by Rosie Thomas
She had fallen asleep after all and it had only been a nightmare, nothing more.
She had no idea of the time, but the depth of darkness suggested that it was the lowest hour of the night. She was sweating and shivering and her mouth was parched. Her water glass was empty. Phyllis had not filled it up for her.
Phyllis was dead.
Nancy slid out of bed and haphazardly drew on some clothes. She set out for the distant bathroom but in her confused state she remembered there were windows on the half-landing just beyond it. She was taken with the idea of looking out of one of the windows at the shifting sea. It wouldn’t be soothing, but it might be something like looking the enemy in the eye. Feeling her way along the wall she shuffled through the darkness. In an angle of the stairs a little triangular bay jutted out towards the sea. She sank down on a window seat and pressed her forehead to the cold glass.
There were bobbing lights out on the water but she thought at first that the beach below the terrace was deserted.
Then, looking harder, she saw that there was someone out there. A figure like a black stone pillar stood alone, staring in the direction of the pier. From the set of his shoulders, the angle of his head, Nancy knew it was Mr Feather.
She watched him for a long time but he didn’t move. The black flower was withering in her chest, its petals falling into soft dust.
CHAPTER TWO
A month later, on the Saturday of the Eton and Harrow Match, Devil left the house very early without telling anyone where he was going. Arthur boiled with fury and anguish, demanding of Eliza every five minutes when she thought he would come back.
‘We’ll be late, Mama. I can’t bear it. He promised, you know. He did, didn’t he?’
‘Hush, Arthur. Mama doesn’t know any more than you do,’ Nancy said. She could see that Eliza was particularly weary this morning. Her mother suffered from back pain and other ailments that were not discussed, and the holiday in Kent had been planned so she could rest and recover some strength in the sea air. The loss of the Queen Mab had been the end of that, and Phyllis’s death had left the Wixes’ London house muddled and freighted with unacknowledged grief.
It was ten-thirty before Devil reappeared. Cornelius had been out with his butterfly net to a patch of buddleia that grew on the canal towpath near to the house, and he saw the surprise first. He hurried in to find Nancy.
‘You’d better come and look,’ he called. She followed him outside to see what was causing a commotion in their quiet road, and she was not amazed to discover that it was her father.
Devil beamed behind the steering wheel of a motor car. He wore gauntlets and a tweed cap and he looked delighted with the world and himself. Arthur had already vaulted into the passenger’s seat. Devil leaned out to kiss his wife on the lips.
‘What do you think?’ Without waiting for an answer he called over her shoulder to Nancy and Cornelius, ‘Quite a handsome machine, eh?’
Arthur’s tow-blond head bobbed up and down. ‘Pappy says it’s a De Dion-Bouton landaulet,’ he shouted.
Two or three of the men from the street, hands in pockets and hats on the backs of their heads, were murmuring over the long, polished bonnet. Brass fittings glittered bright in the cloudy air. Devil kept the engine running and the machine purred and shivered like a big sleek animal. Nancy jumped on to the wooden running board. There was an open seat at the back, reached by its own door. Cornelius sprang in at the other side and they jigged up and down on the leather upholstery.
‘Can I drive?’ Cornelius demanded.
‘D’you fancy the job of chauffeur, Con?’ Devil laughed. ‘Let me show you how she runs first. Arthur, sit in the back, please. Make room for your mother up here.’
Eliza was all cold lines. She hesitated, but found no option other than to step up into the seat next to her husband.
‘Where are we going?’ she icily demanded.
Devil grinned. ‘To Lord’s, where else? We’re all dressed up and ready for Arthur’s special day, aren’t we?’
He eased a lever and the car rolled forward. He swung the wheel and they were soon bowling along the high road, overtaking a tram with a blast on the horn and a rush of speed. Cornelius sat with his palms flat on his thighs, rocking with pleasure, and Arthur chanted ‘De Dion-Bouton’ over and over.
‘She ran smooth as silk, all the way from the chap in Sydenham who sold it to me,’ Devil preened.
Eliza said, ‘Please tell me you haven’t paid good money for this motor car.’
‘It’s not new. Built in 1908, but hardly driven. Rather a bargain.’
Eliza’s voice rose. ‘You’ve bought it? A car, at a time like this?’
The three children glanced at each other.
‘What better time? We deserve to be happy. Everyone has been so cast down since the steamer, I thought a surprise would cheer you all up.’
Eliza’s gloved hand struck her husband’s arm.
‘Damn you,’ she hissed.
He looked down at her, and the car briefly swerved and rocked before he corrected it.
‘Don’t be a shrew, Eliza.’
She sat in silence all the way to the cricket ground. As they drew near to it the crowds heading for the match turned to stare at them. Devil waved as if he were the King.
‘Let’s have a happy day, shall we?’ Devil pleaded with her. ‘Arthur will soon be at Harrow, Cornelius is leaving school. We should enjoy being together while we can.’
As usual, Nancy was not mentioned. She was the middle child, and a girl.
Eliza was looking forward to meeting her sister Faith, with her husband Matthew Shaw and their three children, and to sharing a picnic luncheon with them. It was her choice either to enjoy herself or to let Devil’s misguided gesture mar the day. The two small vertical clefts between her eyebrows melted away.
‘We’ll talk about this machine later,’ she said, allowing her husband to help her down. Devil winked over his shoulder at Nancy and Cornelius. Arthur had already run to the gate, unable to contemplate missing a single ball.
It was a chilly day for July, with low clouds seeming almost to touch the roof of the pavilion. Under the muted sky the grass flared with a saturated, emerald brilliance. In the luncheon interval, when the ladies left their seats in the stands to mingle in the outfield with the other family groups, they covered their shoulders with wraps and kept their parasols furled.
After their picnic the sisters strolled arm in arm, drawing plenty of interested glances from the other spectators. Faith’s vast hat was festooned with flowers and veiling while Eliza had chosen a tall, narrow toque with a single extravagant plume that curled almost to her shoulder. The hat made her look like an Egyptian queen.
Nancy and her cousin Lizzie Shaw followed them, arms linked in an unconscious reflection of their mothers. Nancy had turned thirteen last week and to mark this milestone Eliza had given her a pair of glacé leather shoes with raised heels, and her first pair of silk stockings. After her usual lisle bulletproofs the whispery silk left her ankles feeling naked, and she stepped a little unsteadily on the unaccustomed heels. The day was supposed to be a celebration of Arthur’s imminent entry into Harrow and the ranks of public-school men, but for Nancy it retained the queasy, brittle veneer that had become familiar since the loss of the Queen Mab. She did what was expected of her, at school and at home, but she couldn’t shake off the sense that none of it mattered. What did it even mean to be alive, she wondered, when death always hovered so close?
Phyllis had disappeared as if she had never existed, and they hadn’t even attended her funeral. Nancy had asked Eliza if she might go, but Eliza had replied that it would not be suitable. If Nancy even tried to talk about the companion, Eliza shook her head.
‘My poor Nancy. It’s hard to come to terms with it at your age, but people do die. The best way is to look forwards, and try not to dwell on the past.’
Nancy began to wonder about the events in her parents’ history that made them so fie
rcely intent on the here and now, and so unwilling to acknowledge what was past.
Lizzie tugged at her wrist and flashed a grin. Miss Elizabeth Shaw was a red-lipped young woman of twenty-one, with dark eyelashes and a ripe giggle. She had trained as a shorthand typist before taking a job with the managing director of a tea-importing company. She liked to describe herself as a career woman, tilting her head on the stalk of her pretty neck as she did so and laughing in a way that was not in the least self-deprecating. Lizzie declared interests in the suffragist movement, although Nancy privately believed that this might be as much to discountenance her conventional parents as from real conviction.
‘Guy Earle is a handsome boy, don’t you think?’
She was referring to the Harrow captain, at the same time as observing the progress of a pair of uniformed young army officers who were strolling in the opposite direction.
‘Is he?’
Lizzie let out a spurt of laughter. ‘Come off it, Nancy. You’re not a baby. You like boys, don’t you?’
‘I like my brothers and my cousins. I don’t know any others.’
Lizzie’s brothers Rowland and Edwin were sleek young City men in their mid-twenties, one a stockbroker and the other employed in a bank.
Her cousin laughed again. ‘Oh, darling Nancy. You will, I promise.’
Their fathers leaned against the front wall of one of the stands, smoking as they watched the crowds passing in front of them. Devil had never been interested in cricket and barely understood the rules of the game, but he was quite happy to issue his thoughts on the bowling.
Nancy’s uncle Matthew Shaw was hardly any better informed. He was a solid, uxorious man who had long ago – when the Shaws and Eliza first met Devil Wix – been the manager of a waxworks gallery. Since those early days he had taken over the running of his late father-in-law’s wholesale greengrocery business and was building up a sideline in fruit importing. He was a capable businessman and Devil had more than once tried to recruit him to manage the theatre – in tandem with himself, naturally. Matthew always rejected these advances. He loved Eliza Wix as a sister, but he considered his in-laws to be a racy and a risky combination. Matthew was aware that the Palmyra was forever on a precarious footing, and it mystified him that year after year Devil was able to keep it afloat, constantly reinventing and rejuvenating what was (for all its proprietor’s claims) a Victorian variety hall.
‘Arthur’s happy,’ Matthew observed.
The boy could be seen at the foot of the pavilion steps as he tried to catch an off-pitch glimpse of his team heroes.
‘He’s got good reason. This match is in the bag.’
Matthew nodded. They all knew that Cornelius was not quite like other boys and would never tread the conventional path, so Devil had determined that his younger son should go to a great public school. Arthur was a gifted cricketer but he was only average at his lessons, unlike Cornelius who was an encyclopaedic authority on the few subjects that interested him – Lepidoptera and the classical orders of architecture amongst them. So it had been a day of rejoicing in the Wix family when after months of tutoring Arthur narrowly passed the Common Entrance exam for Harrow. For Devil and Eliza it was a measure of how far they had risen in the world.
Eliza’s late father had been a wholesale greengrocer and Devil’s course had been even more dramatic. He ran away from a bleak village childhood, and in his early days in London he had slept in the streets. Now that he was a theatre impresario, even though the foundations of his prosperity were not as secure as they appeared, these precarious origins were not much recalled – even with Faith and Matthew. Arthur was now only weeks away from entering Harrow School, and although he and Faith thought it both pretentious and extravagant of the Wixes to be sending their boy to one of the great public schools, Matthew had to acknowledge that Devil’s partisan attitude was justified today.
The Shaw brothers reappeared from their excursion to the Lord’s Hotel, carrying a beery waft with them. Rowland laced his hands behind his head and stretched his legs beneath the seat in front. He swallowed a belch.
‘I’m quite ready. Play can resume.’
Arthur raced round the ellipse of grass and bounded up to his family.
‘Earle and the rest of our fellows are pretty confident,’ he announced, as if he had taken his lunch in the pavilion with them.
Bats under their arms, two Eton men strode out to the wicket.
Eliza had taken a glass of hock with her picnic. She remarked, ‘How lovely it is to be all together like this. We must come again next year, don’t you think?’
‘Please, Mama, hush,’ Arthur cried in anguish.
Nancy rested her chin on doubled fists. She longed to lose herself in the game like everyone else, but the scent of mown grass rose and surged into the crannies of her head. A tilt of perspective replaced the cricket pitch with mud and shattered trees and the sad remains of men.
She resisted the swamp with all her strength, clenching her teeth until her jaw creaked. No one was looking at her. Flags in front of the pavilion stirred in the summer breeze and she heard the cheering for a boundary as if it came from a long way off.
Perhaps strength of will was what was needed. The Uncanny mustn’t be allowed to claim her.
From now on, she must try to be the one who claimed it.
The white figures of the cricketers swam against the grass but they remained themselves. The smell of grass was now only a midsummer scent mingling with strawberries and her mother’s perfume.
I won’t think about the other place, she repeated. I shall try to be more like Arthur and Lizzie.
As if to endorse her strength of will her father nudged her and winked.
‘What do you think of this, eh?’
She swallowed hard. ‘So exciting.’
Bob Fowler, the Eton captain, was finally caught out.
‘Now we’re secure,’ Arthur crowed.
But Eton’s tenth-wicket partnership suddenly began to hit the Harrow bowling all over the field. Astonishingly, fifty runs were put on in only half an hour.
In the tea interval Devil and the three Shaw men walked to the boundary to watch groundsmen dragging up the heavy roller. The sky was lightening at last and a pale bar of sunlight crept between clouds to fall across the face of the Grand Stand. In a state of unbearable tension Arthur could only jiggle in his seat. The Shaw men stopped ribbing him.
A succession of wickets fell before the Harrow captain came out to bat. He staunched the flow with a score of thirteen, but then he was caught off a savage yorker.
Arthur could not help himself. He jumped up and yelled, ‘No! Earle’s not out. It was a bump ball, I saw it. Not out, I say.’ Faces turned to him.
‘Arthur,’ Devil said sharply. He knew enough about cricket to recognise unsporting behaviour.
Harrow’s tenth man could be seen sprinting out of one of the tea tents with a cream bun still grasped in his hand, urgently summoned to prepare for his innings. The last stand put on a desperate thirteen runs.
‘Come on,’ Arthur gasped.
But then, at one minute to six, the end came. The batsman played inside a ball that did not turn as expected, and was caught in the slips. The roar from the crowd was loud enough to lift the roofs. It swelled over Regent’s Park and the villas of St John’s Wood. Eton had won the match by nine runs.
Arthur blinked at the tumult of Eton boys and families surging on to the pitch. He pulled his straw hat down towards his ears until the crown threatened to split from the brim.
‘I don’t know how that happened,’ he whispered. ‘It’s be-yond comprehension.’
Cornelius placed his bookmark.
‘Are we going home now?’
The pandemonium in the ground was growing and the exuberant crowds seemed denser than they had done all day.
‘It will take for ever to make our way to the underground in this crush,’ Matthew complained.
‘And I am afraid I must leave you and take t
he De Dion to the theatre,’ Devil apologised. He adjusted the brim of his hat with the Harrow colours to a more rakish angle and smoothed the flanks of his striped blazer. In less than an hour he would be in his white tie and tailcoat, ready to step out on the Palmyra stage as the evening’s master of ceremonies.
‘I’m glad you have your motor car, and the rest of us are in no hurry,’ Eliza observed.
Devil kissed her on the cheek and offered Faith the same salute. To Arthur he said, ‘Next year, there will be another match. And in five years’ time you will be lifting your bat in the Harrow eleven.’
Arthur set his smooth jaw as he stared into this dizzy future. A second later Devil had vanished into the crowd.
The rest of the party agreed that they might as well allow the hubbub to die down. The four women took a stroll round the outfield. Lizzie was saying that her boss Mr Hastings was a tremendous oarsman and she greatly preferred rowing to cricket as a spectator sport. Perhaps next year Nancy might like to come with her and some lively girls to Henley? This year they had had so much fun – a broad wink – and she was sure Nancy would adore it.
A man was standing beside the perimeter wall, shading his eyes from the weak sun as he looked towards them. His dark coat made him incongruous amongst the other spectators in their light summer clothes. As they drew abreast he stepped into their path.
‘Mrs Wix? Nancy?’
It was Mr Feather.
He tried to lock his gaze with Nancy’s but after the smallest nod in his direction she fixed her attention on the pavilion roof. Her heart banged uncomfortably against her ribs. Faith and Lizzie politely withdrew a little distance.
‘How are you?’ Eliza murmured to him. The man’s gaunt appearance startled her. ‘I am so sorry about Mrs Clare.’
‘Thank you. It was a terrible … it is not … I had hoped …’