Sleeping Beauty (28 page)

As she tied the gown, another idea occurred to her. “Well, I’ll buy a house near Cambridge, a house like this one.”

James grimaced over his own arm as he stuck it into the sleeve of his suit coat. “Of course, it would have to be very, very tall to get as good a view of
the Mediterranean.” He was saying they shouldn’t try to find again exactly what they’d had here.

“All right, a little English cottage. Some roses in front, some honeysuckle in back over an arching trellis.” She laughed. “Maybe a little tributary with moorhens and coots. Or a pond with a swan.” She was being silly, trying to make him laugh.

He paused long enough for a labored smile. But he was thinking about it; he didn’t dismiss the idea outright.

Coco’s spirits took wing. Yes. The idea grew in her imagination. She said, “We could find a place in the countryside. A sweet little place of our own close enough for you to ride to it, for me to take the train from London. I could stay a week here and there, sometimes just for the weekend. You could drive to it after your last lecture or meeting.” Oh, yes. She said brightly, “You could even arrange your schedule so you have Fridays or Mondays free and—”

“Coco, I couldn’t do that. I can’t take off days and days from my work and still make adequate progress.”

“Well, we could find a house that was at least close enough so you could come for dinner, spend the night occasionally midweek.” She teased, “You eat dinner, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

He was serious. Sometimes his work kept him from eating a regular meal. She frowned.

He added quickly, “But it’s still a good plan. The best either of us has come up with.” He reached toward her, took her hands, and drew her to him. “And we’ll buy it together,” he added. “We’ll nei
ther one keep the other. It will belong to both of us. Our own cottage retreat out somewhere so remote no one will know, no one can bother us.”

A hideaway in the English countryside wasn’t a perfect solution, but what else could they do? “Yes. Our own private place. It will be the sweetest house. An oasis.”

He smiled back. “Absolutely. It’s what we’ll do. Can you come up in three days, after Commencement, to start looking?”

“Yes.” She laughed—laughter that started out light, sophisticated, vaguely cynical that became a hard, full-bellied cackle. A guffaw of delight.

Coco took the train back to San Remo that afternoon, where she closed up her house. She would stay in London till she and James had made their arrangements. She, the cook, and Lucia sealed up rooms and covered furniture with Coco humming to herself, daydreaming of England again. England, lovely, green England. Why had she ever thought Italy was prettier?

She boarded the train again the next day, in high spirits as she headed north. Her plans were to not even stop in London for the time being; she went straight to Cambridge. She’d stay with David, provided the honey was cleaned up. She’d find a hotel or another boardinghouse, if not. Lucia would stop in London and take care of opening the house there, making it habitable and comfortable again. Coco would go back and forth as need be.

She arrived in Cambridge only two days behind James, where she hired a carriage and headed toward her boardinghouse between the university
town and Grantchester. It was a glorious ride. Cambridgeshire was in the full, summer flower of early June; beautiful. David was waiting for her when she arrived. He waved from a second-story window.

Coco stepped out of the hired carriage, waving at him overhead. The sun was high and warm, the sky was a bright, cloudless blue. What a day, she thought.

She didn’t even see Phillip till he was lifting her bag from the boot.

An hour earlier, while Coco was still on the train clattering along toward Cambridge, James had walked into his rooms at All Souls, glanced at his front parlor, then thought, Well, where the hell was Nowles, and why hadn’t he put away the books James had used last night?

It took a moment more for James to understand what had happened. He frowned as he set down a case of rocks he’d been carrying. He hadn’t used so many books as all that, he thought. And Nowles had cleaned them up, hadn’t he? Were these there this morning? It was such a mess that James himself began to pick them up.

Indeed, books lay everywhere. Books and papers. And Nowles had nothing to do with the matter. James’s rooms had been ransacked. As if someone had gone through every bookcase, looking for something. The drawers to James’s desk at the back of the room gaped open. Everything on his desktop was in a chaos other than his own making; he didn’t recognize the order. The place was upside down.

“Ah. There you are.”

James startled, then turned.

His legs crossed, a book in his lap, Phillip Dunne sat on James’s sofa. He sat at an arm, where James himself usually sat while instructing and occasionally grilling undergraduates in geology during a supervision.

In Phillip’s lap lay James’s African journal.

James scowled at the book. “Yes. Here I am. And here
you
are. Who the hell did this?” He looked at the mess again, waiting as if Phillip might have a reasonable explanation.

Phillip cleared his throat, a small
ahem
. “I did, actually.” Before James could demand to know why, the Vice-Chancellor raised one eyebrow, a superior arch that challenged James to say differently. “I needed to read your journal. You said I could, so I helped myself.”

“Yes, but I rather thought you’d ask for it politely. Then I’d get it for you.” James allowed himself to cast his eyes around the office again. “My God, Phillip,” was all he could say. His file cabinet was dumped out onto the floor. Next to this scatter of paper lay his records of examinations, his supervision appointments, his lecture notes for next week.

There was more here than a simple search for some travel notes.

“Why did you do this?” he asked.

“Athers.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch, Phillip. You turned the room inside out, not Nigel.”

Phillip defended quickly, “He wants these.” He tapped the tattered binding in his lap. “He’s rabid, James. It’s the gold.” He cleared his throat again. “I’ve been told we’ll be facing a court demand by
the end of the week for your journal, logs, every last piece of bumfodder involved with the expedition. It will be served on you, and you’ll have no choice but to hand these all over. I needed to see what they said.” He paused, then added, “James, he’s claiming you helped your fellow expedition members along to their deaths, that you have gold tucked away of your own, that you did a heinous thing for gold and glory.”

James didn’t know what to say for a moment. He frowned. “Then you’re here to try to decide if there is merit to the accusation? To decide if I would murder a hundred and forty-seven of my friends and colleagues?” He felt compelled to add, “I didn’t, you know. Nor can I believe anyone, let alone you, would think I could.”

Phillip shook his head. “I know, I know. It’s terrible. I don’t believe you would hurt anyone, not intentionally.”

Whatever that meant; small relief. “Phillip, you can’t be so frightened of the truth here. We have to stand on what we know and on our righteous indignation if anyone, Nigel or otherwise, says differently. We can appeal to the Crown—”

“And the first thing it would want is to have a look at your African notes.”

“Fine.”

“Not fine. James, James, James.” Phillip stood, clucking his tongue, shaking his head wistfully, as if speaking to a dull child. He sighed. “I’ve glanced through them, old boy.” His eyes became direct. He blew air out through his compressed lips, before he said, “There are things here”—he held up papers, loose pages he had come away with in his
hand—“that make you look bad: concocting poison with the natives, maunderings about England and your Englishness. Can’t have it. Can’t have my man looking—well, like he’s running with the lost boys, spearing things, playing savage.”

Ah. James began to understand his crime.

“Nigel is right to want these,” Phillip continued, “if he means to impugn you. These make you look bad. Can’t have it, James.” He paused before he said, with no give, no latitude for negotiation, “I want them now. I’m taking them. I’m going to hide them, bury them, if I have to.”

James took the words as they were no doubt meant: as a veiled threat to disavow him, to hand him over—to
help
Athers—if he didn’t do as he was told. He would look jolly English and valiant, or he would be labeled suspect, a traitor. Investigated as a fraud and possibly a murderer.

James went to the sofa where Phillip had left the rest of his journal. He closed the rest of his notes into their rotting binder, making neat his poor, loose, vulnerable pages. He had to use both hands to hold them all intact; Phillip had not been kind to them. James slid the bundle to him so he could redo the ties; he tied up Africa: his two years with his friends, his year and a half alone, the only Englishman, only white man to be found in a hundred miles or more, the whole experience tied together with string. He lifted it up, offering the slightly neater package to Phillip.

It was actually, physically hard to let it go as Phillip took it.

A span of silence opened as the two men faced each other.

Then Phillip asked, “Are you sleeping with her?”

“What?”

“Coco. Kelnicker said he saw you coming out of Tolly’s a month ago with a black-haired woman. Tuttleworth thinks you fancy her. And I keep remembering your bolting from the table the night I asked her to marry me.” With hardly a pause, he added, “I could if I wanted to, you know. I hardly give a damn anymore. I mean, I’ll do my best, but if I go under, I go under. But you—” He let the thought linger, unfinished. “Are you?” he asked again. Then couldn’t resist saying, “It would be so stupid, you know, for a man with your ambitions.”

James blinked, staring at Phillip. He could hardly believe he was hearing these words from a man who for years had conducted a clandestine affair with the same woman, an affair so well managed that no one had even suspected, not even James. Phillip’s righteous posture didn’t make James feel angry so much as worn, frayed at the edges. He said wearily, “Right. No, I’m not her lover.” What did Phillip expect? Honesty, for godssake?

Phillip nodded. He believed him. Well Phillip should: James had never lied to him before.

Lying here was of course the right thing to do. Yet it felt strange doing so—sad, oddly destructive. Like striking a flint to dry grass, dead grass, watching it ignite. The expedient of the lie admitted their friendship was over. Or a piece of it, anyway. And like a grass fire, James feared, once the pretense began, it would be all but impossible to contain.

Chapter 19

“W
-why are you here?” Coco managed to say, as Phillip took her bag from the carriage.

“Just dropped in on David,” Phillip explained. “I’m seeing a lot of him, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoy his company, Coco. You did a damn fine job with our son.”

“Th-thank you.” She frowned as she followed him inside.

Despite his reputed bad back, he carried her heavy bag with a bounce to his step. He dumped it at the foot of the stairs, and immediately turning around, said, “We can get that upstairs later. Come have tea with me, will you?”

“I—ah—”

“Only for a minute. David and I are off to the cricket match.” He wiggled his eyebrows with enthusiasm. “Front row seats in the pavilion at Fenner’s.” He took her elbow.

Coco found herself being guided into the boardinghouse’s small eating common. Several young men held down a table by the unlit fireplace, strag
glers from elevenses tea. Phillip waved at them, calling them by name while he escorted her toward the interior pass-through window that opened into the kitchen. There, he ordered them both tea, then leaned on the counter, waiting for it.

He purely beamed at her for several seconds, before he said, “I’ve been dying to talk to you. Been thinking of you.”

Coco tried to be positive, supportive of an old friend who’d recently lost his wife. Though she couldn’t say that Phillip looked bereaved. In fact, he seemed in fine feather, able to take some of the old pleasure in life she remembered.

Then he added, “You and me and David.”

She was set back by the juxtaposition, but was determined, in the short amount of time before his cricket game, not to nitpick her way into an argument. Besides, why begrudge a new widower his good spirit?

David, she told herself. David was making him happier. Or a combination of David and the weight of Wilhelmina Dunne lifted finally from her husband’s shoulders. David had helped Phillip with the funeral arrangements. Lady Dunne had been buried in London four days ago. Whatever sort of grieving Phillip was doing, he was doing it while putting a very good face to the world.

He shifted on his feet, toward her slightly, saying, “You know, I’ve been thinking. He shouldn’t be David Wild. He should be David Dunne. He
is
David Dunne. Always has been. And if you and I got together, no one would even think twice—”

“Whatever you and David want to do, do it. But leave me out of it.” Coco tried not to sound as
annoyed and severe as she was beginning to feel. “So far as I’m concerned,” she said, “Horace is David’s legal father today, just as he was when David was six.”

“Except that he wasn’t. And isn’t. Some things should be set right, Coco—”

“And some things can’t be.” She held his eyes a moment, pressed her lips, then gave up. Pointless. She had never won a dispute with Phillip. He always thought he knew all the answers.

Nonetheless, he stood quietly for a moment, leaning on the counter till a tray bumped his elbow. He jumped, then took it. He carried their tea and accoutrements to a table with Coco following, with Coco wishing she were somewhere, anywhere else.

He set the tray down, pulled out a chair for her. As he set her chair in from behind her, he leaned over her shoulder and murmured, “No matter what you think, no matter how late I am with it, I want to square myself with David. Let me sign the papers.”