“Please,” I said, turning away from Marlatt and approaching his table. “My friend was supposed to meet me here. It isn’t like her to go walking off with strange men. Can you tell me what he looked like?”
The old man looked me up and down and shrugged. “Can’t say I got a close look at the chap. Slim. Dark suit, black coat, black hat. Respectable. Spoke softly.”
“His face?”
The man shrugged again.
“Was he dark haired or light haired?”
“Dark haired, from what I could see.”
So it wasn’t James, then. It couldn’t be. “Did she seem to know him?”
The man took a drag of his cigarette, enjoying the attention, likely the only he’d had all day. “Well, she gave him a glare when he approached her, though she’s always got a sour face, that one. Argued with him a bit at first. But then she got real quiet while he talked, and the next thing I saw she followed him out of here without a word.”
“Did you hear them?”
“Miss, I haven’t heard right since about ’13. I have no idea what they said.”
“Which way did they go?”
“That way.” The man pointed.
The opposite direction from her flat, then. I thanked him and hurried back into the street. The rain had long stopped, but dusk was just beginning to fall, the sky turning lavender-blue. I hurried down the sidewalk, looking for Davies’s rumpled hat and mismatched jacket, her patented slouch as she walked alongside a nondescript dark-haired man. I pushed through the suppertime crowd, dodging elbows and handbags and puffs of cigarette smoke.
By the time I pushed my way out into the crowds on Shaftesbury Avenue, I had to give it up in despair. Davies and her mysterious man could have gone anywhere, ducked into a shop, taken a taxi or a bus. I was nearly at the roar of Piccadilly Circus, where I had no hope of finding them, even if they had come this way.
Davies never went off with strange men.
Never.
Perhaps she knew him. It was probably nothing.
It wasn’t nothing.
She got real quiet while he talked, and the next thing I saw she followed him out of here without a word.
What could a man—any man—have said to Davies to make her follow him in silence?
“Damn it,” I said under my breath, the curse feeling satisfying on my tongue. I tried it a little louder. “Damn it.”
“Watch your language, young lady,” a woman said disapprovingly as she passed me. She turned and tutted to her companion. “Girls today.”
“Damn it,” I said to her back, and walked toward Piccadilly Circus.
* * *
I suppose it was inevitable that things would fall apart after I met Gloria Sutter. I’m convinced that she had some of it planned, possibly from the moment she recognized who I was while I was sleeping on that train. But sometimes I wondered whether even she was fully in control of what she’d set in motion. The problem with Gloria, as always, was sorting out the truth from the lie.
My mother believed in my new friend Florence for nearly two years. The incredible stretch of time I kept my mother’s suspicions at bay both relieved me and utterly shamed me. In my occasional “nights over” at “Florence’s” house, my mother was never given the burden of knowing exactly what I was up to. But her credulousness came from her belief in me, in my honesty and my loyalty, none of which I earned.
I didn’t see Gloria every day, of course, or even every week. But a month would pass, or possibly two, and I’d get a note in Gloria’s distinctive handwriting, the words toppling over one another like children’s blocks, inviting me to Soho. Perhaps she missed my company, or perhaps she was simply bored; I never knew which, and I never cared. I’d pack my valise, tell Mother I was off to visit Florence, and we’d go out on the town.
Those are some of the longest nights of my memory, stretching until three or four o’clock in the morning. We went to nightclubs and late-night supper clubs; we danced with people we didn’t know; we mixed gin with champagne. I grew used to the sophistication of Gloria’s social circle, their shallow jokes and ridiculous pretensions, and though the experiences were foolish and ultimately meaningless, they had one salient quality: They were fun. We were young, the war was over, and we dealt in death day after day, the faces of the dead haunting both our waking lives and our dreams. So fun was its own reward, a virtue in and of itself. And although we were usually in a crowd, I always felt that between Gloria and me alone there was something different, some recognition and understanding of the desperate need we had for those endless riotous nights.
And then one night I stupidly took a taxi home instead of sleeping on Gloria’s horrible sofa, arriving home drunk at three o’clock in the morning and waking my mother out of bed.
It was a moving scene, straight from a stage melodrama or a two-reel film. My mother was bewildered, then tearful, then angry; I was sullen, rebellious, and finally sick. Before I passed out, my head already aching, I confessed that Florence was a hoax, and I gave my mother Gloria’s name.
The next day, as I alternated between moping in the kitchen and lying prostrate on my bed, my mother called off her afternoon’s appointments and marched out the door, handbag in hand. Through my fog I was able to feel the sheer, horrified embarrassment that my mother was going to Soho. She came home two hours later, white faced and unspeaking.
I stared at my mother over our silent supper that night, watching her pick at her food. “What is it?” I managed, overcoming the shame that had kept me silent. “What did Gloria say to you?”
She set down her fork and looked at me. She wore a faded day dress under a black cardigan, her hair tied at the nape of her neck, and in that moment she looked like any other housewife on our street, a woman who had seen a war and buried a husband and raised a daughter. The anger had faded from her eyes, but something else had replaced it, something deep and terribly torn.
“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” she asked.
I swallowed. “I thought you’d disapprove.”