His ears, she noted, were scarlet, and his eyelids had slid half-way down over his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve been awfully kind. If you bump into him, would you mind telling Douglas I’ve – I’ve retired for the evening?’
A voice behind Alexander barked, ‘Douglas? I don’t think Douglas is going to be too bothered.’ Several of the men exchanged glances and let off a rapid volley of laughter.
Something about their expressions left her unwilling to ask them to explain themselves. Or perhaps it was just that, having felt like everybody’s naïve, frumpy cousin all evening, she had no wish to reinforce that view of herself. She made her way out of the gaming room, her arms crossed miserably across her chest, no longer caring how she looked. The people around her were too drunk to pay any attention anyway. The band were having a break, sitting eating from a tray of canapés, their instruments propped against chairs, while Dusty Springfield sang over loudspeakers, a melancholy melody that made Vivi set her face against tears.
‘Vivi, you can’t go up yet.’ Alexander was right behind her. He reached out a hand and pulled her round by her shoulder. The angle of his head on his neck told her everything she needed to know about how much he’d had to drink.
‘I’m really sorry, Alexander. Honestly, I’ve had a super time. But I’m tired.’
‘Come . . . come and have something to eat. They’ll be doing kedgeree in the breakfast room soon.’ He was holding her arm, his grip a little tighter than was comfortable. ‘You know . . . you look very pretty in your . . . your dress.’ His eyes were now fixed on her embonpoint, and alcohol had removed any trace of reticence from his gaze. ‘Very nice,’ he said. And then, just in case she had missed the point, ‘Very, very nice.’
Vivi stood in an agony of indecision. To turn away from him now would be the height of impoliteness to someone who had made such an effort to entertain her. And yet the way he was staring at her chest was making her uneasy. ‘Xander, perhaps we can meet for breakfast.’
He didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘The problem with skinny women,’ he was saying, directly at her chest, ‘and there’re so many bloody skinny women, these days . . .’
‘Xander?’
‘. . . is that they have no breasts. No breasts to speak of.’ As he spoke, he tentatively lifted a hand towards her. Except it wasn’t her hand he was hoping to touch.
‘Oh! You—’ Vivi’s upbringing had left her with no adequate response. She turned, and walked briskly from the room, one hand placed protectively over her bosom, ignoring the rather half-hearted entreaties behind her.
She had to find Douglas. She wouldn’t be able to sleep until she did. She needed to reassure herself that, no matter how unreachable he had been this evening, once they had left this place he would be her Douglas again: kind, serious Douglas, who had mended punctures on her first bicycle and who, her dad said, was a ‘thoroughly decent young man’ and who had taken her to see Tom Jones twice at the cinema, even if they hadn’t sat anywhere near the back row. She wanted to tell him how awful Alexander had been (and harboured a newly flourishing secret hope that this dastardly behaviour might be the spur for him to realise his true feelings).
It was easier to search now, the crowds having thinned into small, usually sedentary gatherings, the groups of people becoming less amorphous and now cemented into jaded huddles. The older guests had departed for their rooms, some dragging protesting charges in their wake, and outside at least one tractor could be heard trying to clear a path away from the house. He was not in the gaming room, or in the main ballroom, the adjoining corridor, underneath the grand staircase, or drinking with the pink coats in the Reynard bar. No one noticed her now, the late hour and alcohol consumption having rendered her invisible. But it seemed to have rendered him invisible too; she had wondered several times, in her exhausted state, whether, just as he expressed his dislike for such pompous, class-ridden occasions, he might have crept home after all. Vivi sniffed unhappily, realising that she had never asked him the whereabouts of his room. So wrapped up had she been in her own private fantasy, the prospect of having him escort her to her own room, that she had never considered she might need to know where his was. I’ll find him, she decided. I’ll find Mrs Bloomberg and she’ll tell me. Or I’ll just knock on every door in the other wing until someone can find him for me.
She went past the main stairs, stepping over the seated couples propped against banisters, listening to the distant sound of squealing girls as the band gamely struck up again. Weary now, she passed rows of ancestral portraits, their colours unmellowed by age, their gilt frames suspiciously bright. Under her feet the plush red carpet now bore the imprint of carelessly stubbed cigarettes and the odd discarded napkin. Outside the kitchens, from which now emanated the smell of baking bread, she passed Isabel, laughing helplessly on the shoulder of an attentive young man. She didn’t seem to recognise Vivi now.
It was several feet beyond there that the corridor came to an end. Vivi glanced up at the heavy oak door, checked behind her to make sure that no one could see her and let out a huge yawn. She bent down to remove her shoes, several hours after they had first begun to pinch. She would put them back on when she found him.
It was as she raised her head that she heard it: a scuffling sound, the odd grunt, as if someone had fallen down drunk outside and was trying to raise themselves. She stared at the door from behind which the noise had come, and saw it was just ajar, a sliver of Arctic breeze slipping down the side of the corridor. Vivi, shoeless, crept towards it, holding one arm across herself against the encroaching cold, not knowing why she didn’t just call out to see if they were all right. She paused, then opened it, silently, and peered round at the side of the house.
She thought initially that the woman must have fallen down because he seemed to be supporting her, trying to prop her up against the wall. She wondered if she should offer to help. Then, her senses dulled by tiredness, or shock, she grasped in swift, successive jolts that the rhythmic sounds she had heard were emerging from these people. That the woman’s long pale legs were not limp, the useless limbs of a drunk, but wrapped tautly round him, like some kind of serpent. As Vivi’s eyes adjusted to the dark, and the distance, she recognised, with a start, the woman’s long dark hair, falling chaotically over her face, the lone, sequined slipper, upon which stray flakes of snow were settling.
Vivi was simultaneously repulsed and transfixed, staring for several seconds before she grasped, with a flood of shame, what she had been witnessing. She stood, her back against the half-opened door, that sound echoing grotesquely in her ears, jarring against the thumping of her heart.
She had meant to move, but the longer she stood there the more paralysed she became, stuck to the door’s roughened surface, even though her arms were mottling in the night air, and her teeth chattering. Instead of escaping, she leant against the cool of the oak door and felt her legs disappear from under her: she had understood that while the tones were those she had never heard before, this man’s voice was not. That the back of the man’s head, his pink-tinged ears, the sharp edge where his hair met his collar were familiar to her: as familiar as they had been twelve years ago, when she had first fallen in love with them.