Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles) Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Meddlers

  A Time To Heal

  The Burning Summer

  Sisters

  Reprise

  The Running Years

  Family Chorus

  The Virus Man

  Lunching at Laura’s

  ‘The Performers’ Sequence:

  1 Gower Street

  2 The Haymarket

  3 Paddington Green

  4 Soho Square

  5 Bedford Row

  6 Long Acre

  7 Charing Cross

  8 The Strand

  9 Chelsea Reach

  10 Shaftesbury Avenue

  11 Piccadilly

  12 Seven Dials

  JUBILEE

  THE POPPY CHRONICLES I

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-068-4

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  Copyright © 1987 by Claire Rayner

  E-published wordwide in 2010 by M P Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  British Library cataloging information is available on this title

  FOR JAY

  To welcome him to the world of words

  with love

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author is grateful for the assistance given with research by: The London Library; the London Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the General Post Office Archives; the Public Records Office; the Archivist, British Rail; the Meteorological Records Office; the Archive Department of The Times; the Imperial War Museum, London; Marylebone Public Libraries, and other sources too numerous to mention.

  BOOK ONE

  1

  It started to rain about an hour after dinner and that helped. She could sit and watch the drops chasing each other down the panes and bet with herself on the winner. It wasn’t the most exciting way to pass the time but it was better than sitting and staring at the dull street below, her sewing unheeded on her lap.

  The rain should have cooled the air, but it hadn’t. The heat still pressed down on her head like a thick blanket made of food smells, and she played with that thought in a desultory sort of fashion, imagining the smells being visible instead of just heavy in her nose. She saw the layer of cabbage in limp wedges of greyish green leaves separated from the pallor of the boiled potatoes, with slabs of beige fat-trimmed mutton and glutinous gravy, and on each side the dingy brown and yellow of oxtail soup and custard, and the image was so vivid in her mind’s eye that it made her feel slightly sick and her forehead and upper lip became wet again with sweat. And she picked up her sewing, which was a new nightshirt for Harold, and mopped herself with it, not caring whether she made it grimy or not.

  Somewhere in the house a clock chimed, and she lifted her head, listening for more signs of life, but there was nothing. Even the nursery floor was silent, quiet as the grave, she thought, and again imagination slid about her head unchecked and she saw the row of four beds in the big room that was the night nursery, each with its toy box at the foot and a dressing gown and slippers arranged on it, and each with a small brother lying stark and tidy and dead beneath the red counterpane. And then shook herself for being so wicked. They were boring and tiresome and made her life a misery in a great many ways, but they were but children and part of her own family after all.

  She had no right to wish them dead.

  Not that she did. Again she sat and stared at the raindrops sliding erratically down the window and tried to decide what she did want. Not the boys dead – no, not that. Less boring and demanding perhaps, less adored by their mother and father – and then her face hardened, and she forced herself to fix her attention on to one particular raindrop that had seemed to find a barrier at which it sat, fat and sulky, in the middle of the pane while its competitors went skittering crazily down to the winning line of the sill. She would not think about that, she would not –

  But of course she did. She couldn’t help it. How could she do otherwise when once again here she sat wasting her life away while her brothers were having so much better a time of it? Even the baby Harold had more pleasure in this house than she did. But was it her fault she was a girl? She hadn’t chosen to be a female. No one would ever choose that, not unless she were mad, and certainly wouldn’t choose to be as plain and dull and dismal a female as Mildred Amberly. And she whispered to the raindrop, moving her lips with great deliberation to make the words clear, ‘I am Mildred Amberly. I am plain and dull and useless and no one wants me, not even my parents, and I should have been a man,’ and the raindrop seemed to fatten and lurch over the barrier and went running away down the pane to disappear into oblivion at the bottom. And Mildred laughed and rubbed the pane with her finger to see where it had gone and then yawned and looked out into the street again.

  There was still nothing happening down there, and she gazed at the grey paving stones of Leinster Terrace and at the blank heavily curtained windows of the cream stucco-fronted houses on the other side, each in its big stolidity a mirror image of the one where she now sat at the first floor drawing-room window, and imagined something happening. A parade perhaps, a parade of circus animals, with clowns in floppy costumes and dead white faces and women in pink spangles and men on stilts in great crimson top hats and interminable striped trousers. The stilt men, she told herself dreamily, the stilt men would be laughing and smiling and smiling and laughing, and one of them would come and tap tap tap on the drawing-room windows across the street where the Frobishers and the Millars lived, and would break the glass and throw blue smoke bombs inside so that the silly people there all choked and coughed and cried out; and then one of the stilt men, a wonderful happy one with a face full of teeth that glinted in the light of the sun that was still setting in an orange glow behind the chimney pots, would come and break her window and pull her out, plucking her from this dreary room with its dreary overstuffed furniture and the dreary portrait of Papa over the fireplace and carry her away, laughing and teasing and laughing again at her until her own face was nothing but glinting teeth too as she smiled and teased and smiled back at him –

  The image shivered, shattered and died as the rain stopped and she thought for a while about the possibility of opening the window to let in the damp air of the September evening and perhaps the smell of the park, rich and earthy and somehow threatening, even primitive, and then decided against it. First of all the windows, draped as they were in so many yards of Nottingham lace and heavy velvet drapes, would resist any attempt she might make to disturb them, and secondly it was absurd to imagine Hyde Park could ever be threatening and primitive. It would be lovely if it were, if walking along the Bayswater Road could be a risky occupation, if it were possible that great wild slavering beasts could jump out of the sooty thickets of shrubbery and carry her off.

  It really was particularly bad this evening, the way her mind was running away with her, she thought, and picked up the sewing again and looked at it. The side seams were done, and the sleeves were in; all she had to do was complete the smocking down the front, and if she really tried she could perhaps finish it this evening before she went to bed. She ought to, really; Mama had bought enough flannel to make winter nightshirts for all the little boys, three each, and if she didn�
�t get on with them the cold November nights would be here and Nanny Chewson would be wanting to know where they were, and sniffing and looking superior because, of course, once again, Miss Mildred had been wasting her time.

  Yes, particularly bad this evening, she told herself again as she let the sewing drift back on to her lap. Really bad, and not just in her mind. Mama looking so pale she was almost green as her migraine clamped down on her and Papa shouting that he asked for little enough in this house, precious little, and why did a man have to beg for so simple a thing as a shirt ready when he came home from his business and an urgent City dinner to attend, and Basil and Claude sliding away as they had just after tea so that Mama kept asking her plaintively where they were, and she having to lie and say she thought they had gone to a lecture – oh, it had been a particularly bad day. She ought to be glad it was all so peaceful now.

  But it had been bad in other ways too, and her face reddened as she remembered now.

  She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. Not that she was above doing such a thing; when it suited her she listened and pried with a will and a clear conscience and a good deal of skill. But this evening she really hadn’t meant to do it. She had gone up to Mama and Papa’s room with a headache powder she had fetched from Cook, knowing that this time Mama’s headache was a real one and not just another of her excuses to lie on her sofa and sleep, and, Mildred frequently suspected, restore herself with sherry. She had been feeling unusually benevolent towards Mama because Papa had been so particularly horrid about his wretched shirt, and had made Jenny, the parlour maid, cry till her nose ran and threaten to hand in her notice. Getting Mama a headache powder had been the least she could do to help. And there she had been, her hand on the very door of their room when Papa’s thick voice had come booming out for anyone to hear. Only it had been she, Mildred, who had heard, and no one else. Which was perhaps a small comfort –

  ‘I put it to him as straight I could. “The girl’s no oil painting and I’m the first to admit it,” I told him. “But she’s a good-hearted soul, and has plenty of experience in the arts of running a decent man’s house, helping her stepmama as she does. And she’s young – twenty-eight, young, you know – and there’ll be a handsome consideration, a decent sum settled on her, though, of course, with six sons to provide for as well –” and he understood, of course, he did. But he was as straight with me. “A man wants more to a wife than an income, sir,” he said. “And with all due respect, your daughter isn’t for me. I need some more comfort than just money, if you take my meaning, sir, and there it is.” So there it is indeed, Maud. The girl’s on our hands for life, if you ask me. I’ve done all I can to find her a husband and there’s not one that shows a spark of interest that I’d touch with a barge pole. There’s been one or two who’d take anything for a bit of ready cash, of course, but I’m not having that.’

  He had snorted and coughed at the same time then, a particularly disagreeable noise at which he was an adept, and Mildred, her hand still on the doorknob, had almost been able to see him through the dark door panels, his belly pushing proudly over his black trousers and his shirt billowing over his chest as he stood there, legs braced apart and hands on hips while Mama struggled to fasten his studs and arrange his necktie. And had hated him as cordially as she ever had, almost finding enough strength in her hatred to push the door open to rush in and hit him with both fists and scream at him, ‘I don’t want you to find me a husband, I don’t want to have to live with a creature like you, not now, not ever. I hate you and I hate your husbands and I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate –’

  But of course she hadn’t moved. She had just stood there and heard Mama bleating softly, ‘Oh, Edward, poor dear Mildred, she does try, you know, and she means so well, it seems so cruel, and the boys so handsome especially darling Harold with his eyelashes so long –’

  ‘So you put it clearly to her, Maud –’ Her father’s voice again, thicker than ever, though a little muted. He was at his dressing table now, sleeking back his thinning grey hair with the pair of silver brushes her own mother had had engraved for him the year before she died, admiring his red face and his rows of chins as he stared at his horrible self – and Mildred had taken a sharp little breath in through her nose and squinted at the door, and twisted up her mouth, making herself even more hideous than she was, just to show him. Not that he needed showing –

  ‘– you put it clearly to her. She’s as plain as the cat, plainer, and she needs to make more of an effort if she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her days a sour old maid. She’s no conversation, no spark of life about her, makes no effort to please a man – haven’t I brought them here till I’m blue? This one, old Masters’ son, he was the last there was – and even he won’t have her. Not two brass farthings to call his own, son of a useless fool as he is, and even he won’t have her – she made no effort, you see, not an atom, to please him, sat there all through dinner like a long drink of cold water, which is all she is and so I tell you, and there’s an end to it. I’m done with trying. I’ve done all a father can decently be asked to do – now, my coat. No, woman, not that one! I’m to dine at Guildhall, remember. If I’ve told you once I’ve told you till I’m blue. Guildhall! Lord Mayor, all the Aldermen – if I’m not one of ’em this time next year I’ll be a Dutchman. And if I go looking the way you’d turn me out, a Dutchman is all I’d have the hopes of being. Give it here, woman –’

  Mildred had stayed no longer, turning and running down the big staircase, holding her cream serge skirt in both hands almost up to her knees so that she could move as quickly as possible, and had only stopped when she reached Mama’s small sitting room and had thrown herself into it and on to the sofa to catch her breath.

  She had sat there very straight, feeling her face hot and her eyes wide and dry with fury; he had been trying to sell her all through the City, that was what it was, as well as among all his shopkeeper friends in horrible Kilburn and Acton and Lewisham and Camberwell, where he had all his hateful shops. He had sat there in his chop houses and his shop back rooms and his banks and all those other places where he spent so much of his life, offering her to men to be taken off his hands for a consideration. She had always known that the men he brought to dinner from time to time, and who were always made to sit next to her, had been paraded as possible husbands for her. Ever since first Eugenie Frobisher and then Charlotte Millar had married, just after their eighteenth birthdays, she had known everyone thought it was time she was off their hands too. With six boys to educate and set up in life, Papa was fond of saying loudly, a man had his work cut out to do all a father should, and he would stand there at his ornate fireplace in the drawing room and look round at his substantial furniture and substantial curtains and substantial house, clearly pleased with his substantial self. Until he looked at Mildred, sitting straight backed and with her eyes lowered, silent and unresponsive on the sofa as yet another dinner guest tried to make small talk with her and totally failed.

  And how could it be otherwise? Mildred asked herself passionately now. How could it be otherwise? They were always so dreary and so unappealing, with their half-bald heads and their droopy moustaches and wet eyes and their weedy bodies and –

  And who am I, she had thought then, catching sight of herself in the mirror in Mama’s little sitting room, who am I to complain about a man’s looks? With a face and figure like mine, who am I to complain at the sort of men he tries to sell me to?

  Her image had stared back at her, blankly, and she had looked again, trying to see what others saw when they looked at her. A long face, sallow and thin, with a nose to match, long and a little oddly shaped, twisting slightly as it meandered across on its way to her mouth. And such a mouth – long and a little curly too, like her nose, so that she looked always as though she was despondent. And perhaps I am, she thought, staring at her image, and who wouldn’t be? Brown hair, so ordinary in its brownness it looked like dust, straight and with so little life to it that there was no shine a
t all, and such stupid eyes, so pale a brown that they looked almost yellow in some lights, and straight fierce eyebrows and a long chin.

  At least, she thought then, I don’t have awful spots, like poor old Basil. Not that it matters to Basil. A boy – it doesn’t matter what boys look like. Oh, God, I wish I was a boy and had a boy’s body. Not this great long thin thing that has nothing to it that would please any man. And she had run her hands across her bodice, feeling even through the thick cream serge the touch of her own fingers as they brushed across her nipples, and knowing that however sensitive they seemed to be, the breasts they crowned weren’t breasts at all, really. Flatchested and bony hipped, with skinny legs that had nothing of the voluptuous about them at all, that was Mildred Amberly. Was it any wonder her father wanted to get her off his hands so eagerly? And any wonder that no one would take her, even after ten years or more of her father’s efforts?

  Particularly bad tonight, she told herself again, sitting there in the drawing room after dinner and remembering the afternoon’s misery as the sun sagged wearily at the end of the street and let the dark come hissing in from the East. Papa going off in a huff and Mama so miserable over dinner, and the little boys fighting and fussing when Nanny Chewson brought them down for dessert. Oh, a particularly bad night. And the worst thing about it is it will be no better tomorrow or the day after that or any other day. Just for ever and ever like this, with Mama and me helping her and being in the way, and Papa looking at me and despising me because I’m only a girl and not one of his precious boys, and no use as a girl even – and she took a sharp little breath in through her nose and got to her feet.

  Why she looked again into the street she didn’t know. Perhaps there had been a hint of movement that had caught her eye? Whatever it was, she found herself half kneeling on the window seat and staring down into the dimness below. They had gaslight in Leinster Terrace now – had done ever since Papa had made a fuss and demanded the service be added to this important district where important people lived, and clearly the lamplighter had passed while she had been sitting there thinking, for there was a pool of soft yellow gaslight spilling over the paving stones, and in it stood the foreshortened figure of a boy.