The Jewel Box (15 page)

Standing before his door, she wished she hadn’t drunk that last gin fizz. The key was in her hand, but the very idea of walking in unannounced was so bold and brazen that it made her cringe. She should knock. That was the thing to do. She raised her hand and then stopped, lowered it again. Knocking was the demure way. The key—her possession of it—was itself a challenge.

He was lying on his side in the bed, facing away from her, and his deep, even breathing told her he was asleep. It was too dark to make out more than the vague shape of him. Slipping her shoes off, she approached the bedside table and flicked on the lamp. Still he didn’t stir. His shoulders and back were bare, exposed. One arm was curled around his head, the other stretched out over the covers. She looked around her at the huge bedroom, taking in its opulence. Plenty of drapery and tassels. A lot of gilt-edged ornamentation. An Oriental screen. Through a half-open door she glimpsed another room, made out the dim shapes of desk, chair, chaise longue. Through a second door was the marble bathroom.

A sound from the bed, making her jump. A murmur, nothing more. He’d rolled over onto his back. His sleeping face had a gentleness to it that she hadn’t seen before. He’d lost the guile and swagger that attracted and repelled her in equal measure. So
now
what was she going to do? She could hardly hurl the key into his sleeping face. Was she going to wake him up simply in order to do so? Really, the very notion of throwing the key at him seemed ridiculous now that she was standing here beside his bed.

The smartest and most stylish course of action would be to place the key beside his face on the pillow and simply leave. That would be the way to regain control of this situation. He’d surely come chasing after her in no time. The idea lit a flame inside her, warmed her…Yes, she had to admit it to herself: She still wanted him. She wanted him more than ever.

But what if he
didn’t
come chasing after her? What if he read her stylish maneuver as plain old rejection? Was he really the sort of man to go running after a disinterested woman?

Another sound. A sigh. There was a smile on his mouth. His eyes moved beneath the lids. He was dreaming, it seemed.
She wanted to get inside his dream. The idea gripped her, held her. Before she knew what she was at, she was unbuttoning her dress, stepping out of it, unclipping her brassiere…

There was more than one way to take control of this situation.

When she pulled back the covers and slid into the bed, he still didn’t stir. Lying there beside him, her naked body only inches from his, she experienced an intense sense of anticipation. A delicious mingling of lust and nervousness that made her want to laugh out loud. At last she reached out and touched him. Tentatively, and then more definitely, placing her hands on his chest, warm and firm, lightly sprinkled with hair—feeling, as she did so, a kind of ownership—yet aware, nonetheless, that so many other hands had been placed here, like this.

“Hello, Grace.” His voice was still laden with sleep, his eyes still shut. “I didn’t know if you’d come. I thought perhaps I’d have to dance the dance a little more.”

“I’m tired of the dance.” She kissed one eyelid, and then the other. Tracing the edge of his face, stroking his neck.

His eyes opened. He reached up to touch her face, and brought his own to meet it. “You want to be known,” he said. “Really
known
by someone. Don’t you?”

She was aware that she didn’t care, now, which of them was in control. In fact, the truth went further than that. She wanted to abandon control, to surrender it to him utterly.

“You want to fit with someone,” he said. “Don’t you?” And then he moved her, moved with her, manipulating her, fitting her body to his. There was no awkwardness in their movements. No clashing of limbs, no misunderstandings. She marveled at the ease of it all. She’d never been so unself-conscious with a man. When she looked down at their bodies moving
on and against each other, the very sight made her want him more. And then, at last, he was inside her and it was the most incredibly animal experience, the most purely physical sex she’d ever had. She got up on top of him. He rolled back on top of her.

It had been over a year since she was last in bed with a man, and that had been a one-off with Dickie. It had finished between them long before, without nastiness or recriminations. After an initial period of difficulty and distance, they’d settled back to friendship, and both had seemed comfortable with that. But on this particular evening, out at the Mitre together, they’d both been lonely. He’d come back to the house for a nightcap and they’d sat by the dead leavings of the fire with their brandies, talking about inconsequential things. As they’d sat there, she’d weighed it up. Bed with Dickie would feel friendly and familiar, she’d thought. Safe. She could enjoy it without having to think too much about it. Their story was already at an end and this would be a kind of brief epilogue. A welcome interruption in the expanse of nothingness that was her love life at that time. A pleasant reminder that she might still be desirable.

She’d gotten up and taken hold of his hand and he’d looked up at her with surprise and confusion. They’d climbed the stairs in silence and gone quietly to her bedroom, where their lovemaking was gentle and melancholy. Afterward, huddled with him in the single bed, finishing up her brandy, Grace had found she was reeling with the sadness of it—the futility of the attempt they’d each made to escape their loneliness through the sex act, or at least to share the loneliness.

“We shouldn’t do this again.” It was Dickie who’d spoken. The words were in her head too and she’d been preparing
herself to speak them aloud. It was such a relief to know he felt the same way as she did. It made her want to hug him. She’d been about to agree, vigorously, when he added: “There’s still something special between us, Grace. We shouldn’t squander it this way.”

They were eating chocolate cake in the bed, Grace and O’Connell, and drinking champagne. Scattering crumbs over and between the crisp linen sheets. He had announced he was peckish and pushed the bell push marked “waiter.” The waiter then appeared so rapidly that Grace couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been standing behind the door the entire time, watching them through the keyhole.

“So it’s true. You can get absolutely whatever you want just whenever you want it at the Savoy,” she said.

He took a bite and passed the remains back to her, leaning against the cushioned headboard and grinning. “Sweetheart, I’ve always been able to get whatever I want whenever I want it.”

“You like things carefully orchestrated, don’t you?” She licked her fingers. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was you who started the rumor about tonight’s supposed reading. You’d have done it just to see who’d turn up. Just to have a secret little laugh at them all under your fake beard.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think that of me? Did you have that thought racing around in your head while you sat on a folding chair in your ginger wig and hat, waiting?”

“You have no idea how much I regret the wig and hat, Dexter.”

“I told you not to call me Dexter.”

“Then what do I call you?”

“Come here. Let’s get down among the chocolate crumbs.”

She was so aware of his strength when he took hold of her again. He could throw you bodily across the room with barely an effort and you’d lie there all broken and crumpled, and how glorious it would be to be broken by him.

“Happy?” he asked her afterward, as they lay side by side.

“I don’t know.” Now that the heat had ebbed away out of her, she felt ashamed of her weakness. She’d believed herself to be taking strong and decisive action, as she walked along the Strand earlier. But it was weakness, not strength, that had brought her here to him. He hadn’t had to so much as lift a finger to get her into his bed. That key had been enough to make her deliver herself up to him like a birthday present. “I don’t know where I am with you.”

“You want me to tell you I love you or something? Sex isn’t love. I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to explain that to a woman of the world such as yourself.”

She sat up against the headboard, drew her legs up under the blankets to hug her knees. “You once told me you’re perpetually in love. That love makes us feel alive.”

“Trouble is, you’re too used to men falling in love with you. There’s enough
bewitchery
in you to make it happen pretty reliably. You decide you want a man and you click your fingers, and down he goes—prostrate on the floor. But think about it. Did you really expect that from me? Is that really who you want me to be?”

She held her knees even tighter. Scrunching herself into a ball. “I wanted you to telephone me or send me a note.”

“Sure you did. But don’t you see it’s better this way?” He reached for the cigarettes on the bedside table.

“For you.”

“For both of us.” He passed the cigarette across. “Grace, you’re not in love with me any more than I am with you. If I’d
done all the right things, the predictable things, you’d already have tired of me. I’d have been firmly dispatched with a one-liner in your column: ‘Girls, you’d have a more exciting evening with one of his books than with him’—am I right?”

“Maybe.” She blew a smoke ring and then stubbed out the cigarette.

Their third time was dreamy and slow. Perhaps it was the effect of the alcohol, but their bodies seemed not to be in the bed or the hotel room at all. It was as if they were in midair. Her eyes locked on to his and she couldn’t allow herself to look away, feeling that if she did so, she would fall, and it would be a long way down.

At some point it must have ended. They must have dozed off, for Grace was dreaming about Margaret the typist, her coiled black hair transformed into a snake. John Cramer was in the dream too, playing a wooden flute, and the hair snake uncoiled and reared up to its hypnotic tune.

“Sit
down, Miss Rutherford.”

Mr. Henry Pearson didn’t look up from his paperwork.

“Thank you, sir.” She sat on the visitor’s chair, gazing around at the many miniature oil paintings of horses on the brownish-green, baize-covered walls. Walking into this office was like stepping back into a bygone era. Stale air, floating dust particles, creaking chairs, a very specific sort of silence rather like the silence of a library.

Her focus shifted from the room in which she now sat to a brighter, sunnier vista. After a rather sheepish breakfast at the Savoy, she and O’Connell had taken a walk along Victoria Embankment in the bright blue morning. Heavily laden boats were plowing busily by, churning up the water, making it froth and sparkle. There was as much traffic on the river as on the roads and bridges. London was pulsing with life, and Grace
found herself thinking of the blood pumping through her own arteries. Walking beside O’Connell, her hand held in his, she’d been happier than happiness…

“Idle person. One who squanders money or opportunity.” This was spoken loudly, so that Grace jumped. Mr. Henry’s head was still down.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Seven letters.” At last he looked up over his glasses, thick eyebrows raised. In front of him, she saw, was a newspaper crossword.

Grace swallowed. “Wastrel, sir?”

“Indeed.” His smile was too large for the occasion, and vanished after only a second or two. “Obvious, when you come to think of it.” Then his head was down again, presumably to write the word into his crossword—and yet she didn’t think he did so. Instead, he seemed lost in some invisible detail, leaving her to stare at his bushy Victorian whiskers. His silver-topped cane was resting in a porcelain stand in the far corner of the office, along with an umbrella and an odd-looking object that might have been a suction plunger (though what would he want with one of those?).

How odd it had been to be out with O’Connell in the brightest daylight, beside the silvery, enticing river. A man like him should surely exist only in bars, restaurants and hotel rooms, softly lit and shrouded in smoke, husky laughter and erudite evening quippery. Yet there he was. There
they were
, a couple of night creatures out on the loose in the early morning. It had felt almost normal, almost natural.

Mr. Henry laid down his pencil and sat scrutinizing her. If only she wasn’t still in yesterday’s dress. She kept a spare outfit at the office for just this sort of eventuality, but had forgotten,
today, that it was at the cleaner’s. She’d been about to nip out to fetch it when Mr. Henry’s secretary had knocked on her door. Still, she hadn’t seen Mr. Henry yesterday—perhaps he wouldn’t realize. There was such a reek of smoke about her, though, and she was sure there must be a kind of abandon in her appearance. A wild look in her eyes…

“My dear, I thought perhaps you might be tired of your occasional—or, really, not so occasional ‘chats’ with my brother on the subject of your ongoing performance and general demeanor. It occurred to me that you might have something to say to me about it all? Something redemptive, possibly? And since Aubrey is now sufficiently vexed that he’s about to wash his hands of you altogether, I thought I should, as it were, step into the breach.” While he was speaking, he made a steeple of his fingers; collapsed it; made another steeple.

“Well, Mr. Pearson, I…”

She and O’Connell, hand in hand by the river. As their walk had continued, she’d felt their togetherness, their “coupleness,” becoming more real. Her confidence had grown, along with her curiosity. Under the shadow of Blackfriars Bridge, where the air was rank with rotting wood, sewage, dead things moldering on the silt bed, all mingling with industrial fumes and the distant whiff of tallow rendering, she’d started asking about Cramer, probing for O’Connell’s side of the story just as Cramer himself had predicted.

“Eva was unique,” O’Connell had said. “More alive than anyone I’ve ever known. Lived only in the present—to hell with the consequences. You never knew where you were with her because she didn’t know
who
she was from one moment to the next. She was my first love. Perhaps she was my only real love.”