She stood in her boss’s office, sipping the sweet wine he had supplied for the occasion, eating a slice of the cake one of the other girls had baked, accepting the wedding present from her colleagues (a set of table napkins with drawn thread embroidery and matching tablecloth), and listening to him making a speech about what a loss she would be, what an asset she had been, how he was sure the entire firm would crumble about his ears without her. Looking round at the smiling friendly faces, she felt very sad: at the loss not just of the friendship and all the gossip and fun, but of her own independence. She hadn’t realized it mattered to her so much until she said goodbye to it. From now on, she would be dependent on someone else for everything: relying totally on Charles not just financially but for her status in life as well. Any importance she had, any position, would be dependent on his importance and position. She was longing to marry him, was looking forward to being his wife, and in due course a mother; but something deep within her still wanted to be something else as well. Herself.
She was about to set off to meet Charles at the cinema – the new musical Love Finds Andy Hardy with Judy Garland and Micky Rooney had finally reached Shaftesbury – when her phone went. It was Charles.
‘I’m sorry, Grace, but I won’t be able to see you tonight. Something awful’s happened.’
Florence had had a miscarriage.
Robert had phoned sounding distraught at about five; he had arrived home to find Florence lying at the bottom of the stairs, mildly concussed and already in labour. The maid was out, it was her afternoon off; nobody had been there when it happened. Florence couldn’t remember much about it, only that she had fallen from top to bottom of the flight. ‘I know I felt a bit dizzy,’ she said over and over again, ‘after that everything’s – blank.’
Muriel went straight up to London to see Florence in hospital; she came back after a few days visibly shaken.
Florence was not only desperately upset at losing the baby, she said, but was suffering from appalling headaches. She looked dreadful, a huge bruise all down one side of her face, and a badly swollen right eye. ‘Poor child. I felt so sorry for her. And poor Robert was beside himself. He’s hardly left her side since he found her.’
The baby had been a boy; the doctors had been encouraging, had said there was no reason why she shouldn’t have another, as soon as she was better, but Florence said it was the last thing in the world she wanted.
‘I expect she’ll change her mind later, when she’s feeling better,’ said Clifford. He was also deeply upset by the whole thing and had wanted to go up and see Florence himself, but Muriel told him that Robert was finding the whole thing extremely hard to cope with and that, as the doctors had said in any case she should be kept absolutely quiet, he thought it best if there were no visitors for a few weeks.
‘I can understand that,’ said Grace, her heart aching with sympathy not only for Florence but for Robert too. ‘I’d feel just the same, I know, I’d just want to dig a hole and crawl into it.’
Muriel wanted Florence to come to the Priory to convalesce when she left hospital, but she refused. ‘Robert thinks we should be together, and I agree. Maybe later on.’
‘She’s lucky to have him,’ said Charles. ‘Good bloke, old Robert.’
Charles was worrying about the honeymoon.
‘I hope it’s going to be all right,’ he said. ‘I would have taken you somewhere abroad, of course, but I really don’t think it’s going to be possible now. So I thought Scotland. Not so romantic, but—’
‘Scotland would be lovely,’ said Grace. She found it so hard to think beyond the wedding itself that if he had suggested a honeymoon in the middle of the Sahara Desert she would have thought it was a good idea. Not that Hitler would let them get there either.
She still worried about not knowing him properly. It hadn’t just been the shock over Clarissa, or even the slightly sporadic nature of their early courtship – she had tried to ask him about that from the safety of their engagement but he had laughed, made a joke of it, said nicely brought-up girls should never look too hard into their fiancés’ pasts, and then grown irritable and said he didn’t know what she was making such a fuss about, it was necessary for him to go to London on business from time to time, and that was all there was to it. She had tried very hard to accept that, but the fact remained that he hardly ever went now they were engaged and if he did he was usually back on the next day. So she fell back on platitudes about wild oats, and tried to stop worrying about it. Far more troubling she found was his reluctance to talk about himself, altogether; whenever the conversation became personal, when she asked him things, quite harmless they seemed to her, what made him happy, what sad, what he was afraid of, if anything, what his childhood had really been like, how he had felt when he had been sent off to school, he would become first monosyllabic and then abruptly change the subject. The nearest she got to an answer was when he told her men didn’t like talking about such things; it wasn’t exactly satisfactory, but it had to do. They had all their lives together to get to know each other, after all.
‘I do worry occasionally a bit about that dear little soul marrying Charles,’ said Clarissa suddenly.
She and Jack were sitting in the drawing room of their house in Campden Hill Square. It was a very pretty room on the first floor, overlooking the square, and designed entirely to Clarissa’s taste (Jack not being overconcerned with aesthetics) by a very expensive and fashionable young man. The predominant colour was white: white walls, carpets, and a fine marble fireplace, the curtains and upholstery yellow and cream; the furniture eighteenth-century, bequeathed to them by Clarissa’s mother from her own London house. Clarissa adored her drawing room and frequently said it was there she wished to die – ‘On the chaise longue, Jack, now do get it right if you’re around, won’t you, and I want to be wearing something very elegant, not my nightie. At a pinch a satin robe of some kind, maybe.’
Clarissa’s enemies (who were few) frequently said her entire life was a public performance, designed to be watched, and there was some truth in this, the fact that she was already famously stage-managing her death at the age of twenty-four seeming to support this view. But that was not altogether her intention; it was simply an expression of her love for her drawing room in particular and for agreeable surroundings in general. Clarissa was not easily depressed, but a disagreeable place could send her spirits plummeting faster than any number of disagreeable people – partly due to the fact that she possessed in such good measure the ability to transform the disagreeable people into agreeable ones.
Jack got up, refilled their glasses from the champagne bottle that stood on the sofa table and passed her one of them. ‘I don’t actually think you need to worry about her too much,’ he said. ‘I sense quite a steely little soul tucked underneath that shyness. I’m sure she’ll be fine.’
‘Really?’ said Clarissa. She sipped thoughtfully at her champagne. ‘How terribly perceptive you are, darling. I’d never have spotted that in a million years.’
‘Yes, well, I spend a little more time observing people than you do,’ said Jack, smiling at her, ‘and less in making them observe me.’
‘Jack! Is that a criticism?’
‘Absolutely not. It’s an observation. Another observation. Anyway, you make Charles sound as if he’s some kind of a monster. Which he certainly isn’t. Or are you trying to tell me with your intimate knowledge of him that he is?’
He sounded just slightly edgy; Clarissa looked at him warily. She and Jack both had pasts, as they put it; had confessed to them, early in their relationship, as a modern young couple should. She was no more concerned with Jack’s former lovers than about the clothes he might have worn or the cars he might have driven, but she knew he had a most carefully stifled jealous streak within him, found it hard to set her colourful personal history entirely aside, and especially the part of it that concerned the two other men she had been engaged to. Freddy Macintosh, the first fiancé as she called him, was
more easily dealt with – he lived in Scotland and they saw him seldom – but Charles was an intrinsic part of their circle, the brother of her best friend. It was a situation she watched with care.
‘There really is nothing for you to be upset about, my darling,’ she had said, as she drove Jack down to meet the Bennetts for the first time. ‘In the first place it’s over a year now since I – we – broke it off, really lost in the mists of time, and in the second I don’t think I ever really loved him.’
‘Then why get engaged to him?’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ she said vaguely, ‘I can’t quite think now. Because he was there, I suppose. I was awfully young and silly. Not like I am these days. Not a bit.’
Now she smiled at Jack across the drawing room, and raised her glass to him.
‘Here’s to us, my darling, and how much we love each other. Let’s not waste time and energy on those two any more.’
‘You started it.’
‘I know and I’m sorry. Suddenly I can’t think of anything more tedious. I’ve got a much better idea for your consideration. Let’s just go to bed. It’s our favourite time, after all.’
‘Let’s just,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘We can work up an appetite for dinner.’
They went upstairs. Clarissa lay on the pillows on their huge high bed and watched Jack as he removed his clothes, gazing happily at his lean brown body, the flat stomach, the thick black pubic hair, the jutting penis that would soon – well, quite soon, he could delay things for a very long time, until she was quite literally screaming for him – be within her, working at her, bringing her to leaping, climbing, shattering orgasm. She loved him so much, and for all kinds of reasons, not least the endlessly wonderful ways he made love to her. And he was so extremely good-looking. She couldn’t understand people who said looks didn’t matter, weren’t important; they were to her an essential part of loving, of wanting, of sex, of fulfilment, and when she had first met him, first seen him, she couldn’t believe anyone so perfect could have been delivered to her.
They had met at a cocktail party; she had spotted him instantly, wanted him, known she had to have him, had carefully positioned herself in the group next to him, started kissing, laughing, talking in her highly noticeable way. And he had noticed her, of course, and had joined the group, smiled at her, held out his hand. He was dark, wonderfully, romantically dark, with dazzling blue eyes and an absurdly, classically straight nose; and even his handshake was somehow sensuous, not hearty, not hard, but firm, warm, immensely – well, immensely pleasant. She had left her own small white hand in his for a long time, it was a trick of hers, she would pretend not to have noticed, to be so engrossed with the person and what he (always he, of course) was saying, and he had said, ‘How do you do, Jack Compton Brown’ and smiled at her – well, it wasn’t even a smile, it was a huge, heart-turning, world-stopping grin, and that had been that really, there was no question of where things would lead, what might happen to them both. Three weeks later they were in bed; three months later engaged. And after almost a year of marriage, still helplessly, hopelessly in love.
He was young, younger than he looked, only twenty-four, rich – ‘Well, quite rich,’ Clarissa explained carelessly to her friends, ‘his father left him a few thousand, not too many, just about right really’ – charming, amusing. He was a stock-broker, he lived in a small, very pretty house in Kensington, was a fine tennis player, a good horseman, and enjoyed pretty women above all other things. He and Clarissa shared a blithely uncomplicated approach to life, an appreciation of its more sensual and materialistic pleasures and a rather touching recognition that they were both extremely fortunate. All of which made them a perfect match. As her godfather had said, without too much originality, in his wedding speech, it seemed indeed to be a marriage made in heaven. ‘And heavenly it will be, I know,’ she had said in response, raising her glass to Jack, kissing him. And so far she had been right.
He climbed in beside her now, and didn’t do anything, just lay, looking at her, his eyes moving over her, inch by inch, and even that gaze, that intense, intent gaze, made her long, lurch within herself for him.
‘Perfect,’ he whispered, moving his mouth down her throat, onto her breast, ‘perfect, perfect love,’ his lips closing tenderly, sweetly, on her nipples. Clarissa held his head, pressing it closer, harder to her, and then as he moved down, kissing her stomach, reaching further, tonguing her, as she felt the hot, liquid heart of her beginning to open, to flutter, to yearn for him, to be round him, she moaned, thrusting herself, and his tongue grew firmer, more determined, lapping, smoothing round her clitoris; tiny piercing, shooting sensations began to grow in her, and she cried out, a raw greedy sound. He moved then, turned her sideways, lay behind her, his fingers feathering, pushing, probing her buttocks, her anus, kissing her neck, her back, saying her name over and over again, telling her she was beautiful, and then he turned and lay on his back and smiled at her, just lay there, his arms flung wide; and panting, gasping with greed, with love, she climbed on top of him and lay there, legs splayed, fighting, working at him, her vagina closing onto his penis, feeling it wonderfully, savagely in her, pushing, pushing her up, up towards the hot white shaking brightness and then, then she was there, had found it, reached it, and she fell finally upon it, and there was a wild, strange sound in the room, as she called out over and over again and then at last, but so, so slowly, released herself into a reluctant, shuddering peace.
On the same Sunday evening, Grace and Charles sat in the dining room at the Priory, with Clifford and Muriel, doing the invitation list. Muriel was saying fretfully that she didn’t know how they were ever going to get it under five hundred, and Grace was wishing, more fretfully still, that it could be got under five, when the phone rang. Maureen came in. ‘It’s your secretary, sir,’ she said, ‘from the London office.’
Clifford got up and pushed the chair back startlingly hard. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘that case I was telling you about, Muriel, complicated land law. The whole thing’s got very complex, I really will have to—’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Muriel impatiently. ‘Just go, Clifford, and get it over with. We don’t want to hear the details.’
‘Of course. Excuse me, please, all of you.’
He was gone a long time; clearly, Grace thought, it must be a very complex call.
‘I’d love a glass of beer,’ Charles said suddenly, putting aside his list and rubbing his eyes. ‘This is a hell of a job. Can I get either of you anything?’
‘Some coffee might be helpful,’ said Muriel. ‘Go and ask Maureen to make some, would you, Charles?’
‘I’ll go,’ said Grace, ‘I want a drink of water anyway.’
Clifford Bennett’s study was off the corridor that led to the kitchen; the door was half open. As she passed it, she glanced in. He was lying back in his chair, one foot on his desk, laughing into the telephone. She had never seen him looking quite so happy and relaxed; his London secretary was clearly a very positive presence in his life.
He didn’t rejoin them for a long time, and when he did it was only to say goodnight and to tell Muriel he had to go up to London early next day.
Chapter 5
Spring 1939
Grace dreamt at least once a week now that she was back on the big dipper. It was rushing her along towards May the seventeenth, and she was sitting in it surrounded by an ever-increasing pile of presents (and of letters to be written), a fourtier cake, several bales of curtain material, a couple of carpets and her wedding dress, which was a triumph on the part of Mrs Humbolt, wild silk, with a scooped-out neckline, a fitted bodice, long narrow sleeves coming into a point over the hands, a just slightly dropped waist, and a gently full skirt falling into a train at the back. Her headdress (which she was wearing in the big dipper) was a small, seed-pearl tiara lent most graciously by Muriel (the something borrowed) and a long, embroidered lace veil. She was carrying a very large bouquet of white and yellow roses and freesias, and clearly visi
ble as the dress blew up in the wind was a pair of red camiknickers (she was actually going to wear palest blue satin lingerie, an idea of her own which was the something new and blue rolled into one). In the car behind was the vicar, the choir, all rehearsing the hymns (‘Love Divine’, ‘God Be in My Head’ and ‘Lord of All Hopefulness’), and behind that one a third containing her parents, the Bennetts and Florence – all quarrelling. Far below her on the ground was Charles, waving frantically, and (and this rather disturbed her) in the car with her was Robert, holding her hand very tightly and telling her not to worry about anything.
She told Charles about the dream (except the bit about Robert) and he told her it was simply her subconscious worrying away; she said with a sigh she felt she certainly had quite enough for her conscious to worry about without getting her subconscious involved as well.
She knew why she had dreamt the bit about Robert: there had been another incident with him which had touched her at the time, but clearly, she could see, had worried her subconsciously.
Florence and he came down to the Priory for a long weekend, in February; Florence still looked and indeed seemed extremely unwell. She was desperately thin, very pale and listless, and Robert was obviously anxious about her, fussing over her like an old woman, refusing to leave her alone for more than a minute.
He greeted Grace warmly, gave her a hug and told her she was looking very pretty: ‘Engaged life obviously suits you.’
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