In the beginning I gave Constance all those attributes I myself most secretly admired: I gave her black hair and dark-blue eyes and a fiery temperament. I gave her five gray Persian cats (I loved cats) and an Irish wolfhound. I made her a superlative horsewoman who rode sidesaddle to hounds. I let fall the fact that she ordered French scent in large flagons, lived at the top of one of the tallest towers in New York, overlooking the Statue of Liberty, ate roast beef three times a week, and insisted on Oxford marmalade for breakfast. All her clothes, right down to her underwear, came from Harrods.
“Harrods? Are you sure, Victoria?” Charlotte’s mother had been eavesdropping on these boasts avidly, but now she looked doubtful.
“Well, perhaps not
all of
them,” I said carefully, and cast about in my mind. I thought of my aunt Maud and her reminiscences. “I think sometimes … that she goes to Paris.”
“Oh, I feel sure she must. Schiaparelli, perhaps Chanel. There’s a picture I saw somewhere—Charlotte, where did I put that book?” Charlotte’s mother always called magazines “books,” and on that occasion a much-thumbed copy of
Vogue
was produced. It was two years old at least. There, in my trembling hands, was the first photograph of my godmother I had ever seen. Sleek, insolently chic, she was photographed at a London party in a group that included wicked Wallis Simpson, Conrad Vickers, and the then Prince of Wales. She was gesturing, so her hand obscured her face.
After that my lies became less pure. I had learned from that error about Harrods, and I trimmed my image of my godmother to suit the tastes of my audience. I gave Constance several motorcars (a touch of malice there, for none was a Rolls-Royce); I gave her a yacht, a permanent suite at the Ritz, a collection of yellow diamonds, crocodile-skin luggage, silk underwear, and intimate friendship with King Farouk.
I was learning fast, and most of these details I picked up either from Charlotte and her parents or from the fat and glossy magazines that lay scattered around their home—magazines that were never permitted at Winterscombe. I think I liked this Constance less than I did the Constance of her first incarnation, who lived in a tower and rode to hounds at full tilt. But my preferences were unimportant; I could see that these new details impressed my audience. When I mentioned the crocodile luggage Charlotte’s mother gave a sigh; she herself, she said in a wistful way, had admired something very similar, just the other day, at Asprey’s.
There were dangers—I could see that. Both Charlotte and her mother seemed alarmingly well informed about my godmother. They consumed gossip columns; they tossed the names of people my godmother seemed to know into their everyday conversation: “Lady Diana’s dress—what did you think, Mummy?” “Oh, a teensy bit dull, not up to her usual standards.” Did they
know
Lady Diana? I was never quite sure, but I sensed I must be careful. Was my godmother married, for instance? Could she conceivably have been divorced? If she was divorced, that might explain her fall from favor, for my mother was adamantly opposed to divorce. I had no way of knowing, but I suspected that both Charlotte and her parents might know. They also presumably knew—as I did not—why my godmother was rich, what she did, who her parents were, where she came from.
So I spun the tales of my fabled godmother, but I spun them more warily, avoiding all mention of husbands or antecedents. In return for my inventions I gleaned certain facts, which I squirreled away. I learned that my godmother had been born in England but was now a naturalized American citizen. I learned that she “did up” houses, although no one explained what this involved. I learned that she crossed the Atlantic as casually as the Channel, and adored Venice, which she visited every year. When there, she would stay nowhere but the Danieli.
“
Not
the Gritti. I told you, Harold.” We were sitting in their drawing room, on a shiny brocade sofa. Charlotte’s mother was drinking a martini in a frosted glass. She twirled the olive, set the glass down on a bright table of glass and chrome, and gave her husband a cold look. She turned back to me in her new apologetic way, as if I were an arbiter of taste, too, like my godmother. “We stayed at the Gritti last year, Victoria, because the Danieli was chockablock. Of course, if we had had a
choice …
but it was such a last-minute arrangement….”
Holidays. I tensed at once, for there, of course, lay another danger: my own visit to New York. I had hoped Charlotte might have forgotten that part of my boast, but she had not. She also remembered I had given a date: this year.
But when, this year? As the weeks passed, the questions became more pressing. Charlotte returned to boarding school but as soon as the Easter holidays came around, the invitations to tea were renewed.
When, exactly, did I plan to leave? Had it been decided whether I should sail on the
Aquitania
or the
Ile de France
? Was I to travel alone, or was my godmother to visit England and collect me? Surely I could not be going to New York in the summer—
no one
went to New York then, and my godmother was usually in Europe.
There was a brief respite that spring, due to politics: Austria was annexed by Germany, and although I had no idea what that meant I could tell it was something serious, for my father and mother had long anxious conversations, which would break off when I came into earshot. Even Charlotte’s father looked grave. Their own visit to Germany, planned for that summer, was canceled. They opted for Italy after all.
“Things seem so very uncertain,” Charlotte’s mother said with a sigh. “I wonder if your parents will let you travel, Victoria? It would be ever so disappointing if you had to cancel your trip, but I can see …”
“It might have to be … postponed,” I said in a small voice.
“I can’t see why.” Charlotte, who was sitting next to me, gave me a hard look. “America is in the opposite direction. Nothing is happening
there
.”
I mumbled something—something not too convincing, I think, for I saw Charlotte and her mother exchange a telling glance. Perhaps Charlotte was already beginning to believe that the visit to my godmother was a fiction; certainly she now looked at me in a measured way, with a hint of the old superciliousness. I might not have liked her, and I think I was already beginning to regret my lies. All the same I was desperate to regain her respect.
I knew what one did when one was desperate for something: One prayed. My mother had taught me that. For many years, after they were first married, my mother and father were childless; my mother had prayed for a child, and—eventually—her prayers had been answered.
“Did Daddy pray for one too?” I wanted to know, and my mother frowned.
“I expect so, Vicky. In his way. Always remember, it’s important not just to pray for yourself. You mustn’t treat God like Father Christmas and ask for too many things. But if you ask for good things, the right things, then God listens. He might not always grant your wish, or”—she paused—“He might grant it in an unexpected way, but He does listen, Vicky. I believe that.”
Was my visit to my godmother a good thing, one it was permissible to pray for? I weighed the pros and cons for some time; eventually I decided it was quite a good thing. I had been taught to be methodical, and I was methodical about this. I prayed every night and every morning; I prayed on Sundays when I went to church. I bought penny candles once a week and lit them to give wings to the prayer, and I couched the appeal politely: Please-God-if-You-think-it-is-a-good-thing-may-I-go-to-New-York-to-stay-with-Constance-if-it-is-Your-will-thank-you-Amen.
Twice a day, every day for three months. At the end of that time, when it was high summer at Winterscombe, my wish was granted. I should have listened to my mother more carefully perhaps, because it was granted in a most unexpected way.
Until my wish was granted, I enjoyed that summer. I remember days of sunshine and of warmth, a sensation of lull, as if the world waited and held its breath. There was calm, but it was an expectant calm; somewhere, beyond the boundaries of that safe world, something was happening, and sometimes I would fancy that I could hear it, still distant, and soft, like a great, invisible machine in gear—events elsewhere, their momentum gathering.
For many years I had known, in a vague way, that the orphanages that took up so much of my mother’s time and ate such a worrying amount of my father’s money, had connections with their counterparts in Europe. So, that summer, when my mother took me aside and explained that plans had changed, that she and my father would be in Europe on orphanage work during July and August, I was surprised, but not greatly. Although we never went abroad for holidays, my mother had once or twice made such trips in the past, usually in the company of her closest friend, the formidable Winifred Hunter-Coote, whom she had known in the Great War. This time, she explained, my father had decided to go with them, because they were not just visiting European orphanages, as they usually did, but were seeing friends in Germany who would help them to bring certain children to England. Just for a while, she explained, it would be safer for those children to be here, rather than at home in their own country. They were not necessarily orphans, she said in her careful way; they were perhaps more like refugees. It was not always easy to persuade the authorities to let them leave, which was why my father was going with her and with Winifred, for his German was fluent….
Here, in a way that was uncharacteristic of her, my mother paused, and I knew there was something she was leaving out, something she did not want me to know.
“Won’t their parents miss them?” I asked, and my mother smiled.
“Of course, darling. But they know it is for the best. We shall be away quite a long time, and I shall miss you too. You’ll write, won’t you, Vicky?”
I did write, every day, joining the letters together so that they were like a diary, and sending them off once a week to a series of
poste restante
addresses. To begin with, it felt strange, a summer at Winterscombe without my parents, but after a while I became used to the new quietness in the house, and besides, there were diversions. My aunt Maud was brought down to stay, and arrived with packages of brightly bound novels. She was a little frail, for she had had a mild stroke the previous Easter, but her appetite for fiction was undiminished. Uncle Freddie arrived, complete with greyhounds; they had definitely “fizzled,” I could tell, because Uncle Freddie no longer mentioned the Irish Derby. Jenna was there and William was there and Charlotte was safely distant, at the Danieli, so there was no need to worry about the lies for a while. There were strawberries to pick, and then raspberries and young peas and lettuces. High summer, and I was content, even though my parents were away. Best of all, I had made a new friend.
His name was Franz-Jacob, he was ten years old, he was German, and he was Jewish. He arrived with the first contingent of orphanage children, part of the small group of five or six German boys who stood a little apart from the English children who came to Winterscombe regularly every summer.
I think perhaps my parents had known his family, who were still in Germany, but whatever the reason—it could simply have been that he was known to be exceptionally clever—special arrangements had been made for Franz-Jacob which singled him out from the others. He lived with the other children in the dormitories, which had been built years before in the old dairy and laundry buildings. He was invited to join in their games of cricket and tennis, the swimming parties and nature rambles that were organized that year, as always. But he also came up to the house every morning to join me at my lessons.
Since my mother was away, those lessons were conducted entirely by Mr. Birdsong and concentrated on his own strong points: Latin, history, mathematics, robust and heroic English poetry. I was not very good at any of these subjects, and I think, looking back, that it must have been very tiresome for Mr. Birdsong to have to teach me, although, if so, he disguised his impatience well. From the first day that Franz-Jacob joined my classes, Mr. Birdsong blossomed.
I was still struggling then with long division and making little progress. Franz-Jacob, whose English was limited, provided Mr. Birdsong with a chance to try out his German—that was the first excitement. The second excitement was his ability at mathematics. They began, I remember, with equations: a textbook was produced and Franz-Jacob bent over his desk. The sun shone; the room was warm; his pen scratched. In the length of time it took me to complete two sums, Franz-Jacob had completed an entire exercise.
He took it up to Mr. Birdsong and presented the pages with a small bow; Mr. Birdsong checked them over. He nodded; he clicked his tongue in admiration; he appeared at first surprised and then became pink in the face, a sign of excitement.
“This is very good, Franz-Jacob.
Das ist werklich sehr gut.
My goodness me, yes. Shall we try our hand at some fractions?”
Franz-Jacob shrugged. The fractions exercise was completed equally quickly. From that moment on, Mr. Birdsong was like a man reborn: He entered the schoolroom with a new energy in his step. I saw, for the first time, a glimpse of the man he used to be: a gifted mathematician at Oxford who, at his father’s behest, had abandoned an academic career to take up Holy Orders.
I was neglected after that, but I did not mind. Mr. Birdsong might set me poems to learn or might encourage me to write out the important dates of the Reformation, but although he remained kindly there was no fire in his eyes when he heard the poems or the lists of dates. The fire was reserved for Franz-Jacob. They had moved on to calculus, and Mr. Birdsong’s hand shook a little when he opened the textbook.
I thought Mr. Birdsong’s reaction was entirely proper. Franz-Jacob was exceptional—I, too, could see that. He was unlike anyone I had ever met.
To look at, he was small and slightly built, but with a wiry strength that made the bigger English boys wary of bullying him. He had a narrow, intense face, dark eyes, and thin black hair worn cropped short at the nape of the neck and long at the front, so it often fell across his eyes when he worked; he would push it back impatiently. He rarely smiled. There was in his eyes an expression I was unfamiliar with then, though I have seen it since many times, an expression peculiar to those Europeans whose families have been persecuted in the past and may yet be persecuted again: European eyes, which regard even happiness warily.