TP Fielden - Died and Gone to Devon

‘Would you kindly bring me a large Plymouth gin?’ she said. It didn’t sound like a request. The girl blinked, looked at the clock over the mantelpiece and the lifting morning light through the window, then bobbed and moved away.

Just look at her, thought Miss Dimont. She’s eighty but her eyes are clear, her voice is strong, she carries herself in a commanding manner, and she oozes charm. What an extraordinary woman!

‘I was too tall for the Prince of Wales,’ began Mrs Phipps. ‘He could be quite charming but he was such a pipsqueak. And he bleated if he didn’t get his way – very unattractive in a man, don’t you know.

‘We were at the Embassy Club – it’s where we all used to go, everyone knew everyone, of course. And I could see he’d been eyeing me up. His popsy at the time was Thelma Furness, though she wasn’t there that night.

‘He sent someone over to ask me to dance, which really is not the way to go about things, but he was the future king so I suppose he could please himself. We both got up and moved towards the dance floor but the moment we met, you could tell it would be a humiliation for him – I was nearly a foot taller, or so it seemed. We managed to scrape around the floor but he was very unhappy – never liked people showing up how short he was.’

‘Did you lead, or did he?’ asked Miss Dimont mischievously.

‘Ha! Ha! I will say this, he had the grace to ask me back to his table and that’s when it all began.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘Well, there was a group there, possibly ten, can’t remember them all but Prince George was there – you know, the Duke of Kent, the one killed in the war – and he had some American girl in tow. There was Diana Cooper and her husband, as well as Lord Dudley, Lord Sefton, a few others and this girl Pansy Westerham.’

Mrs Phipps looked around the room but so far there was no sign of the gin. She plunged on.

‘Pansy and I hit it off immediately – she raised one eyebrow as if to say, who’s your short friend? We both started laughing and that was it. She was wonderful company, didn’t care a hoot about anybody or anything – big blue eyes, wonderful figure, and funny as all get-out. We had lunch the next day and we were best friends from the word go.

‘She was having a fling with one of the men at that table but wouldn’t say who – she said it was complicated. But she told me everything else, I even knew his inside-leg measurement, dear!

‘After we’d known each other a few weeks she confessed there was someone else – someone she didn’t even like but was drawn to, fascinated by – he sounded quite nasty, actually. We’d meet most nights at the Embassy and she’d tell me little bits and pieces but actually, darling, I was only half listening – that nightclub was the most dazzling place on earth. Everybody who was anybody was there, and slap bang in the middle of it all were the Prince of Wales and Prince George and their côterie. Your eyes were out on stalks and of course, you were on the qui vive – I was between husbands at the time and you never knew who might come over and ask you to dance.’

‘Apart from the Prince of Wales.’

‘Ha! We never danced again – but I did have a go with Prince George – a lovely dancer and very manly with it. But he knew it, my dear, always a bit of a put-off.’

‘Not always.’

‘No, not always.’

There was a pause as they pursued their separate, pleasurable thoughts.

‘So,’ said Miss Dimont after a moment or two, ‘was it Pansy you wanted to talk to me about?’

‘I was just coming to that,’ said Mrs Phipps, beaming as the waitress slid into view with a glass on a silver salver. ‘Won’t you have one?’ The question was rhetorical.

‘After a bit Pansy got very down. It was man-trouble all right, you can always tell, but she didn’t want to discuss it. She just looked very strained and talked about the weather, that sort of thing.

‘Then one day she wasn’t there – pouf! Disappeared like I don’t know what. She had a little house off Knightsbridge, and I called round a couple of times but there was never an answer. I telephoned, left messages, but nothing.

‘I wondered if she’d run away with her bad man, but gossip soon got around our circle and nobody that we knew had left their wife, or absconded, done a bunk, so we were up a gumtree.’

‘I think I know what’s coming,’ said Miss Dimont, leaning forward with interest.

‘I expect you do, dear, what with your background in sleuthing. Anyway, they found her a fortnight later – dead in the street. She’d fallen from the top of her house – just behind Harrods, you know – and it was all very distressing. It turned out she had a husband who loved her dearly, she never told me about him, who lived in Paris. And there was a child she never mentioned either.’

‘Sounds like you never knew her after all.’

‘You’re right, of course. Later I discovered she developed pashes on people but after a bit got bored and moved on. When I thought about it afterwards, I realised she must have been running away in her mind from something – the abandoned husband and child, I suppose. And what she wanted to do was to live inside other people’s worlds. She wanted to open the door and take refuge in your house, as it were. She was delightful company, adorable, but all it covered up was unhappiness.’

‘You think she killed herself?’

‘Well, people took quite a lot of drugs back then – not like today, dear.’ Mrs Phipps looked ruminatively into her gin glass. ‘Morphine and cocaine and so on. Quite a lot of people killed themselves back then – but no.

‘No, that’s why I wanted to talk to you about her, Huguette – shall I call you that? I think she was murdered, and something inside me – even thirty years later – wants to find out what exactly happened.’

There were tears in her eyes. ‘Will you help me? Do you think you could get to the bottom of it? Find out the truth?’

‘Geraldine, think about it – how could I find anything out after all these years? There’s been a world war, an atom bomb, who knows what.’

‘But my dear, you’re so clever! All those things you’ve seen and done!’

Judy Dimont got up. ‘After all this time?’ she repeated, gathering up her raffia bag. ‘Geraldine, I would love to, but there’s not a chance. Too much water under the bridge.’

The old woman looked forlornly into her gin.

‘But now you’ve told me, I won’t be able to think about anything else.’

Monday morning was always unnerving at the Riviera Express. The weekend had gone by in a flash, and now there were only four days left to press day. An ancient accounts book, importantly renamed ‘the diary’, sat on a rickety table outside the editor’s office and its entries were a strong indicator of the excitements ahead for the newspaper’s readers on Friday.

The blank space against Wednesday was not unusual – it was early closing day and probably for that reason alone the world came to a halt in Temple Regis. Maybe it was the day people stayed at home for Ray’s A Laugh on the wireless, but whatever the reason, it was unnerving to see how little news there was to harvest in the coming days – hence the nervous 11 a.m. weekly assembly over which the editor, Rudyard Rhys, grumpily presided.