by Caro Fraser
No one answered his knock at the door, so eventually he turned the handle and went in. The door opened straight into what was Nell’s sitting room, a comfortable clutter of rugs and sofas and books. A large wooden table under the window was heaped with a tangle of fabrics, sketches, skeins of thread. Leo looked around uncertainly in the silence and then walked towards the door beneath the stair that led to the kitchen. As he went through, the door at the rear of the house opened and Nell came in from the back garden, wiping her plump hands on the edge of her caftan. She saw Leo framed in the doorway, and stopped in surprise.
‘Good God!’ She came forward, moving a chair aside and stepping closer to him. ‘Well, you’re a stranger.’
He leant forward and kissed her cheek. Like a soft, withered peach, he thought. He remembered how tight and smooth her skin had been twenty-six years ago, how sunburnt. She had been slender then, but with that fullness around the breasts and hips which promised what he saw now. Gone to seed, he thought. All that lovely, warm ripeness had swollen to fullness, to soft folds of flesh hidden beneath her caftan. Still pretty, though, with that wispy blonde hair, only faintly touched with grey, escaping from the cotton headband wound round her head. She looked like some exotic, overblown relic of the sixties. Which, of course, was what she was.
And Nell thought, how expensive he always smells. How desirable. It ached her to see how handsome he had become, how assured and elegant. Maturity became him. He had got better-looking with age, while she, she knew, was beyond reclaim. But she did not betray any of her thoughts. It was not part of the image which Nell projected to the world. Nell did not care. Nell was strong, independent, her own person. It doesn’t matter what you look like, she told people, it’s what’s inside that counts. And people would say, isn’t Nell marvellous? She’s really comfortable with herself, she doesn’t care what people think. But what Nell thought, at moments like this, was, God, give me back my youth. Just an hour of being what I once was, so that this man might want me, might undress me and I could let him look at me and love me without shame.
‘You look more like something from “Man in Vogue” every time I see you, Leo,’ she said, eyeing him from top to toe. ‘Cup of tea?’ She edged away towards the sink, her loose silk moccasins shuffling on the stone floor. ‘Or what about some whisky?’
‘I’m driving,’ replied Leo with a smile.
‘Stay for lunch,’ said Nell quickly.
‘All right. Thanks. Whisky, then.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Eleven-thirty is just about civilised.’
Nell grunted and turned to the cupboard. ‘You don’t have to worry about that out here. You’re not in London now. I drink what I like, when I like. Get out of it, cat!’
Leo watched as she fetched the half-full bottle and two glasses. He loved Nell for the fact that she behaved in such a matter-of-fact manner. No twittering greetings of welcome, no gushing surprise. Just two glasses of whisky and normal conversation.
They sat and talked, mulling over the doings of mutual friends from Cambridge, the whisky warming them gradually, their eyes growing less wary of one another. It must always be at the back of our minds, thought Leo. Even when we’re eighty, if we meet, we’ll look at one another and think, ‘You were my first lover,’ and recall how it happened and how it was. Timeless. And yet we shall never mention it to one another now. It’s too precious to touch.
‘I’ll tell you why I came,’ said Leo after a while. ‘I mean, apart from wanting to see you,’ he added, while she gave a grimace of disbelief. ‘I wanted to buy one of your pieces. Something as a present for someone.’ She looked at him in faint surprise. ‘You do still make jewellery?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, nodding. She drained the last of her whisky. ‘I was in the workshop when you arrived. Come on out and have a look.’ She rose and Leo followed her out through the chilly, weedy yard to a low stone shed. They stepped inside, into warm air perfumed with paraffin. Nell went over to the workbench beneath the window. ‘Have a look,’ she said, then turned and fetched some pieces from a small safe below the table. Leo noticed the fleshy spread of her hips against the cotton folds of her dress as she bent, and thought of Rachel’s pale, slender body, its cool skin.
She spread the silver jewellery out on rolls of cotton wool and he examined each in turn. ‘You do beautiful work,’ he murmured. ‘It’s very fine.’
She watched him, saw the way the white winter light glinted on his hair, and wondered, with fleeting pain, why things changed, why time was so cruel, so unfair. She wished Leo had not come. She knew how she would feel when he had gone.
Leo picked up a slender necklace of silver leaves, each different from the other, and held it up to the light. ‘I like this,’ he said.
Nell gave a lopsided smile. ‘You always did like the most expensive things,’ she said.
Leo unfastened the tiny catch, put the necklace around Nell’s neck and held it there. It lay against the crêpy swell of her bosom, the tiny furls of the leaves shining against her reddened skin. Nell felt suddenly horribly self-conscious. I am so big, she thought, I am so changed. And yet, I’m not. I’m still me inside. It was all she could do not to put her arms around him and hold him to her.
Leo eyed the necklace, imagining how it would look around Rachel’s neck, lying against her soft, translucent skin.
‘I want this,’ he said, removing the necklace from around Nell’s squat neck. ‘And because I’m disgustingly rich, you can add a couple of hundred to the price. To show how much I love and admire you.’
‘You’re an arrogant bastard,’ said Nell mildly, taking the necklace from him to polish it gently before wrapping it up for him.
‘Do you sell much?’ asked Leo, as they left the workshop and went back across the yard to the house.
‘A fair amount,’ said Nell. ‘I make a good living, anyway. And the tapestries sell, too.’
Nell made them lunch of smoked mackerel and salad, and they talked more generally, argued even. The afternoon crept on.
‘I’ll have to go,’ said Leo at last, ‘if I’m to get back to London by this evening.’
Nell picked up their plates and took them to the sink. When she turned round, Leo was writing out a cheque. He tore it from his chequebook and handed it to her.
‘That’s twice what I would sell it for,’ said Nell, looking at the cheque.
‘That’s what I think it’s worth,’ replied Leo, smiling and tucking his pen into his pocket.
‘What you think she’s worth, you mean,’ said Nell wryly.
Leo said nothing for a moment, then, his face expressionless, replied, ‘No – what it’s worth, I’m afraid.’
‘At any rate,’ she said, following him to the door, ‘you’re back to girls now, are you? You want to make your mind up, Leo.’ She tried to keep her voice mild and chiding, but there was a note of sourness in it.
With a small sigh Leo turned and said, ‘Thank you for lunch, my love. And thank you for the pretty necklace.’
She pursed her lips, folded her arms, preparing to watch him leave, and for the afternoon to envelop her in melancholy.
‘Come by more often,’ she said. She wanted to know about the woman for whom Leo had bought the necklace, just as she wanted to know about all the people, the great chain of them down the years, starting with Christopher, who had taken her first love further and further away from her. But she could not. She watched as his car disappeared over the brow of the hill, thinking, wrongly, that Leo, and that day under the trees near the river, was the reason why she was where she was now, and why things had turned out the way they had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Not surprisingly, Mr Lamb did not appear in the office on the day after the Nichols & Co Christmas party. And during the first week of the New Year he was still absent. Word began to get round that he had three broken ribs as well as a broken nose, and wouldn’t be back for another week. Good, thought Felicity; he was a pig and he deserved it. But she felt twi
nges of apprehension. What would happen when he came back? No one had said anything to her about her transfer to the computer department, so she thought it best to sit tight and draw her wages until something happened.
‘I thought you was going to another department after Christmas?’ Louise remarked one afternoon, as she and Felicity stood by the coffee machine.
‘So did I,’ replied Felicity vaguely. ‘But no one’s said anything.’
Rachel, too, was perplexed. She had hoped to have a new and rather more competent secretary in the New Year, but still Felicity sat there opposite her VDU, committing cardinal errors of spelling and grammar, tottering here and there on her spike-heeled shoes, misfiling, mislaying and chattering cheerfully.
‘Felicity,’ said Rachel at the end of the first week of January, ‘what arrangements did Mr Lamb make, exactly, for transferring you?’
Felicity, who was wrestling with a stapler and two thick bundles of documents, glanced up.
‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘He’s still off, and no one’s said anything, so I’m just carrying on here till he gets back. There. One for you, one for the file,’ she added, stacking the bundles together.
‘Oh, I see.’ Rachel didn’t want to approach the other partners about it, since she had the feeling that this was being done without their knowledge. She could do nothing but put up with Felicity’s atrocious typing.
But Rachel had more on her mind than work and the office. That night she was seeing Leo for the first time since he had come back from Wales. After the flat days of the holiday spent with her mother in Bath, life suddenly seemed full of rich and beautiful purpose once more. The thought of him, the fact of him, blotted out everything else. No one, no one, had ever been so much and so gloriously in love as she was. And she could see him that evening, if the slow hours ever passed.
Leo, however, was not in the same mood of happy anticipation. The early part of the year always tended to depress him slightly, and the feeling was exacerbated by the absence of William from chambers. Everyone was affected. Henry, competent and brisk though he was, was struggling beneath the doubled workload of trying to organise the working lives of all the members of chambers, and although they were patient and understanding with him, tempers had begun to fray and there was discord in the normally harmonious atmosphere. Even the typists, without Mr Slee’s firm shepherding, were argumentative and bitchy.
Sir Basil, in particular, was morose and gloomy without his head clerk; he had not realised how much he valued the fact of William’s contemporaneity, the sense that, throughout the years, he and William were the stout senior bulwarks of chambers. Now the balance had shifted. William’s heart attack had been an intimation of mortality. William was growing old. So was Sir Basil. His practice, too, was not what it had been. He was conscious that he lacked the energy, and often the enthusiasm, which some of his weightier cases demanded. Roderick Hayter and Cameron now seemed busier than ever, taking much of the prestigious work which would once have gone to Sir Basil. Financially, Sir Basil knew that it was no longer necessary for him to maintain the high level of his practice. He could retire – but to what? What was there for him besides the law? He had no wife or children, no outside interests. He was the head of chambers, and 5 Caper Court, he told himself, needed him. It would totter without him. Just look at how things fell into disarray without William.
Leo, too, was surprised at how much he missed William and the daily reassurance of his familiar, avuncular presence in the clerks’ room. Unlike Sir Basil, however, Leo knew that things would gradually right themselves, that chambers would adjust to the loss of William, temporary or permanent. That was the way things went. Nonetheless, he felt dispirited by the change. It seemed to him further evidence that his world was betraying him. His life seemed to have altered radically, so that he scarcely recognised it. Before last autumn, before he had applied to take silk, he had had no misgivings about his career, had been plagued by no self-doubts. He had performed his work with the utmost energy, aware of his talents, confident of success, and had lived his own private life exactly as he pleased, away from the eyes of others. Now each day brought a new uneasiness; his self-perception was altered. Everything, it seemed to him – his ego, his reputation, his prospects for the next twenty-five years – now depended upon whether or not he took silk. If he failed this year, there would be no point in trying again. There could be only one reason for failure, and that reason would damn his chances for ever. He could no longer view with equanimity the disparate strands of his life, private and personal. All that was gone.
And what private life did he now possess? he asked himself, as he made his way downstairs at the end of the day. Rachel. Nothing but Rachel. Pure charade staged for public benefit, designed to convince the world at large of his orthodoxy, his safety, his harmlessness.
He reached his car and, as he unlocked it, caught sight of Anthony crossing from Inner Temple library to Bouverie Street. His figure seemed more manly, thought Leo, less boyish now. His step was assured, unhurried; he walked as one in complete possession of his world. When I am sixty, thought Leo, Anthony will be at his peak, successful, brilliant. All the things I am supposed to be now. For a moment he thought of locking the car again, catching up with Anthony … He suddenly recalled the intensity of feeling they had once shared, and was touched by a sense of loss. Their relationship now was one of only the vaguest politeness.
Leo watched Anthony disappear round the corner, and then got into the car and flung his briefcase onto the passenger seat. He switched on the engine and stared for a moment at the dashboard. I am on my way, he told himself, to spend the evening with someone for whom I feel nothing, when all I would like to do is to spend it with that young man, to sit and watch him, talk to him, enjoy him. No, that was not fair, he thought, as he backed the car out and drove through to Middle Temple Lane. He did feel something for Rachel. How could anyone spend so much time with someone and not feel affection? She was sweet, she was flawless, she was loving, but the habit of her company oppressed him.
In spite of his morose thoughts and misgivings, he was startled, when she opened the door of her flat, by how fresh and lovely she looked. He had quite forgotten. Some trick of his mind managed to make her image insipid when he was away from her, but the reality was quite different. She was wearing jeans, a white woollen sweater with a low neck, and her hair was pinned up loosely.
‘You look like Audrey Hepburn,’ he remarked, kissing her reflectively, then putting his arms around her.
She breathed a sigh of relief, snuggled against him, and murmured, ‘Hello. Oh, hello, hello, hello …’
The last two weeks seemed to her the longest she had ever known, but now he was here, and she was safe and happy. So happy that she wanted to tell him how much she loved him. She looked up into his face, marvelling, as she always did, at the perfection of it, its angles, the blueness of his eyes, the distant, musing warmth of his smile. But one did not say those things to someone like Leo. Instead, she simply kissed him again.
Leo allowed himself to be kissed, then disengaged himself from her embrace and took his coat off. She followed him into the sitting room, and he was suddenly conscious of a faint sense of claustrophobia. Such a female domain, he thought. He needed a drink.
‘Have you any whisky?’ he asked. ‘I could do with one. Long January days.’
He sat down on the sofa and watched as she poured him a careful Scotch from one of the neat array of bottles which stood on the little rosewood cabinet. Her fingers looked thin and white against the glass. So fastidious, he thought. He wished she would just splash it carelessly into the glass instead, wished the room were more disordered and relaxed. Both Rachel and the room gave one the feeling that they had been poised, waiting, beautiful and breathless, for his arrival. He thought of Nell, and smiled suddenly.
She turned with his drink and caught the smile. ‘What?’ she asked.
He looked up at her. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just pleased to be here.
’ He watched as she crossed the room and set his drink down beside him, then said, honestly, ‘I had forgotten how beautiful you were.’ She smiled her slow, grave smile. ‘Are,’ he added. She went back to pour herself a drink and he pulled the packet containing Nell’s necklace from his pocket and set it down on the table.
‘For you,’ he said, pointing to it as she sat down. ‘A belated Merry Christmas.’
She glanced at him, then picked the packet up tentatively and unwrapped the layers of tissue paper, unrolling the cotton wool. She held the necklace up to the light and gazed at it, entranced.
‘Leo, it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she added, as she fastened it around her neck, then drew her hand across the tiny leaves glinting at her throat. No, thought Leo, perhaps I shouldn’t. Another one of the indissoluble little ties, an added weight in the chain. But in spite of his thoughts he suddenly fished in his jacket pocket for the photographs he had brought from his mother’s house.
‘I thought these might amuse you,’ he said, and tossed the envelope into her lap.
She drew the pictures out and studied them one by one, laughing occasionally.
‘Oh, I wish I had known you then,’ she murmured, gazing at a young, dark-haired Leo smiling crookedly into the sun. He watched the childlike pleasure on her face, and wondered for the hundredth time how he was to bring this to an end in a few months’ time. ‘Just think,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘when you were seventeen, I’d only just been born.’
It would be an utter relief, he told himself. He had never lived so constantly in the company of any woman before, and it astonished him that anyone managed to endure marriage. She is like a long, cool glass of some health-giving drink, he thought. And oh, how he longed for a draught of some swift, brutal and intoxicating passion. The way it had been before. When this was over, it could all go back to the way it had been before. But as she looked up, laughing, holding up a picture of Leo in baggy bermudas and a straw hat, standing next to a punt with Christopher, he realised that the prospect of destroying her trust and affection was appalling. He had not bargained for so much love. Just an affair, an easy affair, something which could be lightly discarded in due course. That was all he had intended. And now he had this.
