One Enchanted Evening Read online

  Raymond squeezed her hand tenderly. ‘You’re strong, Hélène. You can handle this.’

  But as they walked through the doors, Hélène was thinking: Maybe I can do this. But what if I don’t want to? What if there’s something more important in the world, some other place I ought to be?

  Later, after the demonstrations were over and the evening dances yet to begin, guests could be heard to remark in the hotel halls how clumsily Hélène Marchmont had danced that day. They wondered if she was tired, or if she was unwell – or if the punishing schedule of dancing at the Buckingham Hotel was finally taking its toll on one of its leading lights. Only Hélène knew why she’d found herself out of rhythm with the music, out of synch with Raymond as they performed their climactic double reverse spin to an expectant crowd.

  Secrets were ten a penny in the Buckingham Hotel, but this one she would keep for herself.

  September 1936

  Chapter Four

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN AT THE Buckingham Hotel, and for hotel page Billy Brogan that meant only one thing: opportunity.

  Billy had been twelve years old when he ferried his first message for a guest at the hotel, and since then he had outlasted one head concierge, three night managers, two grill chefs, one bookkeeper and – as far as he could count – more than three hundred waiting staff, kitchen staff and chambermaids. He had even outlasted Mr Moore, the garage attendant, who had come to the Buckingham as a stable hand and lost no opportunity to talk about how different things used to be in the good old days. Five years after running his first errands, Billy considered himself a veteran of the establishment. Why, he was even longer standing than Lord Edgerton himself – and that had to mean something. It would soon be three years since Lord Edgerton had taken majority ownership of the hotel. The days before seemed a bygone age. Billy had often loitered outside the hotel director’s door in those months before Lord Edgerton had swept in and made the Buckingham his own – and he fancied he knew more about the financial ruin that had once faced the hotel than anyone but Maynard Charles himself. He’d known about the plans to open a ballroom long before the heads of department; he’d even seen the magazines featuring Hélène Marchmont on Maynard Charles’s desk and fancied, before the rumour had even begun, that the hotel board was courting the glamorous star to appear on their dance floor. No, there wasn’t a thing that happened in the hotel to which Billy Brogan wasn’t privy. And that was exactly the way he wanted it to stay.

  Tonight Billy stole across the Grand Ballroom as it filled with guests in black silk velvet and cocoa silk chiffon, and slipped into the musicians’ room behind the dance floor. The boys from the band were either lounging around or fastidiously checking their instruments for the performances to come. Behind the practice piano, Louis Kildare, a tall black man, was hunched over his saxophone with Hélène Marchmont at his side.

  ‘You wanted me, Miss Marchmont?’

  When Hélène saw that Billy was standing there, she reached into a clutch bag at her side and drew out a manila envelope, inscribed with two words: NOELLE ARCHER. This she handed to Billy, who almost saluted as he took it in his hands. ‘Tonight, miss?’

  ‘If you would, Billy,’ Hélène said – and Billy recognised a weariness in her tone that she was trying hard not to let show. ‘Of course, you have my gratitude.’

  For a boy like Billy Brogan, gratitude came in the form of a half-crown pressed firmly into the palm of his hand. ‘You have my word, Miss Marchmont.’

  The way Billy Brogan said such things, always with an excitable little flourish, made Hélène smile. ‘Be off with you,’ she said, and Billy was beaming as he disappeared.

  Louis Kildare shook his head as he watched the hotel page go. ‘You have a soft spot for the boy.’

  Kildare was a broad man, with black hair cropped short in the style of all the players in the Archie Adams Band. He was wearing the same white jacket as the saxophonists and trumpet players, though on Kildare the cuffs seemed too short – and he was positively bursting out of the bow tie Archie Adams insisted he wore. When he grinned at Hélène, the smile seemed to dominate his face – but tonight she was not smiling back.

  ‘They’ll understand, you know.’

  Hélène hardened. ‘Who will?’

  ‘I know where that letter was going, and they’ll understand. It’s hotel business. It isn’t your fault Graf and Gräfin Schecht demand the pleasure of your company. Are you hearing me?’

  Louis Kildare had a simple way with words, or perhaps it was just his accent that made him seem so blunt. He’d grown up playing trumpets in his native Caribbean, a familiar face in every club from Jamaica to Trinidad and Tobago, but in the end London had offered so much more. He’d come here on the heels of greater musicians than he: Ken Johnson, who made the alto sax feel alive; Ellis Mills, who played the horn but could have shown the dancers in the Grand Ballroom a thing or two if only Maynard Charles might have permitted it; Carl Barriteau – who’d taught Louis to hold his own on the clarinet when they’d bunked together in the bars of Trinidad. All of these people from all over the world, but London was the place they all aspired to be. Here the clubs and hotels were eager for any talented players they could find – and, even though most still resisted having a black musician in a white orchestra, there were other places where it was the music, not the colour of your skin, that mattered. The Nest. The Midnight Rooms. Café de Paris. Louis and his companions had played in all of these clubs until Archie Adams had chanced upon them and demanded they audition for his own band.

  ‘You ever want to go back to the clubs, Louis?’

  Louis smirked. ‘Every now and then. They were different to the Buckingham.’ He paused, sensing that something was wrong. ‘Hélène, has something happened?’

  ‘It’s nothing, Louis.’ She touched his hand tenderly. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘I worry often, Hélène.’

  ‘It’s just . . . sometimes I wonder what it’s for. Why I’m here. I never danced in the clubs, Louis. I came up through the tea dances, always on the arm of some local lord. But after too long in the Buckingham Hotel, with Mr Charles breathing down your neck, and you start to wonder – maybe there’s somewhere freer. Somewhere where you’re not being watched every second of every day. You used to love the clubs, Louis. So did . . .’

  Hélène’s words petered into silence. Behind the area where the musicians gathered, a door led down to the dressing rooms. When she looked up, Raymond de Guise was standing there, looking pristine in his midnight-blue dinner jacket, its rolled collars faced in a shimmering silk. There was something dramatic and sad in the way he gazed out across the musicians. Hélène’s eyes lingered on him. Some of the other dancers had been known to swoon when Raymond de Guise sauntered by. They saw in him somebody doomed and romantic, but Hélène knew who he was dancing with tonight – the exiled ballerina Grusinskaya – and that look on his face was only Raymond de Guise, lost in concentration as he prepared to dance with an equal.

  ‘You still feel it, don’t you?’ Kildare dared to venture. ‘You still think about him often.’

  ‘Oh,’ Hélène said, her voice more brittle than ever, ‘how could I not?’

  Raymond de Guise’s eyes landed on her. He lifted one eyebrow, as if to ask her if she was ready.

  ‘He would want you to . . . be yourself again, Hélène. He’d want you to live a new life. We all do.’

  ‘I know,’ whispered Hélène, ‘but as opulent and beautiful as this new life is, what if what you really want is the old?’

  *

  By the time the Archie Adams Band struck up the first notes of ‘No Other Love But You’, Billy Brogan was already sailing along the Strand on the top of a double decker bus. London at night was as cold and beautiful as Hélène Marchmont herself. A stiff wind whipped in off the river and, as Billy saw the bright lights of the Savoy Hotel rolling by, he felt a flurry of pride. The Savoy Hotel might have looked grand from the outside, but where was it that Mr
Baldwin, Mr Chamberlain and their ministers took private rooms to chair their most important meetings? Where was it that King Edward brought Mrs Simpson for afternoon tea? And where was throwing a New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball in his honour, with royalty from as far away as Norway coming to join in? The thought made Billy Brogan proud beyond measure. To come from a Lambeth terrace and belong to a place like the Buckingham was a very fine thing indeed.

  The bus took him over the river, glittering and black, and into the warrens and winding streets of the south. As they went, Billy took the envelope out of the folds of his coat and stared at the name on the front. NOELLE ARCHER. His fingers toyed with the seam, but he had no need to open it. No, he thought with a wry smile, no need to open it at all. I already know what’s inside.

  Ordinarily, Billy had no qualms about opening the letters he was asked to ferry around the Buckingham – or, like now, further afield. Jobs had perks. Raymond de Guise got his visits from his own personal tailor, a man by the name of Ernestine who owned one of the most prestigious shops on Savile Row. Hélène Marchmont had access to the safe Mr Charles kept, filled with diamond pins, necklaces encrusted with sapphires, and all manner of other expensive jewellery. Even the bright-eyed new chambermaid – Nancy Nettleton, was that her name? – had her room in the staff quarters and, if she was canny enough, her choice of leftovers from the room service trolleys left sitting untouched in the suites. Billy Brogan’s chief perk was knowledge. It brought a certain kind of pride to know who was doing what, who’d been disciplined for breaching Buckingham rules, who was meeting whom in the vacant rooms of an evening and taking full advantage of the lux-urious satin sheets only the most important guests were allowed.

  There was no address on the envelope but, some time later, Billy stood outside one of the old railwayman’s terraces on Brixton Hill. There were lights on in the windows of the terrace. He could hear music as well – not music like he was accustomed to, but trumpets and clarinets all the same. Somebody was rehearsing here, but they were putting up a din quite unlike the things Billy had heard in the Buckingham Hotel, faster and looser and more . . . experimental? Was that the word?

  There was another sound too. Behind that door, a baby was crying. Somebody cried out in exasperation and, with muttered apologies, the music came to an end.

  Billy took it as his cue. He slipped the envelope under the door – and then, rapping on the wood as he turned, took flight up the road.

  Chapter Five

  ON THE SIXTH STOREY OF the Buckingham Hotel, where crown princes and Texan oil barons rubbed shoulders in the burgundy halls, there was one door through which no chambermaid was ever permitted to pass.

  At 9 p.m., with the last of the late summer light finally fading across London, the door to the Park Suite opened and Maynard Charles stepped into the corridor. Moments earlier, he had stepped out of his dressing gown and back into the double-breasted grey suit he wore for all formal occasions. With a look over his shoulder, he closed the door behind him, produced a single silver key and made certain that the lock was tight. Then he glided on, until finally he reached the top of the stairs, where he waited as an attendant summoned the lift. In his mind he began listing the tasks he had to complete before the night was through.

  Running the Buckingham Hotel was not, as many hoteliers said, like being the captain of a ship. It was more, Maynard Charles mused – as he stepped into the ornate golden cage of the executive lift and allowed the attendant to take him down through the Buckingham’s many floors – like being the conductor of an orchestra. All of the musicians had to play in time with one another, or the whole piece would sound discordant and wrong. He allowed himself a thin smile, for he found the idea that he and Archie Adams had anything in common wryly amusing. Maynard Charles was not a man of music, but he could appreciate the value of an orchestra and dance troupe. What he could not appreciate was the manner of a man like Archie Adams, and so many among his band, who seemed to live for nothing other than the ‘good times’ they had with their instruments in hand. Most of them are too young to have been in Flanders or France, Maynard thought. They’d be different men if they had been out there like me and my brothers, if they’d heard the roaring cannonade, sat cramped together in a hole in the earth for days on end while a very different sort of music – the deathly music of mortars, the music of bombs – played all around. Perhaps that might have drilled some decorum, some sobriety, some propriety, into them. Thank the Lord, he found himself thinking, the Buckingham did not host the rhumbas and sambas of which some of his guests had spoken. The world was a licentious place but some bastions of righteousness remained.

  The third-floor cocktail lounge was walled in great glass windows that overlooked the treetops of Berkeley Square, with a terrace on which the Buckingham gardeners had reared exotica with such fine fragrances that guests might easily think themselves drinking Martinis on some balmy Mediterranean coast. Regular guests called this place the Garden Lounge, but Maynard insisted upon its proper name: the Candlelight Club. Inside, a harpist was playing on a tiny spotlit stage and the room, bathed in blue light, was alive with guests in lounge suits and bias-cut dresses, while a veritable army of waiters flitted silently between them, keeping glasses full.

  The noise of gay chatter increased as Maynard stepped out of the lift and stepped through the doors. The Candlelight Club was suitably busy tonight. The Lebreton-Whites, in from Paris on their monthly sojourn, were being served champagne from a magnum bottle by one of the waiters, dressed head to toe in white. Mr Caponne, from Room 24 – who had made his riches in iron – was perusing a list of wines that the hotel sommeliers had spent years cultivating. Merivale Lloyd, whose librettos were performed on stages from New York to Berlin, had a table to himself in the corner closest to the harpist, until a lady dressed in a scarlet gown presumed upon him to take the neighbouring seat.

  As Maynard crossed the club, his eyes took in every last detail. Soon he found himself at the marble bar that skirted the circumference of the room. As he pulled up a stool, the cocktail waiter glided over.

  ‘Your speciality, Mr Charles?’

  ‘Not tonight, Diego. Give me an Angel Face, there’s a good man.’ It was not his usual drink, but there were some moments when a dry Martini would not do. Tonight demanded something more decadent. Something more indulgent? Something sugary and sweet, to take the edge off what he was about to do.

  He looked over his shoulder. Merivale Lloyd and his new companion had slid closer together.

  When Diego returned to present the rich amber cocktail, Maynard asked, ‘The lady in red, speaking with Mr Lloyd. Who is she?’

  ‘One of the hotel dancers, sir.’

  Maynard nodded. Diego did not mean dancer in the trad-itional sense. The lady entertaining Merivale Lloyd, and the others like her who flitted through the Candlelight Club tonight, were dancers in spirit only – private dancers, with whom a guest might decide to retire for the night. It was, Maynard Charles had often reflected, one of the more interesting – yet less salubrious – aspects of his role that these workers needed managing, just the same as the cleaners and valets, chambermaids and chefs who made up the rest of the Buckingham army. That these particular hotel dancers were not in the official hotel accounts did not mean he did not keep cards for each of them in his private index. They may not have drawn salaries from the Buckingham books, but they were every bit as important for the health of the hotel. A place like the Buckingham could not expect to exist without attracting some sort of parasites. And better to make sure they were of the correct class and comportment than outlaw them altogether. A lone man, even a man of Maynard Charles’s calibre, could not stand up against an unstoppable tide.

  ‘Send for one of the pages, won’t you?’ he said airily. ‘Have someone watch Mr Lloyd’s room this evening. I don’t recognise our lady friend. If she’s above board, then fine. But let’s find out first.’

  ‘As you wish, Mr Charles.’

  The cocktail wait
er disappeared on his errand. After he was gone, Maynard Charles reached into the inner pocket of his dinner jacket and produced one of his White Owl cigars. As he lit it, he turned to the evening edition of The Times and scoured its headlines. In Spain the Nationalists had captured San Sebastián. On the second page the editorial led with Mr Hitler’s rally. It had only been six months since he’d marched back into the Rhineland and now he was declaring Germany a fully armed nation once again. Maynard Charles had to take deep lungfuls of smoke just to steady his nerves. My friends died so that there wouldn’t be war again. And now look where we’re going . . . It would have made his blood boil, but his blood was already boiling tonight – and not even the drink in his hand was enough to make him relax.

  A finger tapped at his shoulder. Instinct told him to turn around – but he was a practised, mannered kind of man, and instead he said, ‘Let us find ourselves a table, shall we? Somewhere we can talk.’

  Maynard did not look at his guest as he stood up and, summoning a waiter to carry his drink, made haste to a table in a shadowy corner of the lounge. Here the music of the harpist was faint, but the conversations of his fellow drinkers still buzzed around him, so that everything was a single indecipherable noise – which was exactly what he needed.

  ‘Bring my friend a soda and lime, would you, old boy?’

  The man named Moorcock removed his Bollman trilby and placed it on the table beside him. In the pale light of the club, Maynard watched as he picked a stray grey hair from the hat and disposed of it under the table.

  ‘I’ll take a Martini,’ he said.

  Maynard simply glared.

  ‘A Martini, Mr Charles. A little hospitality would go a long way between us.’