The Jewel Box (19 page)

He talked about a time in October of 1915, the La Bassée offensive in the Loos Battle, when his company was waiting in a trench for the order to go over. They’d thought they’d be waiting a few hours, but almost a week later they were still there in the rain and the mud, drinking copious amounts of whisky to keep their heads together, and failing to sleep when their turn came about. All around them were the corpses of their fellow men, growing more and more awful each day, their stomachs swelling and bloating and collapsing, their skin changing color. They watched rats feeding on the bodies of the dead. The stench, he said, was indescribable.

He talked about a soldier from the East Surrey regiment dying in No-Man’s-Land.

“We could hear him—his agony—it went on and on and it was terrible to listen to but we couldn’t go to help him. The shelling was too heavy. He kept apologizing for the racket he was making. When the stretcher-bearers finally found him, dead, he’d stuffed his entire fist into his mouth—so as to spare us, you see. And so as to be sure none of us would try some foolhardy rescue attempt.

“We never did go over, not that time. Word came eventually that the show had ended and we were to go back.”

Grace looked up at him, expecting to see tears, but his face was all white anger.

“Do you know something? Hardest of all were my brief spells at home. All that bogus ‘home service’ that was all about, while life went on as normal. Women like your mother strutting about in their uniforms, absurd poems about the crimson cornfields and the spilled blood of the brave. We had
no idea
why we were there, Grace. Frankly we had more hatred for our damned colonel than we had for the Germans. You know, he complained, immediately after La Bassée, about the sloppy informality of officers who allowed soldiers to address them by their first names. I don’t think any of us who were there could go on believing in God or England or anything much. But I tell you, Grace, it was easier being out there than it was being here, where everyone was so bloody ridiculous about it all. And now, too, with all those empty patriots with their grand words who saw not a moment of the war as it really was, having simply forgotten all about it, resuming the peacetime complacency and ignorance that we went out there to fight for.”

Without any discussion, Grace and George stopped their walks. She felt they both knew how close they’d come to crossing that invisible line of theirs. Ironically, his decision to talk to her about his war experiences had prevented anything happening between them. How could the desire for an illicit kiss survive such talk? And yet their shared understanding had deepened as a result of his decision to speak to her. On the walk home he’d held so tightly to her hand that she thought he’d break her fingers.

“I’m going to crack on with my move,” she told Nancy. “George is so much more himself again. You don’t need me around anymore.”

“You’re right about George being better,” said Nancy. “Life is really quite pleasant at home now, isn’t it? In which case, why leave?”

A few days later she was up in her room, packing, the case open on her bed. Everyone was out and the house was quiet. She’d told Nancy she couldn’t be dissuaded. It was time for her to get out from under their feet. They needed some privacy, and frankly, so did she.

When the front door banged and heavy feet came running up the stairs, she knew it had to be George. A moment later he came crashing in without knocking. He was red in the face and disheveled.

“You can’t go.”

“Why not? Because Nancy said so? Has she been crying on your shoulder in some café or other? Asking you to come straight here and try talking me out of it?”

“This has nothing to do with Nancy.” He was still breathless from all the running. Just how far had he run?

She sighed. “You know why I have to go.”

He appeared to be struggling for the right retort. She was reminded, as she looked into his eyes—all pent-up passion and words unspoken—of what she’d said to him on the Heath years before.
Say it. Make it real.
But then the struggle was over and he was sweeping aside the packing case and her carefully folded clothing so that it all crashed and tumbled down onto the floor. And then he was pushing her down on the bed and she was pulling open his clothes, and finally—finally—they were giving in to the thing that had gripped them both for such a long time, and the relief was immense.

Grace had pondered, in those days when she and George had clutched each other on the Heath, the possibility that if they gave in they could get past it—whatever “it” was. Predictably, this proved not to be the case.

They’d scraped themselves off the bed and dressed in the half-light, awkwardly and shamefacedly. He’d slipped away downstairs without either of them speaking a word about what had happened between them. But once she was alone again, the first thing she did was to push her case back under the bed and put her clothes back in the wardrobe.

From that day on, whenever Grace and George found themselves alone in the house, they were at each other. It was a compulsion. Both quietly encouraged special little outings for Nancy and Mother. Both would absent themselves from gatherings and events if they knew the other was at home on their own. Increasingly, they took risks—creeping about the house at night, sometimes even stealing into the garden shed together. Occasionally, they’d meet at a small hotel near Russell Square, signing the register as Mr. and Mrs. Sharp.

Grace wondered, sometimes, how she’d feel about George if it wasn’t for all the subterfuge. Was she in love with the man for himself or simply because he was Forbidden Fruit? She hoped that it was the latter because that meant it would fizzle out over time. The novelty would wear off and they’d withdraw from each other. This, really, was the best way it could end. The least painful way. And it had to end one way or another—there was too much at stake for it to be otherwise.

But it was their sense of guilt, rather than their desire for each other, that wore itself out. The lying became second nature. They stopped worrying that they’d be found out. They even began to believe it was in everyone’s best interests that their affair continued. They were all happier this way, after all, including Nancy.

This was the reasoning that gradually shaped itself in
Grace’s mind during the two years and ten months of her affair with George. This was the way she saw the situation up until the eve of Nancy’s twenty-fourth birthday, when she dispatched her sister and mother to the pictures and went home to sleep with her brother in-law as she’d done so many times before.

But something about October 17, 1922, was different. Grace sensed it, knew it when she heard keys rattling in the front door a good hour or so early, and before she heard her mother’s voice saying, “That’s it, dear. You go and lie down on the couch and I’ll get you a nice cup of camomile tea.”

George was deeply asleep, his head on her chest. She had to prod him in the shoulder three or four times before he stirred and coughed and half sat up.

“Shh.” She held a finger to his lips. “They’re back. Nancy’s ill or something. I’ll dress and go down. Wait a few minutes before you follow on.”

As she slipped out of the room and down the stairs, there was a foreboding that sat, heavy and toadlike, in Grace’s stomach. It wasn’t so much about the possibility of having been caught, they’d had near-misses before—nearer than this—and somehow they’d always gotten away with it. If a person is trusting and unsuspicious, they simply don’t see what’s right in front of them. They don’t see it because they’re not looking for it. No, this was about something else.

“Nancy, darling!” Grace entered the lounge to find Nancy on the sofa looking pale, and Mother holding a hand to her forehead to feel her temperature. “What on earth has happened?”

“She fainted at the cinema,” said Catherine. “Came over all weak and wan. Five minutes later she was claiming to be tickety-boo, but I thought it best we came straight home. Right. I’ll go and make that camomile tea.”

“Must you?” pleaded the patient.

Grace peered at her sister as their mother left the room. Yes, she was pale. But she looked…Well, she looked extremely happy. “Nancy, what’s going on? Are you ill or not?”

“Not.” And now Nancy smiled her biggest ever smile. “It’s what I wanted to tell you earlier, Gracie, but I couldn’t get a word in edgeways and then the moment sort of passed, and anyway I thought I really ought to tell George first.”

“Oh, my darling!” Grace rushed forward, arms open, and in that moment her world shifted utterly. Holding Nancy tight, she glanced up and saw George standing hesitant in the doorway, his face in shadow.

“Well, look who’s here,” she said, as warmly as she could. “Nancy has something important to tell you.” And then, in a slightly quieter voice, “I think I’d better leave you two alone.”

I’ve never been much of a one for cards. I don’t have the patience for bridge, canasta confuses me and rummy reminds me of those wet Sunday afternoons in childhood which made me want to scream about the unbearable dreariness of life and rip my hair out at the roots (this was in my pre-bob era, when my hair was long and such a gesture would have been highly dramatic). So you can imagine how thrilled I was at the prospect of the Silvestra Club’s new innovation, Wednesday Whist. Frankly, even the thought of a whole evening of card play accompanied by the Silvestra’s sluggish jazz was almost enough to send me to sleep. But reader, how wrong I was!

First, I discovered that since my last sojourn, Dan Craven’s orchestra has gone decidedly uptempo. Well done, Mr. Craven, for heeding my advice! Then came the revelation that whist is simple, quick and easy (rather like one or two acquaintances of
mine, but we’ll say no more about that). I swiftly mastered the rules and discovered—oh shock—that I was actually enjoying the game. I attempted an attitude of great seriousness—it seemed the thing to do, what with the tables being specially dressed for the night in green baize and topped with smart little lamps, and the packs of cards all being so new and pristine. But it was hard to keep a straight face when it turned out my gentleman partner was the most outrageous cheat! Really, this should have come as no surprise to me. It stands to reason that any bachelor as handsome and clever as he simply has to be a filthy rotten scoundrel or he’d have been snapped up and married off years ago. In fact, I suggest a trip to Wednesday Whist as an effective way of vetting the character of your new beau. My devilish friend’s audacity was staggering, though he remained insistent that it was all down to skill and that no foul play was involved.

But the really fun feature of Wednesday Whist is what happens in between games. After each hand, and before you and your partner move on to the next table, the winning girl chooses to dance either with her own partner or with the opposition fellow. It was so delightful, deliberating between my chap and the other (we won quite a bit, due to the Devil’s aforementioned dubious tactics), while the losing lady sat fuming and waiting for her fate to be decided. The resulting Charleston is all the more fun for the mild cruelty involved in these shenanigans, and what’s more, there’s no tiresome cutting-in.

Also, girls, you should get along to Selfridges to survey the new season’s swimwear. It’s what they’re all wearing in Deauville and down on the Riviera, so I’m reliably told. Plenty of bold horizontal stripes, so probably not for the larger lady. And don’t forget your bathing cap. Your bob needs thorough protection from all that sand and salt.

Finally, we should all be thinking, later this week, of Charles A. Lindbergh, a daring
American mail pilot (yes, they fly their post from place to place over there!) who, weather permitting, is to embark on what could be the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, in his airplane,
The Spirit of St. Louis
. Cross your fingers for this fine hero as he takes off from Long Island on the twentieth. Cross your toes, too. Cross everything you have. They’ll throw the party of the century for him when he lands in Paris.

I bet he doesn’t cheat at cards either.

Diamond Sharp

Marylebone
Library was packed. People were seated on folding chairs arranged in rows, but the standing space at the back was crammed, too. The room was usually cavernous and cold, but tonight it was sweltering. The heat came primarily from bodies. Heavy suits and hats had been donned on this warm May evening by people who wanted to look smart, and the effect was to swaddle and insulate the entire room. Much of the formal clothing was black, so the audience had a somewhat funereal persona. The library’s habitual dusty aroma was intensified by a strong scent of mothballs and the backs of wardrobes.

The only noises in the crowd were the occasional cough or sniff, the rasp and drag of breath, and a muted something that might have been the sounds of people fanning themselves with hands and pieces of paper, or could even have been the
sound of generalized anticipation and anxiety. But now a low hum was added to the subtle soundscape—a hum that vibrated unpleasantly in the ears, the teeth, the stomach. A hum that seemed to Grace to be an explicit escalation of the ever-present background hum that lies behind life; the hum that you sometimes hear when you sit alone in an empty house, or when you lie down in bed at night trying to sleep. Perhaps the sound of the blood in your head.

This hum—the vibrating hum running through the crowded library—was being emitted by the seated woman at the front of the room who was the focus of this gathering, and who faced the audience with eyes closed and palms held out, slightly cupped. She’d been in this pose for over five minutes already when she began her humming.

Grace, who was sitting beside O’Connell in the ninth row (near the back of the room), was trying to guess Mrs. McKellar’s age. Her face, devoid of makeup, was pallid, with a suggestion of numerous years, yet there were few lines around the closed eyes and mouth and on the brow. She was dressed in a shapeless yellow robe, and her colorless hair was mostly concealed by a knotted yellow headscarf. She could be a sixty-year-old who’d somehow escaped the effects of age using her own psychic powers, a forty-year-old who had no idea how to dress and present herself, or anything in between. Whatever her age, she was strange, slightly frightening and almost certainly on the make.