by Rosie Thomas
His movements were unpredictable these days. Some-times Devil stayed at the stables workshop until the small hours, tinkering with his latest illusion.
‘If we come tomorrow afternoon you won’t breathe a word beforehand?’
‘Cross my heart,’ Nancy promised.
The room was too cramped to encourage further lingering and the happy couple departed. As she said goodnight to the others Nancy became sharply aware of Lion, dressed in his invariable jersey and flannels, the collar of his shirt poking up from the neckline of the jersey. He was large and physically at ease with himself, impatient to be somewhere where the fun might start again, always agreeable but – she reflected – in his inner core, absolutely and implacably selfish.
An answering point of determination, hard and bright as a diamond, crystallised within her.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she told him.
‘Good show. Let’s get moving.’
Sylvia and Jake went in opposite directions and Lion and Nancy were alone. He tipped his head in the direction of the Strand.
‘It’s not far. We can easily walk.’
‘Lion,’ she began. ‘I don’t want to go to the party. I thought we might talk.’
He laughed. ‘Ah, it’s the engagement, isn’t it? I’m afraid there will be a flood of business between now and the wedding. Dresses and favours, honeymoon and hymns and attendants and bouquets, tra la.’
He saw Nancy’s face.
‘Wait a minute. You don’t mind about it, do you? Are you envious of Bella? It’s not you, Nancy darling, all that conventional frippery. You are far bolder and more original than she is.’
‘No, I’m not jealous of Bella.’
The night air was still and cold, tasting of acrid city dust. She linked her arm through Lion’s and he made no objection as she led the way up a spiral of dipping stone steps to Waterloo Bridge. They reached the central span and leaned on the granite coping to peer down into the water. The current swirled around the pillars, catching and re-flecting the lights from the bridge. Behind them two open carloads of rowdy young people roared past, reminding her of their early days of scavenger hunts and midnight excursions upriver to swim in the Thames at Maidenhead. Lion flicked a halfpenny in the air and watched it spin into the water.
‘Make a wish?’ he suggested. When she didn’t answer he said, ‘This is about Arthur and Bella’s wedding, isn’t it?’
She paused, but didn’t give herself time to change her mind.
‘No, it’s about you and me. I want to end it.’
‘I see.’ She saw surprise and displeasure darkening his face. ‘Why? We have a happy time, don’t we?’
‘We do. We have done ever since the bicycling weekend.’
‘What’s wrong, then?’ His hurt pride was turning to the sulks. She was disrupting his natural ease and self-satisfaction.
Nancy hesitated.
Happiness – or Lion’s superficial definition of it – wasn’t precisely what was at stake. Gil Maitland was both wrong and terrifyingly right, although she hadn’t seen or heard from him since the evening at Fifteen when he had advised her to consider matters in a cooler light. All she had learned from the intervening weeks was that she couldn’t begin to contemplate the future – any future, whether Gil was somehow to be part of it or not – without first setting the present straight. She had to break off from Lion, whatever else happened.
‘We’re good at now, most of the time. But what about when we get older?’
She kept any plaintive note out of her voice.
Lion scowled, ‘I haven’t the faintest. I am interested in now. The war was only a beginning, you know. There is far worse to come, in Russia and in Europe as well as here. Live for today, Nancy, that’s my motto.’
‘I know that. But I would like to think I might marry and have a child some day. I am twenty-six.’
Lion’s frowning profile and the curly mane of hair were outlined against the sky. He seemed to be intent on the flow of the river.
At length he shrugged.
‘I’m sorry. I never thought of marrying you.’
She had been a fool ever to hope otherwise. It was cruel of him to say it so baldly, but now she knew. She had to pinch her bottom lip between her teeth to hide the quivering.
‘I see. All right, then. We can still be friends, I hope?’
‘I’ll miss all the splendid fun we’ve had,’ he answered.
It was probably what was always said in these circumstances.
‘So will I.’
This was the truth. She might also come to miss Lion himself, but Gil Maitland filled her landscape so entirely that she couldn’t envisage where or how.
They walked up to the Strand as they had so often done before, and Nancy climbed aboard an eastbound bus without saying anything except goodbye. She looked back at Lion standing with his hands in his pockets. Briefly she let herself imagine that he felt sad, and was sorry to have let her go.
At home Nancy quickly wrote a letter to the City address, marked it ‘Personal’ and sealed it in an envelope, ready for the post.
In his reply Gil invited her to meet him at an address in a Bloomsbury square not far from Gower Street. If she was sure, and if it was convenient, he had written. If it was not, they could perhaps make a different arrangement.
Yes, it was quite convenient, she inwardly laughed as she scribbled the answer. She would find it convenient to swim the Atlantic or fly to the moon, if she was sure Gil would be waiting at the journey’s end.
On the doorstep, with her hand raised to the white ceramic button in the centre of a polished brass surround, she found her heart thumping and all her senses heightened in a way that was nothing to do with the Uncanny. She was on the brink of something momentous, and there would be no stepping back once the move was made. At the same time she recalled the steps up to the much bigger doors at Bruton Street, and the way Celia had reminded her of one of Cornelius’s butterflies pinned in a polished box.
Nancy squared her shoulders. Right and wrong, she was thinking. She was doing wrong, but all the pin-sharp impressions of the hour and the urgency of her senses cried right. She put her finger to the bell push.
Gil opened the door himself. Inside was an inner door that let them into a small windowless hallway tiled like a chessboard in black-and-white marble.
‘This way,’ he said.
As soon as the second door closed behind them Nancy had a sense of privacy and security. The walls were solid, and the ceiling overhead. No sounds of traffic penetrated from the square.
He took her by the hand and led her through the rooms. The drawing room was empty, and the view from the windows into the plane trees at the front was hidden behind closed blinds. Next to this room were a simple kitchen and a bath-room, and at the rear a bedroom opened through French doors into a secluded garden flooded with pale sunlight. A table and wrought-iron bench stood under the bare branches of a tree.
The rooms were minimally furnished and there was not a single ornament or personal possession to be seen. The space seemed almost insistently neutral, as if it had been scrutinised in advance and swept clean of any traces of previous occupation.
‘Whose flat is this?’ Nancy asked.
‘I bought it some years ago. It seems a shame that it’s never used.’
He lifted her hand and placed a set of keys in it.
‘It’s yours now.’
‘Mine?’
‘Why not? I never want to take you to a hotel. I can hardly bring you to Bruton Street, nor will you want to see me at Waterloo Street. This is a place to which you may safely invite me, if that’s your inclination. Those are the only keys, by the way.’
The dimple beneath his left eye appeared in advance of a smile.
‘But …’ Nancy protested. Her mind raced through the implications. ‘If you install me in a flat like this, it makes me your mistress.’
‘Is that a moral objection? Or is it the term itself you dislike?’
She began to laugh. ‘It’s rather old-fashioned, yes.’
‘You haven’t committed yourself. There’s still time to come up with another word or to change your mind altogether.’
‘I’m not going to do that.’
In a low voice he asked her, ‘So, would you care to be-come my mistress?’
She took a step towards him, and then another, until barely an inch of air separated their bodies.
She remembered the electricity that had passed between their hands, poised over the table at the Ritz. The current was so powerful now that it almost stunned her.
‘Lover is a better word,’ she said.
‘Lover, then.’
Gil Maitland was almost certainly practised in these mat-ters. He had probably practised them in this very room. Yet he said now in a rush, ‘I don’t care what we call it. Nancy Wix, I want you. I want you more than I have ever wanted anything in my life until this moment.’
She dismissed her final quiver of misgiving. Whatever had happened to them separately before this, all she cared about was now and the future. She knew that his longing for her matched hers for him, and that physical urgency was only the shell of it. She could hear his heart speaking.
His hand touched the small of her back, the lightest of touches. She submitted to its pressure as he guided her. He kissed her as he undid the buttons of her dress and slid the straps of her underclothes down her shoulders. She arched herself against him, the weave of his coat coarse against her skin. Every piece of her was thirsty for him.
‘May I?’ he murmured, as his lips moved over her skin.
Yes. Yes, and yes. Don’t ever stop.
She stroked his hair, finding it smooth after Lion’s matted curls.
His fingers explored her and she gave herself up to him.
‘Won’t you take your clothes off too?’ she murmured.
Obediently he removed links and undid buttons, until they were naked and facing each other.
The neutrality of the rooms lent the two of them a sort of equivalence. They could paint their own pictures on the walls, and furnish the shelves with happiness still to be created. Their faces moved closer until their mouths just touched.
‘Now,’ he said.
‘Now,’ she echoed.
Afterwards they lay for a long time in each other’s arms, listening to the sound of one another’s breathing. Nancy studied the intricate flecks of colour in his irises, the sheen of sweat at his temple, the taut skin where his razor had met the hairline. It was startling to be so easily and absolutely entwined with another human being. It was like finding that all the leaks and cracks in her awkward life had been quickly and deftly sealed.
Lion would have been laughing, propping himself on one elbow, talking unstoppably and coming up with ideas for what they might do with the rest of the day. Gil seemed content to lie and look at her, letting the moment extend for as long as they could remain in it.
Slowly, though, the angle of the light changed and the ordinary day gathered itself in the corners of the room. Nancy sat up, drawing her knees to her chest as she surveyed it. On the wall across from the bed was the place for her Dürer print.
She took a sharp inwards breath as reality descended.
She had just had the best physical experience of her life – better sex than she had ever imagined – but it had been with another woman’s husband. And here she was, planning the arrangement of her possessions in the rooms that hus-band had prepared for her.
Guilt spread its black wings.
And this is what you must live with, she told herself. Don’t forget for a moment what you are really doing. What you have done.
And then she made the silent vow. Don’t let any damage come about. Nobody must ever know about this day and – whatever happens – Celia must never, never find out. The guilty fervour set up a tremor of perverse pleasure. She and Gil were yoked now, by the need for secrecy as well as by passion.
For some reason her cousin Lizzie Shaw came into her head with a ripple of involuntary amusement.
‘What makes you smile?’ He reached up to outline her lips with his forefinger. ‘Don’t stop, by the way. I want to lie here and look at your mouth forever.’
‘I was thinking about my cousin. She says she adores sex, but she doesn’t like men.’
‘I hope you don’t feel the same?’
‘About men? I like you. I like you to an absolutely embarrassing degree. Didn’t you notice, when you bought me a half-pint of beer in Fleet Street and drove me home through the rain?’
‘Maybe a little. Myself, I felt quite thunderstruck. I wanted to boot Higgs out and drive off into the night with you. But what would a beautiful and unusual young woman – young suffragist, I beg your pardon – want with a dull old economist like me? I had to let you go. I wondered about you often enough after that night.’
He hesitated over the next question. ‘Nancy, what about your boyfriend?’
She leaned over him, looking into his eyes.
‘I told him that it was over. He was decent about it. I don’t think I broke his heart, in any case.’
‘I didn’t even have the right to ask. But I’m glad. I’m a jealous man.’
‘Gil, what about your wife?’
His eyes didn’t leave her face.
‘I married Celia. It is my responsibility to take care of her, and my promise was to love her. Both of those I will do, as far as I possibly can. I am her husband and that can’t and won’t change. But I will take care of you too, Nancy, if you will allow me to. And somehow our love will find its own level. Like mercury,’ he added.
She stared.
‘In a certain light, a puddle on the step at our old house used to look like mercury. I know because my father used it in one of his old illusions.’
Gil kissed her.
She added, ‘I can’t come to live here. I have responsibilities too. My father and brother need me at home.’
‘I understand. Then we can make a small secret world for ourselves in these rooms, can’t we? And live in our world when we are able?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. This was a lovely prospect. She hoped that she was not drawn to Gil Maitland because he could make difficult things appear so easy. Not just because he was powerful. Not just because he sealed the leaks within her and melted her bones. He deserved to be loved simply for who he was.
‘Excellent.’ He pulled her down to him. ‘Now I would like to make love to you again, please.’
It touched her that he made the request sound like a child asking for a treat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The day of the wedding came.
At Henbury church Nancy slipped down the aisle and unobtrusively took her place in the pew next to Devil. She would have loved to arrive at Arthur’s wedding on Gil’s arm, but she had already learned that relationships like theirs always stayed behind closed doors. They most definitely did not announce themselves before the eyes of an entire congregation. Arthur and Bella had invited Lion and he had waved to her as she came in. She felt Gil’s absence particularly because Lion was here.
The church bells rang down one by one, the organ voluntary ended and the congregation shuffled to its feet. In the porch the bride’s old nanny adjusted the train of the dress as General Sir Reginald Bolton held out his arm to his daughter. His bearing was upright even though his service history was heavy enough to weigh down a much younger man. Bella radiantly smiled through the folds of her great-grandmother’s Honiton lace veil. She had never looked lovelier, and she knew it.
The sidesman was the son of a family that had worked for the Boltons at Henbury Manor for generations. He signalled to the organist, a great chord broke the tense silence, and Bella and her father processed down the aisle to the music of Handel. The pews on the bride’s side of the church were packed with Bolton cousins and aunts and godparents and a few of the most important family retainers squeezed in at the back. The pews on the groom’s side held a less homog
eneous crowd.
At the chancel steps Arthur gazed ahead, as if he feared that a wrong move even at this last moment might jeopardise everything. Every fold and crease and ribbon of his dress uniform was perfect and the stained glass cast dapples of colour on his straight back. Standing beside him as his best man, Cornelius was buttoned into a morning coat that was inevitably too small. The waistcoat strained and his neck bulged over the stiff collar. He was sweating with nerves and his garden-roughened hands shook on the order of service.
Devil’s tailcoat and neatly parked topper made him look as if he had turned up for work and was about to go onstage. Enjoying the comedy as well as the triumph of their presence at this gathering of the upper classes he turned to Nancy, winked, and made a magician’s pass over the upturned hat. In the pew behind them Faith and Matthew were with Lizzie who was with Raymond Kane, and behind them rows of Arthur’s brother officers and army friends lined up with the more presentable of the Palmyra’s artists and stagehands. Sylvia Aynscoe had sewn an afternoon dress for herself and a rather more chic outfit for Nancy, every stitch of each as tiny and perfect as if she had been locking the couple’s future happiness into the bound seams. Jake Jones sat next to her, impeccably correct in his turnout too, to the extent that he had left Freddie behind. Jinny Main and Ann Gillespie were just behind them, next to Lion who seemed to know half the congregation and whispered scandalous versions of their histories and interrelationships to his companions.
‘Ah, how lovely,’ he murmured as Bella passed by and then leaned forward to wave to a girl seated on the opposite aisle.
Arthur dared to look over his shoulder. His bride in her lace and pearls came softly to his side and her small attendants spread her train over the chancel steps. There were no girl children on the groom’s side, so seven-year-old Tommy Hooper was a page. He stuck out his tongue at the smallest bridesmaid and the little girl turned her back on him so sharply that her ringlets bounced.
The rector of Henbury came to the chancel rail.
‘Dearly beloved,’ he began.
A mossy scent drifted from the arrangements of paper narcissi and early white roses – Lady Bolton wanted lilies and hothouse blooms, but Bella had held out for simpler flowers – to mingle with the smell of mothballs and eau de cologne that Nancy always associated with such occa-sions.