The Jewel Box Page 15

  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.”

  Piccadilly Herald

  The West-Ender

  May 16, 1927

  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

  Eight

  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.

  The humming had lasted three or four minutes now. The audience as a whole was still and rapt, but Grace shifted on her seat and tried to stifle a yawn. When her stomach gurgled, O’Connell turned and raised an eyebrow.

  “I can’t help it,” Grace whispered. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “What happened to lunch? Are you on some crazy diet that doesn’t allow you to eat during daylight hours?”

  “I had a deadline. But you wouldn’t understand the prosaic necessities of my working life, would you? The meat and vegetables of it all.” Heads were turning. They were like naughty children at the back of a classroom with their whispers and their giggles. “Where shall we go when this pantomime is over?”

  “I think we’d better go someplace that’ll give me a better understanding of the meat and vegetables of your working life. Since I obviously want to understand you completely and utterly, my darling.” This was delivered with a squeeze of the hand.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Shh.” O’Connell placed a finger on his lips. “You’re disturbing the ‘ether.’”

  “Well, we certainly don’t want that.” Grace peered again at the humming woman, and then at the crowd around her. “There’ll need to be a lot of spirits in that ether if everyone here’s to get their money’s worth!”

  The humming grew louder and climbed a note or two up the octave. The woman sitting to Grace’s right clutched at the jet beads around her neck with gnarled hands.

  “Imagine how many shillings have changed hands here tonight,” whispered Grace. “What sort of person makes a living out of other people’s deaths?”

  “An undertaker? A florist, a stonemason, a grave digger, a doctor, a lawyer…I imagine Mrs. McKellar would say she has a God-given gift and a vocation to help the needy, but that she also has costs to cover and mouths to feed.”

  “Yes, I expect she would.”

  “Quiet at the back!” The woman’s green eyes were open and directing a ferocious glare at Grace. “Keep your trap shut or sling your hook.”

  “Very spiritual,” Grace muttered as Mrs McKellar’s eyes slid closed again and the humming was resumed. From all around the room, people were staring at Grace. They should by rights have been a bunch of elderly people, this audience. This ought not to have been an appealing evening excursion for men and women in their thirties and twenties; for boys and girls barely over the age of consent.

  Everyone in this room has been floored by grief, thought Grace. None of them is free of it yet.

  “Ah, Edwin, there you are. And about time, too.” Mrs. McKellar rose to her feet, the yellow gown hanging in voluminous folds as she swayed gently, one hand clutched to her forehead. She had already explained to the audience that her “spirit guide” was a boy by the name of Edwin who’d died in the influenza epidemic after the war. It was Edwin who would communicate with the spirits on her behalf. “Who is he, Edwin? Tell us his name.” She paused then, cupped her hand to her ear. “Did you say Archie?” Her eyes were open again now. “Or Alfie?” At this last name there was a sharp intake of breath from a woman near the front. “Alfie,” Mrs McKellar confirmed. “What do you have to say, Alfie? Something about the children?”

  Grace could just about see the woman who’d gasped, between heads. She had to be forty or so. At the word “children,” her shoulders slumped. Grace wondered what her facial expression showed.

  “Alfie is very sorry,” said Mrs. McKellar to the woman, “that he didn’t give you any children”—and then, after a searching pause during which the woman tilted her head slightly to one side—“who survived.”

  There was a choking sound. The woman had started to cry.

  “Anything you’d like to say to him, dear?”

  “Only that I’ll always love him.” The woman’s voice was cracking.

  “He says he loves you, too. He’s watching over you from the other side.”

  “This is obscene,” Grace whispered.

  “He says you should look after the box,” adde
d Mrs. McKellar.

  “The box?” The woman appeared to sit up straighter at this. Her voice became sharp. “Where is the box?”

  But Mrs. McKellar was done with Alfie. There was a little girl trying to get through now. A girl in a white nightie with a rag doll. This physical detail alerted two sets of grieving parents among the audience, who delivered up their dead daughters’ names. A moment later Mrs. McKellar was able to confirm the child was Edith, not Mary, and offered up the usual vague reassurances of eternal love from the other side.

  “There’s not even any skill in this,” whispered Grace. “It might as well be me up there. She’s a vulture, and they’re too desperate to see it.”

  “What about Alfie’s box?” said O’Connell. “Where did she get that from?”

  “Oh, everyone keeps something valuable in a box. It was a racing certainty.”

  “There’s a soldier here,” announced Mrs. McKellar. And Grace saw that awful hope on the faces of almost everyone around her. “An officer. Can’t quite spot the rank or regiment. He’s tall, with reddish hair.”

  O’Connell elbowed her in the ribs. “Listen up, Gracie. This could be your moment.” His face wore that devilish gleam. Was this why they were here? So he could watch her reaction when this charlatan started spouting about dead soldiers? Not for the first time, she felt like a specimen being taken up between his thumb and forefinger and placed under a microscope.

  “What’s your name, sonny?” said the woman.

  A deep breath and another glance at O’Connell. He was just joking with her, that was all. He’d touched a sore point, probably without even knowing he’d done it. They’d spotted the poster together, a couple of days ago, and had come here for a giggle. They hadn’t guessed that it would be like this. They hadn’t thought it through properly.

  “What was that, Edwin?” Mrs. McKellar had her hand on her forehead, and was making as though she was struggling to hear something. “A ‘W,’ did you say?”