by Ella Carey
Tess sat down on her sofa with a thump.
The fact that Leon had handed Tess’s best author to a man whose father was the most famous literary critic in New York was more than irksome—it was driving Tess out of her mind. She couldn’t stop the pictures that formed in her head: Sean Cooper in his top-rated spot on one of the numerous talk shows he appeared on, dissecting the latest literary sensation with all the aplomb of a well-seasoned pro. Alec Burgess would be next on his agenda; Tess was sure of it. Her client, her work, and yet she could do nothing to stop the train that was leaving her far behind.
Tess was running a hand through her tousled blond bob when her phone rang. “Yes?” she answered, and exhaled the moment she heard her older sister’s voice.
“Where are you?” Caroline sounded imperious. Tess’s sister had a sexy catch in her voice that had been the envy of their entire high school. Caroline had always been well known for her big green eyes, dark lashes, and perfect olive skin, while Tess had always been, well, Tess. Thinner, less well developed, and stuck with the dimple she hated and which her older brother, Bobby, teased her about incessantly.
Caroline was in bossy mode. “You knew we were starting at seven. And you know that Dad can’t stand it if anyone’s late. Let alone . . .” Caroline’s voice drifted off, as if, perhaps, even she thought she had gone too far.
Me, Tess didn’t add. She stopped her thoughts from travelling down the well-worn path that they loved to take—it wouldn’t matter if Caroline or Bobby were late for a family dinner. They had glamorous careers, while Tess was just bookish Tess.
Tess took in a breath and stood up. “I’m on my way.”
Even though dinner at her sister’s trendy apartment in that brand-new tower just off Fifth Avenue was about as appealing as lying in a cold bath, Tess grabbed her favorite red coat and her keys and rushed down the stairs of her building as fast as she possibly could.
Outside, the clouds were bilious, pregnant with what could turn into a summer downpour. Even though it was still light, there was a strange energy in the air. The streets were packed as Tess made her way down to the subway and grabbed a train to her sister’s apartment.
How was she going to tell them?
Tess cursed herself for not remembering the dinner, for forgetting to change into something chic and competitive tonight. Her black shoes were mid-heeled, and that was fine for her job, but her sister would be in stilettos. Tess’s suit seemed drab, and the sense of tiredness that had overwhelmed her after she walked out of Leon’s office still hung over her. The situation seemed impossible, but she had to work out what to do.
She held fast to the handrail as the train wound its way underneath the city and let her gaze lose itself in the blackness of the tunnels.
That same old sense of anticipation and dread rumbled through her stomach as she made her way into the all-glass black monolith that Caroline and her trendsetting husband called home. As the elevator rose high through the building, Tess tugged at her black skirt, painfully aware that her stockings were cheap and her shoes were scuffed as well as old.
Caroline let her in, her face already flushed from a couple glasses of champagne—it was always like a party when Tess’s family got together. It was as if they were all celebrating their collective new-money success, with each gathering an exercise in self-congratulation. Tess’s parents had grown up in the Midwest, and her father had slaved in the sixties to set himself up as a property developer in New York. He’d made a killing and expected the next generation to carry on the tradition.
But Tess knew that her family could never hold a candle to James’s family’s Establishment cachet. If members of that venerable class were to bump into Tess’s parents, they would probably treat them as if they were something distasteful that had stuck to their leather-soled shoe. In contrast, James’s family name alone put him in the top literary and artistic echelons even before he set foot in an Ivy League university or began the career that would have been mapped out for him at birth. He would never have had to battle for anything as Tess or her family had done.
To Tess’s family, books and publishing were as alien and stuffy as a dusty old library full of literary classics was to the most frivolous of fashion and gossip magazines. And Caroline’s claim to fame was that she had risen to become the editor of one of New York’s most famous loudmouthed glossies.
Tess hovered in the kitchen, unable to take her eyes away from her older sister sashaying about on the white marble floor, holding a flute of champagne, her blond hair cascading down her back. She was dressed casually, making Tess feel even more fusty in her suit. Caroline’s stonewashed jeans showed off her long, long legs, and the flowing top that she wore revealed just enough décolletage to be sexy. Her husband, Kurt, was chopping up salad ingredients, also wearing a loose shirt over jeans that showed everything off.
They looked, as usual, like a pair of models in one of the ads that Caroline would place in Floodlight Magazine.
“Tessie.”
Tess winced, leaning in for her father’s kiss. Dale Miller’s carefully clipped sandy beard touched her cheek for a brief second before Tess’s older brother, Bobby, appeared and slapped him on the back.
“Dad!” he said. “You gotta come and look at this!”
As usual, the television blared the latest baseball game, throwing volleys of sound around the entire living space every few seconds when the crowds cheered a player. Dale patted Tess on the head and sloped off with Bobby to sit on one of the oversize white sofas on the endless expanse of black marble floor.
“You look all worn out!” Tess’s mother squeaked, also leaning in for a quick kiss on the cheek.
“And you’re not working too long hours, I hope.” She framed Tess’s face in her hands for a moment, searching with her deep blue eyes. “Couldn’t you get a job with Caroline? There must be something we can do. I hate to see you living in that darned studio. And what about men? Have you met anyone interesting, darling?”
By “interesting” Tess knew exactly what Lucille Miller meant. Interesting meant successful, dressed like a knife-edge, someone who would fit in with this family where Tess felt like a lost old shoe. Throughout her twenties, when some popular family friend or a jock buddy of Bobby’s had shown an interest in her, the whole family had pushed Tess toward whomever as if she were a meal on a plate. She’d only given in once, leading to an episode she preferred never to revisit. Work had become her escape, but now that seemed to be gone . . .
“So.” Once the food was set out on the glass table in the middle of the room with its sweeping views all the way across Manhattan, it was Caroline who raised the one topic Tess dreaded to hear.
“Tess, darling,” she said, in her most charming and killing tone of voice.
Tess helped herself to salad, but her stomach churned at the reality of her life. She couldn’t even keep one author who now lived like her entire family did, and in doing so, seemed to have eclipsed her.
“Yup.”
“You are going to thank me forever,” Caroline said, her blond hair bouncing as she jiggled about in her chair.
“Go on,” Lucille said.
Tess placed the salad tongs back in the bowl. “Mmm hmm,” she said, taking a sip of her wine.
Perhaps she should marry a model too. Like Caroline.
“What is it?” she asked, unable to keep the resignation out of her voice.
“Go on!” Lucille said. “It’s exactly what she needs.”
“Well!” Caroline said. “I got Alec Burgess a two-page spread and a cover on September’s issue. And you are going to be featured. We want all the gossip—from his favorite hangout spots to what he wears to bed and who his main squeeze is these days. No holds barred. Our readers will devour him. So, are you going to prostrate yourself on the floor and be my slave for life? This is big, Tess. National coverage. But I think Alec is ready to go to the next level.”
Tess put down her glass.
“Excellent,” sh
e said, feeling her expression drop.
“I’m hoping it will throw you in the way of other bestselling authors, too, Tess. I’m doing this for you.”
“Aren’t you going to say thank you?” Lucille tossed her hair. And sniffed in that annoying way that she had.
“Great!” Tess said, picking up her glass and holding it in the air. “Fabulous. Thank you. It’s just what I need.”
Perfect. Timing. The conversation ricocheted around the table as it usually did. Tess stabbed her fork into her salad.
But as her family whirled on without her, Tess found renewed determination. She needed to get Alec Burgess back. End of story. She was sick of being sidelined and it was not going to happen at work.
CHAPTER FOUR
Melbourne, 1946
Cigarette smoke and the strains of Frank Sinatra drifted out into Pink Alley and disappeared into the warm summer night. Edward stood at the end of the narrow lane that ran off Melbourne’s Little Collins Street, searching for an entrance to the loft above the stone stable block where the party was being held. The upstairs space at the end of the lane had clearly been converted into a makeshift studio, home to a member of Melbourne’s growing coterie of artists. Here students mingled with painters, writers, and left-wing intellectuals. They rubbed shoulders and discussed what mattered in life. Together with bookshops and cafés, these lofts served as places to galvanize new ways of seeing and being. Edward had received a spontaneous invitation to tonight’s party from Joy Hester, an artist whom he met at a lecture on modernism at the university. He was intrigued after talking to her and decided to at least show up.
Now, he wandered into the desolate stables, looking for a way to access the floor above. Edward guessed that the ground floor was probably used as a garage before the war, after some well-to-do person had finished with his horses and buggies. Oil stains marked the concrete floor where hay would have been piled up once.
A makeshift set of wooden steps stood at the far corner of the deserted, moody space. Edward moved toward them, then paused, one foot on the first stair and his hand resting on the chipped handrail, hoping not to get a splinter from the flaking wood.
Someone else had appeared in the stables. He sensed a presence before he heard the clack of high-heeled shoes on cracked cement. The footsteps were uneven, as if the person who was wearing the shoes was not used to walking in them.
Edward turned. The footsteps stopped.
“Well, hi there.” A girl, whose voice cracked a little when she spoke, stood outlined in the hazy air. She wore a cherry-red beret atop long dark hair that Edward suspected would swing when she walked. Her dress was red, too, and it was held fast around her waist with a fabric belt. Edward admired the girl’s lack of artifice as she stared up at him.
“The steps are hard to climb when you’re drunk,” she said, her extraordinary dark eyes lighting up as she spoke. “But once you’re upstairs with them all, it’s the perfect escape.”
Edward sensed a smile forming on his lips. “Would you like to go up ahead of me?” he said. “It’s my first time to one of these things. I’m afraid I don’t know anyone much. I’ll probably end up standing by myself.” He had only just started at Melbourne University, studying, much to his upper-class family’s chagrin, English lit.
“Don’t worry, they won’t let you be a wallflower,” the girl said, moving toward the stairs and running her white-gloved hand over the wooden banister as if it were a polished handrail in some grand estate. “And anyway, it’s the conversation everyone comes for. It doesn’t matter who you are or who you know. Everyone is welcome here. As long as you have firm views on art. And politics.” She started climbing the staircase, then stopped to face him.
Edward fought the urge to chuckle. “I’m Edward. Edward Russell.”
The girl lit up with a gorgeous smile. “And I’m Rebecca,” she said. “Rebecca Swift.”
“Shall we go upstairs, Rebecca Swift?”
The studio was filled with smoke and bohemian guests. Men in rolled-up shirtsleeves and with sweaters tied over their shoulders mingled at the bar with women who were dressed like men. Empty glasses decorated tabletops and modernist art adorned the walls, the paintings looking over the party as if they, too, were bizarre guests. The scene here was about as far away from Edward’s family as Antarctica was from New York.
A striking modern painting stood on an easel near the door. Two girls graced the canvas, dressed in kaleidoscopic miniskirts. Men leered at them, grabbing them from behind. It was both disturbing and strikingly honest.
“Social realism and surrealism all at once. Exactly,” Edward said, half to himself.
“You’ve got it,” Rebecca said. “That’s what they’re all about here.”
Joy Hester appeared, a cigarette tapering from her elegant hands, her peroxided hair swept back from her attractive face.
“Hello again . . . ,” Edward said.
“Joy Hester.” She laughed as she spoke. “I suppose you’ve forgotten my name. I forget everyone’s name. What do you think of Albert’s work?” she went on, turning unaffectedly to the painting next to them. “Tell me.”
“I hadn’t forgotten your name,” Edward admitted with a laugh. “And as for the paintings, they are honest and vibrant.” He knew that he needed to be direct in the company here tonight. “But dark, authentic, raw at the same time. They cut to the heart of things that I think we don’t wish to see.”
Joy took a drag from her cigarette. “Well, we agree about that, Edward Russell,” she said. “The artist, Albert Tucker, is my husband.”
“Albert Tucker, of course.” He was an emerging local artist. What an intriguing place Melbourne was turning out to be. After six years in the air force, during which Edward’s main action was surviving a plane crash in England before being deemed only fit enough to run a supply route up and down Australia’s east coast, it seemed as if life was beckoning him back. The dark years had passed.
Joy Hester chatted with Rebecca before a striking dark young man, whom Edward recognized as the modernist poet Max Harris, appeared, dragging Joy off into another conversation. Edward turned to the girl with the beguiling smile.
He didn’t want her to go away.
“A drink?”
“Sounds perfect,” Rebecca Swift said. She led him to the bar. “They’re in a mood for a real party tonight,” she laughed, taking a glass of champagne from Edward. “Often you get together with them and they are arguing about politics and art. Terribly serious. There’s an inner circle. Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, Max Harris, John and Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan, and Danila Vasilieff. Their arguments can continue on until morning . . .”
Edward leaned in close to her, not just in order to hear. He knew about Sunday and John Reed. They were infamous among his parents and their friends for having eschewed their wealthy social circles to forge a life that was regarded as bohemian. The Reeds led the modernist movement in both life and art. They’d moved out of the city and set up home in an old dairy farm at a little place called Heidelberg, where they lived in what Edward’s parents decried as a “commune” famously known as Heide, growing their own vegetables and being largely self-sufficient, not to mention sharing their home with a group of modernist artists whom they’d “picked up from the gutter,” according to Edward’s social milieu. But the Reeds went on thumbing their noses at the Establishment. It was the class in which both John and Sunday had been raised.
What seemed to fascinate and shock people the most was that Sunday and John apparently had hearts so modern that while they loved each other deeply, they both allowed room for love that extended beyond their marriage. Sunday’s long-term affair with her protégé, the younger artist Sidney Nolan, was carried on while John stood by. This state of affairs was something that repulsed Edward’s parents and their upper-class sensibilities to no end. Sunday had also indulged in an affair earlier with the young artist Sam Atyeo, and John carried out a dalliance with Sam’s wife, the artist Moya Dyring. I
t was all completely unacceptable, and yet Edward had to wonder whether it was the fact that the Reeds were honest and open about their love affairs that irked the upper classes the most. In any case, the rift between the modernists and the established upper classes was as deep as a canyon; it was political and it cut across every divide in society . . . and Edward was more than intrigued.
“Joy Hester is a bit of a role model for me,” Rebecca went on. “I admire her work. She prefers drawing over painting, which I find interesting. I enjoy the same medium myself.”
“Are you an artist?”
“Only an aspiring one.” Rebecca tilted her head. Her beret slipped.
Edward caught it and put it back on her head.
She seemed a little self-conscious then. Edward couldn’t help but think that it was as if her facade had slipped for one brief moment.
“So, why are you drawn to art?” he asked. He wanted to cut to the heart of things for some reason—to know about her properly rather than engage in small talk.
Rebecca’s features softened. “I have a theory about art, and about people who feel it.”
“Tell me.”
“There are two worlds in this life. The first world is that of the imagination, and the second one is real life. I prefer the first world. I think it’s far more important.” She took a sip of her champagne and watched him from under her eyelashes. “Does that shock you?”
Edward softened his own voice. “No. In fact, I know exactly what you mean.”
She looked up at him, fast, before her eyes dropped to the ground.