The Crimson Rooms (2 page)

“Yes, he really is so like his father, it’s uncanny. I’m hoping that you might have some photographs of James when he was a child so we can compare father and son at the same age.” She took yet another step toward me and I noted a trim ankle beneath a daring hemline. Behind her on the pavement was a collection of neat though shabby traveling bags. “Oh, this isn’t
all
,” she exclaimed, “I have another trunk and assorted boxes, I’m afraid, but we couldn’t manage them in the cab. They’ll send them on tomorrow morning.”

Mother and child were like a tide coming in over the steps and across the threshold. “I absolutely do not understand,” I said.

The woman gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “Don’t say you never got my letter. Oh, the post from Canada is so unreliable. I expect it will arrive tomorrow, just when we don’t need it. No wonder you’re surprised to see me. I must admit I was puzzled that nobody was there to meet us off the boat, but now I understand completely.”

“But don’t you see,” I said, still blocking the way, “I have no idea who you are.”

She frowned. “But you must. I’m Meredith and Edmund here is my son, your brother’s child.”

The boy’s prominent eyes were fixed on my face, occasionally losing focus as his eyelids fluttered. Brown knees stuck out from beneath flannel shorts: my brother, at precisely the height when, if I knelt, his head was level with mine as he gripped me with monkey arms and legs. We used to call it
a cling
. But here, on the step, in the small hours of Monday, May 19, 1924, with the dream of the real James still fresh, this other child was unreachably out of time.

“I didn’t know James had a son,” I said.

“Well, surely you must have done. Unless . . . don’t tell me your father kept it from you all this while.”

“My father died last year.” The boy’s hair, I noted, sprouted up at the crown in a backward quiff; his lower lip was moist and full.

“Ah, that explains a great deal. I’m sorry. I would so like Edmund to have known his grandpa. But listen, I must get this child to bed. We don’t mind where we sleep,” Meredith was saying. “After the ship we’re just so grateful not to be afloat, on
waves
. A sofa and a blanket would do.”

Surrendering, I leaned forward to take the child’s hand—I knew that it would feel warm and a little sticky in mine—but he hung his head and held back, so instead I picked up the luggage. Now I was terrified lest he disappear, but mother and child came tripping into the house hand in hand, she with just her little purse hanging from a chain over her shoulder while I struggled with a cluster of bags. “We must be very quiet,” I whispered. “I don’t want anyone else to be woken.”

We crept upstairs, past James’s hat and blazer on the hall stand, the urn of dried flowers on the half-landing, the sleepers on the first floor and the gallery of Victorian Giffords above the dado, to my own landing, where the door to James’s bedroom was kept tight shut, but in the spare room next door, where a couple of empty beds lay flat as boards covered by camberwick bedspreads. I took armfuls of mothball-smelling blankets from a linen chest and starched sheets from the airing cupboard, but when we set to work I was put to shame: Meredith was an expert bed-maker, who could create angular corners and shake a pillow dead-center in its case first time, whereas I hadn’t made a bed since Girton.

I showed them the bathroom but told them not to flush the lavatory at this hour. Meredith only gave me a preoccupied smile and it was clear that I was now expendable. She was lifting the child’s shirt over his head; I glimpsed pale, smooth skin, the little disks of nipple and navel, the fragile collarbone. My boy, how I would have kissed him between neck and shoulder.

They ought to be fed, I realized, and crept down to the kitchen for something suitable. A hot drink was impossible, as it would mean relighting the stove, beyond me at the best of times. In the end I took up cold milk and cookies; by the time I’d climbed three flights of stairs, there was no light under their door—they must already be asleep—so I went back to bed and lay, picturing the boy tucked up under the white sheet, his palm beneath his cheek. In a little while he would turn onto his back and throw his arm across the pillow.

The house seemed to sag under the weight of these new arrivals. Rigid as an effigy, I relived the last half-hour: the dream of James, the child on the doorstep, James’s child. As dawn thinned the darkness, I tried to work it out. James had written regularly, right up to a fortnight before his death, and never mentioned this woman Meredith. I thought he confided everything in me. Was it possible that he had time, in the midst of war, to conduct a love affair? Had my father really known? Why had nothing been said? And what did this woman, now installed with her son in the spare room, want from us?

At six o’clock, abandoning any attempt to sleep
, I got up. Above me, on the attic floor, our maids Min and Rose (collectively known as
the girls
, though both approached sixty) were astir. The light, reflected off the white tiles in the bathroom, was pitiless when I risked a glance in the mirror. The Canadian woman, Meredith, had been lying; I was nothing like my clear-eyed brother. My thirty-year-old face was all hollows and angles, my gaze haunted.

Fumbling with the small buttons of my blouse, I tried to decide how best to alert the household to our visitors’ arrival. The process would be a tedious one and I was bound to be held responsible for the shock. The maids were straightforward; they must simply be told that for the time being there were two extra mouths to feed (without additional housekeeping money). Grandmother (maternal), nearly deaf and partially blind, would be agog with interest but slow to comprehend the complexities of the situation. Prudence, Father’s elder sister, would have a hundred remarks and accusations. And Mother would weep.

But she, after all, was Father’s widow and nominal head of the family. James was her son and Edmund her grandson. It was Monday morning and I was due to leave the house at eight. There was nothing for it but to break the news at once, so I went down to the kitchen, had Rose make a pot of tea, and carried it up to Mother’s bedroom myself.

She had the infuriating habit, blamed by Prudence on poor circulation and lack of exercise, of being cold even in the height of summer. At any rate, I found her sound asleep under a winter quilt, the room a fug of sleeping female flesh and lavender. As I swept back the curtains, she raised herself on one arm, gray-brown hair falling away onto the pillow, hand shielding her eyes. In her youth, when a soft chin, melting eyes, and tight lacing were all the rage, Mother had been considered a great beauty. Now in her mid-fifties, she was too thin and her lips drooped at either end as if with the weight of abandoned hope. “What is happening? What’s the time?”

“I’ve brought tea because I need you to wake up properly so I can talk to you. You’ll need to be very strong, Mother, and prepare yourself for a great surprise.” I perched on the edge of the bed, allowed her a sip of tea, and then removed the cup and saucer because I was afraid her hand would jolt. “We have a visitor whose name is Meredith. She has come with a small boy called Edmund who she claims is James’s son. From what I can gather, she and James had a love affair during the war. There now, that’s all I know. Would you like more tea or will you spill it?”

I had seen her receive shocking tidings before, of course, and knew she did not manage it well. On this occasion, she fell back on the pillow, arms rigid on either side, shut her eyes, and took gasping breaths while I studied the greasy smear made by the milk on the surface of her tea and wondered if I might have been less brutal. But I was irritated by these dramatics, which were all too predictable and ensured that the rest of us felt we had to protect her from bearing responsibility.

Mother now covered her face with both hands and moaned: “I can’t believe it. I can’t . . .”

I had always disliked her bedroom, which as a child I regarded as a distastefully private place where I was summoned for little chats while Mother put up her hair or fastened her corsets. At dead center, on a strip of Turkish rug, stood a round table covered by a lace-trimmed cloth, upon which a writing box with brass fittings was placed, like a reliquary. This was the repository of James’s school reports, his letters, and the appalling telegram. On the mantel were twin oval photograph frames, one containing a picture of James aged thirteen when he started at Westminster; the other my father in his prime, dressed in top hat and tails, his belly round and his smile hearty between beard and mustache. Father, before James’s death, had been powerful and noisy, with a glint in his eye that spoke of a hunger to earn, own, conquer. The only photograph of me was relegated to a side table. Aged twelve years, I had been decked out in a frothy gown and ringlets for a studio portrait in which my mutinous eyes and thrusting jaw were strikingly at odds with the soft curls and girlish throat.

“They woke me at about three,” I told the prostrate figure in the bed, “so I put them in the spare room. I’ve asked Rose to grill extra toast when they get up. I’m about to leave for the office, but I expect our visitors will sleep late and then they could go for a walk or something, which will keep them occupied until I get home.”

Mother’s round eyes opened. “Oh, no, no, no you can’t leave me.”

“I must, I’m afraid.”

“But you can’t ask me to deal with them on my own, Evelyn. I can’t take in what you’re saying. A boy? James’s son? But how can we believe them? They might be impostors. What proof is there?”

“The child is unmistakably James’s son, I would say. You’ve only to take one look at him to know that. Meredith says she was in correspondence with Father, but lately of course he didn’t reply. Do you know anything about all this?”

Mother’s eyelid gave the merest flicker as she shrank down under the quilt. She had known of the boy’s existence and kept it from me; that much was clear. The knowledge diminished my sympathy still further. “Well, I am going to work now. Be prepared for the fact that Edmund is so like James, it’s as if James were a child again.” The image shimmered between us, prompted by the miniature Jameses that hung from ribbons in the alcove by her bed: baby James in a bonnet on her knee; James the schoolboy in cap and overtight tie; James in cricket whites. For a moment, I thought I would reach her; I ached for her to recognize that I suffered too, that I had been struck by the savage disjunction between one child and another.

Instead she wept. “Ah, no, don’t leave me, oh, Evelyn, what shall I tell Mother and Prudence? How could you be so cruel?”

“I can because I must. I am needed elsewhere.” I ran swiftly downstairs to the hall, where Min was passing through with a breakfast tray, bottom lip caught between her teeth as a sign that she was suppressing comment with difficulty. “Please make sure that our visitors have everything they need, Min. I forgot to give them towels last night.”

Then I rammed on my hat, skewered it with a pin, buckled the belt of my jacket, and seized my briefcase and gloves. As I set off into a warm, blowing morning, I thought: Thank God, I have my work.

M
ale Giffords had been lawyers
for generations. Our house in Clivedon Hall Gardens, Maida Vale, was adorned by portraits (bad oils or stiff daguerreotypes) of gentlemen with the same demanding eyes and fob watch as my father; each, in his turn, a luminary of the firm Gifford & Aldridge. When James and I were children, sometimes, as a treat, we were taken to visit Father’s office in Holborn, where James, as young as three, was placed in Father’s chair from whence he beamed at a procession of admirers, his plump hands pummeling the arms and his cheeks bulging with toffee supplied by the elderly Mr. Aldridge, who promised to teach young Master Gifford all about property law, the moment he was old enough.

Since nobody else was interested in my future, I plotted it myself. Hurdle number one was to get myself sent to a decent school. Mother deplored the idea but Father, more indulgent, said it would keep me amused, so each morning I went by omnibus to St. Paul’s in Hammersmith. On the way, from my perch on the top deck, I glimpsed other lives, less ordered and opulent than my own. At twelve, I was introduced to a bowdlerized version of
The Merchant of Venice
and fell in love with Portia, who contrived to be wayward, clever, and successful, all qualities I wished to have (I was resigned to being without beauty and thought I didn’t care for wealth). Later we studied the French Revolution and found that the likes of Robespierre, with the compelling sea green eyes (same color as my own), had also trained as a lawyer. The law, it seemed to me, was my destiny. I discovered that though the British Law Society stood firm against women lawyers (“If there’s one calling in the world for which women are conspicuously unfitted . . .”), my legally qualified sisters were allowed to practice in the United States, in Canada, India, France, and Denmark. Surely it was just a matter of time.