Chapter 1 #3
‘They do, I’m afraid.’ His own friends. His own family, sometimes. His father, certainly, rarely spoke about him. But Edwin was always there. The golden ghost.
He looked across at Clementine and sensed he had found something precious.
He had waited long enough. Sometimes, he had thought he would never find anyone to melt his frozen heart.
That he would just have to find someone to marry whom he could tolerate, rather than adore, which wouldn’t be fair on them, because no one wanted to be merely tolerated.
But here his heart was, beating away deep inside him, pumping blood around his veins, reaching every corner of him, like warm treacle, melting away all those chips of ice.
As James brought them their wine, he held up his glass to her.
‘Well. Here we are. Wilton’s on a Tuesday.’
‘I know,’ she sighed happily. ‘Isn’t it bliss?’
They chatted easily, offering each other titbits of information so they could put each other into context.
Alfie told her about his family’s paint factory, and how they had made specialist paint during the war: anti-glint paint, to stop glass from catching the enemy’s eye; fire-resistant paint to coat the rafters of buildings; black-out paint for windows, and a special kind of gloss that held shattered glass together if a building was bombed.
‘We made a lot of money, but we saved a lot of buildings and a lot of lives.’
‘That’s how we won the war. People thinking on their feet and making sacrifices. Not being afraid to change.’
‘Yes.’ He was glad she understood. He gave a wry grin. ‘And now we’re back to normal, churning out common or garden paint for people’s homes. Anyway, enough about that. Tell me about you.’
Clementine told him about her work at the gallery. She was more than just her brother Ben’s assistant. She was charged with keeping her eye out for new artists for them to exhibit.
‘I’ve found this incredible young Scottish artist I’m very excited about. I’m hoping Ben will agree to an exhibition later this year. His work’s very intricate and delicate but quite challenging. Visceral. I can feel it here.’ She put a fist on her solar plexus.
He loved the way her eyes shone when she spoke about her protégé.
He could see how deeply she cared. He knew a bit about her world through Edwin, of course, so was able to show more than polite interest. She had so much more spark than most of the girls he knew, who thrived on gossip and speculating how much money people had.
Suddenly, the Pouilly Fuissé was drained and little bowls of lemon soufflé were empty in front of them. He didn’t want the night with her to end, but end it must.
Alfie insisted on taking Clementine back to her flat in Kensington in a taxi even though she told him she’d be all right on the bus.
They stood outside on the pavement, under a flowering cherry which filled his head with its glorious scent.
The taxi was waiting on the other side of the road to take him on to Pimlico, engine idling, and the driver spread his newspaper out over the steering wheel.
He was used to prolonged farewells. It was an occupational hazard.
‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’ Clementine was gazing up at him. ‘I think it might be the nicest I’ve ever had.’
‘Wilton’s is always good.’
She nudged his arm with her elbow. ‘I didn’t mean the food, though it was delicious. I meant the company.’
‘Oh.’ He went pink with pleasure.
The taxi driver pipped his horn, making them both jump.
‘You’d better go. The meter’s running.’
He didn’t want to, but she was right. He hesitated, not sure what to do, whether to lean in to kiss her cheek politely or offer his hand or put his hands in his pockets and shuffle off.
He wasn’t usually so reticent. Kisses were easily obtainable these days, yet something was holding him back.
What if she didn’t want to be kissed? The thought of rejection was too much to bear—
Suddenly he felt her arms around his neck, and her warm mouth on his.
He’d been so lost in his dilemma, she must have tired of waiting for him to make the first move.
Her kiss was fleeting, yet underpinned with urgency, just long enough to be a promise of something more.
Nigel had warned him, he remembered now, not to be taken in by Clementine’s demure exterior. Clementine’s kiss was … breathtaking.
She disentangled herself, laughing at his startled expression.
‘Go! Or the cab fare will be more than the dinner bill.’
He didn’t care about the fare. He grabbed her, pulled her close, wrapping her up in his arms. She gave a squeak of surprise just before he put his lips on hers again, taking control, gentle but fierce.
After a few moments their kiss became languid, exploratory, a kiss that could last until the end of time.
She pressed herself against him and he could feel their hearts crashing together and he thought maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be all right, and he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life pretending after all.
‘You’ll know, when it happens,’ Edwin had once told him. ‘If you have to wonder, it’s not the real thing. But when it does happen …’ he searched for the words – ‘it’s overwhelming. Everything joins up. Your mind, your heart, your soul, your body. It’s like being electrified.’
Alfie was riveted but wasn’t sure he entirely understood.
He’d still been a gangly teen, with little access to female company because of the war, but of course the whole subject of women and what they did to you, intentionally or unintentionally, was intriguing, and Edwin was his only access to information.
The funny thing was, Alfie didn’t think Edwin was talking about his fiancée when he talked about being electrified.
Meg was the daughter of one of their father’s friends from Oxford, a Rhodes scholar and now a wealthy businessman in New York.
Meg and Edwin had fallen in love when she came to London on holiday one summer and his parents had offered her a room in the family flat.
Their wedding had been postponed when war broke out, and nobody knew when it would be rearranged, of course, because no one knew when it was all going to end, and Edwin hadn’t seen Meg since the August before the beginning of the war.
The last time Alfie had seen them together, Edwin hadn’t looked like he did now, eyes shining, almost fizzing with some kind of energy.
He didn’t like to quiz him further, for he wasn’t sure what to ask, and it unsettled him.
He had wondered, after that illuminating conversation, if Edwin had met someone else?
It wasn’t unlikely. He was still living at the family flat in London, in between postings.
Being a war artist had a certain cachet, and Alfie knew enough about women to know they might not find the presence of an American fiancée an obstacle.
He knew the truth now, of course, but he always pushed it to the back of his mind, for he was the only one party to his brother’s secret. And now he understood why Edwin had been able to describe the feeling in such detail, for he felt exactly the same. Electrified.
Clementine had set his blood on fire. When he looked in the mirror, he saw the same slightly dazed and completely bedazzled expression he’d seen on Edwin.
And when he touched her, it turned him inside out.
Did she feel the same? He thought perhaps.
They had met nearly every day since their dinner at Wilton’s three weeks’ ago, unless she had a private view or he had an event.
At lunchtimes, they sat on a bench by the pelicans in St James’s Park, because it was halfway between her brother’s gallery and the dusty old cellars he and Freddie were renting on Pall Mall.
‘We Arbutuses love a pelican,’ Alfie told her. ‘It’s our family crest.’
He showed her the signet ring on his little finger, which bore the crest of a mother pelican pecking her breast to draw blood to feed her offspring.
‘It looks a bit gruesome, but it’s to show her loyalty to her children,’ he explained.
‘I love it,’ said Clementine, admiring the bloodstone, tracing her finger over the engraving, pressing it into her flesh to see if the image would print itself on her skin.
‘It’s my birthday in two weeks,’ Alfie said, on impulse. ‘Would you come to Foxwood? I always have a birthday tea in the garden.’
He’d never taken a girl back to Foxwood before.
It was his haven, and he was very possessive of it.
Protective, even. Girls were for London, for gallivanting and larking about.
Foxwood was for his more reflective side, for it was still full of shadows, of memories, and the thought of taking someone there and having to pretend that it wasn’t was daunting.
But he could already imagine Clementine lying on a rug on the lawn, eyes half closed while the clouds scudded about above her.
Somehow, he thought she would understand, without him having to explain, that even though Foxwood was everyone’s idea of the perfect English country house, and everyone in it seemed gilded, it held heartache in its walls.
But it was still special. He could never turn his back on it.
And he knew it was where he belonged, ultimately.
Dancing the night away at the Astor Club, rife with dukes and gangsters, or the jazz-filled Flamingo, was a rite of passage.
They were places you passed through on your way to real life.
‘I’d love that.’ She squeezed his hand, as if to say, ‘I know how much this means’, and they sat there in the sunshine, each of them privately wondering what on earth would have happened if they hadn’t turned up to the engagement party they’d each had no desire to go to.