Evelyn Lawrence met Geoffrey Beaumont at the Royal Pavilion Midsummer Ball of 1926. She had turned eighteen that year and had spotted her gown in the arcade of glass display cases at Plummer’s Department Store: a simple sleeveless design in white chiffon with a drop-waist sash and an organza flower at the hip. Her mother had studied the gown through the glass display as if she were viewing a breed of monkey at the London Zoo. The handkerchief hemline was questionable; the fabric flimsy. Did Evelyn want to be showy?
Her cousin James was on his hols from Cambridge where he was reading Medicine, and had gladly agreed to escort her. But after his third glass of Veuve Clicquot, as they strolled between dances in the Pavilion Gardens, he’d confessed to her that he’d persuaded a beautiful girl to join him for a cigarette and a discussion of whether art was possible after a world war, or – he grinned at Evelyn – was everything doomed to idle expressionism?
Evelyn glanced back. The girl, a redhead in pale green silk, waited on a galleried balcony.
‘I take it the question is hers, not yours?’
‘I only need a line, Evvie …’
‘You have too many already, James!’
‘She’s clever. She’s clever like you.’
‘You see!’
‘You once told me that finishing school would have finished you off were it not for the art classes.’
‘History of Art classes. If she knows her art, she’ll finish you off.’
‘It is my sincere hope.’
‘James!’
‘Evvie, dear heart, listen. If I fail in my cause, I’ll have no choice but to confess to your parents that you are so winsome, I’ll need to marry you myself, and to hell with even-featured, physically impressive children who don’t drool. I think they’ll come round to the idea once they realize your dowry won’t even have to leave the family.’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘My first proposal … Somehow, I’d imagined it all so differently.’
‘I’ll tell your mother it all began with that sudden shower as we stepped from the cab, when, yes, Aunt Maude, it was as you’d feared: Evvie’s flimsy gown clung to her, and I couldn’t help but observe –’
‘With your anatomical eye …’
‘With my anatomical eye – of course – that her breasts are of a size and shape otherwise seen only in the delicacy of champagne glasses’ – he glanced for corroboration at the empty coupé in his hand – ‘and that’s when I knew, dear Aunt, that’s when I knew I had to have her.’
‘One line …’
‘You are the bestest.’
‘You are unstoppable. Ask her if she regards Max Beckmann as an idle expressionist.’
‘Beckmann?’
Her smile was sly. ‘See you shortly.’
The Pavilion’s oriental domes and minarets were floodlit and golden, as beautiful and unlikely as ever. High overhead, gulls floated spectral against the inky sky, while partygoers strolled across the lawns, their laughter rippling strangely. From the ballroom, the slow-slow-quick-quick tempo of a foxtrot spilled into the night, and, somewhere, a woman declared drunkenly that she’d lost a shoe.
As the lawns emptied, Evelyn began to wonder just how late it was … Had James forgotten her? Ahead, in the dim light of a red paper Chinese lantern, she could see loops of smoke rising from a cigarette, although she had to edge closer before she could make out its owner. ‘Sorry to trouble you.’ She tried to sound breezy. ‘Would you have the time?’
As he stepped into the light, smoke escaped his nostrils. ‘Certainly.’ He pushed back a starched shirt cuff. ‘It’s twenty minutes past ten.’ He was tall, long-limbed. She couldn’t help but observe that the sleeves of his tailcoat were actually too short. ‘The only thing worse than borrowing one’s tailcoat,’ she heard her mother declare, ‘is buying one’s furniture.’ For her mother, it went without saying that one inherited one’s worldly goods – and that one owned a good tailcoat.
On his breath she could smell whisky, no doubt from a flask hidden in the pocket on the underside of his tails. He reached into his jacket and offered her a cigarette from a case but she shook her head. She never managed not to cough, she explained, privately regretting that she sounded like a child. She met his eye, and looked away again, as if to examine the paper bloom of the lantern. He invited her to join him on a nearby bench but she declined, unable to say that a damp bench would mark her gown. Across the lawn, the lanterns were dissolving into the mist that had crept up from the front. ‘You can smell the sea,’ he said.
In the narrow pool of light, his eyes were a rich brown, warm as autumn chestnuts, but was there also, she wondered, something guarded about them? Did he labour under a certain reserve? And now, was he simply too polite to walk away and rejoin his party?
‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, remembering the sea. ‘There’s a definite tang in the air.’
He pointed to the Pavilion’s central dome and offered some fact about its construction. As he did, she noticed that the underarm seam of his jacket was split, and had to suppress a smile.
A stray couple walked past. The man was singing a tune – ‘’Deed I Do’ – and tapping out the renegade beat on his top hat as his partner’s hips sashayed to the rhythm. Their figures disappeared before his voice did, but, when it too was gone, the night seemed quieter, emptier – as strange as a theatre after closing, when the boxes, the bright plaster cherubs and even the chandelier’s dazzle have been absorbed into the ubiquitous dark.
Each suddenly felt odd, like an exile, between worlds. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with the toe of his shoe. ‘Would you like me to escort you inside?’
‘I’m keeping you.’
His eyes widened. ‘Not at all. I only thought –’
‘Yes,’ she said, getting hold of herself. ‘Yes, I really should locate my cousin.’
They introduced themselves, belatedly. She liked his smile, even though his strong teeth seemed slightly overlarge for his mouth. His expression was reserved yet honest and direct. It was a good face, she decided.
She rocked slightly on her heels while both ransacked their brains for something more. She almost laughed. How, in the middle of provincial Brighton, had she found herself standing with a stranger in the gardens of a pleasure palace? When had they stepped into The Arabian Nights ? Her mouth tingled with a sensation she couldn’t put words to, while he considered reaching over the rail to break off a bloom for her hair. But ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Lilac, still.’ After her words, the gesture, he decided, would have been stagey.
She was about to inquire about his party inside but stopped herself. He did not offer her a sip from his flask. Too familiar. Nor did he offer her his tailcoat for her shoulders, because the night was, after all, warm.
‘I hope you’re clever with a needle and thread,’ she said, taking even herself by surprise. He looked bemused. She laughed and took the liberty of poking her index finger into his armpit. ‘It would seem you’ve expanded tonight.’
‘Ah,’ he said, a smile playing on his lips. ‘How careless of me.’
‘And in a debutante’s company.’
‘It seems I’ve let myself go.’
‘I shouldn’t have to see such things.’
‘Quite.’ He nodded gravely.
‘I’m shocked, of course.’
‘I can only apologize. Sometimes, I shock myself …’
She forgot her performance. ‘I don’t believe you!’ She grinned, then turned her face quickly to the sky.
‘Drat.’ He reached for his cigarette case. ‘There goes any hope I had of intrigue.’
She shrugged. ‘If it helps at all, I can’t actually see you in the dark.’
‘That’s very kind, thank you.’
‘Shall we repair to the light?’
‘Yes, I really must get you back.’
‘I would say that my cousin will be worrying about me, but it’s more likely I’ll have to remind him who I am.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Alas’ – his voice in the night was amused and warm – ‘I don’t imagine you’re easily forgotten.’
She turned, snapped a lilac bloom off the bush, and slid it behind her ear. ‘Mr Beaumont, I’ll beg you to remember that, as a debutante, I am entirely forgettable, and my escort will challenge any man who avers otherwise.’ Her smile twitched.
At the top of the flight of stone stairs, the anteroom was as stuffy and raucous as a schoolroom. Near the door, a group of perhaps half a dozen young men clutched their capes and canes, and debated loudly and drunkenly the effects of May’s General Strike. His party, she assumed. Four of them greeted Geoffrey as he passed, and he returned a few quick words. One of the four also nodded warmly to her. Another among them, a man with a monocle – black eyes, a hair-line crack at the rim of his eyepiece – looked intently at Geoffrey but did not nod. Was it a snub?
She would think little more of it, of this stranger, until a year later when she’d turn in her seat at the Savoy Theatre and recognize him immediately in the row behind them. He’d been peering at the programme, monocled again, the edge of its lens still faintly cracked. As he’d chatted with his companion, she’d murmured instructions to Geoffrey to turn around, to look casually, but he’d merely shrugged, seemingly without recollection. After the interval, the pair didn’t return, and at the time it had seemed both something and nothing.
But on the night of the ball, although she briefly felt the puzzle of the man with the monocle – the incongruity of him – she moved quickly past. If James happened not to be where he said he’d be, she’d never find him in this crowd, and Geoffrey would feel obliged to wait with her. They would be forced into small talk. Perhaps there had been another girl he’d been interested in before she’d interrupted his evening. Or perhaps he’d simply been enjoying a quiet cigarette and his own company.
He was broad-shouldering a path for her through the crowd. Somewhere in the distance a tray of empty champagne glasses crashed to the floor, loud as the tide on the shingle. A young man was shouting, in her ear it seemed – ‘Georgie! Georgie! We’re off! For Lord’s sake, Georgie!’ – but they were nearly at the ballroom. She watched an old man in his winged collar bend low, imperiously unsteady, over a glass-topped table until his long, Roman nose met a delicate line of cocaine – and again, ‘Georgie!’
In a moment, they would push through the wide doors and cross the parquet dance floor. She would point to her cousin, alone now, she hoped, on the balcony, and they’d smile their brief goodbyes, shrugging and apparently helpless as the fervour of the crowd and the volume of the ten-man band separated them without the need for formalities.
But as they stepped into the crashing light of the ballroom where the band were playing out the final dizzying throes of a jazz number, the last blast of the night, the crowd surged, and a pair of dancers, ecstatically entwined, backed into her. Geoffrey reached out; Evelyn felt his hand, light on the small of her back, and, in that instant, a charge ran up her spine.
They spent the first night of their honeymoon in an elegant but precarious hotel on Ile St-Louis. The seventeenth-century mansion was slowly subsiding into the Seine and one day, their host had informed them with a Gallic shrug, it would be de luxe accommodation for ‘the feeshes’. The smell of drains wafted in through the window. Geoffrey’s feet hung off the edge of the mattress. Evelyn traced with her toes the cracks that grew like rangy sunflowers up the walls. ‘Perhaps I should say …’
He propped himself up on an elbow.
‘That I’m not …’
‘That you’re not …?’
‘Reluctant.’
‘Ah.’
‘You thought I was going to say I wasn’t a –’
‘Indeed. I was already composing the note I would pin to your chest when I returned you, Cost, Insurance and Freight, to your mother.’
She plucked a hair from his chest and, half laughing, half wincing, he drew her to him.
After three years of marriage and as many miscarriages, Evelyn’s fourth pregnancy felt like a reprieve.
At three months pregnant, they celebrated with a picnic in the Park to which they invited her widow mother and his widower father. She didn’t look well with it, her mother declared, and the conversation had dwindled painfully to talk of the diseased branch of the beech tree overhead, bare of leaves in June, and whether or not it should be cut off. By the end of her sixth month, she could no longer walk even as far as the Park. By the seventh, she was confined to her bed. But no matter, Dr Moore, the Beaumonts’ old family doctor, assured her brusquely. If she did as she was told, she would carry to full term.
She did, yet what followed in the twenty-four hours of Philip’s birth was like nothing she had imagined. She had expected the extremis of the labour. She had expected exhaustion and exaltation. Instead, she’d haemorrhaged. There had been only the sense of her life and her child’s life slipping together from the world on a tide of blood.
When it had finally stopped, Dr Moore had taken Geoffrey to one side. The baby’s shoulder had been badly lodged, but they’d managed to free it without breaking the arm or collarbone. He was a large baby for so small a woman. She’d lost a great deal of blood and she’d been ‘on a very dangerous brink indeed’. Her uterus had almost certainly been compromised. Indeed it was highly unlikely she would carry another child. Even if he were wrong, she would not, he believed, survive another labour, and – here his old watery eyes narrowed beneath their wild Scottish eyebrows – it was Geoffrey’s duty to ensure his wife did not fall pregnant again. Don’t be a beast, those eyes said, and Geoffrey felt a fist punch through to his heart.
As she came to, he pressed his lips softly to her left eyelid, then to the right, and, as she opened her eyes, she smelled something new in his hair, on his jacket – the sweetness of a cigar he’d smoked with a neighbour in the Park outside. In spite of her every intention to brighten, she felt a thorny envy for his ease in the world; for the way the well-worn ritual of a cigar with another man seemed enough to persuade him that all was well that ended well. She was fine, he murmured. The baby was fine.
She nodded because she couldn’t trust herself to speak; to say, didn’t he know, she’d had to fight not to go under as Dr Moore had barked at her, as though from the top of a well. And she hadn’t, she hadn’t gone under. She’d been awake through the horror of the haemorrhage even though she’d been unable to open her eyes. She’d heard them telling Geoffrey very firmly to ‘leave her now’, and she’d wondered to herself, Is this what dying is?
‘You’re on the mend,’ he told her. ‘And he’s already too big for his booties.’
Who was this new, small person in the cradle beside her bed if not the stone that had been tied to her ankle as she fell?
Geoffrey took her hand and stroked her fingers, as if any greater display of feeling might overwhelm them both. Once, he’d imagined that time must suspend itself for life’s great transitions; that it must give way, in those seismic shifts, to some fuller apprehension of reality. Yet in the twenty-three hours of Evelyn’s labour, time was not overcome. It had turned to mortar. He’d felt himself, everything he was, stiffen at the sounds of his wife’s agony, and he’d longed to bolt from the house; to drive through the December night, blasted with cold air. Life had brought him up short. He could neither go up the stairs nor leave the house. It was all he could do to straighten himself for the moment when the midwife would come to him, her face ashen, and lay her hand on his sleeve.
The room still smelled of disinfectant. All that blood.
He rose to open the window. In the watery sunshine of a December morning, as the ordinary sounds of the new day reached them, he pressed his wife’s cold, pale palm to his cheek, and she smiled faintly at the odd sensation of his two-day beard. He thought, Her face has changed; she is someone different today, and he felt her eyes search his for the answers to her confusion and pain.
He wouldn’t understand. It wouldn’t even have crossed his mind yet. Suddenly she’d turned into a fragile thing in their bed, a bone-china cup of a woman, a woman who wouldn’t mend. Not properly. He would never crush her against him again. The fiercity would go out of his love. He would never be able to forget the sight of the blood-soaked sheets piled high in the scullery sink, and their mattress, wrapped in a tarp and carried away.
She smoothed her bed jacket. He moved to the hearth and stoked the coal in the grate. In that moment, each felt a loneliness so profound they had to battle inwardly not to resent one another.
They recovered, slowly. They named Philip for Geoffrey’s father, who had died just months before the birth of his first grandson. They loved one another again, and their love grew, something neither of them, privately, had expected following the trauma of her labour.
Sometimes, in entirely random moments, Evelyn would see her son and have to blink back the memories of the red storm of his delivery. She never forgot, though other women had assured her she would, and occasionally, in those long gazes, something seemed to pass between Philip and her: a flickering of mutual confusion, guilt and apology. Even as an infant, hungry for a feed, he’d struggled to latch on, and she’d wondered, without any hope of knowing, whether the blind panic of his birth had created some unsteadiness, not just in her, but within him too. He was physically robust like his father, but there was something else – a worry, a need, a vulnerability in him – that she could never put right, perhaps because she had put it there herself.
Once, in those early days, she’d asked Geoffrey if she seemed to him naturally maternal. ‘Of course!’ he’d exclaimed, but Geoffrey was no judge of these things. He’d grown up on painful visits to a mother he hardly knew. Naturally she seemed maternal to him. Any woman at home with her children seemed maternal to him. By his standards, even her own mother, remote and lofty on Brunswick Square, was motherly.
Whatever the truth of it, of her, Dr Moore’s judgement had ruled out any other pregnancy. For a time, a part of her had wanted to prove the old doctor wrong, and to have with Geoffrey the large family they’d always assumed was their future. Another part of her was relieved to have been officially dismissed from duty. Geoffrey had said there was no question. He wouldn’t risk it.
So they switched off the bedside lamp. They grew accustomed to nightwear. They’d learned to heed Dr Moore’s advice, relying on rubbers, withdrawals and wordless apologies.
The mark was still there, of course, the small patch on the ceiling in the sitting room, brown beneath a coat of ivory paint, where the blood had spilled to the bedroom floor and seeped through a crack in the floorboards. Sometimes Evelyn would watch her husband in his wingback chair after dinner, his head on the antimacassar, his face tipped up as he blew ribbons of smoke over their heads, his gaze seemingly trained on that guilty spot. Or was it her nerves making something of nothing? ‘Be careful, darling,’ her mother had once said to her not long after Philip’s birth, ‘or we’ll be packing you off to the Nerve Doctor.’ The Nerve Doctor had long been the bogey of her mother’s cautionary tales. Composure and restraint were not merely required, but assumed.
The first day she’d been able to sit up in bed, a week before Christmas 1931, Geoffrey had arrived home from the Bank, smiling unsteadily, with something hidden beneath his snowy overcoat. ‘Guess,’ he said. He looked so hearty and well, he seemed to her then like another variety of human.
‘Flowers,’ she said, trying to brighten.
‘Guess again.’
‘A partridge in a pear tree.’
‘What about one slightly out-of-tune canary?’ He pulled his overcoat back to reveal a small gilt cage. ‘I was rather taken with this chap,’ he said. A bird blinked back at her.
It would sing to the baby, he said, and it was so ridiculous, so bird-brained, one couldn’t help but laugh at the little thing. He sat down carefully on the edge of their bed, awkward next to her, conscious suddenly of his own bulk.
The canary started to sing from his perch. Philip cooed dreamily in his cradle and sneezed. ‘Do you like him?’ Geoffrey asked.
Hot tears came into her eyes.
She named him Dickie.
Sometimes, they would leave the cage door open so Dickie could fly about the kitchen and stretch his wings, often with Philip, as he grew, stumbling after him. But one day, one of the many cats that prowled the Park stole into the house and gobbled up poor Dickie, leaving behind only telltale yellow feathers at the bottom of his cage. They’d had to tell Philip that his friend had flown away through an open window and that ‘any time now’ (Geoffrey had consulted his wristwatch) Dickie would be arriving in New York.
‘But what will Dickie do in Noowook?’ asked Philip from behind his bib, blancmange trembling on his lip.
‘What will he do?!’ boomed Geoffrey merrily.
Philip nodded, his eyes huge and grave. Geoffrey glanced at Evelyn. He had only just arrived home. ‘Why, see the sights, of course!’ he said, gathering his son into his arms and lifting him towards the ceiling. ‘That Dickie will be living the high life in no time, you mark my words. He’ll miss you. Lord knows, it will be hard for him without a good friend like you.’ He pressed Philip against his chest and stroked his head. ‘But don’t you think New York is a better place for Dickie than that old cage?’
Philip buried his gooey face in his father’s tweed. ‘I don’t know …’ Tears were imminent. Geoffrey looked across the table to Evelyn.
‘Dickie will love New York,’ she declared. ‘He’ll visit the top of the Empire State Building, and he’ll perch on the head of the Statue of Liberty. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if dear old Dickie finds himself dining with the Rockefellers themselves tonight.’
Geoffrey turned to her. ‘Not the Rockefellers,’ he said under his breath. Then he passed Philip into her arms as their son started to howl.
She’d forgotten. Jewish banking dynasties, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds of the world, were, he’d explained, the scourge of international finance. On this point he had agreed with her father, an accord that had unsettled her, but then, many of the women at the WI espoused the same view. When she’d laughed at ‘that man’ Oswald Mosley rallying his amateur, well-bred army of ‘blackshirts’, Geoffrey had pointed out that many of the best people in Sussex were giving their sons to Mosley.
‘Who are these “best people”, darling?’
He’d glanced up over his paper. ‘People looking out for the national good, I suppose.’
‘Well, Mosley won’t have my son.’
‘Philip is three.’ He’d smiled his wry smile – ‘I don’t expect the shirt will fit.’ And she’d had to laugh.