The House of Vandekar Read Free Page B

feeling.’
    â€˜I’m sorry. I wasn’t deceiving you. For all these years I’ve been trying to deceive myself. If you want to understand, David, you’ve got to know about my grandmother. Let me start with Alice.’

2
    June was truly glorious that year. Everyone agreed that the season opened with a spell of lovely weather. May was warm and delightful, so different from the dismal chilly late spring of 1933. Yes, 1934 was going to be a vintage year for people who wanted to enjoy themselves. The debutantes were pretty, some outstanding. One or two, like the young beauty from Boston, Alice Homes Fry, were a gift to the society columns. There were balls and cocktail parties and luncheons every week. The Derby, Royal Ascot, Henley, Cowes; country-house parties at weekends and nothing in the world to worry about except love affairs and which invitation to accept. For the rich, that is.
    But Alice Holmes Fry, who had arrived in proper style on the Queen Mary , with her mother as chaperone and a ladies’ maid, had just enough money to last the year in England. If she failed to catch a rich husband she would have to go home to Boston and take what she could get. Americans were sought after and popular; many were very rich and the less well-endowed bachelors with expensive houses to keep up and diminishing resources circled around the little pool of heiresses like hungry crocodiles, teeth bared in ingratiating smiles. They didn’t trouble Alice. The Holmes Frys were Boston aristocracy; they had a well-documented Founding Father among their ancestors, but they weren’t rich. Alice’s father had seen to that. Gambling and women had eaten away what remained of a substantial inherited fortune. When he died there was not much left beyond a modest trust which had eluded him. Alice was twenty-two.
    It was her idea to go to England. Her mother was described by friends and family as a sweet woman, by which they meant she was weak with her profligate husband and too stupid to see their ruin approaching. But Alice knew better. Alice knew it wasn’t weakness or stupidity. Her mother loved him. And she always spoke of him as ‘your dear father’, even though he had died in another woman’s bed.
    Mother and daughter were so different, but they couldn’t have been closer. Phoebe Holmes Fry was small and dark and inclined to plumpness. Alice, she thought proudly, was so like her father, with his bright blond hair and those amazing blue eyes. No wonder the women had run after him – it wasn’t really his fault. Alice had his height and slender build, his magnetism, so that people clustered around her.
    â€˜Why go to England, sweetheart? You’ve got some nice young men just dying to propose, but you won’t let them.’
    â€˜Mother,’ Alice had said, ‘they’re dull and I’m not in love with any of them. I want someone special. There’s no one special here.’
    At least not interested in me. Daddy’s final curtain exit hasn’t helped my chances, but I’m not going to say that. She mustn’t be hurt. He hurt her enough for a whole lifetime, the bastard. If we go to England I’ll meet the sort of man I want. I know I will.
    They booked into the Ritz. ‘But sweetheart,’ her mother had protested, ‘we really can’t afford to stay there!’
    â€˜We can’t afford not to,’ was Alice’s answer. ‘We must do it in style, Mother, or not at all. We’ve got to rent a house, where we can entertain, and it’s got to be in the right part of the city. We’ve budgeted. We’ve got a year. Don’t worry – everything will be fine, I just know it.’
    â€˜I don’t know where you get all that confidence,’ Phoebe said. ‘Certainly not from me. Maybe your dear father …’
    Alice turned away and said, ‘Maybe.’ She didn’t want her expression to be