“You’re supposed to be on safari,” I said, taking in the shock of him. His fine grey suit looked as if it had been drawn onto his body. He didn’t belong in a nursing home on Gerald Road.
“Everything was postponed. I imagine you’ve been too caught up here to know, but my father developed a lung infection. It was a do-or-die situation, but he’s recovered. What of you? I didn’t even know you were expecting, and then there you were in The Times. One son born to one Markham, Beryl, at Gerald Road. You’re a wily one.”
“I wasn’t ready for anyone to know. Now the baby’s in trouble, too.” I felt my face crumpling and wondered if I were about to cry in front of royalty. Would that appear in The Times, too?
“I’m sorry. I heard. What can I do?”
“If you really want to help, you can make sure the surgeon is the very best. You must know who’s good around here, and who can be trusted. He’s still so small. Did you see him?”
Harry shook his head just as two nurses came in and pretended to busy themselves with linens. Obviously they were addled by having royalty in their midst and wanted a closer view.
“I’m happy to look into the surgeon,” he said, ignoring them. “And please don’t hesitate to ring me if you need anything else, anything at all.”
“Thank you. I’m so worried.”
“Of course you are.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it, and then leaned over and pressed his lips to the back of my wrist. It was a harmless gesture, meant only to show concern, but the nurses turned and gaped. Their square caps tipped towards us like flowers, or like megaphones.
Weak as he was, Gervase had the heart of a young moran. He made it through that first surgery, in the middle of March, and was a little more whole afterwards. They created an opening in him where there’d been only a blank expanse of skin. The next month he had another operation to form a rectum out of tissue from his colon, and then yet another, to bring it all together, like dots connecting in a child’s crude puzzle book. Each time we didn’t know if he’d survive the procedure or the anaesthesia. There was always the risk of sepsis afterwards, and haemorrhage, and shock.
The doctors had said no to Swiftsden for the moment. He remained in hospital, while Mansfield and I stayed at the Grosvenor, though in separate suites. We weren’t talking about the fate of our marriage for the moment. We were barely speaking at all.
One day Ginger Birkbeck came to visit me at the hotel. She and Ben were in London because she needed surgery for a benign tumour in some “female” region of her body she was far too delicate to name. But she didn’t want to talk about that anyway…but about Harry.
“Tongues are wagging all over town about you two,” she told me. “Word is that you’re at the Grosvenor because it’s across the road from Buckingham Palace, and that he comes and goes from your suite through a passageway along the basement.”
“That’s absurd. We’re only good friends, and he’s been awfully kind to me.”
“Even so, you should take care. It’s quite a serious thing. Forgive me for saying so, but your reputation hasn’t exactly been spotless. And the gossip columns always jump to the easiest conclusion.”
“Let them, then. I just don’t care any more.”
“So you are involved with Harry?”
“Whose bloody business is it if I am? Or if I’m not?” I paced the plush carpet—green tones and red tones all clashed together, in a muddle of Christmas and Sotheby’s. My God, but I was tired.
Ginger’s eyes widened. From her seat on my sofa, she asked, “You’re not planning to say either way then?”
“You’re missing the point! I’m trying to tell you it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to believe me if I deny the rumours anyway.”
“You could be ruined, Beryl,” she said. “Have you thought of that?”
I closed my eyes and opened them again. “Honestly, if I could have my life back and be left alone, I’m not sure I’d mind that much.”
“I’m trying to help, you know. I only want what’s best for you.”
“Believe it or not, so do I.”
There were a series of raps on the door, and Harry walked in with his lovely haircut and sharp, piney cologne and his knife-pleated trousers. “Hello,” he said. “What’s happening here? How’s Gervase today?”
“Stronger by all accounts.”
“That’s excellent. Really excellent.” He crossed the room swiftly and gave me a squeeze, and then he kissed me on the forehead while Ginger’s cheeks went bright crimson.
—
Finally in early May the surgeons were poised to release Gervase to Swiftsden. Though I knew I was going to have a fight on my hands, I thought it was time to bring up Kenya, too.
“He would never survive the trip,” Mansfield said plainly to me in his brother Charles’s coldly lavish library in Connaught Square.
“Not now, obviously. But next year?”
“I’m not going back—not with the way things are. And Gervase will have a better life here.”