One Summer Night At the Ritz Read Free Page B

whole of Piccadilly. The tourists bustling past, the evening light starting to dim the air, the Wolseley next door, over the road the blue flags with De Beers jewels written on them and the red ones of…she got her A to Z out…the Royal Academy. Pigeons flew past at eye level and she looked down at the people on the open-top buses. She thought about blowing out the drink with pompous William Blackwell and just starting her London adventure, but she had to meet with him. However stilted and awkward it might be, she had to put an end to Enid’s mystery. Had to pass over the baton and say: This is in your court now, you do with it what you will. Meet Martha if you want, come and see the island, or just put it in a drawer and forget about it but this is your history as well as ours.
    She glanced back into the room and saw her dress that she’d hung up for the evening and felt a slight shudder of nerves. She just had to get the drink part done and then the rest of the evening was hers.
    She wondered if there was time to have a bath. She’d only had a bath once before in her life. There wasn’t one on the boat and her year at art college was spent living in a tiny bedsit with a bathroom so small that the shower was over the toilet. But her one-time bath had been when she was seven and her mother, a textile designer, had finished a commission – swathes of the most stunning hand-blocked fabric – late, as always, and they’d gone to the fashion designer’s house on the train to drop it off. Jane didn’t usually go with her but it was her birthday and they were going for ice cream afterwards. Her mother had told her to wait in the fancy living room, but the designer had worried about things getting broken. Her mother had rolled her eyes behind his back which had made Jane laugh and then taken her into the bathroom, filled this massive sunken pink bath and told her to stay there for an hour or so while they finished the work. The designer thought it was all very untoward but Jane thought it was brilliant. A maid came in with fresh towels and a glass of orange juice and Jane lay in the bubbles watching as her toes wrinkled up in the water. When her mum was finished she came in, towelled her dry and they went for ice cream. Jane had lemon sorbet. Her mum had mint choc chip. It was one of the amazing days.
    The bathroom in The Ritz was white marble. The bath had gold taps and Jacuzzi buttons, there were fluffy white Ritz towels and candles and flash bubble bath. When she lay in the warm water, the foam up to her chin, she glanced up and saw there was a chandelier as well.
    For a moment she thought about telling her mum.
    It wasn’t a moment that lasted long, but long enough to remind her that, while it might be a relief that her mother was finally at rest, free of the unrelenting clutches of illness, there was still a giant hole where she had been, where comments like, ‘There’s a bloody chandelier in the bathroom!’ floated with no one to pick them up.
    As she lay back in the bubbles, staring up at the glinting crystals, her phone beeped with a text from Annie.
    At work, just seen Martha out the back reading the diaries. Will keep you posted. Think this is a good sign. Progress. Good luck tonight x
    Jane realised then that not only was there a hole in her future but a gaping one in her past. What would it be like to have, as Martha did, a stack of diaries filled with answers? As she lay in the bath she could finally admit how furious she was with Martha - how annoyed she was that she hadn’t jumped at the chance to read them. She was jealous of Martha’s chance to have a whole history laid bare. Jane would give anything to have the answers to the questions her mother had shut her eyes against, her hands covering her face, refusing to discuss. Just imagining the chance to know who her father was made her want to dunk her head fully under the water and scream, but that would ruin her new hair so instead she stayed where