The Undoing of Daisy Edwards (A Time for Scandal) (3 page)

It wasn’t shame or embarrassment or regret, I don’t think. It was the—the revelation. As if we’d discovered something inside so unexpected, so intense that not even we wanted to look at it. As if we’d ordered tea or champagne and been served neat gin or worse, that stuff that passes for gin in the New York speakeasies these days. As if we’d been served fire-water. Maybe it was just fire.

That sounds crazy. But I didn’t feel crazy as I stood at the door of my flat, watching her float down the stairs. I felt gutted. Turned inside out. I wanted her gone, but I didn’t want her to go. She was too much, but I hadn’t had enough. In the trenches, there were boys who were addicted to the morphine we were supposed to save for emergencies. In the trenches, it got to be impossible to tell the difference between what was normal and what was an emergency. In the trenches, where anything short of hell was a good day, it was hard to deny anyone anything that helped them through, though it cost the rest of us. It was the worst part of my job. Worse even than waving my Webley pistol at the poor bastards who hesitated when we were going over the top. But it’s a fine line. Too much. Not enough. It’s why I never drank in the trenches.

And I never talk about the trenches, either. Five years. You’d think it would be enough time to forget. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Daisy was the same. Too much, but not enough. It scared me, and nothing much ever scares me. Not now.

She didn’t look back. I watched her from the windows of my sitting room. She didn’t look up from the pavement outside. She was only there for a few seconds before a cab pulled up. Daisy is one of those women for whom cabs always appear. It was only then, as she climbed in, that I realised I didn’t have her address or her telephone number, and I wanted both. Realising that sent me straight to the bathroom, to a shower cold enough to make me stop thinking of anything, and then out, out of the city to my airfield, though it was Sunday.

Work is what I do. Work is what I am. It turns out I’m good at making money, which is just as well, because though it’s been closed up since the army left, Harrington House costs a small fortune to maintain. I wish I could let it rot, but I can’t, any more than I could ever live there. It’s not mine. It’s Jeremy’s. Like the title I never use.

Jeremy. Something else I never think about, but sitting at my desk, looking out over the vast, deserted hangar where one of our planes was sitting part-assembled, crouching like a wingless bird, it was as if my brother was there beside me. He’d never been here. Building planes was part of my afterlife. What would he make of the state of his precious home, shrouded, shuttered, the rooms still lined with rows of iron bedsteads that no one wanted to reclaim, the furniture still crammed into the attics, the paintings still stacked in the huge bank vault, which was also a fortune to maintain?

Stupid question—I knew the answer. Jeremy, who had inherited the house and the title aged eighteen, would have been appalled. Would our mother have married the American if Jeremy hadn’t been killed? Would Grace be running wild? Probably not. And what about me? Oh, I don’t know. What was the point of asking such questions, anyway? Jeremy was dead. Our mother was in America. Grace seemed hell-bent on living life at the kind of speed my planes flew at. And I—I just got through each day.

Until this day. Daisy Edwards hadn’t just turned me inside out, she’d let my demons loose. The last thing I wanted. It had taken me years to capture them all. I’d have to have a death wish to see her again. Pushing back my seat, standing at the window that looked out over the hangar, at the wingless plane, I was forced to admit that I had exactly that.

Daisy

I didn’t look back and I didn’t look up, though I was tempted. Even though I was, let’s face it, running away, I still wanted to look back. Honestly, there was a bit of me that didn’t even want to run. It was as if I were two people, which will teach me for trying to be—Daisy and the Vamp. Though the Vamp would no more have stayed there than Daisy. I know that doesn’t make sense, any more than any of it made sense. Daisy, Vamp—they were one and the same. I hadn’t really been acting back there, in that bed with Dominic, not after the first few moments. Sure, when I was acting, I kind of
inhabited
my character, as they say, but I never had any problem shedding her when the curtain went down, and I never forgot, not even on-stage, that I was acting. This was different. I didn’t know who I was, what I’d been playing at. I did know that it left me feeling. Don’t ask me what. All that mattered was that. Feeling.

So there
, I thought as I ran myself a bath back in my flat. I could feel.
So there
, I thought, as I lay in my lovely big claw-footed tub with the water way too hot, and images, like one of those
What the Butler Saw
machines, played over in my head of what, exactly, I’d felt, and how, exactly, Dominic had felt, too.
So there
, I thought, as that buzzy, clenching excitement took a grip inside me again. I closed my eyes and let myself remember all of it then, and I gave in to the temptation to touch myself, remembering, which I hadn’t done in so long, and it wasn’t as good as it had been that morning, in bed with Dominic, but it was still good and that was so much more than nothing.
So there
.

Only later I thought,
so
what?
And
what now?

* * *

Sunday. No show. It would be easy to find out his telephone number, but what would be the point? Dinner was out of the question. I knew, even then, that getting to know him, even just dinner getting to know him, would be dangerous. Sharp edges, that’s how I survived. I didn’t want to soften them with detail. I’d done that once, and look where it got me.

Hearts really do break. They really do, and believe me, even when they’re mended—because they can’t stay broken forever—even then you can still see the scar. You can feel it if you run your fingertips over it, and you should, because then you remember how painful it was in the breaking, and how the tiniest thing can open it up again months, years later.

Really, just the tiniest thing is all it takes. Not the obvious things. You’re prepared for the obvious things. You pack the photographs away, and the presents he gave you. You bury the wedding ring in the ground by the white stone they put up beside all the thousands of other white stones, even though you know he’s not under there, because there was nothing of him left to put under there. You cut yourself off from his family because you can’t bear the way they try so desperately hard not to blame you for not having had the foresight to bear his child. You remind yourself that it was the right decision, to make sure there was no chance of a child while there was a chance there would be no father to look after it at the end of the war, but sometimes, when his mother looks at you in that gently blaming way, you wish you hadn’t been so sensible.

No, it’s not those things that insinuate themselves and jemmy your heart apart, it’s the things you can’t control. The back of another man’s head that looks just like his, the way the hair grows. The dates that just keep coming round inexorably every year. Birthdays. Your wedding day. The day he died. Every single year. I had to throw out the dress I was wearing the day the telegram arrived. I had to change the soap I use because he loved the smell of it so much. Lavender. So old-fashioned, just like him. I wear Caron’s Tabac Blond these days. I chose it because I knew he would hate it. Sometimes, when I’m filing my nails, I’m sure I hear the door closing behind me. He never could stand the sound of an emery board.

Did I love him? It was such an agony when he died, I must have, even though I tried my hardest not to. It’s funny, but while Anthony was like a ghost always just out of sight over my shoulder, I’d become good at ignoring him. That morning, though, the first time I’d ever been with another man, he wouldn’t leave me alone.

Did I feel guilty, as if I’d been unfaithful? No. Anthony betrayed me first. Not with another woman, with another love. His country, he called it, but it was more than that—or less, I don’t know, he never could define it when I pushed him, and I often did. It was one of the few things he’d get quite worked up about, his country. He got it from his father, who got it from his father, and that school they all went to, that—that’s where that reverence came from. That stupid, stupid,
stupid
idea that it was his duty to fight.

I begged him not to go. Then when he did, I refused to tie myself to him. And then when I finally did what he wanted and became his wife, I tried so hard not to care too much. But you can’t stop that. And the war, the bloody war, it’s very good at making you care too much against your will, because it’s way, way too practised at fulfilling your every nightmare. I fell in love with Anthony because of the war. I married him because of the war. Of course he was killed. It couldn’t end any other way.

What’s more, it had ended the same terrible way for thousands and countless thousands of other women in much worse cases than mine. When I went back on-stage a week after the telegram, they were all scandalized, Anthony’s family and mine. For me, it would have been wrong to do anything else. Not because Anthony would have wanted it—despite what he said about being proud of me, I’m pretty sure he wanted me to give it up—but because—well, what else would I do? I’m not the weeping-willow type. I didn’t deserve pity. The war had made me a wife and a widow. I wasn’t going to let it kill me, too.

They said in the papers that I was a trooper, doing my bit for my country. That made me so angry. When Poppy left London for California to star in a moving picture, I could have gone with her. I still think about it sometimes, but despite the fact that she’s always urging me to visit, I get the feeling she needs to be alone, and so do I. We know each other too well. It grates, that knowing. It’s easier to pretend we don’t know, and that’s easier when there’s an ocean between us, even though I do miss her.

* * *

It was when I was taking my curtain call that I got that strange feeling of being watched. I mean, obviously I was being watched on-stage, but the audience were watching St Joan. This was different. Someone out there in the New Theatre was watching Daisy. I wasn’t surprised when Dominic Harrington walked into my dressing-room, though I was surprised that he had been shown in.

‘I don’t like visitors back stage,’ I said.

‘So they told me.’

He closed the door and leaned against it, making no attempt to come any farther, making it obvious that he would go if I said so. I didn’t. I didn’t want him to go. Actually, that’s only half the truth. I was pleased to see him. Now I didn’t have to fight myself not to call him.

What was it about him? He stood out, for a start. He had what they call here, in the theatre, a real presence. He wasn’t good-looking—I think I said that before. But he really was attractive. I mean, really attractive. That mouth. Those eyes. The way he looked at me, not even attempting to hide that he wanted me, it gave me a buzz like a really strong martini, only much better. I could feel my cheeks heat under my grease-paint. I wanted him right back, every bit as much. No need even to think about my Vamp. I ought to be blushing now, thinking about it, but I’m not.

It was—it was visceral, how he made me feel. It still is. What is it about him? Partly it’s that darkness lurking behind his eyes. The fact that it’s lurking. That he won’t let it out. That he’s not one of those men who have to talk. That he’s one of the ones who want to forget, but can’t, but he’s trying. Like I do. Only I would never, ever equate what I’ve been through with what he’s been through, you understand. Only how he handles it.

‘I have to change,’ I said, looking down at my skimpy St Joan outfit.

He smiled, a smile that played havoc with my stomach. ‘You were good,’ he said.

‘You didn’t expect me to be?’

He shrugged. ‘I knew you could act. I just didn’t expect this.’

I was wiping the last of the paint from my face and rubbing in cold cream. It was the way he said it, determined not to let it matter, that made me realise he was just as much confused by what happened between us as I was. ‘I wasn’t acting yesterday,’ I said, though I hadn’t meant to. ‘Only at the start.’

He didn’t pretend to misunderstand, but he wasn’t about to let me see that it mattered, and I liked that. ‘You were good,’ he said again, and the way he said it left me in no doubt of what he was talking about. I bit my lip to stop myself smiling.

‘So what did you expect,’ I asked, ‘that I’d be in a revue, one of those musicals?’

He laughed at that. ‘I’m extraordinarily glad you weren’t.’

It made him look so different, that laugh, the grin that followed. Younger, of course, but I could see he could have been charming, too, once. Still, if he put his mind to it. ‘I certainly wouldn’t go short of work if I sang,’ I said. ‘There’s barely an audience for anything but musicals in the West End these days.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘I used to. Before…’

There was one of those silences. I prayed that he wouldn’t fill it by asking, and he didn’t. Instead, he levered himself away from the door. Even as the leading lady, my dressing-room was pretty small. Dominic made it seem tiny.

‘I know,’ he said, and when I turned away because I thought I might cry, he put his hands on my shoulders, made me get up from the mirror and face him. ‘I know you lost your husband. I know you don’t want to talk about it, any more than I do, but I wanted you to know that I know.’

I nodded. I swallowed hard. ‘Yesterday, you were the first since.’

‘Five years since the Armistice,’ he said, looking a bit desperate. ‘Afterwards, when you left, I kept thinking that should be enough time to forget.’

‘I doubt there will ever be enough time.’

‘I was thinking, maybe the trick is to stop trying,’ he said. ‘What I mean is yesterday, you weren’t the first, but you were the first to—yesterday, I—you—I forgot. With you, I mean. I was—I was…’

‘Free,’ I said, then shook my head. ‘No, not that. But there wasn’t anything else, for a while. Just—just us.’