The Hotel Riviera(59)

There used to be more land, of course, but that was in the old days when Mollie’s grandfather, Sir Blakely Nightingale, whom she never knew, had received his baronetcy for services rendered to his country. In fact, his “services” meant the lavish party he had thrown for Queen Alexandra, who’d been visiting nearby and who had consented to open the annual Blakelys Village Fête. But with four deaths in quick succession, inheritance taxes had taken care of the family fortune.

Miss Nightingale’s father became assistant to the British Commissioner in Shanghai, and Mollie, as she was named, grew up in the British sector of the international concessions, where all the foreigners then lived, under the warm and loving care of Chinese servants who doted on her. Which was perhaps as well because her parents lived the Shanghai high life and traveled a great deal, leaving her alone with the gentle cheongsam-clad nannies while they attended balls at Government House in Hong Kong, or sailed with friends down the big yellow Yangtze River, or partied in Shanghai’s sophisticated nightclubs.

Even when they were home, sometimes Mollie wouldn’t see her parents for days; her father would be “too busy” and her mother would be shopping in the smart boutiques that lined the Nanking Road, or taking afternoon tea with friends in the lobbies of the grand skyscraper hotels, or dancing the night away, because Shanghai then was one of the most swinging cities in the world. A couple of times her parents even returned to England, leaving her alone with the nannies she had come to believe were really her “mothers.”

And that’s how it was that Mollie’s first words were Mandarin. In fact for several years that was all she spoke, learning from the scary ghost stories the servants would tell her at bedtime, and which she still remembered with a frisson of fear today. The Chinese servants also taught her to respect her elders and to kowtow, touching her forehead respectfully to the floor, something her parents found hilarious. They showed her off to party guests—“our little Chinese daughter” they called her, and Mollie blushed, wondering what she had done wrong.

Anyhow, it all came to an end with the death of her father and her return to live at Blakelys.

Parting with her “little mothers” at the age of six broke Mollie’s heart and she never did become accustomed to the dampness of an English summer, or the bitter cold of an English winter. Especially in that by-now crumbling pile called Blakelys, where the few radiators managed only to melt the frost from the inside of the great oriel windows, and where the many coal fires tended by an ancient retainer who went by the name of Fire Bob left a layer of black dust on everything, including the scones you were eating for afternoon tea.

Lady Teresa was as vague as ever about bringing up her daughter, drifting through her days in a miasma of needlepoint and tea parties and local “good works.” A lonely child, Mollie passed the long days (and sometimes half the night too, with the help of a flashlight) reading anything and everything in the manor’s library, or else rowing her boat alone on Blakelys’ lake. She named her boat Li Po after the master poet of the Tang dynasty, whom she was studying in her spare time, of which she seemed to have an endless amount.

She rowed across the lake to the small island she called home, where she’d built a treehouse furnished with cushions stolen from the drawing room sofas, and a table made from a wooden kitchen tray balanced on four bricks. She’d discovered a Chinese tea set in a glass-fronted china cabinet in the dining room, brought back, she supposed, by her father and probably horribly valuable. It had never been used, except now by her when she drank her homemade brews of tea or lemonade and munched on gingersnap biscuits, with her nose in the latest book from Blakelys’ extensive library.

It was only through the intervention of a friend that matters changed. Lady Teresa was told in no uncertain terms, in fact, she was told forcefully, that she had better do something or the child would be completely socially unacceptable. So Lady Teresa, in the one helpful thing she ever did for her daughter, enrolled her in boarding school.

Mollie did well; she relished the companionship of the other girls and she enjoyed her lessons, particularly Latin. From there, it seemed but a short journey to Oxford and then to teaching and her progress to head of a small girls’ school, and then to the “jewel in her crown,” head of Queen Wilhelmina’s.

She’d been an agreeable girl, plain and sturdy, who’d grown into a plain sturdy woman, though there was something commanding about her presence. It must be the blue blood, her mother had said, puzzled.

When Lady Teresa died, the manor was sold for taxes and Mollie was left with her great-grandmother’s pearls and just enough to buy the tiniest flat off Sloane Square in London, as well as the rundown former gardener’s cottage in Blakelys village.

And then, of course, came Tom. “Her” Tom, as she always thought of him, affectionately, oh so affectionately. Tom. A big man with strong opinions and a working-class north-country reserve that was hard to penetrate and distinctly off-putting, until she’d realized that the trouble was he was Shy with a capital S. Shy with women, that is. She herself had never been the backward sort, having quite a strong personality, and somehow after she’d discovered this, their temperaments had meshed.

They’d met in the bar of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, just around the corner from where she’d lived. It was a fine performance of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, a perennial favorite of hers. And, so it turned out, surprisingly, of Tom’s.