Chapter 1 An Unconventional Situation
Five weeks earlier
From the back kitchen, George heard the doorbell’s chime and went to answer it with a sigh.
She wasn’t in the best of spirits. Her period was two weeks late—just her rotten luck—and her back hurt from holding a position in Auden Quennel’s drafty studio.
George worked as an artist’s model, the least worst of several demimonde professions she’d dabbled in.
During today’s sitting, a mouse had run over her bare foot, making her jump up.
“Keep still!” shouted the rude bugger (Auden, not the mouse).
She had burst into tears, then wondered what the hell was wrong with her.
Usually she gave as good as she got. How else was a girl to survive in this blasted world?
In any event, her nice manners weren’t on full display to the tall, overcoated figure who stood on the doorstep. “Ye-es?” she said, holding the front door only slightly ajar. She peered at the man, who had an angular, clean-shaven face and dark shadows under his eyes.
“Good evening,” he said cordially. “Is Mrs. Honor Wilson at home?”
George opened the door a little wider. As the entrance hall’s electric chandelier subsumed the weak glow of the porch lamp, she assessed the stranger.
He was somewhere in his twenties, she decided, and not bad-looking.
Not her type, though. George liked well-fed men with twinkly eyes and languid movements.
Men who seemed durable, brimming with life.
“And you are?” she inquired. Some sort of charity collection, she suspected. Or one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“The name’s Jimmy Sullivan. I hope Mrs. Wilson won’t mind me dropping in like this. We knew each other years ago, you see.”
George didn’t see. In her conceptions of Honor’s past lives, there weren’t any young men who—she glanced down—wore crepe-soled shoes and spoke in unmistakable cockney tones. “You’d better come in,” she said. “I’ll go and see if Mrs. Wilson is at home.”
Mr. Sullivan stepped inside, bringing the mingled smell of fog, tobacco, and Old Spice.
George saw him look at her chest. Admirable at the best of times, it was emphasized by an accidentally shrunken white pullover, the only clean thing she’d had to wear that morning.
Men, she thought with infinite weariness.
They went into the drawing room, and she invited Mr. Sullivan to sit down.
Glancing around, he removed his hat and half smiled, perhaps a little awed by the surface grandeur of the high-ceilinged room, with its maroon velvet sofas and antique-looking rug, the cherub-carved marble fireplace and chandelier made of glass fruit.
As George left him alone, it crossed her mind that he might steal any number of things.
Or was she being a dreadful snob? Thievery was unconfined by class, after all.
One of her school friends had a brother in Wormwood Scrubs.
Wartime profiteering. Nevertheless, she hastened her step on the stairs.
Honor was in the so-called office, from which she published her literary quarterly, Vista.
At a glance, she appeared a handsome woman in her thirties.
Her eyes were a deep china blue, and her black hair was fashionably short, coaxed into waves around her white-powdered face.
The effect was striking; she looked like a silent-film star, or a French chanteuse in a faded professional photograph.
She had spindly fingers, indeed a spindly physique altogether, and wore neat high-necked blouses, jeweled brooches, and mannish trousers.
A pair of tortoiseshell spectacles hung around her neck on a gold chain.
She was seated at a large, squat desk with her back to the window, mustard-yellow curtains drawn against the dark evening.
On the desk was a typewriter, a glass holding an inch of whisky, and a jumble of typescripts, books, and magazines.
At her feet, almost hidden from view, lay her little white mongrel, Lulu.
“George, darling, whatever’s the matter?” she said by way of greeting. “You galloped up those stairs like you were running from an axe murderer. Is someone here?”
Robbie, cross-legged on the rug with some marked-up page proofs spread out in front of him, merely glared at George.
Robbie was thirty-two, but he had the thwarted, perplexed air of a teenager.
His hair didn’t help; wiry and buff-colored, it resisted all attempts to smooth it down.
When he wasn’t swatting hair from his forehead, he was pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.
Impatience emanated from him, as though he were unfairly held back from some glorious destiny.
Perhaps he was. The son of a parson in Dorking, he had planned to go straight to Cambridge from his middling provincial grammar school.
For years, he’d survived on the knowledge that at university, his evident genius (thus far underappreciated by the third-rate minds in his midst) would set in motion a virtually effortless ascent to renown.
The war got in the way, of course. Eventually, his youthful immodesty relinquished somewhere in North African enemy territory, he spent three undistinguished years at Downing College.
He then loitered, not entirely fruitlessly, on the fringes of the London literary world, until coming to Honor via a family connection.
That was nearly five years ago. He had a wife somewhere or other, but no one had ever met her.
“Nothing’s the matter,” began George, “but—”
“You do look cross. Doesn’t she look cross, Robbie?”
Robbie sighed as if making a huge effort and looked at George again. As usual, she got the feeling he disliked her. But what she’d done to offend him, she couldn’t imagine.
“You’ve a visitor,” she said. “A young fellow. Drat, what was his name? Jimmy something. I put him in the drawing room.”
“A writer, I imagine,” said Honor. “It’s a bit much, calling at this hour.
” She glanced at her wristwatch: gone six o’clock.
“Robbie, are you expecting someone?” Writers, invariably young men, occasionally came knocking with pages in hand, hopeful of an audience with Honor.
She enjoyed making someone’s day by praising their work.
This happened rarely. She also enjoyed taking some overentitled twerp down a peg, opportunities for which were more frequent.
Robbie began to deny he was expecting anyone, and George said, “He’s not a writer. At least, I don’t think so.”
Honor got to her feet, drank what was left in her glass, and said, “Ah well, no rest for the wicked!” She was incongruously prone to these washerwoman phrases. Another favorite was “This won’t get the greens on!” As if she knew one end of a cabbage from the other, thought Robbie.
George and Honor went downstairs. As they entered the drawing room, the visitor stood and came toward them. George felt Honor stiffen and gave her a sideways glance. Her nonchalant expression hadn’t altered.
Mr. Sullivan spoke first. “Good evening, Mrs. Wilson? As I was saying to the young lady, I hope I’m not intruding. I was wondering if we could have a talk.” He glanced at George. “Alone?”
“Gosh,” said Honor. “This is all very mysterious. Very well, then.” To George’s surprise, as she’d never known Honor to care about privacy, she added, “Be an angel and shut the door behind you, would you?”
Up in her room George kicked off her shoes, got into bed fully clothed, and pulled the grimy pink counterpane up to her neck.
Pondering on her absent period, she soon forgot about the visitor.
She was never late, was the thing. Obviously, if she was up the duff, she couldn’t have it.
It was simply a question of getting a hold of some money.
Whose fault was it, she wondered, other than her own?
She cast her mind back. Christopher Maidstone or Julian Fyfe, it was one or the other.
Julian was richer, but he was also a Roman Catholic.
Imagine if he proposed? George lit a cigarette and contemplated being Mrs. Julian Fyfe.
Mrs. Fyfe would carry a shopping basket and wear headsquares tied under the chin.
She’d make jam and give some to her neighbors, who’d think her a wonderful woman, a credit to her husband.
When she put on weight—for Mrs. Fyfe, bless her, could never resist a second slice of Victoria sponge—she wouldn’t mourn her nineteen-inch waist. She’d have more important things to worry about, like organizing the bring-and-buy sale for the Women’s Institute and ironing Mr. Fyfe’s shirts.
Suddenly nauseous, George stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette.
She’d go cap in hand to Christopher, then.
He already had a wife, so no fear there.
But even if she scrounged together the money, where did one find a safe abortionist?
A girl she knew had gone to a Harley Street man, who declared her mentally unfit to be a mother and thus was the operation done: quick, clean, and perfectly legal.
The trouble was, George doubted Chris’s funds would stretch to Harley Street.
And she didn’t fancy being classified as crackers. It felt like tempting fate.
There were her sisters: a farmer’s wife in Eastleigh who wore old tweeds and bred Alsatians, and a banker’s wife who did heaven knows what in an overdecorated house near Regent’s Park.
George was the youngest by some years—she’d been an unwelcome surprise—and she doubted either sister would offer much sympathy for her predicament, each being a mother several times over.
They took gleeful pleasure in talking about the revoltingness of the whole business, the bulging veins and stretch marks, the swollen breasts and leaky nethers.
Why should George get to opt out? she could imagine them thinking.
Wasn’t it high time she stopped gadding about having her portrait painted, or however she spent her days?