“Oh, you’re exhausted, aren’t you? My poor darling. Do sit down. There’s a nice cushy armchair right here. Evelyn, sweetheart, you must wait just a moment.”
She leads me to the chair, and I sink back and close my eyes and listen to her footsteps, light as a fairy, as she flutters about the room. A blanket comes down across my lap; Evelyn is urged from the room. A gentle draft caresses my face, from a window newly opened, and then the door closes with a soft click.
When I awaken, the room is dim and the air has gone quite still. The white curtains no longer flutter at the windows. I lift my head to find only a single lamp burning on the table by the side of the bed. A small domed silver tray sits underneath the lamp, and the reflection of the electric bulb creates a steady round pool around the finial, like the Arctic Circle.
A deep lassitude fills me, not unpleasant. The ache in my shoulder has receded, and my brain no longer hurts. I lay aside the blanket and rise from the chair, and only the slightest sensation of dizziness drifts into my head. I grip the bedpost and concentrate on the curtains across the room, long and generous, shielding the balcony from view, while the world steadies around me, scented with orange blossom. A vase of them rests atop the chest of drawers along the wall to my right.
Underneath the dome, someone has arranged a small supper of cold chicken and corn bread. I eat slowly, for I’m not especially hungry; I swallow the food only because I know I ought to swallow food, not because swallowing satisfies any particular desire within me. In fact, I have no desire at all. Every human want seems to have muted inside me, like a knife that has blunted from use.
Except, perhaps, for the scent of the orange blossoms on the chest of drawers. I can’t seem to resist them. I wander across the room, curling my bare toes pleasurably around the soft nap of the rug, and when I reach the blooms I close my eyes and sink my nose among them, and all at once I stand on the worn stone steps of a London church, and it’s springtime, and a man is kissing my lips to the music of a thousand eager birds. As if I’ve fallen into a dream.
I open my eyes, and there is a note nestled between the petals. A note, I would swear, that didn’t exist before.
For some time I gaze at this piece of ivory paper, folded once across the middle, and the line of thin, black letters just visible underneath the shelter of the uppermost half. The edges gain and lose focus, though the fault is not in my mind or in my eyes. I feel, in fact, quite alert—almost acutely aware of the rub of each detail against my senses. The delicate rich scent of the orange blossoms. The white velvet texture of the petals. The silken wood beneath my fingertips, and the slow respiration of the house around me. A plump rag doll rests against the mirror, wearing a pink dress trimmed in tiny lace, and her button eyes address me solemnly. I lift one hand and pluck the note from among the flowers. The two halves part, revealing the message inside.
A single line only, just five words:
Everything you seek is here.
Chapter 14
Versailles, France, August 1917
I woke on my stomach, for the first time in my life. A disorienting rearrangement of the universe. In panic, I lifted my head, and a hand fell on my hair.
“Shh. Go back to sleep.”
“Simon?”
There was a low, chesty laugh. “Were you expecting someone else?”
My head dropped back to the mattress—the pillows were long discarded—and the tip of my nose resumed its communion with Simon’s ribs. The air was dark and drowsy and thick with beloved details, like the rustle of Simon’s breath and the texture of the old linen sheet across my back. His hand remained in my hair, stroking gently, and I recognized the smell of cigarettes. The brief, velvet depth of sleep from which I had just awakened. The strange serenity of my mood.
The absence of dread.
“How long have you been awake?” I whispered.
“About dawn. Go to sleep, I said.”
“Can’t.”
“Rubbish. You’ve scarcely slept at all tonight.”
“Neither have you.”
“Yes, but I’m an old sinner, and you . . .”
I lifted my head again, and this time I propped my elbows underneath me. Simon took shape before me, colored in black and gray: lean, naked, smoking a cigarette. Not the pungent French kind, but a good, sensible British cigarette, mild and good-humored. Parliaments or something. His hair was too short to be really tousled, but I thought I could see the multitude of tracks my fingers had left there, flattened here and parted there. Or maybe it was only my imagination.
I asked him what was the matter.
His hand still wove inside my hair. Nothing, he said. Nothing’s the matter.
“Yes, it is. You’re unhappy.”
He touched my cheek with his thumb, the one holding the cigarette, and stroked along the bone to my ear.
“My God, how beautiful you are. More now than yesterday.”
“Lies.”
“No, it’s true. It hurts to look at you. Like looking at the sun.”
“Just look away, then.”
“As if I could. That’s been my trouble from the first moment, hasn’t it? I can’t look away from you. I want to lie here looking at you forever.”
“I thought you said you were tired of beautiful women.”
“Do you really remember everything I’ve said to you?”
“Every word.” I turned my lips into his palm. This strange delight, so early in the morning, in the face of Simon’s melancholy, was a thing of wonder to me. “Tell me what’s wrong. You’re not unhappy about this, are you?”
“I believe I’m meant to be asking you that question, my pet. How are you feeling?”
“Very well. I think.”
“You’re sure? No aches and pains? I am a doctor, after all.”
“Not at all.”
“Ah, you’re only fibbing to save my pride. But then, you’ve never lacked for fortitude, have you? Virginia.”
I loved the emphasis he placed on my name, each time he said the word Virginia, as if it meant something more than ordinary identification. As if some code were hidden in its syllables. How I worshipped that sound, the sound of my name in Simon’s throat. I never wanted it to stop. Last night he had said it over and over: as he kissed me, as he pushed inside me for the first time, as our flesh stretched and slid together, as he reached the limit of his patience and cried out Virginia! in a voice of almost agony. And I thought, at the time, this was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.