The Villa on the Riviera: A captivating story of mystery and secrets - the perfect summer escape

‘Only there is no entry for her in the relevant volume,’ Oliver said.

The angel was impressed by Oliver, Polly could see that. If it had just been her standing at the desk, in her old mac and wine-coloured beret, she’d still be waiting for the clerk to look up from her card indexes and paper. It had been Oliver, every inch the gentleman in his tailored suit, who had commanded her immediate attention. Just by being there. It was unfair. But useful, she told herself. And of course, the minute he opened his mouth, there was the accent, proclaiming him a product of the upper classes, with all the easy authority that Eton and Oxford gave to the Olivers of this world.

So the woman in the pince-nez had been helpful. Had gone back with them to the red books, had found the one that should have contained the entry for Polly. ‘Polly’s short for Pauline,’ she told the woman, but it made no difference. There was no female Smith, initial P, born in Bingley Street, Highgate on the first of May, nor indeed at the end of April or the middle of May. There was a Thomas Smith, born in Priory Gardens on the second of May; that was as close as she could get.

The clerk closed the book, and Oliver courteously took it from her to replace it on its shelf.

‘You’ll have to get the correct details from your parents,’ the clerk said. ‘If you were born in a nursing home, perhaps in the country, you might have been registered there. I expect your father registered you, and he mightn’t have realized he should have done it where you lived, and not where you were born. Ask him.’

‘I can’t, he’s dead.’

‘In the war?’ the clerk said, with a sudden and unexpected flash of sympathy. ‘I’m sorry. But your mother will know. And doesn’t she have the original certificate?’

‘Good question,’ Oliver said, as they came out of the grandeur of Somerset House into the noise and bustle of the Strand. ‘That would solve all your problems.’

Polly grinned. ‘I dare say in your stately home everything is in perfect order, but Ma’s not very organized with papers. They’re stowed away in boxes, only not so you can find anything. She takes care with her music, she can always find a piece of music she wants. Papers are different, and after all, it was more than twenty years ago. I asked her, of course I did, but she got into such a fret, positively alarmed when I said I’d look through all her stuff, that I thought it would be easier just to come here and get a copy. They don’t need the original for a passport, do they?’

‘A copy from Somerset House passes all scrutiny,’ said Oliver. He drew her to the side, out of the way of passers-by. ‘So what now? Honeymoon cancelled? Come to think of it, wedding off, I’m sure you need a birth certificate to get married.’

‘The wedding isn’t cancelled, because no date has been fixed. Just January.’ Which was now only a few weeks away. ‘Roger told me to see to the passport so that there wouldn’t be any hold-ups. He likes to be ahead of himself. And what I’m going to do now,’ she said, suddenly decisive, ‘is catch a tram and go home and interrogate my mother.’

‘Then I shall escort you to the tram stop.’

They walked along the Strand towards Aldwych, Polly thinking, Oliver watching her. A pigeon landed in front of them and then took off with a whirr, the colour and shape of the grey wings catching Polly’s eye. Grey, but so many shades of it, from almost white to rich purple. And the energy of the movement, effort blending into the smooth ease of flight.

A grey bird on a grey day, but the dismal skies above them had no colour nor shape nor energy. There was the hint of sulphur in the air that warned of approaching fog; the crisp autumn days of October were over and now London had descended into the sullen dreariness of a damp and cold November.

‘The dark days do make me miserable,’ Polly said, as they crossed the road. ‘I spend most of the winter pining for spring and longer days. I never feel really happy in the winter. It’s the cold and the general dimness, I suppose.’

Polly and Oliver went down the steps to the tram station at Aldwych. Oliver took her hand and kissed it, as was his habit, then saw her on to the waiting tram, raising his hat as she climbed on. Oliver always wore wide-brimmed hats in soft browns and greys. She ran up the stairs to the upper deck and snatched a window seat from a burly man with a brown parcel. As the tram rattled off and emerged into Kingsway, she saw Oliver walking back towards Aldwych. Among the hurrying crowds, heads down, faces red from the cold, clad in drab coats and suits, his exquisitely tailored figure and hat made him stand out, as did his languid stride.

The tram plunged underground into Kingsway tunnel.

Polly both loved and hated trams. The clatter and banging and restless swaying disturbed her, but there was a comfort in travelling on a vehicle that ran on its tracks so purposefully and undeviatingly through the chaos of all the thick London traffic. And this particular tram, the Number 35, was part of her life. She had travelled on it every school day to and from her school, and then later on, when she won a scholarship to art school, had ridden on it into the heart of London to her college.

The journey to her old home took forty-five minutes, through the streets of northern London and up into Highgate. She got off at Archway, just as she always did; she could have walked blindfold from the tram stop to her house, and in fact, more than once, going home in a bad fog, she might as well have been blindfolded.

Polly hoped that they weren’t in for one of those terrible pea-soupers, which caught in your throat and always made her feel sick and headachy. She loathed the days when it was as if the sun never rose, and the sounds of London — traffic, voices, street criers, bells — were muffled by the smoke-laden, noxious greenish-yellow air.

She walked along Bingley Street to number 11, pushed open the gate and climbed the steps up to the front door, which was painted a dark green colour and sported a brass knocker in the shape of a pixie. From the window to the right of the front door, she heard the wavering sounds of a piano scale. Her mother had a pupil. She looked at her watch. Ten to five, so the lesson would probably finish in ten minutes. The front door was on the latch, and she opened and shut it behind her quietly. Inside, she took off her mac and beret, unwound her woolly scarf and hung them up on the hook behind the door. Then she walked down the hall and into the kitchen, warm from the stove which her mother kept going all the time in winter. She put the kettle on, and sat down at the scrubbed wooden kitchen table, her feet automatically curling round the legs of the chair as they had done since she was a little girl.

The kitchen overlooked their small garden, a constant affront to the neighbours, whose neat herbaceous borders, squares of lawn and regimented vegetable patches tucked away at the bottom of each matching garden proclaimed the right horticultural instincts. The garden was the one place where Dora Smith’s restrained nature seemed to give way to something more reckless. She packed the space with plants, not in neat lines, but more, Polly always liked to imagine, as a jungle would be. Dense and profuse, and nothing small except the soft swathes of violas and the snowdrops which nestled under the overhanging branches of shrubs and bushes.

But no London garden looked inviting in November. It had a forlorn, end-of-season look to it. The piles of crisp autumn leaves had vanished, leaving just a few soggy remnants on the ground or clinging to the twigs of the trees. The evergreens added a touch of colour and life, but even they had a grey tinge, as though the misty air had got to them as well.

The kettle came to the boil in a flurry of steam. Polly warmed the brown teapot, spooned in the tea, and left it on the stove to brew. The door to the front room opened: voices, thanks and goodbyes, the front door opened and shut, and Polly’s mother came into the kitchen.

‘I heard you come in,’ she said. ‘You’ve made tea.’

‘Have you got a five o’clock?’

‘No. I should have, little Sally Wright, but she has a bad chest, and she isn’t allowed out when the weather’s like this. Just as well, for if she did come, it would be half an hour of cough, cough, cough. She’s a musical child, though,’ she added, wanting to be fair. ‘But I’ve another pupil at half past. Pour the tea, Polly. Do you want a biscuit?’

Polly took a biscuit and chewed it absent-mindedly, for a moment at a loss as to how to broach the subject of the birth certificate.

Then she plunged in, what was the point in beating about the bush? ‘I went to Somerset House today, to get a copy of my birth certificate.’

Dora Smith put her cup down so hard that it rattled the saucer.

‘You aren’t still set on going abroad for your honeymoon, are you?’ she said. ‘I don’t advise it, you’ll catch some dreadful disease, it’s not very clean over there.’

‘How do you know? You said you’d never been abroad,’ Polly said, rather crossly.

There was a pause. ‘My … It’s what people say happens to everyone who goes. And you don’t speak any foreign languages, at least if you do, your French teacher never found out about it, your French reports were always shockers.’

‘Roger speaks German and French. Besides, even if we weren’t going abroad, I have to have the birth certificate to get married. That’s what he says.’

‘I really do not see why you’re in such a rush to get married. Roger still has to finish qualifying, and — ’

‘He is qualified.’

‘Then why is he taking more exams?’

‘You have to, if you want to be a hospital doctor.’

Polly felt she hadn’t got to the bottom of her mother’s ambivalent attitude to Roger and her engagement. Dora Smith was a woman with two distinct personalities. The one Polly knew best was the sensible, practical woman, who shared her neighbours’ attitudes and opinions, among which was the certainty that the main purpose of a young woman’s being was to find herself a good, reliable husband, in a respectable way of life, and settle down with him to be a good wife and mother. Within this conventional scenario, Roger was a gem. A doctor was better than the daughter of Ted and Dora Smith might have hoped for, and a catch to brag about to her friends, if Dora were given to bragging, which she wasn’t.

But Dora Smith had another side, the side that had been dismayed at Polly’s precocious artistic talent, that had refused to praise her exceptional promise, yet who had fiercely asserted the need for Polly to do her art as well as she could. ‘If you’re an artist, then you have to be trained properly, to become as good as you can be. It’s not the same as having art as a hobby. One’s professional and the other’s amateur.’ And it was that Dora Smith who had said, clearly and unexpectedly, ‘If you marry Roger, the light will go out of your painting.’

To which Polly might have replied that the light had already gone out of her painting, and so what difference would it make, but that wasn’t an acknowledgement she was going to make to anyone.

‘Can we get back to the birth certificate? Are you sure you can’t find the original? I don’t see how it can be lost, one doesn’t lose something important like a birth certificate.’

Dora Smith didn’t answer, but took a sip of tea, her gaze wandering away from Polly as she looked out of the window. The clock ticked, the stove gave its familiar creaking sound as it cooled, the cat flap on the back door rattled and a large tabby cat slid through it. He gave Polly an uninterested look with his round, golden eyes, swished a stripy tail and went to investigate his food plate.

Still Dora said nothing.

‘I’m not there, in Somerset House,’ Polly persisted. ‘There’s no Pauline Smith registered, not on that date, not anywhere in Highgate. Was I born somewhere else? In a nursing home?’

Her mother sighed, and Polly saw that her eyes, when she looked back from the window, had a glisten of tears in them.

‘Ma, I’m sorry. What is it? What’s the matter?’

The words came out in a rush. ‘You weren’t born in Highgate, you were born in Paris. I haven’t lost your birth certificate. I burnt it.’

‘Burnt it?’ Polly couldn’t believe her ears. ‘Burnt it? Why? When? Just to stop me going abroad? And how could I possibly have been born in Paris? You’ve never been to France, you said so yourself.’

‘I burnt it when you were a baby,’ said Dora Smith, with a sigh. ‘Oh, dear, why did this wretched man want to take you abroad. Or marry you at all? Bringing it all up. I had hoped …’