“Thank you. I’m fine.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
She angled her head. Talk about right to the point. It was none of his business, but she answered anyway. “No.”
Then he took her full attention by saying, “Spoke to Tuttleworth this morning. You were at his dinner party Tuesday night, where you met, I think, a man by
the name of James Stoker?” He laughed as if to put her at ease, a sound that put her on guard. “Almost impossible to miss him. Handsome fellow, articulate, magnetic—everyone around here loves him.”
“I met him.”
He waited for her to say more.
She said cagily, “He seemed quite decent. Certainly a good friend of yours. He speaks highly of you.”
“Then you know he’s closely associated with me, that I’ve all but sponsored him at Cambridge, appointed him to committees, seen him into a pretty high position.”
“Well, then, he has much to thank you for.”
“Hell, yes. Supervised him as an undergraduate, was his Director of Studies. All but raised him, too, for that matter.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“What did you think of him?” Phillip asked.
Coco knew less and less how to proceed. What was he looking for? She hesitated before she offered, “He seemed…idealistic. His vision doesn’t seem to agree exactly with yours.”
“Ah!” He held up a finger and gave it a wag. She’d somehow guessed close to the answer the don wanted. His eyebrows went up in mock affront. “Though I’m deeply offended.”
She laughed, partly because she was meant to, partly because Phillip had always entertained her. “You’re practical, Phillip, which precludes your being terribly idealistic, I’m afraid. But ‘practical’ has its advantages.”
He chuckled, mollified. He looked around them, at ease suddenly. Phillip liked to watch—when one
spoke to him in public—to see, Coco always imagined, if there was anyone else he knew, anyone he might like to hide from or for whom he might wish to abandon her in favor of a more useful association.
Distractedly, while watching a couple at the newsstand, he said, “I don’t know. Someone mentioned that they thought James might have an eye for you, that—”
“Phillip, honestly. I don’t think he’s even thirty. What would he want with a woman my age?”
Much too quickly to be flattering, he said, “Right,” and laughed. “My first thought, too. I mean, not that you aren’t lovely, Coco, but James is just so—oh, I don’t know.” He made a face, puffed cheeks, then let the air go. “
Pfffah
, he’s no paragon, I’ll tell you that.” Phillip pushed his lips forward, frowning. He was going to size James up for her, correct any misconceptions. “Stoker is a walking chain reaction of money flowing into Cambridge. All right, he’s intelligent, a true scholar, but mostly he’s charming: full of the social skills that in a different lifetime, with less talent and less honesty, would have made him a successful con artist. Idealistic, ha.”
“All right.” It was a waste of her breath to say more, Coco thought.
Yet as they stood there, a train whistling in the distance, she grew more and more uncomfortable. It seemed intolerable that Phillip misunderstand a young man who meant him only good, his ward, his protégé, his surrogate son, without at least someone saying something to him.
She said, not only for James’s sake, but for Phil
lip’s—who needed all the friends like James Stoker he could get, “I think you distrust him, Phillip, because you’ve let distance come between the two of you.” When she glanced at Phillip Dunne, he was looking at her, attentive. And suddenly she couldn’t shut up. She told him, “You’ve been out of town too much. You’ve separated yourself from him. You’re the practical one: talk to him. Fix it.”
“Coco—” he began, but the rushing air of an arriving train, followed quickly by the loud screech of steel and blasts of steam, put a break in the conversation.
Coco signaled her maid. A porter came forward, rolling her trunks and bags on a trolley.
The train rumbled down to the loud vibration of a waiting engine. As her bags were loaded, Phillip said, “Coco, I’d like to see you again.
You’re
something I’d like to fix.”
She glanced at him. “I don’t need fixing, Phillip.” She laughed. “I fixed myself years ago. But if you’re in the mood, call on David. He’d enjoy any efforts you might wish to make.”
He took her arm to help her step up onto the train, then kept hold of her hand. When she turned on the vestibule step, he said, “Don’t reach too high, Coco.” He paused. “I’m the best you can do.”
God, she hoped not. What a curse
that
would be. She stared at him blankly, acknowledging nothing.
He said, “A man like Stoker, well—” He shook his head. “You’d destroy him, you know.”
Her chest tightened, as if the air on the platform had grown cold, hard to draw in. A chill spread through her. Yet she kept her eyes level, facing Phillip: facing him down.
After a moment, he turned loose of her hand with a sniff, as if she had injured him. With anger, like a poke with a sharp stick, he said, “Willy’s worse. The clinic wouldn’t take her. I had to put her in a hospice in Bath.”
Coco pressed her lips together, frowning. “Oh, Phillip. Why aren’t you in Bath, then?”
He made the smallest shrug. Then he became the man she’d known, the man she’d cared for once. He held his hands out, empty, bereft. His eyes, honest, really meeting hers, glassed when he said, “She has no idea”—he shook his head—“no idea whatsoever I’m there.”
“I’m sorry,” Coco said. “Oh, Phillip, I am so, so sorry.”
He nodded.
She felt taut, helpless as the train pulled out. Through the window glass she saw Phillip. He stood on the platform, rigid, watching as she left, his mouth a thin, stretched seam in his face, the tightly drawn mouth of a man in crisis, fighting tears.
As the train lurched forward, faster and faster, Coco didn’t take her seat. Rather she stood, holding onto the luggage rail overhead, maintaining her balance only with difficulty. She felt sad for him. He made her throat tight, her lips tremble. But as the feelings rushed in, he was only an excuse: Phillip was past business. It was safe to feel bad about a man who’d made mistakes and whose wife was now dying. She did feel sorry for him. Yet he was not the reason the muscles of her neck felt strained, stretched till her throat felt narrow, till she couldn’t swallow.
She was leaving James, really leaving him and every possibility of him, behind. She dare not write as promised. It was necessary to make a clean break.
Because she had always known what Phillip had put into words: She would destroy her young hero if she let their association continue, if she let James hope. They could not be “friends only,” though they had tried to be, because he was in love with her. Moreover, there were high feelings on both sides, feelings that wanted to escalate. He and she had somehow gotten into a heady spin of emotions not easily brought under rein. Too intense, too large. Too impossible. The situation spelled disaster for Sir James Stoker. If she encouraged him, he would eventually do something rash, ruin himself over her.
Because her worst fear was tied inextricably to one of her greatest pleasures in him: Her stalwart knight did not possess the necessary duplicity to remain in contact with an infamous woman. It was not in his nature to live the hypocrisy required.
She stood there swaying, hanging on for dear life as the train clattered into a steadier rhythm—wishing likewise that all she might have said in letters would move as quickly from her mind as the accelerating countryside. There seemed so much all at once that she had intended to say that must now go unspoken, unwritten. She hadn’t told James yet about her beautiful garden in Italy, about the funny quirks of her land agent in Biarritz, about how she could become afraid if she were alone in any of her houses when a bad thunderstorm struck. She had wanted to ask what Mtzuba looked like, how he and James had managed to talk.
This sort of minutia rattled through Coco’s mind, till Lucia made her sit. Coco turned unstably, gripping the overhead rail, then fell into the plush velvet train seat. Relief. Yes, yes, she told herself as she leaned back, I’ll be fine. She closed her eyes. She had always been alone, always gone her own way. It didn’t matter that others saw her, at best, in a shady light. It didn’t matter that she was leaving behind someone she admired who had miraculously seen her, known her in a way similar to the way she knew herself. She had been fine before she met James; she would be fine again without him.
She sat there, dry-eyed, stoic, bumping along, alternately grieving and reassuring herself. It was not until she fell into a doze that her mind took on the larger aspects of what she was giving up: the sight of his face and smile, his humor…the feel of his strong, warm body…his gentle, upright spirit…his understanding, so rare and generous—oh, God, this. In her sleep she saw again the look in his soft gold eyes, their bewildered tolerance and, where need be, forgiveness…their welcoming acceptance…their open, undefended expression of love.
When she awakened, it was with a disoriented jolt. She was befuddled. The train had stopped. Steam hissed in rising cloud-like bursts outside her compartment. London. The day was gone. Lucia, her back to her, stood, reaching overhead to organize hat boxes, to gather up their things. Coco took in a breath, then let it out slowly. Her sternum ached as if a tight band had been wrapped around her chest all the way from Cambridge. The compartment door opened, outside air blew in, and her cheeks felt suddenly wet, cold. Goodness—she madly wiped at her
face with her knuckles and the backs of hands, unable to think what else to do. She was unsure how to cope with what had not happened to her since she was seventeen: She’d been crying. Her lashes and under her eyes were damp from it, while salty-dry tracks made her cheeks feel stiff.
A
t the end of May, almost a month later, James sat at his desk in the book-lined study of his rooms at All Souls, while on his lap lay his tattered African journal. Its binding had rotted long ago; its cover was blistered, its pages foxed. By the end, he’d held it all together with string. Today, he’d been leafing through it—from the carefully regimented pages, dated and inscribed with locations and landmarks, full of respectable observations about the “natives” and the “primitives,” into the undated pages of a man lost. These last became simple notes and were the most interesting of all to James. They dealt with nothing, with everything; the spectrum of human life, large wonders, small events, minutiae, from the conundrum of why the crocodiles didn’t eat the hippopotami to the practical matter of the best dart poison for bringing down a warthog. Here was where the Englishman’s pages gave way to the pages of simply a member of the tribe of man.
James tried to remember when he’d begun to feel differently about his homeland. He loved England.
He had; he still did. It was the backbone of his existence, but it was also somehow wrong about its authority and rights in the community of the world.
The world was becoming a smaller place. And a lonelier one for James.
He wished Coco were here to talk to about the turmoil of all that lay in his lap here. He missed her. It had been more than three weeks since her departure, and still he had not heard from her. Term was ending, which meant exams, then a week of student celebration, then Congregation and Admission to degrees. After which followed the Queen and an earldom. Her Majesty’s birthday, though she was born in May, was to be officially celebrated June twelfth. Oh, happy day.
James dropped his loose-paged journal down onto the desk top. Happy day, indeed. He harrumphed as he milled about through the papers and a few rocks that lay on his desktop, looking for a pen. He could find not a thing with which to write. Just as he could find not a single celebratory feeling within himself. There seemed nothing whatsoever to celebrate, nothing that made him happy.
“Blast and damn,” he muttered, as he riffled through the surface debris of his desk. Blast and damn. Never had he been more thriving; never had he felt more miserable.
He didn’t wish for a moment to be part of any celebration. A letter from Coco might have made him shout; he wasn’t even sure. He was puzzled as to why he hadn’t heard from her. Puzzled, annoyed, and hurt. He had no idea where he might contact her. He kept meaning to look up David and ask him for her address, but this seemed to put Coco’s son
in the middle. In any event, James kept asking himself, Why didn’t Coco write on her own? She had
his
address; he’d made sure of that. Why didn’t
she
tell him where she was? Didn’t she
want
to hear from him?
James didn’t know.
He slapped his journal closed, then pivoted in his chair to set the book back up on the shelf. His private journal. Part of what Athers had wanted in his quest for gold. James’s own private papers. On second thought, James lifted the journal back down, pulled a few books out from his bookcase, then set the journal behind them, putting the books back.
Stupid. He hated doing things like this. Coco would laugh. Coco would have helped him think it through. She would listen. They would talk. She would have helped him make sense of the idiocy of Athers. Along with the idiocy of Phillip fending off the Bishop with a random, careless swipe when it occurred to him; worse than no help at all.
If she would only send an address, send word…let him know where to contact her…. Then none of his distresses would feel as burdensome. And his joys, shared with her, would feel tenfold.
James was nine years old when Phillip Dunne and his wife took him officially into the main house. More Phillip, actually. Lady Dunne, the Viscountess Dunne, lived in a cloud of severe headaches and daily laudanum. She spent most of her time in bed. James had inhabited Wilhelmina Dunne’s house for ten years and hardly seen her; he hardly knew her. Worse, he suspected no one knew her any better
than he did. For this reason alone, he had sympathy for her.
The Dunnes slept in separate rooms. The Viscountess slept on the ground floor. She was afraid of the stairs—sensibly, since she was frequently too incoherent to safely negotiate a staircase. The Dunnes’ marriage served them both, no doubt. But James could not see how it was a happy union.