The Jewel Box (22 page)

In the meantime, it was good to distract herself with cocktails.

“Shoes,” Dodo announced. She and Grace ducked down to peer under their table. Humphries’s were black, shiny and new-looking. Topping’s were brown and slightly scuffed. What’s more…

“Dum, you appear not to be wearing socks! Can this be true?” Grace straightened again to confront Topping’s blushing face above the table.

“Some sort of holdup at the laundry,” Topping muttered.

“A win for Dee,” said Dodo. “That’s three–all. I do like a close competition.”

Grace bent for another look at Topping’s bare ankles. So vulnerable in their knobbly nakedness twixt shoe and trouser. Strangely endearing. When she sat up again, who should be standing beside their table but the Deep Blue Sea.

“Where did you spring from?”

“Nice to see you too, Grace.” He was looking tall. Had he always been that tall? He was smiling warmly at her. Then he turned to Grace’s companion. “Dodo! How lovely. How long has it been?”

“John, darling. How marvelous!” Dodo was on her feet and they were embracing—the sort of ambiguous embrace that could be platonic or then again might not be. “Far too long.”

The outpouring continued when they’d sat down.

“Do you remember that marvelous evening at the Ritz?”

“Oh, of course. Simply marvelous.”

It all put Grace in mind of that evening at the Tutankhamun when Cramer had turned out to be an old acquaintance of Sheridan’s. Did
everyone
have a past that featured him? He was inescapable, or so it seemed. He popped up everywhere and was connected to everybody. She looked across at the disgruntled Dee and Dum. “Want to dance with me, boys? There are points to be won.”

Out on the floor, the orchestra was playing fast. She attempted to dance with the two of them simultaneously, while they barged about, each trying continually to cut in across the other. They weren’t bad dancers, either of them, but they were foiled, to an extent, by their own determination to outdo each other. By the time Grace stepped down, her feet were distinctly trampled on.

Back across the room, Dodo and Cramer were laughing, their heads close together. She was continually touching his shoulder as she spoke. Then his arm. Her hands had a restlessness, as though they just had to be on him somewhere.

“Who won?” asked Humphries.

“Neither of you. You each lose a point. Now go and find someone your own age to dance with. This is becoming tedious.”

As she arrived back at the table, there was a lull in conversation.

“Talking about me?” Grace tried to make her voice light. “I suppose I’m the only truly interesting conversational subject in this place?”

“Now, now, Grace.” Dodo was brittle. As brittle, perhaps, as those carefully arranged curls in her hair. “Don’t let your
vanity run away with you. John was talking about that young man who’s about to try to fly across the Atlantic. He’s convinced the fellow’s going to pull it off, and he’s going over for the landing.”

“I know.” Grace turned to Cramer. “But what if he fails? You said they’re calling him the Flying Fool.”

“He’ll get there. I just know it. You have to have faith sometimes, Grace. You have to believe.”

“That all sounds a little bit religious, John. I didn’t know you were the godly sort.”

That smile was still there. “Just wait and see.”

Cramer had ordered more cocktails. A gin fizz for Grace, a Singapore sling for Dodo, and monkey glands for Dee and Dum. Cramer himself was drinking something clear with ice and lemon. A surreptitious sniff confirmed that it was plain water. She’d forgotten about this business of his not drinking, and now it was too late for her to be wary of her own state. When she looked across at the raucous Dodo, she saw herself reflected back. The excessive delight in one’s own shrill cleverness. The expansive, clumsy gestures. The loud laughter.

Cramer had come here this evening with a couple of friends who were over from New York. “I don’t know what’s going on with them,” he was saying, shaking his head. “One moment we’re having a fine old time and he’s telling a story about a trip to Coney Island and suddenly I notice she’s gathered herself up tall and there’s this look in her eye like she wants to kill him. And he still hasn’t seen the look—he’s going on with the story, and it’s all about shooting rabbits in that fairground game—and by now she’s sort of reared up in her seat. She looks like a cobra just before it strikes. You know? Those snakes with the hoods like the ones in the Kipling story about
the mongoose? And I swear—
swear
—that she makes a kind of hiss and shows her teeth—and he still hasn’t noticed, and he’s
still
talking about Coney Island and how they’d all gotten the boat home at the end of the night, and then she says
‘Cecil!’
—just his name, that one word—and he finally looks at her, and in one split second, all the happiness is sucked out of him, just
sucked
out. And there I am, sitting at the table with this venomous snake and a kind of dry husk that, until one second earlier, was my old friend.” He shook his head and took a mouthful of water.

“So what happened next?” asked Grace.

“Well, that’s when I spotted you two,” said Cramer. And then he turned back to Dodo and they were off again. “Really, Dodo, it’s just so great to have run into you again!”—and Dodo was preening, and Grace was thinking,
please
, not
more
of this. Dodo had always been one to sit back and coolly survey the men present—blow a little smoke at them, allow them a flicker of her attention. But look at her tonight around Cramer! She was treating him like something rare and exotic that she simply had to take possession of.

“What do you miss most about New York?” Dodo was asking him now. “The food, perhaps? London is so woefully behind the times. Perhaps the coffee?”

“The roof gardens.” Cramer looked wistful. “Now that we’re in May, all the best dinner-dance joints will be opening up their roofs till all hours. I love those long summer nights. Trouble is, you’re liable to turn up to meet your friends and find a padlock on the door and the usual pinned-up notice about closure. The padlocking is just the pits.”

“We have some lovely gardens in London.” Grace was folding the little paper coaster on the table in front of her into tinier and tinier triangles. Each fold was more decisive than the
last. “Though they’re not so often on the roof. I’ll have to take you out to one or two.” She smiled across at him, realizing a moment too late that she was flirting. An automatic compulsion to compete with Dodo, a refusal to be outdone by her. She should
not
flirt with Cramer.

“And I miss Betsy,” said Cramer. Then added, “My daughter.”

“Of course.” Grace eradicated the flirtatious smile. “How old is she?”

“Fifteen. She’s at school at the moment. Then she’ll go to my mother for the summer.”

“She must be lovely,” Dodo gushed. “I’d love to have a daughter. It must be awful for you to be so far away from her.”

“Yes.” Cramer was staring mournfully into his glass of water.

If he missed Betsy so much, why did he choose to work abroad and leave other people to take care of her? Why wasn’t he with her? But then a thought struck Grace: Maybe he couldn’t cope with her now that Eva was gone. Perhaps she reminded him too strongly of her mother. Perhaps she even blamed him for her mother’s death.

Cramer glanced up, as she was reflecting on this, then looked away.

He knows that I know,
thought Grace. She caught his eye again, and this time he held her gaze, and everything around them slid. The smoke and the music and the laughter. Dodo’s voice was chuntering away behind it all (she had Humphries and Topping speaking words backward). And still Grace could not look away from Cramer. Something was fluttering in her chest, catching at her throat.

It was Cramer who finally broke the long moment. “What do you want to do with your writing, Grace?”

“Do?” Grace was startled at the question and still unsettled.

“Your column’s good. I’m really enjoying it. But surely it’s only the start for you?”

“Oh, I see.” She thought of her recent conversation with Dickie. The way she’d pushed for more work on the paper and been put firmly in her place. “I’m not sure I’m really a writer. It’s a hobby that got out of hand. That’s all.”

“That doesn’t have to be all. Not if you want more. On the surface your column is just reveling in and poking fun at a certain way of life, but there’s always something else bubbling away underneath. There’s skill in that.”

“You think so?”

“Your strength, as a writer, is the comedic approach. It’s a clever way of delivering a message. Essentially, you do some beautiful gift wrapping. The question for you, in the long term, is what you want to put in the parcel.”

All that damn drink—she couldn’t think straight. “I’d like to believe there’s something more out there for me.” She ran a finger around the top of her glass, tried to steady herself. “What do
you
want in the future, John? What else is out there for you?”

Dee and Dum were tripping over their own tongues just as they’d tripped over their feet on the dance floor.

“Now say ‘platypus’ backward,” said Dodo’s red lips. “Quickly! Now try ‘inconsequential.’”

Something was passing between Grace and Cramer. A sort of recognition.

“Now say ‘betrayal.’”

In the ladies’, Grace stood before the washbasins and contemplated splashing cold water on her face. No—better not. Not
with all this makeup on. She’d end up all stripes and smears like one of Tilly’s paintings and it would take forever to put her face straight again.

Gripping the edge of the porcelain basin, she examined herself in the mirror. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. The lines on her forehead—were they new? She must remember not to frown in future. Frowning was fraught with danger.

Lips too thin,
she told herself, as she had done countless times before.
But don’t go thinking you can fix that with lipstick
. And then:
Is that mouth a mean mouth?

Sometimes, when they were girls, she and Nancy had compared their faces in the mirror and tried to decide whose was best. Grace had sharper bones, distinct features. Nancy’s face had a broad, appealing softness. Nancy would say she envied Grace her aquiline quality, her look of intelligence. Grace, on the other hand, envied Nancy’s full, pouting lips. Her generous smile.

Had Cramer compared the two sisters? He wouldn’t have been the first to do so. Had he kissed her sister’s beautiful mouth? Nancy had denied that anything was going on between them, of course, but Grace knew to look beyond the words that were spoken. What, other than love, could have lit Nancy up so brightly after her years in the dark?

She closed her eyes and immediately opened them again. It was all spinning about in there: O’Connell saying he loved her and then telling her all that awful stuff…Cramer looking at her as though he knew her from the inside out and telling her things about who she might become if she had the will to do it. She was too drunk to fathom it, any of it. She should go straight home and get some sleep.

“Layarteb,” she said, to her reflection.

“I beg your pardon?” said the woman standing at the basin next to her. Another blonde. Tiny nose, high-arched eyebrows, and wearing a dress that was a cascade of delicate pink petals (had to be a Madeleine Vionnet).

“Layarteb. That’s ‘betrayal’ backward.”

“Oh, sweetie, that’s a word I know
all
about.” The woman patted at her unruly hair. “I’ve been at both ends of that particular word, and let me tell you, neither end is especially comfortable. Take my advice: Stay at home with a book.”

As she came out of the ladies’, Cramer was just coming out of the men’s.

“There’s something I want to know,” she said.

“What?”

“Come with me. I need to talk to you away from Dodo.”

With that, she grabbed him by the hand and led him quickly around a corner and around farther corners until the corridor ended in double doors and kitchen smells.

“So, ask away.” And then, when she failed to speak, “What next, Grace?”

He lifted her chin and kissed her. The kiss was like the look they’d shared—it was a continuation of that look. They kissed like they were trying to break out of themselves and into each other. Her back against the wall steadied her; anchored her to the solid, physical world while everything else was adrift on the Deep Blue Sea.

“Stop.” She pushed him away.

“Why?” He was still bending over her, perhaps about to kiss her again. “I don’t want to stop.”

“But what about Nancy?”

“There’s nothing going on between Nancy and me.”

He kissed her again and, despite her screaming conscience, she grabbed him, reaching around his neck to pull
him closer, tighter. She shut her eyes as they kissed, and Nancy was there. Nancy in the dusky green dress she’d worn on the night of the Wiener schnitzel dinner, her face all floury and happy. Again she broke away.

“She’s my sister. I can’t do this to her.”

He shook his head, a look of bafflement on his face. “Nancy and I are friends. Nothing more.”

“My sister’s in love with you. She’s in love with you, John!”

He took a step back. Rubbed at his forehead. Acrid smells from the kitchen. Something was burning.

“But I’ve never done anything. I had no idea that she—”

“Oh, God! You’re either ridiculously naïve or utterly callous, and I’m not sure which is worse!” She tried to shove past him but he grabbed her by the arm.

“Grace, wait!”

“All that time you’ve been spending with her, just the two of you and the children. The walks, the café visits, the dinners…”

“We were both lonely. I’ve grown fond of the children. And of her. But that’s all there is to it.”

He was taller and thinner than O’Connell, but they were somehow alike. It was in the eyes, she realized. Cramer’s were darkest brown, but their expression made them remarkably like the pale eyes of her lover.

“I think you know how I feel about you, Grace. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I think you feel the same.”