by Jane Healey
“What’s wrong?” she asked as I entered. She was standing by her dressing table, putting on earrings—and even that little motion, the intimacy of watching her do her toilette, seemed to floor me.
I shut the door behind me but kept a hand on the doorknob, squeezing it painfully.
“There’s something between us, isn’t there?” I said to her, before my bravery could abandon me, every word shaking. “Or am I just a fool, embarrassing myself?”
She shook her head, and every inch of me hung on that very movement. “You’re not a fool, Hetty. Or if you are, then I am too,” she said, with a tremulous smile.
“I want—” I bit my lip and swallowed the words I could not say. “I want—” I said again, and she walked over to me, and my breath suddenly caught in my lungs. She was close now, a look of sympathy and hope on her face, close enough to fill my vision with only her. I glanced between her lips and her eyes as our faces inched toward each other, almost but not quite meeting, and then I kissed her, and her lips were soft and damp, and she twined a hand in my hair and kissed me back, the both of us gasping, making small animal noises into each other’s mouths.
It was as if I were kindling that had been lit by her touch and she had joined me in the flames, we could not slow down, we could not stop as I tugged off her blouse and she pulled off mine. My hands fumbled on the catch of her skirt as she kissed me and smeared her lips across to my neck, sucking at the skin as her own hands scrabbled at my trousers, and then we were falling down on the silk quilt of the bed, plucking off our stockings and socks, shifting camisoles and knickers out of place, kissing breathlessly, laughing into each other’s mouths as we wove our bodies together.
I touched her then as I had always wished to be touched, with lips and tongue and hands and fingers, and she touched me back. We whispered secrets to one another, we looked at each other in shared amazement, and then I tucked my face into the curve of her neck as we brought each other to climax, our bodies wedged together, wet and warm and shivering.
* * *
“Is it mad of me to say that I think I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you, standing in your traveling clothes in the middle of the drawing room?” she asked, several hours after we should have been at dinner. We were sharing some of the chocolate she had hidden away in her room, licking and nipping at each other’s fingers.
“I don’t think so. I remember the first time I saw you too, how beautiful I thought you were, how singular,” I replied, my head propped up on her stomach. I could not believe how natural this felt with her, lying naked with one another. Perhaps it was because we were both women, that her body was only a mirror to mine.
“You know,” she said, “no matter what the war brings, I am happy that it brought me you.”
I turned my head so that my ear was pressed against her skin and I could hear all the noises of her insides, the echo of her heart thrumming away. I wanted to believe in what she said, but I knew nothing of what war was really like, what horrors might ensue, and I did not trust this house to leave us unscathed. “We’ll be safe here at Lockwood, safe together,” I said, and tried not to notice that it sounded less like a promise and more like a plea.
Twenty-Nine
What a funny-looking monkey,” one of the new maids said, squinting at the spotted cuscus posed on top of a cabinet of elephant bones, with its folded hands and patterned woolly coat.
She was the second new starter that July, and was more schoolgirl than maid. I did not wager she would last long at Lockwood, partly for her dreaminess and partly because of the way she spent so long in the museum’s rooms gazing at the animals—a habit that I certainly could not begrudge her.
“It’s actually a marsupial, not a monkey,” I said. “It was caught in northern Australia. They’re nocturnal, and you can tell this one is male because of the colors of its coat.”
“It almost looks like sheepskin, the coat,” she said, nodding toward the animal and its beady black eyes.
“It’s a little softer than that,” I said, but did not encourage her to touch it as I would if Lucy had asked the question instead.
The maid was perfectly pleasant but she was not the company I wanted for these few precious free hours before dinner. I glanced across the billiards room at Lucy, and she and I shared a sympathetic look. Our thoughts were as attuned as our bodies were now—we needed only a glance, the twitch of a smile, or a raised eyebrow, to say myriad things—a fortunate turn of affairs because there seemed to be so many hours of the day we had to share with others, when we had to content ourselves with these looks and smiles, with a few carefully chosen words concealed in polite conversations, rather than the freedom we had when we were finally alone together, in those few hours we could steal when the rest of the house was asleep.
“I’m glad they’re safe here,” the maid said with a nod toward the large-spotted genet in his cabinet. “I wouldn’t rate their chances in London; my mother says the city is going to be leveled, that there won’t be a building standing.”
“I’m sure it won’t be as bad as that,” Lucy said.
The new locks on the museum doors seemed to have done the trick, for no intruder had made their way in, and every morning when I opened the doors, I found not a hair out of place on any animal. But it did not stop my worry, the fear that still kept me awake on those nights I was apart from Lucy, or the nightmares I suffered when I finally snatched an hour or two of sleep.
Over the last month, I had prepared my excuses were I to be found on the way to or from Lucy’s room. I might be returning a book, or a borrowed pair of earrings, or I might simply be coming to talk to her—for close female friends could talk at any hour of the day, surely? There was no real reason for Lucy and me to hide, and there was nothing about our public countenances that might reveal we were anything but good friends. But this was a new world and I did not know its rules, the way things were done—what did other women like us do to hide their relationship, to keep it safe? Were there other women exactly like us? It did not feel as though there could be; we seemed to be in our own singular world apart, discovering a newfound land together.
Lucy needed to see the cook and so she and I made our silent goodbyes in the hallway, as if we were heading for separate parts of the country and not different corners of the house, our hands meeting with a featherlight touch before she strode off, and even that slight brush of skin on skin inflamed me. I thought about the previous night, when we had tumbled down on her bed and pulled the covers around us, burrowing into a hot den with only our hands to guide the way.
Lately, the only time I felt solid, real, was when I was with Lucy, and when I was not with her, every other concern and fear came pressing in, the walls of the house seeming to narrow, my jaw tightening with anxiety. It was my nightly journey back from her room to mine, alone, that I hated most of all—descending the spiral staircase to the first floor of the west wing in the pitch black and then traversing the long, hushed corridor to the lonely east wing and my room, with the meager light from the entrance hall downstairs to guide my way. I hated it because it seemed a symbol of my solitary future, of the day I would have to leave Lucy for good, but also because I could not shake the feeling that there was someone watching me, following me along the corridor, their eyes glinting in the dark, their footsteps silent. Each time when I reached my bedroom door and looked back, I expected to see a flicker of movement in the gloom at the other end of the corridor, a figure slipping out of sight, and each time I saw only darkness. It was my own mind that was haunting me now, not a ghost or an intruder.
* * *
After the rains of July ended, a blue-skied hot August arrived which—when accompanied by the grim news that spilled forth every evening from the wireless—had the effect of making everyone want to live in the now, to take pleasure where we could. This could be the last summer, the last heat on our skin, the last sip of water warmed by the sun, the last crunch of dry grass underneath our toes, the last warm nigh
t, the last warm day. I took any excuse to spend time outside away from the house, staring with tired eyes at the blue of the sky or the lush green of the garden foliage, trying to ignore the gray towers of Lockwood looming at the corners of my vision.
One week, the Major was away again and the housekeeper was visiting her sister, and there was a holiday atmosphere in the house. The wireless and the record player hummed loudly throughout the day, the new French maid, Josephine (whose long lashes reminded me of the stripes on a chipmunk’s face), sunbathed for an hour after lunch, and Paul was found kissing a village girl in the pantry and scolded laughingly by Dorothy, who pushed the rumpled girl out of the house with her broom.
I ranged the gardens with Lucy, watching her freckles bloom, noticing that the tips of her hair had lightened ever so slightly; lying in the shade of trees, having picnics out on the grass. We swam in the lake too, lying on our backs gazing heavenward while the lip of the water danced across our skin. We picked flowers and tried weaving them into crowns, and when the sun had set and the gardens emptied of every other human soul, we crept out now and then under the dark of blackout, unseen by all but the animals—the prancing foxes, the cats, the nocturnal birds—and kissed in the walled garden, loved one another under the willow tree, and lay on the grass staring at the stars, holding each other’s hand and squeezing at odd intervals as if to say, Here I am, with you.
One night I asked her if she was scared of being outside at night without a torch, but she said that even with a new moon it was lighter outside than a dark room ever was, that the stars were always there to light the way.
“There are no walls here,” she said, sweeping one arm out, “just wind and grass and life going on forever. Perhaps I wouldn’t have nightmares if I never had to go inside,” she mused, then cut her eyes to mine ruefully, “but there are some things that are probably best done in one’s bedroom.”
Since her turret bedroom was so high, and the grounds of Lockwood vast, it was impossible for us to be seen as long as we did not stand directly in front of the windows, and there was something thrilling about leaving the curtains open in the bright summer evenings, pushing the blankets back from the bed as we made love, the flowers we had brought inside turning the room into an indolent hothouse. And when dusk arrived and I saw her face draw tight with nerves, I would quickly close the blackout curtains and then usher her upstairs to her bathroom with its crystal lamps, where we shared the large bath and I saw her tension ease in the warmth of the water as the walls of the room perspired with steam, our fingers pruning as we dozed off and then woke with a start, chilled and stuck to one another’s skin, before clambering down the metal staircase to her bedroom and the silken sheets and soft pillows that awaited us as I tried to prolong those blissful hours.
“If we lived in our own house, our own little flat, then we wouldn’t have to duck and hide from servants”—from your father, I thought, but did not say—“we could have breakfast in bed together and frolic about the house as we liked,” I said to her at three o’clock one morning, my voice thick with tiredness.
Lucy only smiled a little sadly in response to my daydreaming aloud. We did not speak much of the future, and in that regard I suppose we were like many of the couples that had come together in wartime, determined to grab happiness where we could without thinking of what might be ahead, but we had the added complication of our shared sex, of it being quite impossible to marry or buy a house together or do any of the things ordinary couples might aspire to do once peace reigned again.
* * *
In the meantime, the war was as easy to forget as a background hum, a kind of odd season, something I could do nothing about, until the day we saw our first German plane roaring across the sky, its sleek sides splitting the world into before and after just as it sliced through the air like some apex predator; perfectly, lethally, adapted to its environment.
Lucy and I were together in her bedroom listening to her record player, which she had retrieved from the drawing room, talking about Gone with the Wind, which we had chanced a visit to see, when we heard the strange tinny echo of the air-raid siren in the village and then, moments later, the whining roar of Lockwood’s own siren kicking in. As we panicked and fumbled about, we glanced out the window and saw the plane, its engine noise a rumbling bass underneath the siren, and we scrambled down and down the stairs until we finally found our way to the basement, where every other member of the Lockwood household was huddling.
“Did you see it?” Paul asked. “The plane?”
“I did,” I said.
“So did I,” Lucy said, clutching the torch she had brought with her between her hands, glancing at the old-fashioned wall lights that lit the basement.
“We don’t have any antiaircraft guns in the village, do we?” Dorothy said morbidly. “We’re sitting ducks.”
“I’m sure he’s just passing through, looking for a more interesting target than an old country house,” Paul said. We tried not to think about the damage, the loss of life, that might ensue at someplace that was more interesting to the Germans.
“There’s an RAF station forty miles away, they’ll be heading for that, or the ports on the coast,” the housekeeper said, as if the rest of us were very foolish.
The all-clear sounded and we emerged from the gloom into a bright summer afternoon that looked for a moment like some kind of large theater backdrop, until we rearranged our minds to make space for the new experience of daytime air raids.
The siren sounded once more that day and once again at night, but no other plane was seen. We learned the next day of the massive raids across the country on the airfields and RAF bases—the Luftwaffe numbering a thousand planes, like some ravenous migrating flock—and of the bravery of our own men fighting against them in the air.
Thus began the new normal of air raids, increasingly confined to the long hours of night which seemed to become ever longer with the anxiety, as the Germans graduated from attacking airfields to factories, from ports to cities and towns. And then the Blitz in London began, and as I lay awake in bed, my body trembling with fear that I knew had little to do with the war, I thought of the millions there and I would tell myself to buck up, to get this madness under control, that I had no right to true terror, given I was living in such luxury, so far from a major metropolis.
The basement shelter was a great equalizer, holding as it did the servants, the lady of the house, the assistant keeper of the museum, the farmer and his wife, the gardeners, and even passing tradesmen. The only person who did not join us was Lord Lockwood himself—or any women he had visiting him. On one occasion we emerged from our subterranean lair to the sound of the wireless blazing and feminine laughter and masculine merriment, as if the Major had forgotten that other people lived in the house with him, so long had we been underground.
It was a woman called Sylvia who seemed to receive the most invitations now, and who Lucy seemed at best lukewarm about. She was dark, like the photos I had seen of Lucy’s mother, and only twenty-two, and I decided that her face reminded me of that of a harp seal, despite the fact she obviously did not have whiskers.
“Is it awkward for you, having Sylvia staying here?” I asked one Sunday afternoon as we sat on the terrace in the sun, watching as Sylvia walked the gardens arm in arm with the Major, her face turned upward to look at him as if he was some wondrous painted ceiling in a church and not just a middle-aged bore of a man.
“A little, but I’m thankful at least that it isn’t Mary,” she said, blowing cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth. “It was too odd to have someone I once played with as a child move in as my father’s companion.”
“Quite,” I said, as she passed me a cigarette and our fingers met with a fizz of sensation.
The Major looked over at us then and I took my hand back quickly and fumbled with the lighter.
I used to hate him because of how tyrannical he was, how he mocked me, but now there was a note of fear too when I crossed his p
ath, as if he might look at me and know what I was doing with his daughter, as if he might write to tell the museum that I was a degenerate who had taken advantage of his hospitality in the most sordid of ways.
Although Lucy seemed resigned about the Major’s parade of younger women, she was not so sanguine about his refusal to take shelter with the rest of us, and I could tell sometimes by the quiet pain on her face that she brooded on it often. She had arguments with him that the rest of us pretended not to hear, embarrassed by the naked fear in her voice when set against the easy nonchalance of his.
“He is so stubborn,” she told me one evening, biting her nails. “He will get himself killed, and all for hubris. All because he says he survived the last war and so the Germans aren’t going to kill him here at home, as if daring them to.”
I tried to console her but my heart was not quite in it—not that I wanted him to die, I was not that craven, but I did not see the point in trying to argue with him or to sway him from his foolish actions. And anyway, if a bomb did drop straight on us, would it not be possible that all of us in the basement would die too? This was a notion I tried desperately to forget, to brush away like a spot of smut on the fabric of my mind.
Every hour spent in the basement I would sit there, on one of the sofas that had been moved down for our comfort, and stare at Lucy’s hand next to me, the shadow of it, half wishing that we might hear a plane and then I would be allowed to touch it, to clutch her to me, because intimacy was allowed in moments of great fear when all the barriers of propriety broke down.
The other half of my mind was upstairs with my animals, slipping down the long gallery, nudging into rooms, past cabinets and boxes, my chest fluttering in anticipation. It was indeed likely that we would survive down here in the cellars, as long as someone came to dig us out, but the animals would be destroyed by a direct hit—all those many years of work and the tender hands of museum workers, blown to pieces, all those rare specimens that could not be found again. And then what would historians and scientists discover in the future on this very spot, I found myself thinking—bones of lions and bears and whales; skins of tigers, wolves, and giraffes; fish scales, feathers, ostrich eggs; but no human skeletons. It would be as if this house had been populated by the wildest of animals, an ark of the rarest creatures left to drift alone, while all the people had long since fled, leaving them to their sorry fates.
