know into their everyday conversation: “Lady Diana’s dress—what did you think, Mummy?” “Oh, a teensy bit dull, not up to her usual standards.” Did they know Lady Diana? I was never quite sure, but I sensed I must be careful. Was my godmother married, for instance? Could she conceivably have been divorced? If she was divorced, that might explain her fall from favor, for my mother was adamantly opposed to divorce. I had no way of knowing, but I suspected that both Charlotte and her parents might know. They also presumably knew—as I did not—why my godmother was rich, what she did, who her parents were, where she came from.
So I spun the tales of my fabled godmother, but I spun them more warily, avoiding all mention of husbands or antecedents. In return for my inventions I gleaned certain facts, which I squirreled away. I learned that my godmother had been born in England but was now a naturalized American citizen. I learned that she “did up” houses, although no one explained what this involved. I learned that she crossed the Atlantic as casually as the Channel, and adored Venice, which she visited every year. When there, she would stay nowhere but the Danieli.
“ Not the Gritti. I told you, Harold.” We were sitting in their drawing room, on a shiny brocade sofa. Charlotte’s mother was drinking a martini in a frosted glass. She twirled the olive, set the glass down on a bright table of glass and chrome, and gave her husband a cold look. She turned back to me in her new apologetic way, as if I were an arbiter of taste, too, like my godmother. “We stayed at the Gritti last year, Victoria, because the Danieli was chockablock. Of course, if we had had a choice … but it was such a last-minute arrangement….”
Holidays. I tensed at once, for there, of course, lay another danger: my own visit to New York. I had hoped Charlotte might have forgotten that part of my boast, but she had not. She also remembered I had given a date: this year.
But when, this year? As the weeks passed, the questions became more pressing. Charlotte returned to boarding school but as soon as the Easter holidays came around, the invitations to tea were renewed.
When, exactly, did I plan to leave? Had it been decided whether I should sail on the Aquitania or the Ile de France ? Was I to travel alone, or was my godmother to visit England and collect me? Surely I could not be going to New York in the summer— no one went to New York then, and my godmother was usually in Europe.
There was a brief respite that spring, due to politics: Austria was annexed by Germany, and although I had no idea what that meant I could tell it was something serious, for my father and mother had long anxious conversations, which would break off when I came into earshot. Even Charlotte’s father looked grave. Their own visit to Germany, planned for that summer, was canceled. They opted for Italy after all.
“Things seem so very uncertain,” Charlotte’s mother said with a sigh. “I wonder if your parents will let you travel, Victoria? It would be ever so disappointing if you had to cancel your trip, but I can see …”
“It might have to be … postponed,” I said in a small voice.
“I can’t see why.” Charlotte, who was sitting next to me, gave me a hard look. “America is in the opposite direction. Nothing is happening there .”
I mumbled something—something not too convincing, I think, for I saw Charlotte and her mother exchange a telling glance. Perhaps Charlotte was already beginning to believe that the visit to my godmother was a fiction; certainly she now looked at me in a measured way, with a hint of the old superciliousness. I might not have liked her, and I think I was already beginning to regret my lies. All the same I was desperate to regain her respect.
I knew what one did when one was desperate for something: One prayed. My mother had taught me that. For many years, after they were first married, my mother and father
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