“Shh. You’ll wake the neighbors and cause a scandal,” the man said, laughing. His voice carried clearly in the still night air.
“That’s nothing new. I already have a scandalous reputation, don’t you know?” Mother stopped on the front step, wrapped her arms around the man, and kissed him full on the lips. The kiss was like something from the cinema, lasting for half a minute. Audrey averted her eyes as if her mother stood there naked.
“Shh . . . Quiet down, old girl!”
“It’s fine for you gentlemen to have a good time. No one even blinks at your indiscretions—even if you’re married to some stuffy old wife. But if a woman has a little fling, it’s goodbye future. Goodbye reputation. A proper gentleman wants to marry a good girl.”
“It’s time to go to sleep, Rosy dear.”
“I’m good, aren’t I, darling?”
“You’re very good,” he said with a laugh. “Now toddle off to bed before we wake up the neighbors.” The front door opened and the butler helped Mother inside. The man in the Bentley drove away. Audrey longed to sink into the ground, to crawl into a hole and disappear. She felt Eve nudging her forward.
“Let’s go in through the back door,” Eve whispered. “I know where there’s a key.”
Audrey barely knew what she was doing as Eve led her around to the rear of the town house and up the servants’ stairs. She could hear Mother singing in the hallway, the servants shushing her. She wished she had never seen her mother kissing that man or overheard the ugly truth. How could she ever face her mother again?
“I would like you to leave,” Audrey told Eve when they reached the bedroom level.
“Are you sure you want to be alone? Don’t you need a friend to—？”
“No. I don’t need your pity or . . . or your stupid strawberries. Just go away and leave me alone.” She closed the door in Eve’s face, then sank to her bedroom floor in a heap. Nausea overwhelmed her. Eve and all of the other servants had witnessed Mother’s disgrace. They all knew the truth about her. Did Father?
Audrey wanted to shrivel up and die. Her body shook as she wept tears of shame and humiliation. Then another, darker emotion gradually took control. Rage. For as long as Audrey could remember, Mother had lectured her about proper social behavior and keeping up appearances and being in control of one’s emotions. No matter how hard Audrey had worked to please Mother, she had never quite measured up. And now it enraged Audrey to see her mother’s secret life exposed. She longed to run far, far away, to be someone other than Lady Rosamunde’s daughter, to live a different life.
And yet . . .
In spite of what she now knew, something deep inside Audrey still hungered for Mother’s approval. She ached to know she had done well, had obeyed all the rules, impressed all the right people. Most of all, she longed to see pride shining in Mother’s eyes when she gazed at her.
Audrey hauled herself up from the floor. She dried her eyes, lifted her chin. Perhaps her own success in London’s social world might one day atone for her mother’s disgrace. And earn her love.
LONDON, DECEMBER 1936
Eve lifted the heavy flatiron from the kitchen range, tested it with a drop of spit on her finger, then gingerly pressed out the wrinkles on her blouse, fearful of scorching it. “I could finish this in a jiffy with an electric iron,” she muttered to her roommate, who was washing clothes on the scrub board. Neither of them could afford laundry service at the boardinghouse.
“Why can’t Mrs. Russell spend a shilling or two and modernize this place?”
“I know! It’s like living in the last century. We don’t even have—” Eve paused when the telephone shrilled in the front hallway. The lively chatter in the boardinghouse parlor also stilled as the girls listened, each hoping the call was for her.
“Eve Dawson! Telephone!”
Eve grinned and parked the heavy iron on the stove before hurrying to the phone. “It’s a man,” the girl who had taken the call whispered. She handed over the receiver. Eve couldn’t imagine who it might be.
“Hello, this is Eve.”
“Hello, beautiful friend of my sister. Alfie Clarkson, here.” If Eve had been given a hundred tries, she never would have guessed Alfie. Goose bumps prickled on her arms. “I’ve been kicking myself these past eleven months for misplacing your telephone number,” he continued, “but I just now found it. I realize you likely have dozens of men queuing up at your door, but my fraternity has a formal event at the Savoy on December 10, and I would love to take you.”