The Far Side of the Sun (28 page)

‘Looking for someone, Ella?’

It was the Duke of Windsor.

‘No, not at all.’ Ella gave the ex-King of England a bright smile as she danced with him. ‘Just thinking too much about the aircrews here.’

They both glanced around at the uniforms surrounding them, wrapping girls in their arms as if for the last time.

‘Well, my dear, you’ve done them proud again. A pat on the back for you is well deserved.’ With a laugh he patted her back.

‘Thank you.’

The band broke out ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and the tempo on the floor picked up. The Duke was a fine dancer, moving well despite his small stature, a smooth slight man who prided himself on his charm. Immensely vain, in Ella’s opinion. He lavished no end of care and expense on his personal appearance, his suits all top quality Savile Row, the waist of his jackets set especially high to elongate his silhouette.

She’d admit that at forty-nine, tanned and trim, he was still good-looking in a boyish sort of way with his soft blond hair swept back. But there was a petulance around his mouth, a pettiness. And a sadness in his large blue eyes that was sometimes so intense that she could scarcely bear to look at him. Yet he had everything – an attentive wife, wealth, status, an important job, good health – the whole works, for heaven’s sake. Yet he regarded himself as hard done by. Always greedy for more. Poor Reggie would rather sew his lips together than breathe a disloyal word against a member of the royal family, but when he returned home tense and frustrated some evenings, Ella knew exactly who to blame. But she was being good. Dancing. Smiling. Asking no favours. Reggie would be pleased with her.

‘Is Sir Harry not here tonight?’ she enquired casually.

Sir Harry Oakes and the Duke were frequent golfing partners.

‘No, he’s a touch under the weather, or so he claims.’ The Duke chuckled to himself, deep lines sprouting around his eyes. ‘More a case of the cat’s away, so the mouse will play. If you take my meaning.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. His wife and daughter are over in America.’

The thing about the Duke was that, as Governor, he was remarkably well informed and liked to keep up with all the latest gossip. Ella arranged her face into a sympathetic smile.

‘You must have had a busy week, sir. A bit of a headache, what with the murder and the labour unrest.’

‘Ah, don’t remind me, my dear.’

He spun Ella around the dance floor, as if to demonstrate the giddiness of his week. She passed close to a set of broad shoulders that towered over the Duke and for a second her breath hitched in her throat. But they were the wrong shoulders.

‘Anything new on the ghastly murder?’ Ella asked.

‘It’s a damnable business. Such a ballyhoo, but they have turned up nothing on the unfortunate fellow yet.’

Unfortunate
. Was that the word for him?

‘The police are searching high and low,’ the Duke continued, ‘for his wallet. They are convinced he must have had one. Colonel Lindop tells me that he believes someone stole it on the night of the murder and that they will find it eventually. He’s a good chap, I’m sure he’s right.’

‘He usually is.’

‘So they’re going to drag the young woman who found him in for questioning again.’

Ella’s heart tightened. ‘I heard that she was in the clear.’

‘No, not yet. But I’m afraid, my dear Ella, it’s time for you to lose your bodyguard. We’ve made the decision that the situation with the labour bosses is stable now, thank God, and presents no further threat to our women. Anyway, Lindop is pulling his men back from other duties to concentrate on the murder enquiry. Quite a relief for you, what? It can be damned annoying to have one of those chaps hanging around all the time, don’t you think?’

He didn’t notice that her eyes had frozen wide open, that her jaw had grown slack as she searched for words.

The band started up with ‘That Old Black Magic’ and that was when she saw him. A gap in the crowd of dancing couples opened up, a narrow ravine leading straight from him to her across the dance floor. Ella stared at him greedily. At the way his muscular frame was barely comfortable within the ill-fitting evening jacket as he bent his attention on the woman laughing in his arms.

He was dancing with Tilly Latcham.

‘Enjoy your dance with HRH?’ Freddie de Marigny asked. Sir Harry’s son-in-law was ploughing through yet another cocktail.

‘Yes, thank you.’

Reggie treated her to an approving smile.

‘He looked very earnest,’ said Hector.

Tilly’s husband was seated at their table with Reggie and Freddie, wreathed in cigar smoke and brandy glasses. Ella sat down and reached for a glass of wine.

‘Not boring you, was he?’ Hector asked jovially. ‘With a stroke-by-stroke account of his golf this afternoon?’

He laughed good-naturedly. Hector was rather good at the sport, whereas it was common knowledge that the Duke was something of a duffer at it. She accepted a top-up to her glass and drank it down quickly.

‘You okay, old girl?’ Hector murmured. ‘You don’t look too good.’

She nodded. ‘I’m fine.’

She was fond of Hector. He was one of those men who kept life simple. He believed in black and white, had no time for Reggie’s greys, yet oddly the two men hit it off well together.

‘Where’s Tilly got to?’ he asked.

‘I’ll find her.’

Ella rose to her feet and pushed her way through the crowded club, scrambling to get as far away from the dance floor as she could.

How can you look in a mirror and see the eyes of a stranger? A person you have never seen before. How can that happen?

Ella leaned over the washbasin in the powder room and splashed water on her cheeks, but it made no difference. Her face was so hot she thought it would melt. It was shock. She knew that. Not shock at seeing Tilly Latcham laughing in Dan Calder’s arms or at knowing his hand rested snugly in the centre of her back with nothing but a shimmer of silk between their two bodies.

No. Not that shock. Though even that was enough to knock holes in her.

Worse, far worse was the shock of how much she cared. How much it hurt. How much she’d lost control of who she was.

She shuddered.

‘Ella, I’ve been looking everywhere for you, darling. What are you doing hiding in here?’

Tilly had breezed into the powder room on a wave of perfume and cocktails. Her mouth was bright red as though someone had been kissing it.

‘I’m just taking a breather, Tilly. It’s so hot on the dance floor.’

Tilly inspected her quizzically. ‘You do look a bit flushed.’

Ella rinsed her hands again and took a towel to dry them. She refused – absolutely refused – to ask her friend about the dance with Dan Calder. Instead she combed her hair a little too roughly and pinned back a blonde lock that had escaped its pearl grip.

‘Hector is on good form tonight,’ she commented.

‘He’s been in an odd mood all day. I think he’s planning a surprise of some kind, silly chap.’

‘A trip to New York?’

‘Maybe. Who knows? I’m always happy to go shopping for a new gown. Have you taken a good look at the Duchess’s Schiaparelli? Must have cost a fortune, but she hasn’t got the figure for it.’

‘It looks stunning. But she does seem awfully out of sorts tonight.’

Tilly patted her own dark waves and trailed one curl artfully over her freshly powdered cheek. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She looks…⁠’ Ella sought for the right word ‘… hungry.’
Wolfish
, she thought, but didn’t say.

Is that what I look like now? Hungry. Wolfish. Prowling after what I cannot have.

‘Well, darling, that’s hardly surprising, is it?’ Tilly shrugged. ‘She’s always wanting what she hasn’t got.’

Tilly was not a fan of the Duchess and regarded as inexcusable her habit of issuing blatant reprimands to the Duke in public.

‘It’s not easy for her,’ Ella pointed out.

Both Ella and Tilly were aware that it was whispered behind closed doors that the Duke had a sexual problem, that he was premature when it came to the delights of the bedroom, and only with the Duchess had this handicap been contained somewhat. How true the rumour was, Ella had no idea. But it would explain some things about the relationship – his total dependence on his wife, the neediness in his eyes whenever he looked at her, his unwillingness to renounce Wallis Simpson even for the throne of Britain. And it was common knowledge that Wallis had spent time in Shanghai where – so the rumours went – she had learned certain sexual techniques, including the extraordinary Shanghai Grip.

All tosh, probably. But sometimes Ella was conscious of an unsteadiness about her, as though she was wound too tight. Exactly as Ella felt now.

Reggie, take me home, take me home now
.

Tilly looped her arm through Ella’s and started to march her to the door. ‘Come along, my angel, I want to dance with His Royal Highness… and there’s someone who wants to dance with you.’

How could she dance with him and not devour him?

Wolfish. On the prowl. Teeth glistening with saliva.

Ella shut her mouth and kept a respectable distance between their bodies, so that she could not reach out and take a bite. A sliver of decency remained to her and she clung to it, so that he would have no inkling of the workings of her mind, of the slippery slope down which her thoughts were falling head first.

‘So, Dan,’ she said in a voice that grated on her nerve ends, the tone of a colonial matron patronising her pet servant, ‘I hear I am to lose you. What a shame.’

Grey eyes. Streaked with the palest of blues. They stared at her as if she were a stranger he had never met before, one he didn’t particularly like. ‘I have heard nothing about that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The station is very overworked right now.’

Her hand lay lightly in his. No clinging. No sliding up his arm to touch the clean sharp edge of his jawbone.

‘Because of the Morrell murder, I suppose,’ she said.

‘Exactly.’

And then they ran out of conversation. It just stopped. Something that in all their hours spent together in the car had never happened. She didn’t look away at the other dancers or at the band swaying to the music on the stage, but stared at Dan Calder’s face mutely, until he abruptly released his hold on her and stopped dancing in the middle of the floor. The crowd surged and swirled around them and the singer crooned, ‘
Don’t go walking down lovers’ lane with anyone else but me
…
⁠
’

‘This is no good,’ he said softly. She barely heard it above the music.

‘No.’

‘Better to stop now.’

He turned on his heel and walked away from her, wrenching something out of her. How had this happened? How had she been reduced to this so fast that she didn’t see it coming? How? She watched him swerve between tables and disappear through the exit doors.

‘Ella? Are you all right?’

She had no idea who spoke. She started to move and then she was running, pushing through the doors and calling his name. When his arm seized her and pulled her into a dark corner behind the cloakroom, she knew it was wrong. When his hand caressed her face and the lean hard length of his body crushed against hers, she knew it was insane. That it was what cheap and nasty girls did behind their husbands’ backs.

But her body was out of her control. It was doing things that shocked her – touching the warm full flesh of his mouth with her fingertips and pressing her thigh tight against his, until suddenly his lips were on hers, his tongue driving into her mouth.

‘Reggie?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Are you awake?’

‘I am now.’ His voice was thick with sleep.

‘Reggie, we’re all right, aren’t we?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean we’re happy, aren’t we?’

He rolled over in bed to face her, though in the darkness they were nothing more than vague shapes, featureless and anonymous.

‘Of course we’re happy,’ he said, but she could hear a ripple of alarm in his voice. ‘What’s got into you?’

She ran a hand over his naked chest, feeling the familiar baby-softness of the well-padded waist, coming to rest just short of the dense bush of hairs at his groin. ‘There is so much unhappiness out there, I could feel it tonight at the club, as if it was dripping from the ceiling, all those young lives at risk. I want us to be always happy. I want us to be always…⁠’ Her throat was so full of tears she couldn’t finish the words.

‘My own sweet Ella.’ He scooped an arm around her, drawing her close. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

He kissed her forehead. A gentle, reassuring kiss that made her feel worse. She pulled his mouth to hers, desperate to have his stamp on her, his ownership marked plain for her to see, and he obliged. He lifted himself on top of her and carefully, considerately, inserted himself inside her. She listened to his muted grunts, felt the warmth, inside and out, of his desire to please her and she told herself it was enough. She didn’t need more.

When it was over, the dull restless ache between her legs was still there, unsatisfied and unforgiving. Reggie fell asleep with his face tucked in the crook of her neck, his breath warm and relentless on her breast. She lifted the sheet and pressed it down on her mouth to silence her cry.

‘Emerald, I want you to prepare a picnic for me today, please,’ Ella said breezily.