by Rosie Thomas
And plead his love suit to her gentle heart?’
The transformation in Celia was terrible for Nancy to see, because it was so immediate and so joyous.
Colour instantly warmed her white face and her eyes glittered with tears. She drew in a shivering breath, hardly daring to believe her ears at first, and then allowing the significance to sweep through her.
‘Is that what you heard? He said that? It’s Prince Hal, you know. King Henry. We performed that scene, almost the last thing we did together, before he left for France. Those lines come straight from his dear heart, I know that. He’s there. After all, after so long, I feel him close. It’s the most perfect message you could have brought me.’
This time the clasp of the hand was fervent and Nancy could feel that Celia was trembling.
‘Thank you, thank you so much. You are truly, truly gifted.’
In spite of her guilt Nancy was stung. Naturally Celia Maitland wouldn’t have thought that Nancy Wix might know the play, or any Shakespeare. Gil had chosen the message adroitly. Coming from a mere medium it was convincing and had it been planned it would have been suitable for the best of seances, worthy of Lawrence Feather himself. This chill knowledge filled Nancy with a deeper degree of dismay, of dislike for what she must do to earn her living, and of disgust with herself.
Gil attended to his wife. He drew her to him and she sobbed a little against his shoulder.
Over her head, his eyes urgently met Nancy’s. He signalled his love and need for her and the intimacy revealed in that single glance was almost shocking to Nancy. They depended on each other now. They were locked into a bond that absolutely excluded Gil’s wife and which seemed far more dangerous than mere adultery.
Gil murmured, ‘Celia? If you are ready I think I should take you home now.’
She nodded, and let her husband help her to her feet. The way he picked up her little velvet bag for her indicated that he knew exactly what it contained. Nancy saw that clearly too.
They each took one of Celia’s arms and they steered her gently between the tables. Heads were discreetly lowered now and no one stared at them.
The Bentley was at Bruton Street so a taxi was summoned. In answer to Gil’s polite question Nancy said that she would easily make her own way home. He shook her hand, a quick and urgent grasp, and helped his wife into the taxi. She stood alone on the kerb as they drove away.
Now she and Gil were more than illicit lovers. They were conspirators and the landscape was darker and wider.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
December 1931
As soon as she reached the flat Nancy lit a fire. She knelt on the hearth to put a match to a pyramid of coiled newspaper and kindling, then fed it with sticks until the flames leapt up. Once the fire was blazing she sat back on her heels and slowly warmed her fingers. The weather had been bitterly cold and her chilblains were troubling her again.
She found some red candles in a drawer and placed them in the silver candlesticks. She had picked a few tendrils of ivy in the square’s gardens and now she twisted these between the candlesticks on the mantelpiece. They looked festive amongst the ornaments and framed photographs.
Over the eight years the quiet rooms had acquired the patina of occupation. The shelves overflowed with books, there were well-tended plants on the sills and pairs of Gil’s spectacles lay unfolded on the arm of a chair and on the little bureau. She prepared a tray with some glasses and the whisky decanter and sat down to wait for him. He had already told her that he would have to return to Bruton Street for dinner because Celia was at home.
He came a little later than promised, driving his latest Bentley into the square and leaving it parked outside. It was not an unfamiliar sight there.
‘Darling, I’m so sorry. What a day.’
He kissed her on the bridge of her nose and she let her head briefly rest against his shoulder while she breathed in his good scents of starch and cologne and male skin. She resisted the urge to cling to him.
‘Drink?’
He made a face. ‘God, yes, please. I’ve been shopping. I can’t stand Christmas.’
His shopping would have included a well-chosen piece of jewellery for her, and although he was generous she thought in her heart how an extra hour or two with him would have been even more precious.
‘And I adore it.’
They smiled at each other, acknowledging the familiarity of their differences. Nancy would spend Christmas as always with her father and brother, and this year Jinny and Ann were to join them. Bella and Arthur would be at Henbury with their three boys and the Boltons. Gil would leave with Celia in the morning for a week with her parents. He was always humorous about the clockwork inevitability of church on Christmas morning with the lesson read by the Earl, the King’s speech, the Boxing Day shoot, but she suspected that he didn’t mind any of it all that much.
‘How is Celia?’
Their way of dealing with their old deception was to tiptoe around it. Celia was often mentioned, and Nancy knew about all the superficial social and domestic events of Gil’s life with her, but she was never properly discussed.
‘Not very well. But reasonably calm. When are you to see Jake?’
Nancy planned a pre-Christmas visit to Jake and Freddie. It would have been even more enjoyable if Gil could have come with her. Jake and Gil liked one another in spite of being different in every possible respect, and the particular limitations of Nancy and Gil’s relationship were accepted without comment in the way that all human permutations were accepted at Whistlehalt.
‘I wish you were coming. I think I’ll go tomorrow. Freddie’ll pick me up at the station, he said.’
They put their feet close to the fire and she told him about her week. There had been the usual crises to deal with at the Palmyra, and Devil grew more difficult with every year. These were the problems contained in one of her boxes, and in the other box the serenity of her half-life with Gil – idyllic except for its incompleteness – was unchanged.
This evening there wasn’t time for them to go to bed, even for an hour, although she longed to feel Gil’s arms around her as much as she wanted sex. They exchanged their Christmas presents instead. Nancy’s was a necklace with a sapphire pendant in the shape of a heart, a lovely jewel with a point of blue fire leaping in its centre. She thought it was a little hard and cold, and then felt guilty for her own ingratitude.
Much too soon it was time for him to go. It would be more than a week before they could hope to see or even speak to each other. He took her in his arms and she felt better at once because love seemed to flow out of him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, gently rocking her.
‘Don’t be.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you.’
After the door had closed she listened to the rich burble of the Bentley’s eight cylinders as Gil prepared to drive away. She thought absently of how Devil would admire the car and what a shame it was that he had never seen it.
Whistlehalt had always seemed to offer a sanctuary, al-though Nancy would have insisted that she had no need for such a thing.
She loved its isolated setting above the silvery curve of the river and the dense woodland that hid the house. A solitary walk before tea led her along paths snared with dead brambles and under canopies of leafless trees, and with the surface of her attention occupied by finding the way she let her deeper thoughts play over the business of the theatre and what needed to be done at Waterloo Street. Another year was coming, and the demands at the end of this particularly dismal one had never seemed more pressing.
Their Waterloo Street landlord was a rapacious man. In all the years they had occupied the little house he had done next to nothing to maintain his property. The slates were cracked and creeping loose and Nancy was tired of shuttling tin buckets placed to catch the drips. Draughts sliced between the damp bricks and the warped sash frames and Devil caught colds that descended to his chest until h
e was racked with coughing. But still the landlord insisted that they didn’t pay enough rent to allow him to toss pound notes, as he put it, at the decaying bricks and mortar.
When they confronted him directly he told Nancy and Cornelius that they should make him an offer for the house. He would be glad if they would only take the damned place off his hands he said, before naming an outrageous sum. When they refused he gave them a glare from under the greasy brim of the hat that he never took off. They returned home and rolled up strips of newspaper to stuff into the chinks of the windows, and tried not to hear the irregular ricochets of dripping water. Devil wore two waistcoats under his coat, which made him look like a vagrant. The boys from up the road hooted at him as he shuffled by. Depending on his mood, Devil would either lunge at them with his stick, shouting imprecations until they scattered in alarm, or produce a halfpenny from the ear of the smallest child and drop it into his hand. As a result they would approach him with wary greed every time he left the house.
Devil worried much less about the practicalities of life than either of his children. He inhabited a world of memories, most of them relating to his past glories.
‘I used to make ’em laugh’, he said. ‘And then scare them stiff, and send ’em out wondering and amazed.’
Chuckling, he would take out his handkerchief to wipe the corners of his streaming eyes. He still practised sleights and flexed his knobbly fingers in the least chilly corner of the kitchen, but he had long ago retired from the stage. Dreams of Ancient Egypt had been his last show. Whenever Nancy or Cornelius sighed too audibly over the theatre or domestic accounts he would thump his stick on the floor.
‘The Palmyra is mine, remember. The deeds are in the safe. Worth a fortune, that place is. Not that I’ll ever sell it.’
Nancy turned up the path that led towards Whistlehalt. Wet undergrowth slapped against her corduroy trousers and she dug the balls of her fists deeper into her pockets as she tackled the slope. The clean scents of mud and leaf decay and country rain lifted her out of the circle of anxiety.
Takings were down, but somehow the Palmyra survived. Her own shows still drew decent audiences, and the Society for Psychic Research had adopted the theatre for their demonstrations and public lectures. Jakey’s occasional one-man readings were an important mainstay because they always sold out, and for the rest of the time the stage was given over to a hybrid of music hall and magic variety acts. As the owner-manager Devil stubbornly clung to the traditions of the house and Desmond, who did the bookings and all the rest of the work, invariably supported him. It was Desmond who had booked Gracie Fields for a few nights, and although they couldn’t afford her any longer Nancy made sure that the star’s name always appeared in their publicity with her praise for the Palmyra quoted in bold type:
Nancy didn’t need Jinny or Ann to remind her that she was fortunate, at least compared with many. This year three thousand hunger marchers had converged on London, bearing a petition with a million signatures. The Depression was no longer a notion associated only with America and its stock market. It had taken shape, like a vast hooded crow, and it flapped over all of Europe as well as England. Only that morning Nancy had flicked through a magazine left behind by one of Jake’s guests and come across a cheerily inclusive article in which the writer spoke of ‘profiteers, dole-drawers, music-hall artistes – in fact the only people who have money today’.
She gave a hollow laugh before chucking the magazine at the wall.
A wicket led from the woods into the Whistlehalt garden. It was the still point of a winter afternoon, when the light had drained away but it was not yet fully dark. When Nancy glanced across the lawns to the golden squares of the house windows and afterwards looked down, she could no longer pick out the delicate thorny margins of the holly leaves. The bushes themselves stood out as dark clumps lining the paler gravel. She was approaching the house, thinking ahead to anchovy toast and the possibility of a slice of Dundee cake, when she noticed a car drawn up by the front door. She had been envisaging a cosy, shoes-off tea with Jake and Freddie and so the prospect of visitors wasn’t particularly pleasing, especially as there were several more people already expected for dinner.
She slipped round by the terrace, intending to take off her muddy boots outside the kitchen door. As she passed the drawing room she looked in and saw a grey-haired woman seated with her back to the French doors. She was moving on down a path that led between rhododendrons to the side entrance when something caught her eye, just before she stepped into the tunnel of evergreens. A small figure was standing motionless at the far side of the terrace, a child with long hair falling over a face as pale as the moon.
It was Feather’s soaking girl.
It was years since Nancy had last seen her.
She called in a low voice, ‘What do you want?’
The apparition turned on its heels and ran away over the pewter grass. Nancy stood staring after it. Lawrence Feather had sent the little creature back to her, she was certain of it. Fear crept through her at the thought of his return.
‘What do you want?’
Her voice quavered in the wet air. Nothing else stirred and her heart slowed to something like its normal rhythm. She continued on her way into the house.
Freddie was in the back kitchen, half-buried in the branches of a giant fir tree that he had dragged in from the back step. Needles strewn over the lino indicated the route he had taken.
‘Isn’t this a beauty?’ he called.
The house was full of its primitive forest scent.
‘It’s very big.’
‘I told them to send the biggest they had. Let’s go to town, I said to Jake. Christmas comes but once a year.’
‘Who’s the visitor?’
‘Oh, that’s Mrs Templeton. I came in here looking for tea, or preferably someone to make it, and found the delivery boy with this.’
No one had real servants any longer, except for people like the Maitlands. The hospitable tradition at Whistlehalt was nowadays supported by a series of migrants, young men who were theatrical or musical or still in the process of choosing which of the arts to adopt. Drawn into the circle that revolved around Jake, they were invariably eager to stay and pay for their keep with cooking or housework. Some were better at the work than others but the atmosphere of high culture and bohemian manners suited them all.
Freddie said that the pansy bowl, as he called the household, bloomed beautifully so long as Mrs Gubbins came up from the village every day to do the real slog. Nancy wasn’t even sure if this was her real name. She was a well-padded woman never seen without her wrap-around apron, except in the few seconds before she bundled herself into her overcoat and pedalled off down the drive. She pretended to be ignorant of the exact nature of her employers’ lives but she liked nothing better than stage-door gossip, and the jokes of the snake-hipped young men who called her Mrs G as they ran in and out of the kitchen. The current mainstay of these was a dancer called Guillaume who had had a career with the Ballets Russes. He was an excellent cook but he wasn’t good at clearing up. This afternoon the sink was full of pans and dishes and Guillaume was nowhere to be seen.
As she rolled up her sleeves a memory came back to Nancy of Devil leaning against this sink, on the morning after the first party of her adult life. There were fewer parties these days, even at Whistlehalt. Dorothy and Suzette and the others had stopped whirling, or else they had spun off the merry-go-round and disappeared altogether.
She told Freddie, ‘Go on. I’ll make the tea and bring it in.’
‘Darling, that would be angelic. Where do you think that lovely tub can be, the one pretending to be a squat little Grecian urn that we put the tree in last year?’
‘No idea. Does the Honourable Mrs Frances Templeton like anchovy toast?’
Freddie raised a plucked eyebrow. ‘I’d forgotten you know her. Of course, she’s a relation of Lion’s, isn’t she?’
‘An aunt. I met her even before I knew Lion, throug
h the suffragists.’
‘Lord,’ Freddie sighed. ‘I’m going on a hunt for the balls to hang on the tree. They’ll be wrapped in cotton wool somewhere.’
Nancy laid a butler’s tray with the best china and napkins, with dishes of anchovy paste and honey in the comb and farm butter, and made tea in the silver teapot. She swaddled the toast in a clean teacloth to keep it warm and hurried the whole lot through to the drawing room.
Jake leapt up, looking relieved to see her. He took the heavy tray while she unfolded the frame beside the fire. Logs blazed in the hearth.
‘You know my neighbour, Mrs Templeton, don’t you?’
The lady held out her hand, appraising Nancy as she did so.
‘Zenobia Wix?’ Her memory was formidable. ‘Are you still a Spiritualist?’
‘I never was one, really. I am just a stage medium.’
Mrs Templeton patted the seat beside her to indicate where Nancy was to sit.
She said, ‘I believe Mrs Bullock Dodd has sadly passed to the other side. Do you ever hear from her there?’
‘I’m afraid not. She probably has more interesting people to converse with.’
Mrs Templeton looked amused. She hadn’t in the end followed Lady Astor and successive women into Parliament, although she remained a pillar of the Liberal party and a campaigner for women’s rights. Nancy reflected that it was thanks to the efforts of women like Frances Templeton that even she had gained the vote.
She had used hers in support of Ramsay MacDonald.
Jake held up the silver teapot. ‘Frances, may I pour you some tea? We’re just talking about some odd people who have set up a camp in one of the fields, Nancy. It looks a thoroughly miserable place, but if that’s where they want to be I can’t see any harm in it.’
‘I am inclined to agree with you,’ Mrs Templeton said. ‘My husband has some reservations to do with precedents and property, but as a lawyer as well as the owner of the land it would be surprising if he did not. However, if you have no objections, Jake, I think we’ll let the poor creatures stay where they are for the time being.’