On a Cold Dark Sea(63)

Georgie abruptly turned and walked back into the bedroom. Charlotte hovered in the doorway, worried she’d offended him. Georgie opened a drawer in a bedside table and pulled out a metallic strand with a circular gold object swinging from it like a pendulum. A pocket watch. Georgie handed it to Charlotte.

“A present from dear Pater on my eighteenth birthday.”

Charlotte looked at the cover, which was etched with a family crest. She popped it open and saw the initials “GSV” in elaborate Gothic script.

“I nearly sold it,” Georgie said. “During those first years, in New York. God knows I needed the money. Yet I kept it, like a sentimental fool. I kept it because it was all I had left of my parents, even though every time I looked at it, I remembered how much they hated me.

“When the porter at college found me and Reg . . .” Georgie paused and looked at Charlotte, as if deciding how much to tell.

There were two tufted chairs in front of a large picture window, and Charlotte sat in one, telling him with her eyes that she would listen. Georgie took the watch back and sat opposite her, sliding his fingertips along and around the chain. He smiled gently, a gentleman’s assurance that he was perfectly all right and wouldn’t make a fuss.

“Well, there was no mistaking what we were up to,” Georgie said. “You can imagine the uproar. I was sent home in disgrace, with the understanding that I could plead youth and ignorance and pin the blame on Reg. If I was suitably repentant, I’d be allowed back next term. But Father wouldn’t play along. He was livid, as angry as I’d ever seen him. Howling that no son of his would perform such deviant acts. He put on quite a show.”

Georgie was making light of it, pretending time had drained the story of its sting. But Charlotte saw the wounds that had never healed. The pain that made Georgie hate himself, even now.

“I thought Mother would take my side,” Georgie continued. “She’d always spoiled me. Called me her baby long after I was out of the nursery, I’m ashamed to say. The whole time my father was berating me, my mother didn’t say a word. Finally, to my utter shock, Father banished me from the house. Quite medieval, don’t you think? I was sent away with only the clothes I was wearing—luckily I’d a few pounds in my pocket and a line of credit at the bank in Oxford, or who knows what I’d have done. As Father was ordering me out, I kept waiting for Mother to rein him in. To say he’d done enough, or we’d talk it over in the morning. She never did. She stood there, watching, as I walked away crying like a schoolboy. It was like she’d turned to ice.

“I phoned the house the next day, from the inn where I’d spent the night in town. The housekeeper answered, and I said, ‘It’s me, Master George, please let me speak to my mother,’ and she said she’d been told Lady Upton wasn’t taking any calls. I said, ‘Not even from her own son?’ and she said those were her orders, and I promptly broke into tears—proving my father right, I suppose. I still remember the click when the phone was put down. It was the sound that severed me from my family forever.”

Georgie was still a performer; his glance drifted mournfully downward as he sighed. But that didn’t mean his emotions weren’t real.

“Reg saved me,” he said. “That sounds foolish, doesn’t it, given what happened? But he took me in when I had no one else. I wrote to Mother a few times—when I told her I was leaving the country, I felt sure she’d write back, to say goodbye, at least. She never did.

“I don’t know if Reg intended to take me, when he first planned his trip to America. We hadn’t talked much about the future—we hadn’t talked about it at all, to be honest. But when he asked me along and talked about all the adventures we’d have together, it felt like I’d been given a second chance at life. When he was lost”—Georgie took a momentary pause, swallowing down the pain—“I was shattered. But I couldn’t go back. I owed it to Reg to live a life of truth, the sort of life he’d have had if he survived. Begging my parents for forgiveness would have been a betrayal of Reg, and it would have been useless, besides. I’d no doubt my parents preferred to see me dead than a nancy boy.”

“I think your mother would give anything to know you were alive,” Charlotte said.

Georgie shrugged and looked down at the watch. “Six o’clock,” he said. “Julio will be serving the canapes.”

“Julio?”

Georgie grinned. “My butler.”

“Good gracious. Does he serve in full livery?”

“Poor chap, he’d roast.” Georgie stood and offered his hand.

Below, by the pool, someone had turned on a gramophone, and voices were singing, “It don’t mean a thing! If it ain’t got that swing!”

“I should be going,” Charlotte said.

“Oh, please stay. I’d like you to.”

“Are you sure? I don’t know”—how to put it delicately?—“I don’t know if it’s my sort of crowd.”

“Afraid you’ll be corrupted?” Georgie laughed, amused by Charlotte’s reticence. “No orgies, I promise. Just dinner. I’d love everyone to meet you.”

She’d assumed it was the other way around: I want to impress you by showing off all my dazzling friends. Charlotte was unexpectedly touched by the sincerity of Georgie’s invitation. It gave her a warm quiver of pleasure, followed quickly by thirst for another drink.