Good Hope Road: A Novel (16 page)

Folks around here had obviously heard neither of the Depression nor Prohibition, Jim thought, as he took in the kaleidoscope of flutes, goblets and sundry glassware so thoroughly flumed and plumed he hadn’t the slightest idea what they were called. He eyed the peacock feather positioned archly alongside.

‘You got any beer?’

A flicker of empathy crossed the waiter’s face. ‘Just the cocktails here, and bourbon and single malts at the bar.’ He passed a jaundiced eye over the cocktails. ‘You could try the Abbey,’ he suggested, ‘doesn’t look too bad.’

Jim grimaced. ‘The bar, you said?’

He made his way past the mammoth tubs of magnolia and red-daggered birds of paradise, the light from chandeliers overhead dancing across the laughing, animated crowd. People were thronged three and four deep around the bar, the harried bartenders trying their best to keep up. He pressed his way in, the blur of faces starting to set his teeth on edge, when he happened to glance to his right. There she was, Madeleine, not a foot away.

She sat with her elbows propped on the marble top of the bar, deep in conversation. He tapped her on the shoulder. Pale, freckled. Bare, exposed in the low-cut dress she wore. He had to tap her again before she looked up.

‘Jim!’ She smiled. ‘You came.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, frowning. ‘You invited me, remember?’ The music from the jazz band was so loud, he had to shout the words into her ear. She wore no jewellery, neck, arms and earlobes bare of adornment, just that inviting expanse of cool, milky skin.

She laughed. ‘I did. You said “maybe”.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Freddie, Jim.’

Jim noticed both the proprietary arm that Freddie draped around her, and the fact that she didn’t seem to mind.

‘So where are the peacocks anyway?’

‘In the greenhouse.’ She gestured about her. ‘They’d be skittish here, with so many people around.’

She leaned across the bar. There was a single peacock feather tucked into the braided bun she wore at the nape of her neck, its colours startling against the richness of her hair. Without waiting to ask what he wanted to drink, she ordered him a malt whisky, their fingers touching as she handed it to him.

‘I see you got the dress code?’

He looked at her surprised, and she brushed a hand over his cummerbund, his stomach contracted at her touch. ‘Greens and Blues.’

‘You didn’t tell me that.’

‘Oh, I don’t believe in dress codes,’ she said blithely, passing a hand over the ivory silk of her dress. Her eyes were impish, daring him to comment on the feather in her hair. Greens, and blues.

‘You wanted me to show up in overalls,’ he accused, only half jokingly.

She laughed. ‘That
would
have been something. Well, that cummerbund is perfect. Vintage,’ she pronounced, examining it. ‘The Major’s?’

‘Your father?’ Freddie butted in, trying to get in on the conversation. ‘A veteran, Madeleine said – you should be proud.’

They ignored him.

‘Come on.’ She set down her drink and slipped from the stool. ‘I’ll introduce you around. My parents are here somewhere as well. Freddie,’ she called over her shoulder, ‘be a dear and save our places.’

Professor Scott stood nursing his drink with Douglas Garland and a knot of other men, all similarly bass-voiced and large-bellied. ‘Good to meet you, son,’ he said affably, shaking Jim’s hand. He put an arm around Madeleine’s shoulders. ‘Cookie here told me about your father.’

‘So how
is
the Major doing?’ Doug Garland asked. ‘We used to hunt together,’ he informed the group. He waved his cigar about. ‘Haven’t seen him in years though.’

‘A veteran?’ one of the men asked with interest. ‘And what does your father make of Smedley Butler?’

Jim shrugged. ‘He ran as a dry. Not the easiest ticket to win over voters.’

Garland laughed. ‘No, nor was it the wisest.’ He clinked his glass to Jim’s. ‘Prohibition’s had its run, I wager. There’s more money to be made in taxing alcohol sales than in outlawing it. One way or another, men are going to find a way to drink, and men like Butler simply don’t get that.’

The superciliousness of his tone irritated Jim. ‘My father supports him. Says he’s done more for our vets than most any other politician.’

‘Ah, yes, the veterans and their Bonus Bill. Veteran doughboys, dear, from the Great War,’ Garland elaborated, for Madeleine’s benefit. ‘They think the Government owes them dues because they went over to France. They’ve been petitioning the administration for a payment of arrears.’ He pulled on his cigar. ‘We’re grateful as a nation, of course we are, but where’s the money for this “bonus” going to come from? Not to mention that most of these men are hale and hearty and perfectly capable of earning a living – it’s been fourteen years since the armistice, for God’s sake. Isn’t it enough that we have that lot in the dust bowl to feed, without having to worry about paying off these fellows back from France?’

‘My father’s a “fellow back from France”,’ Jim said coldly. ‘Not that he’d say it, but the fact that men like him went over there, and the fact that they made it back, ought to make folks like you thankful. If it hadn’t been for them fighting – and winning – the war, who knows how much of this,’ – he gestured about the glittering room, ‘would have remained.’ He set down his drink. ‘This was a pleasure,’ he said acidly.

‘Jim!’ It was Madeleine. ‘Wait up.’ She caught his arm. ‘What, you’re just going to leave?’

‘Garland’s an asshole.’

‘It’s just talk, that’s all. Politics. Why’d you have to get all bothered?’

He was quiet.

‘Come on, let me show you the peacocks. Oh, don’t be so dreary! Come
on
,’ she cajoled, and wanting to be mollified, he followed her.

She led him down a hall and through a door at the far end. It opened on to a quieter, perfumed passageway, gently lit. ‘The rose hall,’ she said. ‘You should see it during the day. Masses of roses everywhere, it’s like something out of a magazine.’

They walked for a while, the strains of the band growing fainter, their footsteps echoing on the marble. Their fingers touched, once or twice. Another door ahead. She pulled it open. ‘
Et voilà
, the birds.’

The room had been converted into a large, high-ceilinged aviary, housing a family of peafowl. Seven in all, two males and five peahens, roosting on the ledges built into the wall. One of the males cocked its head at their approach. It spread its short wings and sailed to the floor as they drew nearer, its tail sweeping behind the richly hued body in a magnificent, six-foot-long train.

‘Look at the colours,’ she said softly. ‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?’

He shrugged, still smarting from Garland’s comments and bent on being contrary.

‘What’s with “Cookie”?’

‘My parents call me that. You know, Cookie, as in French.’

He didn’t, but nodded anyway. The peacock looked contemplatively at them, the crest on its surprisingly small head bobbing to and fro. It raised a clawed foot, holding it in mid-air as, slowly, its tail started to rise. It grew higher, fanning into an orb of hammered gold. Jim watched in fascination, almost forgetting his earlier rancour. An eruption of ivory quills, feathered in glittering colour – copper, emerald, and silken black; at the apex of each quill, a single cobalt eye.

The bird began to dance, the colours leaching into one another as it swayed and quivered. Petrol-over-water colours, the sheen of a fin upstream. They stood in utter silence, watching spellbound, and watched in turn by those shimmering, myriad eyes. The tapping of the bird’s feet was the only sound in the room: a symphony without music, fluid, haunting; a message composed in code. The edges of their palms touched. She lifted her hand, a quiet, unfussy movement, and placed it in his. It felt entirely natural to close his fingers about hers.

He registered the smoothness of her skin, the specific, slotted fit of bone and palm and angled wrist of her hand in his own. The peacock danced. As if in a dream, Jim turned towards her, just as she lifted her face to his. The soft heat of her mouth. Her lips parting, deepening that first, gentle caress, sending a tremor through his body as her tongue flickered hungrily against his own.

‘Madeleine?’

Footsteps sounded in the hall outside. The peacock stopped abruptly, its tail drooping. She pulled away, slipping her hand from his just as Freddie entered.

‘Wherever did you go?’ Freddie demanded petulantly. ‘I’ve been hunting all over for you. Dinner’s been announced.’

‘We—’ Her face was flushed. ‘I was just showing Jim the peacocks.’

Freddie put a possessive arm about her. ‘Will you be joining us, Stonebridge?’

‘Of course he is.’ She didn’t disentangle herself from his hold, though.

They began walking back. Jim was quiet, still strangely affected by the bird, the way it had danced, as if only for them, his skin still tingling from the unexpected heat of that kiss. He knew from the way she touched her palms to her cheeks that she felt it too.

‘I don’t think I got what you do, Stonebridge?’

‘That’s because I didn’t say.’

‘Jim’s family have apple orchards and a farm.’

‘That can’t be easy,’ Freddie said pompously. ‘With the economy . . . I own an aeroplane – Cookie and I like to go flying,’ he said, squeezing her shoulder, ‘and it’s a shame to see all those rundown, hardscrabble holdings, falling into ruin. It’s a hard living.’

‘Freddie!’ she exclaimed, frowning, but Jim interrupted.

‘It’s a hard living, but someone’s got to do it, right? You know what else about us hardscrabble types?’ He stepped angrily forward, and Freddie blanched. ‘When pretty-boy flatlanders fly their dinky toy aeroplanes over our woods and rivers, causing no end of headache and spooking all the fish, why, we give them a real hardscrabble salute. Just like this.’ Jim raised his finger, right in Freddie’s face.

‘I’m leaving,’ he said to Madeleine. This time, she did not stop him.

He tried to put her from his mind after that. ‘A flatlander,’ he said to himself, ‘and too used to getting her own way.’ They had nothing in common, he reminded himself, her with her dancing and theatre groups and flying about in noisy planes, whereas his life was here, amidst these woods and stone-rutted hills, rooted in the soil of this farm. And yet, the memory of her lingered – how natural it had felt to kiss her, the feel of her hand in his own.

He went hunting, and despite the grouse being especially skittish and the drumming hard to locate, he bagged himself a brace. The larger of the two had a beautiful set of tail feathers; he saved the longest, striated in brown and white, not admitting to himself that the reason he did so was that she might find it interesting.

The Major asked, awkwardly, how the evening had gone. ‘Garland said hello,’ Jim lied. His father looked at him sardonically and Jim turned away, unwilling to meet his eyes. He rapped his knuckles aimlessly on the table. ‘Her folks call her Cookie.’

The Major looked puzzled. ‘After “madeleine”,’ he said, his brow clearing. ‘It’s a French cake,’ he elaborated, ‘like a soft cookie, I suppose.’

Jim said nothing more but later that week, with his father out of earshot, he asked Ellie if she knew how to bake madeleines. ‘They’re French,’ he explained, with a studied casualness.

Ellie looked at him over the tops of her glasses, a quizzical expression on her face. She didn’t know no fancy French food, she said, but if he wanted some Indian pudding, there were three baking in the oven.

Restless, he called a girl he hadn’t seen in some time. It made him both guilty and irritated to hear the lilt in her voice, knowing it was there because he’d called. He leaned in to kiss her after the movie they went to but when she pretend pouted and drew back, eyes wide, he shrugged and turned the key in the ignition.

‘Jim!’ she said, clearly hurt, ‘it’s been a while, that’s all.’ He stopped the engine, feeling like a heel. ‘I missed you,’ she said after wards, and not knowing what to say, he pulled the tail feather from the dashboard and gave it to her. ‘For me?’ she exclaimed, and tucked it behind her ear.

He patted her arm, disliking himself, but unable to stop thinking of another woman, dressed in ivory silk, the chandelier picking out blue and green highlights in the peacock feather she wore in the braid of her russet hair.

The girl started to call again after that, with increasingly desperate frequency. Each time, he instructed his father and Ellie to tell her he was out. Ellie shook her head disapprovingly, but reserved comment. When at last Madeleine called, she arched an eyebrow.

‘Her call, you’ll take, I’m guessing?’

‘No,’ he said, coolly, ‘same message.’

The other girl finally gave up. Madeleine, however, was not so easily put off. She continued to call, sometimes a day, maybe two passing after her last call, but call she did. Jim stubbornly refused to speak with her, although it was hardly lost on the Major, the way his son asked offhandedly at the end of each day if anyone had called.

Finally, it was the Major who, exasperated by this jackass charade and the ringing of the damned ’phone, called an end to the impasse. ‘You should come over,’ he said tersely to Madeleine when she next rang, before she’d even had a chance to ask for Jim. ‘He’s in the barn.’

He was tinkering with the bike when she showed up. He looked up as the door of the barn cranked open, and there she was, graceful against the light.

‘Hello.’

He continued to grease the chain.

‘I called a few days ago, left a message. Did you not get it?’ she pressed.

‘Wasn’t anything for me to say.’

She laughed. ‘Well, that’s why I thought it best to come.’

He sat up, wiping his hands on his overalls. ‘And did you bring your precious Freddie with you?’

‘No. No, I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I’ve told Freddie that it’s best he head back to Boston.’

‘That’s a shame,’ he said caustically. ‘The two of you sure make a handsome couple of flatlanders.’

‘Well, then that
is
a shame,’ she agreed, sitting down in the straw next to him. She touched a finger to a spot of oil and lifted it to the light, examining the smudge on her skin. Her hand seemed to him like a bird, delicate of wing – a thing of porcelain slightness.