The Ashford Affair Read online

  So there. She’d had enough, enough of this, enough of him, enough, enough, enough.

  Frederick leaned both hands on the metal table. The table gave under his weight, causing him to stagger slightly, but his eyes didn’t leave hers.

  “You haven’t the slightest idea, have you?” he said softly. “You want Shakespeare? I can give you Shakespeare. ‘I could be banded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, but that I have bad dreams.’ Do you know what it is to have bad dreams, mouse?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said with frustration.

  “It has everything to do with everything.” He pushed abruptly away, making the table rock. Addie’s drink sloshed over the edge of the glass, spilling through the slats of the table, staining the crepe de chine of her dress. “See that man over there? The one coughing into his companion’s handkerchief?”

  “Yes? What of it?” She knew him, vaguely, and didn’t think much of him. He’d married an American heiress and gone on to spend her money on cigarette girls.

  “He got a dose of gas in Bethune. Not by the Bosh, by our side. They’d brought the wrong sort of spanners. The cylinders cracked. Do you know what it’s like to be trapped in a trench with a lungful of yellow gas? Do you know what a man looks like after he’s been gassed? You can’t even begin to comprehend the stench of it.”

  Addie blinked at him, confused. He never spoke of the war. She had alluded once or twice, tentatively, to his war record, but each time he had changed the subject quickly enough to make her head spin, turning her question to the side with a joke or an observation about the scenery.

  “But didn’t you have masks?” asked Addie timidly.

  Frederick’s face was a study in bitterness. “Our masks were a mockery. You’d like the resonance of that, wouldn’t you? A mere masque of a mask, all form and no function. They looked well enough for the papers back at home, but they didn’t do a bally thing to keep out the fumes.” He fished her abandoned drink up from the table and knocked it down. “A nice sort of poetic justice all around. We unleashed it and it killed us.”

  “But now that we know,” ventured Addie, feeling on firmer ground here—hadn’t The Bloomsbury Review printed an article on just this topic?—“we know better. The League of Nations—”

  “The League of Nations is a sham. It’s not worth the paper on which its charter is written.” He stared into the empty glass, looking up with sudden violence. “No, it’s worse than a sham. It’s a scam. The idealists bustle around it like so many deluded ants while the realists go and stockpile their weaponry in private.”

  “But now that we’ve learned how horrid war is, surely people will want peace—”

  Frederick’s voice was like a lash. “People don’t want peace; they want revenge. You thought the last war was bad? Just wait and see. They’ll come up with more and better. More gas, more trenches, more maimed men screaming.” His face twisted. “There’s a peculiar sound a shell makes just before it’s about to fall. A whistling noise. Can’t you hear it, Addie? That’s where we are now, just waiting for the next shell before the screaming begins.”

  She felt cold, cold straight through in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. She swallowed hard. “But—but, surely,” she said, “if we can just make sure people remember.” She could feel herself beginning to babble. “There was the moment of silence, and you have all those articles in the papers, and statesmen and philosophers and poets all working to—”

  “Words,” he said flatly. “Nothing but words. Words can’t protect you. They can’t protect any of us.”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong!” The table rocked as she leaned forward, clutching at it to make it still. “Words are the most powerful things there are. If we only—”

  “Don’t be naïve.” His words hit her like a slap in the face. “It will happen again, and worse. All your poetry is nothing more than ribbons, a pretty package to wrap the basic bestiality of man. But the bestiality will out and all your free verse can do nothing to hold it. Nothing at all.” He raised his glass to her, offering it in mock salute. “Drink tonight, Miss Gillecote. For tomorrow we die.”

  Addie knocked his hand away. “Don’t be horrid,” she said fiercely, standing with a scrape of metal on stone. His coat fell from her shoulders. She made no effort to retrieve it.

  “You call it horrid; I call it honest.” His eyes glittered like green glass. “That’s not horrid. Horrid is coming back to your cot to find a couple of rats scrapping over a human hand. Horrid is men waist-deep in mud, with sores that never heal. Horrid is sharing a cigarette with a man who two minutes later has no face. You want true horrors? I could a tale unfold to harrow up your linen-white little soul. This.” He pointed unsteadily at the dance floor. “All this that you so despise is the panacea that makes the horror of living just barely bearable.”

  “Surely,” said Addie, “you can’t mean that.”

  “Which would you prefer? Would you rather I mouth polite social nothings to you? Would you rather I lie? You probably would,” he said meditatively. “Most of us prefer lies to truth, because the truth is too bloody awful. We say that we want truth. We don’t. We want a pretty lie so we can dress it up in fancy clothes and call it truth.”

  Addie’s head was swimming, and not from the drinks. She made an effort to catch on to their original argument, to bring it back to something she could understand.

  “But this”—Addie made a gesture that encompassed the crowded garden, the bright lights, the gaily dressed dancers—“all this is a lie, then, too. If you’re so sick of lies, why not be sick of this?”

  “Not a lie.” Frederick braced an arm against the wall above her shoulder, his face very close to hers. “A distraction. You might even call it a digression. A momentary pause in man’s beastliness to man. Shouldn’t we enjoy it while it lasts?”

  “What if—” The stone of the wall was rough against her bare back, rough and cold. Her eyes were on a level with Frederick’s bow tie. She lifted them to his face, saturnine in the glow of the lanterns. “What if I don’t believe that man is that beastly?”

  His eyes dwelled deliberately on her lips. “Don’t you find me beastly?”

  “Not most of the time, no,” she said tartly.

  She shocked him into a laugh. He pushed away from the wall, miming applause. “Well played, my dear, well played.”

  She hated it when he sounded like that. She watched him reach into his pocket from his flask and said sharply, “You’re inebriated.”

  Frederick uncorked his flask. “No. I’m drunk. And I intend to get drunker.” He looked down at her and his voice softened with something very like tenderness. “Go home, Addie. You’re not meant to be here.”

  “Only if you’ll come away, too,” she said impulsively. “You’ll thank me in the morning.”

  “A rescue mission?” He gave an ugly laugh. “I shouldn’t bother if I were you. Do you want to know the truth? I am beastly. We all are. If you’re wise, my girl, you’ll find yourself a nice little cloister somewhere. Get thee to a nunnery, Addie. And stay there. You’re too good for this wicked world. Out went the candle and we all were left darkling.”

  “You’re mixing your Shakespeare,” said Addie, “and talking nonsense.”

  “Not nonsense. It’s the truest truth I’ve spoke yet. I’d have said it before if I weren’t such a self-indulgent ass. There was a time when I deluded myself—but never mind that.” He shooed her with the flask. “Get shot of me, Addie. Slough me off like a snake’s skin. In layman’s terms, stay away.”

  “Fine,” said Addie, gathering up her wrap. “If you want to drink yourself into oblivion, I won’t interfere.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He grabbed her by the shoulders, his fingers biting into her bare skin. “This is it, Addie. The end. No more. For months now, I’ve tried— I can’t play nursery games with you anymore.”

  “Nursery games?” she repeated indignantly
.

  “I can’t batten off your belief. ‘I eat the air, promised crammed; you cannot feed capons so.’ It doesn’t work. I’ll only suck you dry, like Stoker’s vampire, and leave you as much of a husk as I am. What’s the point of it?” His voice was as raw as the December air, a despairing denial of the prospect of spring. “I can’t offer you sweet whispers in the moonlight or prospects of domestic bliss.”

  Addie felt her cheeks going red. “I never asked—I never thought—”

  For a moment, his hands cupped her bare shoulders, sliding down her arms in a caress, a caress that made the music and laughter recede into the distance, someplace far, far away. “Didn’t you?”

  Addie looked up at him, prepared to protest, to deny it, but his mouth cut off her angry words, cut off thought, cut off everything but the scent of the flowers and the taste of alchohol and tobacco on his tongue, all the forbidden fruits, making her cold skin burn wherever he touched, her head spin. The music was only a distant thrumming in her ears.

  She’d liked to have thought that she raised her arms to push him away, but they wrapped around his neck instead. This … this was what it was about … the illicit pleasures at which the poets hinted, of which the moralists warned, why people abandoned propriety and fortune for a hurried encounter in a hired room.

  His arms pressed her hard against him, molding her pliant form to his. But only for a moment. He released her so rapidly that she nearly fell, catching at the end of the table to steady herself.

  He was breathing as rapidly as she was, her lipstick smeared on his lips, staring at her as though—as though he were afraid of her.

  Cruelly, deliberately, he scooped up his jacket from the floor, turning away from her, turning away so that she couldn’t see his face. But she could hear his words, every painful one of them, enunciated with horrible clarity as he shook a cigarette from its case with hands that weren’t entirely steady.

  “Go home, Mouse. And pretend you never met me.”

  New York, 1999

  Jon met her at the airport.

  He had to jostle her elbow before she noticed him. Clemmie was in her own private fog, her head an alphabet soup of anxieties, worries surfacing and submerging against the murky background of her mind. Her BlackBerry was buzzing; there was already a list of e-mails from Paul that stretched all the way to the bottom of the screen.

  Paul had been furious when she announced that she was leaving. They had meetings scheduled tomorrow with more of the PharmaNet top brass; she was supposed to be taking interviews, preparing fact sheets. There are outlines for everything, she had told him. Harold can handle it. Harold looked like he didn’t know whether to be flattered or terrified. My grandmother is dying, she said flatly, feeling like she was lying, hoping she was lying. I haven’t taken a vacation day in three years.

  Fine, Paul had said, and she’d known he was going to take it out of her later, with some assignment that didn’t need doing, or grunt work that could have been given to a contract attorney, that he didn’t think a grandparent—too far down in the food chain—was worth this dereliction of duty.

  It had taken nearly twelve hours to get back to New York, twelve excruciating hours. There had been snow, delicate, storybook flakes that sent Heathrow into an uproar, delaying departures, turning Terminal Four into an ad hoc dormitory. The airport had only one deicer. How could an airport in a cold climate have only one deicer? But she was one of the lucky ones. Her plane had taken off, albeit four hours late.

  Her BlackBerry started buzzing the moment she turned it on after customs. Buzz, buzz, buzz. She marched head down through the baggage claim, scrolling through messages, trailing her suitcase behind her. She’d meant to get a cab, but someone jostled her arm and there was Jon, waiting among the ranks of taxi and livery drivers who always queued up by the end of the baggage claim.

  “I thought of making a sign that said ‘EVANS’ with two Ns…” he said as he gave her the statutory one-armed hug, the proper cousinly greeting. “But you look like you wouldn’t remember your own name right now.”

  “What is my name again?” Clemmie leaned into him a little longer and harder than necessary. He smelled of starch and the sort of detergent that promised spring freshness. Reluctantly, she extracted herself, clipping her BlackBerry back to her belt. She’d deal with Paul later. “Thanks, Jon. You really didn’t have to. I was going to get a cab.”

  He shrugged. “No problem. Besides, I thought it might be good to prepare you a bit before we get there. This all you have?”

  He took the handle of her suitcase from her before she could ask him just what he meant by “prepare.”

  He kept his hand under her elbow as he ushered her out the sliding glass doors, pulling her back as a car skidded past, driving perilously close to the curb.

  “Asshole,” he said without heat. “That wasn’t his light.”

  “Isn’t the cab line that way?” Clemmie tugged on his arm, but he shook his head.

  “This way,” he said, pointing to one of the short-term parking lots. Given that he had her bag, there was little choice but to follow. He clicked something on his key chain and the lights of a battered blue Mazda blinked into life.

  Clemmie allowed herself to be deposited into the passenger seat, her heel snagging on a tear in the carpeting.

  “Caitlin didn’t get the car?” she croaked as Jon inserted himself neatly into the driver’s seat, clicking his seat belt into place.

  He gave her a wry look. “It was North Carolina. We had two cars.”

  “Oh,” said Clemmie, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say to it. The simple phrase carried with it a picture of domesticity she hadn’t yet managed to achieve with anyone, anywhere. She and Dan hadn’t even shared a coffeemaker.

  “You have your license yet?” asked Jon, setting the car into gear.

  “Who drives when there are cabs in the world?” said Clemmie. She shifted in her seat, the seat belt cutting painfully into her chest. “Granny Addie. You haven’t told me—”

  “Christ, Clemmie, don’t do that!” Jon slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid rear-ending a cab that had cut in front of him. He gave her a weak smile. “Not until we’re out of the airport, anyway, okay? I’m not used to New York drivers yet.”

  “Okay, but—”

  Jon flipped on the radio to 1010 WINS, the automotive equivalent of white noise. A canned voice informed her that there were delays on the GW Bridge, but the Throgs Neck looked clear. “You might want to nap a bit. You look like crap.”

  “I’d like to see how fresh you look after two transatlantic flights and three days in the same suit,” said Clemmie, stung.

  There was a complicated tangle in front of them involving two cabs and a livery car. Jon pulled over into a space on the side, twisting in his seat to look at Clemmie.

  “For once, don’t fight me on this? It’s going to be rough enough for you without the sleep deprivation factor.” He started ticking off items on one hand. “The Greenwich cousins keep calling, wanting to know if she’s dead yet. Your mother and Anna are at each other’s throats. The lawyer is hovering like a vulture. And then—there’s Granny Addie.” He cleared his throat, his eyes shifting away. “Don’t kid yourself. You’re going to need all your strength when we get there.”

  “What about you?” she asked guardedly.

  Jon shrugged and turned the key in the ignition. “I haven’t been on two transatlantic flights. And I don’t wear suits.”

  “Wait.” Clemmie put a hand on his arm. The engine died down into a low rattle. “I get it. I’ll close my eyes and be quiet and whatever. But before we go, I need to know. What happened?” Her voice broke on the last word, all the frustration of the last ten hours seeping through.

  Jon pressed his eyes closed and opened them again. When he spoke, he looked at the windshield, not at Clemmie. “Donna found her on the floor next to the bed,” he said in a monotone. “She had hit her head on the edge of her night-table drawer
. They think she might have been reaching for something, overbalanced, and fallen.”

  “But—it’s just a knock on the head?” Even as Clemmie was saying it, she knew there was no “just” when it came to a woman of ninety-nine.

  Jon shook his head helplessly. “That’s it. They don’t know. They think she might have had a heart attack and then fallen or that she might have fallen, hit her head, and had a heart attack. We just don’t know.” He sounded as frustrated and angry as Clemmie felt. Remembering himself, he said quickly, “But they’re doing everything they can, Clemmie. It’s a good hospital. And your mother wouldn’t let them do otherwise.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Clemmie. Her mother could be a bulldog when she wanted to, entirely mono-minded. But Clemmie’s mind was on other things, picturing Granny Addie lying crumpled beside the bed, on the pale-blue flowered carpet, her night-table drawer open, Bea’s black-and-white face staring sightless at the white plaster ceiling. “How long was she there for? Before they found her?”

  Jon took off his glasses, rubbing them on the hem of his shirt. It was a blue and yellow polo shirt and beginning to look nearly as worn as Clemmie’s suit. “It couldn’t have been more than half an hour,” he said wearily. “Donna checks up on her at regular intervals ever since that incident last summer.”

  “What incident?” Clemmie twisted so far that her seat belt rebounded against her.

  If he’d said, Don’t you know? she might have punched him. Instead, he said, “She was on her own watching TV, didn’t like what came on, reached for the remote, and overbalanced. Debbie was in the kitchen making dinner and didn’t hear her.” He slapped a palm against the steering wheel, taking out his frustration on the one thing in reach. “That apartment is too damn big.”