FORTY-NINE

1921

Arlette never saw the baby. It was taken away from her before she had a chance to set eyes on it. She’d been delirious at the time, full of ether and chloroform, crazy as a street lady, no idea what was happening. The only thing she knew was that her baby had come three months early and was already dead.

“What color is it?” she asked the midwife as the baby was carried from the room like waste product.

“Please don’t talk, Mrs. De La Mare,” she was told sternly.

“Is it white?” she screamed. “Is it white?”

“Of course it’s white,” the midwife snapped at her. “What other color could you possibly expect it to be? A tiny white boy. Poor wee soul.”

She strode from the room and Arlette was left alone, her body aching and empty.

A tiny white boy.

Thank God for that.

Thank God for that.

For months she had feared her instincts wrong. A tiny, gritty part of her quietly questioning the evidence. Maybe it was Godfrey’s.

But no. The baby had not been Godfrey’s. It had been Gideon’s. She had not gone through these past four months of wretchedness for nothing.

She put her trembling hands to her belly. It was still full and firm. A cruel illusion. No baby. Just an empty sack. She had known, she had known for days. Where once there had been the soothing, fascinating tumble and kick of a being inside her, suddenly, there had been nothing, just a desolate stillness. When the pain had begun, she’d known. Known that she would be pushing out a baby whom she would never hold in her arms.

A tiny white boy.

Francis Worsley. That was to be his name.

She sat up and felt the room spin in circles around her head. The door opened and a man stood in the doorway, a tall handsome man. Her husband. Her rapist. He was crying.

“There,” she said coldly. “There. It is over. We can end this farce. The marriage will be annulled.”

“Our baby,” he sobbed. Mucus bubbled from his nose.

“I know,” she said. “It was never meant to be. It was your punishment,” she continued, “for what you did to me.”

He stared at her desperately, his fist half-stuffed into his mouth to hold back the tears. “You callous whore,” he sobbed. “You dirty, callous whore.”

She stared at him. “You made a whore out of me, Gideon. All of this is your fault. Every last bit of it.”

“I cannot believe I ever loved you. I had no idea your heart was made of lead.”

She turned and faced the wall, her back to him, her hands tucked beneath her cheek. “Please go, Gideon,” she said. “When the midwife says I am fit to be up, I will pack my things and return to the Millers.”

She heard him in the doorway, the damp, ugly noises of misery, his fist beating the wall twice, and then the sound of his leather soles turning on the floorboards and the door slamming closed behind him.

She breathed in hard, sucking down her own desperate sobs.

Her baby was dead.

But her future was reborn.

• • •

Most of the orchestra was based in London now—the tour suspended temporarily because the manager had been declared bankrupt and his case was going through the courts—picking up checks and handfuls of notes here and there, performing in smaller groups around the Soho clubs.

Arlette had kept up with Godfrey’s comings and goings through Minu, who still frequented the clubs and parties. It had been painful to be reminded that beyond the walls of her strange Chelsea prison, beyond her empty, loveless marriage with Gideon, life was continuing in all its silly, glittering, lighthearted glory. Godfrey was still living in his rooms in South London and playing with the Love Brothers, a regular nightly slot at the Blue Butterfly on Coventry Street.

It was there, exactly four weeks after the stillbirth of her son, that Arlette went to see what could be salvaged from the pitiful remains of their love affair.

• • •

She and Minu sat side by side in a booth, drinking pink gins, gossiping frantically and pretending that the previous six months had been merely a blink of the eye. Minu still did not know the truth about the baby, about its conception. When Arlette had returned that night from the party at the Millers’, she had brushed away Minu’s concerns, told her that she had been violently sick, too much to drink, maybe, or something she’d eaten. She did wonder if Minu had worked it out for herself, as she’d never questioned the fact of Arlette jumping so quickly and unexpectedly from a torrid love affair with Godfrey into marriage and parenthood with Gideon. But if she suspected anything, she said nothing, merely went along with Arlette’s charade of their being two carefree young gals out on the town.

“My new roommate is not a patch on you, Arlette,” she said reassuringly. “She is so deadly dull, you know. She attends the Sunday service at St. George’s and says grace before so much as a sip of water. I can’t think why I ever thought to let her have the room. I was swayed by her looks. So awfully pretty. I thought that a pretty girl would by definition be a jolly girl. I was wrong.”

She laughed, and Arlette laughed and then glanced over Minu’s shoulder at the stage, where the previous band was bowing and smiling at the applauding audience. She breathed in deeply. Soon, she thought, any moment, Godfrey would be there. Her Godfrey. The only man she’d ever loved. Minu glanced at her and squeezed her hand. Arlette smiled back. One day Arlette would tell Minu everything. Not now. Not yet.

A smiling man took to the stage, his hands clasped, his hair slicked back with pomade, a daffodil pinned to his lapel, and said in a faux American accent: “Ladies and gentlemen, sirs, lords, dukes and duchesses, kings and queens, it is my pleasure to introduce to you our very own special guests, three of the most celebrated performers from the world-renowned Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and all the way from the sun-kissed isles of the Caribbean, please put your hands together for Sandy Beach and his infectious Love Brothers.”

Arlette did put her hands together, and she clapped until they rang with pain. The spotlights swung up and the curtains were parted and there he was. Handsome and bright-eyed, his clarinet clutched between his long fingers, in a royal-blue suit and a matching mohair fedora, his foot tapping along in rhythm with the opening bars.

Arlette caught her breath and stared.

She stared and she stared, drinking in every detail of him, knowing he would be unable to see her with all those lights in his eyes, knowing that after tonight she might never see him again.

“He looks well,” Minu whispered loudly in her ear.

“Yes,” agreed Arlette. “He does.”

After the performance, she and Minu made their way backstage, a place Arlette was intimately familiar with. She’d stood in a dozen different backstage areas a hundred times; she knew the smells, the noises, the protocols.

Even before she saw him, she smelled him: vanilla and sandalwood, the scent she’d helped him choose in Liberty almost a year ago. She turned and there he was, jacketless, shirt stuck to his body with sweat, a towel in one hand, a cold beer in the other, a smile from some other just-finished conversation still playing on his lips.

“Oh, my dear sweet goodness,” he drawled, the smile freezing in place.

“Hello,” she said.

He looked behind himself and to the left and right as though the reason for Arlette’s presence might somehow make itself known in physical form. “Well, gosh, hello!”

“You were wonderful tonight,” she continued brightly. “Truly amazing.”

“Why, thank you, Miss De La Mare. Or should I say Mrs.?”

“No, I am Miss. Still.”

“And you came”—he looked again from left to right—“alone?”

She nodded. “Gideon and I are no longer together. I lost the baby. The marriage is to be annulled.”

Godfrey’s eyebrows jumped up towards his hairline. “My goodness, my goodness.” He rubbed his chin and stared at the ground. “Well, well, what an unexpected turn of events. And of course, I hope it goes without saying that I am truly, truly sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, Godfrey. But it was for the best.”

He glanced at her uncertainly, taken aback by her words.

“The marriage was never consummated, Godfrey,” she whispered meaningfully.

He stared at her again in surprise. “But . . . ?”

“It was never consummated. The baby”—she lowered her voice further—“it was Gideon’s fault. He took advantage of me . . .”

She cleared her throat and flushed red. It was the first time she had told anyone and the words burned like hot coals as they left her mouth.

Godfrey blinked and shook his head as though mistaken in what he had heard her say. “You mean he . . . ?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “At my birthday party.”

His face clouded over with anger. “He . . . he . . .” He turned this way and that, trying to find a place for himself. “Jesus Christ, Arlette, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it was all such a horrible, terrible mess, and I wanted everything to be as simple as possible. Because it was the right thing to do.”

“How could that have been the right thing to do? We were in love, Arlette. We were going to be together. If you’d told me, I could have—”

“What, Godfrey? What could you have done? There is nothing you could have done. Hit him? Beaten him to a bloody mess? Then what? I would have had a bleeding husband, and I still would have been pregnant. And you might have ended up in jail.”

“I would not have hit him, Arlette. I have never hit another person in my life. I would have . . .” He ground his hands together as he tried to find inside himself a solution to a problem that had passed. “I would have just wanted to know. So that I could have held you and taken care of you. So that I might not have spent the past six months in a state of terrible indescribable pain, feeling like a stake had been passed through my heart and left there.”

Arlette took his hands in hers and said, “It is done now. It is finished. We can go now and dance. Would you like that? To go dancing?”

He lifted his gaze from the floor. “Yes,” he said. “I would very much like to go dancing. Thank you.”

• • •

They danced until three in the morning. It was the first time Arlette had danced since her birthday party in September. She felt young and light upon her feet, and for moments at a time, it was possible to believe that the past six months had never happened, that her life had continued as it was destined to before Godfrey had gone away to Manchester and left her in the untrustworthy hands of Gideon. But she wanted more from tonight than to dance and to laugh; she had a deep, smoldering need to cover over the past with a new layer, to paste over the foulness of what Gideon had done to her with the goodness of what Godfrey could do for her. She wanted to go to bed with him. Desperately. So when he offered to see her home to the Millers’, she said very firmly, “No. I would like to go home with you.”

He looked at her curiously. “I am not really supposed to have lady friends to stay,” he said in a tone that suggested he might be prepared to risk the wrath of his landlady on this occasion.

“I know,” said Arlette. “And I have no intention of staying, Godfrey. I should merely visit. Very briefly.”

Godfrey smiled at her. “Not too briefly, I hope?”

“Let us not discuss it for another moment. I honestly feel there is nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever.”

Godfrey said, “I could not agree more. Shall we?” He offered her the crook of his elbow, and they walked together from the club and into a carriage headed for the murky unknown depths of a place called New Cross.

• • •

The sun rose at six A.M. and Arlette saw clearly for the first time the dank starkness of Godfrey’s lodgings. They were squeezed, at very close quarters, upon a collapsible bed with a thin mattress. The room was carved in two from a bigger room by a thin wall papered over with a print of damp roses. Godfrey had a sink through which ran a long crack that looked as if it might fall apart at the merest touch. His clothes hung from a coat stand in the middle of the room—“to keep them as far away as possible from the mold on the walls,” he’d explained. A small window hung with dirty lace looked out over a builder’s yard, and cold air blew in through a missing pane. As she awoke she felt a vague horror at the surroundings, uncomfortable after a night on the loose springs of the cheap bed, and cold in spite of the proximity of Godfrey. The room smelled of stale cooking: mushy vegetables and boiled bones. She brought herself closer to Godfrey’s body, the only savory thing in the room, and he tucked his head neatly into the crook of her neck.

The room was ugly and it smelled, but in the years and the decades to come, when she looked back on this watery early-April morning in a New Cross backstreet in 1921, Arlette would be filled with deep nostalgic yearning. In her mind, Godfrey’s charmless room would take on the air of a magical fairy-tale setting, an enchanted room with real roses climbing up the walls and swallows pirouetting outside the window. Unknown to her, this would be the last time she would feel Godfrey’s body against hers, the last time she would feel his breath in the crook of her neck, his fingers curled around hers, and the last time in her whole life that she would experience real happiness.

She wished she’d known it at the time, wished she’d thought less of the smell of boiled bones and more of the feeling of his satin skin. She wished she had not rushed away so soon, had not been so concerned with the prospect of discovery by a red-faced landlady. And she wished she had said more to him, more than the hurried words of someone who thinks they have all the time in the world. She had not known at that precise moment that she was not living in her happy-ever-after, that her happy-ever-after was not going to materialize, that something had gone wrong during the editing process of the screenplay of her life. That while she made her goodbyes, her unnecessary escape to the warmth and comfort of Leticia Miller’s house, other things were shifting around, little tiny imperceptible happenings that, during the course of the day to come, were going to hammer the path of her life completely out of shape.

• • •

A confused and gin-sodden Leticia was crouching in the front garden of her beautiful stucco house in Holland Park, her youngest son in her arms, her daughter by her side holding the cat, watching the house burn slowly but purposefully to the ground. A dozen firefighters were trying their best to dampen the flames, but already the bones and cavities of the house were clear to see; already it was obvious the house was dead.

“It’s all my fault!” Leticia was wailing. “All my fault!”

Lilian merely scowled at her and rubbed the cat’s head.

“What happened?” asked Arlette, running from the hackney carriage.

“A burning cigarette. It fell from my fingers onto my discarded clothes. I believe, also, an upended bottle of something flammable may have played a part.” She said all of this in a high-pitched voice, tremulous and wistful, as though recounting a lovely dream. She smiled and held her boy closer to her.

• • •

“Mother was drunk,” said Lilian. “Out for the count. While her children slept. The maid sounded the alarm. Thank God there was one responsible adult in the house, otherwise who knows what might have become of all of us.”

The maid stood to their left, wrapped in a blanket, drinking something warm from a hip flask. The last of the night darkness had left the sky, and the scene was bathed in the stark light of day.

Lilian said, “I’m going back to Philip’s house.” She looked at Arlette. “Will you come with me?”

Arlette looked from the house to Leticia and then to Lilian. Philip’s house next door looked warm and welcoming. “Yes,” she said, “if you think they won’t mind.”

“Of course they won’t. They’re the very definition of hospitable. Mother, you should come too, let James get warm, get something to eat.”

“No,” said her mother numbly. “No, you take James. I’ll stay here. Until it’s done. I can’t go until it’s done.”

So Arlette, Lilian, James, and the cat headed next door, where Philip’s parents made sure they were given bowls of steaming porridge and strong cups of coffee, and offered them beds for the nights to come.

“That is so, so kind of you, thank you so much. And, of course, Father has been telegraphed. He’ll be home soon, I’m sure. He’ll make arrangements for us all. This will be only for a night or two.”

“As long as it needs,” Philip’s mother said. “As long as it takes.” She looked at Arlette and said, “And you, Miss . . . ?”

“Miss De La Mare.”

“Yes, of course, Miss De La Mare, you are welcome to stay too.”

Arlette smiled blankly. The offer was sincerely voiced, but Arlette felt a void behind it, something empty and nonexistent. She would stay tonight, quite happily, in this warm and welcoming house of strangers, she would stay the night after, and the night after that. But then what? Mr. Miller would return, he would probably move the family into a suite at a smart hotel, or possibly take a short lease on an apartment for them all. Again, Arlette felt sure that she would be welcome, that space would be found for her, but again, there was a darkness behind the fact. Because she was twenty-two years old, she had shared rooms with a girlfriend that she had paid for with her own earned money, she had run a department in a famous London store, she had been married, she had lived in her own home, she had taken a baby to six months’ gestation and delivered it dead, she had annulled a marriage and spent the night with her charismatic lover in a boardinghouse in New Cross, and the days of living off the generosity of her mother’s friends seemed no longer appropriate. She was no longer “spending some time in London,” she was living here, and it was time, she believed, to put down roots, to stop being a transient, a guest. It was time to start her life properly.

“Thank you,” she said fulsomely. “Thank you so much. That would be most kind.”

Already she was making plans for the next phase. Already she was dreaming of the register office wedding, a just-so little blue dress, a small bouquet of gerbera daisies and sandalwood blossom, a raucous party at the Blue Butterfly or the Cygnet, maybe a fancy dress, an open invitation to the whole orchestra and all of her friends. She thought of the little house that she and Godfrey could share, maybe on a neat terrace somewhere in South London; she would not mind, some bits of South London were rather nice, or so she’d been told. She thought of a small cozy kitchen and a cat or two. She thought of friendly neighbors, curious about the unusual couple next door, him black, her white, both so pleasant, both so smart. She thought about parties and tours, she thought even about taking Godfrey to Guernsey, where she would march him into her mother’s house with pride, pretend that her mother’s face wasn’t contorted with not knowing what to say. She thought about babies and she thought about a long cruise to the Caribbean to visit his mother, with a pair of adorable coffee-skinned tots by their side. She saw it all clearer than she’d ever seen anything in her life.

She saw her future.