The Forget-Me-Not Sonata Read online

‘Very well,’ Rose conceded, sitting back in her chair with resignation. ‘But you tell, Edna, it makes me too distressed to speak of it.’

  Aunt Edna’s blue eyes twinkled with mischief and she slowly lit a cigarette. Her two nieces waited with impatience as she inhaled deeply for dramatic effect. ‘A tragic though utterly romantic tale, my dears,’ she began, exhaling the smoke like a friendly dragon. ‘All the while poor Emma Townsend has been engaged to Thomas Letton she has been desperately in love with an Argentine boy.’

  ‘The worst is that this boy isn’t even from a good Argentine family,’ Aunt Hilda interrupted, raising her eyebrows to emphasize her disapproval. ‘He’s the son of a baker or something.’ She burrowed her skeletal fingers into her sister’s packet of cigarettes and lit up with indignation.

  ‘The poor parents,’ Rose lamented, shaking her head. ‘They must be so ashamed.’

  ‘Where did she meet him?’ Audrey asked, at once moved by the impossibility of the affair and eager to hear more.

  ‘No one knows. She won’t say,’ Aunt Edna replied, thrilled by the mysterious nature of the story. ‘But if you ask me he’s from the neighbourhood. How else would she have bumped into him? It must have been love at first sight. I’ve been told by a very reliable source that she would creep out of her bedroom window for midnight rendezvous. Imagine, the indecency of it!’ Isla wriggled in her chair with excitement. Aunt Edna’s eyes widened with the fervour of a frog who’s just spotted a fat fly. ‘Midnight rendezvous! It’s the stuff novels are made of!’ she gushed, recalling the secret meetings in the pavilion that she had enjoyed in her youth.

  ‘Do tell how they were discovered,’ Isla pleaded, ignoring her mother’s look of gentle disapproval.

  ‘They were spotted by her grandmother, old Mrs Featherfield, who has trouble sleeping and often wanders around the garden late at night. She saw a young couple kissing beneath the sycamore tree and presumed it was her granddaughter and her fiancé, Thomas Letton. You can imagine her horror when she failed to recognize the strange dark boy who had his arms wrapped around young Emma and was . . .’

  ‘That’s enough, Edna,’ Rose demanded suddenly, placing her teacup on its saucer with a loud clink.

  ‘Dear Thomas Letton must be devastated,’ Aunt Edna went on, tactfully digressing to satisfy her sister. ‘There’s no chance that he’ll marry her now.’

  ‘From what I hear, the silly girl claims she is in love and is begging her poor parents to allow her to marry the baker’s son,’ Aunt Hilda added tartly, stubbing out her cigarette.

  ‘Good gracious!’ Aunt Edna exclaimed, fanning her round face with the menu in agitation, but clearly savouring every detail of the affair.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Rose sighed sorrowfully.

  ‘How wonderful!’ Isla gasped with glee, wriggling in her chair. ‘What a delicious scandal. Do you think they’ll elope?’

  ‘Of course not, my darling,’ Rose replied, patting her daughter’s hand in order to calm her down. Isla always worked herself up into a lather of excitement over the smallest things. ‘She wouldn’t want to bring shame upon her dear family.’

  ‘How sad,’ breathed Audrey, feeling the full force of the lovers’ pain as if she were living it herself. ‘How desperately sad that they can’t be together. What will happen to them now?’ She blinked at her mother with her large, dreamy eyes.

  ‘I imagine she’ll come to her senses sooner or later and if she’s lucky, poor Thomas Letton may agree to marry her still. He’s so fond of her, I know.’

  ‘He’d be a saint,’ Aunt Hilda commented, dismissing the girl with a swift sweep of her knife as she spread jam onto her scone.

  ‘He truly would be,’ Aunt Edna agreed, extending her arm across the table to help herself to a piece of Walkers shortbread. ‘And she’d be very fortunate. There’s a great shortage of men now due to the war, it’ll leave an awful lot of young women without husbands. She should have had the sense to hold onto hers.’

  ‘And the poor boy she’s in love with?’ Audrey asked in a quiet voice.

  ‘He shouldn’t have hoped,’ Aunt Hilda replied crisply. ‘Now, did you know Moira Philips has finally dismissed her chauffeur? I think they were right to do so considering there was a high chance that he was reporting their conversations to the government,’ she continued in a loud hiss. ‘One can only imagine the horror of it all.’

  Audrey sat in silence while her mother and aunts discussed Mrs Philips’ chauffeur. She didn’t know Emma Townsend well for she was a good six years her senior, but she had seen her at the Club. A pretty girl with mousy hair and kind features. She wondered what she was doing now and how she was feeling. She imagined she was suffering terribly, as if her whole future was a bleak, loveless hole. She looked across at her sister who was now playing with her sandwich out of boredom; Mrs Philips’ chauffeur was extremely dull compared with Emma Townsend’s illicit affair. But Audrey knew that their shared interest in the scandal differed greatly. Isla was riveted by the trouble the girl had caused. The romantic, or tragic, elements of the story couldn’t have interested her less. She delighted in the fact that no one could talk of anything else, that they all spoke with the same hushed voices that they adopted when talking about death and that they devoured each sordid detail with hungry delight before passing it on to their friends. But most of all the glamour of it enthralled her. How easy it was to rock their orderly lives. Secretly Isla wished it were she and not Emma Townsend who basked in the centre of such a whirlwind. At least she would enjoy the attention.

  It was a good two weeks before Emma Townsend was seen at the Club. Like a forest fire the scandal spread and grew until she was wrongly accused of being pregnant by the gossiping Hurlingham Ladies. The Hurlingham Ladies consisted of four elderly women, or ‘Crocodiles’ as Aunt Edna wickedly called them, who organized with great efficiency all the events held at the Club. The polo tournaments, gymkhanas, flower shows, garden parties and dances. They played bridge on Tuesday evenings, golf on Wednesday mornings, painted on Thursday afternoons and sent out invitations to tea parties and prayer nights with tedious regularity. As Aunt Edna pointed out, they were the ‘protocol police’ and one knew when one had fallen short when the little lilac invitation failed to find its way to one’s front door, though it was at times a relief not to have to think of an appropriate excuse to decline.

  Audrey and Isla had spent the fortnight looking out for poor Emma Townsend. She hadn’t appeared at church on Sunday, which infuriated the Hurlingham Ladies who sat with their feathered hats locked together in heavy discussion like a gaggle of geese, criticizing the girl for not showing her face to the good Lord and begging His forgiveness. When Thomas Letton walked in with his family the entire congregation fell silent and followed his handsome figure as he walked up the aisle with great dignity, his impassive features betraying nothing of the humiliation that Audrey was sure burned beneath his skin. The Hurlingham Ladies nodded in sympathy as he passed, but he pretended not to see them and fixed his eyes on the altar in front of him before settling quietly into his seat next to his mother and sister. Emma hadn’t been seen at the polo either or at the picnic which followed, organized by Charlo Osborne and Diana Lewis, two of the Crocodiles, who spent the entire afternoon muttering that if she so much as showed her face at their event they would send her home in disgrace while secretly longing for her to appear to give them more to gossip about. Then finally after two long weeks she arrived on Saturday for lunch with her family.

  Audrey and Isla sat in the lounge with their brothers and parents and, of course, the indomitable Aunt Edna, when Emma Townsend crept in with her head bent, staring with determination at the floor in order to avoid catching anyone’s eye. Audrey looked about as the chattering ceased and every eye in the room rose to watch the solemn procession file in and take their seats at a small table in the corner. Everyone, that is, except Colonel Blythe, who was too busy with his grey winged moustache buried in the Illustrated London News, smoking his Turkish cig
arettes, to notice the silent commotion that made a small island out of him. Even Mr Townsend, a large-framed man with silver hair and woolly sideburns, seemed to swallow his indignation, choosing silence over confrontation which would normally have been his response at such a moment. He meekly ordered drinks and then turned his back on the rest of the community who were waiting like jackals to see what he would do next.

  ‘Well,’ Aunt Edna exploded in a loud hiss, ‘so unlike Arthur not to growl at us all.’

  ‘That’s enough, Edna,’ Henry chided, picking up a handful of nuts. ‘It isn’t our place to comment.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she conceded with a smile, ‘the Crocodiles do enough of that for all of us.’

  ‘They’ll be furious they’re missing this.’ Isla giggled and nudged her sister with her elbow. But Audrey couldn’t join in the merriment. She felt desperately sorry for the family who all suffered so publicly along with their daughter.

  Just when the Townsends’ shame threatened to suffocate them a gasp of astonishment hissed through the room like a sudden gust of wind. Audrey turned around to see Thomas Letton striding across the floor with his chin jutting out with resolution. Isla sat up with her mouth wide open as if she were about to scream with excitement. Albert, hating to miss an opportunity to pay his sister back for years of teasing, grabbed a peanut and flicked it down her throat. She stared at him in surprise before turning as red as a beet as the nut caught in her windpipe and prevented her from breathing. Pushing her chair out with a loud screech she swept the glasses off the table where they shattered onto the floorboards causing everyone to avert their attention from Thomas Letton and the Townsend family to see what the disturbance was. Isla’s bloodshot eyes rolled around in their sockets as she choked and waved her arms about in a frantic attempt to get help. Before Audrey knew what was happening her father had grabbed Isla from behind, pulling her off the ground and wrapping his strong arms around her stomach, thrusting his wrists into her lungs, again and again. She spluttered and gasped, all the time turning redder and redder until the whole lounge had formed a circle around their table like a herd of curious cows, anxiously willing Henry Garnet to save his daughter from a hideous death. Rose stood petrified with terror as the life seemed to leave her little girl’s body in agonizing spasms. Silently she prayed to God. Later she would praise Him for His intervention because with one enormous thrust the peanut was dislodged and the child gulped in a lungful of air. Albert collapsed into tears, throwing his arms around his mother with remorse. Aunt Edna rushed to embrace Isla as she lurched back from the brink of death and began to shake uncontrollably. The crowd of onlookers clapped and cheered. Only Audrey noticed Emma Townsend leave with Thomas Letton. It didn’t escape her notice, either, that they were holding hands.

  ‘Great Uncle Charlie died from choking,’ Aunt Edna remarked solemnly when the clapping had died down. ‘But it wasn’t a peanut. It was a piece of cheese, a plain piece of farmhouse cheddar, his favourite. After that we always referred to him as Cheddar Charlie, didn’t we, Rose? Dear Cheddar Charlie.’

  Chapter 2

  Much to the indignation of the Hurlingham Ladies, Thomas Letton and Emma Townsend were married in the autumn. Rose was delighted that at last the Townsend family could hold their heads up again but Aunt Hilda felt very strongly that the girl was undeserving of such a decent young man. Aunt Edna called her an ‘honorary Crocodile’ and made snapping noises with her tongue behind her back, which made Isla giggle and copy her. Though Isla was less tactful, she would buzz about her aunt like a dragonfly singing ‘snap snap’ with her eyes wide with naughtiness. ‘What’s got into the child, Rose? All this snap snapping, what on earth does it mean?’ Aunt Hilda complained. Even Rose found it hard to contain her amusement and reassured her sister that it was a game she had brought back from school.

  ‘Oh good,’ Aunt Hilda replied, ‘I thought it had something to do with me.’

  ‘Of course not, Hilda. Ignore her, she’ll move on to something else soon enough,’ she said. Of course she was right. Isla had a short attention span and soon the ‘honorary Crocodile’ bored her.

  Emma Townsend’s love affair had made a deep impression on Audrey. She was unable to forget. She observed the wedding from a distance, imagining the bride’s passive resignation to her fate as she dutifully took her vows and embarked on a life without love. To Audrey such a bleak destiny was unspeakable, worse than death. But when the couple returned from their honeymoon, a fortnight later, the young wife seemed happy enough in her new role. The scandal was erased by time and the willingness on the part of the community to forget. Soon even the Hurlingham Ladies set aside their disapproval and received the new Mrs Letton with gracious smiles, delivering once again those little lilac envelopes with the same tedious regularity as before. But Audrey believed she heard muffled cries of pain in the light ripple of her laughter. She believed she saw suffering behind her eyes that revealed itself only in the rare moments when she would lose concentration and stare into space as if recalling those tender kisses beneath the sycamore tree. To Audrey, Emma was a tragic figure and her tragedy endowed her with a solemn beauty she hadn’t had before.

  When Audrey turned eighteen in January 1948 her mother took her shopping in the grand Harrods store on Avenida Florida, accompanied by Aunt Edna and Isla and then for tea in the Alvear Palace Hotel. Aunt Edna, who like her sister Rose had never been to London, shuffled about the shop complaining that it was nothing like as glamorous as the original, which was much larger and as magnificent as Aladdin’s cave. But to Audrey and Isla it was a treat they always looked forward to, not only because of the clothes their mother bought them, but because it was an adventure to watch the elegant ladies in tidy hats and gloves totter up the carpeted departments on precariously high heels, browsing among the cosmetics and fashion imported from Europe. Isla watched with envy while her elder sister tried on grown-up dresses and silk blouses and sulked when she wasn’t allowed a pair of earrings until she was eighteen. To appease her, Aunt Edna bought her a Pringle twinset, which immediately managed to put the smile back onto her face because she knew her mother disliked it when Aunt Edna undermined her weak attempts to discipline.

  The heat was insufferable as they marched up the dusty streets, ignoring the dirty little beggar boys who leapt out of the shadows like monkeys to ask for money or sweets. They passed a magazine stand where Eva Perón’s luminous face smiled out at them from the front page of every national newspaper. The dyed blonde hair pulled back into a severe bun, the cold brown eyes and the triumphant smile reflecting the ruthless ambition of a woman who would never be satisfied. Aunt Edna and Rose walked briskly on, keeping their opinions to themselves for fear of being overheard. There were too many stories of people being lynched by angry mobs of Peronists all because of a careless remark. The streets of Buenos Aires were not the place to speak ill of the First Lady. One no longer felt safe even within the walls of one’s own home.

  Audrey adored the city. It gave her a taste of freedom to bathe for an afternoon in the sweet anonymity of this urban labyrinth. She loved the bustle of people, striding purposefully to their jobs or to meetings, or ambling nonchalantly up the avenues, gazing into shop windows or lingering on sunny corners watching the world dash by. The cars and the noise excited her, the frothy squares and grand ornamental buildings enchanted her and she yearned to be a part of it, to weave her way quietly into this other world like a thread of silk in a vast tapestry. She adored the romance of the little cafés and restaurants that tumbled out onto the pavements and served as tranquil watering holes before the frenetic hurry would begin all over again. The quaint shoe-shiners and flower sellers who enjoyed breaks together in the shade, discussing politics and trade, sipping mate through ornate silver straws. The air was thick with the smell of diesel from the buses and caramel from the pastry stands and punctuated with the animated voices of children that rose above the busy hum of activity. She didn’t miss a single detail as she followed her mothe
r’s rapid footsteps up the pavements. Noticing the young couples wandering hand in hand beneath the palm trees in the Plaza San Martín her mind drifted once more to love. Her heart stirred with longing as the rich scents of gardenia and cut grass clung to her nostrils and transported her into the languid world of the novels she loved to read. She imagined that one day she might walk hand in hand like those lovers did and perhaps steal a kiss beside the fountain. But then they were in the tea room at the Alvear Palace Hotel and Rose was telling them about the two young men who had recently arrived from England to work in their father’s company.

  ‘Cecil and Louis Forrester,’ she said, clearly impressed for her mouth twitched into a small smile.

  ‘Brothers?’ Aunt Edna asked, unbuttoning her blouse an inch and fanning her damp flesh.

  ‘Yes, brothers,’ Rose replied. ‘Cecil is the elder, he’s thirty and Louis is twenty-two. Louis is a bit . . .’ she paused to find the right word, anxious not to appear malicious. ‘Eccentric,’ she said with emphasis then moved swiftly on to his brother. ‘Cecil’s so handsome and refined. A charming young man,’ she gushed.

  ‘Can I have dulce de leche pancakes, please?’ Isla interrupted, eyeing the trolley of cakes as it was wheeled past by a white-gloved waiter, clearly taken with the two young girls who shone prettily in the smoky tearoom.

  ‘Of course you can, Isla. Is that what you’d like too, Audrey?’ Audrey nodded.

  ‘Have they come alone?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘Yes, they have. Poor Cecil, he served in the war. Played an important part, I believe.’ Rose sighed heavily. She wanted to add that apparently Louis had refused to fight, stubbornly remaining in London playing melancholic tunes on the grand piano, even during the raids, but she held back. It was unfair to turn her daughters against him even before they had met him. ‘They’ve come out here,’ she continued to Aunt Edna, ‘to get away from Europe and all that depressing post-war gloom. Their father, who has done business with Henry in the past, suggested they come. We owe him a favour or two. He’s been very good to Henry. I’m so happy he can help them. They’re staying at the Club.’