“Mrs. Spencer, you have to let him out,” Pru implored after nearly a week of suffering his uncomfortable presence. “You can’t treat him this way. It’s the holidays! Have a little compassion.”
“Treat who?” Mrs. Spencer said in her carefully honed pretend na?veté. “And, by the by, Christmas is over. The giving season is finit.”
“You know exactly who I’m talking about. You’ve locked the poor writer in his room. Forget the giving season, this is basic human decency.”
“Miss Valentine, that’s preposterous. Tell me, have you seen any chains? Any locks on his door?”
“Well, no, but I haven’t really—”
“I see you go in there,” Mrs. Spencer said with a snigger. “Toting food and companionship and Lord knows. Surely you would’ve noticed signs of bondage. Or is it that you want to find signs of bondage?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Did it ever occur to you that he relishes the situation? Maybe reclusiveness is his preferred state. The man is a writer.”
“Yes, but—”
“He’s come to write, not consort with pretty, if not slightly vaporous, young girls. As shocking as you may find it.”
True, he was there to write, but Win Seton hadn’t made a lick of progress on his book. Oh sure, the constant snap of the keys was fine and dandy but it couldn’t have been a biography he was writing. Mrs. Spencer had given the man precisely nothing to work with. Pru sat in on every confab, so knew this as fact. And every evening it went like this.
At seven on the nose, Mrs. Spencer would change into a dramatic silk dressing gown. She’d call Pru into her company and announce: “Time for my interview!”
It didn’t matter if Pru was in the middle of a chore, or if there were dogs half fed, half bathed, or half birthed. Mrs. Spencer would run Pru down and drag her upstairs to sit watch. The man was a “likely deviant,” Mrs. Spencer claimed, and Pru her chaperone.
“Are you ready to pen my memoirs?” she’d trill and plant herself at the edge of Win’s bed, highball in hand.
Her hair, the gown, those diamonds winking in the lamplight, all a far cry from her customary soiled trousers and straw hat. Even the cocktail was wrong. Mrs. Spencer didn’t drink, as a rule, and instead preferred laudanum to calm her nerves. Pru didn’t understand it at all.
“Start with my profile,” she’d say. “What do you think of my profile?”
“Perfect Hellenic proportions,” Win responded obediently.
From the outset the writer accepted his role and played it to the hilt. Flatter, flatter, and when all else failed, flatter some more. One could never go wrong when referencing “Hellenic profiles” and so Win did without abandon. It was a commendable perception for a man blessed with rascally schoolboy charm in lieu of intellect.
“Hellenic,” Mrs. Spencer said with a happy sigh, every time. “Yes. Thank you for noticing. God has blessed me well.”
As Win told it, if Mrs. Spencer was the duchess, then God had nothing to do with her legendary silhouette. Gladys Deacon was born with a small kink in her nose, a quirk that vexed her from the start. She also deemed her eyes unacceptably close together and therefore vowed to ameliorate her oh-so-many physical flaws.
To that end, a teenaged Gladys Deacon set off on a worldwide tour to survey the most prized busts and sculptures in creation. She studied each piece, diligently analyzing and recording the distance between eyes and the lengths of the noses. Eventually, she arrived at the ideal proportions and took her data to Paris, where she underwent a series of wax injections to achieve this artlike perfection.
“I’ve never heard such a thing!” Mrs. Spencer claimed whenever Win brought it up. “Wax injections! Honestly. No, silly writer, I was born with this most original and God-given face.”
And so it went between Win and Mrs. Spencer. He prodded. She denied. He wheedled. She demurred. Pru sat watching, wondering what the bloody hell they were all doing there. Everyone was haggling for something, but from very early on the end result was obvious. Not a one of them was going to get what they wanted. Not even Pru.
Twenty-six
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 1973
“Hello,” Pru said, standing sheepishly in the hall.
She had a sack in hand, in it a jumble of foodstuffs she’d acquired in town.
“I thought you’d like something to eat? May I come in?”
Win didn’t look up from his typewriter. Instead he made some sort of roll-nod gesture, which Pru took as invitation. With a begrudging smile, she stepped through the doorway.
“Hopefully Mrs. Spencer won’t mind me visiting her memoirist unsupervised,” Pru said, padding gingerly across the room. “I feel like, I don’t know, you’re not getting enough food or something. Silly notion, probably. But with the conditions downstairs…”