The Debutante (25 page)

Wren,
It was an accident. You must believe me. I simply forgot how many I’d taken.

You see, things keep me awake at night. Things I wish I could forget about and I cannot sleep, so the doctor gave me some pills.

But then, I don’t expect you’ve ever done anything you regret.

It was an accident. Please don’t let her send me away again.

He will never marry me. He never will. And I can’t imagine what I’ve done wrong!

D

Jack stayed at a bed and breakfast in Lyme Regis, driving up to Endsleigh to spend the day working alone. Since his last visit it had grown still more wild and unkempt. Without Jo to clean, polish and air the old house, a filmy grey layer of dust settled upon everything, dulling sounds and giving it a muffled, crypt-like atmosphere. Most importantly, Cate wasn’t there. She was so closely linked to his experience of the place that without her it felt bereft of charm or any sensual beauty. The rooms had seemed better proportioned, more pleasingly decorated when she was either in them or about to enter. Now he wandered through them alone, his mind drifting from one memory to another, untethered and unfocused.

After a while, he found an old record player tucked into the corner of the study and a pile of thick vinyl opera recordings. He put them on, loudly and opened the French windows at the side of the house. The majestic tenor voice of Jussi Björling filled the vast, empty rooms, echoing through the main hallway with its marble floor and cavernous ceiling.

And so he worked, making himself endless pots of strong black tea, moving methodically through the rooms, labelling and cross-checking, work which required only the smallest fraction of his real attention. Against the backdrop of grand emotion,
Madama Butterfly, Faust, Lucia di Lammermoor,
he wrestled with his own feelings, and the ghosts that stubbornly dominated his thoughts—Julia and her lover, who even now, two years
later, continued to maintain an intimacy with her that he knew he’d never enjoyed.

It was one thing to lose his wife. It was another thing to realise the love they’d had was meaningless, like a bad cheque.

Like a record with a deep scratch, his mind kept repeating, stuck in the moment when reality came crashing down on him, playing and replaying the phone call, early that sunny Sunday morning; a call he thought must be from Julia but which turned out to be from a Berkshire police officer, saying things that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t possibly be true. One minute he was comfortably drowsing, enjoying the freedom of having the bed all to himself, listening to the birdsong outside and planning his day off. The next he was sitting up, the birds sounded as if they were screaming rather than singing and he was falling, internally, at a terrifying speed with nothing to grab hold of.

‘She’s at her sister’s,’ he kept insisting. ‘It can’t be her.’

The officer spoke slowly, patiently. ‘Her identification says Julia Coates. She has dark brown hair, drives a black Mini Cooper.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘You need to come in, sir.’

‘But it can’t be her!’

‘Sir—’ the man paused—‘how can you be sure?’

There it was; how could he be sure? A crack formed, a single hairline fracture across the eggshell surface of his ego. It grew wider, more devastating as the day unfolded,
till any sense he had of being able to trust his own senses or interpretation of life disappeared forever.

‘Sir?’ The officer was waiting. ‘Would you like me to contact her sister for you? If you give me her name and number, I’d be willing to speak to her directly. Sir? Are you still there?’

Jack had heard about people whose world had turned upside down in a moment. He’d outwardly sympathised but felt secretly immune, even superior to such twists of fate. He didn’t believe in fate, after all. It was all about attitude and effort. He was self-determining.

Only that turned out to be an illusion too. He wasn’t self-determining. Or rather, the only thing now that he got to determine were his responses, his attitudes, how he would deal with what life doled out. That wasn’t good enough. He wanted more than that.

The Greeks called it hubris. What the fuck did the Greeks know?

More about tragedy than he did, he thought wryly.

Her sister hadn’t spoken to him herself. The family that had once welcomed him and been his as well, especially after his father deteriorated, took a step back. And he found he was instantly isolated, separated by their loyalty to Julia. No one ever said anything directly; no acknowledgement was ever made of how she was found. They were grieving the loss of their sister, their child. He was alone in grieving the loss of his marriage as well. The gap widened. An unspoken hostility grew between them, built from the
unsaid words; a kind of defensiveness on both sides, which gradually hardened into a wall. Had they believed he had something to do with her infidelity? That he’d driven her to it through some neglect or unfaithfulness of his own? Had she confided in them about her lack of marital satisfaction? And so it spread outwards like a kind of web; extending to embrace her friends—friends he’d thought of as belonging to him too until they struggled to make eye contact with him at the funeral or no longer bothered to ring.

He hadn’t been the one who’d cheated. But he was the one who felt punished for the affair.

The one who was left.

‘It’s time you moved on,’ people began to say, as little as six months later. ‘You need to let go of that now.’

Yes, he needed to let go of it, accept it, and endure the increasing indifference of those he thought had loved him. He needed to grow up, get on.

Life wasn’t fair. Who ever said life was fair? So she cheated. Time to get a girlfriend; buy a house … start again.

Yet the wound went too deep. He’d lost what he couldn’t afford to lose. Hope. A basic tangible belief in the goodness of people, of love.

Could he have prevented it? Is that what they thought?

The words on the card ran through his mind.
Forever.

He thought of Cate.

Did forever even exist any more?

And so his thoughts ran, endless, obsessive, battering him through the long, still days, like waves pummelling into the rocks, wearing his spirit down. He made no attempt to stem the tide and gave up trying to shake himself out of it. For too long he’d strained every inch of his being, trying to avoid the overwhelming mass of feelings. He couldn’t do it any more. He surrendered. So what if he fell, tumbling into a bottomless abyss? He no longer had the energy to pretend to be normal. And here it didn’t matter. He was alone. He could wear the same clothes, forget to shave, eat or not eat as his fancy took him. Here, in this abandoned old house, miles from anywhere, he could be mad and no one would hear if he ran from room to room, screaming.

Endsleigh was as eloquent and grand as his rage and fear; as wild and neglected as his grief.

So instead he listened to Renata Tebaldi singing ‘Un bel dí’, over and over, drinking cold tea, wandering from one room to another, occasionally doing work, and occasionally lying down in the cool overgrown grass at the side of the house, dozing in the sunlight, allowing his mind to be stilled briefly by the gentle breezes and birdsong.

On the fifth day he arrived at the house to find a familiar car in the drive.

Rachel was sitting on the front steps, dressed in jeans, a smart white button-down shirt and a pair of flat red ballet pumps, smoking a cigarette.

‘It’s more beautiful than I imagined,’ she said, standing.
‘Which,’ she added, ‘is more than I can say for you! Lost your razor, have you?’

Jack laughed, hopping out of his convertible and shutting the low door. ‘What are you doing here? Come to lend me a hand?’ Walking over, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. It was good to see her; she smelled reassuringly of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 19. He hadn’t realised how lonely he’d been. ‘Is Cate with you?’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry, darling, just me. And no, I haven’t come to help so much as to check on you.’ She reached out a hand, running her fingers lightly along his dark unshaven beard, glistening with silver strands. ‘It looks as if I’m just in time. You’ve gone a bit Grizzly Adams, kiddo.’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

Her face softened. ‘It’s a shit time of year.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed again.

‘I’ve got a grand idea. Show me the house and then let’s bunk off and go and have a slap-up lunch somewhere, on me. What do you say? I’m just guessing but I’ll bet you haven’t had a proper meal in days. Am I right?’

‘How well you know me!’ he smiled, and then stopped. His face changed, suddenly serious. ‘Paul … he died in the summer. It’s that time for you too, isn’t it?’

She took one last long drag on her cigarette and, tossing it down, ground the end out under her heel. ‘Well remembered.’

They stood a moment, looking out over the horizon to the sea beyond. The wind blew but the sky was cloudless, limitless, a scorching sun beat down, like an eye that wouldn’t blink or close.

‘I cannot bear it,’ she said at last, matter-of-factly.

He took her hand.

She looked up at him. The bright armour slipped away; she seemed to age before him, her eyes had a hollow helplessness he recognised.

Turning the key in the lock, he pushed open the heavy oak door. ‘Come inside.’

12
Birdcage Walk
London

30 October
1936

My darling Wren,
This business of living on one’s own is a bit more difficult than I imagined. Of course Anne is terribly good at it but I’m hopeless. For example, washing clothes seems to take forever and all I end up with are piles of soggy soaking woollens which of course shrink and then I look like I’ve pulled a sock over my head instead of a jumper. And the washing-up is even worse. I’ve already broken two glasses and chipped a teacup that Anne says I must replace or the landlord will become cross. Little balls of dust blow across the living-room floor like tumbleweeds. I practically wept when Mrs Lynd, the charwoman came today. I have rarely been so pleased to see anyone in my life!

I’m forever forgetting to buy any food, and when I do, I don’t know how to cook it. Scrambled eggs aren’t meant to be crunchy, are they? The instant Anne leaves the house, I pounce on whatever she’s left behind like a starved animal. (She’s taken to hiding her bread and honey and now it’s a real trick to find it!)

The job is coming on. I have graduated from wrapping and posting orders and am now allowed on the shop floor. The Old Guard came in the other day to order a book called, Wellington: The Man and the Myth, which I’m fairly certain he already owns but which is expensive and so gave me quite a good sale in front of Mr Thurberton. Then he offered, a bit reluctantly, to take Anne and me out to lunch. It was only because we stood in front of him, gazing up like a pair of puppies and refused to budge. We went to Lyons, which I don’t think he’s ever been into in his life and seemed to confirm his worst fears about the decay of modern civilisation. Of course Anne and I were too busy cramming food into our mouths to care, as we only had a short break, and even pocketed the bread rolls for supper later. TOG was horrified but slipped me a five-pound note before we left. He is dear in his own way.

I haven’t seen much of Nick. Some Canadians are in London, friends of his family, making their rounds. I got quite upset about it; behaved stupidly. There’s a daughter, Pamela, quite pretty in a bovine sort of way. We rowed which was dreadful and entirely my fault. It is such a hopeless situation. I’m completely desperate about the whole thing. I simply don’t understand why something that is so easy and straightforward for other people is so impossible for us.