Daughter of the House

by Rosie Thomas

  Working as a stage medium made a real performer of her. As well as the ability to detach from the worst of the sorrows, she was acquiring the skills of timing and delivery. Learning from the mistakes she made at her own early seances, and by watching the success of those who were better at it – in particular Jake Jones, as an actor – she was discovering how to hold an audience captive. Just to see if she could do it she would wait, and listen, and let the silence extend until her sitters drew in a breath and held it.

  It felt like cradling a bird’s egg, warm in the palm of her hand.

  Eliza and Devil’s stagecraft had been all about speed and glamour and forms of deception that were visual rather than abstract, but she was sure that the concentration required was the same. Public performance absorbed more energy than Nancy had ever known she possessed. She understood her parents better for this discovery. Once she experienced the terror and the answering thrill of the stage for herself, her mother’s longing for her lost days seemed natural. So too did Devil’s passion for keeping the Palmyra alive at any cost. They hadn’t been attentive to their children, but the reasons for their benign neglect were much clearer now. For many years the Palmyra had been a challenge and they had risen to it. They made it a success, until the war came and changed the world.

  She admired them for what they had done. Now, with her growing success, she felt the old theatre drawing her back.

  Wix and Family, she thought.

  Devil had spent the money from the sale of the Islington house on paying off the theatre debts. He was preparing to launch a new show, with tricks of his own devising accompanied by music for the modern age. He was sceptical when she suggested that the week’s programme might include a performance by her, although the money flowing in from her outside work impressed him. And he had always hated the way that Lawrence Feather claimed half of everything she earned.

  ‘I’ll talk to your mother,’ Devil said.

  Eliza had finally been persuaded to come and live at Waterloo Street. She loathed the house and its cramped rooms and the rowdy neighbours, but Devil wooed her and in the end she wearily gave way. She made no effort to arrange the smaller pieces of their old furniture that would fit through the meanly proportioned doors, and she spent a good deal of her time sitting in the little front room she dismissively referred to as the parlour. Surprisingly, Cornelius took to the place far better than the rest of them and he settled in like a snail drawing into its shell. He occupied the bedroom under the eaves, building a set of shelves for his architecture books and boxes of butterflies. At the back of the house was a very long, thin strip of garden and although the ground was more soot and brickdust than soil he began patiently to cultivate it. A man and a cart arrived with a huge mound of rotted horse manure and Cornelius dug it in and planted vegetables. Eliza watched him through the back kitchen window. She missed her old garden with its elegant pale blooms and arches of greenery.

  Arthur had returned with his regiment from France, and was now stationed at regimental headquarters in Surrey, although there were rumours of imminent deployment to Palestine. He didn’t need to make his home at Waterloo Street, but even so the house was much too small. As Cornelius was not likely to move out Nancy decided that she should be the one to go.

  ‘Move in here with me,’ Lion murmured as he undid the buttons of her blouse in the attic above Shepherd’s Market. Over his shoulder she regarded the detritus of Lion’s haphazard life and the views from the smeared windows that consisted mainly of pigeons perched on sloping roofs.

  ‘We aren’t married.’

  A merry smile lit his face as he kissed her.

  ‘Are we to be governed by such bourgeois pre-war constraints, my darling? Is all the discussion with Jinny and the others about equality and women’s freedom mere talk?’

  ‘No. I do believe we should be equal,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Good. So, I love you and you love me. You do love me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, because she did. She liked him too, and there was no point in speculating on what might have been with another man.

  Yet, and yet.

  This would have been the moment for Lion to ask her to marry him. It was disconcerting to have to acknowledge that it was secretly what she hoped for. Perhaps the carefree version of herself she presented to Jinny and Ann and their friends was just that, a version.

  It was confusing.

  Lion only smiled again. ‘Well then, what’s the problem?’

  She tapped his lips with the tip of her finger, echoing his lightness.

  ‘I wouldn’t be an independent woman, would I, if I moved in with you?’

  She found herself a tiny place to rent, just one-and-a-half rooms with a windowless cave of a shared bathroom, near the vegetable market in Covent Garden. It was noisy at all hours but there was a side view of the Actors’ Church of St Paul’s, and she loved it from the very beginning. To be alone in her home seemed the greatest of all luxuries. She splashed white paint over the dark Victorian wallpaper and pinned a cheap print of Dürer’s Adam and Eve above the bed.

  Eliza and Devil didn’t try to stand in her way. She would still be contributing money to the Waterloo Street household – she had insisted on that – and the balance between parents and daughter had subtly shifted as a result. She was allowed her freedom, within reason. Eliza was interested to hear about the new place, although when Nancy pressed her to come and see it she only smiled vaguely and said, ‘Covent Garden? I think long ago Jakey Jones had a room there, right beside the market. Sylvia Aynscoe and I went to visit. In those days he was such a starved little waif and now look at him, on stage at the Haymarket.’ She lifted a hand in acknowledgement of Jakey’s rise in the world and gave a shiver of a laugh. ‘I remember the stink of rotten tomatoes and squashed plums. In a week or two, yes, I’ll come and see you there. I’d like that.’

  Eliza liked to talk about how Nancy was following in her footsteps. When she was a girl she had left her father’s house, and the stepmother she disliked, to live for a little while with Faith and Matthew. After Edwin was born she moved to a room in a ladies’ boarding house in Bayswater, financing herself with a small legacy from her mother and her infamous job as an artists’ model. Sylvia Aynscoe was her upstairs neighbour and Eliza persuaded her to leave her job in a dressmaker’s atelier to become the wardrobe mistress at the Palmyra.

  ‘When I left that house it was to get married to your father. When is that boy of yours ever going to propose?’

  Eliza approved of Lion. He was an old Etonian and he had a respectable job, even though it was in a dubious trade like advertising. She had found out that one day he would inherit Stadling. She continued to insist that Nancy must do well for herself; if it was not to be as a personal assistant to a businessman then a good marriage was preferable to continuing in her present peculiar occupation.

  Nancy said, ‘I am not expecting him to propose, Ma. Why don’t you tell me the story about the beginning of the Palmyra?’

  When she was in one of her euphoric moods Eliza loved to reminisce about the old days. She laughed and sparkled and Nancy could see the lovely girl she had once been.

  They were all in love with her, Faith had said.

  Lion had plunged into the depths of the party but Nancy still lingered in the doorway. She felt tired and out of sorts, and not in the least like dancing. She and Lion had quarrelled earlier, although they had made it up under the Dürer engraving before they came out. The day before, a mother who had lost her only son in France had come to a sitting and almost as soon as Nancy closed her eyes the boy was there. He was stark pale, seemingly unhurt, posed with his cap under his arm against a background of bare fields as if for a photograph.

  Through colourless lips he murmured, ‘Mum, I am sorry you have to be without me. I broke my promise, didn’t I?’

  The woman wept when she relayed the words.

  ‘He wrote in his last letter that he would be coming home to take care of me. T
ell him I understand. Tell him I love him.’

  A whole day later Nancy was still shaken and listless from the after-effects of the Uncanny.

  Lion was irritated.

  ‘Why do all your insights have to be concerned with death and decay, Nance? Why can’t you tell someone that Grandpa wants them to know there’s a thousand gold sovereigns buried in the back garden and you are going to draw them a map of where to start digging?’

  ‘I suppose it is the time we are living in. So many boys died.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

  It was rare for Lion to allude to the war.

  Humbly she said, ‘No. I’m sorry for being rotten company sometimes. I’d adore it if there were gold sovereigns but I can only see what I can see. Maybe it won’t always be like this.’

  She meant that as time passed the memories might soften into history and the losses become easier to bear for those who were left behind.

  Lion sighed.

  ‘Poor old Nancy.’

  She said carefully, ‘No, there’s nothing to complain about.’

  Lion was looking over his shoulder to see why she hadn’t followed him into the thick of the crowd. Instead of leaving her to her own devices he threaded his way back through the jigging bodies and took her arm.

  He pleaded, ‘Nancy, we’re at a party. I like this tune. Have a drink and a dance with me and then I promise we’ll go home, eh?’

  The room’s heat prickled in her hair. They were doing a new dance called the Bon Bonbon, which involved sticking out the bottom and shaking the hips. It was ridiculous but everyone loved it.

  A hand shot out from the fused mass of people and clamped her wrist.

  ‘I say, aren’t you Zenobia Wix?’

  The woman’s lips were painted purple and the thick kohl rimming her eyes emphasised their blackness.

  ‘I hear you are the most marvellous spirit voice. I really have to come to you right away. Tomorrow if possible. But must I do it through that terrible Feather person?’

  ‘At present, yes. Perhaps soon I’ll be at a new venue. The Palmyra theatre.’

  ‘Darling, really?’

  The black eyebrows shot up. The woman, whoever she was, wanted an immediate private hearing.

  At that moment Nancy felt another person’s gaze locked on her. It was magnetic, almost burning on her skin, and it dragged her attention away from the insistent woman.

  She turned her head. And met Gil Maitland’s eyes.

  He was standing motionless, less than a yard away. He must have heard everything because he repeated with the slightest of smiles, ‘Zenobia Wix?’

  The room was stilled. Nancy’s lips parted but she couldn’t speak. Blood pounded in her throat, and the breath locked in her chest as astonishment followed by hope and longing crashed though her. Every instinct told her to reach out and seize this man’s hands and then run with him, as fast as they could, away from the din and the people and all the constraints of her life. But her legs had turned to jelly, and she stood transfixed.

  ‘Excuse us,’ Lion said.

  He removed Nancy from the woman’s grasp, circled her waist with a proprietorial arm and steered her away. Nancy sensed Gil’s eyes on her shoulder blades, the back of her head, on the bare nape of her neck.

  ‘Wait …’ she stammered.

  ‘What for? You needed rescuing,’ Lion laughed.

  When she was able to look back again, Gil had gone. The crowd had swallowed him up and it was as if he had never been there at all.

  Was he real or had she summoned him from her subconscious? Nancy felt giddy with shock and disappointment. In desperation she scanned the room but there was no sign of him.

  ‘Look who I’ve found,’ Lion crowed.

  She spun round, and saw Lizzie.

  Her cousin was Bonbon-ing with a cigarette holder tilted between her crimson lips. She did sometimes pop up where the various segments of London nightlife intersected, accompanied by her latest beau who was a racing driver called Raymond Kane. He held the record for the fastest lap of the Brooklands racetrack. Lizzie seemed no more taken with him than any of his predecessors. Her main interest was still in building up her business and making herself rich.

  ‘Showing the world what’s what’ was how she put it nowadays. Nancy and Lion agreed that by the world she meant men. Her absconding husband must have hurt her more than she would admit to any of them.

  Lizzie flung her arms around her cousin and blew a kiss to Lion.

  She yelled into Nancy’s ear, ‘Have you seen who’s here?’

  Yes. In the entire crowd there was only one person, the only one she wanted to see.

  Nancy stared in the direction of the brandished cigarette holder, to the back of a man’s head. The fair hair was shaved to the nape with military precision.

  ‘Arthur?’

  It was weeks since she had seen him. He very rarely came to Waterloo Street. The army gave him far too little time off, he claimed. Arthur was commanding some special training units bound for the Middle East and he would not enlarge on what he did, but the family understood that it was something to do with military camouflage against the latest threat of attack from the air. Devil proudly nodded.

  ‘Of course. The craft is in his blood. Disguise, distraction, misdirection, remember?’

  Lizzie beamed at Nancy and Lion. ‘This shindig is turning into a family gathering. D’you think my ma and pa will be the next to show up?’

  Raymond loomed beside her.

  ‘Hullo there, Nancy. Do tell your cousin to pay some attention to me, won’t you?’

  ‘Say something interesting, and I might,’ Lizzie retorted.

  ‘Come and meet my brother,’ Nancy said to Lion. They didn’t mingle with each other’s families, and he hadn’t yet met either of the Wix brothers. But the evening had already spiralled so far beyond her grasp that she didn’t care about any of the social import.

  Lion raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? From the sound of him I didn’t think this would be Cornelius’s sort of show. Will he teach me to Bonbon?’

  ‘Not Cornelius. I mean Arthur.’

  When they reached him, they were astonished to see that Arthur now had a girl in his arms. He was the handsomest person in the room, as evidenced by several of the most notorious old predators of both sexes who hovered nearby and shot hostile glances at each other. Arthur and the girl hastily separated. She was very young and slender, with a cloud of soft hair and the small chin and round eyes of some shy woodland creature.

  Arthur reddened.

  ‘Nancy?’ He turned to his companion. ‘You didn’t tell me my cousin and my sister would be here.’

  The girl scanned the crowd. ‘How could I have known? I only came because Brian insisted. I hardly recognise an-other soul. Won’t you introduce me?’

  She was wearing a jersey dress and a single strand of pearls, obviously judging the party to be the bohemian sort one didn’t dress for. This must be Isabella Bolton. Arthur hadn’t mentioned her for months and Nancy had quietly assumed that peacetime had changed his feelings, or hers, along with so much else. Clearly she had been wrong – it was obvious they were together.

  Arthur made the introductions. Another young man stepped forward and shook hands with them. This was Harry Bolton, Bella’s brother and Arthur’s old school friend with whom he had been through the war. Harry was dark and sturdy, with an athlete’s muscular poise. His frank smile made Nancy like him at once.

  Arthur told Lion that he was glad to meet him because Nancy had so often spoken of him. She had also mentioned the day of the Eton–Harrow match, he said.

  ‘Despair,’ Arthur added and Lion grinned back.

  ‘Rotten luck for you.’

  Lion pondered, ‘Isabella Bolton, eh? Didn’t I go to Miss Wicklow’s dancing classes with your big sister? I probably trampled on her patent-leather shoes.’

  He mimed two steps of a clumsy waltz.

  ‘Probably. I went to Miss Wicklow’
s too. It was hellish, wasn’t it? Maudie’s an old married creature now and has hatched a proper brood.’

  ‘I got chucked out of Miss Wicklow’s after one lesson,’ Harry said. ‘Never did learn to dance.’

  Further conversation wasn’t easy. The floor vibrated with the noise and there was a loud crash of breaking glass followed by some shrieking.

  Arthur put a finger to his stiff collar. A bead of sweat shone at his hairline.

  ‘God, this is a terrible racket. Have you two had supper? There’s a little place round the corner that’s not too bad. Bella likes it anyway and Harry’ll come along too, if it’s not just me and his sister. Won’t you, old boy?’

  ‘You make me sound a perfect clod,’ Harry complained.

  Lion was always glad of an opportunity to eat. They crunched awkwardly over shards of glass on the way to the door. Lizzie was nowhere to be seen but the black-eyebrowed woman darted at Nancy.

  She shrieked, ‘Zenobia Wix! You can’t leave, I have to talk to you. Somewhere quiet.’

  Nancy had no wish to engage with her. Backing away from the woman and holding up her hands like a shield, she scanned the room one last time. Gil wasn’t there.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Arthur murmured in her ear. Lion was deep in laughing talk with the Boltons.

  ‘Yes,’ she managed to answer. They escaped from the party.

  The restaurant was tiny, with red-shaded lamps on the tables and ambitious murals of mountain scenery. The tablecloths weren’t too clean but the proprietor flicked a napkin over the best one and gave them a warm welcome. His accent was a thicker, heavier version of Dr Vassilis’s.

  ‘Ladies, what is your pleasure? Come, have a cocktail. I make for you myself.’

  Bella wasn’t too girlish to order gin. The drinks came quickly and the food soon followed. It was unusual in that it consisted mainly of highly spiced minced meat wrapped in stewed leaves and served with bowls of rice and olives. Lion ate eagerly, licking his fingers and nodding approval.

  ‘Decent little joint.’

  ‘Bella and I come here when I’m broke. Which is more often than not,’ Arthur sighed.

  Bella couldn’t be as ethereal as she looked, Nancy decided. And as if she had spoken out loud, the girl pushed aside the dinner she had barely touched and leaned across the table to confide.