“Want to get under his bloody sheets?” another called. “Naught more attractive than a man who can’t run from your clutches.”
The second lieutenant was smiling a watery smile. Major Hammond was laughing with his mouth wide open, an overloud laugh that did not contain amusement. Georgie kept her back rigid and tried not to look at the faces of the men, either chuckling or comatose, as she walked between the beds towards the washroom.
“Not much to look at though, is she,” one of the men said as she passed.
“Well,” said another, “fine for wartime.” When she got to the washroom and shut the door, she could still hear one of the men: “We were called up, not to fight the Hun but to woo and screw the girls of England!” More laughter, and one of the men started to sing a song that Georgie didn’t know.
She heard Mrs. Thwaite yell above them, “All right, gentlemen!” and one man’s laugh rang out like a howl. Georgie scrubbed her hands—pressing them together to stop them shaking—changed her clothes, and headed out onto the street.
TWO
Outside, the air was a gift, crowding her face. It had nothing to do with decay. A last streak of sun was creaking down behind the buildings, and soon it would be dark. She started to walk towards the dormitory. Still, she could hear that jeering, see the major’s bubbling wound, the matron’s cut-glass stare. For a moment she thought of writing to her mother, of admitting she’d been wrong to come. Already she yearned for the silence and privacy of her bedroom, of the small library on the first floor of her mother’s house.
But she wouldn’t write. She would go back to her room and arrange the contents of her two leather suitcases on the few provided shelves and rest until her next shift at the hospital. Tomorrow she would write to Willy and to Dorothy and announce she was settled in London, and next week she would go to a meeting of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, without having to lie to her mother about where she was going.
She’d glimpsed this kind of freedom at the first soirée that her mother had taken her to, back before the war, in 1908 when she had turned sixteen. The soirée was what she would come to know as the usual affair at Olivia Shakespear’s; in the large drawing room, clusters of people chatted and sipped, and Jelly d’Aranyi played Schumann on the violin, and a servant walked around refilling glasses of what Olivia whispered was rather middling claret that someone had gifted her and she was trying to get rid of. Discussions ranged from Schopenhauer to Schubert, tarot and Tattwa, to the most thrilling moments at recent séances. Olivia had attended a session only last month where an ancient Egyptian soul had spoken, declaring that the current age was nearly over and another was about to begin.
Georgie had been taught to call her parents by their first names—never “Mother” but always “Nelly”—and in this room she saw a different Nelly from the one she knew. Nelly had clearly spent many evenings in that drawing room, and Georgie was startled to watch her integrate herself so effortlessly, talk without self-consciousness, and laugh with an ease that Georgie had rarely heard at home. Nelly introduced her to the pianist Walter Rummel, whom Georgie had seen play at concerts, and the poet W. B. Yeats—known to all as W. B.—whose poems Georgie knew and admired, and with whom she had a brief conversation about the Renaissance philosopher and occultist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Georgie even shyly mentioned that she had started to translate the early works of Pico from Latin, and she could have sworn that W. B. had looked impressed.
But the person Nelly most wanted her to meet was Olivia’s daughter, Dorothy. When Georgie saw Dorothy across the room, chatting assuredly to two young men, she was doubtful that they would be friends. Dorothy was already twenty-three, and very pretty in an unreal way, like those drawings of jaunty women from Harrods advertisements. She wore a dark blue dress which, while not especially revealing, hung on her body and clung to every lovely angle of her, as if the dress itself had a kind of nonchalance. The guests around her, whether they faced her or not, all seemed aware of each dip of her head, each arching of her fine, white neck. Georgie was surprised to see her slide that neck to the side and fix her eyes right on her.
“Are you Georgie? Nelly said you were coming.” Dorothy was smiling at her with white, even teeth that made Georgie nervous. The young men reluctantly made room so she could join them in the circle.
“I suppose that makes you Nelly’s daughter,” one of the men said.
“I suppose it does, but thankfully I’m many other things besides.”
The man laughed but hardly managed to pry his eyes from Dorothy. He was handsome in a bland way and spoke with the hint of squeezed colonial vowels. He held an unlit cigar, but one of his fingers was twitching, and his laughter sounded as if he were on the verge of spitting, as if he were holding marbles in his mouth. Georgie waited for Dorothy to introduce them.
Instead, she said, “Excuse us. I need to show Georgie something.” Without another word, she was gone. Georgie hesitated a moment—meeting the bewildered eyes of the men—before following Dorothy as she slipped out of the drawing room and down the hall. At the end of the hall, Dorothy turned into another room, and once Georgie went in, Dorothy closed the door behind them.
She flicked a match and lit a thin white candle on the table, illuminating the library, with shelves full of books up to the ceiling and a narrow ladder leaning beside the window. Georgie looked around and back at Dorothy.
“Alone at last,” Dorothy said.
“That man’s in love with you,” Georgie said, realizing it herself. “They both are.”
“They’re infatuated. It’s not the same.”
“How do you know?”
“Who cares. Freddie can’t stop telling me all about it. It’s horrendous.”
“I can imagine,” said Georgie, who couldn’t.
“Drink?” Dorothy pulled from a shelf a heavy cut-glass decanter of brandy and two tumblers, the kind Georgie’s father drank from. Georgie nodded. She was rather overwhelmed by Dorothy’s ease, and she tried to unstiffen her own body as she found herself a place in a large leather chair. She could still hear the blur of chatter in the drawing room.
Dorothy poured. “Do you paint?”
“Terribly,” Georgie said, “but cheerfully.”
“Good,” Dorothy said, who handed her a drink and, after offering a cigarette to Georgie, who declined, lit one for herself. Georgie took a cautious sip of the brandy. She knew she would have to go home for dinner—it was still only early evening—and she wondered what Nelly would say if she were visibly drunk.
“Are the parties always like this?” Georgie said, watching Dorothy sit on another armchair and draw her knees up to her chest like a girl. Georgie had recognised other people out in the drawing room—the painter Rothenstein, the actress Florence Farr.
“Always.” Dorothy glanced back towards the drawing room, as if the chatter were carrying on purely to irritate her. “Freddie, whom you didn’t quite meet, is on the road to being a typical Oxford man.”
Georgie nodded. “I think I’d prefer to be an Oxford man than to marry one,” she said, taking a larger sip this time. “I am a translator.”