The Jewel Box (34 page)

“About the party…I want to explain…”

“No need.”

“The drinking—that night was the first time I’ve drunk alcohol in years.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I won’t be doing it again, Grace. Really, you have to believe me about that.”

“It’s none of my business, John.”

They were entering the East Heath now, where the grass grew in long tufty clumps on the uneven ground. The trees arched thickly overhead, their roots pushing up the sandy paths as though struggling to get to the surface.

“Back in my drinking days, I used to have a recurring dream about driftwood. Old bits of worn-out wood washing up on anonymous gray beaches, and just being left high up on the sand with all the weed and debris. It was a very weird dream. Slow-paced. The repeated sound of the waves against the shingle—that endless slow shushing noise…It terrified me.” But now he shrugged. “God, this sounds so lame, even to me.”

“Not at all.” It was dark in this part of the Heath in spite of
the weather, with the trees’ thick foliage blocking out the sun. “I know exactly what you’re talking about. I dream sometimes about a half-open door. There’s a strong draft in my dream and the door is shifting very gently back and forth in that draft. Tiny movements. As it moves, it creaks. A subtle creaking noise—nothing more, but it keeps on coming, over and over. There’s nothing I can do about it. I have dreamed about monsters and war and disease—all the usual nightmares. But this dream about the door—it’s much more frightening.”

“Then you
do
understand,” he said. “When I stopped drinking, I stopped having the dream. But since the night of my little relapse, it’s come back. Quite a few times. I can’t have that nightmare back in my life, Grace. I won’t let it happen.”

They were walking beside the Mixed Bathing Pond, the water a deep green and the humid air filled with gnats. Nobody swimming about today but the ducks.

“I’m glad you hit O’Connell.”

“
Are
you?” He took her arm and linked it through his. Decisively.

“I’d have liked to have done it myself. I’m immensely glad he’s leaving. I had him all wrong.”

“So did I, actually.” His arm tightened around hers.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, he came to see me the day after the party. Dropped by at my house, just like that.”

“Really?”
She remembered what O’Connell had once told her about Cramer—how he’d followed him all over the world. He’d joked that Cramer would somehow manage to be there at his deathbed, like the Grim Reaper…Cramer had been at the Savoy, of course, on the day of her first date with O’Connell. “
He
came to see
you
?”

“It was so strange. His manner was polite and formal, as if we were a couple of distant acquaintances. I asked him in and we drank tea together, holding our cups correctly, talking about the
weather
—we’ve obviously both been in England too long! And all this ‘niceness,’ in spite of his swollen nose and split lip. In spite of my hungover red-rimmed eyes…”

“What did he want?”

“Once we’d gotten through all that politeness, he told me he was sorry he hadn’t been straight with me all these years. He said that while he was alone, writing
The Vision,
he went through a kind of crisis. Eva had chosen me but, really, he’d already withdrawn from her. Effectively, he chose Veronique. But the process of writing the story rekindled his love for Eva. He said he relived the whole relationship alone in his study—the good and the bad. He was eaten up with jealousy at me for having it all for real while his life was just a dusty room with a typewriter. He said the nights were the worst. It was during that time that he began to hate me.”

“And he just decided to go to your house and tell you this after all that time? Do you believe him?”

“Actually, I do. I know when he’s lying and when he’s not. He told me he’d gotten over it all once the book was published and he was out of the wilderness. But it’s remained his big regret that he chose art over love. By the time he reached the end of
The Vision
he was all dried up inside. He tried to make himself fall in love with other women over the years, but it was all fakery.”

“But then Eva started writing to him?”

“By then it was too late. Veronique had wrung him out and hung him up to dry. There was no love left in O’Connell, not even for Eva. He said her letters made him sad and regretful. Sometimes they made him angry with me—he blamed me
for the state she was in. He said he only replied to about half of them. Some of his replies were nostalgic, dwelling on the past. Others detailed his life and how far removed it was from hers. Then it all became too much for him and he wrote her a three-liner telling her to leave him alone.”

“How did she respond?”

A sigh. “She ran away from the clinic to go search for him on the day of a lecture. He told me she knocked on the door of his room when he was dressing. Black tie, tux, dinner jacket—and there’s this wreck of a woman crying and pleading with him to love her like he used to. It was all too real for O’Connell. He was brutally dismissive. Told her he didn’t love her and he never would again. Had to physically prize her off him to get out the door. As he was leaving, he suggested that she stay on to take a bath and pull herself together. He said he’d thought at the time that he was being generous. His parting words were to tell her to leave the key at the desk.”

“How daft that he refused to talk to you about this for all these years.”

“He hated me. And I followed him around, asking the same questions over and over again because I hated him. It was all about Eva, but it also stopped being about her. It became simply about us. Me and him and our hate for each other.”

“But now he’s told you. What now?”

As they arrived at Parliament Hill the world seemed to open out. The overarching trees gave way all of a sudden to a bright blue sky that had never seemed so huge and so full of promise. They climbed together, up the steep path. Above them, a small boy was trying and failing to launch a purple kite into the air. Two girls threw sticks for their dog to chase.

“I love this place.” Grace could feel the blood pumping through her. “I belong here.”

“And yet you’ve decided to leave.”

“That’s right.”

They reached the top of the hill, and Grace’s bench. London was spread out below them in a shimmering heat haze. He sat down. Patted the seat to ask her to join him. After a brief hesitation, she did.

“I’ve never felt I really belong anywhere,” he said. “Perhaps I’ve belonged to people rather than places. Yes, I’m sure that’s right.”

She thought of herself and George sitting together on this bench. The holding of hands, and eventually of each other.

“I’ve always longed to belong to someone. Entirely and completely. My whole self. My everything.”

“Oh, Grace. Don’t leave.” He put his arms around her, here at this place that was the center of her world. And here, with her memories looming large all around and about them—
even
here in this place—she found that she’d stopped thinking about the past or the future, and for the longest moment it was just about him. His mouth. The warm, inky smell of his neck. But even as the moment stretched out, golden and green and sweet, it was suddenly over again and she was pulling away from him. Getting up, smoothing her hair, turning away.

“You know why I hit O’Connell at the party?” came his voice. “Sure, I couldn’t stand to see him acting like he was king of the place, swanning about in that ridiculous white suit, surrounded by admirers. But that wasn’t it. Sure, he’d put my Eva in a book and made a load of money out of it and tried to poison my marriage, and refused to talk to me about my wife’s death. But that wasn’t it either. None of it.”

“So, what was it then?”

“Do you
really
not know? It was about you, Grace.
You.
Because you were his, not mine. Because he came over to gloat about that. To tell me that he
had
you, body and soul, and that he’d go on
having
you until it became too dull to continue, and until he’d used you up like an old cloth, and that I would never,
ever
have you, even when having you was no longer worth anything—because you were his and because he’d make damn sure of it.”

“How dare you!” She turned to look at him, and his eyes were dark and wet.

“I’m telling you the whole truth, Grace. That’s what he said. He was taunting me because, actually, he sensed something between us and he couldn’t stand it. I hit him because I love you.”

“Oh. Oh dear.” She’d come over all dizzy, and he was instantly on his feet, guiding her back to the bench. She tried ineffectually to bat him away as she sat down.

“What is the
matter
with me?” she snapped. “I’m not the fainting sort. I’ve never fainted.”

“That night at the party,” he said, more softly. “The
thing
between O’Connell and me—well, it stopped being about Eva and the past. And it became about you and about the present. Because, actually, he loves you, too.”

“That’s rubbish! Him and me—well, I don’t really know what it was all about but it wasn’t love.”

“He loves you. Or loved you, I’m not sure which. As much as he’s capable of loving anyone. And actually, enough to want you to find happiness.”

Grace could feel her hands shaking. Her whole body felt quivery and strange. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve seen his column today, surely? He wrote, ‘You’re not the only one I’ve wronged.’ And then he wanted to tell you there’s another good heart out there. He said, ‘I hope you find each other.’”

That feeling again—of a shared understanding between her and Cramer. Something fundamental in their bones and their blood.

“He came to see me at my house because of you. Because you told him he should tell me the truth about the past, and you made him feel ashamed of himself. Because he finally saw that he’d been clinging to the past as much as I. Because he realized, when you and he were standing there in that bathroom, that he’d lost you and that he was behaving like a child.”

Gradually, the shaking abated. As Grace tried to assemble her thoughts, she kept her gaze fixed on the towers and roofs and spires of London.

“Let me tell you something,” she said eventually. “Twelve years ago I sat on this bench, looking out at this view, and listened to a boy telling me he loved me. That same night he proposed to my sister. Four years later, I sat here again with a hollowed-out soldier who couldn’t talk to his wife. He told me his secrets and we began to clutch at each other, and things happened between us which were utterly wrong and which should never have happened. It was George. Nancy’s George. John, whatever there is between you and me—what
ever
there is—it isn’t worth as much to me as my sister is. I will not get myself embroiled with another man who can’t choose between Nancy and me.”

“That’s quite a story.” The arm around her shoulders was withdrawn. He sat forward and appeared to be thinking this through. “But Grace, we’re not all the same. It’s you that I want.”

“That was what he said, too.”

“I am
not
George.” An angry glare. “And I’m not O’Connell either. You’re the only woman who’s even
registered
with me in over five years. How many times do I have to tell you that Nancy and I are just friends?”

“But you took her to Paris!”

“God!” He bashed at his own temples. “I took Nancy to Paris because she’s good company and I didn’t feel like being on my own. We had separate rooms. Hell, your sister deserved a holiday, Grace!”

Two boys were kicking a football about a little way off. Back and forth it went between them.

“And anyway,” he continued, “what exactly were
you
up to that weekend?”

“This isn’t about what
I
did. I went away with O’Connell because I knew I had to leave you to Nancy.”

“Oh, Grace, you’re quite incredibly hypocritical and obtuse when you want to be. You’re refusing to see the most obvious thing! It’s
you
who couldn’t choose. Not me.”

“I don’t want O’Connell.”

“So what
do
you want?”

Back and forth went that football, just down the slope.

A sigh. “Nancy’s in love with you. I can see it even if you can’t or won’t. God, even my
mother
can see it. I will not jeopardize my sister’s happiness or her children’s. Not again.”

“Your sister and I will never be together.
Never
.”

The bash-bash of the football. A low hum that might have been the sound of the city below them. Of all the life surging through it.

“Good-bye, John.” Grace stood up and dusted herself down.

“Grace, for five years my world has been nothing but hate and darkness and grief. You’ve changed all that.
You
. I’m living again. Really
living.
And I think you feel the same.”

“You asked me what I want. What I want is to leave London. What I want is to be far away from you. Good-bye.”

She turned for one last glance at him. He looked deflated, defeated. Nothing left to say. When she walked away, he didn’t try to stop her.

Once upon a time people believed that, before it dies, the swan sings a beautiful and mournful song. Hence the expression “swan song.” But really, did any of the simple folk who propagated this notion ever bother to listen to a swan? She might have a slender neck and a nicer-than-average plumage but, in case you were in any doubt, let me assure you that as a chanteuse, Miss Swan is hardly on a par with Bessie Smith.

This, nevertheless, is Diamond Sharp’s swan song. You, dear readers, will long ago have decided whether my dulcet tones are any prettier than those of my fair-feathered friends. Either way, this is the last time I shall ask for your indulgence.

Today I shan’t be worshipping the choux pastry at Chez Noisette (though it is so light they must surely have to glue it to the plates to stop it floating away); bemoaning the boiled-
to-pulp vegetables of Florence Finnegan’s (may the proprietor drown in a vat of his own frothing cabbage water); accusing the manager of the Salamander nightclub of watering down the spirits (I josh, of course); or lauding the eye makeup of a certain Mr. Hamilton-Shapcott (Sheridan, where did you get that mascara? I must have some posthaste!).