Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  There was the faintest shush of sound as a piece of paper landed on my desk atop the others.

  And then he was gone, without a pause, the outer door thumping closed, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined it. From the other direction, Casparov’s door closed as well.

  Helen kept typing, unmoved. But I stopped and stared at the folded slip of paper that sat accusingly before me. Like a villain in a stage melodrama, I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, feeling the damp perspiration there. I unfolded the note and read it.

  Will you meet me in Soho Square, at eight o’clock tonight?

  My mouth dropped open. It was madness, pure madness. I would think I’d imagined it, except for the fact that I held the note in my hand. I knew the man not at all; we had not exchanged a word. He could be a madman, luring me somewhere alone to murder me. He could be a Lothario, leaving notes for typists all over the city, then meeting them and despoiling them one by one. I did not know what this man was about, but one thing was certain: I would not go. I could not go.

  I tucked the note into the bodice of my dress and went back to typing.

  And that night I went home to my flat after work was finished. I took off my work dress—one of the three I owned—and put on the nicest dress in my wardrobe, a lavender wool with buttons up the front and a hemline that fell nearly to my ankles, as hemlines did in 1914. I brushed out my hair and repinned it in a different style, topped it with a modest hat, and put on stockings and shoes. Then I sat on the edge of my sorry bed, my hands in my lap, thinking.

  At seven thirty I put on my coat and belted it tightly at my waist. I put on my threadbare gloves. If Alex was a murderer, I found I didn’t much care. And if he was a despoiler, well—at least I’d be despoiled. I was nearly twenty, with no marriage prospects, and perhaps it was time.

  Perhaps, I mused, he’d change his mind. Perhaps he wouldn’t even be there. But he was, still in his leather coat and wool trousers, the hat pulled down on his head. He saw me immediately and watched me approach, his blue eyes missing nothing, giving nothing away.

  “You changed your hair,” he said when I drew close.

  I looked up at him. The sodden cold of April was numbing my cheeks and creeping down the neck of my coat, but he seemed unaffected. “I shouldn’t be here,” I said.

  He sighed, as if he knew I was right. “My name is Alex Manders,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “If you’re asking my name,” I replied, “it’s Jo Christopher.”

  One eyebrow rose inquisitively beneath the brim of the cap. “Jo?”

  I shrugged. “Joanna. Though I never use it.” I looked briefly around us, at the evening crowds passing us in the square. “Why am I here?” I asked, though I was unsure whether I asked it of him or of myself.

  He turned to face me directly for the first time, looking down at me. I caught the faint whiff of leather, and I knew with perfect certainty that the inside of his leather coat would be warmed by his body, the thought rocking me back on my heels. “You’re here because you’re being asked out to dinner,” he replied.

  “With you?” The words burst out of my mouth, incredulous. “Alone?”

  He hesitated for the briefest moment, but in that moment I had a glimmer of understanding. Despite his bluntness, he was not telling me; he was asking. The note he’d left me had been a question, not a command. He was asking, and a part of him thought I’d say no.

  “I realize I’ve gone about it the wrong way,” he said. “But I had no chance to speak with you. There’s an Italian place just across the square here, and I thought—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.”

  He smiled at that, and I found myself smiling back at him, something inside me melting like wax. He lifted his elbow to me.

  “Very well, Jo Christopher,” he said. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  He knew everything about everything. We talked about politics—I read the news every day, devouring Casparov’s many newspapers when I took my luncheon—and we talked about art, and we talked about novels. Without Mother to care for, I’d found myself with time alone for the first time in my life, and I’d spent my leisure hours in galleries, museums, and lending libraries. It was a wealth of riches, but I’d had no one to talk to about the things I’d seen.

  The Italian restaurant was small and intimate, with perhaps twenty tables, its light dim against the evening darkness of early spring. The food was delicious, and Alex ordered first one bottle of wine and then another. He knew exactly which wines to choose from the list, of course. He simply knew.

  In the absence of the cloth cap, his hair was light brown, burnished in the light, with perhaps a hint of russet—in the candlelight it was hard to tell. He wore it short, combed back from his forehead and his temples. Beneath the jacket he wore a white shirt, tailored perfectly to the lines of his body, the top button open at the throat and the cuffs rolled back to just above the wrists. It was incredibly, unthinkably casual; I had never in my life seen a man dress so. I could have devoured him whole.

  He had the same thought about me, I could tell. Even as he talked his gaze wandered my throat, my jaw, the line of my ear, the slope of my nose before he’d come back to his senses and look away. I was completely unused to such close attention, and it both embarrassed me and made my head spin.

  “You seem to be a very capable typist,” he said when the conversation turned personal.

  I took a sip of my wine, which rolled wonderfully past my tongue. “How would you know?” I asked.

  He frowned, caught out. “Well, there was a lot of . . . clacking.” He saw the amusement on my face and said, “Very well, then. You seem to be a rapid typist.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely. I was giddy with the wine and the good food and the tiny little restaurant; the evening seemed otherworldly, as if it belonged to someone else’s life. “And you seem to be a very capable . . .” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Layabout,” Alex Manders supplied. “I’ve just been traveling, and now I’m at loose ends.”

  It must be nice to be wealthy enough to be at loose ends, I thought, but I couldn’t help saying, “You don’t look particularly happy about it.”

  He shrugged, the movement graceful in the dim light. “I’m happy enough, I suppose. I’m twenty-two, and I have what I want.”

  The words hung in the air, crackling between us. They seemed to affect even him, because he dropped his gaze to his wineglass and ran a finger around the rim as I watched, hypnotized.

  “That must be nice,” I said softly.

  “Don’t you have what you want?” Alex asked, looking up at me again. “An independent woman in London, with a job and her own money, spending her time at museums and in intellectual pursuits. I think there are a lot of girls who would envy you.”

  I stared at him, caught between feeling aghast and breaking out in laughter. My life was hardly one any woman would envy. But he did not know about Mother, of course—that was why he had such an absurd impression of me. “It isn’t quite that simple,” I said.

  “Why not?” he asked me. “I want to know.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible to explain.”

  He took a drink of his own wine. “You don’t think I can understand, do you?” He gave me a half smile that made my toes curl beneath the table and shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we’re not meant to see eye to eye, you and I. Perhaps you’ll always be a mystery to me.”

  I had to laugh at that. “I’m not a mystery,” I said. “I’m just a typist. And of course there are things you don’t know about me. You’ve only known me an hour.”

  He did not answer that. Instead, his gaze drifted over me softly this time, taking in my features with an expression I could not read until it came to rest on the center notch of my collar, which rested demurely on my clavicle. I fel
t my skin flush. “We can talk about Serbia again, if you like,” he said.

  I cleared my throat. “We talked about Serbia enough, I think. And about arms races with Germany and your strange idea that there will be some kind of war.”

  He shrugged, his gaze still soft on my clavicle, as if it fascinated him. “It’s inevitable.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  Again he smiled a little, almost to himself. He was trying to impress me, I thought, with his worldly opinions. “Let’s talk about something else, then. There’s something that makes me curious.”

  “What is it?”

  Alex raised his gaze to me. His expression had eased a little, lost some of its dreamy seriousness. “How is it that you’re certain your fellow typist’s niece is actually her daughter?”

  It took me a moment to follow. I’d told him sometime during the first bottle of wine about Helen and her ruse, barely thinking about what I was saying in the rush of conversation, the pure pleasure of talking to him. But it had snagged in his mind, I could see now.

  “It’s simple,” I said. “Of course I know it.”

  “You’ve never spoken to her about it. Did she confess to you?”

  “God, no.” He still gave me a searching look, so I had to explain. “It’s not a new ruse, Alex.” I closed my mouth before I could elaborate that my own mother had introduced me as a niece more than once, when she introduced me to people at all. It nearly always worked.

  “Perhaps the girl’s parents truly did die,” he persisted. “Perhaps you’ve got entirely the wrong idea, and you’re slandering the lady in your mind unnecessarily. Do you think that’s possible?”

  I did not even hesitate. “No,” I replied. “Helen has sacrificed everything for that little girl. She has no friends, no family. She’ll never marry, because no man will want a single woman who already has a child, niece or not. She never goes anywhere, does anything, and she lives in terror of losing her job. That’s the kind of sacrifice you make for a daughter, not a niece.” I looked away from him for a moment, trying not to let on how closely I understood Helen’s life. “Helen must type or perish,” I explained, keeping my voice steady. “Like me. It’s why we get on as we do. No questions asked, no secrets told.”

  Still he watched me, his hand resting around the stem of his glass, the candlelight flickering on his face. There was gentle surprise in his expression, and an effortless intelligence that swiftly put the pieces together behind his eyes. Good breeding, I had thought when I’d first seen him. He didn’t seem wildly wealthy, and he certainly wasn’t titled, but Alex Manders came from a background that let him live at loose ends, that had no concept of type or perish. In his world, women had the money to do what they wanted; or they married and kept houses and children while their husbands cared for them, with no thought that to some women, that was good fortune such as they had never seen.

  But there was no judgment in that look. He saw me just as I was—all of me, clearly and in detail, without the preconceptions of class, despite his declaration that I was a mystery. I didn’t know how he had come by it, but he had the ability to observe, to understand, with the same stark clarity as a film camera. It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time, to truly be seen.

  I took a breath. “My mother,” I managed, and then I stopped. My cheeks heated, shame and anger and fear mixing in my veins in a brief flash under Alex Manders’s clear, unwavering gaze. “My mother is in an asylum for the insane. The nicest one I could find. The nicest one I could afford.” I let the words hang there between us for a moment, like smoke. I did not look at him. “She has been ill all my life, I think, though it has worsened over the years. She will never walk out of there. She will never get well.” I blinked hard, fighting everything I felt, always fighting. “That is the truth of it, Alex. The truth of me. I type or I perish.”

  His extraordinary eyes with their dark-ringed irises never left me. “And your father?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t know who he is,” I confessed. “I used to think that Mother kept the information from me, but now—now I think perhaps she doesn’t know. Her memories are . . . precarious. She remembers things that were never real. I think that perhaps, if she ever knew, that knowledge has gone.”

  There was a pause. “I am sorry,” he said at last, with a sincerity that made my breathing nearly stop. “I am so very, very sorry.”

  It wasn’t just sympathy in his voice. It was as if he knew. But of course he couldn’t know, not really. “Yes, well,” I said. I took a gulp of wine, trying to process the fact that he wasn’t putting the leather coat back on, putting the cap back on, and walking away. No one had ever said to me that they were sorry and meant it. The sensation was strange, like falling. “I have a question for you,” I said to him, deflecting the topic.

  “What is it?” He sipped from his own glass.

  “Are you an orphan?”

  He froze for a moment, the rim of the glass still against his lip, before he lowered the glass again. “How,” he said softly, “could you possibly know such a thing?”

  “I guessed,” I said, pleased despite myself that I’d guessed correctly. “You assumed that Helen’s girl really was an orphan. It was something in your tone when you asked.”

  He leaned back in his chair and regarded me. “I shall never attempt to hide anything from you,” he said. “There is no point. My parents died while on holiday without me in Turkey. The train they were on derailed in an accident. They were both killed instantly. I was seven.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. I meant it, but at the same time part of me eased and took a deep breath. He knew. He knew what it was like to be without parents, to fight and fight every day alone. Money didn’t matter here; anyone who has lost their parents, or never known them, knows that money doesn’t make it better. What matters is that horrible, yawning feeling of facing the world alone.

  “It was terrible,” Alex agreed, keeping a close shutter on his expression. “And it was unexpected. They left enough money to see me raised and through Oxford, at least. And they left no plan of where I’d go, so I was passed from relative to relative for a time. I spent three years in Germany with my paternal grandparents.”

  Yes, now that he said it I thought I could see German ancestry in him. “So you speak the language, then?”

  “Fluently, and French as well. It’s my second home, Germany. But I came back to England for Oxford. And when I finished there, I traveled about for a time.” He smiled. “And now you see me, an aimless fellow with a great deal of education and not much to do.”

  I looked at him, and the yearning in me was painful, like a sickness. The strong line of his wrist against the table, the careless glint of his wristwatch in the light, the line of his chin, the shadow of his Adam’s apple on his throat, the soft rise and fall of his chest beneath the white shirt—all of it had infected me like a plague. “I am glad I see you,” I managed.

  He took one look at my eyes and pushed his chair back, fishing urgently in his pockets for money to pay the bill. “Let’s go.”

  We walked for a time in the April night, our shoes splashing through thin puddles on the London streets, my gloved hand on the arm of his coat. I have no memory of what we talked about—serious things, things that made us laugh. He flirted outrageously with me, and I flirted back. He kissed me on a street corner somewhere, his hands in their leather gloves cradling my face, his lips warm on mine. It was a curious feeling—the leather so impersonal on my skin, as if I had a stranger’s hands on me. But his kiss was passionate, his intent unmistakable, and when I leaned into him, my own hands grasping for purchase on the front of his coat, he broke the kiss, hailed a taxi, and put me into it.

  He had an apartment somewhere off Chalcot Road, near Regent’s Park, in a building that was respectable without being ostentatious. It was dark, tidy, nearly unused, with a front hall, a kitchen, a small p
arlor on the ground floor, and a flight of stairs leading upward. We toured none of it. By the time he got us through the door, I was dropping my coat and had started frantically unbuttoning my dress, and he was undressing nearly as fast. In the front hall, he kissed me until we were both panting. On the stairs, he debauched me. And in the bedroom—we barely made it past the doorway—he had me for the first time, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  We stopped bothering with niceties. Your body is made for mine, he said somewhere during that long, long night, and I could only clutch him harder and agree. I had never thought such a thing could be possible. But from the moment he’d walked past my desk, Alex Manders had entered my life and burned all of it down in a single night, as if with the flick of a match. And I gave in willingly and watched it go.

  It wasn’t until much later that I thought to wonder why he had been in Casparov’s office that day and what exactly Casparov had thanked him for.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I behaved unconscionably, of course, that night with Alex. Unforgivably. Stupidly. All a girl had in life was her respectability, and I had thrown mine away.

  I bathed as well as I could while Alex slept the next morning, and then I put my lavender wool dress back on and went to work at Casparov’s office. I had cleaned myself up, so I did not look exactly like I had just engaged in an illicit night of passion, but the dress was too fine for workaday wear. Helen barely looked at me, but Casparov noticed; he seemed to suspect that I was dressing to impress him, and when I sat down to start work he paid me an effusive compliment, badly translated from Russian. He did not touch me, for which I was glad. If he had touched me, I thought I might have screamed.

  I kept my face impassive and sorted through the day’s pile of notes. Then, my mind scheming furiously behind my calm features, I began to type.

  Pursuant to the previous matter, it is my understanding that the letter of 20 March outlined all ramifications, with the exceptions already noted in the previous Contract (32-C) clause 7B, subsection D, as well as ramifications previously discussed . . .