by Rosie Thomas
‘I couldn’t describe to Celia what I actually saw.’
‘I imagine you sometimes witness painful sights.’
‘My boyfriend complains. He wonders why I can’t see buried treasure in people’s back gardens. I would if I could, honestly.’
‘Ah yes, your boyfriend. Will you marry him?’
‘No,’ she said.
Their plates were removed, the spotless cloth covered with another.
‘May I smoke?’
She accepted one. It was oval with a gold tip, densely packed and fragrant, quite unlike any cigarette she had ever smoked. They leaned back in their chairs, openly studying each other.
‘How do you explain your gift?’ Gil asked.
‘I can’t. It’s possible that time doesn’t move in one direction but in two, or twenty, or even a million. Or perhaps it’s an illness. A tiny brain seizure, or a petit mal.’
He raised an eyebrow, giving the theories proper con-sideration.
‘I think some mathematicians might be interested in your first proposition.’
Nancy watched the dancers stepping with their bodies closely locked. She would have liked very much to dance with Gil Maitland, and she forced herself to recall why he had brought her here.
‘How do you think I might help Lady Celia?’
She had the distinct sense that he also had forgotten the reason. He rotated his gold cigarette case on the tablecloth, tapping the long edge with his forefinger.
At last he leaned forward.
‘My wife is a morphine addict.’
The music stopped and there was a brief patter of applause. Couples passed on their way back to their tables in a ripple of chatter and perfume.
There was pain and weariness in his face. There were conjectures she would readily have made about him, if this had been a sitting.
‘I am sorry. That must be very difficult.’ An uncomfortable association stirred in her, as if she almost recognised someone or something else. She tried, but she couldn’t grasp what it was. ‘What can I do?’
‘Perhaps you could let her talk about Richard, in the way her parents are too buttoned up to allow? I’ve done my best, but repetition and familiarity have dulled my effectiveness. I am not asking you to invent some golden afterlife for him to inhabit, but a single word might make a difference. It might offer her some hope.’
Nancy both wanted and didn’t want to do what he suggested.
She said, ‘I would find it difficult to deceive her.’
Involuntarily Gil reached out. Their hands hovered for an instant, separated by a sliver of air that was alive with electricity. Then they touched.
‘My dear girl,’ he said.
I wish. The longing to be Gil’s dear girl shot through Nancy like a bolt of lightning. She withdrew her hand and hid it in her lap.
All around them was a busy surge of diners, greeting and kissing and exchanging one table of friends for another.
Gil said, ‘I want to talk to you. Shall we get out of this zoo and have a drink somewhere?’
‘No.’
She said it quickly, because if she had waited a second longer it would have been impossible to get the word out.
He exhaled, slowly, and then he slipped his cigarette case into his pocket.
‘I understand.’ The dimple showed, briefly. ‘Let me find you a taxi.’
Out in Piccadilly the doorman flagged one down. Gil handed her inside and stood back, one hand raised.
‘Until next time, Nancy.’
She didn’t echo the words.
As she sat in the speeding taxi, she thought that if she had spent a moment longer with him she would have been physically unable to tear herself away. Leaving him was the hardest thing she had ever done.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
At last Arthur gave way to Bella’s entreaties and Nancy’s persuasion. He invited Bella home to Waterloo Street to meet the rest of his family.
‘Is there an engagement?’ Eliza cried when Nancy suggested a tea party.
‘No, no. It’s too soon for that. They are friends, that’s all.’
Nancy did her best to reassure him but Cornelius looked unsettled when he first heard about the visit.
‘I don’t like crowds, I hate loud noises, and talking to strangers makes me anxious. I’ve already got everything I want under this roof.’
It was true that he seemed happy so long as he could plant vegetables and read his books. The damage he had suffered in France would never be fully repaired, although he didn’t seem to be suffering any longer. He moved deliberately through his uneventful days.
‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Con.’
He tilted his head and peered at her through the thicker lenses he now wore. His fingernails were ingrained with garden dirt.
‘Whereas you have to carry the burdens for all of us,’ he said sadly.
Nancy was surprised. It wasn’t what she felt.
‘Actually, I go to parties and drink too many cocktails.’
‘Well and good. If that’s what you like to do, of course. Personally I would rather pull my own teeth.’
Eliza insisted that she must bake a cake for Bella’s visit.
On the day she got up early, not long after Devil had gone out to the theatre, and enveloped her skeletal frame in an apron that had once belonged to Mrs Frost. While she swept the hall and stairs and dusted the dado rails Nancy heard cupboard doors banging in the kitchen. Spoons clattered in the sink. She concentrated on rearranging the mats to hide the worst gaps in the floorboards, determined not to interfere. The parlour was not an inviting place, but she did what she could to make it look homely. When she was straightening the cushion on her mother’s chair her fingers encountered something smooth tucked out of sight between the seat and the arm. It was a small brown phial, empty, of the sort that had held Eliza’s medicine long ago when she was recovering from influenza. Nancy stared at it, wondering why an empty bottle had found its way from Islington to Waterloo Street. She put it in her skirt pocket.
‘Nancy? Where are you?’
Eliza was calling from the kitchen. Nancy saw that her mother hadn’t cleared the table before starting her preparations, and the breakfast crusts and Devil’s fried-egg plate lay in a jumble of flour bags and smears of butter. Small pancakes of dark yellowish sponge mix had appeared in two baking pans.
Nancy ran her finger inside the mixing bowl and licked up the sweet residue, recalling how she had helped Mrs Frost to make birthday cakes amidst the appetising smells of the Islington kitchen. It had been a place where scoured pans hung from hooks in descending size order and jars of jam and chutney winked on the shelves.
‘Into the oven with them,’ Eliza cried. ‘How long, do you think?’
Nancy tested the heat of the oven door with the flat of her hand. Baking didn’t happen much at Waterloo Street although Cornelius always lit the fire as soon as he got up and the oven seemed good and hot now.
‘Half an hour?’
Eliza slid the pans into the oven. The second the door clanged shut she whirled to the store cupboard and began to rummage through the packets and boxes.
‘We must have icing, of course. White icing with coloured piping, don’t you think? I know Cook used to have a piping bag, it must be here somewhere. Pink sugar rosebuds would be pretty and I shall do an inscription in the centre, Arthur and Isabella.’
‘Ma, I don’t think there will be time for that. The cake will have to cool, and icing needs to set …’
Eliza ignored her. ‘Icing sugar, let me see. Cornflour, no. Tapioca, no. Arrowroot, no … why would anyone need such a thing?’
Nancy turned to the sink. It was half-full of washing-up and an inch of grey water with eggshells and tea leaves floating in it. She began methodically to stack the pans on the wooden drainer, glancing out at Cornelius in the garden as she did so. It was a grey day of early winter with damp glimmering on slates and beading the humps of sacking he pegged over the beds to keep the eart
h warm for early planting. Cornelius was working in his shirtsleeves and braces, sweeping up the last of the dead leaves with slow strokes. He shovelled the resulting pile into a wheelbarrow and trundled it to the compost heap. He was absorbed in his work, bending and stretching his broad hips and meaty arms in a steady rhythm that showed contentment.
The kitchen filled with the scent of baking and Nancy relaxed with her hands in hot soapy water.
‘Oh, hell.’
Eliza screeched as a bag of icing sugar slipped out of her hands. The bag burst open as it hit the floor and a fat plume of sugar rose into the air. At the same moment the back door flew open and a gust of wind blew the sugar everywhere. It stuck to the layer of greasy dust coating walls and shelves and in seconds the room looked as if it was silvered by a heavy frost. Eliza seized a brush and began to jab at the broken bag and its contents, sending secondary clouds of sugar into the air. Nancy rushed to close the door.
‘Ma, stop. Let me do that.’
Eliza faltered and sank down into the old chair next to the range. She gripped the arms and glared but she couldn’t hold back the tears.
‘I can’t do anything,’ she sobbed.
Nancy cradled her head, feeling the shock waves of her mother’s despair.
‘Hush. You can do everything. You always have done. For my whole life, as long as I can remember, you have been the star in the sky. No one else ever came close to you.’
Eliza lifted her ravaged face to meet her daughter’s eyes. Icing sugared her grey hair as if she were powdered up to play an ancient crone.
‘If that is what you think …’
‘It is what I know.’
‘My precious daughter, I don’t deserve your admiration or your love. I am a feeble old fraud.’
Nancy made her sit back in the chair. She dried the tears for her and said, ‘I won’t listen to any more of this. Let me clear up the worst of the mess before Arthur and his girl arrive.’
Eliza fretted, ‘Where is your father?’
‘I’m sure he’ll be here soon.’
Nancy busied herself with a broom and a bucket of warm water until she became aware of smoke and a smell of burning. Eliza must have dozed off but she woke up now and screamed, ‘The cake.’
The tops were blackened. Nancy prayed the cake was not completely beyond rescue.
‘We’ve still got half an hour. Look, we can just slice these bits off and hide the rest with decoration.’
So it was that Nancy was still wearing her old skirt sticky with sugar when she opened the front door to Arthur and Bella Bolton.
‘Welcome, Bella,’ she said.
She led them into the parlour where Eliza waited tensely beside the tiny black-leaded grate. Her hair spiralled in damp grey twists out of a hasty bun and her eyes burned far more brightly than the sluggish fire. In a bold but last-minute attempt at style she had dashed upstairs and come down again wound in a cocoon of knit and crochet shawls and scarves, a swathe of clashing colours that made her look like a pirate-prophet, magnificent but mad. Nancy’s eyes slid to Arthur, combed and handsome and upright in his uniform, and from her brother to Bella. Today Bella wore a little belted suit in soft lavender tweed, grey kid shoes, and a tiny hat perched on the side of her head.
Nancy instantly saw the room, and her ailing mother and herself, as if through Bella’s wide eyes.
There were darker patches on the walls where someone else’s pictures had once hung. The lace curtains at the window were slightly torn. On a low table a tea tray was laid with forget-me-not patterned china. A chipped cake stand displayed a cake piled with strips of luridly green angelica and halved glacé cherries thumbed into a bed of butter icing coloured salmon pink. Bella’s gaze fixed on the cake.
Eliza said, ‘How do you do? I made it myself, you know. We don’t have a cook nowadays, of course.’
‘It looks beautiful. How do you do, Mrs Wix?’
Arthur embraced her. ‘Ma, dearest Ma.’
He hadn’t seen her for a month, and the endearment didn’t hide his shock at the sight of her. ‘Where is Pa? And Cornelius?’
Bella sat down at one end of the chaise longue.
‘What a … what a sweet house. How long have you lived here?’
Eliza’s arm swept in a jerky arc, almost hitting the teapot. ‘Not long. Too long, that is. I don’t know where my husband is, I’m afraid, at this moment. He is not a predictable person, except in his unpredictability. My son Cornelius will join us in a moment. Are you out this Season, Miss Bolton? You look very young.’
‘Please, won’t you call me Bella? I came out absolutely ages ago. I help out now with some of my mother’s work, raising funds for war disabled and so on. My sister was a VAD – there was a convalescent unit at our house in the country and I would have loved to do the same but I was still in the schoolroom. Maudie is married now, of course. Two little boys.’
Her chatter ran on, fluent and friendly, easing the atmosphere. Bella was like Arthur and possessed of the same skills. They were well matched. Nancy poured tea and sliced cake. Eliza was doing her best but she floundered.
‘My sister Faith lost her two sons.’
A line appeared in Bella’s smooth forehead. ‘I know. How sad for you all,’ she said gently.
Cornelius appeared and silently shook hands. The only place left for him was next to Bella, so he plumped himself down without looking at her, perching with his big earthy fingers splayed on his thighs. He accepted the cup and saucer Nancy gave him and the china rattled, betraying his anxiety, until he placed it on the floor next to his feet.
Arthur asked, ‘How is the garden, Con?’
‘It’s December,’ Cornelius answered patiently. ‘When are you going to Palestine, Arthur?’
‘Delicious cake,’ Bella murmured.
The front door slammed. Devil shouted, ‘Arthur? Where are you, my boy? Let’s have a look at you.’
He burst into the room, grey hair ruffled from the removal of his hat, waistcoat loosened and watch chain glinting, electric with energy, wreathed in smiles.
‘Eliza, forgive me. I am overcome with shame. Miss Bolton, delighted to meet you. Theatre people, you know, we are theatre people. There was mayhem in the flies and in the orchestra pit. A stagehand dropped one of the heavy mirrors and smashed it.’ He took Bella’s hands and kissed the knuckles. ‘The worst of accidents in our world. Did you know that? Superstitious nonsense, of course. You look very beautiful, if I am allowed to say such a thing. Arthur, I see you don’t spend all your time hiding tanks under haystacks. Excellent.’
‘Call me Bella, please.’ She smiled at him, a little uncertain but on the brink of being charmed. Devil’s children exchanged glances. He had been drinking but was not yet drunk.
‘What’s this? Tea? Doesn’t the occasion call for a cocktail, at the very least?’
‘Pa, no. Take this, won’t you?’
Nancy passed a cup and Devil took up a position on the hearthrug.
‘When may I welcome you to the Palmyra, Bella?’ He bowed, with more than a touch of the master of ceremonies.
Eliza stood up in a ripple of scarves. A line of bracelets clanked on her forearm and her head was held erect.
‘Cocktails. Yes.’
Before they could stop her she had darted from the room, bright as a bird of paradise. A second later there was a sharp scream and the thud of a tumbling body. Cornelius was the first to his feet, overturning his cup and sending tea splashing over Bella’s shoes. They found Eliza in a heap at the bottom of the short flight of stairs that led down to the kitchen. She was moaning in agony.
‘I forgot. I thought I was in the old house.’
Cornelius bent over her, authoritative while the rest of them hovered in dismay.
‘Where are you hurt, Ma? Here? Or here?’
‘Ankle.’
Bella stooped beside her and took a handkerchief from her bag. She tipped eau de cologne from a crystal phial and pressed the cloth to Eliza’s templ
es. Nancy was impressed.
‘It’s not broken,’ Cornelius said after a careful examination. ‘A nasty sprain, though. I’m going to lift you up. Ready?’
He hoisted Eliza easily in his arms and carried her back to the parlour. Arthur held one hand and Devil supported her while Nancy fetched a bandage and bound up her ankle. White to the lips, her pupils dilated, Eliza looked up at Bella at last.
‘What must you think of us?’
‘I think Arthur is lucky to have such an affectionate family.’
Arthur rewarded her with a smile so filled with love that Nancy had to look away. Envy of other people’s happiness was an unpleasant sensation. She tried to dispel it by re-arranging cups and offering more tea and cake.
The rest of the visit occupied a more conventional hour, in which Arthur and Bella and Nancy did most of the talking. Devil was clearly sobered by anxiety about Eliza. He watched her closely, his expression dark.
At the end Arthur said, ‘Bella, I think we should leave Ma to rest her leg now.’
Bella stroked her gloves over her small fingers and but-toned the cuffs.
‘May I call and see how you are recovering, Mrs Wix?’ she asked.
Eliza was growing agitated, but she nodded.
After the young couple had gone, Devil followed Nancy into the kitchen when she took out the tray.
‘What do you think of Miss Bolton?’
‘I like her,’ Nancy said unhesitatingly.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘So do I.’
There were raised voices in the parlour. When they hurried back they found Eliza struggling to rise from her chair and Cornelius doing his best to restrain her.
‘I must be able to walk,’ she hissed.
‘Ma, you have to keep your foot up to rest the sprain. You won’t be able to get about for a few days at the very least, maybe longer.’
‘He’s right,’ Nancy insisted, putting her hands on her mother’s shoulders and trying to make her sit down. Eliza writhed out of her grasp, surprising her with the sudden strength in her frail body.
‘I must walk.’
‘No,’ Devil said coldly. She turned to face him, catching her lower lip between her teeth like a guilty child.