1966
THE STAIR HALL, THE MIRRORMAKERS’ CLUB
It was so strange, coming back to The Mirrormakers’ Club.
They were late to the party – a reunion for old staff – and their lateness made Livy even more nervous. She and her husband lived in the country – once a land girl, always a land girl! as they said so cheerfully – and the clamour of the city felt foreign, long-forgotten. No longer was the building she looked for a lone survivor among bomb sites. She had told herself it would seem smaller, drained of its power in the modern city, with the Barbican estate rising just a few moments’ walk away. It would seem unfamiliar and strange to her.
But she was wrong. It was utterly familiar, as though it had waited at the back of her mind all this time, bedded into the layers of her memory, to be raised whole and complete in every detail. She stared at it as one would at the ghost of a loved one or a darkest enemy. The years fell away, and she was young again.
She had peeled off her white gloves in the heat, and her husband held her hand, as London continued around them in its obliviousness. The Club stood in the twilight, a spectre from another time, faced with pale Portland stone and set on a plinth of storm-coloured granite. Above each of the upper-storey windows were decorations darkened by pollution: overflowing cornucopia, a flaming torch crossed with a sheaf of arrows – the trophies of a former age, their messages meaningless to an age of concrete and glass. Its large windows were bright with electric light.
They crossed the road, and went closer still. Livy walked up to it: put her hand to the wall. The building towered above her. Closer, she saw its scars; stared up its flank, pitted and blackened in patches. It bore its imperfections triumphantly, as though they were of no consequence. She saw no broken windows, no fluttering drapes, no signs of major damage. Its bruises sympathetically restored, it stood as firm as a fortress. The front doors were thrown open and from its entrance came the sound of laughter and voices echoing off the marble-clad walls of the Stair Hall.
‘Are you sure you want to go in?’ her husband said.
‘Yes.’
There was no Bill. No Peggy. She looked for them, but saw only unfamiliar faces. So much had changed in the meantime – whole lives been lived, children been born, but the interior was uncannily the same: perfectly restored after the bombing, even the entrance Hall with its panelling. She remembered how she and Peggy had emerged from the fire, gasping, into the London air, astonished to be alive. There was the same dome, spinning away from her. And Woman and Looking Glass, reinstated to its pre-war position, so that she exclaimed out loud, her breath catching on a sob, and her husband seized a glass of wine from a passing tray and put it gently in her hand.
As she drank it, she looked around. No Jonathan. And she hadn’t thought of him for years; could barely remember his face. They had gone to Redlands, once. The house thrown open to visitors, a museum of a lost world. No sign of the family. The land rolled on for ever. She hadn’t known how responsible Jonathan must have felt for it all, how vast and rich it was, how ungovernable. She and her husband and children had picnicked on the front lawn.
Her eyes focused on the painting as she took her last mouthful of wine, and her husband took the glass to find a refill. How we lived through that time, I do not know. You and I, Charlotte, how we survived. How strange: it was just a painting now. Familiar, yes, but not freighted with that intensity which she remembered.
‘Very fine painting. I’ve always liked it.’ She turned to see a man she did not recognize. He introduced himself as the current director of the Club, and Livy put her white gloves on again, to shake his hand. He wore a ceremonial jewelled badge tied on a ribbon round his neck.
‘That’s a beautiful thing,’ she said, the drink giving her courage. ‘I don’t remember seeing it before. I was here in the 1940s.’
‘It was put away with the treasures during the war, so I’m told,’ the man said. ‘It’s Victorian, and was designed by some past director. It has a crystal behind the coat of arms. I have no idea why. He was rather a strange chap.’ He pulled a face. ‘Eccentric. It makes it so heavy.’ Laughing, he flipped it over, and back again. And she stared at it, this irregular, pear-shaped crystal.
‘Can I see it again?’ she said. And the second glance confirmed it as much as a glance ever could. ‘You should have it valued,’ she said. ‘As a piece of jewellery. It looks like a diamond to me.’ She was amazed at how calm she felt, saying the words.
‘I don’t think so.’ His face was still jovial, but doubtful.
They talked over other things, until, laughing, the director moved on. And Livy closed her eyes for a moment. It made sense, she supposed, that Ashton should put the diamond into something related to the Club. The place which had been the centre of his life after Charlotte’s departure. The proof lies heavy on my chest. The Kinsburg Diamond. How hard it must be, she thought, to think you are powerful, and yet have the one thing you want always slip through your fingers. But though she pitied him, she could not forgive him leaving the fake stone for his descendants to find, sending the echo of that bitter disappointment and disillusionment down the generations. Had he really wanted his children, or his children’s children, to feel the shock of that fall in the heart, as he had? She thought of Jonathan, of his struggles, and she thought she might weep.
‘Here you are.’ It was her husband, bearing more wine, his face bright and slightly flushed. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘You put so much more feeling into your thanks when I bring you wine.’
She laughed. ‘You should have some too.’
‘Don’t you worry about that, I certainly will.’
‘Odd, isn’t it?’
‘Beyond odd.’
‘And to see the painting.’
‘What does it feel like, being here?’ She saw the concern in his face, the slightest hint of insecurity. ‘Any ghosts?’
‘No.’ She turned away from the painting, towards the growing party, voices rising cheerfully in the echoing marble hall. A grand building: a place built for dining, and celebration; a place built to outlast generations. ‘No ghosts at all.’
And at those words of reassurance Christian Taylor smiled, and kissed her on the forehead.