Home > The Glittering Hour

The Glittering Hour
Author: Iona Grey

Prologue

 

The End


February 1926

The February dawn crept in slowly, apologetically, as if it sensed how unwelcome it was. The room came into focus in increments, like a photograph developing.

But the numerous images that had lined the walls were gone now, like everything else. The room – never lavishly furnished – had been stripped back to impersonal functionality: a scarred table, a flimsy bentwood chair. A canvas kitbag was propped against the table leg. Her gaze flinched away from it.

She missed the faces on the walls. He photographed strangers: the poor and the dispossessed, the wounded and the mad, capturing dignity in their distress. Suffering gave people a natural nobility, he said, though she knew it was pointless to hope it might do the same for her. She had chosen the coward’s way out. There would be no honour in her pain.

He lay behind her, the way they naturally fitted together, his chest against her back, his hard thighs tucked beneath her knees. She couldn’t see his face but she knew he was awake and, like her, was watching the treacherous daylight gather. Across the city it would be stealing into another room, stretching out across an empty bed, touching the snowy silk folds of the wedding dress hanging on the wardrobe.

She had to go. Before the world woke up properly. Before her absence was discovered and the alarm was raised.

She turned to him for one last time.

 

 

PART I

 

 

1

 

Alice


January 1936

The winter sky was yellowish-grey and it sagged wearily over the frozen world. It had snowed last night, but disappointingly; a mean scattering of dirty white that had frozen into sharp crystals – nothing you could make a snowman from (would she be allowed anyway? Probably not). The cold slapped Alice’s cheeks and burned deep into her bones as she trudged miserably after Miss Lovelock.

They had taken their usual route, along the west carriage drive and round the edge of the lake, where last autumn’s leaves still lay in a mouldering rust-coloured carpet. The gardens at Blackwood Park were extensive and elaborate; once they had been the jewel in its crown, but now, with only elderly Patterson and a simple boy to maintain them they were overgrown and out of bounds. Alice’s daily walk (non-negotiable: Miss Lovelock was a great believer in the benefits of Fresh Air) was over the rough parkland, past sheep that eyed her with hostility. After eleven days it had already taken on a familiarity that was oppressive rather than comforting.

Eleven days. Was that all?

The unsettled feeling in her tummy was back as she thought of all the days that yawned ahead until Mama came home. She stopped, focusing on the white swirl of her frozen breath and the poker-like plants at the edge of the water. Bulrushes, Miss Lovelock said. Alice had heard of them in the bible story of Moses, but had never seen them before she came to Blackwood – there certainly weren’t any on the banks of the Serpentine or by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, or any of the other places she went for winter walks with Mama (sometimes followed by tea at Maison Lyons or Gunters, or – if they had got cold and wet – crumpets at home, toasted together in front of the parlour fire). She stared hard at them, making herself notice their compact shape and velvety texture, because noticing those things distracted her from the sick, hollow feeling in her tummy. She would have liked to break one off, to take back up to the house so she could sketch it with the beautiful set of pencils Mama had bought her for Christmas (twelve different colours, like a rainbow in a tin) but she suspected that wouldn’t be allowed either. Grandmama had taken the pencils away when Alice had arrived, ‘for safekeeping’. Drawing was not encouraged at Blackwood Park.

‘Alice! Come along, child – quick march!’

Miss Lovelock’s voice, bristling with impatience, carried back from the point far ahead to which her brisk pace had taken her (‘quick march’ was not so much an expression, but a command. She was extremely fond of marching.) Everything about Miss Lovelock was brisk and no-nonsense, from her lace-up shoes and mannish ties to her fondness for arithmetic and Latin verbs – subjects with exact answers and no room for ‘what if?’

(Mama said that ‘what if?’ was always a good question to ask. She turned it into a game that they played on the top of the motorbus: what if you could be invisible for a day – what would you do? What if animals could talk? What if Parliament was filled with women instead of men?)

Alice left the bulrushes and began to trudge dutifully towards Miss Lovelock. The governess’s arms were folded across her wide chest and, even at this distance, Alice could see that her brows were drawn down into a single black line of exasperation. Much as Miss Lovelock liked Fresh Air, Alice knew she was eager to get back to the house and hand over her charge so she could spend the afternoon listening to the wireless in the warmth of her room. Even so, passing the old boathouse Alice couldn’t resist pausing to press her face close to the mossy window, peering in at the tangle of fishing rods in the corner, the pile of moth-eaten cushions, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghosts that slumbered there dreaming of long-ago summers; of boating parties and picnics and swimming in the lake …

Blackwood Park was full of ghosts. Its empty corridors echoed with the whispers of lost voices and snatches of old laughter. It was a house where the past felt more vivid than the present, which was nothing more than a stretch of endless days fading into uniform blankness. It had been Mama’s house when she was growing up, and she had told Alice how she, Aunt Miranda and Uncle Howard would play hopscotch on the marble floor in the entrance hall and French cricket on the nursery corridor with the footmen, in the days before the Great War when there had been footmen at Blackwood (and when there had been an Uncle Howard – though of course he hadn’t been an Uncle then, and never would be a living one). Alice thought it might be their voices she heard. Their laughter, their footsteps.

‘Alice Carew, will you please get a move on!’

Her sigh misted the greenish glass and she turned reluctantly away. The light was bleeding from the January sky and a pale smudge of moon had appeared above the trees. Behind Miss Lovelock the house loomed, dark and imposing, its windows blank, its secrets hidden. With a leaden heart Alice walked towards them both.

 

* * *

 

In the nursery corridor, high up at the top of the house, it was hardly much warmer than it had been outside. Alice’s breath, instead of appearing in cavalier plumes, hung about her in a ghostly wreath. Her footsteps, as she followed Miss Lovelock to the day nursery, made no sound on the bald carpet, as if she were no more substantial than the childhood shadows of Mama, Aunt Miranda and Uncle Howard.

There had been no nanny or nursemaids at Blackwood for twenty years. The nursery corridor, on which the schoolroom was also situated, had been closed up for much of that time, the forgotten dolls and stuffed animals in the day nursery left to contemplate a more glorious past, the rocking horse to gallop, riderless, over the same patch of faded rug. The rooms must have been hastily cleaned and aired before Alice’s arrival, but pockets of stillness remained where Ellen’s careless duster hadn’t quite reached, and the air had a stale quality, like in a museum.

There were no lessons after lunch at Blackwood, unlike at the girls’ day school Alice went to in South Kensington. There the afternoons were spent in companionable industry, doing art or needlework or domestic science (Miss Ellwood, the principal, was a forward-thinking woman who was fully aware that even the most well-bred young ladies must be able to fend for themselves in a world where the Servant Problem was becoming increasingly acute). Miss Lovelock, having deposited Alice in the day nursery with the instruction to read something ‘improving’, retreated to her room with indecent haste and closed the door firmly. A moment later Alice heard the muted crackle of the wireless set.

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