‘That’s it, put your foot there and lever yourself up.’
He watched her stand on the step and grip the metal spikes, his arms ready to catch her if she slipped. Perhaps intoxication made her less aware of the danger, but she moved with the assurance of someone who was used to climbing and skilled at it. He had a sudden vision of a vast estate somewhere, brothers perhaps; a childhood of climbing trees and riding horses. He wondered why she wasn’t afraid. If being alone in the dark with a stranger – a lower class one too – didn’t frighten her, did anything?
‘Men’s clothes are much more practical than women’s. I’d hate to attempt this in a dress.’
She swung herself over and dropped to the ground beside him, staggering slightly. He caught her arms to steady her. For a moment they were only inches apart and he saw the liquid gleam of her eyes, the glisten of her lips. He let her go as if she was red hot and stepped away, going over to retrieve the shovel.
They found a place inside the spread of a large shrub with leathery leaves where the ground was soft, but even so, slicing into it with an implement designed for a very different purpose was hard going. The handle of the coal shovel was so short that Lawrence had to kneel, half-digging, half-scraping the earth and its tangle of roots. By the time he’d gone down a foot he was breathing hard and his shirt was sticking to the small of his back.
A motorcar passed on the road a few feet away, its headlamps sending a broken beam of light flickering through the leaves. Instinctively they stilled, their eyes finding each other’s and holding fast until it was gone. Then she picked up the pillowcase and lowered it into the shallow hole, tucking it in tenderly.
She surprised him. He knew about her, of course; you’d have to be an illiterate hermit living on a remote island not to have heard of Selina Lennox, baronet’s daughter, fully paid up member of the set the newspapers called the Bright Young People. They played out their charmed and privileged lives in the beam of public attention, attracting amusement and disapproval in roughly equal measure. Sam Evans – a miner’s son who’d grown up in the gnawing poverty of a Welsh pit town – virtually frothed at the mouth at each front page photograph of outlandish fancy dress costumes and every report of flamboyant excess. In theory Lawrence shared his indignation about parasites living off the sweat of the working man, but he couldn’t help being drawn to their glamour, admiring their innate elegance. He recognized Selina Lennox’s face, but the newspaper photographs hadn’t prepared him for her extraordinary colouring; the old-gold hair and the creamy vellum texture of her skin. The astonishing aquamarine eyes.
She took a handful of earth and scattered it on top of the bloodstained pillowcase.
‘Do you think it had a name?’ she asked softly.
‘I doubt it.’
‘We should give it one.’ She looked around. ‘What’s the name of this place?’
‘Cartwright Gardens.’
She considered it. ‘Not pretty, but distinguished. Very well. Cartwright … may you rest in peace, and your soul roam freely in a heaven with no motorcars and an abundant supply of mice.’ She paused. ‘I’m trying to remember how the burial service goes, but my mind’s gone blank.’
‘Something about us coming into the world with nothing, and leaving with nothing?’ In Lawrence’s case, that was a state of affairs that seemed likely to persist through the intervening years too. ‘And a bit about the resurrection and the life. He who believeth in me will live, even though he dies.’
‘Yes, of course. What rot.’ In the deep blue shadow he saw her take something from the pocket of her jacket – a silver cigarette case – and snap it open. ‘Damn. Only one left. I hope you don’t mind sharing.’
She put the cigarette between her lips and he held up his lighter. For a moment her face was bathed in the glow of the flame and he watched her cheeks hollow and the cigarette tip glow as she breathed in. Her eyes glittered gold through her lowered lashes. And then she was veiled in shadows again.
‘You don’t believe in the afterlife, Miss Lennox?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ She settled herself back against a broad branch. ‘I think it’s just another story we’re told to make us more accepting of life’s cruelty, don’t you?’
She held out the cigarette and he took it, putting his lips where hers had been. He thought of Cassie and his mother, dead within a week of each other, and everyone saying at the funeral how it was good that they were together.
‘Yes,’ he said, and an echo of the fury he’d felt then, in the churchyard with the tattered remnants of his family – his father, ashen and helpless, and Stephen, glassy-eyed and silent (always silent) standing beside the obscene hole where his mother and sister were to be left – came back to him, souring the taste of the rich tobacco on his tongue. It wasn’t good that they were together. They weren’t happily living a parallel family life somewhere else, the two of them, his mother doing the wash on Mondays and calling Cassie in from playing out for bread and dripping. The fact that the Spanish influenza had taken them both in one savage swipe was just brutal and unfair.
His hand shook a little as he passed her the cigarette. In spite of all the wine he’d drunk earlier his senses were painfully sharp and he heard the tiny kissing sound her lips made as she took a drag.
‘So … you said you’re an artist. Too glamorously bohemian. What do you paint?’
For a split second he considered telling her that he didn’t paint; that he was actually a photographer and the reason he was still up was that he’d been taking advantage of the dark and Sam being asleep to develop prints in the flat’s tiny kitchen area. But then she would ask what he did with his photographs, who bought them, and the answer to that was nothing, and no one. He decided to be honest. ‘I paint portraits for grieving parents from photographs of their dead sons.’ His voice held the bite of self-mockery. ‘Neither glamorous nor bohemian. Very pedestrian, in fact.’
There was a pause as she took another pull on the cigarette. Her head was tipped back, her face pearly pale in the blue gloom. She’d pulled the collar off the man’s shirt she was wearing and removed the top two studs from its starched front, so it parted a little across her generous chest. Her black silk bow tie hung loose around her neck and a strand of gleaming hair, heavy with oil, had fallen forward over her cheek. She exhaled a plume of smoke and he breathed it in. The intimacy of it stirred something inside him.
‘Important though.’
‘I’m hardly setting the art world on fire.’
She made a dismissive sound. ‘Who cares about the art world? I sometimes go to the Royal Academy Private View and most of the work is either screamingly dull or hilariously dreadful. Last year I actually wondered if someone was playing a rather good practical joke.’ Their fingertips touched as he took the cigarette and he wondered if she felt the same little jolt as he did. ‘My parents got my brother to sit for a portrait in the first year of the war, before he went over to France. It’s my mother’s most treasured possession. She loves it more than she loves my sister and me.’
Her tone was light, but he sensed that it was a brittle veneer.
‘He didn’t come back? From the war?’