Sins

Dougie looked round the empty basement beneath the Pimlico Road photographic studio, which would soon be packed with the young and the beautiful, all intent on partying the night away.

He reckoned he’d been lucky to have met Lewis Coulter. Lew–to those he knew well–supposedly employed Dougie as a junior photographer, not a general dogsbody, but when you were an Aussie newly arrived in the old country, no longer sure of your station in life, and you had your own private reasons for being here, you didn’t start protesting to the employer who had taken you on simply because he’d liked the look of you.

Besides, Dougie liked his boss and his work. He’d learned a lot from watching Lew doing his stuff–and not just with his camera. For all his outwardly lazy charm, Lew could move with the speed of lightning when he saw a girl he wanted–so fast, in fact, that the poor thing was as dazzled by him as though she had been a rabbit blinded by the headlights of his Jaguar sports car.

The fact that Lew was a member of the upper class only made the situation even better. Working for him gave Dougie an entrée into a world in which he might otherwise never have been accepted. He could study this exclusive world at first hand, something he needed to do all right, since by all accounts, if this lawyer bloke was right, then he was a member of the aristocracy himself. A duke no less. Strewth, he still hadn’t got his head round that. After all, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a duke. He’d done pretty well for himself without being one, keeping his supposed title a secret from his new friends in London, along with his real reason for being here. He didn’t want to be tracked down and revealed to be a duke, so he had also kept quiet about his background in Australia. He didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.

He’d taken a look at the house in Eaton Square that was supposedly his, although he hadn’t been to see the other place yet, the one in the country. From what he’d heard Lew saying about Britain’s aristocrats, they were all so deep in debt that they couldn’t wait to offload their old houses onto the National Trust, and he certainly didn’t intend to part with any of his inheritance keeping an old ruin going.

Dougie reckoned he’d been lucky in meeting Lew. But then Lew wasn’t your normal upper-class snob. He was a true decent bonzer bloke, who could out-drink anyone, including Dougie himself. Not that Dougie had been doing much serious drinking recently. He was too busy working for Lew.

They’d first met in a pub in Soho and, for some reason that he couldn’t remember now, Dougie had challenged Lew to a drinking contest. Dougie had fallen in with a lively group of fellow Aussies, and egged on by them, he had been sure he would win. How could he not when he was six foot two, heavily muscled and an ex-sheep shearer, and his opposition was barely five foot ten, had manicured nails, spoke with an irritating drawl and dressed like a tailor’s dummy? No contest, mate, as Dougie had boasted to his new friends.

He had kept on being sure he would win right up until he had collapsed on the pub floor.

When Dougie had finally come round he had been in a strange bed in a strange room, which he had later discovered was the spare bedroom of his now employer.

When he had asked Lew what he was doing there, the other man had shrugged and responded, ‘Couldn’t leave you on the bar floor, old chap. It isn’t the done thing to leave one’s mess behind, don’t y’know, and since your own friends had gone, I had no choice other than to bring you back here, unappealing though that prospect was.’

Still half drunk, Dougie had promptly come over all emotional and had thanked him profusely. ‘You know what, you’re a real mate.’

Lew had responded, ‘I can assure you I am no such thing. I had to remove you from the pub because the landlord was threatening to make me pay for a room for you. The last thing I wanted in my spare room was a sweaty drunken Aussie stinking of beer and sheep.’

Dougie had soon realised that Lew was something of a ladies’ man, bedding them faster than Dougie could count and then dropping them even faster. It was nothing for him to have three or four girls on the go at the same time. Dougie had never had any trouble attracting girls himself, but he freely admitted that Lew was in another league altogether.

Lew explained to Dougie that he was the only son of a younger son, ‘which means I’m afraid that whilst my veins might be filled with blue blood, my bank account sadly is not filled with anything. D’you see, old chap, the eldest son gets the title and the estate, the second son goes into the army, and the youngest into the Church, unless they can find heiresses to marry. Such a bore having to earn one’s own crust, but I’m afraid needs must.’

From what Dougie had seen, Lew’s life was anything but boring. When Lew wasn’t photographing, he was either out partying or, like tonight, throwing parties of his own. Tonight was to be a ‘bring a bottle’ get-together, to celebrate the birthday of one of Lew’s many friends.

There’d be models, and the more daring society girls and their upper-class escorts, sneaking a look at Lew’s bohemian and louche way of life, actors coming in from the nearby Royal Court Theatre, arty types; writers and musicians.

Pretty soon now people would start arriving. A smooth Ella Fitzgerald number was playing on the gramophone. Dougie always felt nervous on these occasions. He was proud of what he was–an Aussie from the outback–but he knew that the more sophisticated young Londoners liked to make fun of colonials and laugh at their gaucherie and inadvertent mistakes. Dougie was constantly getting things wrong, putting his size elevens in it and ending up looking like a prize fool. There’d been no call where Dougie had grown up for the fancy manners and customs that Lew’s sort took for granted. His uncle had been too busy running his sheep station to have time to teach his orphaned nephew all that kind of fancy stuff, even if he had known about it himself, which Dougie doubted.

It had been Mrs Mac, his uncle’s housekeeper, who had seen to it that he knew how to use a knife and fork properly and who had taught him his manners.

As a boy, Dougie had worked alongside the station rousabouts, drovers and the skilful shearers, learning the male culture that meant that questions weren’t asked about a person’s past, and that a man earned respect for what he was and what he did in the here and now, and not because he had some fancy title. It might have been a hard life but it had been a fair one.

Now he was having to learn to live by a different set of rules and customs. He’d caught on pretty quickly to some things–he’d had to, or risk going around with his ears permanently burning from humiliation.

Dougie checked his watch. Dressed in black trousers, and a black polo-neck jumper with the sleeves pushed back to reveal the muscular arms and the remnants of his Australian tan, his thick wavy dark brown hair faintly bleached at the ends from the sun, Dougie had quickly adopted the working ‘uniform’ of his boss, and mentor.

He wondered if the pretty little actress he had his eye on for the last couple of weeks would be at the party. But even if she did bite, he could hardly invite her back to the run-down bedsit in the ‘Little Australia’ area of the city, which he shared with what felt like an entire colony of bedbugs, and two hairy, beer-swilling, foul-mouthed ex-sheep shearers, whom he suspected knew one end of a sheep from the other better than they did one end of a girl from the other. Sooner or later he was going to have to find a place of his own.

‘Quick, there’s a taxi.’

They’d had to run through the rain, Janey laughing and pulling the plastic rain hood off her new beehive hairstyle as the three of them scrambled into the taxi and squashed up together on the back seat.

‘Twenty Pimlico Road, please,’ Janey told the driver before turning to Ella.

‘You’ll have to pay out of Mama’s kitty, Ella. I haven’t got a bean.’

Like any protective mother, Amber wanted to keep her children safe, but wisely she and Jay had also agreed that they didn’t want to spoil them, so the rule was that on shared outings, when a taxi was needed, this could be paid for from a shared ‘kitty’ of which Ella was in charge.

‘We could have walked,’ Ella pointed out.

‘What, in this rain? We’d have arrived looking like drowned rats.’

Her sister was right, Ella knew. But though the Fulshawes might be rich–very rich, in fact–that did not mean they went in for vulgar ostentation or throwing their money around. Ella knew for a fact that the workers at Denby Mill, her stepmother’s silk mill, were paid in excess of the workers in any of the other Macclesfield mills. But millworkers could not afford to ride to parties in taxis and Ella’s social conscience grieved her that she was doing so.

On the other hand, without passengers how would the cabby be able to earn his living? Her conscience momentarily quietened she looked down at her ankles, hoping that her stockings would not be splashed when she got out.

They were halfway to their destination, stopped at a red traffic light, when suddenly the door was yanked open.

‘’Ere, can’t you see I’ve already got a fare?’ the cabby protested.

But the young man getting into the cab and pulling down the extra seat ignored him, shaking the rain off his black hair and grinning at the three girls as he demanded, ‘You don’t mind, do you, girls?’ in an accent that held more than a trace of cockney, before turning to the driver: ‘Trafalgar Square, mate, when you’ve dropped these three lovelies off.’

Ella had shrunk back into the corner of the cab the minute she had seen the intruder. Oliver Charters. She’d recognised him straight away. Her face burned. Of all the bad luck.

Ella had disliked Oliver Charters the minute she had set eyes on him, and she had disliked him even more when he had started to poke fun at her, mimicking her accent, and generally teasing her.

Her boss had noticed and had asked her why she didn’t like him.

‘I just don’t,’ was all she had been able to say. ‘I don’t like the way he talks, or looks, or…or the way he smells.’

To Ella’s chagrin, her boss had burst out laughing.

‘That, my dear, is the heady aphrodisiacal smell of raw male sexuality, so you had better get used to it.’

Remembering the way he had behaved towards her in the Vogue office, Ella could feel herself stiffening with resentment.

Janey, of course, had no reservations about the intruder. Eager to please as usual, she smiled warmly at him as she said, ‘You’re playing that new dare game that’s all the rage, aren’t you? The one where you have to jump into someone else’s taxi and get the driver to take you somewhere without them complaining?’

Oliver flashed her a grin that revealed the cleft in his chin, pushing back his thick floppy ink-black hair and smiling at her with the brilliant malachite-green eyes that mesmerised cute little popsies like this one at sixty paces.

‘Play games? Nah, not me. It’s you posh nobs that do that. Me, I’ve better things to do wiv me time.’

Janey looked so entranced that Ella couldn’t help but give a small snort of disgust. He was putting on that cockney accent, exaggerating the way he normally spoke, and now that he’d got Janey on the edge of her seat, all wide-eyed with excitement, he was laying it on like nobody’s business.

The snort had Ollie turning his head towards the corner of the taxi. Ella, realising her mistake, shrunk deeper into the shadows and lowered her head so that he couldn’t see her face.

Oliver gave a dismissive shrug–the girl in the corner had probably got spots and puppy fat–and turned back to Janey, who quite obviously did not have either, and neither did the little beauty with the Eurasian looks.

‘We’re going to a party–why don’t you come with us?’ Janey offered.

‘No he can’t.’

Now it wasn’t only him who was looking at her, Ella realised, it was Janey and Rose as well, and just then the taxi turned a sharp corner, throwing her forward so that she had to grab the edge of the seat to steady herself, and the light from the street revealed her face to Oliver.