The house was full of shadows and whispers. Footsteps echoed along the corridors, as rapid as the hammer-thud of Lawrence’s heart. His own rasping breath was loud in his ears, but he could hear Selina’s too, and the murmur of her laughter drifting back along the narrow passageways. Every now and again he caught a glimpse of her – the flash of her smile, a ripple of silk – before she disappeared around the next corner. He tried to call out to her, but his voice cracked in his throat and no words came out. He tried to run faster, to catch up with her, but his legs were leaden and the air dragged at him, as if he was under water. As the thought occurred to him he felt his chest squeeze and burn, and suddenly the air wasn’t air any more and his lungs were full and he was drowning. Through the greenish depths faces stared down at him from portraits on the walls with cold, superior eyes, and the submerged corridors stretched ahead and behind and in all directions, leading nowhere.
He woke with a strangled gasp, heart ricocheting off his ribs, skin clammy with sweat. For long seconds he lay still, breathing heavily as the room reassembled itself around him and the shapes of furniture and objects solidified in the pre-dawn light.
A dream. Just a dream.
They never bothered to fold across the shutters or close the curtains, and he could see the moon’s face, as pale and serene as a Renaissance Madonna, drifting above milky layers of mist over the park. Almost reluctantly he adjusted his focus to look at Selina, lying beside him. Her hand was curled as sweetly as a child’s against her cheek, her lips slightly parted. The melting light stole the colour from her face, turning her into a living photograph. She looked secretive and self-contained as she moved through places where he couldn’t follow her, just like in the dream. His heart gave a painful lurch as it came back to him; that feeling of helplessness as she slipped away, forever just beyond his reach.
It wasn’t just a dream. It was how things were between them. How they would always be. Their store of stolen days was almost used up. A telegram had arrived from Selina’s mother, pointedly asking if she was better and reminding her that her presence was expected at some dinner party on Friday. She would take the train to Scotland and he would return to London, to the squalor of Marchmont Street and the studio, the tedium of commissions. And when the summer was over he would still be doing that, while she resumed her round of house parties, cocktail parties, costume parties, and he read about them in newspapers that were as disposable as he was.
His breathing had slowed, his heartbeat steadied, but the feeling of despair remained. The moon looked down on him with infinite pity.
They woke to heavy skies massed with pewter grey clouds, and an odd yellow light that tarnished the gold stubble in the fields. The sun had disappeared but the air was hot and heavy, as if the world was holding its breath, waiting for something.
It was their last full day together; the knowledge was as oppressive as the sultry air. The conversation that had flowed so easily, so naturally between them seemed to have dried up, leaving silences weighted with things they couldn’t say. That afternoon they crossed the ha-ha at the front of the house and walked through the long grass to the lake where the water was deeper for swimming. There was a boathouse there, and an old rowing boat, its rotting hull filled with six inches of green slime. She showed him the rope swing that her brother had made, and told him how he’d taught her to swing out over the lake and jump in. They went on it together, as she’d once done with Howard, clinging to the rope and to each other, then letting go and plunging down into the water.
The dream came back to him as he kicked up through the depths, glimpsing the glimmer of her pale limbs just above him. The ache in his chest when he surfaced wasn’t entirely from the temporary lack of oxygen. He swam to the deck that jutted out from the boathouse and hauled himself onto it, to avoid having to wade through the mud and reeds at the water’s edge. She was still swimming, floating on her back a little way out, her thin chemise turned transparent, her breasts just breaking the surface. She looked like a water nymph in a pre-Raphaelite painting, or a particularly erotic Ophelia. The light was leaden, but shaking the water from his hands he reached for his camera and managed to take a shot before she flipped over, mermaid-like, and disappeared beneath the water.
Ripples spread over the surface of the lake. Above the trees the inky clouds boiled, and thunder echoed faintly on the still air. He lay down and stared up at the dull sky. Perhaps it was the change in the weather that made everything feel different; the brewing storm that gave the day its unsettling end-of-the-world atmosphere. Closing his eyes he heard the splash of water as she surfaced and climbed out, felt a shower of droplets as she came over. In the darkness behind his closed lids he pictured the clinging silk against her wet skin and swallowed, not trusting himself to look. This morning’s lovemaking had had a ferocity that had left him feeling drained and hollowed out. There was a little pause, and then the rasp of a match, the smell of singed paper and good Turkish tobacco, and he felt her lower herself onto the deck beside him.
Her fingertips brushed his lips as she offered him the cigarette. He opened his eyes a crack to see her looking at him.
‘You’re miles away,’ she murmured. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I was actually thinking how far away the rest of the world seems. It could have ceased to exist for all we know.’
She laughed, and lay back on the wooden boards, her arm touching his. ‘How wonderful if it had. If there had been some kind of giant catastrophe that had wiped out all of civilization in an instant, and we were the only survivors. We could live here for ever, like this. It would be heaven.’
He took a drag on the cigarette and blew out a long column of smoke. ‘You’d get bored eventually, without the parties and the dancing and your London friends.’
‘I wouldn’t. We could have parties here, just the two of us. Why would I want to dance anywhere else, with anyone else, when I could dance here, with you?’
‘Because I’m a terrible dancer.’
‘I’d teach you. I’d teach you to dance like you’ve taught me to make love. I’m sure the principles are very similar.’ She took back the cigarette. ‘I daresay you’d get bored though. You’d miss the city. The variety. You’d run out of things to photograph.’
They were teasing, but testing each other too. Dangerous undercurrents swirled just beneath the playful words, threatening to drag them down. Far above, the treetops shivered and whispered in some sudden breeze, too high up to disturb the still air where they lay.
He rolled onto his side, propping himself up on one elbow to look at her. ‘I’d photograph you. Every day. The changes in your moods, your face, your body.’
‘You’d long for me to get old and ugly to make your photographs more interesting.’
‘I’d be waiting until doomsday. You’ll never be old and ugly.’
There was a little silence as she sucked smoke into her lungs and exhaled it again. When she spoke the teasing note had evaporated from her voice and she sounded subdued. Resigned.
‘Time catches up with us all in the end. We can’t run away from reality for ever.’
And there it was; the truth they had been trying to ignore. A direct acknowledgement that the adventure they had plunged into so recklessly was coming to an end. His chest felt like it had a stone pressing on it. The air was too thick to breathe.
‘Why not?’ he said hoarsely. ‘You’re not that little girl hiding behind the milk churns anymore. You can run away to wherever you like now. No one’s going to haul you out and send you home.’
‘And where would I go?’
‘Wherever you wanted. Paris. Provence. America. Anywhere.’
‘With you?’
‘If you wanted to.’
He wasn’t sure if they were still teasing. He suspected that she was, but he knew that he was serious and that he would go anywhere with her, if she said the word. To the ends of the earth. He sat up, pushing his damp hair back from his forehead.
‘What would we do for money?’ Her voice, from behind him, was soft and sleepy. She was inviting him to tell her a story, he realized; to conjure a fairy tale with a happy-ever-after, like the ones he used to make up for Cassie. With a sigh he rested his elbows on his raised knees.
‘I’d paint. We could go to Cornwall … Edith has a house in St Ives. There’s quite a community of artists down there and some of them are beginning to make a name for themselves. We could live cheaply enough, and I know I can sell enough paintings for us not to starve—’
‘But it’s not what you want to do. You don’t want to paint.’
He almost laughed. As if that mattered. As if he’d let a stupid, abstract preference like that stop him from being with her.
‘I’d still take photographs. The light there is purer than anywhere. And there’s the sea – I might even be able to sell more.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘Once, last year. Edith put me in touch with a family near Penzance who had lost two sons; they wanted a portrait incorporating both of them. They were a well-off family … lots of photographs, which they were reluctant to part with for long. I spent a week in St Ives doing sketches to work out a final composition for them to approve.’
It was like remembering something that had happened to someone else, in a lifetime when he didn’t know her. He had liked it there. He had liked the emptiness of the streets when the wind blew salt spray off the sea, the dark cave-like pubs where the landlords turned a blind eye to licensing hours. The smell of sea and fish and tar had reminded him of home, of Hastings, in a way that was peaceful rather than painful, which it always was when he went back. He had photographed the clouds and the cobbles glistening like the silver scales of a fish in a sudden shaft of afternoon sunlight, and an old woman sitting in the window of a house on the quay, her face creased like an old map.
He described Edith’s house on a narrow street between the town’s two stretches of sand, its whitewashed bedroom with the sagging brass bed overlooking the church on the hill, the studio Edith had created in the attic, where the precious light flooded in. And as he talked, he envied the person he had been then, ignorant and untroubled and self-reliant, before he’d laid his heart in the hands of another.
The thunder’s growl was closer now. No breath of wind disturbed the glassy surface of the lake, but the highest branches of the trees writhed in silent agitation.
‘It sounds perfect. I’d love to go there.’
Her note of regret was like a death knell. He felt a sudden wrench of anger, and understood that he hadn’t been telling her a story but offering her a choice. A chance.
‘You could. If you wanted to.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘I thought you wanted freedom? Independence?’
‘I do. I’d swap places with those Cornish fishermen any day, if I could. Or with your fairground people.’
‘But that’s a fantasy.’ Exasperation crackled through his words. ‘You don’t need to swap places with anyone. You can be yourself and still be independent.’
She gave a short laugh. ‘No – that’s a fantasy.’ She sat up. ‘Do you think if I waltzed off to live in a fisherman’s cottage in Cornwall with an artist that my parents wouldn’t cut me off without a penny? That I wouldn’t be instantly excommunicated from the social circles in which we move? As far as everyone I know is concerned it would be as if I’d died, only slightly more embarrassing.’
‘Wouldn’t your friends understand?’
‘How could they when I’d be giving them up too?’
He stood up and moved away from her, frustration beating a hot tattoo through his veins. Going to the edge of the jetty he looked across the lake. Its surface reflected the angry sky, giving the impression of swirling currents in its depths.
‘So what can you do?’
He said you, but as he waited for her reply he knew his future rested on it too. His happiness.
‘I can play the game, like a good girl.’ She spoke in a tone of careful reason. ‘I can obey the rules, outwardly at least. I can get married to the right sort of man, and have a home of my own and an income and ten times the freedom that I have now, with my parents and the rest of the world watching every move. I’ve thought about it from all angles, and I believe it’s my best chance. On my own I’m nothing. I have nothing – no money, no status, no power. As a wife I’ll be in a position to make choices. To have some control—’
Marry me, then, he wanted to say, but managed to stop himself. He knew that wasn’t what she meant. Bitterness seeped into his laugh.
‘Selina, are you serious? Control?’ He turned to face her. ‘You’d just be exchanging one gilded cage for another. Bigger perhaps, furnished according to your taste, but still a cage.’
‘Lawrence, don’t…’
The first drops of rain had begun to fall, shattering the glassy smoothness of the lake, but neither of them moved.
‘Don’t what?’ He didn’t want to say the things that were seething in his mind, but somewhere they had passed a point of no return and it was too late to stop. ‘Don’t make you face up to the truth? That isn’t independence Selina. It’s cowardice. Being married to a rich man you don’t love isn’t being free, it’s being too afraid to live properly.’
He saw her stiffen and go still, then she drew herself upright, lifting her chin and meeting his gaze unflinchingly. In the odd brooding light her eyes had a dazzling, dangerous glitter.
‘Don’t say that.’ Her voice shook with fury. ‘You know nothing, Lawrence. Nothing. You’re a man – you go where you like, you sleep with whom you like and no one bats an eyelid. You please yourself, and you have no idea what it’s like to have no autonomy and to be scrutinized and judged every day – on your clothes, your body, your friends, your face.’ She crossed the wooden deck to scoop up the linen dress she had stripped off in such a different mood an hour ago. ‘Oh, don’t worry – I’m quite used to being told that I’m too silly, too brazen, too fat, too wild. Too disrespectful of my brother and all the boys like him who died. I must admit, being called a coward is new, but it doesn’t hurt any more than all the things I’ve heard a thousand times before.’
‘Selina, wait—’
Her anger had lanced the boil of his own frustration. He felt stricken and contrite, ashamed of the impulse that had driven him to push her for a reaction. But it was too late to say sorry. She had turned and was walking up the jetty with quick, angry strides that made the boards shake beneath him. She didn’t look round when he called her, and he was left standing there as the rain began to fall in earnest, filling the air with the silvery rush of water, the smell of wet earth, the feeling that summer had ended, and with it something far more precious that wouldn’t come again.
The light in the drawing room was murky in the sudden downpour. Howard’s face was shadowy in the gloom. She sloshed brandy into a glass and raised it to her lips, closing her eyes as she felt its burn down the back of her throat.
She had run back from the boathouse. Her body fizzed and pulsed with unspent energy and her lungs felt scorched. Going straight up to her room she had stripped off her wet chemise and pulled old clothes from her drawer – an ancient cricket sweater of Howard’s and a pair of his prep school pyjama trousers, the striped flannelette soft and faded. In the mirror above the fireplace she caught sight of her reflection now and felt a stab of perverse satisfaction at its unattractive oddness. She swallowed the brandy and poured more.
He had made her feel beautiful. He had made her feel fearless and powerful, but the truth was she was none of those things. It was right that he should see her as she was now he’d realized the truth.
The only sounds were the murmur of the rain outside and the unsteady rasp of her breath. The house was quiet enough for her to hear the door close downstairs in the servants’ passage, still enough for her to feel the air stir as the baize door swung open. His bare feet made no noise on the marble floor, but she was aware of a flicker of movement in the mirror’s silvery surface. He was standing in the doorway. The silence stretched, and then he expelled a long, shaky breath.
‘Selina, I’m sorry.’
She sipped her brandy, holding the glass very close to her lips.
‘I was wrong. I shouldn’t have said those things – I was stupid and I had no right. I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you – I had no right to do that either.’ He sighed again, sweeping his hair back with a weary hand, making droplets of water shower the Aubusson roses beneath his feet. ‘Look, I’ll go. I’ll get my things and—’
‘What did you say?’
Her voice was small. A shivering breath in the raindark room.
‘I’ll leave. Now. I don’t know if there’s a train, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll—’
‘Not that. The other bit.’
‘About falling in love with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t want to.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘This was supposed to be fun … an adventure, but I couldn’t help it. You’re astonishing, Selina. How could I not fall hopelessly in love with you? If I’m honest, I knew it would happen, but I never intended to tell you.’ His mouth twisted in a bitter parody of a smile as he echoed her words from days before. ‘I never wanted to burden you with my tiresome emotions. Forget I said it.’
Very carefully, she put her glass down.
‘Stay. Please stay.’