Alec stared at the stem of his glass. ‘I don’t think that would be quite appropriate,’ he said coldly.
‘No, darling, I insist.’ Clara smiled with all her teeth. ‘We’ll invite everyone.’
Alec gripped the edge of the tablecloth. ‘We’ll discuss the details later.’
Uncle Edward coughed. ‘Probably a good thing to have a blasted party. It’ll be the last one you’ll have for a while.’ He threw his napkin on the table and got to his feet with a great deal of noise. ‘Bit of a long day. Think I’ll go up now.’ He left without waiting to hear our muted chorus of ‘Goodnight’.
We sat in silence as the servants cleared the cheese plates and brought in coffee. Alec helped himself to port, forgetting to offer me one. After the servants had withdrawn, Clara lit a cigarette and said, ‘You may as well tell me now. I’ll find out soon enough.’
‘Please excuse me.’ I scraped back my chair.
‘Stay,’ said Clara, and although it was absent from her voice, in her eyes I saw the quavering plea.
I stayed. Alec was too drunk to care either way. He turned his cigarette tin over in his fingers and stared at it intently.
‘I s’pose you’re having the time of your life,’ he mumbled at his wife. ‘Love to see me fall.’
Clara blew smoke at the ceiling. I looked at it, wishing, as I had so many times this summer, that I could escape to the electric light fitting myself.
‘As we’re yoked together in this,’ she said, ‘I actually do have your best interests at heart.’
Alec snorted.
She eyed him and said, almost softly, ‘Tell me the worst.’
He looked up at her, as cold as I’d ever seen him. ‘We’ll have to sell some of Mother’s furniture. Get rid of the car. And most of the servants, including Scone.’
‘Fine.’ She tapped ash into the tray.
‘I’ll have to find some sort of employment.’
She sucked on her cigarette. ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘There, I agree with your father. I think it’ll be good for you.’
‘And we’ll have to sell Castaway.’
‘No.’ There was no pleading in her voice; it sounded like a statement of fact.
He shrugged. ‘No choice, sweetness. We’re going to move into a serviced flat in London and Father’s going to get me a job through one of his cronies and we’re going to live bloody well happily ever after.’
‘You’re not selling Castaway.’
I was sure Alec did not see her hands shaking on her cigarette, but I could, as she said, ‘Your mother would never have allowed it.’
‘Don’t you dare mention my mother.’ He jabbed a finger. ‘Castaway is not your house. It’s mine, and I can do with it what I like.’
She banged her palm flat on the table. ‘It’ll be chopped up into flats or turned into an hotel or … or something hideous like that.’
‘It’s only a house, Clara. It’s not a baby.’
She received the words like a slap in the face. She flicked a glance at me, and I saw tears trembling in the corners of her eyes. ‘You’d regret it,’ was all she said, swallowing hard.
‘You ought to be careful, Clara.’ His face reddened. ‘I raised you up from the gutter; I can drop you back down again.’
She blew smoke towards him. ‘If I go down,’ she said in a voice as smooth as coffee, ‘you’ll be coming right down with me. Dearest.’
Alec uttered an oath and saw me finally. ‘Enjoying the show?’ he snarled.
I stared at him, surprised, and said, ‘Oh, come on, Alec.’
He cursed again and left the room. A few seconds later the front door banged so resoundingly on its hinges that the entire room rattled.
For a full minute, silence reigned, except for the hiss of Clara’s cigarette being extinguished. I considered my options. Either, I thought, I could leave the room on a pretence of neutrality or I could plant my flag now. Then I heard a swallowed-back sniff from Clara and knew, just as I always had, that the choice was no choice at all.
‘I don’t know about you,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘but I need a very stiff drink.’
She widened her eyes so the tears would not fall, and reached blindly back to the bell pull by the fireplace.
‘Not here,’ I added, and her hand dropped.
Clara drew in a breath; of course, she saw in an instant the partisan nature of my statement. She nodded and stood up, turning to face the mirror that hung over the mantelpiece. She patted her perfect hair, her eyes in the reflection as black as coals. ‘I know somewhere,’ she said in a murmur.
She moved swiftly into the hall. I heard her talking to Scone, to whom none of what had occurred could be a
secret, and by the time I joined her in the hallway she was already dressed for outside. I collected my hat from its peg, and together we walked down the steps in the warm, scented night air.
She did not speak to me the entire way down the hill. Only her heels clattered angrily as I kept pace with her. Dr Feathers’ waiting room was lit as we walked past, and I saw the doctor in the window. I raised a hand to him in greeting, and he nodded, arms behind his back, and I wondered what he thought of my accompanying my cousin’s wife into town, not five minutes after the master of the house had gone this same way.
We continued along the seafront, past the entrance to the Snooks. The midsummer sky was still indigo; a few stars twinkled, but true darkness had not yet set in. We walked all the way to the east end of the town, towards the small harbour, and crossed the road just before it. A terrace of whitewashed houses stood facing the front, and from the basement of one I heard the faint pulse of live music.
Clara stopped at the top of the steps and turned to me. ‘Thanks, Robert,’ she said. ‘You’ve been an awful brick about the whole thing. I know it can’t be easy, stuck between Alec and me.’
I shrugged. ‘I want you both to be happy.’
She shook her head. ‘When two liars marry each other, it’s never going to end well.’ She grimaced. ‘And d’you know what? I’m fed up of lying.’
I frowned, because it seemed to me I had never seen her so honest. ‘Are you lying now?’
‘All of this …’ she drew a line around her black beaded
dress and her emerald wrap with one finger. ‘All of me is a lie. The only thing of me that I have that is still true is down there.’ With the same finger, she pointed to the basement.
I peered. Through the barred windows I saw hazy movement. ‘What’s down there?’
She inclined her head, saying, ‘Come and find out,’ before turning and heading down the steps. I paused, and then followed her. She knocked rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat on the door and then waited. I hovered on the steps as the door opened and a burst of music and sticky warmth emerged. I heard a voice say, ‘Sweetheart! You’re back!’ and as she leaned in I saw two masculine arms embrace her.
Clara smiled up at me and disappeared beyond the doorway. I hesitated and then climbed down the steps and entered the room.
It was stiflingly hot inside and almost pitch-black – or, at least, after the milky light from the street lamps outside it seemed so. The room was crammed with people, and they all seemed to be talking and moving at once, making the place appear a many-headed, buzzing insect. At the far end of the room, on a raised platform, a band was thumping on a piano and playing strings and horns. I saw with a jolt of surprise that they were Negro.
A hand pulled at mine; it was Clara’s, and she tugged me through the throng to a small bar on the right where a man – perhaps he of the embracing arms – was serving drinks. He sported a thin, elegantly twisted moustache and eyebrows arched even more sardonically than Clara’s.
‘This is my cousin, Robert Carver,’ said Clara breathlessly. ‘Robert – a good friend of mine, George Basin.’
The man put down the glass he was holding, wiped his hands on his apron, and shook mine. ‘Glad you persuaded her out the house,’ he shouted, over the noise of the band. ‘We been missing her down here these past few weeks.’
‘Stop your flattery,’ said Clara, but her lips and eyes flashed all the same. ‘And get us a drink. What’ll you have, Robert? Gin? It’s too hot for anything else, isn’t it?’
I nodded, too ambushed by my surroundings to care much what I was drinking. There were couples dancing in the middle of the room, in front of the band. The singer, his eyes screwed tight shut with concentration, belted out a fast jazz number and the couples twirled apart and together. Bodies banged against bodies, hemmed in by the narrow walls of the club, and Clara handed me my drink and I knocked it back, needing the dumbing effect of the alcohol to cushion the novelty.
‘Like the whangdoodle?’
I looked down. A short man wearing blue-lensed glasses was shouting up at me.
‘The band,’ he added at my bemused expression.
‘The band? Oh – yes, very.’ I did not add that I had almost no experience with bands, apart from the Salvation Army in the park on bank-holiday afternoons.
‘From London,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘They play all the top places there, you know. Clara! Nobody told me you was here.’
Clara embraced this man too, kissing him on both cheeks, and introduced me to him as Mr Eli Golden, the proprietor. ‘Eli saved me from death by boredom,’ she said. ‘When I moved back here I thought I’d never go dancing again, and then I met Eli.’
‘She’s a great little hoofer.’ Eli winked at me. I presumed he thought me her lover, and I blushed, glad of the darkness. I remembered what Alec had said, about her fall after dancing, and wondered if the accident had happened here, perhaps on those stone steps outside.
Still, she appeared unaffected by the memory now. ‘Want to dance?’ she said, and I heard, in the exuberance of shouting, and the sentences clipped of necessity, a coarse echo of another voice, one that spoke without irony, with literalness, in harsh, unaffected tones.
I shook my head. ‘I can’t, I’m afraid.’
For answer, she took my empty glass from me, laid it on the counter and pulled me into the middle of the throng. I was jostled on all sides by moving bodies, but I managed to grasp Clara’s right hand with my left and put my other to the small of her back, which was damp with sweat. I had no idea what to do now, but I managed to sway in time to the music as she darted away and towards me, her hips shimmering, her lips mouthing the words to the song, perfectly in time, as if the rhythm of the band was beating out the pattern of her heart.
Towards the end of the song she was claimed by other friends, both male and female, and I retreated gratefully to the edge of the dance floor. I ordered another drink and leaned on the bar, craning my neck to watch her dance, cursing when other couples lumbered in front, obscuring my view, and I wished now that at some point during my wasted adolescence I had taken lessons, at least, and wondered why nobody had ever pointed out to me that an ability to dance was worth a hundred Latin declensions or a matchless spin-bowl.
There was a commotion near the stage, and a great deal of applause and whooping. ‘Here she goes,’ said George Basin behind me, and when I queried him he said, ‘Your cousin. They always get her up on the stage when she’s here.’
The singer bowed and made way for Clara, who scrambled rather inelegantly up on to the platform. She passed her drink down to a friend in the crowd, and there was a general hushing sound as dancers stopped moving and chatterers turned to see what was going on. The double bassist twanged a few notes, the pianist floated a melody over the crowd, and Clara opened her arms wide and sang in a voice as deep as the sea outside the door: ‘
Your love won’t give me no roses
…’
The couples on the dance floor nodded to each other and struck up into a new rhythm, swaying together. The chatterers resumed their chattering. I remained where I was, one elbow on the bar, my face welded to the sight of Clara Bray, her eyes limpid with feeling, her voice dredging all my unused emotions up from the bottom of my heart and flinging them out across the crowded floor.
And I knew then that I would always love her, no matter what happened in the future or who she’d been in the past. My adoration was unselfish; it was not dependent on subclauses, it merely was, and that knowledge was enough to make me happy.
‘Good actress, ain’t she?’
George Basin was grinning at me. I was irritated he had interrupted my contemplation of Clara, and so I ignored him, but he hardly seemed to care.
‘Yeah,’ he continued. ‘I reckon she could have been one
of the stars, you know, in the pictures and that, if she hadn’t a got married. When she sings it makes you feel all sort of mushy inside, know what I mean?’
I nodded dumbly, and returned my attention to the stage, smug and safe in the knowledge that, however good an actress she was, I knew the real Clara Bray, who had cried on a five-bar gate and trembled as she smoked a cigarette; and as she climbed down from the stage to adulation and cheers and joined me, breathless and excited, I saw her eyes glowing and knew she could not be more real. I longed to take her in my arms and kiss her, and contented myself with saying idiotically, ‘Bravo! Very well done!’
‘I expect you think I’m a terrible show-off,’ she said to me, as the band struck up again. ‘Well, you’re right.’
The weight of the people thrust her against me. I thought I could feel her heartbeat, but realized it must be my own, thumping like a rabbit’s inside my breast. ‘Th-thank you for bringing me here,’ I shouted back.
She smiled and flung her arm out. ‘This was my life,’ she shouted. ‘In London. Until I met Alec. Now I’m an old boring married woman.’
‘You’re not, absolutely not. Well, married yes, but that’s it.’
She touched my chin. ‘Bless you. Sweet Robert,’ she said, and my insides twisted, because this was the most affection she had ever shown me, and whether it was alcohol-induced or not, I didn’t care.
We stayed a while, as she introduced me to friends I had no interest in, and I laughed and joked with them all the same, and before the party had ended she said she was achingly tired and did we mind leaving. I shook hands
with everybody, and as we climbed back up the basement steps to the street, I watched her bottom as it rose up the steps, shifting in its swathe of silk.
‘I know you’re looking where you shouldn’t, Robert Carver,’ she mumbled as she walked up.