The Crimson Rooms (27 page)

“I miss her terribly,” said Mrs. Hobhouse. “The last time my Stell slept here, it was the night before her wedding.”

“Do you mind me opening the drawers?”

“Do what you like. The police have been through anyway. I don’t feel anything’s private anymore. But you won’t find anything.”

I recognized the room’s appalling sense of abandonment. Everything in it, so familiar to Stella, was disconnected and cheapened without her. I opened a few drawers but the contents were so sorrowful that I closed them hastily; clothes too unloved to be moved to the bride’s new home, a child’s prayer book, a doll with a celluloid face and a wonky eye, and a waitress’s uniform cap and apron, presumably left over from Lyons.

“In the top of the wardrobe are some wooden bricks and such I was keeping for grandchildren,” said Mrs. Hobhouse.

I held an irrational belief that whatever I was looking for would never be found while Stella’s mother was present. In the end, I asked if she could perhaps find me paper and pencil, since I had foolishly forgotten my own. This did the trick; she backed away and left me. Very softly, so as not to offend Mrs. Hobhouse, I closed the door and something swung against me, a cotton robe with frilled edging and a faded design of roses. With some reluctance, I brought the cuff to my face. The fabric smelled of the room and very faintly of a sweet perfume I remembered from Stella’s wardrobe in her new house. The pockets were empty.

Other than that, the room at first yielded no secrets. The rails at either end of the bed could have done with a fresh coat of paint, and I imagined Stella’s damp stockings hung there to dry overnight. In the narrow wardrobe was a child’s woolen coat with a velvet collar and on the shelf above a sun hat and the collection of toys in battered cardboard boxes.

I shut the wardrobe door and looked into the mirror. On the eve of her wedding, Stella would surely have tried on her dress one last time and paraded here, turned sideways to examine her profile, contorted herself to get a glimpse of the back view. She must have sat on the bed, crossing and recrossing her legs to inspect her ankles in the glass that now reflected only my pale face, framed by the dark rim of my hat. I hoped Stella had enjoyed her dancing days while she had the chance.

I used to be invited to parties
even before Meredith arrived to shake us all up, though generally I didn’t go; experience had taught me that church socials and gatherings organized by former school friends, now married, would unfailingly disappoint. But I remembered a time, before the war, when I had sat thus before a mirror and lifted the hair from my neck because I was nearly an adult and had acquired a slender throat and a rather intriguing set of curves between chin, breast, waist, and hip. I remembered, on the evening of a party, believing that I was on the verge of everything and that life was a precipice over which I longed to fling myself.

And today, gripping the edge of Stella Wheeler’s mattress, I felt the same as during the concert at Toynbee Hall. Love, love was what I wanted. I saw reflected a thirty-year-old virgin with creases on her brow and a frown between the eyes, and recalled the hopeful girl who had attended lots of parties until at last she got herself kissed under the canal bridge. The ghost of the murdered Stella Wheeler clung to the robe hanging on the back of the door and whispered: You could have had more. You had the chance to find out more and you didn’t take it. Well, more fool you.

The man in question was of such a high rank that I had to fall back against the wall when he passed me in the corridor. We women were mostly employed in the bone-cold rooms of the censorship office crammed so close that our elbows collided. Our days were spent dipping our pens in black ink and scrubbing out dates, times, and places from the back of a hundred thousand postcards. After my brother’s death, I worked like an automaton, because it seemed to me that every postcard must in any case be from a dead boy, the last product of his pen a spattering of unoriginal words many of which I ruthlessly crossed out. Sometimes I was tempted to stuff a sackful under my blouse and burn them, to spare the families the hope, on seeing his handwriting, that a beloved boy was alive.

We all assumed that any other woman in the building not engaged in the censorship office must be doing something much more interesting. There were some locked rooms we didn’t go near, because the work that was done inside was of such high security that only the cleverest women who could also type or knew languages were admitted there. So finally I persuaded my father to bring a typewriter home from his office and in the small hours taught myself to touch-type (amid complaints from the girls, who slept in the rooms above mine, that the hammering was keeping them awake) and successfully applied for a transfer to a much snugger office, where I typed up decoded messages about the movements of German troops. Nobody ever discussed the information we passed on, but among us there was a warm and unspoken camaraderie, founded on pride.

One officer, a colonel, noticed me and I sensed that when he entered the room he sought me out and took pleasure in seeing me there. He was quietly spoken, reserved, and had been injured in the left arm. The spring and summer following my brother’s death felt cold and I was cocooned in layers of wool and grief, so the world held few connections for me except the keys of my typewriter. This unassuming man, though, occasionally caught my eye and smiled.

A few weeks before the armistice, there was a party after work to celebrate a birthday. As I was leaving, the officer approached me with a stunningly straightforward invitation. “It’s Miss Gifford, isn’t it? Would you have dinner with me tonight?”

It must have cost him dear to ask. I knew that he was married, with a family in Dorset, and I suspected he was not a habitual philanderer and that this was a rare and uncharacteristic venture for him. So I agreed at once, touched by his interest, flattered, and too numbed by grief to know what my true feelings were anymore.

The streets were wet and a light drizzle was falling. He was gentlemanly, shielding me from the traffic and adjusting his pace to mine. Dinner was in a discreet restaurant, subterranean, with tables pushed into little alcoves so that we were more or less alone, and it occurred to me, when I realized the intimacy of the place, that he was perhaps more accustomed to clandestine suppers with ladies than I had imagined. I made a safe choice from the menu and thought that Rose could have managed a much better leek-and-potato soup than this. He drank several glasses of wine to my one as he talked about the first year of the war, when he’d seen active service at Aisne and Ypres where his arm had been wounded. He considered himself much better suited to intelligence work than combat. “I’m indecisive, a poor quality for a military officer but in many ways an excellent one for someone working in intelligence. I can be relied on not to do anything rash. It has taken me three months to get around to inviting you to dinner even though you are the most attractive woman I have seen for a long time. Ah, you look surprised, which I suspect is typical of you. You seem to me quite unaware of your own power.”

Smiling, he lowered his eyelids as if pursuing a private thought, and I knew that he would want to make love to me, and that I would let him. I was curious, after all, and found him intriguing, even though he seemed not to find any incongruity in talking about his wife, who bred dogs, or his three sons, two of whom, thank God, were too young to serve, one out in France. I was required to disclose nothing about myself.

He had a quiet apartment near the restaurant, full of beautiful pieces of porcelain and glass. “I’m a collector,” he told me. “Even in France I found time to seek out bits and pieces. I can’t resist them”—and he gave me a globe of hollowed-out glass that filled my hand with crimson.

I never could stand the truth of color. At that moment, I wished he had been less kind, less tentative, because now that I liked him more I wanted him to make love to me less. I couldn’t imagine how it would come to pass that we would remove our clothes and lie on his bed.

He took the bowl from me and put it down. “You have beautiful hands,” he said, “it was the first thing I noticed about you. But I have some advice. After the war, never let on you can type unless you have no other choice. I think you are much too clever a woman to spend your life typing up other people’s letters.”

I smiled cautiously. He was holding my elbow as he looked down at my hand and I made out the shape of his skull under his thinning hair. His thumb moved from my arm and instead stroked my breast. The trouble was, in the end, that I was quite incapable of losing myself in his touch and therefore could not stand the thought of the mechanical act ahead. He was too polite, I too indifferent.

I took a step back and withdrew my arm. “I’ll go now,” I said.

His face closed up and the corner of his lip, under the mustache, tightened. In the neat spaces of his apartment, my own movements were calm as I collected my gloves and bag from the hall and let myself out. But during the long walk home, I cursed myself, not for accepting his invitation to dinner but for failing to take the opportunity that had been offered.

I glanced again into Stella’s mirror
and it was then that I saw her, almost concealed from view behind books on a shelf above the bed, with just a foot extended past a copy of
Little Women
. Pushing aside the book, I discovered a statuette, so small that it would almost have been covered by my fist, of a naked girl connected to a plinth by one tiny foot, running, hair flying back, hands raised above her head, small-breasted, every detail distinct, even the fuzz of pubic hair and her little toes. I knew practically nothing of art, less about sculpture. All I knew was that this little bronze, suggestive but exquisite, was entirely out of place in a bedroom where no other item had cost more than a guinea.

When Mrs. Hobhouse returned, we made an inventory, beginning with the dressmaker’s dummy (modeling her half-made dress for Stella’s funeral), the robe behind the door, and the bed, and continuing with the contents of the wardrobe and drawers. We even took out the box of toys, noted the farm animals, and counted the bricks. In a further battered box was a collection of dollhouse furniture, roughly made but with working doors and drawers. “My husband used to make it for her. She loved small things when she was a child,” said Mrs. Hobhouse, beginning to weep.

I opened each miniature drawer. Inside were trinkets, a windmill from a charm bracelet, a tiny shell, and an odd assortment of dried-up things such as one might find on a nature table in school: an acorn in its cup, a sycamore key, and a conker case.

“Funny girl,” said Mrs. Hobhouse, “she will have kept those for her dolls.” I didn’t contradict her, but the chestnut case, though discolored, was quite soft and its smell too distinctive to be anything but last season’s.

Last of all, I went to the bookcase and took down the bronze dancer. “Oh, that,” said Mrs. Hobhouse. “I didn’t know she kept that here.”

“Where did it come from?”

“She bought it herself. I hate the thing.”

“Mrs. Hobhouse, might I borrow it, if I take great care of it?”

“Whatever for?”

“I want to show it to Mr. Breen. It seems rather unusual to me.”

Her eyes were fixed on the statue and I realized that it was asking a great deal, to take away something of Stella’s. “I’ll write you out a receipt,” I said. “I won’t keep it long.”

Afterward, she followed me downstairs. “Well, that was a waste of your time. I’m sorry.”

“Not wasted,” I said, “I wanted to know more about Stella and now I do.”

“Such as what? What do you know?”

“Why, that she was much loved, Mrs. Hobhouse.”

Perhaps it was this last remark that made her trust me finally, because as I left, she put her hand on my arm. “I’m worried that there won’t be hardly anyone at the funeral. Will you be there?”