The Crimson Rooms (32 page)

Ten names in all. I unpinned the notice, folded it up small, and put it in my pocket. Then I told Leah: “It will look much better if you surrender the children now rather than be forced.”

A gush of endearments followed. The children, I noticed, were more stoical than the mother; the younger, Cathy, clutching the chalks, the older again holding tight to her sister’s hand. They were now keen for the moment of parting to be over, while Leah was too wrapped up in the drama of the moment to help make it happen. When I opened the door, Miss Hands was in the passage, looking frightened. The children were hugged violently, then surrendered. I was relieved to see that Miss Hands smiled down at them kindly, that they took her hands fearlessly and then were whisked away with merciful speed.

“We should wait for the matron to come back,” I said. “We should apologize for the earlier scene.”

“She’s the one who should be sorry.”

“Leah, she holds all the cards. Don’t you understand? She could report you to the board and they could forbid further visits.”

But after a quarter of an hour or so, it became clear that Miss Buckley would not return to her office. Her absence was the last word, and I realized that she was even more formidable than I had thought.

A
fter depositing Leah at Caractacus Court,
I made my way by omnibus to Arbery Street, where I intended to tell Mr. Breen about the disastrous episode at the children’s home. He was not about, however, so I sat in the basement and wrote a verbatim account. At one point I went upstairs to make tea, offering Miss Drake a cup as usual, today more than ever for the sake of companionship.

“Thank you, no. I shall have my tea at a quarter past four.”

“I can wait.”

“I wouldn’t dream of putting you to the trouble.”

I tried to catch her eye; I so longed for a little warmth, but she went on hammering at the keys.

By the time I let myself
into Clivedon Hall Gardens, the family was at supper and Meredith’s voice rang clearly through the half-open dining room door. “There were wonderful artifacts from Africa, Prudence was very taken with them, weren’t you, Prudence?”

“Certainly. I have a great fondness for color. The exhibition gave one a sense of one’s place at the center of an empire teeming with opportunity and inspiration. My criticism is that there was too much to see in a day. Far too much. I shall have to go back. The silks from India . . .”

“And of course I could not keep away from the Canada Hall even though I knew it would make me a touch homesick,” said Meredith. “They insisted that our chief claim to fame is that we make good butter. Can you imagine? When we have so much richness . . .”

I was determined not to sit at the same table as Meredith and had actually reached the foot of the stairs when Min appeared from the basement with a tray of liver and onions. “Are you going straight in to dinner then, Miss Gifford? I imagine you won’t be wanting soup.”

So I sat next to Prudence, managed a few mouthfuls, and after a while began to register a disturbing change, which in the circumstance had a macabre irony, as if the fates were laughing at me. Surely I must be imagining it but no, absurd though it seemed, Prudence too was perhaps in danger of falling a little in love. There was Meredith with her huge eyes and darkened lashes, cutting Edmund’s liver into slivers, some of which she slipped onto her own plate so he wouldn’t have to eat it all. And there was Prudence, alert to every move, no longer huffy with disapproval but gruesomely teasing, posting remarks across the table as if daring to see how they might be received.

“No, Meredith, I did not like that Aboriginal shield. On the contrary, I found it horrific. You always seem to prefer items connected with blood, I notice, whereas I liked the more domestic artifacts, the . . .”

“Blood and death,” said Meredith, with her mouth full. “Even you cannot deny their existence, Prudence. My art teacher, Mr. Waters, instructs that they are the themes of so much of art. Oh, and love, of course.” Here she looked Prudence full in the eye and I felt the poor woman quiver beside me. “You show me a great painting, Prudence, and I’ll show you . . .”

“In Hunt, for example,
The Light . . .
”

“Hunt is not a great painter. It’s time you came to terms with that. He’s great with his brush. He’s great at telling a story, but he’s not a great painter. He does not push back the boundaries of our understanding, he is insipid.”

“How can you say that . . . ?”

The rest of us were excluded. Mother interrupted from time to time with an admonition to Edmund to keep his elbows off the table or eat up his nice liver, but she’d been defeated at bridge in the afternoon and consequently had a headache. Grandmother, who was fond of liver, ate with her usual dedication to the task and for once did not bother to pick up snippets of conversation. Only I, it seemed, spotted the danger to Prudence’s peace of mind.

The subject of the art party came up over the blancmange. “Meredith tells me you had a lovely time,” said Mother, a little resentfully, “but that you nearly drowned in the river.”

“Hardly.”

I would not meet Meredith’s eye, though she exclaimed: “Oh, it was so good to see Evelyn having fun for a change. You should have seen her knocking back the absinthe.”

There was an awful silence. “Absinthe,” said Mother faintly.

“Not in front of Edmund,” said Prudence.

“Why not? What is absinthe?” he asked.

“A poisonous drink. So poisonous that it’s against the law in most countries.”

“And Mommy drank it?”

Meredith hugged him. “And so did Aunty Evelyn and look, we’re both still alive. It’s not poison, Edmund, unless taken in great quantities.”

“All alcohol is a form of poison,” said Mother. “It’s a poison to children, Edmund, and to some adults who don’t know when enough is enough. But absinthe. I’m surprised at you, Evelyn. Your father always used to say that if, as a lawyer, he was ever found dabbling in anything approaching an illegal substance, he would expect to be struck off.”

Meredith laughed. “Absinthe, like all drink, is delicious, Edmund, and don’t let anyone ’round this table tell you otherwise. Your father, as I recall, was especially fond of spirits.” I flinched from this reference to James, which was accompanied by a sideways glance at me as if to say: Remember what I told you. “What your grandmother means is that like so many grown-up things, drink has to be treated with respect. Why, I bet you’ve drunk plenty of absinthe in your time, haven’t you?” she asked Grandmother, who was sucking blancmange through her remaining five teeth.

“We got hold of some once for a first-night party, the play was a Sheridan, I believe. I have never been so sick. But afterward I dreamed that I was a ballerina. I’ve never forgotten that dream. So vivid. So lovely to float through the air and then leap clean off the edge of the stage.”

Meredith helped herself to more blancmange; she had a very sweet tooth and was undaunted even by Rose’s lumpy milk puddings. I broke in hurriedly with an offer to take Edmund upstairs for a bedtime story, and to my relief, he came willingly, holding my hand as if we were old friends. I had visions, as I got up from the table, of his performing the same trick as the Marchant girls and clinging to his mother’s skirts. He chose the story of Briar Rose, the abused girl whose fate was decided by the whim of a couple of wise women and whose only other claim to distinction was that she slept for a hundred years.

Afterward, he lay against me, full of questions. “But she’d be a hundred and fifteen when she woke up. How would she be able to stand?”

I thought of those little Marchant girls trapped in a place they hadn’t chosen and my anger grew, like the wise woman’s in the story, until when Meredith came up to help Edmund with his prayers I was in a furious state. Wicked, wicked woman for slandering my brother. And now she’d compounded the wrong by seeking to corrupt his son with talk of absinthe.

After Meredith had kissed Edmund on the forehead, he at once curled on his side, ready to sleep. I took her pointy little elbow, pushed her into my own bedroom, and shut the door behind us. “I can’t bear it, what you said about my brother. Admit you were lying.”

“Evelyn, aren’t you tired after our late night? I am.” She did look exhausted, sunken-eyed, the bones prominent in her forehead.

But the counterarguments had been building in my head all day. I would take her story apart until there was nothing left but the lurid shreds of her twisted imagination. “You know what bothers me most of all, that you said you were training to be a nun, that you would lie even about that. You love clothes, beautiful things, art, pleasure. Forgive me but I see nothing of the nun in you.”

“Oh,” she said wearily, her hands loose on her lap and her head bent, “and what is your image of a nun, I wonder? I wanted to be a nun because I loved God, it was that straightforward. I was a fool, I guess. I had such a clear sense of what I would do it was bound to go wrong. I would devote myself to God and I would nurse. And then in the war, in those hospitals, my faith—I guess that’s what you’d call it though it doesn’t fully explain what I felt—at first grew even stronger. I could do what was required of me, I knew. I could love those men, those pitiable men, I could love our enemy who sometimes came to us in a pulpy mess as prisoners, even the profiteers and the politicians and generals who had sent men to their deaths in such monstrous numbers. I didn’t get angry or rebellious or resigned, because I had sacrificed my will to another’s. What I
thought
was irrelevant after that, what I
did
and believed was all that mattered. Yes, I had surrendered, and it was a good feeling. I let go. I did my work. And then your brother came along.” She glanced at me and her eyes were sober, as if she were struggling to be entirely truthful but I didn’t trust her, I thought her a consummate actress and that this gravity was just another ploy. “He saw me as a challenge, something to break through to. He wanted me, all of me, body and soul, my full attention. He couldn’t stomach the fact that I might actually have something else,
someone
else on my mind.”

“My brother did not rape you. He was incapable of hurting anyone. He was kind and respectful. He wouldn’t do that to any woman, because he loved
me
. He would think of it happening to me.”

She lay back on my pillow, curled on her side, and drew her knees up to her chest, watching me. “It’s not my intention to make you think too harshly of him. I understood him and perhaps in some ways I wanted him. I had wanted so many others. I wanted to be held and kissed and made love to. I wanted oblivion. Of course I did. But don’t you see? I had wanted it but given it up. I had turned my back on that kind of comfort and he violated the choice I had made. That was the worse thing he did, almost worse than forcibly entering my body.”

“But if you wanted him, you must have given him a signal.”

“What signal, exactly? That I found him handsome and amusing? That I felt sympathy for him? That I rejoiced in his recovery and was so sad because he had to go back? Yes, I felt all those things. Is that what you meant, Evelyn?”

“I think he must have believed . . .”

“You were about to say, he must have believed that when I resisted him I was just playacting. Then you think as your brother chose to. You are no better than he. I might have known. God, you British middle classes, you cannot be in the wrong, can you, especially not if you want something that you can’t have? He regarded my resistance as an obstacle, simply, to overcome.” She unrolled from the bed and stood so close that we almost touched and I saw every detail of her small throat and her moist mouth and her hair falling in feathery wisps on her forehead.

“He raped me, Evelyn. Believe it. Accept it, please, so that we might put it behind us. So that we might be on the same side.”

Her breath was on my chin and her eyes were pleading and ardent, turned up to me like a saint’s at the foot of the cross in a bad painting. Perhaps it was fatigue, the lingering nightmare of the art party or the visit to the Good Samaritan Home, perhaps it was the unwanted intimacy of that moment or that she seemed so false, so determined to act out her part, but I couldn’t stop myself, my hand came up and I struck her on the right cheek, not hard but enough to shunt that piteous look from her eye. “I don’t believe it. I used to think I would help you, that we should accommodate you for the sake of Edmund. If you want us to care for him, we will. He shall be ours. But I want nothing to do with you and your lies and your wickedness. I want you out of my life.”