As she sat before her mirror, screwing little emerald studs into her ears, she thought about Milan.
He wasn’t at all happy about this.
She couldn’t blame him either. He had sound reasons for loathing Julius Hackmeyer, and even sounder reasons for not wanting her to get into a sexual situation with him.
“But I won’t let him touch me,” she’d said. “And I want to ask him about what he did to you. I want to make him see that it was wrong.”
“Don’t talk about that. Don’t talk about me. Don’t go.”
“I have to go. I’ve promised Karl-Heinz. But I’ll leave after dinner. I won’t get into the whole BDSM scene thing. How about that?”
Milan huffed and puffed, then shrugged.
“Where does he live?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should tell you.”
“I don’t want the address. Just wondering if it is near here. If so, why don’t you come and see me afterwards?”
Lydia rather thought Karl-Heinz would want her to stay with him—unless he stayed after she left, which was a possibility.
But she tutted and sighed and said, “Belgravia, I think. Bit of a trek.”
“Oh, Belgravia, of course,” sneered Milan. “Hapsburg princes could not live anywhere else.”
“I do mean to tell him what a shit he was to do that to you,” she said earnestly.
“Ach, don’t. Leave it. Ancient history, Lydia, and now I am a virtuoso, so he has failed.”
And he took up his violin and played a cadenza with demonic relish, tossing his hair like fury.
She and Karl-Heinz made their separate ways to Belgravia, since it lay east of Lydia’s apartment and west of Karl-Heinz’s. She hoped he would be there before her and texted him from Hyde Park Corner Tube station, once she’d made it to ground level, just to make sure.
But he didn’t reply.
The lights were on all over London now that the nights drew in so quickly, and the wind was brisk and cold, so she plunged her hands into her coat pockets and headed in the direction of Eaton Place. The streets were canyons with high white plaster sides, all boasting huge porches and pillars and floor-to-ceiling windows and shiny painted black railings to prevent pedestrians tumbling down the basement steps. Behind the shutters and heavy curtains, golden light spilled out and Lydia imagined what all these rich people might be doing in their castles. Having cocktails before dinner, or receiving distinguished guests from distant lands. Or perhaps they were all watching EastEnders, like everybody else.
Well, now she was rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful of the classical music elite, so she supposed she would get an insight into their lives.
Here it was. Eaton Place. Huge five-storey wedding-cake house, just like all the others she’d passed on her way.
Lights on in the ground and first-floor windows.
Please be here, Karl-Heinz.
She rang the bell.
The door was answered by a girl in a maid’s uniform. Except, when she looked a little closer, she saw that it wasn’t really an ordinary maid’s uniform. Its brief skirt was puffed out by layer upon layer of stiff lacy petticoats and the top was cut very, very low, exposing almost all of the girl’s cleavage. She was pretty and cheeky-looking with olive skin and overly-glossed lips.
“Good evening, Ma’am,” she said, a Cockney twang evident in her tone. “You must be Miss Foster.”
“That’s right.”
The maid shut the door behind her.
“Let me take your coat, Ma’am, and I’ll take you through to the drawing room for champagne cocktails.”
Lydia handed her coat to the girl, who put it on a stand in the huge black-and-white tiled hallway. A massive chandelier hung unlit in the darkness. A shaft of light from a room beyond some double doors illuminated a chunk of the lobby, so that Lydia could make out the shapes of statues and huge vases and a giant staircase heading upwards. Hackmeyer’s London pad certainly wasn’t your average pied-à-terre.