Evie
I woke up at midday, panic driving me to my feet. Good God, I was still in yesterday’s clothes, I realized blearily. I must have just lain down on my bed when I’d come in at dawn and passed out straight away.
How had I slept so late? He’d be back in a few hours.
There were so many things to do first. I should set out the letters on the desk, make sure there were chairs, and that Marie-Thérèse knew to put out something for him to eat and drink, and find a book to write translations of the letters into, and pens, and ink …
But what I found myself rushing to do, instead of all that, was to bathe and wash my hair. Marie-Thérèse was doing the washing today, and nothing would be ironed and ready in time. Thank God I still had one clean dress left: the plain beige linen one with the short sleeves. I thought it too severe, but it would have to do.
Once the dress was on, and Marie-Thérèse had promised to leave out some cold cuts and the fruit tart she was already stoning apricots for, I went tiptoeing back into Grandmother’s room. I was intending to borrow her big modern black-and-white bangles, to wear for luck. But when I tried them they kept banging against my wrists. I knew I’d never be able to write with them on.
In the end, I put on the amber necklace I thought I might recall Grandmother having worn long ago instead. On me, it had none of the wildness I remembered, but the beads gleamed discreetly against the pale linen of my dress, and took away its severity, at least.
I also opened Grandmother’s square, faceted, black-edged, glass-stoppered bottle of scent and dabbed it at wrists and neck, as I’d done yesterday. The perfume aroused no memories of her in me, but I liked the mysteriousness of it. It made me feel more worldly. I patted down my curls, so they would dry flat. The face in the glass looked white but, I thought, feeling a little reassured, far more composed than I felt.
For luck, I picked up the picture of young Grandmother, and took it with me when I left her room. I put it above my own bedroom fireplace, and went on looking at it. But, inside, I was half thinking, even as I looked at it, of another face.
It was the sudden tenderness I thought I’d seen in Jean’s pale-blue eyes, leaning over me in the cab, which had unsettled me.
I’d so hated his coldness earlier. His dismissal had seemed unjust enough to be worth fighting, because, I thought, what he’d been turning away from wasn’t me but the smugness that he must think went with whatever he assumed was my place in life. I knew I wasn’t that girl. I might not have been expelled from my past in quite the same way as he and his father had – or Grandmother, come to that; I might not worry about money, either. But, all the same, I knew what it was to feel an outsider.
How strange, I thought, that, after always feeling so detached from all those other young men – the Winthrops and Bills, with their sense of fun and their interesting clothes and their certainties; or Cousin Theo in his midnight-blue dinner suit and his (different) certainties – I should suddenly mind so much what this one, in this shadowland city filled with ghosts and regrets, might think of me.
As I carried the letters along the corridor to the study, where I’d decided to sit with Jean – it got the late sun – a line from Grandmother’s poetry book flitted through my head.
I have dreamed so much of you
that my arms, accustomed
while embracing your shadow to cross themselves over
my chest would maybe
not fold around the contours of your body.
And that, faced with the actual appearance of
what has haunted and
governed me for days and years,
It might be I who became a shadow.
O sentimental scales.
‘Wish me luck, Grandmother,’ I said, out loud. My hands were trembling.