by Rosie Thomas
‘I hope you’ll say yes to being her godmother, Nancy?’
The pigeonholing was no fault of Lizzie’s. Of course she would regard her cousin as the reliable spinster aunt, suitable for the role because of her availability even though not godly in person. In the same moment Nancy stood apart from herself, looking at the person she had been and might easily have remained.
She felt a surge of simple joy.
The filaments of life were branching and translucent buds of flesh were forming within her body just as they had done in Lizzie’s.
‘Of course I will. I promise I will take care of her.’
She kissed her goddaughter’s forehead and laid her in her mother’s arms. As she straightened she noticed Jake’s appraisal of her. She snatched up her champagne glass and the rim clattered faintly against her teeth.
Lizzie turned to him. ‘And you, Jake? Her godfather? Do say yes.’
‘It is the least appropriate choice you could make, but I’m flattered. Here’s a toast to Jennifer Faith Eliza. Health, love and happiness.’
They echoed the words and drank.
Lizzie was ready for talk but Nancy could barely put words together. The prospect of approaching motherhood had been an abstract notion until this moment. And then in a matter of seconds there were curled baby fingers and a crescent of eyelashes, and the scent of recent birth that was as strong as anything had been in the lost Uncanny. Yet this was a real smell, of blood and flesh, and it was as visceral as love itself.
Even Lizzie was looking oddly at her now.
‘Nance?’
She managed to laugh.
‘Yes, look at me, smitten by my new goddaughter. When will you two be able to go home to Raymond?’
Lizzie waved a hand.
‘In a few days I expect, as soon as the maternity nurse is ready to join us. I don’t in the least mind being here. I’m thoroughly comfortable, as you can see. Tommy hasn’t the slightest need of me nowadays and Jinny runs everything at Exotics with such frightful efficiency that I expect to be out of a job before Christmas. What news of the wedding?’
‘Cornelius mentioned the beginning of December. A very quiet affair, just family.’
‘I’ll have my figure back by then, thank God. Any other news?’
Jake had stood up and moved to look out of the window. He wasn’t very interested in conversations like this. Nancy glanced his way and then said, ‘It’s not exactly news, but there is something you could both help me with. Some advice.’
Jake turned at once and Lizzie sat up. She was wealthy in her friendships, Nancy thought, and that would count even more in the future. She took out the solicitor’s letter and smoothed the creases against the bedcover.
‘What do you think of this?’
She told them about Bloomsbury, her visit to the offices in the City and Gil’s offer of the leasehold. Jake picked up the letter and read it, then studied her again over the top.
Lizzie had learned about Gil only latterly and now she shrugged, ‘Well, I must say. He redeems himself a little.’
She had been scandalised to hear about Thelma Auger, which given Lizzie’s own history struck Nancy as comical.
Nancy said, ‘I am thinking that perhaps I should thank him and politely decline.’
Lizzie goggled.
‘You think what?’
‘It feels mercenary to me. You know, “Thanks for ten years. My fee is a ninety-year lease.” I’m not sure I want to be paid, mostly because that isn’t what happened. Our love affair came to an end and we are both sad, but Gil doesn’t owe me a thing.’
A wing of Lizzie’s hair fell prettily forward as she buried her face in her hands.
‘No,’ she murmured. Jake kept a straight face as she emerged again.
‘No, no and no. Listen to me, my girl. It’s not being paid off. It’s a generous gesture you thoroughly deserve. Gil Maitland can afford it, from what I hear. You will accept his offer, in fact you will snatch off his arm, or I shall never speak to you again. Jinny and your brother are getting married, they’ll be looking after Devil at Waterloo Street, which is as it should be, but you can’t live there with them. It’s hardly fair to Jinny, is it? What are you going to do? You haven’t even got a job.’
It wasn’t that Nancy hadn’t considered the matter. These days Cornelius wore the little house the way a snail wore its shell. She thought of how it would be if he had to leave his garden and the quiet run-down street, beyond which he rarely moved, even if it were only to live safely with Jinny somewhere close at hand.
With Jinny, who would be his wife. She blinked, still getting used to the idea.
Her friend had left the flat near Shaftesbury Avenue because it was too painful to live amongst the memories it contained. Lately she had been occupying one room deep in the warren of Soho.
For herself, Nancy had thought she might return to somewhere like her old whitewashed place near the actors’ church. Reflectively she smoothed the front of her skirt.
‘Jake?’ she asked.
He considered.
‘I wouldn’t go as far as Lizzie, because I’d miss you too much to be able to cut you off for life. Setting aside your natural pride, it is a generous offer and it might be churlish to refuse. Although I quite understand what you are feeling, and why.’
‘You think I should let Gil give me a home?’
Jake looked her up and down, and this time she saw the question in his eyes. She glanced hastily away.
‘I do, in the circumstances.’
‘Hallelujah. Sense from somebody,’ Lizzie cried.
Jennifer woke up and began to cry. Her lungs were powerful.
Nancy and Jake walked arm in arm towards the river and Waterloo Bridge. The streets were crowded with people making their way home from work. A scurrying boy with his nose in a comic slammed into Nancy and she almost fell.
‘Watch where you’re going,’ Jake angrily yelled after him.
‘I’m all right.’
‘Shall we get a taxi?’
‘No, thanks. Honestly, I’d like to walk.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Jake …’
He stopped to place his hands on her shoulders. This time Nancy looked straight back at him. The crowd parted and flooded on towards the station, turning them into an island in a human stream. A news vendor was shouting the headlines from his pitch and sun slanted over the buildings to gild the crawling buses.
‘Who is the father? Is it Gil? You don’t have to tell to me if you don’t want to,’ he added.
It was a relief.
‘Yes, Gil is the father. Of course I want to talk to you. No one else knows yet and I’m not sure how you guessed.’
‘I just looked at you.’
She nodded. He listened and watched, and then used the observations to clothe the characters he played. That was what Jake did, and there was no better judge of people. She let her forehead rest against his shoulder and he held her in his arms, cheek against her hair. They must look like two lovers, she thought, about to tear themselves apart on Waterloo Steps.
‘I am not going to tell Gil I am expecting his child,’ she said.
‘I see. There are things you can do, of course, to remedy your situation. Is it a matter of money?’
She pulled back and the sun flooded into her face. Even the dead eye seemed to see its brilliance.
‘For people like us it’s always a matter of money in some way, isn’t it? Only people like Gil and Lady Celia think money doesn’t matter. I’m going to have the baby, Jake, because I want it more than anything, and I am happy for it to be mine alone.’
Lawrence Feather briefly slid into her mind but she dismissed him, and all the memories. The dark past and the Uncanny all lay behind her now.
Jake sighed as he tried to angle her away from the un-ending stream of people. Whichever way they stepped they were jostled.
‘This is a ridiculous place to try to talk.’
‘Let’s walk t
hen.’
They linked arms and reached the bridge. Out here the sky was open and dust particles shimmered in the air. Sparrows perched on the ladder bars and globes of the street lamps, rising in twittering groups to circle over the water before descending again. At the midpoint of the bridge Nancy and Jake stopped walking, as if the equidistance from either bank lent them the privacy they were looking for. Tiers of windows glittered on either side, but out here the two of them seemed suspended in emptiness. They leaned on the coping to gaze into the foam-flecked water before Jake took her left hand and turned it palm down against the warm stone.
‘I know this is 1933, and you are a modern woman. However, what you envisage won’t be as easy as you imagine, for you or the child. Won’t you be needing a husband?’
Nancy began a laugh, but it caught in her throat.
Long ago at Whistlehalt Jake had told her that if she needed him he would be there.
‘Is that a proposal?’
Now it was Jake who laughed.
‘How would you receive it, if it was?’
‘What would Freddie say?’
‘I don’t suppose you will want to take on two husbands. But I am serious. The offer is there, Nancy. A nod to convention, a name for the child, a shell of security for you both. And a selfish advantage for me, of course. I am too old for it to be a matter of great concern, but the studio would be happy to see me equipped with a wife and baby.’
Their fingers interlaced.
Looking at him, Nancy saw as if for the first time his shrewd eyes and the twin vertical clefts between them, the light hair and the deprecating set of his mouth. She knew what it was to love a man, and that made her happy. She didn’t love Jake Jones in that way, and she wasn’t going to marry any man for his name alone.
There were so many different kinds of love.
‘That is the most generous offer anyone has ever made. Thank you, Jake.’
‘No, then?’
‘No,’ she whispered.
He kept hold of her hand.
‘Look at what’s happening in Germany, and in Russia. Another war is coming, Nancy, and the world will change all over again. You’ll need me and you will need your friends, and we shall all need each other.’
She couldn’t disagree with the prediction.
‘I will be here,’ she promised.
Jake kissed her knuckles and released her hand.
‘And I will be here. This is our pact.’
The light softened as the sun slid down behind them.
‘Shall we walk on?’ he asked. He would have to be at the theatre soon. His resemblance to Devil in this made her smile.
‘I think I’ll stay and watch the river.’
Jake kissed her cheek and no one would have mistaken them for lovers this time. She watched him go, walking quickly with his hat brim pulled low over his forehead, attracting no one’s attention.
When she could no longer pick him out she turned in a full circle.
Upriver to her right the burned-out shell of the Palmyra was hidden from her view by the great buildings on the Embankment. Beyond that she could see the white face of the clock of Big Ben and the spires and crenellations of Westminster, the sweep of olive-green water, and on the other side the blinding white slabs of the new building of a petroleum company. As she turned eastwards again she could feel the tug of the tide beneath her, drawing her with it as if she were floating on the water. To anchor herself she looked towards the dome of St Paul’s, set like a pearl in the ring of the City.
She had no idea of the future and for the moment felt no anxiety about it.
She belonged here, on the bridge over the river in the heart of London.
‘You and me,’ she said aloud to the baby, and a passer-by glanced at the woman with an eyepatch who was exclaiming to herself.
It was her good fortune, Nancy understood, that she belonged to a disreputable theatrical family like the Wixes. She could do what she liked with a reputation she didn’t possess.
She was free.
It came to her, like a gust of wind off the river, that Eliza would have thought the very same thing.
Be swept away by Devil and Eliza’s story in The Illusionists…
London 1885
As a turbulent and change-filled century draws to a close, there has never been a better time to alter your fortune. But for a beautiful young woman of limited means, Eliza’s choices appear to lie between the stifling domesticity of marriage or a downwards spiral to the streets – no matter how determined she is to forge her own path.
One night at a run-down theatre, she meets the charismatic Devil Wix – showman, master of illusion, fickle friend. Drawn into his circle, Eliza becomes the catalyst of change for his colleagues – a dwarf, an eccentric engineer and an artist – as well as Devil himself. And as Eliza embarks on a dangerous adventure, she must decide which path to choose, and how far she should go when she holds all their lives in her hands.
Click here to buy now
About the Author
Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including the bestselling The Kashmir Shawl. A keen adventurer, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton in South Georgia, and travelled in Ladakh and Kashmir. She lives in London.
Rosie can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RosieThomasAuthor where she’d love to hear from you.
Also by Rosie Thomas
Celebration
Follies
Sunrise
The White Dove
Strangers
Bad Girls, Good Women
A Woman of Our Times
All My Sins Remembered
Other People’s Marriages
A Simple Life
Every Woman Knows a Secret
Moon Island
White
The Potter’s House
If My Father Loved Me
Sun At Midnight
Iris and Ruby
Constance
Lovers and Newcomers
The Kashmir Shawl
The Illusionists
Daughter of the House
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