Forbidden Places Page 4

  Then she wouldn’t see him again for ten days or a fortnight. And however much she told herself it didn’t matter, it hurt her.

  She continued to worry about the difference in their social situation; and one evening, after she had had a couple of glasses of wine over dinner and he was being particularly funny and sweet and had taken her out twice in the week, and she was feeling more confident than usual: ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘Charles, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes of course you can.’

  ‘Well – do you ever see me as a bit different? From you?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ he asked, looking at her in apparently genuine astonishment.

  ‘Charles, you must know what I mean. Your family is much more—’

  ‘Much what?’

  Oh, God, now what did she say? All the words were so dated and stupid, things like ‘well-bred’ and ‘higher-class’. They made her sound at best stupid and at worst neurotic. She finally settled for ‘well-off’ because that was unarguable.

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ he said, smiling at her sweetly. ‘It’s not your fault though, and it’s not mine. We can just blame our fathers. I certainly never think about it, if that’s what you mean. Now come and give me a kiss.’

  She had a shrewd idea he had known exactly what she meant and had deliberately chosen to duck the issue, either out of cowardice or embarrassment. She tried to tell herself she should stop thinking about it, and take what he said at face value. But she couldn’t. Not quite.

  At the end of July it was her birthday. A very large bouquet of flowers was delivered to the house, yellow and white roses, which sent her mother into such paroxysms of excitement that Grace got the giggles; and that night he took her out to dinner, to a place they hadn’t been to before, a hugely expensive place in the country, near Tisbury, and as they sat in the bar, she drinking her sherry, he his gin and Italian, he passed her a small box. ‘Happy birthday, Grace,’ he said, and she almost fainted, thinking it was a ring. When she opened it and saw it was a coral necklace, her first emotion was a stab of violent disappointment, but then she realized she was being ridiculous. The card said, ‘For the loveliest neck I know,’ which was hardly poetic, she had to admit, but the thought behind it was very romantic.

  She had eaten and drunk much too much and on the way home he had to stop the car because she felt sick; she got out and walked down the road a little way and he sat watching her, and then he walked after her, took her in his arms and said, ‘I really can’t imagine life without you now, Grace. You’re the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me.’

  It was all very romantic, romantic and wonderful; but even after that he disappeared again for over a week. And once again she found herself unable to believe that in the end he wasn’t going to drop her in favour of one of the girls he had grown up with, carelessly confident girls with double-barrelled names and braying voices who would make wonderful wives and give grand dinner parties and in time produce extremely well-bred babies.

  There was a very bad patch towards the end of the summer when he went away to the South of France for a couple of weeks ‘to stay with some friends of my parents. They’re already there, it’s been fixed for ages.’ Every hour was an agony, as she imagined him lying on the beach with a series of gorgeous girls, or even, and possibly worse, one gorgeous girl, but when he got back he came straight round to see her, looking wonderfully tanned, with a bottle of French perfume (Joy by Jean Patou), and said he’d missed her so much and had thought of her a great deal.

  The other bad occasions, apart from his absences, were when she had to go to the Priory, which happened from time to time, mostly to play tennis on Sundays, or occasionally for a drink on Sunday morning; they were generally low-key occasions, with not many other people there, usually a few of the Bennetts’ friends rather than people of Charles’s own age, but they were still difficult to get through. She wondered sometimes why there were so seldom young people there and if Charles was deliberately keeping her away from them, his own friends, because he was in some way ashamed of her, or felt uncomfortable with her. She once broached the subject, rather bravely she thought, to Charles, and he laughed and told her she was imagining things, and that he wanted to introduce her to people slowly because she was so shy. ‘All my friends who have met you think you’re lovely. You do worry about silly things,’ he said, kissing her.

  ‘I know,’ said Grace humbly.

  The most terrifying occasion was a big party in early August that his mother gave in a marquee in the garden for Mr Bennett’s birthday. ‘Please come,’ Charles said as she objected at first, said she couldn’t, ‘it’ll be fun, and I want everyone to meet you and know how lovely you are.’

  Grace spent the next three weeks alternately wilting with terror at the prospect, and telling herself it must be significant that he wanted her there at all. Surely, surely he couldn’t just be whiling away a few hours with her, seeing her as some little local amusement, if she was to be at so important a family occasion.

  She actually prayed for some illness to strike her down, considered sleeping in wet sheets so she would get pneumonia or eating stale cheese from the larder so she would be sick, but she lacked the courage, and in the end it was all quite all right, despite her realizing very swiftly that the simple white silk dress her mother had made for the occasion, with its little cap sleeves and handkerchief hem, was simply not grand enough, that everyone else was in slithery satin or embroidered taffeta, long, long dresses with low necklines revealing fine bosoms and bare shoulders, and a great deal of very noticeable jewellery. She walked through the house and into the marquee, a huge marquee, filled with flowers and tables and waiters in white jackets with trays of drinks, and a band playing wonderfully and people with the Voices, as she had come to think of them, marvellously, carelessly beautiful girls, gossiping and laughing, and noisily confident men, all knowing one another, all belonging to the same overprivileged, self-opinionated club; and although she was on Charles’s arm she felt, she knew, that everyone was staring at her and asking each other if they thought Charles was serious about her, and how such a thing could be.

  She would have fled then, had he not taken her straight over to his mother, who had been at least graciously polite, and dear old Mr Bennett who had been absolutely sweet to her, told her she was by far the prettiest girl there and he wanted to dance with her as soon as possible. Actually, she thought, as he led her onto the floor and swept her into a surprisingly smooth foxtrot, he didn’t really look old at all, not really, just distinguished, with his thick white hair, his marvellous blue eyes and his tanned face. It was the first time she had seen him in anything other than his baggy old gardening clothes, and his dinner jacket, superbly cut, showed off a wonderfully slim figure.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘young Charles is certainly very taken with you. We hear of nothing else these days.’

  Grace half hoped that wasn’t true, because she feared it would make Muriel Bennett doubly unfriendly, and half hoped it was. She actually found it a little hard to believe, even with several glasses of champagne inside her.

  She and Mr Bennett danced three dances, culminating with him demonstrating a considerable skill with the new jitterbug; Grace and indeed the whole dance floor stood still to watch him. He finished, laughing, and then took her arm. ‘I really am too old for that sort of thing,’ he said, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, ‘but I do love dancing.’

  ‘Well, you’re very, very good at it,’ said Grace, ‘that was just the best I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You mustn’t flatter an old man.’

  ‘I’m not flattering and you’re not an old man.’

  ‘I’m afraid I am. Fifty-nine today. I must seem like Old Father Time to you.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. It must be wonderful,’ she added, as he led her back to her table, ‘to be surrounded by all your friends, everyone you care about, on your birthday.’ And he gave her a very odd, distan
t look and said, ‘Oh, Grace, indeed it must,’ and then smiled at her, somehow rather sad suddenly, and kissed her hand and passed her over to Charles, and told him how lucky he was to have her.

  Later, briefly, she saw him all alone, standing by the tennis court, smoking a cigar; she asked Charles if they shouldn’t go and see if he was all right, and Charles said no, the old boy was fine and his mother didn’t like cigars, he always slipped off at parties to have one. Since half the men at the party were smoking them, Grace couldn’t quite see this was necessary, but she didn’t argue, especially as a slow waltz was just starting and Charles was holding her very close.

  ‘You look lovely,’ he said, ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  She couldn’t think of anything nicer that he could have said.

  Florence and Robert were very late arriving at the party. Grace was surprised; Charles had made such a big thing of how it was an annual family event, but it turned out that at the last minute Florence hadn’t been well, and they almost hadn’t come at all. Robert had felt she shouldn’t make the journey. Grace wondered if perhaps Florence was having a baby, but didn’t like to ask. Florence was very pale, and even less friendly than the last time they had met, but Robert was the reverse, came over and said how pleased he was to see her again, and later asked her to dance. It was a waltz, and he held her rather alarmingly close. She was worried that Florence might notice, but she was talking to her mother and didn’t even glance at the dance floor.

  ‘You,’ said Robert, smiling down at her, his pale eyes moving over her face, lingering on her lips, ‘you are the best thing that’s happened to this family for a long time. If I may say so.’

  Grace didn’t know quite what to say, so she smiled rather inanely at him and concentrated on her dancing. At the end of the waltz the music changed to a quickstep which he launched into with great enthusiasm, but at the end, he took her back to her table and excused himself, saying he didn’t feel too well. She went into the house to find the lavatory soon after that and then, feeling hot, walked briefly into the garden to get some fresh air; Robert was hurrying towards the rose bushes, his face glassy pale in the moonlight, and although she tried not to, she heard the unmistakable sound of vomiting. It seemed to her that the only unwellness he was suffering was from a surfeit of champagne. If she was married to Florence, she thought, she would drink too much.

  She had expected to find herself one of many girls invited by Charles specifically, but she was very much his chosen personal guest. He danced a great many dances with her (he had explained he had to do other duty dances, ‘especially with Mother’s friends’) and in between she found herself, slightly to her surprise, quite in demand. Several of Charles’s friends asked her to dance, saying they’d heard a lot about her; a couple of them were, although friendly, just slightly patronizing, and she couldn’t think what to say to them, but one of them, introduced to her by Charles as ‘my blood brother, Laurence’, was really sweet, very polite and consider ate, and at least made a pretence of being interested in what she had to say.

  ‘Why blood brothers?’ she asked and he said oh, they’d been at prep school together. ‘Pretty grim it was too, at the end of the war, dreadful food, and masters as old as Methuselah.’ One day Charles had been beaten by one of the masters and Laurence had found him sobbing in the garden, lying hidden behind a hedge. Charles had made him swear he wouldn’t tell he’d been crying, and Laurence had sworn he wouldn’t and had gone to fetch a bramble branch from the other side of the garden, pricked both their fingers with it and they had solemnly mingled the blood to enhance the importance of the occasion.

  The party ended with everybody doing the conga round the marquee and the garden, led by Clifford and watched by an only mildly disapproving Muriel. Grace, in front of Robert in the line (recovered now, and holding her waist just a little too tightly) and behind Laurence, felt she had somehow crossed some mysterious divide and that while she would continue to be petrified of Muriel and to a lesser extent of Florence and all the rest of their kind (with the surprising exception of Charles himself), they were at least no longer an unknown terror; they seemed to have secret areas of unhappiness, to drink too much, to have had difficult childhoods, just like everyone else.

  And she also found herself accepting the slightly erratic form of Charles’s courtship. He obviously cared about her, was clearly not ashamed of her; it would be extremely foolish, not to mention destructive, to argue with it. In future she would simply enjoy things more.

  It seemed to Grace, looking back afterwards, that that summer drew a line on what was certain, what was carefree, what was safe. Fear stalked the country; the talk everywhere was only of war. She and her mother sat at the supper table night after night and listened to Frank Marchant speaking, as men were speaking in houses and clubs and pubs the length and breadth of England, on the inevitability of war; and then they listened to the nine o’clock news and heard it again. Whenever Hitler appeared on the cinema newsreels he was booed; there was much talk of the necessity of evacuating children and old people to the country. Charles came back from London with tales of trenches being dug in the great parks, of barrage balloons being flown over London, as a deterrent against attacks from the air, of huge anti-aircraft guns being raised, of convoys of troops being moved about the country in apparently haphazard fashion. Grace came home from work one day to find her mother in tears and three gas masks lying on the hall table, hideous, obscene things, with their huge eyes and piglike snouts, somehow symbolizing the ugliness of war itself. She didn’t know how to comfort her.

  She was quite frightened herself. The scaremongering was considerable; she read an article in one of the papers prophesying the death by bombing in London alone of over half a million people, of looting in the streets, the breakdown of law and order and medical facilities. She showed it to Charles; he kissed her and tore it up. ‘You must let us do the worrying, Grace. That’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘Who?’ she said irritably.

  ‘The men,’ he said in genuine surprise.

  It was at moments like that that she felt she didn’t know him at all.

  But the turmoil was at the same time exciting; it contributed to her disturbed emotions, brought them somehow nearer the surface. If there was a war, she thought, Charles would have to go away, he would be in danger, might even be killed; the very possibility – in actual fact remote – intensified her feelings about him. Even Muriel Bennett terrified her less; in a state of war, she seemed suddenly almost unimportant.

  ‘If only we had a decent man to lead us,’ Charles said one Sunday as they strolled round the lake by the castle. ‘Chamberlain’s an idiot. Hitler could have him for breakfast. Father says Churchill should be brought back, everything he said has been proved right.’

  ‘Churchill!’ said Grace. ‘Surely not. He’s been out of power for ages. My father says Baldwin should never have gone.’

  Everyone agreed that Chamberlain was a disaster; then he stood on the aeroplane steps, waving his piece of paper from Munich, proclaiming that he and Herr Hitler had negotiated ‘peace for our time’, and very briefly they all agreed they must be wrong. Mrs Chamberlain was surrounded by huge crowds in the street, wanting to shake her hand; Grace’s father read out an article in the Daily Telegraph comparing Chamberlain to Gladstone; over at the Priory a more cynical Clifford Bennett was laughing over a eulogy by the journalist Godfrey Winn comparing Chamberlain to God. ‘I’m not at all sure about all this,’ he said. ‘Do we really want to form a pact with a racial persecutor?’

  ‘But it does look better,’ said Charles to Grace, describing this scene and laughing too. ‘Do you feel calmer now, Grace darling?’

  ‘Yes thank you,’ said Grace, smiling at him, taking his hand. She found his calling her darling more exciting than anything, even more than when he kissed her. He looked back at her, very serious suddenly. ‘You’re lovely,’ he said, ‘really beautiful. I’m so proud of you.’

  He often said
that now; it was when she was most certain she was in love.

  Florence was just checking the dinner table for what felt like the hundredth time – the candles, the flowers, the place names – was every single glass absolutely gleaming clean? It was the most crucial dinner party, Robert had stressed it again and again. God, that stupid girl had all put the fish knives the wrong way round. The doorbell rang. It was Charles. He smiled at her rather uncertainly.

  ‘Hallo, Florence. Can I come in?’

  ‘Oh – Charles. Goodness. Well – I suppose so. Yes.’

  ‘You don’t look terribly pleased to see me.’

  ‘Oh, Charles, I am. Of course. But we’ve got a terribly important dinner party tonight, Robert’s clients, you know and—’

  ‘Florence, I’m not going to stay. Well, not now. I’m going out with some chums. But I wondered if you could give me a bed for the night.’

  ‘For the night! Well, I don’t know, Charles, you see—’

  ‘Florence, what on earth is the matter? I’ll creep in, I promise. I won’t say anything unsuitable to your smart friends, in fact I won’t even show my face if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘Charles, it’s not that, of course—’