I leave for Kenya. I was saying to Cecily how she should come stay with me.’
‘Absolutely,’ Tarquin agreed, looking down fondly at Cecily. ‘Well now, it’s been a delight to meet you.’ He reached for her hand and brought it up to his lips. ‘It would be a pleasure to show you around if you make the trip. I hope we meet again soon. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
As Cecily watched Tarquin escort Kiki through the crowd, then searched the room for her mother and father, she thought that even if she never laid eyes on Captain Tarquin Price again, tonight he really had been her knight in shining armour.
Like the rest of New York, Cecily had never enjoyed January, but this particular one felt more miserable than any other she had lived through. Usually, the view of a snow-covered Central Park from her bedroom window cheered her up, but this year it rained a lot too, and the pavements were covered in grey sludge that coordinated with the murky skies.
Before Jack’s abrupt departure from her life, she had filled her days with plans for the wedding and the numerous charities that her mother and her friends worked tirelessly to run. Which, in Cecily’s view, meant wasting endless hours deciding on a venue for the latest fundraiser, then further time choosing the menus. The guest list would come next – totally dependent on how many dollars the recipient of the invitation might have to spare. Dorothea relied on her eldest daughter to let her know who her debutante friends were marrying; if the fiancé or new husband was wealthy enough, Cecily would invite them along.
Even though she knew that her mother and her cronies worked hard for their good causes, Cecily had never yet seen any of them get their immaculate silk gloves dirty by actually visiting one of the charities they raised funds for. When Cecily had suggested that she went to Harlem to visit the orphanage for which a charity dinner had raised over a thousand dollars, Dorothea had looked at her as if she was crazy.
‘Cecily, honey, what can you be thinking?! You’d be robbed by those Negroes before you’d had a chance to get out of the car. Everything you’re doing for the charities is providing funds for those poor little coloured babies. Be happy with that.’
Since the Harlem Riot of 1935, which had happened when she’d been a sophomore at Vassar, Cecily had been aware of the tension. On so many occasions she’d been tempted to ask Evelyn, the household’s black maid of the past twenty years, what her life was like, but the golden rule was that one never exchanged personal details with one’s staff. Evelyn lived in the attic with the other kitchen staff, only leaving the house on a Sunday to go to ‘my church,’ as she called it. Archer, the chauffeur, and Mary, the housekeeper, were married and lived uptown in Harlem. At Vassar, there had been a few outspoken women who were demanding social change. Her friend Theodora often left campus at weekends to go to a civil rights rally in the notorious 19th Ward. She’d slip back in through the dormitory window just before midnight on Sunday, reeking of smoke and brimming with rage.
‘The world needs to change,’ she’d whisper angrily as she put on her nightgown. ‘Slavery might be over, but we’re still treating a whole race of people as if they’re less than human – segregating them, keeping them down. I’m goddamned sick of it, Cecily . . .’
January was also a very quiet time on the charity committee circuit, so Cecily was mostly stuck in the house with her thoughts. Even the radio provided little light relief as Hitler continued to make incendiary speeches, attacking British and Jewish ‘warmongers’.
‘The winter of 1939 sure is a miserable time to be alive,’ Celia muttered to herself as she took a walk through a fog-swathed Central Park, just to get out of the house.
Dorothea was away visiting her mother in Chicago. As Cecily sat down with her father at the vast table in the dining room that faced onto the snowy garden, she wondered if she would ever pluck up the courage to suggest they ate supper on such occasions at the small table in the far cosier morning room.
‘Do you like the new-style decor?’ Walter asked her, taking a sip of wine and gesturing vaguely at the sleek, modish furniture. The Fifth Avenue house, with its imposing stone facade facing Central Park,