The First of July (6 page)

“Got it,” Theo said. “Up here.” He raised his head and specks of light filtered through the brim of his straw hat, scattering on his face like freckles. A light sheen of sweat covered his smooth cheeks. He looked wonderfully happy. Wonderfully young and fine and, for once, with no shadow of dissatisfaction.

They crossed the road, Theo stopping him to watch a shiny black beast of a car grumble by.

“My father has a car,” Theo said. “Although not one like that. Unfortunately. But popular with young ladies. As is my father. Now—here we are, Regent Street. The center of the purchasing world.”

A newspaper seller was shouting over the crowd: “Tensions rise in the Balkans! The prime minister in talks! Read all about it!”

The broad street curved away in a gentle arc. Dark green awnings shaded pale gray stone, with window displays unlike anything Benedict had ever seen. Caves of draped sea-green and carmine silks; exuberant osprey-feathered and flowered hats. Every building was decorated with festoons of red, white, and blue bunting.

“Where do you actually want to go?” Benedict, unsettled, had already decided there was a limit to how long he wanted to traipse up and down.

“Debenhams,” Theo said. “It has everything, Novello says. But I need to hit the right note—not too intimate, or Mrs. B will have the vapors. Not too flashy, but not something a chap might give his maiden aunt.”

“Handkerchiefs? With lace? Or her initial?”

“For heaven’s sake, Ben, I want to transport her to another world—one she might share with me; one far from the Close and the incontinent seagulls and the smell of halibut on the air—not make her think about blowing her nose.”

Benedict laughed. Was Theo serious about Agnes? Was Agnes at all serious about him?

“A parasol,” Theo said. “A beautiful French parasol for a beautiful girl born in July. That way she’ll always associate me with the sun.”

“Or the eternal shades.”

“What do you think they’ll cost?” Theo said, a little anxiously.

They were outside Debenhams now, and the doors were opened solemnly by a commissionaire as stiff and gold-edged as any general.

Then, looking relieved, he said “Gloves,” as if talking of precious jewels. “A pair of continental gloves of rare beauty, a present simple in conception, so acceptable to her mama. They will be my proxy: skin against skin; as soft and pale and pliant as Agnes herself.”

Harry, New York,
May–June 1914

H
ARRY MARRIED MARINA IN MAY,
when blossoming trees lined the wide avenues. The day was unnaturally hot, especially for a man in formal dress. Harry waited inside the crowded Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He had asked her cousin George to be his best man. He knew it would please her, although he thought briefly of his own cousin Jimmy, who should have been at his side. He was glad that the wedding was in New York and James in Tanganyika, so any obligation, and need for deception, was eradicated by geography. The American cousin, a keen yachtsman, looked more nervous than Harry, and his recent haircut had left a white collar of skin below his sea-weathered tan.

But he had told Marina’s father a lie. There was no getting around it. It was a terrible, opportunistic lie and he hated himself for it; what Marina had come to mean to him felt like a punishment for a moment’s madness.

Two years earlier, ago a business acquaintance in the Deep South had contacted him. The great liner
Titanic
had sunk and, reading through the passenger list, the acquaintance had seen the name of Henry Sydenham as a first-class passenger who had not been saved. He had thought immediately of Harry, and was relieved to find him alive, well, and on dry land.

Some while later, but long before Harry had realized he wanted to marry his daughter, Mr. Van Guyen had invited him to dinner, a dinner at which Harry had drunk much more than was good for him. He was trying to impress upon the older man the importance of working conditions, and with Marina’s father talking of investment in his business and trying to find out more about him, Harry had impulsively sent his own father to the bottom of the Atlantic—although in the best of company. He hoped that this would allay Van Guyen’s curiosity about his background and motivation for leaving his home country. He had always known his father would not come to America; he would hate being cooped up on a ship. But Marina’s father had twice traveled to London. If Mr. Van Guyen wrote to Harry’s father, his father would reply and, in his expansive way, invite Marina’s father to Abbotsgate. Abbotsgate was where he had left the muddle of his former life. Neither father must ever know of the other. The easiest answer was for Harry’s father to be dead. But as soon as the claim was made, he knew that it was a stupid, unnecessarily dramatic story, even for a lie.

Within the year, everything had changed. There was Marina at the center of his life. There, now, were their kind friends, all of whom shared the distress of Harry’s tragic loss. One middle-aged woman among them had indeed been on the
Titanic
, but had not, unsurprisingly, met Harry’s father on board. He could never now be resurrected. It was not a matter about which there could have been a misunderstanding. His ghost, Harry’s lie, would have to accompany him into marriage; the lingering fear of his resurrection.

A year later, he had had two large brandies before plucking up the courage to approach Marina’s father and ask for her hand.

“I am well provided for,” he said. “My mother left me a substantial sum of money and property in England. I also have a stepmother. On her death I shall inherit considerably more and, of course, I have built up interests here” (how pompous he sounded; a liar and a pompous fool) “but I am confident I can keep Marina as I would wish to and as I am sure you would hope.” Her father looked close to tears.

“Your poor step-mama,” said Marina’s aunt. “Might she come to the wedding, or is she quite an elderly lady?”

“Not old, but not strong, and, given the circumstances … I don’t feel I could ask her to make a sea voyage.” He felt a simultaneous blend of self-admiration and self-loathing.

The aunt had been mortified. “Of course. How foolish of me. I am so dreadfully sorry.” She had taken his hand and he had known himself to be a complete cad.

Now he looked across at that kind aunt, taking the place of Marina’s dead mother. She beamed at him from under a purple hat, trimmed with tartan ribbon. She had traveled to England and Scotland as a young woman and developed a passion for all things British. She had always been for the marriage.

He and Marina had had one night in the Waldorf before joining their ship the next morning, and then, ahead of them, lay the freedom of a three-month tour around Europe.

She had surprised him. He’d thought she would be a compliant, even quite an enthusiastic, lover; she was no prude, and their kissing had often left her breathless and flushed; but the woman who was now his wife was eager and subtle and adventurous. When they woke, tangled in sheets in the morning, her skin tasted of salt, she and her hair smelled animal, and he looked down at her nakedness with a great leap of joy and a simultaneous delighted surprise and relief that she made no effort to cover herself. She was the one. She was his. He had his life back. Her damp skin had the sheen of pearls. She was, had been, entirely unexpected.

She was as different as could be imagined from the dark-haired, secretive woman who had obsessed him for so long. Less desperate, less hungry, and less knowing. She followed his lead but did not reposition herself to suggest new ways he could take his pleasure as his former lover had. Now Marina smiled sleepily and put up a hand to stroke his face. “I hope you haven’t changed your mind after last night,” she said. “I hope there’s not a first Mrs. Sydenham locked in an attic in England.”

He forced himself to smile. “Only my stepmother, as far as I know. And she’s usually in the drawing room or the yard.”

Was she watching him more closely than usual? He turned and sat on the edge of the bed.

“I wish I could meet her when we’re in England,” she said. “I know we’ll only be there for a day or so, but it’s a shame she can’t come down to London.”

“I’m sure we’ll visit again; in better times.”

He found himself on the brink of saying that it would be too soon after his father’s death and remembered the father of a school friend, a top King’s Counsel who specialized in defending murder cases, saying that building a case was confused by criminals coming to believe, simply by virtue of repetition, the lies they told. Was he turning into such a man? He would tell her. Soon he would tell her. Must tell her. Though even then it must be a partial truth.

“We’ll probably take a brace of grandchildren with us to see her next time,” he said.

“But if she’s not very strong—”

“She’s scarcely an old lady,” he said. “All the more reason not to wait too long to produce Master and Miss Sydenham.” He turned and lay facing her. “Who will scandalize her with their American accents.” She gazed back at him, unspeaking, her hair untidy on the pillows. He rolled back toward her. Laid his hand on her breast, feeling comforted rather than aroused. “If we didn’t have a boat to catch and countries to conquer. . . .”

The journey to Europe had been mostly pleasure. “You’re not scared?” she’d said as the great liner pulled away from the waving crowds, the wharves, cranes, and storehouses.

He laughed. “Of course not. I’m British; we have seawater in our veins.”

“I just thought … after what happened.”

Again a shadow. He was not just a liar, but a careless one. Fortunately she mistook his reaction for distress. “I’m sorry. I’ve no sense of timing. Come on, Mr. Sydenham, let’s explore our newfound land.”

The journey had been much easier, much more luxurious, than his outward journey from Liverpool. That time he had been driven forward by anger and hurt as well the fear and excitement of starting a new life. He had removed himself from what he believed was an intolerable situation; exchanged his family and friends for a few letters of introduction and that portion of the inheritance his mother had left him that he could get his hands on. Now he had that new life, a better one than he had ever dreamed of or deserved; yet a small part of him harbored misgivings as they journeyed east. In New York his decisions had been clear-cut; as they crossed the Atlantic they became more complicated, more blurred, more tinged with regret.

Their stateroom was unreasonably large and strangely silent. Although he felt little sense of their occupying a cabin, there was, instead, the feeling of being slightly drunk in a country house. It was very quiet, but he was aware of an almost imperceptible tremor around him if he thought about it. He did think about it sometimes, at night, as Marina lay curled up against him, breathing evenly. Beneath them and the first-class warmth of their cabin lay fathoms of water, and his imagination traveled downward into the rocky abysses, getting colder and darker until, finally, all light was extinguished.

His reasons for spending so little time in England were largely valid: he wanted them to have a real honeymoon, exploring new places, sharing experiences they would remember when they were old. He didn’t want to be her teacher, to show her; he wanted them to find things together. They had both traveled to the Continent before: she, briefly, to Paris, he on walking tours in Germany and Switzerland after he left school. Marina teased him sometimes that he was a romantic only thinly disguised as a rational man, as he planned not only the places they should see but, sometimes, the time of day at which they should be seen.

“The Colosseum by moonlight is just a tradition,” he’d said. “Byron wrote about it. Shelley too.” But he even wondered himself why he needed it all to be perfect.

“Fine models for marriage, both men,” she said.

He shook his head at her in mock severity. “You’re talking about two of my country’s greatest poets. Do you hear me cavil about Longfellow? But in Venice, for instance, if we get up early we can feel we’re in Italy, not in some outlying territory of the United States. In Paris, we can buy our lunch in the markets. And in the matter of sunsets, you can never be too careful.”

She had flung her arms around him and they had fallen back on the bed in their stateroom. She knelt over him, undressed herself, and this time controlled everything that followed. In this too, she was serious and determined.

Two weeks later they arrived in Venice to cold and drizzle. Marina, her fur wrapped around her, was undeterred. That evening, the skies cleared and they had stood on the balcony of their hotel listening to the bells ring and the drift of voices over the canal. The concierge had lit a fire and they had dinner, almost naked, in their bedroom, she with a sky-blue swansdown wrap around her shoulders. She looked, he thought, like a painting of a wanton girl by Fragonard: the fine strands of hair framing her face, pale and dewy but for the pink fading on her cheeks, her soft mouth, her rose-pink nipples and the reddish gold of the triangle of hair between her legs.

“You’re like a box of fondants,” he said. “Delicious.”

She put down her fork and was about to make a facetious riposte, he thought, when suddenly and almost desperately he leaned forward and held her by the top of both arms.

“Don’t ever stop loving me,” he said. “If one day you think I’m not the man you thought I was: in all the hurly-burly of our lives ahead, don’t stop loving me. I don’t think I could bear it.”

Her irises were a hundred different flecks of color: blue, yes, but violet, gray, green too, and her eyes were filling with tears.

“You’re a man,” she said. “Just a man. A human being like me. I don’t expect you to be more than that. I can’t offer you more than that myself, and I don’t want you to be more than you are. Together we’re better than apart—that’s all and everything.”

Looking back, he scarcely remembered the details. There was just the relief. That this perceptive, loving woman was his. That he was cured. All the rest, everything they saw or tried, was just a stage set for loving her. His appetite for her shocked and delighted him; and her abandon, which had so surprised him at first, heightened his hunger for her. They might be gazing at paintings of unknown saints, laughing about the smell of the water or buying Murano glass as green and dark as the stagnant canals, but much of the time he was thinking about how it would be back in their hotel.

If he thought of the past at all, it was in disbelief. How could he have imagined for so long that his life was over, that he could never love again? Every young man had rushed into love and behaved stupidly when it went wrong; many men had to watch the woman they desired in the arms of a rival. But few had to accept her as their mother. Few had to live with the consequences of thwarted passion.

They were in Rome by late June. Then, on their last day, they decided to walk into the countryside. A light carriage dropped them at the centuries-old tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way. Then they were completely alone. Glimpses of ancient cobbled road continued up into hazy hills, deep ruts worn in its surface from the carts and armies of ancient time. They sat on fallen stonework and looked up at the ivy-covered tower. The high-pitched song of larks dipping and soaring was the only sound in the silence, except for the rustle of dry grass as they moved.

Poppies and cornflowers grew untidily around the base of the tower. Marina had brought her paper and pastels, but she made no attempt to start drawing.

“Sometimes memories are better than pictures,” she said. “I can’t paint sounds or the smell of hay and pines. Anyway, now that we’re married you don’t have to pretend you think I’m a good artist.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, now is the time you’ve been waiting for.” He pulled out a small book with a shabby cover. “Lord Byron,” he said with a flourish. “Who, you suggested, was a less than good husband. In fact it was after his honeymoon that his wife went scuttling back to her parents speaking of unmentionable vices.”

“What were they?”

“They were unmentionable, Marina. But he was an imaginative man. Or it could have been the poetry.”

They were back through the city gates as the sun was setting and the day was beginning to cool. She sat in the carriage with her head on his shoulders. On one side, the palaces of the Caesars were a vast and forbidding cliff; on the other, a wide area of worn turf followed the lines of a chariot track. The sky was fiery and streaked with violet.