I glanced at Thorpe, who was shaking hands with the duke, chortling amicably. The sunlight turned both heads the same shade of golden-white. “I never realized you were a skier.”
“I’m not,” she said.
I turned back in amazement, but before I could ask a thing, she was hustling me toward the motorcycle.
“Go on, now. I’ll have your things sent back by car. Your bicycle and dress.”
Thorpe helped me into the sidecar, made sure my dress was tucked inside. I still carried my bouquet of pink hibiscus. The smell reminded me of my bungalow, of Cable Beach, of the bark of the sea grape trees on the edge of the patio. I looked at Thorpe’s face, which had lost its smile, and now looked tense with shock. I touched my cheek and realized I felt the same. As I said, thank God there was no Cecil Beaton in Nassau to pop from the bushes and immortalize that.
“Which home, though?” I said. “Mine or yours?”
“Yours. Mine smells like something’s got in and died there.”
Thorpe went around the side of the motorcycle, climbed aboard, started the engine. From the portico, the duke and duchess, Miss Drewes, Marshall the butler all stood and waved.
“Off we go,” said Thorpe, and I tossed my bouquet just as the motorcycle jumped from the curb. I thought I sent it in a nice, clean arc toward Miss Drewes, but when I glanced back, I saw the pink flowers inside the bemused palms of George Marshall.
At the end of Cumberland Street, Thorpe stopped the motorcycle. The British Colonial Hotel loomed before us. To the left, West Bay Street ran along the shore toward Cable Beach. To the right lay the business district, the docks, the ships alongside, the smaller boats bobbing at their moorings. I realized that the trembling came not from the rumble of the idling motorcycle engine, but from within. I glanced up at Thorpe’s profile and thought, My husband.
For no particular reason, as the motorcycle turned left down West Bay Street, I thought of Tommy Randolph’s funeral. Did I mention it was May when I killed him? Well, it was. It was early May and the air was turning hot in Bakersfield, California, hot and dry, so the medical examiner had packed his body in enough ice to freeze an elephant before they shipped it by train across the country to some mortician chosen by his parents.
The day they buried him, however, the weather had cooled considerably. It was one of those May days in which you can still glimpse the retreating spring, and the air tasted of damp and melancholy. Not grief, mind you. As I said, nobody really mourned Tommy. You saw the relief in everybody’s eyes, the guilt at the relief, the narrow, shameful stares at the coffin as the pallbearers inched it into the ground and the breeze picked up as if to hurry them along, get that bastard inside the earth where he belonged, that much closer to hell. The new leaves shivered in the trees. I remember the good reverend father spoke his lines hastily, so that the words slurred together, Wecommendtoalmightygodourbrotherthomas, and that a little glint of sunshine caught the lid before it disappeared from view. Then it was all mercifully over and we turned away from Tommy and from each other. I shook hands with the Randolphs without meeting a single eye. My mother was there too, although the twins were both in college, Leo at Harvard (the Lightfoots were Harvard men) and Vanessa at Skidmore, and couldn’t come. Or perhaps it was thought best that they didn’t come, tender lambs as they were. Meanwhile, my father had avoided the affair on principle—he hadn’t attended the wedding, and he damned well wasn’t going to attend the funeral—so it was just the two of us on my side, mother and daughter, against the various Randolphs, and I’d like to say that we forged a bond in that moment, that this harrowing encounter brought us close together at last.
But you see, I was still so shocked, so numb with horror at myself. I couldn’t speak to my mother at all. I caught her glance only once as they nestled Tommy’s coffin in its eternal hole. During the service, they had left the casket open, because a well-placed shot behind the ear leaves your face remarkably unscathed and Tommy’s face was the only noble part of him, and as I’d stared at his waxy skin and his eyes for the last time, his lashes that remained as long and lush as in life, I’d felt terrifyingly little emotion. Maybe a speck of pity, that was all. So I was reflecting on this apathy as the breeze nudged my widow’s veil, wondering whether it meant I was a monster, a sociopath or whatever they called them, and I happened to glance at my mother just as she was glancing at me, and I saw at once that she knew exactly how Tommy had died. Mothers know, don’t they? They gave birth to you and suckled you and tended every inch of you. They can peer straight through your eyes and part the drapes of your soul.
I remember looking away and thinking, Well, that’s that. I can’t return home, not ever. She’ll have it out of me, one way or another, and once the deed was committed to words, once it floated free of my mouth and into the atmosphere, it became truth. I had killed my husband with my own hand and a .22 caliber revolver I’d procured myself and hidden in the bedside table. I had killed Thomas Randolph. So my mother and I walked away from that cemetery without saying a word to each other, not a blessed word. She’d returned to my childhood nest in Great Neck, and I’d found a room in a cheap hotel in Murray Hill, and I hadn’t seen her since.
Come to think of it, maybe that was why I felt this shiver of memory as we sped along West Bay Street. Why the smell of leaves returned to me, the rotting earth, the fear, the breeze that was nothing like the tropical draft that swept against us from the road. Not fear or premonition, or anything like an echo from one husband to the other. It was the opposite. I recalled Tommy’s funeral because at that moment, standing before his grave, I’d decided I never would confess. I never would tell a living soul what had happened in Bakersfield.
Surely no person existed whom I could trust like that.
When we came to my bungalow, Thorpe stopped the engine and dismounted to help me from the sidecar. The heat billowed from the asphalt, the wind sang. The surf was picking up; you could hear the noise all the way from the road.
To my surprise, the doorknob turned before I had the chance to insert the latchkey. “Hello?” I called.
“Miss Lulu?”
“Veryl!” I went down the hall, just as she emerged from the study, duster in hand. “You’re still here? Aren’t you supposed to be finishing up at the Prince George?”
“They give me the day off,” she said. “Why, what that on you finger?”
I looked at my left hand and saw, rather to my shock, a slim gold band adorned with a row of tiny diamonds. “I got married.”
Veryl put her hand to her heart and took a step backward.
“You see, Thorpe came home last night, as I’m sure you noticed, and he asked me to marry him—well, didn’t exactly ask—”
“Oh, Lord, Miss Lulu.”
“I’m still rather shocked, myself.”
“Oh, Lord. Where he at?”
“Putting the motorcycle out back.”
I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of champagne from the icebox.
“Miss Lulu?” said Veryl, from the doorway. “That fellow be back here today.”
“Which fellow?”
“The one be giving you they letters.”
I turned from the icebox. “What did you say to him?”
“I say you at the canteen, be home after lunch.”
“Well, I won’t be back. I’m through with all that. I won’t be carrying letters for anybody, from now on.”
“That so?”
“That’s so. I’m Mrs. Thorpe now, Veryl. I’ve hitched my wagon to another star.”
Veryl still held the duster, dangling from her hand. The ceiling fan was on, rotating the stuffy air above us. I set the bottle on the washboard. “What’s the matter, Veryl? Do you have something to say to me?”
She hung the duster from its hook on the wall and straightened her dress. “I does, Miss Lulu. I be giving you notice.”
“Notice? Notice of what?”
“Leaving,” she said. “Leaving my position. At the end of th
e month.”
“Oh. I see.”
“My cousin Iphigenia and me, we be saving up wages. We gwine open a little tea shop, down Victoria Street.”
You might have thought she’d have some trouble looking me in the eye with this news, but she didn’t. Not Veryl. She tilted her chin and caught me square with those dark, serious peepers of hers and told me her mind in a formal voice. She had finished straightening her dress and her arms hung rigid down her sides like a pair of sticks. She looked awfully brave.
“Well,” I said. “This is all rather sudden. I had no idea.”
“You been generous, Miss Lulu, and I appreciate that. You paying thirty shillings when the other ladies be paying fifteen—”
“Have they, now?”
“—and I been saving that money, week after week. So we be opening our own tea shop, Effie and me, the fifteenth of August.”
The champagne bottle was already dripping sweat. I pushed the hair from my damp forehead. “Well,” I said again. “Well, that’s grand. I’ll be the first one in line. You’ll be serving that rum cake of yours, won’t you?”
“Now, what does you think, Miss Lulu?”
“Good, good. And if you don’t mind asking around the Prince George for another housekeeper, I’d be much obliged.”
“I be asking already.” She untied the apron from her waist. “One thing more, Miss Lulu.”
“What’s that?”
Veryl was folding her apron carefully, applying all her concentration to the creases. As always, her hair was parted down the middle and pulled back into a snug knot at the nape of her neck, and though she scraped it all into pitiless order, still the curls made tiny, stubborn ripples all the way down. When she first came to work for me, I used to wonder what it looked like when it was loose, how long it was, whether the curls all sprang back to life as soon as they were set free. Of course, I never did find out. That was the thing about what they called the color line around here: neither one of us had the nerve to cross it.
“Well?” I said.
“You be careful, is all.”
“Careful? Careful of what? Of Thorpe?”
She looked up. “All them. Them Government House, they friends. Something bad gwine happen, Miss Lulu. Be brewing in the air, like some storm.”
“Well, that’s why I’m washing my hands of that business, like I told you,” I said. “Now where the devil are the champagne glasses, hmm? I thought I put them away.”
Veryl stepped to the cupboard and pulled out a pair of coupes, which she set on the counter. “You ain’t finished until they-all finished, Miss Lulu. You remember that.”
Over the last of her words, Thorpe ducked through the doorway into the kitchen. “Remember what, Miss Veryl?” he said cheerfully. “To make her husband breakfast every morning? Oh, champagne. I knew I married the right sort of woman. I hope you’re going to stay and toast us, eh, Veryl? Failing that, you might offer Lulu your condolences.”
“Now, stop,” she said, as he kissed her cheek. “You gwine down the beach, you two. Never mind Veryl.”
“I’ll give you a lift home, shall I?”
“No, sir. Bus be rolling by any second. You take good care of my Miss Lulu, now, or you be hearing from the end of my good broom.”
When she left, the bungalow turned quiet. The champagne dripped on the counter with the glasses, which Veryl had smuggled in—along with most of the glassware, chinaware, and cutlery, not to mention the towels—piece by piece from the Prince George. The ceiling fan swirled about a centimeter from the top of Thorpe’s head, and as I stared at the blur of blades, I felt a premonition come over me. Thorpe stepped closer and kissed my lips. “Everything all right?”
“Everything’s just fine,” I told him.
Thorpe chipped some ice from the block in the icebox and filled the champagne bucket, which also bore the Prince George crest. I wandered to the patio and stood there in my yellow silk dress, gazing down the beach to the mounting surf. The sea grape trees bent in the wind. I kicked off my shoes and stepped on the sand, outside the shelter of the patio. Behind me came the sound of Thorpe, setting the bucket and the glasses on the table. I thought we were the only two people alive under this sinking sun, this restless sky. The only two people alive in the world.
“Good evening, Mrs. Thorpe,” he said. “It’s a fine day to be married, isn’t it?”
He stood only a few yards away. I remember thinking that he bore not the slightest resemblance to the man I’d met on a Pan American airliner, two years before. He was his old self, the man I liked to think was the true Thorpe. I thought that this was what he must have been like, before the war came. Charming and spindly, subject to romantic impulse, bristling with new, crisp enthusiasms that seemed odd to other people, and wonderful to the woman who loved him. I thought how ridiculous I must look, my hair all askew, my dress stained with sweat, my lipstick long gone. I thought what a leap of faith he had taken, what a leap I had taken, how we were falling together through an unknown space to land in a foreign country.
He’d removed his jacket, and his shirt was wilted, unbuttoned at the collar. The skin beneath was flushed. He had his hands on his hips, his feet square beneath him, his head bare, his jaw glittering with new stubble. His freckles stood out from his apricot face. His hair spiked from the top of his head like the fur of a puppy. His lips were red and round and damp. I could not comprehend that he belonged to me. I could not imagine us in a neat, rectangular house somewhere, cooing over a baby while the pot roast grew tender in the oven. I couldn’t imagine a future for us at all, any kind of future. I thought, this will never work, we’re doomed, we haven’t got a chance in this crazy world.
Thorpe was grinning, though. He seemed to have forgotten any doubts. He pulled off his shoes and socks and joined me on the sand. I smelled his soap and his sweat. I went on my toes and kissed his nose, his eyes, his chin, his mouth. He snatched my hand and dragged me down to the water, where we plunged into the roiling surf and kissed some more, kissed with hysterical abandon, because we were married now and it was our right to kiss each other in full view of the world. Eventually the surf became too rough, the kissing too important, and we staggered back onto the beach. The dress came off, the trousers, the shirt, all ruined. We moved into the shadow of the patio. I saw the bruises on his ribs, the scar on his jaw, the profuse nicks and flaws on the surface of his skin. I pressed my fingertips on his collarbone, then my lips. I said clearly, “Don’t go back to London.”
He didn’t answer. I don’t know if he heard me. His pupils were giant in his blue eyes, his skin was flushed. This husband of mine wasn’t looking at my face, no, he was looking at my breasts and the dent of my waist. He was lifting me into the hammock that hung between the sea grape trees. I mouthed the words, Don’t go back, don’t go back, don’t go back, and I must say they formed a nice syncopation to the beat of his pale, bony hips. Don’t go back, don’t go back. We swayed dangerously in the hammock. The hot air pooled in the hollows of our bones. We were married, we were made into a single, sacred flesh, consecrated by the holy water of our mutual perspiration. I gathered his wet buttocks in my hands and arched my back. He came an instant later. Don’t go back, I gasped, but he was already gone. The hammock swung with our dead weight. The sea grapes groaned with it.
We remained outside all evening, in the ocean, in the shade of the sea grapes, drinking champagne. Thorpe was right, nobody else was outside on a day like this, at least not at this end of the beach. The surf was picking up mightily, in big, urgent waves. Thorpe had once explained the science of them, how a single ripple traveled across miles of ocean, and I was entranced by the idea of this packet of energy passing between molecules of water, the way sound travels through air, the way light travels through space. I stuck my toes in the water and thought, This wave began with a gust of wind, and that gust of wind began as a beam of sunlight warming the air, and that beam of sunlight began as a fusion of atoms inside the sun, and that fusion of ato
ms . . . well, here I got a little murky, but you see what I mean. This wave now breaking on the beach had a whole history of its own, which I could never learn, just as we’re all upon this earth ignorant of the vast, complicated histories of those living alongside us. Why, on the other side of this very ocean, men were blowing each other to pieces; at this very moment, some fellow lay on the sands of North Africa in the act of dying, bleeding, suffering, while I stood here on the sands of Nassau and knew nothing about him or the hearts due to shatter at his passing. You look out into the teeming air, and you have no idea what’s going on outside your own square yard of it.
I mention all this because I remember how the gathering storm sent us scurrying back indoors at half past ten o’clock, and while we did this, a few miles away, Harold Christie was finishing up a game of checkers with Sir Harry Oakes and a couple of dinner guests at Westbourne. But of course I didn’t know that fact, at the time. Of all that happened at Westbourne that night, I was blissfully unaware until later.
Thorpe and I scurried indoors, as I said, and closed the shutters against the spitting rain and the gusts of tropical wind. A flash of lightning illuminated the sky, and the crack of thunder followed swiftly. Thorpe asked me if I was afraid of storms, and I said I hated the damn things, you never knew what might happen in a storm.
We crawled between the sheets. Having made love twice already, marriage safely consummated, we felt no urgency. I stretched back and wiggled my toes, and Thorpe lay on his side against me and examined every inch of my figure while the rain beat noisily against the shutters and the tin roof. He spread his hand over my stomach, a gesture I loved for some reason. The sensation of that palm on my navel.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Why were you recalled to London?”
The room was dark and motionless, only the sway of the electric fan, while all hell slammed against the walls of our cottage. I kicked off the sheets from my legs.
The Golden Hour Page 36
