Susan Speers (29 page)

“Mrs. Simon is cook and housekeeper,” he said, as I shook her hand. “Very discreet,” he added when she closed the parlor door behind her. “No other servants but my groundskeeper and his idiot helper. Girls from the village come in to clean. He won’t find you here.”

“Thank you,” I was numb.

“Funny, I keep this place to foster clandestine affairs, and you just the opposite.”

“Why are you so kind to me?” I saw past his bluff humor.

“You have the look of my mother, Clarissa, and her mother before her.”

“That isn’t the only reason.”

“Peace is near, Clarry. Promise me you’ll come alive again when England does.”

I waved from the steps as he drove off.

I lived there like an animal in its hole, licking my wounds. I wrote to Genie and Amalia and Thérèse through my solicitor. If Jeremy approached them, they didn’t say. Archibald Mosely knew I’d left off writing and painting. He didn’t pester me.

I read the papers and heard the bells of the armistice. If Mrs. Simon thought I was quiet in the face of wild celebration, she made no comment. Every morning at ten a.m. she suggested I take a walk and I explored the estate. At the far end of Rutherford’s enclosed land I discovered a knot garden and a labyrinth.

I walked in circles and thought of Jeremy. I ate my meals and thought of Jeremy. My last thought at night was of Jeremy. Rutherford kept a good library and I read through Dickens again, tears coursing down my face. I put the volumes away after my solitary Christmas and began with Trollope. There was a spinet piano in the parlor but I never touched it.

*****

A brief line in one of the London papers let me know I could return to the city:
Mr. Jeremy Marchmont has left for Paris to assist the British delegates at Versailles
.

So he had left London and I could return. I quit my bolt hole with thanks for Mrs. Simon, who had a soft heart beneath her starched uniform, and the gardener who answered my endless questions. I only wished I could see the knot garden bloom, but it was time to go.

I was at the Savoy until Genie, now wed to her general, insisted I come stay with them.

“Herbert is back and forth to Paris and I would love the company,” she said. She didn’t tell me, not until I had settled in and been seduced by the pleasures of a well run London town home, that our publisher wanted her to encourage me to return to work.

“I’ve seen your enchanting stories,” Genie said. “You must get on with it.”

The long months in Dartford had helped me adjust to a world without Jeremy, as much as that was possible. When my heart quieted enough that I could think, Trollope’s excellent prose and the manicured gardens hidden behind high brick walls had piqued my imagination.

I wanted to write another story about Willow, about her lost love, Léon. I wanted it to be a novel. There were two empty rooms on the third floor of Genie’s home, one on either side of her husband’s study.

“I’m kitting this one out for me,” she said, in the room that looked out over the cobblestoned street. “I think the one over the garden will do for you.” Four town homes shared a locked half acre of natural plantings, benches and paths.

Genie and I would eat a hearty breakfast, work all day, then meet over tea. I liked my new life as much as I could like any life bereft of Jeremy. I tried not to think of him, but when that proved impossible, I only dwelt on him before I slept. I hoped to encourage happy dreams of the past, but that never happened. Instead, night after night, I explained at length why I gave him up. The Jeremy in my dreams turned his back and I woke in tears. This will fade, this will end, I told myself, but it didn’t.

Jeremy was in Paris. Rutherford, too, though he didn’t say why. Genie’s husband spent more and more time across the channel as peace negotiations intensified. On one of his rare sojourns in London, he accompanied us to a reception at the elegant mansion of a government minister. Genie teased me into buying a new dress for the occasion, blue and silver. Her maid threaded brilliants in my hair.

We entered a large salon, crowded with people still giddy from the armistice and the golden opportunities showered on those who made peace as victors. The horror and sorrow of the war were banished from social occasions, wearing black was considered very bad manners.

A string quartet played beside the gleaming ebony of a grand piano. During an intermission, a handsome man took his seat at the keyboard and fussed with the tails of his tuxedo. When he looked up, I smiled and felt my spine relax for the first time since I sat aboard the train from Hethering. Chase Gordon smiled back.

He was at my side before the last notes of the piano quintet faded from the echoing room.

“Clarissa,” he said. “I dream of you.”

“Don’t be silly, your name is on the lips of a thousand girls.”

“But on my lips, only one.
Cla – ri-ssa
.” He sang my name on three jazz notes and I burst out laughing. My laughter sounded rusty to me, but Chase roared in return.

“You look like a lady who needs a glass of champagne,” he said. He leaned closer. “You look like a lady who needs some fun.”

He was right, I wanted to have fun. I wanted the cares of the last five years to roll off my back. I drank three glasses of champagne in quick succession and danced with Chase until took me in to a midnight supper of smoked salmon and strawberries.

He brought me home in the early hours of the next day, and just after I fitted my key into the front door lock, he leaned forward and kissed me. “I mean that,” he said, stroking my cheek, “and I’m willing to wait until you mean it too.”

He never gave me time to think, but that was more than all right. I’d done enough thinking to last me a frivolous year or two. He took me to tea dances, he took me to parties, he took me to concerts, he was the center of a gay crowd who drank to enjoy, not to forget. For the first time, my name appeared in the society pages.

At the end of every giddy occasion, his smile turned serious before he kissed me and spoke words that touched my heart.

“I know you’re running from something, Clarissa,” he said one night. “I’d love it if you ran to me.”

He would leave me and sit at his piano through the night, alternating cups of black coffee and flutes of champagne as he composed. One song after another was published to great acclaim. “
A Lady Who Needs Some Fun
”, “
I’m Willing to Wait
”, “
Run to Me
”. I was half mortified, half flattered when we dined out to celebrate a new sale.

“What about trouncing Debussey? What about your serious music?” I scolded him.

“Clarry, when you’re falling in love you write love songs.” Was he truly sincere? Chase kept everything so light, I was never entirely sure, and his graceful touch suited me perfectly.

He had yet to ask if I’d conquered the composition he gave me, but I began to practice again. Not Chopin, just Chase’s music. When he asked me to play, I’d be ready.

*

One night, Chase and I were at a cocktail party that continued past midnight, the company was so congenial. Chase was teaching me to smoke a cigarette from the end of an elegant holder and I was tipsy enough to find it hilarious. Through a haze of smoke I saw a face I only just recognized, my old schoolmate, Daisy.

“I’d hardly know you, Clarry,” she said, her face to one side, watching me from cat’s eyes colored with cosmetics. “You’re always so proper.”

“There’s no benefit to proper,” I managed, before Chase pulled me away to dance.

An hour later she found me pinning up my hair in the ladies’ retiring room.

“You ought to bob that,” she said, brushing her own shining cap of dark curls.

“That’s not proper,” I laughed.

“I don’t grudge you your merriment,” she said. “Especially now Jeremy’s playing happy families again. I wonder if they’ll have another child? Their boy is sadly frail. An heir and a spare, you know.”

The smile slid from my lips.

“After all you did for him, too,” she said, “and I heard it was
all
. Chase will show you a good time.”

I turned away to find my evening bag. A gilded egg paved with crystals, why had I thought it beautiful? It was cold and hard like the rest of the world.

“Don’t get too attached to Chase, darling,” Daisy drawled. “I’ve marked him for mine.”

The salon’s French doors were open to the summer night. Chase was at the piano with a clutch of admirers. I left him a note with our hostess and took a taxicab home.

Chase called in the next morning. “How is your headache?” he asked.

“Better now,” I said.

“Daisy’s shrill voice will do that,” he said. “Don’t take her seriously. I never do.”

I poured him a cup of black coffee.

“Milk, I think, this morning,” he said. “Got to keep up my strength chasing you all over town.” His eyes fell on Genie’s baby grand piano. His music was on the rack. “Care to play for me?”

If he expected me to demur, I didn’t. I gave him the music to read, sat down on the bench and played
Landsdowne
from memory.

Chase’s smile was broad and sweet. “Well done,” he said, and came to sit beside me. “What made you choose that particular tempo?”

I played it again, slowly, with many suspended notes, I played it in a minor key, I played it in cut time. “There’s a lot of music in this piece,” I said.

“How can you know it better than I?” He took my hands and kissed them. “Day after day, I see you more clearly. I believe you’re the one for me.”

“
Day after Day
” was his biggest hit yet in England and America, but what pleased me more is that he began serious composing again, and he played those notes for me first.

*****

One afternoon, my muse abandoned me and I couldn’t set down two words that made sense. I left off unsatisfactory doodles in my sketchbook to find my coat and head out for a walk. This will clear the cobwebs, I thought, as I ran smack into Rutherford Dane.

“I was just coming to see you,” he shouted after he set me back on my feet. A dog began to bark. “Thought we might have tea in your fancy digs.”

What Genie or her dignified husband might think of my uncle, I couldn’t imagine and had scant interest in discovering. “Walk with me, Rutherford,” I said. “My work is going badly and I need a change of scene.”

“I’ve an idea,” he said, once the frown from being denied cream cake had left his brow. “Meant to do this before. Come for a drive?”

He displayed a fine disregard for the complexities of London traffic, but we made it to our destination without actually killing anyone. I looked up at the august stone face of the National Portrait Gallery.

“I’ve something to show you,” he said, his firm grip on my elbow propelling us up two wide staircases. “Don’t like the thought of you in London without family while I’m abroad.”

We sat down on a carved stone bench in front of a wall of portraits. “Look up, Clarissa. There she is.”

There I was. In an elaborate gold painted wood frame, wearing a gauzy regency gown, I stood in a natural pose on a balcony that overlooked the grounds of a vast estate.

“Who is that?” I asked Rutherford, and stood to approach the wall. The portrait was hung so high, though, the best view was from the bench, so I sat back down.

“She’s your great grandmother, Lady Anne Wealing.”

“We are very much alike.”

“I can’t speak for every detail,” he said, his gaze fixed on Lady Anne’s near invisible drapery, “but your great granny and you could be twin sisters.”

I treated Rutherford to tea at the Ritz.

*****

Chase brought me to a benefit recital for war widows and orphans. He would debut
Landsdowne
, then segue into his popular songs. I’d never seen him nervous, but after we arrived at Lord Dagenham’s London home, he got jittery. He obsessed on finding me just the right seat in the third floor ballroom, now fitted with a performer’s dais and several hundred chairs.

“You don’t have to sit through the whole dreary programme, darling,” he said. “Stay long enough to lead my applause then make an excuse.”

The air in the ballroom was stuffy, and once Chase played, I was glad to escape. Lord Dagenham had borrowed one of my new watercolors, a fanciful children’s knot garden, to hang in his lounge. I walked down the corridor to find it, a room with walls of glass panes draped in thick velvet hangings for privacy.

Inside, a solid wall held a number of botanical prints and paintings, each with its own electric picture light. Mine was in the corner nearest the window, as if yearning for real sunshine. I reached out a finger to trace its curved paths, the little black haired boy, the toddling baby with her red gold curls.

“Is no memory safe from you?”

I didn’t whirl around, though I wanted to. For a moment I inhaled to breathe his exhaled breath. I let my ears savor the echo of a voice I heard only in dreams.

When I turned I saw him, very tall, very distinguished, sitting in a wing chair moved from the fireplace to face the corner by the window.

“Good God, Jeremy,” I said.

“I’m afraid I don’t agree with that characterization.” His voice was cold, his eyes were dull. He looked at a point just past my shoulder.

“I didn’t know you’d come back —” I said, then stopped and flushed.

“Or you’d go to ground again? You needn’t have hidden from me in Dartford, Clarissa. I didn’t pursue you.”

“I understand,” I said. He was very angry.

“Did you go to meet me that last day?” His thin voice seemed indifferent.

I shook my head no. But he knew that. Why ask?

“I suppose that’s best. I didn’t come either. In the end, you were right, my son’s claim was paramount.”

He didn’t want me to know he’d sat on the bench waiting for me. He wanted to hurt me as I had hurt him. He succeeded.

“You despise me now?” My breath shuddered in my chest. My heart ached. “You said you’d always — care about me.”