November 1925
The ruby engagement ring that Rupert had commissioned from Aspreys was far too big. He had it altered to fit her finger, but that only solved half the problem. Nothing could reduce the size of the stone, which felt as heavy as an anchor on her hand and kept twisting around, catching on things. In the early weeks of her engagement it served as a constant reminder of the strange new reality in which she so suddenly found herself, and the rather incredible fact that she was Rupert’s fiancée.
She stumbled through the days like a sleepwalker, going through the motions of normality, reciting lines that sounded correct in a voice that was carefully controlled. In an attempt to economize, Sir Robert had decided to close up the house on Chester Square for the winter, but Miranda had allowed Selina to stay with her and Lionel in their new house in Egerton Crescent, and for that she was grateful. She couldn’t have borne to be at Blackwood; to sleep every night in the bed she had shared with Lawrence and watch the dawn break through the lily-strewn curtains, to dine every evening at the table on which she had lain back amongst the servants’ hall crockery and scattered roses.
But being in London brought its own kind of torment, especially at this, the darkest time of year, when the earth seemed to spin less steadily on its axis and the sodden earth beneath her feet felt less solid. Sitting in Miranda’s freshly decorated drawing room on her hard, new sofa, Selina wondered how she might stop herself from going mad. Usually she got through the late autumn days by packing her diary with lunches and shopping trips and cocktails and the theatre, so the time passed in a champagne haze and the lights of Mayfair’s bars and clubs kept the darkness at bay. Usually she had Flick, to take her hand and pull her onto dancefloors, to order a succession of extravagant drinks, to make her smile with her spontaneity and irreverence (last year she had bought twenty paper poppies from a street seller outside Knightsbridge tube station and fashioned them into an eye-catching headpiece which she had worn to the theatre on the eve of Armistice Day) and to remind her airily that life went on.
Except when it didn’t.
The room was brightly lit, but she could feel the darkness encroaching. Already it had swallowed the branches of the trees in the square and was creeping, like fog, up the steps of the house. She should get up and ring the bell to get Jean to come and draw the complicated swagged curtains, but somehow it seemed safer to stay where she had sat all afternoon, and try to ignore the ice stealing through her limbs and the darkness pressing against the windows and the vortex beneath the tightrope.
She felt like a fox that had managed to outrun the snarling hounds and had gone to earth, crouched in the cold, cramped darkness, sensing it was safe so long as it didn’t move a muscle. The journey to Bloomsbury, to apologize and try somehow to explain, was impossible to contemplate. How could she find the strength to face Lawrence, when she couldn’t even cope with Miranda’s housemaid? The girl always looked at Selina with sly curiosity, as if she couldn’t quite believe she was the same person whose picture she had seen in the newspapers, dancing at the Café de Paris, or piled into a motorcar on one of the original treasure hunts.
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Selina wasn’t that person anymore.
The clock ticked on. Somewhere a door opened and shut again, and a faint current of air sighed through the house. Footsteps tapped on tiles. Voices murmured and then died away. The fire hissed and subsided into ash and the twilight deepened. At length the drawing room door opened, making her start.
‘Oh – here you are!’
Miranda came in, still wearing her fur stole and hat. She sounded surprised and a little irritated, as if she’d expected Selina to be out drinking cocktails or shopping for gloves. (It was funny – when she had done those things it had irritated Miranda too.) ‘Goodness – why are the curtains still wide open? It’s quite dark outside – Jean should have closed them when she brought in the tea.’ Going over to ring the bell she looked around for the tray. ‘You have had tea, haven’t you?’
‘No.’
Miranda gave an exasperated click of her tongue. It seemed that her stores of kindness and patience were finite, and having Selina under the same roof was rapidly depleting them. Standing at the fireplace she flicked through the sheaf of envelopes she had picked up from the hall table, pulling off her gloves to tear one open.
‘I hope you returned Rupert’s telephone call … Is he taking you out for dinner tonight?’
‘No.’
Miranda pulled a face at the card in her hand. ‘Ugh – Monica Fitzpatrick At Home.’ She shoved the card to the back of the sheaf and looked at Selina with a frown. ‘No, you didn’t return the call, or no you’re not going out to dinner?’
‘Both.’
She wondered what Miranda would say if she told her that she had forgotten all about the telephone call, which had apparently come this morning when Selina was still in bed. How convenient it would be if Rupert slipped into her thoughts as often, as effortlessly and insistently as Lawrence did.
She saw Rupert every few days, and when they were together he was as polite and distant as ever. His proposal had been unexpected, but also understated; offered in the spirit of a solution to some practical problem. He had told her to think about it, but she had known that if she did all the good, solid reasons for accepting would be dissolved by the simple truth that she didn’t love him. As it was, she said yes with only the smallest hesitation, the briefest pang of regret for the life she might have had.
She didn’t want that life now. She didn’t want the uncertainty that had once seemed so exciting, or the wild extremes of emotion that had made her blood rush and her senses reel. She didn’t want that savage, exhilarating, annihilating craving for another human being … Not when human beings were so fallible. So fragile.
Life with Rupert would be safer. More settled. She felt nothing for him but a sort of detached admiration, a distant affection, and that was a relief; like stepping into cool shade after the burn and dazzle of the midday sun. His emotions, if he had them, were safely contained behind an impenetrable façade of correctness. In his world, a cushioned safety net of wealth and status and authority lay between her and the void. Once she had striven to live. Now she just wanted to survive.
Miranda was looking at her narrowly, her hand on her hip. ‘I do hope you’re not having second thoughts.’
‘No,’ Selina said again, this time with more conviction. ‘Not at all.’
Sam Evans was not a man much given to worrying.
If he felt concern it tended to be in a general, rather than a personal sense: for families in Welsh pit villages struggling to send their children to school with shoes on their feet and food in their stomachs, or the poor bastards who were heroes in wartime and embarrassing inconveniences when peace came. But this morning the unease that had been gnawing intermittently at the back of his mind for several days had got acute enough to drive him from his bed half an hour early and take a detour from his usual route to work via the studio on Gower Street.
As far as he could tell Lawrence hadn’t crossed the threshold at Marchmont Street for the best part of a week; since Sam had shown him the Lennox girl’s engagement announcement in The Times, in fact. He hadn’t known for sure that there was something going on there, but Lawrence’s subsequent disappearance put it pretty much beyond reasonable doubt. As for the daft bugger’s current whereabouts, Sam had narrowed it down to three possibilities. He would either be at the studio, working like a madman in an attempt to forget her; in a cheap hotel somewhere, having persuaded her to run away with him; or face down in a gutter in Soho, mired in drink and self-pity. The first was preferable, especially as the boy owed him three weeks’ rent. The last was most likely.
It was a hard, cold morning, with a white sky and a weak sun that promised warmth but didn’t deliver. Sam paused by the railings on Russell Square to fill his pipe, then strolled on, merging with the students in flapping Oxford bags and mufflers hurrying along Gower Street. He knocked on the door of a house that must have once been distinguished, but had sunk into shabby disrepute since being divided into flats for students at the nearby university and the Slade. Leaning easily against the railings he waited, sucking on his pipe.
It was a recent thing, the pipe, and he wasn’t quite used to it yet. He’d taken it up in the hope that it would prove to be economical, and also because he thought it gave him an air of intellectual gravitas. In newspaper offices, cigarettes were for hacks. If he wanted to be taken seriously as a social and political commentator he had to look the part.
He knocked again, more loudly this time, and gave the door handle an optimistic shake. Locked. He checked his watch. He’d give it another five minutes, but he couldn’t wait much longer than that. The vague concern solidified a little, its edges sharpening with irritation. Bloody temperamental artists, he thought. Give me a straightforward working man who says what he thinks and eats, sleeps and drinks at normal times. Who beds a few women, finds one he wants to marry, then spends the rest of his life eating and sleeping with her and drinking in the pub with the boys. None of this exhausting grand passion. None of the bloody melodrama.
A brewers’ dray lumbered past, the harnesses of the horses clinking. Sam watched the students in idle fascination. A smug, self-absorbed bunch, for the most part, still wet behind the ears and not one amongst them that looked like he could do a day’s labour. He caught snatches of their conversations as they passed, their public school voices carrying on the cold air. For all their learning, their minds were as narrow as their ridiculous trousers were wide. Glancing back down towards Russell Square a figure amongst them caught his eye and made him look again.
The same voluminous tweed trousers, the same flannel blazer and striped school scarf, but topped off with a turban fashioned from a green paisley scarf. Recognizing Lawrence’s friend Edith, Sam levered himself upright and straightened his corduroy jacket, shoving his pipe into the pocket. He watched her face change as she saw him, registering first recognition and then alarm.
‘Mr Evans, isn’t it? Is something wrong?’
‘No – at least, I hope not. I came to ask the same question. Haven’t seen young Weston for a week, so I thought I’d check if he’s here before I telephone Scotland Yard.’
Young Weston? What the hell had made him say that? He sounded like Lawrence’s ridiculous old uncle. Edith Linde moved past him to open the door with a sympathetic (pitying?) smile. ‘Yes, don’t bother the detectives just yet. I imagine he’s here. He usually is…’ Sam followed her into the hallway and up a scruffy staircase. She sniffed the air. ‘I’d say he’s been working.’
‘Painting?’
Sam would have said he wasn’t a fan of women in trousers, but he’d never followed one closely up a steep flight of stairs before. There was something rather magnificent about Edith’s tweed-clad behind. He wondered fleetingly if she was a Sapphist, and tried to remember if Lawrence had ever mentioned anything about it.
‘No,’ she said, reaching the landing at the top. ‘Finished his last portrait commission weeks ago and hasn’t taken any more on, even though I could get him five by lunchtime, for certain. He’s not interested. He’s suffering the agonies of unrequited love, so he’s not interested in anything; just wanders the streets with that blasted camera of his, and then works all night developing the photographs.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Doesn’t it smell evil?’
‘Tell me about it. He usually uses the sink at the flat. So … taken it badly, has he? The Lennox girl’s engagement?’
Edith pushed the door open. ‘See for yourself…’
The vinegary chemical smell was stronger in here, mingling with the reek of stale alcohol. Clear winter light poured through the skylights onto the chaos below, but Sam didn’t notice the mess. His attention was grabbed by the string that stretched from one window to the next, like a washing line, and the photographs that had been pegged on it to dry.
Edith sighed and muttered something as she went over to the Belfast sink and filled the kettle, then lit the stove. Sam was aware of her tidying up behind him, stacking plates and gathering cups, tipping landslides of cigarette ends into the dustbin, talking all the time. Finally, when he’d made his way along the line of photographs, he turned to face her.
‘Sorry?’
She gave him a withering look. ‘I said, I’ve tried everything. Stern lectures. Praise and encouragement. Dragging him to the pub and dangling pretty young things in front of him – they might as well be my elderly maiden aunts for all the interest he shows. As this is an artists’ studio I’ve even threatened to evict him unless he starts painting again, but I’m afraid he knows I don’t mean it.’ She paused for a moment, an empty wine bottle in her hand, and looked wistfully towards the divan in the corner. ‘I’m afraid I’m far too fond of him.’
Sam followed her gaze. The subject of their discussion was just about visible, lying face down under a faded green velvet curtain, a half-empty bottle of brandy beside him. His hair – which Sam was always bellowing at him to get cut – was inky black against the white pillow he was clutching, and his bare shoulders, rising and falling gently as he breathed, were as pale and hard as sculpted marble. Bastard, Sam thought with fleeting envy. If he’d been discovered sleeping off a heavy night you could bet he’d be lying on his back snoring like a walrus with his mouth open. Trust Weston to look like some bloody Pre-Raphaelite painting.
The kettle hissed on the stove. Edith went over to the sink and began rinsing cups. She had taken off her blazer and was wearing a white shirt and a sleeveless Fairisle jumper. Splendid bosom as well as a magnificent bottom, Sam noticed. He made an effort to look away, turning back to the photographs and rubbing a hand across his beard.
‘You’re right to be tough on him. That’s what he needs – a kick up the backside. He’s too soft for his own good. Romantic ideals are all very nice but they don’t put food in your belly or a roof over your head. How long since he’s paid you rent?’
‘I don’t mind about that. I’ve told him it doesn’t matter. He always pays when he’s got work—’
‘Then we’ll just have to get him some.’
Briskly, Sam began unpegging the photographs from the line. Some had been taken on the Embankment, by the look of it, others beneath cavernous railway arches somewhere. All of them exposed the city’s secret shame: men in ragged layers of clothing sleeping rough on newspaper beds, limbless veterans on winter pavements being passed by smart shoes. Lawrence must have carried a lantern with him to light the night shots adequately without resorting to the glare of a flashbulb. In some the men had their faces tipped up towards the light so that it shone in their blank eyes and on the hollows hunger had carved in their unshaven cheeks. In some it glinted off the medals pinned incongruously to their tattered coats. Sam was the least sentimental person imaginable (when sober, anyway) but even raw, uncropped and unedited the images brought a lump to his throat.
Edith’s voice was sharp. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Mr Evans?’
‘I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing, Miss Linde…’ He continued unpegging until he’d gathered all the photographs, then turned to her with a bland smile. ‘I’m doing Lawrence Weston a very large favour, though there’s a chance he won’t see it that way at first. What’s the date today?’
‘Gosh – I don’t know – the third of November? Something like that.’
‘Exactly that. Which means that in just over a week it’ll be the eleventh of November, and the newspapers and illustrated magazines will be falling over themselves to pay tribute to our Glorious Dead.’ He held up the sheaf of photographs. ‘I’m going to see if I can sell them the idea of remembering our Inglorious Living as well.’
She was impressed, he could tell. And rightly so, because anyone could see it was a ruddy good idea. ‘Shouldn’t you ask him first? They’re not yours to sell.’
‘And have him come out with a string of excuses? Not bloody likely. And in a way they are mine. Boyo over there owes me three weeks’ rent. I’m taking goods to the value of, instead.’
‘I’m not sure that I approve, but I’m not going to argue.’ She dried a cup with a square of paint-stained linen. ‘Coffee?’
He felt a pang of regret. ‘I must be off. I’m late as it is.’
‘Ah. You’re leaving me to do the explaining when he wakes up.’
‘Tell him he can take it up with me – if he ever comes back to the flat.’ Tucking the sheaf of photographs into his document folder Sam went over to the stairs. ‘I know he won’t believe it, but I’m doing it for his own good. I actually care about him, the daft sod.’
‘So do I,’ Edith said sadly.
Buggeration, thought Sam as he thudded down the stairs a moment later. So there was his answer. The good news was that Edith Linde wasn’t a lesbian. The bad news was she was carrying a bloody great torch for Lawrence Weston.
As soon as Selina saw the photographs in The Bystander she knew they were his. It wasn’t just the subject that gave them away as Lawrence’s, but his perspective on it; the emphasis on small, significant details, the unexpected angles and the way he used the light. It jolted her, like a step missed in the dark.
It was the afternoon of Armistice Day, a day of striking clocks and muffling silence; a damp, dripping day at the dying of the year, so much worse this time than any of the awful ones that had come before. Lady Lennox, in town to collect some things from Chester Square, had called for tea. While she and Miranda discussed a dinner party Miranda was to host, a seating plan dilemma, Selina absently turned the pages of the magazine. Until she reached the feature entitled Our Forgotten Heroes.
In an instant she was catapulted back to the night of her birthday and the room with the faces around the walls. Warmth spread through her body, radiating out from her poor, battered heart, and she ran her fingers over the pages, the faces of the men in them, because they felt like a part of him. She didn’t realize she was crying until a tear splashed onto a ragged chest of medals. Miranda stopped talking and looked at her in alarm, then reached over to remove the magazine from her hands. ‘Such a dreadful article – one expects better from The Bystander. As if seeing all those people begging on the streets wasn’t depressing enough. One doesn’t want to be confronted with them in one’s own drawing room as well. Here – look at The Tatler instead. There are photographs of Lettice Wilton’s wedding. Her dress was a bit Hail Caesar, don’t you think? Unfortunate.’
The photographs shifted something inside of her, jolting her out of her numbness. She hadn’t seen him, hadn’t even written to explain, though she had intended to. As the blank days passed she had found it was safest not to think about him, not to think about anything at all, but suddenly it seemed incredible that she had cut herself off so brutally. She wondered if he was waiting for her, understanding that she needed time, or if he was angry. She wondered if he had heard of her engagement, and felt her heart shrivel with guilty anguish.
Tomorrow, she resolved, closing her fist around the aquamarine pendant.
Tomorrow she would go. And then maybe she would be able to put it behind her and get on with the rest of her life.
She left Egerton Crescent while the maids were still opening shutters and laying fires (causing a flurry of alarm; no one expected her up before luncheon). She couldn’t face the prospect of encountering the terrifying Edith at the studio in Gower Street, so she wanted to catch Lawrence before he left the flat. If she had to wait until he returned in the evening she suspected she might lose her nerve.
It was a drab morning. As the taxi made its way along Piccadilly she wondered why the streets were so busy and leaned forward to tap on the glass and ask the driver if there was some public event that she was unaware of. It was just the time of day, he told her with a shrug. People on their way to work in shops and offices, delivery men doing their morning rounds. A harassed-looking policeman directed traffic at Piccadilly Circus, trying to make order out of chaos, his white sleeves flashing in the November gloom.
An ordinary day, she thought, looking out of the window. Ordinary people. Ordinary lives. No outward sign of pain or passion. Did they experience it? Had the woman hurrying down the steps of the motorbus on Shaftesbury Avenue known what it was to be undone with need? Had the policeman laid himself bare before someone, body and soul? Had it brought him happiness, or destroyed him? Had he ever broken someone’s heart?
She thought of Lawrence’s photographs. Everyone knew about those whose lives had been shattered by war, but what about love? No medals for them. Their wounds were hidden, but no less devastating.
The taxi set her down in the usual place at the end of Marchmont Street. As she paid the driver her hands were shaking so much that coins slipped between her gloved fingers and rolled into the gutter. She couldn’t bring herself to scrabble around in the dirt to pick them up. There was a dustcart outside the Marquis Cornwallis pub, and men whistling as they hauled dustbins. The cold air was filled with the reek of rubbish and rang with the clang of iron. The ordered tranquillity of Egerton Crescent felt like a continent away.
As she approached number twenty-three the door opened and an elderly man emerged, carrying a violin case. He looked at her in surprise as she slipped past him and went into the hall. She remembered the silvery ribbons of sound that had shimmered through the walls.
Her chest burned as she climbed the stairs. Lawrence’s world was attics and stairs and skylights, a view of chimneypots and rooftops. It was bare floorboards and thin walls and unmade beds, rough red wine and Woodbines. It was inconvenient and insubstantial, not solid enough to hold back the great nothingness beyond. Resolve gathered inside her. He would see that she couldn’t live like that, surely? He would understand what she had done.
There was a clutch of empty bottles, like skittles, outside the door at the top of the stairs. She looked at them as she knocked. The landing smelled like the blast of air one breathed in when one passed a public bar. She waited a moment then knocked again, harder. A muffled shout came from inside.
‘For Christ’s sake – it’s open!’
Hearing his voice almost made her knees buckle. She went in. Her head still felt empty, like it was floating, but her heart was beating so hard she was sure it must be echoing through the whole building. The corridor was gloomy, striped with bands of pale light that came through open doorways. At its end a shadow moved across the door of Lawrence’s room. For the first time the thought occurred to her that he might not be alone. She felt sick.
‘Lawrence?’
Her voice was a croak. The word died away into silence. The shadow moved and he appeared in the doorway, holding on to it for support.
He was naked to the waist, barefoot, wearing trousers with the braces hanging loosely down. In the dirty light his skin was so pale it looked almost bloodless. He was thinner than when she’d last seen him, and than in those ripe days of August when the sun had burnished his skin and the ridges of his ribs and the hollows in his cheeks had been less pronounced. In a second he was in front of her, pulling her roughly into his arms. It took every ounce of strength she possessed to resist.
‘No – please, Lawrence – I can’t! I didn’t come here for that!’
He stepped back, his chest rising and falling rapidly. His eyes glittered darkly, as if with a fever. For a moment he gazed at her, then he turned away abruptly, his whole body taut.
‘What then? What did you come here for? To ask me to take photographs at your wedding?’
‘You saw the announcement,’ she said, shakily.
‘Of course I bloody saw it.’ He walked down the corridor, into the bedroom. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t? This is Bloomsbury, not Outer Mongolia. We do get The Times here.’
Hesitantly she followed him, her eyes automatically drawn to the faces on the walls. She had known it would be hard. She had been prepared for him to be hurt, frustrated perhaps … Not bitter. Not cold. She had allowed herself to imagine that he might hold her and tell her he understood, and that he would always love her. Would always be there, if she needed him. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she had been relying on hearing that.
‘Lawrence, please—’
He rounded on her. ‘Do you love him?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘Then why? Why are you doing this?’
His anger sparked her own. ‘Because I don’t love him – that’s why! I don’t feel very much for him at all, and do you know what? It’s a relief. I can’t do it, Lawrence! I can’t live like that – like we did; everything heightened and intense – so intense it hurts. It’s dangerous, love like that. It’s an addiction, just like the drugs and drink that killed Flick. It feels marvellous at the time, of course – that first hit, when you’re glittering and invincible – but it doesn’t last. It can’t. You have to know when to stop, or it’ll destroy you.’
‘And that’s what you’ve done, is it? Decided to stop loving?’ He was incredulous. Scornful. ‘What a genius idea – just like signing the temperance pledge! You’re going to marry a man who treats you like one of his possessions and live the rest of your life with your heart buried in stone? You’re going to pretend love is just another one of those tiresome emotions –’ his lip curled as he threw her own words back at her ‘– and become as cold and hard as your mother. Is that it?’
‘No!’ The dart hit home, more painful than she could have imagined. With great effort she schooled her tone into one of careful reason, squashing her anguish into a tight hard ball. ‘Please – try to understand. I can’t trust myself, that’s all. I love too much. First Howard, then Flick – I can’t put my heart on the line again, Lawrence; I’m simply not strong enough, or brave enough to take the risk.’ She broke off with a sudden, painful laugh. ‘How ridiculous. Taking risks is the thing I’ve always done best. All the years I fooled myself and everyone else into believing I was fearless by doing foolish stunts and breaking silly rules, and now I’m too scared to leave the house.’ She took in a shuddering breath. ‘I want certainty, Lawrence. Stability. Permanence.’
‘Permanence? I give it a year before you’re climbing your silk-lined walls with boredom and drinking too much sherry at lunchtime. Two years and you’ll have made a discreet arrangement with some obliging chap to help pass the long afternoons until the husband you don’t love comes home.’ His laugh was harsh. ‘Perhaps I could offer myself for the position? It would be just like old times, but with more expensive sheets and a maid to make them afterwards.’
‘You make it sound sordid.’ A tear slipped down her cheek. She was too ashamed to admit that he had voiced her secret hope; one that she had scarcely dared admit to herself. That somehow, this wasn’t the end.
‘It would be. Sordid and wrong.’
‘Because I’d be someone else’s wife?’
‘I’ve slept with married women before. I didn’t give a fuck about their husbands and I don’t see why yours would be any different.’
She felt herself flinch. Her jaw ached with the effort of not crying out.
‘Then why?’
He went over to the table beside the bed to pick up a packet of cigarettes. She watched the movement of the muscles beneath his skin as he bent his head and hunched his shoulders to light one. How well she remembered the feel of his back beneath the palms of her hands, those constellations of freckles. Once he would have lit one cigarette for them to share and passed it to her, easy and intimate, but now he held the packet out. She shook her head dumbly.
‘Because it would be a betrayal of the girl I fell in love with.’ He tossed the spent match into a saucer of others. ‘I wouldn’t stain her memory by going to bed with her ghost. I wouldn’t humiliate myself by becoming the occasional amusement of a rich man’s bored wife.’
‘It wouldn’t be like that—’
‘Yes, it would.’ His fury was contained beneath a thin veneer of controlled exasperation. ‘Jesus, Selina – can’t you see the irony of what you’re doing? You’re so scared of death that you’re meeting it halfway. That’s not keeping yourself safe from what you fear, it’s giving yourself up to it. You want certainty? I can give you that. Not in diamonds and rubies and grand houses, but in waking up every day and knowing beyond doubt that you are loved more than you can comprehend—’ He broke off, thrusting his fingers into his untidy hair, stricken and helpless. ‘We’re all going to die sometime – that’s a fact. And the only thing we can do to cheat death is to live properly. Bravely. Love wholly. Living, instead of just existing – you said that, remember?’
‘That was before,’ she sobbed. Before the obscenity of Flick’s death. Before she fell in love with him, when it was still a silly, shallow game of dare. ‘Grand houses and rubies can’t be snatched away in an instant, but people can. Love doesn’t protect you from hurt, it makes you more vulnerable to it.’
He slumped back against the wall as the fight suddenly went out of him. ‘Don’t do this, Selina. Don’t marry him. Please.’
This weary defeat was even harder to bear than his anger. She shook her head. ‘It’s too late.’
‘It’s not. Not yet.’
She thought of the announcement in The Times, Miranda’s list of instructions about guest lists and menus, the engagement dinner Rupert’s parents had held for them at The Dorchester. Could all of that be wished away? Undone? He was just a foot away from her. A single step and she would be in his arms. For a fragment of a second she allowed herself to imagine it. Kissing him. Tasting him and breathing him in and feeling the silken tangle of his hair in her fingers …
‘It’s better this way. For both of us,’ she whispered. ‘Even if it doesn’t feel like that now.’
‘In that case, go. There’s nothing more to say.’
They gazed at each other, wide-eyed, from opposite sides of the chasm that had opened up between them. Dazed with disbelief, she turned and forced herself towards the door, out into the passageway.
A sense of unreality carried her forwards. With every step she waited for his voice calling her back, or his footsteps behind her and his hands, pulling her against him, not letting her go. But there was silence at her back and emptiness ahead of her. She walked towards it and closed the door with quiet finality.
The breath of air that gusted through the rooms carried the faint trace of her scent. Leaning against the wall Lawrence remained perfectly still, listening to the crash of his desperate heart and her footsteps fading on the stairs. In the saucer on the desk the cigarette he had lit was burning itself into ash. His own words echoed in his head: it’s not too late.
He could go after her – she was still under the same roof, still within reach …
He raised his hands to his head and closed his eyes, surrendering to the painful realization that that wasn’t true. She was far beyond his reach, and always had been. She might still be in the same building but she belonged to a different world.
When Lawrence had woken up that morning he’d thought that nothing could hurt more than his hangover. He’d been wrong. In a few hours the pain in his head would start to ebb as the alcohol gradually left his bloodstream. He knew he would spend the rest of his life recovering from falling in love with Selina Lennox.
THE BEAUMONT NURSING HOME
BEAUMONT STREET
LONDON W1
Darling Alice,
I don’t know how to write this. I don’t know where to start to tell you the truth. I wish I had done it earlier. I wish I didn’t have to do it at all but it seems