The Ashford Affair (22 page)

This one was called The Garden of Eden, the garden represented by a few bare flagstones of outdoor space done up with a handful of desolate-looking potted shrubs and hanging lanterns made to look like apples.

It was official. Addie detested nightclubs,

She had been to enough of them to make a survey. For the last month, she had racketed from one end of London to the other with Bea’s set. She had painted her lips an unbecoming red in a fruitless effort to blend in, pinning back her modest dresses to achieve the requisite low-backed effect. It always looked wrong on her, somehow. She looked wrong. She couldn’t mimic their drawling slang, their casual hyperbole. “Too, too utterly shame making!” shrieked one of Bea’s friends. They spoke of topics that bored Addie and of people she didn’t know.

Addie knew they thought her boring. She couldn’t blame them. She was boring with them. All of her enthusiasms stuck in her throat. They wouldn’t want to hear about Fernie’s experiments in spiritualism (Fernie had been quite convinced that she had got a message from her dead fiancé on the Ouija board the other day, although no one, including Fernie, had been able to make the least bit of sense out of it), or Addie’s success in persuading the printer to allow the
Review
more credit or the hilarious spectacle of the office cat getting snarled in a typewriter ribbon, yowling furiously and leaving streaks of ink over everything and everyone as he led them a merry chase around the office until finally brought to bay behind the junior poetry editor’s desk. They didn’t want to hear about the lecture she had been to on political economy or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

How could anyone hear the mermaids singing each to each among this din?

It was her deb year all over again. Bored and boring, she trailed in Bea’s wake yearning to go home. She knew everyone thought Bea a perfect martyr for taking her on. So dull, darling! Too, too yawn making!

In the midst of the fray, she could see Frederick making his way through, creating little eddies as he passed.

He did look very handsome in his evening togs, Addie thought wistfully. Not in the way Marcus was handsome, full and fair and English, but with a wiry, dark poise, as if he were made out of paper stretched over wire, intricate and precarious. He had some of that quicksilver quality she had always envied in Bea, that odd combination of vitality and grace.

Bea’s friend Rosita leaned close to shout something in his ear. Addie saw the flare of his lighter as he held it to Rosita’s cigarette. That was Frederick, lighter always at the ready, always game for another glass.

Gone was the man who had debated poetry with Addie, and sat rapt through a concerto that sounded to Addie like the pounding of feet on the stairs of a bus. This was a different, worldlier Frederick, a Frederick whose smile touched only one side of his mouth and whose slightest statement was double-edged and honed to cut. He fit in beautifully with Bea’s set so beautifully that it was easy to forget he had originally been Addie’s discovery and not Bea’s.

Addie wasn’t sure she liked this Frederick.

“Here you go.” Frederick shouldered his way into her protected alcove. She had found a bit of high ground above the dance floor, two steps up, in the lee of a stone embrasure, guarded by a screen of those silly pots. There was a rickety wrought-iron table and chairs, uncomfortable and rust tinged but better than nothing. “Your libation, fair lady.”

He had picked up their habit of speech, the insouciant, mocking tone; or maybe that had always been his and she just hadn’t realized it, hearing only what she wanted to hear.

Was this what Bea had meant about the goblin fruit? That with exposure Addie would realize it tasted only of ash?

“Thank you.” Addie took the cup from him, some sort of dubious mixture with a lemon peel floating on top. It looked as though they had haphazardly dropped in the contents of half a dozen bottles and stirred. If this was goblin fruit, it tasted not of ash but of very strong liquor, inexpertly mixed. She took a sip and tried not to gag. “It’s lovely.”

“They call it an Adam and Eve.” He propped an elbow on the stone embrasure behind him, uncorking the silver flask that lived in the inside pocket of his jacket. “Designed to bring you straight back to a state of nature.”

Addie hunched her shoulders. Her wrap had been designed for the interior of a warm ballroom, not a December garden. “I wouldn’t mind a few extra fig leaves right now.”

Frederick blinked, then frowned. “Devil take it, you’re half-blue. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Addie gamely lifted her glass. “I’m sure this will warm me right up!” If it didn’t lay her flat out in the process.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said briskly. “You’re all over gooseflesh.”

He shrugged out of his jacket and set it around her shoulders. Still warm from his body, it smelled of tobacco, brandy, and Frederick.

“Thank you.” Addie pulled the coat close around her shoulders, fighting an entirely unreasoning sense of pride at wearing
his
jacket. Idiot, she told herself. It meant nothing at all, other than rudimentary good manners. “But won’t you be cold?”

Frederick unlooped the white silk scarf from his neck and draped it around hers. “Me? I’m steaming. Bloody hot for December.” He staggered a bit as he stepped back, and Addie noticed that his color was high, his eyes bloodshot. “Too much dancing.”

“Perhaps you ought to go home,” Addie suggested tentatively.

“And miss all the fun?” He gestured out at the dance floor. There was the inevitable jazz band blaring away on the other side, trombones and trumpets and someone making an unconscionable rattle with a pair of cymbals.

Bea was in the midst of it all, ethereal in an ice-blue silk frock. She was modeling the policeman’s helmet Geordie had pinched from Rector’s, posing with it, evading mock attempts to pinch it back. Addie could hear her laugh, too high-pitched, too loud, just a little bit drunk. Addie would have gone over and hugged her, but she knew her sympathy wasn’t wanted, that it would destroy the impression Bea was trying to create.

It was all about Marcus, of course. Addie had spotted him as soon as they came in, everyone fighting over the policeman’s helmet, elbowing one another back and forth. Bea had been laughing and jostling with the rest, until suddenly she wasn’t. It was only the briefest pause, a,
What, darling? It’s the band—too deaf making!
but Addie had looked where Bea had looked and seen him there, in an alcove with Bunny.

Would you like to go?
Addie had whispered to Bea quietly, so the others couldn’t hear.

Why would I?
Bea had said haughtily, and sailed off into the thick of the fray to make a spectacle of herself, a spectacle entirely wasted on her husband, cozy in his corner with Bunny.

“I’m not sure ‘fun’ is quite the word,” said Addie, thinking of Bea watching Marcus watching Bunny.

“You don’t like this, do you?” Frederick said suddenly. He peered at her with the concentrated stare of the inebriated. “Why?”

Because I don’t fit in, she wanted to say. Because my pearls are paste and my dress looks wrong and you only dance with me because you have to.

“I don’t like places where you can’t hear yourself speak,” she said priggishly. “As for the drinks—have you tasted them?”

“Toss ’em down faster,” he said. “Then you don’t have to bother with the taste.”

Addie looked with distaste at her Adam and Eve. “But if you don’t like something, why have it in the first place?”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll have it,” he said, and took her drink from her.

“It’s not just the drink,” said Addie unhappily. “It’s all of this. I just don’t see the
point.
Going from place to place, complaining that it’s just too boring or too hot or too crowded, only to go on to another just like it, and then doing it all again the night after that.”

“The point, my dear girl,” Frederick said, “is enjoying oneself. Enjoying oneself right into oblivion. Or, if the do-gooders are right, straight into damnation.” He eyed the liquid in his glass skeptically, shrugged, and downed a hearty swig. “But, then, damnation is waiting for us whether we will or no. At least we’ll have trod our measure along the way. A measure, a measure, a measure full of pleasure. Are you sure you wouldn’t like it?”

He offered her the glass. Addie batted it away, and Frederick laughed. It was a singularly unpleasant laugh.

Addie wiggled upright in her seat, grabbing at his jacket as it started to slide from her shoulders. “I just don’t see how one can countenance the idea of living purely for pleasure—especially when most of it isn’t so pleasant at all! Cocktails that taste like petrol and dancing to music that’s hardly music and laughing like loons at jokes that aren’t the least bit funny and then waking up with a bad head the next morning. It’s a waste.”

“Oh?” said Frederick lazily, stretching an arm out across the back of her chair. Even through the jacket, his touch made her skin prickle. She hated herself for that, for wanting him despite all of this, all of these wasted, miserable evenings.

“Yes,” she said sharply. “It’s a waste. It’s a waste of time and energy and intellect.”

Frederick rolled his head slightly to the side so he could look at her. “You left out money,” he drawled.

“I’m not concerned about money,” she said primly. “It’s the waste of talent that concerns me.”

Frederick rummaged in his pocket for his cigarette case. “Don’t moralize,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“What does suit me, then?” she demanded. “Pinning back the backs of my dresses in the middle of December? Making conversation I can’t remember a moment later—and wouldn’t care to if I did? Competing for the attention of buffoons in dinner jackets who think it’s the height of wit to pinch a policeman’s helmet?” She could hear her voice rising and she didn’t care. She’d had enough, enough of being patronized and ignored and made to feel small. “I never knew before what Shakespeare meant by an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, but now I do. I see it right before me, night after night, and I don’t like it and I won’t pretend I do, not for anyone.”

So there. She’d had enough, enough of this, enough of him, enough, enough, enough.

Frederick leaned both hands on the metal table. The table gave under his weight, causing him to stagger slightly, but his eyes didn’t leave hers.

“You haven’t the slightest idea, have you?” he said softly. “You want Shakespeare? I can give you Shakespeare. ‘I could be banded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, but that I have bad dreams.’ Do you know what it is to have bad dreams, mouse?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said with frustration.

“It has everything to do with everything.” He pushed abruptly away, making the table rock. Addie’s drink sloshed over the edge of the glass, spilling through the slats of the table, staining the crepe de chine of her dress. “See that man over there? The one coughing into his companion’s handkerchief?”

“Yes? What of it?” She knew him, vaguely, and didn’t think much of him. He’d married an American heiress and gone on to spend her money on cigarette girls.

“He got a dose of gas in Bethune. Not by the Bosh, by our side. They’d brought the wrong sort of spanners. The cylinders cracked. Do you know what it’s like to be trapped in a trench with a lungful of yellow gas? Do you know what a man looks like after he’s been gassed? You can’t even begin to comprehend the stench of it.”

Addie blinked at him, confused. He never spoke of the war. She had alluded once or twice, tentatively, to his war record, but each time he had changed the subject quickly enough to make her head spin, turning her question to the side with a joke or an observation about the scenery.

“But didn’t you have masks?” asked Addie timidly.

Frederick’s face was a study in bitterness. “Our masks were a mockery. You’d like the resonance of that, wouldn’t you? A mere masque of a mask, all form and no function. They looked well enough for the papers back at home, but they didn’t do a bally thing to keep out the fumes.” He fished her abandoned drink up from the table and knocked it down. “A nice sort of poetic justice all around. We unleashed it and it killed us.”

“But now that we know,” ventured Addie, feeling on firmer ground here—hadn’t
The Bloomsbury Review
printed an article on just this topic?—“we know better. The League of Nations—”

“The League of Nations is a sham. It’s not worth the paper on which its charter is written.” He stared into the empty glass, looking up with sudden violence. “No, it’s worse than a sham. It’s a scam. The idealists bustle around it like so many deluded ants while the realists go and stockpile their weaponry in private.”

“But now that we’ve learned how horrid war is, surely people will want peace—”

Frederick’s voice was like a lash. “People don’t want peace; they want revenge. You thought the last war was bad? Just wait and see. They’ll come up with more and better. More gas, more trenches, more maimed men screaming.” His face twisted. “There’s a peculiar sound a shell makes just before it’s about to fall. A whistling noise. Can’t you hear it, Addie? That’s where we are now, just waiting for the next shell before the screaming begins.”

She felt cold, cold straight through in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. She swallowed hard. “But—but, surely,” she said, “if we can just make sure people
remember.
” She could feel herself beginning to babble. “There was the moment of silence, and you have all those articles in the papers, and statesmen and philosophers and poets all working to—”

“Words,” he said flatly. “Nothing but words. Words can’t protect you. They can’t protect any of us.”

“Oh, but you’re wrong!” The table rocked as she leaned forward, clutching at it to make it still. “Words are the most powerful things there are. If we only—”

“Don’t be naïve.” His words hit her like a slap in the face. “It will happen again, and worse. All your poetry is nothing more than ribbons, a pretty package to wrap the basic bestiality of man. But the bestiality will out and all your free verse can do nothing to hold it. Nothing at all.” He raised his glass to her, offering it in mock salute. “Drink tonight, Miss Gillecote. For tomorrow we die.”