‘We can take the yacht to Cowes in August,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You too, Eugene, if you’re still with us.’
‘Oh,’ said Thea, ‘do you mean to abandon the cause for the high life, Henry?’ She carried a sliver of terrine up to her mouth, placed it in and chewed. The combination of chicken, tarragon and aspic was curious: the meat dry, the herb pungent, the jelly cold and wet on her tongue. She took another, larger mouthful of wine to wash away the taste.
‘No,’ Henrietta said with great and exaggerated patience, ‘I shall go to Cowes a suffragette and I shall doubtless return a suffragette. I don’t believe I am obliged to eschew all merriment in the name of votes for women.’
‘You’re talking about the Cowes regatta, right?’ said Eugene, keen to move the conversation on from this uncomfortable bout of restrained bickering.
‘Are we?’ said Thea, and in spite of herself she looked a little brighter.
‘Mmm,’ said Henrietta, through her food. Unlike her sister-in-law, she ate with gusto – always had. She was tall and strong and hungry, and made no apology for her appetite. Also, since her mother’s marriage to the Duke of Plymouth there had been no one at home to upbraid her about it. ‘You’re being fearfully slow, Thea. This year the Russian emperor is to sail to the Isle of Wight on the imperial yacht to visit the king. Absolutely everyone will be there.’ She paused and laughed, including both Eugene and Thea in the joke. ‘There’s not an aristocrat in England, nor a royal in Europe, who isn’t all of a sudden a passionate sailor.’
‘Gee,’ Eugene said. ‘Don’t throw eggs at the tsar, Henrietta.’ She humoured him with a small smile.
Thea replaced her knife and fork on her plate to indicate that she had finished. Her face had the glow that came and went with her moods; Eugene regarded her through his painter’s eyes and thought how lovely she could look, and how unlovely: how to capture that in oils?
‘Toby didn’t tell me all that,’ she said. ‘It sounds fun.’
‘Oh good, you’ve cheered up,’ Henrietta said.
‘Well, Toby didn’t tell me the best part.’
‘You didn’t exactly encourage him, did you?’ Eugene said. ‘You told him to buy another car instead. You were very disagreeable.’
‘Well. He started it.’
She sounded like a five-year-old, thought Henrietta. She looked at Eugene, who was licking his knife. He winked at her and she almost wished her mother were with them; she would have so detested this evening. Thea raised an arm and snapped her fingers at a footman.
‘More wine, Thomas,’ she said, and then: ‘So, Henry, what do we wear?’
‘The art at Cowes,’ Henrietta said, ‘is to dress very simply, at huge expense.’
‘Like Marie Antoinette’s shepherdess period, but nautical?’
‘Exactly.’
Thea sighed contentedly. How pleasant to have a scheme. She wished now that Tobias were still here, so that she could be pleased with him. Still, at least she had Eugene at her beck and call, and he was much better than nothing at all.
T
here was a garden for the residents of Bedford Square and, though it was small, it was green and peaceful, at least until the city roused itself and began to bustle and roar. Today had dawned like a blessing: soft sun, gauzy mist and the trees blurry at their edges in the half light. Anna Sykes had woken just before dawn and left the sleeping house to walk under the canopy of fresh spring leaves and look back at her lone footsteps in the dew. Once, not so long ago, she’d lived in a house on the edge of Netherwood Common and had grown accustomed to stepping out of the door and onto grass; here, in the heart of the city, she could almost do that still.
She loved this London home and the square in which it sat. She could think and paint steadily here, rarely lacking ideas or inspiration, and the sober flat-fronted house they rented seemed possessed of a steady creative influence, unusual and precious. In Ardington, at their constituency home, people knocked on the door and made demands, and were quite within their rights since Amos was their Member of Parliament and she his wife. She never tried to sketch there or try out her ideas on canvas, or even think, much. In Ardington her sense of self was informed entirely by her husband’s success rather than her own. Here, in London, Anna Sykes was someone else, with a successful business and an income that supported Amos’s life at Westminster as well as paying the rent and the wages of a housemaid and a governess. These two different Annas weren’t contradictory or incompatible: they rubbed along with each other very well, as long as each had space to breathe.
Now, alone in the sleeping square, she strolled through the grass for a while then took up a stick and wielded it like a golf club to strike the dead, dried head of a late daffodil, watching with some satisfaction as it leapt from the stem and into the air. Another, then another, and then she stopped, thinking that if this were Maya’s game instead of her own she would certainly forbid it. She sat down on a convenient bench and tucked her hands under her legs, as if to keep them from further mischief. She was small and slight and colourfully clad in a blue frock and an Indian shawl that depicted exotic flowers in yellow, crimson and white: gaudy flowers she doubted existed, even in India. She was hatless; her preferred condition at a time of day when she knew there would be no passers-by to judge her unrespectable. Her hair – blonde, cropped to just below the jawline – looked tousled, as if she had yet to brush it, which was indeed the case.
On her bench, watching the day begin, Anna considered the light; the way it filtered through the haze of early morning and the leaves of the trees, and fell across the grass in a dappled, lacy carpet. There was no warmth in this dawn sunshine, merely the suggestion of it. Why not, she thought, depict exactly this on the walls of Marcia de Lisle’s summerhouse? Or perhaps each wall of the hexagonal building could show another phase of the day: dawn through to dusk, the light waxing and waning on its progress. The idea excited her and she stood abruptly, startling a pair of pigeons that had ventured too close, lulled into complacency by her stillness. The birds erupted into ungainly flight and alighted on a gas lamp, from where they watched her with beady, mistrustful eyes. Galvanised by her thoughts, anxious to commit them to paper, Anna walked briskly through the garden and across the road to the elegant Georgian house. She pushed open the door and entered the hallway, and the grandfather clock struck six, as if in greeting. Norah, the maid of all work, heard the latch click shut and stuck her head around the door of the parlour.
‘Morning missus,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Beat me to it again?’
Anna smiled, but abstractedly, and without pausing to pass the time of day she took the stairs, two at a time, all the way up to the top floor of the house where once there would have been a nursery and servants’ bedrooms, but which was now furnished with desks, easels and shelf after shelf of artists’ materials. She took up a paintbrush and a palette of water-colours and, at a draughtsman’s board on which a large sheet of paper had been attached, ready for just such a moment as this, she started to duplicate the images in her head.
An hour later she was still there and so absorbed in her work that she didn’t hear her husband’s footsteps on the stairs, clomping upwards from the first-floor landing. Amos Sykes might be an MP these days, but he still dressed like a miner, and on the occasions when even he deemed it proper to wear a suit he refused to put anything on his feet other than sturdy boots better suited to a pit yard than the House of Commons. Rightly or wrongly, Amos judged a man by his footwear as much as by his principles. A fellow in two-tone calfskin spectators with a sole no thicker than a rasher of back bacon was not a man to be trusted. For a reasonable man, Amos was unreasonably stubborn in this regard.
‘Morning, Rembrandt,’ he said now.
His wife looked at him and rolled her eyes, then returned to her work. He laughed at his own joke, since she wouldn’t, and then he came up behind her, lifted her hair and kissed the soft nape of her neck.
‘Can you see what I’m getting at?’ Anna said, stepping back into the circle of his arms. He tilted his head left and then right.
‘Dawn, I’d say. Sunrise over Bedford Square.’
She was pleased. ‘For that,’ she said, ‘you get this,’ and she turned around and kissed him on the mouth, lingeringly, as if all she had to do today was this, and she was committed to doing it well. When at last she broke away they held each other’s gaze for a beat, then she said, ‘I’ll be down soon.’
He groaned. ‘Do you mean you’re sending me away?’
She nodded and adopted a stern expression. ‘I need to finish this.’ She turned back to the painting with that firmness of resolve which, generally speaking, was one of the qualities Amos admired in his wife but at this moment would have happily exchanged for something else: helpless desire perhaps; wanton lust. But he knew his Anna well. Nothing would be gained by pestering so he left her to it, resigned to breakfast for one and the relentlessly perky chatter of Norah Kelly.
Anna Rabinovich hadn’t been looking for a safe harbour, but she had found one anyway. Since childhood she had embraced the principle of change and adventure, had always known that there was more than one life to be lived in the allotted span of one’s existence. But there was probably a limit, and these days she assumed that for her it had been reached. For now, at least, she wanted no more than she already had, and when her previous lives impinged on her present – when the memories barged in, unbidden – she felt a small wave of anxiety at the possibility that everything might change again. She was twenty-eight years old, and she had already known so many different ways to live. She had been the cosseted child of a merchant in Kiev; she had been the young wife of a Russian Jew reviled by her parents; she had been an immigrant, fleeing the pogroms and leaving Russia for England in search of sanctuary; she had become a mother and then a widow, and had known abject poverty; she had found peace and friendship in Netherwood, and forged relationships that would always sustain her; and now she was Anna Sykes, and she hoped this fundamental fact would never change, or anyway, not soon. She cherished the present because she understood how different it could be from what was to come.
A woman can’t be permanently grateful, however. When she came downstairs to find Amos already gone and the table in disarray she felt a flash of annoyance: with him, with herself and with Norah. There was a pot of stewed tea, a silver rack bearing one slice of brittle toast and a dish that, judging by the unappealing traces of cold fat inside it, had once borne bacon or sausages but was now quite empty. There were crumbs on the tablecloth, lids off the preserves and no clean cutlery or china anywhere in evidence. The morning sun was unforgiving; it streamed through the windows, highlighting the sorry scene.
‘Norah!’
Anna waited. Really, the girl had very little to accomplish in the mornings. They were such a small household, especially with Maya away. The child was in Lyme Regis with her governess, Miss Cargill, who had studied Greats at Cambridge and was now funding further academic study by tutoring Maya in all of her own enthusiasms. She took a lively, itinerant approach to teaching: at the moment they were fossil hunting at Church Cliffs, and would be gone for two weeks.
‘Norah!’
Maid of no work, Amos called her, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so depressingly true. Footsteps from the kitchen signalled her approach and then there she was, smiling all over her freckled face as if she couldn’t be more delighted to have been summoned.
‘Mrs Sykes,’ she said. ‘We’d given you up for lost, me and the mister.’
Norah was from Limerick, where, she was fond of recalling, the pace of life was slow and what work there was to be done got done in its own sweet time. This interesting life philosophy hadn’t emerged until after she had been appointed.
‘Norah, do you think it might have been an idea to clear away Mr Sykes’s breakfast things? Do you think it might have been nicer for me to find table looking spick and span?’
Anna’s Russian accent grew stronger when she was cross. Ordinarily, her command of English was near faultless; she had made a hobby of it, collecting idioms and correct pronunciations like other people collected stamps or china thimbles. Annoy her, however, and suddenly her Ws were all Vs and her As were all Es and the definite article – often elusive – disappeared entirely. Norah, reading the signs, flushed a little, though her smile barely faded.
‘Well sure, missus, now you’re here I’ll be clearing that table and putting some fresh toast out, so I will. Will you be wanting tea? Or should I put a pot of coffee out, it being nearly half past nine?’
This sounded like a reproach, even to Norah. ‘Either way, it’s no trouble missus,’ she added judiciously.
‘I’ll have tea, thank you Norah. I’m going to leave room now and come back in ten minutes, and I expect to see everything as it should be. Do you understand?’
Norah flashed her a baffled, injured look.
‘Sure, what do you take me for? An eejit?’
This was something else that Norah’s interview hadn’t revealed: a tendency towards lippyness when a simple ‘yes’ would serve. Her manner was altogether too casual and familiar, and in many other households she would have been dismissed within a week of starting. But she was young and Irish and – Amos had said – vulnerable. They had hired her and now they had a moral responsibility to keep her, flaws and all. She was good with Maya, minding her when the two of them were working and Miss Cargill’s lessons had finished for the day, and in any case Amos couldn’t spend his working day trying to protect the poor and oppressed, then come home in the evening and sack the maid, could he? Anna supposed not, though there had been many a time in the past two years when she would have liked to do exactly that.
‘Norah,’ she said now, ‘please, just do as I asked.’
‘I shall, missus.’
Anna made to leave, but before she was out of the door Norah said, ‘Ah bejesus, I’ll be forgetting my head one day,’ and produced a folded piece of paper from the pocket of her pinafore. ‘The master asked me to give this to you, missus. It’s a few lines to say sorry he missed you and would you like to take a stroll by the river at dinner time?’