by Лорен Уиллиг
Chapter Sixteen
It was midnight, bleak and frigid cold, by the time I struggled up the Tube steps at Bayswater Station.
There was no self-indulgent cab on the way home from the movies. It was nearly midnight and Cinderella’s coach had turned back into a pumpkin. Or a Tube train, as the case might be.
I huddled down into my coat and clamped my elbow over my bag as I navigated my way down Queensway. It wasn’t entirely deserted — there were still lights on in the pub at one end of the road and the odd group of roving tourists — but the daytime crowds had gone and the shops were shuttered. Crumpled take-out wrappers and abandoned tourist brochures littered the street, bumping along in the wind like an urban version of tumbleweed. The whole stretch had the derelict feel of a party space after the party had gone.
The James Bond theme music was still playing in my head, bringing with it that rush one gets after a really good action movie. I wasn’t ready to go home and go virtuously to bed. I wanted lights, people, conversation.
There wasn’t much I could do about the first two, but I could manage the third. As I turned off Queensway, I fished my mobile out of my bag. It was a bit late to be calling, but that was the nice thing — well, one of the nice things — about having a boyfriend. You didn’t have to worry about things like socially acceptable calling hours with them.
Scrolling down through my contacts list, I hit “Colin.” It had taken me a while to program him into my phone, as though by presuming him permanent enough to be enshrined in my contacts list along with my parents, Pammy, and my favorite pizza place, I might somehow jinx the whole thing.
The phone rang twice, then three times, before Colin finally picked up. “Selwick.”
I must have caught him in the middle of working on something, because his voice had a preoccupied sound to it and I could hear the clack, clack, clack of computer keys still going in the background. Or that might have just been the static on the line. Cell to cell does not always make for the best connection.
“Hi!” I shrilled, my breath coming in pants as I tried to walk, talk, and keep my head down against the wind all at the same time. “It’s me.”
“Me?” The clack, clack, clack had stopped at least.
“Eloise,” I specified. I stopped short of adding “your girlfriend.” Although I was pretty sure I was, we had never actually specified that bit. “How many women do you have calling you in the wee hours?”
“The hour isn’t exactly wee yet,” pointed out Colin, with that amused note in his voice that I loved so well. I could picture him settling back in his incredibly uncomfortable desk chair, wedging his mobile more snugly against his ear. “It’s not yet midnight.”
“Close enough,” I chattered. “How’s the book going?”
“Slowly.” Colin was, or so he claimed, working on a spy novel. I wasn’t sure what the plot was, but it seemed to have something to do with international mobsters operating out of Dubai. Or was it Moscow? He was very cagey about the whole project. “Are you outside?”
“Yup!” I hitched up the strap of my bag, nearly dislodging the phone from my ear in the process. “I’m just on my way back from going to the movies with Serena! We saw the new James Bond.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, followed by, “Oh.” And then, “Was Pammy with you?”
It was a logical question. Pammy had gone to school — to different schools — with both me and Serena, so she was the natural connecting link. “Nope. Just me and Serena.”
Silence.
“Hello?” I said, frowning at my cell. “Hello? Oh, good, you’re still there. I thought the line had gone.”
“I’m still here,” said Colin, but there was something flat about it. I couldn’t tell whether he was displeased or just preoccupied. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the warm and fuzzy reception I had been hoping for.
I hate cell phones sometimes. It’s impossible to pick up nuances of tone, especially with the wind driving your hair between your ear and the phone and the sound of your own breath rasping into the receiver.
I soldiered on, turning the corner onto Leinster Street. “Guess who we ran into in the movies?”
“Dr. Evil?”
Okay, it couldn’t be that bad if he was making Austin Powers jokes. He was probably just checking e-mail while talking to me. I do that sometimes. It’s awful of me and I know I shouldn’t, but I do it anyway. “No. Your friend Nick. He was there with some little blond chicky.”
“He usually is.”
“It sucks for Serena, though.” The wind was stronger as I turned down Leinster. I hunched my shoulders against it. “I was kind of hoping . . . I don’t know.”
“Hoping what?” I finally had Colin’s full attention, but not in a good way. There was something sharp about the way he said it that put me instantly on edge.
I shrugged before realizing that he couldn’t see it. “That she and Nick might hit it off.”
“She’s known Nick for years,” said Colin flatly. “And weren’t you just trying to set her up with Martin?”
Something about this conversation wasn’t going quite as I had intended it. “Yes, I know, but . . .” Why did I suddenly feel like I was the one on the defensive? “She seems to have a thing for Nick.”
Another horrible pause. Now that I was aware of them, listening for them, they sounded ten times worse. I could hear Colin exhale, his breath whistling down the line.
In the fake reasonable tone that people use when they’re trying not to say what they’re really thinking, he said, “Maybe you should just leave it be.”
Since when had I become the villainess here? “I just thought it would be nice if Serena had someone of her own.”
“It will happen when it happens.”
And in the meantime, I’d have his sister as a permanent third wheel on our dates, if not present in fact, then in spirit.
I rammed my shoulder against the front door of my building. The door always stuck, but tonight I slammed it with even more force than necessary. “Oh, come on. These things don’t just happen. Especially when people are too shy to make them happen for themselves.”
“Are you saying that Serena needs you to find a bloke for her?”
Put that way, it did sound a little ridiculous. Not to mention condescending and more than a bit of an insult to Serena.
“I’m not saying she can’t cope on her own.” Oh, crap, that hadn’t come out right, had it? I rushed on, “It’s just that dating isn’t easy. Everyone can use a little helping hand now and again.”
“That’s not a helping hand, that’s a bulldozer.”
I’m not the bulldozer; Pammy is the bulldozer. “Fine.” I said tightly, kicking the door shut behind me. “I was just trying to be helpful.”
“I’m not saying your intentions weren’t good.” Now that I was inside, the wind had stopped howling in my ears, but Colin’s voice had gone as crackly as a brown paper bag. My building is a Victorian structure, a large town house turned into a series of flats. There’s something about the old construction that stymies mobile reception. I like to think that it’s the ghosts of disapproving Victorian spinsters going about gumming up everyone’s lines.
A cute conceit, but not exactly useful when one is in the middle of a tense conversation with one’s boyfriend.
If I went down to my basement flat, I would lose him completely, so I stood there on the upper landing, letting my bag drop to the floor as I rested an elbow against the ancient radiator where everyone’s mail got dumped every day. I could feel the damp heat of it against my legs.
“Then what are you saying?” The scent of mold made my nostrils twitch. I scrubbed the back of my hand against my nose.
With only a single bulb hanging drunkenly from the ceiling, the foyer seemed even dingier than usual, with its ancient blue carpet and peeling blue wallpaper. We’d had our first kiss in this foyer, Colin and I, crackling radiator, mold and all.
Colin was clearly not in a kis
sing mood at the moment. “I’m just saying you should let it go.”
“You mean you don’t want me meddling in your sister’s life.” Fine. I got it. It was his family and it wasn’t any of my business. And maybe it wasn’t.
No, I corrected myself. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t be any of my business. But it became my business when a good half of our already limited time together had to be shared with his only sibling. He couldn’t have it both ways.
“You just don’t know what you’re dealing with. Our family is” — Colin struggled for the appropriate adjective — “unusual.”
“I would never have gotten that.” Although, come to think of it, everyone thinks his family is unusual. True, the Selwicks did have that whole spy thing going, but everyone kept swearing right and left that that was all in the past.
So what else was there? I remembered those albums, and my conversation with Mrs. Selwick-Alderly about Colin’s parents. Even if Colin’s mother had run out on his father, that wasn’t precisely unusual these days. Sad, but not unusual. My friend Pammy was the product of not one, but three broken homes, and look how she turned out.
“Serena’s had a hard time.”
For heaven’s sake. Not that again. Yes, I knew, Serena had had a bad breakup the previous year. But, then, so had I. If Colin wanted to compare bad breakup notes, I thought that public infidelity, at my department Christmas party, no less, was right up there with some jerk using Serena to get to her family archives. It’s always fun heading back to the history department on a Monday morning, knowing that about half the department have seen your boyfriend — your very official boyfriend of two years’ standing — kissing someone else in the cloakroom of the Faculty Club, while the other half may not have witnessed the deed, but have all heard about it. With embellishments.
It had been painful and humiliating and I had done some nasty things with voodoo dolls, but you didn’t see me starving myself into a size zero and sobbing into my Cheerios over it a year later.
The more I thought about it, the more militant I felt. What had happened to the good old stiff upper lip? I was beginning to get more than a little fed up with the whole poor-Serena-the-martyr narrative. To be fair to Serena, it was never a line she had tried to play. It was all coming from Colin.
Being a protective big brother was one thing, but this was something else.
Which was why I said, in an intolerably bossy tone, “At some point, you’re going to have to stop coddling her.”
Stupid. Stupid. Never ever use the phrase “have to” with a boy. Or anyone else for that matter. It’s the fastest way to end a conversation. Or a relationship.
“Let’s just drop it, shall we?”
“You’re angry with me, aren’t you?” I said unnecessarily.
Silence. I stared at a curl of wallpaper that had started to peel away from the wall. The underside had turned an ugly mustard yellow. I could hear the creak of Colin’s chair as he tipped it back on its hind legs. “It’s been a long day.”
“Right,” I said. I knew I should ask him why, ask him how his day had been, change the subject, but I couldn’t make my lips form the words.
“I’ll see you on Valentine’s Day,” Colin said. He didn’t need to sound quite so grim about it.
“Okay,” I said, in a small voice. “I’ll see you then.”
At Serena’s party. There was no escaping it, was there?
Pressing the “end” button on my mobile, I dragged myself down to my basement flat, hauling my bag by the strap so that it bumped along the steps behind me like a child’s toy.
After that, I only wished I knew what kind of Valentine’s Day it was going to be.
Chapter Seventeen
Penelope hadn’t imagined that it was possible to feel any lower than she already had, but she did. She felt lower than an untouchable, lower than the scraps missed by the sweepers in the streets.
The lights on the veranda stung her eyes, painfully bright after the soothing shadows of the gardens. The lantern light seemed to cut straight through her clothes. It sliced through the battle armor of paint and jewels to the huddled, whimpering creature crouching underneath. It was all she could do not to slink off to a burrow somewhere and lick her wounds in echoing silence. But she didn’t have the luxury for that.
A hand snaked over her shoulder to push open the drawing room door for her. Penelope could see a sliver of brown wrist showing against the edge of a white cotton glove. Penelope wrapped her own ungloved hands in the gossamer folds of her skirt, feeling her wedding band slip on her ring finger, too large without her glove to hold it in place.
“I can get that,” said Penelope tartly.
“I know you can,” said Captain Reid, and there was something in his voice that made Penelope cringe.
He wasn’t supposed to pity her. He wasn’t allowed to pity her. He was supposed to madly desire her so that she could swirl away laughing, with a cunning comment and a tap on the cheek.
Look how well that had turned out for her last time. With Freddy.
“Thank you for your escort, Captain Reid,” she said in a voice that effectively killed off any further conversation. She swished past him without meeting his eyes. It was bad enough hearing the pity in his voice. She didn’t need to see it as well.
Her husband, such as he was, had already found himself a pack of cards and someone to play them with. Freddy, Henry Russell, and two others were engaged in a spirited game of Pope Joan. He looked up abruptly as Penelope sauntered by and gave her an overly hearty smile. It felt like a bribe, so many pats on the head for good behavior in public.
Well, she didn’t feel like behaving.
“Do try not to lose the rest of my dowry, dearest,” she said in a voice that tinkled as sweetly as the cut crystals hanging from the chandelier.
Freddy slapped down a card, his blue eyes telegraphing a warning. “I wouldn’t” — slap — “be too worried. I’m feeling in a winning mood tonight.”
Penelope let her eyes drift deliberately towards the small knot of officers at the other side of the room. “Funny,” she said. “So am I.”
Lieutenant Sir Leamington Fiske and his friend Pinchingdale hailed her with flattering enthusiasm. Penelope leaned into their compliments like a beggar crowding close to a fire, hating herself for doing it. She shouldn’t need the flattery of second-rate roués to soothe her pride. But she needed to do something to gouge the pity out of Captain Reid’s eyes. She didn’t need him, not one bit. It was just that he was the first person she had run across after . . . well, after that. She shied away from the memory of that lush room with its equally lush occupant. It might just as well have been Pinchingdale, or Fiske. Anything in trousers would have done.
As if to prove her own point, Penelope laughed very loudly at something Pinchingdale had just said. She had no idea whether it was meant to be funny, but she supposed it must have been, because Pinchingdale puffed out his chest in a gratified way and reached for her hand, her scandalously ungloved hand.
Penelope slapped him away with an arch little flutter that was more a “come hither” than a “go hence.” “Naughty, naughty,” she crooned, and checked over her shoulder to make sure that Captain Reid was watching, watching her have an absolutely brilliant time, desired and desirable, crowded with amorous attentions.
When had it become about making Captain Reid jealous? She could see Freddy’s color rising, but the victory was an empty one. It wasn’t Freddy’s blood she wanted to make boil, but Captain Reid’s, and he was watching her in an entirely too-detached way, as though he knew exactly what she was doing — and felt sorry for her.
Very ungentlemanly, that. He wasn’t supposed to understand what she was doing, he was just supposed to succumb to it.
Dimly, Penelope acknowledged that she had missed a step somewhere. The whole point of seducing Captain Reid had been to make Freddy jealous. That was all right. To seduce Captain Reid out of revenge was perfectly fair and just; to want him b
ecause she wanted him . . . that would be adultery.
“Mr. Pinchingdale.” Penelope broke into a very long story involving an inheritance that ought to have been his but for the perfidy of his cousin in refusing to die at a convenient moment. She curved one hand to simulate a cylinder and shook it suggestively. “I find my glass is empty.”
“Far be it from me to contradict so charming a lady” — Pinchingdale, who fancied himself a rake, positively oozed oil as he took the opportunity to possess himself of Penelope’s ungloved hand — “but I see no glass in your hand.” One by one, he peeled back her fingers to reveal empty air.
With the flat of her hand, Penelope pushed playfully at his chest, sending him staggering. “My point precisely, dear Mr. Pinchingdale. Somewhere in this room, a glass simply yearns for my lips.”
“Fortunate glass!” exclaimed Mr. Pinchingdale. “Might one hope that the provider of the item might also feel the touch of your lips? As a form of . . . bounty.” From the direction of his gaze, it was another form of bounty he had in mind.
Not that Penelope was all that bounteous in that area. Not like the girl on the floor of the zenana, who had positively jiggled with overabundance.
Penelope cast him a look to smolder by. “That depends on the . . . bounty of your offering, Mr. Pinchingdale.”
“Bartering your favors, Lady Frederick?” inquired Fiske, as though the idea rather pleased him.
“My favors, like everything else, belong to my husband,” countered Penelope, blowing a careless kiss at that individual. “The laws of England are quite explicit in that regard.”
Fiske hitched a hip against an octagonal table that wobbled with his weight, sending a small statue bobbling for balance. “I wouldn’t have thought you one to abide by the letter of the law, dear lady. Not from what I’ve heard of your . . . career.”
Penelope gritted her teeth and smiled. He was referring to her marriage, of course. Her infamous, thoroughly reported, thrice-damned marriage. Of all the manifold indiscretions in her long and heedless existence, who would have thought that that particular one would lead to this? Driving Percy Ponsonby’s phaeton into the Serpentine had been far more satisfying.