Windfallen

  "You don't have to go, Joe," Lottie called. "I . . . I just need to freshen up a bit."

  "No. Really. I don't want to be any trouble. I'll come back when you're up."

  "Er . . . I'd like that, Joe."

  Celia placed the tray carefully on Lottie's bedside table. Then she looked sideways at Guy. She smoothed her hair, an unconscious gesture.

  "You look very flushed."

  Guy raised a hand to his cheek, as if surprised. He went to speak, then changed his mind and mutely shook his head.

  There was a long, awkward silence, during which Lottie found herself pulling the covers farther and farther toward her chin.

  "I suppose we'd better leave you in peace," said Celia, opening the door for Guy to exit. Her voice was low, halting. She didn't look at Lottie when she said it.

  "You sure you don't want to stay, Joe?"

  She heard his muffled affirmation. He would be talking into his chest.

  Guy walked out past her. His shirt, Lottie noted anxiously, was untucked at the back.

  "Bye, Lottie. Hope you feel better soon." It jarred, that false cheerfulness.

  "Thank you. Thank you for the drinks."

  Celia, holding the door for him, stopped and turned.

  "Where's the fruit?"

  "What?"

  "The fruit? You were picking up some more fruit from the station. There's none in the hall. Where is it?"

  Guy looked briefly blank, then raised his head in acknowledgment. "The fruit. Didn't arrive. I waited for over half an hour, and then it wasn't on the train. It'll probably come on the two-thirty."

  "I hear you've had a fresh coconut," said Joe, stepping on his own feet at the top of the stairs. "Strange-looking things, those coconuts. Like people's heads. But without the eyes . . . and things."

  Celia stood very still for a moment. Then, looking down, she walked past Guy and tripped down the stairs.

  ALMOST FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, LOTTIE STOOD shivering in Number 87 Beach Hut, once, according to a fallen nameplate, known as Saranda. She pulled her coat around her, hauling Mr. Beans's straining figure back on his leash. It was nearly dark, and without lighting, the hut was growing darker and even less welcoming.

  She'd been waiting there almost fifteen minutes. Several more and she would have to head back. Mrs. Holden didn't like her going out at the moment as it was. She had felt Lottie's forehead twice before she grudgingly let her go. If she hadn't wanted fifteen minutes alone with Dr. Holden, Lottie didn't think she would have allowed her to go at all.

  She heard the hissing of bicycle tires along the pathway. The door opened, tentatively, and he was there, hurling himself off his bicycle, sending it colliding into the door. They paused, then embraced hurriedly, their mouths clashing awkwardly.

  "I don't have long. Celia is stuck to me like glue. I only got out here because she's in the bath."

  "Does she suspect?"

  "I don't think so. She never said anything about--you know."

  He bent low and patted Mr. Beans, who was sniffing at his feet. "God, this is awful. I hate telling lies."

  He pulled her to him, kissing the top of her head. She wrapped her arms around him, inhaling the scent of him, trying to imprint the feel of his hands on her waist.

  "We don't even have to tell them. We could just go. Leave a letter." He spoke into her hair, as if he wanted to breathe her in, too.

  "No. I can't do it like that. They've been good to me. The least I can do is explain."

  "I'm not sure you can explain."

  Lottie pulled back, looked up at him. "They will understand, won't they, Guy? They'll have to. That we didn't mean them any harm? That it wasn't our fault? Because we couldn't help it, could we?" She began to cry.

  "It's nobody's fault. Some things are simply meant to be. You can't fight them."

  "I just hate the fact that our happiness is going to be built on such misery. Poor Celia. Poor, poor Celia." (She could afford to be generous now that he was hers. The strength of her sudden sympathy for Celia had shocked even her.) She wiped at her nose with her sleeve.

  "Celia will survive. She'll find someone else." Lottie felt a faint pang at the matter-of-factness in his voice. "Sometimes I even thought it wasn't really me she was in love with, just the idea of being in love."

  Lottie stared at him.

  "I just felt, sometimes, that it didn't particularly have to be me, you know?"

  Lottie thought of George Bern. Then felt peculiarly disloyal. "I'm sure she loves you," she said, her voice small, reluctant.

  "Let's not talk about it. Look, Lots, we have to make a plan. We have to work out when we're going to tell them. I can't keep lying to everyone--it's making me really uncomfortable."

  "Give me until the weekend. I'll see if Adeline will have me. Perhaps with Frances gone they'll need help with the housework. I wouldn't mind."

  "Really? I don't suppose it would be for long. I just need to sort things out with my parents."

  Lottie pressed her face into his chest. "I wish it was done. I wish we were three months on already." She closed her eyes. "It feels like waiting for a death or something."

  Guy was glancing out of the doorway. "We'd better head back. I'll go first."

  He bent his head and kissed her full on the lips. She kept her eyes open, not wanting to miss a moment. Behind him the lights of a ship winked their way across the harbor.

  "Be brave, Lottie darling. It won't be like this forever."

  And then, with a brief hand to her hair, he was out and pelting back up the dark path toward home.

  CELIA HAD MOVED BACK INTO HER ROOM. LOTTIE HAD groaned inwardly when she saw Celia's nightdress laying across her bedspread. She'd once been an extremely good fibber; now, with all her emotions as raw as if she'd been turned inside out, she found she'd become useless at it, a blushing, prevaricating incompetent.

  So she'd stayed away from Celia as much as possible; this had been made easier by Celia's own propensity toward an almost frantic level of activity. If she wasn't out spending her father's money with an almost religious fervor ("Look! These shoes! I had to get these shoes!"), then she was sorting out her belongings, casting aside anything deemed too "young" or "not London enough." At dinner, safe in company, Lottie was able to retreat into herself, trying again to focus exclusively on her food, drawn only halfheartedly into conversation by Dr. Holden, who seemed oddly distracted himself. Mrs. Holden was determined to engage Guy, bombarding him with questions about his parents and what their life abroad was like, smiling and fluttering at him as coquettishly as if she'd been Celia herself. Lottie and Celia, to Lottie's relief, had collided only once, the previous evening, when Lottie had admired Celia's new feathered haircut and then pleaded that she, too, needed to retire for a long, hot bath.

  So it was with some shock that Lottie returned from her breathless, preoccupied walk with Mr. Beans to find Celia lying on her bed, wrapped in a towel and apparently engrossed in a bridal magazine.

  The bedroom seemed to have shrunk in size.

  "Hullo," Lottie said, peeling off her shoes. "I . . . I was just about to have a bath."

  "Mummy's in there," said Celia, flicking a page. "You'll have to wait a while. There won't be any more hot water." Her legs were long and pale. She had rose-colored varnish on her toenails.

  "Oh."

  Lottie sat with her shoes, her back to Celia, thinking furiously of places to go. Once they had spent hours lying on their beds, stretching the most trivial of subjects into hours of conversation. Now Lottie could not face the thought of being alone with Celia for minutes. Freddie and Sylvia had been put to bed. Mr. Holden was unlikely to want to talk. I could go and ring Joe, she thought. I'll ask Dr. Holden if I can use the telephone.

  She heard the slick sound of the magazine flipping shut behind her and Celia turning to face her.

  "Actually, Lots, I need to talk to you."

  Lottie closed her eyes. Oh, God, please no, she thought.

  "Lots?"
<
br />   She turned, forced a smile. Put her shoes carefully on the floor beside her bed. "Yes?"

  Celia was looking at her intently, her gaze unwavering. Her eyes, Lottie noticed, were an almost unnatural blue.

  "This . . . this is a bit difficult."

  There was a brief silence, during which Lottie slid her hands surreptitiously under her seat. They had begun to shake. Please don't ask me, she begged silently. I won't be able to lie to you. Please, God, don't let her ask.

  "What?"

  "I don't really know how to say . . . Look, what I'm about to say . . . must remain absolutely between me and you."

  Lottie's breath had lodged high in her chest. She thought briefly that she might pass out. "What?" she whispered.

  Celia's gaze was steady.

  Lottie found she couldn't tear her own away.

  "I'm pregnant."

  EIGHT

  Strictly speaking, it had been meant for emergencies, like the afternoon they pulled the missing five-year-old girl from the harbor around at Mer Point. Or when he had to deliver the kind of news that required a seat first; sometimes a stiff whiskey helped them bear up a bit better. But Mr. Holden, eyeing the bottle of fifteen-year-old malt in his top drawer, believed that there were days when a tipple or two could be considered, in all fairness, medicinal.

  Not just medicinal but necessary. Because, if he allowed himself to think about it, his were not simply the usual reservations of a father sending his beloved daughter up the aisle. This sense of anxiety and impending desolation was about what he was being left with: a sterile, loveless marriage to a miserable, flapping wife. A life without even the diversions of Gillian, now that she had headed off to Colchester. A little blunt, she had been, and she'd never let him think he was anything more than a staging post on her unstoppable path, but she had been funny and enjoyably undeferential, and she'd had skin like the alabaster on those marble frescoes: smooth, perfect, but warm. Oh, God, yes. Warm. And now she was gone. And Celia, the only other object of beauty in his life, was going. And what did he have to look forward to? Just a slow grind through middle age, with its endless trivial complaints and its occasional afternoons at the golf club bar, with Alderman Elliott and his like clapping him on the back and cheerfully informing him that his best years were far behind him.

  Henry Holden reached for the little medicine measure on the shelf behind him and then sat and slowly poured himself a couple of fingers of whiskey. It was only a little past ten in the morning, and the whiskey's fiery path down felt abrasive, almost shocking. But then, even that small act of mutiny felt reassuring, too.

  She would notice; of course she would. She would reach up to straighten his tie or whatever other proprietary fiddling she could think of, and then, catching his breath, she would step back and look at him, her expression registering just the faintest hint of distaste. But she wouldn't say anything. She would just put on that slightly hurt expression that he really couldn't stomach, the one that told of crosses borne and endless days of martyrdom. And she would, without ever mentioning it directly, find some subtle way of letting him know that he had disappointed her, that he had let her down again.

  He refilled his measure and swallowed another two fingers. This time it was easy, and he savored the afterburn around the inside of his mouth.

  Masters of their domain, they called them. Kings of their own castles. What rot that all was. Susan Holden's wants and needs and miseries dominated their marriage as surely as if she had written them in ink and beaten them into him with a flaming cane. There was nothing that escaped her eye, nothing that prompted in her a sense of spontaneous happiness. Nothing that remained of the beautiful, carefree young solicitor's daughter that she had been when they met, with a waist that he could fit his two hands around and a glint in her eye that used to make his stomach turn over. No, that Susan had slowly been eaten by this miserable matron, this anxious, fretting thing whose only obsessions were how things appeared to be, not how they were.

  Look at us! He wanted to scream at her sometimes. Look at what we've become! I don't want my slippers! I don't care if Virginia bought the wrong piece of fish! I want my old life back--a life where we could disappear for days on end, where we could make love until dawn, where we could talk--really talk, not just this endless prattling that passes in your world for conversation. He had been tempted, once or twice. But he knew that she wouldn't understand; she would just stare at him, wide-eyed in horror, and then, with a barely suppressed shudder, would compose herself and offer him some tea. Or perhaps a biscuit. Something to "cheer you up a little."

  Other days he thought perhaps life had never been like that; perhaps in the same way that one remembered childhood summers as warm and endless, one also remembered love never made, an uncomplicated passion never really felt. So Henry Holden retreated a little further. Closed his mind to what he'd lost. Like a mouse on a wheel, just kept moving forward and tried not to look at the view. Most of the time it worked.

  Most of the time.

  But by the end of today, Celia and her sillinesses and her mercurial moods and her laughter would be gone. Please, God, he thought, let her not end up like her mother. Let the two of them escape our fate. He had initially failed to understand Celia's sense of urgency with this wedding, her determination to bring it closer. He didn't entirely believe her when she said that October weddings were all the rage. But then he looked at her sense of panic and irritation when Susan started fussing about doing it next summer and realized he understood after all--she was simply desperate to leave. To escape from that stifling household. Who could blame her? He would secretly have loved to do the same.

  And then there was Lottie, whose melancholy at Celia's impending departure had left him aching silently on her behalf. Strange, unreadable, watchful Lottie, who still occasionally warmed him with her unguarded smile. She had always saved a special smile for him, even if she hadn't been aware of it. She had trusted him, loved him as a little girl, more so than anyone else. She'd followed him around, placed her small hand inside his own. And still he knew there was some kind of connection between them. She understood about Susan. He could see it in the way she watched them all; she could see it, too.

  But Lottie wouldn't be there for long either. Susan would make sure of that; she was already hinting furiously about plans and futures and what was supposedly best. And then, after Lottie, the children, and then it would just be the two of them, circling each other. Locked in their respective miseries.

  Got to get a grip, Dr. Holden told himself. Best not to think too hard about these things and shut the drawer.

  He sat for a minute staring out the window of his office, past the circulation chart and the medical leaflets that some pharmaceutical rep had left the previous morning. Past the framed photograph of Merham's respected doctor with his beautiful wife and children. Then, almost unaware of what he was doing, he opened the drawer again.

  WITH A FLOURISH JOE GAVE THE BONNET OF THE DARK blue Daimler a final gloss with a chamois, then stood back, unable to suppress the beam of satisfaction.

  "See your face in that," he said.

  Lottie, seated silently on the backseat waiting for him to finish, tried to raise a smile and failed. She kept looking at the pale leather seats, conscious of the status of its next passengers in just a few hours. Don't think, she told herself. Don't think.

  "She worried I'd be late, was she? Mrs. Holden, I mean?"

  Lottie had volunteered, a means of escape from the mounting hysteria of the Holden household. "You know what she's like."

  Joe shook his head, wiping at his hands with a clean cloth. "Bet Celia's excited about going."

  Lottie nodded, trying to keep her face neutral.

  "They moving straight on, are they? Where is it, down to London?"

  "To start with."

  "Then some fancy country abroad, I reckon. Somewhere hot. Celia'll love that. Can't say I envy her, though, do you?"

  She found that she could get through al
most any conversation now; a month's practice had left her with a face like a poker professional. Nothing revealed, nothing signified. She thought of Adeline's mask, a benign outward appearance, disclosing nothing. Just a few more hours. Just a few more hours.

  "What?"

  She must have said it aloud. She did that occasionally. "Oh. Nothing."

  "How's Freddie doing in that pageboy outfit? Mrs. H got him into it yet? I saw him at High Street on Saturday, and he told me he was going to cut off his own legs so that they couldn't get him into those trousers."

  "He's wearing them."

  "Bloody hell. Sorry, Lottie."

  She shook her head. "Mr. Holden's offered him two shillings if he keeps them on till after the reception."

  "And Sylvia?"

  "Thinks she's royalty. Waiting for Queen Elizabeth to come and claim her as her missing sister."

  "She won't change."

  Yes she will, thought Lottie. She will be happy and gay and carefree, and then some man will come along like a demolition ball and smash her whole life into impossible pieces. Like her father had presumably done to her mother. Like Dr. Holden had to Mrs. Holden. There was no lasting happiness to be had.

  She thought of Adeline, whom she had seen yesterday for the first time since the Bancrofts had visited. Adeline, too, had been low, lacking her former vibrancy, had wandered around the pale, echoing rooms as if nothing within them were of any interest, as if she could no longer see the bold canvases, the bizarre sculptures, the piles of books. Julian had gone to Venice with Stephen. George had got a grant at Oxford to write some research document on economics. Lottie did not like to ask too much about Frances. And soon Adeline would herself be gone. She couldn't bear England in the winter, she said repeatedly, as if convincing herself. She was headed over to the South of France, to a friend's villa in Provence. She would sit and drink cheap wine and watch the world go by. It would be a wonderful holiday, she said. But the way she spoke made it sound neither wonderful nor like a holiday.

  "You must come," she said to Lottie, who was trying to look as if she didn't care. "I will be all alone, Lottie. You must come and visit me."

  They had walked slowly out onto the terrace, to the mural, where she had reached out a hand and taken Lottie's, very gently. This time Lottie did not flinch.