meadow and I am enjoying my visit. I needed a change of scene, even if the scene here is a little too social for my present comfort. Clarissa Stoneley, by origin from Alabama and more recently the relict of Jimmy, the Duke of Midhurst's younger brother, is here with her lover, a Latin who looks and probably is a gigolo from Rio, much younger than the ancient Clarissa who is certainly making an exhibition of herself. But either she doesn't know it or doesn't care. Apparently they are living in a suite at the Westbury in New York. The gigolo, incidentally, is barely polite to me.
None of Dolly's usual Broadway/Los Angeles set in the party, so Job is missing nothing. Lester Chaffin arrived this morning. He's a senator from one of the mid-west states and Dolly says he's tipped to be the new Under-Secretary at Defence. She also told me, to my surprise, that she's expecting Tancred tomorrow evening on his way home from some ministerial meeting in Washington. He's only staying two days but Dolly is determined to take him to the ball at the Ivory House on Wednesday evening. I don't know the Ivory House, the former home of the Van Mortens. It is said to be one of the marvels of Oldhaven. I shall be interested to see it decked out for a ball. At the beach I sit in my panama hat at a table under the awning amid a group of the elderly, listening to their gossip about the young while my companions drink innumerable vodkas on the rocks and I eat a tasteless salad and sip iced tea. There are some very leggy young wives, who wander into the bar after playing extremely energetic tennis, sweating and rubbing their noses – while their precocious children run around whining and getting under our feet. Clarissa says that when the parents have lunch, the children, even those aged eight or nine, meet behind the clubhouse and smoke marijuana! One young woman, a friend of Dolly's who seemed to keep herself rather apart from the others, came and sat with us for a time. She's a good-mannered, good-looking young woman. She told me she's visiting an aunt who lives in Oldhaven. She volunteered to get me another glass of iced tea, and went all the way to the bar and brought it to me. She tells me she has no husband. I like her.
8 August
I am completely done up from last evening. I had a bad attack, violent pain, and I was brought home soon after one o'clock by the young woman I had met at the beach in the afternoon. I was on the point, I thought, of death.
But the ball in that extraordinary, fin de siècle house had been a splendid spectacle. Enormous late-Victorian rooms, swathed in flowers specially flown from Colombia. Drink, of course, flowed but the young nowadays don't seem to get as intoxicated as we did in my youth. Perhaps they are all on cocaine? Or heroin. The music, as always in the States, catchy and tuneful – until later in the evening when it became too noisy. I had a dance with Dolly, which was constantly interrupted by her irritating habit of greeting and embracing everyone on the dance floor. I was glad when she led me back to the table that our elderly group had commandeered. She then demanded that the band play ‘Hello, Dolly' and danced it like a dervish with Clarissa's gigolo, much to Clarissa's annoyance. She made a complete exhibition of herself.
Tancred had arrived in the morning. He greeted me, as I would expect, rather coolly. At the ball he didn't dance. He was unchanged, which was remarked upon critically. Dolly had to explain he'd flown straight from Washington and meetings with the administration, and had no dinner jacket. He did not come to the beach but spent most of the day talking with Chaffin. I suppose this was the reason he'd come; not to see Dolly, as she thought. I remembered what Kitty had said about Tancred's drinking but I saw that he was drinking little. Kitty, I suppose, being catty – like all politicians.
At about half past midnight I had gone to the loo. There was a cord across the bottom of the great stairs in the hall to show that upstairs was out of bounds, but so taken was I by the magnificent vulgarity of this extraordinary house that I thought I'd like to see more of it. No one was about, so I unhooked the cord and went up the great staircase. I proceeded with great caution, in case any of the upstairs rooms was occupied and I opened each door very quietly, so that I could peer inside. One, leading off the landing at the top of the stairs, opened on to a sitting room or library, very dimly lit with an open french window on to a veranda. I could smell the scent and indeed see the plumes of smoke from expensive Havanas and made out the backs of the heads of three men sitting and talking on the veranda. One of the voices I recognised. It was Tancred's. I heard him saying that the Prime Minister, whom he had defended so stoutly in the House in May, was of course a complete fraud, very manipulative, playing off his ministers one against another. There followed some talk about him and then I heard an English voice, I thought it was, saying, ‘He's had a mistress for years, someone in his constituency.' Another said that the President should be careful. He shouldn't treat the PM as too close a friend. He doesn't, said an American voice. Tancred then went on to say he didn't intend to stay long in politics. He needed money. He'd only gone into politics to get the chance of making some, either while he was a minister or after he'd left the Ministry through the connections he'd made while in government. The American voice then said quietly, ‘We must see what we can do.'
As this was said I thought of Tancred and Oscar Sleaven, but I heard a chair being pushed back on the veranda so I slipped out, closing the door silently, not feeling guilty at having eavesdropped but fearful in case I was discovered. Perhaps it was this anxiety that led to what followed next.
As I came down the stairs, I suddenly had a violent attack, piercing stabs of pain in the chest. I had to clutch the banister to prevent myself from falling. It was very hot and I began to pour with sweat. Somehow I managed to get down and I found a chair in one of the rooms off the dance floor. I was feeling very dizzy and faint, and was leaning forward, my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, when I heard a voice. I looked through my hands and saw kneeling in front of me the young woman I had met at the beach and who had brought me the iced tea. She asked if I was all right and I said yes but that I ought to go home. ‘I'm not drunk,' I added.
‘Of course not,' she replied and asked if she should fetch Mrs Partiger. I said no but I would be very grateful if she could help me call a taxi to take me back to Euston Farm.
‘I'll take you,' she replied. She took my arm, led me to the hall, sat me down and told the parking attendants to bring round her car. I suppose the servants and some of the guests who were in the hall thought I had drunk too much. Her car, when it came, was a small open tourer and the drive, with the cool air round my head, made me feel better. I said I was sorry to have taken her from the party but she said no, she was glad to leave. She said that as a child she'd often visited at Oldhaven but she preferred the winters when the place was empty. She remembered Christmases, with the houses and gardens decorated by lights and snow on the rocks. She said Dolly Partiger had been very kind to her when she was growing up. She knew most of the people at the dance but they were all much richer than she, married to Wall Street brokers. She said she lived in the Village in New York. She'd like to come to Europe next year to paint in London or Paris but she doubted she had the money.
When we got to Euston Farm she asked if she should help me to my room but I said no as I was feeling a little better. She helped me up the steps and at the front door she suddenly leant up and kissed me on the cheek. I was quite touched. I got to bed but didn't sleep much. I thought of the young woman's kindness. I hope she's a good painter.
9 August
I am still not feeling at all well. I should never have gone to that dance. It was too much for me. Today I declined going with the others to the beach for lunch and sta