A Dangerous Fortune(88)
It was on the street that he had met Nora. He had gone to Peter Robinson’s in Oxford Street—a shop that had once been a linen draper’s but was now called a “department store”—to get a present for his sister Dotty: he planned to take the train to Folkestone immediately afterwards. But he was so miserable that he did not know how he was going to face his family, and a kind of paralysis of choice made him incapable of selecting a gift. He came out empty-handed as it was getting dark, and Nora literally bumped into him. She stumbled and he caught her in his arms.
He would never forget how it had felt to hold her. Even though she was wrapped up, her body was soft and yielding, and she smelled warm and scented. For a moment the cold, dark London street vanished and he was in a closed world of sudden delight. Then she dropped her purchase, a pottery vase, and it smashed on the pavement. She gave a cry of dismay and looked as if she might burst into tears. Hugh naturally insisted on buying a replacement.
She was a year or two younger than he, twenty-four or twenty-five. She had a pretty round face with sandy-blond curls poking out from a bonnet, and her clothes were cheap but pleasing: a pink wool dress embroidered with flowers and worn over a bustle, and a tight-fitting French-navy velvet jacket trimmed with rabbit fur. She spoke with a broad cockney drawl.
While they were buying the replacement vase he told her, by way of conversation, that he could not decide what to give his sister. Nora suggested a colorful umbrella, and then she insisted on helping him choose it.
Finally he took her home in a hansom. She told him she lived with her father, a traveling salesman of patent medicines. Her mother was dead. The neighborhood where she lived was rather less respectable than he had guessed, poor working class rather than middle class.
He assumed he would never see her again, and all day Sunday at Folkestone he brooded about Maisie as always. On Monday at the bank he got a note from Nora, thanking him for his kindness: her handwriting was small, neat and girlish, he noticed before screwing the note up into a ball and dropping it into the wastepaper basket.
Next day he stepped out of the bank at midday, on his way to a coffeehouse for a plate of lamb cutlets, and saw her walking along the street toward him. At first he did not recognize her, but simply thought what a nice face she had; then she smiled at him and he remembered. He doffed his hat and she stopped to talk. She worked as an assistant to a corset maker, she told him with a blush, and she was on her way back to the shop after visiting a client. A sudden impulse made him ask her to go dancing with him that night.
She said she would like to go but she did not have a respectable hat, so he took her to a milliner’s shop and bought her one, and that settled the matter.
Much of their romance was conducted while shopping. She had never owned much and she took unashamed delight in Hugh’s affluence. For his part he enjoyed buying her gloves, shoes, a coat, bracelets, and anything else she wanted. His sister, with all the wisdom of her twelve years, had announced that Nora only liked him for his money. He had laughed and said: “But who would love me for my looks?”
Maisie did not disappear from his mind—indeed, he still thought of her every day—but the memories no longer plunged him into despair. He had something to look forward to now, his next rendezvous with Nora. In a few weeks she gave him back his joie de vivre.
On one of their shopping expeditions they met Maisie in a furrier’s store in Bond Street. Feeling rather bashful, Hugh introduced the two women. Nora was bowled over to meet Mrs. Solomon Greenbourne. Maisie invited them to tea at the Piccadilly house. That evening Hugh saw Maisie again at a ball, and to his surprise Maisie was quite ungracious about Nora. “I’m sony, but I don’t like her,” Maisie had said. “She strikes me as a hard-hearted grasping woman and I don’t believe she loves you one bit. For God’s sake don’t marry her.”
Hugh had been hurt and offended. Maisie was just jealous, he decided. Anyway, he was not thinking of marriage.
When the music-hall show came to an end they went outside into a fog, thick and swirling and tasting of soot. They wrapped scarves around their necks and over their mouths and set off for Nora’s home in Camden Town.
It was like being underwater. All sound was muffled, and people and things loomed out of the fog suddenly, without warning: a whore soliciting beneath a gaslight, a drunk staggering out of a pub, a policeman on patrol, a crossing sweeper, a lamp-lit carriage creeping along the road, a damp dog in the gutter and a glint-eyed cat down an alley. Hugh and Nora held hands and stopped every now and again in the thickest darkness to pull down their scarves and kiss. Nora’s lips were soft and responsive, and she let him slip his hand inside her coat and caress her breasts. The fog made everything hushed and secret and romantic.
He usually left her at the corner of her street but tonight, because of the fog, he walked her to the door. He wanted to kiss her again there, but he was afraid her father might open the door and see them. However, Nora surprised him by saying: “Would you like to come in?”
He had never been inside her house. “What will your papa think?” he said.
“He’s gone to Huddersfield,” she said, and she opened the door.
Hugh’s heart beat faster as he stepped inside. He did not know what was going to happen next but it was sure to be exciting. He helped Nora out of her cloak, and his eyes rested longingly on the curves beneath her sky-blue gown.
The house was tiny, smaller even than his mother’s house in Folkestone. The staircase took up most of the narrow hall. There were two doors off the hall, leading presumably to a front parlor and a back kitchen. Upstairs there must be two bedrooms. There would be a tin bath in the kitchen and a privy in the backyard.