the edge of the lake. ‘I know I am clumsy,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. Perhaps his fiancé had told him so. ‘No, it is just difficult.’
‘I want to be honourable,’ he said. ‘To honour what is between us.’
He was looking at her in the darkness, at her silk dress, her silk hair, her costume wings: not seeing her, herself. Naming shadows and fancy moths, this pampered life—it was all false, Aurora thought.
Also false: herself and Lewis.
‘I want to be honest,’ she said. ‘I don’t care much about honour.’
She took off her shoes and stockings, and walked into the water, certain he would not follow. He did not.
Imaginary Ladies
In Portland, East and Verrall stayed in Mrs. Kay’s boarding hotel as they always had, Julius in the next room. Bella was at the Nortonia Hotel, but the delightful tea garden with its Japanese lanterns was closed for the winter. Mr. Pantages had gone south to see a very pretty quick-change artiste whose final change was Godiva. It was more peaceful without his attentions, but her contract was up in January. She continued to headline every bill—and had her picture on the cover of a song-sheet for You’d Be Surprised!—but could not help feeling unsettled.
She felt a fretful, pestering hunger for company, a loneliness as grey as the November evening. Restless and not at all tired, instead of turning in to the Nortonia, she walked down towards Mrs. Kay’s hoping to catch East still at cards in the parlour; it was only just past midnight. She did love East, and he liked her too, however brisk he might be.
Everyone knew Verrall loved Aurora, but maybe East could like her best—he liked so many girls, why not her most of all? She was no longer a child, after all. Perhaps he would come back to the Nortonia with her, just this once.
A fast clip down cold, echoey pavement warmed her. Through hedge-grown back streets she arrived at Mrs. Kay’s from the side and could see, across the grass, the lighted square of East’s and Verrall’s window—not asleep, then.
No, there was East in his shirt-sleeves moving about. Verrall stood behind him, brushing a coat with careful strokes. It was like the picture screen. Bella stood watching.
Taking off his shirt, his chest vulnerable and thin in the lamplight, East laughed at something Verrall had said. Just quietly, a joke between the two of them. Verrall wore a grin of calm pleasure, having pleased his friend. He came to the window—he would see her watching.
No, he turned back, hand on the curtain, to say something, and East came forward and laid his hand on Verrall’s neck. An easy gesture. But it came to Bella, watching them, that East was Verrall’s, and Verrall East’s.
That it had always been so, whatever nonsense East might spout about imaginary ladies, whatever bonbons he might dole out.
Verrall pulled the curtain across.
Bella turned and made her way back through empty streets to the hotel.
Suffit
Victor had been wounded at the Somme. In November the official letter came, before any word from Victor. Both Clover and Madame stood for a long while in the gloomy front hall, trying to read the telegram. Three heads close together in the hall mirror when Clover raised her eyes. Madame’s dark little head—how fond she had become of it—and Harriet’s, remarkably similar.
‘Wait,’ Clover said, and stepped across to push the brass light switch. Before she could return to the paper, Madame had read it and fainted flat on the worn carpet.
Clover read it for herself and then sat down beside Madame, back against the wall and legs out in front of her, still holding Harriet. It was a relief, in a way, that it said wounded in action. That it had come, the thing she knew would be coming.
Harriet climbed off her lap and patted Madame’s face, saying, ‘Dama! Dama!’
In January 1917, Victor was sent to a London hospital, his leg badly infected. The pins the field surgeons had inserted to hold his leg together were causing a great deal of pain; the swelling was terrible to see, and the scar livid. Clover went to Wandsworth Hospital every day, a complicated trip involving two changes on the underground and several buses. Two hours, to be allowed ten minutes with Victor—‘until his condition improves to my liking,’ the ward sister said.
He was not always himself. He did not want to speak, but might return the pressure of her hand. Sometimes there would be a delay, and Clover counted the seconds