Serial Monogamy (16 page)

“I
t wouldn't do, love. It just isn't big enough. Not now that you've got the Royal Doulton.”

Shay nodded in agreement and looked dispiritedly down at the card table onto which she was trying to squeeze six place settings. She had pulled it out into her living room and placed it in front of the couch, where two of her guests would have to perch on extra cushions to reach the table height; the remaining four would have chairs on the other side of the table and at each end, but the truth was there really wasn't room for two place settings on the sides of the square table. A pair of the large Royal Doulton dinner plates that Mrs. Brown kept for special occasions could just fit side by side on the tabletop but they left almost no room for the cutlery, let alone the flowers Shay was planning for the centre.

“I've got another like it down in the shed,” Mrs. Brown volunteered. “You could put the two tables side
by side, throw the cover over the top and nobody would be the wiser.”

“Oh, Mrs. Brown…”

“You'll have to clean it off, mind, and I am not lugging it up those stairs.”

“No, of course not. I can manage it, no problem.”

Shay waited while Mrs. Brown accumulated the necessary energy to negotiate the stairs and followed her out into the small back garden to the shed. She was feeling rather guilt-stricken about all Mrs. Brown's contributions toward her dinner, which included the pudding basin, the Royal Doulton china, the tablecloth, two extra chairs and now the table itself. The flat came furnished with basic kitchen utensils, china and cutlery and there seemed no good reason to demand the inventory to accommodate six dinner guests and the making of charlotte russe. Mrs. Brown's growing list of initially grudging offers reminded Shay of the old fairytale about the two soldiers who trick the hungry villagers into sharing their firewood, their pot and finally their vegetables to help the strangers make a miraculous stone soup. Perhaps it was a story about a con; maybe it was a moral about hospitality. The problem with Mrs. Brown's generosity was that Shay increasingly felt that it would only be polite to invite her landlady to dinner and she had neither enough lamb nor enough space to accommodate a seventh guest. And, if she were honest with herself, she did not feel Mrs. Brown was quite the type of person
who would mix well with the group she had assembled for her dinner party.

Shay had few friends in London, so the guest list had proved a challenge. She had started with her desire to recreate one of Catherine's dinners and once that had taken hold, the power of the idea had proved strong enough to overcome her social anxieties. First, she would invite the Clarks. The Clarks were contacts of her brother's—he did something in the City, she was a publicist for a small theatre company—who had been kind to her when she first arrived. That is, they had invited her over to their small flat on two occasions and she felt she ought to reciprocate. So, that was two guests. Then she invited her one real friend in London, her fellow researcher Alex. A cheerful young woman from Birmingham who seemed a rather unlikely personality to be spending her days in a library, Alex was perpetually single, a state she lamented with an almost gleeful self-dramatization. Shay had racked her brains to find another male guest for Alex's benefit but had finally given up and invited Fiona, the shy and rather dour assistant librarian who they both agreed needed to lighten up.

And then there was the fifth guest, Jeff. Shay had met Jeff in the park. He was her best find in London, her big hope for her stay. Her flat was in North London, and when she made the effort, which wasn't often, she could reach an entrance to Hampstead Heath in twenty minutes. So, one clear Saturday a month previously, just as the pleasantly early English spring was starting to appear, she had
been out walking on the heath, bored and disconsolate despite the day, when Jeff ran into her. Literally. He was jogging with headphones on and had run smack into her as he emerged from a walking path that led at an abrupt angle onto the main route she was taking. She all but toppled to the ground, and as she was steadying herself, he snatched the headphones off his ears and began apologizing profusely. When she finally managed to interrupt him to tell him all was okay, he heard her accent.

“Hey. Are you American too?” he asked with an enthusiasm that was so boyish it was rather appealing.

“Sorry. Canadian,” Shay replied.

“That's okay. Canadians are nice too,” he said. “I mean…I'm sure you're very nice, if you're Canadian. I mean…” He heard himself and started to laugh.

Jeff often laughed at himself; Shay found it a change from Al, who laughed at the world around him but, when it came to himself, seemed to believe, without the least hint of snobbery, in some sense of slight superiority conferred by his own charm, as though he was truly a blessed being whom others ought to be rather grateful to know. He floated above the world a little bit and drew you up to that plane. Shay liked that about him; she was grateful to have known him. She did not, on the other hand, feel the least elevated by the friendly Jeff, who seemed to live with both feet resolutely planted on the ground, although she was also grateful for his existence. He was an escape route, Plan B. She just needed to get over Al—she hadn't
spent a morning in bed since Christmas; it had been at least a month since she'd cried—and fall in love with Jeff—he really was sweet—and go back to the States with him. (He was an MBA on a three-year posting with an American multinational that believed potential executives should have foreign experience.) They would have babies, and she would finish her dissertation, and they would live in New York and it would all be lovely, cozy and calm just like other young couples without anguished emails and tearful phone calls and promises and compromises and separations and reunions.

So, she was thinking fondly of Jeff as she carefully penned his name in black ink on a rather expensive blank business card she had purchased at a stationer's down the street from the butcher. The name cards were, of course, utterly unnecessary for a table of six, but Shay liked the idea and felt they would lend an appropriate formality to the proceedings. She had also written out her menu twice on larger cards and fiddled about trying to position it so everyone could read it without it blocking her flower arrangement, a few early tulips and a bit of baby's breath she had picked up at Sainsbury's.

By six thirty, Shay had her table ready and her food prepared. The charlotte russe that she had made that afternoon sat cooling in her minuscule fridge, all ready to be turned out of its mould later in the evening. The potatoes were cooked and mashed, and could be browned under the broiler at the last minute. The leg of lamb
should start cooking as the guests arrived, she calculated, having already checked that the roasting pan could actually fit in the tiny oven, while the asparagus could be steamed in the microwave. The fish she planned to fry up as they were having their drinks; the lobster sauce could be quickly heated in a pan on the other of the stove's two burners. She was poised, ready for her guests, and feeling rather smug when she looked down at the jeans she was still wearing: the lobster bisque had spattered a bit when she opened the can. With fifteen minutes to spare, she raced into the small bedroom behind the kitchen, clawed a pair of black dress pants out of the overcrowded closet, changed her blouse and charged into the bathroom to attempt to do something about her hair. She was yielding the mascara wand when someone pounded at the door.

It was Alex.

“Your landlady let me in,” she explained, bouncing through the door and plonking two bottles of sparkling wine on the few inches of bare space beside the kitchen sink. “Bubbly. The Victorians drank a lot of it, if I recall correctly.”

Shay began thanking her profusely, but Alex waved it off and moved across the room to admire the table.

“Oooh. Place cards. Very posh,” she said as she walked about the table, admiring it from all directions. “Greg. Liz. That's the couple, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Jeff. He's the one, right? The American?”

“Yes.”

“Watch Fiona doesn't nab him right from under your nose,” she said and both of them giggled. “Well, I'm early. I wanted to make sure I was here to get the festivities started. Shall I pop a cork?”

They were both sipping Alex's wine when the doorbell rang downstairs.

“I'll get it, Mrs. Brown,” Shay called out as she headed through the door she had left open and downstairs to the house's cramped entrance hall.

She opened the door and found Jeff standing there accompanied by a very tall, very blond young woman.

“Hi,” he said cheerfully. “Hope we aren't the first. We came early because we have dinner reservations for eight.”

Somewhere a bird was singing, a low note and then a second higher, the pair repeated again and again. At the very edge of consciousness, Nelly was deliciously aware of sleep. She felt the cool sheets and the soft pillow; she stretched out an arm across the bed. She was alone. For some reason, that was a good thing here, an indulgence rather than an absence. The two notes gradually grew into a whole chorus of birdsong. A glimmer of light appeared beneath the curtains. It was a late autumn dawn. Oh yes, she was in Italy, in the Trollopes' villa. Today she planned to visit the Uffizi, and later take tea in the Boboli Gardens with Mrs. Watson, if the day were clear. She smiled at the thought, rolled over and went back to sleep.

By three that afternoon, Nelly was wandering through the parterre of the Boboli Gardens on the arm of Harry Watson,
an amiable young American who seemed to lack any particular direction in life beyond traipsing around Italy after his formidable mother. His conversation alternated between a discussion of Italian art and comments on the view while his eyes would stray occasionally to hers and then move quickly to his shoes. Nelly had to repress a giggle; the effect was wholly innocent and rather sweet. But by four o'clock, rather to her surprise, it was with Mrs. Watson with whom she was engaging in a tête-à-tête on the teahouse terrace while Harry went in search of a waiter.

“Where do you live in England, Miss Ternan?”

“Oh, you would not know the place; it's very quiet.”

“I have spent a good deal of time in England. Do you live in the home counties?”

“Yes, just outside London. In a village.”

“A village in Buckinghamshire? I think your sister mentioned Bucks. I have friends who live at Aylesbury.”

“No, not in Bucks any more. I moved recently.”

“Oh really, closer to the city?”

“Yes, a bit closer.”

“In Berkshire, perhaps?”

“No, not Berkshire.” Nelly, who was beginning to feel as though she was playing a game of hunt the thimble, relented a bit. “South of the city. At Peckham.”

“Oh, Peckham. Why, you are almost in the city. Do you manage to have a garden there? The English always have such lovely gardens.”

“Yes, I have a garden.”

“How pleasant for you. And what kind of house is it? A cottage perhaps? English cottages are so pretty.”

“Well, you might call it a cottage,” Nelly replied vaguely. Her new house in Peckham was twice the size of the cottage at Slough and had a generous garden in which she could walk the dog.

“And would your home be a family legacy? Your sister told me your father died when you were just girls. Very sad for you.”

“Yes, well, my father did not leave much of a legacy,” Nelly replied. “At least not in real estate.” She had started to spy where this conversation was headed.

“Something from your mother's family then?”

“Yes,” Nelly lied definitively now. “From an aunt.”

“But your sister was working as a governess before her marriage, I believe?”

Nelly grasped the implication immediately. Fanny had married her employer, the recently widowed Tom Trollope, older brother to the novelist Anthony and himself a writer living in Italy with his young daughter. If Fanny needed to work for her room and board as the Trollopes' governess, how did her younger sister have the means to live in her own house?

“It is a rather modest place we recently acquired, but it belongs to all of us,” Nelly improvised. “Fanny always wanted to make her own way. She had taken music lessons here and her work with the Trollopes did prove a welcome opportunity to see more of Italy.”

“I see. How admirable of her. Your sister is a powerful personality, my dear, and such a beautiful voice.”

At that point they were interrupted, much to Nelly's relief, by Harry himself. She foresaw no difficulty in gently ridding herself of a love-struck American but his inquisitive mother's attempts to ascertain her suitability as a daughter-in-law were becoming conversationally difficult.

Fanny and Maria had met Mrs. Watson, a wealthy Philadelphia widow with artistic tastes, when all three were sketching in the Uffizi the previous month, and they were quite devoted to their new friend. It was easier, however, for Mrs. Trollope, recently married into a famous literary family, and her sister Mrs. Taylor, whose wealthy husband back in Oxford indulged her interest in travel and art, to become fast friends with a new acquaintance; their unmarried twenty-eight-year-old sister had to be more careful about how she described her circumstances.

“I was thinking, Miss Ternan, that if tomorrow is just as fine, we might rent a boat,” Harry said after he settled himself at the table, promising tea was imminent. “I know the river seems rather dreary in Florence but I am told that if we can just row out of the city a bit, the Arno is really quite scenic. I don't imagine I could get us all the way to Pisa…”

“Oh, you are proposing to row yourself?” Nelly asked in some surprise, assuming that one of the boatmen on the quays would do the job.

“Yes. I'm a bit of an oarsman. Back home, on the Delaware, I row every morning.”

“The Delaware River?” Nelly asked.

“Yes. Do you know it?”

“No, I've just heard of it. Fanny was born on the Delaware.”

“Really? How did that come to pass?”

“My parents were visiting America and were travelling when my mother gave birth. Fanny was born on a paddle steamer.”

“How romantic!” Mrs. Watson broke in. “What were your parents doing in America?”

Nelly paused. Perhaps American prejudices against the acting profession were less pronounced than those in England. Still, it was better to be judicious; if Fanny wanted to tell Mrs. Watson that her parents had been travelling players and Mrs. Ternan was retired from the stage, she would do it herself. Nelly should never have let slip the bit about the paddle streamer; Fanny would not be pleased. She had become increasingly sticky about appearances since her marriage, worrying away about who might think what about their family arrangements. It was as though she cared more for her in-laws' reputation than she ever had for her own. “We wouldn't want…” she had said to her sister when Nelly had first arrived but had never stipulated exactly what it was that wasn't wanted.

“Oh, my father was travelling on business,” Nelly replied vaguely now.

“Have you ever been to America yourself, Miss Ternan?” Harry asked.

Nelly had been promised America, and she fairly longed for the prodigal land of teeming cities and red Indians. “Next month, I'll be in New York,” she would say to herself. “By spring, I will have seen Niagara.” Her nomadic instincts drew her to a new land, she wanted to follow her mother's footsteps—and others' too; she wanted to see for herself what she had so often heard described. If she could not have a distinguished writer for a husband and an Italian villa to live in like Fanny; if she could not have a wealthy businessman and a rose garden in Oxford like Maria; if she must always hide the reason for her spinsterhood and the source of her real estate, she could at least be the one who travelled to America. She would not be cheated of that honour along with all the rest.

Charles was resolute. After the heartbreak of France and the boredom of Slough, he had moved her to a larger house, with a garden for her little dog, in Peckham, a short train ride into the city. And he had promised her a trip to America. On his second American tour at least, he would enjoy the company and she the position that they both deserved. She had agreed to the trip with some trepidation but much enthusiasm and, although she did not tell him so, was no less determined
in her own way. This time she would be the one he would call his intrepid companion. She would be there if he were overcome by the roar of the falls. She would be his helpmeet and mainstay. She was worthy, more worthy, more fitting.

Of course, she could not travel as his consort, but as his goddaughter instead, a young protégé to whom he wished to show the world; she would be introduced everywhere, attend all the banquets. There would always be separate rooms. All would be achieved with the utmost propriety. The Americans were a hospitable people, welcoming, happy to oblige a guest without judgment or preconception. She, however, saw the trouble: if she was named as his travelling companion in newspaper accounts of his progress and word got back to England that Mr. Dickens was accompanied by a Miss Ternan, some people might remember when and where they had heard her name before. Some Americans might even remember. They might recall there had been rumours of scandal associated with his name; that stupid letter had been published first in an American paper. He had been ill advised to write it; he was half mad at the time. It might yet come back to haunt them.

Still, Charles refused to be deprived of her company for the length of a six-month tour, and Charles was used to getting his own way. He decided he would go ahead and get the lay of the land, see what the hotels looked like, ask a few discreet questions, see if she could travel with
him but only attend private functions perhaps, and he tentatively booked a passage for her on a steamer from Liverpool leaving a month after his own departure. She did not like the idea of crossing by herself; neither did he. She feared seasickness; he feared a shipboard romance. But it seemed their best chance and so now she waited for a coded telegram that would tell her “All well” and send her to claim her ticket in Liverpool.

In the meantime, Fanny and Tom had invited her to stay; Tom, who knew Charles well, was aware of Nelly's situation and less concerned with appearances than his new wife but tactfully refrained from asking his sister-in-law whether she had got any news from America. They all found it simplest if Charles's name was not mentioned and she tried to tell herself that the trip was unlikely to happen anyway. That she did not want to make the long voyage by herself and feared that some awkwardness might await on the other side of the Atlantic. It was her way of guarding against disappointment. It didn't really work, however, for as the days in Italy went by and Christmas beckoned, she grew increasingly excited and kept catching herself thinking, “Soon I shall be at sea!”

“No, I have yet to have the pleasure of seeing America,” she replied. “But I hope someday I will.”

“I hope so too,” said Harry emphatically.

A few days after the walk in the Boboli Gardens, the housekeeper came into the breakfast room. “Telegramma, signora.”

Fanny glanced at the envelope.

“It's for you, Nelly.”

Nelly took it from the housekeeper's hand and ripped it open.

SAFE AND WELL. ALL MY LOVE
, it said.

Nelly stared down at the page. “All well” meant come. “Safe and well” meant the trip was impossible and his assistant would cancel her passage.

“Bad news?” Fanny asked as she watched her sister's face.

“I wonder if I might stay for Christmas.”

“Oh. It would be lovely to have you here for Christmas. You, and mother and Maria too, if we can convince her to come back. Stay as long as you like. Stay till the spring comes.”

“Thank you. Spring in Italy might be very pleasant,” Nelly said, swallowing her emotions.

Lying in bed that night unable to fall asleep, she mulled it over. Springtime came early in Italy and first there would be a family Christmas in the villa. It would be a safe haven. No lonely steamer passage. No awkward meeting in New York. No misunderstandings in unknown towns or difficult questions from strangers. No waiting
in hotel rooms while he was out at banquets. She released her image of the roaring falls and the busy streets and replaced it with one of lemon trees in flower. In the end, she was not disappointed at all.