‘Why are you skulking around outside my bedroom door at this hour?’ she said.
‘Skulking?’ he said.
‘Yes, skulking.’ She crossed her arms over her breasts – her nightdress was a flimsy summer one; most of her clothes were still at St Vincent’s.
‘I was merely passing,’ he said, and the way he said it, she knew he was smiling.
She reached outside the door and groped along the wall until she found the light switch. ‘“Until the Lord come,”’ she said, flicking the switch, ‘“who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness…”’ She trailed off. The way he was looking at her – eyes lowered, showing only a peep of iris, chin tilted down. She couldn’t quite code that look – it seemed a lazy sort of repugnance but also something else, something like… no, she couldn’t articulate it.
‘Go away,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ he said.
And just as he turned to go, she noticed it – the crotch of his black trousers pouched out – poked out.
Something like hunger.
He strode off down the corridor and she slammed the door shut. ‘Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting,’ she said, glaring at the door as if it was the disgusting thing. And she remembered the rest of that Bible quote – it was from Corinthians, wasn’t it? Or Isaiah? ‘Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts.’ Quite.
Chapter 8
February 1924, The Old Vic, London
The man sitting – no, slouching – in the seat opposite her was called Harold Cromwell and he was, for heaven’s sake, the biggest dullard she’d ever had the misfortune to converse with. He was a filthy rich publisher specialising in maritime fiction and non-fiction, although the majority of his fortune was amassed through his dead wife, who’d contracted malaria while visiting West Africa. Maritime fiction! What was she supposed to do with that? Her father had introduced him to her at a formal dinner in Brighton last week and they’d chatted politely. That should have been that, but then she had to go and tell him about her friend Bart’s debut on the London stage and, spotting an opportunity with his greedy little blueberry eyes, he’d asked if she’d like to go with him to the opening night, and she was too taken aback to think up a fast fib.
‘I’m sorry, what were you saying?’ she said, reaching for her champagne.
‘I was saying, your friend seems to be having a jolly good bash at old Mercutio. A natural if ever I saw one.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, sipping her drink. It was the interval. Bart was doing well and she felt supremely proud. He captured Mercutio’s cocky posturing perfectly, no surprise there, and his oration was clear and musical.
‘His first night, too! I wonder, how long has he been at it? Acting, I mean.’
‘Not very long, actually.’
‘One would think otherwise.’
‘True. One of his schoolteachers spotted the talent. In all the years I’ve known him he’s never confessed to having any interest in the theatrical arts at all. He was an absolute triumph at the audition, you know.’ She kept back the part about the director being a friend of Lucille’s. It possibly bore no significance.
Harold fiddled with his cigar case, eyes down. ‘And how long have you known him, may I ask?’
Ah, thought Bettina, and so now we come to it. ‘Since we were babies really.’
‘And is he settled yet? With a spouse, I mean?’
‘No. So far he has thwarted all of his mother’s match-making attempts.’
Harold nodded for too long. ‘Right. Right. Bit of a serious business, finding the right person.’
Bettina looked at him coolly, fingers laced around the delicate stem of the flute. ‘It is. One must be very choosy.’
‘Right. Right. You’re not wrong there. Well, shall we make our way back to our seats?’
‘Do you mind if I nip to the ladies’ first?’
‘I don’t mind at all.’ He jumped up to pull her seat out. He had very weak shoulders, she thought. Like the sloping roof of a derelict barn. No – there really wasn’t any need for this cattiness. He was just a sad old widower. A sad, rich old widower after a young trophy wife to flaunt to his— oh, shut up, Bettina. She picked up her purse and walked away. ‘Do you mind awfully if I nip to the lavatory to slit my wrists?’ she said to herself. ‘Do you mind terribly if I nip to the lavatory to bash my skull repeatedly against the porcelain?’
The ladies’ was floor-to-ceiling marble and in the centre was a grand water fountain made of coral-pink stone. A black-haired woman stood at the far end, applying lipstick in the mirror. She wore a glittering, white sleeveless gown with a turquoise sash and matching turquoise gloves and her limbs were chubby and pale. Small doll hands. Large bosom. Bettina stopped and stared, and noticing, perhaps, the sudden halting of footsteps, the woman looked over at her.
‘Margo?’
The lipstick was slowly lowered and returned to the beaded evening bag open on the counter. Lips were smacked and blotted with tissue. ‘Oh,’ said Margo. So prim, that ‘oh’, so nonchalant and prim, as if her cook had just told her that the parsnips had gone bad. ‘Hello, Bettina.’ Her peat-black eyes cool – no: cold. What a fine display, thought Bettina, what a superb performance. Well, I’m not going to stand for it. She marched up to her old friend and grabbed her around the upper arms. ‘Please drop the frosty cow routine. You were my only friend in that rotten school and I’ve missed you terribly.’
Margo gaped up at her, irises jittering as she processed this. And then quite suddenly, she laughed, her jaw clanging open and her eyebrows tilting in that helpless way, and she took Bettina in her arms and held her tight, the laughter still bubbling up. I will not, thought Bettina, take pleasure in this embrace. But the way she was laughing, her whole body shaking, and all of this pressed tight against her.
Margo pulled away, wiping a tear with a gloved finger. ‘I forgot how bold you are. Oh dear.’ She shook her head, smiling. ‘I’m so glad you just said that, because if you hadn’t, I would have carried on with it and we would have bid goodbye in polite, curt voices and that would have set the tone forever.’
‘I would’ve hated you. Honestly.’
Margo had been pulled out of St Vincent’s by her father after the boiler-room disgrace and Bettina hadn’t seen her since. She’d constantly wondered how she was faring, and missed her horribly during term time, forcing herself to befriend a stout American girl called Isobel who criticised absolutely everything and everyone she came into contact with and had nothing good to say about England at all (if English food was so disagreeable to her then why did she fill her face with it at any given opportunity?). She imagined Margo locked in a room at the top of her house, like Mr Rochester’s mad wife, and sometimes thought, meanly, Well, where’s your liberal mother now? According to Lucille, who somehow knew everyone’s business, Margo’s father had been on the verge of sending her to a sanatorium. Bettina’s parents, though incensed about the drinking and the smearing of her reputation (their reputation), were a little more level-headed about the other stuff, since ‘everyone knows this type of thing happens in boarding schools, so no need to whip the silly mares over it’ (her father’s words). But Margo’s family had that sapphic great-aunt locked up in the attic of their history.
‘I have so much to tell you,’ said Margo in a frantic whisper, ‘only my auntie is waiting outside for me – she’s my chaperone, can you believe it?’