The Wardrobe Mistress Read online

  ‘What’s the book?’ she whispered to a woman next to her.

  The woman was heavily made-up and swathed in chocolate brown fur. She glanced down at Vanessa, her leaded eyelashes fluttering. ‘The Complete Works, of course. Who are you, a niece or something?’

  Vanessa ducked the question. ‘Complete works of . . . ?’

  ‘Shakespeare, who else? I’m sure we’ve met. Where would that be?’

  Vanessa shook her head, and skirted around the crowd to get closer to the graveside. Where was her mother and her dad’s friends? He’d had friends, surely? They weren’t here, at any rate. This was a gathering of strangers. Most of the women wore furs and hats like black butterfly cakes. One or two of the men wore fur too. Nearly all wore silk scarves. Edwardian echoes.

  You’ve messed up, Kingcourt. She’d have crept away had not her eye alighted on a man whose outer garment made her heart stutter. It was a black cloak, one side dandily turned back on itself to reveal a crimson silk lining. He wore a felt hat pulled forward. She gasped, ‘Dad?’

  People turned. The man turned. He was young, with light brown hair greased flat against his neck. Why wasn’t he in uniform, a man of his age? And were black cloaks fashionable London-wear these days? She itched to know if this one smelled of cigars and bay rum. But somebody stepped between them and Vanessa was confronted with a different pair of shoulders. Navy blue shoulders, an athletic neck above a white collar. Her naval officer. He was wearing his cap and his white-gloved hands were loosely clasped behind his back.

  He’ll suppose I’ve stuck to him, like chewing gum.

  The coffin was placed on the grass by the grave. Mourners surged forward, pushing Vanessa along with them. She felt her balance go and grabbed at the nearest support – the half-belt of a Navy frock coat.

  Her officer turned. Vanessa heard him say, ‘You?’ but by now she was on her backside, on the ground. She held out her hands and he pulled her up.

  His coat was closed with eight brass buttons, with ribbons and orders to the left lapel. The leaves and crown on his cap were gold bullion, the anchor worked in silver. This wasn’t any old officer. The three cuff rings marked him out as a commander. Captain of a vessel? Had she run into him visiting her base or on board his ship, she’d have saluted.

  He looked at her as he might at a coffee stain on an otherwise pristine cloth. ‘Do we really belong to the same funeral?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whose is it?’

  ‘Mr Wilton Bovary’s. Did you know him? He is – was – an actor and theatre impresario.’

  ‘I never met him,’ she said miserably.

  The officer’s voice gained a rasp of distaste. ‘Not a sightseer, are you?’

  ‘Here for fun? Believe me, no.’ She wanted to rub her bruised backside but her well-trained body insisted on standing to attention. ‘I’m looking for the “London parishes” bit of the cemetery.’

  ‘This is the actors’ corner.’

  ‘Then I’m in the right place, but it’s the wrong man.’

  The young man in the cloak turned at this moment, making a ‘shush’ motion. He’d pushed his hat back, revealing that he was good-looking in a full-lipped way. A Roman nose kept him from effeminacy but his light-brown eyes held a sulky expression. Extinct acne craters hinted at a troubled adolescence. He drawled, ‘Artistes are buried on Sunday, as are those of a more ordinary caste.’ He pointed toward a path leading away through a spinney. ‘Cut-price burials that way.’

  ‘You’ve a vicious tongue, Edwin.’ For the first time, Vanessa’s officer showed warmth. ‘The best tribute to pay Bo would be to imitate his kindness.’

  ‘I never imitate and kindness is for fools. And don’t patronise me, Commander. I’m Wilton Bovary’s heir. What are you, exactly?’

  ‘Twice your size, and his godson, so shut up.’

  The young man shrugged, then scraped Vanessa again with his eyes. ‘Couldn’t you put on your best blues, dear?’

  This Edwin was ‘a cocky little snot’ as Joanne Sayer, her best friend at base, would phrase it. What he couldn’t know was that in spite of being small and wrapped in apology, Vanessa Kingcourt grew steelier the deeper you dug. She said quietly, ‘You won’t mind me asking which of the services you’re in?’

  The scarred cheeks reddened. ‘Flaming gall! Who are you? Have we met?’

  ‘Never.’ She leaned towards him and inhaled the tang of tobacco and bay oil. ‘But I know that garment, gentle nymph.’

  The young man’s mouth twitched into a strange shape before he hurried away.

  The man referred to as ‘Commander’ said heavily, ‘I apologise. In my opinion, snobbery is the last resort of an empty mind.’

  ‘You don’t have to stand up for me, sir. I know I’m a mess.’ Vanessa had left Banff in a tearing hurry, only throwing bare essentials into her bag. No eye makeup, no eyebrow pencil. Nothing to sustain vanity or protect her skin from the chill. She guessed her face was bluish with unnaturally rosy cheeks. ‘I’m sorry to have intruded.’

  Cutting through trees, following cocky Edwin’s directions, she emerged into a sweep of ground devoid of headstones.

  A little way off, three figures stood by an open grave. Two graveyard workers in mufflers and flat caps waited nearby with shovels. Vanessa knew she’d finally located the right funeral.

  Chapter 3

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mum, I got lost.’ Vanessa took her place next to the woman in a slab-grey hat and raincoat and forced herself to look at the pine coffin at the grave’s edge.

  Welcome to third class, for cut-price burials.

  There was no priest and the man and woman standing a respectful pace behind Vanessa’s mother, were strangers. Strangers to Vanessa, anyway. The man nodded when he met her eye. He looked to be seventy or thereabouts, broad-faced with a heavy serving of jowl. Tufts of grey hair above his ears suggested a neglectful barber. His black, discreetly mended suit matched the worn bowler hat in his hands.

  His companion was about the same age as Vanessa’s mother. She wore a long coat that reminded Vanessa of pictures of her grandmother and great aunts. A black shawl enveloped her head like a mantilla, secured under her chin by an enamel brooch that gleamed like a jewel in a coal scuttle. At first, Vanessa thought she was seeing the woman in profile but no, there was a missing side to her face. The ‘good’ side showed that she must once have been handsome. The left portion was crushed inward and tram-tracked with burns. A horrifying mess. Vanessa looked away, confused by the interest that flared in one dark, undamaged eye.

  ‘Who are those two?’ she whispered to her mother. This was their first meeting in four-and-a-half years. Vanessa’s postings since 1940 had been too distant for home visits.

  ‘Shush. Friends of Clive’s, they said. Except they call him “Johnny”.’

  ‘Stage friends, then. I won’t forgive myself for missing the ceremony.’

  ‘You didn’t miss much. Whoever paid for this kept it plain and simple.’

  ‘Who has paid?’

  ‘The theatre he was working at. The vicar’s fee, the coffin, everything. Now shush!’

  The workmen lowered the coffin with the aid of ropes. Vanessa heard it bump on the bottom of the pit; they’d let go too soon. The men glanced towards Vanessa’s mother as if to say, ‘That’s your lot, Missus.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have brought flowers?’ Vanessa asked.

  ‘February.’ Ruth Quinnell had a ‘no-waste’ rule when it came to words.

  ‘I don’t mean florists’ blooms. A bunch of Christmas roses . . . the Hellebores must be out at the front of the cottage by now.’

  ‘Not this year. I can’t garden as I used to. I’m not getting younger.’ Ruth unlinked her arm from Vanessa’s. ‘Nine o’clock start, my telegram said.’

  She’s already edging away, Vanessa thought. As a child, she’d been afraid of her mother. Never a patient woman, her husband’s desertion had sharpened Ruth’s temper and made her hands itchy. Growing up, Vanessa h
ad fantasised about her dad swooping in and fetching her away from Stanshurst. She’d imagined them together in a garret, he acting, she helping out in the wardrobe room . . .

  Things had improved when Vanessa joined the school sixth form and taken a Saturday job in a Hayes greengrocer’s shop. Ruth had mellowed as if Vanessa’s accession to adulthood had removed a splinter or turned off a maddening background noise. Ruth had even occasionally called her ‘dear’. They’d do puzzles together in front of the fire, go for walks. But when Vanessa announced her plan to go to London and art school, the ‘off switch’ had flicked back.

  ‘Just like him, leaving me for The Smoke.’

  Ruth had greeted her daughter’s reappearance in uniform with studied lack of interest: ‘You should have gone for nursing. Nurses are useful. What does the Air Force want girls for?’

  Vanessa’s hasty marriage had widened the rift. ‘Who is he? What d’you know of him?’

  As for her brutal tumble into widowhood . . . Silence. No questions, no sympathy.

  Vanessa wanted badly to cry right now but a glance showed no similar gleam in Ruth’s eyes. If she’d imagined her dad’s death would bring them together, she must think again. ‘There will be a headstone, won’t there?’

  In answer, Ruth gestured at the flat campus, where graves showed as unmarked hummocks. Early snowdrops and yellow, inch-high aconites were the only break in uniformity. ‘This is what a person gets when they don’t put anything by or plan for the future. When they give up an honest job for a life of self-indulgence.’

  Vanessa sighed. The men clearly wanted to begin shovelling dirt on the coffin. It must have been back-breaking, digging this earth. ‘Are we going to leave without saying anything?’

  ‘Say a prayer if you want to but be quick. I’m half perished.’

  A prayer. Or maybe a line from a play . . . But all that came were the most inappropriate words imaginable: ‘We may save Briar-Rose from doom, if with noise we fill this room!’

  She turned towards the strangers, thinking that perhaps one of them might have a memorised line – but they had gone.

  The men picked up their shovels. A moment later, the skittering of soil on wood signalled the ritual’s end. Ruth Quinnell turned to go, wordlessly inviting Vanessa to follow.

  ‘Not yet!’ Heedless of the frost, Vanessa snatched a handful of aconites and snowdrops. Gold and silver rained down like charity on the unadorned coffin. Too little, too late. She asked the gravediggers to give her five minutes, and they retreated.

  The coffin was of the cheapest, knotty pine. No gleam of a nameplate, just C J Q stencilled at one end. The red-lined cloak and dashing hat must have been to feign the appearance of success. ‘Oh, Dad.’ She’d had years in which to rediscover him and hadn’t bothered. Too angry. And now, too late.

  ‘Bye, Dad. You followed a dream. When this war finishes, I’ll move you to a more befitting corner, with a headstone.’ She dragged out her handkerchief. When the convulsion of grief was over, she looked around and found the woman in the long coat standing close by, watching her. ‘What’s your business?’ jerked in shock from Vanessa.

  The answer was unintelligible because the woman’s mouth was a mess of scarring. Vanessa had seen badly damaged men crawl out of planes. She’d seen burns a-plenty, but this woman’s flesh had been seared to the bones of her skull.

  The woman made a gesture and Vanessa realised that she was being asked to hold out her hand. Most reluctantly, she did so and cold metal was placed in her palm. A key, a slender spike of gold.

  ‘Yours – by right,’ the woman said hoarsely.

  ‘Mine? I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘Farren.’

  ‘Is that your name?’ Vanessa had heard of Nellie Farren, a burlesque actress of the late nineteenth century, but she was long dead, she was pretty sure. She tried to give back the key but the woman gestured in frustration.

  ‘Wardrobe – hair ribbon. Child.’

  ‘You’re the lady at the theatre! You’re . . .’ the name shied off her tongue. Vanessa remembered ebony plaits, and the hair-ribbon the woman had tied into her own curls. Sea green. What had become of it? ‘Sleeping Beauty, Christmas. My father took me to meet you.’

  A disturbing meeting. Ink on her fingers.

  The woman replied by stroking Vanessa’s cheek. Ignoring Vanessa’s horrified start, she pointed to the grave and made a dumb show of ripping out her heart and throwing it to the ground.

  A memory sprung at Vanessa, of a beautiful woman declaring, ‘You tore out my heart, Johnny.’ This woman had loved her father. Loved him still. ‘Eva! Your name’s Eva!’ It popped out, like a ripe pea from a pod. ‘Did he abandon you too?’

  The woman rasped, ‘Johnny followed money.’

  ‘What money?’ Vanessa gestured to the grave. ‘And please, his proper name was Clive.’

  ‘Must go back.’

  Vanessa looked past the woman, hoping to see the man with the bowler hat. ‘Is your companion waiting?’

  Wrong question, said the woman’s ferocious gesture. ‘You go back. Farren.’

  ‘Never.’ Vanessa turned away, thinking that Eva of all people should know you can never go back. When she finally garnered the courage to face Eva again, she was alone but for the gravediggers wanting to resume their work. ‘Where did that lady go?’

  The elder of the two pointed towards the path Vanessa had come down earlier. ‘Back to her cave, I should say. I wouldn’t bother chasing her. This place is a wilderness if you don’t know your way about.’

  ‘She gave me this,’ Vanessa said weakly, holding up the key. ‘I don’t want it.’

  The man looked at it and grunted. ‘Looks like proper gold. Hang on to it, sweetheart. It might unlock a treasure chest.’ He looked down into Johnny Quinnell’s grave. ‘I don’t suppose he left you much, did he?’

  Vanessa found her mother at the pillared gates on Bagshot Road. Cars lined the kerb – private vehicles, a rare sight. Some people evidently had access to fuel. The mourners who’d been at the wealthy actor’s graveside massed in small groups. A woman’s confident voice rang out: ‘I shall ride back in the Riley with Miss Shadwell and Miss Eddrich. See how I sacrifice my comfort, Patrick, so you may go in the Minx? Your legs are long, like George Washington’s.’

  ‘Abraham Lincoln’s, I imagine you mean. Thank you, Noreen, but your sacrifice is not necessary. I shall ride in the Continental. We’re giving the Commander a lift into London.’

  Patrick, author of the resonant jibe, had fair-to-grey hair, worn a little longer than convention. He reminded Vanessa of the actor Leslie Howard, to whom she’d lost her heart in a country town cinema in ’43, thanks to the US Airforce. USAAF planes had imported movies like Gone with the Wind along with chocolate, gum and nylons. She’d preferred Ashley Wilkes to Rhett Butler. She had a weakness for fair men. ‘Patrick’ was tall and slim. He wore a rakish Homburg hat.

  The woman trying to organise his journey was the one who’d earlier insisted that she knew Vanessa and once again, she wasn’t giving up so easily. ‘Impossible, Patrick dear. I’m taking the Commander back with me!’

  ‘Not a chance, Noreen. It’s all decided. See you at the wake.’

  Vanessa turned away, disturbed by her ability to be amused while her father’s body was even now being covered by stones and soil. She and her mother would take a bus to the railway station. For Vanessa, there was the pilgrimage back to Banff while Ruth would head home to Stanshurst.

  ‘Can I arrange a lift for you?’

  Vanessa jumped, though she was growing familiar with this imperious voice. Looking up into the solemn face, she thought, He’s handsome, but not in a comfortable way. I like how his cap squares off his face.

  She looked down, afraid her eyes were bleary with crying. ‘No, thanks. I’m with my mother.’

  ‘We can find space for two. Our car convoy will pass the station, if you’re going back that way.’

  ‘Yes, but . . 
.’ her mother was already at the bus stop on the opposite side of the road. How to explain that the company of actors was anathema to Ruth? ‘Rotten, stuck-up theatrical types’ was Ruth’s kindest epithet for them. Actually, Vanessa thought, I don’t want to ride in an expensive car either, leaving my dad in a pauper’s plot. ‘I hate imposing on strangers.’

  A smile moved the forbidding lips. ‘If you ask me, they’re the best people of all to impose on. Once you say goodbye, you never have to express gratitude again. Don’t freeze for the sake of good manners. You can squeeze into one of the vehicles bringing up the rear.’

  She knew he meant no insult, but it was sounding more and more like crumbs from the well-spread table. ‘As I said before, sir, I hate imposing.’

  ‘It isn’t imposing while you’re in uniform. Compassionate leave, I take it?’ He answered himself with a nod. ‘Where are you based?’

  ‘RAF Banff, on the—’

  ‘Moray Firth. I know it, though from offshore rather than land-side. You’ve come a long way.’ He swept a hand towards his fellow mourners. He’d changed back into brown leather gloves. ‘These people can put themselves out for you.’

  ‘But not for my mother. And really –’ emotion was working its way to the surface. He’d seen through her stubborn refusal, had unbent a little . . . sympathy was a killer. ‘A car-ride will make the rest of my journey intolerable.’ Giving a sharp salute, she tried to go but his hand wrapped round the crook of her elbow.

  ‘Where are your gloves?’

  She looked at her blue-red fingers. ‘On a parcel shelf of the train I came down on. With a bit of luck, they’ll make their way to Lost Property.’

  Taking off his own supple tan pair, he enveloped her hands, passing on his blood heat. Her mind clogged with a profound sense of loss. Of missing something she’d never had. When she finally raised her eyes to his, her yearning slipped out. ‘I wish I could take you on my journey with me.’