The Jewel Box (18 page)

“Quite like he was when he was a child. Odd. Delicate. Lovable, in my opinion, though not in everyone’s. Inheriting all that money has made him more sure of himself. And being more sure of himself has made him more and more eccentric. It’s as if he’s consciously decided to heighten every aspect of his personality. Even his speech impediment.”

“Crikey.” Nancy raised her eyebrows. “I’d like to see him some time.”

“John’s an old friend of his,” said Grace. “Perhaps you should get him to take you along to the Tutankhamun one evening?”

A frown. “I don’t go about with John in that sort of way.”

“Don’t you?” Grace eyed her as she took up a cast-iron frying pan and began scrubbing. “You know, Nancy, you look happy this evening. Properly happy. I’ve not seen you this way since before George died.”

Nancy shrugged. “Perhaps I am. It’s been a lovely evening, after all.”

“But?”

“But nothing. It’s been a lovely evening. There’s nothing more to it than that, Grace. So you may as well stop your prying.”

“If you say so.” Grace sighed and set the frying pan down on the draining rack. But she wasn’t yet finished with the subject of Cramer. “You mentioned over dinner that you think John’s writing a novel. What gave you that idea?”

“Oh, just something he said the other day. I can’t even remember quite what it was now. And it seems I was wrong anyway. But there’s something else, too…”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve been rereading
The Vision.
I was rather interested to look back at it given the current circumstances. I finished it last night in bed.”

“And?”

“It’s very strange reading a book once you know a little of the real-life people and events that lay behind it.”

Grace waited for her to say something further. Grabbed a blackened saucepan and went at it with the brush.

“Now that I know John…Well, I have to say that I could hear his voice in it.”

“What do you mean,
hear his voice
?”

“I’m not entirely sure. It was rather odd. It made me think about ghosts. Haunted houses, all that. Invisible presences. Not that I believe in any of that.”

“What on earth are you on about?”

“Just that John was so patently present, in that book. It was as if he’d had a hand in writing it or something. I do know that sounds bonkers.”

“Yes, it does.” Grace laid down the saucepan. “Particularly having heard his opinion of it.” She was quiet for a moment, mulling this over. “They were very close when O’Connell was writing it. Perhaps that closeness has somehow made its way into the novel.”

“Perhaps so.”

The window was entirely misted over now. The girls’ reflections had vanished in the condensation.

On
the afternoon of October 17, 1922, the Rutherford sisters, laden down with splendid purchases, stopped off for tea and cake at the Lyons Corner House on Piccadilly. Nancy, on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, was positively oozing happiness and vivacity. Grace was quietly cheerful and much occupied in ensuring Nancy had the delightful shopping day she truly deserved.

“I can hardly believe how lucky I am.” Nancy’s mouth was full of cream cake, and crumbs shot across the table. “Oops, sorry.” She dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. “Everything was so horrible for so long. Do you remember my hideous twenty-first?”

“Of course.” Grace sipped her tea and turned to look at the string quartet playing bravely on behind the hubbub of conversation, the clattering of teacups, the rumbling of cake
trolleys pushed back and forth. “How could I forget? But that’s all in the past now.”

“You were such a trouper.” Nancy took another big mouthful of cake. “Smoothing everything over with the guests and holding the fort. Helping me put George to bed when he finally came staggering back from the pub. Cleaning up the sick.”

Grace rolled her eyes. “
Please,
Nancy, must you mention that? Anyway, birthday girl, it’s about time you put all that nastiness behind you. George is fine now.”

“Yes.” Nancy’s eyes were bright. “Thank goodness. You know, Grace, I really believed he was doing it to spite me. That he hated me, and I couldn’t work out why. You remember how he used to speak to me, don’t you? I couldn’t look Mummy in the eye. Couldn’t bear the fact that she witnessed so much. I mean, you did too, of course, but that’s different.”

“Let’s have some wine,” said Grace, brightly. “We should drink a birthday toast.”

Oh, rather.” Nancy bent to delve in one of the bags at their feet. “I
do
love the blue dress
so
much. You’re a peach. I’m going to wear it for the party tomorrow night. Do you think George will like it?”

“He’ll love it. You look divine in it.”

The waitress came over and Grace ordered two glasses of white wine. The quartet was playing something familiar and cloying.

“Who wrote this music?” Grace asked.

“It was all anger about the war,” said Nancy. “George, I mean. Pent-up rage. Boiling blood. Those nightmares…I couldn’t wake him out of them. I just had to cling tightly to the bed and wait for them to end. I suppose that was what
I was doing more generally. Clinging on and hoping it would all come right again. And then it did.”

The waitress brought the wine over. They clinked glasses.

“To you. Happy birthday for tomorrow. Is this Vivaldi, do you think?”

“And to you, too.” Nancy clinked again. “For being such a brick. Really, I think it was you who held us together.”

“Rubbish.” Grace took a mouthful of wine. “Let’s look to the future. Speaking of which, what time are you meeting Mummy?”

“Five o’clock. Grace, there’s something I want to tell you.”

“You’d better drink up then. It’s almost half past four. Which film are you going to see?”

The lying had been going on for a very long time. One could argue it started that night in the summer of 1915 when George proposed to Nancy at the farewell dance. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much lying as keeping silent. George and Grace had kept silent about what had taken place between them on the Heath earlier that day.

The “keeping silent” continued when he told her about how Steven had really died, and asked her not to speak about it. And then came the letters. He’d asked her to write to him while he was away. How could she have refused him and why should she? They weren’t love letters, after all. They were impersonal and newsy—reassuring him that Nancy was well and content, but that she talked about him constantly and missed him. She passed on the Hampstead gossip: Philippa Green’s pregnancy; Tabitha Ferrier’s roving eye; Frederick Perry-Johnson’s return home after losing an arm. She bemoaned the state the house was getting into: the blocked drains, the broken door handle, the damp patch in the kitchen, the drafts.
She told him that he’d better come home soon or the house would fall down around them. She said little about herself.

It seemed right to keep silent about the letters. It wasn’t that she had anything to hide. It was just that she didn’t know how to explain why she had suddenly taken to writing frequently to her sister’s husband. It seemed such an odd thing to be doing. And the longer it went on, the less easy it was to speak of, particularly as George was keeping quiet, too.

The spring of 1918 arrived, and George continued to write only to Nancy, making no mention of the letters he received from Grace. His letters talked mostly of how he missed them all at home, but also of train journeys through lovely scenery, of long days spent marching, of trench foot, boredom and singing. His were letters unaltered by the censors. He kept off subjects that would frighten his wife. But the Rutherford sisters were reading about the big German offensive in the newspapers and listening to the reports. They knew George must be in the thick of it all, and that he couldn’t possibly be telling them the whole story. Nancy showed the letters to Grace, who began to think she could discern secret messages through the trivia—messages intended for her only.

When he talks about the heavy rain, she decided, he is speaking about the experience of being shelled. Stories of kicking a football around with the boys back at the billets are really telling a much darker tale. He knows she won’t see that. He knows that I will.

Over time, Grace felt increasingly entitled to read George’s letters, and if Nancy didn’t show her one, she would go digging about in her sister’s bureau on the quiet, searching for it. She had begun to see herself as George’s secret confidante. Her own letters became less self-conscious and more personal. The fact that George didn’t write back to her
directly made it easier for her to unburden herself. His silence was a warm one, a welcoming one. By the end of the summer, with all the news reports declaring the German army to be on its knees and the war all but over, Grace’s letters had evolved into a kind of episodic diary from which there was little that she held back.

The much-heralded return was destined to prove difficult for all concerned. George’s smiles seemed forced. He was overly polite, awkward and twitchy. He appeared to want to hide as much as possible: in bed, behind newspapers, at his job in the City, at the pub with old friends. Late at night, Grace would hear Nancy crying and railing at him. His replies were curt and quiet.

For herself, Grace was only too glad of George’s reclusiveness. It was one thing to tell an absent and silent George all her greatest secrets and desires, and quite another to find herself sharing a home with him again. Just to be in a room with him was squirmingly embarrassing. The things he knew about her…There was no way to take them back. But she was already going out to work by this time, and took to leaving the house early and coming home late. Quietly she began to save money for a deposit on a flat of her own.

As 1919 wore on, it all got worse. George absented himself more often and drank more heavily. His moody silences were interspersed with episodes of anger. Nancy’s disastrous twenty-first birthday party was the last straw. But when Grace announced her plan to move out imminently to a little flat in Bayswater, Nancy grabbed both her hands and begged her not to go.

“I can’t cope with him alone…He
listens
to you. Yes, he does. He reins himself in when you’re here because he doesn’t want you to think badly of him. When it’s just me, he doesn’t care what he says or does.”

“You have Mummy,” Grace reasoned.

“Gracie,
please
stay for a bit longer. I need you to help me get him back on track. If you could spend a bit of time with him…Talk to him…”

They began taking walks together on the Heath every few days, Grace and George, at her suggestion. They’d talk a little but often they’d just walk silently. It was an easy silence between them. He seemed to relax in her company, her arm linked through his. Sometimes they’d sit for a while on the bench, near the top of Parliament Hill, where he’d once declared his feelings for her. Grace thought about it whenever they sat there, and she knew he was thinking about it, too. On the return to Tofts Walk, he’d begin to tense up. The silence would have turned stony by the time they reached the house.

Nancy seemed grateful out of all proportion.

“We just walk,” Grace would tell her. “And sometimes we sit. He hasn’t told me anything. Nothing about the war. Nothing about you. I can’t see that it can be helping very much.”

“But it
is
helping.”

And evidently it was. He was softening, gradually but tangibly. Thawing. He stayed at home more. He eased up on the drinking.

The walks continued. One day, as they sat on their bench, George reached out for her hand, and she let him hold it. There was nothing more—just her hand held in his as they sat there. When they got back to the house, he was positively chipper for the rest of the day. On the next walk he did it again, and this time they sat much longer together. She was aware of his breathing, the sound of it, the subtle movements in his body. The warmth of their joined hands. But she didn’t allow
herself to turn and look at him. Kept her gaze fixed on the view: London, reduced to the size of a toy town below them.

On the next occasion, when it happened again, she did turn and look at him, at the golden strands running through his coppery hair, at his pale, hollow face—hollowed out by unhappiness and perhaps by memories he couldn’t speak about. His hazel eyes were not tranquil as they had been before the war. But they weren’t empty anymore either, as they had been when he’d first arrived home.

“Would you let me hold you, Grace?” he said. “Just hold you?”

She moved closer and his arms came around her. Leaning in to him, she tucked her head under his chin, and listened to the beating of his heart while all around them leaves were falling.

There was comfort in the way they’d sit holding each other—and it happened every time after that, of course. They’d sit longer and longer, even when winter arrived and the Heath was cold and wet and windswept. Where they touched, a sort of current ran between them and gave them both sustenance. Each time it happened she sensed how obvious and natural it would be to simply lift her head and bring her mouth to his, but knew this was the boundary she must not cross. It wasn’t exactly innocent, what they were doing together, but there was still an ambiguity to it. They simply had to stay the right side of the boundary.

Then, one snowy January day, as they huddled together on the bench, it all became too much.

The trouble is, she said to herself, I’m dwelling on this more and more, and I think he is, too. The longer we resist it, the more obsessed we both become. Maybe if we give in, we can get past it, leave it behind.

She was going to do it, any moment now. She was going to lift her head and kiss him. It simply had to happen.

The Heath was muffled by a layer of snow. Flakes were falling silently, wetly, into their hair, onto their shoulders. Somewhere in the distance, some children were squealing as they hurled snowballs at each other. But it was all very distant. Grace took a steadying breath…And George, still holding her, began to speak.