by Sophia Tobin
She tried to hide the revulsion she felt. Proffered the brooch, she smiled. ‘How beautiful.’
‘I’m not here to buy, Terry,’ said Jonathan. ‘Ask Mr Hampton if he is free to speak to me. This young lady is an employee of the Mirrormakers’ Club – may she wait here for me?’
‘Of course, Mr Whitewood.’ The young man withdrew the brooch sharply, shut the case with a bang and locked it with a flourish. ‘Michael! Go and see if Mr Whitewood can go in to Mr Hampton.’ A smaller man hurried off.
And you even knew Jonathan’s name, thought Livy. Yet you thought I was a tart, so called him sir. Salacious, obsequious discretion. Her eyes met Terry’s and he sneered, openly, in front of her. It was an expression he had evidently practised many times and revelled in. When the other man returned, and ushered Jonathan to Mr Hampton’s office, she turned away to gaze in one of the cabinets. Examining a paste brooch, she found Terry behind her.
‘Eighteenth-century Portuguese, going for a song these days.’ His voice and phrasing was less polished and polite now; the effort had gone out of him. He was examining her closely and she sensed he was cataloguing faults: beneath his eyes, she sensed, a woman would always be found wanting.
‘What do the letters mean?’ She pointed at a series of letters in tiny script, four of them underlined.
He raised an eyebrow, and clearly calculated that she would never be buying anything on her own behalf. ‘The first four are the cost price in code. The underlined ones next to it are the lowest we’ll take – that’s the number that counts.’
‘Oh.’ The underlined ones, she thought. That’s what counts. And something clicked in her mind. Henry’s letters, so many words underlined.
Terry looked rather intrigued by the expression on her face. He pointed at the small gilt brooch Peggy had lent her, in the form of an ivy leaf. ‘Ivy for fidelity,’ he said, and tilted his head, his expression softening a little.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Didn’t say I liked it.’ There was that smile again.
Livy turned back to the case. ‘I don’t need any help here, thank you.’
He took a step away, and gave a half-bow. ‘Yes, madam,’ he said mockingly. ‘Of course, madam.’ And he made his way back to his place behind the counter.
Livy stood, staring at the pink Portuguese paste. She felt someone’s eyes upon her. She turned. It was not Terry. He had turned himself to torturing a fellow employee. Her eyes travelled up the panelling behind the counter. At the top, there was a ledge, where the secretaries sat. All-seeing, a security measure, perhaps.
One of the secretaries stood, the top half of her body just visible to Livy. Tight blonde curls, pale powdered skin, red lips. The perfect bow of them – painted or natural, she couldn’t tell. They stared at each other. The woman’s hair and skin seemed to have a kind of radiance to it which shone out on this room with its dense carpet and dark wood. A spotlight seemed to be permanently turned on her. She reached for a piece of paper, and the gesture was in the manner of a performance. Then her mouth twitched into a slight smile; no, it was a sneer. A sneer based on past knowledge. How many women had Jonathan brought here, in the past? Livy wondered. It was disconcerting to be one of so many.
The woman sat down, and disappeared from view. Livy was left staring, bereft, at the space where she had been. She turned back to the damned paste brooch. Stared at its every detail: at the dust which had gathered on one part of it, at a smudge on one of the stones.
It was with relief that she heard a door open and male voices in the far room. Jonathan came to her. He was flushed and she could see the relief on his face – things, perhaps for the first time in a long time, had gone well for him. He saw the opposite in her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. She shook her head. Her eyes went to the balcony, where a tube containing a rolled note had been sent on a wire.
‘It will be only a moment, Mr Whitewood,’ said the smiling man Livy took to be Mr Hampton, with a half-bow to Livy – he must have trained Terry, she thought. ‘Our girls are most efficient.’ Above, the hard mechanical tap-tap of a typewriter began, and Livy wondered whether it was the blonde woman’s fingers, her nails lacquered red, which struck the keys so hard and fast.
Jonathan cleared his throat. ‘Just a little paperwork,’ he said to Livy.
The doorbell was shaken into life. A man came in with his hat on and collar up, with a confidential air. Terry sold him a brooch and he left again, maintaining his obtrusive air of secrecy. Terry only referred to him as ‘sir’, and the recipient of the gift as ‘the lady’.
Livy turned to her wall-cabinet again. ‘Anything you like?’ said Jonathan, but his too-cheerful smile wilted under the look that Livy gave him. Then his attention was caught by movement above and he looked up. She saw what he saw – fragments of the woman in her peripheral vision – pale gold, red and white, and she saw also the instinctive flicker of desire in his own gaze, the beginning of that unconscious half-smile. She glanced, and saw that Jonathan’s eyes had met those of the woman.
‘I should awfully like to leave,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘The air feels rather thin in here.’
‘In a moment. The paperwork has to be done. Can you really not bear it? Wait outside if you wish.’
She went without another word, the door pulled open by the doorman with what seemed to be his customary violence.
*
On the street, she felt immediately better. Standing outside the door, she saw the eyes of the doorman appear over the once-white pleated curtain which covered the door glass panel almost to the top.
It took such a long time for Jonathan to come to her that she took to counting the moments. When at last he emerged from the jangling door she started off without waiting for him any longer – anything to be beyond the reach of the doorman’s steady, inquisitive gaze. It was the unashamed quality of their looking – his and Terry’s – which had made her wriggle inside her clothes. She supposed she deserved it. The closeness between her and Jonathan had felt different within the walls of the Mirrormakers’ Club. It had not felt impure, or morally wrong, to desire him, to let him put his hand on her leg. But in the real world, it did not stand up to inspection: it was just another tawdry liaison.
She heard Jonathan calling to her to stop, and in the end he reached for her arm and drew her back against a shuttered shop front.
‘What on earth is the matter?’ he said. ‘You seemed eager to come and then you darted out of there like a scalded cat. I’ve never seen you like this.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘We’d best get back. There’s something I want to check in Henry’s letters.’
‘Wait. Tell me what’s wrong.’ His concern for her filtered over his face.
‘They thought I was your mistress,’ she said.
She saw all the emotions: his realization, the shame, the desolation. Saw them pass over those usually cold green eyes like fast-moving weather. ‘Did they?’ he said. ‘I see.’
‘You must have known they would.’
‘Why? I didn’t know they would remember me.’
‘Of course they remember you. They all know your name. They’ve seen scores of women go through there on your arm. Did you not want to lose face? Did you want to show them your unlimited capacity for getting women?’
‘Stop.’
She stared at him in stubborn fury. She realized how angry she was. Anger pure and clean and bright as a flame that one waves a knife through. She felt the world shift a little, as it had when she had seen the bones in the London earth.
‘You must believe me.’ His impassive face, that slight flush building near his cheekbones, the immense beauty of the angles of his face. Such a man, she knew, would only have to look at someone to gain their interest. ‘I didn’t take you there as some kind of trophy. What kind of man would that make me?’
She shrugged. Knew Miss Hardaker would tick her off for such a thing. Words, Miss Baker, are the doorway to respect. Choose your words c
arefully, speak clearly, do not fumble with gestures and slang.
‘Livy. I took you there for moral support. I needed company and I wanted that company to be you. You have been my companion in all of this. You give me strength, you give me the interest to put one foot in front of the other. That’s why I asked you.’
She looked at him disbelievingly.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘You are not like – the other women. No, listen. Do you think I would have shown this part of me to another woman? My weakness, my hopelessness? I feel truly dreadful. To have sold my wife’s jewels. Can you imagine what that means to me, and to her? That I have not been able to provide for her. And now that they seem to mean so little to her that she throws them in a box and sends them to me?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can imagine, I think, what that must feel like.’
‘Yes, you can.’ He looked around them, at the pale, washed-out landscape littered with rubble. ‘I do love her, you know. As much as I love anyone. When I think of her now I feel sorry, and wretched. But when I think of you, I feel that I am still a person. A man. That there is still some life in me. I know it was selfish to take you. But I am a selfish creature, you see. I don’t think I’ve ever pretended otherwise.’
‘Let us just go home,’ she said. Home. The Mirrormakers’ Club. She desperately wanted to be sitting in the basement vaults, listening to the wireless with Peggy, wondering which part of the archive to look in next. Ignoring the fact that the past was vacant, and empty, in her mind; and so was the future.
They began to walk, both of them tired and slow, visualizing a broken journey of buses on diversion past bomb sites and eradicated buildings. She thought of Redlands, serene in its estate, bordered by hills and trees, and realized she had no vision of it at all: Jonathan had no talent for description. She had conjured her own house out of the landscape. It was all her imagination.
‘Will the money be enough?’ she said. ‘For Redlands? You talked of saving it.’
He glanced at her. ‘To shore up the house? Yes. We have damp – but I won’t bore you with the details.’
‘You said you didn’t have the luxury to begin again,’ she said. ‘But the diamond will give you that, won’t it? That’s what you want.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Only you will begin again with the same things – you will stay at Redlands, you will stay with your wife?’
He looked puzzled. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘It’s a wonderful thing, then, isn’t it?’ she said, stopping and turning to him. ‘Not to want life to be different. Just to want to improve it a little. It’s not as if you really want to destroy everything. Not like me.’
As he reached out to take her shoulders, the air-raid siren began to wail.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
1941
On Regent Street, Livy had been walking for ten minutes, stumbling along in the darkness, Jonathan at her heels.
‘Livy, the raid,’ Jonathan said, taking her arm and pulling her to a stop. ‘We have to take shelter.’
‘Leave me if you want,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go underground.’ She thought of Christian. I’d rather be in the open air, even with bombs falling.
In one hand he held his hat; his other hand curled and uncurled, the only sign of agitation – except that his grey winter coat was undone, where he had fled after her. The flush in his face, against his pale skin and dark hair, made him look older and a little feverish. His uncertainty woke her affection for him. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said.
‘Come with me,’ he said, and he took her hand. She was about to protest when she realized that he was leading her away from the Tube. They walked for five minutes before he led her down a side alley to a metal door. He banged on it. No one came. He swore under his breath and putting his hand into his coat pocket, fished for and pulled out a bunch of keys. He struggled to find the right one, but at length he unlocked the door, and they went in together.
There was post on a small table with a telephone, and an ancient staircase. Livy followed Jonathan up one flight, then two flights more. Another key produced entrance to an office, which was in an ornamental turret of the building.
‘We’ll go to James’s office,’ said Jonathan, as if she would know who that was. ‘It’s the most comfortable.’
James’s office had a vast desk, a small bookcase, and a leather buttoned sofa against the furthest wall from the window. There was also a drinks trolley. Jonathan poured them each a glass of whisky. ‘I’m sorry there’s no ice,’ he said. ‘It’s cold enough. Perhaps we don’t need it.’
Up here, there was no wire mesh on the windows, and the blackout paper applied to the panes had been torn. ‘We won’t turn the lights on,’ said Jonathan, as though to himself. Livy took a gulp of the whisky, and nodded. Jonathan turned from the window and came to sit by her on the sofa.
‘Why do you have the keys?’ she said, and took another mouthful, as though it were medicine.
‘Stevie’s family has a controlling interest in the business,’ he said. ‘Not that it’s worth much, these days. I used to work here one day a week. I’m a working man too, you see.’
She looked at him, and couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Hardly.’ She drained her whisky glass and put it down.
He gazed into her face in the shadows; at the uncompromising shine of her eyes. ‘You’re an innocent,’ he said. ‘You talk about your darkness, your urge to destroy. I don’t buy it, Livy. There are some types of innocence which can never be destroyed, or driven away. They are not a matter of decision; they are in the very grain of you.’
He thought of Stevie then, walking in her garden. He thought of her with a twinge of guilt, at the jewellery he had just despatched to an antique dealer. On her white shape, he could pin purity, but not innocence. No matter how hard he tried. He thought of the empty doorway at Redlands, as he trundled away to London.
He needed to forget. He put his glass down. Then he reached towards Livy, and raked his fingers through her hair; held the back of her head in his hands as one would a precious thing, then leaned forwards and pressed his face to the side of her neck.
The gesture changed everything. The pure relief of his physical touch took her breath. She drew back, and saw it in his eyes, saw the choice in that moment, although it had the quality of the inevitable about it. The danger. The edge of the roof, the light shining on bones in the earth. All these things pulled her towards them, had their own magnetism, as he did – as he had, from the first moment she had seen him. She closed her eyes, and kissed him.
When she opened her eyes she saw that in his face was that mixture of tiredness, and honesty, and perplexity, that chink of openness, which unlocked her desire for him. One kiss led to another, and another, a seamless process set in motion. They could only both yield to it, in its immensity. A silent agreement not to think about the past, or the future. Equal in desire, they lived in the moment. One touch for another, an exchange, equal and opposite. Through the moments, through the hours; through the crisis, the ragged peak of pleasure, and then another.
The night poured in through the windows. A darkness as dense as the London earth in the moat.
*
They woke at the same moment, as a bomb passed the open office door, down the stairway, rattling its way through the building like a rat in a drainpipe. Jonathan’s eyes widened in shock, and he silently folded his body around Livy’s. She pressed her face to his shoulder, pale and clammy in the moonlight.
The explosion rocked the building, but, though they waited, curled around each other, the ceiling did not fall. Broken glass glittered on the floor. They lay there for several minutes, as though hesitant about whether they still lived.
Jonathan sat up, and turned, groped for his shoes in the darkness so that he could navigate the room. He walked across the room with their glasses, rinsed them out with soda to rid them of any fragments or dust, and filled them with whisky again. As he stood doing it, Livy sat u
p too, and reached for his jacket to cover her nakedness. She looked at his pale back in the moonlight, his shoulders slightly hunched. She felt stiff, a little sore, the impression of his fingers on her back, where he had gripped her. She stared ahead of her, at the shapes in the darkness. There were so many different shades of darkness.
She took the glass from him, and drank. He looked at her, without drinking.
‘I didn’t hurt you?’
She shook her head, but didn’t meet his gaze with her own. The moment of deepest pleasure had traded one memory for another. Lit the fuse. She could not speak: she could not say what was unfurling in her mind. Memories, page after page of them, as though she flicked through a book.
One minute per page. Speed reading. As she had in the architect’s office.
He smiled like a boy. She watched him drink. She felt strangely detached from him, as though their lovemaking had delivered her from his spell. His power was gone. For a man who was meant to be important, he was strangely unobtrusive. He wished both to be benevolent and to impose his will on the world. It was impossible, she thought, to live such a contradiction with any clarity or real happiness.
‘You’re shaking,’ she said. She had noticed it before, on long evenings in the shelter, but never spoken of it.
The smile faded. ‘Yes. Can’t help it sometimes. All of this. Reminds me of the past. Not that the last war wasn’t great fun, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Why are you not afraid? Not visibly afraid, anyway.’
‘The whisky, mainly.’ She looked at him, finally took a sip, and gave a sigh of surrender. ‘I am afraid.’