Another Heartbeat in the House (4 page)

‘A Maltese? Oh, Ian, you are sweet to think of it, but they're
actresses
' dogs.'

She headed out onto the street. It was a clear evening, though cold, but she wanted to walk to clear her head.

A dog. Even thinking about a dog made her feel disloyal to Mac. But Mac had been good for Edie, and the notion of the year ahead stretching day upon day with no Mac in her life was a dismal one. A Maltese! How silly of Ian to think that she should consider getting a toy dog. She wasn't a toy dog person. She wanted a terrier, a feisty, funny little battling dog. Mac had had the sweetest temperament because he had been a stray with a gammy leg, left to die. That was why she had been able to take him to the office with her: he never moved from her side. She couldn't run the risk of replacing him with a dog that might not have the same saintlike character.

She let herself in through the front door and climbed the stairs. As she unlocked the door to her flat, she saw that a note had been pushed underneath. Picking it up, she looked at the handwriting on the folded paper.
To Edie Chadwick, Flat 6, Onslow Gardens, South Kensington, London SW, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Universe
. It had been the way Hilly and she had used to address letters to each other when they were schoolgirls.

Dear Edie
– she read; the words were in turquoise ink –

It's nearly 1937. We haven't spoken all through 1936, and I can't bear the thought of another year going by without speaking to you. I'm sorry about the whole D du Maurier thing, really I am, but I can explain everything when we get together again over tea in Valerie's. Please, please say we will! We'll nab our corner table and hog it for a whole afternoon. Tea and macaroons, and then you can fill me in about what's happening in your life and I can fill you in on what's happening in mine – and Edie, I am so, so very sorry about Mac. I just heard today. He was the best dog, and I know that you must be going through such a horrible time.

Anyway, I hope that wherever you are tonight you're having a splendid time, and I hope hope hope that I'll hear from you tomorrow. We have been so stupid. Let's pretend last year never happened.

With all my love
,

Your Hillyness.

PS: Am off to the Caribbean Club, but thought I'd drop into the Gargoyle on the way to see if you might be there.

Edie smiled her first genuine smile of the year. How serendipitous that they had been having the same thoughts on the same night! How lovely that the horrible year was behind them and they were setting forth into a new era of friendship! Maybe she should take Uncle Jack up on his offer? Maybe she and Hilly could wangle a week or two off work and go back to Ireland on a sentimental journey? She could scarcely remember the place; they seemed to have spent most of their time there out of doors, exploring the woods and swimming in the lake. It would be too cold to swim at this time of the year, but if they left it until Easter …? She would run the idea by Hilly when they had their reunion over tea and cakes in Valerie's.

Edie undressed and washed her face and rubbed in a little Pond's. Then she got into her pyjamas, filled her hot-water bottle and curled up in the dip in the mattress that had been moulded there permanently by Mac's sleeping form. For the first time in a week, she did not cry.

Very early the next morning she was woken by the girl from the ground-floor flat banging on the door to tell her that there was someone on the telephone for her. Edie shrugged into a dressing gown and ran downstairs to take the call. It was from Hilly's sister, to tell her that Hilly had been seriously injured in a car crash, and had been taken to Guy's Hospital.

In Guy's, Edie sat by Hilly's bedside, prattling non-stop. The nurse had said that while she looked impervious to any external goings-on, Hilly could almost certainly hear what was being said, and that it was a good idea to talk trivia.

So Edie told Hilly all about a humourless youth called Toby who had had some poetry published by Heinemann and had been pestering Edie with phone calls ever since to see how sales were going (not very well, but since he was the son of a major shareholder, Edie couldn't be rude to him). She told her about Ian and his ridiculous idea for a novel about the secret service, and how he'd made her a dirty martini from olive brine and snowballs. She told her how miscast Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer were in the new film version of
Romeo and Juliet
, and how beautiful Garbo had looked in
Camille
, and now she was telling her friend all about her plans for their holiday to Ireland.

‘Uncle Jack says we can stay as long as we like. We could take the mailboat. Prospect House'd be just the place for you to recuperate, when the weather gets a bit warmer. I always thought that it was such a ravishingly romantic house – like something out of
Le Grand Meaulnes
. There was a carving – do you remember? – in a secret place inside the shutters in the library. It was just a date, surrounded by a wreath of oak leaves and an ace of … clubs, was it? No – spades! An ace of spades – but we thought it was some mysterious symbol with all kinds of hidden meanings. Remember the night we stole bridge rolls and ham and lemonade and sneaked down to the lake for a midnight feast, and there were owls in the wood, and when you hooted at them they got really confused and thought that you were an interloper owl? We could do that again, except we could bring a bottle of wine instead of the lemonade. And we could cycle off somewhere, maybe find a quaint little pub with fiddle players, and drink Guinness. There are hills, Hilly, for hillwalking! And maybe we could take a boat out on the lake and catch fish for dinner. You caught a trout once, remember? It would be an awfully big adventure.'

As soon as she uttered the words ‘awfully big adventure', Edie wished she could grab them and stuff them back in her mouth, because of course Peter Pan had described death as being an awfully big adventure. What had she said? What had she
said
?

She gabbled through another ten minutes of nonsensical monologue before the nurse came and told her time was up, and as soon as she left the hospital, she cycled home as if pursued by Furies and broke the lock on her bureau and reinstated the torn photograph of Hilly in its silver frame.

But it had been too late.

Hilly died the next day.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
she was due to go to Ireland, Edie had a rendezvous with Ian. She would have been happy to meet in a pub somewhere, but he insisted on taking her to the Grill Room in the Dorchester. She wore the same cocktail frock that she had worn four months ago – a lifetime ago – on New Year's Eve.

‘What on earth made you decide on Ireland?' Ian said, once the waiter had taken their orders. ‘You could have taken yourself off somewhere like Capri or Biarritz, and had fun.'

‘I should hate to go to either of those places. I thought you knew me better than that, Ian! Besides, I want to go to Ireland as a kind of homage to Hilly.'

Ian looked blank.

‘We spent a fortnight there once, when we were kids. It was one of those magical times – you know, when there are no adults to cramp your style. It was the last summer we had fun together before it was time to grow up. The year after, Hilly started taking drama terribly seriously, and I had to learn the oboe.'

‘I didn't know you played the oboe.'

‘I don't.'

‘How long will you spend there?'

‘Mr Byard at Heinemann told me to take as long as I like, but I can't afford to take much more than a fortnight. I'll bring some copy-editing work with me. That means I won't have such a huge backlog when I get back.'

Ian lit up a Morland. ‘Ireland. My great-grandfather came from County Cork.'

‘That's where I'm going.'

‘I spent a summer on the north-west coast once. It rains a lot, and there's nothing much to do. I fell in love with a doe-eyed gel named Deidre and got drunk as a longshoreman on poitín.'

‘I'll be kept pretty busy. Uncle Jack wants me to close his house.'

‘What will that involve?'

‘Packing everything to go to auction and putting the house up for sale.'

‘Is it a big house?'

‘Not particularly.'

‘Georgian?'

‘No. Early Victorian, I think.'

‘Bloody horrible, Victorian architecture.'

‘I liked the house. I remember it as being full of light. Very shabby, but rather lovely.'

‘Well, I hope you get some good weather. I'm off to Deauville at Easter, for golf and gambling. I'll send you a postcard to make you jealous.' Ian blew a plume of smoke and squinted at her through it. ‘Are you on the telephone there?'

‘No.'

‘I shall worry about you, you know, stuck in some Irish bog all by yourself.'

‘Don't be silly, Ian. I shall be perfectly fine. I'm looking forward to it. I need a change of scenery. I'm fed up with London.'

She said the words lightly. To be ‘fed up' was social shorthand for what could better be described as enduring a maelstrom of unspeakable emotions. In Edie's case, these were grief, shock, incredulity and guilt – the worst guilt she had ever felt, the kind of guilt that made her wish that she had been the one who had ended up under the wheels of a car on that hellish New Year's Eve. She had talked about Hilly – of course she had – to friends and colleagues and family; she had spent a long weekend at home in Oxfordshire where she had planned to go through her old diaries and school newsletters – only to find that her mother had thrown them all out in a rare spring-cleaning splurge. Anyway, after four months, she realized that people didn't want to listen any more. It wasn't because they didn't care, it was because they had proffered all the sympathy they could muster, uttered all the words of advice they could dredge up, murmured platitude after well-meaning platitude while Edie cried and cried on shoulders until the time-honoured words: ‘There, there,' and ‘Hush, hush,' had lost their power to console.

‘What
is
your scene these days? Are you still frequenting dives like the Gargoyle?' Ian tapped ash from his cigarette with a manicured fingertip.

‘No.'

‘I'm glad to hear it. You should come along with me to the Embassy Club some night. I can get you in for nothing. I'm having a fling with one of the Bubble girls there.'

‘What's a Bubble girl?'

‘She's an actress. Well, a dancer, really. Her name's Storm. They're terribly boring, actresses, you know. They're always thinking about their careers.'

‘Would you prefer it if they were always thinking about marriage and babies?'

‘Good God, no. Touché.'

Edie took a sip of her posh martini, and decided that she liked Ian's dirty version better.

‘Great name, “Storm Fleming”,' she said. ‘Sounds like the heroine of a romance novel.'

‘Very bodice-ripperish. I've been thinking up names for the heroine of my novel, incidentally. What do you think of “Tatiana Romanova”?'

‘It's dreadful.'

‘Yes, you're right. I'll stick with “Yolanda Pollock”.'

‘You're incorrigible, Ian. Did you know that Margaret Mitchell's original choice of name for Scarlett was Pansy?'

‘Scarlett who?'

‘O'Hara, of course. In
Gone with the Wind
.'

‘
Gone with the Wind
. It's a really terrible title, when you think of it.'

‘Not when it's taken in context.'

‘It invites all kinds of jejune jokes. We'd have had great fun in the dorm with a title like that. Have you found yours yet?'

‘My what?'

‘Your
Gone with the Wind
? You were on a quest for a new bestseller last time we talked books.'

Edie didn't want to talk about her quest for her new bestseller. Since Daphne du Maurier had left Heinemann for Gollancz, since Hilly had died, and since Penguin had taken the publishing world by storm with a new series of pocket-sized titles in paperback, she had felt more and more hopeless. So far this year, no new writing voice had sung to her, no author made her laugh or cry or gasp out loud, not a single manuscript had landed on her slush pile that made her want to sit up all night turning pages. She knew that when Mr Byard, the company director, had suggested to her that she take as much time off as she wanted, it meant that he was worried. Times were tough in the publishing world, and lay-offs commonplace. She knew it was unlikely that the next
Gone with the Wind
was going to come her way, but she had hoped for something rather more gripping than the most recent submission, which was set in a girls' boarding school, and had been written by someone with the unlikely-sounding name of Gropius Greville.

‘Actually, now that I think of it, there is a manuscript that you might be interested in having a look at, Ian.'