The Memory of Lost Senses (33 page)

When Cecily arrived she brought apples and raspberries, and some eggs. And, for a while, Jack loitered about in the doorway, looking nonchalant, or trying to, and saying things like, “I’m just popping out to the courtyard,” or, “I need to have a quick word with Mr. Cordery . . .” and then disappeared for five minutes and came back, twitchy, nervous, hands in pockets. But Cora was keen to catch up with Cecily alone. And so, eventually, she asked Jack if he’d be so kind as to run an errand for her, delivering a remittance to the shop in the village.

Cora did not particularly wish to hear about the Academy. It had once been George’s domain, the world he had presided over without her. But she had to ask. It would have been impolite not to.

“And so, what did you see at the Academy, dear?”

“Golly, we saw so much, I hardly know where to begin.”

And then she did, she began a roll call of familiar names and old friends, and Cora stared at her, impassive, occasionally raising an eyebrow in recognition or nodding.

“Oh, and we saw quite a few of Lord Lawson’s paintings as well.”

Cora smiled. And as Cecily reeled off famous titles, each one—still vivid—flashed through Cora’s mind’s eye. “And Sylvia happened to mention that you were once his sitter,” Cecily added.

Cora closed her eyes. “Dear Sylvia, she does get a little confused about certain things, and this is one of them!” she said and tried to laugh.

“But you knew him?”

Cora glanced away. “Yes, yes, I knew him. I met him in Rome, when I was very young—when we were all very young.”

“He was President of the Academy,” Cecily said, as though Cora needed to be reminded.

“That is correct, he was. And a supremely gifted and talented painter.”

Happily, the conversation moved on.

“. . . and then we took an omnibus and sat up on the top, and went the whole way round Hyde Park, and Jack pointed out where he lived with his mother . . . You never lived in London?” she asked.

Cora shook her head. “No, though I know it well, and have stayed there often enough.”

“I’d like to live in London one day, I’d like to experience life in a city.”

“Paris is the best city to experience life when one is young.”

“Do you ever wish you were still there?”

“Oh, sometimes, but only if I could be young again also,” Cora said, smiling.

“Hmm. I can imagine you there, in Paris. It suits you more than Bramley!”

It suits you more . . .

The words threw her back: they were the very words Edward had used in Paris, when George brought them together again, after so many years.

“It suits you more, more than Rome or London. Yes, Paris suits you!” Edward had exclaimed, and all three of them laughed.

They were dining at the Café Anglais on the Boulevard des Italiens. She and George had recently traveled together from Rome via the Riviera to Paris. And back in the French capital, they had attended the opera and theater, and dined out together each evening. At that time George made frequent visits to the city and they had seen more of each other. To many in Paris they were a fixture, a couple like any other. So much so, that many there—none the wiser—simply assumed them to be
Monsieur et Madame
. And Cora, now styled the Countess de Chevalier de Saint Léger, had begun to think this was the way it would be. And she could live with it, she thought. She could live with George coming back to her once a month, perhaps, telling her there was no one but her, that he loved her, adored her. Such passion, she told herself, would only be diluted by a contract, a contract of marriage.

But that evening at the Café Anglais, Edward had overshadowed George. For his presence was commanding, his seniority unquestionable. And he had been charming, effusive, telling Cora he simply could not believe how little she had aged, or that the young English girl he remembered so well from Rome was now such a renowned society figure, a feted hostess. Like a fine wine, he said, she had only improved with age. But Edward’s broad smiles and attentiveness had had a debilitating effect upon George’s spirit; he had grown quieter and more sullen as the evening progressed. He sent back his steak, complained about the service, and made such a fuss about a draft from the door that they moved tables, twice.

Only years later did Cora learn of George’s anguish that night. That after escorting her home and returning to his hotel with Edward, he had been unable to sleep and had come to her.

At two o’clock in the morning he had walked out from his hotel on the Rue de Rivoli into a seedy mix of nocturnal human debris littering the street corners and alleyways of the French capital. He told her that his body seemed decided upon a route without any consultation with his mind. Eventually, he had found himself in front of the stone steps leading up to the doorway of her apartment building. And through the closed shutters he thought he could make out a light within her room. He had stood there for some time, wondering what he should do. With his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat, he had shuffled and paced, up and down and up and down in front of the building, berating himself out loud and muttering expletives in any number of languages. At one point, he ran up the steps and held his hand over the cord of the bell, only to pull it away and run back down the steps. Then a light had gone on inside the ground-floor apartment. A window opened. “Who is there? What do you want?” a female voice called out. And George quickly marched off back up the street, into the night.

Now Cora thought, if only he had pulled on that damned cord. Why hadn’t he? What stopped him? She felt the dull ache of regret and longing, and years gone by. And she thought of her marriage, her final marriage, there in Paris the very next year. But it was not revenge. It had never been about revenge. Or had it?

There had always been gossip about George’s affairs, and there had been so many by then. He had grown more handsome with age, his silvering hair and beard lending him a distinguished look that seemed only to emphasize his success. And what had once been his “perfect vision” had aged, aged beautifully, as he repeatedly told her, but aged nonetheless. The waist had thickened, the pert chin had softened, and the hair, like his, had silvered and lost its sheen. Oh, Cora still had her admirers, George included, but she could not compete with youth. She was by then the mother of a young man, and had, everyone knew, been widowed twice, and the map of her life showed on her face.

The final agony came only a few months after that fateful dinner at the Café Anglais, when Cora received a letter from Sylvia informing her that George had recently returned to London from Paris—with Evie Dipple. Had Cora seen them together? Did she know? Sylvia asked. She went on to say that she had heard he was “smitten, quite besotted by the girl, and she—young enough to be his daughter! But I imagine you saw them, crossed paths, or perhaps heard that they were in town? I’m longing to know if you met them, and what you made of it all & of her. I understand she is an actress as well as an artist’s model, & from somewhere in the East End, I believe. Quite something when one bears in mind what a snob George once was. Such hypocrisy!”

That George had elected to bring his young lover to Paris cut as deep as any goodbye. They could so easily have crossed paths and yet she had been kept in the dark; he had not even had the decency to warn her. The irony of her name, her title, and the fact his new love hailed from the East End of London was not lost on her either. And if we had met, if we had bumped into each other, she thought at the time, what would I have done? How should I have been? Am I nothing more to him than a former and occasional lover, an old friend? “I am the mother of his children . . . the mother of his son.”

“Does it still feel strange to be here, back in England?” Cecily was asking, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, chin cupped in her hands.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I think I might wake up and discover that I have dreamed this . . . this particular part of my life, my dotage. Wishful thinking, perhaps,” she added, raising her eyebrows. “You know, when I was young, when I was your age and first in Rome, everything felt
too
real . . . too vivid and alive.”

“Maybe it was that place.”

“Mm, that place, that time. It was all new to me, still foreign, exotic”—she smiled—“and I, like a newborn baby, opening up my eyes for the very first time, dazzled by the splendor, the magnificence, the mystery of it all. Life is so intoxicating when one is young.”

It was Clifford who had said to her, “We all lose our senses here, for a while at least. It’s an inevitable though heady infatuation. We’re made to fall in love—by history, the romance of the place. The possibilities seem limitless, and for a time we think we are immortal, like the ancient ruins surrounding us. You’re simply infatuated, my dear. No more or less. It will pass.”

But it never passed.

Later that afternoon Jack came to Cora and asked if he could speak with her. And she guessed what was coming, had been anticipating it for weeks, but she was still unprepared. Now, he too sat with a notebook and pencil, saying he wished to record it, “get it all down.”

“There’s really no need, Sylvia is recording my memories.”

He told her he wished to know more about Jack, his namesake; his grandfather, he called him.

“Oh well, he was a good man, a very good man, kind, discerning . . . gentle. Very like his father.”

“And I look like him, or so Sylvia said.”

“Mm, somewhat.”

They spoke about her aunt, and Cora described the palazzo apartment where they had lived with James Staunton and his son, Jack; pointing to various paintings and items of furniture that had once been there. Oh, how she wished he could have seen it, and seen Rome, as it used to be. They had been so happy there, a close family, she said. Herself, Aunt Fanny, James Staunton and Jack: a family of four. And she and Jack like brother and sister.

He frowned. “But then you married him . . . Jack.”

She smiled, nodded.

“But was it not odd for one’s uncle to become one’s father- in-law? One’s brother one’s husband?” he asked. “Must be queer to marry within one’s family.”

Her heart shivered. “Well, we were, for a time, like brother and sister.”

“And then?”

“And then we fell in love and were married,” she said, looking down, smoothing out the skirt of her gown. She glanced up, caught his eye. “Not all marriages are born of passion, and I’m not sure it’s a necessary foundation for an
enduring
marriage,” she said.

“And were you happy together?” he asked, staring directly at her.

She glanced away. “Well, yes,” she replied, “as happy as it was possible to be then . . . as happy as I knew how to be then.”

“You never speak about him.”

She shrugged. “It was a long time ago, we were married for a very short time.”

“And his death, it was an accident?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “an accident. He slipped and fell.”

It had been early autumn, she told him, barely a month before the birth of his father, Georgie. An English banker—a friend of the family—had arrived at the apartment in a state of great distress, followed by two men, carrying Jack. He was already unconscious, covered in blood from a gaping wound to his head. There was nothing Dr. Small could do. He died hours later. “I thought at the time I was dreaming, having a nightmare, that I would wake up and discover . . . something else. It’s all a blur now, that time. I was nearing the end of my confinement and I think I slept all through those final weeks.” She shook her head. “Hard to recall . . . hard to recall.”

For a few minutes his questions stopped. He sat pondering, cogitating, jutting out his jaw, hand to his chin in that way he did—like George, like Georgie. Then he said, “I always feel as though there’s something you’re not telling me. Please, don’t take this the wrong way. I just have this . . . this feeling that . . .”

“Yes?” she said, looking up at him, her heart trembling.

“Oh, I don’t know. I imagine it’s all because, well, because I’ve not known anything about you, not properly, not up until now. You know, for a while you were almost a myth to me. I hardly believed you existed!”