Even though it was only a month since their son, Sheridan, was born, and therefore a nap could surely be forgiven, she didn’t want him to think her feeble.Not now.Not when there was, suddenly, such hope in front of them again.
Since Sheridan, they had been different.The hardened layer of mistrust between them that had seemed to strangle any kinder emotions was thawed.At least for now.Melted by the milky eyes of their newborn son.
She knew about Marjorie – everyone, she thought ruefully, knew about Marjorie, but she also knew that Marjorie meant nothing.Or very little anyway.That deep down, under that silent, brooding surface, she was in her husband’s heart in a way that was at times angry, even violent, but also tender and true and, most of all, constant.There might be Marjories – any number of them – and still they would never mean anything.She knew, too, that if they could just stop fighting, they would be able to make their way back to one another.
There had been others for her too.Not as many as was whispered, but a few.Enough to know that they were nothing – nothing – to the man she had married.Whom she had loved and desired since she first met him, even through the years after Caroline’s birth, and then Perdita’s, when the anger between them had seemed so great that nothing could return them to what they had once been.Over those years they had poisoned the water with rows that were first passionate and urgent, and forgotten in a storm of love, but then became bleaker and more cruel; followed not by love but by days, sometimes weeks, of silence.Those rows had put them far from one another, onto two lonely islands.
She remembered the night, some months after Caroline was born, when he had gone to her dressing room and cut her clothes to pieces, snipped and slashed through every dress she had owned, heaping the floor with torn and gashed piles of silk and satin that lay there like so many smears of paint.And how she, surveying the damage the next morning, remembering too the way he had come to her, after his explosive revenge, had felt a shiver of excitement that she was capable of provoking such emotions.
That had been how they were together.But it had been too much.In the seven years between Caroline’s birth and the arrival of little Sheridan, it had become harder to dissipate the anger after those rows.As though each explosion left a residue, one that accumulated over time, layering over and over until everything between them was sticky to the touch.Each new row dragged behind it the memory of all the others.
‘You cannot smash something again and again and still expect to mend it,’ Duff had said once, sadly, when she had been drunk enough, brave enough, to try and ask him what he thought had gone wrong.‘Eventually there is no strength left in it.’
And then, when she had entirely given up hope, when Perdita was four and Caroline nearly seven, came the old dragging weariness and with it a bleakness that lay on everything so that she feared she was in what her mother – who knew such moods better than most – would call ‘a melancholy’.Until the sudden realisation that her sickness was one of hope, of life.And then came a boy.A son.
Duff, she recalled now, had cried.Tears had fallen from his large dark eyes onto the delicate hair of his newborn son, and when Maureen had said, ‘Is he not the most beautiful of all our babies?’he had agreed, nodding furiously because he could not speak, was busy blowing his nose loudly into a large white handkerchief.
She had been glad, then, that she had tried so hard to keep them married.‘Why not divorce him?’her sister Oonagh had asked, Aileen too, so many times.
‘What, and be as déclassé as you?’Maureen had snapped.‘You forget I’m a marchioness.’
‘No one could possibly forget, Maureen,’ Aileen had murmured.
‘Well then, why would I give that up?’
‘Because he makes you unhappy, is rude and often drunk,’ Aileen had said.
‘He is my husband,’ Maureen had retorted.But she had remembered the conversation, many times, in the days when it seemed that even she, with a will her father had once described as ‘like iron, only stronger’, could not keep the marriage from sinking beneath the weight of his rages, his drinking.And, if she was honest, her own cruel tongue – the habit she had of lashing out, and always with the surest blow, instinctively inflicting the deadliest wound.
‘At least I know when you are home,’ she had hissed at him shortly before the pregnancy, ‘like King David or Solomon, whose presence was heralded by divine trumpets.Only in your case, it is the heavy snores brought on by bottles of brandy that ring out across the house.How are we ever to have another child – the son you say you so desire – when you are asleep in your dressing room, knocked cold by drink, night after night?’
‘I’d rather lie in the arms of a brandy bottle than in yours,’ he had retorted, face dark with the humiliation she had meant to heap on him – meant, that is, until she saw the pain in his face that she had put there.
And then, when it seemed as though they would never find their way back to kindness, a reprieve so unexpected, a second chance, had brought them to this new and tentative place.A place she must mind and nourish and make strong.Strong enough to withstand the dark fury in both their natures that brought them together with such passion, and drove them to such violence against one another.
She passed a hand over her cropped golden hair to smooth it now, and hoped her face was not creased by the cushion she had slept on.‘How was your day?’she asked, sitting up straighter.Pugsy stirred and stood on his short legs, pink tongue hanging out over his black snout.
‘Difficult.Chamberlain is still playing at peace, even though he knows – must know – that he cannot placate and appease forever.He feeds scraps to a beast that is insatiable, one that will take everything he offers, then have his arm off when there is no more.There are no more deals to make with Hitler.No more drawing lines, then looking the other way when he marches over them.Chamberlain talks of being reasonable, of diplomacy and compromise.But those words are simply cover for his weakness.’He sounded angry.He always did, now, when talking of Germany and what he called ‘the craven response’ of Prime Minister Chamberlain.
‘I don’t know why we wouldn’t just let Hitler have his bits of Czechoslovakia, or wherever it is,’ Maureen said on a yawn.‘I mean, what is it to us?Who cares?’
‘We’ll all care when we see that he has gobbled up most of Europe and stands breathing down our necks,’ Duff said shortly.‘If he was to be content with his “bits of Czechoslovakia” as you call it, I might agree.But he won’t.Nothing will stop him except force.Just ask Germany’s Jews.’
‘Ask them what?’She lit a cigarette, closing the lighter with a snap.
‘What kind of man Hitler is,’ Duff said shortly.‘He is ugly and insatiable.That’s what Chamberlain can’t, or won’t, see.’His voice softened.‘How is our son?’
‘Enchanting.I am certain he is especially intelligent.His expression is so alert, so curious.’Actually, she couldn’t see any difference in Sheridan compared with other babies of that age.They were all rather alarming, she thought.Formless and yet focused, in a way she didn’t understand but that frightened her.But Duff liked her to say such things about their son.And so she did.
She rang the bell, and when the butler appeared, she snapped, ‘Manning, can’t you get some light in here?Must I peer and squint in my own home?’Then, ‘And bring the cocktail tray.’That, she thought, would keep Duff by her side.
‘Mix me a Martini, darling?’she said when the tray arrived.‘Nanny will bring Sheridan down any moment.’That too would keep him with her.
The butler came in with the telephone.‘Mrs Channon, m’lady.’How Maureen loved that Honor was only a Mrs now, and no longer Lady Honor Guinness, while she, Maureen, was Lady Dufferin.She stretched her arms above her head and arched her back luxuriously before taking the shiny black telephone.‘Hullo?’
‘Darling, I hoped you’d be there.I need to borrow you.’
‘Why?’Maureen was suspicious.She looked over at Duff, pouring gin into two glasses.
