The Jewel Box (37 page)

“Where are you going, then, on your train?”

Maybe they were right, Nancy and Mummy. Maybe she’d been afraid of finding happiness. She’d donned a hair shirt at some point over the last few years and then become accustomed to it. It had been almost reassuring when the
relationship with O’Connell had gone wrong. How could it have ended in any other way with a man like him? It was yet another demonstration that she wasn’t destined to find happiness in that most ordinary and fundamental of ways—through loving someone and having them love you back.

“The traffic seems awfully slow. Is something going on, do you think?”

“Well, there’s some sort of march on in the West End. Them peculiar wood-cut people. All camping and funny green cloaks and then a bit of nationalism thrown in. Know the ones?”

“Do you mean the Kibbo Kift?”

“Yeah, them’s the buggers. John Hargrave or whoever he is. Funny bloke. Give themselves fancy names and all, don’t they? White Dove, Golden Eagle, all that sort of rubbish.”

The taxi had slowed to a halt now. Grace gazed out at a tall gray house with a red door. Three or four months back she’d been to a jazz party in the upper rooms of that house. She’d capered about with two Vorticist artists—one in a ridiculous beret, the other with a pointlessly pointy beard—and got giggly on gin cocktails, aware that somewhere on the other side of the room, Dickie was watching. She must have looked like she was having the time of her life. Actually, she was terribly lonely that night.

“Bunch of overgrown Boy Scouts with a bit of a nasty underside, if you ask me,” said the taxi driver. “Haven’t heard that Hargrave say anything that’s worth getting the streets all clogged up.”

They’d been still for almost two minutes now. She leaned forward and peered out at the choked-up street. Cars, buses, trams, all motionless. “When’s the march due to finish? Do you think we’ll be moving again soon?”

“No idea, love. What time’s your train?”

Round and about them, drivers were changing their minds and directions, pulling out of the jam and peeling off east.

“Can’t we go another way?”

“Not unless you want me to go all down through Clerken-well. Don’t fret, I’m sure we’ll be moving again in a minute.”

“But you just said you had no idea how long the march was due to go on for!”

The bus driver ahead of them was sticking his arm out the window to signal a change of direction. A bus bound for Waterloo, like them, about to swing out east through Clerken-well.

“If you ask me that’s downright irresponsible.” The cabbie tutted. “He’ll have people on that vehicle wanting the West End.”

“Will you
please
make a detour,” asked Grace through gritted teeth.

In her head, John was walking slowly up the gangplank onto a ship—not a modern ocean liner, but a Spanish galleon with sails and cannon and a skull and crossbones flying from its mast, all set to spirit him away.

“What time does your train go?”

The advertisement on the side of the bus read: “Let’s go to Lyons.” A small boy sitting inside was drawing with his finger in the muck on the window. A baby was crying, its face red, its mouth wide. There were several old women in hats.

“My life is slipping away from me while we sit here. I have to get to Waterloo!”

There was a dark-haired, dark-eyed man on that bus. He was gazing out at the street with a face entirely absent of expression. The look of one who has abandoned hope.

John!

No, it couldn’t be. Could it? Surely he’d be at Southampton by now. He’d left hours ago. Though maybe, just possibly, he’d gone somewhere else first…Errands to run, people to say good-bye to…

She blinked. Strained for a clear view of him just as the bus swung out to join the stream of eastbound traffic.

It was him. It
was
.

“Stop!” Though, of course, they were stopped already. Shoving her cigarette into the ashtray, she groped for the door handle.

“Hey, what d’you think you’re up to?” The driver was twisting around in his seat.

“Got to go.” She delved in her purse and randomly shoved a handful of coins at him.

“You sure, love? Ta.”

She had the door open, and was clambering out, holding her hand up to try to halt the moving cars, scissoring her way through to the bus.

“Your bag, miss. You forgot your bag.”

The bus was lurching into motion, pulling away into the moving traffic.

“John!” she yelled, waving her arms. “Wait! John!”

She began to run. Running in high heels, her arms flailing, after that bus. Running in a stupid, girlie, chiffon-floaty sort of way. Desperation personified, her heart hammering. Some schoolboys were laughing and pointing. A woman with a pinched face tutted. A workman whistled. But all Grace knew was that she had been given another chance and she was damned if her chance was rumbling away with that bus.

The bus was picking up speed. Inside her head, she pleaded—not with God, in whom she didn’t believe—but with
herself.
Got to catch that bus. Got to catch that bus.
Hitched up her dress and pushed herself to run even faster.

A tightening of the traffic—just a momentary one, but enough to narrow the gap. The back platform of the bus was almost within her reach. She could jump for it. A flying leap of faith and a grab for the pole.

Scared to get what she wanted, eh? She’d show them. Oh yes, she’d show them now.

She wasn’t close enough…

“Stop, you bastard driver!”

A pink-cheeked young conductor appeared, looking down at her. Dinged his bell.

“Now, now, miss, I won’t have language like that on my bus.” It was slowing up. He was reaching down for her. “No need for all that. Just ain’t ladylike, is it? And running like your very life depended on it!”

She grabbed his arm, hard, and up she went, with a half jump, half step, onto the platform.

“But it does, you see.” She was panting so hard that she could barely get the words out. “My life
does
depend on it.”

The conductor pushed his cap back and scratched his head, as the crazy girl flashed a smile at him and went lurching past, along the bus, teetering on her heels, struggling to keep her balance as the bus hit a pothole. Cheeky sort of smile, she had. Not his type, of course. Hard as nails, you could see that at a glance. Good-looking, but she knew it a bit too well. One of those faces it’s difficult to forget. He’d choose commonplace prettiness over her sort of looks every time. Would tire you out, waking up each morning to that face. None too young either. Probably one of those modern girls, would give you a verbal thick ear soon as look at you. Uppity madam. Still, she had something, there was no doubt about that. Plucky
sort. That was quite a sprint she’d just made. And all to catch her man, by the look of things. He heard her shout the name “John!” and then, “It’s me.” He saw a man’s head turn, startled eyes and then the widest grin.

The bus lumbered on.

The
first columnists appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, with the rise of mass market newspapers and magazines. The earliest columns were political essays, satirical sketches or caricatures, many of them one-off articles. But it wasn’t long before the cleverest, funniest and most popular obtained regular spots, bylines, headings and avid readerships.

The column, as a form, established itself most rapidly in the United States, where its proponents could earn a good wage, thanks to the syndication system. In the United Kingdom, the columnist had to scratch about for income from other sources, whether through journalism or otherwise, and consequently it took longer for the column to take hold. Had Grace Rutherford really lived and written her column in 1920s London, she would have been something of a pioneer.

Not that Diamond Sharp would have been the first frivolous gossip writer in London, nor the first Englishwoman to try
her hand at it. As early as 1846, Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, was commissioned by Charles Dickens as a “purveyor of fashionable intelligence” for his
Daily News.
Her reign lasted only six months, however. When Dickens stepped down as editor, his successor swiftly ditched Lady Blessington.

Viscount Castlerosse, author of “Londoner’s Log” in the
Sunday Express,
is often credited as the first English gossip columnist. For fifteen years from 1926, he wrote as an eligible, roving bachelor sharing intimate secrets. English readers enjoyed a blend of gossip, opinion and self-revelation, and the
Daily Express
emerged as its principal supplier. Notable columns included “Talk of the Town” by Dragoman, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis’s “By the Way,” J. B. Morton’s “Beachcomber” columns and my personal favorite, Tom Driberg as “William Hickey.”

Women columnists established themselves earlier and more conclusively in the United States than the United Kingdom. In 1879, Louisa Knapp Curtis began a monthly column on housekeeping in her husband’s magazine. This was so successful that ultimately Cyrus Curtis sold his
Tribune and Farmer
in order to back his wife’s new
Ladies’ Home Journal
. In a rather more glamorous arena, Louella Parsons became the first Hollywood movie gossip columnist in 1914. By the 1930s she would be joined by Hedda Hopper, and the two would lock horns in a fierce rivalry. Dorothy Thompson, meanwhile, started out as a newspaper reporter, and from the mid-1930s became a significant anti-appeasement and anti-isolationist voice in “On the Record.”

Diamond Sharp owes something to many of these, as well as to later columnists such as Jill Tweedie, who wrote for the
Guardian
from the 1960s to the 1980s; a campaigning feminist who exposed her own struggle with the difficulties of putting
feminist principles into practice in life. Also Anna Quindlen’s “Life in the 30s” column, written for the
New York Times
during Quindlen’s three-year extended maternity leave, and finally abandoned when she began to tire of the self-exposure. Diamond’s biggest influence, though, is the 1920s
New Yorker
columnist “Lipstick,” alias Lois Long. This dashing flapper-about-town delivered spiky and highly opinionated verdicts on New York’s restaurants, dinner-dance clubs and illicit drinking dens. In one column she even reviewed a police raid on an after-hours club.

As to my other characters—well, Dexter O’Connell, John Cramer and Eva owe something to (but are certainly not based on) F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre.

John Cramer’s mustache actually belonged, however, to a youthful Ernest Hemingway.

Oh, and Ciro’s nightclub really did have a glass dance floor.

1927:
This year, London girls are wearing their hair and dresses shorter than ever, copying the Hollywood flapper look. They want the life that goes with it, too—dancing the Charleston all night, having romances with dashing young men. It’s the dream. A life just a little bit wild.

In her weekly newspaper column, Diamond Sharp gives her readers a taste of that little bit of wild. She dances at the newest clubs, throws back the best martinis, and flirts with London’s most eligible bachelors…all in the name of research.

What her readers don’t know is that Diamond, the woman with the sharpest bob in town, isn’t all sparkle and shine. Her real name is Grace Rutherford; her real job is that of a lowly advertising copywriter; and her real life is spent supporting two widows, her mother and sister.

But when two handsome American writers begin to compete for her attention, Grace’s reality becomes a drama that spins out of her control. As she seeks to understand the dark past that binds the two writers, Grace realizes she must deal with her own dark secrets—and those of the people closest to her.

1. “And at the heart of this ever-changing city, there is a fundamental core of values which remain unchanged, and which must remain so”. What were the values of this time, and how were they changing? How was this change reflected in London’s society?

2. “The bobbed hair…it’s symbolic”. What does the bob symbolize in
The Jewel Box
? How do you think men viewed this hairstyle? Do you think the bob is still a powerful statement today?

3. Did you like the book-within-a-book plot? What is the significance of O’Connell’s title,
The Vision
? What do you imagine the cover for this fictional book looked like?

4. Competition is a large theme in this novel. Who are the players, what are they competing for, and does anyone win?

5. Compare and contrast the two men who made these statements: “You’re beautiful girls, and you’re so alive and so different—and each of you is more special, more valuable, for the existence of the other one”. “You’re like a couple of gems in a jewel
box, you two”. How does the title of this novel pertain to not just one woman but to all women of that time?

6. Do you believe O’Connell when he says: “I like the not knowing. I like life to be unpredictable”? Does Grace share that sentiment? Do you think they are similar or complete opposites?

7. Analyze Grace’s dream: “Grace was dreaming about Margaret the typist, her coiled black hair transformed into a snake. John Cramer was in the dream, too, playing a wooden flute, and the hair snake uncoiled and reared up to its hypnotic tune”. How is this dream meaningful? Where else do dreams appear in
The Jewel Box
? Why do you think the author used dreams in such a manner?