“The drinking? The strange men?” She shook her head. “Of course I disapprove.”
My cheeks heated. “I don’t do anything with strange men.”
“Well, there’s that, at least.” She sounded weary. “But that isn’t what I meant. Why didn’t you tell me about her? About Gloria?”
She meant Gloria’s powers; she’d almost certainly sensed them from the first moment, just as I had. What had happened when they met? What had they talked about? Had they discussed me? I was seized with jealousy, sharp and overwhelming. I hadn’t told anyone about Gloria because Gloria was mine.
“I don’t know,” I managed, sullen.
My mother put an elbow on the table and pressed her fingers to her chin, her gaze leaving me. She had long, elegant hands, the fingers tapered, the nails oval. I’d only partially inherited those hands; mine were nice enough, but my mother’s had a beauty I’d always envied. Now she sat thoughtful, the thin circle of her wedding ring dull in the evening light.
“I feel sorry for that girl,” she said at last.
I gaped at her. “Sorry for her? She’s beautiful and rich.”
“She’s lonely,” my mother said. “This is a lonely business. Do you know she actually offered to contact your father for me?”
“What?”
“Oh, yes. It was a clever offer, you know. Contacting one’s own family . . . It’s unthinkable. I could never have done it myself, though I’ve thought about it more times than I can count.”
I swallowed. “You’ve thought about contacting Father?”
“Every day. Don’t look so shocked, Ellie. Someday, when you have a husband, you’ll understand what the cost is to lose him.”
She looked tired again, and I closed my mouth. She almost never talked about my father, who died in the war. A shell hit him in Gallipoli, and he never came home. My father had always been kind and loving to me, but the center of his life had been my mother—a sentiment I understood, because she was the center of my life, too. My own grief at his death had been suffered in silence, subsumed by the fact that my mother had nearly fallen apart. My parents had never been showy or romantic; it was only after the loss of my father that I began to understand how truly in love they had been, in their quiet way.
“Gloria Sutter,” my mother had said, “knew within seconds just what to offer me, and she had no second thoughts about speaking of it. She called it an offer to atone for how the two of you deceived me. I turned her down, but I won’t lie—I was horribly tempted. I considered it more seriously than I’d like to admit before I said no.” Her gaze focused on me again, and she sighed. “I’m still angry with you, and perhaps this is stupid, but I’m not going to forbid you to see her again. You don’t have very many friends your own age—possibly the two of you can help each other in some way. But I don’t want you drinking in public. And stay away from any of the men she introduces you to.”
It was generous, but I defied her, even in that. It was 1921, and hedonism was the height of fashion in London. I stayed out late dancing; I had my hair bobbed. We had another fearful row. I continued to see Gloria, and I continued to follow her into anything she told me was fun. I kissed a few different men who seemed to want me to, but they tasted like alcohol and cigarettes, and the thought of taking off my clothes for them was humiliating. Still, I tried the kissing at least, and we laughed about it afterward. Something about me was jagged and off-kilter; I felt like a stranger inside my own skin, a person I didn’t recognize. And somewhere in that fog of late nights and arguments, the stranger I had become met James Hawley, and watched from under her lashes as he removed her shoes, her heart squeezing in her chest in longing and disappointment as the room spun.
My mother and I did sessions during the day as we always had, with Mother in her beaded dress and scarf in the sitting room and I behind the plum curtain with my eyes closed, the back of my neck itching, summoning the dead. They always came. My mother grew tired more often, and sometimes she went to bed after supper and slept without pause until I roused her in the morning. I watched her grow paler, the smudges under her eyes becoming larger, and something inside me wanted to climb into bed with her at night and curl up next to her as I’d done as a child. But I never did.
One day, after our last appointment had left, I found her sitting in the kitchen, still wearing her dress and scarf. She held a letter in her hand.
“I’ve made an appointment,” she said. “For a test.”
I stared at her. She couldn’t be sick—she couldn’t possibly be. “A medical test?”
“No.” She put the letter on the kitchen table. “A test for the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research.”
I blinked at her. It was early spring, the air raw and damp, and I pulled my oversize cardigan closer over my chest. “What are you talking about? Are you mad?”
Her lips thinned and she didn’t answer me.
I pulled back a kitchen chair, the legs scraping loud in the silence, and dropped into it. “Gloria has done tests for them for a year,” I said, trying not to think of James Hawley. “She laughs about it. It’s a lark to her. The tests she describes are horrible—demeaning and useless.”
My mother raised her gaze to mine. Outside, the sky darkened as the supper hour approached, the faint, dismal gray that had lingered over the day finally fading. “It was Gloria who asked me to participate.”
“What?”
“She wrote me.” My mother traced one long, beautiful finger along the edge of the letter on the table. “She told me the work was important, that the New Society was fighting for recognition for people like us. She said it would mean a lot to her if I’d submit.”
“And you believed her?”