The Crimson Rooms (42 page)

W
hen I arrived home after ten o’clock that night,
Mother was still waiting up for me. “Where have you been, Evelyn?”

“Working late.”

She hovered about me, took my hat, and hung it up next to James’s. “I told Rose to keep back a plate of cottage pie because I didn’t know when you’d be in. I was afraid . . . Oh, Evelyn, I’ve been so worried you wouldn’t come home at all. What must you think of me?”

“Really, does it matter what I think?”

“Of course it does. Evelyn, please, don’t be cold.”

“I must speak to Meredith. Is she in?”

“She’s with her art group. She didn’t say when she’d be back. When I told her my idea that she might have an apartment in this house she laughed at me. She said she had to be free and she couldn’t think of anything lonelier than being within the household but not of it.”

“She has a point.” There was a hat box on the hall stand. I took off the lid and inside was a purple velvet hat with a padded brim and matching rosettes. Not summery, not dainty, but at least not black.

“It was in the sale,” said Mother.

I nodded, took the hat, and put it on her head, adjusting it low on her brow. She peeked out at me, fearful, and I saw how her prettiness had disintegrated through the strain of these fruitless little stabs she made at controlling her life.

“Please talk to me, Evelyn. Say you’ve forgiven me.”

“I can’t yet.”

“I knew this would happen. I knew you would be angry.”

“Give me time, Mother. Good night now.” I walked relentlessly upstairs, away from the thin figure in her lilac cardigan, who must always be appeased.

Edmund’s door was open. He was fast asleep, and the landing light fell on his bed, where he lay on his back, one arm flung out so that his half-clenched fist hung in space.

Next morning, I waylaid Meredith
as she and Edmund were running down the stairs on their way to his elementary school in Lisson Grove, and asked if I might keep them company.

Even Meredith would not give me the cold shoulder in front of her son, so the three of us set off, she very chic in her Eastbourne yellow summer frock and hat, Edmund sturdy in shorts and long socks, myself giraffe-like in a dark skirt. Edmund, never slow to seize an opportunity, insisted on walking between us so that we might swing him over the cracks in the pavement, but as soon as he’d left us, crossing the school yard with heartrending confidence, a pall of silence fell and Meredith started to walk away, even when I called after her: “Would you mind, could you spare a few minutes? I want to talk to you. We could perhaps go to the park, if you had time.”

“Oh, I have all the time in the world. But you, surely not.”

“I want to apologize for what happened, if you’ll let me.” The last thing I expected was to see tears start to her eloquent eyes and hang on the lashes.

“Meredith, however shocked I was I should not have struck you. It probably doesn’t help at all that I’ve never done such a thing in my life before. I offer you my unreserved apology and beg you to forgive me, if you can.”

She stood with bowed head until a nursemaid asked her to step aside so she could get by with her push chair. This prosaic street of villas and box hedges hardly seemed the right setting for a highly charged scene, whether of reconciliation or rejection. James’s letter was lying in the briefcase with my love letter from Nicholas. How could Father’s bag, the street, or the city contain such words?

“I would like us to start again, right from the beginning,” I pleaded. “Meredith, you have received very poor treatment from my family for so long. I want to make amends.”

I was walking toward Regents Park, and to my relief she did follow, though lagging slightly behind. We crossed the Outer Circle and entered the park proper near the boating lake, made unattractive by a frisky little breeze and an overcast sky. Meredith, in her light frock, clutched her goose-pimpled arms. She wouldn’t meet my eye and I felt a pang of nostalgia for the much chirpier Meredith, who had taken me on a trip to Eastbourne: unpredictable, infuriating, even dangerous, yes—but vivacious, intriguing, tricky.

Once we were in the park, out of sight of others, she began to cry in earnest. She did this tidily and well, so that tears ran neatly down her cheeks to be caught in a diminutive handkerchief. “I have been so afraid that Edmund and I would be destitute. I was cursing myself for the way I told you what happened, when I was drunk and not able to consider properly what I was saying.”

I glanced down at her, struggling to see her through James’s eyes, to understand what he had loved. Was it just that hers was the first face he saw when he regained consciousness? Or was it her difference from us, the Gifford women, that drew him, the fact that she was small and ardent and driven by an inner light very different from ours?

“You have to understand that what you told me about James seemed entirely out of character to me at the time. What I have come to realize is that I probably didn’t know him well enough to judge how he would be when he was away from me. I was just his sister. I didn’t know what war was like.”

“That’s it,” she cried. “We all behaved out of character. But you see, if we hadn’t been changed by what we saw and did, why then, we’d have been made of stone. Evelyn, I want you to know this. I didn’t tell you what happened between me and James to shock or blackmail you or kill your love for your brother. I told you because that’s what happened.” The bizarre thing was I wished I had believed her before I read James’s letter. It seemed to me so clear now, that she was telling a version of the truth. “But I should have said more. I shouldn’t have left you to imagine the very worst. He wasn’t actually violent to me. I scarcely realized what was happening because I wanted so much to cling to him—by then I was lost too, Evelyn, the war had done for me finally and to hold a young man in my arms when he needed me seemed the only reasonable thing left to do—and then, too late I realized that he was expecting far more than me, was blind and deaf to my protests.”

After a long pause, I said, “I understand Mother put a plan to you and you turned it down.”

“Certainly I did.” Meredith was actually grinning. “Can you imagine if I were to live in the midst of you but conveniently tucked away; Prudence and your mother on the first floor and me and my friends crashing up and down the stairs in the small hours. It would never work. And besides, I’ve changed my mind about what I want. I was at Sylvia Hardynge’s house last night. She has a studio in the attic.”

Despite the chill air, I stood still. “Sylvia?”

“Surely you remember her from the art party; fiancée to that barrister acquaintance of yours. She invited us back for cocktails after class to see her work. Hadley is very taken with her. We all are, except Margot, who’s jealous. Sylvia’s family lives in this mansion with a semicircular drive, columns to the porch, servants skimming about, mother and father out at the opera. Sylvia says they’re all running around looking for distraction because her brother, who’s in some kind of asylum, is very sick and they’re at their wits’ end. For some reason he could be thrown out of the place he’s in at present. But apart from the mad brother, Sylvia, it seems to me, has everything, including a studio, so I can’t be too sorry for her. It’s a wonderful room, part of the roof has been glassed so that it’s full of light in the day and stars at night. I should like something similar.”

She was teasing me with this extravagant request and I tried to laugh. Nicholas would undoubtedly have been up to that studio in starlight. I imagined how he and Sylvia must have stood together, like at the art party, his arms around her, their kiss, and all about them Sylvia’s blank canvases.

Meredith’s face was peaky with cold, and her fingertips purple. We took a path that led to the north of the boating lake. The wind had blown debris from beneath the trees, and scraps of dried leaves, the very last of last year’s, whisked across my foot. The ghost of a memory stirred but flickered away.

“We’ll talk another time,” I said. “You are too cold here and I have to go to work. But do we understand each other a little better? I do so want to find a solution.”

At the junction with Grove End Road, where I was to catch the omnibus, we parted. I should have liked to embrace her, to set a seal on my apology, but could not yet. “I was wondering,” I said, “if you can spare the time, would you come with me on a trek around London’s hospitals? I’m not acquainted with how hospitals work, you are. Could you, would you help? It’s to do with Stella Wheeler, the girl who was shot.”

I half expected a rebuff, but instead the old light came to her eye. “Why, I’d love to. This is your
murder
case, you mean . . . Oh yes, please.” Then, as the bus came, she asked wistfully: “Where are you going now?”

“To the office first.”