The Crimson Rooms (30 page)

She lay watching me, with one dainty arm crooked behind her head. “I’ve weighed up what to say. I know that if I do tell you, something will be broken forever. Bizarrely there’s a part of me that wants to preserve your memories of him. You are all so frail, creeping about in your old museum of a house. Why, I can see the imprint of your father’s head in a cushion on a drawing room chair. I swear that James’s boater hangs at a certain angle in the hall because that’s how he left it. I’ve done an experiment, pushed it another way but half an hour later it’s always back in its old position. It’s as if you all took a deep breath when you heard that he got killed and you’ve never let it out again. Now what if I break this spell, I think, and tell the truth about their precious boy? What then?”

“Nothing could make me love or miss him less.”

“Oh, that’s never been my intention. No, no, we all need to love as much as we can. Perhaps, you know, a whiff of human frailty might make you love him more. Well, the truth is this. James fell in love with me, like so many of them did. We were ministering angels, after all, in our white veils and aprons. Those men emerged from the pain and the horror to find that we had created order and had quiet voices and gentle hands. We were women. But unlike the others your brother was greedy. It wasn’t enough to look—he had to touch, too. He grew hungrier and hungrier, pursued me, wouldn’t leave me alone, refused to take no for an answer, found out my routine until, on the evening before he was due to go back, he came looking for me with just one idea in his head.”

I watched the candle within the lantern flicker as it swung back and forth. Dimly I was aware that the lovers had settled into the bottom of the boat, murmuring and nuzzling.

“Say something,” she said.

I was silent.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Of course I understand. There’s Edmund.”

Her voice came in stabs. “Ah no, no, you don’t understand. I’m telling you that he forced himself on me.”

I said not a word.

“Well?” she said.

“Please, no, don’t.”

“Ah, I was ready for denial. I know you’ll say it wasn’t rape. I couldn’t understand your brother until I met your father, and now that I’ve met you too I have an even clearer picture of why he did it. Oh, James was brought up decently, had a sense of decency, but there was a kind of stranglehold on his emotions, a point where he simply went blind and gave in to desire because he didn’t recognize desire for what it was. He thought that desire had to be satiated, like hunger or thirst. There was no stopping him, he would not listen to me or, I suspect, to the voices of all you others in his head.” She looped her arm around my neck and pulled herself up so that her mouth was actually on my ear. “Let me tell you one more thing,” she whispered. “Then you’ll believe me, perhaps. You see, I wasn’t just any nurse. Like I say, I was with a Roman Catholic order. I was training to be a nun. I had taken vows. You didn’t ask where it was I went at night, to be alone, where he found me. Can’t you guess?”

I thrust her away with such force that my elbow flew back and cracked against the side of the boat. “I don’t believe you. Why do you want to hurt me like this?”

“I don’t want to hurt you. It’s the truth. I’m telling you the truth because I want my life back. I did not choose Edmund. I love him, in the end, though I thought I never would, he had done such damage to what I was. But when he was born I felt this tug at my heart and I could not help but embrace him. But why should that one moment define my life? I didn’t sin, yet I find myself with no vocation, no future, and hardly any money, forced to love the child conceived in a moment of struggle and fear. And because of Edmund, I have to relive that moment again and again, the fact that though my mouth opened no sound would come, that I felt so little and powerless, in such pain and shock, not just my body but my soul, my own self, all I wanted to be, violated. In the end I couldn’t live with the imbalance of that, of knowing you were all here, oblivious to the damage he’d done.”

It was impossible to follow what she’d said. Instead I was scrabbling to recover my old images of James: James in uniform, the hardness of his warm cheek when I kissed him, James mortally wounded and so innocent. “Did you make this allegation about James to my father?”

“No. I did not.”

“Why not, if it’s true?”

“I took pity on him.”

The pair in front had emerged from their embrace and in a clumsy, giggling effort to regain their seat, tipped the boat so furiously that one of the oars fell into the river. Margot gave a little scream, stood up, clutched hold of the side, and tried to reach it. Too late I saw what was happening, cried out, and shifted my weight, but the next moment Margot had tumbled in after the oar with a wild cry and a great splash. I suspect that the fall into the water was partly self-willed, because she surfaced, shrieking with laughter, hair plastered to her face.

“Never mind the oar,” shouted Hadley, a little more sober. “It’s floated too far away. And no, don’t try and pull on the boat there, you’ll have us over, work your way round to the front and hold on to the prow . . .”

Meredith and I sat side by side, not touching. My face was set in a travesty of a grin, as if I thought that was the correct response to losing an oar and a passenger, and I discovered that I was wet through. The bottom of the boat was inches deep in river water and Margot had splashed us all. Meanwhile, the commotion had attracted the attention of other boats, a few of which came pitching or gliding down the river, depending on the oarsman’s skill or degree of inebriation. “Are you all right?” “Is everyone safe?” came voices across the water.

“We’ve lost an oar,” called Hadley, hauling Margot back into the boat, where she slithered in her trailing robe like an ungainly fish. “Hard to find it in the dark,” someone said after a few minutes. “I tell you what, grab hold of our painter and we’ll tow you in.”

By now we had drifted a long way downstream but at last, after more shouting, squealing, and rocking, our boat made ungainly progress back to Lady Carr’s jetty. Margot was shaking violently under the sodden blanket. I thought perhaps Nurse Meredith would spring into action but she said nothing and I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. As we neared the jetty, we saw that quite a crowd had formed, including Lady Carr, whose jet beads glinted in the moonlight. And, with the inevitability of all the events of that fateful night, I saw Sylvia Hardynge, shrouded in a shawl and hopping from foot to foot, and beside her Thorne. I looked away to the far bank, which was mercifully dark, and then closed my eyes as the boat sailed with surprising grace and speed to its mooring.

Everyone was shrieking instructions to Margot, who had to be helped out of the boat, swathed in a dry blanket, and rushed up to the house. Arms reached down to Meredith and me. I allowed my hand to rest briefly in some warm, male clasp, then stood shakily upright, though I could scarcely feel my hands and feet. My dress clung to me, the blue satin sheath drooped from my shoulder, my hair was matted on my cheek. I walked through the crowd, still with that polite smile stuck to my lips, and looking to neither right nor left. Meredith was ahead. And now I was on the lawn, feet squelching in wet shoes, the strip of blue satin knotting around my thighs, and I was past the empty dance floor and the arbor where the band had been, I had almost reached the gate at the side of the house, I would walk straight home, I thought, anything to get away, but it was too late, I heard his voice behind me full of incredulous laughter: “Miss Gifford, Sylvia said you were here but I thought she must be mistaken. What an extraordinary coincidence.”

I stood stock-still in my drooping clothes, aware that my frock clung to me, was even perhaps translucent, and that my hair was in rattails. Half turning my head, I murmured: “Forgive me for not stopping, Mr. Thorne. I am very wet. If you’ll excuse me.”

But he came closer and put the back of his finger to my arm. “You are freezing cold. Can I offer you my jacket? No? How are you traveling home? Sylvia and I could take you in . . .”

“Thank you. We have a cab.” I moved on. From the corner of my eye I had seen the group who’d thronged the jetty hurrying up toward us, led by Sylvia and Lady Carr. Then at last I was at the side of the house and out on the street, where miraculously a cab was waiting with Meredith already crammed tight into the far corner of the backseat. For a moment I wondered whether I could bring myself to get in with her. Then I thought of Edmund, of work in the morning, and of Thorne, who was staring after me.

We did not speak on the journey home, though from time to time one or other of us shivered violently. At Clivedon Hall Gardens, I paid the cab driver and unlocked the front door while she waited wordlessly on the step. Once inside, she slipped away and ran upstairs.

Rather than follow I waited until there was no further movement overhead, then went into the dining room, where I drew back the curtain. Moonlight fell on the table set for breakfast, on the looming furniture.

I sat in my customary chair, from whence I could see the portraits of Father and James. My brother’s eyes were shadowed in the inadequate light but the lines of his cap and shoulder were clear-cut as ever. I went up close and drew my fingertips over the glass. Never, I think, had I wanted him back so badly.

But my father. Even now I could smell the whiskey on him, a sickening whiff of hair pomade and spirits. At night sometimes, after the war, I had woken in the small hours and known that he was still up. When I crept downstairs, I found him at the table, his tumbler pushed among the breakfast things, the decanter unstoppered, his head sunk low. Sometimes, if I could bear it, I sat with him.

Once he did speak, weeping unrestrainedly so that tears and saliva dribbled onto his plate. “I killed him,” he said, “my son,” and he glanced at me with cowed eyes to see if I would offer any comfort. “I could have kept him back. I could have pulled strings and got him a safe posting. Instead I forced him to sign up early. I envied him. I thought the war would be glorious and swift and that it would be better for the firm if he volunteered. I told him he was a coward when he admitted to being afraid.”

I could not even bring myself to reach out and touch his wet hand. I did not trust those whiskey-fed tears or know how to forgive him.

But now I had words alright. “Why, on top of everything else, did you not tell me about Meredith and Edmund, Father? It’s too much for me to bear.” I knew why. Father had preferred to wallow in the death of an innocent boy. To have acknowledged that James had darker urges, had loved a woman, would have sullied the process of grieving, complicated the guilt. And so he had kept James’s memory simple, like a martyr’s.

I did not believe Meredith. I loathed her. But she had altered my image of James forever. Desire hung about the polished surfaces of that room. I felt it twitch and mutter even within the tightly folded and rolled napkins.

W
hen I arrived at Caractacus Court
at ten o’clock the next morning, or rather the same morning, in yet another cab, courtesy this time of the
Daily Mail
fund, I was greeted by Mrs. Sanders, who invited me to go up and view the transformation to the Marchant living accommodation. She told me that Leah had been scrubbing floors both in her own house and other people’s since her release, and had already saved five shillings. Leah stood at the entrance to her room, arms folded, as if to say, I told you so, wearing a jaunty hat and well-brushed jacket and skirt. Thanks again to the newspaper, her debts to Mrs. Sanders had been paid and her old room refurnished with a couple of beds and four dining chairs. There was even a rug to go before the fire and a cradle for the baby when she got him back, though I doubted that an eighteen-month child would fit into so small a bed. Less promisingly, I distinctly smelled alcohol on her breath.

Once in the cab, neither of us spoke. Leah was pent up, clutching a canvas bag containing gifts for the children, as stipulated in a letter from the home: grapes and colored chalks. Apparently, she still regarded me as enemy number one, because she turned her face to the window and refused to engage with me. And I, reeling from the events of the previous night, was in no mood to speak to her. My eyelids stung and my pulse raced—I had slept for perhaps an hour and a half. Poor Leah, engaged in the mission to save her children, could have no idea how remote she seemed to me or how unfit I was at that moment to be her legal representative. But then, as rain slashed against the window, she suddenly said: “You tell them to let them kids come home with me and I’ll give them such a treat of fish-and-chips. Mrs. Sanders will mind them evenin’s when I go cleanin’ them banks. Mr. Breen give me a reference so I shall have no trouble gettin’ as much work as I like.”

“Mrs. Marchant, please don’t raise your hopes. There is no question of the children coming home with us today. This is a visit simply, in which we must begin the process of convincing the authorities that you are a fit parent. So of course we shall tell them the good news about your work and you will be allowed a brief interview with your children, fifteen minutes, they said, but that is all.”