by Julia Whelan
He waves me off. “I’ll take care of it.”
I bristle. “No. Absolutely not. Are you insane?”
“What?”
“I’m not taking your money.”
“Who said anything about taking it? I’m sharing it. ‘Can’t take it with you,’ and all that.”
“Stop it,” I snap. “That’s not funny.”
Now Jamie really looks at me. I’m not ready for jokes about his illness. I swallow, soften a bit. “Look, no one’s ever paid for me, for anything. If you’re going to come with me, we’re going to do it on my budget. I won’t be, like, some . . . kept woman.”
Jamie looks at me. I’m gratified to see that he gets it. He’s not rolling his eyes or belittling what’s clearly a matter of pride for me. He’s just nodding slightly, thinking. Before he even opens his mouth, I know a negotiation is coming. “If any of the plans you’ve already made can’t be refunded, I’ll pay for that.”
So far, so fair. “All right.”
“We’ll take the Aston. A car’s the only way to access some of the more remote hill towns. You can pay for petrol?”
I nod. “Done.”
“And I get five trump cards.”
“What does that mean?”
“Five instances where, if you’re whingeing about how much something costs—hotels, experiences—I get to trump it and we must do it. Because there are some things you’ll regret not doing when you had the chance, and I can’t have that.”
I narrow my eyes. “Three trump cards.”
“Am I a genie?”
“The number three has a nice fairy-tale symmetry to it, don’t you think?”
He snorts. “Deal. And one more thing. If I want to do something for you along the way, buy you something small, take you to a nice dinner, you’ll let me because I’m your boyfriend now and that’s the sort of special preferment boyfriends are afforded.”
I’m unable to contain my smile, excitement bursting through me like a supernova. But almost immediately it’s doused. I peer at him. “Don’t you need to be with your family for the holidays?” A whisper-like sound comes from the foyer, followed by the gentle slapping of something landing on the floor. Before I can question what it is, Jamie stands, unconcerned, and walks out of the room. I call out after him, “Because we could leave after—”
“I really have no need to be with my family at present.”
I chew on this as he reenters the kitchen carrying a pile of mail. I persist. “But you’re . . . you know.”
“Dying?”
I give him a reproachful look and he drops back into his chair and starts sorting the mail into three neat piles. “All I’m saying is if my mom lived in the same country and I didn’t show up for Christmas, I’d hear about it for the rest of my life.”
“Yes, but if you knew the rest of your life was to be significantly abbreviated, I should think you could bear it.”
He actually has a point. Sarcastic, macabre, but a point nonetheless. Eventually I want to discuss his family, especially his father, but not right now. Right now I’m too excited. The possibility of traveling with him is a dream come true that I didn’t even know I had dreamed.
Jamie drops the last piece of mail on what’s clearly the discard stack and stands, going to the counter for more coffee. It’s a very ornate card to be so casually thrown onto the discard pile. It’s square, gilded around the edges, and made out of a thick cream-colored card stock. There’s calligraphy on the front. I pick it up as Jamie says, “Would you like a spot more?”
“Huh?” I turn the card over in my hands.
“Coffee.” Then, in a bad truck-stop diner accent, “‘Warm up on the joe, darlin’?’”
I smile but don’t look up. The card I’m holding is a final invitation. A reminder invitation. To the very ball Charlie mentioned when we were trying to help Maggie: the Blenheim Ball. The don’t-tease-me-with-something-I-can’t-have Blenheim Ball that’s happening in two weeks. “Jamie?”
My voice has him side-eyeing me suspiciously. “Am I correct in assuming my name is going to be followed by a request of sorts?”
I hold up the card. “This invitation, it’s to the Blenheim Ball. I’ve actually heard of it, and, well . . . I’ve never been to a ball. And actually—”
“You can’t imagine how much I detest these things,” he interrupts.
I soldier on. “But it’s a palace. And I’ve never been to a palace.”
Jamie waves his cup dismissively. A drop splashes over onto the floor. He uses a socked toe to wipe it, and says, “We shall see many palaces. Wait until you see Versailles. In fact, let’s go there first. We’ll start in Paris, take the train out, I know a lovely little inn in the village there.”
“I want to go.”
“And we shall. The weather might be crap, but—”
“Jamie!” He finally looks at me. I hold the postcard up with fervor, like it’s a map to some buried treasure. “I want. To go. To the ball.”
He looks appalled. “Why?”
“Because I’ve always wanted to!” This is probably true. I guess. I mean, who doesn’t want to go to a ball? “I’m from Ohio!”
Jamie shakes his head, sitting back down. “Ella, these things are dreadful. Awful rich people affirming to each other how awful and rich they are.”
“Right! Great!”
“And my parents will be there.” He says it like a warning.
“So?” Jamie sighs, looks at the floor. I go coy. “Unless . . . you don’t want them to meet me.”
“Oh, you are a sly one. You know it’s not that.”
I switch effortlessly into wheedling political-operative mode. “Are things so bad with them that you can’t fulfill the simple dream of your American girlfriend”—I stutter slightly over the word—“because your parents might be on the other side of the room?” Jamie levels a look at me. I push it further. “Either tell me why it’s impossible to be in the same room as them or take me to the ball. Your choice.”
Jamie’s jaw flexes. After a moment, he sighs. “Fine. We’ll go.”
“Really?!” I’m surprised by his response and even more surprised to find that I’m genuinely excited.
“Just let me—” But I’m jumping into his lap, coffee splashing everywhere. Jamie lets out a laugh as I kiss his face all over.
“Thank you, Jamie. Thank you so much.”
Jamie adopts a princely affectation. “’Twill be my sincerest pleasure to escort you, madam.” Then he drops it, looks at me seriously. “But do understand, I may find it necessary to leave early.” I tilt my head at him. “If I’m not feeling well I won’t stay there making a spectacle of myself, providing grist for the gossip mills.” I can understand that. These are the things I need to start considering. Jamie tips his head back slightly, eyes thoughtful. “You know, it might be wise for you to bring along a companion, just in case.”
“Excellent idea!” I say, a bit too quickly and loudly.
Jamie looks at me, suspicious or confused, I’m not sure which. “Yes, a buffer of sorts.”
I bite my lip. It’s time. “Can there be more than one buffer?”
Jamie looks imperiously down his nose at me. “How many buffers?”
“I know three buffers that would make some seriously questionable, Faustian-level bargains to go.”
“I knew it!” he says with a smile, oddly triumphant. “I knew you had some ulterior motive.”
“No, I really do want to go, it’s just that—”
His smile broadens. “I’ll put the tickets on my parents’ tab.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. The shock of my attendance will cause them to buy everything at the silent auction just to gloat. A case of Rothschild, a chef’s-table dinner at the Dorchester, yet another round of golf at St. Andrews my father will never use. We’re single-handedly contributing to the prosperity of the foundation.”
I throw my arms around him.
He mutters into my hai
r, almost to himself, “I ought to see if Cecelia will be coming.”
“Cecelia?” Even now, after everything, her name still doesn’t sit as well with me as I would like. Which I’m not proud of.
“Yes. I’m sure my father took care of it, but I’ll ask.”
I pull back and look at him. “Why would your father take care of Cecelia?”
“He does whatever he can to be kind to her.”
“But why?”
Jamie quirks his head at me. “Because Cecelia was Oliver’s fiancée.”
Chapter 21
What is he buzzing in my ears?
“Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
Robert Browning, “Confessions,” 1864
Blenheim Palace is mind-bogglingly big. Trying to understand how the massive horseshoe-shaped structure used to be—and a portion of it still is—a home, makes my brain hurt. Yes, America has its great mansions, but they’re provincial by comparison. Cute colonial attempts. Summer cottages. Cabins in the woods. And we’re only twelve miles from Oxford. It was a fifteen-minute drive. A drive in a sleek, black Mercedes limo.
With Jamie’s family crest on the door.
Which he tried to block from view by standing in front of it and insisting, “No, please, by all means, after you.”
Today is a “good day.” He woke up feeling normal, much to his chagrin. I know he would have loved to have an excuse to cancel.
But damn, does he look good in his tux.
Everyone looks good. The gowns aren’t sparkly and flashy, they’re understated, the material thick and sumptuous, the cut impeccable. The suits are throwbacks to double-breasted days of yore. As we follow the crowd toward the front door, two giant braziers on each side dart firelight across the guests. Maggie slips her hand into mine and squeezes.
We were in Hall when I told Maggie, Charlie, and Tom that Jamie and I were officially together, and they were happy for me. When I told them I got us tickets to the ball, they had a collective psychotic break. Tom fell to the floor in a giraffe-like sprawl, Charlie stood and slowly ascended to the tabletop, arms outstretched, singing “Jerusalem,” and Maggie just started quietly weeping.
I look over at Charlie in his tails and the Salvador Dalí mustache he grew (or attempted to grow) for the occasion. Tom, in a top hat that adds an unnecessary eight inches to his height, bounces on the balls of his feet, and just misses bumping the little blue-haired biddy in front of him. His attentions are elsewhere. He’s eye-darting Maggie, glancing at her and then quickly looking away before being caught. She looks like Veronica Lake, decked out in a floor-length, cowl-neck, ruby satin dress. Her hair’s dyed platinum blond for the night and styled in long 1940s waves cascading over one shoulder. When Tom first saw her, his eyes goggled and he yelled, “Oi, Mags, you’re gorgeous! You look nothing like yourself!” Charlie and I both swatted him and he turned immediately silent. He kept an openmouthed stare going all the way to the limo before seeming to decide—after giving her a hand to help her into it—never to look at her again. Until now. He looks slightly repentant. And confused. I catch Charlie’s eye and we share a hopeful grin. So far, so good.
I’m in a vintage yellow gown that Charlie picked out for me and Maggie did my hair in some intricate pin-curl updo. She also did a smoky-eye thing that I would have never attempted on my own and can’t stop looking at in any mirror I pass. I definitely look nothing like myself.
We enter the palace and I have to remind myself to breathe.
It’s decorated for Christmas. The marble floors are like glass, reflecting light from two twenty-foot Christmas trees standing sentry in the entry hall and the garlands strung across the gallery railing. The soft orange glow emanating from the vaulted and frescoed ceiling forty feet above bounces off the stone columns and refracts in the paned windows with hushed luminescent whispers.
Everywhere I turn there’s another statue, another piece of art, another tapestry, bookcase, alcove, mural. Jamie guides us through the rooms and hallways (the ones we’re allowed in) as if he grew up here, pointing out historical architectural details, recounting the palace’s ancient scandals, hinting that one or two of his ancestors may have been key players in them. It’s unnerving how unaffected he is by all of this, how easily he moves in this setting. Servants open the door for him, take his jacket, hand him champagne, and Jamie moves through them by rote. Conversely, I’ve turned into a parrot, compulsively squawking, “Thank you! Thank you! You don’t have to do that, thank you!” He wears his tux like a second skin; his posture straightens, his head tips back slightly. He’s like an actor slipping into character.
Jamie’s words come back to me: it’s just awful rich people affirming how awful and rich they are. As someone who wasn’t raised with money, or even remotely near it, I’m simultaneously awed by this kind of wealth and also deeply uncomfortable with it. As much as I may choose to ignore it, Jamie is a product of this system. I’m only now realizing just how much. And yet he’s chosen to toil away in academia, researching, writing, teaching. I wonder if this is the source of some of his familial tension. Maybe they want him to have done something more . . . fitting with his life? Something more profitable? Prestigious? Where I come from, ending up with a PhD, teaching poetry at Oxford, living in an inherited Victorian town house would be inconceivable; but maybe that life is just as inconceivable where Jamie comes from, only for the opposite reason: it’s a failing.
Jamie must see some of this transpiring on my face, because he peers at me and asks, “You all right?” We’re alone now. Maggie, Charlie, and Tom have wandered off to find a bar and we’re scouting for a place to situate ourselves.
I turn to answer him, but my eyes are drawn to a middle-aged woman about ten feet behind him. She’s wearing one of the more colorful gowns, a paisley floral pattern. She also holds a fan. Like, an actual fan. Like it’s Gone with the Wind and she’s about to tap someone flirtatiously on the shoulder with it. She drips money like a leaky faucet.
“Don’t look now,” I murmur lowly, “but the very definition of ‘awful and rich’ is standing right behind—oh shit, she’s looking at us. Let’s go.”
“Steady on, chin up,” Jamie murmurs, a smile playing at his lips. “I’m sure whoever she is, she’s simply thinking how stunning you look tonight.” I lean in to kiss him, but the woman heads decisively toward us. She winks at me (odd), then breaks into a run, and attacks Jamie, grabbing him around the waist. Jamie’s face registers shock, but he looks down at the bejeweled fingers entwined on his stomach and smiles. He quickly spins, enveloping the woman in a hug. They pull apart and she clasps his cheeks between her hands. She gazes into his eyes, her face lit from within by that combination of love, pride, and joy that only exists in one person: a mother looking at her child.
“Gorgeous boy,” she breathes.
“Beautiful mum,” he says back, clearly echoing some childhood game.
Looking at her love for him is like looking directly into the sun.
She steps back like a general, assessing her son fully. “You’re looking quite well, my love, quite well.” She pokes his stomach. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you came.”
Whatever I was expecting Jamie’s mother to be like—their relationship to be like—it wasn’t this. At all. I’m so confused I’ve been standing here with my mouth wide open since she grabbed him.
She eyes me. “Shall you introduce me, or must I do everything myself?”
“Yes, of course.” Jamie touches my shoulder. “Eleanor Durran, may I present my mother, Antonia Davenport.”
She takes my hand with gusto. “Eleanor! How lovely. You don’t often hear that name anymore.”
I smile. “That’s why I go by Ella.”
She chuckles. “Family name?”
“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I answer. “My father had delusions of grandeur.”
Jamie chimes in. “You’ll appreciate
this, Mother, Ella actually saw you standing—”
I grab the sentence out of his mouth. “Standing over there and wanted to tell you that I absolutely love your dress!” I smile hugely and quick-flash my eyes to Jamie, silently threatening death if he contradicts my story.
“Likewise,” she says, still smiling. It’s as if she’s physically incapable of not smiling. It’s natural, real, written on her face with caring penmanship. There’s a mischievous quality to her, a whimsy that I’ve seen in her son when he’s at his happiest. It’s infectious. “That yellow is extraordinary. In truth, it was the first thing I noticed, and I thought to myself, ‘Who is that stunning light of a woman standing there?’ And then I realized you were standing with my son.” She pokes Jamie’s stomach again. “Well done, you!”
Jamie grabs her wrist and peers at the fan hanging off it. “And what is this?”
“Oh, Jamie, I’ve discovered the most exquisite escape hatch.” Her wide eyes and open enthusiasm strip thirty years from her face. “If I find I’m unable to extricate myself from a particularly dire conversation, I simply wave this and insist that I must get some air. Menopause is truly the most miraculous excuse.”
Jamie lifts an eyebrow. “Is it? I must try it sometime, then.”
Her eyes flit behind me and she calls, “William! Come say hello!”
I look over my shoulder and find the man who stormed out of Jamie’s office, looking as though he has been forcibly stuffed into a tuxedo. A rugged, feral man tortured into elegance. I smile at him as he approaches. He barely returns it, the side of his mouth spasmodically jerking to the left. I don’t wait for an introduction, extending my hand gamely. “Ella Durran. Nice to meet you, sir.”
He takes it, brief but firm. Unisex. He’s not changing his greeting because I’m a woman or, more, his son’s girlfriend. I can respect that. “William Davenport,” he intones, low and rumbly, like a cartoon lion. “I had heard my son was dating a beautiful American girl,” he continues, trying to be endearing, but like his tux, this, too, seems unnatural. He doesn’t look at me.
“I had heard those rumors, too, sir, but I didn’t let them stop me.” Antonia laughs, Jamie smiles, but William gives me nothing more than a tight smirk. He glances at his son. “Jamie.” I can’t tell if it’s a greeting or a reprimand.