December 1927, Davenport House, London
Could she do better? The dress was divine – a luxurious silk that brought to mind creamy coffee pouring into a cup, and it had tiny opal charms embroidered along the neckline. One could always do better. She poked her fringe into place then bent forward, checking her cleavage in the mirror. Her breasts sagged and separated like large milk puddings. Maybe tonight called for something less lovely. She didn’t need to go rubbing things in her poor cousin’s face.
Tuna’d had a miscarriage recently, her third in a row, and had apparently taken to staying at home, bringing her five o’clock vermouth forward to half past four, then four, then half past three. She’d put on three stone. All of this gossip, of course; Bettina hadn’t visited Cousin Tuna in over seven months.
But Tuna didn’t have a monopoly on misery! Bettina had suffered the most evil morning sickness in the early months, unable to keep anything down until mid-afternoon. She frequently felt dizzy with anaemia, endured sciatic nerve pain along her buttocks and needed to urinate every five minutes. Her feet and hands were bloating at such a rate that she fancied she could almost see them swelling in real time, like a beached whale carcass slowly filling up with gas.
The dress clung to her stomach. God no. Here, Tuna, would you look at this new life growing inside me! God no. Poor thing. She took out a magenta dress, picking off a speck of lint. Perhaps – and she was big enough to acknowledge this – perhaps, deep down, she’d been avoiding Tuna all this time. As if Tuna might taint her in some way. As if miscarriage was catching.
What a ghastly thought.
The magenta dress was fine. Fine. She checked her nostrils in the mirror and went downstairs to find Doris the cook at the kitchen table, fixing a clock with her sleeves rolled up and a small screw bit between her teeth. She asked her to do up her dress buttons and Doris gave her a peevish look, thinking, undoubtedly, that she wasn’t a bloody lady’s maid. Still, she did up the buttons, saying, ‘Lovely fabric on this,’ in her wheezy Scotch drawl.
They only had a live-in cook now, with the gardener coming in twice a week and a girl doubling as maid and housekeeper coming in every day until seven at night, noon on Sundays. Bart was unwilling to sell the Brighton house, not wanting to displace his mother. Bettina imagined Lucille as a huge, cracked tortoise, her scaly hide like peeling whitewash, slowly creeping from room to room, leaving her droppings under dust-sheeted furniture.
‘My mother is too spoiled to tolerate a decline in her living standards,’ Bart told her, ‘and I am, as you know, a proud, unabashed mummy’s boy.’
So they had to ‘tighten their belts’. Bart’s stage salary was glorified pocket money, he claimed, and the ‘fortune’ left to him by his father, while generous, would not last long if he insisted on employing butlers and valets, all of which he could do without frankly, because he wasn’t a ‘damn child or a cripple’ and anyway, ‘how can a nation call itself great when its elite cannot do basic things for themselves?’
Bettina remembered Étienne saying similar things.
‘Can you imagine,’ he said, ‘if we were to lose everything? Every penny? And suddenly having to do everything, entirely everything for ourselves? Cooking our own food, cleaning our own home. Have you ever imagined that?’
Bettina nodded; she had. Of course she had. It was telling that he was thinking about loss. And of course there was the great unspoken thing: Bart and Bettina were idiots with their money and had squandered hundreds of pounds on wild parties and luxurious holidays abroad. After their wedding they’d been like children handed a hammer and a piggy bank and left unsupervised.
Bart was currently rehearsing for the part of Peter in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. He hated Chekhov, finding his plays ‘dull enough to induce coma’, but Bettina positively nagged him to take the part, thinking that any role was preferable to his constant moping around the house. ‘You might even meet someone,’ she came close to saying.
Bart did not want to meet anyone. Bart was terrified of love, if this was what its loss – there’s that word again – could do to a person.
Jennings the butler opened the door and a cloud of incense smoke enveloped his shoulders, lending him a fantastical vampiric air. ‘Please, come in, Mrs Dawes, you are very welcome,’ he said, his tone kindling dry. Jennings had been on Tuna’s staff ever since her marriage – he’d previously butlered for her husband Max’s family. His hairline started in wispy jags three quarters of the way along his head, leaving a waxy, mole-dotted pate; his eyelids drooped like melted cheese and his forehead, in Bart’s charming words, was as creased as an old spunk rag.
The front hall was the size of a ballroom (Max’s family had in fact used it for this purpose throughout the previous century, hosting extravagant dances which were attended, apparently, by members of the royal family) and it was flanked by a staircase the width of a rugby goalpost. A crowd of people in bizarre costumes were chattering and dancing in this ex-ballroom now, under a heavy cumulus of cigarette smoke and incense.
‘Oh, I didn’t know it was fancy dress,’ said Bettina.
Jennings let out a smirk. ‘It isn’t. Please, come in from the cold.’ Bettina looked again: men in Russian Cossack costume, gypsy tweeds, floral waistcoats; women in Arabian harem-style fabrics, some in gothic funeral attire. He was having her on. ‘I feel quite under-dressed,’ she told him.
‘You are dressed tastefully,’ he said. ‘May I take your coat?’
She shrugged off her coat for him and saw Tuna, in a scarlet dress with a humongous bustle and a ridiculous pair of painted-on eyebrows, crying and running barefoot across the hall. A skinny, sickly-looking man wearing dark-green eyeshadow followed her. He was bald and nude from the waist up and he wore only a green Highlander’s kilt. He had the frame of a young boy and his ribcage stuck out. Tuna bundled up the train of her skirt and bounded up the stairs, still weeping. She stopped halfway up, turned back and shrieked, ‘Don’t you dare follow me, Bone!’ before continuing up the steps. The partygoers stopped what they were doing to look. And then quickly resumed their dancing and chatting.
‘What on earth sort of party is this?’ she said to Jennings.
He shrugged. ‘Mrs Garside has acquired some new friends. And some new ideas.’ He ran his hands along the fur coat draping his arm. ‘If she’s not careful, she’ll soon have to acquire some new staff.’
‘Should I go up to her?’
‘If you like.’ He glanced down at her stomach. ‘Congratulations by the way. I am of course thrilled for you and your husband.’
Thrilled? He looked like he’d just been diagnosed with cancer of the prostate.
She headed for the staircase, protecting her bump from errant elbows and hearing snippets of droll conversation: ‘He never would have said that if he knew who you were—’, ‘—spiritual frisson, you know, though I shouldn’t think—’, ‘—quite suicidal, honestly, so I said to her—’, ‘—and I fucking hate hydrangeas—’
Max Garside was home roughly fifty days of the year. Tuna was by now used to doing without her husband and no longer pined for him, deciding instead to take a pro-active approach to her loneliness by sleeping with other men – usually artists and poets. She seemed to have a new favourite every month. So prolific was she in her philandering that it was entirely possible her miscarried babies had not been Max’s at all.
Then again, Max probably had a woman in every port. Bettina imagined him arriving at some crumbling, lice-infested Ukrainian cottage with a stack of presents under his arm, breezing through the doorway and saying, ‘Daddy’s home!’ to a clutch of dusky, barefoot brats (were Ukrainians dusky?), before sweeping up a big-hipped, scraggle-haired peasant in his arms and kissing a mouth marinated in garlic.
Bettina knocked on Tuna’s bedroom door.
‘Fuck off!’
‘It’s Bettina.’
A moment’s silence then a sudden stampede, a flung-open door and Tuna’s tear-blotched face. ‘Oh, Betts, I’m so glad to see you!’ Tuna yanked her into the room and crushed her in a strong hug. ‘Have a little drinky-poos with me, will you?’
Bettina nodded, looking around the room. It had been entirely transformed, the wallpaper stripped and the walls painted an obscene bright orange. The tasteful paintings of pastoral scenes had been replaced by cubist doodles, zodiac charts and God knows what. Where the ottoman had once stood there was now an antique Punch and Judy theatre, the puppets drooping over the tiny stage like boneless trolls. The Welsh dresser had been painted red, its shelves filled with odd curios: eyeless dolls, rabbits’ feet, a collection of crystals, vases filled with dead flowers and – wasn’t that a monkey paw? The room stank like a church; on the dressing table a quartz ashtray held a tablet of smoking charcoal on which was placed a pinch of Frankincense.
Tuna went to her bar, her train dragging over the junk on the floor, and poured drinks. She had indeed put on weight. But she looked fantastic.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ she said, handing Bettina a drink. ‘Congratulations! You did receive the flowers, I hope? And the rocking horse?’ She got down on her knees and pressed her ear to Bettina’s belly. She smiled, looking up at her. ‘A girl. Mark my words. I’ve a gift for this.’
‘Are you all right now?’
‘Oh, I’m fine. Just a lovers’ tiff.’
‘That bald chap?’
‘His name is Bone.’
‘You’re joking.’
Tuna took out a silver cigarette case – it was a Russian design inlaid with three small rubies – and lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t judge me, Bettina. The man is a genius. And I’ll tell you something else: he’s got a nine-incher. And I never exaggerate in these matters.’
‘Him? Surely not.’
Tuna nodded matter-of-factly, squeezing out smoke through a gap in her teeth.
‘Well,’ said Bettina. ‘I suppose I’m happy for you.’
‘Don’t be. He’s also a sadist. I’m giving him the old heave-ho tonight. Here, sit down with me.’ She swiped a pile of clothes off her sofa.
‘I’m very sorry about the baby,’ said Bettina, sitting down.
‘It’s fine, I’m fine. It was only a few weeks along – practically a blood clot. Don’t look at me like that; I don’t want any sympathy. I just want to have fun.’
‘All the same …’
‘It mightn’t even be me with the problem. What about Max? Did you ever think of that? Might be something wrong with his little tadpoles.’
‘Max?’
She must have sensed the incredulity in Bettina’s tone because both sets of eyebrows went up. ‘Yes, Max. Who else?’
‘Oh, come on. You go through beaus almost as fast as you go through maids.’
Tuna laughed with delight, her chin doubling. ‘Silly girl! I don’t let them put it in there! Only Max has that dubious honour.’
Bettina sipped her drink. ‘Oh.’
‘We’re having some poetry in the garden later. I tried to get Siegfried Sassoon down for a reading but it’s impossible to nail the bugger down.’
‘Is it a fancy-dress party? Jennings told me it wasn’t but I think he was being snarky.’
Tuna swatted the air. ‘Jennings can kiss my tits. You know what? We never really stop being young. We are forever those dreamy-eyed children, wanting to play, to pretend, to imagine other realities. But it gets knocked out of us, doesn’t it? By old miseries like Jennings.’
Bettina wasn’t paying full attention; she was looking down at her dress. ‘I am the most boring person here.’
‘Only aesthetically speaking, darling. Here, do you want to borrow something of mine?’
Down the stairs they went, arm in arm, stepping in unison (it had been agreed that they would step in unison). Tuna had changed her outfit and was now wearing a yellow smock made entirely out of bright canary feathers. She had dried turkey feet hanging from her ears, the claws painted with yellow nail polish. She was very proud of this touch. Bettina had transformed herself into Theda Bara’s Salome, a rough approximation thereof at any rate, with a huge, heavy headdress, white flowing gown and severe vampy eyeliner. Her own finishing touch: a false moustache.
Tuna took Jennings to one side and asked him to get rid of Bone and all his effects – she wanted him gone within the hour. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said, holding up a finger to his face. ‘I hate it when you look at me like that.’
He raised a wry eyebrow. ‘I don’t know what you could possibly mean.’
‘You may judge me,’ said Tuna, ‘but I pay you. Get rid of him. Don’t let him take the portrait in the green room.’
‘Which one?’
She leaned in and whispered into his ear.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That one.’
‘It was a gift,’ said Tuna. ‘He’ll try and say it wasn’t, but it was. It’s mine.’
‘Very well.’
‘I do appreciate everything you do for me, Jen-Jens.’
His lips tightened and pursed as if he were trying out a smile for the first time. ‘I’m sure, Mrs Garside,’ he said, leaving.
‘He’s not fooling anyone,’ said Tuna, snapping her fingers at the drinks’ waiter. ‘He absolutely adores me.’ She took a drink and sipped it. ‘I do hope Bone doesn’t make a fuss. He’s always threatening to kill himself.’
‘Then let him.’
Tuna stared at Bettina, shocked. ‘Meow, darling. Bad kitty.’
‘All I mean is, he’s not your problem any more.’ She waved her hand around the crowded room. ‘Look at all these other problems you can choose from.’
‘Give me five minutes to breathe, will you? I think I could do with a break from men, to be honest. He was so mean to me, Betts. Always trying to pick at me, to pick me to the bone. Ha! Bone! He called me a tourist, can you believe that? Here, let me light that for you.’ She snapped open her lighter and hovered it under Bettina’s cigarette. ‘I mean, it’s true that I’ve dipped my toe into a new way of life recently—’
‘Dipped your toe? You’ve dived right in.’
‘Well, yes. I know how it looks. But this is what I said to him: I said, for a start, even if I am a tourist, it is not for the sake of fashion, it’s not so superficial as that – it’s not like buying a pair of jodhpurs because jodhpurs happen to be in vogue, it’s because I have an adventurous spirit, I aim to explore and celebrate all forms of culture, to feast at the table of life. And what could be more quintessentially bohemian than the possession of such— Are you listening to me, darling? I also said to him, “Well, I’d rather be a tourist than a bore!” And I poked him like this.’ She jabbed a finger into Bettina’s chest. ‘“I’m fucking interesting! And I’m funny! And those two qualities trump yours, you neurotic cry-baby!” Sorry, darling, did I poke you too hard there?’
‘Oh, no, it’s fine.’ She gave her cousin a dazed smile. There was a woman across the room who she’d first thought a man, a very slender man, in a man’s suit and bowler hat. But there was the suggestion of hips, of breasts. Her hair was short and black, or seemingly short; it was probably scooped up into a bun and hidden under her hat.
‘Honestly, I think you really lucked out with Bart,’ continued Tuna. ‘He’s such a riot. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks, it’s so very refreshing—’
Was the woman looking at her?
‘—but then, I thought I’d lucked out with Max, and look at our situation. Him nipping back once in a blue moon to try to impregnate me—’
Winking?
‘—and me just waiting in this huge house, neglected and bored and getting fat, like some tragic Dickensian figure. What was her name? Mrs Haber – you know, whenever I try to remember her name, I always think “Haberdashery”! Was she even fat? Something about a wedding dress, that’s all I remember. Didn’t she set herself on fire? Perhaps I should set myself on fire. Bettina, are you actually ignoring me?’
‘Huh?’
‘Perhaps I should set myself on fire if it meant I’d get your attention. That man you’re staring at is actually a woman, by the way. In a man’s suit.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘You wouldn’t be the first gal fooled.’ Tuna looked at the woman from under her white-blonde lashes, her head dipping slyly – setting the turkey’s feet to waggling – and gave her an icy little wave. The woman started to stroll over, hands in her pockets. ‘Her name is Jean, she’s a complete pervert,’ said Tuna. ‘Be careful – she eats straight girls for breakfast.’
The woman – Jean – arrived. ‘Petunia.’ She poked Tuna’s earrings with a gloved forefinger. ‘Are those bird’s feet?’
‘They are indeed.’
‘Fantastic. How are you not an artist?’
Tuna drew her lips into a lemon-sucking smile. ‘You know very well that I am.’
Jean turned to Bettina and extended her hand. ‘Janine Freeman, but everyone calls me Jean.’
Bettina took her hand, squeezed. ‘Bettina Wyn Thomas. Sorry – Bettina Dawes.’ And – how awful – she let out a shrill yelping laugh belonging to a baby seal. ‘What a thing to forget!’
‘If I was married to a man I’d want to forget it too,’ said Jean.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Tuna, rolling her eyes. ‘So it begins.’ She plunged her hand down her dress and plucked a pack of cards from her cleavage. ‘I’m off to do tarot readings.’ She leaned into Bettina, held out her hand and said, in a crone’s whisper, ‘Crosss my palm with seelver,’ then stumbled off, dragging her leg.
Bettina let out another panicked laugh. It was like hundreds of pigeons suddenly flying off from Trafalgar Square – a vast empty silence left in its wake.
‘Isn’t she terrifically funny?’ she said. ‘Isn’t she just – she’s my cousin, you know.’
Jean took out a slim silver flask from her breast pocket. ‘She did a tarot reading for me once and it was quite eye-opening.’ Her eyes were so black that the pupil was indistinguishable from the iris, the skin around them bruised by lack of sleep or anaemia or some other deficiency. Her skin was flawless but very pale, almost unpleasantly so. She had a big nose, slightly hooked, and a full mouth that tucked in at the corners. She looked very sure of herself.
‘So what do you do?’ said Bettina.
‘I have a bookshop in Piccadilly.’
‘Oh? Which one?’
‘The Cave of Virtue.’
Bettina smiled politely and emitted a quiet ‘Oh’. She had nothing to say about a shop she’d never heard of. She had nothing to say at all.
‘And you?’ said Jean.
Bettina took a drag of her cigarette, turning and tilting her head to blow the smoke away. What answer could she give? What had she to recommend herself, besides money? ‘Well.’ Jean waited, amused. ‘I suppose I don’t do anything that you might consider valuable. I’m a wife and I run a household. I happen to be growing a human being inside me at the moment.’ She looked at Jean with defiance – a child’s defiance.
Jean frowned. ‘Why do you think I wouldn’t find value in these things?’
‘I don’t know.’ Bettina felt her face go hot. ‘Because you’re a working woman? And I don’t do anything? I don’t know.’ She took a big swallow of her drink. What an idiot she was being. What a weird baby.
‘What do you like to do? By way of pleasure.’
‘I like to …’ What did she like to do? Really? She forced her eyes to meet Jean’s. ‘I’m going to be honest with you, Miss … Freeman, was it? I enjoy drinking, eating and sitting around saying marvellously witty things. I like spending my husband’s money and dancing. That’s about it. No, wait – I like to read books, lots of books. Does that redeem me somewhat?’
Jean laughed, clapping her hands. ‘Bravo!’
Bettina grinned stupidly.
‘What kind of books do you read?’
‘Well, let me see.’ Bettina affected a look of ponderment. Maybe she should profess a love for the poetry of Sappho? No. Too obvious. But why not be obvious? God, this was all so excruciating. She drained her drink.
‘Sappho.’
There. Done. She squeezed her empty glass between both hands. As if she were wringing the neck of some unfortunate bird.
‘You’re not one of those foul degenerates, are you?’ said Jean, her lips pulled back into a sneer.
Bettina gaped up at her. Fool. She was a fool. ‘Of course not, I don’t—’
‘I’m joking!’ said Jean.
‘Oh my God,’ said Bettina, her voice wire-thin. ‘What a horrible thing to do.’
‘You’re upset? I’ve upset you? Oh, come on, it was a joke.’ Jean took hold of her wrist and pulled her in. ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ She smelled like rosewater, alcohol and something mildly unpleasant – bad breath, possibly. Yes – bad breath.
‘I wanted the ground to swallow me up.’
‘I said I was sorry.’
Bettina blew out air, her eyes on Jean’s necktie. ‘I think I need to sit down.’
‘You’re not going to faint, are you?’
‘No! Take me somewhere quiet.’
‘As you wish.’ Jean offered her arm and Bettina took it, warily, slipping her hand through the gap as if it housed a coiled snake.