Forty-seven
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 1973
“Miss Valentine!”
A vigorous rapping erupted on the other side of the door. It was Win, of course. Mrs. Spencer never knocked.
“Miss Valentine! Are you in there? Let me in!”
Pru took her time to respond. She was comfortable right then, lounging beside a fire, wrapped up with a blanket and a book. This time it was P. G. Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens. Pru hadn’t read Wodehouse before. His works were humorous, lighthearted, not appropriate for a Very Serious literature major. What a bore she’d once been.
“Miss Valentine?”
“Yes,” she responded, somewhat reluctantly. “I’m here. I guess.”
She’d hardly gotten the words out when Win exploded into the room.
“You have to come with me!” he said, hopping toward her, his hair flapping like the ears of an excitable spaniel. “Now! It’s urgent! I need to show you something!”
“Win…” Pru said with a groan. “It’s late. I’m comfortable and I don’t want to get up.”
“Don’t be a loaf-about,” he said. “And it’s not that late. Also, a fire? It’s hardly cold at all.”
“It’s January! And this house is draftier than Santa’s sleigh.”
Plus everyone knew the best place to read was beside a snapping blaze, especially if you were thousands of miles from home. Or if you didn’t have a home.
“I’m in the middle of a book,” she said.
Win eyed the cover.
“Love Among the Chickens,” he said. “Well, I prefer his Blandings Castle series but to each her own. Anyhow, Wodehouse can wait. Trust me. You’ll want to see this.”
Win reached for her hand. Pru took it with another groan. He lifted her to standing.
“I’ve a decade and a half on you,” he said. “And you’re the one bellyaching like an old maid.”
“I’m not old. Just comfortable. Preferring to be unpestered.”
“Well, you are in the exact wrong residence for that.”
He led her down the hall.
“What about Mrs. Spencer?” she whispered as they pattered toward the stairs. “You know she hates it when we ‘ride roughshod’ around the house after she’s retired for the evening.”
“We’re not roughshodding anything. And why do you care what a ninety-year-old woman thinks?”
“Well, she pays me for one. On top of that, she’s already chapped at me for botching a puppy-weaning two days ago. No one told me I was supposed to be weaning him so I can’t really be faulted. But naturally Mrs. Spencer doesn’t care about such technicalities.”
“Not to worry,” Win said as he helped Pru over a broken step. “The old bird’s out in a purple laudanum haze.”
She was out but for how long? The problem with purple laudanum hazes was that when Mrs. Spencer woke from them she was usually seeing red.
“So where are we going?” Pru asked.
When they hit the ground floor, Win guided her around the corner and toward the Grand Dining Hall.
“Oh good grief,” she said. “Back to the portrait? It’s lovely but can’t you moon over it unassisted?”
“Shush! This has nothing to do with the Boldini.”
When they stepped into the room, Pru’s eyes went straight to Gladys Deacon’s silver plume. That’s when she noticed the wall beside it. The fissure from a few days before had transformed into a yawning divide.
“Oh my God!” she yelped. “What happened? Is the room collapsing? Do you have earthquakes in England? We should move the portrait so it doesn’t get damaged. How do you even move a priceless work of art? A transport company?”
“No earthquakes. I opened the wall with my own two hands.”
“Mrs. Spencer is going to kill you! I mean truly kill you! Probably with a gun!”
“Miss Valentine. Look. Stop yammering and look.”
He dragged her closer. Pru’s hands trembled like the earthquake she’d imagined.
“That crack in the wall,” he said. “The wall itself. It looked queer when we were in here the other day. So I decided to perform an inspection.”
They approached the opening, which was less a hole and more of an entrance, a door, a hatch into an entirely different room.
Pru gasped as they stepped together through the passageway.
“Is that…” she started.
“Yes. A secret library. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Oh … my … God…”
She took a few more steps. They were suddenly surrounded, on all four sides, by books. Hundreds of books. Thousands, probably.
Pru’s breath quickened as she scanned the room.
Shelves ran floor to ceiling, from one corner to the next, all of them tightly packed with books of all sizes and colors. Any other room in the Grange was partially finished at best: a few appliances and minimal dishware in the kitchen, the sparse dining hall, Win’s bed on the floor upstairs. But this room, it was curated. And it was full.
“Win!” Pru said and flew to a row of J. M. Barrie. “This is magnificent!”
Peter Pan. The Little White Bird.
“I knew you’d love it.” He grinned. “Worth getting off your duff for, isn’t it?”
“Yes. A million times over.”
Pru spun around to face a collection of Arnold Bennett. She closed her eyes and inhaled, the smell of paper strong in the air.
“I feel a little drunk,” she said.
Win chuckled.
“You seem a little drunk besides.”
Pru opened her eyes again and spotted an old friend.
“Look!” she said, sliding a book from its spot. “Virginia Woolf! A Room of One’s Own. Every girl at Berkeley would be swooning at the sight.”
She opened the front cover.
“First edition. And it’s signed!”
“Ms. Woolf and Gladys Deacon were acquainted,” Win told her. “Virginia said of her, ‘one does fall in love with the Duchess of Marlborough. I did at once.’”
Win then moved down a row of books, looking for something specific.
“Ah!” he said. “Here it is. A collection from R. C. Trevelyan, the poet. Polyphemus and Other Poems, The Foolishness of Solomon, The Death of Man. He wrote almost nothing in the late teens and early twenties. A horrid case of writer’s block. Virginia Woolf said it was Lady Marlborough who released Bob from his misery. She called it ‘the legacy of Gladys Deacon.’”
“The legacy being she could get writers out of their slumps?” Pru asked. Then added with a wink, “Looks like she’d better get working on you.”
“Hilarious! A real comedy routine from our cherished Miss Valentine. And yes, she was referring to his writer’s block but also that Trevelyan lived in Gladys’s home for a spell. After leaving the duchess’s tutelage, the formerly homosexual poet had a renewed interest in the female sex. Or sex with females.”
“Was it necessary to specify that last bit?” Pru asked. She looked back at the shelf. “Hello, Mrs. Dalloway.”
She smiled but although Pru loved Mrs. Dalloway, she bypassed her for the book beside it. Grand Babylon Hotel.
“Mrs. Spencer put Woolf next to Arnold Bennett?” she clucked. “Woolf couldn’t stand the man. She thought him hideously old guard.”
“I’m sure you can take it up with Mrs. Spencer. Perhaps she’ll permit you to rearrange the books according to each writer’s complaints and position of envy.”
“I’ll pass, in the interest of my sustained existence. Obviously she doesn’t want us in here, if it’s hidden away like this.”
Pru stroked the spine of a Cocteau, then a sequence of Conrad.
“Wow,” she said. “Wow.”
“Look what I’ve got,” Win said and raised a book, tall and thin. “The famous collection of sexual renderings by D. H. Lawrence.”
“You would find that one,” Pru said
and rolled her eyes.
She lugged a stool from the corner and climbed on top to examine the upper shelves. Forster, Wells, Shaw, Wharton. The gang’s all there.
“Oh!” she said, stretching to the right. “Is that? I can’t believe she has this one!”
Pru tugged a book out from between two others, and then held it to her chest.
“One of my favorites.” She breathed in its scent. “Sailing Alone Around the World. It was my parents’ favorite, too.”
“I’m not familiar,” Win said and took a few steps closer.
Book in hand, she hopped down from the stool.
“It’s a memoir by Joshua Slocum,” Pru explained. “He was the first person to sail the world alone. His book was an enormous hit when it came out.”
She pried open the cover and ticked through several pages.
“His publisher built him an onboard library for the journey,” she said. “How neat is that?”
I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
“Books were always my friends,” she repeated with a goofy yet winsome smile.
“Ah.” Win set the literary pornography on a shelf. “You like seafaring tomes. I s’pose it makes sense for a Boston girl.”
“I’m not a Boston girl,” Pru said, staring into the book. “I grew up in Sausalito. It’s a former fishing village just outside San Francisco.”
As for myself, the wonderful sea charmed me from the first.
Even a decade later Pru could still picture her home. She could catch glimpses of the wind kicking up water, the morning fog gripping the roads. She closed her eyes to conjure the sun as it rose and cleared out the gloom, washing the world clean. Inhaling through the books, Pru could almost smell the sea.
“It’s odd,” Win said. “In all of our conversations, I don’t think you’ve once mentioned your childhood. Or your parents. On bad terms, are you?”
Pru shook her head.
“No terms,” she said. “As a child I adored my parents. They were beautiful and careless, but oh such fun.”
“Gatsby-esque?”
“Something like that. They were sufficiently well off to appear rich, but in absolutely no position to spend with the abandon that they did. I suppose my mother was like Mrs. Spencer’s, minus the slain lovers. But, gosh, they made it seem so simple and happy with their clothes, and their boat, and all that champagne spilling into the bay.”
“That’s why your family was so fond of the sailor,” Win said, pointing to the book still in her hands. “You were bred for the sea.”
“Or irony. When I was nine, my parents took our boat Day in the Sun out onto the water and never returned.”
“No!” Win said, mouth gaping. “Surely that’s not true.”
“Unfortunately, it is.”
“That’s horrific!”
“They eventually found the boat upturned, bobbing along in the bay, their bodies likely sunk to the bottom, if not eaten by sharks.” Pru pitched the book onto the stool. “Joshua Slocum, the author, disappeared on his boat, too.”
“Miss Valentine.” He clutched his chest. “I’m gutted. Truly. I wish I possessed the slightest of couth. I haven’t the faintest clue what to say.”
Pru shrugged.
“There’s nothing to say, really. I was at school when it happened, which was noteworthy as my parents thought experiencing life was far superior to sitting in a classroom. Luckily, I was a bit of a nerd. Of course I didn’t always feel so lucky, having been in school and not with them that day.”
“Oh Miss Valentine,” Win said and looped an arm around her shoulders.
He felt strong. Steady. Secure.
“I wish there was something I could do.”
He squeezed tighter and Pru was surprised to find herself snuffle-nosed and weepy-eyed. It’d been so long since she’d cried about them. Of course, as of late, all her tears had been for Charlie.
“What happened after?” Win asked. “Who raised you?”
“I went to live with my aunt and two much older male cousins,” she said. “They might be as old as you are, even.”
“And they’re still alive? Someone call Ripley’s!”
Pru gave him a shaky smile.
“Another aunt soon followed,” she said. “Then a relative whose genealogy I can’t recall. My parents were viewed as vastly irresponsible but in my first nine years, I lived in one home. In the next nine years, I lived in eight.”
“Blimey, this old man’s heart can’t take it. It’s ripping apart at the mere thought of a wee Valentine amid all that loss and upheaval. Those big eyes, the sweet face. Gutted, I tell you. Simply gutted.”
“It’s fine,” Pru insisted. “Everyone was fine. Nothing was awful. At worst, the guardian-of-the-moment ignored me. Sometimes I got a hug, or a Christmas present. It was no love fest, but if you’re going to be a foster kid, it was a halfway decent fate.”
Pru shimmied out of his grip.
“So,” she said. “There you have it. My own story. I’ll bet you wish you stuck with the explicit drawings.”
“I’m having a hard time digesting this,” Win said, his eyes almost glassy. “God, you were an orphan, weren’t you? Straight out of a Dickens novel, impish and ragtag to boot.”
“A Dickens character?” Pru turned to face him, a smile breaking across her face. “Funny, I thought the same about you. I guess it’s no surprise we ended up in the same book.”
Forty-eight
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 1973
They spent over two hours in the library that night, thumbing through books, quoting the masters, sniggering over Lawrence’s drawings. He had a knack for making the men appear perfect, the women contorted and deformed.
Finally, even Pru had had her fill.
“Might be time to call it a day,” she said. “I’m dizzy from all the books. Or the dust.”
Pru looked down at her hands. Her fingertips were shiny, bearing a slight silver sheen from the pages and the type. She wiped them on her trousers.
“What’s this?” Win said. “Even the highly literary Miss Valentine can tire of books?”
“I think my brain’s not used to all the words. Quick. Get me a spaniel to deworm.”
She nudged a first edition of The Jungle Book back into its shelf.
“What do you plan to do now?” Win asked.
“Uh. Go to bed? Like a normal person?”
“I was not aware normal and boring were synonymous,” Win said. “Come on. You can sleep when you’re dead. Let’s head out for a pop.”
“A pop? Of your dreadful family wine? No, thanks, I don’t want to suffer another three-day headache.”
“I don’t think you can blame the wine quality, it was more a matter of quantity,” he said. “But, no, I was thinking we grab a pint at a proper pub. In town.”
“In town?”
“Sure. The Royal Oak. The George and Dragon. Take your pick.”
Pru weighed the possibility. Other than getting flayed by Mrs. Spencer or ending up in Win’s bed a second time, what did she have to lose? Finishing the Wodehouse suddenly didn’t seem so important.
“You know what?” Pru said. “Let’s do it. Why not?”
“Why not. A jolly good question. Okay. Let’s go. No time to waste.”
Before Pru could regain her judgment, Win hastily ushered her from the library and out onto the road. Win hoped they’d keep a tab for him at the G&D because he didn’t want to bother scrounging up a few quid.
“Are we competing in a race or something?” Pru asked as they clipped along. “If so, I think we’re in the lead.”
“Ha! Funny as always! No, I only want to get there before last call.”
It was nine o’clock.
By the time t
hey bumbled into the George & Dragon, Pru’s nose was running from the cold and also their brisk pace. She looked down and realized she had on slippers, lounging clothes, and no coat.
“Uh, Win,” she said. “We should probably turn around. Look at me! I’m not even properly dressed. This is a bad idea…”
“Of course it’s a bad idea, which is exactly why we’re doing it. Regardless.” He gave her a once-over. “You look rather charming. Quite cute.”
Pru blushed, right on time, and he led her to the back of the pub, ordering up two pints on the way.
“This place is very English,” Pru noted as they sat down.
“How curious. It’s not like we’re actually in England or anything.”
“And you were heckling me for my ‘comedy routine’?”
Without her asking for it, Win yanked off his sweater and tossed it her way.
“The old G and D is a seventeenth-century pub,” he said. “It has most of its original beams and fireplaces.”
“Well, I love it,” Pru said, wiggling into his sweater. “Much better than sitting in your room while you mope about in your underclothes.”
“And yet, last time I did that you stayed the night.”
Pru chuckled as the barkeep dropped off two pints. They each took a sip. Between the sweater and the beer, Pru thawed at once.
“So,” Win said and wiped a line of foam from his top lip. “You’ve told me about your parents, offered a touch of Berkeley to boot, now it’s time to fess up about the rest of it.”
“The rest of what?”
“Your life,” he said. “But mainly I was referring to the fiancé.”
“Charlie?” Pru said, her heart beating fast.
She didn’t want to tell Win about Charlie. It felt like two different worlds, compounds that should never mix.
“Charlie.” Win took another gulp of beer. “Sure. Okay. Lay it on me. Tell me about ol’ Chuck.”
“There’s nothing to tell. He’s gone. We weren’t even engaged for that long. That’s all I have to say on the matter.”
“If you planned to marry the bloke, surely you have more to say.”
“Nope,” she said. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
“Not particularly.”
I'll See You in Paris Page 22