by Hannah Emery
He lies back down, and Isobel puts her head on his chest. ‘I can’t believe she let you go,’ she says.
Tom laughs loudly, the sound at odds with the darkness and the silence around them. ‘I’m glad she did. What made you think of Georgia tonight, anyway?’
‘Just something the old lady across the road said.’
‘Oh, she talks nonsense. Ignore her.’
They lie together, Tom’s breathing becoming steadier and slower, his chest rising and falling with approaching sleep. Isobel closes her eyes, but they spring back open, alert and unwilling to rest. She turns in bed, her newly rounded belly making it a little more awkward than it used to be. The air is stuffy and she feels too full. She sticks out a foot from the soft warmth of the duvet, savouring the cool air that touches her skin, and waits for sleep to come.
Chapter 12
Victoria: 1964
I’m already married.
As his words rang around the room, Harry’s expression was frozen with horror. It was as though, Victoria noticed bitterly, he had only just found out himself, as though he was the one who had just had his heart pulled from his chest and hurled out of the window so that it splattered onto the concrete beneath.
Victoria put down her plate on the floor and suddenly remembered that she’d left her parents’ bedroom window open, and that there was probably going to be a huge rain stain on their green carpet.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, picking up her plate again, because to leave it on the floor would mean the end of things, it would mean that this conversation was too big to carry on eating through. She held it steady on her bare knee, the white china cold on her skin. She stared down at the gooey, raw egg, the sickly white and yellow that had merged into one another.
‘I thought you knew, Victoria. I don’t know why, but I thought you knew. I have a wife.’ Harry put his head in his hands, in his wonderful hands that a few moments ago Victoria had thought were hers.
‘You don’t wear a wedding ring,’ Victoria said, then hurled her plate across the room at him. Egg flew and rained down onto the floor, onto the furniture. A drop of yolk landed in Harry’s almost-black hair and melted into it like snow.
Harry moved towards her and put his arms on Victoria’s shoulders, which were shaking now with huge, uncontrolled sobs.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my darling. I should have made it clear, and I started to tell you a number of times, but in all honesty I probably didn’t want to because I didn’t want to lose you. I’ve never known anybody like you before, Victoria.’
‘I want you to myself,’ Victoria said quietly, her sobs subsiding, her shoulders stilling.
Harry stared at her, and Victoria saw that there was a tear working its way out of his left eye. He blinked it away, ‘I know.’
‘You don’t know, because you have me to yourself. I’m the one who has to share.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve thought and I’ve thought, but I don’t know how to solve it,’ Harry said. His chin began to tremble and Victoria watched as the tear that had threatened a few seconds ago began to spill from his eye. He did not cry like Victoria did, or like anyone she knew. His face did not turn red, and he did not bat the tear away. He let it fall and carried on speaking, even though his voice was shaking and his cheek was stained with the single wet track. ‘I’m stuck, Victoria. I’ve already asked her about a divorce. She simply won’t agree to it, and so the courts would deny it.’
Victoria shook her head slowly, and the new, sharp idea of Harry belonging to somebody else rattled around, making her brain ache. ‘What’s her name?’ she asked, not really wanting to know, but unable to focus on anything until she did.
‘It’s Sarah,’ Harry sighed.
‘So the note in Great Expectations was meant for you, then.’ It was like a crushing weight on her chest, like when Frederick the cat sometimes sat on her in the middle of the night, so that she woke up suddenly with a heavy weight bearing down upon her. But much, much worse. ‘What does the message from your wife mean? What was she ‘almost’?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What have you seen?’
Victoria ran to her bedroom, not caring if he followed, not caring if he saw her Bunty comics and stuffed rabbits and bears, because what difference would it make now? She snatched Great Expectations from under her bed, brushing away the balls of matted dust that had attached themselves to it.
‘Here. The inscription on this page says, ‘to remind you of what I almost was. S’. What did she mean when she wrote it?’ Victoria’s words were high and loud, ripped from her with no control.
Harry followed her back from her bedroom to the lounge and pulled his shirt over his chest. That milky-tea skin that she’d thought was hers, locked away again. Unbearable.
‘We met when we were very young. We were just friends, really, and we never should have been anything else but we drank too much one night at a party and she…Well, suddenly we were going to have a baby. So I asked her to marry me. I didn’t love her, but she obviously couldn’t have the baby all by herself, without a husband. We planned a wedding straight away. But the day before we were going to get married, I found out that there was no baby. There never had been. It was just an elaborate plan to get me to marry her. I threatened to walk away from her, the wedding, everything. But she begged me not to. All of her friends were married and she didn’t want to be left behind. She said that if I cancelled the wedding she’d turn into Miss Havisham, waiting for love for all eternity. That’s what the inscription in my copy of Great Expectations means. But I grew to see over time that she didn’t really love me at all. She just wanted a husband and the life that all her friends had.’
‘Have you forgiven her?’
‘For lying to me? No, I haven’t. I don’t love her, Victoria. And I never could after what she did. But she’ll never agree to a divorce. I don’t quite know what to do.’ Harry’s jaw was set tightly, but Victoria could see a slight tremor fighting to make itself known. ‘I never dreamed there’d be someone like you in my future when I married Sarah. I just wanted to do the right thing.’
Victoria sighed, her breath trembling as it left her body. ‘How can you teach all the classics and such great literature day after day, and think that marrying somebody you don’t love is the right thing to do? Maybe what my father says is true after all. Maybe university doesn’t teach you anything.’
Harry took her hand and held it tightly, so tightly that it hurt. Victoria could feel the bones of her fingers crushed against one another, but when she looked at Harry’s face she could tell that he didn’t mean to hurt her, that he was lost in his own world, so she grimaced and stayed quiet.
So this was it. She could stay quiet, have contact with Harry’s skin, his beautiful big hands and his milky-tea skin, and ignore her body shouting out in pain. Or she could leave him to his wife, and have nothing.
No pain, no pleasure.
‘Are you really glad it rained on the day we met?’ she asked. ‘Or do you wish it’d stayed fine, so that you’d walked straight past Lace Antiques, and straight past me, and kept things simple?’
Harry pulled Victoria to him, kissing her over and over again: the skin of her neck, her cheeks, her forehead. ‘I thank all the stars in the world that it rained that day. And I think it rained so that I would come into Lace Antiques and meet you. I needed you.’ His words trembled, his voice breaking. He held her tightly, his chest broad and strong against her. ‘I know I’m asking a lot of you, Victoria. Too much. But I need you to wait for me until we can somehow work this out. I can’t live without you now.’
‘I don’t think I can live without you. And I’m not sure I want to try,’ Victoria said slowly, picking at the sticky patch of yolk in his dark hair.
Harry smiled at her and Victoria felt a strange prickle of relief. He couldn’t possibly smile at Sarah like that, with his whole being. Perhaps Victoria could be the only one, then, in her own way. The shock was still smar
ting, but maybe Victoria could let time soften it, and maybe they could somehow work out a way to be together.
And that’s when they heard it. The car skidding up to the shop, her father’s shout. Victoria was on her hands and knees before she knew it, picking up pieces of broken plate and wiping unpleasant, cold egg from the blazing orange carpet with her bare hands. Harry was buttoning his shirt back up to the top, his face pale.
‘My skirt!’ Victoria hissed at him. ‘Where’s my skirt?’ Hysteria rose up inside her, the urge to do more than cry or laugh, but the need to unleash a torrent of emotion from her body.
Downstairs, the shop door clicked open. There were rumbles of conversation, her father shouting about a clock. His heavy footsteps on the stairs. Her mother’s sighs floating through the air. Victoria saw her skirt, at last, a flash of burgundy under the couch. She pulled it on, swatting Harry away as he tried to fasten the buttons at the back because his hands were too big and he was being too slow and there just wasn’t enough time.
When her parents entered the room, Harry and Victoria were sitting at opposite ends of the couch, Great Expectations between them, the heavy smell of fat and eggs lingering in the air.
‘Why aren’t you in the shop?’ Jack said, his mouth downturned in disappointment. Obviously, he hadn’t managed to win the clock at today’s auction. As he noticed Harry, his face tensed in irritation. ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is Harry. He’s here to talk to me about A levels,’ said Victoria loudly. Better A levels than what had really happened.
‘A levels?’ Mrs Lace said, taking off her string of pearls and dangling them from her delicate hand. ‘What on earth for?’
‘Oh, I just wanted some information on them. I was thinking about perhaps going back to school in September, and then one day to university,’ said Victoria, emboldened by the sight of her pale, fragile mother, the woman who never told anybody what she wanted or did anything of her own.
Her father gave a laugh: an empty, echoing bellow that stopped as suddenly as it had started. ‘Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Forgive us,’ he said, beckoning for Harry to stand and then placing his hand on Harry’s back to direct him to the door. ‘My daughter is full of fads and fancies. She’s silly, like her mother. She’s wasted your time. If you’d like to have a look around our shop on your way out, I’d be happy to show you some of our best pieces.’
Harry shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t collect antiques. I didn’t mind talking to Victoria about her education. She’s welcome to visit me at Silenshore University if she wants any more information.’
‘She won’t be wanting any more information, and she certainly won’t be wanting to go to your university. I’ll see you out.’
Victoria sat still and watched her father followed Harry out of the room and shut the door behind them. Her mother dropped her pearls on the floor.
‘Victoria, I hope you-‘
‘Don’t, Mum. Please don’t.’
Mrs Lace stared at Victoria, her blue eyes draped with makeup that was starting to flake with the wear of the day. Victoria stared back indignantly, her cheeks beginning to flame. Her mother knew. Her mother knew that Victoria’s skirt wasn’t fastened properly at the back, that her blouse wasn’t quite straight, that her skin was still warm from being so close to Harry’s. But so what? Victoria wanted to scream. So what? What she had done with Harry was better than anything that her mother had ever done, because Harry was nothing like Victoria’s father and Victoria was nothing like her mother.
‘Be careful, darling,’ her mother said, stepping over her pearls and leaving the room.
It was a whole week before Victoria saw Harry again, after he’d met her parents and she’d made him an omelette, then thrown it at him and there’d been sultry thunder clouds ripping through the sky.
‘I’ve missed you so much. I was desperate to come and see you but after the way your father reacted to me, I thought I should avoid the shop,’ Harry said as he and Victoria sat opposite one another in The Golden Egg in Soho. Harry had taken Victoria to London and she had told her parents that she was going out for the day with Sally.
‘I hope my father doesn’t go into Clover’s and see Sally working,’ Victoria said, her stomach turning at the thought of being found out. How many lies had she told since she had met Harry? The thought was an unpleasant one and she squashed it so that it lay like a dead spider in the corner of her mind.
‘He won’t. He’s in the shop. And your mother won’t go to Clover’s, will she? It doesn’t seem like she goes out much alone.’
‘She never goes out alone. It’s his fault. He’s a bully,’ Victoria said vehemently. ‘He makes her so very unhappy.’
‘What do you think would make her happier?’ Harry asked, frowning.
Victoria sighed. She looked up around at the bright colours that lined the walls. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what she wants. I just know what she doesn’t want, and that’s my father and me, and I don’t blame her.’
‘I hope that’s not true. How could she not want somebody so beautiful?’
Victoria grinned. ‘I hadn’t realised you were so taken with my father.’
Harry laughed loudly, and dropped his fork so that it clattered onto his plate. ‘It’s his eyes I love the most,’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘They’re like the stars.’
Victoria laughed and drank the last of the wine that Harry had ordered for them. It was red: dark, sweet and warm. ‘Thanks for bringing me to London, Harry. I’ve not been since I was very young, and I think that was only to auctions. I love it here. I love how lively it is. Silenshore is so small and nothing ever happens there.’ Victoria grabbed Harry’s hands suddenly, dragging them clumsily across the table. ‘Please let’s live in London one day!’
‘I would love that. I will do everything I can to make it happen. It might take some time, but I promise that I’ll try.’
‘I don’t want a promise. I want a dream. I want to dream of living here, with you, in a messy flat full of friends and books and colour.’
Harry squeezed Victoria’s hands, then brought her fingers up to his lips and dotted them with soft kisses. ‘Then let’s dream.’
They walked along the river after their early dinner, hand in hand. Nobody looked at Victoria as though she might not belong to Harry, as though she had lied to her parents and should really be behind the counter of Lace Antiques. They simply accepted that Harry might be hers, that she might be his.
‘So tell me, Victoria Lace. What else do you dream of?’ Harry asked.
Victoria looked out at the glittering Thames. ‘Oh, I dream about lots of things. I dream of drinking champagne with you, and reading lots more books. I dream of learning to cook, and meeting more writers, and writing my own books, and dancing, and wearing beautiful dresses.’
‘Well!’ Harry linked his arm into Victoria’s and pulled her towards him. ‘I do have a lot to organise for you!’
‘And France!’ Victoria went on. ‘I want to go to France! My mother used to talk about France all the time. I think her family came from France, a long time ago. I would like to go to Paris, and visit my long-lost relatives, and find out that I am a French Queen.’ She stopped speaking, breathless with the excitement of the future that suddenly lay before her, twinkling and beckoning like the gentle waves of the river beside them.
‘I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make those things happen for you, Victoria,’ Harry said. He did not mention his wife and his ties to Silenshore, and Victoria was glad.
‘I meant to bring my old copy of The Blue Door back for you,’ Victoria said as they walked alongside the salty river, gazing up at Big Ben and the cloudless, pale sky. ‘I’ve finally finished it.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘I was wrong, wasn’t I? I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t even kidnapped. She hid herself away and sent the ransom notes herself, just to make some money! And the music man from the street had only tried to help f
ind her. I had him down as strange. I got it all completely wrong.’
‘I had a feeling from the start that she was a fake,’ Harry said with a wink.
‘Oh, and I suppose you also knew that the mysterious blue door was actually a trap door?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘I liked the old house that the girl was found in. If that was a real place, I’d like to go there. I wonder if Robert Bell had been somewhere like that in real life. He didn’t say in his talk.’
‘You liked it? I think it’s meant to be haunted and frightening.’
Victoria let go of Harry’s hand and sidestepped as they were divided by an oncoming crowd of men in crisp brown suits. As they walked past, a cloud of bitter aftershave lingered in the breeze. ‘I wasn’t frightened at all,’ Victoria continued. ‘My mother used to talk about spirits and spells when I was little, and I quite liked the idea of there being people around us who we can’t see. I like to think I’ll be one of them, one day.’
‘I’m never sure what to believe,’ said Harry as they walked on and on. He took Victoria’s hand again and squeezed it. ‘All of Robert Bell’s books have some kind of ghostly place in them. Perhaps if he comes to visit us again at the University, we can ask him about it. He might tell us about the house that inspired him, and if it was actually haunted.’
