bound to be bores, so maybe I’ll just stay right here with you.’
‘We’d love you to, darling. I’ll just fetch a waiter to lay another place.’
As her mother hurried off, Kiki turned her eyes to Cecily then held out her hand. Cecily took it and found that the long, tapered fingers clasping hers were icy cold, despite the heat of the room.
‘You’ve done the right thing by having the guts to come here tonight,’ Kiki said, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘I don’t give a damn for a single person in this room. Nothing’s real, you know,’ she sighed, reaching for the glass of champagne that Dorothea had left on the table and draining it. ‘As my friend Alice says, we all end up as dust one day, no matter how many damned diamonds we own.’ Kiki gazed hard into the distance as if she was trying to see through the walls of the Waldorf.
‘What is Africa like?’ Cecily asked eventually, feeling she should lead the conversation as her godmother seemed to be lost in another world.
‘It’s majestic, terrifying, mysterious and . . . totally inexplicable. I have a house on the shores of Lake Naivasha in Kenya. When I wake up in the morning I can see hippos swimming, giraffes parking their heads between the trees as if they’re pretending to be branches . . .’ Kiki laughed in her deep throaty voice. ‘You should come visit, get out of this claustrophobic ghetto of a city and see what the real world is like.’
‘One day I’d love to,’ Cecily agreed.
‘Honey, there is no “one day”. The only time we have is now, in this minute, or millisecond maybe . . .’ Her voice trailed off as she reached for her evening purse, beaded with what looked like hundreds of tiny sparkling diamonds. ‘Now, you must excuse me, I need to visit the restroom, but I’ll be right back.’
With a nod of her elegant head, Kiki stood up and made her way through the tables. She rather reminded Cecily of Daisy Buchanan – the woman Jay Gatsby idolised in The Great Gatsby – the ultimate twenties flapper. But times had moved on now. It was no longer the Roaring Twenties, even if her mother and her friends still lived as though they were in that glorious moment of madness after the war had ended. Outside the hallowed walls of the ballroom, the rest of America was still struggling out of the aftermath of the Great Depression. Cecily’s only personal contact with its ramifications was when she was thirteen and had seen her father crying on her mother’s shoulder as he’d described how a great friend of his had jumped out of a window after the Wall Street Crash. Later, she’d grabbed her father’s newspaper from their housekeeper Mary’s hands as she was throwing it away in the trash, and had done her best to keep up with what was happening. Surprisingly, the subject was never raised at Spence, the private girls’ school she’d attended, even though she’d asked her teachers about it on a number of occasions. When she’d left school, Cecily had begged her father, Walter, to let her go on to college to study Economics at Vassar – citing that two of her friends with more enlightened parents had gone off to Brown. To her surprise, Walter had agreed to a college education, but had questioned her choice of major.
‘Economics?’ He’d frowned, before taking a hefty slug of the bourbon he favoured. ‘My dear Cecily, that is a career reserved completely for men. Why don’t you major in History? It won’t be too taxing for you, and it will at least equip you to make conversation when entertaining your future husband’s friends and colleagues.’
She had done as she was told, understanding the compromise. Taking Economics as one of her minors, Cecily had loved her classes in Algebra, Statistics and Miss Newcomer’s famed Economics 105. Sitting in the wood-panelled lecture rooms, and spurred on by the other brilliant women around her, she had never felt more inspired.
So how come she had found herself back in her childhood bedroom in the family’s mansion on Fifth Avenue with no hope for the future? Now alone at the table, Cecily looked around the ballroom for her mother and took a gulp of champagne in an attempt to stop maudlin thoughts filling her brain.
After leaving Vassar in the summer and joining her family at their home in the Hamptons, Cecily had