Fragile Blossoms (21 page)

‘Did you know she is opening another of her coffee shops in Cambridge?’

‘I heard a whisper.’

‘We’ve taken tea in the Norfolk place, me and Mrs Scholtz, and liked it real fine. Didn’t we Mamie?’

Mrs Scholtz nodded. ‘We did.’

Luke shifted in his chair. ‘I believe it is popular.’

‘Popular? The place was heaving and the phone ringing off the hook people making bookings. Such a pretty place with an air of gentility and good china and linen, we saw things that day that we liked. The name, for instance, the Nannies? That is so cute and clever! Makes a man feel cosy and warm. You’d buy anything just to sit and be comfortable. Anyway, we got to thinking about and our hotels and decided Mrs Dryden’s Tea-Shops would suit us fine.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘We’re thinking to have such a tea-room in every one of our hotel lobbies and would like her, and her name, as sponsor. What do you think if I spoke to her? How would she take the idea?’

Luke shook his head. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I meant to contact her last time we were in London and but we were busy and she was tied up with the Royals.’

Mamie Scholtz leaned forward. ‘We met her, you know, a couple of years back. We shared a box at the Garden. Such a pretty woman, such eyes and such a manner! No wonder the Prince of Wales is taken with her. I really liked her as did Bobby but Freddie C was being silly at the time and it put her off.’

Robert Scholtz nodded. ‘Shame about that, we might’ve shared a deeper acquaintance. Still that was then. Time has moved on and we mean to bring Mrs Dryden, and you, to the East Coast.’

‘I think Mrs Dryden has a partner to consider.’

‘You mean Doctor Adelman? Yes well we know about him. We met him at Evie’s too and sat with him at the opera. A fateful meeting as it turned out. I shall give him, and the beautiful Julianna much thought.’

‘Ooh!’ Face flushed and wig askew Eve dropped into a seat beside Luke. ‘If I don’t sit down I shall fall down.’

‘My word, Evie,’ Mamie Scholtz passed a fan.’ You’re looking rather warm.’

‘It is too warm for October and I’m too old for polkas. What were you discussing? Did my ears deceive me or were talking of Ju-ju Dryden?’

Luke considered slapping a hand over Robert’s mouth but didn’t bother. Eve’s been laying fuses all week so sooner or later a bomb is bound to go off.

‘We were talking of installing coffee shops in the Scholtz Hotels.’

‘What soda-fountains?’

‘Heavens no! English Tea-Shops like those of your friend Mrs Dryden.’

‘You mean the Nannies! Umm yes, what a wonderful idea! They will go down awfully well in Boston.’

‘That’s what I was saying to Mr Roberts,’ said Mamie.

Evie patted a hanky about her face. ‘And did Mr Roberts agree with you?’

‘He did,’ said Robert Scholtz. ‘He thinks it’s a humdinger. Next time I’m in the old country I’m popping along to see that little lady. And while I’m about it I shall lean on our friend here to come to Boston and work his magic. What say you, Luke, shall I start leaning?’

Conversation passed back and forth across the table, the subject matter, English Tea-Shops on American soil. Eve was witty and made jokes about toasted crumpets and cucumber sandwiches. Everyone laughed. Then Freddie arrived with friends and the subject matter changed to who could balance a champagne glass on his nose and quote from the Gettysburg Address without spilling a drop. Luke watched all and said nothing. He knew sooner or later the storm would break. It did break and a crystal water jug with it smashing into the bathroom mirror.

It is early morning. Luke sat on the terrace writing to Nan. Eve hasn’t slept and neither has he. From two in the morning, naked but for a cotton-shift and a coral necklace, she’s wandered about bare feet slapping the marble floor. Around four she collapsed on the bed and is there now, asleep or comatose he can’t tell. Five am a maid tapped on the door. Luke sent her away.

‘
No grazie, signora! Diamo madam dormire
!’

At least asleep she is quiet.

Eve and her problems! Luke is dead beat and his shoulder on fire where she bit him. She bit him because he wouldn’t do what she wanted. Migraine headaches and other pains he can tolerate. It’s the mental stuff that he finds hard to handle. When she’s low or has had too much to drink a kind of madness takes over where she needs to humiliate or be humiliated. She throws things and punches and kicks. Usually it’s a servant or Luke at the end of her fist except he’s not Luke to her then he too is a servant to be abused.

Such absurdity usually ends in her need for sex, rotten sex, dirty and dark. ‘Harder, you useless creature!’ she’ll shriek as he pushes into her. ‘It’s not working! Do it harder!’ What she wants is to be forced and tossed aside as a used paper bag, he knows it so. He also knows every man has a darker self that given the lead can rise up with a clenched fist. He’s not prepared to meet that Luke, not for anyone.

In the early hours they had sex, a lacklustre affair all flesh and no heart. Then she spoke of Julianna. ‘Your teeth are not very sharp tonight, Mister Wolf. Why don’t you think of me as Little Red Riding Hood alias Ju-Ju Dryden? I’m sure that will fire the engines.’

Angry he told her to shut up he didn’t want to hear such stuff. She laughed. ‘Of course you do, you just need persuading.’ That’s when she bit him, not hard at first her teeth grazing his flesh but enough for him to pull away. She’d followed on her hands and knees across the bed. ‘I know you think of her,’ she said. ‘Inside of me or out you do it all the time so you might as well have my sanction. Here!’ She’d ripped the shift from her breasts. ‘I make you a present. Do it! Call me your darling Ju-ju! Kiss my lips and sip my honey! Then we might both get the pleasure we yearn for. ’

It was too much for Luke. ‘You’re crazy,’ he’d said. ‘I could never think of you as Julianna. In fact when I am with you I try not to think of her. Feeling as I do, utter disgust for me, and for you, why would I want her here?’

That’s when she bit him again. Screaming she leapt onto his back sinking her teeth into his flesh.

‘Good God!’ He came close then to striking her. ‘Is this what you call love?’

Eyes shadowed she’d grinned. ‘Why are you saying you love me?’

‘I could never love you!’ He’d turned away. ‘Neither when I am with you can I love anyone else, especially not myself! You or rather I have made that impossible.’

Away she went waltzing about the room coral necklace looped about her breasts and his blood on her lips. He went to the bathroom to bathe his shoulder and the door was flung open and a water jug hurled at the mirror.

‘Don’t you close the door on me!’ she ran at him through shards of glass her feet cut and blood spraying. ‘How dare you shut me out? You’re here to be of service to me, Luke Roberts, that’s all. You’re not a companion or a friend, you’re a paid servant! A hireling! So don’t you forget it!’

Now she sleeps. She’ll wake and remembering what has passed will again beg Mister Wolf to stay. Luke Roberts, the servant and hireling will stay, but she needn’t bother begging the Wolf to stay. The Wolf was never here.

*

Shuddering, Julia gestured toward the stone coffin. ‘He lay in that?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Radcliff.

‘All night?’’

‘So he said.’

Julia was appalled. Struggling to breathe, a scarf over her mouth to filter dust and in the only light a lamp held over the sarcophagus, she found it terrifying. It was all she could do not to make a wild dash back into the air, to breathe sweet sunlit air and not the foul excretions of bat and mice.

How anyone would want to stay in this claustrophobic box is a mystery. One might as well be buried alive. ‘And he was alone?’

‘A guide would have led him down but I doubt he would’ve stayed. A king’s burial chamber, it would have been against their beliefs.’

All night alone in this tomb and he never a word to Julia! It says much about Owen and even more about their marriage.

Numb, she peered through the gloom. But for the collective corpses of flies and spiders and bats and other creeping things there was nothing to see. Owen died under the wheels of an ox-cart, his right arm flung out and his face turned toward the East. No one told her so nevertheless standing beside this stone coffin she knew it to be so. She knew too there was blood on his chest, bright red in the hot sun, but none on his face, and that his eyes were open and his lips upturned as though smiling.

‘Was it you he ran to meet, Miss Radcliff, when he was knocked down?’

‘No, not me, a beggar.’

‘A beggar?’

‘Yes one of the many here in Cairo forever clutching a bowl. The chap had fallen and couldn’t get up. Owen saw and tried dragging him out of the way. The cart took them both. The beggar all but dead I saw it as a waste of a life, but then you know Owen, he saw all life sacred even that of a leper. ’

Julia was bent over in pain! Until this moment she thought she’d mourned his death. She was wrong. Any pain felt before was as nothing to this. It hurt so much she couldn’t weep the tears locked up inside. It hurt! Oh it did hurt! What’s more she knew back home in Norfolk Matty was hurting too.

For the last two day’s Kitty Radcliff’s every comment on the man has been peppered with that rider, ‘
but then you know Owen
.’ Last night Julia had wavered thinking maybe she didn’t know him. But now, hearing of this, that he gave his life for another, she realised she did know him.

‘Yes, I did know my husband. I knew him very well.’

Kitty Radcliff said nothing. Then she sighed. ‘I’m sure you did. After all what was there to know. He was an academic with the thrill of history and Egypt on his mind, but he had his wife and his son in his heart. You were the blood in his veins. Beyond that everything and everyone was incidental.’

The guide jiggled the lamp. ‘It is late. We must go now, Missies.’

Julia nodded. ‘Yes we do need to go. Perhaps you’ll show me the way then, Miss Radcliff?’

Kitty Radcliff frowned. ‘To what?’

‘To his grave.’

‘To his grave?’

‘Yes.’

You’re looking at it.’

‘What?’ Julia could only see the empty sarcophagus. ‘Where is it?’

‘Everywhere! ‘

‘What do you mean?’

‘For God’s sake wake up, Ju-ju!’ Kitty Radcliff flung out her arms. ‘He’s everywhere. He’s in the walls and the stone. He’s thick on the ground and he floats in the air! Owen is dust! We took him out of that grave, me and Mohammed, and we burnt him to cinders! Then we swept him up and carried him down here in a five cent jug. How else could we manage?’

‘Oh my Lord!’ Julia gasped. ‘Of course! How else could you.’

‘Look, Missy Passmore!’ The guide swung the lamp back and forth and the walls and motes of dust hovering in the air sparkled. ‘Doctor Sahib!’

‘Oh yes!’ Tears poured down Julia’s cheeks. ‘Doctor Sahib!’

Quartz glittered in the huge slabs of granite, or maybe it was phosphorus or gold pyrites or silver, whatever the walls were alive. Everywhere Julia turned there was light, splendid and beautiful, the effulgence of a thousand stars.

The guide moved the lamp higher and light flashed on Kitty Radcliff’s tear-stained face. ‘Owen was kind. He talked to me in Cambridge and I talked to him. He valued my opinion here when others did not. I respected him and I believe he respected me. I was there the day he said it, ‘
how must it feel for a man to be buried among kings
.’ I brought him here so he might find out.’

‘I understand,’ said Julia.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes I do.’

‘I couldn’t leave him there. He had to come. These tunnels? You saw them. It’s as Petrie Flinders said they are filled with rubble and impossible to negotiate but they won’t always be like that. Fifty years from now the world will come marching down those steps. Day after day people from every country and every walk of life will see the mystery that is Khufu, and one of those mysteries, if not the greatest, will be the light that greets them down here in this chamber, the light of Doctor Owen Passmore.’

Thought there was nothing left to say, or so Julia thought. The first bitter anger was fading. There was even grudging admiration for a woman that could do that, could dig a body out of grave, reduce it to dust, and then to spread the dust as a sower spreads seed. It takes courage to do that. That Kitty adored Owen was evident. Julia could forgive that. She knows only too well one can’t help who one loves. One must forgive and forget, thought Julia.

Miss Radcliff was not done, she had more to say.

They left the pyramid and made the journey back. The cart pulled up outside the hotel. Julia got out and wanting to part with civility offered her hand. ‘No.’ Kitty Radcliff pulled away. ‘It’s best you hang fire. I have something for you. Once given you might not want to shake my hand.’ So saying she dug into her pocket and dropped a wedding ring into Julia’s hand.

‘Oh!’ Julia gasped. ‘It’s Owen’s ring. ’

Kitty Radcliff nodded. ‘It’s amazing what you find when a body is cinders.’

Julia couldn’t move. The ring was cold in her hand ice. ‘You wore this?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were you doing pretending to be Owen’s widow?’

‘In my heart I was though no one was fooled.’

‘And if the first grave had not come to light you would still be wearing it?’

She nodded again. ‘I suppose.’

‘So why do you give it to me now?’

‘Owen would want me to.’

The day was hot but the ring was cold. It felt strange to Julia, unfamiliar as though belonging to another. A choice lay before her, what she did next, what she said could harm or heal. God, she was angry! Such anger! She wanted to slap the woman, to hurt her as she had hurt Julia.

Then as clearly as though he were there beside her she heard Owen sigh.

‘Ah poor soul.’

The choice was made. She reached out and taking Kitty’s hand closed her fingers over the ring. ‘Take it. It’s not mine. It’s yours.’

A tear ran down Kitty Radcliff cheek. ‘Why?’ she said.

‘Because Owen wants you to have it, and you have so often pointed out you know Owen.’