August 1925
The summer, until then so damp and disappointing, produced a sudden spell of glorious weather. The timing was perfect, almost as if it was intended especially for them, as a personal blessing. When she looked back later (as she sometimes did, no matter how hard she tried not to) Selina would see that time at Blackwood as sealed off from reality, subject to a sort of enchantment. A time of awakening and startling discovery.
They had made their plans by stealth, in letters, but his arrival – a day early, just after Polly had left – took her by surprise. He had been in Guildford, delivering a painting, and arriving at the station to return to London had heard an announcement for the train to Salisbury. He had boarded it on impulse, changing to the branch line to Hindbury as she’d instructed and walking across the park in the lilac dusk. Selina had been in the bath, blotting out the eerie silence of the empty house with the gramophone, and had not heard the distant jangle of the bell down in the basement. It was only when the music slowed into silence that she heard the echo of footsteps in the hall below and realized she wasn’t alone.
Her mind instantly conjured scenes from her darkest nightmares, and the extent of her isolation had come crashing into her consciousness. There was no one to come to her aid, no one to hear her scream. Snatching a silk kimono she had pinched from Miranda’s room and shrugging it onto her wet body she crept out into the corridor, hiding behind a pillar to peer over the balustrade and down the sweep of the staircase. He was standing at the bottom, his white shirt pale in the dim blue light and as she looked down, his voice drifted up, audible over the frantic hammer of her heart.
Hello?
Terror gave way to relief. Joy. With a cry she rushed down the stairs to throw herself into his arms, and they kissed and laughed and tried to speak.
‘I’m a day early—’
‘I thought you were an intruder.’
‘Sorry. I tried to telephone from the station. But—’ Holding her face in his hands he kissed her fiercely. ‘I could have been an intruder. The door downstairs was unlocked.’
She gave a groan. As she was leaving Polly had told her to bolt it, but she’d forgotten. The responsibility of managing the house was strange to her.
‘I’m so glad you’re here.’
‘Thank God for that. I didn’t know whether to come. I didn’t know if you were alone.’
‘I’m alone.’
She hadn’t been able to imagine him there. Since she had left him in the taxi that day, after Miranda’s wedding, she had been torn between excitement and horror at the thought of what she’d done, inviting him to Blackwood. Even when she’d been writing to him, giving him the date of her parents’ departure, the details of train times and the station name, there had been a part of her that didn’t believe he would come. That didn’t want him to. She feared that what had been exciting in London might collapse into awkwardness at Blackwood; that the words that had tumbled out of them would dry up in the oppressive silence of aloneness and the magic would turn out to be an illusion, but as he cupped her face and kissed her again she knew that she had worried for nothing. The rightness of him being there made her blood sing.
‘Come on, come upstairs.’ She pulled him forwards. ‘Where are your things?’
‘I don’t have any. Just my camera, and a few supplies I bought in Salisbury.’
‘Supplies?’
‘A toothbrush and—’
He broke off and stopped, just below her on the stairs. In the fading light his eyes were dark and liquid as they took in what she was wearing. Or wasn’t wearing. She heard his sharply indrawn breath.
‘Jesus…’
She laughed, but there was an edge to it. ‘Sorry. I was in the bath.’ She wrapped the flimsy, fluttering silk kimono more tightly around her, though she wasn’t sure if that made it worse or better. Three steps below she saw the movement of his throat as he swallowed.
‘It’s me who should apologize.’ His voice was hoarse. He looked away, a muscle flickering in his cheek, above his clenched jaw. ‘I didn’t mean to—’ He swallowed again, and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I should wait downstairs until you’re dressed—’
He was clinging desperately to the last shattered fragments of propriety, she realized, for her sake, and the idea was touching and strangely empowering. The air between them buzzed with some invisible charge and her blood ran hot in her veins as she went to him, stopping on the step above, where their eyes were level. She took his hand, put it on her waist, beneath the open kimono and, in the second before she kissed him, murmured, ‘Don’t you dare.’
Later they went down to the servants’ basement in search of food. In the enormous kitchen Lawrence took charge, bringing in kindling and coal from the store outside to light the range while Selina went down to raid the cellar for champagne, which they drank from plain china teacups from the huge dresser. They talked softly, quietly, even though there was no one to hear them, afraid of breaking the bubble of shimmering intimacy.
He cooked scrambled eggs and they ate them sitting at one end of the table, knees touching, gazes tangling and then darting apart. There was a new shyness between them, in spite of the barrier they had crossed. Because of it. She felt dazed and full of wonder, as if she’d just discovered an astonishing secret or stumbled across some priceless treasure. She couldn’t stop looking at him; at his bare chest and his hands.
‘I never thought it would be like that,’ she murmured eventually, when curiosity overcame her shyness. ‘I didn’t know what it would be like, to be honest, but I didn’t expect it to be so … heavenly. No one tells girls anything except that it’s not nice. A duty, to be endured rather than enjoyed.’
He took her hand and lifted it to his mouth to kiss her fingers. ‘Since the continuation of the human race depends on it, it really needs to be enjoyable, for both parties.’
‘That’s the other thing I was wondering…’
‘What?’
She looked down, heat flooding her cheeks at her own ignorance. ‘The bit about the continuation of the human race. How do I know I won’t have a baby?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of that.’
‘But how?’
It was his turn to blush. ‘I went to a chemist’s shop. There are things you can buy.’
Her eyes widened. ‘What things?’
‘I didn’t use one this time.’
‘Why not?’
‘We didn’t need to. I didn’t want to rush you, or hurt you, or do anything to compromise you…’ His eyes were very dark as he looked at her, reflecting the gold points of the electric lights, high up, and his smile was grave. ‘If your father came bursting in with a shotgun right now you could claim quite honestly to be unspoiled for your husband on your wedding night.’
She hesitated, trying to make sense of this, then gave a gasp of astonished laughter.
‘Do you mean … that we didn’t actually do it?’
‘Technically, no. But there’s more to it than just … well, the basic act. I believe for women that alone can be a bit … disappointing.’ She saw the flash of his smile as he pressed a kiss into her palm. ‘Someone once told me that a woman’s body is like a piano. It’s up to the man whether he chooses to pick out a nursery rhyme with one finger, or learn how to play a symphony. I suppose that was the first movement…’
Selina’s breathing was ragged in the quiet kitchen as his lips brushed the inside of her wrist. She wondered absently who had told him that, who had taught him, but his mouth was spreading shivering warmth up her arm and there were more urgent things on her mind.
‘I’m terribly ignorant about culture,’ she whispered. ‘Remind me – how many movements are there in a symphony?’
His dark gaze found hers and made goosebumps rise at the nape of her neck.
‘Four.’
Blackwood was beautiful in the summer.
She had forgotten that, or stopped noticing it a long time ago. Since Howard died it had become a sort of mausoleum of memories, a place of exile, where time hung heavy and there were no distractions from her thoughts. But in those long, golden days and warm nights as she led him through its empty, elegant rooms she saw it through Lawrence’s eyes, and she began to love it again.
The first day set the pattern for the ones that followed. They dozed away the morning, waking early to make love when the pink light of the rising sun made the lilies on the bedroom curtains blush. Then they slept again and woke, ravenous, to run down to the kitchen and breakfast on whatever they had to hand. Most mornings they found supplies in the scullery, brought up from the farm by Polly: a jug of milk, a loaf of bread, a basket of eggs – sometimes a fruit cake or a waxed paper parcel of bacon – and they picnicked on these delicacies as Lawrence waged his own personal battle with the kitchen range, determined to get it up to a good heat and keep it going. Selina’s gratitude to Polly was laced with guilt, but she pushed it to the back of her mind, not wanting anything to break the spell of their perfect solitude.
On that first day she took him through the house, opening doors to rooms she hadn’t looked inside for years, where the furniture was draped in dust-sheets, the chandeliers wrapped in Holland, and unfaded squares on the wallpaper showed where paintings had been sold to pay debts and fund Miranda’s wedding. There was one door she didn’t open, one room she didn’t show him. The drawing room remained shuttered and closed, Howard’s portrait gazing impassively through the gloom over the shrouded furniture. She couldn’t quite bring herself to share it, because that would mean confronting the obscenity of Howard’s loss all over again.
Death had no place in their selfish, stolen idyll. Her whole body, awoken by Lawrence, thrummed with life. She felt strong, quick, hungry, beautiful: miraculously invincible. By keeping the drawing room shuttered and sealed she had made death her prisoner, preventing it from slipping out to follow her along the corridors and wait for her around corners, or lie between her and Lawrence at night, tarnishing her joy.
They explored outside too, wandering in the afternoon heat through the neglected garden. They avoided the walled garden, where Patterson (the only servant never to take advantage of the annual fortnight of leave) pottered amongst the raspberry canes and rows of beans, roaming instead through the wilderness, discovering overgrown follies and features, once fashionable, now forgotten.
Lawrence carried his camera with him all the time, but never photographed anything just as it was, for itself alone, as other people did. She came to understand that he saw things in terms of shadow and shape, texture and contrast. Light. Instead of taking a picture of the Botticelli pool in the old orangery (so called because of its shell-shaped bowl) he made her trail her hand in the water and photographed the sunlight captured in the droplets that fell from her fingers. Instead of recording the exotic plants that rampaged untended up the orangery’s wall and pressed against its grimy glass, he framed the shadow of their leaves on her bare midriff as she lay on the tiled floor. And then she gently took the camera from his hands and watched the detached, focused expression on his face change as he looked at her without the filter of the lens.
In many ways it was like she had gone back in time as she rediscovered the places that had formed the outposts of her nursery-centred world. They hacked a path through the overgrown garden to the lake with the Chinese Tea House in its centre. She was amazed to discover the key was still in its old hiding place on a ledge beneath the sweeping eaves, and the gramophone was still inside, records stacked untidily beside it. Its brass horn was tarnished to match the green of the walls, and mice had nibbled the corners of the striped cushions on the low settee bench that ran along the back wall, but it didn’t take long to tidy up, and they set up camp there, whiling away the languid afternoon of that first magical day, draped lazily together on the couch, taking it in turns to wind up the gramophone and let music fill the drowsy air.
The next day they returned, taking a picnic of bread and cheese and a bottle of Montrachet, and an old fishing rod discovered by Lawrence in the gun room. His seaside childhood had made him a confident fisherman and, using dead flies from the cobwebbed window as bait, he stood on the wooden deck and cast his line. Selina lay on the sunwarmed boards and watched him, mesmerized by the sunlight on the water and the movement of the muscles beneath the gleaming skin on his back.
Bach’s Goldberg Variations (selected by Lawrence) poured from the gramophone, the sound faded and scratched but still searingly sweet. She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, watching colours burst in the darkness behind her closed lids. It was like being permanently in that glorious, fleeting state at the start of the evening – the glittering hour, Flick called it – when the first swiftly downed cocktail drove away the demons; when her blood was warm and her limbs loose and everything shimmered with promise. She was intoxicated by him. Beneath his hands the clamour inside her had quietened and the endless questions – half formed, never spoken – that had nagged at her for years had been answered. Or simply scattered like dandelion seeds in a breath of wind.
Sex. It was the feral beast that slunk through the ballrooms of Belgravia, fascinating and dangerous. It was the sharp tang of bodies beneath the waft of Turkish tobacco and French perfume, and the frantic rhythm of a jazz band; the sense of something just out of sight, beyond her reach. What little she knew about it had been pieced together from the slivers of information reluctantly imparted by governesses (asking forthright questions about it had been one of her favourite ways of tormenting them) and debutantes’ gossip. One thing she was sure of was that it was wrong to want it. Nice girls absolutely didn’t. (She had learned that lesson early from Nanny Cole; the punishment for touching had been more severe than for lying even, or elbows on the table.) She had thought that there was something wrong with her for being curious. Something unnatural.
How fabulously absurd that seemed now.
Her uneducated, unfocused imagination had pictured something that was business-like, but noble – some sort of perfunctory courtship ritual from which she would emerge feeling womanly and complete. Instead she felt undone. The sharp-edged fragments of herself, her armour against the world, had been dismantled, piece by piece. She had been prepared for discomfort, awkwardness, embarrassment: to feel acutely self-conscious, like she had at her first proper dances when she didn’t know anyone and wasn’t quite sure what to do or how to behave but, wrapped in the darkness of his gaze as his fingertips traced delicate patterns of pleasure on her skin, she simply was … More profoundly herself than she’d ever been before. And the damaged world felt perfect again.
That night, to her delight and astonishment, there was fish for dinner. Perch, Lawrence thought; golden green and delicately striped. Selina was so impressed by his skill and practicality that it galvanized her into making her own contribution to the menu. She waited until she knew Patterson would have retreated to his cottage before slipping into the kitchen garden to gather handfuls of French beans and emerald green pea pods, and unearth waxy little potatoes. The strawberries were nearly over, but raspberries still hung from the canes and there were peaches – as big and warm and pink as the sinking sun – on the glasshouse wall. She took one, breathing in the heady sweetness of its warm skin as she went back up to the house.
After the makeshift picnics of the past couple of days, it felt like a feast, worthy of celebration. While Lawrence expertly gutted and filleted the fish in the shallow scullery sink Selina went down to the cellars to bring up more champagne (carefully amending the number Denham chalked above the rack, to leave no discrepancy) and left it to cool in a bucket of water while she laid the table in the dining room.
It was like playing house. No grown-ups. No rules. She didn’t bother with the handpainted Dresden dinner service, or the stiff damask napkins (she had no intention of taking the time to wash them afterwards) and brought up plain white china from the servants’ hall instead. She placed the silver rococo candelabra in the centre of the table, and went out to collect whatever she could find in the garden to put in the elaborate Sevres centrepiece.
Walking back to the house in the rosy gold evening she thought suddenly of Flick and Theo. She could picture them vividly – Flick in the South of France, Theo in Italy – preparing for the evening ahead; a cocktail while dressing (‘a little sharpener’ she could hear Theo saying) followed by dinner in the right restaurant, a party perhaps, with the other smart people who flocked to Cap Ferrat and Florence. Had Selina been in Scotland, the vision would have driven arrows of envy into her heart, but there in the silent garden with the shadows deepening around her, the soft air shimmering, she knew that there was nowhere on earth she’d rather be. The evening stretched ahead of her, as sweet and delicious as the stolen peach; a pathway into another exquisite night.
And there she stopped herself. Thinking ahead was strictly forbidden. Live for the moment – that was the creed by which she lived, and it was more important now than ever. She didn’t want to count the dwindling days or confront the fact that separation waited on the other side of this spell of perfection, just as surely as the real world lay beyond Blackwood’s sleeping parkland. She wanted to forget that their paradise was a fool’s one, and all this bliss only borrowed.
In the kitchen Lawrence stoked a shower of sparks from the range, pausing to admire its fierce glow for a moment before shutting the iron door. After three days he had finally got to grips with its moods and idiosyncrasies and managed to keep it alight, which would make cooking significantly easier and the results considerably better. He felt a beat of satisfaction.
He’d never thought of himself as much of a cook, had never been very interested in food before, beyond the basic requirement of fending off hunger, but everything was different here. The shafts of evening light filtering through the high-up windows (positioned so the kitchen staff wouldn’t be distracted by the view, he supposed) onto the clean, worn wood of the table turned the produce into a still life from the Dutch School: pearly potatoes with the earth still clinging to their skins, peas spilling like jewels from their tight pods, the peach … Everything was beautiful. Sensual. He photographed them, glad that he had used the money from the wedding photographs (an amount he would have had to paint three portraits to earn) to buy a second-hand roll-film camera, cursing the fact that he’d only got two spare reels of photographic film. It had been all he could afford that evening in Salisbury, but was woefully inadequate in this place of aesthetic wonder. He would have pawned something to buy more if he’d realized what awaited him.
But how could he have known? How could a boy who’d grown up in a few ramshackle rooms where everything was cheap and shabby and worn and mended have anticipated this? Not just the grandeur of the house itself – the marble columned hallway and wide staircase; the ornamented ceilings in the state rooms and the formidable array of paintings and statuary – but the abundance of light that flooded in through high, clean windows and reflected off gilded mirrors, turning everything into a subject, a still life, a study. All his life he had been instinctively drawn to beauty, like a plant is drawn to the sun, but it was only now that he realized how little he’d learned to survive on. The sheen of rain on rooftiles, the jewelled shadow cast by a wine bottle on a windowsill, a bucket of yellow roses outside a florist’s shop, those had been the crumbs that sustained him. This was a different world.
And at the centre of it all was Selina, whose own beauty was both reflected and enhanced by the house. She was like a chameleon who adapted to her surroundings. In London she was glossy and sharp and sophisticated, with her painted lips and mascara’d, kohl-smudged eyes, and he had found her explosively attractive like that. But this other version of her – bare-faced, bare-footed and golden – was another thing entirely. He was fascinated by her: captivated by the velvet texture of her skin, the glints in her hair, the delicious contours of her body and her fluid movements. He felt like touching her should be forbidden, like when his mother had taken him into a country church and held his hand tightly as he’d stood, awe-struck, before an Arts and Crafts sculpture of the Virgin Mary. Don’t touch, Laurie. Just look. Isn’t she beautiful?
He was still that small, undernourished boy. Still awestruck by beauty, still hungry for it, still desperate to escape the meanness of the life into which he’d been born. And here he was … He lifted a handful of beans out of the water he’d been washing them in, tossing them into a colander in a shower of droplets, noticing the resonance of their intense green against the copper. He was a beggar at the feast, gorging himself, but a part of him was aware that more famine lay ahead. This was just a brief spell of plenty. How could it be anything else?
Out in the passageway a bell rang. He froze for a moment, his heart ricocheting off his ribs. It was too late for visitors. Had someone seen lights and come to check if the house had been broken into? Cautiously, wiping his hands on a cloth, he went out into the servants’ corridor and was wondering if it would make more trouble if he answered the door himself when the bell rang again.
He looked behind him, in the direction from which the sound came, and saw a row of bells high up on the wall. One still shivered with silvery sound.
He expelled a breath of relief as understanding dawned, and felt a smile begin to pull at his mouth as desire uncurled in the pit of his stomach. Without hesitation he headed for the servants’ stairs, taking them two at a time in his haste to answer her summons to the Blue Bathroom.
Selina had intended that they would dress for dinner. As part of the game, she had imagined putting on one of the silk and chiffon dresses Polly had carefully unpacked and steamed when they’d returned from London – the sea green one, perhaps, with the tiny glass bugle beads that would glitter in the candlelight – and had thought that he could choose one of the dinner jackets and evening shirts that still hung in Howard’s dressing room.
But in the end it didn’t turn out like that. When the bathwater had cooled around their sated bodies and the bottle of champagne they’d shared was empty it seemed silly to go to the trouble of dressing. And so they went downstairs barefoot; Lawrence in a clean shirt (not just without a tie, but collarless too – Mama would faint) and Selina in nothing but Miranda’s silk kimono and a smudge of red lipstick. She lit the candles and uncorked wine in the dining room while Lawrence went down to the kitchen to boil the potatoes and fry the fish.
The day had faded into dusk. Selina folded back the shutters and left the curtains open so the long windows glittered with reflected candlelight. They sat opposite each other, on either side of the table, not at its ends, though it still seemed too far apart. As they ate she found herself watching his hands, mesmerized by the movement of his long and beautiful fingers as he picked up his wineglass or pushed back the heavy lock of hair that fell over his forehead.
The perch were white-fleshed and delicately flavoured, surprisingly good. When her plate was empty she picked little potatoes from the bowl between them, licking the butter off her fingers, abandoning herself to the pleasure of eating in a way that would once have made her feel guilty and ashamed. Their gazes held across the expanse of polished mahogany and he smiled that slow, lopsided smile.
‘Your mother is looking at me.’
She glanced sideways, to where the Sargent portrait of Lady Lennox in her Coming Out diamonds hung beside the chimneypiece.
‘How do you know that’s my mother?’
‘I can feel her disapproval.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not surprised. Mama is of the white tie for dinner generation. The modern fashion for black tie is enough of an assault on propriety to her; poor dear must be positively apoplectic at the sight of a young man in her dining room in no tie at all, and servants’ hall china on the table.’
‘Do those things really matter so much to them?’
‘Oh God, yes.’ Picking a slender French bean from the serving bowl she trailed it through the melted butter on her plate. ‘They matter more than anything.’
‘Not more than you do, surely? Your happiness.’
She looked up at him in surprise, wondering if he was being sarcastic, and deciding from his unsmiling face that he wasn’t. ‘Of course they do. Those things are the foundations on which their world is built – solid, important things that support the entire social structure. My happiness is infinitesimally small and insignificant by comparison. They distrust strong emotions of any kind. I’m sure they’d rather I was happy than unhappy, but they’d really rather not be troubled by my feelings at all. Or anyone’s.’ She took a mouthful of wine. ‘Much better if we’re all just sensible about things. No fuss.’
His face was shuttered and inscrutable, but a muscle was flickering above his jaw. ‘Do you agree with that?’
She pictured Howard’s portrait in the darkened drawing room, and made an effort to keep her tone light. ‘I certainly don’t disagree. Other people’s emotions are always rather tiresome, don’t you think? In fact, come to think of it, so are one’s own…’
They were in danger of becoming serious; straying perilously close to the line she had drawn in her mind and the barriers she had built around her heart. Getting to her feet she picked up the wine bottle and splashed some into her glass then reached across the table to fill his. ‘Which is why it’s best not to think about them. And also why cocktails were invented, and jazz and dancing. And sex…’
‘Sex isn’t a new invention.’
He was leaning back in his chair, outwardly at ease. Only the hoarseness of his voice gave him away, and the dark gleam of his eyes. Warmth unfurled like smoke in the pit of her stomach. In one fluid, impulsive movement she pushed her plate aside and got up onto the table, stepping between serving bowls and silver in her bare feet, snatching the billow of her silk robe away from the candle flames as she lowered herself onto the table-edge in front of him.
‘It might as well be as far as I’m concerned.’
Her feet were in his lap. She watched his eyelids flicker and his jaw tense as she flexed her toes. ‘If we do it here, on the dining table, will we be responsible for the collapse of the civilized world?’
Her laugh was throaty as she leaned down to kiss him. ‘Let’s try it and find out…’