table when May returned, holding a spoon with the remains of Cooky’s sponge-cake mixture smeared around her lips. Both plaits were in their familiar state of disarray, the coppery strands of hair escaping as ever from their loosened ribbons. Florence put her arms around May’s waist and then stood on her chair so she was on the same level as May. As Florence kissed her quickly on the lips, May could taste the uncooked sponge mixture on her own mouth. The sudden, intimate, reassuring contact made her feel she could not bear to be alone any longer, so instead of returning to her room she went upstairs to see if Sir Philip had arrived home. She had made a decision about something that had been troubling her for a week. She wanted to ask Sir Philip if she might have permission to drive Julian up north.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
During the night, Julian’s bed in the Wigan boarding house had come to life beneath him. He had been warned about bedbugs and other species of vermin that sprang into action in darkness. Last night in the pub Julian had heard a story about a rat that had recently fallen through a small hole in a tenement ceiling a few streets away, landed on top of a young boy and removed a substantial chunk of flesh from his arm. The child had developed septicaemia and died shortly afterwards. Julian’s eyes scanned the flaking plasterboard above him for rat-size gaps. Meanwhile, he doubted whether the mattress beneath him, or indeed any of the other mattresses in the boarding house, had ever been cleaned and tried not to think about how many transitory bodies they had supported over the years. The stench from the canal that ran along the side of the street seeped through the barely open window. Julian tried to stop up the smell by burying his nose in his arm but the power of damp and dirt had already impregnated his skin.
As he lay on the flea-infested mixture of horsehair and foam rubber, he opened John Gunther’s new book on Europe.
“Adolf Hitler, irrational, contradictory, complex, is an unpredictable character; therein lies his power and his menace,” it began.
But Julian’s concentration was disturbed by the intestinal emissions coming from the snoring occupants of the two other beds. Although his glasses lay on the floor beside him, he did not reach for them. He preferred for now to leave the detail of his surroundings in soft focus. Julian wondered what the new king would have made of the sights of Wigan. As Prince of Wales, Edward had been so unexpectedly concerned with the underdog and had been applauded for his genuine empathy with the British people. Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a frequent dinner-party guest at Hamilton Terrace, who with her husband, Fruity, knew the king well, had spoken of how he had on more than one occasion shared a beer with out-of-work men in the makeshift bar of an abandoned church crypt. Had this pleasure-loving American woman stoppered up the king’s concern for suffering? The confrontation at that dreadful dinner party had left Julian sceptical of the worthiness of the man who for such a short time had occupied the throne. Julian liked to think he would never understand someone who put personal feelings in front of moral principle. Of course, the best thing would be if the two sides of the argument could merge but Julian was uncertain in what circumstances that might occur. He wondered for a moment whether he dared risk discussing all this with May before remembering how, not long ago, Philip had emphasised to him and Rupert how important it was not to speak about that dinner to anyone, including the servants. Delicate negotiations with the national newspaper editors had so far ensured that Mrs. Simpson’s name had been kept out of the British papers. The government had agreed to do all they could to keep it that way.
“Best to keep one’s trap shut until things die down or, if we are lucky, fizzle out,” Philip had said with a little knowing tap of his forefinger on the side of his nose.
“What with all the other problems facing the government both at home with Mosley’s fascists as well as abroad with Germany and now the potential for revolution deepening in Spain, the prime minister does not want any … ah … um … complicated personal relationship sending jitters through a public that is just settling down to the idea of a