‘I can hardly remember her. Only that she cried a lot and was sick on the ship,’ Hettie told her pragmatically. So far as she was concerned, Ellie was her mother, and her memories of warm loving arms holding her as a child were always of Ellie’s arms.
For all that, physically, she looked so unique, with the compelling blend of her English and Japanese features, Hettie’s nature was entirely English, Ellie acknowledged. She certainly could not imagine Hettie with her determination and high spirits ever behaving towards a husband in the subservient manner that Ellie’s own first husband, Hettie’s father, had told her was traditional amongst Japanese women.
When Hettie had been growing up, Ellie had dutifully bought her books to read about her mother’s homeland, but for Hettie’s own sake she had not wanted her to be singled out as ‘foreign’ or ‘different’. If Minaco were able to see her daughter, would she feel as proud of her as Ellie herself did right now? Or would Minaco resent her and think that she had usurped her role from her? What would a mother want for the child she had to leave behind?
‘Come on, Mam,’ Hettie urged, disrupting Ellie’s thoughts. ‘Let’s go downstairs so that I can show Da and John my dress.’
Connie had cleared a space for her right inside the door so that she could make a grand entrance and that she did, pirouetting in front of her audience with flushed cheeks and shining eyes.
Hettie could see Gideon frowning slightly as he looked at her exposed arms and calves, but it was towards John she turned in happy anticipation, awaiting his awed recognition of her metamorphosis. However, the look of grim anger on his face was such a shock that it caused her to teeter in mid pirouette and almost stumble, her face paling as John got up to leave the room.
‘John!’ She caught the door as it slammed behind him, and pulled it back, following him into the hallway. ‘What is it?’ she begged him. ‘Why did you look at me so? Don’t you like my dress?’ Her eyes were more sparkling than ever with her shocked bewilderment and confusion, the small hand she extended towards him in desperate appeal trembling.
‘How can you even think of parading yourself in public in such a garment? Where is your modesty?’ John could see that his harsh words had shocked her, but she had shocked him. How could he explain to her that seeing her like that had suddenly reminded him of the poor, too young girls he had seen during the war around the camps, selling themselves for the price of a loaf of bread? How could he explain to her that his reaction was caused by his own contradictory feelings – part male arousal and part fierce desire to protect her from that arousal?
Hettie snatched back the hand she had extended to him and tucked it behind her back as a child would have done. ‘What do you mean? It is the fashion…modern…everyone is wearing shorter skirts now.’
‘Maybe so but they are not wearing them to expose themselves for the pleasure of every man who cares to walk in off the street to ogle them, are they?’ John couldn’t help saying jealously.
Hettie could see that John wasn’t convinced but rather than argue with him she tossed her head and said determinedly, ‘Well, Mam chose this dress for me, so there! Thank you very much! Besides, it is only ladies taking their afternoon tea who will see me.’
‘Aye, and their husbands, sons, and fathers, when they come to join them, which they will do, especially when they learn that there is a singer to be found all tricked out in a costume designed to entice them,’ John muttered unkindly.
‘Oh! Why are you being so horrible to me? I am grown up now, John, and not a child any more, and I won’t be treated as one,’ Hettie burst out defiantly, unaware of the fact that John had only wanted to protect her.
Unable to understand what was happening – why John, who was supposed to care about and be happy for her, was being so mean – Hettie declared crossly, ‘I hate you, John Pride, and I shall hate you for ever!’ before turning round and running up the stairs to throw herself full length on her bed and sob out her hurt feelings.
He shouldn’t have walked out of Connie’s parlour like that, John acknowledged bleakly, and nor should he have spoken so unkindly to Hettie, but the sight of her tricked out in her fancy frock and looking like a stranger had done something to him he couldn’t understand himself. He felt ashamed of himself for the way he had behaved. His sisters sometimes scolded him that, whilst he had generally inherited their father’s amiable and kind nature, sometimes he could be as they put it ‘as stubborn as a mule’.
Somewhere in amongst his anger there had also been pain. But although John could understand the reason for his fierce anger, he could not understand why he also felt such a sharp sense of loss and despair.
Couldn’t Gideon and Ellie see the danger of allowing Hettie to parade herself around as though she were a grown woman and not still in reality a girl? Couldn’t they see, as he so plainly could, that Hettie would lure men to her with her beauty and innocence and that for her own sake she needed to be protected?
His angry thoughts had taken him past the Bluecoat School, Connie’s husband Harry’s ‘rivals’, without him noticing. Rather than wait for a bus, he decided he might as well walk the whole way to the Adelphi – it might help him clear his head of the mass of confusing and unhappy thoughts which besieged it.
The hotel had been rebuilt in 1912 to the designs of Frank Atkinson, and was still considered by Liverpudlians to be, as Charles Dickens had once written, ‘the best hotel in the world’. The turtles for its famous turtle soup were, so it was said, kept in a tank in the basement.
As he reached the hotel, the liveried doormen were busy opening hackney cab doors and assisting elegantly dressed guests to alight whilst another doorman whistled up porters to take charge of the luggage. Skirting past them John walked into the marble foyer and glanced absently at the listing of transatlantic crossings prominently displayed.
Beyond the entrance hall, thronged with a confusion of arriving and departing travellers, a flight of steps led up to the large top-lit Central Court with its pink pilasters.
Ignoring the glazed screens with their French doors that filled the arches and opened up into the large restaurants on either side of the Central Court, John made his way to the Hypostyle Hall, which was where Alfred had suggested they meet.
Several of the tables in the large square empire-style hall were already filled with people taking afternoon tea, and as John surveyed them he was approached by an imposing flunkey who demanded condescendingly, ‘H’excuse me, sir, but h’if you was wanting to take…’
‘I’m here to meet a friend,’ John stopped him calmly.
‘Oh, and ‘oo would that be, sir?’
‘The Earl of Camberley,’ John told him.
The immediate change in the flunkey’s attitude towards him would normally have made John chuckle, but on this occasion he was still too heart-sore from his earlier outburst to do more than ignore the man’s pleasantries as he led him to a table.
‘Shall you be wishing me to ’ave His Lordship called, Sir, or…’
‘No, that won’t be necessary. I’m a few minutes early.’ He looked past the flunkey to the area just in front of the entrance to the open-air courtyard where a large grand piano stood on the shiny marble floor.
Was this where Hettie was going to be singing?
Refusing the waiter’s offer of tea, John studied the occupants of the other tables. They were in the main family groups, passengers, he guessed, for tomorrow’s Atlantic crossing, although there were some tables filled exclusively by ladies sipping tea and busily talking to one another.
‘John, old chap.’
He had been so engrossed that he hadn’t seen Alfred, and as he stood up to shake his hand his friend drew the young woman at his side forward and announced, ‘Polly, allow me to introduce to you my very good friend, John