Under the terms of her father’s will, the entire – quite substantial – family fortune should have become hers when she married. When the trustees in America had learned that her husband-to-be was a musician, however, they had invoked ‘the gold-digger clause’. It had been inserted by her father’s lawyers to protect her from such undesirable ne’er-do-wells and had frozen the bulk of the money until the tenth anniversary of their marriage.
Under pressure from her Aunt Adelia, they had grudgingly released enough to enable her to buy a property in London suitable for a member of the Wilson family of Annapolis. There was an annual allowance, too, sufficient to keep her comfortable. But the trustees handled the household bills and servants’ wages themselves and were unwilling to allow her control of the full amount until they knew that this Maloney fella meant business.
Skins let himself in. It was half past four in the morning so there was no one about. Even the housemaid – who, it seemed to Skins, was always working – was still fast asleep. He knew he should be, too, and that if he got his head down as quickly as possible, he’d be able to spend some time with Ellie and the children before he had to go out to work again.
Like Dunn, though, he found himself too wide awake to go straight up and instead went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of cocoa. He took it through to the drawing room, where he planned to sit in his favourite armchair and read yesterday’s paper.
When he arrived he found Ellie lightly snoring in her own favourite chair, her dark hair strewn across the winged back and the paper resting on her delicate nose. He gently touched her arm and she stirred.
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘What are you doing down here?’
She folded the paper and sat up. ‘Catherine had a nightmare so I went to try to comfort her. By the time she was settled I was so wide awake I thought I might as well come down here and wait for you.’
‘Poor kid. Is she all right?’
‘She’s fine. But how are you? You must be done in.’
‘I’m fine, too. And all the better for seeing you. I wish I’d known you were down here, though – I’d have made you some cocoa.’
She smiled. ‘I was hoping to be able to welcome you home, but I nodded off. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said as he sat down. ‘Anything good in the paper?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘There never is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why we bother with it. We hardly get time to read it, and when we do, we just complain it wasn’t worth reading.’
‘We need to keep up with current affairs,’ she said.
‘And why’s that?’
‘I come from a very political family. We like to keep our fingers on the pulse.’
‘Which is why you used to be a nurse, obviously. It all makes sense now.’
‘The metaphorical pulse, goofus.’
They had met in Weston-super-Mare in 1910 when Ellie was touring Europe with her aunt. That trip got ‘a little out of hand’ and the two women were spirited home by the American embassy after a series of unpleasant incidents at their hotel. But the encounter at the Arundel Hotel where Skins and Dunn had been playing with Robinson’s Ragtime Roisterers had changed their lives forever.
Skins had managed to hand her his calling card before she was whisked away, and the two youngsters struck up a transatlantic correspondence that carried on uninterrupted until the war. Their letters became more sporadic as the mail ships began to face attacks in 1915. The last letter Ellie received from him told her that Skins and Dunn had volunteered together for the Middlesex Regiment and were certain to be in France by the end of the year. Ellie had no intention of leaving it at that. She had a plan, and it only took three years of working her way round the local aid stations in France to get it to work perfectly.
Skins had thought himself lucky to get all the way to the summer of 1918 with only minor scratches and a bruised ankle to show for it. Then, one bright, sunny day in August 1918, a stray shell landed directly in front of his company’s trench. Skins was leaning against the wall telling a joke about a talking dog when the shell exploded. The sturdy construction of the trench had protected him and all his friends from the blast, but the signpost on the trench’s lip, pointing westwards and indicating that Tipperary was ‘a long, long way’, did not fare so well. It was knocked over by the force of the explosion and landed on Skins’s unprotected head, knocking him unconscious.
The official record showed simply that he had been wounded in combat, but the unofficial record kept by one of the junior officers said that he had been ‘rendered unconscious by a sign of dubious comic value while telling a joke of equally dubious comic value and being, in direct contravention of Standing Orders, sans tin hat’.
He regained consciousness quickly, but the sign had opened a gash in his head that required stitches. He was taken to the local aid station where he was seen by an excitingly familiar American nurse. She stitched his head wound and demanded that he spend at least two hours of his next leave taking her to dinner.
They married as soon as he was demobbed in 1919.
And now, to the intense irritation of her extended family, she was a musician’s wife and living in London. Her uncles and cousins were completely unable to understand why she didn’t want to marry a member of the Maryland senate and settle down where she belonged. Only her Aunt Adelia supported her decision to lead an independent, modern life.
‘You probably ought to get back up to bed,’ said Skins. ‘I’ll not be long.’
‘I probably should,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow.’
‘Today.’
‘Today, then, pedant. Can I have a sip of your cocoa?’
‘Always.’
Ellie stood and took the cup from him, kissing the top of his head as she did so. She took an enormous gulp of the hot chocolate and set off upstairs.
Skins looked at the tiny dribble of cocoa she’d left him and settled down to read. In spite of his fervent belief that he wasn’t anywhere near tired enough to go to bed, it wasn’t long before he found his eyes swimming out of focus. It was time for bed after all.
Chapter Two
Sunday had been a day of rest, but the band had another late night on Monday in their regular slot at the Augmented Ninth. It was a new club that advertised itself as providing ‘the hottest jazz and the coolest cocktails’, and its clientele could listen to the latest tunes while getting themselves one more than one over the eight if they so chose. Skins had tried to tell the owners that if they had to explain the club’s name it probably didn’t work, but they were adamant. And he was right. None of the club-goers got it, but they knew it had something to do with music and they didn’t care as long as the music and the booze were good.
Dunn had arrived home in the early hours of the morning and was fast asleep, dreaming about the band. Things were going well, but Skins seemed to have a broken bass drum. Every time he kicked the pedal it gave a rattling thud, not a satisfying boom. The more he kicked, the worse it got. He hit over and over again, getting faster and more urgent, while Dunn and the band marvelled at the speed and skill of their drummer’s right foot. Perhaps he should consider taking tap-dancing lessons. But the sound just wasn’t right. Maybe the skin was split.