Читать книгу: «The Art of Love»

ELIZABETH EDMONDSON
The Art of Love

COPYRIGHT

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

Copyright © AEB Ltd

Elizabeth Edmondson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007223787

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007283705

Version: 2016-12-28

DEDICATION

For Rosie Buckman

With love and gratitude

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

PART TWO

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

STOP PRESS

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

ONE

‘If I’m not Polly Smith, then who am I?’

‘What a profound question,’ said Oliver Fraddon.

The two of them were standing side by side in a gallery at Somerset House, home of the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths for all the counties of England.

‘The world in little, one might say,’ Oliver went on, looking along the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with thousands of large red ledgers that contained the transitions of millions of lives, present and past. ‘All of us written down here, captured, immortalized. Volumes full of names and identities, A to Z, plain and extraordinary. We’re born, we marry — or some of us do — and we die, and each time we are set down on a page in here. A frightening thought.’

‘Never mind the frightening thought, what concerns me is that I’m not among those immortalized here,’ Polly said.

‘Very true. I suggest we go back to the desk and ask the recording angel for help.’

He led the way down the metal spiral staircase, warning Polly to watch her step. ‘Or you’ll end up as a new entry under Deaths.’

The clerk standing behind the long wooden length of the main counter had not a touch of the angelic about her. She wore pince-nez attached to a thin chain and had a harassed air. Oliver addressed her. ‘This young lady seems to have gone missing.’

The clerk looked at Polly with worried, faded grey eyes, eyes that were kinder than her pinched mouth. ‘Oh dear. Can’t find yourself? Not where you should be? Your name is Smith, you say. Well, there are rather a lot of Smiths, but in the end there’s only one of you. It comes down to having the right dates and the right address. Once we’re sure of that information, we can find you. Unless,’ she added, her voice sharpening, ‘unless you’re a foreigner.’

‘Do I look like a foreigner?’ Polly asked, indignant, not because she minded being taken for a foreigner, but because she wanted to assert her rightful place, numbered among all her fellow citizens here, in those large red books.

‘No, but if you were born abroad, even if you were as English as me and Mr Grier over there, then you wouldn’t be in the main part of the registry, but in the records we keep elsewhere.’

‘In the nether regions?’ suggested Oliver in Polly’s ear. ‘The brimstone section, with devilish clerks scurrying to and fro.’

‘It doesn’t arise,’ said Polly, ‘I was born in Highgate. 11, Bingley Street, off Archway. My mother still lives there. On May the first, 1908.’

‘Only there is no entry for her in the relevant volume,’ Oliver said.

The angel was impressed by Oliver, Polly could see that. If it had just been her standing at the desk, in her old mac and wine-coloured beret, she’d still be waiting for the clerk to look up from her card indexes and paper. It had been Oliver, every inch the gentleman in his tailored suit, who had commanded her immediate attention. Just by being there. It was unfair. But useful, she told herself. And of course, the minute he opened his mouth, there was the accent, proclaiming him a product of the upper classes, with all the easy authority that Eton and Oxford gave to the Olivers of this world.

So the woman in the pince-nez had been helpful. Had gone back with them to the red books, had found the one that should have contained the entry for Polly. ‘Polly’s short for Pauline,’ she told the woman, but it made no difference. There was no female Smith, initial P, born in Bingley Street, Highgate on the first of May, nor indeed at the end of April or the middle of May. There was a Thomas Smith, born in Priory Gardens on the second of May; that was as close as she could get.

The clerk closed the book, and Oliver courteously took it from her to replace it on its shelf.

‘You’ll have to get the correct details from your parents,’ the clerk said. ‘If you were born in a nursing home, perhaps in the country, you might have been registered there. I expect your father registered you, and he mightn’t have realized he should have done it where you lived, and not where you were born. Ask him.’

‘I can’t, he’s dead.’

‘In the war?’ the clerk said, with a sudden and unexpected flash of sympathy. ‘I’m sorry. But your mother will know. And doesn’t she have the original certificate?’

‘Good question,’ Oliver said, as they came out of the grandeur of Somerset House into the noise and bustle of the Strand. ‘That would solve all your problems.’

Polly grinned. ‘I dare say in your stately home everything is in perfect order, but Ma’s not very organized with papers. They’re stowed away in boxes, only not so you can find anything. She takes care with her music, she can always find a piece of music she wants. Papers are different, and after all, it was more than twenty years ago. I asked her, of course I did, but she got into such a fret, positively alarmed when I said I’d look through all her stuff, that I thought it would be easier just to come here and get a copy. They don’t need the original for a passport, do they?’

‘A copy from Somerset House passes all scrutiny,’ said Oliver. He drew her to the side, out of the way of passers-by. ‘So what now? Honeymoon cancelled? Come to think of it, wedding off, I’m sure you need a birth certificate to get married.’

‘The wedding isn’t cancelled, because no date has been fixed. Just January.’ Which was now only a few weeks away. ‘Roger told me to see to the passport so that there wouldn’t be any hold-ups. He likes to be ahead of himself. And what I’m going to do now,’ she said, suddenly decisive, ‘is catch a tram and go home and interrogate my mother.’

‘Then I shall escort you to the tram stop.’

They walked along the Strand towards Aldwych, Polly thinking, Oliver watching her. A pigeon landed in front of them and then took off with a whirr, the colour and shape of the grey wings catching Polly’s eye. Grey, but so many shades of it, from almost white to rich purple. And the energy of the movement, effort blending into the smooth ease of flight.

A grey bird on a grey day, but the dismal skies above them had no colour nor shape nor energy. There was the hint of sulphur in the air that warned of approaching fog; the crisp autumn days of October were over and now London had descended into the sullen dreariness of a damp and cold November.

‘The dark days do make me miserable,’ Polly said, as they crossed the road. ‘I spend most of the winter pining for spring and longer days. I never feel really happy in the winter. It’s the cold and the general dimness, I suppose.’

Polly and Oliver went down the steps to the tram station at Aldwych. Oliver took her hand and kissed it, as was his habit, then saw her on to the waiting tram, raising his hat as she climbed on. Oliver always wore wide-brimmed hats in soft browns and greys. She ran up the stairs to the upper deck and snatched a window seat from a burly man with a brown parcel. As the tram rattled off and emerged into Kingsway, she saw Oliver walking back towards Aldwych. Among the hurrying crowds, heads down, faces red from the cold, clad in drab coats and suits, his exquisitely tailored figure and hat made him stand out, as did his languid stride.

The tram plunged underground into Kingsway tunnel.

Polly both loved and hated trams. The clatter and banging and restless swaying disturbed her, but there was a comfort in travelling on a vehicle that ran on its tracks so purposefully and undeviatingly through the chaos of all the thick London traffic. And this particular tram, the Number 35, was part of her life. She had travelled on it every school day to and from her school, and then later on, when she won a scholarship to art school, had ridden on it into the heart of London to her college.

The journey to her old home took forty-five minutes, through the streets of northern London and up into Highgate. She got off at Archway, just as she always did; she could have walked blindfold from the tram stop to her house, and in fact, more than once, going home in a bad fog, she might as well have been blindfolded.

Polly hoped that they weren’t in for one of those terrible pea-soupers, which caught in your throat and always made her feel sick and headachy. She loathed the days when it was as if the sun never rose, and the sounds of London — traffic, voices, street criers, bells — were muffled by the smoke-laden, noxious greenish-yellow air.

She walked along Bingley Street to number 11, pushed open the gate and climbed the steps up to the front door, which was painted a dark green colour and sported a brass knocker in the shape of a pixie. From the window to the right of the front door, she heard the wavering sounds of a piano scale. Her mother had a pupil. She looked at her watch. Ten to five, so the lesson would probably finish in ten minutes. The front door was on the latch, and she opened and shut it behind her quietly. Inside, she took off her mac and beret, unwound her woolly scarf and hung them up on the hook behind the door. Then she walked down the hall and into the kitchen, warm from the stove which her mother kept going all the time in winter. She put the kettle on, and sat down at the scrubbed wooden kitchen table, her feet automatically curling round the legs of the chair as they had done since she was a little girl.

The kitchen overlooked their small garden, a constant affront to the neighbours, whose neat herbaceous borders, squares of lawn and regimented vegetable patches tucked away at the bottom of each matching garden proclaimed the right horticultural instincts. The garden was the one place where Dora Smith’s restrained nature seemed to give way to something more reckless. She packed the space with plants, not in neat lines, but more, Polly always liked to imagine, as a jungle would be. Dense and profuse, and nothing small except the soft swathes of violas and the snowdrops which nestled under the overhanging branches of shrubs and bushes.

But no London garden looked inviting in November. It had a forlorn, end-of-season look to it. The piles of crisp autumn leaves had vanished, leaving just a few soggy remnants on the ground or clinging to the twigs of the trees. The evergreens added a touch of colour and life, but even they had a grey tinge, as though the misty air had got to them as well.

The kettle came to the boil in a flurry of steam. Polly warmed the brown teapot, spooned in the tea, and left it on the stove to brew. The door to the front room opened: voices, thanks and goodbyes, the front door opened and shut, and Polly’s mother came into the kitchen.

‘I heard you come in,’ she said. ‘You’ve made tea.’

‘Have you got a five o’clock?’

‘No. I should have, little Sally Wright, but she has a bad chest, and she isn’t allowed out when the weather’s like this. Just as well, for if she did come, it would be half an hour of cough, cough, cough. She’s a musical child, though,’ she added, wanting to be fair. ‘But I’ve another pupil at half past. Pour the tea, Polly. Do you want a biscuit?’

Polly took a biscuit and chewed it absent-mindedly, for a moment at a loss as to how to broach the subject of the birth certificate.

Then she plunged in, what was the point in beating about the bush? ‘I went to Somerset House today, to get a copy of my birth certificate.’

Dora Smith put her cup down so hard that it rattled the saucer.

‘You aren’t still set on going abroad for your honeymoon, are you?’ she said. ‘I don’t advise it, you’ll catch some dreadful disease, it’s not very clean over there.’

‘How do you know? You said you’d never been abroad,’ Polly said, rather crossly.

There was a pause. ‘My…It’s what people say happens to everyone who goes. And you don’t speak any foreign languages, at least if you do, your French teacher never found out about it, your French reports were always shockers.’

‘Roger speaks German and French. Besides, even if we weren’t going abroad, I have to have the birth certificate to get married. That’s what he says.’

‘I really do not see why you’re in such a rush to get married. Roger still has to finish qualifying, and — ’

‘He is qualified.’

‘Then why is he taking more exams?’

‘You have to, if you want to be a hospital doctor.’

Polly felt she hadn’t got to the bottom of her mother’s ambivalent attitude to Roger and her engagement. Dora Smith was a woman with two distinct personalities. The one Polly knew best was the sensible, practical woman, who shared her neighbours’ attitudes and opinions, among which was the certainty that the main purpose of a young woman’s being was to find herself a good, reliable husband, in a respectable way of life, and settle down with him to be a good wife and mother. Within this conventional scenario, Roger was a gem. A doctor was better than the daughter of Ted and Dora Smith might have hoped for, and a catch to brag about to her friends, if Dora were given to bragging, which she wasn’t.

But Dora Smith had another side, the side that had been dismayed at Polly’s precocious artistic talent, that had refused to praise her exceptional promise, yet who had fiercely asserted the need for Polly to do her art as well as she could. ‘If you’re an artist, then you have to be trained properly, to become as good as you can be. It’s not the same as having art as a hobby. One’s professional and the other’s amateur.’ And it was that Dora Smith who had said, clearly and unexpectedly, ‘If you marry Roger, the light will go out of your painting.’

To which Polly might have replied that the light had already gone out of her painting, and so what difference would it make, but that wasn’t an acknowledgement she was going to make to anyone.

‘Can we get back to the birth certificate? Are you sure you can’t find the original? I don’t see how it can be lost, one doesn’t lose something important like a birth certificate.’

Dora Smith didn’t answer, but took a sip of tea, her gaze wandering away from Polly as she looked out of the window. The clock ticked, the stove gave its familiar creaking sound as it cooled, the cat flap on the back door rattled and a large tabby cat slid through it. He gave Polly an uninterested look with his round, golden eyes, swished a stripy tail and went to investigate his food plate.

Still Dora said nothing.

‘I’m not there, in Somerset House,’ Polly persisted. ‘There’s no Pauline Smith registered, not on that date, not anywhere in Highgate. Was I born somewhere else? In a nursing home?’

Her mother sighed, and Polly saw that her eyes, when she looked back from the window, had a glisten of tears in them.

‘Ma, I’m sorry. What is it? What’s the matter?’

The words came out in a rush. ‘You weren’t born in Highgate, you were born in Paris. I haven’t lost your birth certificate. I burnt it.’

‘Burnt it?’ Polly couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Burnt it? Why? When? Just to stop me going abroad? And how could I possibly have been born in Paris? You’ve never been to France, you said so yourself.’

‘I burnt it when you were a baby,’ said Dora Smith, with a sigh. ‘Oh, dear, why did this wretched man want to take you abroad. Or marry you at all? Bringing it all up. I had hoped…’

‘You had hoped what?’ Polly felt a cold sensation in her stomach. Paris?

‘You’ll need all the details if you really must have a passport. I’ll write them down for you.’

Polly watched her mother as she got up and went to the drawer where she kept scraps of paper. She smoothed out the back of an envelope, and wrote in her clear italic hand. Then she passed it to Polly, and went over to stand at the sink.

Polly stared down at the elegantly inscribed words.

‘This makes no sense,’ she exclaimed. ‘Who’s this — I can’t even pronounce it — this Polyhymnia Tomkins?’

‘That’s your real name,’ Dora said, leaning on the sink and running the tap, so that Polly had to raise her voice to be heard.

‘Tomkins? I’m Polly Smith. How can I ever have been called Tomkins? And Polyhymnia? That’s not even a proper name.’

‘I’m not your mother,’ Dora said. ‘And Ted Smith wasn’t your father.’

TWO

On the tram back into the centre of London, Polly sat unseeing, not noticing the people around her, or hearing the grumbles of two women in the next seat about the weather, not aware of the bell clanging, the swaying as the tram went over points, oblivious to everything outside herself, as she tried to make sense of what her mother — who was not her mother, after all — of what Dora Smith had told her.

What kind of a mother could she have been, this woman who had abandoned her so casually into the care of her sister when she was only weeks old, and never saw her again, who clearly didn’t care whether she were alive or dead?

What kind of a mother would call her daughter Polyhymnia?

‘Polyhymnia’s one of the muses,’ Dora Smith told her. ‘The muse of sacred song.’

Sacred song indeed. Well, no one could have been more wrongly named, because, to Dora Smith’s dismay, Polly had no ear for music at all. She had ground her way through piano lessons until both of them had given up with relief, and she couldn’t hold a tune; singing at school had been a case of miming and mumbling, under the constant frowns of the singing mistress.

Dora Smith had been less than forthcoming about her sister, Thomasina. That was another ridiculous name. ‘We went our separate ways,’ was all she would say. ‘We weren’t at all alike.’

‘Where is she? Is she still alive?’

‘I don’t know, and that’s the honest truth.’

‘How could you lose touch with a sister? If I had a sister…’

Which was an unkind thing to say. Of course, if she, Polly, wasn’t the Smiths’ daughter, then Dora Smith had never had children of her own. Polly had asked, when she was a little girl, why she didn’t have a brother or sister, and Ted had put down his newspaper and frowned at her, saying that wasn’t a suitable question to ask. Later, when she was in her bath, being soaped and flannelled from nose to toe by her mother, Dora Smith had said with a sigh that she wished Polly did have a little brother or sister, but fate had chosen for her to be an only child.

I couldn’t have had better parents, Polly told herself fiercely.

Dora Smith had said, with a world of sadness in her voice: ‘You are my daughter, Polly. You’re the only daughter, the only child I had. Ted loved you as if you were his own, and well, a niece is close. A sister’s child. You’re my blood, that counts for a lot.’

Only it didn’t seem to count sister to sister, not if Thomasina had walked out on her sister and her baby’s life with never a backward glance.

‘Why Paris?’ Polly wanted to know. ‘What was she doing in Paris?’

There it was again, Dora’s obvious reluctance to answer questions. ‘She was a bit of a gadabout, restless, never happy in one place. She had friends in Paris, I suppose.’

Illegitimate. Polly stared out into the chilly darkness, vaguely lit by the headlights of cars and streetlights gleaming dully through the thickening fog. She was illegitimate.

‘What you’re saying is that I’m a bastard,’ she had said, raging at Dora.

‘Don’t use that word. Not ever.’

‘It’s the word other people will use. Didn’t that ever occur to my mother?’

‘Your mother…your mother was an unconventional person. She wouldn’t — that is, what people in general might consider a stigma, wouldn’t be to her. I remonstrated with her when she arrived on our doorstep with you in her arms. I said she should marry your father, so that you wouldn’t have the disgrace of illegitimacy, but she said no healthy baby could be any kind of a disgrace.’

‘That was big of her.’

‘They’ll give you a short birth certificate at Somerset House,’ Dora said. ‘One that doesn’t have any blank spaces. Thomasina refused to fill in any details for your father.’

‘It was an English birth certificate, though? I am English?’

‘Of course you are,’ said Dora, shocked. ‘As English as a Chelsea bun. At least she had the sense to register you at the consulate there, that’s what you do, for English babies born abroad. Go back to Somerset House with those details I’ve written down, and they’ll find the entry all right.’

It was extraordinary to think that all these years she’d lived as Polly Smith, and in fact she was no such thing. Her passport would proclaim to the world that she was Polyhymnia Tomkins. A stranger. She couldn’t think of herself as any such person. Polyhymnia Tomkins was the fabrication, she was the person who didn’t exist, not Polly Smith.

‘You always said Polly was a pet name for Pauline.’

‘Ted said we couldn’t have a girl called Polyhymnia. He said you’d be teased at school, and the neighbours would think it odd.’

‘Did you live here when I was born?’ Polly had asked her mother. ‘Here in Bingley Gardens? You told me you’d always lived here.’

‘We didn’t. We lived in South London, in Putney, when Ted and I were first married. When you arrived, Ted said we’d have to move. He’d been with the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, but he didn’t mind moving to north London because he’d applied for a better job, with the Great Northern. It was a promotion, so he was pleased about that, only it was a long way to travel right across London to Kings Cross every day. So we moved to the other side of the river, where no one would know that you weren’t our child.’

No parents could have done more for her than Ted and Dora Smith had done, Polly knew that. It was unreasonable and ungrateful of her to be angry with Dora for never telling her who she really was, but she wasn’t feeling reasonable or grateful.

‘I knew I’d have to tell you one day, only the right moment never seemed to come. And I came to forget that you weren’t really my daughter.’

And to all intents and purposes, Polly was their daughter. She didn’t remember Ted Smith very well; she’d been seven when he went away to fight in France, and nine when the telegram came saying that he’d been killed. What with the savings he had left and what Dora had made with her piano lessons, she had never lacked for anything, and she hadn’t lacked for love, either, Dora was lavish in that commodity.

Dora had seen to it that Polly worked hard at school, found the money for extra art lessons when it became clear how gifted she was, and instead of having to leave school at fourteen to earn her keep like several of her friends, she was allowed to stay on and try for the scholarship to art college. Dora Smith had paid for the extra that the scholarship didn’t cover, making sure that Polly had everything she needed.

Not for the first time, Polly found herself wondering about Dora and her mother’s family. There had been two sisters. Did she have any uncles? What about her grandparents? Dora had always been reticent about her family. ‘My parents were quite old when they had me, and they’re long since dead,’ was the sum of the information she was prepared to give Polly. Where had they lived, where had Dora — and, of course, Thomasina — grown up?

‘Oh, various places,’ was the evasive answer to that question.

Polly came to with a start. The tram had reached Kingsway, and everybody except her had got off. ‘Hurry along there,’ the conductor said, his face pinched with cold. ‘Haven’t got all day, you know.’

Polly felt strangely discouraged as she walked through the Georgian streets to the house in Fitzroy Street where she lived. She let herself in, the familiar smell of wet shoes and overcooked cabbage washing over her. Her landlady was mean with light bulbs, and the light in the stairwell was almost as dim as the foggy world outside the door. Polly climbed the four flights of stairs to the top floor. She opened the door to her attic room, took off her mac and hung it on the back of the door. Then she removed her damp beret and ran her hands through her hair.

Did she want to bother with a passport at all? Not to have one would mean she couldn’t go abroad. Nor, according to Roger, could she get married. Was that true? Vague ideas of special licences flitted through her head, but Roger would expect her to produce a birth certificate in any case, he’d want to file it away with all his other documents.

The moment she had a passport, it was hullo, Polyhymnia Tomkins, goodbye Polly Smith. Yet, legally, she supposed, she was already Polyhymnia Tomkins, always had been Polyhymnia Tomkins. It was Polly Smith who did not exist.

What’s in a name? she said to herself.

A lot. A name wasn’t just a series of letters arranged in a particular way. A name was a person. It could be more than one person, there were probably dozens, hundreds of Polly Smiths up and down the country. But each one was identified by her name. Without a name, you weren’t a person. It would be impossible to be truly human without a name. You gave a pet a name, a cat, a horse, a tamed magpie, even, was marked out from others of its kind by its name. Although animals were different, a new owner might change a creature’s name. It was a mark of humanity that your name was an integral part of you.

What about orphans, who were adopted and given a name by their new parents? Or, for women, marriage changed your name, you became Mrs Roger Harrington, or even — since she had noticed that the servants in Bryanston Square called Roger ‘Mr Roger’ — Mrs Roger.

Spies changed their names, and so did criminals on the run. Authors wrote books under pseudonyms. Actors and actresses had stage names, look at her friend Tina Uppershaw, born Maureen Scroggs. Film stars who started life as a Mavis or a Ken became a Carole or a Ronald, with a new surname that would look good in lights.

For Polly, names had a special dimension. She saw letters in colour, and words and names were a glowing blend of those individual colours. Polly was slate blues and greens with flashes of light and yellow. Pauline was another colour, a darker one, but since she never used it, it didn’t bother her. Smith was brown and maroon with touches of grey. Whereas Polyhymnia was a much more complicated palette of light and dark, warm and cold colours making an intriguing but unfamiliar whole. Tomkins was a grey and pink name, with a touch of wine at the edges.

Polly sighed. This was making her head ache even more, she must stop these thoughts going round and round in her mind. She made herself focus on her surroundings, she had long ago discovered that to live entirely and intensely in the present moment was a cure for most ill moods and worrying times.

Polly’s room was perfect for an artist. It had a north-facing skylight and a dormer window looking out over a parapet to the smoky chimneys of London. Her narrow bed, covered in a blue and yellow cloth, was set under the eaves, which meant that she had to sit up carefully in bed, so as not to crack her head on the sloping ceiling. Her clothes hung on a rail behind a curtain and she kept the rest of her things in a large chest of drawers set against another sloping ceiling, which left space behind it for her suitcase and various other possessions. The floorboards were uncovered, except for a small blue rug beside the bed. By the door was a washbasin, a great luxury. The bathroom was two floors down, and shared with the other occupants of the house: her landlady, Mrs Horton, her daughter, who was a nurse and kept odd hours, and three other lodgers.

Polly looked around her room, seeing it not as the haven it had been to her, a haven and a workplace, with her easel set up in the centre of the room, her paints and tools on a table beside it, not the place where she lived and worked, but a place inhabited by a stranger.

She crouched down beside the gas ring on which she boiled her water and did all her cooking, turned on the gas, which came on with a hiss, and struck a match. The burner lit with a soft popping sound. She had a saucepan with soup she’d made the day before and she put it on to heat.

This room belonged to Polly Smith. Only she wasn’t Polly Smith.

She sat down at the table and opened a sketchbook. She unscrewed the cap of her favourite fountain pen, and with a few swift strokes, drew herself. A realistic self portrait; this was the face that looked out at her from the mirror, was caught in snapshots or, looking severe and criminal, the face in the photo which she had had taken for her passport.

Then she drew another figure, a faceless young woman, dressed not in a limp skirt and jumper, but in a trailing robe. She added a sleek hairdo and whorls of smoke rising from a cigarette in an absurdly long holder.

Polyhymnia Tomkins, sophisticate.

Now her pen was working rapidly, and more featureless figures danced off the page. A Grecian woman, in flowing robes, swirling down on a parson sitting at an organ. Polyhymnia, Muse at work. Next came a woman dressed in breeches and a pith helmet who was gazing at a supercilious camel. Beneath that she wrote, Polyhymnia Tomkins, explorer.

Then a woman in a sensible tweed suit pushing a pram with a felt hat on her head. That was Mrs Roger Harrington. Of course, when she married Roger, she wouldn’t be Polly Smith in any case, she would lose both Smith and Tomkins, for ever. And as to the Polly, she would just go on being Polly as she always had done.

This prospect didn’t cheer her up as much as it might have done. She would have to tell Roger, of course. Tell him that he wasn’t marrying respectable Polly Smith, daughter of the respectable Mr and Mrs Smith of Bingley Street, but Polyhymnia, bastard daughter of Thomasina Tomkins, father unknown.

Father unknown. Was there any way you could discover who your father was, when your mother vanished without saying? Why hadn’t Ma — who wasn’t her mother, but her aunt, how could she ever get used to that? — questioned her real mother more vigorously, insisted on being told who was the father of her child? Or made an effort to find this out, while the trail was still hot and it might have been possible to discover who Thomasina’s friends were, and who among them had been more than a friend?

Of course, her mother might have had dozens of lovers. Might even have been — no, she wasn’t going to think that for a moment. There had been an exasperation in Dora Smith’s voice when she reluctantly spoke of her sister, but no moral disapproval. She wasn’t much given to moral disapproval, which was another thing that singled her out from her neighbours.

A married man, probably, thought Polly with all the cynicism of her twenty-five years. An old story, and a simple one: an affair which could never end in marriage. The man refusing to acknowledge a child, or maybe Thomasina too proud or too kind to threaten her lover’s marriage. France was a Catholic country, if the father were a Roman Catholic, then the situation would be hopeless, even if her father had wanted to marry her mother.

Could she find out more about her mother, somehow? She wouldn’t have Ma’s help if she tried to, that was clear. ‘I’m not going to say another word about Thomasina, and that’s final. It’s all over, it’s all in the past, and that’s where it will stay. No good ever came of delving into the past.’

There was no arguing with Ma when she had that look on her face. The Inquisition wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of Dora Smith once she’d made up her mind.

Wild thoughts of employing a detective flitted through Polly’s head — only how could she possibly afford a detective? She could try herself to find out more, but where would she begin? Tomkins was such an everyday name, not quite as ordinary as Smith, yet there must be thousands of Tomkins in the British Isles. Since she hadn’t the slightest idea what part of the country Dora or her family came from, it would be pointless trying to find out more.

The soup bubbled and rose to the top of the pan, and Polly only just whipped it off before it dribbled down the side of the saucepan. She poured it into a bowl, spread a thin layer of margarine on a slice of bread and, pushing aside her sketchbook and pencil, set the soup on the table.

She ate slowly, looking into the distance, not seeing her familiar surroundings, but a strange place, full of people she didn’t know. A world to which she was connected, but one where she had no presence or substance. She shook her head. Then she glanced at her wristwatch. Oh, Lord. Ten past eight, and she was supposed to meet Roger at twenty past, when he came off duty at the hospital. She gulped down the last of the soup, dumped the bowl and spoon in the basin, pulled on her mac, rammed her beret on to her head, picked up her shoulder bag and ran out of the room.

THREE

Dr Roger Harrington was waiting at the corner as Polly came panting up. Sturdy, good-looking, he had an air of competence and a cleft to a strong chin that betokened a firm if not obstinate nature. This evening there was a weary look about his eyes, not surprising when he’d been on duty for more than twelve hours.

‘Really, Polly, you must try to be more punctual,’ he said, as she put up her face for a kiss.

‘Sorry,’ said Polly.

‘I thought we’d go to the pictures, but we’ll have to buck up if we’re going to get there on time.’

Polly had to jog to keep up with him. ‘What’s on?’

‘We’re going to see The Mayor of Hell. James Cagney.’

Polly sat through the film with the action on screen barely registering in her mind. Somehow, that evening, she must tell Roger what she had discovered: that she wasn’t who he thought she was, that he was engaged to a woman who didn’t exist, and instead had attached himself to the illegitimate offspring of Thomasina and God knew who.

It was made worse by the fact that Roger, after the film was over — a film that he said he’d really enjoyed — was full of his latest medical interest. ‘Heredity is the key to everything,’ he was saying. ‘That’s what makes us what we are. There’s no getting away from it. Just like with racehorses, who your parents and your grandparents and great-grandparents are determine just who and what you are.’

‘I don’t know much about my grandparents,’ Polly began, seeing an opening.

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen photos of your father, a fine, upright man, and he died bravely, so he clearly had a good character. That’s what counts. And there’s nothing wrong with your mother, she’s healthy and reasonably intelligent. Hardworking, responsible, look what a good job she’s made of bringing you up single-handed, there’s no reason why you won’t be the same. And she’s artistic, and so are you. With her it’s music, with you it’s paint, but it’s all the same. Temperaments and choices are predetermined you see, by our genes.’

Polly wasn’t sure what genes were, and felt that she’d rather not know.

‘And here I am, a doctor and the son and grandson of doctors. It’s in my blood.’

Polly could see a number of objections to this. There was Shakespeare, the son of a glover, or had his father been a butcher? No literary genes there, unless his mother had been a poet in secret, but she had a suspicion that the female line didn’t count as much in Roger’s thinking as the male one. ‘What about someone like Leonardo da Vinci?’ she said, tucking her hand into his.

‘What’s he got to do with it?’

‘His parents weren’t artists. He was illegitimate, you know.’

They were under a streetlight, and Polly could see the frown on Roger’s firm brow.

‘Was he? That’s something that we, as a nation, are going to have to be very careful about, now that all this new stuff about heredity is being discovered. It’s too risky having children growing up who don’t know who their fathers were. Besides, the chances are that the children of a woman who isn’t married will inherit her lax morals, and will go the same way themselves.’

No, this wasn’t the moment to tell Roger about Polyhymnia Tomkins.

At Polly’s house, he took the key from her and opened the front door. Then he gave her a chaste kiss and walked briskly away. Polly stood for a moment in the doorway, watching his upright retreating back.

He never came up to her room with her in the evening. The only time he ventured there was in broad daylight, at teatime, and then he left the door open. ‘You don’t want to get a bad name with your landlady or your fellow lodgers,’ he told her.

What if he was right, like mother like daughter, and she was destined for a wild life of immorality instead of a safe marriage to a good man? Yet her life so far had hardly been characterized by sexual recklessness.

Polly’s first fling had been a minor one, a step taken in a spirit of determined curiosity with an older man, a friend of Oliver’s who had invited her into his bed when she was spending a weekend in the country, a bohemian household ruled over by a famous painter, where it seemed that bedroom doors opened and shut as a matter of course. He was an attractive man, but she hadn’t enjoyed the experience greatly, He had laughed at her and said that the worst was over, and once she lost her heart to a man, she would find sex exciting and ecstatic.

Then she met Jamie, a fellow artist, and she discovered that Oliver’s friend had known what he was talking about. Jamie; no, she wasn’t going to think about Jamie, brilliant, erratic, blissful in bed, funny — and, like so many of his contemporaries, with his soul scarred by four years of war that he’d been lucky to survive.

Polly pulled the pillow over her head to shut out her thoughts as well as the sounds of the dachsund on the other side of the street, who barked every night until his mistress came home, and she felt nothing but gladness that the day, a day which had held such astonishing revelations, was over.

Tomorrow, she would go first thing to Somerset House and get that damned birth certificate.

Polly Smith was a sound sleeper, oblivious to the world almost the moment her head touched the pillow.

Polyhymnia Tomkins, it seemed, was troubled with insomnia. Polly woke at four in the morning after several restless hours. She slid out of bed, pushing damp hair back from her forehead, why was she so hot? She drank a glass of water, and looked around for something to read, anything to take her mind off the thoughts that were driving round and round in her mind.

Her eye fell on her passport photo, clipped to the passport application form. It was waiting for the birth certificate, so that she could take it to the Passport Office in Petty France.

What was it that it said on the accompanying instructions? The photograph had to be signed by an MP, a JP, a solicitor, a member of the medical profession, a clergyman. Who had to declare, in solemn words, that the photograph was a true likeness of…of whom?

How could anyone declare that the photograph was a true likeness of Polyhymnia Tomkins, when no one in the whole wide world knew or had ever known Polyhymnia Tomkins?

She’d intended to go to her old school to ask the headmistress to sign it. How could she look Miss Murgatroyd in the eye and say, ‘Actually, I’m not Polly Smith, and the woman you knew all the years I was at school as my mother is no such thing. I’m her sister’s illegitimate daughter.’ Polly grew pale at the thought. Who could she ask to sign it? Could anyone sign it, given the circumstances? What would people think of Dora Smith if word got out that the girl everyone knew as her daughter was in fact her niece, father unknown?

The feeble grey light of a November dawn was spreading across the sky before Polly fell asleep again, and when the alarm clock went off with raucous enthusiasm, she felt as though she’d had no sleep at all.

Well, she might as well get the birth certificate, she told herself as she washed in the basin. After that she would have to tackle the problem of the photograph.

This time, she went alone to Somerset House. Last time — was it only yesterday? — she had gone with a light heart, a sense of being on her way to the excitement of going abroad. Oliver had been with her, now, on her own, she found the imposing eighteenth-century building had a sinister air to it.

She hoped, unreasonably, that there would be a different clerk on duty, but no, the woman who was sitting at the enquiry desk was the same one, grey hair twisted into a severe bun, grey eyes enlarged by the pince-nez, eyes that didn’t look at all kind this morning, but full of suspicion.

‘You were here yesterday,’ the clerk said accusingly.

‘I was, but it’s a different name I’m looking for now.’

Polly hoped she was speaking with calm self-assurance, but the woman’s eyes glinted with malicious understanding.

‘Not who you thought you were? We get that all the time. They say it’s a wise child who knows its own father, don’t they? If you’ve got the details right this time, you should have no trouble.’

She went back to the cards she was filling in.

Polly cleared her throat and waited.

The woman looked up. ‘Well?’ she said sharply.

‘You said yesterday that people born abroad weren’t in these books.’

‘Are you now saying you were born abroad? Are you sure you’re English?’

‘Quite sure.’

The woman banged her hand down on the bell on the corner of her desk, and after a short pause, a lugubrious individual in a brown linen coat appeared.

‘Mr Grier will show you where to go.’ And, to Mr Grier: ‘Foreign.’

She bent her head again, and Mr Grier looked at Polly. ‘Which country?’

‘France.’

‘This way.’

They went out of the big room with its serried ranks of ledgers and along a corridor, then out into the central square. ‘It’s in a different section,’ he said, pushing open a door and standing back to let her through. They went along another passage, and he stopped at a door with a single word written on it: ‘Miscellaneous’.

It was a small room, with more of the red bound ledgers, but only a handful of them compared to the room they had left. ‘France,’ he said, hauling a volume down and laying it on the high wooden stand, which stood against one wall in a narrow gap between the shelves. ‘Leave the volume here when you’ve finished, I’ll put it back.’

Miscellaneous. That was what she was, miscellaneous. Wasn’t there a famous aristocratic woman in the eighteenth century who’d had so many children by various fathers that they were given the surname Miscellany?

The book opened at the year 1920 — how few English people seemed to have been born in France. After the war, they would mostly have been diplomats’ children, she supposed. Perhaps, being so close to England, women preferred to come back home to give birth. She turned back the pages until she came to 1908. And there, halfway down the page, she found the entry. Polyhymnia Theodora Tomkins.

She had a middle name; Dora Smith had never mentioned that. Theodora, Dora’s own name. Perhaps the sisters hadn’t been quite so estranged, after all.

She copied the details on to one of the slips of paper provided in a wooden box on the stand, and retraced her steps to the main desk. She handed the slip to the clerk, signed the form, which was filled in with firm, clear letters, and wrote her address.

‘It should arrive within the week,’ the clerk said. ‘You want a short certificate, do you? I see.’

Polly felt her colour rising, she resented the clerk’s knowing look. A short certificate, proclaiming her illegitimacy to the world, was to be despised.

That’s that, she said aloud as she stepped out into the Strand. The first step had been taken to bring Polyhymnia Tomkins to life.

Perhaps as Polyhymnia she would turn out to be quite a different creature from her old self. Even if she were Polly Tomkins — and no one would use a name like Polyhymnia on an everyday basis, for heaven’s sake — a Polly Tomkins must be a different person from a Polly Smith.

Or was that so? If Polly Smith married a Mr Tomkins, would she be different from when she used her maiden name, was a Tomkins in essence different from a Smith? Would she become a different person when she was Polly Harrington?

Yes, she would be different, because she would be a wife, and in due course a mother.

The thought depressed her.

The last traces of the previous day’s fog had been blown away by the brisk westerly wind that brought instead gusts of rain sweeping across the city. People walked quickly, heads down, black umbrellas held aloft. Polly didn’t have an umbrella, she had given up on umbrellas a long time ago, since, unless it was raining and the brolly in her hand, she invariably left it somewhere. She turned up the collar of her mac and stood for a moment in a tobacconist’s doorway, out of the rain, while she decided what to do.

She could go back to her studio and work. No; the painting on her easel at the moment wasn’t coming out as she wanted it to, and it grew more unpleasing by the day. Figures on a street, but as Oliver remarked, it looked like the worst excesses of the industrial revolution, with gaunt figures against a backdrop of chimneys.

‘It’s London.’

‘Never. It’s undoubtedly some dreary northern street, you’ve caught the spirit of disillusion and hopelessness wonderfully well.’

‘It’s meant to be Russell Square in the rush hour.’

‘One day, Polly, you’ll find what you really want to paint, and it won’t be rat-coloured figures in a dismal landscape, no, nor those fetching but trivial book jackets you do for WH Smith. Nor touching up flower paintings in Rossetti’s workshop.’

‘The jackets and the flowers make me money.’

‘Of course, and even an artist must live, if only on eggs and soup. I daresay you could make an excellent career out of nothing but the book jackets; they have a charm which is, you don’t need me to tell you, quite lacking in your paintings.’

His words had stung Polly. No artist himself, he chose to find his company among artists, and was renowned for having an eye and an unerring instinct for putting his finger on the weakness in any artist’s work. And Polly, honest with herself, had to admit that her art was never going to please her or anyone else unless it changed dramatically.

Her friend, Fanny Powys, happy in her own work of silkscreen printing, had tried to cheer Polly up.

‘Oliver doesn’t bother to make his sharp remarks about painters he doesn’t think have any talent. If he’s polite, you know that artist’s a no-hoper.’

And Fanny should know, for it was at the private view of an exhibition of her prints that she had introduced Oliver to Polly. Polly, her attention entirely on a vigorous design taken from the whorls of oyster shells, had paid scant notice to the tall man who remained standing beside her.

‘It’s a matter of patterns,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes Fanny’s work different from most of her kind.’

And Polly had found herself drawn into a lively discussion about silkscreen printing, which led to wider topics of contemporary art. Polly was amazed that Oliver, who was, he had at once told her, not an artist, should have such an eye, such a quick appreciation of what artists such as Fanny were about.

‘I grew up surrounded by paintings and works of art,’ he explained. ‘My father is a collector, and very knowledgeable. He’s always been interested in the artists of the day as much as in past masters, and so I follow in his footsteps.’

Polly disagreed with Oliver about the work of several painters, and the argument was continued over supper at Bertorelli’s, the restaurant that was to become their favourite eating place.

Polly had taken an immediate liking to Oliver. ‘We are snip and snap,’ she explained to Fanny. ‘Oh, it’s not sex, although I suppose…No, it really isn’t. Affinity, that’s the word.’

‘A strange affinity,’ Fanny said drily. ‘Polly Smith and the Hon. Oliver.’

‘Hon.?’

‘His father’s a lord. Didn’t he tell you?’

Polly pondered on this piece of information. Did it make a difference? No, Oliver was Oliver. Of course he had another life, far removed from the impecunious day-to-day existence of artists like herself. Yet he was, in his way, one of them. ‘He’s a friend,’ she told Fanny. ‘We like one another’s company. Our minds are in harmony. That’s enough for me, his being an Hon. is neither here nor there.’

A man in a dark coat said, ‘Excuse me,’ in affronted tones, as though Polly were standing there with the express intention of keeping him from his tobacco, and she moved out of the way, back into the full force of the wind and the rain.

She made up her mind. She would go back to Highgate, and consult Ma about the passport photograph. Maybe she could suggest who could sign it for her.

Dora was at her piano; even on her busiest days, she never did less than two hours’ practice. In the kitchen, Mrs Babbit, the char, was singing loudly to herself as she turned out a cupboard.

‘How can you play with that noise going on?’ Polly said, as she always did.

‘Focus,’ said Dora, as she always did. Polly, somewhat hesitantly, because she didn’t want to sound accusatory, explained her problem.

‘I never thought of that.’

‘If I’m illegitimate, which I am, then that’s a fact, and there’s no point denying it,’ Polly said.

‘And no need to go broadcasting it from the rooftops, either. I’ve protected you from that all these years.’

‘And it wouldn’t be good for you if word got around. I don’t live here any more, but you do. I’ve been racking my brains, but I simply don’t know these professional kind of people, except the vicar here, and Miss Murgatroyd.’

‘It’ll have to be Dr Parker,’ Dora said. ‘He knows you aren’t my daughter, and he’ll sign it for you.’

‘You told him?’

‘When Ted and I were still hoping for children. He’s never said a word to anyone all these years, he won’t say a word now. Go along right away, and you may catch him before he sets off on his rounds.’

Polly arrived at the doctor’s house just as he was putting his medical bag into his black Wolseley. As she called out to him, he looked up with the long-suffering expression of a doctor trying to get away, but he smiled when he saw who it was.

‘I thought you were another patient.’

‘Well, I am, I suppose, but I’m not ill. I’m never ill.’

‘So what can I do for you?’

‘It’s a photograph, for a passport. It needs a signature. I thought…Ma said…’

Dr Parker was suddenly alert, and he drew his bushy brows together. ‘Passport, eh? So Dora’s had to come clean at last, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

He ran his eyes down the form. ‘I’ve done this often enough before.’ He opened the car door. ‘Can’t do this standing in the rain.’

The car smelled musty and leathery. Comforting, somehow. He rested the photo on the steering wheel and took a fat black fountain pen out of his inside pocket. He unscrewed the cap and turned the photo over. ‘Read out the exact words, Polly, and then you can tell me who you are.’

‘Polyhymnia Tomkins, I’m afraid.’

‘Good God. Let’s hope I can spell Polyhymnia.’

‘P-O,’ began Polly.

‘It’s all right, I can remember enough of my classical education to cope with that. One of the muses, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Tomkins was Dora’s maiden name. You’re her sister’s child.’ And then, catching sight of the bleak look on Polly’s face. ‘Cheer up, young lady. As a doctor, I could tell you, if I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut, how many people even in this small part of London aren’t quite what or who they think or say they are.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Daughters who are actually granddaughters, sons who were born a year after their named fathers went away to the war, married couples who never went before a priest or a registrar. Your secret’s perfectly safe with me, Polly. Besides, you’ll soon be Mrs Harrington, and no one will know or care what your name was before that.’

‘No,’ said Polly, as he wrote on the back of the second photograph and handed it back to her.

‘Tuck those away safely, or the ink will run in the wet and it’ll be all to do again. Are you going abroad for your honeymoon?’

‘Roger likes mountains, so it’s to be the Alps.’

‘The mountain air will do you good, bring some colour back to your cheeks. As your medical man, I can tell you that you’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘I don’t like the winter. And I’m not sure about mountains. It’ll be cold.’

‘But bright.’

The birth certificate arrived in a brown envelope, stamped OHMS. Polly hesitated, then pulled it out and read it. Brief was the word. Name, place of birth. She would go today to the Passport Office; if she put it off, she might never do it, but once she’d handed over the form and the photographs and the birth certificate, it would be out of her hands.

What would Roger say when he asked for the birth certificate? Would he ask why she didn’t have a full one? Could she pretend she asked for a short one because it cost less? That wouldn’t be quite honest, she must pluck up her courage and tell him the truth about her parentage.

With this uncomfortable thought in her mind, Polly went off to Petty France, to wait on a hard wooden bench before being called up to show her papers, hand in the forms and address an envelope to herself. The passport arrived three days later, dark blue, embossed in gold with the royal coat of arms, and filled with stiff empty pages.

And there, written in an official hand was her new identity, Polyhymnia Theodora Tomkins. Born Paris, May 1, 1908.