The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (36 page)

The woman lowers her voice. The mast and the cables of the ship’s derrick sway high above her cap.

—Heard about the
Britannic
?

—Pardon?

—Sunk yesterday in the Mediterranean. Along with God knows how many souls. Imagine, there could be a U-boat under us at this very moment, or a mine—

Imogen thanks the woman and hands back the field glasses, continuing along the promenade deck toward the stern. The nausea has come back and she does not know if it is the ship or the child or Ashley or everything put together. She goes to the ship’s doctor, but he is too busy attending wounded soldiers to see her. A sympathetic nurse gives Imogen a bottle of patent medicine for seasickness. It tastes of bitter herbs and alcohol and syrupy mint, and Imogen goes back on deck feeling worse than ever, the horizon pitching and rolling, the air thick with cold spray, black smoke pouring from the twin funnels above her. She grasps the railing and watches the swells break against the ship’s hull.

It had all gone wrong. For weeks she had fretted away long nights in stark terror of Ashley’s death, picturing how it might come to him in a bullet or a bomb, wondering if she would feel the smallest tremor in the
ground, a rustling in the grass. But when the catastrophe finally arrived there had been no tremor, no warning, because in going to France she had somehow mangled the one thing she was trying to save. And he had mangled it too.

For it hadn’t only been Ashley in danger, Imogen suddenly realizes. They could all be brought under the waves of chance, their whole being submerged in an instant. It could happen to anyone on land or sea: the gold-braided naval officers on the navigation bridge, the ladies at tea in Mayfair and Belgravia, the art students sketching the Velázquez at the National Gallery. Even the frock-coated gentlemen in gray suede gloves walking through the solid doors in Whitehall that were never locked, the War Office and the Admiralty from which the whole empire was directed—they were all weaker than they knew, so much weaker. For nothing was certain, least of all the things one counted on to survive.

Imogen takes the bottle of medicine from her coat pocket and throws it over the rail, watching it flip end over end until it is lost in the gray.

It seems hours before the ship reaches Folkestone. Imogen boards the connecting train and at dusk the conductor enters her compartment to draw the air-raid blinds. The electric light is too murky to read by and she does not know they are in London until the conductor opens the compartment door.

—Madam, it’s the terminus. Charing Cross Station.

She takes a taxi to Cavendish Square and enters the house, creeping up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom. She throws her dress on the floor and pulls off the silk combination she has been wearing for three days. She had left her spare in Laviéville. Her bed seems alien with its Turkish counterpane and soft bolster. She is nearly asleep when she hears her door open in the darkness. Imogen turns her back to the door, pulling the covers tight around her shoulders. The door closes again.

In the morning they are waiting for her in the parlor: her father leaning beside the mantel clock with the smoldering stub of a cigar in hand;
her mother looking pallid on the divan, her hands in her lap; Eleanor perched on the piano bench, her legs crossed tightly at the knee. Her father clears his throat.

—Imogen. It’s time we spoke.

Imogen glances at her sister, but Eleanor turns her face to the window. Imogen looks at her father.

—I was at Beatrice’s in Surrey, didn’t Ellie tell you? I meant to come back yesterday, but the trains got muddled by the zeppelin—

Her father taps his cigar on an ashtray on the mantel.

—She told us, her father says. And we’ve more pressing matters to discuss.

He comes quickly to the point. He impresses upon Imogen that the decision is not simply hers to make, that the ignominy of the existence she intends would not only be hers but scrupulously allotted to all four of them, even to the more distant relatives of the Andersson or Soames families.

—You imagine you’re simply deciding for yourself. But what you do affects all of us.

Imogen crumples into a chair. She has not bathed since her return and her hair and skin smell of salt water. Her father continues his discourse, outlining the consequences of an illegitimate child, the hardship it would incur on Imogen and the child and the family at large. To this speech Imogen’s mother adds meager words of agreement. Her father begins to question her.

—You say this fellow won’t marry you?

Imogen puts her hands to her face. She can feel the nausea coming back.

—I don’t want to marry.

—But what are his intentions?

—It doesn’t matter what he intends. It’s my life—

—Imogen, will he or will he not?

Imogen looks at her father. Her voice is hard.

—He will not.

—Can he pay anything?

She glares at him, too angry to speak, her fingers clutching the bracelet on her wrist. Her father is unperturbed.

—You don’t care for money now. But you will in time.

—He can pay, Eleanor whispers. He gets thousands and thousands per year, so Charles heard. They say his uncle was frightfully rich and left him nearly everything.

Imogen’s head turns with a start. She has never heard of Ashley’s money before and she is on the point of questioning Eleanor when her mother begins talking in an oddly calm voice, her words evidently well rehearsed.

—Darling, what I say may sound cruel to you at first. But Papa and I have put a great deal of thought into this, and I promise you it’s the best thing for everyone. Most of all for you—

Imogen has trouble listening, but she absorbs the dim outline of their plan. Eleanor will announce she is expecting a child; Imogen will write to Ashley to say she has miscarried; the two sisters will go to Sweden, ostensibly to escape a winter of rationing and bombing raids for the comforts of a neutral country; the sisters will live in the seclusion of a rural home, the secret of Imogen’s pregnancy closely guarded; Imogen will deliver the child with the assistance of a hired live-in nurse; Eleanor will return to England with the child and raise it as her own. The plan would neatly solve every problem, for Imogen and the family would emerge with their reputations unscathed, the child would grow up without stigma, and Eleanor would gain the child Charles and she had so far failed to produce.

Imogen is horrified. She stands and curses them all, most of all her sister.

—Mind your own bloody lives! This is my life and my child—

—Darling, calm down—

Eleanor stands up and touches Imogen on the shoulder, but Imogen pulls away.

—I can’t believe you told them. Why did you tell them? Why?

—You can’t do this on your own.

—I am doing this on my own.

Her father stubs out his cigar.

—And how do you intend to finance yourself? Or the child for that matter? Filling shells at Woolwich twelve hours a day, one day off every fortnight? Imogen, you’re nineteen years old and you haven’t the faintest notion what it means to pull your own weight in this world. You’ve never done it and pray God you never shall.

No one speaks. Eleanor sits down and looks out the window. Imogen’s mother comes to Imogen and takes her hand, practically kneeling before her daughter.

—You must think of us, Imogen. Think of what they would say. Think of Papa’s position, you’ll see he’s only trying to protect us. For heaven’s sake, think of your child. Don’t you wish it to be happy, to have every chance in life as you’ve had?

Imogen shakes her head. —Does every girl in England have a family that makes decisions for her? And takes her own child from her?

Her father scoffs. He takes another cigar from a box on the mantel, but he is too agitated to light it.

—You’re the child, he retorts, otherwise we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Imogen, we’re not here to beg for your consent. I won’t see this family’s reputation compromised on account of your girlish fancies. If you won’t entertain your mother’s ideas you shall have to entertain mine, and I daresay they’ll please you even less. When I think of the thoroughly decent fellows you’ve ignored only to turn to this scoundrel, it makes my blood boil—

—What do you know of him?

—I know what he did to you.

—And you think I’m naïve. What makes you imagine I didn’t do it to him?

They stare at her in frank amazement, Imogen staring back, looking at her family as if she had never seen them before in her life. Her father, his forehead slightly flushed, muttering to himself as he cuts the end of
the cigar with a pair of silver clippers and strikes a match; her mother, grasping Imogen’s hand and talking softly about dire consequences Imogen is too young to understand—her father’s delicate position, the blockade and U-boats, no coal in Sweden save for what the Germans give, now the Russian problem too—not to mention the scandal of the last envoy’s niece in Paris, which had not been half so delicate, and not in wartime; and Eleanor, worst of all Eleanor whom Imogen now hates as she has never hated anyone, Eleanor who still will not look her sister in the eye, her face turned to the window as she smoothes the folds of her skirt.

—It follows you all your life, Imogen’s mother whispers. You’re too young to know what that means, but I’ve known women who twenty years later can’t enter a room without imagining they’re being spoken of—

Imogen is not listening. She swallows and says some stupid, hateful thing to all of them, hardly aware of her words, then dashes into the hallway, grabbing her handbag and pulling her umbrella so violently from the basket that it topples, spilling the umbrellas and walking sticks and Grandfather’s silver-headed cane. She leaves them all on the ground and runs out, slamming the door behind her and crossing the square before anyone can follow.

She does not know where she is going. The sky is drizzling as Imogen turns west on Oxford Street, the shops and sidewalks, the motor drays and omnibuses appearing and dissolving as her mind runs in frantic circles. She thinks back to Eleanor two weeks ago, when Imogen had told her she was pregnant and Eleanor had fallen silent, then taken her hand and said it would be all right. She remembers the last night with Ashley at the Langham Hotel, the lights turned off and the curtains drawn, Ashley kissing her bare shoulder and saying it was all right no matter what happened to him in France, that to truly love one person was the most anyone could ask of life, even if it lasted only for a week—

Don’t say such things
, Imogen had told him.
Never say them, Ashley.

The rain quickens as Imogen crosses Vere Street, the newsboys
running for shelter into the doorway of Marshall & Snelgrove. But Imogen is already soaked, the cold water running down her neck into the collar of her frock. She walks all the way through Hyde Park into Knightsbridge until a white-haired man on the Brompton Road sees her crying on the sidewalk. He raises his umbrella to shelter her from the downpour.

—I beg your pardon, but madam, you’re soaked to the bone. You’ll catch pneumonia. Can’t I help you in any way?

It takes Imogen five minutes to persuade him to leave her be, fabricating some tale about how she has always walked in the rain without an umbrella, ever since she was a young girl, and she does not at all mind being wet. The man shakes his head, watching her in the rain.

—Madam, we’ve all lost something in this war. But we must carry on as best we can.

Imogen walks back through Hyde Park Corner carrying the man’s umbrella. She goes into a
bureau de change
in Piccadilly and changes the rest of her francs for sterling, but she spent so much on the journey to France that she has only one pound, six shillings left. At the post office on Regent Street she writes two different telegrams to Ashley, tearing up each of them in frustration. He is too far away and there seems nothing she can say that will change anything. She walks down the street to a branch of the Westminster Bank, but none of tellers will let her draw from her father’s account, even if she has the checkbook, and when they go to fetch the manager she decides to walk out rather than be humiliated further.

You mustn’t despair
.
You mustn’t think at all. Only keep going.

Imogen walks to the Alpine Club on Savile Row. The office is closed, but the club porter answers the door and Imogen asks for the London address of her cousin Hugh Price. The porter shakes his head. He says that Mr. Price does not reside in London, and in any case he is on active service in France.

—Miss, I believe you’re chattering. Won’t you come inside to warm up?

—You’re very kind, but actually I’m in quite a hurry—

It is growing dark now and Imogen walks faster to try to stop her shivering. She must get into dry clothes. She goes to three hotels but they are far too expensive, for Imogen knows her money will have to last, and the last clerk says he cannot recommend a cheap hotel for a young lady. Finally she goes to the YWCA on Baker Street and pays two shillings for a membership card and a bed in a frigid room furnished only with a small table and a Bible. The light is off and someone is snoring in the other bed. Imogen hangs up her wet coat and frock and pulls the papery sheets over her, still wearing her damp cotton crinoline. The blanket is scratchy and it smells of mothballs. She reads the poster on the wall by the moonlight.