Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
‘Now you play hostess …’ Maureen got up, jumping from bed to ground in one quick movement.
She was still, Honor saw with a mean kind of relief, stout around the waist since Sheridan.
And her legs were plumper than they had been.
She could imagine the expression of distaste on Aunt Cloé’s face if she were to see her daughter like that.
But somehow, with Maureen, it didn’t much matter.
Not when her face glowed with life and mischief the way it did.
Not when you saw the energy of her. She went to the window and pulled the sash up, standing in full view so that anyone who looked up could have seen her there in her night clothes.
‘Maureen!’ Honor said.
Her cousin looked at her, head to one side, and said nothing. Then she untied the belt of her silk dressing gown, letting it fall to the ground so that now she stood in only her slip, short and strappy so her arms and shoulders emerged, white and soft like cream from the coffee-coloured silk.
Honor took a step backwards, away from the brazenness of Maureen’s exposure. ‘I’m going to check on Elizabeth,’ she said again.
‘Send Duff up if you see him,’ Maureen said. ‘And tell the maid not to disturb us.’
Honor, shutting the door behind her, found her heart was thumping as if she had just climbed a long flight of stairs.
What was Maureen about? She certainly wouldn’t tell Duff anything.
She couldn’t imagine herself saying the words – knew her face would betray her should she even try to, flushing red and swelling up like a hot cross bun.
Was that what she had gone looking for with the baron?
she wondered. Or was it proof she looked for that it wasn’t ever to be for her?
Whatever she sought, she hadn’t found it, she thought, remembering the strange, brief, unexceptional nature of the affair.
She followed the hallway down past the bit where it turned at an angle and faded to something more spartan, rich Persian rugs replaced with simple woven affairs, down towards the nursery and the Yellow Room.
‘Elizabeth?’ She tapped at the door. Nothing.
‘Elizabeth?’ She knocked, loudly now, and again.
‘What is it?’ The voice was thick with sleep.
‘May I come in?’
‘If you must.’
The room was dark, curtains closed, and the air was thick and sweetish-smelling: last night’s cocktails, cigarette smoke; sour reminders of the night’s exertions. One of her dresses lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. She bent to pick it up, shook it out and draped it over the back of a chair.
‘What do you want?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘To see if you need anything.’
‘How insincere you are. But while you’re here, pass me a glass of water.’
Honor poured a glass from the jug that stood by the dressing table.
It was yesterday’s water, but it would do.
She held the glass out to Elizabeth, who slowly pushed herself up to a seated position, took it and drank it down in one go, so fast that a trickle spilled from the corners of her mouth and ran down her chin.
She appeared to be naked under the sheet, and Honor hoped the hand holding it wouldn’t let slip.
The heavy linen looked the colour of oatmeal against her skin: white, traced with blue where her veins showed through, twisting a map of roads and byways down her thin arms. She had a rash on the inside of one elbow, a red patch turned raw at the edges.
‘Another.’ Elizabeth held the empty glass out. Honor refilled it and Elizabeth drank half before putting the glass on the table beside the bed.
‘May I open the curtains?’
‘Oh go on.’ She winced at the sunlight that poured into the room, and Honor remembered that was another reason why they had decided this would be an unimportant sort of a bedroom – the morning sun was too direct and unkind.
Looking back at Elizabeth, tangled up in the sheets and counterpane, she asked, ‘How did you sleep?’
‘Badly. But I usually do, so don’t start to fuss.’
‘I do too,’ Honor said in a rush. ‘I heard you coming up.’
‘Did you now?’ Elizabeth gave her a look. Her face was blotchy, with smudges of black around the eyes where last night’s make-up hadn’t been removed. She must have fallen into bed the minute she got her clothes off. Honor’s clothes.
‘Yes, and even then it was another hour, I would say.’ It felt strange to tell Elizabeth anything. She couldn’t remember ever having had a real conversation with her.
‘Curious, aren’t they,’ Elizabeth mused, ‘those night vigils? I sometimes imagine I am the last person left alive, and that the world will end come dawn and I am simply watching, and waiting, for this end – in order to see it through, you know?’
Honor shuddered. It was much too close to what she herself felt; only Elizabeth seemed to find the fantasy interesting, even amusing.
To Honor, it was terrifying; a dark loneliness so complete that she sometimes thought she would never speak again, never feel the touch of another person’s hand to hers.
‘How dramatic you are,’ she said quickly.
‘Well, what do you do?’
‘I make lists,’ Honor said, shrugging. ‘Of things I must do.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘Of course.’ Then, ‘I used to have the most divine doctor, who gave me these little yellow pills that put me out like a light. Sometimes for days at a time. It was so simply heaven, you cannot imagine. If there was something I didn’t care for, or someone I was sick of, I simply counted out the pills – a couple more than he said – and swallowed them, and that was me gone, out, away.
’ She gazed off in silent contemplation.
Then, sadly, ‘The police found him and got terribly cross and took away his licence. So now I am back just as I was.’
‘They have put you with Fritzi, for the tennis,’ Honor said, to change the conversation. ‘I think they will want to begin soon.’
‘The cardboard prince,’ Elizabeth said. ‘How furious he must be. I amn’t in his plans at all.’
‘Does he have plans?’ Did everyone have plans?
‘Oh yes. Only he can’t work out how to put his plans in motion.’ Elizabeth gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘And that indecision may cost him everything.’
Honor was going to ask more – ask Elizabeth to be more definite in what she said – but she had already lost interest in the conversation.
‘Pass me a cigarette,’ she said, and Honor did, privately wondering how she could possibly sit there in bed and smoke, surrounded by last night’s squalor.
‘May I open a window?’ Honor asked.
‘No. And I say, I’m going to need a pair of shoes. I can’t play tennis in anything I have.’
‘I’ll have Molly find you something. But speaking of plans, I think you are getting in the way of Maureen’s.’
‘Duff?’
‘Yes, Duff.’
‘Serves her right,’ Elizabeth said, suddenly vicious. ‘Though it’s not my fault that he’d rather stay up with a bottle of brandy than go to bed with her.’
‘I’ll send Molly to you.’ Honor felt how much she needed to get out and away.
‘Yes, run away, there’s a dear.’ Elizabeth stretched out her legs and lay back against the headboard. She took a deep drag of her cigarette and reached an arm to flick ash into the half-full glass of water on the bedside table. The sheet held up under her arms began to slip.
Honor hurried out.