‘Can I kiss you?’ he asked slowly.
She had known him barely an hour, so she felt sure that she shouldn’t allow his lips to go anywhere near hers. But in this tight, intimate space, after holding hands and running around dark streets together, she felt as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
She nodded, and his mouth brushed against hers.
He made a noise as if he were tasting her, and she liked how it sounded, liked how it made her feel – beautiful and desired.
The gearstick pressing against her leg was uncomfortable, but as his tongue pushed into her mouth she could feel it less and less.
‘Come closer,’ he muttered, as he came up for air.
She heard a rustle of fabric and felt his hand push up under her dress, rising smoothly higher and higher up her leg as her pulse raced faster and faster.
It didn’t feel so right now. She could feel a strange fluttering sensation between her legs and it frightened her a little.
His fingertips touched the strip of flesh above the top of her stockings. It was as if his skin had seared hers.
‘No,’ she said softly, but he didn’t seem to hear. His fingers kept on probing, hot and sweaty against her skin.
‘Stop,’ she managed to say more forcefully. ‘Get off me.’ She used one hand to push him away.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, jerking back and frowning at her.
All of a sudden, he didn’t seem so attractive. Up close in the confines of the car, she could see the open pores on his skin, flushed slightly red. His lips were cracked, and those blue eyes were cold.
‘Just stop,’ she panted, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, feeling her lipstick and his saliva smear across her face.
‘Why? I thought we were enjoying it.’ He frowned.
She sank back into her seat and regulated her breathing.
‘It’s wrong. We’ve only just met.’
‘You didn’t object when I stopped the car,’ he sneered sarcastically.
‘I wanted to take a nice walk along the river.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You debs are all the same. You like to keep up appearances in those pretty little dresses, but deep down you all want it.’
Without thinking, she slapped him across the face, hard.
‘You bloody little bitch,’ he snarled.
‘Believe me, you deserve a lot worse,’ she said, struggling to open the car door.
‘That’s right, get out.’
‘What a gent!’ she shouted after him as the engine gunned to life and he roared off into the night.
As she stood there on the embankment, watching the tail lights of Harry’s car disappear, it started to spit with rain. Shivering, she folded her arms around her body and cursed the weather, cursed Harry and cursed the whole damn Season. She had no idea where she was and there was no one around to ask. Ahead of her she could see a tramp coming towards her. He shouted something and it frightened her. She turned to walk towards the bridge, but her shoe slipped on the wet ground and she fell on to her hands and knees, smearing the front of her dress with slime.
Picking herself up, she suddenly felt lopsided, and as she looked down, she saw that the heel of one of her shoes had broken off. She kicked off the shoe and threw it angrily into the river, then, realising that it would be easier to walk barefoot, threw the other one in as well.
She hopped off the cobblestones and on to the pavement, which was cold and grainy underfoot. Away from the river the street was busier, and when she stopped and asked a man where the nearest bus stop or tube station was, he pointed across the river, where Putney Bridge station was apparently located.
She shook her head as she walked. How could she have been so stupid, getting herself into that position? She knew that she wasn’t exactly experienced when it came to the opposite sex, but she wasn’t completely clueless either.
When she had finished at Madame Didiot’s school, she had moved into a small rented room belonging to a friend of a friend. Liberated from flower-arranging classes and shorthand tuition, she had begun slipping in to lectures at the Sorbonne – she wasn’t officially enrolled at the famous Parisian university, but her French had been good enough to talk her way out of trouble on the one occasion she had been asked for her student card – and it was here, in the back row of a lecture theatre in her last week in Paris, that she had met Jacques.
Afterwards they had shared a post-lecture cigarette in the quadrangle, where he had invited her for coffee to discuss the finer points of Molière. He was twenty-one, from Nice, and liked to think of himself as a communist. A few days later he had taken her to a jazz club, and then to a dive bar on the Left Bank, where they had stayed until 3 a.m. with a group of his friends discussing freedom of the arts in the Soviet Union.
On her last night in Paris they had gone for beer and moules in a café on the Left Bank where Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to drink. They had wandered over the Seine, across the Pont des Arts towards the Louvre, where they had kissed quite passionately in the doorway of the museum. She had rather panicked about the kiss before it had happened. At Madame Didiot’s, the girls had crept into each other’s rooms after lights-out and talked about their sexual experience – or lack of it – practising their French kissing with their hands, tongues pushed through the slim hole between thumb and forefinger. But when it had happened for real, it had all been rather instinctive and very enjoyable, even when Jacques’ hand had slipped under her blouse. He had invited her back to his studio apartment in the Bastille, and when she had refused, he took it like a gentleman, which was why she had been so surprised at Harry Bowen’s lack of grace and manners.
It was raining harder now. She looked down and saw that she was leaving a trail of dark fuchsia paint behind her.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said out loud, as tears began to well.
She could hear a car slowing down behind her. For a moment she dared not look around. That was all she needed – to get picked up by the police under suspicion of being a woman of the night.
‘Are you all right?’
Turning around, she saw that a dark red sports car had stopped on the bridge. The passenger-side window had been wound down and she peered through to look at the driver. He looked vaguely familiar but she couldn’t instantly place him, and her pulse started to speed up in panic.
‘Are you okay?’ the man repeated.
‘I’m fine,’ she stammered, knowing that she should carry on walking.
‘We were both at Emily Nightingale’s party earlier. In Belgravia. My name’s Edward Carlyle – we didn’t officially meet, so I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’
‘Georgia. Georgia Hamilton.’ She hesitated, then remembered what Sally Daly had said about him – VSITPQ – and stepped closer to the car.
‘Look, do you need a lift anywhere?’ he asked, shouting to be heard over the rain.
‘Honestly, I’m fine. I think the tube is just across the bridge.’
‘If you don’t contract tetanus beforehand,’ he said, looking down at her bare feet.
‘Then I’ll watch out for any rusty nails.’
Raindrops lashed against her face and she had to wipe her eyes to see him.
‘Look, I don’t wish to be rude, but I don’t know you from Adam. You could have been drinking. You could be a complete sex-obsessed pervert . . .’
She watched one of his heavy brows rise in the darkness.
‘Or you could smell my breath, use that phone box to tell your parents that Edward Carlyle will have you home within fifteen minutes, and avoid catching pneumonia.’
She thought about his offer for a moment, then opened the car door.
She watched his gaze fall to the hem of her skirt, which was now dripping with wet paint, and she could tell from his expression that he wished he had not made his offer. On closer inspection, the car was an Aston Martin, no doubt very expensive.
‘I’m sorry. I’m melting,’ she wince
d.
He reached over to the glove compartment, removed a newspaper and spread it over the passenger seat.
‘Chivalry’s not dead, then,’ she said gratefully.
‘Interesting dress. Is it meant to self-destruct?’
‘It’s hand-painted.’
‘Watercolours,’ he smiled.
She told him her address, then sat stiffly praying that she wouldn’t get any paint on the black leather seats.
‘So what are you doing out here?’ she asked as he revved the engine.
‘I was on my way to a party in Richmond.’
‘So was I,’ she said, wondering if he was a friend of Harry’s, wondering if she should say anything about what had just happened.
‘But it’s that way . . . I saw you as I was coming over the bridge. I recognised you . . .’
‘And you thought I’d lost my mind.’
‘Something like that,’ he muttered. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I might have some explaining to do to my cousin. This is her dress.’
‘And where are your shoes?’
‘En route to the North Sea.’
She realised he must think she was a lunatic.
‘So are you enjoying it so far? The Season?’ he said, breaking the awkward silence.
She snorted.
‘I’m off to Paris as soon as the damn thing is over with.’
‘Ah, a Francophile, are we?’
‘I know it well,’ she sniffed. ‘I used to live there. I had a life out there, a boyfriend.’
‘Really?’ he said with interest.
‘He was a communist,’ said Georgia with some pride.
‘My goodness. I don’t suppose you told him about becoming a debutante, then.’
She frowned, realising that he had a point. Perhaps that was why Jacques had not yet replied to any of the letters she had sent him.
‘I’m going to be a writer,’ she explained quickly. ‘That’s why I’m going back to Paris. To write a book.’
‘You don’t have to go to Paris to do that,’ replied Edward with annoying matter-of-factness.
She turned and frowned, watching his profile – a strong nose and a set jaw gave him a look of confidence that bordered on arrogance – and decided to stand her ground.
‘Several of the twentieth’s century greatest novelists might disagree with you. Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound all wrote some of their best work there.’
‘Not because of the nice views and decent croissants.’ He shrugged. ‘They were all escaping either war or Prohibition. Paris was more bohemian and liberal; it attracted artists like a honeypot and they in turn inspired and mentored one another. But it could have happened in any number of big cities. A coffee shop in London could become the next great literary salon. It’s what’s here and what’s there that counts,’ he said, pointing to his head and his heart. ‘Everything else is just geography.’
‘Well I found I worked very well there,’ she said, sniffing. ‘I had a favourite spot right in the gardens behind Notre-Dame. By the time I left two weeks ago, I had five diaries full of thoughts and scribbles.’
‘Then there’s your book. A memoir. An English Girl in Paris. You could even finish it between parties.’
‘No one is going to be interested in the memoirs of an unknown eighteen-year-old girl. I want to be a novelist like Françoise Sagan.’
She could see him smiling to himself in the dark and it irritated her.
‘So what about you? What does life beyond the Season hold for you?’
‘I graduate in a few months,’ he said, explaining that he was at somewhere called Christ Church, apparently part of Oxford University. ‘My father works at a bank. I’ll go and join him there, but at some point I want to live in New York.’
‘New York?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘My mum always says that New York has no culture. No history.’
‘Nonsense,’ smiled Edward, as if she had said something quite ridiculous. ‘The Met Museum is the best in the world. Plus jazz, art, theatre, film . . . It’s like Paris was in the twenties.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ she replied haughtily. ‘You were London’s biggest cheerleader a minute ago.’
‘London is a great city, but it will take another decade before it is fully recovered from the war. The Empire is dead. The class system is dying. You only have to look at the end of the deb season to know that. New York is the new centre of the world. So that’s what I want to do. Open a division of the bank on Wall Street. One day the City of London will be the centre of the financial world again, but until that point, the global commercial heartland is New York.’
‘Well, it must be nice to have it all figured out,’ she said a touch more tartly than she meant. ‘Meanwhile, I’ve got nothing to look forward to but six more months of stupid cocktail parties and dances.’
‘Get a job,’
‘I’m doing the Season.’
‘But your days are free, give or take the odd trip to Ascot or a pheasant shoot.’
‘I don’t have any experience.’
‘Work in a coffee shop. Meet people, observe them, people-watch. It’ll all be good for your writing. Perhaps you could even start a literary salon.’
She wasn’t sure if he was teasing her. Certainly he had the innate confidence of the rich, that self-belief that made her feel slightly uncomfortable, as much as his suggestions appealed to her. They were on the King’s Road now and the neon lights from a row of coffee shops spilt on to the puddles in the street. Part of her wanted to go inside one. She wanted to drink espresso and learn all about jazz in New York, suspecting that Edward Carlyle was the sort of person who knew a lot about all sorts of things.
She was going to suggest it but he was already indicating right to turn on to her street, and she felt a faint pang of disappointment.
‘Which number?’ he asked, slowing the car.
She could see the upstairs light on in their little flat. Estella would be waiting up for her.
He pulled in to the kerb, and for a second the two of them sat in a silence that made her feel uncomfortable.
‘Are you heading back to Richmond?’
‘I think I’ll give it a miss,’ he replied, glancing at his watch.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for making you miss the party.’
‘I should be thanking you. I really need to be getting back to Oxford.’
‘No, thank you,’ she said quietly. She got out of the car and looked back at him. ‘Thank you for rescuing me.’
‘Have a good season, Georgia Hamilton. You know, sometimes things in life are a little easier, a little more enjoyable when you don’t resist them quite so much.’
‘Georgia. The taxi is here.’
‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she called back from the comfort of her single bed, trying her best to disguise the sleepiness in her voice. The piping-hot bath she’d taken after returning home from the Swiss Chalet coffee shop behind Peter Jones had made Georgia very drowsy indeed. She loved her waitressing job at Chelsea’s grooviest café – she was allowed to take home free cake, could sit and write during the quiet periods and had even had the odd patisserie lesson from André, the pastry chef. But when she got home, she was dead beat, which was fine when she could just go home and sleep, but quite dreadful when she had a party to attend.
She heard her bedroom door creak open, and when a dramatic gasp followed it, she knew that her slumber was about to be short-lived.
‘You’re not even dressed,’ said Estella in panic.
Georgia pulled the blanket further up her face and groaned.
‘Five more minutes,’ she said, feeling all warm and cosy.
‘But the taxi’s here. The meter will be running . . .’ Her mother strode over and tore the blanket back.
‘I’m sorry, I was just tired . . .’
‘It’s that damn job, isn’t it? We’re going to have to p
ut a stop to it if all you want to do is come home and sleep. Serving cream horns all day long isn’t going to—’
‘Isn’t going to what?’ asked Georgia, sitting up, the suggestion of giving up the café angering her.
Secretly she admitted that it was proving difficult juggling the job with the demands of the Season, which now seemed to have moved up a gear. But she earned almost ten pounds a week and already had forty pounds stuffed in her knicker drawer. Her French friend Grace said she knew of a room in a house in the Bastille that could be had for only sixty francs a month, and at this rate she would have enough money to move to Paris by the autumn.
‘Isn’t going to what?’ she repeated. ‘Find me a husband?’
Estella took the white dress that Georgia was due to wear that evening and flung it on the bed. It landed on the blanket like a swan shot down from the sky. Georgia looked at Estella and shook her head. She knew that it was unfashionable to have a good relationship with your mother, but she and Estella were genuinely close. Lately, though, she hardly recognised her mother, and couldn’t believe she was choosing the silly demands of the Season over her own daughter’s happiness.
‘I’ll meet you downstairs,’ she said sulkily, swinging her legs out of bed and holding up the dress.
‘No, I’ll wait for you,’ said Estella more softly.
Georgia went into the tiny bathroom to change, slipping on the white gown. It was not one of Clarissa’s. It had been a gift from Topaz, and although Georgia had no idea where the money to buy it had come from, it was quite lovely – long, with layers of net and tulle that shot out from the waist like a tutu. She tucked her hair behind her ears, securing it with two small jewelled clips, pulled on her white gloves, and glanced in the mirror. For one second it was like looking at a Degas picture.
‘I should probably mention that we’re being collected . . .’ said Estella through the door.
Georgia stepped into the hallway.
‘Are Uncle Peter and Aunt Sybil in the taxi?’
‘No, we’re meeting them there.’ Estella’s eyes darted away from her daughter.
Georgia went to the window and looked on to the street, where a taxi was parked outside the house. Even from this distance she could tell that there was someone in the back seat, that he was male, in his twenties and wearing white tie.
The Proposal Page 9