‘I say come on, Ashby – come in old man and have a soak!’ The invitation came through the steam and hearty laughter of the baths in the Acton changing rooms; and the speaker had captained Ned’s victorious rugby team. ‘Come on, Ash, you know you want to! It’s ever so lovely when you’re in, as the duchess told the curate!’
Ned grinned, and climbed in with the rest, to feel the heat close in around him, to soak the pain and stiffness from his muddy limbs. He’d never been especially gregarious, and had joined the college First Fifteen more for the game itself than any social reason. In the university laboratories and lecture halls, his body was reduced to faculties – a brain with eyes and ears, and legs to move it from one classroom to another; and it was only on the rugby or the cricket field that he could feel as physically useful as he had at home in Sussex.
Later in the Acton clubhouse there were pints of beer put away, rude songs to sing in celebration of their manhood, and then eventually a private omnibus to carry the team back to Holborn in soggy triumph. But Ned found he couldn’t wait that long. It was a goodish hike to Shepherds Bush, and he knew he wasn’t likely to find a crawler outside the two bob limit. But he felt the need to walk. The alcohol had combined with his two tries, the hot bath and the cold night air to make him feel a hero – to glory in the breadth of his own shoulders, the power in his strong legs.
Ned strode on through the darkness thinking how truly great it was to be alive and free! Until he saw a hansom cab ahead, and thought instead how pleasant it would be to ride.
‘Where to, Guv?’ the cabbie called down through the roof trap.
‘Harpur Street, off Theobald’s Road.’ He felt the hansom move out from the kerb and settled back to watch the yellow gas lamps flicker past the window.
Ned had changed his mind about the city soon after he began to board with Simmie. The stroll down from college to his lodgings, once so dispiriting, was now cram-full of interest. Everyone he met now seemed so much more cheerful than they’d been before; the horses glossier, the sooty gardens bright with flowers – with at the end of it, at Harpur Street, a reassuring sense of coming home.
Tonight after supper there’d be cocoa by the fire, with Simmie sitting in the pool of light under the gas chandelier, sewing and chatting away in the wonderful chaotic cocoon of her parlour. And when she looked up at him and smiled, as she would often, he’d see in her face the girl she’d been – and not so long ago at that. When she leant forward to poke at the fire he’d catch a scent of lavender, and become irreverently aware of the curve of her back, the tautness of her dress against her thigh, the movements of her breasts within their soft cage of cotton and lace.
In the morning when he woke, it would be Sunday. There’d be no whistling or scraping of shovels from the mews beneath his window. The other chaps were home for the weekend. It would be peaceful in the house. He’d breakfast alone and scan the newspaper, waiting for Simmie to come down in her Sunday finery dressed up for church. And then he’d settle down again to read the newspaper again, whilst waiting for her to come back to him and see about the Sunday roast.
It seemed to Ned on his way back from Acton that he’d known Simmie all his life. Sometimes he even managed to forget the way he’d met her. In one of her more forthcoming moments, Gladys had told him that her mistress inherited the house in Harpur Street from Llewellen’s mother, an old Frenchwoman for whom she’d acted as companion – and Ned entertained a brief, unpleasant picture of the married son creaking up the back stairs to Simmie’s bedroom; before deciding that it was all too long ago to matter. He knew Llewellen had avoided her on his last trip to London, and was safely off the scene in South America, in any case.
‘And best place for him,’ Ned thought swaying with the motion of the cab and burping up an aftertaste of bitter ale.
‘I’ll be orf then, Mum,’ said Gladys from the parlour doorway. ‘I’ve laid yer a cold supper in the dinin’ room, an’ for ’is nibs if ’e should show ’is face. So I’ll be back for breakfast, if that suits?’
‘Oh yes, thank you so much, Gladys, that’ll do splendidly. I do hope you enjoy yourself.’
Gladys had special bookings to see George Robey at the Oxford; and as the niece who was going with her lived but a few steps from the theatre across the Tottenham Court Road, had been given leave to stop over with her for the night.
‘Thank ye, Mum. I’ll be sayin’ goodnight then.’ But Gladys wavered. ‘Spose ye’ll be alright alone wiv ’im?’ She jerked her bonnet awkwardly towards the empty chair.
‘Of course I shall! Why Gladys, what on earth do you think could happen?’
‘Well if ye don’t know, Mum, it ain’t for me to tell yer. All I will say is they’re all tarred wiv the same brush, men, even the quiet ones. I won’t say no more, but I’ve seen the way ’e gawps at yer, an’ don’t think that I ’aven’t!’
‘Oh come, you’re being quite absurd! In the first place I’m old enough to be practically his mother, and in the second… Well, can you see our Mr Ashby hurling himself at my feet?’
‘It ain’t yer feet I’m worried abaht!’ Gladys put in darkly, then took herself off sharpish – for if there was one thing she could not abide, it was being laughed at. And her mistress was still laughing gently when the front door closed behind her.
‘Really!’ Simmie thought, ‘what would I do without Gladys and her street philosophies to brighten my lonely days!’
She prodded ineffectually at some loose wisps of hair which had escaped from her bun, and took up another piece of mending from the basket by her chair. It was a shirt of Ned’s, with two of the shell buttons splintered by the laundry mangle. As she removed the casualties and rifled for replacements in her button-box, Simmie gave the garment a look of quiet satisfaction. The old lady’s death had left such a vacuum in her life, more than she sometimes realised, and it was pleasant to be needed once again. She wasn’t bound to sew for her boarders, but was pleased to see their clothes amongst her mending. She liked the feeling that these hulking young men were dependent on her in some way – for their appearance in addition to their board and lodging. It made her feel almost as if they were her own sons.
In point of fact it had been simpler than she had imagined to have her name added to the official Register of Boarding Residences for College Students. And what a joy they were to have! All of them such sweet things in their different ways, and none more so than Ned Ashby. There was always something touching about the transition from youth to manhood; and Ned’s vulnerability was written all over his handsome face. He was without a mother, as she’d been at his age, and needed looking after. On an impulse, Simmie lifted his clean shirt to bury her nose in it, was disappointed to discover that it smelt of nothing more than starch and linen – and then amused at her own disappointment.
‘Which is what comes of letting Gladys put ridiculous ideas into your head,’ she told herself, returning the shirt to her lap to smooth it flat again. ‘You’re far too old for that kind of nonsense, Simmie, and you know it!’
But it was too late of course; it always was by the time she caught herself at it. The thing she’d unconsciously sought was the faint tang of male sweat. And Simmie realised with a pang that the image it suggested was of another white shirt, Robert’s, lying in a bar of sunlight on the floor of a hotel bedroom. She’d be unwise – so unwise – to go over it all again. But then wasn’t it rather nice to be unwise sometimes, she thought recklessly, when one was all alone with nobody to witness one’s foolishness?
‘You are wicked!’ she said aloud, mechanically threading the first new button into place, as the hidden spring of memories within her rose and overflowed.
It was so easy to remember, even now, how young and carefree she had felt that afternoon, watching Robert stride towards her through the park in his pale summer suit and panama straw hat.
‘Mamma has taken the carriage out on the razzle,’ he called to her. ‘So I’ve been left with shanks’ mare!’
It was a hot midsummer’s day. The sky was vast and blue, with just enough breeze to allow someone to fly a brilliant green and yellow kite. As they strolled down the hill, the grass engulfed them in a sea of seedheads, sorrel plumes and daisies. Kit was in his glory bouncing through the long grass to retrieve the sticks Simmie threw for him; and Robert stooped to gather a great bunch of daisies for her along the way. She held his cane and hat for him, with in her other hand a discarded parasol of Isobel’s – and as she watched him move bareheaded through the sunlight, she knew she was in love.
In the months since he first stopped his carriage to apologise for muddying her dress, they had met often in the park. So long as he was up in town, he visited his mother at her house in Ham each week; and so long as it was fine – and once or twice when it was not – Simmie and Kit had been there to intercept him on his return. At first she’d gone to some lengths to pretend they’d met by chance, stationing herself in a different position each time along the carriage drive. But their meetings brought such colour to her life, that she soon abandoned the pretence to welcome him as a friend.
Simmie could tell him little of her own life. There wasn’t much to tell. But he had spoken to her openly of his wife and children. His profession had taken him to so many different parts of the world; and he’d enthralled her with the tales of his adventures in France and Portugal; quarrying lime in Canada, and exploring ancient Inca silver mines in South American Peru.
Then, as the traffic in the park had lessened through the winter months, she had agreed to ride with him in his mother’s smart Victoria. He had twice taken her to tea in a discreet Kingston teashop, pointing out Mamma’s grand house on Ham Common as they passed by; and afterwards, so many times, they had descended from the carriage to walk in the wet park while the old coachman brought the horses on behind.
Simmie walked Kit every day to allay Isobel’s suspicions, counting through the weekdays to the only day that counted; the day when she’d see Robert. For all the time they spent together she was aware of his eyes on her face and body; and the fact that she could never tell what he was thinking, only added to her own excitement. Already she had broken the rules of her upbringing and society simply by being with him, and there was more to come. It was impossible to do what they were doing without some sort of a climax. It couldn’t just end quietly, peter out – it couldn’t!
Nor did it. The moment had come when Simmie least expected it, that lovely summer day in Richmond Park. Robert had been lying on his elbow, splitting the ribbed stems of her flowers with his pocket knife and threading them into an outsized daisy chain.
‘I’m sailing on the Arcadia next week for Colombo and Singapore,’ he said – and the thrust had been so quick and sure, that at first she felt no pain. Only a kind of numbness.
‘How long will you be away?’
‘A year, two years. Maybe longer. I’m to report on the North Borneo Trading Company holdings in Labuan, and may go on to take a squint at Australia. If the place is all that it’s cracked up to be, there could be opportunities out there in iron or coal.’
‘For you to settle, do you mean? To stay for ever?’
‘Forever is a long time for someone like me, Simmie.’ His dark eyes flickered, searching hers. ‘But I’ve heard that there are worse places to bring up a family. If I can find something that interests me, we might give it a try.’
That’s when she’d felt it, the sharpness of the pain. That’s when she turned to him with her soul in her face.
It was the look that he’d been waiting for, that any man would wait for she supposed; and his next words were the words that any man might use to seduce a lovelorn girl like her.
‘We still have today,’ Robert said, looping the daisy chain around her neck and tucking a superfluous flower into the ribbon of her hat. ‘I want you very much – you know that, don’t you – and I can see that you want me as well.’ His voice was deeper, thicker, more persuasive than she’d ever heard it. ‘So why not come with me now, my dear? Why not?’
The chain of flowers felt curiously heavy on her breasts; and the direct words he used broke through her last defences.
‘Let me give you something to remember – that we’ll both remember, Simmie, in the future. Whatever comes, I think that I can promise that at least.’
There’d been a pleading, naked need in Robert’s eyes that she was totally unable to deny. All her life she had responded willingly to others’ needs; and where his need coincided with her own there was no choice for her to make. He was completely irresistible. If he had touched her then she’d have melted, lain back regardless like an animal in the dry grass. As it was, she simply stood when he stood, walked when he walked – up the grassy hill to the Richmond Gate and the big gothic hotel that overlooked the river.
He was brisk, almost businesslike the way he went about it; and she didn’t doubt he’d trodden this path more than once before. Outside the hotel he paid a raggletail urchin to mind the dog, with the promise of a double fee when they returned. And although she hadn’t liked it, Simmie was unable to resist. All her will had gone and she could only do as she was bidden. While Robert disappeared into the hotel she waited limply outside it. With one hand she broke the daisy chain around her neck to drop it on the hotel railing. She had quite forgotten the single flower he’d tucked into in her hatband; and it was only later when she and Kit reached home, that she discovered it.
Simmie looked up from her mending at the bureau by her parlour window. In the second drawer lay her journal for 1890; and she smiled again to think of what she’d written, and omitted, in the entry for that day; scribbling behind her arm in case Isobel should catch her – the little daisy from her hatband wilting on the blotter at her elbow.
The simple act of walking through the door of the hotel on Robert’s arm was the equivalent for Simmie of passing through a wall of flame. None of the heroines she’d read about had ever crossed this line, even in the most sensational of novels. She walked mechanically into the echoing marble vestibule, looking neither right nor left, but feeling the eyes of everyone upon her. This was where dreams stopped and reality began. Outside in the street she’d shed the moral principles that had armoured her all her life, and now she was exposed. She was about to commit a mortal sin. Worse, a social error. At twenty-three she had become the thing that Isobel had warned her of; an Abandoned Woman!
But when Robert closed the bedroom door behind them, he shut out the world out too, and with it her humiliation. All that she could think of now was Robert himself and her own trembling body. She stood with her back to him in the open window, groping for her hatpins. Below her in the sunshine she could see the shining curve of the river, and all the little rowing boats, gay with coloured parasols. She saw them but saw through them, opened her mouth to describe the scene, but said nothing while she listened for his movement in the room behind.
By the time he reached her she was scarcely breathing. She had got the girl to lace her tighter than usual that day. So when his hands closed over her shoulders, Simmie really thought that she was going to faint. She found herself panting, gasping for air – and when she felt the pressure of his body, she leaned back to it and closed her eyes; helpless, sinking, dying of love. Or perhaps of something even stronger. In a while his hands were restless, and then busy. Before she understood what he was doing, he had unhooked the last of her back-fastenings and pulled her bodice forward. It was for her to free herself of sleeves and camisole, to step out of the skirt, the petticoat and the drawers; moving like a hypnotic beneath his gaze. But he wouldn’t release her from her tight stays. Not yet.
His coat was already on the door; and now he stood before her in the band of sunlight from the window to undo his waistcoat. He stooped to his boots and stockings. Then as he straightened to his necktie and studs she caught the look in his dilated eyes; opaque, intensely self-absorbed, commanding her to watch him as first the shirt and then the narrow breeches fell to the floor.
He wore nothing underneath; and the sight of Robert Llewellen’s naked body shook Simmie then as nothing had succeeded in shaking her before or since that time. He was muscular and olive-toned, primitively rampant, smooth as silk. As he moved around and beneath her to her lacings and suspenders and last flimsy chemise, she smelt the musky, masculine odour of him. She saw the hard swell of his crouching thighs, the fine black hairs between his shoulder blades; and when she felt the brush of his moustache on her skin, Simmie had given herself to him unrestrainedly – wanting, longing to be conquered and debased; desperate to drown herself in the depths of his dark, ruthless eyes.
That afternoon in Richmond, in the sunlight, on the floor and on the bed, Robert had brought her all the dissolution Simmie craved, and more. He’d promised her a day that she’d remember as long as she still breathed. And even now, more than fourteen years later, there was hardly a gasp or tremor of it she could not recall. Sitting with her mending in her cosy Harpur Street parlour she thought shamelessly of the things he’d done to her, that she had done for him – arching her back unconsciously while she relived them – to squirm and spread herself in the seat of her armchair.
‘Anyone home?’
At the first sound of Ned’s voice, Simmie’s guilty knees had sprung together, to send the mending flying from her lap.
‘Ned – dear!’ she gasped with one hand on her heart. ‘My goodness you have given me a start!’
He strolled in then in his overcoat and comforter, looking clean and wholesome and more than a little pink around the gills. ‘I got away early,’ he said simply. ‘Thought I’d come in for a bite and a bit of a chat.’ And smiled that diffident, endearing smile of his; weaving somewhat unsteadily towards her through the labyrinth of Simmie’s parlour furniture.
She smiled too with her head on the satin chair-back, suddenly exhausted.
As he reached her, he brushed her cheek with his hand; a spontaneous gesture of affection that on any other night would certainly have passed as nothing more. But that night, at that moment, it touched Simmie in her loneliest most sensitive spot – and without thinking, she caught his hand in hers and turned her head to kiss the damp hollow of its palm.
Then, shamingly, she began to cry.
Later, much later, Simmie turned up her bedroom lamp; returning to her mirror to do battle with the crushed bird’s nest of her hair. Behind her on the bed, Ned sprawled like a great slain ox – so different to Robert and yet so much the same.
He had tried very hard to be slow and gentle, poor boy. And failed utterly.
‘Thank you.’
Robert had never said it, not once; although God knows she’d given him more of herself. A great deal more.
As she looked at Ned’s reflection in the gaslight, Simmie felt a tenderness for him that she’d never felt for the man that she loved.