The Shifting Fog (52 page)

It worried me to think of her out alone at night, keeping such a thing from Teddy—worse, Deborah. And I wondered where she was going, whether she would tell me. Despite my misgivings, however, I agreed to help. Of course I did. It was what she’d asked of me. Neither of us spoke as I helped her into a dress she’d already chosen: pale blue silk, with a fringe that brushed her bare knees. She sat in front of the mirror, watching as I pinned her hair tight against her head. Plucking at the fronds of her dress, twirling her locket chain, biting her lip. Then she handed me a wig: black, sleek and short, something Emmeline had worn months before to a fancy-dress party. I was surprised—wigs were not her habit—but I fitted it, then stepped back to observe. She looked like a different person. Like Louise Brooks.

She picked up a bottle of perfume—another of Teddy’s gifts—

Chanel Number 5, brought back from Paris the year before, then changed her mind. Returned the bottle to its place and regarded herself. It was then I saw the piece of notepaper on her bureau:
Robbie’s Reading
, it said.
The Stray Cat
,
Soho, Saturday, 10 pm
. She grabbed the paper, stuffed it into her clutch purse and snapped it shut. Then, in the mirror, her eyes met mine. She said nothing; she didn’t have to. I wondered why I hadn’t guessed. Who else would have her this alert? This jittery? So full of expectation?

I went ahead, making sure the servants were all downstairs. And then I told Mr Boyle I’d noticed a stain on the glass pane in the entrance vestibule. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t have any of the staff hearing the front door open for no reason.

I went back upstairs and signalled to Hannah, standing at the turn of the stairs, that the way was clear. I opened the front door and through she went. On the other side we stopped. She turned to me, smiled.

‘Be careful, ma’am,’ I said, silencing my rumblings of foreboding. She nodded. ‘Thank you, Grace. For everything.’

And she disappeared into the night air, silently, shoes in her hands so as not to make a noise.

Hannah found a taxi on a street around the corner and gave the driver the address of the club in which Robbie was reading. She was so excited she could hardly breathe. She had to keep tapping her heels on the floor of the taxi to convince herself it was really happening.

The address had been easy enough to obtain. Emmeline kept a journal into which she clipped pamphlets and advertisements and invitations, and it hadn’t taken Hannah long to find it. She needn’t have bothered as it turned out. Once she’d told the taxi driver the name he needed no further instruction. The Stray Cat was one of Soho’s better known clubs, a meeting spot for artists, drug dealers, business tycoons and bright young members of the aristocracy, bored and idle, keen to shake off the shackles of their birth. He pulled up the cab and told her to be careful, shook his head as she paid him. She turned to thank him, and watched as the club’s reflected name slid off his black cab as he disappeared into the night.

Hannah had never been to such a place before. She stood where she was, took in the plain brick exterior, the flashing sign and the crowds of laughing people spilling onto the street outside. So this was what Emmeline meant when she talked about the clubs. This was where she and her friends came to play in the evenings. Hannah shivered into her scarf, kept her head down and went inside, refusing the valet’s offer to take her wrap.

It was tiny, little more than a room, and it was warm, full of jostling bodies. The smoky air smelled sweetly of gin. She stayed near the entrance, close to a pillar, and scanned the room, looking for Robbie.

He was onstage already, if stage it could be called. A small patch of bare space between the grand piano and the bar. He was sitting on a stool, cigarette on his lips, smoking lazily. His jacket was hanging on the back of a nearby chair and he wore only his black suit pants and a white shirt. His collar was loose and so was his hair. He was flicking through a notebook. In front of him, the audience lounged around small round tables. Others had crowded onto bar stools or draped themselves against the edges of the room. Hannah saw Emmeline then, sitting in the middle of a table of friends. Fanny was with her, the old lady of the group. (Married life had proven something of a disappointment for Fanny. With the children appropriated by a rather tedious nurse and a husband who spent his time dreaming up new ailments to suffer, there was little to keep her interest. Who could blame her for seeking adventure at the side of her young friends?) They tolerated her, Emmeline had told Hannah, because she was so genuine in her pursuit of fun, and besides, she was older and could get them out of all sorts of trouble. She was especially good at sweet-talking police when they were caught in after-hours raids. They were all drinking cocktails in martini glasses, one of them ran a line of white powder on the table. Ordinarily, Hannah would have worried for Emmeline, but tonight she was in love with the world.

Hannah inched closer to the pillar but she needn’t have bothered. They were so engrossed with one another they had little time to look beyond. The fellow with the white powder whispered something to Emmeline and she laughed wildly, freely, her pale neck exposed. Robbie’s hands were shaking. Hannah could see the notebook quivering. He rested his cigarette across an ashtray on the bar beside and began, giving no introduction. A poem about history, and mystery, and memory: ‘The Shifting Fog’. It was one of her favourites.

Hannah watched him; it was the first opportunity she’d ever had to gaze at him, to let her eyes roam his face, his body, without him knowing. And she listened. The words had touched her when she’d read them, but to hear him speak them was to see inside his own heart.

He finished, and the audience clapped, and someone called out, and there was laughter, and he looked up. At her. His face didn’t betray him, but she knew he saw, recognised her despite her disguise.

For a moment they were alone.

He looked back at his notebook, turned a few pages, fumbled a bit, settled on the next poem.

And then he spoke to her. Poem after poem. About knowing and unknowing, truth and suffering, love and lust. She closed her eyes and with every word she felt the darkness disappearing. Then he was finished and the audience was applauding. The bar staff swept into action, mixing American cocktails and pouring shots, and the musicians took their seats, broke into jazz. Some of the drunk, laughing people improvised a dance floor between the tables. Hannah saw Emmeline wave to Robbie, beckon him to join them. Robbie waved back and pointed to his watch. Emmeline jutted her bottom lip, an exaggerated gesture, then whooped and waved as one of her male friends dragged her up to dance. Robbie lit another cigarette, shrugged into his jacket and tucked his notebook into the inside pocket. He said something to a man behind the bar and headed across the room toward Hannah. In that moment, as time slowed and she watched him walking, drawing closer, she was faint. She experienced vertigo. As if she were standing on the top of an enormous cliff, in a strong wind, unable to do anything but fall.

Without a word, he took her hand and led her out the door. It was three in the morning when Hannah crept down the servants’ stairs of number seventeen. I was waiting for her, as I’d promised, my stomach a knot of nerves. She was later than expected, and darkness and disquiet had conspired to feed my mind with awful scenes.

‘Thank goodness,’ Hannah said, slipping through the door as I opened it. ‘I was worried you’d forget.’

‘Of course not, ma’am,’ I said, offended.

Hannah floated through the servants’ hall and tiptoed into the main house, shoes in hand. She’d started up the stairs to the second floor when she realised I was still following. ‘You don’t need to see me to bed, Grace. It’s far too late. Besides, I’d like to be alone.’

I nodded, stopped where I was, stood on the bottom step in my white nightie like a forgotten child.

‘Ma’am,’ I said quickly.

Hannah turned. ‘Yes?’

‘Did you have a nice time, ma’am?’

Hannah smiled. ‘Oh, Grace,’ she said. ‘Tonight my life began.’

III

They never met at his house. As far as Hannah knew he didn’t have one. They met in borrowed locations, wherever it was that Robbie happened to be staying. It only added to the adventure so far as she was concerned. She found it thrilling to escape into someone else’s house, someone else’s life. There was something delicious, she thought, about captured moments of intimacy in a strange place. It was easy enough to arrange. Robbie would come to collect Emmeline and while he waited would slip Hannah a note with an address, a time, a date. Hannah would scan the note, nod agreement, and they would meet. Sometimes it was impossible—Teddy would demand her presence at a political event, or Deborah would volunteer her for this committee or that. On such occasions, she had no way of telling him. It pained her to imagine him waiting in vain. But most of the time she did make it. She would tell the others she was meeting a friend for lunch, or going shopping, and she would disappear. She was never gone for long. She was careful about that. Anything beyond two hours was liable to raise suspicions. Love makes people devious and she soon became adept: came to think quickly on her feet if she were seen somewhere unexpected, by someone unexpected. One day she ran into Lady Clementine on Oxford Circus. Where was her driver, asked Lady Clementine. She’d come out on foot, said Hannah. It was such beautiful weather they were having and she’d felt like a walk. But Lady Clementine didn’t come down in yesterday’s shower. She narrowed her eyes and nodded, told Hannah to be sure and be careful as she went. The street had eyes and ears.

After that, Hannah was always sure to make a purchase on her way home—a new hat, a pair of gloves, a ticket to an exhibition—so that she might hold it up to show where she had been, why she was later than expected.

And so they met. She would leave number seventeen and make her way to wherever the most recent note had told her, careful not to encounter any of Deborah’s spies. Sometimes it was an area she knew, other times it took her to a distant part of London. She would find the street, then the house or flat. Would make sure no one was watching, and then, breath catching in her throat, would ring the bell.

He always came directly. Opened the door and let her in. They’d go upstairs then, away from the world and into their own. Sometimes they didn’t make it upstairs so quickly. He would close the door and kiss her before she could speak.

‘I’ve been waiting so long,’ he would say as they stood forehead to forehead. ‘I thought you’d never get here.’

And then she would hold a finger between their lips, remind him of the need for quiet, and then, oh then, they would go upstairs. Sometimes, afterwards, they would lie together on the bed and she would guess at the kind of person who might live in such a place. A writer, she would say, eyes scanning the loaded bookshelf. ‘He must be a writer.’

‘He?’

Hannah would look at him. ‘Or she. Is it a she?’ She was jealous then of this phantom woman who lived in her own flat, who was friends to Robbie and saw him when she, Hannah, could not. He would laugh at her then. ‘You’re telling this story.’

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s a he. But he’s not a writer. He’s a doctor.’

‘A doctor?’

‘Only a doctor would have an entire shelf of anatomical books.’

She would look at him triumphantly, certain she had guessed it right this time.

‘True,’ he would say. ‘Unless he’s an artist. Artist’s need to know anatomy.’

She would nod seriously. ‘I like that. An artist.’ And then she would grin at him. ‘And I was right. Ha! You said “he”. It
is
a man’s flat.’

After a while they stopped playing guessing games and began playing house. One day, in a tiny bedsit in Hampstead, Hannah was making Robbie a cup of tea and he was watching, amused, as she stumbled with the tea leaves, wondered aloud whether they would still work being so dry and crispy.

‘If we lived here,’ said Hannah, ‘I’d need to work somewhere. To pay the rent.’

‘A sewing shop,’ Robbie said. He knew how badly she stitched.

‘A bookshop,’ she said, eyeing him sternly. ‘And you . . . you’d write beautiful poems all day, sitting here beneath the window, and you’d read them to me when I came home.’

‘We would move to Spain to escape the winters,’ Robbie said.

‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘And I’d become a toreador. A masked toreador. The greatest in all of Spain.’ She placed his cup of weak tea, leaves swimming on top, on the bedside table and sat next to him. ‘People everywhere would guess at my identity.’

‘But it would remain our secret,’ said Robbie.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It would be our secret.’

One drizzly day in October they lay curled up together. It was a dingy flat, dark and poky, belonging to a writer friend of Robbie’s. Hannah was watching the clock on the mantle, counting off the time before she had to leave. Finally, when the unfaithful minute hand reached the hour, she sat up. Retrieved her pair of stockings from the end of the bed and began to drag the left one on. Robbie walked his fingers along the base of her spine.

‘Don’t go,’ he said.

She bunched her right stocking and slipped it over her foot.

‘Stay.’

She was standing now. Dropping her slip over her head, straightening it around her hips. ‘You know I would. I’d stay forever if I could.’

‘In our secret world.’

‘Yes,’ she smiled, kneeled on the edge of the bed and reached out to stroke the side of his face. ‘I like that. Our own world. A secret world. I love secrets.’ She exhaled, she’d been thinking about this for some time. Wasn’t sure why she wanted so keenly to share it with him. ‘When we were children,’ she said, ‘we used to play a game.’

‘I know,’ said Robbie. ‘David told me about The Game.’

‘He did?’

Robbie nodded.

‘But The Game is secret,’ said Hannah automatically. ‘Why did he tell you?’

‘You were about to tell me yourself.’

‘Yes, but that’s different. You and I . . . It’s different.’

‘So tell me about The Game,’ he said. ‘Forget that I already know.’