The Ashford Affair Page 21

  “Thanks.” Clemmie took her glass and sank down on the sofa. It was surprisingly comfortable. At the desk, Jon poured himself a slug of scotch. While she was showering, he’d changed from button-down and khakis into T-shirt and jeans. “You’re being really decent,” she said.

  “Are you going soft on me?” The sofa creaked as he lowered himself down next to her, settling back against the battered plaid cushions. More gently he said, “I know this is a tough time for you. We can resume our usual hostilities later.”

  Clemmie looked at him sideways, at the purple smudges underneath his eyes, the new complex of lines around his lips. He wasn’t, she realized with some surprise, the arrogant boy she’d known, always faster, taller, just a few steps ahead. That boy was gone, and in his place was a man who looked as bone weary as she did.

  “Not just a tough time for me,” she said. “How are you holding up?”

  Jon gave her a look of mingled surprise and gratification. “It’s … tough.”

  Clemmie nodded meaningfully, indicating that, yes, she got it. And she sort of did. Almost. Insomuch as a broken engagement could be compared to a divorce.

  Jon leaned his head back against the back of the couch. “Addie—she did a lot for me. She meant a lot to me.”

  Huh? Clemmie had meant the divorce, not Granny. She caught herself just before she blurted that out, confining herself to another nod, repressing the urge to point out that that wasn’t what she’d meant, that it wasn’t his grandmother.

  Which meant what? That he had no right to mourn?

  Jon propped himself up on one elbow. “Do you know she’s the reason I went to grad school?”

  Clemmie shook her head over her glass. “No.”

  Jon stared at the brace of the bookshelf, a reminiscent expression on his face. “I was right out of Yale. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. I took that consulting job, remember?”

  “Yeah.” That, she remembered. “That was why you were in Rome.”

  She wasn’t sure where that had come from. They never talked about Rome. It was one of those unwritten rules.

  Jon glanced at her searchingly. Clemmie looked hastily down, locking her fingers around her glass. “Anyway”—the couch cushions shifted, rocking her closer to him—“I’d been planning to apply to either law school or business school after, just because everyone else was. I told Addie, and she said, ‘What do you want to do?’ Just like that.”

  Clemmie kept her eyes on her drink. “That sounds like her.”

  “She told me there was no point in making myself miserable just because I thought the world thought I should, that values and mores changed over time and I should do something that genuinely intrigued me, because, in the end, any job has its downsides and you have a better shot sticking it out if you like it in the first place.”

  “I wish she’d told that to me,” murmured Clemmie.

  She’d never doubted Granny had been proud that she’d gone to law school. Granny was very open in deploring her own lack of formal education, less open, although no less obvious, in her disapproval of Clemmie’s mother having gone straight from school to marriage. It had been taken for granted that Clemmie would make good on the opportunities her grandmother had never had and that her mother had passed up; she had taken her success as one for the team. But there had never been anything about making oneself happy or thumbing one’s nose in the teeth of the world to do so.

  Of course, as Jon was so fond of saying, maybe it was just because she had never asked.

  Jon smiled faintly, lost in memory. “She gave me that lecture—you know the one—”

  “The ‘when the crops were failing in Kenya’ lecture?”

  “That’s the one.” They shared a look of mutual amusement. “‘If we had let ourselves be discouraged…’ You know the rest.”

  It was Granny’s equivalent of the traditional “when I was your age, I had to milk the cows and walk fifteen miles to school,” only it involved the farm nearly failing and everyone having to pitch in to bring it back. They’d both heard that lecture far too many times, usually when whining about work they didn’t want to do. It basically boiled down to “pick what you want and then stick with it,” something that, so far, none of them other than Granny Addie had had any particular success at doing.

  Jon stretched out his legs and balanced his glass on his stomach. “You know, she made that up? There wasn’t a coffee-bean blight in 1935. I looked it up a few years ago.”

  “She was probably conflating events. People do that.” Clemmie snuggled down into the couch, curling her legs up underneath her. “I’d always thought of it less as history and more as a fairy tale. You know, one of the ones with a moral lesson, like the one where the girl who takes all the apples off the tree and the cakes out of the oven is rewarded and the one who doesn’t is sentenced to spit toads every time she speaks, or something like that.”

  “I don’t think I read that one,” said Jon. “But I’ll take your word for it.” He joggled his drink, watching the amber liquid make patterns on the inside of the glass. “What was your Grandpa Frederick like?”

  “Didn’t you—? I forgot. You only met him towards the end.”

  Jon smiled crookedly. “That’s right. I came around late.”

  “But you stuck.” Clemmie held out her glass for a refill.

  “Like a bad penny.” Jon hoisted the bottle up from its resting place on the floor next to the couch and obligingly poured another tot.

  “Aren’t pennies by their very nature good?” It was less of a tot and more of a jigger. “That’s good. Thanks.”

  Jon topped off his own glass somewhat more sparingly than hers. “I got the sense you didn’t exactly feel that way at the time,” he said carefully, setting the bottle back down next to the couch. He didn’t meet her eyes. “About my being around.”

  The scotch made Clemmie’s lips feel numb. Not just her lips, all of her. She looked down into her glass. “I was jealous.”

  Jon choked on his scotch. “You were jealous of me? Why? They were your family. I would have given my eyeteeth to fit it. If I knew what eyeteeth were,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Yes, but…” Clemmie shifted in her seat, navigating around a lump in the cushion. “I was a responsibility. They had to deal with me. You were there because they liked you.”

  “I was there because my father married your aunt,” corrected Jon. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “I thought you were so lucky.” Clemmie twisted the fringe of the afghan through her fingers. “Aunt Anna was so much fun. Mother was always working all the time, and when she wasn’t I wished she was. And there you were, with Aunt Anna and Uncle Leonard in that cool apartment on the West Side with the twisty staircase—”

  “Listening to them throw crockery and wondering how long it was going to be before it was all over.”

  Clemmie stared at him.

  Jon leaned his head back against the back of the couch, staring dreamily up at the ceiling. “They fought. All the time. Why do you think I spent so much time at Addie’s? It was the only place I could get my homework done without risking accidental concussion.”

  Clemmie swiped her wet hair out of her face. Jon’s father had been a famous—and famously temperamental—playwright. Clemmie didn’t remember much of him. He wasn’t the sort who showed up for family occasions. “I didn’t— I had no idea.…”

  “Whoa, Clem! Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t that bad.” For a moment he looked like the supercilious prep-school boy she remembered, smirking at the world. “You were right. Anna was fun,” he said judiciously. “When she was around. She was like that. I’d be her favorite hobby for about three days, and then she’d be off again, doing something else. Correction: doing someone else. She was sleeping around on my dad.”

  Clemmie stared at him.

  “Of course, odds were Dad was sleeping with someone else first.” Jon sampled his scotch. “It was … messy.”

  “W
hy didn’t you say anything?”

  “What was I going to say? We weren’t exactly best buddies at the time, as I recall. Besides, it was a point of honor for Anna not to let your mother know. Your mother has this disapproving look—”

  “I know,” said Clemmie quickly. “Trust me, I know.”

  Jon leaned his head back against the back of the couch, balancing his glass on his stomach. His shirt rode up, showing a slice of well-muscled chest, still tanned from the Carolina sun. “What a goddamned mess. Your parents, my parents, Anna.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. He sat up abruptly, catching his glass just before it fell. “No wonder none of us can make a marriage work.”

  “Hey!” Clemmie wasn’t sure why she minded, but she did. “You don’t know that. Besides, there’s Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick.”

  “Yeah,” said Jon with a curious look on his face. “Them.”

  Clemmie rose to her knees on the couch. “What, you’re going to give up because of one bad experience?”

  Jon hand lightly skimmed hers, sending goose bumps up and down her arms. “Where’s that engagement ring, again?”

  Clemmie snatched her hand back, rocking back on her heels. “At least I knew when to cut my losses! Maybe if you’d had the sense to break up with Caitlin—”

  She broke off, appalled. Some blows were too low. But it was too late; it had already been said.

  “Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” said Jon. His expression turned dark. “But what the hell. Maybe it wasn’t Caitlin. Maybe it would have happened with anyone. Maybe this whole love-everlasting thing is just a sham.”

  “That’s a cop-out,” said Clemmie sharply. “But why should that surprise me? You have a long history of copping out.”

  Jon turned and looked at her very, very slowly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He knew exactly what she meant. But that had been their deal all along, their unspoken deal, that there were some things they just didn’t talk about. Brush it under the table, pretend it never happened, act like everything was okay.

  Clemmie was sick of pretending. She’d had it up to here with brushing it under the table.

  He wanted to know what she meant? Clemmie looked Jon in the eye. They were practically nose to nose, so close that she could smell the booze on his breath and the faint whiff of detergent on his clothes.

  It was time to finally have it out.

  “One word,” she said. “Rome.”

  London, 1921

  “When were you going to tell me? Or weren’t you?”

  A gentleman, Hodges had said. A gentleman to see her. Bea closed her eyes against a sudden wave of dizziness. She should have told Hodges she wasn’t at home to him, but that would have caused talk among the servants and talk was the very last thing she wanted right now. One couldn’t bar the door to someone without begging the question why.

  She had never thought he would come here. They had been so careful, so discreet. He hadn’t come here, not to Rivesdale House, not since Addie had brought him, so very long ago. But here he was, in her drawing room—no, in Marcus’ drawing room—stalking towards her, a piece of cream-colored writing paper crumpled in one hand.

  He brandished the paper. “Did you just mean to leave it at this?”

  She’d meant that to keep him away, not conjure him like a bad fairy. Goblin fruit … Bea felt panic rising in her and clamped it down, clamped it down the way she did the nausea that plagued her all the time.

  “Darling! What a surprise. Do come have a drink.” Perhaps if she acted normal, it all would be normal; they could be sophisticated and civilized and pretend nothing had ever happened. She could close her eyes and everything would go back to the way it was meant to be, before Bunny, before Frederick, before everything. “Your usual?”

  She reached for the shaker with hands that were surprisingly steady. Breeding will tell, her mother would say. Early training paid off. Her whole world would crumple around her and she could serve beverages in a hand that did not tremble. Tea and scandal, those had been the dishes in her mother’s parlor. What would it be for her? Gin and ruin? The stakes had changed. Her mother had lied; nothing in Bea’s early training had prepared her for this.

  “Don’t play games,” Frederick said harshly. He held up the crumpled piece of cream-colored paper. “What do you mean by this?”

  “Exactly what it says,” said Bea calmly, although she felt anything but calm.

  “And in a good, clear hand,” he said, his dark eyes flashing. “‘My dear Frederick, as entertaining an interlude as this has been, the time has come for us to say adieu.…’”

  “Would you rather I had put it in verse?”

  He wasn’t amused. “You might at least have had the decency to break it off in person.”

  Bea shrugged. “One does get so frightfully busy—”

  “Don’t,” he said sharply, and the intensity in his voice made her set down the shaker. “Don’t.”

  Bea looked at him, this man who had been her lover for three whirlwind months. Three months of smoky nightclubs, hurried embraces in the backs of taxis, clandestine meetings at his flat. They had known each other’s bodies, quite intimately, but in the most basic of ways he was still a stranger to her. She had never expected he would react like this. Although, to be honest, she had never thought much about how he would react at all; she had been too overcome with her own need, the need for revenge, and then, in a panic, the need to make it all go away. To make him go away.

  Heavens, she felt ill.

  It had been one thing to push the boundaries, to get back at Marcus for his neglect, to pay him in his own coin, a pretty little revenge, an adultery for an adultery, an affair for an affair. But this—she had never meant it to come to this, to skate so close to disaster.

  Nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go; nothing had happened as planned. Marcus was meant to be bitterly jealous, to sweep her away, and they could go back to life as it was meant to be, her adored, he adoring, the smartest couple in London, her mother bragging about her daughter, the marchioness.

  She wanted to make it go away; she wanted to make Frederick go away.

  “Must you?” she said, and meant it honestly this time. “We never pretended our hearts were involved.”

  His lip twisted. “Not hearts, perhaps, but do some justice to my pride. You might have done more than send a note. Or are you that overrun with engagements?”

  Another wave of sickness swept her. Bea gripped the drinks trolley with both hands. Morning sickness? More like morning, afternoon, and evening sickness. She felt ill all the time, in every possible way. The sight of a plate of eggs and bacon turned her green; the scent of gin made her stomach churn. No one had warned her that childbearing made one bilious.

  “Engagements?” Bea laughed, and there was an edge of hysteria to it. “Haven’t you heard, darling? I’m engaged in the greatest engagement of all.”

  Frederick looked blank.

  “I’m with child.” She smiled brittlely. “Just what everyone has been waiting for. The ceremonial bearing of the heir.”

  Frederick didn’t say anything. He just looked at her and looked and looked and looked again, as if he were turning her inside and out. Bea’s hands instinctively went to her stomach, still flat, still so hard to tell, if only the other signs weren’t there. How her maid had smirked! And Marcus—how was she going to tell Marcus?

  He could be made to believe; he had to be made to believe. All those nights he stumbled home, practically insensible—he’d never remember they hadn’t been together, not if she swore to him they had. He’d be too proud of getting an heir to contest it, all the congratulations from his friends, his mother, her mother. He’d have to give up Bunny. It would put everything back the way it was; it had to.

  The silence made her ears hurt; it was too loud, all that not saying anything.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

  When he spoke, his
voice was low, but not so low she couldn’t make out the words, the words she least wanted to hear:

  “Is it mine?”

  FIFTEEN

  London, 1921

  “Don’t be abominable,” snapped Bea.

  Addie scarcely heard her. The only words that mattered were Frederick’s.

  Is it mine?

  That he asked that … That he could ask that … Addie’s stomach cramped. She had come down for her phenacetin tablets. She had given the bottle to Bea last week, and Bea had put it down on the drinks trolley, after bolting a tablet with a stiff chaser of whiskey and soda. Headache, she had said. Bea never had headaches. But Bea hadn’t been at all herself these past few weeks. She had been pale and strained, snappish and easily tired. Addie had watched her anxiously. Not influenza; Addie knew the symptoms of the flu by heart.

  Just a headache, that’s all, Bea had said snippily. There’s no need to fuss. Bea never had any patience with illness, with either others or herself. She was, as she herself liked to put it, healthy as a horse. The one time she’d been ill, Nanny had threatened to bolt her to the bed. Addie had begun to wonder if she would have to do the same, bolt Bea to the bed and call a physician, just to make sure there wasn’t something truly wrong.

  Addie had never imagined this. When she’d heard Frederick’s voice, she thought he might have come for her. It had been so long since she’d seen him, not since that horrible night in December at that hideous nightclub, the least garden-like garden Addie had ever seen. There had been no more concerts together, no more lectures, no more tête-à-têtes over tea. He was gone from her life as though he had never been.

  From time to time, she’d seen snaps of him in the papers. She’d never admit to anyone at the Review that she read the Tatler, but she did, flipping through guiltily, scanning for familiar faces, the girls from her deb year, the men who hadn’t danced with her, their faces pitilessly illuminated by the light of the flashbulbs. And there, behind Bea, in the shadow, had been Frederick, at one of those hideous clubs. Addie had asked Bea about it, tentatively, and Bea had shrugged and said he went about with the old crowd from time to time and could Addie pass the marmalade?