Park Lane

by Frances Osborne

  It’s so long since she’s written that she scarce knows how to move her hand across the page, and what’ll Michael make of a scrawl like that. Still, she’s no paper to spare, for she has to write twice. One to the old lodgings, just in case. One to the service address – there’s a hope they’ll find him. She’s not thinking about where else he might be.

  She writes to come and find her, that she’s been trapped here, not able to send a letter out before, and she needs him to look after her now. We’ll be a family, she writes. That’s not telling him so much he won’t come, she thinks, but he won’t be able to say that she lied to him.

  Next morning she’s out the far end of the field and down to the road to catch the postman as he passes. She stands in the middle of the road and waves him down like there’s an accident around the corner. He has to pull the horse up so sharp that its hooves are near on Grace’s chest.

  She’s still enough of a smile on her to get a nod and wink back. And a promise not to tell the Blunts, as it’s for a surprise, and who would want to ruin it? As the cart rattles off, Grace sends a prayer with it. Please God, she begs, if you’ll still listen to me, send me Michael. Then you can do what you want with me.

  26

  IT’S EVEN RAINING INSIDE, THINKS BEA. THE restaurant’s windows have steamed up, and small droplets are beginning to run down the panes, streaking the view of Piccadilly. She looks back across the table at Bill Fitzroy, all pale brown hair and reasonable, well, quite attractive, blue eyes fixed on her intently. A little too intently. She should perhaps not have kissed him ten days ago.

  Last week, last week she was liable to kissing. The day after Mother’s funeral, she drove the Calcott to Pimlico, her stomach turning with embarrassment and excitement and a heave of memories, not all of which she wished she had. The house looked as grey on the outside as she’d remembered it being inside. The door was answered by a short, wide-shouldered woman with dyed black hair piled up into a bun on the top of her head. Below, the skin on her face sagged from wartime rations. The woman looked her up and down. Mr Campbell, she said, dear, you’re not his sister, are you? He only left word for her, didn’t mention anybody else. He’s one of the ones that hasn’t been back for over a year, dear. Bea’s head whirred, of all the things she’d been steeling herself for, this had not been one, the dread of him no longer wanting her drowning out that possibility.

  She took the tea offered. Don’t be silly, she told herself, of course he isn’t dead. To her, though, he was perhaps as good as, for he had not even thought that she might have wanted to find him.

  A couple of days later, her head still spinning, and fired up by half a bottle of champagne, she had, extremely willingly, kissed Bill Fitzroy.

  Since then there have been two bunches of flowers and three calls. The first two calls, mercifully, she was out. On the third, she’d been running downstairs, practically buttoning her coat as late as ever. This time for the family solicitor, for Bea has been left to supervise the sinking of the ship. Clemmie has retreated to Gowden and the half-baked Tom, Edie’s little Archie scooped up under her arm. I wanted another, she said, and I don’t think I’ll be getting one out of Tom. Thus Bea has been left to pack away the world they grew up in.

  What then? VAD nursing will trickle on for a while, for the wounded don’t recover the moment the bells ring. However, it will end soon and Lauderdale Mansions has been empty since the war began. Now there’s the vote at thirty, Emmeline has retreated. The Women’s Party in the election last year was such a damp squib that she, Mrs Pankhurst that is, is going to lecture abroad. This Celeste despises. ‘Damn fickle woman, should have spotted it a mile off. Come on, Beatrice, are you really going to wait another five years for the ballot? You might even miss the next General Election.’ Bea’s not sure how much she cares any more. It’s a detail, a fingernail compared to everything else that has happened since the war began. She’s almost back to where she was beforehand, floating along between social engagements with Celeste trying to stir her up to something.

  Bea leans back, taking her elbows off the restaurant table and mistakenly letting her bad hand fall on to the tablecloth in front of her. Before she can withdraw it, Bill’s one remaining hand is on hers. His other wrist hovers below the table top. He has managed quite well to keep it out of sight, which has only made her the more curious. She has grown used to trying not to gaze at the injuries that pass on the street. Some, the legs, or rather lack of legs, she can hardly bear to see. It’s the powerlessness, she thinks, on a body that is otherwise so strong.

  ‘Beatrice,’ begins Bill, and Bea feels a prod of panic. It is clearly a ‘begins’ and she somewhat dreads where he is going next. He can’t be going to, is he soft in the head, a touch of what Tom has? She thought it was just Bill’s hand that he’d not come back with. She wants to say Good God, is that the time, but they’ve not even been there an hour and are somewhere between the main course and pudding – which they went for instead of a starter. Won’t lunch, thinks Bea, become inconveniently long when rationing ends and they can stuff themselves on three courses in the middle of the day again?

  She interrupts, stop him, Beatrice, dead in his tracks. ‘Bill?’

  ‘Yes.’ His eyes light up. Hell.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ She picks up her purse and winds her way through the tables towards a glass door leading into the hallway. As she enters the hallway, she steps around the ladder of the man recruited to de-fog the windows and thinks that, were she with someone she wanted to be with, she would have rather liked the fogged glass to cut her off from the world outside. But everything familiar to Bea seems to be falling apart in a way it wasn’t during the war. Is that another reason why she kissed Bill? To take herself back to the old days? He was a face from that past, and she might have kissed him then.

  There’s also that glaring word being muttered around all the dregs of drawing rooms in town. Shortage. Good God, it’s so tasteless, like the harvest was poor while the other harvest, over there, was so damn rich. Take what you can, says Clemmie, who is all for accepting a spontaneous proposal. And in the absence of Mother, Bea finds that she is behaving in just the manner that, out of pure stubbornness, she refused to do when Mother was around. She is contemplating marriage for the hell of it because Mother may just have been right when she said life is easier with a husband; however little you are in love with them, at least then nobody thinks you are looking, especially if you are twenty-five.

  Bea glances through the now cleared window and stops stockstill. Looking back in and straight at her is a face she recognises. It stares at her hard for a second or two, then turns and walks away quickly.

  Her ribcage is squeezing into itself and she’s catching her breath. It’s like that image of Edward she caught in the yellow drawing room. It can’t really be Mr Campbell, can it? Not walking down Piccadilly at half past one in the afternoon. And what are the chances he’d be back so soon? Unless, like the others, he’s on a brief leave before going back to clear up the mess. Mind you, stretcher-bearers, all they have to do now is help those who can still travel return home. Mr Campbell, no, Michael. Her anger at herself makes her feel sick. But would she not just do the same thing again? No, she could still slip away from the shining bars of marriage and country-house life that she is but half a dozen words from right now, and do something quite different, couldn’t she? But it was a ghost, wasn’t it, a figment of her imagination appearing at the final hour, just in time to make her realise she might have a choice.

  She rushes to the door and out into the street. That bowler hat and trench coat, thick young neck between, is ahead of her but moving away fast. It is damp and chilly and she hasn’t a coat, and she’s left poor one-handed Fitzroy to wonder whether she’s quite well, but she’s trotting to keep up. She needs to trot faster, all he’ll have to do is vanish into the crowd at Piccadilly Circus and she’ll have lost him. Ahead there’s a small crowd blocking his way and he stalls to step aside. It’s long enough,
and her hand reaches his sleeve, as she gasps for lack of breath.

  ‘Michael!’

  He stops, turns and looks straight at her as though she’s a bridge away.

  ‘Miss Masters,’ he says.

  Lead pie in her stomach. Miss Masters? Where’s the ‘Beatrice’ that he asked to call her last time they met? Does he hate her that much? His eyes are pitch-dark enough to make her run. Stand your ground, Beatrice. If he goes now, then he’s gone.

  She’s been through this moment in her head more times than anyone can count. Next time, next time, this is what I’ll say, she told herself, but now there are no words there for her.

  He’s talking, though. How funny, it always used to be her who spoke more.

  ‘Not like a lady to run down the street.’

  Bea finds herself shaking her head. No, she says. Not like a lady.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be returning to your lunch companion?’

  Damn you, Michael Campbell, she wants to say. You’re so damn ungentlemanly – but the Bills of this world dull in comparison. Does he realise that the angrier he is, the more determined it makes her to stay?

  Same place, he challenged her to. The tea room. What if the Zeppelins had it, she replied. Then it’s since breakfast this morning, he said. But, she began, and then she stopped. How could she say, But you’re not back in your old lodgings. Or at least you weren’t last week.

  She is in her bedroom, still debating whether to change her outfit again. There’s not been much new since the war began, just a lot of taking-in, and only half of her clothes fit into the cupboards in Celeste’s surprisingly feminine spare room, which, though barely a quarter of the size of her room on Park Lane, feels four times as airy. The other half of her clothes are on the unused nursery floor upstairs and for the past hour Bea has been pattering between the two, hunting down skirts and dresses and blouses that flap at the edge of her memory. She wants to look different to the woman who ran away from him after they’d made love.

  The front doorbell clangs and Bea starts. Celeste’s visitors rarely put in an appearance at such a civilised time of day. Bea can’t help but walk to the door of her room and open it just to listen. Whoever has arrived is planting weighted footsteps across the marble floor of the hall. Now he has stopped and is speaking measuredly, as if considering each word before it is delivered in a voice strange to this house, but very familiar to Bea.

  She doesn’t run downstairs. She can’t move, can barely breathe, and she is waiting for the room to spin. Somewhere outside her head she can hear steps padding up the stairs to the drawing room on the first floor. Bea sits down at her dressing table and leans on her elbows. A pot of powder falls over and she watches the grains spread on to the carpet, light as dust. That’s how I feel, she thinks.

  The knock at her door still startles her. One of Celeste’s maids stands in the doorway, all crisp in her black and white, her face soft with concern. Christ, does she know, too? She’s been with Celeste long enough. Before the woman has had the chance to speak, Bea nods. As she starts to stand up from the dressing table, the maid moves towards her as if to help her, but Bea shakes her head, pulls herself upright, wrestling her feet back into her shoes, and then heads for the door.

  ‘Miss Beatrice?’

  Bea stops. She really doesn’t want to stop, in case her legs don’t work when she starts moving again. But there is concern in the woman’s voice, and Bea pauses. What is she going to say? That he’s missing an eye, an arm, a leg?

  ‘You’ve a couple of hooks still open, Miss Beatrice.’

  ‘Oh.’ And Bea lets her do them for her and, without asking, smooth down one side of Bea’s hair and add a pin. Then Bea goes out on to the landing and down the two flights to the drawing room.

  He is in uniform, and five years have aged him ten. His eyes are calmer, almost dulled, as he looks at her, but he is still John, all slim and high-cheek-boned and somehow boyish. She turns away so he can’t see whatever look it is she has on her face, which feels flushed and freezing and watery, all at once. Her insides are knotting themselves. You can’t, thinks Bea, just shut off everything you have once felt, blow it away in a puff as if it were never there at all. The world must be filled with people whose hearts do not fully belong to one person. Blast it. How damn annoying, how annoying of him to be here, now, waking the kraken she had long put to sleep. It’s not true, is it, that if you let wounds heal well enough, the scars can never be pulled open.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  ‘For what exactly, Mr Vinnicks?’ and she feels a little stab of pleasure as he starts at the froideur of being called by his surname. Thank her? She’s angry now – it has taken her five years to be angry. She tells herself it’s with him, for being pulled along by the hand for all those months and then so suddenly let go. But it’s not: she’s angry with herself for the fool she was for believing him, and the fool she might still be.

  ‘For seeing me.’

  ‘I could hardly pass you on the stairs as I left.’

  ‘Beatrice, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s too late, John.’ This was at least true until five minutes ago.

  ‘Bea, I made a mistake.’

  ‘A lot of mistakes have been made over the past few years. You shouldn’t marry people you meet on a boat.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, you knew her beforehand?’ Take the anger out of your voice, Beatrice. You’re giving yourself away.

  ‘No, we didn’t marry.’

  Bea flinches, she can’t help it, and she knows he’s seen. She should be sympathetic now but she can’t do it. She can’t lie like that, it would be too damn obvious what she really thought. So she says exactly that, what she really thinks.

  ‘Don’t expect my commiserations.’

  He pauses, swallows, looks at the carpet and then back up again.

  ‘Will you—’

  This time she’s not going to stand and wait for the words not to be the ones she wants to hear. Five years, a war, a quarter of the men she used to dance with dead, and holes left in the rest patched up with her own hands, and she’s still not up to being disappointed by John again. And the thought that he hurt her that much gives her a rush of desire to hurt him back.

  ‘Good God,’ she interrupts him, ‘you’re not going to propose now, are you?’

  He doesn’t reply to this. He just looks straight at her. ‘I’ve two tickets for Carmen,’ he says. ‘For the day after tomorrow …’

  Bea nods.

  She feels sick in the taxi to Pimlico. She’s late. Of course she’s late. Not that John stayed long, not even beyond simply arranging to meet, but afterwards she’d had to go and sit down upstairs, wait for the flush to subside, and wonder what she was going to say to Mr Campbell.

  What is she doing with him, with John, with Bill, with any of them? That she’s such a far cry now from war-wounded Bea who felt she barely merited a second glance should make her feel pleased, but she is simply uncertain as to how she should behave. There are no rules for all this sort of thing now, it’s not how it was.

  It’s guilt that she’s bringing with her: she’s barely seen Mr Campbell, and she’s going to let him down again. Of course she couldn’t have stood him up after last time. She’d certainly never see him again then. And she doesn’t want that, even though John is back.

  There’s nothing between Mr Campbell and me, she tells herself. Not after no letter for a year and just five minutes on the street. When she’d returned to the table Bill had still been sitting there, looking nowhere. An old friend, Bea said. We lost contact during the war. Yes, Bill said. Bea glanced down and saw that he had already settled up. Let’s go, he said. And they went. She sent a short note to thank him for lunch. He has not replied.

  *

  Pimlico is sadder than ever. The tea room more so, and Bea hesitates outside. The paint has all but vanished from the sign and there’s a board across one of the front windows. She pulls her coat tighter around her as she w
alks in.

  He’s not there. Good God, she can’t be so late that he has come and gone already. She looks at her watch. Half past, hell. It’s started to rain, her taxi’s gone and the street is empty. She sits down at a far table and considers how angry he must still be with her to have left.

  Bea is still sitting there five minutes later when a figure in the doorway catches her eye. It is Mr Campbell, mackintosh undone, the hem swinging around his knees. She gets a half-smile across the room, but no apology. I know, he says, when he reaches her table, that you have hardly been waiting. The waitress approaches, half the age and size of the one who was here before. As she puts a card on the table Bea notices, they both notice, the indentation of a wedding ring. That’s not been gone long, he says when she walks away. No, replies Bea.

  He’s different to how he was in Piccadilly. The dislike has gone and in its place is a distraction; he’s tapped that cigarette on the table over a dozen times. He’s looking at her, though, with what, Bea thinks, is a look of regret – and this gives her hope. He is moving the cigarette towards his mouth when he glances at Bea and hesitates.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do.’

  He passes it to her and she puts it in her mouth, holding it high and to the side. He takes out a box of matches, strikes one and leans over the table towards her and she can feel the size of him swallowing her up. Hold fast, Beatrice, she tells herself, and break this silence.

  ‘No lighter?’ she teases.

  ‘No holder?’

  ‘There weren’t so many in France,’ she replies.

  ‘Bloody mess. The whole thing, a bloody mess.’

  ‘Isn’t slaughter always bloody, Michael,’ she says, using his Christian name pointedly, as if to pull him to her.

  ‘Sadly, it is not,’ he replies, ‘always pointless.’

  ‘So, where has it not been pointless?’

  ‘When it makes men free.’