Mariette nodded.
Lisette took Mariette’s hand in both of hers and squeezed it. ‘When you meet a man in secret, you only see what you want to see. You are often so caught up by the excitement and by the way he makes you feel, you don’t question anything, or look too closely. I have discovered the best way to find out how a man really is, is to watch him in the company of other people you know well. Both good and bad points become apparent then.’
‘But other people said how charming he was.’ Mariette felt that Lisette was dismissing Morgan out of hand. ‘You would too, if you met him.’
‘I hope so, ma chérie,’ Lisette smiled. ‘So when he is back in England, we invite him here. Yes?’
The first week of March was cold, with rain and strong winds, but the weather turned warmer in time for Mariette’s birthday, on the 8th. Suddenly there were swathes of daffodils in the parks and gardens, green buds on the trees, and Mariette understood why Mog had said England was beautiful in the spring.
Lisette and Noah gave her a beautiful silver locket for her birthday, with an inscription from them inside it. Rose gave her a fluffy stole, and a parcel came from home with a turquoise crêpe de Chine dress made by Mog, a white hat with a turquoise ribbon from her mother and, from her papa, a replica of his little fishing boat which he’d carved and painted himself. The name of the boat was Little Rebel, which made her eyes prickle with tears.
Lisette made a special birthday tea, including a cake with nineteen candles. After Mariette had blown out the candles, Rose announced they were going to be picked up later by Peter Hayes and taken dancing in Soho.
‘So you’d better put your glad rags on, Mari,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve been dying to wear that divine cream lace dress ever since you got here. Now’s your chance.’
Peter Hayes took Rose out quite often. She had confided in Mariette that he was the man she wanted to marry, but she played hard to get, often accepting dates with other male friends.
Mariette liked Peter, as did Lisette and Noah. He was twenty-eight, tall, with soft brown eyes. Although not exactly handsome, he was, as Rose described him, ‘presentable’ and a solicitor. Rose made much of him coming from a very good family, and she often spoke about their huge house out in Berkshire, but however much Rose made out that she was selecting him for his family and position, Mariette knew that wasn’t his only attraction. He was not only lively, intelligent, kind and generous, but sexy too.
Rose was a virgin and intended to stay that way until she married. But Mariette could see by the way her friend lit up in Peter’s company that she was itching to go to bed with him.
‘You’ll have a lovely time with Peter and Rose,’ Lisette assured her. ‘I know we can trust Peter to look after you. Now, run along and get ready.’
As the two girls went upstairs, Rose whispered, ‘Peter’s bringing a friend. I know you’ll like him. His name is Gerald Allsop; he’s younger than Peter but they went to the same school.’
‘Is he a solicitor too?’ Mariette asked.
‘No, not yet, he’s still doing his articles. I didn’t tell Mother and Father he would be with us because they would want to meet him and quiz him first. That’s a bit of an ordeal for anyone, they are so old-fashioned sometimes. So he’ll meet us there. But if you do like him and want to see him again, I’ll just tell them tomorrow that Peter introduced you to him, which is more or less the truth.’
‘Are you sure you want me coming along with you and Peter?’ Mariette asked. She was a little afraid Gerald would prove to be stuffy and earnest, and that Rose had only asked her to come with them tonight to stop Gerald being a gooseberry when she wanted to be alone with Peter.
‘Of course I do,’ said Rose, slipping her arm around Mariette’s waist. ‘You are nineteen now, quite old enough to be shown off, and I want to see if you remember all the dances I’ve taught you.’
‘You look an absolute picture!’ Noah exclaimed, when Mariette came into the sitting room with Rose an hour later.
Mariette blushed. She adored the cream lace dress; it had a silky underdress with shoestring straps and a low neckline, but the overdress had elbow-length sleeves and a higher neck, which resulted in a peek-a-boo effect with enough flesh showing through for glamour, but not enough to look common. The skirt was cut on the cross, so it clung to her hips and then flared out in handkerchief points that reached to mid-calf.
‘Perfect!’ Lisette clapped her hands in approval. ‘I always envied Belle having Mog to make her clothes; she is such a marvellous dressmaker.’ She took the new fluffy stole from Mariette’s hands and arranged it around her shoulders. ‘So chic and beautiful.’
‘You don’t think I ought to have put my hair up?’ Mariette asked. She had wanted to put it into a roll – a popular style amongst Rose’s friends – but her hair was too curly to stay in place, so she’d clipped it up on either side of her face with two little slides.
‘It would be criminal to hide that pretty hair,’ Noah said stoutly. ‘In my opinion, all women should have flowing locks until they are at least thirty.’
Lisette laughed. ‘He would still have me wearing mine loose and grey, if he had his way. But he is right about you, Mari, your hair is too pretty to put up.’
‘And you look beautiful too,’ Noah said to Rose. ‘I always like you in that dress.’
Rose was wearing a dropped-waist pale pink crêpe de Chine dress with panels of slightly darker pink embroidery. Mariette thought it a little old-fashioned, but it suited Rose as she was rather flat-chested. Her satin shoes had been dyed to match her dress, and she had a pink flower in her hair.
The doorbell rang.
‘That will be Peter,’ Rose said. ‘Come on, Mari, it’s time for dancing.’
‘Have a lovely evening,’ Lisette said. ‘But remember, not too late coming home.’
Mariette had heard Rose talk about Soho a great deal; her eyes lit up when she mentioned it. She said it was where all the fun people went for a daring night out, and the Bag O’Nails, where they were to celebrate Mariette’s birthday, was right at the centre of it.
The club was dark and smoky, and full to capacity. A five-piece band of black musicians were playing jazz, that wild music she’d heard before in Curaçao. As they squeezed through to a table reserved for them, Mariette could see by all the shining, rapt faces around her that she wasn’t alone in liking the music.
The dance floor was packed with energetic dancers, and it was a startlingly different scene to anything she’d imagined. Up until now, all the English people she’d met seemed very sedate, and so she expected people to be waltzing, or doing the quickstep, not throwing each other around as they were doing here. But the music made her want to lose all her inhibitions and dance like that too.
Gerald was waiting for them at the table. As he got up to be introduced to her by Peter, she knew immediately that he would never be able to make her heart race, however ‘suitable’ he might be as a boyfriend.
He was tall, slender and wore his dinner jacket with the confidence of a man born to it. He was, in his own way, attractive, with light brown well-cut hair, puppy-dog brown eyes and a bright smile. But the hand that shook hers was too smooth and soft, and his teeth were yellow and crooked.
Yet Gerald looked at her as if he’d just been offered a wonderful and unexpected gift, and Mariette assumed by this that he’d got the idea that all girls from New Zealand were bound to be as plain as a pikestaff.
A bottle of champagne was already chilling in an ice bucket on their table. Gerald filled their glasses and offered up a birthday toast to Mariette. ‘I’m told New Zealand is a very beautiful country,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘But I wasn’t told the girls there were beautiful too.’
Mariette had never had much opportunity to drink alcohol. On special occasions, since the age of around fourteen, her father would pour her a glass of wine, but he always topped it up with water. She’d had a few sneaky sips of brandy or whisky at friends’ houses, when their parents were out,
but although she liked the idea of drinking, she’d never liked the taste. But now she found she did like the taste of champagne, and the loosening-up effect it had on her.
‘Mother will never forgive me, if I take you home drunk,’ Rose said in warning. ‘So drink it slowly, and not too much.’
Mariette had to admit that Gerald was a perfect gentleman. And he was fun too, laughing readily, and all too willing to dance with her.
The music was too loud to have a conversation, and she didn’t want to talk anyway – not when she could dance and get swept away by the music. By the time the tempo slowed, she was feeling distinctly woozy from the drink, and it was lovely to be held in Gerald’s arms during the slower dances.
‘May I take you out again?’ he asked. ‘We could go to the theatre, or have dinner.’
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, leaning into his shoulder. ‘I’d like that very much.’
Then suddenly Rose said it was time to go. The last thing Mariette remembered thinking, as they left the club, was that if this was a taste of nightlife in London, she was never going back home.
11
As March turned into April, Mariette noticed that there was a great deal about the Spanish Civil War in the newspapers, but far less about a war with Germany. When people talked about the possibility, it was spoken of in such a light-hearted manner that it was hard to take the threat seriously. Even so, gas masks had been handed out to schoolchildren back in January, and each day there were more sandbags appearing in front of public buildings. People were told to stick tape to their windows in a criss-cross pattern, to avoid flying glass in the event of an air raid, and trenches were being dug in many parks to provide air-raid shelters.
But there was still no letter from Morgan.
Mariette veered from thinking it just took a long time for a letter written at sea to get to England, to being convinced he’d forgotten her the moment she left the ship. But letters from home reached her within eight weeks, and she asked herself why he would say he loved her and ask her to wait for him, if he hadn’t meant it.
She had begun her secretarial course at Marshalls Secretarial College for Young Ladies, at Swiss Cottage, at the end of March, which was a distraction from thinking about Morgan. On her first day at college, there had been a lot of talk about Hitler invading Austria. And almost every evening, when Mariette arrived home, Noah was either talking to people on the phone or on his way out to meet people to discuss what this might lead to.
At the end of April, Noah said that he wanted to go to Germany, to try to gauge the mood of the people there for himself. He said he’d been blinkered when he thought that war could be averted, and he now believed it was inevitable.
He left for Germany a week later, but when Belle and Etienne telephoned one evening during that time, she didn’t tell them where Noah had gone, or his opinion about the likelihood of war. As her parents could only ever talk for three minutes, because of the cost, Mariette filled the time with tales of what she’d seen or done, and asked about her brothers and Mog, anything rather than give her father an opportunity to ask leading questions. She knew if he found out Noah’s opinion had changed, he’d insist she book a passage on the next boat home, and that wasn’t what she wanted.
She missed her family more than she had expected to, but she loved being in England far more. She felt free here, people weren’t watching her every mood or judging her. Rose had become like an elder sister and friend rolled into one. Some evenings, she would put her latest record on the gramophone up in her bedroom, and she’d teach Mariette to dance. Other times, they went to the pictures or out roller skating. Rose was a bit bossy, and an awful snob sometimes, but that amused Mariette more than it offended her.
There were lots of evenings too when Rose went out without Mariette, to meet her friends alone. But that was fine with Mariette; there was the wireless to listen to, Lisette to talk to in French, and books to read.
She fitted in well at Marshalls Secretarial College too. None of the other girls had ever met someone from New Zealand before, and everyone wanted to be her friend. Shorthand seemed terribly difficult, but she really liked typing and was already one of the quickest in the class. She loved talking to the other girls in the lunch break; none of them were as narrow-minded and naive as the girls back home. She listened to them talking about the places they’d been, about their families and the young men they walked out with, and she felt she was learning more in a week than she would learn in a year in Russell.
But it was London that she had lost her heart to, and she didn’t want to leave. The city was beautiful and exciting, maybe a little dangerous, and she felt she belonged here.
Morgan was another reason why she didn’t want to leave. Just the thought of his lovemaking made her shiver and bubble, and she had to trust that he would write, and eventually come back to her. If she had to go home now, she would always wonder if he was truly ‘the One’.
Getting a typing and shorthand diploma would help her case to stay in England. Her parents would be proud of her. And if she found a job she loved, she didn’t think they’d insist on her returning home.
The night Noah returned from his ten-day trip to Germany was one Mariette felt she would never forget, because it brought home to her the reason why war was inevitable.
His expression had been grave enough to give them some inkling of his concerns. But the way he hugged each of them was evidence that he was afraid.
‘I didn’t like the look of things over there at all,’ he said over dinner. ‘Everyone seems to be in thrall to Hitler. While it’s true that he has brought Germany out of the Depression and created full employment again, he’s won his power by destroying or imprisoning anyone who opposes his ideals and methods.’
‘So you think there really will be a war?’ Lisette asked, her face stricken.
‘I have no doubt any longer.’ Noah shook his head sadly. ‘Chamberlain may be intent on appeasement, but Hitler’s Nazi party is all powerful, they will sweep away any opposition. They have Austria now, and Czechoslovakia – and who knows where else? They are victimizing Jews too. I spoke to a group on their way to Hamburg, hoping to get a passage to America. They were born in Germany, fought for their country in 1914, and yet they told me they would fear for their lives if they stayed.’
‘But why would Hitler do that?’ Mariette asked.
Noah sighed. ‘Hitler and his Nazi party appear to see the Jews as the worm in the apple. They blame them for the terrible inflation that began in 1929, and for just about everything else. In Berlin, I saw some old Jewish men being forced to get down on their knees and scrub the street. I couldn’t believe what I saw.’
‘That’s horrible, Daddy,’ Rose gasped. ‘Couldn’t you stop it?’
Noah looked at her and sighed. ‘How could I, when people all around me were laughing and jeering at those poor old men? I would have been lynched. I saw a rally where Hitler spoke to a vast crowd, thousands of people. I couldn’t understand much of what he said, but I saw a terrible fervour in the eyes of all his followers. They see him almost as a god, a leader who is going to give them back everything that was taken away from them in 1918.’
‘Don’t let’s speak of this any more tonight,’ Lisette begged him. ‘I find it frightening.’
A few days after Noah’s return from Germany, Mariette got her first letter from Morgan, posted in New Zealand. She was so excited, she thought her heart would burst. But as she read it, her heart sank because she could hardly believe it was Morgan who had written it. It was so badly scribbled – childish printing, terrible spelling, no punctuation – and there were no references to anything they’d talked about or shared when they were together.
He did say he loved her and couldn’t wait to see her again. He said too that his ship was undergoing some repairs, but he didn’t say how long this was going to take, not even when he expected to return. As he hadn’t dated the letter, and the postmark was too blurred to read the date, for all
she knew he could already be back in England by now.
She spent the next two or three days brooding on it and realized Morgan had obviously received little or no education. He had been vague about his upbringing and, apart from mentioning living in the East End for a time, he’d told her little else. But he was bright and articulate, so how could he write so badly?
Maybe being able to write a good letter wasn’t the be all and end all, but Mariette had been brought up to value the written word, and she felt very uncomfortable knowing that Morgan didn’t have such basic skills.
By the beginning of May, Mariette was doing so well at secretarial college that she was now the fastest typist in her class. Although she still had a way to go to be up to the eighty words a minute required to get her certificate, and she was still slow at shorthand, her teacher said she was nearly there.
Just a few days later, while Mariette was still in a rosy glow about her teacher’s encouraging comments, and imagining a bright future for herself, a letter came from Morgan. She hadn’t expected to hear from him again so soon, and it threw her into a tailspin.
He was in London, staying in Whitechapel, and he asked if she would meet him on Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square.
While her heart leapt involuntarily at the thought of seeing him again, she wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to meet him. It would be easy enough getting out on a Saturday afternoon – she could say she was going shopping with a friend from college and then going on to the cinema – but she didn’t want to deceive Noah and Lisette.
She’d discovered life was far easier with approval, and she was happy going to college and making friends with girls who were as well behaved as Rose. Her night out in Soho had shown her that she could have a wonderful time without being sneaky, or being expected to have sex.
Meeting Morgan would involve both things.
Just the previous day, Rose had been talking about one of her friends who had fallen for a man who was, as she put it, ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’.