The Jewel Box (9 page)

“It’s of no concern to me whether you believe it or not. It’s the truth.” Grace was struggling with her beef. Her mouth was terribly dry, no matter how much wine she drank. She could barely swallow and felt she must be chewing and chewing, like a cow, having to swill each troublesome mouthful down with yet more wine. She hated being so nervous.

O’Connell seemed determined to pursue this to its bitter end. “There must be somebody. What about your editor? Sedgwick, isn’t it?”

“We’re just friends.”

“Do you think he sees it that way?”

“I don’t know. So long as he keeps his feelings to himself, I don’t have to think about it.”

A smile that worked only the bottom half of O’Connell’s face, leaving his eyes untouched. “I’ve seen you together, don’t forget. You should have heard the change in his voice when I told him I wanted
you
to interview me.”

“Well, if you’re right, that’s his misfortune.”

He speared a piece of beef, but just sat there with it stuck on the end of his fork, so that she found her gaze attracted to
the hand that held the fork. He had a plain silver ring on his little finger. A sprinkling of golden hairs on his skin. “You’re a hard woman,” he said now. “What made you so hard?”

“There was someone who died. But that’s not exactly unusual, is it? Not at the moment. Not in this country. Everyone has lost someone, and it’s no real reason for being ‘hard,’ as you put it. Perhaps I’ve always been that way.”

“Are you trying to present me with a challenge?” That chunk of beef was still suspended there, on his fork.

“What do you mean?”

“You want that I should prize my way into your armor? Open you up like a can of sardines?”

“Can’t you find a more lyrical simile? You’re a writer, after all. If you’re attempting to romance me, you could try to be a little more poetic about it.”

He leaned forward very slightly. “Come on. You’re not interested in all that flannel, are you? It’s something else that you want from me.”

“Really? What is it that I want from you?”

“You want to be known. Really
known
.”

“Oh. I thought you were going to say something interesting then.”

O’Connell chuckled lightly, before putting the forkful of beef into his mouth and beginning to chew. Grace watched his mouth. Thought about his mouth. How it might taste.

“He went a bit wild after
The Vision
came out,” said Margaret, over her lunch of curried haddock at the Carlton. “All that money. You know how it is.” (As if either of them could possibly know, Grace thought, toying with a limp salad.)

“Cars. Women. Parties. Fights. He was always being thrown out of hotels. He got himself banned from a small town in
Pennsylvania in—oh, I think that must have been about 1920. And he was arrested once, in France. Down on the Riviera. First there was a fight with the proprietor of a restaurant. Fists flying, plates thrown. Then, when they threw him and his friends out, he climbed up on top of a statue of a horse and started shouting and singing. Refused to come down. In the end the police had to fetch a ladder and
drag
him down. He bought his way out of trouble, of course.”

“Of course.”

“There was a woman called…Henrietta, I think her name was. She was with him in France that summer. She was married…to a senator, if I’m remembering correctly. That was quite a scandal. She was the basis for Helena Doherty in
Hell and Helena,
his third novel. Have you read that one?”

“I’ve only read
The Vision,
” said Grace. “What happened to Henrietta?”

“She went back to her husband,” said Margaret. “He got quite a lashing in the papers about all that. People were jealous, you see. Of his money—the way he was living. All of it. But then he went quiet.”

She’d finished her curried haddock and was eyeing the dessert trolley. Grace called the waiter over, but it took a long time for her to decide between some profiteroles, a chocolate and cream gâteau and an apple pie. In the end the gâteau prevailed.

“You say he went quiet? What do you mean?”

“Just that. People said he was burned out. You know, in the newspapers and all that.
Unruly Son
and
Hell and Helena
—they just didn’t do very well. Not compared with
The Vision.
The critics didn’t like them much and they didn’t sell so many copies.
I
liked them, of course, but then I’m not most people. Everybody wanted him to write another like
The Vision.
Perhaps,
in the end, it started getting to him. Or perhaps he just ran out of money—I don’t know. But he sort of vanished. All those stories—the playboy antics—it all stopped. Nobody really knows what he’s been up to these last few years. Every now and then there’s a rumor that he’s written something new. That’s what they’re all waiting for. People want him to fulfill his potential and come up with the Great Magnum Opus. We all hope that’s what he’s been doing. And now
you’re
going to find out. You’re going to meet him—to be alone with him!”

For the last five years, since the publication of his third novel,
Hell and Helena,
Dexter O’Connell has been uncharacteristically silent. No novels, no short stories, not even an article or a book review. For almost a decade, barely a week would pass without O’Connell saying something loud and sparkly and stylish in a prominent publication. Barely a month without a protest against his “demonic” work from the Wisconsin League of Motherhood or the Texan Church of the Lost Children, or some other bunch of crackpots.

Some have imagined him written out, spent out and gone to seed, resting his flabby arms on the bar of a cheap French hotel, sighing for his lost splendor. Others have him closeted away in a garret, bashing out the Great Magnum Opus in monastic isolation. Perhaps bashing his head repeatedly on the desk when he can’t summon it up, that ungraspable magical energy that once made writing as easy as laughing.

And now here he is. Eat
ing overcooked beef with Yours Truly. He has about him an air of contentment and ease. His hands don’t shake. He doesn’t seem at all like a man “back from the brink.” But will he whisper a single word into my sympathetic ear about what he’s been up to all this time? Will he, heck!

“Yes, I’m writing a new novel,” he says reluctantly, after I have expended considerable charm in coaxing and cajoling him (and I
am
charming, let me tell you). “No, it’s not finished. It will be, though—probably in a few months’ time. I’m over here to work on a section that’s set in London. I suppose you could say it’s a sequel to
The Vision
, though the word “sequel” is a belittling one somehow. They’ve stayed with me, those characters. Stanley’s gotten a few gray hairs at the same time as me—” (Fret not, girls. I couldn’t spot a single gray thread on his head and am positive its particular golden hue doesn’t come from a bottle. Put this reference to the aging process down to poetic license.)—“Veronique’s acquired a kind of polish and poise that one sees in the slightly older but still beautiful woman. That wicked mischief of hers has evolved into something altogether more calculated. Question is whether there’s anything soft under all the brittle shine and cleverness. That’s what fascinates me about Veronique.”

It’s taken him this long, he says, to feel ready to say something more about Stanley and Veronique. Their story has had to sit and mature in his mind as his own life story has gone rolling on. They’ve been growing up, with him, but have had to wait for him to develop a new perspective—on their experiences and on his own. Now, after all this time, after the bad-boy behavior and the silence, he’s finally about to give us the book we’ve all wanted for such a long time.

The bottle of good red cast its usual spell, and Grace found herself beginning to relax. By the time they’d arrived at the Armagnac, she was entirely at ease and more than a little garrulous. She’d been telling him how men, in novels, were more attractive than men on the big screen.

“They’re limited, you see, by reality.” She gestured expansively with her cigarette holder. “When you read a book, you can make of the main man whatever you like. You can mold him to suit your own personal tastes. The camera works to transform an actor into a hero, but it can go only so far in its transformation. I might be able to make a sponge cake from some flour, eggs, sugar and butter, but I couldn’t possibly produce the perfect French croissant, no matter how hard I try.”

“And you’re fond of croissants, as any regular reader of your column will know.”

“Shush, shush.” Another wave of the cigarette. “I haven’t finished. In a year or two, the actors will all be speaking. So even their
voices
won’t be left to the imagination. That will make them all the more ordinary.”

“Do you think it’ll take off? Talking pictures?”

“Oh, certainly,” said Grace. “Mark my words. And just watch for the careers that will come crashing down. Talking pictures will require an entirely different sort of acting. The big stars of the future will be our best English theater actors, you wait and see.”

“You have it all worked out, don’t you?” O’Connell put a fat cigar into his mouth.

“I’m not afraid to speak out. It’s the way I was brought up. Mummy and Daddy always encouraged us to question assumptions, form our own views.”

“Us?”

“Me and my sister.”

“Ah yes, that whole routine. Diamond and Sapphire…”

But Grace had wandered off on her own train of thought. “Perhaps
that’s
why I’m not married. I’m argumentative. I won’t let any man push me around or tell me what to think. I suppose that makes me a bit of a handful.”

“Well, I don’t know about
pushing
you around. How about we get out of here now and I
dance
you around a little at some fashionable establishment? Might that appeal to your idiosyncratic and thoroughly single-minded self?”

“Oh, rather!” And before she could get control of it, the excitement lit up her face like a child’s.

“He has the nicest voice.” Margaret had cream on the end of her nose, from the gâteau. Grace was trying to signal its presence to her but she seemed oblivious—giving attention only to her own story. “Musical—you know what I mean? Writers aren’t always good readers. The two things don’t necessarily go together. But O’Connell…he has a quality. You could imagine him on the stage. He’s very obviously somebody. If he wasn’t a writer, he’d be famous for something else.”

“I’d better get the bill.” Grace checked her watch. “We have to get back.”

“I’m so jealous of you!” Margaret was all eyes—
huge
eyes—behind those glasses of hers. “I’ve often imagined bumping into him somewhere. Just, you know, bumping into him. And he’d look down at me and he’d say—”

“That’s what happened to me.” Grace smiled. “I bumped into him.”

But Margaret wasn’t listening. “I suppose this is the closest I’ll ever get to being alone with him. This lunch with you, I
mean. When I come to read your interview, I’ll recognize my own questions, the things I’ve told you. It’ll be as though I’m talking to him myself, but through you. As though you were some sort of medium for our two spirits.”

“Steady on.” Grace glanced again at her watch.

“Sorry, Grace.” There it was again—that overfamiliarity…“His books mean the world to me, that’s all.”

“Oh, good.” The bill had arrived and Grace went fumbling in her purse.

“When does it come out? The article? It’ll be funny, seeing your name in the newspaper. ‘Interview by Grace Rutherford.’ Imagine what they’ll say at Pearson’s!”

“Ah.” Grace emerged from her handbag. “There’s something I shall have to tell you on that front. It’s quite a secret.”

“Really? Do tell. You can trust me.”

“Well, the thing is, I write a column for the
Herald
under a fake name…”

Margaret still had that blob of cream on her nose. Perhaps it would be there for the rest of the day.

His Charleston was impressive—but then, how would it ever have been anything else? He, the inventor of the flapper, the bad boy of American literature, dancing companion of all those bejeweled lovelies with the fat husbands who’d no doubt have lurked in corners, watching jealously. She couldn’t imagine him needing lessons with Teenie Weenie. He fairly whirled her about the Lido Club so that she felt her feet were hardly touching the floor. He made her feel she weighed nothing—inside as well as out, for her emotions were spinning all about her so that she laughed and laughed as they danced. He had a grin on his face, too, that made him look like the young boy he must have been when first he conjured up Veronique.

When finally they staggered, dizzy and disheveled, from the dance floor to their prime table (Manny Hopkins, the proprietor, had actually cleared some people off it on spotting them come in together), with a good view of the orchestra and tonight’s special guest singer, Violet Lamore, fresh from a season at the Montmartre in New York, O’Connell called to their waiter for champagne. On impulse Grace turned to him and said, “Are we celebrating something? Have you finished your new novel?”

His face clouded over.

“Dexter, I’m interviewing you for a newspaper. I have to ask you about the novel.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “The interview. I’d forgotten about the interview.”

“It was your idea.”

“Not one of my best.”

“Dickie thought you might have finished the novel.”

“Did he now?” They fell quiet as the waiter brought the champagne.

A crackle of applause. Violet Lamore had taken her position at the microphone. She was tiny and stick-thin, but her voice, when she began to sing, was amazingly deep and resonant, with a hint of tragedy to it. O’Connell sat gazing across, seemingly moved.

Sipping her champagne, Grace watched O’Connell watching the singer. She’d been with him for five hours now. All too soon the evening would be over and she’d be on her way back to Hampstead. Back to the family, to her life of hectic dullness. Somehow she’d have to find the time, in between a few snatched hours of sleep and a day’s work at Pearson’s, to cull a coherent newspaper interview out of what would surely end up as an evening of flirtation and verbal dueling, underscored
by an odd intensity—a sense that, at some deeper level, they had an understanding. That they both knew they were dancing the necessary dance.