The Very White of Love: the heartbreaking love story that everyone is talking about!

12 NOVEMBER 1938

London

Familiar stations flash by in a blur of rain. Seer Green and Jordans. Gerrards Cross. West Ruislip. Martin has managed to get back to Whichert House for another weekend before term ends in December. They sit side by side, legs touching, hands clasped. It’s Nancy’s daily commute to her job as a secretary at an insurance firm in Holborn. Now he is sharing it with her. At Marylebone, they get on the bus to Oxford Circus, sit up top in the front seat, like excited children, watching London scroll across the glass screen of the double-decker’s window. She has a new outfit: a little black dress, with a grey velvet jacket, which makes her look like a film star. She points out her favourite landmarks. This is her city, Oxford his. Each stone, each street has a story, a story they are becoming part of together.

‘Us on a bus . . . ’ Martin starts to hum a tune by his favourite jazz artist, Fats Waller. Nancy joins in.

Riding on for hours

Through the flowers

When the passengers make love

Whisper bride and groom

That’s us on a bus

They run down the stairs, laughing, and jump off the bus. But they are soon wrenched back to the dark clouds of the present. As they walk through Soho, a man in a threadbare overcoat bellows the Evening Standard headline: ‘Night of the Broken Glass. Read all about it!’

Martin counts out a handful of coppers, points to the headline. ‘At dinner the other evening, one of the college tutors was saying that all this about the Jews is propaganda by the Rothschilds and the rest of the bankers.’ Martin frowns. ‘To drag us into a war with Hitler.’ Martin shakes his head. ‘There are loads of students, too, who think Hitler is the best thing since tinned ham.’ Martin indicates the newspaper headline. ‘Tell that to my uncle, Philip Graves.’

‘The foreign correspondent?’ Nancy sounds impressed.

‘Yes. He was one of the people who helped expose that hateful book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as a forgery!’

Nancy nuzzles against him. ‘You come from such a talented family.’

‘Somehow it seems to have bypassed me.’

‘You got the looks.’ She kisses him on the nose.

They have an hour until the performance begins. Nancy is taking him to a musical revue at the Players’ Theatre Club, in King Street, the company where she has got a small part in a production next season. They are making waves on the London theatre scene. Churchill is a fan and, through rehearsals, Nancy is meeting the actors, including the famous comedienne, Hermione Gingold.

She leads Martin through a warren of streets, their shoes keeping time together, his chunky Church’s brogues next to her tiny, brown boots, their soles touching the same pavement. Love is opening new paths, streets he would never have known if it were not for her, fields where they have walked hand in hand, cafés and bookshops he would never have entered without her, places that are now special to him because of her. And as they walk side by side, he thinks about the thousands of other places that they will visit, the lakes they will see, footpaths they will tramp. England. France. Perhaps Italy. Shared journeys stretching into the future.

‘How about this?’ She has stopped in front of a little Italian bistro on Greek Street: a bog-standard Italian with red and white check tablecloths; cheap Chianti in straw-covered bottles; framed photos of Italian tourist spots; wicker baskets of day-old bread. Martin stares at her reflection in the window. Another place, transformed by love.

‘Perfect.’ He puts his arms around her and turns her face towards his, bends and kisses her: a kiss that seems to go on and on.

They take a table by the window, it’s so cramped Martin hardly fits on his chair, but they have their backs to the other diners and can look out onto the street, watching their own private Movietone of London in 1938.

Nancy orders linguine with clams in a red sauce. Martin chooses lasagne. They share a salad – chunks of spongy tomato, wilted lettuce, some slivers of red onion, brown at the tips. As the tines of their forks touch, they burst out laughing, reach across the table, kiss. Then Nancy pulls away, her face suddenly anxious.

‘Do you think there’ll be another war, Tino?’

It’s a question that has been secretly nagging at Martin ever since Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, like toothache. But, until now, he has not shared his fears with Nancy. ‘I hope not.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘We have so much ahead of us.’

‘But I am not sure appeasement will work.’ Nancy frowns. ‘Not with Herr Hitler. He’ll just take it as a sign of weakness.’

‘I agree.’ Martin leans forward, intently. ‘What we need is tough, military sanctions. But through the League of Nations.’

‘Has the League of Nations actually achieved anything?’ Nancy regrets saying it as soon as the words leave her mouth.

‘I know that’s what people say.’ Martin’s eyes blaze. ‘But if you look at their track record, they’ve actually done a lot for peace. And, I mean, what else is going to stop barbarism from occurring?’

Nancy twizzles some pasta onto her spoon. ‘You know, when I was studying in Munich in 1935, we saw Hitler at the opera.’

‘Really?’ Martin is bug-eyed.

‘Mummy watched him through her opera glasses.’ Nancy grimaces. ‘Said he had beautiful hands. Pianist’s hands.’

The idea that Hitler has beautiful hands seems incongruous and repellent for a man who was currently tearing up the peace in Europe. But Martin says nothing.

‘You remember that little painting that hangs over the fireplace at Blythe Cottage?’ Nancy lays down her fork and spoon.

‘The seascape?’ Martin pours them both a glass of wine.

‘It’s by an Italian painter I got to know when I was living in Munich.’ She takes a sip of wine. ‘Jewish Italian. Paul Brachetti.’

‘Rhymes with spaghetti.’ Martin reddens with embarrassment at his lame joke.

‘He was almost twenty years older than me.’ She takes up her spoon and fork and digs at her pasta.

‘In love with you, no doubt.’ Martin squeezes her knee.

Nancy ignores him by twizzling her fork and spoon. ‘He used to call me his little English rose,’ she says. ‘We would meet for coffee in the English Gardens. Talk about El Greco, his hero. God’s light, he called it.’ She smiles at the memory, then her face darkens, as though a shadow has passed across it. ‘One day, he arrived in a terrible state. They’d broken into his studio, smashed his paintings, daubed swastikas on the walls.’ She reloads her fork with spaghetti. ‘His paintings were what they called entartet. Decadent.’ Her laugh is a staccato howl. ‘Seascapes!’ She takes another sip of wine. ‘Three days later, we met again. A café near the station.’ Nancy lays her napkin on the table, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘He was carrying a battered suitcase and some parcels, wrapped in newspaper. His hair was a mess, his eyes were bloodshot.’ Her pupils darken. ‘He’d come to say goodbye.’ Nancy’s voice quivers.

‘Where did he go?’

‘He said he would try and get to Spain, first.’ She smiles. ‘He wanted to seeToledo, where El Greco learned about light. Then Lisbon. Maybe a ship to America.’ She looks across at Martin, tears in her eyes. ‘I tried to give him some money. But he wouldn’t hear of it.’

Martin reaches across the table and takes her hand. Suddenly, he feels much younger than the two-year age gap between them, less experienced. The only time he has been to Europe was when he was a schoolboy and he stayed in Zermatt at a posh hotel with his parents. She has seen swastikas daubed on the walls and helped rescue a Jewish painter.

‘I wish I could have met him,’ he says.

She opens her bag and takes out a handkerchief, blows her nose, then brightens.

‘We’re going to miss the curtain if I carry on like this any longer.’

‘Come then, my love.’ Martin kisses her hand and waves for the bill.

There is a play to be seen, friends to meet, songs to be sung. The crisis in Europe can wait.

‘Nancy, darling!’ a voice calls out across the packed room.

Martin watches as a tall, dashingly handsome man advances towards them. Something about his face seems familiar but Martin can’t place him. The only thing that is clear is that he is no stranger to Nancy.

‘Michael!’ Nancy holds her cheek out to be kissed.

Instead, he gives her a boozy kiss on the lips. ‘You look gorgeous as ever.’

Martin scowls. Nancy blushes. ‘Michael, this is Martin Preston. Martin, meet the incorrigible Michael Redgrave.’

Martin’s eyes widen. The famous actor! He stares at Nancy, impressed by this new side of her he has not seen before.

‘So, you’re taken already?’ Redgrave gives a crestfallen look. ‘Then I suppose I’ll have to find myself another redhead.’

He is about to turn away, when a bosomy woman swathed in what looks like a Turkish robe sashays across the floor towards Redgrave, like a Spanish galleon.

‘Dorothy!’ Redgrave hugs her. ‘Murdered anyone recently?’

‘Scores, darling.’ The woman pulls a wry grin, tips back a G and T.

‘Nancy, allow me to introduce you to the doyenne of crime fiction.’ Redgrave’s baritone booms across the room. ‘Dorothy Sayers. Nancy Whelan. Martin Preston.’

Martin bows slightly and holds out his hand. His uncle, Robert, has spoken warmly of the great detective writer and Martin has read all the Lord Peter Wimsey books. ‘I’m a huge fan!’

Sayers sizes him up. ‘Steady on, you’re sounding like an American.’

Martin feels embarrassed for a moment. Then laughs. Nancy joins in as Miss Sayers tips back the rest of her G and T, kisses Redgrave on the cheek, then heads for her seat.

It’s a tiny space for a theatre: just one half of a pub. The audience sit at tables, so close they almost touch the stage. Others stand at the back. Blue smoke hangs in the air. Waitresses weave in and out of the chairs. There is laughter; conversation; the camaraderie of the boards.

The programme is titled Ridegway’s Late Joys, after the theatre’s founder, Peter Ridgeway, and consists of various song and dance acts introduced by the ‘Chairman’, a plump, rosy-cheeked man with a huge handlebar moustache. An all-male chorus in black tie and tails sing a song called ‘Strawberry’. It’s all very camp, and British. Next, a curvaceous blonde in a sparkly leotard, boots and feathers on her head, croons a song called ‘La Di Da’.

‘Isn’t that Peggy Rutherford?’ Martin whispers to Nancy, pointing at a woman two tables along.

Nancy raises a finger to her lips, as the highlight of the show begins: ‘Tell Your Father’, a Cockney ballad about the perils of alcohol, performed by the well-known singer, Meg Jenkins, who appears on stage wrapped in a black shawl, looking lugubrious.

By the end, the whole audience is singing along with the chorus. Clouds are gathering over Europe, but London is determined to enjoy herself.

They only just make the last train home. Martin pays for seats in first class and, as it’s so late, they are the only passengers. They are both a bit the worse for wear and almost immediately fall into each other’s arms, kissing until their lips are red and swollen, as empty stations slip by under a gibbous moon. By the time they reach Beaconsfield it’s past midnight. Luckily, Martin has left the Bomb there and in a few moments they are racing through the moonlit lanes.

‘Fancy a nightcap?’ Martin suggests. ‘I don’t want this night to end.’

‘Perhaps a quick one.’ Nancy smiles. ‘My mother will be waiting up for me, I’m sure.’

There are no lights on as the Bomb crunches to a halt on the gravel outside Whichert House. Martin gingerly lets them in by the back door then puts his fingers to his lips and takes Nancy’s hand and tiptoes towards the living room, feeling like a conspiratorial child about to steal some chocolate.

The living-room fire is still glowing in the grate. Martin puts on another log, takes Nancy’s coat and switches on the lamp by the fireplace, then searches for something to cover the lampshade. He picks up a shawl, drapes it over the lamp, plunging the room into shadow.

‘Better not set Aunt D.’s shawl on fire,’ Nancy jokes.

Martin pours two nightcaps, then goes over to the gramophone, takes a record from its sleeve, lays it on the turntable and drops the needle. There’s a brief hissing, then a piano refrain, light and delicious, like champagne. Little trills on the high keys; the plunk of a double bass; a strumming guitar; warbling trumpet. Fats Waller. Today’s musical theme.

Her waist is smaller than his encircling hands, and he feels for a moment she’s so delicate she might break in his arms. But she presses into him, emboldened by the promise of a shared future, not fragile or porcelain, but a flesh and blood woman dancing in his arms, laughing uproariously as he mimics Fats Waller’s throaty growl.

Everybody calls me good for nothing

Because I cannot tell the distance to a star

But I can tell the world how wonderful you are

I’m good for nothing but love

Night and day they call me…

Nancy holds her finger to her lips, worried they might wake Aunt D.

‘…good for nothing,’ Martin croons.

‘Yes, yes!’ she repeats with him, hamming it up with Fats, laughing.

Then she pulls his face towards hers and kisses him hard on the mouth.

CHRISTMAS EVE 1938

Whichert House

The weeks have raced by with a scramble to finish end of term essays, a round of boozy Christmas parties and the final hockey matches. But, finally, it’s the vacation again, he’s back in the bosom of his surrogate family at Whichert House and, most importantly, he can see Nancy almost every day.

But, as a cloud of snow sprays from the tyres as the Bomb screeches to a halt outside Blythe Cottage, he doesn’t feel his usual heady sense of anticipation. Instead, his nerves are as taut as piano wire. The time has come to introduce Nancy to his famously unpredictable mother.

All the way from Wiltshire, after picking her up from her nursing home, Molly had been nothing but negative about the person Martin now cares about more than anything in the world; the person who, as he walks towards Blythe Cottage, its windows and gables picked out with fresh snow, appears at the door ensconced in a fur muff, with fur glove warmers and a fur-trimmed coat, like a character in a novel by Turgenev, then races down the path and into his arms.

‘What do you think?’ she says, doing a little pirouette in the snow.

‘You look enchanting.’ He kisses her. ‘Ravishing.’ Kisses her again. ‘Bewitching.’

Laughing, they clamber into the Bomb. Even though it’s cold, he’s got the top down. It’s only two miles. ‘Don’t expect too much, carissima,’ he says, honking at a lorry. ‘She’s a terrible snob and likely to go on the pot about the von Rankes, Uncle Robert . . . ’ He rolls his eyes and laughs.

He has explained the convoluted genealogy typical of an upper-class British family and even drawn a family tree: how his mother is Robert Graves’ half-sister, from their father’s – Alfred Percival Graves, also a poet! – first marriage; how Robert is from the second marriage, to Amelie von Ranke. ‘She loves that von!’ he says, shifting gear. ‘Even though, as someone recently reminded me at a family funeral, we’re really only . . . half-Graves.’

He glances over at Nancy. How will his fiery redhead handle his mother? Will Molly be rude and condescending? It’s enough to make him turn the Bomb around and escape back to the middle-class comforts of Blythe Cottage and Peg’s knitting needles.

‘I brought her a gift.’ Nancy pulls a small parcel out of her bag, beautifully wrapped in pink tissue paper.

‘A book?’ Martin reaches down and touches her leg tenderly. ‘You really are determined to educate us, darling.’

‘Well, you are only a half-Graves.’ She reaches over and kisses him on the cheek. He revs the Bomb, so the Riley’s eight-cylinder engine throbs beneath them.

The driveway at Whichert House is lined with Chinese lanterns that glow in the murky half-light of an English winter day. As they walk inside, he sneaks a kiss, then straightens up, shoulders back, like a soldier about to go on parade. ‘Ready?’

The family is gathered in the living room. A Norway spruce stands in the corner of the room. A log fire roars, casting a reddish light on the wood-panelled walls and ceiling.

‘Mother, I’d like you to meet Nancy Claire Whelan.’ He touches Nancy’s waist as reassurance.

Molly reaches out a black-gloved hand. She’s swathed in a heavy, dark velvet dress, the sort of thing Martin associates with séances or midnight mass. A rope of enormous pearls hangs between her equally impressive breasts. She raises an ivory-handled lorgnette to her eyes, and peers at Nancy as though she is some exotic, and rather dangerous, animal. ‘So this is the girl who has you all topsy-turvy?’

‘It is, indeed!’ Martin’s arm is secure around her now, where it belongs.

‘Martin has told me so much about you . . . ’ Nancy enthuses.

Molly doesn’t reply but looks Nancy up and down again, like a trainer appraising a racehorse. Martin has the queasy feeling that, any moment, she will ask to see Nancy’s teeth.

‘Darling!’ Roseen rushes forward to rescue them, kisses Nancy on the cheek. Since their brief encounter in the pub in Knotty Green in October, they have become fast friends, meeting up in London for drinks, going to the theatre, or taking long walks through Kensington Gardens. ‘You look chic as ever.’

‘I love those colours on you.’ Nancy admires Roseen’s black and grey outfit. ‘You look like a Cubist painting!’ She hugs Roseen then moves along to Aunt D.’s two unmarried sons, Tom and Michael.

Nancy has caught glimpses of the two brothers in her visits to the house. But this is her first, formal introduction. Martin has prepped her, explained how, though they are in their thirties, they both still live at home. How Michael has Down’s syndrome and can’t work, except to help in the garden or fix machines; how Tom, the elder brother, commutes to London to the family law office with Uncle Charles. And how adored they both are by Aunt D. and the rest of the family.

Tom tilts his head, like a heron, then shakes her hand, formally. ‘Happy Christmas.’

Michael steps forward. His face beams, innocent and eager to please; his glasses are as thick as the bottom of a whisky bottle. He pumps her hand. ‘You smell . . . like roses!’

There’s an awkward silence. Tom glowers at his brother. Then everyone bursts out laughing. Everyone except Molly, that is.

‘Michael, that’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week.’ Nancy kisses him on the cheek.

Martin watches her move among his family, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. The people he loves most in the world all together in the same room.

‘Nancy, dear, come and warm yourself by the fire.’ Aunt D. pats the Chesterfield next to her.

‘Bubbly?’ Uncle Charles, her husband, holds out his hands, palm up, like an Italian priest offering communion wine.

‘Bloody Mary for me, Charles.’ Molly’s voice is loud, stentorian.

Martin frowns at his mother.

‘What will you have, darling?’ Martin whispers in Nancy’s ear.