All That Glittered

London, January 1943

The all-clear sounded at half past four.

By then I had been writing for seven hours.

It is a curious sound, the all-clear. The siren that sends you underground rises and falls like a woman keening. The one that lets you out simply holds one long, level note, as though London were letting out a breath it had been holding all night. I have heard both more times than I can count. I have never quite decided which I dislike more.

At seventy-six, one discovers that the body develops opinions of its own, most of them disagreeable. My right hand ached to the wrist. My back had set like plaster in the shape of the chair. The gas fire had sunk to a blue mutter, and the tea at my elbow had gone cold so long ago it had grown a skin.

I put down my pen.

Outside, London was still standing.

There is something to admire in that. The Germans had spent a good deal of time and ammunition trying to persuade the city otherwise, and here it remained: battered, filthy, smelling of wet ash and cordite and broken drains, and profoundly unwilling to cooperate.

I rather admired its disposition. It reminded me of my mother.

I drew back the corner of the blackout curtain. Curzon Street lay grey and blind beneath a sky the colour of pewter. Somewhere below my window a man was sweeping broken glass from the pavement. I could not see him in the dark. I could only hear the broom: a long patient scrape, a pause, the small bright tinkle of shards sliding into a pan, then the scrape again. No doubt he had a wife, children, a shop that had suffered some fresh indignity in the night. Nevertheless, there he was, clearing away the wreckage so that the milk cart could come through at six.

The English have a remarkable capacity for carrying on.

I should know. I have made an entire life of it.

I rose from the desk, pulled my dressing gown closer, and went down to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea.

There was a time when the suggestion that the Duchess of Ashworth might boil her own kettle would have caused my mother to expire on the spot.

An impossibility now, of course. Mother is long dead. Though I confess there were afternoons during her lifetime when I found the prospect of her expiring on the spot rather appealing.

She had devoted the better part of her existence to making certain I never performed a task that might suggest we were anything less than extraordinary. Servants were employed to dress us, feed us, clean up after us, and sustain the elaborate fiction that great wealth rendered its owners incapable of ordinary human functions. I was nineteen before I knew where the kitchen was in our own house on Euclid Avenue.

She would have been horrified to see me standing at a kitchen range in my nightgown, with my white hair down my back in a plait like a schoolgirl’s, watching a kettle.

I smiled at the thought.

At my age, one takes one’s amusements where one finds them.

Tea in hand, I climbed back up to my desk.

The journal lay open where I had left it, the ink on the last page still faintly bright.

Seven hours.

Seven hours to set down the truth of a life I had spent more than half a century arranging to look like something else.

I had not meant to write so much. When I first sat down the evening before, with the sirens beginning their dreary ascent over Hyde Park, I had scarcely known where to start. I had imagined a few pages. A confession, perhaps. A modest accounting of the things I had done, the people I had loved, and the mistakes I had made.

Modesty, however, has never been among my more reliable virtues.

Once I began, the words came with an almost indecent enthusiasm.

I wrote about New York in 1888. About a city so drunk on its own money that it mistook extravagance for civilisation. About Fifth Avenue, where the houses stood shoulder to shoulder in brownstone and marble like rich dowagers refusing to give up their seats. About drawing rooms so crammed with gilt and velvet, ormolu clocks and Turkey carpets and palms in brass pots, that one could scarcely cross them without upsetting a Sèvres vase worth more than a schoolmaster earned in a year. About gowns from Worth that arrived from Paris in boxes as large as coffins, and dinners of fourteen courses, and women who changed their clothes six times a day for the sole purpose of being seen to have changed them.

About people who were, on the whole, considerably less interesting than their furniture.

I wrote about my mother, and her ambitions, and the terrible, magnificent engine of her will.

About my father, and his railroads, and his laugh, which was the best sound in any room it was ever in.

About the absurdity of being born into a family rich enough to buy practically anything, only to discover that the one thing I truly wanted was the one thing money could not buy.

And, naturally, I wrote about him.

Declan.

Even now, after all these years, his name has an extraordinary effect on me.

It is ridiculous, really. I have lived through two wars. I have buried people I loved. I have presided over an estate, raised a family, nursed the dying, and entertained men who fancied themselves the rulers of the world. I have survived my mother’s ambitions, English society’s judgments, and more formal dinners than any woman should reasonably be asked to endure.

Yet the simple act of writing his name can still make my hand shake.

How very inconvenient.

He called me Vivi.

Not Miss Caldwell. Not Your Grace. Not any of the carefully constructed titles by which the world measured my worth.

Just Vivi.

Two syllables. No one else ever used them. In his mouth they were enough to make me forget everything I had been taught about who I was supposed to be.

I closed my eyes.

Memory is a peculiar thing. It will mislay an entire decade without apology, then hand back some small, insignificant detail with merciless clarity.

I can no longer remember the colour of the gown I wore to my first ball, though Mother spent a small fortune on it and reminded me of the expense for weeks.

But I remember his hands.

Good heavens, I remember his hands.

Strong hands, capable hands, roughened by honest work and smelling faintly of boot polish and bay rum. Hands that should never, according to every rule governing our respective stations, have touched me at all.

And yet they had.

I opened my eyes.

There are certain memories a woman ought to have the decency to surrender with age.

I have never been particularly decent.

The truth is that I loved him.

Not with the pretty, restrained affection that society considered suitable for young ladies of good family. Not with the sensible gratitude expected of a woman lucky enough to make an advantageous match.

I loved him recklessly.

I loved him selfishly.

I loved him in ways that frightened me, delighted me, and in the end asked more courage of me than I possessed.

That last admission has taken me fifty-four years to put into words.

There. It is done.

I suppose the ceiling ought to have fallen in, or the heavens opened, or Mother’s ghost materialised beside the wardrobe to demand that I reconsider my language.

Instead the clock ticked. The fire muttered. Far away, a lorry changed gear on Park Lane.

And the world went on turning, quite indifferent to my confession.

I took a sip of cold tea, and did not notice it was cold.

Declan has been dead for twelve years.

The news reached me in the autumn of 1931, in a letter so ordinary in appearance that I nearly left it unopened until after luncheon. Cream envelope. Typed address. The kind of letter that usually concerns a lease, or a bequest to some distant cousin’s parish.

He had died in March, it said. Suddenly. His heart.

He was sixty-nine.

They had taken six months to tell me. I have never known whether that was discretion or simple carelessness. I have never been able to decide which I would prefer.

I remember sitting in the library at Ashworth with the letter in my lap. It was a bright October morning. A long bar of sunlight lay across the carpet, full of slow dust, and I watched it as though it were the most interesting thing I had ever seen. I watched it for a very long time. I remember thinking, with great clarity and no feeling whatsoever, that the carpet wanted beating.

Then I folded the letter, put it in the drawer of my writing table, and went for a walk.

I walked the length of the beech avenue and back, and then again, and then out across the park toward the river, where the leaves had turned the colour of old pennies and came down around me in the wind like something being slowly torn up. I walked for nearly two hours. I do not remember a single thought I had. I remember only my boots, and the leaves, and a pheasant that went up out of the bracken with a sound like a shot and made me cry out aloud.

When I came back I dressed for dinner.

What else was I to do? There were guests that evening. There were servants to direct, a seating plan to be checked, a bishop’s wife who could not be put beside the Liberal member for Salisbury. People expected the Duchess of Ashworth to remain precisely what she had always appeared to be.

And she did.

I did.

That night, when the guests had gone, Edward found me standing at our bedroom window in the dark, still in my evening gown, my gloves still on.

“Darling,” he said. “Whatever is it?”

I told him someone I had known long ago had died.

“Someone important?”

I could not answer. I nodded. He did not ask anything more. He simply took off my gloves for me, one finger at a time, the way one undresses a child who is too tired to manage, and held me until I stopped shaking.

I did not tell him who it was.

For more than forty years I had taken a peculiar comfort in knowing that somewhere in the world, Declan O’Brien was alive. We were separated by an ocean, by circumstance, by choices neither of us could undo. I had no intention of seeking him out.

But he existed.

He breathed the same air under the same indifferent sun. Somewhere he rose in the morning, and drank his coffee, and read his newspaper, and went about his day.

There remained, however impossibly, the prospect of another letter. Another glimpse. One more moment.

Then came the cream envelope.

And suddenly there was no somewhere.

Only nowhere.

I had thought myself thoroughly acquainted with grief by then.

Apparently grief still had a few things to teach me.

I looked toward the window.

At the edge of the blackout curtain, the dark had begun to thin. Dawn was coming up over Mayfair the colour of dirty pearls. Before long there would be queues outside the grocer’s for whatever the ration book allowed this week. The buses would grind back into service along Piccadilly with brown paper pasted over their windows. Someone would complain about the weather, someone else about Mr. Churchill, and London would go about its business as though the night had not happened at all.

There was a kind of reassurance in such stubbornness.

I turned back to the journal.

There were things in those pages that would astonish my family. Others that might wound them.

There were names I had never spoken aloud in their presence. Choices I had defended so fiercely that I had almost persuaded myself they were the right ones.

Almost.

I wondered what they would think of me when they read it.

Then I laughed.

A startling sound in the quiet room. I had not heard myself laugh like that in years.

All my life I had been expected to care what people thought. My mother had raised the practice to the level of a religion. Which families approved of us. Who had declined an invitation. Whose daughter had married whom. Which title outranked which, and by how much, and whether it was enough.

Wealth, I had discovered, was perfectly useless at silencing the opinions of people determined to feel superior. So, as it turned out, was a coronet.

Well. I was seventy-six.

My hair was white. My joints ached. Europe was at war for the second time in my life. My grandsons were in uniform, and my neighbours were being blown to pieces in their beds.

If I had not earned the right to tell the truth by now, I suspected I never would.

Let them think what they liked.

Let them whisper.

Let them be scandalised.

God knows it would give them something to talk about besides the war.

I picked up my pen.

At the bottom of the last page, I wrote one final sentence.

Before I was the Duchess of Ashworth, before I was a wife, a mother, or the woman the world believed me to be, I was Vivi.

I paused.

Then I added:

And there was a man who loved me enough to remember her.

I closed the journal.

Outside, behind the curtain, the sun was rising over London.

The broom had stopped. The milk cart had come through after all; I heard the clink of bottles on a step somewhere down the street, small and bright and absurdly ordinary.

I finished my tea. I turned off the lamp. I went upstairs to bed.

For the first time in fifty-four years, I had told the truth. All of it.

I had no idea what it would cost me.

But then, I have rarely known the price of anything until after I had paid it.