London Rain

by Nicola Upson

  ‘I’d love one. I don’t know why, but there’s something about Mary Stuart that always drives me to gin.’ Lydia laughed and led the way up the steps to the ground floor. As they were leaving, Josephine noticed Vivienne Beresford in the foyer with an ordinary-looking silver-haired man in his late forties. ‘Is that her husband?’ she asked in surprise. ‘I suppose it’s superficial of me, but I expected the fuss to be over something more memorable.’

  ‘I’ve never met him, but I suppose so. If we get a move on, we might find out.’

  Before Josephine could stop her, Lydia walked briskly across the entrance hall, timing her ploy to perfection. Vivienne greeted her warmly, enquiring how rehearsals had gone with a dignity that Josephine doubted she could have mustered under similar circumstances. Any introductions were superfluous as soon as Anthony Beresford opened his mouth; the voice that drifted so often into thousands of homes, including her own, was instantly recognisable – soft, authoritative and somehow reassuring – and Josephine found herself transfixed by it, in spite of her misgivings about the man’s character. After a polite interval, Beresford looked at his watch and gently touched his wife’s arm. ‘Come along, darling,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an early start in the morning and the Tube’s bound to be hell.’

  She nodded, but refused to be rushed. Instead, she turned to Josephine. ‘If I said eight hundred words by Friday afternoon, would that be all right?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The article you promised me. Normally I’d give you longer, but the printers are closed over the coronation holiday.’ She smiled and joined her husband before Josephine could argue, then called back over her shoulder. ‘I’d never admit it to his face, of course, but Julian does have some very good ideas. It’ll sit perfectly with next week’s Richard III.’

  Lydia watched them go, looking apologetic. ‘That was my fault, wasn’t it? The gin’s on me.’

  ‘Damned right, it is. We’d better make it a quick one, though. I seem to have a deadline.’

  2

  Anthony was right about the journey home. Commuters poured like lost souls into the station at Oxford Circus, and the mood on the platform was brittle and confrontational as the familiar stoicism of Londoners on the move fell victim to the noise and the crush. Vivienne Beresford watched two trains arrive and depart before the natural momentum of the crowd carried her and her husband into another packed and stifling carriage. There was nowhere to sit, but she rarely relaxed on the twenty-minute journey home and the snippets of conversation that carried on around her were a welcome distraction from her own thoughts. She felt Anthony’s arm at her back as the train jolted into life, a gesture both protective and habitual, and glanced at his face while he stared absent-mindedly into the blackness beyond the window. Even in the early days, before their marriage became a wary, prolonged game of chess, she had never been able to guess what he was thinking, and once upon a time that had bothered her; now, she counted it as a blessing. In the dusty, smoke-stained glass, he noticed her reflection looking up at him and smiled. ‘I’ll be glad when this is over and we can all go back to normal.’

  His voice distinguished him suddenly from the other solid, reliable-looking men on the train; it drew the usual glance of curiosity and recognition from one or two of the women closest to them, and Vivienne wondered when the pride she used to feel had changed to resentment. ‘Not wishing away your chance to shine, surely?’ The response was more aggressive than she had intended and she bit her lip, hating the petulant note in her voice but unable to do anything about it. ‘I sometimes wonder whose coronation this really is.’

  Anthony could reasonably have argued that the occasion was benefiting her career as much as it was his but, as usual, he refused to rise to the bait. The tunnel widened for a moment and another train appeared alongside theirs, pulling ahead and falling back, the carriages offering a mirror image of randomly gathered lives until the tracks diverged again. It was how they existed, she thought sadly – always a little apart, one moving forward at the expense of the other, and it amazed her that the charade could have gone on for so long. Every evening, they picked at the trivialities of their day with a tedious thoroughness, but what really mattered – the slow and inevitable disintegration of their marriage – sat mute and unacknowledged between them. To begin with, she had tried to fight the silence, driven by anger and disbelief at the first of Anthony’s many infidelities, but she had never been a match for him: the voice, the control, the diplomacy – all the tricks of his professional trade – were used to devastating effect on the domestic front, and she had no defence when such apparently inoffensive weapons were turned against her. He had perfected the art of never allowing a row to surface; as soon as she opened her mouth, he would adopt a look of weary concern and shake his head, as if it were up to him to weigh the value of her accusation, and if she continued what she had started, it was her behaviour which seemed foolish and unreasonable.

  The lights flickered as the train pulled into Marble Arch with a groan of brakes, and Vivienne shuffled her position slightly to accommodate the influx of parcels and shopping from a busy Oxford Street. ‘They should get to Constitution Hill just after two,’ Anthony said, as if continuing a conversation that had been going for some time. ‘It’ll take three quarters of an hour for the whole procession to come through, so the trick will be to let the bands and the marching do some of the talking.’ She nodded, wondering why he hadn’t yet asked about her day as he always did before mulling over his own. Did he know already what had happened at the read-through this afternoon? It wouldn’t surprise her; gossip spread through Broadcasting House at a breathtaking speed, remarkable even for an organisation devoted to communication, and it was one of many things that she hated about the building.

  She remembered how hopeful it had all seemed when they first moved in – a new start, to which she had perhaps given more significance than she should have. Anthony’s office was panelled in English walnut, free of unnecessary decoration like the rest of the building but sparse and unwelcoming after the homeliness of Savoy Hill that he professed to miss. She had bought things for it to surprise him – a painting for the wall, a clock for his desk – but the gesture had simply embarrassed him, and when she tackled him about it, he said that they made the space look cheap and frivolous. The gifts, chosen with such care, were gone within a week. Thinking about it, that was probably the moment that she had begun to hate her husband, or at least the moment that she realised she hated him. To her surprise, she found that she was as good at hate as she must have been deficient at love, and she knew now, as the train stopped at Notting Hill Gate and he stood aside to allow her out of the carriage, that she hated him still, that there was no way back for either of them.

  By mutual consent, they finished their journey on foot rather than change lines for the station closest to home. Vivienne never tired of walking the streets of Kensington, which – in small, precious corners – could still pass for a large country town, offering the flurry of Oxford Street without its brashness. The air – a bracing reminder that summer was still in its infancy – felt fresh and invigorating against her face after the staleness of the Tube, and she could happily have wandered for miles, but the lofty Gothic spire of St Mary Abbot’s appeared on the horizon all too soon. Reluctantly, she followed Anthony across the High Street and into Young Street and home. The house, which they had bought when Anthony returned to London for good at the end of the twenties, wrapped itself around her like a vice as soon as she closed the front door. Their evening routines were as precise and as ordered as the pattern on the carpet, and the predictability with which he went through to the sitting room to switch on the wireless and pour them both a drink might have been laughable had it not seemed suddenly so pointless. There was a time when she had comforted herself with the thought that she still had this, the right to their shared, familiar rituals. His company at the dinner table, the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, belonged to her and to her alone –
but what were those footsteps really worth when they were always coming and going from someone else? Night after night she lay awake, wondering what made him stay? He wasn’t a coward, so why didn’t he simply pack the battered brown suitcase that had seen Paris and Vienna and Tangier, and leave? Was it just the knowledge that any sort of scandal would ruin his career, or had he never found anyone worth the effort? It was true that his affections seemed to die, in time, with each affair, but they always grew again somewhere new – and Vivienne could never decide if that was a mark for or against the possibilities of love.

  She moved his macintosh from the banister to the coat stand, automatically going through its pockets, disgusted at the cliché that her life had become. He had only been careless once, but the shock of that crumpled piece of paper with its hastily scribbled number still had the power to knot her stomach whenever she thought of it. The hotel was in Pimlico, a scruffy, tawdry affair called the Tivoli, and she had paced up and down outside for half an hour before finding the courage to go inside. The woman on the desk had the look of someone whom nothing could surprise, certainly not the appearance of another curious wife, and Vivienne blushed even now at how naive she must have seemed; it had never occurred to her that rooms could be booked by the hour, but she had handed over her fifteen shillings and sat for as long as she could bear behind a grubby net curtain looking down into Belgrave Road. Quite what she had hoped to achieve by her visit was still a mystery, but all she could remember now was the smell of cheap perfume in the hallways and the aching sense of betrayal. A picture hung over the bed, she recalled, a poor reproduction of Monet’s ‘Woman with a Parasol’; it had been one of her favourite paintings but she had not been able to look at it since, and it occurred to her now, as then, how easily beauty could be destroyed. As she left the hotel room and walked out into the street, no wiser than she had been before, she wondered why history and literature were always on the side of the lover, and had vowed then and there to play Anthony at his own game, testing the water with someone at work who had always admired her. To her horror, Anthony had encouraged the attachment, finding ever more ingenious ways to throw them together and seizing the opportunity with such obvious relief that any words of passion intended for her would-be lover had died in her throat.

  But he had never humiliated her in public, not until today. In that split second, when she had seen herself through the mocking, pitying eyes of others, everything had changed. The charade was over, and it was impossible to pretend any longer, even behind closed doors. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand the house for a minute longer. It should be Anthony who felt trapped by these walls, Anthony who needed to be free, but she was the one suffocating, and she had to get away. She took her coat from the rack and picked up her bag, then stopped as she saw her husband in the doorway, their drinks redundantly in his hands. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he asked, looking at her in surprise.

  Vivienne felt a hollow sense of victory in the knowledge that she could in some small way bewilder him as he bewildered her, but it faded as her words betrayed the courage of her convictions. ‘I need to go out again. I forgot your cigarettes.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll pop out later if I need to. You’ve had enough for one day.’

  ‘It’s all right. I won’t be long.’ Ignoring any further arguments, she slammed the door behind her and walked out into the street, heading away from the shops to the peace of Kensington Square. At the corner, she turned to glance back at the house, afraid that Anthony might sense the crisis and come after her, but the door stayed firmly closed. It was raining now and she had come out without an umbrella, but she pulled her coat around her and walked to the far side of the gardens, taking what shelter she could from a line of young trees. Still the rain stung her eyes, bringing with it a clarity that she had rarely experienced. She knew what she was capable of, and understood, too, that her resolve wasn’t simply a response to what had happened today; it came from a thousand incidents and emotions, some from the past, some more recent, most from imagining a future in which nothing ever changed – and despair was more powerful even than hate. One day, if her life carried on as it was, she would kill her husband. As she waited for the rain to stop, she wondered how and when she would find the courage.

  3

  Two martinis later, Josephine left Lydia at the Criterion Theatre, wondering what the cocktails would add to Coward’s beautifully crafted script. The evening had settled into a half-hearted drizzle, and the roar of daytime Piccadilly died a little as the centre of the West End made its transition from a life of work to a life of pleasure. Even the most dogged of flower sellers – who seemed to Josephine now to have a fancy-dress air about them, left over from a different age and strangely out of place against advertisements for Brylcreem and chewing gum – had moved away, leaving the fountain steps vacant for tourists to gaze at the lights and the traffic. It was still the middle of the evening and Piccadilly had not yet come into its own; later, when the theatres poured themselves into the streets and the clubs opened their doors, this small but iconic part of London would become all things to all people, as if the coloured signs and extravagant promises could drain the life from the rest of the city; now, it was a compromise, whose maze of entrances and exits underlined its lack of purpose. Even Eros – it defeated Josephine why the statue should be so famous – seemed unusually diffident, pointing his arrow vaguely towards a short, elderly man who was too busy struggling with an umbrella to notice. He seemed an unlikely candidate for romantic intrigue, she thought, but so did Anthony Beresford; no doubt the small metal god knew more about love than she did.

  On a whim, she crossed the street to a telephone box and asked the operator to put her through to Scotland Yard. It took Archie several minutes to come to the phone, but it was worth the wait to hear the pleasure in his voice. ‘Josephine! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight. How was the read-through?’

  ‘Fascinating, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Have you eaten yet?’

  ‘After a fashion. I had a sandwich a couple of hours ago on the way to a briefing. With everything that’s going on here, I’m not sure I can remember the last time I sat down to a meal. Mrs Snipe’s threatening to hand in her notice if I leave one more breakfast untouched.’

  ‘So could you spare an hour for dinner? It’s my shout. Timber won last week at Newmarket.’ For her fortieth birthday, Archie had bought Josephine a half-share in a racehorse and the colt was proving a particularly shrewd investment, securing a place in each of his first three outings.

  Archie laughed. ‘I know he did. I backed him, so we’ll go Dutch. Are you at the Cowdray Club?’

  ‘No, in Piccadilly. I’ve just left Lydia at the theatre. We both needed a drink after the BBC.’

  ‘Is everything all right for the broadcast?’

  ‘Oh yes. The action was all off-mic. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Would it be easier if I came to you? I’m not sure I fancy the Yard’s canteen, but we could find somewhere nearby if you’re pressed for time.’

  ‘Actually, I could do with seeing another part of London. Let’s go to the Criterion Restaurant. I could meet you there in about half an hour?’

  ‘Perfect. Do you want to call Bridget? I haven’t seen her for ages and it sounds like you’re a stranger, too, if you’re living at work.’

  ‘That would have been nice but she’s in Cambridge until the weekend. She’s the only person I know who genuinely doesn’t give a damn about the bloody Coronation.’ Although she liked Bridget, Josephine breathed a sigh of relief; she and Archie were always more relaxed on their own and she was pleased to have him to herself. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ he promised. ‘See you at the restaurant.’

  Josephine walked back to the Criterion to wait, touched by the way that Archie always found time for her, no matter how busy he was, and looking forward to seeing him. Their friendship – love would not have been an exaggeration, although she would have found it hard to place t
hat love in any of the conventional categories – had survived twenty years of distance, jealousies and misunderstandings on either side, and was the stronger for it; more recently, as each of them found happiness with someone else, Josephine had waited anxiously for things to change between them, but by some miracle the awkwardness had never come. If anything, they were closer than ever.

  The restaurant was crowded and there was no point in trying to talk her way to a table when Archie would manage it effortlessly, so she took shelter from the rain under the front canopy and watched the audience arrive for the 8.30 performance of Private Lives. The Criterion was often overshadowed by its grander neighbours in Shaftesbury Avenue and St Martin’s Lane, but she had a great affection for London’s intimate basement theatre. In the bustle of Piccadilly, very few people gave the building a second glance and the delicate classical stone seemed almost shy about its beauty – but there was something very special in the way it refused to shout to make itself heard, looking out over the madness but never rising to it. The theatre’s restrained frontage gave no indication of the foyer beyond, but those who walked through its doors were well-rewarded: large mirrors alternated with exquisite decorative tile-work, and Josephine passed a pleasant few minutes in contemplation of the foyer’s lurid but magnificent coved ceiling, where threatening cherubs danced round an impossibly muscular musician and a maiden whose innocence was scarcely more convincing. As she waited, the last few stragglers drifted down into the beautiful horseshoe auditorium, and she imagined Lydia in her dressing room, preparing for her first scene. The whole afternoon had left her feeling guilty and unsettled, and – although her own situation was different – she found it impossible not to refashion the eternal triangle in her mind and see herself in Millicent Gray’s corner. Once or twice, as she sat across the table from Lydia, talking idly about theatre and the BBC, she had come close to broaching the subject of Marta – but each time she had stopped herself, partly from an absurd reluctance to upset her friend so close to a performance, partly because of her own inexcusable cowardice. And perhaps it was her imagination, but Lydia seemed to sense the danger, skilfully directing Josephine down other paths until neither of them was sure who had more to fear from the truth.