Chapter Twelve
Last day
of January on the empty heath, it was hard to tell where the
caravans had been. Turning up the collar of his coat against the
knifing wind, Laurie tried to get his bearings. The track from the
main road, which led to this clearing. On the horizon, that line of
trees, in whose shelter he and Sasha had lain.
When the
Romani left, they left completely. Sasha had told him this. It was
not like a travel folks’ camp, where a hundred traces of human
habitation might remain—abandoned hubcaps and tarpaulins, old
tether pegs for horses. They were too used to being hunted and
moved on. Leaving a place came more naturally than
staying.
And this
camp had been wiped out. Eradicated. Laurie had crept back on that
apocalyptic night. Shaken Sir William off when the old man had
caught up with him and tried to get him back into the Daimler to go
home. He had knelt in the tree line, watching men and women gather
around the corpse of Mama Luna. Gunari had knelt over her, sobbing
like a child. Laurie had wanted to help them, but he knew he had
brought death on them and had no right to ever intrude on them
again.
A circle
of stones on the ground. Shivering, Laurie went to stand beside
them. Inside them was the faintest trace of burning, a bronzing of
the frosted earth.
“Laurie?”
He
looked up. Clara had stopped her silent carousel circling of an
ivy-covered oak and was watching him, eyes wide. He put out a hand
to her, and she ran to his side. She leaned against him, pushing
one mittened hand into the pocket of his coat.
She
wasn’t the same child who’d returned from France after Christmas.
She hadn’t come back to the same world. Laurie had sat with her in
the remains of her old one and tried to explain to her the things
that had been changed. He was grateful for Gibson’s presence, and
his aunt’s, but the words had had to come from him: that her father
was dead, her mother incapable of looking after her. Conscience,
strain, and overwrought nerves had met in Lady Fitzroy a week or so
after her confession, and she was now repeatedly assuring the staff
of a discreet private nursing home that she would do anything,
anything at all for that poor boy.
Clara
had listened to him. She had been very calm. She had said she was
tired and wanted to go to bed. Laurie had carried her upstairs.
Tucking her under the duvet, Laurie had asked her what she
felt—just that, because he needed to know she felt something, that
shock had not wiped her blank. She had said, “I don’t really mind,
Laurie. I know I should, but I don’t, as long as I have
you.”
Laurie had tried. He had finished his run as Flamineo at the
Empire to great acclaim, and acceded to Mr. Jacobs’s insistence
that he now move on and find himself a company that could pay him
according to his worth. It hadn’t taken long. Laurie, who detested
musicals, hadn’t wanted to go into rep with Les Misérables, but the money was
good, even for the kind of bit part that was all he could swing for
in a big West End show, and the juggernaut that was
Les Miz showed no sign of
slowing down or stopping. Ever. Regular work, a decent
wage.
These
things established, Laurie had put in a hopeless application for
Clara’s guardianship. A kindly social worker had come to the flat
in East Hill. Laurie could afford something better now, but he
could not move. How would Sasha find him? The social worker, who
had seen children thrive in accommodations far more cramped and
squalid than this, had told him that the flat was not the problem.
He was an actor, wasn’t he? He lived alone. No matter what he did,
he could not guarantee to be at home when Clara needed him. And he
was young. Give it a couple of years, some changes in his
circumstances, and perhaps they could look at his application
again.
Elise
Devereaux, who was fond of her nephew and had not contested his
guardianship claim, had waited until he came to her, pale and
tired, and asked her please to take his sister in. She wanted to be
near to Marielle, she said, and rather than disrupt Clara’s life
still further by a move to France, she would, with Laurie’s
consent, move with her family into the Mayfair house until things
were calmer. That way Laurie could visit—she understood he did not
want to move back in—and Clara could go and see him. Laurie had
smiled at her in gratitude and told her it really was not up to
him. Sir William had been as good—or as bad—as his word and had
left his entire property to Clara, to be held in trust until she
was eighteen.
He lived
for Clara’s visits. She came, face alight with the adventure of it,
every weekend when he had both days off, and they slummed it,
although Laurie’s standards of housekeeping were now quite high,
and they washed and recycled their tins when they’d eaten the beans
directly out of them. They had long walks. The heath was the
nearest big stretch of outdoors, and Clara loved it, flying around
in its windy vacancies, forgetting for a while that she was
different now. That she was sobered, shadowed, leaving childhood
behind. Her hand in his pocket clenched and stirred, and Laurie
stroked her hair. “All right, love,” he said. “Let’s go
home.”
“All right. Are you
all right? What was here?”
Laurie
couldn’t tell her. Sometimes he thought the events of that night
had broken him in ways he didn’t yet understand. He was fine when
he was busy, and he lived as good and regular a life as he could
manage. But when he let his guard down, things were strange.
Walking home from the Tube stop one night, he had picked up a
tail—a couple of thugs who catcalled and jeered and followed him a
block or two, long enough to make his heart beat fast, and yet when
he’d turned a corner, they’d been gone. The Indian general dealer,
one day when he’d been short of cash and gone in to do what he
could with a fiver, had handed him a twenty, assuring him he’d
dropped it on the floor last time he had been in. Laurie somehow
never felt entirely alone.
But he
was. Sasha had vanished as completely from his world as he had from
off John Kucharski’s radar. Laurie, always ready, had waited. Was
waiting still. He took Clara’s hand. The year’s first snow began to
fall, whirling in wind-driven spirals around them. Soon the edges
of the world were blurred, the air a dancing chaos. Laurie waited
until the flakes were coming fast enough that he could half
convince himself the caravans were back again, and then he turned
away.
* *
*
February the second. Only just—Laurie heard his alarm clock
beep midnight as he fell through the door. His Misérables nights seldom ended much
earlier than this, but tonight he’d got entangled in an after-show
party and barely caught his last train home. Counting on his
fingers, he worked out what day it was and how many times he’d
manned the barricades and danced up and down the streets of
revolutionary Paris that week, and decided with relief that
tomorrow had to be his day off.
There’d
been food at the party, and since tomorrow was Saturday anyway, he
didn’t need to cook himself the dutiful late supper he seldom
wanted but knew he had to have if he wanted to wake up the next day
capable of getting out of bed. He hadn’t foreseen—probably few
straight-drama actors did—the sheer bloody effort of musicals. He
was aching from his hip bones down to the balls of his feet.
Flopping down onto the sofa, he kicked off his shoes and socks and
inspected the damage. Not too bad. His blisters from the first week
had callused over, and his arches, though throbbing, were
intact.
He let
his head fall back. He wondered if he had the energy left to be
lonely. If so, it was his own doing. He could have had company
tonight. The boy playing Enjolras, who had been gently circling him
for the last week or so, had made his move, emboldened by cheap
champagne. Laurie, cornered in the cloakroom, had for a few seconds
been too surprised to do more than stand there, pressed back among
the coats, letting Enjolras kiss him and run hungry hands down his
spine to his backside. The extrication had been hard. Enjolras had
been embarrassed and upset. And there was nothing wrong with him,
or with what he had done—on the contrary, for that first moment his
touch, the press of his body, had been delicious. It was just that
he wasn’t Sasha.
Laurie
lifted a hand to touch his lip. It was a bit sore. Enjolras,
nervous, had been rough. Pressing the bruise, Laurie tried to
conjure the mouth he did want there. Always warm. Texture of grape
skin and suede. Often as not, smiling as it descended onto
Laurie’s, not just a kiss but a grace, a benediction. Shivering,
Laurie rested a hand on the fly of his jeans and arched up against
his own touch. But he was too worn-out even for that, and he closed
his eyes, letting his hand fall away.
February
the second. Candlemas, St. Bridget’s day. He hoped she was looking
after Marielle Fitzroy, other than whom she had no more devout
worshipper. Laurie remembered being taken to the early morning mass
at St. Patrick’s in Soho Square and seeing the church full of
snowdrops and candle flame, heralding the arrival of spring.
Bride’s day, too, the goddess of painters, poets, metalsmiths, and
players. That had been the excuse for the party at the Queen’s.
Theatrical people were careful to placate all available deities.
Laurie had heard whispers that Bride had been good to him and the
director was going to ask him to try out for Marius. Laurie
shuddered. He prayed not. The pay would be too good for him to turn
it down, and yet he did not think he could spend six nights a week
persuading Eponine in musical couplets not to die. Perhaps his
indifferent voice would save him. Good enough for spoofing opera to
Clara. Not, he was fairly sure, even halfway strong enough to fill
the Queen’s capacity-crowd spaces, vibrating the plasterwork and