“I’m delighted for you, only . . . surprised, I suppose. You were always so honourable.”
“Well, honour wasn’t doing anything for me.” The waiter had dropped a salver on the table and she signed her bill with a flourish. “Mrs. Pellanora’s establishment does.”
“I don’t think any the less of you,” I said fiercely, panicked at the thought of losing her again so soon—here one heartbeat, gone the next. “I could never think less of you.”
Wincing, Clarke shook her head. She was so striking in her boyish clothing, the curve of her throat and the flash of her eye beneath the glass half-moons, that save for the skirts and the curls she really did seem a young rake cooing over watch fobs and walking sticks in Regent Street.
“I’ve an appointment to rehearse with our pianist in half an hour.” She tugged on a pair of gloves. “You should know I don’t regret seeing you, Jane, and that I don’t any longer harbour a . . . Hang it, nothing I say will do any good to anyone. When I think of you, it’s altogether fondly.”
“Clarke, please don’t—”
“Will you say my name at least?” Flushing again, she adjusted her pince-nez. “I don’t know why you do that, I never did. Rebecca is my name, Becky what my parents called me, Becca what the four other company girls call me. Take your pick. Why should you want to remind us of Lowan Bridge?”
Because the only shaft of sunshine in all that endless midnight was meeting you.
“Rebecca.” The name tasted strange, like salt where sugar was expected. “Let me contact you, please. Have you an address?”
“That would be unwise.”
Desperate, I snatched up her bill and stole the pencil from the salver, scribbling my room number at the Weathercock and the street address. I thrust it at her.
After breathing tensely through her nose for a few seconds, she took it. Clarke placed the paper in a pocket beneath her jacket lapel and pressed her lips together.
“I always loved you as a sister.” My hand was so near to hers that taking it was a thoughtless act, the only right one.
My old friend cocked her head at our joined fingers, cogitating; she was a self-made woman, a singer of questionable provenance, and otherwise she had not changed a whit since she was six years old, and I was speaking the truth: I had always loved her.
“I never loved you so,” she said.
Clarke freed her hand from my tightening grasp as two tears fell soundlessly from beneath the pince-nez. Had she trussed me up like a slaughtered buck, I might have thought it my just deserts for the web of lies in which I had entangled her—this, though, seemed to exceed the boundaries even of cruelty. When my breath hitched, she rose to depart.
“Do you recall the book you had—the one my father published? The Garden of Forbidden Delights?”
My mouth must have worked; but sepulchres cannot produce sound, and I was a monument to wishes ungranted and tenderness left to rot unused.
The whisper of fingertips touched my cheek, and then Clarke was kissing me.
It was only a brief press, but it was neither dry, nor chaste, nor seeking. It was the kiss of a person who has thought about variants of the same kiss for a very long time, as if it were a hundred kisses, all of them passionate and all of them hopeless. I was startled and—in the moment—grateful enough even to reciprocate, did so before even thinking why I should not, and I tasted years in that kiss. I tasted years of dying hope, and the sweet bellyache of longing, and coffee, and Clarke herself, before she pulled away, running her thumb over my open lips.
“That was how I loved you,” she told me.
Women often embrace, sisters often kiss, and no one regarded us as she bowed her head, closing her eyes for a fleeting instant, and then turned and walked out of the tea shop.
I floated to the window, following her as she strode into the street. She did not look back, gauging the traffic at the corner with a practised tilt of her head; therefore I was the one turned to salt, and not Rebecca Clarke, when I watched her hand leave the front of her bodice and drop my address to the cobbles, the paper fluttering prettily before it landed in the filth and the straw.
For minutes which stretched before me like miles, I stood at that window, still seeing the ghostly afterimage of her slim back and gleaming hair the instant before I lost her for the second time. Carriages and buses clattered over the bill, no longer visible in the road, but that was for the best—I had never wished Clarke harm in all my days, and if seeing me grieved her, I renewed my vow never to seek her out.
An unexpected peace flooded the air around me.
Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.