Free Dark Angel by Sally Beauman

bed by my father and William. The next morning he departed, early, so I never received my jar of violet cream, and I discovered no more on the subject of Constance.
    For several months nothing happened: Charlotte contracted measles; her party was canceled; her mother took her to Switzerland for a period of convalescence. Christmas came and went, and it was not until January of the new year, 1938, that I saw Charlotte again.
    I was invited to her house for tea, alone—an honor never accorded me before. To my surprise I was invited again the following week; the week after that there was a most pressing invitation to join Charlotte and her friends on an expedition to see a London pantomime.
    My stock had risen, it seemed, not just with Charlotte but with her parents also. I was no longer just a dull child from an impoverished background; I was Constance Shawcross’s godchild. I was about to visit her in New York. Quite suddenly I had acquired possibilities.
    At first, I am afraid, I enjoyed this very much. I was given wings by Constance’s surrogate glamour; I took those wings and I flew. Since I knew virtually nothing about my godmother, I was free to invent. I discovered the addictions of fiction.
    In the beginning I gave Constance all those attributes I myself most secretly admired: I gave her black hair and dark-blue eyes and a fiery temperament. I gave her five gray Persian cats (I loved cats) and an Irish wolfhound. I made her a superlative horsewoman who rode sidesaddle to hounds. I let fall the fact that she ordered French scent in large flagons, lived at the top of one of the tallest towers in New York, overlooking the Statue of Liberty, ate roast beef three times a week, and insisted on Oxford marmalade for breakfast. All her clothes, right down to her underwear, came from Harrods.
    “Harrods? Are you sure, Victoria?” Charlotte’s mother had been eavesdropping on these boasts avidly, but now she looked doubtful.
    “Well, perhaps not all of them,” I said carefully, and cast about in my mind. I thought of my aunt Maud and her reminiscences. “I think sometimes … that she goes to Paris.”
    “Oh, I feel sure she must. Schiaparelli, perhaps Chanel. There’s a picture I saw somewhere—Charlotte, where did I put that book?” Charlotte’s mother always called magazines “books,” and on that occasion a much-thumbed copy of Vogue was produced. It was two years old at least. There, in my trembling hands, was the first photograph of my godmother I had ever seen. Sleek, insolently chic, she was photographed at a London party in a group that included wicked Wallis Simpson, Conrad Vickers, and the then Prince of Wales. She was gesturing, so her hand obscured her face.
    After that my lies became less pure. I had learned from that error about Harrods, and I trimmed my image of my godmother to suit the tastes of my audience. I gave Constance several motorcars (a touch of malice there, for none was a Rolls-Royce); I gave her a yacht, a permanent suite at the Ritz, a collection of yellow diamonds, crocodile-skin luggage, silk underwear, and intimate friendship with King Farouk.
    I was learning fast, and most of these details I picked up either from Charlotte and her parents or from the fat and glossy magazines that lay scattered around their home—magazines that were never permitted at Winterscombe. I think I liked this Constance less than I did the Constance of her first incarnation, who lived in a tower and rode to hounds at full tilt. But my preferences were unimportant; I could see that these new details impressed my audience. When I mentioned the crocodile luggage Charlotte’s mother gave a sigh; she herself, she said in a wistful way, had admired something very similar, just the other day, at Asprey’s.
    There were dangers—I could see that. Both Charlotte and her mother seemed alarmingly well informed about my godmother. They consumed gossip columns; they tossed the names of people my godmother seemed to