“Let me check our calendar, dear . . .”
Audrey twisted the telephone cord around her finger. “It’s rather urgent,” she added.
“Right, then. Why don’t you come on Friday afternoon and join us for dinner? Sylvia will be here with her family, but I’m sure we can make room for you, too.” Audrey wrote down directions to the town house, barely remembering it from years ago. She would leave Bobby with the nurse for the weekend and drive up to London alone. She wondered if her uncle knew that Alfred Clarkson wasn’t her father. Should she tell him? Might he know who her real father was? She closed her eyes as she hung up the phone, wishing she could awaken from this nightmare.
Audrey remembered her uncle’s London town house as if she’d dreamt about it a long time ago. From the outside, the five-story home that had belonged to their family for several generations seemed to have survived the war unscathed. She remembered it as being more opulent than her own home, with a centuries-old coat of arms in the foyer and gold-framed oil paintings of her ancestors. But once inside, Audrey found that the splendor she remembered from childhood had faded, as if the war had sanded all the gilt from the edges of this once-splendid house. It occurred to her that her uncle might have reached out to her after the war because he needed her father’s money.
The housekeeper met Audrey at the door and showed her to one of the bedrooms. “The missus said for you to come down for drinks at seven. Dinner is at eight.”
“Is one still expected to dress for dinner?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
Audrey remembered the ritual from before the war. Mother and Father always changed into formal attire for dinner. Audrey thought that the war had done away with such formalities but had added a gown to her bag just in case. She was glad she had. She brushed her hair, slipped into her dress, and made her way down to the parlor shortly after seven.
“Audrey! So good to see you!” her uncle said. “You look splendid! Let me fix you a drink.”
She normally didn’t drink, wary of following in her mother’s footsteps, but she accepted it, hoping it might steady her nerves. She had come prepared to grovel and plead as she asked her uncle to help her find a place to live and a way to support herself and her son, ready to return to her place among the aristocracy. But first she needed to make polite conversation with him and her aunt, who were nearly strangers to her, and then with her cousin Sylvia and her husband after they joined them downstairs. Audrey dreaded making small talk and felt as awkward now as she had as a young girl. Perhaps even more so, knowing she would be forced to beg. She took a sip of her drink, then set it aside, despising the taste.
By the time the family assembled, drinks in hand, Audrey’s stomach had twisted into a tight knot. She was about to ask her uncle if she could speak to him in private before dinner to end the suspense of waiting, when her cousin’s young son and daughter joined the gathering, interrupting them. The son was perhaps eight years old, the daughter a year or two younger. Like Alfie and me. They had come downstairs with their governess to see their parents for a few minutes before going to bed. Audrey’s heart squeezed when she saw the daughter nervously biting her lip, the son standing stiffly at attention. Their parents might have been strangers, greeting them for the first time. Audrey remembered standing before her parents this way, desperate for their approval and love. And never receiving it.
She held her breath, hoping her uncle’s family would be different from hers, hoping for signs of warmth and affection for the children’s sakes. Yet the icy ritual played out just as it had for her and Alfie. This was how the gentry lived and raised their children. One must control one’s emotions. One mustn’t cry or carry on. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Audrey.”
As she witnessed the frigid scene, Audrey suddenly caught a glimpse of her own mother. She would have been raised this way, too, with parents who were cold and aloof. Parents who disdained displays of emotion. Might Mother have longed for warmth and affection as a child, just as Audrey had—and been denied? This might explain why Mother treated Audrey the way she had. How could her mother show warmth and tenderness if she had never experienced them herself?
Nor had she received love from Father. Their marriage had been a mutually beneficial arrangement, lacking love. Mother had never known the joy that Audrey had discovered with Robert, loving her husband with complete abandon, opening her heart and soul to him, and being fully loved in return. Had Mother been so desperate to be loved that she had turned to other men? As shameful as the circumstances of Audrey’s conception had been, Audrey felt a stab of pity for her mother.