by Kate Morton
She picked up a bottle of perfume—another of Teddy’s gifts—Chanel Number 5, brought back from Paris the year before, then changed her mind. Returned the bottle to its place and regarded herself. It was then I saw the piece of notepaper on her bureau: Robbie’s Reading, it said. The Stray Cat, Soho, Saturday, 10 pm. She grabbed the paper, stuffed it into her clutch purse and snapped it shut. Then, in the mirror, her eyes met mine. She said nothing; she didn’t have to. I wondered why I hadn’t guessed. Who else would have her this alert? This jittery? So full of expectation?
I went ahead, making sure the servants were all downstairs. And then I told Mr Boyle I’d noticed a stain on the glass pane in the entrance vestibule. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t have any of the staff hearing the front door open for no reason.
I went back upstairs and signalled to Hannah, standing at the turn of the stairs, that the way was clear. I opened the front door and through she went. On the other side we stopped. She turned to me, smiled.
‘Be careful, ma’am,’ I said, silencing my rumblings of foreboding. She nodded. ‘Thank you, Grace. For everything.’
And she disappeared into the night air, silently, shoes in her hands so as not to make a noise.
Hannah found a taxi on a street around the corner and gave the driver the address of the club in which Robbie was reading. She was so excited she could hardly breathe. She had to keep tapping her heels on the floor of the taxi to convince herself it was really happening.
The address had been easy enough to obtain. Emmeline kept a journal into which she clipped pamphlets and advertisements and invitations, and it hadn’t taken Hannah long to find it. She needn’t have bothered as it turned out. Once she’d told the taxi driver the name he needed no further instruction. The Stray Cat was one of Soho’s better known clubs, a meeting spot for artists, drug dealers, business tycoons and bright young members of the aristocracy, bored and idle, keen to shake off the shackles of their birth.
He pulled up the cab and told her to be careful, shook his head as she paid him. She turned to thank him, and watched as the club’s reflected name slid off his black cab as he disappeared into the night.
Hannah had never been to such a place before. She stood where she was, took in the plain brick exterior, the flashing sign and the crowds of laughing people spilling onto the street outside. So this was what Emmeline meant when she talked about the clubs. This was where she and her friends came to play in the evenings. Hannah shivered into her scarf, kept her head down and went inside, refusing the valet’s offer to take her wrap.
It was tiny, little more than a room, and it was warm, full of jostling bodies. The smoky air smelled sweetly of gin. She stayed near the entrance, close to a pillar, and scanned the room, looking for Robbie.
He was onstage already, if stage it could be called. A small patch of bare space between the grand piano and the bar. He was sitting on a stool, cigarette on his lips, smoking lazily. His jacket was hanging on the back of a nearby chair and he wore only his black suit pants and a white shirt. His collar was loose and so was his hair. He was flicking through a notebook. In front of him, the audience lounged around small round tables. Others had crowded onto bar stools or draped themselves against the edges of the room.
Hannah saw Emmeline then, sitting in the middle of a table of friends. Fanny was with her, the old lady of the group. (Married life had proven something of a disappointment for Fanny. With the children appropriated by a rather tedious nurse and a husband who spent his time dreaming up new ailments to suffer, there was little to keep her interest. Who could blame her for seeking adventure at the side of her young friends?) They tolerated her, Emmeline had told Hannah, because she was so genuine in her pursuit of fun, and besides, she was older and could get them out of all sorts of trouble. She was especially good at sweet-talking police when they were caught in after-hours raids. They were all drinking cocktails in martini glasses, one of them ran a line of white powder on the table. Ordinarily, Hannah would have worried for Emmeline, but tonight she was in love with the world.
Hannah inched closer to the pillar but she needn’t have bothered. They were so engrossed with one another they had little time to look beyond. The fellow with the white powder whispered something to Emmeline and she laughed wildly, freely, her pale neck exposed.
Robbie’s hands were shaking. Hannah could see the notebook quivering. He rested his cigarette across an ashtray on the bar beside and began, giving no introduction. A poem about history, and mystery, and memory: ‘The Shifting Fog’. It was one of her favourites.
Hannah watched him; it was the first opportunity she’d ever had to gaze at him, to let her eyes roam his face, his body, without him knowing. And she listened. The words had touched her when she’d read them, but to hear him speak them was to see inside his own heart.
He finished, and the audience clapped, and someone called out, and there was laughter, and he looked up. At her. His face didn’t betray him, but she knew he saw, recognised her despite her disguise.
For a moment they were alone.
He looked back at his notebook, turned a few pages, fumbled a bit, settled on the next poem.
And then he spoke to her. Poem after poem. About knowing and unknowing, truth and suffering, love and lust. She closed her eyes and with every word she felt the darkness disappearing.
Then he was finished and the audience was applauding. The bar staff swept into action, mixing American cocktails and pouring shots, and the musicians took their seats, broke into jazz. Some of the drunk, laughing people improvised a dance floor between the tables. Hannah saw Emmeline wave to Robbie, beckon him to join them. Robbie waved back and pointed to his watch. Emmeline jutted her bottom lip, an exaggerated gesture, then whooped and waved as one of her male friends dragged her up to dance.
Robbie lit another cigarette, shrugged into his jacket and tucked his notebook into the inside pocket. He said something to a man behind the bar and headed across the room toward Hannah.
In that moment, as time slowed and she watched him walking, drawing closer, she was faint. She experienced vertigo. As if she were standing on the top of an enormous cliff, in a strong wind, unable to do anything but fall.
Without a word, he took her hand and led her out the door.
It was three in the morning when Hannah crept down the servants’ stairs of number seventeen. I was waiting for her, as I’d promised, my stomach a knot of nerves. She was later than expected, and darkness and disquiet had conspired to fill my mind with awful scenes.
‘Thank goodness,’ Hannah said, slipping through the door as I opened it. ‘I was worried you’d forget.’
‘Of course not, ma’am,’ I said, offended.
Hannah floated through the servants’ hall and tiptoed into the main house, shoes in hand. She’d started up the stairs to the second floor when she realised I was still following. ‘You don’t need to see me to bed, Grace. It’s far too late. Besides, I’d like to be alone.’
I nodded, stopped where I was, stood on the bottom step in my white nightie like a forgotten child.
‘Ma’am,’ I said quickly.
Hannah turned. ‘Yes?’
‘Did you have a nice time, ma’am?’
Hannah smiled. ‘Oh, Grace,’ she said. ‘Tonight my life began.’
III
They always met at his place. She had often wondered where he lived, but her imaginings had never brought her close. He had a little barge called the Sweet Dulcie and he kept it moored at the Thames Embankment, usually near Chelsea Bridge. He had bought it from a dear friend, he told her, in France after the war, and had sailed it back to London. It was a sturdy little thing and, despite appearances, quite capable of voyage on the open sea.
The inside was surprisingly well-appointed: wood-panelled, a tiny box kitchen hung with copper pots and a sitting area with a pull-down bed beneath a bank of curtained windows. There was even a shower and water closet recess. That he lived somewhere so unusual, so different to anywhere
she’d been before, only added to the adventure. There was something delicious, she thought, about captured moments of intimacy in such a secret place.
It was easy enough to arrange. Robbie would come to collect Emmeline, and while he waited would slip Hannah a note with a time and a date and the bridge by which he’d be moored. Hannah would scan the note, nod agreement, and they would meet. Sometimes it was impossible—Teddy would require her presence at an event or Estella would volunteer her for this committee or that. On such occasions, she had no way of telling him. It pained her to imagine him waiting in vain.
But most of the time she did make it. She would tell the others she was meeting a friend for lunch, or going shopping, and she would disappear. She was never gone for long. She was careful about that. Anything beyond a morning or an afternoon was liable to raise suspicions. Illicit love makes people cunning and she soon became adept: came to think quickly on her feet if she were seen somewhere unexpected, by someone unexpected. One day she ran into Lady Clementine on Oxford Circus. Where was her driver? asked Lady Clementine. She’d come out on foot, said Hannah. It was such beautiful weather they were having and she’d felt like a walk. But Lady Clementine hadn’t come down in yesterday’s shower. She narrowed her eyes and nodded, told Hannah to be sure and be careful as she went. The street had eyes and ears.
The street, perhaps, but not the river. At least, not the sort of eyes and ears that Hannah had to fear. The Thames was different then. A working waterway, full of the bustle and traffic of commerce: coal-ferries en route to factories, barges transporting dry goods, fishing boats baring cargo to market; and along the canal towpaths, great gentle Clydesdales pulling painted longboats, trying to ignore the cheeky swooping gulls.
Hannah loved it on the river. She couldn’t believe she’d lived in London for years and never discovered the city’s heart. She had strolled across the bridges, of course, some of them at least; been chauffeur-driven to and fro on many occasions. But she had paid scant attention to the seething life below. If she’d ever given the Thames a thought, it was to cast it as an obstacle that must be crossed in order to get to the opera, the art gallery, the museum.
And so they met. She would leave number seventeen and make her way to whichever bridge his note had named. Sometimes it was an area she knew, other times it took her to a foreign part of London. She would find the bridge, descend the embankment and scan the river for his little blue boat.
He was always waiting. When she drew near, he would reach out, take her hand in his and help her aboard. They’d go down into the cabin, away from the busy, noisy world and into their own.
Sometimes they didn’t make it inside so quickly. He would hold her steady and kiss her before she could speak.
‘I’ve been waiting so long,’ he would say as they stood together forehead to forehead. ‘I thought you’d never get here.’
And then they would go inside.
Sometimes, afterwards, they would lie together, lulled by the gentle rocking of the boat. Telling each other about their lives. They spoke, as lovers do, of poetry, and music, and the places that Robbie had been and she longed to see.
One wintry afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky, they climbed the narrow stairs onto the upper deck and into the wheelhouse. A fog had come in and with it the gift of privacy. In the distance, on another reach of the river, something was burning. They could smell the smoke from where they sat and, as they watched, the flames grew higher and brighter.
‘It must be a barge,’ said Robbie. Something exploded as he spoke, and he flinched. A bright shower of sparks filled the air.
Hannah watched as a cloud of golden light consumed the fog. ‘How dreadful,’ she said. ‘But how beautiful.’ It was like one of Turner’s paintings, she thought.
Robbie seemed to read her mind. ‘Whistler used to live on the Thames,’ he said. ‘He loved to paint the shifting fog, the effects of light. Monet too, he was here for a while.’
‘You’re in good company, then,’ said Hannah, smiling.
‘My friend who used to own the Dulcie was a painter,’ said Robbie.
‘Really? What’s his name? Would I know his work?’
‘Her name is Marie Seurat.’
Hannah felt a flicker of envy then, thinking of this phantom woman who had lived on her own boat, made a life as a painter, known Robbie when she, Hannah, had not.
‘Did you love her?’ she said, preparing herself for his answer.
‘I was very fond of her,’ he said, ‘but alas, she was rather attached to her lover, Georgette.’ He laughed, watching Hannah’s face. ‘Paris is a very different place.’
‘I’d love to go there again,’ said Hannah.
‘We will,’ said Robbie, taking her hand in his. ‘One day, we will.’
As winter became spring and they continued to meet, Hannah and Robbie began to play at house. One day, she was making him a cup of tea and he was watching, amused, as she considered the tea leaves, wondered aloud whether they would still work being so dry and crispy.
‘If we lived together,’ said Hannah. ‘I suppose I’d become more domesticated. I quite like the idea of baking.’
Robbie raised his eyebrows: he’d seen what she could do with toast.
‘And you,’ said Hannah, ‘you’d write beautiful poems all day, sitting here beneath the window, and you’d read them to me. We’d eat oysters and apples and drink wine.’
‘We would sail to Spain to escape the winters,’ said Robbie.
‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘And I’d become a toreador. A masked toreador. The greatest in all of Spain.’ She placed his cup of weak tea, leaves swimming on top, on the little shelf beside the bed and sat next to him. ‘People everywhere would guess at my identity.’
‘But it would remain our secret,’ said Robbie.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It would remain our secret.’
One drizzly day in April they lay curled up together, listening to the gentle slap of the water against the boat’s hull. Hannah was watching the clock on the wall, counting off the time before she had to leave. Finally, when the unfaithful minute hand reached the hour, she sat up. Retrieved her pair of stockings from the end of the bed and began to drag the left one on. Robbie walked his fingers along the base of her spine.
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
She bunched her right stocking and slipped it over her foot.
‘Stay.’
She was standing now. Dropping her slip over her head, straightening it around her hips. ‘You know I would. I’d stay forever if I could.’
‘In our secret world.’
‘Yes,’ she smiled, knelt on the edge of the bed and reached out to stroke the side of his face. ‘I like that. Our own world. A secret world. I love secrets.’ She exhaled, she’d been thinking about this for some time. Wasn’t sure why she wanted so keenly to share it with him. ‘When we were children,’ she said, ‘we used to play a game.’
‘I know,’ said Robbie. ‘David told me about The Game.’
‘He did?’
Robbie nodded.
‘But The Game is secret,’ said Hannah automatically. ‘Why did he tell you?’
‘You were about to tell me yourself.’
‘Yes, but that’s different. You and I . . . It’s different.’
‘So tell me about The Game,’ he said. ‘Forget that I already know.’
She looked at the clock. ‘I really should be going.’
‘Just tell me quickly,’ he said.
‘All right. Just quickly.’
And she did. She told him about Nefertiti and Charles Darwin, and Emmeline’s Queen Victoria, and the adventures they went on, each more extraordinary than the one before.
‘You should have been a writer,’ he said, stroking her forearm.
‘Yes,’ she said seriously. ‘I could have made my escapes and adventures at the sweep of a pen.’
‘It’s not too late,’ he said. ‘You could start writing now.’
Sh
e smiled. ‘I don’t need to now. I have you. I escape to you.’
Sometimes he bought wine and they would drink it from old glass tumblers. They would eat cheese and bread, and listen to romantic music on the tiny gramophone that had accompanied him from France. Sometimes, when the lace curtains were drawn, they would dance. Oblivious to the boat’s confined space.
One such afternoon he fell asleep. She drank the rest of her wine, then for a time she lay next to him, tried to match her breaths to his, succeeded finally in catching his rhythm. But she couldn’t sleep, the novelty of lying next to him was too great. The novelty of him was too great. She knelt on the floor and watched his face. She’d never seen him sleeping before.
He was dreaming. She could see the muscles around his eyes tightening at whatever it was playing on his closed lids. The twitching grew fiercer as she watched. She thought she should wake him. She didn’t like to see him like this, his beautiful face contorted.
Then he started to call out and she was worried someone on the embankment might hear. Might come to their aid. Might contact someone. The police, or worse.
She laid her hand on his forearm, ran her fingers lightly over the familiar scar. He continued to sleep, continued to call out. She shook him gently, said his name. ‘Robbie? You’re dreaming, my love.’
His eyes flashed open, round and dark, and before she knew what was happening she was on the floor, he on top of her, his hands around her neck. He was choking her, she could barely breath. She tried to say his name, tell him to stop, but she couldn’t. It only lasted a moment, then something in him clicked and he realised who she was. Realised what he was doing. He recoiled. Jumped off.
She sat up then, inched quickly backwards until her back hit the wall. She was looking at him, shocked, wondering what had come over him. Who he had thought she was.
He was standing against the far wall, hands pressed against his face, shoulders curved. ‘Are you all right?’ he said, without looking at her.