Spare Brides Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Adele Parks

  The right of Adele Parks to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in this ebook edition in 2014 by Headline Review

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 4722 0540 7

  Cover art © Ilina Simeonova/Trevillion Images

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Adele Parks

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Winter

  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

  Chapter 25

  Spring

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Summer

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  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

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Autumn

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Bibliography

  © Jim Parks.

  Adele Parks worked in advertising until she published her first novel in 2000; she has since published thirteen novels, all of which have been top ten bestsellers, and her work has been translated into twenty-six different languages.

  Adele spent her adult life in Italy, Botswana and London until 2005 when she moved to Guildford, where she now lives with her husband and son. Adele believes reading is a basic human right, so she works closely with The Reading Agency as an Ambassador of the Six Book Challenge, a programme designed to encourage adult literacy.

  Praise for Adele Parks:

  ‘A wonderful book about a group of women struggling to deal with life after World War One. Bright young things and disappointed hopes, it is a heady cocktail of love, class and beaded frocks. Her most accomplished novel yet’ Daisy Goodwin

  ‘A beautifully written, thoughtful exploration of love and loss … This is Parks at the top of her consistently excellent game and is one of those rare books you won’t stop thinking about until long after you turn the final page’ Daily Mail

  ‘Simply unforgettable’ Lisa Jewell

  ‘Will captivate you from the first page’ Closer

  ‘A wonderful exploration of love’ Katie Fforde

  ‘She is a particularly acute observer of relationship ups and downs, and her stories are always as insightful as they are entertaining’ Daily Mirror

  ‘We can’t think of many authors who create more flawed and lovable characters’ Glamour

  ‘Parks writes with wit and a keen eye for detail’ Guardian

  Also by Adele Parks

  Playing Away

  Game Over

  Larger Than Life

  The Other Woman’s Shoes

  Still Thinking Of You

  Husbands

  Young Wives’ Tales

  Happy Families (Quick Read)

  Tell Me Something

  Love Lies

  Men I’ve Loved Before

  About Last Night

  Whatever It Takes

  The State We’re In

  Spare Brides

  About the Book

  New Year’s Eve, 1920. The Great War is over and it’s a new decade of glamorous promise. But a generation of men and women who survived the extreme trauma and tragedy will never be the same.

  With countless men lost, it seems that only wealth and beauty will secure a husband from the few who returned, but lonely Beatrice has neither attribute. Ava has both, although she sees marriage as a restrictive cage after the freedom war allowed. Sarah paid the war’s ultimate price: her husband’s life. Lydia should be grateful that her own husband’s desk job kept him safe, but she sees only his cowardice.

  A chance encounter for one of these women with a striking yet haunted officer changes everything. In a world altered beyond recognition, where not all scars are visible, this damaged and beautiful group must grasp any happiness they can find – whatever the cost.

  To Alex Mahon

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to my wonderful, supportive and brilliant editor, Jane Morpeth, and to the entire team at Headline. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, they are a lovely lot. Georgina Moore, Vicky Palmer, Barbara Ronan and Kate Byrne deserve particular acknowledgements; they work ferociously on my behalf and are a formidable, incredible team. I also owe a huge thank you to the marvellous Jamie Hodder-Williams.

  Thank you, Jonny Geller. I will never forget your reaction on first reading Spare Brides; the memory is one of the highlights of my career. I possibly shouldn’t care quite so much about impressing you – but I do. Thanks to all at Curtis Brown for your continued support of my work, home and abroad.

  Thank you to my family and friends, my fellow authors, book sellers, book festival organisers, reviewers, magazine editors, TV producers and presenters, The Reading Agency and librarians who continue to generously champion my work. Once again I’d like to thank my readers; I hope you love reading this one as much as I loved writing it.

  As ever, thank you, Jimmy and Conrad, for providing inspiration, meaning, encouragement and love. It’s all about the two of you. Always.

  WINTER

  1

  LADY CHATFIELD – WIFE of Lord Chatfield, daughter-in-law to the Earl of Clarendale, daughter of Sir Harold Hemingford, Lydia to her friends – allowed her silk robe to drop to her feet. She enjoyed the feel of the fabric shimmying down her body, like breath. Now naked, she stood in her dressing room and wondered, as she often did at six thirty in the evening, what her maid, Dickenson, had picked out for her to wear this evening. She tried to guess, through a process of elimination, as her dress was probably in the maid’s care now. A stain might be being dabb
ed into oblivion, lace might be being steamed so it would stand proud like a fence, or a hem might be being subjected to a last-minute stitch or two so that the correct amount of calf was on show. Dickenson was thorough; her most-often-used phrase was ‘just to be sure’. She treated Lydia’s garments like newborns: pampered, worshipped.

  Lydia inhaled the dust and silence of the old house – resting after the bustle of tea, reprieved as there was to be no formal dinner here this evening – and scanned the padded silk hangers. She spotted her tangerine organdie and silk frock, the one with crystal beading shaped like teardrops, plus the teal moire taffeta silk that she liked to wear with a jaunty sash belt; in addition, she carefully counted numerous gowns in chiffon: saffron, scarlet, cobalt and emerald, all decorated with tulle or organza and delicate pearl beading. None of these colourful dresses would do. She examined the white and cream gowns. What was missing?

  It was all a little frustrating really. If she’d had the energy, she might have been quite cross about the entire debacle, but she rarely allowed herself to become properly vexed nowadays; she considered doing so such poor taste. Taking everything into account, she had little to moan about. Yet she had expected a new gown from Callot Soeurs fashion house. She’d ordered an oyster silk treasure with lashings of diamanté beads spilling from the neckline down her breasts and shoulder blades. With painful clarity she’d been able to visualise the effect she would have made on entrance to the Duchess of Pembrokeshire’s New Year’s Eve ball. The dress had a darling plush fox-fur trim around the hem and cuffs and she’d planned to wear it with her purple velvet shoes, the ones with the elegant heel and glass beading. Purple with oyster and fur was the sort of combination that was bound to make the papers. The dress ought to have arrived before Christmas. It hadn’t. It was difficult to complain; no one actually expected really decent service any more, not since the war. And the French – well, the French especially were horribly unreliable, a law unto themselves. That was why the English – beaten down by rules and queues – found them so fascinating and irresistible.

  Lydia sighed. Her breath and mood clouded the cold air. Where was the housemaid? She ought to have poked the fire in the bedroom; a girl could freeze to death in her dressing room if the servants were slow. Lydia bit down on her irritation. It was misdirected and unfair. Still, it was hard that she didn’t have anything new for tonight; she was sure that every other woman in the British Empire would have a clear idea what to wear as she watched 1920 melt away, as she sighed a relieved welcome at 1921. One year further on. One step further away. Making the whole ghastly business more past, less present.

  She wished Dickenson would get a move on too. The goose bumps that were erupting all over her body looked ugly. She robustly rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Ought she to pop on her own drawers and brassiere? She didn’t mind doing so; dressing herself was actually what she preferred, but Dickenson invariably made such a fuss if Lydia did take the initiative, grumbling, ‘Is Lady Chatfield trying to do me out of a job?’ Silly really, since they both knew that Dickenson’s duties extended far beyond those traditionally associated with a lady’s maid, and that, in truth, she was stretched, often frazzled. As Lydia wondered whether she ought to reach for her silk dressing robe again, Dickenson burst into the room.

  ‘You’ll catch your death, standing around that way,’ she cried. Then, almost as an afterthought, ‘Sorry I’m late, my lady.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Lydia’s eyes did not rest on Dickenson even for an instant. She didn’t need them to. She knew what her maid looked like. She was petite, meticulous and she put Lydia in mind of a bird, because when she moved, she darted. She was always dressed in a black frock with a plain white collar, as was proper and required. From October to March she wore a dreary knitted black shawl that would have been better suited to a woman thirty years older. She pulled it close around her shoulders and held it there with an amber brooch that, if Lydia recalled correctly, had been willed to her by her aunt. Her eyes were so dark it was impossible to see her pupils; there was rumour of her having Continental blood, but no one ever probed. Her nose was long and narrow and her mouth was slightly sombre, even woeful. She didn’t often laugh. She appeared old. She was not.

  Lydia’s gaze stayed trained on her own reflection, which anyone would have to admit was altogether more pleasing, more modern. It took a moment to adjust to; she was still getting used to her short bobbed hair. Like every fashionable woman she wanted to wear her hair cropped at the ear, as she favoured close-fitting cloche hats. Over fifteen inches had been lopped just before Christmas. She felt light and exhilarated, although Lawrence hadn’t been overjoyed; on more than one occasion he’d wrapped a scarf around her neck whilst they sat by the fire or at the dinner table, making jokes about her feeling a draught. She smiled, indulging him, although she didn’t find the joke especially funny; hadn’t done so even the first time he made it. She suited the modern style. Her glossy black blunt-cut fringe framed her startling blue eyes and added a hint of danger and drama to her pale skin. When she’d worn her hair long she’d looked like a medieval queen – passive, protected; now, there was an edge to her, something thoroughly modern, and equally mesmerising. Her high cheekbones, creamy, pearlesque skin and full, almost fat lips were all the more notable now her hair was chopped. If only her nose was a little thinner. Sleeping for four years with a peg nipping the end had failed to do the job her governess had promised it would.

  ‘I got held up, my lady. I was with the new cook.’

  ‘How is she settling?’

  ‘She’s competent.’ Dickenson drew her lips a fraction closer together. Lydia understood at once, but chose not to comment. She found running a house wearisome and would always prefer not to waste her time and breath on the domestic matters that she knew were ultimately her domain. Her maid, however, could not imagine a subject more fascinating or worthy and, unaware of her mistress’s deep-seated indifference, pursued the subject with fervour. ‘She’s not at all happy with—’

  ‘The workload,’ Lydia guessed. ‘No one is.’

  ‘I chipped in. Helped with the …’ Dickenson broke off and glanced at her red fingers, swollen so that they looked like raw sausages. Lydia followed her gaze, but had no idea that the experienced hands that would soon be running through her glossy locks, fixing a diamanté comb above her left ear, had just moments ago been scrubbing garden vegetables. She couldn’t imagine such a thing because she’d never consciously given any thought as to how vegetables – or meat or bread for that matter – were prepared to grace her table. Lydia was aware that the house was functioning on a skeleton staff. She knew the problems, and the solution too, but patience was required. No one could ever say so – it was practically criminal, certainly disrespectful, to even think it – but the fact was they were all waiting for her father-in-law, the old earl, to die.

  ‘We all have to do our bit. Things aren’t what they were. They can’t be,’ she commented as she put her arms through the straps of a brassiere that Dickenson was holding for her. Dickenson ran around her mistress then touched the smooth, pale skin in between her shoulder blades, silently indicating that she needed to bend forward to lower her breasts into the supporting cups. Lydia obliged, then straightened and stood still as Dickenson continued to dance around her, hastening to fasten the small hooks and eyes and adjust the lace shoulder straps so they sat flat and comfortable. Lydia allowed the maid to drop a silk chemise over her head, the material fluttering around her like insect wings, then waited as Dickenson laid a napkin on the plum velvet stool in front of the dressing table. Lydia sat down carefully. She wished she was allowed to sit on the soft velvet – she liked the malleable, slightly crunchy feel of it beneath her – but Dickenson said it was unhygienic and caused unnecessary cleaning work, and insisted on the starchy napkin. ‘Yes, we must all do our bit,’ Lydia repeated.

  If the maid was tempted to comment that Lydia did not seem to be doing anything at all, let alone her bit, she was
wise and disciplined enough not to do so. Janice Dickenson had started her career as a kitchen maid in Lady Chatfield’s family home. In those days Lydia called Janice Janice and Janice called Lydia Miss Lydia. It would surprise Lydia to realise that Janice was only thirty-one, just three years older than Lydia herself. The maid had joined the household at the age of twelve, when Lydia still inhabited the narrow corridors that led to a stuffy schoolroom but no other world at all; she had assumed that a girl with a job and an income, no matter how modest, must be properly grown up, maybe even ancient, an assumption Janice’s mother as well as the staff and the entire family at Hemingford Manor also made.

  The two girls had been friends, or at least friendly, then. On more than one occasion Lydia’s governess had caught Lydia running in the street or spied her in the village without a bonnet, misdemeanours that resulted in Lydia being lectured on decorum and sent to bed without supper. On these unfortunate evenings Janice would sneak up to the nursery room with fruit, bread and cheese. This was at the housekeeper’s instruction – Janice would never have risked taking food from the pantry of her own volition – although Lydia never knew as much and considered Janice an ally in her austere, unrepentantly strict home. Someone who could be relied upon if need be. Someone who might cover and console.

  Lydia had married the Honourable Lawrence Chatfield eight years ago. She was a young, pre-war bride, awash with optimism and first love, a recognised society beauty. They were all so proud of her, so pleased for her, scoldings about undemure, hatless behaviour long forgotten. Marrying the third son of an earl was fitting, appropriate to her own rank and beauty. Lydia, naturally nervous at the thought of moving so far away from her family home, remembered Janice, who she had imbued with feelings of sympathy and sentimentality. She had plucked the girl, who was by then an under house parlour maid, from oblivion and asked whether she might like to be a lady’s maid. Janice was not fuelled with unreasonable ambition, but she was fed up of plunging her hands into icy water every morning, cleaning fireplaces and front steps, polishing the shoes and boots of everyone in the household and washing endless pots smeared with goose fat and gravy (that particular task grated the most because, by rights, it should no longer have been her responsibility; there was a new kitchen maid employed for such menial work). She’d accepted Lydia’s offer of advancement immediately.