Under the Jeweled Sky (8 page)

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“What's to talk about?” said Margie. “Either he wants to be with me or he doesn't.”

“Of course he does.”

“Then why is he taking so long about it? I'm beginning to wonder if it's not just because he feels bad about letting me down.”

“He's just shy. You know how he loves you.”

“I do,” Margie said. “And that's the tragedy of it. He loves me but he doesn't want to sleep with me. We should be lovers by now. He should have got me into bed months ago, or at least tried to.”

“He has more respect for you than that.”

“I don't want respect. I want him to stop dithering and act like a man. And now you're getting married after just five months and here am I, dancing around the mulberry bush, waiting for something I know is never going to happen.” Margie picked up her drink again and nursed it. “It feels so unfair.”

“Unfair.” Sophie laughed to herself. “Somebody else said that to me today.”

Margie looked at Sophie curiously, noticing the sudden note of sadness in her. “You are in love with him, aren't you?”

Sophie felt her insides tighten.

“Yes,” she said.

The word fell from her automatically. Of course she was in love with him. She had no reason not to be. In love. In sensible, adult love. This sort of love she could manage. This sort of love would not tear the flesh from her bones and eat her alive from the inside out. This sort of love would not leave her wishing she were dead, knowing that she had nothing to live for. She would be safe in this love, safe from the abyss that had once threatened to swallow her whole.

Lucien Grainger stubbed out his cigarette and tried not to smile, glancing over at the pianist playing thin, watery tunes from the far corner of the restaurant, an elegant candlelit affair just a stone's throw from the blackened Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Sophie had been like a cat on a hot tin roof all evening, and he could see that the wine had gone to her head. Unsurprising after the enormous martinis they had sharpened their appetites with at seven. Let her take her time, he thought. It was perfectly obvious that she was going to say yes.

Lucien knew very well that women could be strange creatures, contrary in nature, often just for the sake of it, yet she had clearly given the matter a great deal of thought, hence her avoidance tactics over the last week, and this had served to elevate his opinion of her further. He had expected Sophie to jump at his proposal with an immediate yes, but credit to her, and somewhat to his surprise, she had seemed nothing short of shocked. It wasn't quite what he had had in mind. Later that same day, he had mulled it over while swimming lengths in the pool at his club and had arrived at the uncomfortable conclusion that he had seriously miscalculated the manner of his broaching of the subject.

He had assumed, quite wrongly it seemed, that Sophie was beyond the tender age when a girl expected to be swept off her feet with a grand gesture on bended knee. Instead, he had brought the idea to her as one might float a business proposal, confidently setting out his stall, expecting her to melt into his arms. How wrong he had been. At first she had seemed both panicked and crestfallen, as though the bottom had fallen out of her world, and at that very moment he had realized his monumental error. It was no wonder she had been so upset. She had probably dreamed of this day for years, since girlhood, the perfect marriage proposal, and he couldn't have made more of a hash of it had he tried. Poor Sophie, it wasn't her fault that he had come to the idea slightly hard-boiled, nor was it surprising that she had taken off like that. He'd been a bit of an idiot and would have to make it up to her. After all, any man about to take a wife would be well advised to learn her foibles as quickly as possible and to remember that women were just girls in grown-up clothes. A lifetime partnership required a great deal of diplomacy, and a little romance went a long way in keeping a woman happy. He wouldn't make that mistake again, and he hoped that the ring in his pocket would be more than adequate when it came to redeeming himself. It had cost a small fortune, but as the man in Garrard's had said, an engagement ring is just as much a reflection of the gentleman who gives it as of the lady who wears it, and this one would reflect on them both very well indeed.

Lucien leaned comfortably into his chair while the white-coated waiter swept a few loose crumbs from the table. Picking a stray thread of tobacco from his lip, he opened the subject she had so diligently skirted through the soup. “You realize I'm in hell, don't you?” Sophie smiled at him. He pretended to look injured. “I never thought I'd see the day when I'd be left hanging by the woman I want to marry. Why don't you just put me out of my misery and be done with it?”

“It's such a big step.”

“Of course it is, but we're ready for it, aren't we?”

Sophie's head began to throb again. She had thought about it all so much that it had turned into one big, confused mess. Why was she hesitating? She had already made up her mind. If she didn't get married now, she might never have another offer, and she did want to get married, she had decided. She wanted to have a family and to build a life with a good man by her side and have a nice home and, she admitted to herself, a sense of security for her future. What else was there? It wasn't as though she had a profession, or a vocation, or anything at all that she could speak of for that matter. She should marry and have a family before it was too late, or she would probably regret it for the rest of her life, and there was not one single good reason she could think of for not marrying Lucien.

• • •

It was no accident that Sophie had ended up working at the Foreign Office. England was such a small place, so claustrophobic in its outlook. Perhaps she was one of those people who would never feel settled. She never had, not for as long as she could remember, always looking over her shoulder, waiting for something bad to happen.

She had spotted the vacancy advertised in
The
Times
while eating a ham sandwich in the café beside South Kensington tube station after visiting the Natural History Museum. The museum was one of her Sunday destinations, where she could revisit, frozen in glass cases, the birds and animals that had populated the grounds of the grand palace she had once lived in, in a place far from here. The hidden cobras, the mongooses kept for the purpose of keeping their numbers down, the monkeys that gamboled across the rooftops, arms laden with stolen fruit. She would watch as the museum visitors pointed and stared, laughing sometimes, exchanging uneducated opinions about what they were like in real life. After visiting the stuffed tigers and pinned butterflies, she had headed for the café, ordering a sandwich and a cup of stewed tea from the steaming pot, and had sat at a table with only the newspaper for company. And there it was, advertised in the secretarial positions, the posting crested with the emblem of Her Majesty's Foreign Office. It had hit her, just like that. Here lay an open gateway to the whole world. It was a menial position and the salary was low, but she didn't care. Two weeks later, she found herself being interviewed by a no-nonsense matriarch who tested her secretarial skills and asked her outright whether she was on the verge of getting married or anything like that, given her age. Sophie seemed rather mature for the position, and they didn't want to hire somebody who had their mind on other matters. To work for the government was a serious undertaking, the woman had said, and she would be expected to concentrate on her job, with no chattering. This was not a venue for husband-hunting, and anyone thinking otherwise would soon find themselves dismissed. The woman's finger bore no wedding ring, and Sophie had the presence of mind to assure her that she was a confirmed spinster with very little time for the opposite sex. The letter of appointment arrived within a week, and the following Monday morning, Sophie had presented herself at the Foreign Office in Carlton House Terrace.

She had started in the typing pool, churning out endless tedious reports and minutes, and quickly garnered a reputation for her knack of deciphering other people's shorthand and the worst of the men's longhand, which she attributed to the fact that her father was a doctor, saying that his scrawl was unintelligible to anyone other than himself and her. One morning, quite out of the blue, she was told to go to the top boardroom to replace the director's secretary, who was off with a bad dose of the flu. Had she known that she was to be presented at such a senior level, she would have worn something different that day. The weather had been unseasonably warm, the vault of the upper rooms ripening to a sweltering heat, and she was wearing a cotton dress that she had thought she might just get away with, sleeveless, nipped in at the waist, with a full skirt that gratefully received every small breeze beneath its layers. Her usual light wool skirts had stuck to her and prickled at her skin, and she had noticed that some of the other girls had submitted to the humidity in less substantial garments. So long as their skirt fell below the knee and they had something with which to cover up, a light cardigan perhaps, nobody had minded.

The gravitas of the boardroom had made Sophie self-conscious the moment she walked in. A dozen men, simmering beneath their shirtsleeves, had turned their eyes to her as she scurried in with her notepad. In that instant, she had been paralyzed by nerves, realizing that she had no idea where she was supposed to sit before being directed to a chair in the corner, set back from the men, as though to remind her that she was not really there, her ears not her own. As the meeting began, she had recorded their words, their ideas, their idiotic suggestions, leaning into her pad, concentrating hard, determined to prove herself every ounce as skilled as the absent secretary, so that she might be moved up soon and spared the misery of the windowless dungeon where typewriters rattled a constant stream of meaningless transcripts that nobody would ever bother to read. When the meeting came to a close, Sophie realized with horror that the skirts of her dress had ruched up beneath her pad, exposing the beginnings of her stocking top. It was no wonder that that awful man Christopher Soames had turned up at the pool not two hours later, asking her if she had any plans for lunch while perching himself suggestively on the corner of her desk. The way he had looked at her, she had felt as though her dress had disintegrated and fallen to the floor, and she had endured the rest of the short heat wave in a stifling twinset.

Lucien saw that Sophie's thoughts had drifted. He reached across the table and placed his hand over hers.

“How long does it take to know you've met the right woman?”

“But you don't know me at all.” She thought for a moment and corrected herself. “We barely know each other.”

“And isn't that wonderful?” he said. “What two people really know each other when they marry? It takes years, my darling. Years and years before we'll know one another inside out. That's part of what marriage is all about. Didn't you know that?” Sophie nodded a little. He was right, of course, as usual. The waiter arrived with their entrées, a fillet of sole for her, a piece of steak for him. “You see this?” He cut into the beef, juices running red. “I like my steak bloody, very bloody. And you?”

“Not so much,” Sophie said, her smile opening up a little.

“English mustard or French?”

“French.”

“There, you see?” he said. “There's nothing to it.”

Lucien filled his mouth, nodding his satisfaction. Sophie watched him for a little while and wondered what it would be like to sit across a dinner table from him for the rest of her life, to wake up every morning under the same roof, to go to sleep at night in the same bed. She tried to picture him old, with gray hair, wearing striped pajamas, but the image escaped her. All she could see was the man before her, solid and straight-backed, entirely comfortable in the space he occupied. It must be nice to be a man, she thought, a man full of confidence and self-assurance. She would happily bet five pounds that he had never felt vulnerable for a moment in his life. He had probably won all sorts of trophies at school and had been in the first eleven. Men like that don't like to lose. In all probability, he always knew exactly what he was going to do at any given moment. If only she could be him for a while, to know what it was like, to think what he was thinking. Sophie ate a little of her fish, but found that she wasn't particularly hungry.

“I don't want to make a mistake,” she said.

“We won't.”

“But how do you know?”

“How does anybody know?” Lucien said patiently. “All any of us can do is to say yes and hope for the best, and I think we're pretty much a perfect match. Don't you?”

“I'm sorry to have been such a wet blanket last Sunday. It's just that you took me completely by surprise, that's all. I really wasn't expecting it. A part of me thought you were still in love with…” Sophie stopped short, glancing awkwardly away and feeling foolish.

“Oh.” Lucien shifted uncomfortably. “I see.”

“I'm sorry,” Sophie said quickly. “You know how people talk.”

“Catherine and I were a bad habit that went on for far too long. I wasn't in love with her, and she wasn't in love with me either. She's the last woman on earth I would have wanted to marry.” Lucien discarded his fork and lit a cigarette. “I pity the poor devil who ends up with her as his wife.”

“She's very beautiful,” Sophie said.

“Well, good for her,” Lucien replied without looking up. He didn't want to talk about Catherine Isherwood, the fine-looking daughter of a retired ambassador to the United Nations. There was a time when he had seriously considered her as wife material, but she had unnerved him with her unshakable confidence and consummate charm. It wouldn't do for him to find himself outshone by a spouse who clearly had greater experience in the service than he did. Besides, her specialty area was the Arab states, and he was hoping that his trajectory would not take him down that path. He didn't get on with them particularly well, as he had discovered to his cost when he inadvertently caused an uproar with the Emir of Oman by admiring a cigarette box crafted in the shape of a turtle, encrusted with precious and semi-precious stones. The Emir had promptly presented it to him, throwing the embassy into turmoil as they hunted to find a gift of similar grandeur to return to the prince. A cable had to be sent to the Foreign Office to explain the faux pas made by the junior member of the mission and lists had to be scoured to locate a suitable offering from the catalogue of diplomatic baubles. Some of these treasures had been doing the rounds for years, making it a tricky business to see that they never ended up in the same hands twice. Catherine Isherwood had dined out on the story for weeks, Lucien's smile wearing ever thinner as she entertained her entourage at his expense, as she was prone to do.

“I don't want to rush into a decision that one of us might regret,” Sophie said.

“Who's rushing? Aren't you in love with me? Not even a little bit?”

Sophie blushed under his huge smile. How could she have doubted it? There was something about him that was irresistible, something beyond his broad-shouldered good looks and charming manner. He had a knack of making you feel like you were the only person in the world that mattered, a way of looking at you just so, his attentiveness noticing every little thing. She couldn't have asked for more, yet she couldn't help but wonder why he had chosen her, particularly when he and Catherine had been such an item, a woman from whom she couldn't have been more different.