The Debutante (21 page)

Paul was alive then. Paul, who’d hired him, mentored him; given him a safe place to fall apart. After the accident, he’d let Jack come in even when there wasn’t much to do, just to sit in the office, be among people. He’d made mistakes, stupid, careless blunders; things anyone else would’ve been fired for. Instead, Paul had quietly got on with it, correcting the errors without even bothering to point them out, letting him fuck up. But then Paul was like that. He just got on with stuff in a non-dramatic way. He didn’t press Jack either; didn’t fuss over him or worry. Sometimes he’d take him out for a pint at lunchtime; let him ramble on about anything he wanted to. He remembered talking to Paul about the clothes. It had seemed a terrible dilemma at the time. Paul had offered no advice. He just listened, nodding every once in a while, looking interested. Jack must’ve banged on about it for months. But Paul always gave the matter his undivided attention; always acted like it was the first time Jack had ever mentioned it. It was only later, maybe a year and half later,
that Jack realised he’d been mad. Insane from grief. At the time, he’d thought he was pulling off a fairly credible imitation of a man going through a difficult time. In fact, it had been merely his own amazement at being able to do anything at all that substantiated the illusion of normalcy. But the truth was, he’d been demented and quite obviously so; only one step up from the person talking to themselves in the street, punctuating their monologue with the occasional rant at passers-by or pigeons. He too had felt the pull of the abyss and teetered, for a very long while, on its edge.

Or had he fallen?

He considered, drinking. The wine was warm, bitter.

Was he still there, scaling his way slowly, painfully up the edges even now?

In the end it was Suzanne who had taken care of the clothes. Suzanne had been the sister of the man in the other car. There’d been a joint memorial service, in which she’d played a very active role. She liked to organise; events, careers, lives. Tall, blonde, horsy, with a good education and bad teeth, Suzanne had relished being really rather amazing under the circumstances. She ran a recruitment consultancy. She was bright, efficient, eager to please. And after the memorial service was over, she’d turned her attention to Jack.

She’d set up a kind of informal support group for the friends and relatives affected by the accident, and under this guise, sent Jack a great many emails keeping him
updated about how everyone was doing, organising various get-togethers. Jack didn’t want to make casual conversation or to be supported by other grieving, shell-shocked people. He wanted to be left alone, wandering around London with a gaping hole where his heart and memory should be, and to be mad, in the great English tradition of madness, talking around the edges of his loss with eloquent stoicism rather than striding boldly into the centre of it with a bright searchlight and a lot of American therapy-speak.

But Suzanne hadn’t let him off the hook that easily. And he didn’t always have sufficient inner resources to resist. She’d rung, always on the pretence of making sure he was all right, asking if there was anything she could do, and once, just once, he’d made the mistake of hesitating. ‘Well, I’m not really sure what to do about her clothes…’

There’d been a sharp intake of breath. ‘You still have her clothes?’ She made it sound as if he’d been cross-dressing; fondling them of an evening.

‘Well, yes…’

‘Right. That’s it. I’m coming over tomorrow and we’ll clean out the cupboards.’

‘No, I’m sure that’s not—’

‘No, Jack, I insist. Someone needs to get it sorted. This situation can’t continue.’ Again, she made it sound as if he hadn’t emptied the rubbish in a year; that there was something morally unhygienic about his behaviour.

She’d found her way in. And Jack felt the horror of her being on his private territory with her tall, blonde
loudness; her flowery perfume; her terrifying self-possession. She assaulted all his senses; the ones that had been dimmed, requiring soft noises, dull light; slow, predictable movements.

In the end, she’d been rather useful. She brought her own bin bags and sent him out for a walk. When he got back, she’d done it, even moving his belongings into the empty spaces of the wardrobe so that it didn’t look so bleak or bare. They loaded them into the back of her Ford Fiesta.

‘Shall we have a quick drink?’ she suggested.

He paused. She’d come all this way, done something incredibly intimate … something he couldn’t seem to manage on his own. He owed her.

They’d gone to a local pub, sat in a corner. It was late afternoon. They’d drunk warm whisky and she’d done all the talking, pulling her jumper off to reveal a low-buttoned oxford shirt over surprisingly large, rather distracting breasts. She’d told him about her business, chatted easily about the troubles with staff, holiday plans, family dilemmas; leaning in, making lots of eye contact; laughing just that bit too readily when he’d made any sort of comment, no matter how banal. And to his shame he’d responded; had felt the physical ache of attraction come clumsily, blindly to life beneath the leaden surface of his grief.

They had stayed too long. He hadn’t offered to buy her dinner; hadn’t even pretended to be amusing or charming.

Walking back to her car, he’d made a fumbling sort of lunge at her, which was immediately reciprocated. She’d
bent forward, guiding his mouth to hers, orchestrating the contact that, in his state of drunkenness, was bound to be hit-and-miss. They’d stumbled back into the flat, him groping at her; unfamiliar with her body, her shape and smell. Once or twice there had been head-on collisions. She seemed to go right when he was heading left; up when he went down. It had been a tangled, desperate business, over before it had barely begun, without any pleasure or even relief.

To her credit, she’d left fairly quickly afterwards, gathering up her things, moving away as if on cue. But later it had struck him as pathetic how quiet she’d been; how little she’d felt she could intrude upon his patience or time.

There’d been a few occasions after that, simply because he’d felt so awkward about the whole thing. He’d had a desperate desire to mask his aversion to her by sleeping with her; a strategy that was demoralising for both of them.

It was she who had ended it, two months later.

She’d driven off, slightly huffy despite her sympathetic, understanding speech about how she hoped he looked after himself; she needed someone more emotionally available.

That’s how Jack got more closet space. And another black period he hadn’t reckoned on. Just when he’d thought he was out of it, back it spiralled, in and around itself, sucking him into the vortex.

It wasn’t the loss of his wife so much as the loss of everything around her—a basic belief that life was good and some form of justice would eventually prevail.

Now he sat on the roof terrace of his flat in Canonbury, thinking about another woman—a girl with small, cool hands and a tiny white scar on her forehead. A girl he couldn’t make out; didn’t trust. And yet the memory of her touch, her stillness, lingered.

It had taken so long to come this far. How could he risk losing himself again? He was teetering, in danger of falling into another void of feeling.

A smart man would stop while he could. A clever person would learn from past mistakes.

He took another drink.

Was he smart?

After Suzanne had thrown Julia’s clothes away, Jack had emptied the flat of the details of their life together. He hadn’t done it in the same way, with the same brisk purposefulness or resolve. But he’d done it. Bit by bit. First he took the photos, stacked them in a box that sat in the front-hall cupboard. And then he began to replace the pictures that she’d bought, with pieces he found from either work or the antique shops around Islington. Gradually he made it his practice that any time he happened across something in a drawer, something that reminded him of her or that she’d owned, he took it out, either throwing it away or putting it into the box in the hallway cupboard. Over time the objects went from being
quite obvious, like her passport or a small porcelain figurine, to much more subtle things like a book of matches from a favourite restaurant or a kitchen knife that she’d brought with her when they first moved in together.

All these things went, until finally he was satisfied that he could move around his flat in any room and not come into contact with anything that had belonged or, indeed, been specific to her.

In this way, he exorcised his home, his surroundings, from the traces of her.

For as he recovered from the dark, dragging days, Jack began to see what had been there all along. It rose like a sudden sprawling landscape from a veil of blinding mist, spread out before him all at once and in unmistakable detail.

Everything about their former life had been a lie.

5,
St James’s Square
London

23
May
1936

Darling Bird,
Tell me plain—what is it that men want from us? I cannot make it out. One minute they’re so attentive you imagine they’d die if you moved even two paces to the left. Thirty seconds later they’re off without so much as a goodbye. I seem always to have too much of the men I don’t want and not enough of the one I do! Am quite morbid today. Feel a great big wave of Black building and the only way out of it is to dance harder. Or perhaps to stop dancing all together …

Say something kind to me, my love. Even if you have to lie. And do tell me another story about that funny little maid of yours! Did she really darn the leg of your knickers together? Do you think perhaps she works for Muv?

If you wanted to come to London, I would be your constant, devoted companion. Please don’t leave me alone with all these plotting politicos! The city is simply crawling with ambassadors and foreign royals with the most impossible names and even more impossible manners, lounging around in damp basements drinking too much and fondling each other. Am certain they’re all spies. Lord R spends all his time trying to make me dance with them in the hopes that they’ll be indiscreet. Of course they are indiscreet, but hardly in the way he means. Now, Mr Paul Robeson—there’s a man I’d really like to dance with! Can you imagine what the Old Guard would say to that!

Oh, I do hope I’ve made you blush!

Sending piles of chaste, Rome-approved kisses,

B xxxxxx

The woman turned it over in her fingers, frowning. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she admitted, handing it back to Cate. ‘It’s not really my area of expertise. It looks like an old Girl Guide badge or something, only it’s too old for all that. Why don’t you ask Laurence at stall twenty-eight? I have a feeling it’s something to do with the war. That’s his particular passion.’

Cate slipped the little badge back into her jeans pocket. ‘Where is stall twenty-eight?’

‘Through the passage on your left and right to the end,’ the woman directed her. ‘Laurence Friedman.’

‘Thank you.’

Cate walked through the passageway of Alfies Antiques, through the close, crowded stalls, filled with furniture, clothing, some bursting with fine antiques, some cluttered with kitsch memorabilia. All tastes were catered for here at Alfies. Spanning over four floors, it was one of Europe’s largest antique markets and a great treasure trove where the past came to life in the wonderful collections of passionate enthusiasts.

Right at the back, Cate spotted stall twenty-eight. It was a jewellery concession—watches, diamonds, brooches, pearls; all of them pre-1950 and a few even from the Regency period. A bearded man in his fifties sat reading a copy of the
Sun
newspaper. He looked up, folding the paper away, as she approached.

‘Hello,’ Cate smiled, ‘are you Laurence?’

‘Absolutely.’ He stood up. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I wondered if you could help me.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘I’ve got something that I can’t place.’ She took the badge out and put it on the glass counter between them. ‘I was told you might be able to help.’

He picked it up. It was battered, a dark racing green. In the centre there was a golden candle with the letters SSG. Around the edge it read:
‘The Prize is a Fair One and the Hope Great.’

He looked up at her, frowning. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘I found it. What is it?’

‘Well, I’ve never actually seen one before,’ he said slowly, ‘but I believe it’s a badge for the Society of St George.’ He turned it over. ‘Hold on a minute … what’s this?’ Taking out a jeweller’s glass, he examined the back carefully. ‘It’s got an inscription. God, it’s small!’ He squinted. ‘“God said let there be light and there was you.’” He looked up. ‘Very odd.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that before. What’s the Society of St George? I’ve never heard of it.’