Sleeping Beauty (35 page)

But James didn’t.

The next day she went into Cambridge, to the offices of the geology faculty. There, she was going to ask if Dr. Stoker was lecturing today—she just wanted to see him, stand at the back of the hall, perhaps, assure herself that he was healthy and whole. Instead, though, she overheard a man, a secretary of some sort, worrying to a passing proctor as to whether “Dr. Stoker would want his tea in the Vice-Chancellor’s offices or in the combination room of the Regent House, as the old Vice-Chancellor usually did.”

Well. He’d done it. Good for him. Coco stopped long enough to ask, “Did Dr. Stoker mention anything about moving from the Provost’s lodge of All Souls?”

It was an impertinent question. It received its deserved alarmed stares and silence.

She smiled, then thought to flip open her little drawing pad, removing its pencil. “I’m from
The Ladies’ Gazette
, you see. Will there be any sort of official welcome? Will the new Vice-Chancellor
live on university grounds, or will he be moving into a house in town, like the last?”

The two men frowned at each other, then the smaller one mumbled, “I shouldn’t think there will be much celebration, given the turmoil the good Dr. Stoker must untangle. And he is only the acting Vice-Chancellor until the election in October. Though, of course”—he smiled sanctimoniously—“we fully expect him to succeed to the position.”

Right, as James would say. That was that. Coco understood what had happened.

Outside, walking home, she cried a bit, but then wiped her face. Stop. This was what was always going to be; it was inevitable. Sir James Stoker, soon to be Earl of What-not, had undoubtedly done what he thought he must. Never mind that she had believed he was stronger, believed that together they could overcome any circumstance that might threaten them. Never mind that she’d allowed herself to put her faith in him.

See? said her old cynical self. See? A darling young man, a great fling, but hardly true love. Which didn’t exist after all, except in fairy tales and nursery fables. A real sort of life for herself and James had always been impossible. Don’t mind. You are used to going your own way alone. Get beyond this. Get rid of him. Carry on.

So Coco tried to: At the boardinghouse, she wrote a quick letter to the estate agent, saying she and Sir Armand would not be taking the house after all; please keep the money as a token of their regret.

Then she packed herself up, kissed David goodbye, promised to write, and took her sad self to London.

James had walked back into the Bishop’s house that night ostensibly with great power, dreams fulfilled. Yet he could not fight an expanding sense of disillusionment. Hang them all, he thought. He’d see Coco, of course. No one could tell him not to. Meeting her would be difficult, delicate, but it could be done surely. Up till now they had made only the smallest effort to keep their relationship to themselves. They would do better. They would be secretive; private, covert, downright clandestine if need be. Oh, yes, he looked forward to that. Sneaking around yet more carefully.

Disillusionment became outright gloom, however, when another subject came up. Phillip had told the others that James knew where the Wakua gold was—information that was judged to be “the perfect distraction.” The others discussed “getting up an expedition,” “making the news public.” To a man, everyone expected James to lead the way to gold and glory.

Everyone did
not
think that they should protect the Wakua, whom by the end of that night every member of Council, save James, had called children or worse. The Wakua were to be bought off with baubles, so they could get on with the business of going in, tearing out, digging up their land and homes.

At one point, Athers told James, “You can’t honestly expect to deprive poor Englishmen of a chance for wealth so as to protect a tribe of primitives who don’t know what they have in the first place.”

“But they
aren’t
primitive. The gold they sent—did you see, besides how much, the way it was
worked? The art in it, the skill? They have their own way.”

Athers shrugged. “Survival of the fittest way, James. Survival of the fittest.”

Except without the Wakua, James himself would not have survived, and there was the matter of one hundred forty-seven Englishmen who hadn’t. He didn’t say these words, however. They didn’t change the fact that if Athers took in an expedition with rifles and mining equipment, the Wakua would be no match.

It was midnight before James left Athers’s house. When he did, he departed, angry, baffled, unhappy—feeling like a tart himself: gussied up, bent to the will of others, and holding a fiver for his trouble.

He’d simply been too unsettled and exhausted to face Coco. She would be disappointed in him, he thought. He was disappointed in himself and the world at large. So he went to his rooms at All Souls.

There he’d lain in bed, tired, but finding sleep elusive. Tomorrow he’d tell Coco; he’d see her. He’d explain how things had become rather precarious. He’d tell her that for a while he and she would have to be much more careful. They would have to live one way, but act as if they lived another.

Their existence would become, just for the time being, a kind of…hypocrisy.

Jesus God, he thought, closing his eyes.

And, oh, yes, he would have to tell her that—there was no help for it—he would also be a great deal busier. Which proved so very, very true: In the morning the authorities came to take Phillip to London, and all hell broke loose. James didn’t get away that day or the following one, either.

Chapter 22

A
week later, Coco lay back in a barber chair, able to hear a dental engine through the bone of her jaw. The sound faded in and out, while above her head she watched the pulleys of the dental machinery. Her tooth had broken, and the dentist was having to cut it in half to get it out. It didn’t hurt too much. But the drilling and the sight of the wheels and the little rubber belts, all vibrating in her head, surprised her every time she rallied to consciousness.

She watched the wheels come into focus now, mesmerized. She was fascinated because, until today, she had never seen such an apparatus. The little belts made it clatter along, spinning, humming, thrumming in her head.

She blearily watched the wheels spin, then suddenly—spinning wheels! A spinning wheel! And she had already been nicked by it. She could taste the blood. Coco began to laugh as the rubber face-piece came down again to settle over her nose and mouth. She inhaled, still laughing, as she sank down into inkiness once more, drifting on a sweetish, rub
bery smell that came through the mask and tubing.

She dreamed of liquid sleep supplied in small iron cylinders. Values and tubes. Or perhaps she was not dreaming. Perhaps she was floating up into wakefulness again. The close-fitting face-piece was over her nose and mouth. She could see the India rubber bag above expand and contract as she breathed, hear the sound of the dentist pumping the little handball. Then she was suddenly talking to James.

She told him, “Well, I hope you’re happy.” Her tone, though, said she didn’t mean it; she hoped he was miserable.

As if to please her, his face appeared around the wheels and belts, and her wish came true: his eyes had dark circles beneath them. His hair was askew. Misery was conveniently written all over his features.

She smiled at the sight. “It serves you right,” she said. “Have your fame and glory and title and money—”

She stopped listing all that he had traded her for because, articulated, none of it sounded as appropriately unappealing as it should. Shoving at the dentist, she tried to see her apparition better. To James the Dream she announced, “Well, just take all the things that you want and enjoy them. Me, I’m having what is rotten removed. I don’t keep what can hurt me. I’m strong. I have it out and move on.”

She felt sad all at once, though, strong or not. She consoled herself, thinking: losing a tooth did not rationally make a huge difference, and neither would losing James. Ultimately she’d remain intact.
He had made his decisions. They were bad ones from her perspective, but they weren’t her decisions. Leave him to them.

She must have said something like this, because the dream disputed with her. He’d been busy. He hadn’t been able to see her—

Right. For a whole week. There wasn’t pencil and paper in Cambridge, so he couldn’t have written a line. The twenty-minute walk would have killed him. The five-minute carriage ride would have exhausted his horse.

Stupid dream. He still disputed. He was trying. He was fighting. Life was hard.

Oh, please. She held up her hand that rather flopped on her wrist.

The dentist’s voice tried to soothe someone, possibly move them. Her, she presumed. “No, no, it’s all right,” she told him. “I’m fine. Really. I have my integrity. I did what I thought I should do. I told him, so he could save himself. I had to. I’d do it again. Then he betrayed me, because, you see, he had plans of his own, plans and schemes and ideas, a life with a trajectory of its own: it surpassed me.”

The dream James argued with sputters and indecipherable words.

She said merely, wisely, “You made your choice. Now go lie in it.” This wasn’t quite right. “Your bed, that is. Me, I have a perfectly good life to which I have returned. I don’t need you to kiss it to life for me.” She began to laugh again. “I have a castle in Paris, another in Italy. And I can cut through the brambles all by myself, thank you very much. I shall go to Vienna and dance in the New
Year. I can wake myself up.” She said this perhaps in French. She wasn’t sure.

But an English voice said most clearly, “I don’t see how you can take the moral high ground here. There’s the university, others to consider. It wasn’t just for myself that I didn’t go straight away to you—” The voice—it was James’s again—stammered, then continued. “Besides I wouldn’t have been half so upset or confused if you hadn’t slept with half the men in the room.”

She laughed a dreaming laugh, cackling and giggling. “Laughing gas,” she explained. Though the dentist had told her that laughing gas didn’t make a person laugh. “Never mind,” she said. Then she told Dream James, “I won’t dispute your accusation, only its banality. We know what I’ve done; we know what I’ve been. But I never hurt anyone. I never did anything anyone didn’t want me to, and before you I never betrayed anyone’s secrets, neither their simplest nor their darkest. I know lawyers, kings, and lawmakers who can’t say the same. As to what I was a decade ago, I liked what I did and was good at it. If that is dishonorable, well, then, shoot me.”

No one shot her. That was the beauty of dreams.

Though her imagined James argued some more. With less conviction, he said, “You slept with men for money.”

“Not precisely. I slept with men I liked, then let them give me money. Wives do the same.” She said, “Women don’t have many ways to accrue wealth, Dr. Stoker. In the tradition of geishas and concubines, a courtesan in Paris a decade ago was
not such a bad thing. Perhaps you are too prudish—too English—to understand.”

There was a long pause, the sort in dreams that meant one had triumphed totally, the villain vanquished at one’s feet.

But then James’s meek voice asked, “And love?”

“Ah, love is a different matter.” She said dreamily, “I was in love once. It was fun. But also a torture. It was compelling, I’ll say that. I’m glad to have had it and glad to be done with it.”

Exactly. That’s what she’d tell him. Those words. If she could remember them. If she ever saw him again. Though they were just the sort of words she’d never think of or dare speak to the real James. But in dreams—ah, in dreams, here was where one was always at one’s most clear-sighted and eloquent.

The dental wheel kept spinning, the noise loud, then soft. Much like something similar happening inside Coco’s head. Her brain buzzed while doing slow, floating somersaults inside her skull. Her jaw ached slightly in the way that foretold a bad time later, though it wasn’t bad now. Her tongue checked once in a lull of drilling and found a hole at the back of her jaw that was the size of a crater.

The tooth was out. Overhead the spinning wheel slowed to a soft, whir, softer, softer, like the hymn of a little choir in the distance. An untold number of minutes later, perhaps hours, the dentist helped her to her wobbly feet.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.

“Oh, I’ll be grand. You watch. I’ll be tip-top.”

She took two steps and dropped right into the arms of—it was her fantasy James.

“Coco?” he said.

The room faded around him. It became nothing but chest, warm, hard James-chest that smelled spicy the way his clothes could…of cardamom…cinnamon…lemons and honey. If James ever made her tea as he’d promised, she would ask him to make Dinka tea the way they fixed it in the Mountains of the Moon. What lovely English words, she thought.
Dinka. Moon mountains
.

What a lovely chest. “Mmm,” she said. Yes. She could have stayed here against James’s chest, against his warmth redolent in that strange way of Africa and Englishness. She could have stayed a moon’s age, stayed forever.

The next thing she knew though, she was on a couch, with the dentist telling someone that she was fine and that everything had gone well enough. “I added a dash of ether at the end. It works slower, but lasts longer. She kept coming around and talking. Anyway, the ether was the trick, though it takes longer to wear off.”

She heard these words while sinking into couch cushions.

Then she was standing, insisting on a cab all to herself.

People were moving her, she didn’t care where. She was holding something. At one point, she opened her fist and wondered, What strange thing was this that lay on her palm? Then she recognized it: the better part of her tooth. She squeezed her eyes shut, wrapped her hand around its brittle edges. The extracted tooth was sharp in places. Good. Out. Done.

She was back on the couch. David was mysteri
ously there. “What are you doing here?” she asked, as he put his arm under her.