House of Bells (3 page)

It was one of those days that London did so well, warm spring and a clear light; so of course the streets were busy, and the little park was full of lunchers and loafers, and she was sure they must all be watching her. Head up, then, girl; sunglasses on, eyes front and just keep moving. Dean Street, Frith Street, Greek Street: all in alphabetical order, the secret knowledge that helped her navigate the heart of Soho.

Oysters was easy. There was only one oyster bar Tony deemed acceptable; she could find her way to Tarsier's in the dark, in the rain, in extremis. And frequently had.

Just as well, because gazing into the middle distance was useless for finding her way. Pretending to look stopped her actually looking to see where she was. She supposed that must be ironic or something.

But here was Tarsier's, all barrels and sawdust and bare wood. Here was Tony, perched as ever on a stool in the open window, exhibited to the street. Looking unfairly lovely, the dark tumble of his hair snaring the sunlight while the wide lapels of his jacket only showed off the breadth of his shoulders. Oozing self-content, that too.
See me: here I am, the most fashionable man in London, waiting to eat oysters with the wickedest girl in England . . .

‘You're late,' he said as she hoisted herself on to the high stool he had somehow kept for her despite the crush.

‘Darling. Of course I'm late.'
Sorry, Tony, sorry
. But it was a rule now, never to apologize to anyone. She'd done too much of that, and it didn't help at all. People liked to see you grovel, but that was all about punishment, not forgiveness. She'd been punished enough. She had that in writing, from a lord. ‘So were you, I expect.'

He grinned. ‘I was, but you win in the lateness stakes. I should know never to compete with a pro.'

Damn. She'd flinched at that, which made him twitch a little in his turn. Sometimes they played sensitivities like ping-pong. ‘Just a talented amateur,' she said quickly, as if it didn't matter at all. Trying to cover up too late, as usual. ‘What shall we drink? Is it a Guinness day or a champagne day?'

She had seldom felt less like celebrating, but that wasn't the question. There were only the two alternatives with Tony, when oysters were in the case; and the choice hung somewhat on his mood, somewhat on the needs and intents of his day, but mostly on criteria that she'd never quite managed to pin down. She no longer tried to guess which way his choice would fall. Fifty-fifty gambles were no fun at all when you always, always lost.

‘Champagne, of course,' he said, as though she should have known that. ‘Guinness is for workdays.'

‘Aren't we working?'

‘Not at all. I'm seducing you. That was never work.'

No
, she thought wearily.
I was always too easy, wasn't I?

This time she was careful not to let any of that show on her face. Wearing masks was second nature to her now, and she could swap one with another at a moment's notice. She gave Tony her bright glad smile, and never mind if he saw clean through it; he wouldn't say a word. He was a collaborator through and through, when it suited his convenience. He practically laced her masks up for her, caught them if they started to slip. They both conspired to keep raw emotion under wraps. Her pain embarrassed him, she thought. He shouldn't have to deal with that.

She said, ‘Seduce away. If you can keep your hands to yourself while you're at it.' That was their agreement: no touching now, or not with any serious intent. And being jocular about it, that was in the agreement too. Making like it didn't matter. She could do that. ‘What's this mysterious job of yours?'

And why would you offer it to me? I'm not qualified.

Except that she was, apparently, if having her cover blown was a part of her cover.

He said, ‘There's a house up in the north, border country. Old place, big grounds, you know the sort of thing.'

She did. She said, ‘Tony, I'm hardly – what is it, persona grata? – on the country-house circuit any more.' And never wanted to be, no, never again.

‘No, but that's what I'm building up to.' He gestured towards the waiter in his long apron. No need to order – just a flick of the thumb to suggest a cork removed from a bottle and all was understood. ‘This place isn't on the circuit either, and it ought to be. For some reason your country-house set abandoned it way back, before the first war. It's been half a dozen things since, but never a home.'

‘Never till now, are you going to tell me?'

‘Not even that, not quite. Someone's making a commune there, unless it's an ashram, unless it's a cult. I don't know; there's no information. We sent a man in, and he hasn't come out again.'

‘Oh, so now you want to send me in to be murdered as a spy? Thanks, Tony, but no thanks.'

‘Don't be daft, love. I don't think he was murdered. I think he was swallowed up by all the love and butterflies. I think he was converted. I think he's chanting mantras and eating lentils, or making love and growing onions, or expanding his inner consciousness and waiting for the end of the world.'

‘Making love sounds nice,' she said, because they both expected it of her. She could be as brittle as hard plastic, but she did still have to shine.

The waiter came over with bucket, bottle, glasses. Tony poured. Little rituals: the touch of rim to rim, ‘Cheers, then,' the first sip. Froth, chill, bite. Something seemed to have happened in her head since last night, so that just the taste and touch and tingle of it on her tongue made her want to cry again.

She needed him to say something quickly, so he did. He was probably worried he might lose another hankie. Today's was raw peach silk, peeping from behind that broad lapel, an exact match for his shirt.

He said, ‘OK, Grace, it's like this. You've had enough of London, way too much. You can't leave your flat without being followed by photographers, you can't go to a party without being cornered by hacks and gossipmongers, and you can't walk down the street without being hissed at.'

‘Tony . . .'

‘Basically,' he went on remorselessly, ‘you can't live your life. Everything you see, everything you do reminds you of what you've done, what's happened to you, what you've lost. You need to get away – and that doesn't mean Biarritz or St Tropez; it doesn't even mean Jamaica. Those are just London with better weather. Everyone there is someone you know, someone who knows all about you. What you want, what you're desperate for is a whole new way to live. You want to be someone else, someone who doesn't have a court case and a dead baby and a cruel kind of fame to live with.'

She wasn't going to cry, and she wasn't going to interrupt again. He was telling her story entirely, but he thought it was a fiction, a cover story he was composing on her behalf. Or at least he was pretending that. She owed it to him to play along. She nodded solemnly, clung to the weight of her glass, looked around to see if oysters might be on their way yet.

‘Something you overheard at a party seemed to offer you the chance. The world's full of retreats, of course it is, but this was the one you heard about just when you were desperate enough to do something about it. You were buzzed on dope at the time so you're hazy on the details, but you remembered the name of the nearest station; so when you got home at dawn you just chucked some clothes into a suitcase and lit out. Maybe you were still stoned; maybe you made a conscious decision to be impulsive for once, after way too long trapped in the machine. You choose. Whatever, on the train you're going to change your name. You get on at King's Cross as Grace Harley, and you get off in Leeds as Georgie Hale. Same initials: people always do that, and it's convenient, because I bet half your things have your initials on them.'

Tony, you know half my things have my initials on them. Or are we pretending you don't? Half my other things have your initials on them. Do I need to change your name too?

‘At Leeds you change on to the local line. Drop me a postcard while you're waiting, so I know you've got that far at least. After that you're on your own.'

Tony, love, I've been on my own for a long time now
– but here came the oysters, a great platter of ice and shells and lemons and shimmering flinching vulnerable flesh. Squeeze and swallow.

S
ometimes Grace felt squeezed herself, squeezed like a lemon – all the juice wrung from her – and swallowed whole. Sometimes she felt the other thing: chewed up and spat out.

Mostly, she tried not to feel anything. Actually to
be
as remote and untouchable as she could seem, with her face perfect and her eyes on the far horizon, statuesque. Literally that, like a statue: heartless and bloodless, cold marble all through.

Today – well, any day, really – she wasn't doing so well at that. She tried, she did try, but it was never easy. Like making herself unhuman, by a simple effort of will. Today was harder yet, as wheezing clanking engines dragged her further and further into the north country.

She should be glad, to be out of the Smoke. She
was
glad, in every way that counted. Almost every way. It was just . . . she had made and lived all her life in London, all her adult life, the one that mattered. Even when it had shattered between her hands like a glass bubble, lethal and gone in a moment: even then she had stayed, stubborn or determined or desperate. Living in the ruins, refusing to run away. Keeping her name in the papers, her face in the public eye, because anything else would have been an unthinkable surrender.

This, now: she wasn't surrendering, no. Nor running away. She was
working
. Which felt better on the inside, at least. If anyone – or everyone – else thought she'd slunk away from London in a funk, that was a part of the job, and she could feel good about it.

She could try.

Nothing was easy, but she didn't expect that. She had no right to.

She didn't deserve even this much, this journey, and on the face of it this was no blessing. To sit hour after hour in uncomfortable trains, crowded shoulder to shoulder with strangers; to keep her headscarf and sunglasses firmly in place and her face averted, staring blindly out of the window; to endure the surge and suck of her thoughts, that constant tidal reach from unbearable guilt to dreary desolation. And to wait, of course. To wait and wait for that moment of recognition, the shrill voice, inescapable in these cruel closed carriages . . .

But she waited and waited, and that moment never came. Probably nobody could actually believe that the actual Grace Harley – The Third Woman, they liked to call her in the press – would be travelling north out of London in a second-class carriage. She could have gone first class, Tony would have paid for that –
money's not an issue
, he'd said, and he meant it. Only, if she wore these same dull clothes and sat in first class just like this, headscarf and sunglasses and all, everyone would look at her and see Grace Harley running away. Here in second class, they looked and saw Georgie Hale: a lookalike, perhaps, or an attention-seeker, a young woman who'd like to be mistaken for the infamous Third Woman if it wasn't so ridiculous.

She was doing her job here, thinking it and thinking it. Being Georgie Hale; being Grace Harley being Georgie Hale. Ready for anything. Dreading everything. Feeling the long cord of her life thus far stretching behind her, stretching and stretching as she tugged it tighter and tighter, as she moved further and further away. Maybe she could cut it, cut loose and start again. Maybe she should. Everything that mattered to her was back there, and it was all dreadful.

Maybe it would snap of its own accord, if she just got far enough away. If no one knew her, if she really could live as Georgie Hale.

Maybe it would snap her back, like elastic. Maybe she wouldn't be able to stand life in the deep country, so very far from the bright lights. But then Tony would be disappointed and everything would be just that little bit worse.

Really, there was no telling. Only this: the past at her back in vicious, painful clarity; nothing but fog ahead; and this moment of stillness, sitting and watching the countryside unreel beyond the window. Farmland went to moorland, slowly yielding place. Cattle went to sheep, hedges to rough stone walls, fields to broad open rocky heights. No wonder no one recognized her. She barely recognized herself, in this alien landscape.

Maybe she could shrug Tony away, with all that he implied. All of London, all her life just gone: that could all go with him. Then she'd just be Georgie.

She might like that.

Really, it wasn't so bad, chuntering into the unknown this way. New name, new life. Nothing to carry with her, nothing worth keeping. Nothing to look back on, except Tony—

Who held the purse strings, maybe, but not the strings of her soul.
Money's not an issue.

Maybe she could find a way to make that true.

One station after another, and at last this one was hers. Grace Harley had boarded a train at King's Cross; an unknown, uncertain creature had changed at Leeds; Georgie Hale stepped down on to the dusty platform of a country station that Grace Harley had not heard of a week earlier, where she could surely never be expected to appear.

Nobody, of course, was expecting Georgie. You didn't wire ahead to a commune, if that's what this place was. You followed a rumour, or your need led you, or the yogi drew you, or the spirit brought you. She didn't really know; she'd never been a commune sort of girl.

Never till now.

She was fairly sure of this much, though, that you didn't announce your arrival and expect to be met. Oddly, Tony had almost lost his nerve when she said yes. He'd offered to run her up in his two-seater and drop her off at the door, more or less: ‘Just to be sure you arrive safely. Not literally at the door, I'll be discreet, but—'