2
Back at the flats, she let herself into the small but thankfully light-filled and rather elegant foyer, glad to get out of the heat.
The building was less than ten years old, but it had an art deco feel to it that sat well with the other beautiful architecture to be found in the city.
White-painted, it was a modest but well-proportioned building, with black iron balconies, most of which housed tubs filled with flowers.
These, and the small but shrub-filled front gardens, lent the place an air of distinction.
Inside, the dim light reflecting off the black-and-white tiled floor and cream walls gave her eyes a rest from the strong sunlight. (Typically, she had forgotten to take her sunglasses.)
Due to planning restrictions, Riverside House had only three floors with three sets of flats on each floor.
She usually trotted up the two flights of elegantly curving wooden stairs to her own place for the sake of callisthenics, but today she was too hot to bother, so opted for the one and only lift.
She was just stepping out of it when, a little way down the communal short corridor, a familiar head began to appear from the nearby flight of stairs.
‘Carter! You’re back early,’ she said, making the American man swivel around on the top step to look at her, a smile instantly lighting up his features.
Square of face and with a firm jaw, he had a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheekbones that were the bane of his life – or so he claimed.
At five feet nine, he was shorter than Lyssa and had a mop of unruly sandy-coloured hair.
He squinted at her through pale blue eyes rimmed with slightly gingery-coloured eyelashes, giving the impression that he might need glasses, but in fact she knew his sight to be excellent.
‘Lyss!’ he greeted her happily. ‘Yes, I decided it was too nice a day to stay cooped up at the Bodleian.’ He casually named the world-famous library as if it was as accessible to everyone as the local supermarket.
‘Come on in, I’ve got a Chardonnay on ice, and Jason will only drink the lot if we don’t get our dibs in first. And fast.’
Lyssa grinned and followed him into the flat.
Every floor in the building had its one ‘super-deluxe’ flat, and two more run-of-the-mill offerings, and Carter Lansing III was most definitely one of life’s ‘super-deluxers’.
The youngest son of a very wealthy American family, he wore his affluence easily and genuinely seemed to be unaffected by his privileged upbringing.
The flat was large and spacious and had been ‘interior designed’ to within an inch of its bricks-and-mortar life.
On a cream-coloured corner sofa covered in impeccable natural fibres, a man lounged full length on one side of it, his head propped on the armrest and an open newspaper held out in front of him as he twiddled a pencil rapidly between his fingers and knuckles, the way magicians could.
He was scowling ferociously at the crossword puzzle.
‘What’s a ten-letter word for . . . Oh, Lyss! Didn’t see you there. Don’t tell me, you’ve come to steal my Chardonnay?’
‘My Chardonnay,’ Carter corrected him tartly, with a wide grin.
The man on the sofa waved a hand dismissively in the air and threw down the paper and pencil on the coffee table beside him. ‘Let’s not quibble,’ he said.
His voice was straight out of something you’d hear on an episode of Downton Abbey, which was not surprising as Jason Howerd-Pitt’s parents owned half the Berkshire Downs.
Or was it half of Surrey? Lyssa could never remember which.
She only knew that Jason was always moaning about his poverty, and the pitiful plight of the land-rich but cash-poor upper classes.
She took no notice of him.
Neither did anybody else.
About her own height, slim and dark, he had a brooding, tragic-poet air about him that he exploited shamelessly. He now walked, barefoot, to the large American-style fridge in the kitchen section of the vast open-plan space and opened it, extracting the promised bottle of wine.
‘Sit down and make yourself comfy,’ Carter said to Lyssa, waving a hand carelessly towards the massive sofa. ‘Jase, if you give yourself a giant brandy glass and me and Lyss two sherry-sized ones like last time, I’ll strangle you.’
Jason gave him a rude hand gesture along with a sly smile and, rolling his eyes, reached for three equally sized glasses.
Used to their lovers’ banter by now, Lyssa sat back and relaxed on the sofa (it was so well sprung it was like floating on a cloud) and tossed her bag down on to the floor.
‘Been anywhere nice?’ Carter asked, coming to sit down beside her. He was wearing shorts, a plain sports shirt, and trainers without socks.
‘The Ivy,’ she said casually.
‘Oooo, get her!’ Jason mocked. ‘You never take me to the Ivy,’ he said to Carter.
‘I can’t take you anywhere,’ Carter shot back.
Jason made a show of considering this, then nodded. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ he acknowledged sadly. ‘So, come on, then, fess up.’ He turned to Lyssa. ‘Who was he? And what does he do? And does he have a better-looking younger brother?’
At this, Carter snorted. ‘You keep on threatening to leave me for another man and one day I might just let you. And then where would you be?’ he mock-threatened. Totally unfazed by this, Jason blew him a loving kiss.
‘It wasn’t a “him”, it was a “her”, so sorry to disappoint you,’ Lyssa corrected, cutting across their antics before the two jokers could really get into their stride.
‘And it was work. It’s beginning to look as if I’ve got my next project – all being well,’ she added, holding up both hands and crossing her fingers.
‘Do tell,’ Jason said. ‘I’m still reading that biog you did of that racing driver a couple of years ago.’
‘You’ve been reading that forever,’ Lyssa said, giving him a mock-angry look. ‘What, do you only read a sentence a day or something?’
‘He can’t actually read, didn’t you know?’ Carter cut in. ‘I blame his Eton education. So, who’s the subject this time?’
‘I don’t suppose the name Amelia “Monty” Montrose means anything to you,’ Lyssa said. ‘Not your generation for a start, plus she was British and not American.’
‘It’s ringing faint bells with me,’ Jason said, bringing two poured glasses of wine to the table and depositing them in front of each of them, before going back to the kitchen counter for his own. ‘Wasn’t she something of a notoriously bad girl back in the day?’
‘Not according to her “sort-of” great-niece, she wasn’t,’ Lyssa said mysteriously.
‘Come again?’ Jason said.
Briefly, Lyssa went over her lunch-time date with Elizabeth and the story of the Lucky Cuckoos’ unofficial fifth member.
‘That’s right, it’s all coming back to me now.
I think one of my more aged relatives might even have known her,’ Jason said, slipping on to the end of the sofa and stretching like a cat.
‘I vaguely recall an aunt who once mentioned . . . someone-or-other having a right old gossip session with her about the Montrose “problem child”. You know how these pesky relatives will insist on descending on the family home at Christmas and then going on about the good old days when they’ve had one too many Campari and sodas, bless ’em.
I think one of Monty’s sibs was very bitter about the whole show – having the family name dragged through the mud and whatnot, and reporters besieging the estate and skulking about with cameras in the shrubbery and frightening the horses, etc, etc.
Or was it the other way around, and they were complaining about how the press were treating her?
I can’t quite remember.’ He shrugged his thin shoulders graphically.
‘Either way, I got the impression that she was part of that whole wild-child 1960s scene they had going on back then. Wasn’t she a noted “beauty”, like Twiggy or “The Shrimp”? ’
‘The Shrimp?’ Carter echoed in disbelief, giving them a double take. ‘They named themselves after seafood?’
‘She was a beautiful model in the 60s, and her last name was Shrimpton,’ Lyssa corrected him with a grin.
‘I only know that because, over our lunch, Elizabeth was waxing lyrical about all things 60s. The only things that came to my mind when I thought of those times were the kinds of stuff that everyone thinks of – Mary Quant and miniskirts, the Beatles, and London being the coolest place to be, and all that other good stuff.’
‘Actually, there was a lot going on politically at the time as well,’ Carter said.
‘You had the big freeze in 1963 when you Brits were up to your necks in snow – quite literally – and then you had the Great Train Robbery, and over in the States, of course, JFK was assassinated. A year later Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for life, and your House of Commons suspended the death penalty in ’65. And then Churchill died and . . .’
‘Oh, put a sock in it,’ Jason drawled, faking a huge yawn. ‘We all know you’re a walking encyclopaedia.’
‘Anyway . . .’ Lyssa cut in quickly, before the American could retaliate. ‘Monty Montrose was never a model, but rather the girlfriend of the lead singer of a pop group called the Lucky Cuckoos.’
‘Never heard of them,’ Jason said, already beginning to look bored.
‘Well, they might not have been as huge as the Who or Manfred Mann or any of the really big bands, but they had several hits before the lead singer died. Apparently, Monty and Glen Bannister – that’s the lead singer – were one of the age’s “golden couples”.
He was poor, working class and quirkily handsome, and she was a slender blonde daughter of the rich, landed gentry. ’
‘Cliché,’ Jason sing-songed from the depths of his wine glass.
‘Cynic,’ Carter sing-songed back.