Free Ultimate Prizes by Susan Howatch Page A

her beautiful retiring nature)”—and once all that’s been said everyone relaxes because they know exactly where they stand and no one feels in the least deceived …
    In another letter she told me about her three brothers, all employed in her father’s financial empire, but I realised that since they were many years her senior they had played little part in her growing up.
 … but I’ve always been very close to my sisters —well, we had to stick together, you see, because since Father was so busy making money and my brothers were so busy at public school learning how to be English gentlemen and Mother was so busy being retiring, no one had much time for us except Blackboard our Governess (Miss Black) and even she was always wishing she was somewhere else, so Merry and Laura and I formed what we called The Triple Alliance in order to conquer the world and make everyone take notice of us. I was devastated , simply devastated , when Merry married that sporty bore Wyvenhoe, all polo and fishing and shooting thousands of poor little birds in August (I think he only married Merry to gain permanent access to Father’s grouse-moor). Her marriage destroyed our Triple Alliance and I knew things would never be the same again and I was right, they never were. She lives up in Leicestershire now, although of course she has a house in London, and I seldom see her. But I recovered from losing Merry. It was losing Laura that nearly killed me.
Darling Laura was the light of my life , we were closer than most twins , only twelve months apart, we did everything together, everything, Merry was always the odd one out as she was two years older than Laura, three years older than me. Laura and I were presented at Court together and shared our first Season, and later the Prince of Wales (I’m sorry, I know he’s the Duke of Windsor now, but for me he’ll always be our gorgeous Prince of Wales)—he said he would have danced with both of us simultaneously if he had had two pairs of arms (my dear, Mrs. Simpson was simply seething! ) and life was thrilling, such fun , how we laughed, and then Laura, darling Laura, fell in love with Anthony, and at first I minded dreadfully but after a while I told myself it was wicked of me to begrudge her such happiness, so I made up my mind not to be jealous of him, and once I’d done that I realised he was such a nice man, so sweet-natured, the son of a peer but really quite normal, and they got married in 1938 and they were so happy, living in London—which meant I could still see Laura every day—and then she started a baby and she was so thrilled—we were all so thrilled, even me, although I did have a little shudder at first at the thought of having to share her with yet another person—ugh! how contemptible of me, I despised myself for being so selfish!—and then …
Disaster, tragedy, DEATH . Why do such things have to happen, why, why, why, I cried for days, I felt as if half of myself had been amputated and all the world seemed such a dark place without Laura’s special fight—and when I looked back at all the parties, all the champagne and the caviar, I could only think: Death always wins in the end. Oh, what a dreadful moment that was, so black, so brutal, so absolutely terrifying—and suddenly all my party memories seemed so sinister, I seemed to see a death’s-head grinning at every feast, and that was the moment when I knew parties would never be the same again because I would always be thinking: EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY FOR TOMORROW WE DIE , and the word DIE would always remind me of horrors past and horrors still to come.
Well, when I realised there was no escape from that terrible truth, no escape on the dance-floor, no escape in the saddle at a hunt, no escape among the cocktails at Grosvenor Square, I saw that the only thing to do was not to run away but to stand my ground and try to look Death straight in the face—and once I’d done that I knew I had to live , and when