The room was done up entirely in shades of white. Chairs and stools were upholstered in ivory brocade. Counterpanes were the color of a distant clipper’s sails. And the curtains were an inner layer of translucent muslin and an outer layer of sugar-white grosgrain, with pipings of airy blue.
“My mum always pined for whites. So for me white was—is—the color of luxury.”
After their lightning-like lovemaking on the stairs, the doorbell had rung, and it had been the delivery of the substantial tea that he had ordered from the Savoy Hotel. They’d eaten, and made love on the dining table. Afterward, Stuart had gone down to the basement and packed the boiler with enough coal to last the evening. Then they’d taken a bath together, and only finally made it to his bedchamber minutes ago.
In her dressing gown, she climbed on top of the bed and stood on her knees to study the seascape that hung above the headboard. “Who painted this? It reminds me of the little piece in the main hall—not the Constable, the new one.”
He hesitated only briefly. “You’ve a good eye. They were both painted by my mum.”
His answer surprised her. She looked closer. “She was talented. Her technique wasn’t perfect, but she had a good understanding of color and composition.” She turned toward him. “I didn’t know you ever visited with your mum after your relocation to Fairleigh Park.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Except once.”
His father had forbidden his mother to ever contact him, in person or by post. But Stuart hadn’t known it. For years he’d assumed she’d abandoned him. But when he’d been sixteen, he’d accidentally found out that Sir Francis paid Nelda Lamb a quarterly allowance—which quite put the lie to what his father had always claimed, that he didn’t know where she was.
Sir Francis had put her in his house in Torquay, where Bertie’s mum had lived out the last years of her life. It had been a brilliant move: It took Nelda away from Manchester, where Stuart might more easily find her, and also gave her something greater to lose should she renege on her promise to Sir Francis and contact Stuart.
Quietly Stuart dug up the address of the house in Torquay. At the end of his Easter holiday, he left two days early, ostensibly to return to Rugby. On the way he switched trains and headed farther south, to the Devon coast.
He arrived in the middle of a balmy spring afternoon. The entire coastline was in bloom, the bay as blue as a rain-washed sky. He left his luggage in storage at the train station, inquired for directions, and made his way up the hill behind the Strand.
His heart thrashed in his chest like a bagged weasel. He imagined her standing before her window, watching the road, the way he used to climb to the top of Fairleigh Park’s wrought-iron gates and look out to the country lane beyond, hoping to see her arrival. Or perhaps she would be at devout prayer for him, tears streaming from her eyes. Or writing to him, loving letters that she’d preserved, hundreds of them, for the day when he would come.
He broke into a run at the sight of the house, white and demure. The green door opened. A maid, her apron askew, looked him up and down, disappointed. “You are not my Bobby!”
His heart sank. Such an untidy and insolent maid would have been sent packing from Fairleigh Park without a character. A mistress who tolerated such a maid was at best of questionable respectability.
Hysterical laughter exploded inside the house, laughter both female and male, laughter that would have been considered too shrill and uncontained even for the servants’ hall at home.
“Is this Mrs. Lamb’s house?” he asked, hoping for a negating answer.
“If you’ve a card, I’ll take it to her,” said the maid.
He pushed past the maid into the front hall. The laughter still hadn’t subsided. Through a half-open door, he saw a man in a brown day coat and a woman wearing a yellow-on-blue polka-dot frock, sitting on his lap.
When he reached the parlor, he saw that the woman in polka dots wasn’t the only one on a man’s lap. A woman in a shade of scarlet far too provocative for daytime wear wriggled and giggled on another man’s lap. The third woman, a kohled, rouged hag, had a hookah in hand. And at barely four o’clock in the afternoon there were already half a dozen empty wine bottles all about the parlor.
“Mrs. Lamb, who’s your darling young friend, and where have you been keeping him?” gurgled the woman in scarlet.
Only then did he see a fourth woman, clad almost entirely in white, seated on a bench before the piano and slumped over the lowered lid that covered the keys, an empty wineglass at her elbow.
He didn’t recognize her. He remembered his mother as a weary, fading woman, aged before her years, her hair thin, her face haggard, her skin always splotchy either from the cold or from some dermatological ailment. The woman with her face down on the piano lid seemed hardly older than himself, beautiful, creamy, languorous.