The Jewel Box (23 page)

“You have no idea about my feelings. If anything, I’m confused.
So
confused.”

“Why? What about?”

“O’Connell told me about the bargain.”

Cramer just stood there, looking perplexed.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. He’s told me all about it.”

“O’Connell says a lot of things, Grace. Very few of them are true.”

She stamped a foot in impatience. “He says you were working on
The Vision
together. He says you made a deal—you got the girl and he got the novel. Why would he make something like that up?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

“It doesn’t make sense, John.”

Cramer raked a hand through his hair. “That book is his and his alone. There was no “deal.” I genuinely don’t know why he said what he said, but with O’Connell, it’s all about what he
doesn’t
say.”

“What do you mean?”

“All right.” When he spoke again, a nerve was twitching in his face. “You want to know about the poison between him and me? Well, I’ll tell you.” He leaned back against the wall. Lit a cigarette and passed it across to Grace. Lit another for himself. “There was no ‘deal.’ Eva chose between us and she chose me. We got married and lost touch with O’Connell, and we were happy together until that book came out. When Eva read it, she believed it held messages for her. She started accusing me of sucking all the color out of her, just like the numskull Stanley tries to do to Veronique. She read it over and over.”

He inhaled deeply from the cigarette. Blew out smoke.

“She started writing love letters to O’Connell. I found the carbons. I never found any replies, but he
must
have been writing back.”

“Did you confront her?”

“Oh yes.” He swallowed hard, as though he were trying to force something down. “We had huge screaming rows. Then afterward she’d beg for forgiveness, tell me it all meant nothing. That it was a kind of madness in her. And then the
madness got bigger and I couldn’t go on ignoring it. She’d go running off on some two-minute errand, leaving Betsy alone in the house, and not come back for days. Then when she arrived home, she might go to bed for a week and cry and refuse to talk to anyone. I never knew where she went.”

“Was she with him?”

“I don’t know, even now. It tortured me. I decided to have it out with him. Wrote to him care of his publisher. When we finally met up, it was about as bad as it could be. We sat in a fancy New York restaurant and I watched him eating oysters. Sucking them up in front of me. There was something about him…His air of condescension, his shiny gray suit with the big shoulders, the way he ate those goddamn oysters…I couldn’t speak to him about Eva. I couldn’t bring myself to mention her name to him. He was waiting for me to do it. He was ready to put a look of pity on his face and be nice to me, and I couldn’t stand that. Do you see?”

“I think so.”

“By this time Eva was in and out of the clinic. You know, I never had her locked away. She always went in of her own free will. And it was a nice place. Cost an absolute fortune. We tended to get on better when she was in the clinic—those tight visiting hours and hospital rules suited us just fine. I was as much to blame as she was for the fights we had. I was drinking heavily. Poor little Betsy would come wandering downstairs in the middle of the night to find her father staggering about and her mother talking to the Virgin Mary. Eventually, we moved her out to my parents’.”

“Children always get the worst of it.” Grace wasn’t just thinking about Betsy here. “Stuck in the middle of situations they can’t possibly understand.”

“You’re right about that. Betsy was better off away from
it all. Frankly she still is…So anyway, it all got worse and worse. Eva was in the clinic more than she was out of it. I was very…absent. Then, on May 13, 1922, when we’d been married just over ten years, I came home from, let’s be frank, a three-day drinking binge, to find messages from my parents, the police and the clinic. Eva had left the clinic without permission, made her way halfway across the state and died in a fall from a hotel balcony. They started out by talking about her ‘fall,’ but by the time I got to the mortuary they’d switched to ‘jump.’”

A girl lying on the ground. A broken necklace and a broken neck…

“It was O’Connell’s hotel balcony, Grace.”

“What?”

He stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. “It seems she’d sought him out. He was giving a well-publicized lecture and she went looking for him at the fanciest hotel in town. She’d broken into his room, so the police told me, while he was out at his event. He claimed he’d had no idea she was in town and hadn’t seen her. His cronies were at the police station—the publisher and the literary agent. They’d arrived before me. While I was still struggling for the vaguest understanding of what had taken place, I had the two of them on at me about the importance of keeping O’Connell’s name out of the papers. I didn’t find it difficult to comply with their wishes. I had no desire to run around shouting about what had happened.”

“Oh God.” She leaned against the wall and looked over at Cramer. His face was all darkness.

“I don’t believe it’s the whole story, Grace. I know O’Connell—and somehow it just doesn’t add up. Over the years I’ve tracked him down and I’ve run into him, and each time I see him, I try to get the truth out of him. But five years
on I still don’t understand what happened, and he still hasn’t given me an explanation that makes any kind of sense to me.”

“You’re not saying…He’s not a murderer, John. Whatever he is, he’s not that.”

A shrug. “Like I said before, with O’Connell it’s all about what he
doesn’t
say.” He reached out and put a hand against her face. “Come to Paris with me, Grace.”

“What?”

“Come to Paris with me. Let’s go see Lindbergh together. Share in his moment.”

“Oh, John…” She pulled away from him and started back down the corridor. That hand against her face—that was a gesture she knew all too well. O’Connell would have done just the same thing at such a moment—laid his hand gently against her face.

“You wanted to know so I told you. I’m not leaving you to
him.
” They were back outside the ladies’ toilets and he was right behind her.

“I can’t think straight. It’s too much.”

“John, sweetie!” It was the blonde from the washbasins. The one who knew about betrayal.

“Oh. Barbara.”

“Where did you
get
to? We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Cecil thought you must have gone home but I told him, don’t be silly. John wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye.”

Cramer was looking helplessly past the blonde at Grace, as she seized her opportunity to get away. Out of the corridor and back to the dancing and the jazz and the cocktails. Back to Dodo, who had gathered a stack of lemon slices from the bar and was feeding them one by one to Humphries and Topping, holding each slice carefully in her pointed red nails and slotting it into a willing mouth.

When Grace stepped out of the club, she was half expecting to find Cramer waiting for her in the street. But there was no sign of him. Unsure whether she was relieved or disappointed or both, she stuck out her arm for a taxi and clambered in, alone.

The taxi drove north. The driver kept trying to make conversation with her and she wished he’d stop. He was banging on, for some reason, about the new greyhound racing stadiums they were building at White City and Harringay. She had no interest in dog racing and would have had nothing to say about this even at the best of times. His talk floated all about her while, in her lap, her hands clenched and unclenched.

Something big and frightening was happening to her. She felt it in every cell of her body. It was throbbing in her head, flying in her stomach. When she looked out of the window, it was even echoed in the sky—in the sheer energy of day pushing its way up through thinning night the color explosion that is dawn.

Somewhere in the background the cabby was chuntering on. “I’ll be heading back to Cricklewood after I drop you off. Back home to the missus. Snuggle down under the candlewick and have a good long kip. Lovely…”

“Layarteb,” Grace whispered under her breath.

III.

Flight

Two new lunch restaurants have just hung up their menus next door to each other on Beak Street, each being so much more interesting for the existence and proximity of the other. Let me explain:

Low Fat Feast is a place that does what it says on the tin. Most faithfully. The portions are tiny, the food devoid of fat (and hence, of flavor). The (floury) bread is spread with something thin and almost yellow that bears no resemblance to butter. The mayonnaise…Well, suffice to say it simply
isn’t.
And yet the place is jammed with people of a lunchtime and there’s a queue for tables that stretches out onto the street. My, but we’re very bothered about our figures these days! I predict the current fervor will last until the end of August when Selfridges will have sold every last thread of its splendid swimwear collection, and then we’ll all go back to stuffing our faces.

Next door to the dietary
establishment is Restaurant La Ronde. This place has a newspaper article stuck up in its window, warning of the dangers of dieting. Its food offers plentiful aid to any diner at risk from such perils. I went in yesterday for a splendid finnan haddock, which came with one of the richest cream sauces I’ve ever tasted. It should be noted, however, that the finnan haddock served at Low Fat Feast, though bone dry and half the size, is oddly similar. Indeed, if you compare the two menus, you begin to discern a pattern. Methinks I must get backstage to investigate the kitchen arrangements of these two easily uneasy neighbors. Lastly, would it surprise you to hear that the clientele of Low Fat Feast are, for the most part, on the large side, while those who dine at Restaurant La Ronde are a distinctly slender bunch?

Enough of lunch. I entreat you, on the next possible Friday or Saturday night, to visit the Tivoli Club on Coventry Street and saunter about for a while on the roof. Yes, they’ve gone alfresco for the season. There’s some very good jazz being played up there and the dancing’s not at all bad. Really, I must applaud the Tivoli for taking the risk. There’ll be some nasty wet nights ahead, I’m certain, but they’ve made preparations for this. There is a sort of canopy, and I couldn’t help but notice a great many umbrellas on hooks at the foot of the staircase. So now I have somewhere proper to take a certain American gentleman of my acquaintance next time he talks wistfully of the summer roofs of New York. A word of warning, however: Don’t bring your boyfriend along if he is a proponent of one of the more flailing and unruly forms of Charleston, or he might just dance himself off the edge and take you down with him!

A Mr. Runcett of Camberwell has written to kindly offer his services as my escort for all “gadding about” purposes. He professes himself “moved and saddened” by my column of April 18th, bemoaning the plight
of the intelligent woman as regards the attentions of gentlemen, and also by my mentions of Good Girls, Bad Girls and the Devilish fellow I’ve been out and about with lately. He assures me he has all his own teeth and most of his hair, and offers a very reasonable rate. Grateful though I am for this most dashing of propositions, I’m glad to say I don’t require Mr. Runcett’s services at present. Girls, I’m sure you’ll know for yourselves that it tends to be feast or famine out there. And just at the moment I appear to be dining, as it were, at La Ronde rather than Low Fat Feast. (Though as I said before, I do need to look behind the scenes…)

Now readers, I’m off on a little jaunt and won’t be writing next week. Miss me but don’t cry for me or you’ll smudge your makeup. If you’re good I’ll drop you a postcard.

Diamond Sharp

From the Editor: Miss Sharp, currently away on the aforementioned jaunt, has asked me to deliver the following personal message to Charles A. Lindbergh on her behalf:

“Attaboy, Lindy. Knew you could do it.”

“A
change? You?” Marcus Rino stroked his mustache and contemplated Grace.

“I’ve had this hairstyle for years. I thought perhaps…” Grace, in the chair, studied herself in the long mirror. Her bob was still one of the sharpest in London. She knew this. She knew Marcus knew this, too.

“So, what do you want, eh?” The hairdresser pumped furiously with his foot and the chair rose higher.

“I don’t know. Something different. A permanent, perhaps? There are some nice waves about.”

Marcus took a large white handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and mopped his brow. “Your hair, oh sweet one, is fantastically straight. You have no cowlicks, not a single kink. If I cut it right, it makes the beautiful lines, the angles…Why do you want me to fry it into a frizz, eh? You want to destroy all
your natural advantages?” He nodded meaningfully down the long, heavily mirrored room, where his brother Pietro had just finished putting rollers into the dull brown hair of a bejeweled woman, and was mixing something in a pot. Something that gave off a strongly chemical smell.

“I’d like to think my straight hair isn’t my
only
natural advantage, Marcus. What say I keep it straight but change the color? How about blond?”

The hairdresser bit his little finger. “You want me to put peroxide all over that lovely, dark head and drain all the color out of you?”

“I know you do Dodo Lawrence’s hair. Apparently it’s all right for
her
to be blond, but when it’s me—”

“Dodo Lawrence is a natural blonde. You, oh sweet one, are not. If I could wave a magic wand to show you how you’d look with a permanent or blond hair, I would. We’d both have a good giggle and then I’d magic you back again. I’m a pretty good magician, but this is one trick I can’t perform. Uncle Marcus knows best. And I can’t have you running about town with ghastly hair telling all and sundry who did it to you.”