In the aftermath of her storm of weeping Alice felt empty. Exhausted.
Dr Pembridge had given her some bitter-tasting medicine, and Ellen had been called to help hold her as he forced it into her mouth. As she had fought and howled a distant part of Alice’s mind remained detached and floating above herself, appalled. Now, tucked tightly into bed, she thought of how she had behaved and felt nothing.
The curtains were pulled shut again and the pillow was cool against her cheek. The lamp was lit and Grandmama’s shadow loomed on the nursery wall. It seemed odd that she was there: Alice had never known her to cross the nursery threshold before. She didn’t want to look at her, sitting at the end of the bed. She lay on her side, facing the wall while Grandmama talked in a low voice, telling her the truth that everyone had hidden for all this time.
Mama was not in Burma. She never had been – at least, not since her honeymoon. All the things that she had written about – the voyage on the Eastern Star, the journey up the blood-red Irawaddy river, staying in the little house at the hill station – had happened ten years ago, before Alice was born. She had kept a journal, Grandmama said. That’s how she was able to describe it in such vivid detail in her letters.
Alice wondered how long Grandmama had known about the letters. She’d thought they were secret.
She’d thought a lot of things that had turned out to be wrong.
‘Your mother wanted to protect you,’ Grandmama said. ‘She knew that she had some very difficult and unpleasant times ahead and she didn’t want you to be worried. Your Papa made sure she had the very best doctor, and we all thought that once the operation was over and she had had a chance to recover, everything would be perfectly all right again.’
Grandmama’s voice faltered a little. Alice felt mild surprise at this, but did not turn her head. Her eyes stayed fixed to Grandmama’s dark shape on the wall. ‘Of course, none of us knew that it would take so long…’
Or that it wouldn’t be all right, Alice thought. Not at all. Not ever.
Grandmama stopped talking. Alice thought she heard her take a little in-out breath, but her shadow stayed perfectly still.
‘She had to have another operation,’ Grandmama went on. ‘On her chest. Even so, it seems that her illness has got worse. It’s very … unlucky. Very unexpected.’
Grandmama always held herself very upright, but the shadow that stretched across the wall was stooped, as if she was suddenly as old and frail as Grandfather.
‘Will she die?’ Alice asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own.
‘Yes,’ Grandmama said coolly. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
Alice gripped the aquamarine tightly. She felt as if the spiky kernel that had been lodged in her tummy since Mama went away had split open, and the pain had spread to every part of her, like poison.
‘Can I see her?’
The stooped shadow shoulders stiffened.
‘No. No, I don’t think that’s wise. Not now. Your mama is very weak, you see, and very tired. The doctor thinks it would place too much strain on her and be too upsetting. For you both. You must be very brave and wait for news.’
The aquamarine pressed hard into Alice’s fingers. Poison burned in her throat.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to ask?’ Grandmama said.
‘No.’
‘Very well.’ Grandmama hesitated, and then Alice felt the movement of the mattress as she stood up. The shadow reared across the wall with sudden menace, like a monster from a nightmare. Not real, Mama would murmur, stroking her forehead, just a bad dream. Except it wasn’t.
‘Goodnight, Alice.’
Grandmama’s voice was softer than usual, but the face of the shadow figure remained black and empty as it retreated to the door.
Alice didn’t reply.
Lawrence had expected resistance. Arriving at the smart nursing home sweating and out of breath he had expected to be challenged at the very least, and had been ready to fight.
He hadn’t got as far as working out what that might mean and the lengths to which he would go to see Selina, but in the end it wasn’t necessary. By some stroke of luck his arrival was perfectly timed. The doctors who would have disapproved of him being there had gone home for the day and the night nurse who had just reported for duty seemed to know exactly who this dishevelled stranger was. She led him quickly down the corridor and, outside Selina’s door, she squeezed his arm and told him she was glad that he was there. And then she took him into the room where the girl he loved – still, after all these years – lay sleeping.
The nurse checked the chart at the foot of her bed, smoothed the sheet and adjusted the angle of the dim lamp, then retreated. There was a chair against the wall on the other side of the room, and Lawrence brought it across (what was it doing over there anyway? Did her bloody husband not sit beside her?) then he sank down into it and gazed at her as tears coursed down his face.
She was so thin. Her skin was almost translucent, showing the blue veins beneath. He wanted to gather her up into his arms and breathe life back into her, kiss warmth into her pale, dry lips. The blankets lay flat across her chest and he remembered the break in Polly’s voice when she’d described the surgery she’d had. The doctors called it ‘radical’, apparently. Polly’s word had been ‘brutal’.
God, how he ached for her. He had been on the verge of getting up and leaving the room so he could find somewhere to go and howl out his rage and sorrow when she had opened her eyes and seen him.
They cried together, then. Silently, between kisses, and her tears had run over his hands as he stroked her hair.
There was so much to say, so many years to catch up on, but her breathing was laboured and he could see how much the effort of speaking exhausted her. And so he squashed down his questions and talked to her instead, telling her about Polly’s letter and their meeting at Maison Lyons.
‘She said … She said you have a daughter…?’
‘Alice.’
Her eyes had gone to the nightstand then, and a child’s drawing that was propped against a jug of water. His heart turned over as he picked it up.
‘The Chinese Tea House.’
‘Yes.’
His eyes blurred. For eleven years it had been a place that existed only in his dreams and his memory and in a sheaf of old photographs, but now the October evening fell away and he was back there, at Blackwood that summer, dazzled by the beauty of it all. Overwhelmed and stupefied with first love.
Only love, as it turned out.
‘It’s good.’ He cleared his throat. ‘She’s quite an artist.’
Nine years old, Polly had said, but her penwork was precise and clever. Surely most children didn’t draw like that?
‘I wonder where she gets that from?’
Selina’s voice was a cracked whisper, but her eyes glittered brilliantly and there was a smile on her milk-pale lips. ‘A … honeymoon baby, everyone assumed. I did too, until … I saw her. And then I knew…’
Her breath had spent itself and she spluttered to a halt in a gasping cough.
‘Ours?’ he asked gently. ‘That night…’
She nodded. Her eyes closed, and it felt like a light going out. Anguish gripped him. He had to stiffen himself against the urge to hold her then, and his fingers tingled with the effort of not squeezing her fragile ones too hard. His jaw was set as his eyes darted wildly around the room, furiously willing himself not to let her down by crying. He thought she was asleep, but at length she murmured, ‘Do you remember it?’
He leaned forward and kissed her gently on the mouth.
‘Every moment.’
February 1926
The cold numbed Lawrence’s fingers as he unpinned the photographs from the walls of his room in Marchmont Street. Outside, a steel-edged wind blew mean flakes of snow around the dirty sky while, in the flat below, Mr Kaminski’s violin scratched out scales.
He didn’t have much to pack. A few clothes (Edith had insisted he buy a dinner suit and some decent shirts; apparently Americans set a lot of store by smartness) and his camera. Not much to show for his life so far. Not much to start a new one.
He collected together the images of miners, the shots of smoky streets and backyards and grimy-faced children and put them in a pile for Sam. He had been going to dispose of the others (he had the negatives, after all) but Edith had denounced this as artistic sacrilege and insisted that she would keep them at the studio. He hesitated as he took down a picture of Selina in the orangery at Blackwood, then set it ruthlessly aside.
He didn’t need photographs to remember. And anyway, the whole point was that he needed to forget.
America had been Sam’s idea. A brighter, better, more progressive place than England, he said; he’d be off like a shot himself if there wasn’t so much to fight for still in the Welsh Valleys and the pit villages of Nottingham and the North East. But Lawrence had nothing to keep him in England, no work, and seemingly little interest in finding any. The suggestion that he book his passage and make a fresh start had come at the end of a lengthy lecture in which the words ‘self-indulgent’, ‘pissed-up waster’ and ‘fucking pathetic’ had also been used.
The fact that Lawrence had been too hungover to mount any defence rather proved Sam’s point.
Weeks had passed since that November morning when Selina had come to say goodbye. He had told her that it wasn’t too late to change her mind but as each short day blurred into the next that possibility began to seem increasingly remote, until it felt laughably embarrassing that he had ever allowed himself to believe it. (Or fucking pathetic, as Sam so succinctly put it.) He longed to see her – craved it, in fact – and he gave up wandering the seedier parts of the city with his camera, instead spending his evenings haunting its smart streets, huddling in the shadows opposite The Embassy, the KitKat Club, the Eiffel Tower and The Ritz in the hope of seeing her. His efforts were hardly ever rewarded. New stars glittered in the firmament of the Bright Young Things now; new clubs replaced the old favourites, new dances, new cocktails, new games and names and crazes. Sometimes he saw Theo Osborne, rake-thin, dramatically swathed in furs, but Selina was never with him. On the rare occasions when he did see her she was with Rupert and he barely caught a glimpse of her bright hair as she stepped from motorcar to doorway. Those were the nights when he drank to oblivion. It was just as well it didn’t happen often.
It was Edith, predictably, who took him in hand. He had grown used to her kindness and took her unconditional support for granted, so having it abruptly withdrawn came as a shock. ‘This can’t go on,’ she’d snapped after one of those nights. ‘You’re not the first person to suffer a broken heart and you won’t be the last. You need to pull yourself together before you lose everything.’ When Lawrence told her he already had, she gave him a withering look. ‘Don’t be silly. You still have friends, talent and a shred of dignity. Just.’
Christmas came. In despair he went home to Hastings and spent a sober, largely silent festival with his father and brother. Returning to London in the dead days at the close of the year he went to the Thomas Cook offices in Ludgate Circus and booked a third class ticket to New York, simply because he didn’t know what else to do. The sailing date, at the start of February, had meant nothing to him then. It was only last week that Sam had pointed out that it was the day of Selina Lennox’s wedding.
He turned to look back around the stripped walls. The room had already ceased to feel like his, or like home. It was blank and ready for a new occupant – an earnest trainee reporter Sam knew from his socialist meetings. Only one photograph remained. Lawrence looked at it for a long time before unpinning it with trembling fingers.
It was his favourite one, taken by the Chinese Tea House at Blackwood in the aftermath of languid lovemaking, when she had the sun in her eyes and a drowsy, dreamy smile on her lips. He remembered that moment of ripe contentment, and as he looked at it he could almost feel her touch on his skin and hear the sweet echo of Bach above Mr Kaminski’s laborious scales. He wondered if he would ever know happiness like that again.
He wondered if she would.
The pen he had borrowed from Sam to label his bag still lay on the table. He picked it up and, without stopping to think, turned the photograph over and began to write.
‘Good heavens, it’s bitter.’ Miranda cast her eyes to the leaden heavens as she got out of the car in Egerton Crescent. ‘I can hardly think of worse weather for a wedding. Now perhaps you might see that you should have waited until spring…’
Selina said nothing as she followed her up the path. She had been cold for months, cold right through to the marrow of her bones, and the spiteful little flurries of snow made little difference. It might not be traditional wedding weather, but to her it seemed fitting enough for the spirit of this particular occasion.
It had been unanimously agreed that a small wedding would be best. Both bride and groom had suffered the loss of friends – Selina more recently, but Rupert in greater numbers – and a lavish celebration felt inappropriate. (Sir Robert, who had sold a Canaletto and farm with seventy-five acres to pay for Miranda’s wedding, couldn’t conceal his relief.) Rupert, faced with continuing difficulties with the ruby mines, had intended to travel to Burma immediately after New Year and return in time for a June wedding, but Selina had known that wouldn’t work. If she was left to cool her heels for that long it was likely that she would lose her nerve and there would be no wedding at all. And so she had suggested accompanying him to Burma, as an extended honeymoon. Surely her longing for Lawrence would begin to abate with half a world’s distance between them?
The door was opened by Jean the housemaid, who reverently relieved Miranda of her fur whilst appearing not to notice Selina. ‘There’s a good fire in the drawing room, madam,’ she said. ‘Will you be wanting tea?’
‘Yes, that might be rather nice. We’ve just had tea in Fortnums, but it’s so cold I think we could do with some more to warm us up. Just tea though – tell Mrs Robins not to send up any cake. Although you barely touched a crumb.’ She glanced accusingly at Selina. ‘I rather think you’re taking the slimming a little too far these days.’
‘We’re dining at The Ritz tonight. You don’t need to worry about me starving.’
Jean’s eyes moved over Selina. ‘A letter came for you, Miss Lennox,’ she said, her gaze settling somewhere around Selina’s chest. ‘In the last post. Well, when I say letter … it’s larger than that. An invitation, perhaps. Or a catalogue…’
‘Yes, thank you, Jean,’ Miranda said crisply. ‘I’m sure Miss Lennox doesn’t need you to tell her what her letter contains.’
No, Selina thought dazedly, picking up the envelope from the salver on the table and blinking at the writing she recognized so well. She was suddenly boiling hot, though her face in the hall mirror was as white as the paper in her hands. Her pulse beat loud in her ears.
‘I’ll just – I need to—’
‘But, miss, your coat…’ she heard Jean protesting as she hurried up the stairs.
In her room she shut the door and leaned back against it while she fumbled with the envelope. In her haste she had forgotten to remove her gloves, which made her fingers clumsy and useless. She tore them off and threw them aside, then slid a finger beneath the envelope’s seal and pulled out the contents.
She found herself looking into the half-closed eyes of a girl she barely recognized. A girl with tousled hair and plump cheeks and a sleepy smile, who seemed to be about to take her hand and pull her back into last summer. The feeling made her dizzy. That’s what she had done to him, she remembered, in the second after he had taken that photograph outside the Chinese House. She had taken his hand and pulled him towards her, and they had fallen together on the sun-warmed boards where they had just made love and she had lain with her head on his chest as the echoes of pleasure reverberated through her, keeping time with the beat of his heart.
I want you to have this, he had written on the back. I want you to remember this incredible girl, who was brave and beautiful and happy. I will never forget her.
I once told you that I wouldn’t share you and I couldn’t accept half measures, but that was before I’d tried to live without you. I wouldn’t have the strength or the arrogance to say it now. Knowing you are in the same city, that I might come across your photograph in the newspaper or see you in the street is a temptation and a torment I can no longer endure.
Tomorrow I travel to Southampton, and from there sail to America. When the ship pulls away from the dock perhaps I’ll finally accept that it’s over and maybe then I’ll be able to work out what to do with the rest of my life. I’d like to say that I’ll be able to stop loving you, but I don’t think that will be possible. No matter how much easier it would be.
I hope he makes you happy. I hope he makes you feel safe. I hope he tells you every day that you’re the most beautiful woman in the world. Because, as you can see from this photograph, you truly are.
She was crying when she finished reading: silent, helpless tears streaming down her cheeks. But then her breath caught and she stopped. Gulping and sniffing she scanned the lines again, this time concentrating on the message that lay between them.
Tomorrow he was leaving and she would be married.
But it wasn’t tomorrow yet.
She dressed for him with infinite care, using the silk underwear and expensive scent that had been bought for her honeymoon, putting kohl around her eyes and painting her mouth. Polly said nothing when Selina asked her to unpack the tissue-wrapped treasures from her trousseau, but her eyes were full of questions and anguish.
Lady Lennox had insisted on arranging a pre-wedding dinner at The Ritz for Rupert’s parents. On the way there Selina told Miranda that she would be going on to meet Theo at The Embassy afterwards (and prayed that they wouldn’t bump into him in the dining room). Miranda’s lips tightened with disapproval, but Selina had deliberately waited until they were almost there and there was no time for argument.
If anyone noticed that she barely touched the food that was put before her no one remarked on it. Pre-wedding nerves, they perhaps assumed, which might also account for the slight tremor of her hands and her distraction: twice Miranda had to kick her beneath the table to get her attention when Rupert’s mother addressed a remark to her. She drank the champagne that was poured to toast the joining of their two families, but otherwise her wineglass remained full. She wanted to be clear-headed. For every detail of the hours ahead to remain sharp.
Dinner seemed to last for an eternity – how unfair that seemed when she knew that the night that followed would slip away from her so quickly – but finally her mother was laying aside her napkin, rising from her seat. Selina gritted her teeth through the expansive goodbyes in the foyer, her smile a painful rictus as she tilted her cheek up to accept Rupert’s kiss. Outside she gulped the icy air and looked around for a taxi as Lionel handed Miranda and her parents into their waiting car. ‘What on earth is she doing?’ she heard her mother ask sharply in the moment before the chauffeur shut the door. She didn’t hear Miranda’s answer, or care what it was, because the doorman had hailed a cab which was pulling up at the kerb.
In the years afterwards she would come to think how strange it was that she could recall almost nothing about her wedding day – just a blurred impression of cold satin, the cruel spikes of hairpins in her scalp, the fragrance of lilies – but every detail of the night before it remained etched on her memory. She remembered speeding through the dark streets to Bloomsbury and letting herself into the familiar hallway. She remembered the little jolt of surprise as she saw the candle burning on the windowsill, the slow spread of wonder as she realized he’d placed them all the way up the stairs – quivering flames in glasses and jars and cocoa tins – little pots of gold, leading to his door. She remembered knocking and him letting her in without speaking and how she’d followed him down the corridor to his room.
Candlelight flickered over bare walls. He’d taken down the photographs and packed his possessions. A battered canvas kitbag was on the floor beneath the window and there was a bottle of red wine on the table. From downstairs the spiralling, swooping strains of the violin.
She remembered particularly, with shivering clarity, the expression on his face as she’d stood in front of him in her peacock blue chiffon dress, her gold shoes. Helpless. Wistful. Tender. She had slipped her shoes off and they had danced together, to the borrowed music, breathing in unison, holding each other as if they were made of something fragile, touching as if they were afraid of breaking the spell, bursting the shimmering bubble of candlelight. They spoke little, in low voices, even though Sam was away and they had the flat to themselves. There was nothing more to say.
They drank the wine slowly, eking out the last drops, tasting it on each other’s lips so that for ever after she couldn’t drink claret without a tremor of sensory recollection. She undressed unhurriedly, as if they had all the time in the world, and he lay back on the bed, watching her with dark, liquid eyes. She remembered the rattling hiss as her dress, heavy with beads, slithered off her shoulders onto the bare wooden floor.
She remembered every touch. Every kiss. Every sigh.
They didn’t sleep. At some time in the dark hours, when the candles had burned out, he made coffee and she leaned against his chest in the circle of his arms to drink it. She remembered watching the light gather and wash the bare walls. She remembered turning to him again, wanting to imprint him on every cell in her body.
Had that been the moment that Alice had been created?
She remembered their goodbye. Lawrence, barefoot and bare-chested in the hallway where they’d first met, kissing on and on as the tears streamed down their cheeks. She remembered walking out into the frozen morning, bruised-lipped in her thin silk dress.
That was the bit she remembered best about her wedding day. His mouth on hers as he said I love you for the last time.
October 1936
Lawrence heard her breathing hitch. He was holding her hand and felt her fingers suddenly tighten around his. She opened her eyes with a little cry.
‘Shhh – it’s all right. Sweetheart, it’s all right.’
For a moment she stared at him, as if trying to remember who he was, and then she went limp against the pillows again. Her eyes closed and a tear slid down her cheek.
‘I was … dreaming. About when we said goodbye. I thought … I’d imagined you were ever here.’
He kissed her forehead, then rested his cheek against it, breathing in the scent of her hair, still discernibly hers beneath the hospital smell.
‘I’m here.’
The air rattled through her lungs. He felt her whole body move and sensed the effort it took.
‘Sometimes, when I wake up I see Flick here, or Howard, and I know … they’re waiting for me. Last night … when I saw you there … I thought that it was time. I thought that you had gone before and … come back to take me with you.’
His heart tripped painfully.
‘I wish I had,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘If it meant we wouldn’t have to say goodbye again.’
‘That morning … I thought it was the end. Of everything. I thought I’d never be happy again. Never love again.’
‘You didn’t want to,’ he reminded her, gently teasing.
‘No…’ A smile. ‘But then there was Alice. She showed me that you were right. The only way to cheat death is to love … wholly.’ She took a breath. ‘From the start I loved her so much it … terrified me … But I didn’t run away. Not like I did from you. I learned that there was … a special kind of joy in that fear. I realized that love is … always painful. But in the end … it’s all that matters.’
He had to pause before answering, to control the sob in his voice. ‘It’s not the end. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.’
He waited until her eyes closed and her rasping breath steadied before letting go of her hand and laying it down on the blankets, wincing at the bruises on her papery skin. He stood up and flexed his stiff shoulders. Everything in him resisted the thought of leaving her, but he knew what he had to do.
He just hoped he would have time.