by Rosie Thomas
The business was briskly concluded. The corners of Jake’s mouth twitched and he took care not to look at Nancy. Even Mr Everard Templeton KC would have little say where his wife’s wishes were concerned. She was another Englishwoman of the emergent breed who took on the male universe without a tremor, and Nancy admired her for it – as she had done ever since her first suffragist meeting in the old chapel hall. Mrs Templeton had turned her high privilege to better use than Countess de Laury or Lady Bolton.
Lady Bolton was widowed and now occupied the dow-ager’s wing at Henbury while Sir Harry and his new wife occupied the main house. Harry walked with two sticks and had exchanged the army for life as a farmer. There was no direct heir to the baronetcy as yet but Bella and Arthur had produced three boys in rapid succession.
‘I’ve no idea how it happened,’ Bella always laughed, meaning that Arthur spent so much of his time overseas. The three Wix infants were sturdy children. The first and second had Rowland and Edwin added to their Bolton Christian names, to Faith and Matthew’s great satisfaction.
The world seemed to be repopulating itself with boy children to replace the lost fathers and uncles. Even Lion Stone had two sons. He was married to the girl Nancy had seen him with at Arthur’s wedding, a vivacious creature whose brothers had been in the same house as Lion at Eton.
Mrs Templeton drank her tea and ate her toast. Nancy was being shrewdly evaluated, and the realisation made her feel even more set apart than she did already.
If she had been asked to define herself, what would she have said?
She had learned to control the Uncanny and to profit from it, a little. But it was not enough to make her. She was a daughter, a sister and a friend. What else? She would have liked to be a mother, but it seemed that was not going to happen. She was thirty-four.
‘You are an old friend of my nephew’s, of course.’
‘Yes. How is he, and the family?’
This was no more than a polite exchange. Nancy knew they were flourishing. She heard from Lion from time to time and she was still fond of him. Nancy tried not to think about it, but she had to assume that he hadn’t after all been opposed to the institution of marriage itself – he just hadn’t wanted to marry her. She wasn’t the right type.
Frances Templeton would know all this. She probably also knew that Nancy had been Gil Maitland’s mistress for years. They were careful always to be discreet, for Celia’s sake, but Nancy was aware that her situation was not particularly unusual. Even the Prince of Wales lived by the same double standard. Lady Celia Maitland spent her time in sanatoria, or secluded at home in the country if she was well enough for that. She appeared only occasionally in London, always ethereally pale in her sable and her Vionnet gowns. Gil was known to be a modern husband, the conventions were observed, and there was no need for anyone ever to discuss where the boundaries of his loyalty actually lay.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he would insist. ‘There’s the outside world and its circumstances and there is here, with you and me, and that is what I care about. You are the real world to me, Nancy.’
Gil was generous; she loved him and was loved in return. Yet now, in the firelight at Whistlehalt with Guillaume cosily drawing the curtains and Jake lounging in his velvet slippers, she felt an almost irresistible urge to draw up her knees and give way to noisy tears.
She bit the corner of her lip to hold it firm as she stared into the fire. The vivid pictures of her life with Gil leapt up within the flames. They had shared so much, she thought, considering their circumstances. Gil’s work took up much of his time and a proportion of what was left necessarily had to be devoted to Celia, so the remaining hours were often brutally short. But from the time when they came back from their first holiday onwards, Gil convinced her to make the very best of what they did have. While they were alone in the Bloomsbury flat they concentrated absolutely on each other and Nancy discovered how sweet and soothing it was to be open and at ease with another human being. She told Gil about every facet of her life, even the inner realms of the Uncanny, and she accepted his corresponding admissions without criticism.
As she had guessed, she was not the first woman he had installed in the Bloomsbury flat.
‘But you are the last,’ he promised her.
As their years passed, slowly at first and then gathering the momentum of happy routine, this proved to be the truth.
Nancy might have looked for more of what she already had, yet she didn’t remotely yearn for anything different. They went out quietly together in London, to dine at favourite restaurants – although he never took her to the Ritz again or to Fifteen. They went regularly to concerts and the theatre, as well as the opera. Celia had developed claustrophobia and would never go with him into enclosed places, and Gil loved music. He taught Nancy to appreciate his favourite composers and he bought her a gramophone and piles of records.
After that first holiday there were others, usually business trips abroad on which Nancy accompanied him in the half-ironic role of personal assistant. She toured factories in Germany and Belgium at his side and typed letters in hotel suites in Berlin and Milan and even New York. For the rest of her life she would remember their Atlantic crossings aboard the Ile de France. The outward journey had co-incided with her thirtieth birthday and there had been nights of dancing and strolls on deck under the ocean stars.
On these journeys she altogether forgot the questions about class and status and even morality. She was with her life companion, and that was all.
They even developed a small circle of trusted friends. They saw Francis Lowell whenever he was in England, and others from Francis’s indefinable cadre of diplomats and travellers. She knew some of Gil’s business associates and even occasionally met their wives, although the women tended to be more reserved. In time Nancy introduced him to Jinny and Ann. The girls never properly warmed to him and Nancy thought it was because he took her away from them, rather than because they mistrusted his wealth or standing or took a moral view. Cornelius was the same. She never even tried to bring Gil together with Devil, or Lizzie Shaw. She didn’t think Lizzie would be capable of keeping their secret and Devil in his old age was increasingly combustible.
The two of them were most comfortable at Whistlehalt in Jake and Freddie’s worldly circle.
‘Of course Lion has a connection to our friends who are camping out in the fields,’ Mrs Templeton was saying.
The tears no longer threatened and Nancy dragged her gaze away from the fire.
‘He does?’
‘Yes, it’s one of the reasons why I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.’
Freddie appeared bearing a box of gaudy glass baubles. Nancy longed for the talk to shift to him and the tree and the tinselly rustle of approaching Christmas, or even the beef that Guillaume was proposing to roast for dinner. She most definitely did not want to hear what Lion’s aunt was about to say.
But there was no way to stop her.
‘I understand they are an odd cult of extreme parapsychics. Their leader is your friend Mr Feather, Lion’s godfather.’
Lawrence Feather, Lawrence Feather. The name roared like surf in her head.
He never disappeared, never. He dipped below the surface of her life until she believed he was really gone, and then each time he re-emerged it seemed that he had only been watching her and biding his time.
‘He’s not my friend,’ Nancy protested.
At last Mrs Templeton drove away in her little car. Guillaume was wobbling on a stepladder in the panelled hallway, two other boys were helping to secure the immense tree and Jake and Freddie competed with each other in the bossiness of their instructions. Nancy went up to her room to change. It was the bedroom she had been given on the first visit, overlooking the river that she hadn’t recognised as the Thames. She quickly drew the curtains on the spectre of who or what might be outside looking in. She didn’t feel sociable but nor did she want to be alone. She changed into a dress and ran downstairs again.
The tea tray had been replaced with cocktails. There was dance music on the gramophone, the fire had been built up and Jake’s guests were gathering for another evening.
A man she didn’t know, older than the others but still not out of place in the pansy bowl, held out a hand.
‘How do you do? You must be Eliza Dunlop’s girl, from the look of you?’
He was wearing a plum velvet smoking jacket with cigar ash powdering the lapels. Nancy acknowledged that she was her mother’s daughter after which the man dropped a heavy arm over her shoulders and steered her to a sofa. They sat down and he stuck out his short legs. He had a plump man’s small feet and he was clearly vain about them because his shoes were handmade, and exquisite.
‘George Gardiner,’ he introduced himself.
She didn’t recognise the name, although it seemed that she was meant to.
He explained that he was here to begin work on a portrait of Jake, and she recalled then that he was a painter best known for his pictures of Edwardian society beauties, hourglass figures in court dresses with ostrich feathers nodding in their hair.
‘Long ago I painted a prize portrait of Devil Wix,’ he told her, as if to deny this pigeonholing. He puffed out his broad chest. ‘It was rather fine. He was in his costume for some magic illusion, a cloak and a sword as I recall. I wonder what became of it?’
There had been a portrait, Nancy remembered, hanging in their long-ago house by the water in Islington. She couldn’t recall seeing it after the day she had come home to find Eliza piling up their belongings on the step and raging because Devil had sold their home to save the Palmyra.
The image was coming back to her – the heavy chiaroscuro, Devil’s scowling features made lasciviously handsome in a way she comprehended a little better now. The picture had been mysteriously damaged and restored, although the savage slashes in the canvas could never be fully repaired.
The portrait had not reappeared at Waterloo Street, but nor had Eliza arranged any of their other belongings in the cramped rooms. She had lost heart.
It made Nancy sad to think of it.
‘Were you a friend of my mother’s?’ she politely asked.
Mr Gardiner crossed and re-crossed his ankles, admiring the twinkle of lamplight on glacé shoe leather.
‘Ah, Eliza, yes. What a vision. Half the students at the Rawlinson School were in love with her. All the fellows who were susceptible to the ladies, that is. She was a life model as well as a student, you know. I hope I’m not telling you anything too terribly shocking?’
‘My mother loved to talk about it. Her life-modelling career was one of her very favourite topics.’
George Gardiner rumbled with laughter and folded his hands over the draped velvet.
‘You know young Alfie Egan, I think?’
Nancy did, in a way. Alfie became one of her admirers when she first took to the stage. He was a reedy young man with a fine, fair moustache who sent her flowers and shyly invited her to take supper with him. She had never encouraged him and he had long ago taken his mild devotion elsewhere.
‘Not very well.’
‘His late father, Charlie Egan, was my good friend.’
Sir Charles Egan RA was a more celebrated painter who had held out against the Cubist and Surrealist tides with large canvases titled The Emperor Hadrian’s Feast or Cleopatra Bathing with her Handmaidens.
‘Charlie bequeathed me a folder of his early work in memory of our student days. A gesture combining generosity and a certain vanity, which rather neatly conveys the man himself. Did you ever meet him?’
He was chuckling again, setting up a wobbling of his chin and jowls. Nancy relaxed a little. Guests at Whistlehalt were usually interesting or likeable, and Mr Gardiner was both.
‘No.’
‘Then let me tell you how I recognised you. In Charlie’s folder of sketches and doodles there is a life drawing of your mother, rather better executed than the others, which indicates that his attention might have been engaged.’
The painter’s hands outlined rounded shapes in the air.
‘Your resemblance to her is striking, even though you are …’
‘Dressed?’
He patted her knee.
‘We must meet up in town, and I will show it to you. Your father would like to see it, I’m sure. Do give him my regards, won’t you?’
She promised that she would, without adding that the message wouldn’t mean much to Devil.
After the drawn-out cocktail hour Guillaume and his friend called the guests to dinner. Nancy sat near the centre of the table and looked up and down at the gesticulating, smoking, gossiping actors and artists, catching the shreds of talk and teasing. Tonight Whistlehalt felt particularly like one of her multiplying series of compartments, separ-ate from the Palmyra stage and the quietly opulent restaurants of Mayfair, cut off from the creaking house in Waterloo Street and equally removed from the two rooms in Bloomsbury that she thought of as the heart of her existence.
She wondered if she was the only one to live this way, moving alone and endlessly from set to set like an actor always preparing for the big speech but never quite delivering it. She glanced up to find Jake gravely looking at her. She flicked him a smile and turned to beg a cigarette from Guillaume, making a point of talking and laughing as she smoked.
In the morning she felt thick-headed and lethargic. She had drunk too much in trying to dispel the feeling that something bad was about to happen. It wasn’t the Uncanny, but it was still a premonition that she couldn’t shake off.
Jake suggested a walk. Freddie rarely appeared before midday, and the house was quiet.
Nancy didn’t like the idea of the camp in the fields, nor did she want any glimpse of the soaking girl drifting at the margins of the woodland. But the landscape surrounding Whistlehalt was precious and she couldn’t allow the proximity of Lawrence Feather to cut her off from it. She set out with Jake, leaving footprints in the rime that powdered the terrace and making a dark trail across the frosted lawn. It was a white-skied morning, bitterly cold, without even a bird stirring. Their breath rose in plumes ahead of them.
Instead of dropping down through the trees Jake took the path that led along the ridge. There were fields broken up with copses and brambly coverts. A mile or two to the west the Templetons’ huge house lay in a grid of formal gardens.
‘Where are we going?’ Her voice was sharpened by apprehension.
Jake was surprised. ‘Nowhere in particular. Just a circuit.’
They climbed a stile and walked a diagonal path across a field.
‘Is something wrong? Are you thinking about the cult and Lion’s godfather?’
‘Not really.’
Jake knew she was lying. She shrugged off his concern with a few offhand words about the bad feeling that had never dispersed after she had left Feather’s management for the Palmyra, and about their professional rivalry. To mention Helena Clare and what her brother had done to her, or the childish apparition that Feather stirred up, went too deep into her bone marrow. She was a thing of secrets, she thought sadly. She tried comforting herself with the belief that most people were. More was unknown than ever would be admitted. Did she even know Gil through and through?
‘What else?’ Jake prompted.
They reached a five-barred gate. From the opposite corner of a rough field a thin plume of smoke wobbled in the still air.
She stopped and leaned on the gate. The timber was old and seamed and lichens grew in the cracks. She rubbed at the surface with a gloved thumb, grinding the surface into an ochre powder. She tried not to look across the field but she couldn’t help herself.
The camp was quite well established. There was an old green caravan at the centre of it, roofed in corrugated iron and with a tin chimney sticking up at an angle, and several rough tents and tarpaulins slung over timber frames were gathered around it in a loose circle. Smoke was rising from a brisk fire, and an old horse was tethered near the shelter of th
e hedge. She heard the tap-tap of a hammer on metal as if some machinery was being repaired.
She said quickly, ‘It’s nothing. Money worries, mostly. The Palmyra, Waterloo Street, Pa and Cornelius. I used to feel well off but I don’t any more. Does anyone these days?’
Across the field a man ducked from a tent and stooped over the fire. He wasn’t Feather but still she turned her back to the camp and pretended to study the view in the opposite direction.
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
There were wrinkles fanning from the corners of his eyes and his hair was more grey than brown, yet it was part of Jake’s chameleon quality that he never seemed to age – he could play an old man or a young lover or anything in between. His unobtrusive kindness was undiminished.
‘You’re a good friend. Honestly, Jake, it’s nothing. I just need to get the damned roof repaired at home and persuade you to read at the Palmyra a few more times.’
‘I’m going off to America again.’
‘Good. Make another film and become even more famous, then come back as quickly as you can. Shall we turn back now?’
It was important to get as far as possible from this eerie camp. She stuck her arm through Jake’s and steered him back the way that they had come. Later that afternoon he drove her to the station for the London train.
Jinny’s Christmas present to each of them was a yo-yo. Devil and Cornelius adored theirs from the moment they were unwrapped. Devil was naturally adroit, and in minutes he could make his spin horizontally and loop up in the air. Cornelius was far clumsier but he was fascinated by the play of forces on the wooden puck. Nancy had to prise the toys out of their hands to make them come to the table she had laid in the parlour for Christmas dinner. There was a tiny tree on the table in the window and ivy and holly tacked all round the picture rail. With a red tablecloth and a thick blast of heat from the fire the room was quite inviting.
Cornelius had recently assembled the components of a wireless set. He coaxed the dials until the King’s voice suddenly boomed out. Nancy imagined Gil at this exact moment, listening to the same words and being waited on in some cavernous drawing room filled with intimidating furniture.
