The Wild Rose (20 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Seamie Finnegan, standing wide-eyed in the foyer of 18 Bedford Square, a tall Georgian town house, turned to his friend, Albie.

“Does one
have
to be exotic and stylish to be here?” he asked him, watching a young man with kohl-rimmed eyes swan by, all perfume and silk scarves.

“No, or we wouldn’t be here,” Albie said. “You just have to know the hostess, Lady Lucinda Allington.”

“And how, exactly, does a nearsighted swot like yourself know such people?” Seamie asked, smiling awkwardly as a girl with short hair, rouged lips, and a cigarette in a holder blew smoke rings at him and giggled.

“I was at Cambridge with Lulu’s brother Charles. He died some years ago now, poor bastard. Typhoid. It was a terrible blow to the family. I’ve remained friends with his sister. Come on, let’s see if we can find her.”

Seamie and Albie hung their coats and set off in search of their hostess. They wound their way through the high-ceilinged rooms of the house, each painted a shockingly bold hue—peacock blue, crimson, chartreuse—past all sorts of equally colorful people talking, drinking, or dancing to the songs played on a gramophone. Albie pointed out various painters, musicians, and actors, telling Seamie that if he didn’t know who they were, he should. They found their hostess—Lulu—in the dining room, having her palm read by a stunning Russian ballet dancer named Nijinksy. He was wearing a silk turban, a fur-trimmed jacket, and red silk trousers tucked inside brown suede boots.

Lulu was slender, with a swan’s neck, red hair, and hazel eyes. Her voice was deep and dramatic, her face intelligent and lively.

“Albie Alden,” she said, taking Albie’s hand with her free one. “Why on earth are you here?”

“Lovely to see you, too, Lu,” Albie said, bending to kiss her cheek.

“Why aren’t you at your sister’s lecture?” she asked. “Everyone I know is there. Virginia and Leonard, Lytton, Carrington . . .”

“Everyone?” Albie asked. “What are all of these people doing here, then?”

Lulu looked around the room. “Oh, these,” she said. “They’re not people. They’re actors, most of them. Or dancers. They’ve all just come off one stage or another and are looking to cadge as much free champagne as they possibly can. But you . . . why aren’t you at the RGS?”

“Have I introduced my friend, Seamus Finnegan?” Albie said.

“Finnegan? The explorer? I’m quite honored to meet you,” Lulu said to Seamie. “Though I would have thought that you would be at the RGS, too. Aren’t you interested in Everest? Having been to the South Pole, I should think that—”

Albie took Lulu’s hand from the palm-reading dancer. “I say, old boy, what have you got there? Ah! Her tact line. Damned short, isn’t it?”

Lulu looked from Albie to Seamie. “Oh, dear. Am I being tedious? Is Willa not a good topic?”

Albie smiled ruefully. “Most people would have figured out by my reticence on the subject and by my Herculean efforts to change it that no, she is not.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea. I’ll make it up to you by telling you where I’ve stashed the champagne.” She lowered her voice. “It’s in the oven.”

Albie thanked her and started to move off. “I’ll want to know why!” she called after them. “You’ll have to tell me everything.” Then she turned back to the handsome dancer. “Now, Vaslav,” she said. “Tell me if I’ve got a chance with that delicious Tom Lawrence.”

Seamie followed Albie into the kitchen. A beautiful and bored woman was sitting on the kitchen table, smoking, as a man spouted poetry to her. Across the room, a wiry young man was balancing a plate on top of a wooden spoon, the end of which was positioned on his chin, while he stood on one leg. A group was egging him on in Russian.

Seamie was glad they’d got away from Lulu and her talk of Willa. He had resolved to put Willa out of his mind the day of her father’s funeral, and he was doing his best to stick to that resolution. He thought now, as Albie opened the oven door, took out a bottle of Bolly, and poured two glasses, that maybe he shouldn’t have come to this party at all. Maybe he should have just stayed home. It had been a last-minute decision. Albie had dropped by to visit with the Finnegans at their new flat. He said he’d been going mad cooped up at his mother’s house.

“Where’s Jennie?” he’d asked, after Seamie ushered him into the living room and started to open a bottle of wine.

“She’s gone to the country. To her cottage in the Cotswolds,” Seamie said. “Felt in need of a bit of quiet.”

“The baby tiring her?” Albie asked.

“Yes,” Seamie said.

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

“She wanted to go for the week.”

“So?”

“So I’ve work. At the RGS.”

“Oh, yes. Forgot about that. You’ve become an upstanding and respectable member of society, haven’t you?”

Snorting, Seamie chucked the wine cork at him. Work
had
kept him from going to Binsey, but the truth was, there was another reason he hadn’t gone, one that he did not share with Albie: He’d sensed that Jennie had not wanted him to.

“Seamie, darling,” she’d said to him two days ago, “I hope you don’t mind, but I won’t be able to attend Miss Alden’s presentation at the RGS with you. I’m feeling a bit weary, and I thought I might go to Binsey for a few days. To my mother’s cottage. For a bit of a rest.”

“Are you not well?” Seamie had asked her, immediately worried.

“I’m fine. Just tired. It’s completely normal. Harriet says so.”

“I’ll come with you,” he said. “We’ll go at the weekend. I’ve never seen the cottage and I’d like to. Besides, you shouldn’t make the trip alone.”

“You are so sweet to me,” she said, smiling, but her voice had a slight edge of something in it—anxiousness? nervousness? He wasn’t quite sure. “I think that’s a lovely idea, of course I do, but I don’t want to drag you all the way there just so you can watch me nap. It’s a beautiful place, but it is rather dull. I don’t plan on doing much while I’m there. Just a bit of reading, I should think. I’ll also catch up on some correspondence, and perhaps I’ll arrange for a man to come and look at the roof. The last time I went, I noticed some shingles were missing.”

Seamie didn’t know much about pregnant women, but he knew they could be moody and odd, prone to frets and tears. Maybe Jennie needed a break from noisy London, he thought, from all the demands of her life: checking in on her father, supervising the new teacher she’d hired to take over her duties at the school, attending suffrage meetings. Maybe she needed a break from him but did not know how to tell him—a break from running their home and cooking his meals and attending an endless number of RGS dinners.

“Of course,” he’d said, not wanting to press her any further. “You must do what you think best, but you must write to me. Every day. So that I know you’re safe and well.”

She kissed him and said of course she’d write and that she would miss him terribly. He’d put her on the train just this morning at Paddington Station and promised to pick her up again next Saturday evening.

“Well, since you’re a bachelor again, let’s go live it up,” Albie had said later. “We can head to a pub—there must be something decent around here—and then a party. Some friends of mine who live on Bedford Square are having a do.”

“Live it up, Alb? Since when do
you
live it up?” Seamie asked him.

“Every single day of my life,” Albie said, looking at him over the top of his glasses.

Seamie laughed. “Really? And since when do you like parties?”

“I love parties. Quantum physics is one big endless party,” Albie said.

They’d finished their drinks, gone to a pub for a few more, then made their way to Bedford Square. Seamie noticed that no matter how much he might be joking, or talking about parties, Albie looked weary, yet again. Seamie had told him so and asked him if there was anything wrong.

“The funeral . . . work . . . it’s all got to me,” Albie replied. “I shall take a holiday at Easter. Go to Bath or some such place and restore myself, but for now, I must rely on Theakston’s Bitter, and old friends, to do the job.”

Seamie had nodded, but had been unconvinced. He knew that the death of a parent, combined with a heavy workload, would be enough to exhaust anyone, but deep down, he still felt there was more to Albie’s ever-present air of nervous strain than his old friend was letting on. Perhaps it’s Willa, he thought, and Albie—considerate fellow that he is—isn’t mentioning her out of tact. He knew that Willa and Albie were both staying at their mother’s house. Perhaps they still weren’t getting on. Seamie thought about pressing Albie on it, but he didn’t wish to speak of Willa either, so he decided against it.

“Shall we mingle?” Albie asked him now, glancing about the room.

“After you,” Seamie said, sweeping his hand before him, still wondering at his friend’s newfound sociability.

As they moved through the various rooms of the house, Seamie met a writer named Virginia Stephen, her sister Vanessa Bell, who was a painter, and Vanessa’s husband Clive, a critic. He met the poet Rupert Brooke, bumped into Tom Lawrence, who’d come from the RGS, and whom he was glad to see again, then chatted with an economist named John Maynard Keynes.

Albie had explained to him, on the way over, that Lulu was at the center of a colorful coterie of artists and intellectuals called the Bloomsbury Group. “It’s a very forward-thinking bunch,” Albie had said. “Not terribly mindful of proprieties, morals, or much of anything else, as far as I can see.”

Seamie enjoyed meeting these people, enjoyed their dramatic clothes and gestures, but for some reason, when they found out who he was and what he’d done, the talk always turned to Willa and the RGS lecture. Time and time again, he’d found himself explaining that no, he had not gone to hear it, but he was certain it must’ve been fascinating.

An hour had passed this way when Seamie decided he could take no more. He decided to find Albie—who’d earlier said he was going to make the acquaintance of two painters he’d heard about, young Germans visiting from Munich—and let him know he was leaving. The only problem was, he couldn’t find him anywhere. It was getting on; the party had become loud and crowded. More people were arriving by the minute, making it difficult to move through the rooms.

A woman wearing a long silk kimono and ropes of pearls around her neck made her way over to him, cornering him by the dining room mantel. “You’re Seamus Finnegan, aren’t you?” she said. “I recognize you from your pictures. Were you at the Royal Geographical Society tonight? I’ve just come from there. Saw that smashing girl, Willa Alden. The one who’s mapping Everest. She gave a marvelous presentation. Completely spellbinding.”

“Good God,” Seamie muttered. Desperate to get away from the chatterbox, he excused himself. The only place in the whole house where people were not congregating was on the staircase, which was across from the foyer. He made his way to it, getting jostled as he did, and nearly knocking over a marble bust of Shakespeare with green laurels on his head. When he got to the stairs, he climbed halfway up them and sat down. This was a good vantage point. And a quiet one. He would wait for Albie to walk by, tell him good-bye, then make his way home.

As he waited, finishing off the champagne still in his glass, the front door banged open yet again. A new, and noisy, group had just come in—two men and a handful of women. The men, in suits and overcoats, were tipsy. The women, in long, slim-cut silk dresses with ropes of glass beads around their necks, were laughing at something. One of them, Seamie noticed, was not wearing a dress. She was wearing trousers and a long silk coat.

He couldn’t quite see her face. Her head was down because she was unbuttoning her coat. But his heart started to hammer nonetheless.

“No,” he said to himself. “It’s not her. It just looks like her, but it’s not. It’s just a coincidence. A bloody great coincidence. Everyone here dresses strangely.”

“All hail our conquering hero!” one of the men suddenly shouted, grabbing the laurel wreath off Shakespeare’s head and placing it on the woman’s.

“Oh, do stop, Lytton,” the woman said, looking up and laughing. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“Fucking hell,” Seamie said.

It was Willa.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A volley of cheers rang out. Applause echoed in the foyer. Willa Alden looked around herself shyly, mortified by the attention. She gave a quick bow and tried to back out of the foyer into the dining room, but a drunken man swooped down on her, lifted her up, and deposited her on the table in the center of the hallway, banging her false leg against the table as he did. She clamped down on a groan of pain as she struggled to find her balance. The leg was throbbing. If she didn’t get some laudanum down her throat quickly, she was going to be in trouble.

She tried to get down, but some silly woman was throwing roses she’d swiped from a vase. Guests in the other rooms craned their necks to see what was happening, or ran into the foyer to join in the applause.

“I give you the mountain goddess Cholmolungha!” Lytton Strachey shouted, bowing and salaaming. Willa had known Lytton, a brilliant, acerbic writer, before she’d left London, known he could be a bit dramatic. His antics had amused her in the past, but now she very much wished he would stop.

“Thank you,” Willa said awkwardly, to the people who were clapping for her. “Thank you so much.” Then she turned to Lytton and hissed, “Get me down!”

Lytton did as she asked, taking her hand as she jumped off the table. The leg sometimes made such jumps tricky. The last thing she wanted to do was to knock the damn thing off in front of so many people. That would be quite the party piece.

“Willa Alden,” Lulu said, striding into the foyer and enfolding her in an embrace. “Leonard Woolf just came to fetch me. He saw you at the RGS. He said you’d just arrived, and here you are! I thought so often that I’d never see you again.” Lulu released her. “Oh, just look at you. You’re positively swashbuckling.”

“It’s so good to see you, Lu,” Willa said, forcing herself to smile and be charming. “It’s been ever so long. You are impossibly ethereal and more beautiful than ever. You look as if you exist on air alone.”

“Air and champagne,” Leonard Woolf said. He was Virginia Stephen’s fiancé and a literary critic. He was clever and bookish, like the Stephen girls and all their friends. He’d come to the RGS with Lytton tonight. Willa had met him after her lecture.

A man, tanned and blond and handsome, came up to them. “Lulu, I just wanted to say thank you and good night,” he said.

Thank God, Willa thought. While Lulu was talking to him, she could slip off and take her pills. But no such luck.

“Tom, you’re not leaving, are you?” Lulu cried. “You can’t! Not until you’ve met Miss Alden. She’s another adventurer, just like you.”

Willa smiled at him. She was in such terrible pain. She’d just given an hour-long presentation, then fielded questions for another hour and a half. She had thought this was going to be a small gathering of friends, where she might be able to quickly take some medicine, get a bite to eat, and then collapse in a soft chair. She had not expected this—a large and noisy party. There would be so many people to meet. So many hands to shake. So much chattering.

“It’s an honor, Miss Alden,” Lawrence said. “I was at the RGS tonight. Your lecture was wonderful. There is much I would still like to know, but I will not keep you. I’m sure you’re quite spent. I’ve given one or two talks at the RGS myself and I know how draining they can be.”

“On what topic, Mr. Lawrence?” Willa asked, struggling not to show her pain, to be interested and polite. She wanted no one to think about her leg or guess at her pain. She wanted no one’s pity.

“Carchemish. The Hittites. That sort of thing,” Lawrence replied. “I would just like to say that you must come to the desert. There’s so much to be discovered there, and you won’t have to suffer altitude sickness to do it.”

“Oh, the desert won’t do for our girl,” Strachey said. “She prefers her quests to be impossible. She likes to chase that which she can never have. It’s so hopelessly noble. So impossibly romantic.”

“Are we still talking about a mountain, Lytton? Or your newest boyfriend?” Lulu asked archly.

They all laughed. Lulu invited Tom to lunch; Tom accepted and then invited Willa to supper. Lytton swanned off in pursuit of a drink. Leonard said that Willa must be famished, and then he and Virginia went off to the kitchen to make her up a plate, and Willa found herself suddenly alone in the midst of the huge roiling party.

Thank God, she thought. The pain was nearly blinding now. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled the pill bottle out. She spotted a half-empty bottle of champagne on the floor by Shakespeare’s pedestal and grabbed it to wash the pills down. She knew she should join the party and be a sociable guest, but she couldn’t, not until she got the pain under control. She decided to sit down on Lulu’s staircase. Just for a few minutes. Just long enough to swallow a few pills and rest her leg.

She walked over to the steps stiffly, trying not to limp, and saw that someone had beaten her to them. A man was sitting halfway up the stairs, looking at her. Her heart leapt as she recognized him—Seamie Finnegan, the man she’d once loved. And still did.

“Seamie?” she said softly.

He raised his glass to her. “Congratulations, Willa,” he said. “I hear the lecture was quite a success.”

“You didn’t come,” she said.

“No. I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“I was busy.”

She flinched, feeling as if she’d been slapped, but quickly recovered. She wouldn’t show him her hurt feelings. She had no right to. She was the one who’d left; she wasn’t allowed to have hurt feelings.

“Yes,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady and light. “I can see how busy you are. Well, the lecture was a success. I met some fascinating people, too. Quite a few of them, in fact. I see more people here in an hour than I do in a month in Rongbuk.” She paused, then smiled and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I must get by you. Have to freshen up a bit.”

Seamie moved over on the step to let her pass.

“Lovely seeing you again,” Willa said.

“Yes,” he said tersely. “Lovely.”

Willa, who’d been resting her weight on her good leg, took a step forward now onto her false one. As she did, a white-hot bolt of pain shot up into her hip. She cried out, stumbled, and fell. She hit the steps hard, losing her grip on the champagne bottle and her pills. Immediately, Seamie was at her side, lifting her back onto her feet.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her, alarm in his voice.

“My leg,” she gasped, nearly blinded by the pain. “Where the hell are my pills?” she said, desperately looking about herself. “Do you see them anywhere?”

“They’re here. I’ve got them.”

“I need them. Please,” she said, her voice ragged with pain.

“Hold on, Willa. This is no good,” Seamie said. “If your leg is that bad, you should be lying down, not standing on it.”

She felt him pick her up and carry her upstairs. He knocked on a door, opened it, then carried her inside a room. It was someone’s bedroom. He put her down on the bed and lit a lamp. He disappeared for a few agonizing seconds, then reappeared with a glass of water.

“Here,” he said, handing her the glass, then opening the pill bottle. “How many?”

“Four,” she said.

“That’s a lot. Are you certain that—”

“Give me the bloody pills!” she shouted.

He did. She swallowed them down then fell back against the pillows, desperately hoping they would do their work quickly.

Seamie walked down to the foot of the bed and started unlacing her boots. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want anything from him; she remembered his cutting words to her on the stairs.

“Don’t. I’m all right. Just go,” she said fiercely.

“Shut up, Willa.”

She felt his hands pulling her boots off, rolling up one of her trouser legs. Felt him undoing the buckles and straps of her fake leg. Then she heard him swear. She knew why. She knew what the flesh below her knee looked like when she overdid it.

“Look at you,” he said. “Your leg’s a mess. It’s swollen and bleeding.” He looked up at her. “This is what you’ve been wearing?” he said angrily, holding the leg up. “What is it? Animal bone? It’s barbaric.”

“Yes, well, there aren’t many prosthetic factories at the base of Everest,” she snapped.

“There are in London. You have to see a doctor and have something proper built for yourself. You’re going to lose more of your leg if you don’t. Your body can’t take this kind of punishment. No one’s can.”

And then he was gone. Willa looked at the ceiling, teeth clenched, as she waited for her pills to kick in. They weren’t as good as the thick brown opium paste that she smoked in the East, but she’d run out of that weeks ago, somewhere around Suez, and had to make do with what she could buy aboard the ship, and then laudanum pills from London chemists.

A few minutes later, Seamie returned carrying a basin of warm water, clean rags, carbolic, salve, and bandages.

“I’m sorry I shouted at you,” she said, her voice more civil now, for the pain had backed off a little.

“It’s all right,” he said, placing the basin on the night table and sitting down next to her on the bed.

“No, it isn’t. I . . . Ouch! Blimey! What are you doing?” Willa said, as Seamie dabbed at her leg.

“Cleaning up this mess.”

“It hurts. Can’t you just leave it alone?”

“No, I can’t. You’ll get an infection.”

“I won’t. I haven’t in Rongbuk.”

“Probably because it’s so bloody cold there. Germs can’t survive. This is London, remember? It’s warmer. And dirtier. So . . . how have you been?”

“How have I been?” Willa asked incredulously.

“Since the funeral, I mean,” Seamie said. “How’s your mother? Your family?”

She saw what he was doing—making conversation to take her mind off the pain, but steering away from anything contentious, from anything smacking of the past.

“Mother and I get along as well as can be expected. Albie and I don’t. He barely speaks to me.”

“He’ll get over it,” Seamie said.

And what about you, Seamus Finnegan? she wondered, looking at him, at his handsome face. How have you been? But she did not ask him that question. She thought, again, that she had no right to. Instead she talked about her father’s funeral, and about all the people who’d come to the abbey to pay their respects.

“The burial was the hardest part,” she said. “Going through the tall black gates of that cemetery, so gray and dreary. With the hearse all draped in black, and the horses with their ghastly black plumes. All I could think about as they carried my father’s coffin to the grave site was the Tibetan sky burial ceremony, and how I wished he could have had one.”

“What is it?” Seamie asked, ripping a length of gauze with his teeth and tying it around the dressing he’d made for her leg.

“When someone dies in Tibet, the family takes the body to their priests and the priests take it to a holy place. There, they cut the flesh into bits and crush the bones. Then they feed it all—flesh, bones, organs, everything—to the vultures. The birds take the bodily remains, and the soul, liberated from its earthly prison, goes free.”

“It must be a hard thing to watch,” Seamie said, rolling her trouser leg back down over her knee.

“It was at first, not anymore,” Willa said. “Now I prefer it to our own burials. I hate to think of my father, who so loved the sea and the sky, buried in the cold, sodden ground.” She stopped talking for a bit, as her emotions got the better of her; then she laughingly said, “Though I can’t quite imagine how I’d convince my very proper mother to feed her husband to a pack of vultures.”

Seamie laughed, too. “He was a good man, your father,” he said. “Proud of you, I can tell you. Proud of your climbing. Of what you’d achieved on Kili. He was so distraught to hear of your accident, but even so, he was proud you’d summitted. I remember that, I remember—” He suddenly stopped talking, as if he’d forgotten himself and now regretted what he’d said.

Willa, anxious herself not to bring up what had happened on Kilimanjaro, quickly started talking, desperate to fill the awkward, painful silence.

“You must tell me about the South Pole,” she said. “It must’ve been so wonderful, to be part of that expedition. I can’t even imagine it. To do what you’ve done. See what you’ve seen. To have been the first party to ever reach the South Pole. How amazing. You’ve achieved so much, Seamie, really. You’ve got everything, haven’t you? Everything you ever wanted.”