“Nothing much,” I said, truthfully. Because Sundays were always quiet days—depressing and indeterminably long.
“I wondered if you and your daughter might like to come to the Natural History Museum . . . It’s a great place for children.”
By that time, I had answered his questions, told him of my late husband, Henry, fallen at Gallipoli, and of my daughter, who had never known her father. My lies were to me necessary and consistent with what I had told others. We agreed early on not to talk about the war; agreed it was important to look forward, not back. Leo had been in an administrative position in the army and had not seen any active service, and I knew, could tell, that he was perhaps a little bitter about this. As for marriage, he’d simply never met the right girl, he said.
After our visit to the Natural History Museum, we went to Gunter’s for tea. The afternoon was a success. Lila liked Leo, and so did I. Our Sunday afternoon outing—a trip to a museum or gallery followed by tea—became an almost regular thing, and would no doubt have been more regular but for his elderly and frail mother, to whom he returned to Manchester to visit every other weekend.
Eventually, after one of our Sunday outings, I invited Leo back to the flat, which was strange—as I’d never had anyone back there before. The space, up until then uniquely feminine, seemed not only to shrink with a male presence but to appear browner and gloomier than ever. I saw it all through his eyes: the small sitting room with its gaslight hanging from the grimy ceiling, the tatty furnishings, impoverished curtains, and worn-out-linoleum-covered steps leading down to the windowless kitchen. All of it was drab, and though none of it was me, it was my life.
Leo was, I suppose, quite old-fashioned in his attitude toward our courtship, perhaps because there was the extra complication of a child, or because he simply wasn’t sure. Either way, it took some time for him to make the first move—which was in itself an old-fashioned gesture: to take my hand and kiss it. And yet I appreciated his genteel manner and slow pace, his consideration and the fact that, even after he had seen inside my colorless life, he still wished to kiss my hand. He was a gentleman, and he dressed like one, too: always immaculate in his suit, starched white collar and silk tie, homburg hat and camel hair overcoat. A dandy, the girls at work said, a regular dandy.
Of course he wasn’t like Ralph, not in any way at all. But I did not need or want a penniless bohemian, or another married man. If I was going to have someone in my life—potentially, a father for Lila—I wanted someone like Leo Holland: respectable, hardworking and yes, conventional. That he was older, middle-aged, did not bother me in the least. In fact, I thought his silvering hair and mustache very distinguished-looking, and after all, I was quite middle-aged myself. Yes, I was proud to walk out with him.
One Sunday, when he stayed later than usual, and after I’d put Lila to bed, he said, “One of the things I most admire about you, Pearl, is your dignity.”
I smiled. “That makes me sound old—and very unfashionable.” Because it sometimes seemed to me as though dignity went out with the war, as dated and revealing as a garment from another era. And yet I also knew—knew only too well—that it was a luxury to call anything old-fashioned.
“Not at all,” said Leo. “You’ve coped with adversity, tragedy—and you continue to hold your head high.”
“My late husband told me always to walk forward and walk tall,” I said.
And then I wondered if Leo would still think me dignified if he knew the truth. That the only Henry Gibson I had ever known had died long before the war, that I had never had any husband and that my daughter—like me—was the result of an illicit affair. No, I wasn’t dignified. Unlike my poor mother, I’d simply learned how to swim.
Initially, after I’d first left Birling, I had corresponded with Rodney Watts quite regularly. His son, Derek, was one of those missing in action. He’d never been found, but somehow—and for the life of me I don’t know how—Rodney clung to the hope that his son would one day turn up. I learned from Rodney that Ottoline had taken on a new maid called April, that the house in London had been sold and that Lord Hector had retired. And while Mrs. Lister remained in situ, other maids came and went like guests passing through the revolving door of a hotel.
Then, and in the way these things inevitably do, our correspondence became less frequent. And perhaps I made it so. That link with Birling was also a link with the past, and with Ralph, and in order to move forward, I knew I had to sever what came before—no matter how painful. And so Birling, its inhabitants, ancient routines and quiet customs, were like a dream—and sometimes like a nightmare, too, because my war had been spent there, and I associated that place only with death and grief.
That Christmas, the second after the end of the war, I received another card from Rodney, along with a letter, in which he told me that many of the rooms at Birling had been shut up and staff numbers reduced further. Ottoline was once again very fragile, but she and His Lordship were going away to France in the New Year, to pay homage to their sons. A holiday on the Continent would do Her Ladyship the power of good, he said.
Chapter Twenty
It was a few months after Rodney’s Christmas letter, and sometime in the early spring of 1920, when I saw her. She was sitting alone at a table in the staff dining room, her head bent over a magazine. At first I wasn’t sure. Her hair—once mousy—was now champagne colored and cut short, like mine; her face fuller, puffier. Then I saw the amber cigarette holder, a length of ash threatening to fall onto her open magazine.
I had only ever known her as “Parker,” but it wasn’t enough. So I said, “Scotland . . . Delnasay? . . . Summer ’fourteen?”
“Oh my word . . . Ottoline Campbell’s maid . . . You’ve changed a bit. It’s Pearl, isn’t it? Well I never. What on earth are you doing here?”
An inch of cigarette ash fell onto a black-and-white image of a voluptuous woman in a corset.
“Lingerie,” I said. “And you?”
“Ladies’ fashions—French Salon, of course—but only recently. I just moved over from Gamage’s . . . And it’s Amy, by the way. Amy Patrick. Please, sit down, join me.”
I sat down, she closed her magazine and we spent the next few minutes recalling the names of those who had been at Delnasay that summer—a grim roll call of who had died and who had survived.
“What about Mr. Cowper? Do you know what happened to him?” I asked.
Amy stubbed out her cigarette. “Awarded the Military Cross . . .but lost both of his legs, poor sod,” she added, wincing. “Living in a home in Putney the last I heard—with nurses round the clock, of course. Has to.” She reached over the table, placed her hand on mine: “And such a shock about the Campbells . . . Makes me feel sick to think about them,” she said, staring down at a gravy-smeared plate and shaking her head.
“Hugo and Billy?” I said, thinking we’d gone back to them.
“No, Ottoline and Hector.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, my dear . . . Well, it was a while ago now. The first I knew was when I read about it in the newspaper.” At that moment someone bumped past her. “Excuse me!” she called after them. “Really, I sometimes wonder what happened to good manners.” She rifled through her bag, and I waited as she put another cigarette into the holder and lit it. “It was an accident, a horrible accident . . . And somewhere in France as well, but no other cars involved, thank goodness. They had been on one of those tours. You know, one of those motoring tours of battle sites? Though why anyone would want to go on one of those is beyond me. Anyhow, I think it said they had visited the Somme.”
I nodded.
“It didn’t say so in the newspaper, but I happen to know it was Her Ladyship at the wheel.”
“How do you know this?”
“From Mrs. Parker. I see her quite ofte
n. She’s one of my best customers. Always liked the French fashions, you see . . . Impeccable taste.”
“What did she tell you, Amy?”
She took a long drag on her cigarette. “It’s all a bit of a mystery how it happened,” she said, her voice filled with smoke. “The weather was fine that day, and they had not long left their hotel, were heading to another, heading south, I think Mrs. Parker said . . . perhaps to the Riviera. Anyway, the car went off the road—must’ve skidded or something—and then plunged down a ravine into trees. Boom. Ottoline would have been killed instantly, Mrs. Parker said, because . . . well, her body was quite broken up. But Lord Hector . . . He was found some yards away from the car.”
“Going to get help . . .”
“Or thrown.”
I put my head in my hands.
“I’m so sorry. I thought you’d know.”
We went to the powder room. I stood with my back against a door, listening to Amy as she peed, smoked and spoke, then flushed, unlocked and turned on taps. “Yes, all very sad. Tragic, really . . . the whole lot of them gone.”
I opened the door. I said, “I don’t suppose you know what happened to Ottoline’s cousin . . . He was a painter—and also at Delnasay that summer. His name was Stedman . . . Ralph Stedman?”
She lowered her lipstick, stared at me in the mirror. “Was he the one from India—the captain mentioned in dispatches?”
I nodded. “Yes, India,” I said, moving nearer.
She ran a slick of red over her lips, pressed them together and pouted. And as she put the makeup away in her bag, she said, “He was on that list. You know the one I mean, the one from Geneva . . . the Red Cross list of dead. Mrs. P. saw it. She said it wasn’t as sad as some, because he was a bit older and had no children.”
I turned on a tap and stood staring at it.
“I’d better get going,” said Amy. “But let’s do lunch tomorrow. I always take mine at one thirty. What about you?”
“Yes. One thirty.”
As she made for the door, I called after her. “Amy, that list, the one from Geneva, is it an official thing . . . an official proof of death?”
“I should say. Unless you’re Jesus Christ and rise up again.” She laughed. “See you tomorrow.”
I spent the afternoon in a daze, staring at French lace but seeing only French roads and French mud, and, more abstractly still, wondering if this reality—my life—was all an illusion, and if I’d eventually wake up in another time. I don’t recall measuring or fitting anyone, and I don’t recall speaking to anyone, though I’m sure I did. Over and over I shook my head, as though that action alone could shake out Amy’s words, or dislodge a name on a list someone in Geneva had decided to call Dead. But I knew, and I think I had known for some time. Ralph was gone, and gone forever.
Later that day, I stood outside the staff entrance. Waiting in the drizzle without an umbrella, I felt strangely reconciled to Ralph’s death, but I still couldn’t grasp Ottoline’s violent end, and my mind was awash: I saw a car slam into a tree; saw Lord Hector come to and then turn to his love, his life, that fragile but all the same exciting girl he had married in another century. I saw him reach out to her shattered body and speak to her. Darling . . . Saw him struggle to open a crushed car door; tell her that he was going to get help.
“Sorry I’m late.” Leo held his newspaper above my damp hair. “One of these days I’m going to buy you a big umbrella,” he said, smiling. Then, “Oh dear, has something happened?”
And so I told him about Ottoline, or tried to.
He said, “Let’s go and have a drink.”
“It’s just a shock,” I said, sitting in the gloomy pub with a gin and orange in my hand.
“Of course.”
“You see, I haven’t heard from Rodney—Rodney Watts. He’s the butler. You remember, I told you about him?”
Leo looked back me, vague, but then nodded.
“I haven’t heard anything,” I said again. “And it happened some time ago.”
“Not everyone likes to deliver bad news, and I imagine he’s been very busy. There’ll have been the repatriation of the bodies to organize, a complicated process. And then the funeral arrangements . . . trustees and executors to deal with . . .”
“I missed the funeral,” I said, suddenly realizing.
“You didn’t know.”
“It would have been in the newspapers.”
“You don’t read them.”
Later, we caught the number 19. We sat at the front of the upper deck, and Leo held my hand. He said, “I’m seeing you home and that’s that.”
As soon as we arrived back at the flat, Myrtle said, “That man’s been again, Mrs. Gibson.”
“Oh, and which man is that?” I asked.
Lila pulled at my arm. “Mummy . . . Mummy . . .”
“You, missy, should be in bed.”
“The smart one,” said Myrtle, folding her arms beneath her bosom. “The one in the suit.”
“Yes, but which one?”
“I’ll put on the kettle,” said Leo.
“Mummy!”
“Lila, please don’t interrupt. You must wait until Mummy has finished speaking to Myrtle.”
“That one in the suit, the one I told you about . . . Says he has to speak to you in person, says he’s going to come back next week, on Thursday.”
“Well, that’s all right, then. Thursday’s your day off,” said Leo, coming into the room, picking up Lila and twirling her about in a way I knew would make it hard for me to settle her.
I wondered briefly who the man was. But quite often on my return from work Myrtle said the same thing: “A man has been, Mrs. Gibson.” And then offered the very same limited description: a man in a suit. It had happened before, would happen again, and whether milkman, grocer or gasman—what did it matter? The bills would be paid, eventually.
Myrtle left. I put Lila back to bed and read to her for a while, a very short while, for her eyes closed before I had finished a page. Then I sat for a few minutes, staring at her and thinking of Ralph. I’d tell her about him one day. I’d take her to Scotland, to Delnasay; show her the cottage, the river.
I returned to the sitting room, sat down next to Leo, and as we drank our tea, he said, “You mustn’t let it get you down. About Ottoline, I mean. I know you worked for her for a few years, but it’s not as though she was family—a blood relation.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. I said, “She was Lila’s godmother.”
“Yes, I know, and I understand that you and she were quite close for a time, but let’s be honest—what’s she ever done for you?”
I turned to him, was about to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. I couldn’t tell him.
He took hold of my hand. He said, “She was your employer—your employer, Pearl; that’s all. And you honored her by making her Lila’s godmother . . . But I think she let you down, and Lila, too. I mean, look—look around you. Can you imagine her here—in this room?”
I shook my head.
“No, exactly. She got far more out of you than you got from her. And now she’s gone and . . . well, sad as it is, that’s that.”
We made love there on the sofa. It was the first time since Ralph. And though it was quick and clumsy, it satiated something. Afterward, we sat side by side, disheveled, awkward, each of us staring at the burned-out fire. He said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t quite how I’d planned.”
No, and it wasn’t how I remembered.
The next day, I met Amy for lunch. I selected our table, a quiet spot tucked away in a corner, and I led her into the conversation. I needed her advice, and I knew she’d be open. I said, “Do you happen to know anything about how to stop babies?”
She looked back at me, wide-eyed.
I feigned a little laugh. I said, “Oh, not for me. I
have a friend who’s in a predicament . . .”
“Pregnant?”
“No, I don’t think so. Well, she hopes not, but she might be.”
“What’s her situation?” asked Amy, dunking bread into a bowl of glutinous soup.
“It’s a bit complicated . . .”
“It always is,” she said, without looking up at me. “Is she married? I’m guessing not.”
“No, she’s not married, but she’s seeing someone. Well, she’s been seeing him for a while, I think, but nothing had happened, you see . . . and then, just last night, or maybe the night before, they sort of . . .”
Amy looked up. “They had sex—and now she’s worried that she’s pregnant.”
“Exactly.”
“How old is she—this friend of yours?”
“Oh well, she’s about—”
“I mean, she should know if she’s likely to be pregnant—’cause there’s that safe time, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” I said, “when’s that?”
“Straight after your period, isn’t it? Lasts about a week or so.”
I tried not to smile.
“I don’t know what to advise if she’s pregnant . . . Will this chap marry her, do you think?”
I shrugged. Then I said, “I really don’t think she’s pregnant.”
“Well, she still needs to get herself sorted, get herself one of those Dutch caps.”
“Do you know where she’d be able to get one?”
Amy nodded. “I’ll give you the address.”
Chapter Twenty-one
It was around ten when the doorbell rang.
The Echo of Twilight Page 22