Once the recipient received this letter, Moongate Manor would no longer hers.
4
Diana
1960s
The band in the garden was warming up. Diana Graybrook-Moore could hear them playing the recent hit, ‘Sailor’, by Petula Clark, as she turned slowly in her new dress, humming along to the song. The dress was perfect for her party. Pale peach georgette with an asymmetrical strap over one shoulder that tied in a lazy, elegant bow or could also be tied around her neck as a scarf. It was fully lined and the delicate silk overlay clung to her lithe figure, and with the Bardot neckline, her skin – slightly tanned from the summer – glowed.
‘You look beautiful, dear,’ said her mother, Lillian, whose own grey Hartnell dress was plain in comparison, even with its lace bodice.
‘Thank you, Mother, and thank you for taking me to London to pick the dress,’ Diana said and she kissed her mother’s cheek in a rare display of affection.
Lillian seemed to grimace at the touch of her daughter’s lips on her powdery cheek but Diana didn’t take it personally. Her mother and father didn’t understand Diana’s need to show affection. It was a given that they thought fondly of each other, her father said to her when she once tried to hug him.
Edward Graybrook-Moore was as stiff and upright as any man of his background and class should be – not an emotional man. He had only felt like weeping once, when Lillian had had Diana when she was forty-three years old and he was close to fifty. There were ten years of miscarriages before Diana and the idea that Moongate Manor would not continue in the family had pained him more than he had told his wife. When Lillian learned she was with child again, Edward had made Lillian lie in bed from the start till the end, with her legs held up in a contraption he had made himself that resembled a quarter-sized hammock. Lillian had not argued with her husband because she couldn’t bear to see the spotting again and she had so hoped it would work and keep the baby inside her.
When she had passed the date for the previous miscarriages, Edward had allowed her to have a few hours out of bed where she could sit and do gentle stretches but nothing more.
The day Diana was born was a full moon, so it was natural they would name her after the Roman goddess of the hunt, and now, they were hunting for a husband for Diana. She was eighteen, and Edward and Lillian didn’t want her to face the same challenges they did of getting married later and then facing so many troubles in having a family.
Lillian and Edward were married when she was thirty-five, and she had thought her time was up. She wasn’t a beautiful woman and she was shy, which meant she wasn’t the most popular of the debutantes and – without suitors – she was considered a spinster by the time she was twenty-five years old. Ten years on from that, she was presumed unmarriable, until Edward Graybrook-Moore, who had been living in India for some time, came back to England looking for a wife who wasn’t silly or frivolous and who was still of childbearing age. He didn’t suffer fools, and some even said his arrogance announced itself twenty paces before he came into a room. But Lillian – already living with an overbeating father and insipid mother – assumed this was the normal dynamic of a marriage.
When Lillian and Edward married, Moongate Manor was unoccupied but she took it over with the zest of a woman who could finally make her own decisions. It was a well-run home and when Diana finally came into their lives, Lillian was as content as she could be – more in fact, she often told herself. She forgave Edward all his moods and abrupt words, because she had a baby girl and a house that looked down over the sea.
Now, Diana’s eighteenth birthday party was about to start in the gardens of Moongate.
There were Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees, a dance floor and a small orchestra that had been instructed to play nothing faster than a social foxtrot for the guests and waiters with fresh oysters from Holy Island.
There was a table of cold meats and salads and a dessert table of all of Diana’s favourite pudding including raspberry jelly and ice cream, custard tarts and coconut pie.
It was going to be perfect, except for the choice of band and lack of modern dancing at the event.
Diana had tried to argue but her father said he had invited Princess Margaret and she might come with her new husband. Diana had thought that no one would have liked to have had a little swing on the dance floor more than Princess Margaret, but she knew better than to argue with her father. He always got his way.
At precisely seven, Diana went downstairs where her father presented her with the Moongate pearls. They had been in the family since the house was built, strung for Eliza, the first Lady of Moongate: 140 Tahitian pearls around a sapphire from Kashmir, embedded into a gold pendant.
It was an extraordinary necklace, probably too much to wear with a dress from Harrods, thought Diana as her father fastened it around her neck, but it was tradition and Diana had grown up with the pressure of expectation around her until she formed into her own society diamond.
The band had started and the sound of people’s voice was drifting in from the garden towards the house.
‘Happy birthday, Diana. We hope you have a lovely evening,’ said her father, formally, his hands behind his back.
Her mother nodded. ‘Hear, hear.’ And in a rare turn of events, she leaned over and kissed her husband’s cheek and then Diana’s.
‘Let’s all go and have a glass of champagne. It will be Diana’s first,’ she said as they walked through the doors from the formal living room onto the steps down to the garden.
Diana gave a smile as her eyes became used to the darkness.
How little her mother knew of her, she thought, and she stepped down into the garden, determined to get drunk and lose her virginity.
5
Amanda
‘The move is forcing me to sort all the stuff in the apartment,’ Amanda said as she tried to look at the bright side of such a dark time.
Lainie sat on the bed, drinking an energy drink and looking at the chaos surrounding them both. If Amanda’s best friend came back as an animal in another life, she would be a zebra. Besides the colours matching the scheme of her wardrobe, Lainie was courageous and untameable and she was the most black-and-white thinker Amanda had ever met. To Lainie, nuance was a foreign concept, like eating soup with chopsticks. Why would you even try?
