Chapter 2 Living Cheek by Jowl
On the stairs Robbie and George, hearing animated voices and laughter, exchanged a bemused glance.
They entered the drawing room to see Honor and her guest sitting on a sofa, both in an alert, raised-chin posture.
Saul Reznikov, the poet-refugee who lived in the basement, sat on the facing sofa, a drink in his hand and Lulu the dog in his lap.
As he stroked Lulu’s head, he wore his habitual expression of abstracted benevolence.
Catching George’s eye, he conveyed with a lightning-fast smile-shrug that he, too, had no idea what was going on.
“Ah, here they are,” said Honor. “Allow me to present Mr. Robbie Trafford and the Honorable Miss Georgina Mountford-Owen—though of course you’ve already met. George is very much the linchpin of our little coterie, aren’t you?”
George offered a wan smile and went to make herself a drink.
“This is Mr. James Sullivan,” continued Honor. “An old family friend.” On the last word her voice quavered almost imperceptibly. Between her long fingers she twisted the fraying fringe of a cushion.
If I didn’t know better, thought Robbie, I’d say she was nervous.
But the man standing up and extending his hand didn’t seem at all frightening.
He was tall and narrow-hipped, wearing a forest-green sweater, dun-colored corduroy trousers, and black suede brothel-creepers.
His dark hair was close-cropped, and freckles faintly dusted his hands and face.
There was something callow about him, something innocent and unworldly, that made Robbie think of the young privates he’d fought beside.
“How do you do,” he said, grasping Mr. Sullivan’s hand extra firmly.
“Pleased to meet you,” returned Mr. Sullivan, saying it as a single four-syllable word. “And please, call me Jimmy.” He sat back down and looked at Honor, as if for guidance.
George, who was busying herself with a whisky bottle and soda siphon, asked over her shoulder if Robbie wanted one.
He didn’t normally drink, being irrationally fearful of what he might say or do under alcohol’s disinhibiting influence.
But the strangeness of the occasion seemed to warrant a loosening of his rules.
He was unnerved, too, by George’s news. What did she mean by telling him?
He hated keeping secrets. And her predicament was the ultimate irresponsibility.
Extramarital sex was one thing—he took no moral position on either side—but innocent babies ought to have willing mothers.
His estranged wife, Pamela, had used an apparatus whose intricacies he took care to know nothing about.
Suffice it to say, she knew what she was doing.
She always did; she was an extremely capable girl.
He accepted the drink George proffered, watching uneasily as she sat down next to Saul and took several unflinching gulps from her own glass.
Robbie, rather than sit too close to anyone, pulled over a cane-backed chair with deflated upholstery.
As he sat, broken springs jabbed him. He shifted and tried to think of something to say.
George leaned forward and addressed Jimmy. “You’re a family friend, are you? How…” She paused to concentrate on accepting a cigarette from Saul’s silver case. “How nice. What’s the connection? Honor’s past is an enigma to us. Has she always been such a dark horse?”
Honor stared at her in frank astonishment.
Jimmy cleared his throat. “Well,” he began, “my mother—”
Honor interrupted. “Jimmy’s mother was in service at my grandmother’s house, in Windsor.
We were all devoted to Mrs. Sullivan. Sully, we called her.
The kindest of women. Jimmy used to visit on school holidays, didn’t you, Jimmy dear, and when my cousins and I were staying, we would all play together. ”
Robbie considered dubiously if Honor and Jimmy were close enough in age to have played together as children.
He placed Honor at around thirty-eight. As for Jimmy, it was difficult to tell.
But there was surely a decade between them.
At minimum. So it didn’t quite add up. He tried to picture Honor as a child. It was impossible.
“Have you lived in London before?” Saul asked Jimmy.
Jimmy hesitated, then said, “I haven’t, no. As Mrs. Wilson said, I grew up near Windsor. Always wanted to live in London, though.”
“What did you do in the war?” asked Robbie.
“Really, Robbie!” said Honor, laughing. “As if anyone wants to talk about the war. The point is that Jimmy is going to live here, at least while he looks for a new job.”
Jimmy, glancing from Robbie to Honor, nodded. “I’m ever so grateful. And I promise not to get under anyone’s feet. You won’t even know I’m here.”
“Nonsense,” said Honor, patting his knee. “Saul, darling, how about some music?”
Saul, who kept his own collection of gramophone records in the drawing room, chose a Shostakovich symphony. Its strings blared out with, thought Robbie, profound foreboding. He shivered and looked at his empty glass. Probably a bad idea to have another.
In showy appreciation of the music, Honor placed her hand on her chest and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked around and frowned. “Now, Jimmy, there is someone missing. Has anyone seen Wilhelmina? Is she at that job of hers?”
She spoke, thought Robbie, as if Mina’s job were a needless frivolity. As if Honor weren’t the one charging the girl rent, due promptly each Friday.
“I believe the only evenings she works are Fridays and Sundays,” said Saul unexpectedly. “On those days, she lets me in without a ticket after the program has started. If the auditorium isn’t full, naturally. Dear girl.”
Robbie felt slighted; Mina had never offered him this favor.
Saul belonged to that magical club of men whom women adored, a club Robbie had no hope of joining.
The trick, he suspected, was being handsome but purporting not to realize it.
Saul was in his forties, the most attractive male age in Robbie’s opinion, and knew how to look understatedly suave.
His shirts were always crisply ironed, his ties spotless, even though he had no woman taking care of him.
Noticing an ink stain on his own shirt cuff, Robbie pulled his threadbare sweater sleeve over it.
“Where’s your accent from,” Jimmy was saying to Saul, “if you don’t mind me asking? It’s not English, is it?”
Saul smiled. “How clever of you to notice. The place I’m from no longer exists.
I come from Bukovina. Which means I was born in the Austrian Empire.
Then, when I was a child, the Bukovina became part of Romania.
Today, it is gone from the map. Poof!” He made a fist and flung his fingers open, like a magician revealing a vanished coin.
To this startling answer, Jimmy could only blink and nod.
Robbie felt sorry for him, and said to Saul, “But geographically, your birthplace is in the Ukraine now, is that right?”
“Indeed so,” said Saul. He turned back to Jimmy. “I have lived in your country for nearly six years.”
“Will you stay forever, do you think?” asked Jimmy, back on firmer ground.
“That depends. If I am allowed to, then yes. Why not?”
Why not indeed, everyone murmured, as the slam of the front door shook the house, signaling Mina’s arrival.
Honor sent George to fetch her, and the girls’ voices drifted in from the entrance hall.
Robbie, sitting nearest the ajar door, heard Mina say, “But I look a fright. It’s filthy out tonight. All right, let me hang my coat up.”
Mina followed George into the drawing room and saw, unusually, all the residents sitting together, along with a man she’d never seen before.
He looked clean and tidy, but she knew, before he’d even opened his mouth, that he wasn’t of means (a kind girl will never encourage advances from a man in a subordinate position).
Beetle-crusher shoes, for a start. She stopped caring about the droplets of sleet clinging to her drooping pin curls and the ladder creeping up her stocking.
Honor made the introductions. He had good teeth, noticed Mina.
She’d give him that. Saul offered to get her a drink.
She saw they were all drinking whisky, which in her opinion tasted like gasoline.
“A drink?” she said, as if equally tempted and scandalized.
“I’ll have a very small sherry, if I may.
” She looked at Honor, who was normally a right stingy cow with the booze.
But apparently it was a very special occasion, as Honor just smiled.
Mina sat on the end of the sofa (back straight, ankles crossed) next to George.
Saul handed her a large sherry with a smile.
He was a good old sort. A Jew, of course, and a foreigner.
But Mina took as she found. And Saul had always been kind to her.
Said she reminded him of his daughter. They got separated in Hitler’s war, Saul and his daughter, and he never saw her again. Nor his wife. Poor sod.
“Have you been out somewhere nice this evening, Mina darling?” asked Honor. Nosy parker, thought Mina. What business was it of hers?
“I had an extra dancing class with Mr. Romano,” she said.
“He’s not at all satisfied with our progress on the slow foxtrot.
You know what a taskmaster he is!” Gabriele Romano from Florence—né Malcolm Sidebottom from Yorkshire—was a stalwart of Mrs. Morley’s Charm Academy for Young Ladies, much relied upon for his expertise in deportment, carriage, and sitting.
Mina squirmed to remember how, as an uninitiate, she would sit with her hips too near the edge of a chair.
“Ever been to the Lyceum Ballroom in Covent Garden?” asked Jimmy. “I can just imagine you there, on the dance floor.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” said Mina. “I’ve been invited a few times, though.”