Libby swept back down the stairs an hour later. From the hall she could hear the muted sounds of dinner coming from the dining room. The clink of cutlery, the twitter of the aunts and Millicent’s carping tones: ‘Such a disagreeable girl. My Freddy could have done so much better!’
Soon enough, Libby would be able to afford much nicer digs. Maybe even with Mrs Lemmon across the road and all her lovely hot water and indoor lav.
The very notion made Libby grin as she pulled on her coat but the smile was wiped off her face as she heard a heavy step on the stairs behind her. ‘Going out, sweetling? Care for some company?’
‘Not really, Potts,’ Libby said, but she knew any protest would be in vain and as she slipped out the door, Potts was at her side. ‘You’re missing dinner.’
He sniffed. ‘Vegetable slop and brown rice is hardly dinner. A man requires greater sustenance. Talking of which, I don’t suppose you could advance me a small cash sum?’
‘Absolutely couldn’t,’ Libby said, pulling her coat closer around her. ‘You already owe me eight shillings. Besides, you can’t have spent all your earnings from Sunday night. It’s only Wednesday!’
‘I had various debts to discharge,’ Potts said and Libby caught the pungent whiff of stale alcohol, strong enough that she took a step away.
‘Well, it’s a pity you didn’t discharge mine.’ She made a shooing motion. ‘I’m meeting someone in the Flask on a private matter, you can’t come with me.’
‘Oh, the Flask. There’s sure to be a kind soul in situ who’ll buy a weary traveller a drink,’ Potts said, because he was utterly shameless. ‘I’ll stay in the public bar, you won’t even know I’m there.’
Libby shot him an exasperated look and he rewarded her with a wet, rheumy smile. One always knew when Potts was there. He tended to make his presence felt. What a shock Libby had had when she’d arrived back from Paris to find him in residence.
It had been at least fifteen years since their paths had last crossed. The booze had bloated his slight frame and given his features a reddened, coarse look, but Libby had recognised Potts instantly. He’d always reminded her of a hard-boiled egg with his protruding pale blue eyes and the perfect oval of his head, now devoid of the last few sandy strands of hair, which used to cling forlornly to his scalp.
Potts had recognised her too, though it had taken him a while because Libby was no longer the pretty little redhead bringing up the rear of the chorus line and fighting off the attentions of lascivious directors and ageing matinée idols with a wide-eyed look of indignation and a breathy, ‘I’ll tell my aunt Dolly if you don’t leave me alone.’
‘Little Libby O’Malley?’ he’d hissed in alarm the first time he’d got her on her own. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
It was the first time Libby had smiled in weeks. ‘Dear old Potts! It’s Libby Morton now. I’m the daughter of the house, as it were. And what on earth are you doing here?’
When she’d first known him, Potts was already ruined by drink. Aunt Dolly said it was on account of the war, that he’d been different before that, though everyone had been different before the war. Back in those days Potts would stumble onstage whenever he felt like it, weave in and out of the set, step on everyone’s lines, unable to remember his own. Then back at their digs, he’d stumble on, down corridors, knocking on doors, begging for a drink, for someone to keep him company and the dark hours at bay.
Then Aunt Dolly had run off with a married man who owned a haulage business in Leeds, Libby had left the company for another that was marginally better, Deidre Withers had made her change her surname and she’d barely thought of Potts again. Until there he was in Willoughby Square, claiming to be in touch with the other side. He spent his Sunday evenings very profitably in fancy houses Up West hoodwinking impressionable woman with ‘messages’ from beyond the grave.
‘Mr Potter has access to a plane of being that we couldn’t possibly understand and he’s trying to make contact with my dear Arthur,’ Millicent had told Libby in sepulchral tones when Libby had asked her why she’d taken Potts in. ‘Though my dear Arthur is proving elusive, which is so like him.’
It was all hogwash. The dead stayed dead, however hard one might wish otherwise, and Potts was a charlatan of the worst kind. Giving those impressionable ladies hope where there was none.
Now they walked in silence along frost-dappled pavements. Libby felt nauseous at the thought of whom she was meeting. Watkins. She hadn’t phoned the number on the card, but had sent word to Mickey and asked him to arrange it, but now she wished that she hadn’t listened to her conscience and had left well alone.
Watkins couldn’t be as angry as he’d been on the way down to Brighton but still, turning up with Potts in tow was sure to make him cross.
‘You must promise to stay in the public bar and not bother me at all,’ she told Potts sharply as they turned into Flask Walk.
‘If you’d just spare me a couple of shillings then we can both go our merry ways,’ Potts said.
‘You must still have some of your ill-gotten gains!’
‘They’re not ill-gotten, I do have a gift, sweetling. I see things, people who are among us but not of us any longer, I hear voices…’
‘If you didn’t drink so much you’d have a very quiet, very peaceful life,’ Libby protested. ‘But that said, couldn’t you conjure up a visit from dear Arthur and put Millicent out of her misery?’
‘I don’t conjure up anything. I’m visited by messengers from the spirit realm.’ Potts sounded quite aggrieved that Libby would dare to suggest otherwise. They were at the Flask now and he tried to pull open the door but his hands were shaking so badly that Libby had to do it for him. ‘Besides, sweetling, if I may impart some hard-won wisdom – one should never shit where one sleeps.’
He winked as he pushed past Libby. ‘You old rogue!’ she chided him, but he was gone, shaking his ovoid head in protest at her words.
Libby pressed on through the crowded public bar to the saloon bar. It was cosy with the fire crackling away, lively chatter and laughter, nothing like the stultifying atmosphere of the house in Willoughby Square, and before he even raised his hand in greeting, she saw Watkins sitting by the fireplace with a ubiquitous copy of The Times.
He stood as Libby approached and when she reached him, he leaned forward, so for one clumsy moment Libby thought that he meant to kiss her cheek and she leaned forward too, only for him to take a step back and proffer his hand.
She shook it. ‘Hello,’ she said and she felt inexplicably shy, which was silly when he’d seen the absolute worst of her. Broken on a bathroom floor. It wasn’t just the heat of the fire that caused her cheeks to flame and she had to force herself to meet his eyes.
He was older than she remembered. Hair greying at the temples, lines on his forehead, around his eyes. Libby wanted to tug off her gloves so she could place her fingers on the creases on either side of his mouth and smooth them away. He looked so very worn by his cares.
Watkins was looking at her too, eyes sweeping over her from top to bottom. He dipped his head. ‘You’re looking well. Are you feeling well?’
‘I am. Much better,’ Libby said and she let him guide her to the chair opposite his. He watched as she took off her hat, fluffed her hair, removed her coat and finally sat down. She had thought, in an act of foolish bravado, to turn up in Freddy’s clothes, but now she was relieved that she’d changed into her navy blue as Watkins looked her over once more. His dark eyes seemed to miss nothing, from the scuffed soles of her shoes to the hair that she was still nervously fluffing.
‘Good, I’m glad,’ he said, after a long pause. ‘Would you like a drink? Something to eat?’
‘Just a whisky mac, please.’
‘Please don’t make me eat on my own,’ he said. Libby was starving and they’d already had dinner together in the hotel dining room in Brighton, and it would be just as awkward to sit there as he ate than to eat with him. ‘Shall I see if they have liver on the menu?’
‘Please don’t.’ Libby pulled a face. ‘I know it’s meant to be good for me, but it tastes so livery. They do meat pies. I’d much rather have one of them.’
Libby watched as Watkins went to the bar to place their order. In profile, in his dark suit, hair neatly swept back from his face, he reminded her of Freddy again. He had the same colouring, the same slim build, but Watkins was straighter, stiffer than Freddy who always slunk into a room as if he were unsure of his welcome.
Watkins was also a little older than Freddy. Probably only five years or so, just nudging forty, she decided, but those years put a whole world between them. Freddy was the same age as Libby, thirty-two. He’d been too young to be called up. Hadn’t come of age on a battlefield, in a trench, surrounded by the bodies of his comrades, his brothers, hands indelibly stained for ever more with their blood.
There was a chasm between those men and everybody else. They were hard in a way that Freddy and his friends could never be.
Watkins was deep in conversation with the barkeep, the man nodding respectfully as he listened to him speak, then Watkins turned away and Libby lowered her head so she wouldn’t be caught staring.
‘You really do look remarkably well,’ Watkins said once more as he placed their drinks on the table and sat down. ‘Even your hair is brighter.’
Libby resisted the urge to touch her hair again. ‘Thank you and you… you’re… you seem…’
‘Like a man resigned to his fate,’ Watkins supplied drily. ‘Was I very awful in Brighton? I was, wasn’t I?’
‘Of course not,’ Libby lied. ‘I can only imagine the strain you’ve been under. How unpleasant it must be. No one could blame you for being a little out of sorts.’
‘Very tactfully put, when I was so unkind to you.’ When he was younger, Watkins must have been quite handsome. There were still traces of it in the full lips currently curved in a rueful smile, the high planes of his cheekbones, the almost delicate arch to his eyebrows.
‘I’m the one who should be apologising. I shouldn’t have agreed to go to Brighton when I knew that I was poorly.’ He was still smiling at her. Softening her up, Libby knew that, but she may as well forge ahead while he was in such a conciliatory mood. ‘Mr Watkins —’
‘Hugo, please. I thought we were on first name terms by now.’
Libby pressed her hands together. ‘Hugo, then. I hope Mickey made my position clear. I’m sorry that my, er, episode in Brighton scuppered your chances of getting the evidence you need.’ She lowered her voice, leaned towards him. ‘I live with my mother-in-law, she runs a respectable boarding house. So, going to court, the chance that it might make the papers… it’s simply out of the question, you see. And I’ve recently started a new teaching job so I really couldn’t go away for another weekend either.’
Libby waited for the shadows, the anger to darken Hugo’s features, but he simply nodded, then took a sip of whisky. ‘Mickey made your position perfectly clear but it now transpires that we do have one witness from the hotel willing to testify. One of the other maids. She helped you when you were indisposed.’
Libby stared resolutely at the amber liquid in her glass and tried not to remember the faces floating above her, white and anxious, as she’d lain on the bathroom floor as weak and naked as the day she’d been born. ‘Oh, really?’ she managed to squeak.
‘The only problem is she won’t come up to London to formally identify you – she’s never once left Sussex, apparently, and so I wondered, hoped, you might be amenable to meeting me a couple more times… No hotels,’ he added as Libby stiffened in panic. ‘It couldn’t be simpler. All we’d do is walk in a public place; a park perhaps, trailed by a private detective.’
It was meant to be one weekend. A chance to make some quick cash, take in the sea air.
‘All this trouble,’ Libby said, shaking her head. ‘Forgive me for speaking out of turn but shouldn’t the private detective really be trailing your wife?’
It was like a switch being flipped. A door slamming shut. His beautiful smile dimmed then disappeared altogether. ‘I couldn’t countenance that,’ he said a little forcefully. ‘I couldn’t do that to the mother of my children.’
There wasn’t anything Libby could say to that. The physical pain was gone now but how she ached when she thought that no one would ever describe her as the mother of his children.
It was a blessed relief to see a woman bearing down on them with two heaped plates. The steak and mushroom pie tasted like cardboard, the mashed potato was ashes in her mouth but Libby doggedly chewed and swallowed so she wouldn’t have to talk.
Watkins, Hugo, insisted on catching her eye and smiling, once he made an appreciative comment about the food and persevered until they weren’t sitting in silence as they ate but conversing about the situation in Europe, what was happening in Germany, then Oswald Mosley and his ridiculous black-shirted buffoons.
‘I met him once in a nightclub, years ago,’ Libby offered. It seemed as if there wasn’t a soul in London that she hadn’t met once in a nightclub, years ago. ‘We were introduced by the fellow I was with and Mosley looked me over as if I were a horse he were thinking of buying, obviously found me wanting for he couldn’t even muster up a “hello”. Anyway, I think fascists and their ilk are morally repugnant. So hateful.’
Hugo raised his eyebrows at her. ‘But then you live in Hampstead, a hotbed of Bolsheviks and bohemians.’
‘The parts of Hampstead I frequent tend to be populated by little old ladies. There isn’t a Bolshevik in sight. Besides, no one calls them Bolsheviks any more. Aren’t they just Communists these days? I’m sure they’re the same thing.’
This was more Freddy’s area of expertise than hers. He and his friends would sit in smoky bars arguing happily about how capitalism was finished, a decaying, corrupt system that feudalised the masses and benefited only a few. They could go on for hours, shouting over each other, but whatever Hugo’s political allegiances were, he wasn’t inclined to share them with Libby. ‘So, you’re not a Fascist or a Communist? What do you believe in, then?’
‘I simply believe that people should be kind to each other, then the world would be a much nicer place.’
He raised his glass to her. ‘So, you’re an idealist. I always think idealism is the most dangerous of all the isms.’
Libby supposed she should think of something clever to say in return, but the girl had come to clear their plates and Hugo was ordering another whisky mac for her, whisky for himself. ‘Everyone has to believe in something,’ she said.
‘Maybe I don’t,’ Hugo said. ‘Not any more. Does that make me an anarchist?’
‘If you are, then you’re the most smartly dressed anarchist I’ve ever met,’ Libby said and Watkins laughed and she was laughing too, could feel her cheeks pinking up from the warmth of the room and his approval.
‘So, back to the matter in hand,’ Hugo said abruptly, as if their camaraderie had been an illusion, a distraction. ‘All I’m asking is that you walk with me. Tuck your arm in mine, gaze up at me tenderly so the detective can take a photograph?’
‘A photograph?’ Libby asked warily.
‘So the maid can say you were the woman I was with in Brighton. Mysterious Marigold,’ he said. ‘No one will ever know your real identity.’
‘But are you absolutely certain, hand on your heart certain, that I won’t be called as a witness?’ There were few things the papers loved more than a divorce case, all the salacious details laid bare for the titillation of their readers. ‘You’re not famous, are you? Or titled?’
‘No. I sell cars, own a garage too. Nothing newsworthy about me,’ Hugo said. Perhaps he sensed Libby was wavering for he reached across the table between them to take her hand. Just for a moment. ‘I’m happy to come to you. We could walk on Hampstead Heath?’
‘No! Not the heath.’ It was hard to believe but Millicent had friends, like the vituperative, vile Virena Edmonds who was always sticking her beaky nose where it wasn’t wanted. There had been the time when she and Freddy were lying in the long grass, near the Vale of Health, stealing kisses, when Virena had chanced upon them and had made it seem to Millicent that all sorts of indecent acts had occurred. ‘My mother-in-law… it doesn’t bear thinking about it. And I’m a schoolmistress. If some of the parents…’
‘So, it’s not a no then?’ Hugo looked around the bar as if he expected to see a map of the area pinned to a wall. ‘Regent’s Park?’
‘Highgate Woods,’ Libby said, because it was easier than saying no, however much she wanted to. She suspected Hugo would persist and rather than be worn down, she might just as well agree and get it over with. Like having a tooth pulled. She could easily walk to Highgate from Hampstead and Highgate was positively rural, far enough that she was unlikely to see anyone who could report back. ‘It’s not on the Tube, I’m afraid, but you could get the bus from —’
‘It’s not a problem. Highgate Woods it is, and of course, I’d pay you. Five pounds a walk, does that sound fair?’
Libby’s first instinct was to refuse, to bristle at the suggestion, but she tamped it down. Five pounds for taking a walk? Some people had more money than sense.
They talked some more, about days and times, until Libby heard the crash of a glass, a muttered apology, and looked up to see Potts weaving unsteadily through the tables towards them.
‘Sweetling,’ he said as soon as he was in slurring distance. ‘I beseech you for one English shilling. Surely you can spare that?’
Libby finished the rest of her whisky mac in one quick, choking gulp. Hugo was staring with a horrified fascination at Potts who, since Libby had last seen him, had managed to spill beer down his shirt and acquire a woman’s hat, red with a veil and a feather, perched on top of his bald head at a precarious angle.
She could stay, brazen it out, even introduce them, heaven forfend, but it was easier to gather up her belongings, then Potts who was swaying slowly on the spot where he stood, and make her excuses. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ she said to Hugo who didn’t bother to hide either his amusement or his distaste.