Fragile Blossoms (28 page)

‘It’s good of you. I need him to bring me a couple of things.’

‘There’s always the telephone? You could speak to the house direct.’

‘Yes and Evie on the other end.’

‘You’ll have to face her sooner or later as will I.’

‘Later will do, indeed much later.’

‘Shall you call on Julianna?’

Freddie shrugged. ‘Probably not. She’s carried enough of the burden. I must heft my own baggage.’

‘Good decision. I’d best be buzzing. I’m to be in Harrogate by Monday. I need to sort things with Evie and hopefully clear the air.’

Freddie got to his feet and fists curled deep in his pocket stared out of the window. ‘And what about you and me? Do we need to clear the air?’

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. I thought there might be things to say.’

Luke thrust into his greatcoat. ‘Need we say anything, Freddie? Some things are best left unsaid, that way we don’t learn to regret them.’

‘Do you regret last night?’

‘I don’t but neither would I want to repeat it. ‘Luke picked up his bag. ‘We know how things stand between us. We know who we are and what we are. I doubt either of us will change.’ He offered his hand. ‘I wish you well.’

Freddie shook his hand. ‘And I you.’

Luke gone the room was suddenly small and cramped. Eight in the morning and Freddie dressed and out, it’s a miracle. Usually he’s abed until at least ten of the clock. It’s cold in this room and empty.

‘
We are what we are. I doubt either of us will change
.’

They talked so long into the night they hardly slept. Freddie went over his nightmares and how he regretted Bella’s death. Luke made little comment only to say perhaps he needs to face up to who he is and stop running.

In his heart Freddie doesn’t believe his love of men was forced upon him. He worships male flesh, loves the touch, the lean muscle and structure of the body. Women are softness and uncertain smells. They go in where a man goes out and they wobble. A man’s body has a scent of its own. A woman’s scent is of need and emotion. It is highly charged, explosive, and likely to go off at any moment. A man doesn’t do that, or rather Luke Roberts doesn’t.

Freddie is in love with Luke. He knows when it happened. It was in the cellar in the Lord Nelson over a bottle of Madeira. Head thrown back and throat exposed Luke was laughing, Freddie in that moment was a vampire mentally sinking his teeth into flesh and sucking until the body bled dry.

Man at a Window
is the official title of Freddie’s new work;
Fallen Angel Challenging God
is the subtitle. It shows Luke brooding in a half light, head turned, the long planes of his back and buttocks relaxed, his right hand square on the windowsill and his left cupping his genitals.

‘You know I painted you nude,’ Freddie had said lying alongside him, his head on Luke’s chest listening to the steady unaffected tolling of a heart.

‘I heard.’

‘I suppose Evie told you.’

‘She mentioned it.’

‘And it doesn’t worry you?’

‘It’s done isn’t it and up before the Hanging Committee?’

‘It is.’

‘Then it’s too late to worry.’

‘And this?’ Freddie had lipped Luke’s chest, breathing him in, the scent of olive trees in the rain and wet dog. ‘Does this not worry you?’

Stomach hard and sentiment equally so Luke didn’t move, neither smile nor frown. ‘Do you want me to worry?’

‘No.’

‘Then I shan’t.’

‘This was just the one time, wasn’t it, one night and one moment?’

‘Hardly a night, Freddie. Like St Peter we heard the cock crow three times and never slept an hour. As for the moment and the quantity, that’s up to you.’

Up to you! Those words! They so filled Freddie with desire that he had taken the moment again. He took what he could while he could. Some caresses were allowed others not, the arm pushing Freddie away close to a fist.

How it happened he doesn’t know. All was a jumble of sight and sound. He was weeping and scared, a child again perched on a footstool. He knew that Luke drew him into his arms as a mother might comfort a child. Exhausted then Freddie had slept. When he woke it was to find the man he adored beside him. It was easy them to kiss and stroke and to move down that long body with intent. That Luke continued to lie quiet might have been a gift or token of forgiveness. It was left for the receiver to decide.

‘So you are going?’

‘Yes.’

Luke is leaving. Evie sat in the window seat arms about her knees watching. As with every day that follows a bite of the Black Dog she’s exhausted, an empty shell sucked dry of feeling. There’s nothing she can do to fill the gap, no pills to swallow and no magical spell to lose the blues. A last resort is laudanum but that causes her to sleep when she shouldn’t and wake when she’d sooner sleep. All that’s left is to sit in the window and try not to mind the sunlight making a concertina of her mouth.

Wrinkles in one’s forties are inevitable. Perhaps she should smile more. Sidney maintained smiles exercise muscles. A jolly man inclined to wobble about the knees he would tug her hand. ‘Come on, Evie, forty-three muscles to frown and seventeen to smile? You could never resist a bargain.’

What a good man Sid was and what a beast she was to him. Every day of their marriage he gave her comfort and wealth. She gave him tantrums and an aborted child. A Quaker, a descendent he claimed of the Boston Martyrs, Sidney Bevington-Smythe rolled into her life August of ‘74, at St James’ Palace, the Ambassador’s Ball, and the inauguration of Edward Thornton, Minister to the United States. Already in his late fifties Sidney claimed the first waltz and by the end of the evening the hand in marriage of society beauty Lady Evelyn Carrington, daughter of Sir George and Lady Iphigenia Carrington. 1882, victim of a brain seizure, Sidney rolled out of Evie’s life into the Pacific Ocean, his earthly remains sewn into an oilskin shroud at one with the seas he loved to sail. Foulmouthed but kind and so fabulously wealthy when asked how his fortune was made he said his money thrives as do roses fed with horse shit, his particular brand of compost
‘shat by the Iron Horses that hourly gallop the American Mid-Western plains.
’

Sidney was shrewd. Recognising despair in his young wife and a world full of carpet-baggers who couldn’t wait to get their hands on her ass and his cash he secured his railroad stock in gilt-edged bonds in a deal so tight that though gone almost twenty years his roses continue to thrive. He left a note with his millions: ‘When it comes to Property Acts I’m at one with Charles Dickens’ Beadle, the Law is an Ass. You’re young and beautiful and you’ll make mistakes. I’ll leave you wealthy, Evie, but I’ll not leave you dangerous. ’

Luke Roberts was a mistake, not a fiscal mistake so much as a cultural and spiritual mismatch. Evie with her flyaway temper and desire to die and him with his stiff-necked pride they don’t meld.

Look at him now his back rigid packing things into a battered holdall! Last summer she bought him a crocodile skin bag from Libertys. He doesn’t use it. Same with the silver-backed hair brushes and pearl handle letter-opener. For the good they do they might have stayed in Garrard’s along with the monogrammed cufflinks. The cufflinks were an Easter gift and arrived on the breakfast tray with champagne and smoked salmon. He opened the box, ‘EBC is your monogram?’ When she nodded he’d bared his elegant arse. ‘I think you’ll find a brand is meant to go there. Upper left cheek, in quick and out quicker is the way to do it.’ Evie had laughed and slapped his arse. He laughed with her but didn’t wear the cufflinks. Occasion demanding he wears plain gold, a coming of age gift from his mother. When asked why he said, ‘I’m comfortable with my own things. I don’t mind them getting bashed about.’

Bashed about is what he does with her pride. His refusal to bend to her will rankles but not nearly as much as he, arrogant male, might imagine.

Evie stares out of the window. It is a beautiful day cold yet bright and clear, a day for catching up on acquaintance and for purchasing shirts for Freddie in Jermyn Street, and then perhaps an after lunch stroll through the Gallery. The Hanging Committee accepted
Man at the Window
. It is a fine work reflecting Freddie’s talent. Evie is delighted for him but also afraid. It’s not artistic criticism she fears, it is Queensbury and his mob currently baying for homosexual blood on the corner of every Soho alley. ‘I blame Oscar Wilde!’ said Hugh Fitzwilliam. ‘Him and his bloody poetry! Had he lived his life sooner than written about it the world would be a happier place.’

Godfather viewed the painting weeks ago when it was still on the easel, Evie smuggled him up the back stairs to the studio. Hugh’s eyebrows flew into his hair. ‘Talk about a coming of age! If society didn’t know him of the Greek love they know now.’ For an hour or more he stared and then threw up his hands. ‘So what? Does anyone in this hideous world care what pot we piss in! It’s a game of chance whoever’s in your bed. Let him offer it. With a bit of luck he’ll kill the painting before the painting kills him.’

Now it is hanging and without fuss. In company of other canvasses, particularly the French School of slack flesh and gluttonous derriere, Freddie’s nude is refined. It’s when you take time to query the stance at the window the languorous lips and the hand on the genitals, covering and covetous, that you see the other male, the artist, equally nude watching.

A fuss with respect of Freddie’s habits occurred recently at Long Melford. Afraid for him, the Black Dog chewing her heel, and jealous of Julianna, Evie flew into one of her rages, the consequence of which, like the Walls of Jericho, is now falling about her. Madame Leonora hasn’t been in communication. No one has. Leonora probably feels a gate placed between them. Of Julianna nothing is heard and nothing expected; she left that night head high and heart intact. Sunday Freddie caught the ferry for Montparnasse and the Sargent family, his usual bolt hole. Luke prepares to go, and in all truth Evie, the adjudged villain of the piece, wishes them all to go to hell!

For God’s sake she did her best! Thirty years she’s agonised over Freddie, the past and his foibles. A magnet for rogues and hangers-on he’s always in trouble. Throughout school years it was she who paid off the sharks that would have cut him to pieces. Later at Cambridge it was she who settled the Chancellor when a student was abused and Freddie about to be sent down. He swore he knew nothing of the incident, that it was a Cambridge Don that did the deed and not he. More disposed to do violence to his self than others Evie believed him but it was another stain on his character.

Every year there was trouble culminating in Bella and this crucible of fire.

Evie turned to Luke. ‘When are you coming back?’

‘I doubt I shall.’

‘No?’

‘I reckon not.’

‘Oh well, it is as it is. You gave me fair warning. You said if I were to hurt her you’d leave and as we all know you are a man of your word.’

‘I’m not going because of Julianna.’

‘Then why are you?’

‘I think it best for both of us.’

‘
Je m’en fiche
!’ She shrugged. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

Head down so damned sure of himself and his ideals he blocks all attempts at reconciliation and packs the leavings of his brief sortie here in Russell Square. He’s been this way since Italy and the spat in the Borghese. Some spat, a month on and he still bears a scar on his shoulder. She shouldn’t have bitten him but he drove her wild with his suburban pride and civilised behaviour.

Strange how men can think they’re kind when they are cruel. Some acts of cruelty are visible like a bruise on the jaw or teeth marks in flesh, others not so obvious but as hurtful like the averted profile and the stony look, Luke is master at that. He leaves for them both. To be sure he doesn’t put up a fight. The bag he packs is metaphor of the man high quality and tough as old boots.

Luke Roberts is not easy to love. Today she’s not even sure she likes him. God alone knows why he is here. In early days he was a lover both sensitive and wild. That he pretty soon cooled off is because he was asked for what he could not give, his heart. He loves Julianna, as does Evie, one woman desired by many. It’s more than three years since they lay together in that bed and yet burned into Evie’s memory as a defining moment. Desire for Julianna, to kiss and to hold and to make her scream with pleasure, was always there even on the steps at Cambridge. There is that of Ju-ju that makes a person want to touch as with caressing a gorgeous animal. It’s what the gifts are about, Bertie’s rubies and Eve’s furs. In the slip of silk and satin the mind proposes undressing the beloved. It sees diaphanous chiffon slide down a creamy thigh and the mouth drips to follow. Julianna walks into a room and that same need is reflected in every eye, male and female, which is why, knowing it can’t be returned, sweet often turns to sour. The morning of the opera the need to express love was strong. Evie couldn’t hold back and Julia, who is afraid of greedy love, turned tail and fled. Had Evie toed the line there would have been no falling away, there would be friendship but friendship built on a lie.

Evie’s not good with lies. It’s why she gets on with the likes of Lolly Dupres. There is no lie. Lolly loves men and women with same equal disinterest. She shares many beds when visiting London and goes away singing, her body restored and her heart intact. Evie forced the issue with Ju-ju as she forces the issue with Luke Roberts. It’s as though her soul cries out, ‘bring me love, Lord, but then for God’s sake take it away.’ Male or female who cares if the bed is clean, the arms compassionate, and when they leave they leave quietly.

As far as sex is concerned Evie is the opposite of Freddie and male the antithesis of desire. Where she adores soft Luke is hard, and where silken flesh conjoins with breast he is muscle and bone. She did think she might soften his tough exterior but found the only tender underbelly was hers. Now he combs his hair with his fingers and dons a jacket, a dark jacket, sober and industrious, chosen by him and paid from cash in his wallet, none of your cherry red velvet cutaways beloved of Milady. From her upper floor sitting room overlooking the west of London Evie stares out over rooftops and wishes him and his sober jacket away, affection begrudged is a damnable bore.

‘Are you returning to Norfolk?’

‘Not for a day or so. I’m in Harrogate tomorrow. The hotel is in need of major overhaul. Albert and his crew has been there a couple of weeks already.’

‘You have done well in the latter years. Your name is known throughout the country and respected. In terms of men like Robert Scholtz don’t you think your success is in some degree due to an association with me?’

‘I do and I am grateful.’

‘But not grateful enough to stay?’

‘That wouldn’t be gratitude! That would be me using you and I’ve done too much of that already.’

‘One is never used until one thinks one is. I hope that Freddie and I shall still be a welcome acquaintance with you and your family?’

‘Of course! I would hope you know that to be so!’

‘
Mille grazie,
one takes what one can.’ Anger licked Evie’s skin. ‘You are very calm and composed, Luke, and insultingly so. Such an association, so long of sleeping in the same bed and drinking from the same cup one would hope for a little less head and a lot more heart.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to insult. Talking leads to shouting. I agree with Sir Hugh, the least said the soonest mended.’

‘An unwillingness to communicate has been your position throughout our association except in Rome when you said more than enough.’

‘You communicated for us both with your teeth.’

‘Oh you hold that against me do you?’

‘I don’t hold anything against you but neither can I forget.’

‘Well you do bear a scar and scars are difficult to disprove. I must learn to be less vigorous when chewing. You didn’t say a great deal at Long Melford.’

‘Would you have heard me if I had?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Words wound. I didn’t want to add to your pain.’

‘My pain?’

‘Yes yours! You hurt a lot of people, Eve, that evening. You were cruel. You said things purposely to wound and in so doing wounded yourself.’

‘Did I wound you?’

‘You did.’

‘I didn’t hear you yelp.’

‘Before Rome I learned to yelp quietly.’

‘You have suffered then as well as gained in business and wealth?’

‘Eve, please! Let’s not part bad friends.’

‘We were good friends then before the Borghese?’ Evie threw out her arm. ‘Oh don’t answer that! Go if you must! I shan’t beg! As for the séance and debacle that followed I don’t know why people were so wounded. I only said what was true.’

‘True to you perhaps but not to everyone.’

‘Truth is truth. There can be no deviation.’

Head on one side he regarded her. ‘You can’t believe that, not with what you know about poor Freddie.’

‘Poor Freddie?’ Evie turned to stare. ‘What do you mean
poor
Freddie?’

‘He has suffered.’

‘As have we all! If by poor Freddie you’re referring to his sexual predilection I’ve always known. I have been with him since the day he was born. I’ve watched him grow and shared his struggles. I never once condemned him but neither did I urge him to seek his true nature. To live like that and be happy isn’t possible while hawks like Queensberry hunt his kind. Freddie’s no Oscar Wilde. He doesn’t have the veneer. It’s why Bella happened. He thought to correct what he saw as sin. Poor Bella, I do regret her.’ Evie sighed. ‘But I ought not to call her so. I’ll do as Ju-ju says and give Susan her name.’

He shouldered his bag. ‘I must go.’

‘Wait a moment! I want to ask you how long you’ve known about Freddie.’

‘Since the day we met.’

‘What, back in the Nelson?’

‘Even so.’

‘Good heavens! And you sat for him naked! I am astonished. I felt sure you didn’t know. ’

‘Most men know. It’s instinctive.’

‘Do you not feel awkward?’

‘I do not. His feelings trouble him more than they trouble me.’

‘I doubt your father would think that way.’

‘I don’t know what my father would think. I know what Albert would think but that’s Albert and not me. Did you think I’d be some other way then, maybe take Freddie out on the street and punch his nose.’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘Then you don’t know me. If a man is decent with me I’ll be decent with him no matter what others say. I’m in no position to judge his choices. As for the painting you know I never sat for him naked or otherwise.’