Chapter 10 Pretty, Witty Nell
Pretty, Witty Nell
The amount Flynn had drunk at the Blinkhorns left his brain feeling mummified the next day, and he went for an aimless wander in Hyde Park in an effort to banish his hangover.
He bought a tepid tea from a stall and took a seat on a bench to drink it, while contemplating how he should fill the rest of the empty afternoon.
Perhaps he needed a hobby. Tennis or stamp collecting.
Golf. He couldn’t imagine himself pursuing any of these things.
He had been briefly inspired by an entry on the Stock List for archery—a longbow and leather quiver (John Jacques and Son Ltd, Thornton Heath, Surrey)—imagining the twang of bow and thud of arrow.
You could probably fell an illegal deer in Richmond Park if you were so inclined. He wasn’t.
He was debating whether or not to visit the nearby Natural History Museum—hardly an entertaining prospect, Flynn had not set foot in a museum since before the war—when he heard a breathy voice behind him saying, “Can I interest you in my wares, kind sir?” A plummy-sounding Nell Gwyn, and Flynn knew which one it was before he even turned round.
Lydia. Lydia Fairchild, whose brother had gone down on the Hermes and who had made Badger blush.
“Ahoy there again,” she said, taking a seat next to him. “You looked as though you were a million miles away.”
“I was thinking about dinosaurs actually.”
“Oh lord, I met enough of those during the war. I worked at the Admiralty. All the sailors like a nice girl. Shall we get some tea? Or we could go for a sedate stroll around the Serpentine.”
Flynn opted for the latter.
What did she do now? he asked, and she responded airily, “Oh, you know—this and that.” She didn’t seem like the sort of woman who worked from necessity. There was money there—family, he supposed. After all, she was Norfolk, too.
She threaded her arm through his and they ambled companionably.
The weather had turned warm and there were many worse ways to spend time than sauntering through a London park with a beautiful woman on your arm, breathing in the scent of lilacs somewhere nearby.
Lydia was as pale as porcelain, but had the iron posture of a horsewoman and the certainty of her class.
Flynn thought how easy it would be to succumb to her particular charms. He entertained her by telling her about the Festival Cake and dinner in Belgravia, embellishing the tale with some droll additions.
Lydia seemed the sort who liked to be entertained.
“Archie and Mitzi Blinkhorn?” she mused thoughtfully.
“Do you know them? I think the Blinkhorns were Fascists before the war.”
“Everyone was a Fascist before the war, even my own dear old pa. Unless they were a Communist, of course. Ends up being much the same thing. Fascism in this country is as dead as the dinosaurs up the road.”
“But there must be pockets of it left. Disaffected people. People like the Blinkhorns.”
“The disaffected are like the poor, they are always with us. Enough of politics,” she said with a little toss of her perfect head. “It’s not a fit subject for a sunny day. I’m starving. Shall we get something to eat?”
He thought she meant a café or a restaurant, but she laughed and said, “Oh, no, too dull, come back to mine and I’ll make you something. I’m famous for my omelette aux fines herbes. And I’m just up the road in Hans Crescent.”
He had a feeling that there was more than an omelette on offer.
Tempted though he was—although not necessarily by the omelette—he recalled the way in which Badger had gazed at Lydia.
Badger would be mortified to think that Flynn had won her so easily.
He had failed to win Jane Pargeter’s affections, Flynn wouldn’t betray him with another beauty. He opted for the dinosaurs instead.
“Ah well, suit yourself,” Lydia laughed. “Apparently I can’t compete with poor old Diplodocus.”
He was already walking away in the direction of Exhibition Road when she shouted, “Wait, hang on! Mr. Flynn.” She caught up with him, took his arm again and set off walking. “I can’t call you that—what’s your name?”
“Harry.”
“Harry. Oh, but you’re not really a Harry.”
“I’m not?”
“I shall continue to call you Flynn. Can’t I change your mind? I beg you—don’t doom me to the tedium of an English Saturday afternoon. That would be extremely cruel of you. Tell you what—if you come home with me, I’ll look and see if there’s anything on file about your Blinkhorns.”
“On file? What file?” he puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You know, anything of interest. See if they’re still wrong ’uns.”
“My God!” Flynn said when it dawned on him. “You work for the Security Services.”
“Now and then. Here and there. Why so surprised?”
“Well, for one thing, you applied to be a Nell Gwyn.”
“I did, didn’t I? And I got the job! Thanks to good old Badge.”
For one ridiculous moment Flynn wondered if she had been sent undercover by MI5 to investigate the Festival. Or perhaps just to infiltrate the Nell Gwyns.
He did, after all, let Diplodocus down in favour of the omelette, although it turned out that there were no eggs in Lydia’s expensive flat and certainly no fines herbes.
The only thing on offer was Lydia herself.
His loyalty to Badger lay abandoned by the wayside, but then Flynn’s family motto wasn’t Veritas et Fides.
He took two cigarettes from the pack and lit both before passing one to Lydia, who was lying companionably beside him in her bed.
Flynn’s mattress in Romilly Street was like a pallet of old straw compared to the one on Lydia’s bed in Knightsbridge—it might have been stuffed with swansdown.
She didn’t own the flat—her father did, she said, as if it were of no consequence.
It was “just a pied à terre really.” She propped an ashtray on the bedcovers between them.
It was a pretty little thing (“Sèvres”) painted with flowers and insects, never intended to have Players stubbed out on it.
“You’re really slumming it with me,” he said.
“Known worse,” she said. It could have been a joke. Or not. Hard to say.
All that cool self-possession of hers had been surrendered to overwhelming lust in an instant and recovered afterwards almost as quickly.
She was rather brutal, Flynn thought. Like a man, he supposed.
It would be easy to fall under the spell of a woman like Lydia.
She would make an excellent Nell Gwyn. (Why had she applied? The question remained unanswered.)
He lit more cigarettes, passed hers over and took a long drag on his. “And calm of mind all passion spent,” he said. “What’s that a line from?”
“Samson Agonistes,” she said promptly. “I dislike Milton. So wordy.”
Flynn was impressed. He didn’t usually consort with women who knew both Milton and more than one sexual position.
“You won’t tell Badger about this, will you?” he said.
“Badger? Why on earth would I tell him? Are you suffering from buyer’s remorse?”
“No, not at all, but he would be disappointed.”
“In you, not me.”
“He seems to be continually lovelorn for one unobtainable woman or another.”
“Badger? Badger bats for the other team, Harry. Surely you know that?”
“Badger?”
“A gentleman’s gentleman, as it were. Queer as a corkscrew. Badger has his many secrets. He’s excellent at concealing them. And ‘unobtainable women’ are a good disguise, especially as he shares his London house with a ‘friend’ and has done for some time. Have I shocked you?”
“No.” She hadn’t. Perhaps a little, but he was more shocked by his blindness to the obvious than anything.
“What did Badger do in the war, Lydia?”
“Is our pillow talk to be all about Badger?”
“But you knew him,” Flynn persisted.
“Well, we played together when we were children, but he was my brother’s friend, not mine. I didn’t realize at the time, but when I look back now I think Badger was in love with Edmund.” She said the word “love” as if it was a word from a foreign language that was new to her.
“I’ve heard of it,” Flynn said. Lydia laughed; her throat was raw from the number of cigarettes they had smoked.
“And in the war?”
“Badger? Oh, you know, the usual. The Guards, Security Service, SOE and then the wilderness.”
“Badger was in the Special Operations Executive?”
“The ‘racket’? Yes. Not an agent in the field as such, he worked back at their HQ in Baker Street. Planning drops and so on. He did make it over a couple of times, I think, just to liaise with a couple of his agents. You can’t imagine Badger on a parachute drop, can you?”
“Isn’t this all very hush-hush? Official Secrets Act and so on. Should you be telling me?”
“Oh, God, you can forget hush-hush where that lot are concerned,” Lydia said disparagingly.
“Yes, there’s stuff that will probably remain classified until Judgement Day because some people are rather good at covering their tails, but the SOE’s been a leaky sieve since the war, the OSA means nothing to a lot of them.
They’re falling over each other to get their stories out before they can be accused. ”
“Accused of what?”
“Oh, the list is long, but mainly incompetence. Not understanding when cells or networks had been compromised or when radios and codes and names had fallen into the hands of the enemy. Sometimes it was months before they realized and they continued to parachute agents straight into the welcoming arms of the Germans. And the Germans themselves became very good at impersonating SOE agents, not just in code but in person, too. A lot of SOEs were rank amateurs. Traitors, too, of course. And as for the French…the way they tell it now, every single one of them was in the Resistance, but half of France was collaborating.”
“And Badger?”
“I believe Badger tried to stop some of the worst of it, but no one would listen to him. Hence the wilderness.”
“Also known as the Festival Office.”
—
Flynn was unceremoniously kicked out of Lydia’s bed in the early hours when she said, “Sorry, I need my beauty sleep.” Too tired to walk, he caught a cab that was roaming on the Brompton Road.
He rang Lydia at lunchtime from a phone box on Shaftesbury Avenue.
She answered sleepily and he realized he had woken her.
“How gentlemanly of you to call,” she said, “and on a Sunday, too” (which was criticism apparently).
Although he didn’t say so, it wasn’t necessarily courtesy that had prompted Flynn to get in touch with Lydia, he just wanted to reassure himself that she wasn’t another woman who had disappeared from his life overnight.
The pips went and Flynn fumbled in his pocket for a coin, but by the time he found one the line was dead. When he called her again, although he let it ring for a long time, there was no answer.
He trailed home. There was nothing tempting waiting for him in Romilly Street.
The bright memory of the beguiling Lydia was already fading, replaced by a growing feeling that she had engineered their meeting in the park, almost as though she had been stalking him.
He had been her willing prey. Too willing, perhaps.
On the way home he had picked up a couple of early editions of the Sunday papers. The cake had been introduced by the weekend papers with considerable fanfare and Flynn was supposed to be keeping a cuttings file, although he couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to look at it.
He dropped into his own uncomfortable bed and finally rose to face the day again late in the afternoon. He found himself hungry, for once. An omelette aux fines herbes might have tempted him.
There was a knock on the door. It was Leonora Kane, who came in without waiting to be invited, saying, “Only me, duckie. Oh, look at your poor face, Mr. Flynn. Get in a bit of a fight, did you?”
“Something like that. Not as bad as it looks. Can I help you with something, Leonora?”
“I wondered if you could spare me a few tea leaves? I’m completely out. I’ve used what’s left three times now, it’s hardly worth boiling the water for them and I’ve got a gentleman coming. He does like his cup of tea.”
She grazed through the Sunday papers spread-eagled on the coffee table while Flynn spooned leaves from the Edward VII Coronation caddy into an egg cup.
“Oh, yes,” Leonora said, pointing to a copy of the Sunday People that displayed a photograph of Mitzi and an article about the cake.
“I read about your Festival Cake thing in the Standard.” Flynn had recognized the name on the byline of that piece.
It had been written by one of the cake judges—the man with the Birmingham accent who wrote obituaries.
The article was fulsome in its praise of both the cake and Mitzi, even though it did have the slight flavour of a funeral exequy.
Leonora laughed. “Mitzi’s certainly come a long way since Mrs. Ramsbottom’s.”
“Mrs. Ramsbottom’s?” Did Leonora know Mitzi?
And who on earth was Mrs. Ramsbottom? It sounded rather like an old-fashioned girls’ educational establishment—his own mother had attended a “Mrs. Wedderburn’s”—but Leonora laughed and said, “Well, you could call it an education, I suppose. Long time ago now, of course, after the war—the first one, that is, not the one that’s just gone. A girl had to make a living somehow.”
“You mean Mrs. Ramsbottom was…?”
“A madam? Yes, duckie. A good one, too. Looked after her girls.”
“And Mitzi was one of her ‘girls’?” Flynn couldn’t contain his astonishment.
“Close your mouth, duckie, you’ll catch a fly.
Of course, she wasn’t Mitzi then, she was just plain old Ada.
Ada Clegg. From Doncaster, I seem to remember.
Somewhere like that, anyway. Let you into a secret—I was a Winifred.
Winifred Birtwistle. But Mrs. Ramsbottom thought I needed something a bit more exotic, so hey presto, Leonora Kane was born.
Ada became Mitzi Larkin. Mrs. Ramsbottom went by the alphabet, you see.
I started with her the week before Mitzi, so I was a K.
I always say it’s my stage name, but I was never on the stage, give or take the odd strip club when cash was tight. But I had my standards.”
“Did Mitzi?”
“Standards? Mitzi? She didn’t know the meaning of the word. She was notorious. There was no limit to what she would do.”
And what happened to Mitzi Larkin? (Ada Clegg!) What had been her trajectory between Mrs. Ramsbottom and Major Blinkhorn?
“Lost touch a long time ago, duckie. She moved upwards and onwards, got in with a military man is how I heard it. I recognized her when I saw her photo in the Standard. Calls herself a cook now—never even saw her boil an egg at Mrs. Ramsbottom’s.
Oh Lord, is that the time? My gentleman will be here any minute and he’ll feel very let down if his tea isn’t ready for him. ”