“You know,” I told her, “they’re selling the contents of this place in a couple of days. If there was anything your mother wanted she could”—and what was I doing, really? Trying to bait a girl I’d known thirty years ago back to watch the death of a house she’d been happy in?—“well, she might find something she liked.”
Susan looked down at the cassette, then up at me. “Yeah,” she said, “she might.”
She left soon afterwards, and I didn’t expect much to come of my little suggestion. And not much did.
But not much is not the same as nothing.
There wasn’t, if I am honest, a great deal left in the house after the hotel had taken what they fancied. The drawing rooms, for example, they seemed to be planning to leave as they were, so that guests could get an authentic stately home experience during their stay, which meant none of those fixtures were up for sale. Even the beds they kept, although I’m sure they’ve replaced most of them since—it’s been years after all, and hotel use isn’t kind to furniture.
Most of what remained for the general public was knickknacks, gewgaws, and tchotchkes. And portraits, of course, but I doubted that anybody was actually going to want a painting of somebody else’s great-great-grandfather. At least not at the prices we were asking. I think most of them got bundled in with the house in the end.
In eighty-seven, though, they were still in the long gallery, all discreetly ticketed. I was there as well—in person and on canvas—and so, on that particular day, was she.
Age, I thought, had been kind to my nymph. I was under no illusions, of course, she was very much a woman in her sixties, her hair silvering and her skin lined, but I’d have known her anywhere—across years and continents.
I seldom weep—it was a habit I gave up in early childhood—but seeing her after all that time brought unfamiliar tears to my eyes. She was standing in front of my portrait, looking up at it with such an air of regret and melancholy that I froze.
Perhaps I should have spoken to her. I almost did, in fact. But then Susan came back through from the next room, a man beside her who I assumed was the elusive Mr. Jones. And when the nymph turned to her it was with such belonging and such easy intimacy, I could not quite bring myself to intrude.
Besides, I’d have needed to explain to the daughter that I wasn’t really a housekeeper, and that would just have been awkward. And I have a hereditary aversion to awkwardness.
I don’t know if she bought anything. Or what she said to her family when they asked her why she was staring at that one picture in particular or if they even asked her such a question.
They probably didn’t. I’ve been alive a long time now and something I’ve gradually worked out is that while I have fought for decades to remain at the centre of my own world, it’s a form of hubris to imagine oneself the centre of another person’s. Secretly, I have always held, we are all of us solipsists.
So I left through the far door and retreated to my old room, half-stripped as it was, and sat on the window seat, crying like a fool or a child.
I never saw her again, and in the years since I have made my peace with the fact that I never shall. In my own way, you see, I’m just as great a coward as Jimmy was. I think perhaps I may have modelled myself after the wrong Mrs. de Winter. The money and the lovers were rather wonderful things in the moment, but looking back. Well. It’s that silly nameless girl I envy. The one who took a chance and changed her life instead of spending the whole of it running away.
That’s probably what I saw in the nymph, you know. What I lo—what I admired about her.
There, are you satisfied?
Thursday Evening
“I’m not fucking satisfied,” said Audrey.
They’d retired to a corner of the lobby to lick their wounds. And if Audrey’d been less disappointed-slash-pissed-off she might have appreciated the fact that she had, at least momentarily, the kind of life where you sat in an intimate corner of a luxury hotel with your abrasively sexy not-exactly-girlfriend to bemoan your failure to persuade a jaded aristocrat to fly home from Monaco to be reunited with a woman she’d had an affair with in a stately home seventy years ago. Like, that was a whole mood.
Except it also sucked.
Jennifer was sitting sprawled in a plushly upholstered chair, looking like a twenty-first-century rakehell who’d had a hard night raking hell. “I mean, what did you expect?” she asked. “She spent her entire life bailing on the poor fucker. Did you really think she was going to turn around and say, ‘Actually I’ll make amends at the last moment’?”
“Um. No? But also…yes? Nice things do happen sometimes.”
“Oh yes, because age and wealth are renowned for changing people for the better.”
Tilting her head back, Audrey gazed at the intricate, multicoloured glasswork that cascaded from the ceiling. “Can you stop being cynical for six seconds?”
“I could, but if I was going to, I’d pick a time when that cynicism wasn’t completely justified.”
“You came out here, too,” Audrey pointed out.
“Due fucking diligence. That and not wanting you to spend an evening cranking into the Mediterranean because some haughty bint wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
“Doing what into the Mediterranean?”
“Cranking. You know, cry wanking.”
