Being Clara, she returns bearing not just champagne but dessert, pushed through the doorway on a mirrored serving trolley by a waiter who’s paid to ignore the distinctive round-bellied bottles dangling from each of Clara’s slender hands. “I couldn’t decide,” she says, setting down each one, “so I had him bring them all.”
I can’t tell her that I hate champagne, the taste and the smell and the zing of bubbles against my nose, which brings such painful memories rushing against my skull, I sometimes hold my breath on those rare occasions when champagne must be endured. Clara’s so triumphant, so full of joy at her successful mission—God only knows where she found these bottles, and what she had to do to obtain them for us—I just keep quiet. Wince at the shhh-pop of the first cork. Take my glass and sip as small as I can: a toothful of bubbling wine.
Clara drains half a pint or so and reaches for the strawberries. “That’s better. Now where were we?”
“We weren’t anywhere.”
“Do have one of these chocolates. The pastry chef makes them himself. One by one. I watched him once. Mesmerizing.”
I took a chocolate.
“And for heaven’s sake, drink your fizz. You’ve no idea what promises I made to obtain it. No, no. Not another miserable little sip. Properly. Like this.” She tipped back her head and finished off the glass and poured herself another.
“I can see you’re an expert.”
“You don’t need to be an expert to enjoy champagne.” She made a little leap and plopped herself on one of the beds. “How I do adore this hotel! We stayed here when we first came to Miami Beach, Samuel and I. That was March, after we’d been to identify poor Simon’s body. I couldn’t stand to stay in that dreary little town, so we came here to recover. Just like you! That’s why I thought of this place, when you said Miami.”
I lower myself to the edge of the other bed. “That wasn’t necessary.”
“Yes, it was. I could see it in your face, when we saw the elephant. You were enchanted—as enchanted as darling Evelyn—only you wouldn’t admit it. You daren’t admit your enchantment anymore. Because of Simon, I suppose.” She drinks her champagne and stares at the ceiling. “I say, I rather fancy a fag. You don’t mind, do you?”
I tell her I don’t mind at all, and she leaps up again and rummages through her handbag until her hand emerges in possession of a slim gold case. She knocks out a cigarette and lights it in a series of quick, graceful movements that mesmerize me. When she’s finished, and the cigarette burns from her fingers, she lifts the champagne bottle and wanders dreamily across the room to where I sit on the edge of my bed. “Refill, darling. Now be a good girl and drink it.”
For some impossible reason, I obey her and drink deep, and this time it isn’t so bad. As if those first few sips have numbed the nerves that connect sensation to memory. Anyway, everything’s different now, isn’t it? This is Florida, sun-warmed and hibiscus-scented. The icy champagne just fits, somehow.
Clara watches my face. “That’s better, isn’t it? There’s nothing a bottle of vintage fizz can’t cure, I always say. And you need it more than anyone. You’re in desperate need of a good roaring drunk, Virginia Fitzwilliam.”
“Am I?”
“Oh, yes. Poor thing. I’ll bet you’ve been blaming yourself for the past three years, telling yourself you can’t have any fun, that you don’t deserve any fun because you made such a dreadful, dreadful mistake trusting Simon.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. I thought so in the beginning, after I realized what he really was. But then Evelyn came.”
“Oh, Evelyn. Of course. No, I don’t suppose you can regret her.”
“Never.”
“And you can’t really hate Simon, can you, when he gave you such a daughter. Oh, my darling! What a terrible burden you’ve been carrying, between Simon and your father. All these dreadful men pressing around you.” She wandered back to her own bed and made that same little skipping motion, landing on her back, one white-stockinged leg dangling from the side. “You mustn’t blame yourself, you know. It’s not your fault that men are such beastly bounders.”
“I don’t blame myself.”
“Oh, lies! Yes, you do. And you’re punishing yourself for it. You’re doing penance for allowing yourself to be taken in. Not once, but twice! First your father, and then Simon. Or is it the other way around?”
In a single awkward, unpracticed movement, I lift the glass to my lips and drink all the champagne, all of it, jiggling the stem so that the last drop tracks along the bowl and into my mouth.
Clara turns on her side and examines me. “Ah! I’ve got it right, haven’t I?”
“Not at all.”
“Yes, I have. I’m a terribly keen observer of other people, you understand. We younger siblings always are. I knew right away, as soon as I saw you. My poor Virginia. My poor brave darling.”
I rise from the bed, and this time I’m the one who takes the bottle in my hand. I’m the one who pours the champagne into my glass, almost to the rim. “I’m not brave at all, though. If anything, I’ve been weak. Weak and blind.”
“Because you wanted to be loved. You had no mother, no other family. My God! That man was your father. And Simon was your lover. Of course you wanted to believe in them. I remember the first time I saw you, clinging to Simon like a lovely pale little vine—you’re so tall, and yet you didn’t look tall at all then—and I thought, oh, the poor dear sweet thing. What am I going to tell her? How am I going to warn her?” She reaches forward—I’m standing next to her, because she left the champagne bottle on the small table between our two single beds—and she seizes my empty left hand. “And your father, too. It’s the same thing. You wanted so desperately to believe that he was good, that he wasn’t a murderer. You had no choice but to believe in him. He had all the money, and you had a sister, and then the baby. Where else could you go? You simply had to believe he was innocent. To go on believing. Oh, come here, darling.” She pulls me onto the bed with her and puts her arms around me, and while I’m absolutely not crying a bit—my eyes are dry, my chest still—I find myself helpless to resist her. She has paralyzed me. “You’re safe now, anyway. They can’t lie to you anymore.”
“What a shame. They were both excellent liars.”
“Oh, you don’t need to tell me that! Simon was just—what’s the word? He was congenital. I don’t know about your father, but Simon was simply born that way. A liar. He was an expert, a natural. He knew exactly what to say to you, to make you believe him. He knew exactly what you wanted to hear.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Of course, it made him terribly charming. All the local girls used to go mad for him, whenever he came down from school at the end of term. You can only imagine what a clever seducer he was. He was no more than fifteen, I think, when he got started. Yes, fifteen at the oldest. I remember because I happened upon him with a girl one afternoon, the summer I turned ten. There was a pretty little secret garden on the grounds, you see, just perfect for that sort of thing, all walled and sunken and loads of benches and sweet-smelling roses. I used to play there all the time. I thought it was a fairy garden. Don’t laugh! Oh, the stories I used to make up, the darling little fairies of my youth. Anyway, that’s where I saw them together, although I was so young at the time, I had only the vaguest idea what was going on. Just that it seemed rather beastly, like a pair of naked white rabbits.”
We’re lying on our sides, spoon-fashion, because the bed is so narrow. Clara’s arms are secure around my chest, her breath sweet in my hair. I’ve drunk the champagne too quickly. The opposite wall floats before me. A pair of watercolor landscapes, framed in white, bob and merge along the sea-green wallpaper. I picture a ten-year-old Clara wandering across a wet Cornwall lawn. Turning the corner of a brick wall and finding Simon stretched on a bench or a blanket, atop some faceless, budding, writhing girl. In my imagination, she has blond hair and smells of peaches.
“How awful for you,” I whisper. “And
for her. Poor girl.”
“She was lovely. An utter innocent, of course, just like you. I think he preferred them that way: virgins, or else someone’s naïve young wife. The purer the better. And she wasn’t a village girl, either, this one. She was a proper middle-class sort of girl, an attorney’s daughter, the kind of girl who’s supposed to preserve her virginity at all costs until marriage. Particularly in those days, you know, before the war. The poor darling! I don’t know how he convinced her. The usual way, I suppose. He didn’t give a damn for your feelings; that was his strength. You can do anything if you don’t care how other people feel.”
“I don’t understand that. How he could seem so sympathetic, if he didn’t really care.”
“Because he knew what you were feeling. Don’t you see? He knew, but he didn’t care. He was a tremendous actor. He acted his way through life, manipulating us all like puppets. Everyone else was taken in by him, but I knew. I knew how rotten he was inside. I could just smell it, the rottenness. I’ve always sensed things like that, as if I could just sort of see someone’s spirit, like the color in a rainbow.”
“A color?”
“Yes! Everybody has a color. Oh, not visible, I mean, not exactly. I can’t explain it. Like a sort of halo, I suppose, or rather the impression of a halo. The color I think of, the color that floods me when I see you. I feel myself rather purple, for example, veering between a kind of lurid violet and a lavender, depending on my surroundings.”
I make an awkward laugh. “Really? And what color am I?”
“Oh, darling! You’re blue. Dear, true, pure, melancholy blue! And I adore you for it. My sweet new sister.”
I want to know what kind of color she saw in Simon, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to ask. I gaze at the wall instead, breathing quietly, thinking Blue. A dark blue or a light blue? Or, as with Clara, does my particular shade depend on my surroundings?
She speaks up suddenly. “That’s why he made such a good surgeon, you know. Simon. He wasn’t troubled by what he saw. He could operate on you as if you were an automobile engine. Quite without mercy, but of course it worked. I suppose you might say that human civilization needs people like that—people to do our dirty work, to do all the horrible necessary things we can’t bring ourselves to do. It’s just you don’t want to fall in love with them.”
I sit up. The pins in my hair have loosened, and a few locks drop free. I brace my hands on the edge of the mattress, concentrating my attention on the wall, until the merged watercolors separate once more into two distinct forms. Then I reach for the champagne glass on the nightstand.
Behind me, Clara lifts herself to a sitting position and slips her arms around my waist. Her head rests gently on my back. She’s forgotten about her cigarette. I watch the dying wisps of smoke drift from the white ceramic ashtray next to the champagne bottle. It’s shaped like a shell—the ashtray, of course, not the champagne bottle—and the delicate flutes make a perfect hollow for the cigarette’s round shape. How clever.
I lift the cigarette, rimmed in smudges of Clara’s lipstick, and stub it out. “Still. I can’t regret it.”
“Of course not. You have Evelyn.”
“She is worth everything to me. She’s worth anything.”
Clara reaches past me for the cigarette case. “And your sister? What was her name?”
“Sophie. Her name is Sophie.”
“She’s all right, too?”
“Yes. She’s engaged to be married. A nice, well-bred fellow. Harmless and simple, from a stately old family. He hasn’t got much money, but then he doesn’t need to, does he? I think they’ll be happy together.”
Clara lights the cigarette and leans back against the pillow, watching my profile. “And you? What about you, dearest?”
“What about me?”
“Have you thought of marrying again?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You might as well make a fresh start, mightn’t you? Simon’s dead. The trial’s over, and your father’s got what he deserved. Your sister’s got someone to watch over her. You have your daughter and all your lovely, lovely money. Why not find yourself a handsome, trustworthy lad to share it all with?”
“Because I can’t!”
She leans forward. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of all men now? I assure you, you’ve only been frightfully unlucky. Most of them are quite decent. Anyway, you’d better marry quickly, or you’ll attract all the rotten ones. The ones after your dosh.”
“I’m not afraid of that. I don’t have any intention of forming any—any—”
“Attachments?”
“Is that what you call them?”
“My poor love. Look at you, all frightened and trembling. And you are so blue, you know. You’re not the sort that can take up with one chap and another, flitting about like a bee sipping nectar, and yet you need love. You need love desperately.” She snatches a quick bite from her cigarette. “No. We’ve got to find you a husband. What about Samuel?”
I spring to my feet. “Samuel?”
“He’s handsome enough, isn’t he? And he’s a dear, loyal boy who won’t run about on you. You’re already terribly fond of him.”
“I hardly know him.”
She shakes the cigarette at me. “Now, don’t be coy. I know all about your embrace yesterday.”
“It wasn’t an embrace. Not that kind of embrace.”
“Perhaps on your side it wasn’t. But Samuel! He told me, you know. In his gruff little way. In fact, I suspect you quite overcame him. I shouldn’t wonder if he’s been in love with you all this time. Just like him, to form a passion for an impossible object. It’s illegal, you know, back home. To marry your brother’s widow.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. The Church thinks it’s a kind of incest, apparently. Ghastly archaic old men. Anyway, it all makes tremendous sense. He’s just enough like Simon to attract you, but not enough to put you in danger for your life. In fact, the opposite. Samuel will protect you from anything. Protect you with his own heart’s blood, I daresay, or whatever manner of nonsense you like. He’s a warrior, you know. That’s what they do.”
I walk to the mirror that hangs above the desk. The image appalls me. I suppose I’m not the sort of woman who looks enchanting in dishabille. My hair straggles gracelessly from its pins; my face is wan, protected from sunburn today by the brim of a sensible hat. My bones stick out everywhere. Over my shoulder, Clara’s dark head bobs and wavers. “I am not going to marry Samuel,” I tell the reflection in the mirror, in slow, forceful words. “I’m not going to marry anyone again.”
“Really?”
I turn to face her. “Really.”
She reaches out to crush the cigarette into the crustacean ashtray. “I have agitated you terribly.”
“I’m not agitated. I’m simply not going to marry again. I can’t. I will take a thousand lovers before I marry again. But not that. Not marriage.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid they all are only in it for the dosh? Because Samuel—”
“Actually, there isn’t any dosh. Not much, anyway.”
“I mean when your father’s dead, of course—”
“No. After he was arrested, he transferred everything, all he had, the patents and the money and the house, to Sophie and me, first thing. But I couldn’t keep my share.”
Clara’s still rolling the end of the cigarette in the ashtray. She stops now, holding the stub against the porcelain, eyebrows high and sweetly arched. “You gave it all away?”
“Not quite all. But I couldn’t take Father’s money, any more than I needed. I’ve put almost all of it, including the patent rights, into trust for Evelyn.”
Clara drops the cigarette at last. Rubs her thumb and forefinger together, as if to brush away the ash. “That’s awfully noble.”
I turn back to the mirror. “Not really. It isn’t as if money has ever given me what I really wanted. You might say it’s the opposite.”
�
��Oh, my darling.”
The bedsprings squeak, the rug rustles. Clara lays her small head against my back and wraps her arms around my waist.
“You poor thing,” she whispers against the thin fabric of my dress.
“I’m not poor. I’m rich. I have Evelyn, I have my sister.”
“What about Simon’s estate? Are you going to give that away, too?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Yes, probably. I guess I’ll likely sell it all and put the money in Evelyn’s trust. Once I’ve found out . . .”
“Found out what?”
“I don’t know. Once I’ve seen everything. Everything Simon left behind.”
“That may take a little time. He left behind a great many things.”
My hollow eyes regard me. A bit accusingly, maybe, as if I’m blaming myself for my current state. My current gloom. I should eat more, I think. I should eat more and drink more and go outside without my hat and generally enjoy myself. Why not? I should learn something about this world that Simon inhabited, until I discover what I’m looking for. Whatever that is. A sign or a clue or an elegant solution to the puzzle of Simon’s death. Until I discover whether or not I’m really free.
A foot or so to the left of the mirror, a window frames the western landscape, catching the glare of the dying sun. If I shade my eyes, I can see the smudge of buildings on the opposite shore of the bay. The striving blocks of Miami, where Simon occasionally made visits, to transact business with his bankers.
I say softly, “I’ve got nothing but time.”
Chapter 6
France, February 1917
During the night before I left for France, I slept in Sophie’s room, in her bed, the way we used to do when she was small. After Mama died.
Slept. I don’t think we actually slept. We talked until our throats hurt, we laughed into our pillows, and Sophie cried a little. Sophie’s the sentimental one; she tears up at everything, Fourth of July parades and baskets of puppies. Maybe I’ve spoiled her; maybe I’ve been too protective. I held her while she wept, and the old flannel of her nightgown scratched my neck, and the honeysuckle smell of her hair filled my head, raising all kinds of memories. My chest ached. She asked me why I had to go, and I didn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her that I was going to explode, I was going to go mad, I was a pot of salted water coming on to boil under the pressure of an eternal cast-iron lid, and someone was going to get scalded.
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