The Crimson Rooms (44 page)

“Tell me you have been all right.”

“I have not been all right, Nicholas, I have been very shaken.”

“Good, good. I want you to be shaken, at least a little. You deserve to be, since you have utterly shattered my peace of mind.”

“I have tried to concentrate on work. The trial is so soon. We think Stella really did have a lover. But on the other hand, if Stephen knew, and I think he did, then he had cause to be jealous . . . he has a motive . . . it’s looking even bleaker for him. There is a statue, a bronze dancer, someone must have bought it . . .”

I, who had been praised at Oxford for my ability to carve an argument from a ragged collection of ideas and facts, now was incoherent. My mouth formed words but the rest of my being was yearning to be closer to him; I was mesmerized by the slightest movement of his hand or eyebrow or lip. A crease the size of a thumbnail came and went in his left cheek near his mouth when he smiled. Fleetingly, I caught his eye. After that, I couldn’t speak at all.

He said: “I was praying that you would not think, when you read my letter, that I was making an excuse for not talking to Sylvia. My mind is made up, I’ve not wavered for a moment.”

“Please, yes, you must tell her. I cannot stand secrets.”

“But it’s a matter of timing, do you see? If you’ll let me, I’ll tell you a little more about Donald. I have hesitated, as I said, because of loyalty to his family, but it seems to me that the decision not to betray is far from clear-cut. You are what counts. For you to be unhappy, to be filled with doubt, seems a higher form of betrayal.”

I dared to touch his hand with my fingertips. “Don’t tell me anything that feels wrong. I trust you.”

I did trust him. Even I could not disbelieve the evidence of my eyes. He was muzzy with desire, as I was, and a tremor ran through his hand at the brush of my fingers.

He shook his head, leaned his chin on his palm. “Evelyn Gifford. What have you done to me? I want to kiss you. I want to hold you and show you how very, very beautiful you are but we have to be civilized, so I will tell you a little about Don, if I may, because I don’t want you to doubt me. He’s not at all well. Physically, he seems in the pink of health; if I took you to visit him you would see an immaculately dressed young man, with hair and mustache perfectly trim. On a summer’s afternoon like this one he’d be on a veranda drinking tea. But when we came closer, the illusion would become a little frayed though he would stand up very formally and shake us each by the hand. After that he’d say nothing at all. He can’t, because his thoughts are shot to pieces. The war. Drugs. Recently they changed his medication and he became violent and nearly throttled a nurse. It is pure luck that he was discovered before he murdered her.”

“What happened to make him like this?”

“The war. He was always oversensitive, perhaps overmothered, constitutionally unfit for the shocks we had to endure. His father, Sir David Hardynge, as head of Imperial Insurance was proud of the firm’s contribution—money and men, including his own son. He regarded the war as an opportunity to extend his influence and would not entertain doubts, so Don was one of the first to sign up. He hated every moment, went into that war a brave, brilliant boy and came out like this.”

The tearoom was emptying while the piano played languidly on. At five, time had stretched endlessly away, second by second. Now nearly an hour was gone.

“Can the family bear any more unhappiness?” I said. “How can you hurt Sylvia at a time like this?”

“Sylvia deserves better than a man who is thinking all the time about someone else. And she is tough, I think, not to mention proud. She would never be satisfied with less than everything. She is ardent and wholehearted about all she does. However, I will wait, if you’ll allow me, until the family has got over this current crisis.”

“You know, Meredith was invited home by Sylvia after the art class. I was shocked when she told me she’d been in Sylvia’s house. It all felt so terribly close, as if Sylvia and I are brushing up against each other in the dark. Or rather, she is in the dark . . .”

“I know. I know, it must end soon. But there’s another thing that makes a difference. I’m away next week. Manchester. Fraud case. It seems callous to tell her and then bolt. We need time.”

“You’ll miss the excitement of Wheeler’s trial,” I said, trying not to show my disappointment that he was going to be away.

He paid the bill while I was brought my jacket and briefcase. I had intended to tell him about James’s letter and my attempt at reconciliation with Meredith but there had been no time. And again I felt regret for the time before Nicholas and I had kissed, when our talk had been edgy with expectation. Now we were so sad, so strained, and I knew I would spend the next week missing him, and regretting the things I hadn’t said.

As we walked from the restaurant, he held my elbow. “Next Friday evening when I come back. We’ll meet then. That will be our beginning. I’ll fetch you in the car. But for God’s sake let’s be alone somewhere. I can’t go through a charade like this again.” He urged me past the lift to the glass doors leading onto the empty stairwell. The stairs marched down, down in gracious symmetry to the basement. I walked ahead of him, slowly, my hand on the banister, conscious that step by step the ground floor was approaching, the street door, parting. I felt the life flow out of me. He was leaving, it was so cold, so clinical, with another meeting arranged in a week’s time. The prospect of this tea had sustained me through the past days, and the world beyond Nicholas seemed a chill and very complicated place.

As we came to the last landing, he got ahead of me, spoke my name, and kissed me with such violence that I lost all sense of anything but the taste of him and the cool wall at my back. The sudden contact with another body, the heat and hardness and incredible demands he made of my mouth, the sense of being taken over and broken down into little fragments of Evelyn opened me up to him so freely that for a moment I stood with my back and palms and calves pressed to that wall, unresisting as his hand covered my breast and his knee nudged my thigh. The inside of my head was dark with sensation and my untouched body hot and yearning. I broke away at last, half blind, gasping with desire, fumbled to take hold of his hand, and we ran on down, emerged onto the pavement, and headed toward the bus stop.

There, at last, within earshot of a couple of elderly ladies, each with a formidable handbag, one with darting eyes under an antiquated center parting, I recovered a little, straightened my hat, and managed something of my usual crispness. “By the way, Mr. Thorne, I have relented, since seeing you last. I need your help, if you can give it. This is a copy of the names on the board of trustees responsible for Leah’s children.”

“Good God,” he said, scanning the document, still with a sheen on his lips from our kiss, “I know both these ladies, Manningtree and Curren. Cannon Mullins. No, not heard of him. And I don’t know the chairman. But there’s certainly plenty here for me to go on.”

“I might have known you’d be friendly with the ladies.”

“Miss Gifford, we have already established that I am an impossible snob and move only in the most select circles.”

“How will you approach them? What will you say?”

“I’ll do as I’m instructed by a solicitor. How would she like me to proceed?”

“Two things. I want the children released. And I want to know the policy of the trustees in relation to sending children to the colonies.”

“The latter should be easy, the former more difficult. Perhaps we should talk again, Miss Gifford. Next Friday evening, then? In the meantime, I’ll write.”

For the benefit of spectators, we shook hands. The omnibus arrived and we were caught up in a throng of passengers waiting to board. His hand slid away from mine. I was swept forward. When I looked back, he was standing in the shade of a green-and-white awning, hatless, smiling.

M
eredith proved a stalwart
and indefatigable companion—if anything, a little too ready to enter into the spirit of our search: she was happy to discuss the possible reasons for Stella’s disappearance that April night, with embarrassing frankness. “On the one hand, Evelyn, you are saying that it’s possible she may have sought to end a pregnancy. On the other you think her unknown admirer made her a present of the bronze dancer to encourage intimacy. Does that add up?”

“Nothing adds up.”

“So we are looking for signs of a girl who may have met with a medical mishap or been forced to visit a hospital when an amateurish attempt to intervene in a pregnancy went wrong . . .”

“Do you think it’s hopeless, in your experience? Would you remember such a case, three months on?”

“You have the wedding photograph. Your Stella has quite a distinctive face. So no, I don’t think it’s hopeless.”

We began with St. Mary’s in Paddington, closest to Stella’s home, Meredith sporting a new hat in powder blue with an outsized brim that winsomely framed her little face. At first I thought her dress inappropriate—she looked rather a lady member of the board of visitors than an ex-nurse on a somewhat sordid hunt for traces of a murdered girl—but by the end of the morning, a combination of the hat, an engaging smile, and a confiding glance from Meredith’s enormous eyes had gained us at least a glimpse of record books.

From the moment she stepped onto the polished boards of a hospital corridor and heard the distant sound of trolley wheels, metal clashing on metal, the sluicing of water, smelled disinfectant and sick bodies, Meredith acquired stature and briskness at odds with her usual, nervier demeanor. I remembered James’s description of her expert hands, this neat little woman with unquenchable energy, and again I saw her difference from us. It wasn’t just that we were six inches taller and our limbs long and ungainly, but that our natures were so fixed, our ideas so earnestly focused on our own small horizons. The Meredith I now glimpsed was wide open, accepting of all she saw. Nothing disturbed her; noise, endless waiting, encounters with authorities determined to give nothing away or nurses too busy to speak to us. Again and again she stood her ground until the right questions had been asked, the right member of staff summoned, Stella’s photograph scrutinized, records checked.

At St. Mary’s, where we presented our letter of introduction typed by Miss Drake on “Breen & Balcombe”-headed notepaper, we drew our first blank. “Even if she were here that night we wouldn’t necessarily have a record. We simply don’t have time to write down all the ones who aren’t treated or admitted. All sorts drop in late at night and most we turf out, you know, the sweepings from the park, vagrants, girls too tired to keep going. Sometimes the police bring them through for a quick checkup. They don’t all get recorded.”

I produced the cloakroom ticket. “Do you ever issue patients with tickets like this, you know, if they have to wait, or undress and hand in their clothes?”

“If only we were that organized.”

We began the day traveling from one hospital to another by omnibus, ended it in cabs, too exhausted to consider the dwindling contents of Breen & Balcombe’s petty-cash box. I think we knew, by the time we’d visited Westminster, St. Thomas’s, and Guy’s, that our quest was hopeless. There was no record of Stella. And yet, despite the apparent futility of our pilgrimage, I had a sense that we were creeping ever closer to the truth. Perhaps it was simply that we were taking some action, any action, or perhaps it was because we covered so much ground that we must surely be crossing and recrossing the dead girl’s tracks. Or perhaps it was that by eliminating this one possible explanation for her disappearance that night we were leaving the way open for another to emerge.

Most of the time, during those tiresome journeys from hospital to hospital, Meredith and I were silent. It was as if we were circling each other like fencers afraid of a sudden jab, the opening of an old wound. She relented toward me a little as she teased me for loitering at the entrance to emergency departments, for the
Prudence
mouth, as she called it, I put on when there was a bad smell or unpleasant sight.

Once, I saw another side to Meredith altogether. At Guy’s we were kept waiting nearly half an hour on a wooden bench. Around us was the usual motley collection of sick and walking wounded, and a mother in a stained skirt and shapeless hat, holding a young baby who screamed relentlessly for ten minutes on and on, back arched, gummy mouth wide, limbs thrashing. Twice the mother approached a nurse and twice the baby was briefly examined and the mother told to wait: “Just a moment longer, we’ll be with you soon.”

Meredith, I noticed, had started to tap her little foot as if irritated by the wailing like the rest of us. But when the baby stopped crying at last and seemed to relax in its mother’s exhausted arms, she sprang up, asked, in a commanding voice, permission to hold the infant, put her finger to the side of its throat, her cheek to its lips, and said in a low, insistent voice: “Follow me. We will find a doctor.” The next moment, both women had disappeared.