Something Dangerous Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part One - 1928 – 1939

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  Part Two - 1939 – 1942

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  Part Three - 1943 – 1946

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  No Angel

  Into Temptation

  The Dilemma

  Almost A Crime

  An Outrageous Affair

  Sheer Abandon

  An Absolute Scandal

  Forbidden Places

  This edition first published in the United States in 2007 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 2001 by Penny Vincenzi

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the

  publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection

  with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN : 978-1-590-20796-3

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Paul. For an unfailingly pliant ear

  and an astonishingly absorbent shoulder.

  With much love.

  Acknowledgements

  A small army of people helped me get this book settled in a moderately tidy way between its covers: led once more by my agent and informant Desmond Elliott, walking research library that he is on the subject primarily of publishing, but on other crucial matters too, most notably New York between the wars. In that area I also have to thank Edna McNabney, who provided so many delicious anecdotes, and so much inside information and breathtaking detail about the city.

  Many, many thanks to Mme Nicole Delava, who held me spellbound with her reminiscences of Paris before, during and after the war, and of her journey down some of the same road followed by Adele. And to Annick Salters and Laurence de Lasnerie for putting me in touch with her and for other hugely helpful suggestions, and to Noni Holland for acting so tirelessly as interpreter, translator and guide. For further assistance in Paris I have to thank my niece Rebecca Vincenzi and her friend Mathieu Lis, and for a particularly memorable evening at the Café Flore; and much gratitude also to Nina Salter and her colleagues at Calman Levy in Paris, which was the inspiration, but in no way a model, for Constantines, and also the wonderful archiviste at Hachette.

  Hugh Dickens was not only an inexhaustible and patient military consultant but a most creative and imaginative one; and I am also deeply grateful to Beryl Thompson for her vivid and charming reminiscences of her war in the ATS and to Joanna Lycett for hers in the WRNS. And I owe a great deal to Matthew Parker for his knowledge of the battles waged by the flying aces, and indeed his book The Battle of Britain.

  Special mentions to Helen Pugh and other archivists at the Red Cross in London; and to Kit Sparkes, Colette Levy and Sue Stapely, all of whom gave me their time and expertise most generously; to Clare Alexander who has been such a great support to both Desmond and me; and to my daughter Claudia who also acted as translator and researcher. And Maria Rice-Jones, who gave me a crash course in French, thus enabling me to do even a little translating of my own.

  Several books were of great help to me: The Week France Fell by Noel Barber; Swastikas over Paris by Jeremy Josephs, Occupation by Ian Ousby; London at War by Philip Ziegler; The Viceroy’s Daughters by Anne De Courcy and The Great Crash by J. K. Galbraith.

  As always, huge thanks to Rosie de Courcy, not only for her creative, inspiring and sympathetic editing, and her now legendary capacity never to so much as mention that the deadline has passed this many a long day/ week/month, but also for her ability to stop me panicking and make me laugh.

  Much gratitude to lots of people at Orion: to Susan Lamb, Geoff Duffield, Dallas Manderson, Richard Hussey, Jo Carpenter, and Lucie Stericker, who between them produced, packaged, marketed, sold and dressed the book up so prettily; Emma Draude and the team at Midas who told the world about it, and last but absolutely not least to Kirsty Fowkes who saw the whole thing through with awe-inspiring calm and good cheer.

  And of course, and as always, to my family for putting up with me and the bookmaking process for yet another year.

  In retrospect, it all looks quite easy…

  The Main Characters

  LONDON

  Oliver Lytton, head of Lyttons publishing house

  Lady Celia Lytton, his wife and senior editor

  Giles, twins Venetia and Adele, and Kit, their children

  Margaret (LM) Lytton, Oliver’s elder sister and business manager

  Jay Lytton, her son by her dead lover Jago Ford

  Gordon Robinson, her husband

  Jack Lytton, Oliver’s younger brother

  Lily Lytton, his actress wife

  Barty Miller, brought up in the Lytton family by Celia

  Sebastian Brooke, bestselling children’s author published by Lyttons

  Boy Warwick, Giles’s old schoolfriend

  Abigail Clarence, a teacher, and friend of Barty

  Cedric Russell, a society photographer

  COUNTRY

  Lord Beckenham, Celia’s father

  Lady Beckenham, her mother

  Billy Miller, Barty’s brother

  NEW YORK

  Robert Lytton, Oliver’s older brother and successful property developer

  Laurence Elliott, his estranged stepson from his marriage to Jeanette, now dead

  Jamie Elliott, Laurence’s brother

  Maud Lytton, Robert and Jeanette’s daughter

  John Brewer, Robert’s business partner

  Felicity Brewer, his wife, a poet published by Lyttons

  Kyle Brewer, their son, an editor

  Geordie MacColl, an author published by Lyttons

>   PARIS

  Guy Constantine, head of a French publishing house

  Luc Lieberman, a senior editor

  Madame André, Adele’s landlady

  Part One

  1928 – 1939

  CHAPTER 1

  Venetia Lytton was extremely fond of telling people that the whole country had gone into mourning on the day of her birth.

  This announcement, although historically accurate, and guaranteed to win her attention in whatever company she chose to make it, gave nonetheless a slightly erroneous picture; it was left to her twin sister Adele, naturally inclined to a slightly more prosaic view of life, to explain that their birth had coincided almost to the hour with the death of King Edward the Seventh.

  ‘Oh – all right,’ Venetia would say crossly, ‘but it was still a terrifically dark day, Mummy said the nurses were sobbing harder and harder each time they brought in another bouquet of flowers and when Daddy arrived, the doctor actually greeted him wearing a black tie. So of course he thought something terrible had happened.’

  Whereupon someone, usually one of the twins’ two brothers if they were present, would inevitably remark that indeed it had, and that she and Adele had been launched upon an unsuspecting world, then Venetia would pretend to sulk, Adele would smile serenely, and someone else (usually another young woman in search of a little attention for herself) would endeavour to change the subject.

  It was not easy to divert attention from the Lytton twins; not only were they extremely pretty (beautiful, some even claimed) and very amusing, but they really were quite extraordinarily alike. It was said that the famous Morgan twins, Thelma and Gloria (better known as Lady Furness and Mrs Reginald Vanderbilt respectively), could not be told apart unless you were close enough to detect a small scar under Thelma’s chin, the result of a roller-skating accident when she was a child; the Lytton twins offered no such helpful clue. Venetia did have a small mole on her right buttock, and the twins had also observed, from the first moment such a thing was observable, that Adele’s nipples were darker and slightly larger than her sister’s, but since these were facts extremely hard to verify, and certainly of no use at all in normal social situations, most people had no idea much of the time which of the twins they were talking to, sitting next to, dancing with. Even their closer circle found it virtually impossible to tell.

  It was a state of affairs that the twins still found amusing to encourage. They had gloried in it at school, each claiming constantly to be the other, confusing and enraging their teachers beyond endurance until their mother discovered what they were doing and, being immensely – and most unusually for her class and age – concerned for their education, threatened to send them to different boarding schools, which frightened them into submission, so deep was their dread of separation.

  At their coming-out dance earlier that year, dressed in identical white satin dresses, large white roses in their gleaming dark shingled hair, they had produced so strong a sense of dizzy confusion that several members of the older generation at least had felt themselves to be rather more intoxicated than they were; and it was even rumoured that when they had been presented at court, they had changed places. But those who knew them best said not even Adele (at heart more outrageous if less extrovert than Venetia) would have dared do so appallingly dreadful a thing.

  They were enjoying their season hugely; their mother had chosen one of the early Easter courts deliberately, feeling it would be more memorable, more distinguished: ‘By June it’s getting so dreadfully busy, you’re in danger of being just another dance.’

  Not that the occasion, held at Celia’s parents’ London house in Curzon Street, was in danger of being any such thing: had the house itself been less magnificent, the guest list less distinguished, the champagne less fine, the music less fashionable, the very fact that it was a dance for the twins, with their almost eerie identical beauty, would have made it remarkable. They were, unarguably, two of the most popular and brilliant debutantes of their year, caught up in a heady haze of dances and parties and country house weekends, with all the excitement of the actual season – the Derby, Ascot, Henley and the rest – still ahead of them. Their photographs appeared constantly in the society papers, invitations were still arriving in large numbers, and they had even been awarded the great accolade of a whole page in Vogue, wearing their Vionnet presentation dresses. Their mother, while complaining ceaselessly (and fairly inaccurately) that their season was absorbing too much of her time, was extremely pleased with their success. To launch one beautiful and popular daughter would have been gratifying, to be able to claim two was triumphal.

  Today, their eighteenth birthday, there had been even more reference to the country-in-mourning than usual; so much so that Giles, their elder brother by five years, said at breakfast that he would withdraw from the evening’s party if he heard any more about it.

  ‘And then you’ll be sorry, Venetia, because I shall tell Boy Warwick not to come either.’

  ‘I couldn’t be less bothered,’ said Venetia airily, pulling out a compact from her pocket, dabbing more powder to her small, perfectly straight nose. ‘It was you who invited him, not me, he’s your friend—’

  ‘Venetia, darling, don’t do that at the table, it is so dreadfully common,’ said her mother briskly, ‘and for heaven’s sake don’t do it tonight, your grandmother will have a heart attack. Now of course Boy will be coming, I can’t have the arrangements upset at this point in time. I will check with Cook that everything is in order for dinner this evening – we’re only nineteen I think, now that Barty can’t come—’

  ‘Such a shame,’ murmured Venetia to Adele, and then seeing her mother’s eyes on her, smiled brightly and said, ‘I was just saying what a shame that was. Still, I suppose it is a long way. From Oxford. Just for dinner.’

  ‘Well, she would have stayed a couple of days,’ said Celia, ‘over the weekend in fact, she said. But her finals are looming now, and she is very anxious about them. I think we must respect that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Adele.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Venetia.

  Their eyes met over their coffee cups: then fixed with sweet innocence on their mother.

  ‘We will miss her,’ said Adele, with a careful, quick sigh. ‘She’s so clever, I’m sure she’ll get her first anyway.’

  ‘Absolutely bound to,’ said Venetia.

  ‘Absolutely nothing of the sort,’ said Celia, ‘I cannot understand how you two can still have so little grasp of the connection between hard work and success. No achievement is automatic, and especially no academic achievement. However clever the person may or may not be. Your father got a first, but he worked unimaginably hard for it, didn’t you, Oliver?’

  ‘What’s that, my dear?’ Oliver Lytton looked up from The Times, frowning gently.

  ‘Apparently you worked very hard to get your first, Daddy,’ said Venetia.

  ‘I really can’t remember much about it,’ said Oliver, ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Mummy says you did.’

  ‘As I hadn’t met your mother then, I really think it’s a little difficult for her to say.’

  ‘Mummy doesn’t find anything difficult to say,’ said Adele, and giggled; Venetia echoed her.

  Celia glared at them briefly. ‘I really have more important things to do than engage in extremely silly arguments. And if I’m going to be able to be home in time for your birthday dinner I shall have to leave for the office in half an hour. Giles, do you want to come with me?’

  ‘I – think I might go on ahead,’ said Giles quickly, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Mind? My dear Giles, why should I mind? I’m delighted you’re taking your work so seriously. What particular aspect of it is to occupy you this morning?’

  ‘Oh – just all sorts of things,’ said Giles.

  ‘Really? What exactly? I’d like to know; it must be very urgent, that it can’t wait thirty minutes? Nothing’s gone wrong, I hope. Because if it has
, we certainly need to know.’

  God, she was so unfair, thought Giles; so awkwardly, arrogantly unfair. Putting him in his place, underlining his lowly position at Lyttons even here at the family breakfast table. She knew nothing was wrong; knew too that if it was she would most assuredly have heard of it long before now.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Mother,’ he said, ‘of course it’s not. But I have pages of proofs to read and mark up on the new Buchanan book and—’

  ‘It’s not going to be late, I hope,’ said Celia, ‘it really is imperative it goes on sale in July. I would be very worried to think—’

  ‘Mother, it’s not late. It’s absolutely on schedule.’

  ‘Then why the rush?’

  ‘Celia, do leave the boy alone,’ said Oliver mildly. ‘He simply wants to get on with his job. Probably before the telephones start ringing and there are other such distractions. Proof correcting is time-consuming and painstaking work; I always liked to do it early in the day myself.’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of the mechanics of proof correction,’ said Celia, ‘I’ve done a great deal of it myself. I simply wanted to—’

  ‘Celia—’ said Oliver quietly. His eyes met hers; she stared at him for a moment, then stood up, pushing her chair back loudly, throwing down her napkin.

  ‘Well, clearly I must get to Lyttons myself,’ she said, ‘since Giles is setting such an extremely good example. If you will all excuse me.’

  She left the room; Giles waited a moment, looking miserably down at his plate, then hurried out after her. The twins watched him; then ‘Poor old Giles,’ said Venetia.

  ‘Poor old boy,’ said Adele.