The Jewel Box (33 page)

Seeing his opportunity, Jenkins swooped on the carpet bag. Catherine’s hands were on her hips. “Well, of all the—”

“Mummy, do leave off.” Grace grabbed her mother by the shoulders and planted a kiss on a cheek. “It’s
so
good to see you. Such a lovely surprise. Come and sit down in the shade. Jenkins, could you bring us a jug of the lemonade, please? You must try this lemonade, Mummy. It’s really
too
delicious. I’m simply fanatical about it.”

“Yes. Well…” Catherine sat down stiffly, looking distracted. “The bag has some clothes in it. Yours. You’d barely brought a thing with you, so far as I could see. I thought to myself, she must be rinsing her smalls out each day by hand or making the maid do it, and neither seemed to me to be appropriate.”

“Thank you.” Grace reached over and squeezed her hand. “That was very thoughtful. If you’d only telephoned, I’d have—”

“You’d have what? Made some sort of excuse to stop me coming?” She dashed her hand quickly across her face, but wasn’t quite fast enough.

“Oh, Mummy. Don’t get upset.”

“Well.” Her face grew redder. “What am I supposed to think? We’ve heard nothing from you since that first abrupt telephone call. We’ve no idea when you’re coming home. Tilly keeps asking, and I keep worrying, and Nancy’s convinced she’s offended you horribly in some way she can’t understand, poor girl.”

“I’m sorry, Mummy.”

“So you should be. What is going
on,
young lady?” A large bee buzzed close to Catherine’s face, marvelously oblivious to her frenzy.

“Look, I don’t want anyone to worry about me. That’s the
last
thing I want. I simply need some time to myself. Time to think. That’s not exactly easy at home.”

“It’s not easy for any of us. Life is very rarely easy.” Catherine crossed her arms and stuck her chin out. “We just have to get on with it. But you—running away, losing your job…” She looked about her at the Egyptian statuary and the tiny model pyramids positioned here and there in the flower beds: “And Grace, why did you come
here
?”

Jenkins appeared with a tray. The lemonade was a cloudy yellow. Ice cubes jangling bell-like against the glass jug. They appeared to have a hypnotic effect on Catherine, who sat gazing at them.

Grace waited for Jenkins to go back into the house. “We’ve always been close, Sheridan and I. He said I could stay for a while.”

“Close?” This was delivered with an expression of extreme discomfort. It was rather as if the bee had crawled inside Catherine’s clothing, and she knew that at any moment it could be about to sting her.

“He’s been the kindest of friends. He’s looked after me. He’s like a brother, actually…” Her eyes met her mother’s—and yes, there it was: a sort of panicked recognition. She poured the lemonade, the ice cubes jostling and splashing their way into the glasses. She waited.

“So he told you.” Catherine’s voice was quieter now. “He promised me he wouldn’t.
You
promised—”

“Oh, Mummy. It’s out of the box now. There’s nothing to be done about that.”

“No. I suppose not.”

“He didn’t want to break your confidence. I knew something was going on and I made him tell me. But why didn’t
you
tell me, the other day? Why did you let me go on believing all the wrong was yours?”

“Not my secret to tell.” A sniff that was somehow dignified. “Your father isn’t here to speak for himself. What business would I have blackening his name with his daughter? What good would that have done? Anyway, his bad behavior doesn’t excuse mine.”

“It sheds an entirely different light on the situation, can’t you see that? All four of you were caught up in an utter mess. They had a
baby,
for goodness’ sakes!”

Catherine stared at the honeysuckle. “Look at those bees. All so busy doing what they’re supposed to do. What they were born to do. Where is Sheridan this morning?”

“Over at the Tutankhamun with his bookkeeper. Mummy, you should tell Nancy, too. Now that I know, she’s going to have to know, too. It would be so much better coming from you.”

“I suppose you’re right. Oh dear.” She sucked the air in sharply through her teeth and made a visible effort to rally herself. “He’s a nice boy, isn’t he? Odd, of course, but bright and entertaining. I’d say he’s really quite a dear chap.” And now a frown. “Frittering his life away though. Rather like someone else I could mention…He really ought to go back to university. Perhaps I should speak to him about it. After all, if I don’t, who will?”

Grace rolled her eyes. “So anyway…Did you all know about each other? About the two affairs? I mean, did you all know while it was going on?”

A sip of the lemonade, a jiggling of the ice. “Yes, we did. I say, this really
is
nice.”

“Did you enter into some sort of arrangement? Was it all a frightfully modern social experiment?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

Once again Catherine had that look about her as though the bee was crawling down her back or up her leg.

“And both couples ended their affairs when Amelia became pregnant?” A pause while she waited for the nod. “What happened? Did you sit down in a room together and just talk about it, as friends? How do four people decide something like that?”

“We voted.”

The laughter came before she could stop it. “Oh, Mummy!”

The lightest of titters. “Yes, I suppose it is rather absurd, when you think of it that way. We were trying to do the right thing about a situation that had got well out of hand. It was all very sensible and democratic. In case you’re wondering, the vote was unanimous.”

“Good.” Grace’s thoughts were coming thick and fast. A kind of waterfall. She struggled to slow it all down.

“Your father was a good man. Never think otherwise. I doubt he’d have strayed off the path at all, but Amelia enticed him. Snared him like a rabbit. I don’t know if she really loved him or not. She was very deep, you see. One of those irritatingly fathomless women one comes across from time to time. One is forever trying to plumb the depths with that sort of woman. They were both drawn to that, Edward and Daddy. Me too, in a way, when Amelia and I first became friends at school…Often there’s nothing really
there,
you know, with that sort of woman. Just a vacuum.” She looked down at her lap. Cleared her throat. “Daddy and Edward were opposites. I think so much of it was about the difference between them, and between me and Amelia of course. Daddy was smitten with her for a while.” She was twisting her hands around each
other in her lap. “We
did
do the right thing in the end. For you children, but for ourselves, too. For each other.”

“You can’t always love the people you’re supposed to love. Love just happens. You can’t will it away.”

“But you can walk away.” Catherine moved her chair closer to Grace’s. “Sometimes you have to, no matter how painful it is.”

“I know.”

The bush nearby was covered in ladybirds. Smothered in them, really. And all those cabbage-white butterflies. This tiny garden was teeming with life.

“What are you going to do, Grace?”

A breath. “I’m going to leave London.”

“You can’t do that!” Catherine smacked her lemonade glass down, the ice cubes clinking loudly together.

“Why not? We’re both agreed that I should walk away. Well, I just happen to think the farther I walk, the better.”

“But what about us? What about Nancy?”

“I thought you’d understand, Mummy. It really
is
for the best. I’ll start afresh. I’ll send money.”

“This isn’t about money. Tilly and Felix are missing you so much. You’re so important to them!”

Something caught in her chest at the mention of those two little names. The sharpest of pangs. “I miss them, too. But I have to leave.”

Catherine shook her head slowly. “I wish things didn’t have to change. I love
both
my daughters. Won’t you
please
just come home?”

It was tempting—so tempting—to say: All right, I’ll come home. She could go and put her few things into the carpet bag while Catherine relaxed in the sunshine with the lemonade. They’d talk, on the bus, about the trouble at
Pearson’s—perhaps Mummy would be cross, perhaps not—and then, as they walked through the front door, Felix would come crawling from the living room. He could crawl so fast now—and grab her leg with both arms till she swung him up into the air and held him close. Tilly would be cross and standoffish, but after a while she might deign to glance up from her drawing, and then she’d say, “Have you brought me a present, Auntie Grace?” She’d have to say no but the ice would be broken anyway. They’d be friends again. And then she’d be writing words for Tilly to try to copy, and hugging Felix, and all would be like it used to be—until Nancy came in, that is.

“Tell me one thing,” said Grace. “Do you think Nancy is in love?”

“Yes.”

A curt nod. They were quiet for a moment with the buzz of the bees and the bright pinks and golds of the honeysuckle and fuchsia.

“Don’t worry. I shan’t be going anywhere in a hurry. I have no idea where I’m going, after all.” She tried to force her mood to lighten, and her voice with it. “So, what have you been up to, Mummy? Did you go to that Women’s Freedom League rally?”

“I’ll tell you about that when you’ve told me what happened at Pearson’s. What’s been going on, my girl?”

And they sat on together in the sunshine, talking, as the ice in their glasses melted away.

It
was a few days after her mother’s visit that Sheridan announced he’d had a telephone call from a newly enlightened Nancy, and had invited her to come and spend that afternoon at the house. A chance for them to begin their new relationship.

“Join us for a cweam tea, darling,” he said. “Thwee siblings together, and bla bla. What larks.”

Grace was aware that she’d have to encounter Nancy at some point soon. She could hardly leave town without saying good-bye. She knew too that her dread of the occasion was illogical. Lovely Nancy was still Lovely Nancy, no matter whom she was in love with. Nonetheless, John and George were both looming large in her head at the moment, and she
was
dreading the encounter. And really, she said to herself, it didn’t have to be
today
, did it? Their reunion didn’t have to be
quite
so soon?

“Oh, what a shame that I already have an engagement,” she said lightly to Sheridan, and spun around on her heel so that he wouldn’t see her face.

This did, of course, provide the perfect opportunity for Grace to call by at Tofts Walk and bring out a further suitcase or two of her belongings. Her sister would definitely not be at home. So as the younger Rutherford sister traveled by bus and tram from Hampstead to Kensington later that day to embrace her newly discovered brother, the elder sister was traveling in the opposite direction, reading and rereading Dexter O’Connell’s one-off West-Ender column, which had appeared in that day’s
Herald
.

She’d been warned about the piece by Dickie ahead of time. “You don’t mind, do you, Gracie? Thing is, nobody in my position could refuse a column from Dexter O’Connell. He hasn’t written for a newspaper in years. And you did say you could do with a break…”

She knew she should be glad that O’Connell had said sorry to her in his piece, flattered that he had made a half-open statement of his onetime heartfelt love for her. But the manner of his apology and declaration rankled. He had barged in on her column in order to say his bit. He was asserting his power even as he confessed that she had made him vulnerable. Then of course, the piece itself was a typical piece of O’Connell game playing. An apparent gesture of simple honesty buried in so many layers of fakery and vanity that she couldn’t unpick it. Frankly, it made her think of O’Connell as being like some high-pitched, whining mosquito that you just have to swat. She’d had absolutely enough of him and would be all the happier once Margaret had packed his case and marched him off to that damn boat.

She was so distracted by her own rage at the column that
she was barely aware of getting off the bus, barely aware of the ten-minute walk to her house, of the familiar clink of the front gate, of the rooting about for her keys. So distracted was she that she didn’t notice the second clink of the gate, or the whistled tune: “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,” so that when her name was called out cheerily and a hand touched her arm, her heart thudded and she squeaked aloud. And when she turned around to see John Cramer standing right behind her, her heart thudded yet again.

“Sorry.” Cramer’s shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow, showing brown, sinewy arms. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I spotted you from the window and I just had to come over. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” she said in her frostiest voice. And then she frowned. There was something different about him. “Your mustache—you’ve shaved it off.”

He winced and stroked his upper lip. “Penance for bad behavior at the
Herald
party. It’s a rule I have for myself. My face is too big without it, don’t you think?”

“Mustaches are like dead mice stuck under the nose.”

“That’s harsh! I was attached to mine. Or perhaps it was attached to me…” He smiled. She could feel an answering smile of her own trying to break out. It was all she could do to hold it back.

“It’s good to see you, Grace. Would you come across to the house with me for a cup of tea?”

A tight little shake of the head.

He rubbed at his forehead. “I said something to you at the party, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I must have been boorish, perhaps downright offensive.”

“Not at all. I simply have lots to do.” There were sounds behind the door. Feet coming down the stairs. Catherine,
or possibly Edna. Grace looked up into Cramer’s mustacheless face. You could see his mouth better now. He had a nice mouth—wide and generous…“Though perhaps I could spare the time for a walk. Just a quick walk.”

To begin with, they walked in silence, side by side, over the cobbles of Flask Walk. She had no idea what he was thinking. For herself, she was absurdly choked with emotion—couldn’t trust herself to speak a word. He finally began to talk as they wandered up Well Walk toward the Heath.