The White Marriage Read online

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Modigliani, but your model is now so hungry that she is about to faint. And by hungry, I mean famished. I had no supper last night, and only a bun for breakfast. And what is worse is that the smells from your kitchen are making me feel positively ravenous.’

  ‘Very well. If you must eat, you must. Do you want to see the—’

  ‘No, I will only say the wrong thing, most particularly if I am hungry.’

  Arietta helped Sam to serve chicken pie and new potatoes and peas, followed by small wild strawberries and Devon cream, and a delicious cheese with oat biscuits and unsalted butter.

  ‘That was so good,’ Arietta murmured, feeling more than a little woozy, both from the effects of the wine and the food. ‘I think I have just been in heaven.’

  Sam stared at her.

  ‘No, you have not been in heaven – yet,’ he told her gently, ‘but very soon you might be.’

  Earlier, Sunny’s first morning in Madame Charles’s workroom had made her all too aware that she was a foreigner in an alien country. Obviously the flow of Spanish and Italian that punctured the overlit, underventilated room contributed to this feeling, but it was also heightened by the fact that all the women seated at the tables were not only older, but married, the lights every now and then catching the thin gold bands that proclaimed their status, their figures advertising their post-maternal states, their hair already displaying thickened grey strands. For this reason Sunny knew she would have nothing in common with the ladies that surrounded her, so she resolved to keep her eyes down, and her mouth shut.

  As she sewed she thought of what she would write to her mother about her first days in London. She thought with sudden excitement that she could telephone her from the lodging house; she would actually love to telephone her, to hear her calm voice, until she remembered that a telephone call from her to Rushington would cause nothing but unease. However little the cost to Sunny, even if it was only sixpence, a London call from their daughter would seem shockingly prohibitive and extravagant to her parents, and that being so, the conversation would quickly become unbearably stilted. The fact was that her parents used their telephone as little as possible, regarding it as a sacred and costly instrument. When they did make use of it, it was strictly only to make business or social arrangements. It was never ever employed to hold a conversation.

  As she bent to her work, which was effortlessly easy, it came to Sunny that she had actually never heard her father say either ‘hallo’ or ‘goodbye’. Any kind of greeting or signing off would be considered by John to be both expensive and frivolous. Once the purpose of the call was at an end he would carefully and quietly replace the telephone on its cradle, and that would be very much that.

  The idea of a telephone call to John and Mary therefore being quite out of the question, Sunny began an imaginary letter to her mother, writing it in her head as she stitched.

  ‘Dear Ma, I have arrived in London, and am very well. The lodging house is great fun. There are about six flats in the building. Well, actually they are not flats so much as rooms with bathrooms, but you have your own latch key to your door, which makes it seem like your own flat. Arietta is working in the bookshop. She is very well, and I am too. I hope you are. Love Sunny.’

  She stopped to rethread her needle. No point in stating the obvious. Obviously she was very well, otherwise she would not be writing to them. She would be coming home to be nursed by Mary, not writing to them. Or would she? She started to sew again. Suddenly home seemed strangely out of place in her new life. If she did go home now, she thought she would already feel out of place.

  In the next minutes, as the noise and chatter swelled around her, and the sunlight filtered through the windows on to the variety of stuffs and feathers, sequins and buttons, tiny swathes of silk velvets, flowers and veiling, the realisation gradually came to her that she had been freed from her toys and her old school books, from the pink and white curtains of her room with the bobbled fringe that ran down the sides, from the steady, unvaried life of Rushington, from her parents’ silently reproachful eyes, from the night-time sound of the hunting owl hooting on its way to the Downs; from the Vauxhall breaking down; from Clem Arkwright’s Garage; from the butcher who liked to tease her as if she was still a schoolgirl. She had been freed from the whole tangle of her ordinary, happy childhood.

  She knew that Arietta would call it a happy-sad moment, but to look back any more might mean turning to stone, so she wouldn’t look back, she would jump into the future, flying from the hopscotch square marked ‘past’ to that marked ‘today’, landing safely on one foot, trying not to wobble as she looked ahead to the next square.

  She quickly finished the piece she was sewing and, standing up preparatory to taking it over to Madame Charles, she realised that the time had whizzed by, and it was already one o’clock. Hart was taking her to lunch somewhere – anywhere, she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she knew she was free, that in every essential except one, her life had really begun in earnest.

  Hart was standing by the door through which Sunny bolted out into the suddenly sunny and demurely fashionable street outside. He took off his hat, and as Sunny raised her face to him, he leaned his dark, well-set, handsome head forward and kissed her.

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu,’ murmured Madame Charles, watching from above. ‘L’amour, c’est bon, enfin!’ She smiled, remembering just such moments which now seemed long ago, before turning back to her workroom, and the increasingly wretched matter of the hideous flowers that the Duchess of G. was insisting upon having placed on her cartwheel hat. It would make Her Grace look like an ambulating garden trug, but would she listen to Madame Charles? Non, enfin, the silly woman!

  Arietta had awoken to the late afternoon sun warming the pillow upon which her dark head of hair was resting. It had not taken more than a few seconds for her to realise that she was lying, clothed only in her petticoat, in Sam’s sheets, in Sam’s bed, and that being so, they must have made love.

  She sat up feeling sensuous and miserable, both at the same time.

  ‘Where are you?’ she called out, eventually, because the studio seemed oddly silent.

  Sam leaped up the stairs to the balconied area, which was his bedroom, high above the studio.

  ‘I am here.’

  He sat down on the bed and as he did so Arietta at once lay back against the pillows, closing her eyes. What had she done?

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Arietta kept her eyes closed. She could see colours and sparks, dashes of light against the dark, she could see constellations, and she could also see her mother.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ she replied in a cold little voice, eyes still closed. ‘What should the matter be?’

  Sam leaned forward. ‘I do love you, you know.’

  ‘Yes, of course you do.’

  Since her eyes were still closed, Arietta could not see Sam’s look of hurt surprise at her lightly sarcastic tone.

  ‘No, I mean I really do – love – you.’

  ‘So you just said.’

  Arietta stepped out of bed. Pulling fiercely on the top sheet, she extracted it from the bed before carefully and modestly wrapping it around herself, making of it a floor-length toga before walking it, and herself, across to the bathroom.

  ‘I feel terribly sick. I think I must be pregnant,’ she eventually called from the bathroom.

  Sam waited for her to re-emerge, and then beckoned to her, still wrapped in the trailing sheet, to sit beside him on the bed, where he carefully, very carefully, refrained from touching her, while his eyes looked at her in such a tender manner that, had Arietta actually bothered to look at him, she might have felt better. But as it was she did not. She stared at the floor, tracing a constant pattern with one restless foot on the polished board.

  ‘You cannot be pregnant, Arietta.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Still the foot was tracing a design on the floor board.

  ‘I know be
cause nothing has happened that could make you pregnant.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, how can I best put it?’ Sam hesitated. ‘In order to make a girl pregnant certain things have to happen, and they didn’t’.

  ‘You can get pregnant from kissing, you know,’ Arietta informed him angrily.

  ‘Really? Well, in that case you are definitely pregnant.’

  Arietta looked up for the first time. Sam was keeping an admirably straight face.

  ‘Don’t laugh. You’re probably going to be a father ten times over by now.’

  Sam nodded. Arietta’s mouth set determinedly. She hated him. He saw that she did and waited, still straight-faced. Finally the sides of her mouth started to curl up, and she fell sideways on the bed still clutching the sheet, but laughing.

  Sam joined her. They stared at each other. It was one of those long moments when each person realises, with some interest, just how long the other’s eyelashes actually are; or that the small brown flecks that radiate from the middle of the eye are really rather like the minute markings on a feather; or that the other person’s nose is really rather bigger than at first imagined; or smaller than first imagined; or the forehead broader, or the skin softer and pinker.

  ‘What is the matter, Arietta of the ten babies? Tell your Uncle Sam. He might be able to help you,’ Sam whispered.

  A long silence, during which Arietta turned on her back and stared at the ceiling.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said eventually.

  ‘If nothing why so sad?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I might.’

  Arietta nodded up to the ceiling. Sam was right. She turned back to view him, sideways once more. She would try him, but without much confidence.

  *

  She had gone back for her purse, her wretched purse, and she had opened the front door with her key, very, very quietly, all the time hoping, it had to be said, that her mother had gone out, and she could grab her purse and flee.

  It was as she tiptoed across the linoleum floor of the kitchen that she heard sounds from upstairs, and naturally froze. If she was in of an afternoon, rather than shopping, it was not like her mother to be anywhere except in the sitting room, listening to the wireless. Arietta had begun to creep across the parquet flooring in the hall when she heard the sounds drifting down from the bedroom, They were not sounds she had ever heard before, and yet she knew what they must be. She stood transfixed. She tried to move but her feet wouldn’t do what she was asking of them. At last, at long, long last, they began to move towards the front door, which she closed behind her, so quietly, so slowly, that it was almost unbearable.

  Once outside she started to run towards the station, towards the train, towards London, but not before she had recognised the car, which she now noticed parked opposite the house. It was the same one that had brought her mother home from the dinner party that early morning, what now seemed so long ago. God, oh God, the same car, belonging to some man, to some person, to that someone who was still upstairs with her mother.

  ‘I see.’

  Sam did not look shocked, he looked interested.

  ‘So your mother has a lover.’

  Arietta rolled on to her back once more.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you don’t think she should have a lover?’

  ‘Well, no, of course not.’

  ‘But, forgive me, she is a widow, is she not?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘In that case ask yourself why she should not have a lover. If she is anything like you she is a pretty woman, not yet old, probably attracted to men, and obviously attractive to them, so inevitably, one day, she and they will want to make love, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  For a second Arietta wondered vaguely if she was becoming incapable of saying anything except ‘well, yes’.

  ‘So, what is upsetting you so much then? Why the Miss Glum face that you were wearing earlier?’

  Arietta frowned. Well, quite. What was upsetting her so much? Given that Sam was right, that her mother was a very attractive woman and a widow, why shouldn’t she have a lover? After all, Arietta now had a lover, why shouldn’t Audrey have a lover?

  ‘What is upsetting me so much is that…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Arietta bit her lip. The ceiling was very far above her. It was painted white. ‘Is that I don’t like the thought,’ she finally admitted.

  ‘Ah, yes. And perfectly understandable. My mother is amazingly beautiful, and I hate the thought of her having done anything more than hold hands with my father when he was alive. Uncle Randy has always said parents just don’t do it. Not ever, not ever, ever, ever. They find us as babies behind cabbages, and we grow up to torment them, and that is that. Anything more is just not on, you understand. Just not on,’ he repeated doing an excellent imitation of his Uncle Randy.

  They both laughed, and Sam, thinking the matter at an end, kissed her.

  ‘There, pregnant again, Miss Staunton!’

  Arietta sighed. It was all very well for Sam the debonair painter to make light of everything, but it was not so simple for her.

  ‘That’s not exactly everything, and that is not what I meant, exactly. That is not exactly what is making me miserable – besides thinking I am pregnant, of course.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘You must say.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is probably blasphemous, or something.’

  ‘Let’s take the “or something” bit, and forget the blasphemy. I am in love with you, you must know that. You have to be able to tell me everything, as I have to be able to tell you everything, because one of these days you are going to realise that you are in love with me, so we might as well get on with it, don’t you think?’

  Arietta continued to stare up at the ceiling, thinking hard. Did she dare say what she knew had to be said? It would be so shocking to hear those words out loud, and yet if Sam was right, if they were to love each other, perhaps the words had to be said?

  Finally she murmured the four shocking words.

  Sam sat up and stared down at her. Happily he did not laugh, but nor did he look either shocked or serious. He looked vaguely disappointed.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What do you mean – is that all?’ Arietta too sat up.

  ‘Just that – is that all? Everyone feels like that towards their mother. It’s completely normal. We all feel like that, and most of the time. Uncle Randy says it’s because they’re the first people to punish us.’

  ‘You don’t feel like that.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ she admitted. ‘But I don’t think you do.’

  ‘I have felt like that more than you will ever know, I promise you. Ask Uncle Randy. He was my saviour, my hero, my best friend, without him I could never have survived my childhood, never have become a painter. He fought my mother for me tooth and nail because she was so possessive. It was Uncle Randy who gave me my freedom, my joie de vivre, my love of life.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Now come on, get dressed. I want to get on with the canvas.’

  Arietta dressed and went downstairs. Sam had made coffee. What a comfort that he had made coffee and not tea at tea-time. They sat opposite each other on large squishy chairs, saying nothing, sipping the strong coffee, until it was finished. Then Arietta washed up the cups and he tied the red shawl around her, and they went silently on with the day, he knowing that she must be about to love him as much as he knew he loved her, and she knowing that she was no longer alone.

  And so began a swift succession of days and nights that Arietta spent between the studio, and Beetle’s Bookshop, watched over with benign satisfaction by Mr Beauchamp. Days when Arietta learned to breakfast off cr
ème caramel, to run to the new machine on the corner for snacks at midnight, to walk in the park before the sun got up, but most of all to take each hour as it came, to shy away from anxiety and the bolts of hideous thought, which normal people call conscience and which ruin so much that should be golden.

  Meanwhile Sam began to paint what was to become his first famous painting. Inevitably, because Arietta was sitting for him, occupying his life and his thoughts all the time, he changed the title from Absence to The Red Shawl.

  Chapter Eleven

  Leandra had slipped back into London. It was early morning and there was hardly anyone about, so there was a freshness in the summer air, and a sparkle to the swept streets as yet unadorned with either the rich or the fashionable, only the doormen standing outside the hotels and clubs, a lone gentleman walking his dog to the park, a briskly walking nanny pushing her charge to the gardens opposite her employer’s apartment.

  The taxi from the station having been paid off, Leandra walked quickly into the premises of Messrs Abel & Beddows, antique dealers to the upper classes.

  ‘May I help you, madam?’

  ‘Mr Abel, please. He is expecting me.’

  Mr Abel was a tall man with matinée idol looks. He stood up behind his leather-topped partner’s desk as Leandra was shown into his office and, walking from behind it, he extended one beautiful hand.

  It was something that Leandra had always appreciated about him – not just that he was good-looking but he had extraordinarily beautiful hands. They were not the hands of a tradesman, and although he wore a wedding ring, in the continental manner, there was nothing about him that was not in the best possible taste. He was refined, in the best sense of the word, and if he had not been in trade, he might have married a daughter of the aristocracy, such were his manners, and his grace and charm.

  ‘Mrs Fortescue. Good morning.’

  He smiled, and indicated a graceful and perfectly upholstered chair.

  Leandra sat down. She looked up at him, and she too smiled.

  Mr Abel would know why she was there. She would not have to say anything. He was the soul of discretion. He knew, as they say, how to go on.