by Rosie Thomas
The Shaws were setting off. Faith quietly wept into her handkerchief so Lizzie steered her into the back of her car and bundled the disgraced Tommy in beside her.
‘Look after your granny until I’m ready,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t you dare make any more mischief.’
Faith sniffed.
‘He’s no trouble, really. Are you, Tom?’
Matthew was telling everyone how the General had thanked him for Rowland and Edwin’s sacrifice.
‘I said to him, how proud I am of my sons. Faith sees it a different way. I suppose she’s taking on now because we won’t have a day like this one for either of our boys, and of course Lizzie’s occasion was a wartime event. But we’ve seen Arthur wed, and that’s a great pleasure. If only Eliza had been here with us, eh, Devil?’
He clasped the hand of his brother-in-law and Devil patted him on the back. It was a rare display of affection between the two men.
The charabanc Devil had arranged to transport the Palmyra contingent was also ready, with Sylvia Aynscoe perched up at the front. There would be a sing-song, and they would stop somewhere along the road for beer and sandwiches. Devil said wistfully that he wished he could go with them.
Raymond Kane took the opportunity to give Nancy a very thorough embrace.
‘What a family,’ he said ambiguously, before jumping into his open tourer.
It was already dark beneath the copper beech trees bordering the lawns and the church tower at the end of the avenue was outlined against a deep purple sky. Through the windows of the house the hired staff could be glimpsed stacking glasses and dismantling tables. The Wixes went to find General and Lady Bolton.
The General shook hands with Devil and Cornelius, and he kissed Nancy’s hand in a courtly way that touched her.
‘God bless our children,’ he said to Devil.
‘I think it went off quite well, all things considered,’ Lady Bolton added. ‘Please don’t concern yourselves any more about the floral arrangement. I’m sure the boy understands and regrets what he did.’
As they motored away from Henbury Devil wondered, ‘Do you think the old chap would have liked to drink a quiet glass with us, Con? After all the clergymen and maiden aunts had taken themselves off?’
‘She would never have allowed it,’ Nancy said.
With two hands Cornelius outlined a monstrous brim and imposing crown.
Devil sighed. ‘What do you expect from a woman who wears a hat exactly like a coal scuttle?’
When they reached London Nancy said she thought she would drop in on Jinny and Ann and talk over the day with them. Devil set her down at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and she walked quickly across New Oxford Street and up into Bloomsbury, to Gil and whatever lay ahead of them. The plane trees in the square were leafed in fresh green.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They were to share so many similar evenings over the years, but whenever Nancy thought over her life with Gil it was the evening of Arthur and Bella’s wedding day that came back to her. Perhaps because it glowed with the happiness of the day, or perhaps for the way its intimacy contrasted with the clamour of the party, or perhaps it stayed with her because it was the first time she lied about her whereabouts to Devil and Cornelius.
It was also the first time Gil told her that he loved her.
She let herself into the Bloomsbury flat and its muffled seclusion closed around her. She had time to set out cutlery and glasses and lay a simple meal before Gil knocked at the door. He took her by the hand and kissed her, and she didn’t mind that he hadn’t been at Henbury or that he had never met any of the people who had shared the joyful day.
‘Tell me all about it. I want to hear every single detail.’
‘It was a perfect wedding.’
He took off his coat and sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, in the place that had already become his. Nancy had lit a pair of plain candles and their two minutely superimposed shadows lengthened on the wall behind him. After she had finished the stories of the day and they had laughed about Devil and the country ladies and Lady Bolton’s coal-scuttle hat and Tommy’s act of sabotage, he stood and drew her to her feet. He cradled her head against his shoulder, in the place where the double thump of his heart was amplified by his ribcage.
‘Nancy, may I say something?’
The thudding of her heart matched his.
‘Yes, always.’
‘I want you always to remember that you deserve a better man than me, and you deserve far more from life than I am able to offer you. Wasn’t there any young officer who took your eye at Henbury Manor?’
He was only partly joking. She thought he did perhaps fear losing her, incredible though it seemed.
‘Such as Harry Bolton? No,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine me as a colonel’s lady?’
‘Perhaps not, but as a banker’s wife? An actor’s? A doctor’s?’
She noticed that he only cited the professions.
‘I don’t think so. Do I have to be anyone’s wife? Can’t I just be myself?’
‘Nancy, you don’t know what you’re saying. You are an exceptional creature. Even if it didn’t happen that first night in Fleet Street, or when I saw you through the crowd at that abysmal party, I certainly fell half in love with you in your dressing room, you in your red wrap with your lovely bare feet up on the fender and your little dresser frowning at me. Plenty of more suitable men will feel the same and want to care for you. I’m no more than an adulterous husband and a liar.’
‘I don’t care about that. I am a liar too.’
Gil put a finger to her mouth.
‘Hush. I am sorry my situation is what it is and to have put you in this position. If it’s worth hearing in spite of my failings, I want to tell you that I love you.’
Her heartbeat was a quicker counterpoint to his.
‘To hear you say it is enough. I’m not a child, or incapable of making my own choices. You gave me the opportunity to pull back, didn’t you? I didn’t do it and I’ve never had any doubt that this is what I want. I love you too.’
In that moment they seemed to know and understand each other perfectly and to look for nothing more.
Gil led her back to her chair. He poured two glasses of muscat to accompany the slice of wedding cake she had brought for him and sat down to regard her through the candlelight.
‘Celia tells me that she plans to take a cure at a medical centre in Switzerland this summer. It’s on her latest doctor’s advice. She will travel with her mother and a cousin, and they will be away for perhaps as long as a month.’
‘Does that mean you’ll be mine to do what I want with, for all that time?’
He nodded and she saw the dimple at closer quarters, as when they lay in bed together.
‘I will be yours. But a man has to do business. I must visit some of our manufacturing partners near Paris, and after that perhaps take the opportunity to look up an old friend. He is a diplomat, at present based in Rome. Would you like to come with me, Nancy?’
As recently as yesterday she would have said no. She had the Palmyra to think of, and her booked seances, and Devil and Cornelius and the never-ending drain of Waterloo Street. Today her responsibilities were exactly the same but the wedding seemed to have lightened them. She didn’t hesitate.
‘I would adore to come with you. Will I be your secretary? Your personal cook, perhaps?’
He laughed at that. ‘Of course not. You travel as my friend, Nancy. It won’t be until the summer but with your permission I’ll put the arrangements in hand.’
She felt slightly dazed. ‘How wonderful. But you know, I’d be just as happy to stay here.’
They looked round at the simple room.
Gil said, ‘Me too. Should we go to bed now, do you think?’
When the time came, Nancy told Devil that she was taking a holiday. The Palmyra was closing for a month in any case, while Devil prepared a show called Dreams of Ancient Egypt to showcase his long-awaited illusion.
‘A holiday? For a month? What an idea. With whom, may I ask?’
‘With a friend.’
Devil glowered. ‘Is this the same “friend” who seems to take up half your life nowadays, as if your brothers and I have ceased to exist?’
Nancy had already stopped making up stories about where she was going and with whom. The complications only multiplied and tripped her up until she felt mired in deceit. She explained that she had met a man she cared for and whose circumstances were not straightforward. He made her happy, she added, and if that was enough for her it should also be enough for her family and friends. She refused absolutely to be drawn any further, and her brothers and Jinny and the others accepted her decision and left her in peace. It was only Devil who made any real difficulties.
‘Who is this person? I demand to know. I’ll give him a horsewhipping.’
‘Pa, you haven’t got a horsewhip. Do you mean that thing you cracked to set the balls spinning in the old show opener?’
‘Be careful. You’re not too old to be put over my knee, my girl.’
She circled his shoulders with her arm. Devil seemed frail these days, for all his noise and bluster.
‘I am, actually. Don’t make me want to leave you and Neelie and this house, just so I can live my own life.’
Devil buckled at once. He shut his eyes and pressed his head against her arm.
‘Don’t do that, Zenobia. Please don’t.’
She kissed the top of his head.
‘I won’t. Just let me be.’
In this way her life came to be lived in separate compartments. In one box she kept her family and the Palmyra, and Jinny and Ann and Jake and all her friends; and in the other was the Bloomsbury flat with the newly installed telephone that she willed to ring, and there was waiting for Gil to come, and sometimes there was Gil – which made up for everything.
Nancy had never been abroad. They took the boat train from Victoria and embarked on the Channel ferry at Dover. She insisted that Gil come up with her on deck to watch England sliding away behind the churning wake.
‘Look, Gil. Look at the white cliffs.’
‘Very picturesque, darling. Almost as appealing as the tables laid for lunch in the dining room.’
She leaned in to him, loving the salt wind in her face. She didn’t even think of the Queen Mab.
‘All right. Let’s have lunch. My first ever meal outside England.’
Gil travelled efficiently, but with every comfort. There were always first-class tickets and porters flocking for the luggage and bowing managers showing the way to the best suites. Nancy was shocked by the extravagance, to the point that the collision between his profligacy and her parsimony became a joke between them. Yet such luxury was alluring when he laid it before her. She didn’t think even Ann Gillespie would have turned her back on it.
At the Paris hotel Gil immediately established himself at the desk in their suite. She was intrigued to overhear him making telephone calls and issuing terse directions to contractors and engineers. On their second morning a sheaf of letters was delivered for his signature from the hotel’s commercial bureau and he frowned over the typing errors. Nancy looked over his shoulder.
‘I could do better than that.’
‘Can you?’
‘Just don’t ask me to take shorthand dictation.’
A typewriter was carried into the room and she sat down at the corner of the desk. Gil was impressed that she knew some French, and her years in the print and the secretarial course Lizzie had paid for stood her in good stead now.
He raised an eyebrow when she handed him the finished work.
‘I may reconsider what I said about you being my secretary,’ he said.
She was amused by the strangeness of life. Here she was, exactly as Eliza had wished, a personal assistant to a businessman. She was also the businessman’s mistress – undoubtedly she was – which fell more into Lizzie’s area of expertise.
‘What are you laughing at, Miss Wix?’
‘Time. Destiny. That sort of thing.’
‘Eh? Please explain yourself properly over dinner. I have to go out now for my meeting with Monsieur Emanuel of Matériels Duchamp.’
When Gil was occupied Nancy strolled out to the Champs-Élysées and admired the elegant shops and fashionably dressed women, or lingered over coffee at one of the mirrored cafés. She walked in the Tuileries and explored the cobbled avenues that bordered the Seine, and even found her way as far as Notre Dame. One afternoon Gil took her to the Louvre and introduced her to his favourite pictures, another night they went to the opera to hear Don Giovanni. In a succession of shimmering restaurants she ate delicate quenelles of pike in a silky cream sauce, or sampled cuisses de grenouilles or sole bonne femme or crêpes Suzette. She was startled on the last evening when Gil abruptly took away her fork and squeezed her hands in his until the bones almost cracked.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured, with an odd light in his face.
‘For what?’
‘For your splendid appetites and your energy and for taking so much pleasure in life.’
He pushed his plate away and lit one of his black-and-gold cigarettes. Gil rarely spoke about Celia and he had never uttered a word of criticism, but Nancy understood from his words that Celia did not have the same traits.
‘I have never enjoyed anyone’s company so much,’ he told her.
Nancy glowed. She loved to think that he was finding equivalent pleasure in what felt like pure magic to her.
That night, after they had made love, she lay curled amongst the piles of pillows and gazed at the shadows of gilt furniture and swirls of rococo plasterwork. The heaviness and grime and uproar of London, and the drudgery and plodding routines of her own life – even the queasy swell of the Uncanny – had been consigned to another universe. She listened to Gil’s breathing. He was contained and quiet in sleep, unlike Lion who had thrashed and muttered and snored. She moved her hand stealthily under the starched sheet and let it rest on his warm flank.
In the morning they drank coffee in bed as Gil frowned over the foreign financial news.
‘I think I am in heaven. I adore Paris,’ she sighed. ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’
He folded a broadsheet page.
‘Ah, wait until you see Rome.’
She felt apprehensive about it. In Paris they had been anonymous in the opulent and discreet cocoon of their hotel, whereas in Rome they were to be guests in the apartment of Gil’s diplomat friend.
When they arrived after the long train journey it was blindingly hot and Nancy did not have the right lightweight clothes. She sweated and itched while Gil was cool in a linen suit and a panama hat. She thought irritably, Well. This is where the differences between us will really start to show. I am a badly dressed girl from the lower classes, I don’t know a word of Italian and I haven’t a clue how to make diplomatic small talk. How will he deal with that, I wonder? She stared gloomily out of the taxi window as they whirled past fountains and through dazzling baroque squares.
Francis Lowell’s apartment was huge, with high arched ceilings and cool marble floors. She was shown to a bedroom with faded lemon-coloured shutters folded against the blinding sunlight. The walls were painted with a frieze of cheeky putti. In the pier glass in the little dressing room she caught sight of her red-faced reflection and stuck her tongue out at it. Beyond the dressing room she discovered a tiny bathroom furnished with a sit-bath and a bidet. She ran water into the bidet and defiantly soaked her feet.
Gil’s bedroom was discreetly nearby and his head soon appeared round her door.
‘Are you ready to come and meet everyone?’
‘No. Look at me.’
‘I’m always eager to look at you. Any particular bit?’
She was almost in tears. He didn’t understand what it was like to feel out of one’s depth.
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‘Gil, what am I to wear? What am I to say to your friends?’
‘Why? My friends will love you. It’s not like you to be in a funk, Nancy. I’ve seen you onstage, remember, holding two hundred people captive with ten words. And you are dressed perfectly, by the way.’
He held out his arm, and after a moment she took it.
He wouldn’t have brought her here if he didn’t think she could survive.
They emerged on to a shaded terrace lined with lemon trees in huge terracotta pots. Nancy glimpsed basket chairs with white cushions, a gramophone on a side table, and a number of willowy young people drinking cocktails. A man detached himself from the group and came towards them.
‘Here you are. Was the journey frightful? Gil, my dear, what a pleasure to see you.’
Francis had greying hair and crinkly eyes and he wore a cornflower in the buttonhole of his beautiful jacket. When Gil introduced her he took Nancy’s hand and kissed it.
‘Che bella,’ Francis murmured.
He drew her into the nearest group. The guests were a mixture of English and Italians, most of them young men. They all wore un-English clothes in shades like lavender and primrose, and the talk immediately switched out of Italian into English to include her. Francis Lowell spoke Italian perfectly, and Gil had told her his German and French were just as good. He was attached to the embassy in some cultural capacity although his role was not to be discussed in any detail. The two men could not have been more unlike, but the same vagueness surrounding her brother’s precise occupation brought Arthur to mind.
‘What a divine bag that is,’ one of the chic women said to her. ‘Don’t let it out of your sight or I shall steal it.’
The bag was made of golden straw in the shape of a fish. Nancy had bought it on a whim in an antiques market on the Left Bank, so she told them how she had had to haggle for it in her abysmal French and had confused poisson with poussin. Everyone laughed, and at the edge of the group she saw Gil watching her and smiling.