From London With Love

Chapter One

CHAPTER

ONE

London, Autumn 1968

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?’ said David.

Félicité smiled and put her hand over David’s. She looked on him as a sort of uncle, always there, always supportive but sometimes a little over-protective.

‘I want to do this on my own. She’s my mother, after all, even if she didn’t really bring me up.’ They were sitting in the car outside an imposing house in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, which, Félicité had been told, was a very smart area of London. The house they were looking at had three storeys and an imposing front door. Félicité was not surprised to find her mother living in a house like this.

‘Well, don’t let her try to improve you,’ David said. ‘You’re perfect as you are. And particularly don’t let her try and get rid of your French accent. It’s charming.’

Félicité was startled. ‘I haven’t got a French accent, have I?’

‘It’s very faint. You’ve been brought up in France, been to school there. It’s inevitable.’

Félicité was still slightly affronted. ‘I thought I spoke perfect English.’

‘You do, darling!’ Félicité got the impression that David wished he’d never mentioned her accent. He turned to face her. ‘And don’t be surprised if she’s jealous of you. You are extremely pretty – beautiful even. Hardly surprising given your parents. But Lucinda may not like it. She may feel threatened.’

Félicité was aware she was nice to look at – she received enough male attention from her schoolmates to tell her that – but the thought that her mother might be jealous of her looks didn’t seem credible. She wasn’t that impressed with them herself. Her shoulder-length hair, for example, was neither blonde, after her mother, nor dark, after her father. Instead, it was a sort of caramel colour. She did at least have her father’s dark eyes but she felt they didn’t go with the shade of her hair. She was fairly tall and slim, which was good. David had once said she had a retroussé nose, which, it turned out, meant it turned up a bit. She didn’t usually give much thought to her appearance, but she knew her mother would be looking at her critically. She hoped she would pass her mother’s assessment.

‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I’m going in now. And yes, I know you’ll pick me up again if I’m unhappy in any way. But I won’t be! Lexi says that London is a wonderful city and I’ll meet good friends at my secretarial course.’

David sighed. ‘Alexandra was born here. It was different for her—’

‘Goodbye, darling David.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘I’ll write to you all very soon.’

She got out of the car and, surrounded by her suitcases, rang the doorbell.

It was opened almost immediately by a middle-aged woman in a black dress with a white apron. She wore a lace-edged cap and had an air of suppressed resentment.

‘Felicity, darling!’ said Lucinda, her mother, coming down the stairs behind the woman. ‘I thought you’d never get here and that David must have got lost. Come in. Anna, can you bring in the cases?’

Félicité brought in the biggest case herself. She hadn’t realised there’d be a maid. This trip to stay with her mother suddenly seemed a little more daunting than she’d imagined the visit to 1960s Swinging London would be – the visit that she had been dreaming of for ages.

‘Leave that for now,’ said Lucinda, who was formally dressed in a skirt and jacket, her blonde hair swept into a chignon. ‘Anna will take it to your room. Go and wash your hands and then come through to the drawing room.’

Félicité didn’t consider herself to be biddable but somehow found herself doing exactly as her mother asked. In her home in Provence, where she lived with her father, stepmother and various siblings, she was a confident young woman. Here she felt shy of the beautiful mother she hardly ever saw, and cold in the chilly England of late October.

There was a bright coal fire burning in the fireplace of the elegant drawing room, however.

‘Come and sit by the fire, darling,’ said her mother, handing Félicité a glass of brown liquid in a small glass. ‘It’s too late for tea. That’s sherry. Learn to like it. It’s an English custom.’

Félicité sipped it. It was very dry and she didn’t like the taste, but she did like the warming effect it had on her as she swallowed.

‘Talking of English things,’ said Lucinda. ‘One, I think you should be called Felicity in the English way while you’re here. Two, I’d prefer you to call me Mummy, not Maman. Three, if you could get rid of that affected French accent, I’d be grateful.’

Félicité took another sip of the unwelcoming sherry. She’d hardly opened her mouth since she’d arrived and already her mother was criticising the way she spoke. ‘I’ll do my best with my accent,’ she said, deliberately sounding even more French, ‘and I don’t mind being called Felicity in the English way, but I would struggle with Mummy.’

Lucinda sighed. ‘I’m going to have to work hard on you to get rid of the hoydenish habits your stepmother has obviously encouraged.’

Félicité smiled and finished her drink.

Shortly afterwards, Anna showed Félicité the little bedroom at the back of the house assigned to her and then left her alone to change for dinner. They were expecting a guest, and Félicité was sure it would be a man. Her mother was rarely without a male companion. As she shook out one of the stylish dresses her maternal grandmother (who lived the life of a Frenchwoman) had bought for her in Paris, Félicité hoped that David was wrong, and that her mother wouldn’t feel remotely threatened. Her dresses were elegant, but they weren’t quite what young women were wearing in London these days. They covered her knees for one thing.

However, she felt confident in her appearance when she went through to the drawing room later.

As she’d predicted, there was a man holding a glass of something Félicité presumed was whisky.

‘Gerald,’ said Lucinda. ‘Let me introduce you to my daughter, Felicity.’

Gerald inspected Félicité from head to toe and then said, ‘My, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? She is the image of you, Lucy, and could be your sister!’

Lucinda smiled. ‘You flatter me, Gerry, but thank you. Felicity? Come and tell Gerald about your life in the chateau.’

‘The chateau?’ said Gerald. ‘Does that mean your papa is rich?’

Félicité was inwardly shocked by this directness but managed a shrug in reply. ‘ Pas du tout, ’ she said. ‘I mean, not at all. But the chateau is beautiful and Provence is beautiful too.’

‘And stuck in the middle of nowhere, how boring!’ said Lucinda. ‘Apart from the scenery, which I admit is rather lovely.’

‘It’s not so far from the Riviera,’ said Félicité, sticking up for her home territory. ‘And Paris is easily accessible.’ She had overheard her grandmother use this phrase at a dinner party; it seemed a good time to introduce it.

Lucinda smiled. ‘I must admit my mother has done a very good job buying you some clothes. Had you had to rely on your stepmother for guidance, God knows what you’d have looked like.’

‘You have a stepmother?’ asked Gerald. ‘Do you hate her? Is she wicked?’

‘ Pas du tout, ’ Félicité said again. She was feeling more and more prickly as the minutes ticked by. It was going to be difficult to enjoy herself in London if this was how it was going to be. But Alexandra, her ‘wicked stepmother’, had assured her that once she met other girls her own age, she would be fine.

‘Her wickedness may be hampered by the two brats she’s just given birth to,’ said Lucinda.

‘The twins are one now,’ Félicité retorted.

‘And then there’s the little one, Stéphie. Quite sweet but possibly not all that bright,’ said Lucinda. ‘My ex-husband, the Comte, took her in for some reason.’

‘She is fourteen now, Maman,’ said Félicité.

Lucinda sighed. ‘Can’t you manage to call me Mummy?’

‘No!’ said Gerald. ‘Maman is charming.’ He shot a glance at Lucinda. ‘Having a French daughter is much more exotic than having just another lumpy schoolgirl with incipient spots and body odour.’

Lucinda laughed. ‘Now you put it like that, Gerald, I agree. No one could call Felicity lumpy, and her skin is good.’

Félicité realised that Lucinda seemed to be warming towards her being French, which was a relief, as she had no idea how to be anything else, but she resented being discussed as if she wasn’t present.

‘Ah, we’re embarrassing the poor girl,’ said Gerald. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Lucy, you went to the theatre last night? How was the play?’

Félicité was very tired by the time she was finally allowed to go to bed. Anna had cooked dinner and apparently cleared and washed it up as well. Félicité felt bad about this and resolved to be more helpful once she was used to her surroundings.

She had been told that although her mother rented most of the house, there was an apartment at the top inhabited by the god-daughter of the house’s owner, who lived abroad.

‘We’ll invite her for drinks soon,’ Lucinda had said at the end of the evening. ‘Now you have a good night’s sleep. Your course starts tomorrow. I’ll take you there. It’s not far and we can walk.’

When Félicité inserted herself between the tightly tucked sheets, she remembered her stepmother’s fondness for hot-water bottles: she would definitely have put one in the bed. But she hardly had time to feel the cold before she was asleep.