she could look down and see the whole of Piccadilly. The tourists bustling past, the evening light starting to dim the air, the Wolseley next door, over the road the blue flags with De Beers jewels written on them and the red ones of…she got her A to Z out…the Royal Academy. Pigeons flew past at eye level and she looked down at the people on the open-top buses. She thought about blowing out the drink with pompous William Blackwell and just starting her London adventure, but she had to meet with him. However stilted and awkward it might be, she had to put an end to Enid’s mystery. Had to pass over the baton and say: This is in your court now, you do with it what you will. Meet Martha if you want, come and see the island, or just put it in a drawer and forget about it but this is your history as well as ours.
She glanced back into the room and saw her dress that she’d hung up for the evening and felt a slight shudder of nerves. She just had to get the drink part done and then the rest of the evening was hers.
She wondered if there was time to have a bath. She’d only had a bath once before in her life. There wasn’t one on the boat and her year at art college was spent living in a tiny bedsit with a bathroom so small that the shower was over the toilet. But her one-time bath had been when she was seven and her mother, a textile designer, had finished a commission – swathes of the most stunning hand-blocked fabric – late, as always, and they’d gone to the fashion designer’s house on the train to drop it off. Jane didn’t usually go with her but it was her birthday and they were going for ice cream afterwards. Her mother had told her to wait in the fancy living room, but the designer had worried about things getting broken. Her mother had rolled her eyes behind his back which had made Jane laugh and then taken her into the bathroom, filled this massive sunken pink bath and told her to stay there for an hour or so while they finished the work. The designer thought it was all very untoward but Jane thought it was brilliant. A maid came in with fresh towels and a glass of orange juice and Jane lay in the bubbles watching as her toes wrinkled up in the water. When her mum was finished she came in, towelled her dry and they went for ice cream. Jane had lemon sorbet. Her mum had mint choc chip. It was one of the amazing days.
The bathroom in The Ritz was white marble. The bath had gold taps and Jacuzzi buttons, there were fluffy white Ritz towels and candles and flash bubble bath. When she lay in the warm water, the foam up to her chin, she glanced up and saw there was a chandelier as well.
For a moment she thought about telling her mum.
It wasn’t a moment that lasted long, but long enough to remind her that, while it might be a relief that her mother was finally at rest, free of the unrelenting clutches of illness, there was still a giant hole where she had been, where comments like, ‘There’s a bloody chandelier in the bathroom!’ floated with no one to pick them up.
As she lay back in the bubbles, staring up at the glinting crystals, her phone beeped with a text from Annie.
At work, just seen Martha out the back reading the diaries. Will keep you posted. Think this is a good sign. Progress. Good luck tonight x
Jane realised then that not only was there a hole in her future but a gaping one in her past. What would it be like to have, as Martha did, a stack of diaries filled with answers? As she lay in the bath she could finally admit how furious she was with Martha - how annoyed she was that she hadn’t jumped at the chance to read them. She was jealous of Martha’s chance to have a whole history laid bare. Jane would give anything to have the answers to the questions her mother had shut her eyes against, her hands covering her face, refusing to discuss. Just imagining the chance to know who her father was made her want to dunk her head fully under the water and scream, but that would ruin her new hair so instead she stayed where she was, knowing that there were no diaries written by her mother. Jane would forever live her life as she had always done, with no past except the one she had lived to see.
The Diary of Enid Morris. 1st September 1944
James writes to me. He said he would but I didn’t believe him. I was trying so hard not to be naive that I’d written our affair off after one night. But he writes. Beautiful letters that make me struggle not to hope for the future at a time when I have refused to think about the possibility of life ever being normal again. It’s hard here, but I know it’s harder there. People talk about the trenches but no one can know unless they’ve lived it, can they? He doesn’t say anything really about what it’s like and equally I say nothing either. My last letter started with how glorious the sunshine was. Not that someone had died in front of me last night as we’d put them on a stretcher and I’m worried that I’m starting to become immune to suffering. Or more that I worry, if I keep working with the ambulance, that I might.
He says that he writes to me so he doesn’t have to write to his family. I’ve read about the Blackwells, I think, in the past. I asked my friend Fred if he knew anything about them but he asked why I was asking and I got annoyed with him and told him that it was none of his business. I think because Fred didn’t want me to be annoyed with him, he asked his dad who said that the Blackwells were in oil or something, owned a big house and weren’t our sort of people. (Fred’s dad’s words, not mine.) But in his letters James says they’re claustrophobic.
I wrote back to say that I knew exactly what he meant. The island is claustrophobic at the moment. It’s always claustrophobic. I stand sometimes on the bridge and look down the river and just think that there is so much out there to see. I hope they don’t destroy it all before it’s my time to see it.
Jane tried to play it cool. She tried to walk nonchalantly from her room but the fluttering in her stomach, the slight shake of her hands, the nervous tremor on her lips that made her want to laugh got the better of her and she could feel her legs twitch as she started to walk to the lift. She couldn’t help it. It was all the adrenaline whizzing around inside her. What was she going to talk to him about?
She glanced at her reflection in the big mirrors as she walked. The dress Emily had leant her was a loose box cut, which was the main reason it fit. Cut straight to just above the knee, it was cream silk with hundreds of flowers printed on it. Before she put it on, Jane had spent a moment studying the printwork and, considering the cost of such a designer label, had known that she would have printed it better. A thought that surprised her, considering she hadn’t glanced at a piece of fabric with any remote interest for a decade. The shoes were Annie’s – simple silver sandals – and as she’d slipped them on she’d had to laugh at her bright-pink toenail polish. She’d never painted her toenails before.
Now as she caught glimpses of herself as she headed down the corridor she felt like an imposter. The whole evening like an odd masquerade.
The door to The Rivoli Bar was opened for her by one of the black-jacketed doormen.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He just nodded his head in reply.
In comparison to the almost garish lights of the lobby, the bar was dim. Dark like a speakeasy. The music was low, and the decor varying shades of brown. It was like the bars in old film noirs where they came over and lit your cigarettes for you and everyone drank Old Fashioneds as they plotted crimes. She had to blink to let her eyes adjust. Then looked around and realised she’d have no idea who William Blackwell was. The whole thing was a disaster. She’d seen the odd photo when she Googled him but there were maybe ten men in here dressed in suits and, in the darkness, he could be
