“I told you, it will pass. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Everything about you has to do with me. Don’t you remember? For better or worse. Richer or poorer. So you have to tell me what’s troubling you.”
“There’s nothing troubling me.” He lit the cigarette and stepped to the window. The London drizzle had turned to a steady rain in Hampshire, and now a gale was picking up, lashing the water against the glass. “By God, it’s rotten out there. It had better blow itself out before morning. I don’t fancy driving along the cliffs through all that, not in Jock’s old Wolseley.”
“Simon, you can tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
I lifted my arms again, spreading them out, palms raised, and for an instant, in my lamblike faith, I might have been Christ on the cross. “Look at me. I’m healed. I’m all better. You don’t need to protect me anymore. It’s time you tell me what’s troubling you. To let me share your burden. That’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m your wife now. Richer and poor. Better and worse. Isn’t that right?”
He turned: first his head, and then the rest of him, pale and naked in the dim light of the old oil lamp on the bedside table. He was still too thin. Too thin, his hair overtaken by gray, his face strained. How had I not noticed the new lines in his face? His sturdy, perfect bones poked against his skin. His belly was concave, and I could count the muscles of his abdomen, the movement of his ribs as he breathed. As he watched me, as his gaze dropped from my eyes to my breasts to my waist, as the cigarette dangled unloved from his fingers, I thought how I wanted to feed him. To nourish him with my own body, if I had to. The body I offered him now.
“My wife,” he said softly.
“Yes. Yours. We’re bound together by God. That means something, at least to me.”
His body roused, but he didn’t step forward to claim me. He looked away, at the ceiling and then the window, and then he made for the bottom corner of the bed and sat down, cradling the cigarette between his hands. “I suppose I should tell you. I have to tell you, before we reach the house.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’ve been putting it off, like a coward. I knew it would upset you, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t want to ruin everything. Didn’t want anything to cloud yesterday. Our wedding day. I wanted it to be perfect for you. But I suppose it’s now or never.”
I went on my knees and crawled toward him, laying my cheek on his back. My mouth dried. My blood ran light and cool, anticipating some shock. Some terrible thing. “What’s now or never?”
He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his thighs, nearly dislodging me. I curled my hands on either side of his waist.
“Tell me. I’m strong enough. You’ve made me strong again. We’re married, nothing can change that.”
“It’s Lydia.”
Lydia.
I licked my lips, which were dry and swollen.
“What do you mean? About the divorce? Was there any difficulty? Is she upset?”
He lifted the cigarette to his mouth.
“The child? Little Sammy? Is he all right?” I raised my head. “Your brother! Has he been to see her? Was there trouble?”
Simon detached me gently and rose to his feet and walked around the side of the bed to the table, where he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and finished the brandy. His throat moved endlessly as he swallowed, and when he set the tumbler down his face had hardened into glass.
“I’m afraid Lydia’s dead.”
Chapter 23
Cocoa, Florida, July 1922
I’m afraid the doctor’s not pleased with me. He stitches up my palm and examines my eyes and ears and all that, as duty requires. He asks me to describe my symptoms, and when I’ve finished—before the last word has left my lips, in fact—he demands to know what on God’s green earth I think I’m doing, taking opium. A young mother like me.
I tell him I haven’t been taking opium. Just aspirin.
Oh, the look on his face. He doesn’t think much of the moral constitution of Mrs. Virginia Fitzwilliam, that’s for certain. He checks his watch (he’s been taking my pulse, for maybe the dozenth time) and releases my wrist. On his way out the door, he glances back over his shoulder and shakes his professional head. Presumably on his way to lecture Samuel.
Well, I don’t give a damn what he thinks. At the moment, I don’t care about anything except Evelyn, and she’s sleeping off the mad night in her own little bedroom in Simon’s apartment. My apartment—I must remember that. I close my eyes and recall the weight of my daughter, packed tight into the hollow of my shoulder as we drove down the lurid midnight highway, past the wet earth and the close-packed vegetation drizzled with moonshine. Her warm bones tucked along mine. The lumpen shape of her doll digging into my ribs. And I wonder what it is I’m really craving, the pills or the love, the chemical tranquillity or the real kind: the kind that can only be transmitted through human skin. I’m sweating again, sweating and aching and exhausted, and just as sleep begins to settle over my forehead, a name emerges from the darkness.
Sammy.
“Whatever happened to Sammy?” I ask Samuel when he jolts me awake sometime later, by the act of opening my bedroom door.
“Sammy?”
“Your son.”
He crosses his arms. “That boy is not my son.”
“He’s still a person. A little boy. What happened to him, after Lydia died?”
He stands there at the foot of the bed, scowling at me. He brought a tray with him, and it’s resting on the round table by the side of the bed. The smell makes me sick. I don’t want food. I want something else. Aspirin. Evelyn. Something.
“It was Clara,” he says. “Clara looked after him.”
“And afterward? When Simon left for Florida?”
“Sammy went, too.”
“And who’s taking care of him now?”
“That woman from Maitland, I assume. The housekeeper. That’s where Simon always left him, at the plantation, with the housekeeper and her mother. Didn’t you see him?”
“No. But I think Evelyn played with him, when I was sick. Why would Miss Bertram keep him a secret, though?”
He frowns a little more. Looks at the tray and back at my face. “God knows. You’re still sick. You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“Who gave you those pills?”
“The doctor in Cocoa.”
“Some doctor.” He uncrosses his arms and walks to the window. “Have you remembered anything more about Clara?”
“I don’t understand. You say she’s gone missing?”
“I haven’t heard from her since June.”
“June!”
“Yes, June! You stupid girl.” He grabs the edge of the curtain. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s just—well, she’s got this unfortunate tendency to get into trouble from time to time, she’s a bit headstrong, you know, impulsive, that’s the word, and—this note. The one in your drawer. She didn’t say anything else? Whom she was meeting?”
“Not that I remember. I wasn’t feeling well, that first night—”
“I’m not surprised.”