‘What did you say, Mummy?’ Daphne said brightly and Maddie turned away from the window and tried somehow to get herself together again. There must be no hint to those watchful lascivious little raisin eyes staring at her from that roly-poly face that she was anything but her usual self, the secure, the settled, the beloved wife of Jay Kincaid –
‘Nothing – just thinking of all the work I have to do. I must, I’m afraid. There are deals to be fixed up between our company here and the London end –’ and she waved her hand, trying to be airy, apeing the busy woman dismissing the labour ahead as something she could easily deal with once she got going. ‘So you’ll have to be patient – now I’m going out.’
Suddenly she had to. She had no idea where she would go or what she would do when she got there, but she could not stay here another moment, of that she was certain. It was too stifling and too much effort to be with Daphne.
‘Take the boys out, do. There’s a nice place you can go to – the Public Gardens. There’s a lake and there are the Swan boats – you can take them there and they can sail on the lake. Get a cab downstairs and ask him to take you to the best entrance, I can’t remember if it’s on Arlington or Charles, but the cab driver will know –’
She was gabbling over her shoulder as she went back to the bedroom to collect her bag and a thin coat, and was halfway to the door as she pulled it on. ‘Whatever it costs, let me know, and I’ll settle up with you. I’ve left fifteen dollars on the dresser in my room – use that to start off with but don’t stint yourselves. There are ice-cream sellers and the rest of ‘em there at the Gardens and the boys’ll enjoy that.’
‘But Mummy, won’t they be going to see their grandma and grandpa after their walk?’ Daphne called and she stopped, the doorknob in her hand. She had almost escaped, but now she had to stop and go back for a moment.
‘Oh,’ she said and didn’t know what to say next. She just hadn’t thought about that. That had been part of the original plan, of course, when she had left London. To remind old Timothy and more particularly Blossom of the boys’ existence, and especially of Buster, Timothy Three. She had thought of showing them to Rosalie and Timothy Two as well, had even considered the possibility of persuading Jay to take them to Washington for a visit so that she could prove to them all what special boys she had. But now she was a woman who was about to be divorced with ignominy, the mother of children whose father was about to –
‘There’s plenty of time for that,’ she said now, and walked through the doorway. ‘Plenty of time. Just take them to the Gardens today, and see they go to bed at a reasonable hour. And there’s a TV set here for you to watch tonight if you like. They’ll show you how to use it if you call down to the desk –’
And now she could escape, at last, and she pulled the door closed behind her and almost scuttled for the elevators, needing to be away and out so much that she could feel the urgency pushing inside her like a physical lump. And the lump was still there when she reached the lobby downstairs, bustling still with lunchers even at this time of year when so many people were out of town on holiday and ringing with the cries of satisfied Bostonians meeting each other to display their delight in belonging to what they knew without doubt to be the most important place in the entire world.
And at the sight of them her feelings shifted and twisted and became something quite different. The people she could see milling round her all looked so well, so tanned and so golden. The long Boston summer had toasted even the dullest of them to a rich glowing healthiness, and everywhere she looked there were the familiar self-satisfied brown faces and the glinting fair hair of the deeply comfortable, the deeply complacent, the deeply committed money-makers of whom Jay was so typical an example. At home in London he had seemed an exotic creature, a person of such rare beauty that people – women, at any rate – turned their heads to look at him pass in the street. But here he was just one of a genus, a good example of it, if a somewhat more beautiful than most example, but still just another rich, well-pleased-with-himself Bostonian who regarded the world as his private cow, a place to be used and milked and used again as and when he chose.
And she hated them for it, each and every one of them. How dare they stand here in their Brooks Brothers suits and button-down collared shirts and their magnificently cut hair and perfectly smooth-shaven talcum-anointed faces, looking as though they had a right to do whatever they wanted? How dare they think they could use people’s lives and loves the way they used their dollars and their buildings and their equities and bonds?
And the feelings that had made her so sick and so frightened began to stiffen and to take on shape and hardness so that what had seemed like a thick swirling vapour became a cold liquidity and then a gel, and finally a hard solid mass that settled inside to join the lump already there, and lay lurking like a threatened animal, waiting to jump out at anyone who came near.
She had at last more rage than pain in her and it gave her the strength she needed. And she lifted her chin and took a breath and walked composedly across the lobby to the desk to ask if there were any messages for her.
There were not and she nodded as though that were the response she had not only expected but welcomed and moved away to the great revolving doors and out into the street.
Where the heat hit her like a buffet from a high wind, making her gasp and stand still in the centre of the pavement as she felt the sweat start out on her upper lip and brow. Oh, but she had forgotten, quite forgotten, the heat of Boston in August, and in her belly the crouching animal lifted its head and hated the heat as well and added that hate to the store it already had, and subsided, muttering at her.
She began to walk, slowly, keeping in the shade of the buildings wherever she could, and let her mind begin to think. She did not direct it; she just let the thoughts come and arrange themselves. She could trust her own mind to decide what to do, and how to do it, and she felt her lips curve as the ideas slid neatly into place, quite unbidden by her.
First, to State Street, to see old Timothy. There were things being done by his sons to his business that he knew nothing of. He must be told and turned into her ally again. And she remembered the way he had been in the house on Commonwealth Avenue when she had first come to Boston, all that time ago, and he had shown her just the sort of man he was. Oh, she knew how to handle old Timothy, the randy devil, she knew how to handle him.
And he would see to it that this mad Blossom-inspired notion that Jay was playing with was scotched, immediately. For that, Maddie told herself as the angry animal inside her settled to a slow silent sleep, was what it was all about. It had to be. A mad notion that he could be talked out of. There would be no further trouble, once she had talked to Timothy.
33
August 1953
She came out into State Street and stood there on the pavement as the last workers took themselves home, eddying round her as though she were a boulder in the middle of a brook, their collars unbuttoned and their jackets, hooked over their forefingers, slung over their shoulders and she tried to get her head clear.
She had walked in there quite certain that she could sort it all out and had gone on being so certain as Timothy had come hobbling out of his office, both hands extended, to welcome her.
‘Well, well, well, and here she is then, the girl herself!’ he said and laughed. ‘And wasting her time coming to see the likes of me! Who’d ha’ thought I’d deserve it!’
She had smiled at him smoothly, her eyes wide and sparkling. ‘Still as bad as ever, Pa!’ she said. ‘Still pretending to be old – you’re looking very well –’
‘Ah, well, what’s well? A bit of brown on me from the summer doesn’t make me well. It just makes me look more like the piece of crap I feel,’ and he had laughed and led her into the office and looking round she had been afraid suddenly. It looked different, somehow, as though there were a faint sheen of dust over it, even though in fact everything looked well cared for, and she tried to pin down her uneasiness.
And then, as she looked at the big desk behind which Timothy was settling himself with some muttering about his stiff legs, she knew what it was.
This was not a place where any real work was being done. The desk had a few well-arranged oddments of paper on it, together with the blotter and the requisite telephones and dictaphone and there was an in tray and an out tray, both with one neat file in them, but they looked what they were; mere set dressing. There was no reality in the place. It was a shell of a room, a place that had been left behind when its real tenants – busyness and activity – had passed on. Old Timothy sat here like an ailing crabshell, as discarded himself as his furniture and his phones were. And she shivered a little.
But still she had to try, and try she had.
It had taken time, of course. Timothy was not one to be hustled and it was clear he was delighted to have a visitor. He sent for coffee and doughnuts – which in fact she was glad of, she discovered somewhat to her surprise, for she hadn’t eaten all day – and insisted on talking for a long time about her father.
‘Good old Alfred,’ he said, and leaned back in his chair, and some of the coffee dribbled on to his already stained necktie. ‘Wicked old devil – the deals we pulled, he and I! Did he ever tell you, now, of the time we pinched the motorcycles and then had to sell ‘em back to the owners on account we couldn’t get the gas? Oh, ‘twas a great jape. It was like this –’
And off he had gone on a long rambling tale that she had to tolerate as best she could, as she sat and sipped coffee and listened with all the attention she could to the other sounds outside the office, to which he had blessedly left the door ajar. Was he here, Jay? Would he walk in, and smile at her and tell her that last night had been a bad dream, a bad joke, a bad everything and forget it all, they were of course to be together for always and –
But there was no sound from outside other than the sluggishly whining voice of the receptionist – a new one since she had been here last – and the rattle of the elevator doors and the ringing of telephones. No male voices to be heard at all, apart from the old man’s, droning on and on –
And she had eventually managed to interrupt him, deflecting him from yet another reminiscence about her dead father, by talking of the children.
‘They’re looking so well, Pa, and I’m dying to show you the little one, Danny. He’s a sweetie – you’ll adore him. I think he looks more like you than Timothy Three does, you know.’ And she had bitten her lip knowing that neither of the boys looked at all like the Kincaid family; they had taken most of their inheritance from her, with Buster already showing a marked likeness to dead Alfred.
‘Yes,’ he’d said then and his eyes had slid away from hers and he had reached for another doughnut.
‘When shall we bring them over to you, Pa?’ she said then, a little sharply, recognising uncertainty in him and he had muttered, ‘Hmm?’ sputtering a little so that he sprayed sugar at her and she had leaned back in her chair and said even more sharply, ‘When shall I bring the children to see you?’
‘Oh, hell, Maddie, that’s hard to say. Blossom’s down at the house on Cape Cod. You remember, we have this place at Cape Cod? And I have to go down there tomorrow, on account she just don’t trust me back here – thinks I’m screwing all the help –’ He had laughed then, his face twisting into a lascivious leer. ‘I tell you, in this weather, I’m lucky to get a twitch of any kind, let alone getting any further! I need a bit of chill for that, I do – I was always at my best in the winter – so I have to go down there tomorrow and I dare say I’ll stay a week or two this time. There ain’t a lot happening here, that’s for sure.’
And he had scowled at the room and for a moment she had seen looking out of his eyes the bleak stare of a frightened ageing man who saw himself being left behind as useless, a relic that his sons no longer wanted.
‘So we’ll have to see –’ he had ended vaguely and then had brightened. ‘Now, tell me, my dear, who was at the old devil’s funeral? Was there anyone I’d recall from the old days, now? And –’
And so it had gone on, he dodging and diving, refusing to let her talk of any other personal affairs and at last she had given up in despair as Liam had come, wooden-faced as ever, to collect him to take him back to the house.
‘We can’t take you anywhere then?’ he had said as Liam helped him to his feet and set his straw hat on his head, and helped him into his thin jacket, for he had been sitting in his shirt sleeves. ‘You can take a cab to your hotel? Ah well, then, be sure to call and say your goodbyes before you go back to London –’
And he had gone, leaving her standing there in the middle of his dead office with her pleas unspoken, her plans to use him as her ally against Cray Costello in shards. They had done their work well, Jay and Costello, destroying not only her happiness and her life but the old man’s, too. He was impotent now, she could see that, impotent in every way. A useless old man who had had his balls torn from him by his son and his son’s allies; and the animal inside her woke and stretched and began to glow again with its icy anger.
She picked up a cab that was cruising at the end of the block looking for a fare and told him to take her to the Public Gardens. There was a chance she might find Daphne still there with the boys and they could go back to the hotel together; suddenly the thought of returning there herself, on her own, was more than she could face.
But at the Gardens she realised she was being ridiculous. To search so vast an area for a girl with two small children, even a girl as oddly dressed as Daphne in her nanny’s uniform would seem here in Boston, was absurd and she turned to call the cab back.
But it was gone and there was no other in sight and after a moment she began to walk. It didn’t really matter in which direction, as long as she didn’t stand still, and she pushed the hot stones of the pavement away beneath her thin-soled shoes, concentrating her mind on the heat that came up into her feet to sting them. That was better than paying any attention to the skulking creature in her belly which was sending ever more frequent waves of anger up into her chest.
And then it all became strange. She stopped feeling she was going anywhere or needed to go anywhere. The walking became an end in itself, something that she wanted to do, not to get to any particular place but just for the sensations it gave her, muscles tightening, muscles softening, feet thudding down, feet lifting up, muscles tightening, muscles softening – and so it went on, hour after hour as she moved through the city, somnolent now with the day’s heat and slowly darkening from the brassy blueness of the stifling August day to a rich indigo.
And still she walked, mile after mile, along Boylston Street to the Back Bay Fens, and then curving down the Fenway and back along Huntingdon Avenue, muscles tightening, muscles softening, feet thudding down, feet lifting up, muscles tightening, muscles softening – Huntingdon Avenue to Trinity Church to Holy Cross Cathedral – and she passed the Copley Plaza Hotel and yet didn’t stop as she moved on that leg of her relentless journey and still she went on, moving like a sort of machine with no awareness of fatigue or pain, even though a part of her mind knew perfectly well that she was experiencing it.
And all the time she thought of him, of his cruelty and his wickedness and his hardness. Of his body and the way it made her feel and the way it had been in the beginning, of making love with him on the ship and in their own little house on Beacon Street in Brookline and at home in Stanmore far away in North London and then again of his wickedness to her.
But that was not all she thought of. She thought of Gloria Costello, seeing her as she had looked sitting there beside Jay on that grey day in June – was it so short a time ago? – in the Mall, with Buster on her lap as they watched a Queen go by …
And the anger congealed even more and filled not just her belly now, but all of her.
Quite when it was she remembered Gian she wasn’t sure. Was it as she walked up Tremont Street in the direction of the Common, or later, when she wheeled on to Eliot Street to walk towards Chinatown
where the neon lights glittered and winked and the passers-by looked even more exotic? She had been thinking of Gloria at the Coronation, that was it, and how Gian Giovale had sat there beside her at the end of the row and told her solemnly that Mommas were special people who had special little men to care for. She could see him suddenly, that crinkled head and corrugated brow that was as familiar and as friendly as Daddy’s had been and for the first time in many hours she stopped walking. She stood there staring along Kneel and Street and saw his face superimposed against the vivid colours of the restaurant signs and the restlessness of the stuttering neon. And almost heard his voice too.
‘You never forget, hey? You have any problems with your lovely little men and you come and tell me and I’ll look after you and them.’ A silly sentimental creature, she had thought him there in London on a rainy afternoon in June.
But this was not London in June. This was Boston in August and the air was thick with heat and tension and inside her there was pain and fear and an angry beast and a desperate hollow loneliness and Gian Giovale did not seem now to be in the least sentimental. He seemed to be a promise of peace and comfort, a champion, a bulwark, and she struggled to find the words she needed to describe him to herself and failed.
Maddie Page 35