The Crimson Rooms (56 page)

B
y now it was gone three.
I bought a newspaper and ordered tea and toast in a café as my eyes passed over the usual headlines, queues lengthening outside the Labour Exchange, miners rebelling, government failing. On page three there was an update on the “Shot in the Heart Murder,” in which Sir David Hardynge, philanthropist and parliamentary candidate, was described as a surprise witness whose generosity in private had led to his unexpected embroilment in a murder trial and whose modest dignity in court was exemplary. At a quarter to five, my feet carried me to Maida Vale and the corner where Nicholas was leaning against the side of his car, arms folded, head to one side, casually dressed, no tie, open waistcoat, blazer.

He flung wide the door, helped me in, and at once the horror faded a little as the truth of Nicholas, the clean lines of his body, the shape of his smile, that upward quirk to the left side of the mouth, soothed my aching heart. He kissed me, studied my face, told me I looked desperately tired, kissed me again, and asked where shall we go.

I said I had the key to Prudence’s cottage and we would certainly be private there. Making no comment, he gave me a quick, warm look and turned onto the Harrow Road. I was incapacitated by the shock of being all day so alone and now with him. Here he was, the man I was so in love with, here, the same as when I last saw him outside Fortnum’s though perhaps even more impossibly, unreachably Nicholas, his competent hand on the wheel, the intelligent fingers, the contrast of the white cuff with his skin, the changing angle of his thigh as he worked the brake.

At first, he tried to make me talk. What was the outcome of the Wheeler trial? “Not finished yet,” I said. “Did you not read about it in the papers?” He’d only glanced at the
Times
in the train and there’d been no mention. What about my interview with Lady Curren? “The children are to be released though it was an uncomfortable half-hour. I wanted to know more about the home’s policy on child emigration and Lady Curren thought I was being ungrateful. You obviously exerted quite an influence on her, Nicholas. She spoke of you fondly.”

“Well, she’s Sylvia’s aunt. A formidable woman for her size but her heart’s in the right place. Between them, she and her sister, Sylvia’s mother, sit on practically every committee in town.”

He didn’t seem to notice that I rarely spoke after that. Instead he told me about his brief in Manchester and how he’d managed to get his defendant off with two years’ penal servitude, a sight better outcome than for the others, who received ten years apiece. “The fact is, though, that the sums involved, more than a hundred thousand pounds stolen from the bank over six months, made it a high-profile case that hit the national press. Others like it perhaps may follow for me. It’s all good.”

Summer had matured since we walked together in the fields above Chesham. In the luminous late afternoon, there was scarcely a movement among the dense greenery of the woods. I remembered the acute sense of excitement as I traveled out, alone, on the Metropolitan Line, the child in the seat opposite, with the farthing-sized birthmark, the miracle of finding Nicholas awaiting me under the churchyard wall. And now I was with the same man but with the dream, it seemed to me, in ruins.

For the first time I admitted to myself what I had wanted from this evening when I made my offer to Prudence and asked for the keys to her cottage. Him. Yes. All. And now?

Prudence’s cottage was in a lane just outside the village of Beaconsfield, a few miles from Uxbridge. It was familiar to me from reluctant childhood visits to the recently orphaned Aunt Prudence, who had sat in rustling black satin and served us meager Sunday teas—agony for James and me until we were released into the garden and allowed to play hide-and-seek among the gooseberry bushes. The cottage, of charmless stucco, was set four-square in its gardens behind a low wall, a quarter of a mile or so from the much grander Georgian house that had once belonged to my grandfather.

Prudence had an eye for function rather than beauty. The garden was rigidly carved up into vegetable patch and fruit bushes, with stepping-stone paths in between and squares of flower bed outside the front and back doors. Inside there was no electricity, the fires were rarely lit, and the furnishings, hastily selected from her dead father’s house, the worst of mid-Victorian. On the evening I visited with Nicholas, though the mellow July light was flattering, the angular little house seemed resigned to a future of creeping decay. Leaving me at the gate, he drove off to park in a wider part of the lane. My key gave access to the scullery with its red-tiled floor and dripping tap, where as I child I had been condemned to spend damp half hours with Mrs. Lime, the help, peeling vegetables or washing up.

No wonder the tenants had gone north for the summer. Prudence’s furniture was still there, the heavy sideboard and unforgiving chairs at the swept hearth in the parlor. The windows were too small and deep-set to let in much light or any heat. I looked under the sink but found neither ants nor mouse droppings, only an evil-looking but mercifully empty trap, and ran up the steep little staircase to check the two bedrooms, one containing twin beds, the other Prudence’s, with a three-foot iron bedstead and pious prints on the walls.

Once, when I was eight, James and I had been sent to stay with Prudence
to keep her company now she’s lost Grandfather
, Mother said. James was allocated the spare room, while I had to undergo the torture of sleeping head-to-toe with my aunt, whose sense of decency was outraged when I suggested I share my brother’s room. I lay awake with her feet on my hip, swamped by her very distinctive smell. What was it? Coal-tar soap, hair washed once a week, clothes often aired but rarely cleaned, and most pungent of all, the odor of distaste. I regarded Aunt Prudence as an unknowable woman who avoided touch beyond a peck at arrival and departure, whose activities were rigidly regulated and included numerous trips to the village with a basket and a list of dull messages: call in on old Mrs. P to check her feet, visit Mrs. Carstairs (the vicar’s wife) to offer a seedcake for the bring-and-buy, deliver a parcel of largesse (rhubarb and a cast-off pair of lisle stockings) to the indigent Lawrence family, buy stamps and postcards so that we children could write home daily.

James, at five, was not expected to participate much in Prudence’s life, and a son of the vicar was summoned so that the pair could form a reluctant bond. They were even given an old sheet to make a wigwam. I, on the other hand, was to be Prudence’s little helper as she paid her calls, fussed with church matters, sewed, or worked in the garden. By the end of two days, I was near screaming with boredom. Next morning I took James for a long walk in the enticing country lanes. I remember his hot, rough little hand in mine, the ache of responsibility as we ventured farther and farther from the cottage, his questions: Where are we going? How much longer? What’s a baby bat called? We ate blackberries and stopped to look at everything, a foal rubbing its ear on a gate, a scattering of feathers betokening some dreadful death, a well with a little pitched roof. We got lost, had to ask the way back, and arrived at the cottage with berry-stained mouths and filthy hands. Prudence slapped our legs and refused us jam at teatime. James obligingly howled all evening and far into the night until at last I was allowed to sleep with him, his delicious, fruit-scented, salt cheek pressed against mine. The next day we were collected by Min and brought home to Maida Vale by cart, train, and omnibus.

I stood in Prudence’s bedroom window, facing the front, and watched Nicholas, who leaned on the wall by the gate in a stance that was already wrenchingly familiar, arms folded, head down, legs crossed at the ankle. Bathed in that steady golden light, he seemed to me the image of irrepressible manhood, on the brink of greatness, of an entirely different world to mine.

Where had my dream of a happy ending come from? Happy endings of the fairy-tale variety had not been part of the plan since war was declared, since the toasting fork clattered onto the hearth, since I listened to that fateful lecture in Girton. What a fool I had been to think that a man so beautiful, so full of promise, so sweetly inclined to fall in love, should actually have been destined for me. He, after all, like most other eligible men over twenty-four in Europe, was deeply, fatally snared by the past.

I stood at the window a little longer, making up my mind, then I went down to him.

“What is it?” he said. “What kept you so long?”

“I want you to do something for me.”

I led him inside, closed the scullery door behind us, passed through the kitchen with its blue gingham frills on cupboards and windows, and climbed the little staircase leading to Prudence’s bedroom, where the net curtain at the window was still thrust to one side.

“What is it?” he asked again.

I still held his hand, which I lifted to my breast. “I want you to give me this, only this.”

He took a little indrawn breath but shook his head. His fingers pressed momentarily, promisingly, on my flesh, then withdrew. “Evelyn, we’ll have a lifetime.”

“So much could happen. I want to take this now.”

“My very, very dear girl.” Stunned, wrong-footed, he took a step backward. “Do you know what you are doing?”

I sat on the edge of the bed, hands in my lap, waiting.

“Evelyn.”

“You said you wanted to be with me.” I pulled the pins from my hair and placed them on the quilt, then undid the top button of my blouse. His back was to the light. I thought, if he refuses me, I shall die.

At last he pulled me up so that we stood one on either side of the window, looking half through the lattice, half through net to the overgrown fruit bushes now in deep shadow. Sighing, he reached out his other hand, lifted my hair, held the back of my neck, and brought my face close to his. I was weeping so hard that I had to take long, indrawn breaths as he kissed my mouth.

Everything broke apart, the pink-and-brown-trellis pattern on the wallpaper, the greens of the garden, the darkness of Nicholas. I kept my eyes open because I wanted to know what happened to the world when lovemaking was involved. I heard my own stunned cries as his kisses deepened, my hands tore at his clothes, my flesh shivered under the shock of his touch as he slid his hand inside the neck of my blouse and stroked my breast.

He whispered: “Are you sure?”

I drew him back until I felt the side of the bed against my knees. When we lay down, I guided his hand onto my thigh. He watched me for a moment then tucked me under his arm so that we lay clasped together as he undid the buttons on my blouse and pushed the fabric aside.

“You’re so perfect,” he whispered. “You don’t know. My head has been full, all these years, of images of men who have been most obscenely broken. I don’t know how I shall bear it, the beauty of you.”

“All. Not just men. All of us broken.” Our kisses deepened and I laid his hand on the fastening of my skirt. I had time to wonder, in those kisses, about other women, Sylvia. And then I gave in.

Pay attention, Evelyn. Don’t miss a thing. I followed his hand as it cupped my knee and swept my inner thigh. My flesh shuddered at the impossible intimacy of his tentative fingers. I loved the conjunction of our bodies, the beat of his stomach and thighs so that the pain in my heart at last was crushed to a distant echo. My fists clenched, ankles flexed, neck arched until I didn’t recognize my own body. How would I, when it had been shrouded for a lifetime in shapeless garments, but was now unwrapped at last, and being made love to by this man and no other? I wept to see Nicholas exposed, connected, revealing a face not as it was in public but absolutely stripped of any defense, soft-mouthed, soft-skinned, blurred with love.

This was the opposite of all the rules I had grown up with; cover up, avoid touch, treat your body merely as an inconvenient, suffering vessel for the soul. What a lie to pretend the body wasn’t packed with sensation and desire, capable of embracing and opening itself up to be filled with a new light, a new freedom to be Evelyn Gifford, alive, alive.

But afterward, as I lay in his arms, even as I marveled at the touch of his warm moist skin against mine, they came back, softly at first, mouths whispering against the window, a million dead mouths, among them James, the shadowy Private Fox, and Stella Wheeler with her bronze dancer and her false smile.

I shut them out again and for a while longer spun on the pivot of our brief time together while he covered my neck and breast with kisses.

I couldn’t believe that he didn’t love me.

The shape and contents of the room emerged again: a print of a child kneeling at prayer, blond curls, shut eyes; a spider, legs thin as hairs, twirling from the picture rail. Nicholas’s face, close up, was full of movement, the flutter of his eyelid, a momentary tick at the side of his mouth, the adjustment of his lips as if the muscles were relaxing in preparation for sleep. With one arm he held me, the other hand rested on my stomach. I heard a car in the lane, remembered the gooseberry bushes and how their thorns used to tear at my hair when I hid among them as a little girl.