The London House

I wish Caro were here. We talk about everything—everything except this. Maybe it’s time. Maybe she could help, understand, laugh me out of my fears, and banish these longings. If she does love Randolph, at least there could be clarity, and perhaps I could learn to let go.

I’m convinced that would be better than this—anything would be better than this.





26 May 1940

Dear Beatrice,

Mother asked one question at dinner last night. Only one. “Are we never to have peace in this house?”

Father glowered across the long table and held Caro in his sights. It was as if Mother and I vanished from the room. “Don’t worry, dear. Peace reigns after tomorrow, at least here at Parkley.”

Yes, Caro is home. Well, she was. She came to Parkley for two nights and stayed only one. Despite all the sentiment oozing from her last letter as she reached Hastings from France, she waited seven days to come here and has already returned to the London House this morning.

It’s for the best. Last night, after thanking Father for working with Ambassador Campbell for her passage out of France, she launched into Schiap’s politics, the horrors facing Jews in France, and the “Imperial bubble” she feels has skewed our perspective here in England.

She brought “spit and fire,” as Creighton says, to the table and basically called everyone in England a coward.

Father turned beet red and ordered her out of the dining room—this was after Mother’s question.

“The dining room?” Caro shouted back. “I’ll leave the house.”

And she did. She’s not so independent as to have gone far or to have gotten a flat with friends. She simply returned to the London House—perhaps because Mother asked her to. I suspect Mother feels she will be safer there with its large reinforced basement than in a flat with friends, running the streets for a bomb shelter at night. Caro agreed quickly, seeing either the ease and comfort or the prudence of Mother’s request.

Father is tired of Caro’s “insolent rebellion,” but it isn’t that. She is wired for action. I can see it in her walk and wonder how everyone else has missed it. Her little bouncy step of old is long, firm, and directed now. She sees a way the world should work and is ready to make it so. She reminds me of that Archimedes quote, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” I suspect she spouts these ideas, not even believing most of them, in an effort to get Father’s attention and, perhaps, to find her way home. She’s looking for that lever and a place to stand, and he’s not making it easy.

“I’m sorry I have to go.” She hugged me tight this morning as we waited for the train.

“As am I.” I drove her alone to the station. I didn’t want Creighton or anyone else to take her—I wanted it to be the two of us. I wanted—I don’t know what I wanted, Beatrice. I think I wanted to test my strength. Test if, alone, I could look at her and not scream and cry. If alone, I could love her again as part of my own soul. If alone, I could reach out and help her.

Her latest letter arrived a few days ago—and I have cried every day since. Betsy thought I was getting ill. Only Caro’s visit got me up and out—I couldn’t let her see me down. I couldn’t let her sense my pain. And I was so afraid she’d bring it up and want to relive it all, as she said in her letter, that I avoided being alone with her. But when she didn’t pursue me or say a word, it was almost more painful.

How can she be so cavalier? How can she not blush constantly, recalling all she shared with him in Hastings? All she shared with me in that letter? She never should have written such things. That night changed my whole world—and I was not the one making love to Randolph.

She called this afternoon, after reaching the London House, and asked me to join her.

“We don’t need to be apart. Come stay with me here. It’ll be just like you wanted when we were kids.”

“I can’t. I have work.”

“Margo,” Caro groaned. She heard it—my voice is flat and dead now. “Don’t let them bury you up there. Don’t let them make you afraid to live. Mother does that. She’s the worst hypochondriac there is.”

I wanted to scream. Not only does she have no clue how I feel, but she thinks me a coward? A sycophant to my parents’ every whim? I’m not sure my position can get more humiliating, Beatrice.

“It’s not that.” I tried to lift my voice and muster some dignity, but it came out sharp rather than confident—and nowhere close to kind. “Don’t you think I have responsibilities? There’s good and important work here, Caro.”

“I wasn’t saying that. I’m sorry . . . I just miss you.”

We hung up soon after and I’ve felt sick all night. I keep snapping at people and I feel pulled apart. There are spaces within me, one near my heart and a couple openings around my lungs, that feel endlessly black and empty. I can’t breathe. I can’t relax. I hate feeling this way. I hate hurting her, and all I want to do is hurt her.

But as much as I yell and scream and dream of scratching her eyes out, part of me remembers she is innocent. Caro doesn’t know—and would never suspect. We made a pact to never lie, never divide, and she never broke it. All those years ago, when I was so mad she left . . . That wasn’t her fault either. I see that now. I was sick, and nothing, not even my twin, was coming between me and health. Mother and Father made it clear then and they’ve made it clear every day since. In many ways, Caro is right. I am trapped by their fear. Trapped by my own as well.

How did we get here? How did I diminish so completely? I barely recognize myself some days.

Worse yet . . . Does she get Randolph because my parents claimed me? I was once bold. I was once what he could have loved.

I should have told her. Right then, that summer we were sixteen and she came back and she glowed and it was all new—so new it could have ended. I could have spoken and she would have taken my side. She would have conceded and her weeks with Randolph would have been a summer crush that cooled with fall.

But I said nothing. I said nothing because she’d surpassed me in the short span of a summer. He had held her hand and spoken things I’d only dreamed of. He had never looked at me with anything close to what she described.

What would I have said anyway? That I had loved him since I was ten? That he was mine, like in a game of tag? It would have sounded ridiculous. It would have been ridiculous. But not one ounce of feeling has changed in twelve years.

That’s a lie. Everything has changed. I love him more now than ever.

She can never know.

Even you and I, dear Beatrice, will never speak of this again.





22 November 1940

Dear Beatrice,

She didn’t come home for our birthday. Twenty-two years old. For the first time in years, we are in the same country. We could have been together, but we weren’t. We weren’t because she didn’t come home. She didn’t ask me to come to her, and on the day, she didn’t bother to telephone at all.

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