The Peacock Emporium(9)
She went past the main stairs, stepping over the seated couples propped against banisters. Weary now, she passed rows of ancestral portraits, their colors unmellowed by age, their gilt frames suspiciously bright. Under her feet the plush red carpet now bore carelessly stubbed cigarettes and the odd discarded napkin. Outside the kitchens, from which now emanated the smell of baking bread, she passed Isabel, laughing helplessly on the shoulder of an attentive young man. She didn’t seem to recognize Vivi now.
Several feet beyond the corridor came to an end. Vivi glanced up at the heavy oak door, checked behind her to make sure that no one could see her, and let out a huge yawn. She bent down to remove her shoes, which had begun to pinch several hours earlier. She would put them back on when she found him.
It was as she raised her head that she heard it: a scuffling sound and the odd grunt, as if someone had fallen down drunk outside and was trying to raise themselves. She stared at the door from behind which the noise had come, and saw it was just ajar, a sliver of Arctic breeze slipping down the side of the corridor. Vivi, shoeless, crept closer, holding one arm across herself against the encroaching cold. She paused, then opened the door silently, and peered round at the side of the house.
She initially thought that the woman must have fallen down because he seemed to be supporting her, trying to prop her up against the wall. She wondered if she should offer to help. She then grasped, in swift, successive jolts, that the rhythmic sounds she had heard were emerging from these people. That the woman’s long pale legs were not the limp limbs of a drunk, but wrapped tautly round him like some kind of serpent. As Vivi’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she recognized, with a start, the woman’s long, dark hair, falling chaotically over her face, and the lone sequined slipper, upon which stray flakes of snow were settling.
Vivi was simultaneously repulsed and transfixed, staring for several seconds before she grasped, with a flood of shame, what she had been witnessing. She stood, leaning against the half-opened door, that sound echoing grotesquely in her ears, jarring against the thumping of her heart.
She had meant to move, but the longer she stood there, the more paralyzed she became, even though her arms were mottling in the night air, and her teeth chattering. Instead of escaping, she leaned against the cool of the oak door and felt her legs disappear from under her: she had understood that while the tones were those she had never heard before, this man’s voice was not. That the back of the man’s head, his pink-tinged ears, the sharp edge where his hair met his collar, were familiar to her: as familiar as they had been twelve years ago, when she had first fallen in love with him.
3
She might not have made Deb of the Year (and now that she was “respectable” no one discussed why), but there were few observers of society who doubted that the nuptials of Athene Forster, described as the so-called Last Deb, It Girl, or, among some of the less forgiving society matrons, something far less complimentary, and Douglas Fairley-Hulme, son of the Suffolk farming Fairley-Hulmes, could be hailed as the Wedding of the Year.
The guest list sported enough old money and double-barreled names to grant it a prominent position in all the society pages, along with some rather grainy black-and-white pictures. The reception was held at one of the better gentlemen’s clubs in Piccadilly, its customary air of tobacco-scented pomp and bluster temporarily smothered by spring blooms and swathed drapes of white silk.
There was the groom, universally decreed to be “a catch,” whose serious manner, clean-cut good looks, and family fortune had left heartbroken potential mothers-in-law across several counties. Even as he stood, formal and stiff in his morning suit, the occasion weighty upon his broad shoulders, his obvious happiness kept breaking through, evident in the way he kept glancing across the room to locate his bride, his eyes softening as he saw her. It was also patently obvious that, despite the presence of his family, his best friends and a hundred others, all of whom wanted to pass on their warmest wishes and congratulations, he would rather they had been alone.
And then there was the bride. Her dewy eyes and bias-cut silk dress, which skimmed a figure that might easily have seemed too thin, had led even her more fervent detractors to note that whatever else she was (and there was no shortage of opinions in that department), she was certainly a great beauty. Her hair, more usually seen cascading wildly down her back, had been glossed and tamed to sit regally on the crown of her head, held in place by a tiara of real diamonds. Other girls’ skin might have been grayed by the white of the silk, but hers reflected its marble smoothness. Her eyes, a pale aquamarine, had been professionally outlined, and shimmered under a layer of silver. Her mouth formed a small, secretive smile that revealed none of her teeth, except when she turned to her husband and broke into a wide, uninhibited grin, or when she occasionally locked lips with him in a suggestion of some private, desperate passion, that made those around them laugh nervously and look away.
Justine Forster now sat smiling out gamely from the top table. Having tried to ignore that her already habitually choleric husband was still cross that the date of the wedding had interrupted his annual veteran-soldiers’ trip to Ypres and had mentioned it on no fewer than three occasions already (once during the speech!), she was now trying to ignore her daughter, who, two seats away, appeared to be giving her own husband a verbatim account of the “girl-to-girl” chat she had unwisely embarked upon the previous evening.