Honeyville (18 page)
‘How’s that?’ he laughed. ‘Aunt Philippa, I’ve not been home in ten years. How can I be to blame?’
‘All these dreadful periodicals you insist on sending her. They’ve been putting the silliest notions in her head.’
‘What kind of notions?’
‘Never mind, “what kind of notions”?’ she said, shooing us towards the door. ‘You know perfectly well, darling. And while you’re quite safe, all the way out there in Hollywood, entertaining your modernnotions,
we
are living with the consequences, don’t you see? It’s all very well, teaching your sister about “socialism”. But she doesn’t have the mental resources you do, Xavie darling.And if you ever bothered to put your nose out the window here in your old home town, you would understand the sort of damage that gets done in the name of Notions … Not to mention socialism. And now here’s your sister, getting herself into all sorts of trouble …’
At the front door, Xavier took his aunt’s fat little shoulders in his hands, as if to stop the flow of words. ‘I promise, Aunt. I won’t send her any more periodicals.’
‘Well. Good,’ she said, not quite mollified.
‘We’ll get her back here in no time,’ he said. ‘Just you stay here and hold onto your horses.’
I didn’t return to the McCulloch house with Inez that day. It seemed unnecessary. Instead I waved her off from Plum Street, leaving her in Xavier’s care. We had come in Inez’s Model T, assuming Inez would be much too weak to walk. Xavier had parked by our back door and, after a touchingly warm reunion between them, he carried her in his arms down the stairs from the maid’s bedroom and drove her home to her childhood bedroom.
He kept me abreast of her health with little notes, delivered by the errand boy, and it soon became clear that the danger was passed. After three or four days of McCulloch comfort, eating her favourite McCulloch honeycake (lighter, fluffier, sweeter than anything I ever tasted – and rather sickly for it, I always thought), and after being generally indulged and fussed over, she was strong enough to sit up in bed and hold court. I received a letter from her, this one hand-delivered by Xavier, inviting me to come and call.
‘Will your aunt allow me into the house?’ I asked Xavier doubtfully.
He shrugged – that beautiful, loose-limbed shrug of his. Xavier moved like a dancer, with minimal effort and maximum expression. There were times, I thought, the way he moved, when he hardly needed to speak at all. Not that it stopped him.
‘Better not come when Uncle Richard is about,’ he said. ‘But Inez explains that in the letter, doesn’t she? Come right now, if you can. I’ll be standing beside you. Aunt Philippa won’t dare to turn you away. Especially,’ he added, ‘after everything you’ve done for Inez.’
‘Depends what you count as “everything”,’ I said. ‘She might well hold me responsible for the lot. How much does she know, by the way? I presume – almost nothing?’
Xavier laughed. ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘she knows you’re a hooker. But everything else you told me, and whatever Inez tells me (though I never believe a word she says, and – by the way, Dora – nor should you), I have kept to myself. Have you heard from the man? Mr O’Neill? She talks about him obsessively whenever we are alone.’
‘I’ve not heard from him since the evening it all happened. No. He may have gone to Denver or somewhere. He is often out of town. But he has told me he won’t see her again. And I think he means it. Does Inez understand that?’
‘I’m not terribly convinced that she does. You must tell her yourself, Dora. Will you come? I mean, will you come right now? What are you doing this minute? Please come with me if you can. Inez is so longing to see you.’ It was mid-morning and I was still in my kimono breakfast gown. Xavier had snuck into my rooms, as Inez did, via the back door. I left him perched on my couch, lifting trinkets, examining and replacing them without comment, and went to get dressed.
Mrs McCulloch knew I was expected and had clearly decided that the best way to deal with such a situation was to pretend to be unaware of it. She tolerated my presence remotely – I assume because she felt she had no choice. But she did not come to greet me. I was grateful to her on both counts.
I followed Xavier to Inez’s first-floor bedroom – as light and fragrant and sun-filled as expected, and I sat beside her silk-canopied bed, beneath a golden-framed looking glass and adorable oil portraits of the McCulloch spaniels, and the maid brought us lemonade and cheese sandwiches, neither of which Inez touched.
She looked thinner and even younger than usual, but the waxy-yellow complexion was gone, and she seemed calmer. She didn’t ask me whether Mother Jones was still incarcerated in the San Rafael jail, or whether Mr Rockefeller and the Union had found a way to negotiate. She didn’t ask if any more donations had been made to Union funds (how would I know?), or if I thought the strike would ever end. Actually she seemed quite tired of the whole subject. She only asked about Lawrence. Had I seen him? Had he left messages for her? Had he called at the cottage?
‘He left me a message for you,’ I told her. ‘But you know that, because I told you before you left Plum Street. After all the fuss of being in jail, he said it was too dangerous for you to see each other any more. He was quite angry, if you remember.’
‘What? He said that? Nonsense! When did he say it? I don’t believe you, Dora.’
‘Yes, you do,’ I said patiently. ‘You knew that was what he was going to say. The moment you were dumb enough to get yourself arrested. It’s why you were in such a state when I fetched you. Well. And that’s exactly what he said. He came to Plum Street while you were still very sick. He doesn’t want you to see each other any more. He says it’s dangerous. For you especially. And Inez,’ I tapped her, ‘he’s right. You know it.’
She plaited the tassels on her coverlet, her fingers working faster the longer I spoke, but she said nothing, and I didn’t press her for a response. We talked about the weather. Xavier had spent so many years in California, he had forgotten, he said, about the long, harsh Colorado winters.
Once her aunt had Inez back in the house, she was – understandably, perhaps – unwilling to let her go again, and as she and her husband controlled the purse strings, Inez had no choice but to do as she was told and stay put. Her aunt decreed that she should return to living at home, at least for the time being, and that Xavier, if he wanted it, could take over the lease of the cottage. She also insisted that Inez, as soon as she was strong enough, should return to her work at the library, at least three days a week. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ she told Inez (who reported it to me). ‘And since you refuse to marry anyone, we must keep you busy, at least.’
I think, with Lawrence gone from the scene, Inez was relieved and grateful to be back in her old bedroom in any case, with maids and loving aunts and honeycake on tap. If she hadn’t been, I feel sure she would have put up a better fight. But she took her aunt’s ruling like a lamb, and Xavier took over the cottage.
He was uncertain how long he would be staying in Trinidad and, when I asked, he would only ever say something evasive and infuriating, like ‘as long as it takes’. He claimed he needed to be out of California to catch up on his work, but I got the sense there was a lot more to his unexpected presence in Trinidad than work. When I asked him what prevented him from writing his photo-plays in Hollywood, as he usually did (as well as producing them), he was evasive. He shrugged, in his eloquent way, made a self-deprecating comment about lack of self-discipline. But there were often times when he fell silent and was lost in his own thoughts; when his usual expression of melancholy was replaced with something much fiercer. Something seemed to fill him with dread. I thought perhaps he’d come home to recover from something: an illness or a failed romance, and I asked Inez if she knew. She said, ‘Oh
Xavier
! That boy is always unhappy about something. I should think some silly girl has broken his heart again. Or they won’t make one of his photo-plays into a movie. Or – I don’t know! It’s his artistic nature, Dora. Artistic people are always miserable. I thought I spotted Lawrence this morning, did I tell you? In the back of the Union auto. But it was travelling so fast, I couldn’t make it out. Have you seen him, Dora? You would tell me, wouldn’t you, if you had seen him?’
Whatever it was that was eating at Xavier, he kept it to himself.
Inez and I used to spend a lot of time in the cottage with him. He didn’t seem so terribly desperate to be getting on with his writing whenever we went calling, and the three of us whiled away hours in front of that warm hearth, drinking his whiskey. God knows what we talked about – Inez, mostly, I suppose. What she was to do with the rest of her life, since ‘clearly nobody wants to marry me. And now Aunt Philippa won’t pay me my allowance without checking on every single movement I ever make …’
‘Oh, come on,’ Xavier chuckled. ‘You can run rings round Aunt Philippa, and you know it.’
‘It’s not really the point though, is it, Xavier?’ she said. ‘Heaven knows what trouble you get yourself into out there in Hollywood, and yet here you are, with the freedom to rent this cottage –
my
cottage – and dispense with your inheritance exactly as you fancy.’
‘Not much left to dispense with,’ he said. ‘I’ve already dispensed with most.’
‘Whereas
I
must have
everything
decided for me. I am
not
permitted to spend my inheritance as I would like. For example, on this beautiful cottage. Because I am a woman. And therefore not deemed to be responsible.’
‘Oh baby,’ said Xavier. ‘It’s not fair. I know it. But look at it this way. At least you’ve got some money left, even if you can’t get your mitts onto it yet. And I’ll bet you wouldn’t have a bean, if you’d been given my freedom. You’d be as poor as I am … Maybe,’ he added, considering her, ‘
even poorer
than I am
.
I still have a bit left.
’
‘Well, it’s not fair,’ she said.
‘It’s certainly not fair,’ I agreed.
Xavier glanced at me and smiled, embarrassed. ‘What about you, Dora?’ he said. ‘You think, if you happened to come into an inheritance, you’d be able to keep a hold of it? Or do you think you’d blow it, same as I have. More or less. Same as Inez would, if she had half a chance.’
‘Oh, I’d blow it!’ I laughed. ‘Without a doubt.’
A silence. We watched the fire, and I thought of the money I had blown; the hopes and dreams … He said: ‘Forgive me for prying. Only I’ve been longing to ask so long … how did an Englishwoman like you come to be living in a place like this? In the middle of Colorado, of all places? It seems such a strange place to wind up.’
‘In a brothel, in the middle of Colorado?’ I said. It was what he meant.
He smiled. ‘It doesn’t seem the obvious choice.’
‘Oh Xavier,’ Inez said. ‘I told you already! How can you forget already? It’s the most tragic story! She was doing a show at the opera house, and her husband did a moonlight flit with the other singer. I mean – with the whole travelling show. And the other singer was Dora’s best friend
and
his secret lover. Can you imagine? And they all left her behind. I
told
you—’
‘No, I know about that,’ he said. ‘But before that?’
He asked me about how I came from England, and why and when – and I told him. I was a missionary’s daughter. I came to New York with my mother and father, when I was fourteen years old. My mother died when I was twenty-one, by which time I was married to the man Whitworth, who would later abandon me in Trinidad. I loved him. I loved our life together. My father wanted to return to England and I didn’t, and so he left me behind and we never saw each other again.
It was all true. But I don’t think they believed me.
Of course now I wonder – what might have happened if I had returned to England with my father? My husband would never have followed, and so I would have been leaving him behind. It was always out of the question. Everything that happened afterwards – his abandonment, my slow drift from musical entertainment to less musical entertainment, to Phoebe’s irresistible invitation – looking back it feels as if it was all inevitable: a sour chapter or two in the story that has brought me here, to this sunny desk, this new life. I am happy. For the moment at least. And honestly, that is more than I ever expected. It is enough.
Inez was not happy. She talked incessantly of Lawrence, and I think – though she never admitted it to us – that she used to linger outside the Union offices on North Commercial, and sometimes even venture inside. But so far as I could tell, her dealings with Lawrence and the Union were over. She made no more trips out to the company towns (occupied now only by those non-Union scabs who refused to strike, in any case) and nor, without Lawrence, could she gain access to the strikers’ makeshift encampment out at Ludlow – even if she had wanted to. She stayed in town, and dedicated her energies to the library. It needed more desks, she said. Or better lights, or more French classical literature. It always needed something, in any case. She rarely mentioned the strike, if at all. It was as if she had forgotten everything about it.
And then one day she bumped into Cody.
‘You remember Cody?’ she said, bursting into my room, euphoric again – like her old self. ‘That sweet boy at the Union who was reading the magazine. He looked like he needed feeding. You remember him?’
Of course I did.
‘Well, his mother is sick. He’s working in the hardware store on Maple Street now, since the Union can’t pay him full pay any longer. And he was full of news, Dora! Lawrence has been in Walsenburg these past six weeks! It’s why I’ve not seen even the tail of his coat all this time. You see? … Cody said – well, he said a lot of things. He’s unhappy about a few things. The way the Union does things. I said to him – you have to remember what we’re up against. As long as the other side is fighting dirty,
we
have to fight dirty, and he agreed with me. And I know
you
don’t agree, Dora. But it’s the way of the world. That’s what I said to him.’
