On that walk we also strolled close to Copt Hall. Malcolm joined us, and Harry asked him back to Faerie Hill Manor for the evening, which invitation Malcolm cheerfully accepted.
Deer shadowed us as we turned back for the manor, and I noticed Malcolm looking at me intently when he saw me watching them.
We only ate a light supper. The king (another of my mother’s erstwhile lovers), while not attending, had sent us a beautiful platter of marzipan fruits, coloured and shaped to look like the real thing, with stalks of cinnamon sticks, the ends frayed where they met the fruit for an added touch of reality. After supper, we gathered in the drawing room, gods and Sidlesaghes and Mistresses of the Labyrinth (except Ariadne, who was not present) drifting into three or four groups to either sit and converse over cigarettes and whisky, or to play at board games or cards.
I had not been so happy for years, and it was no surprise at all that Catling should choose that day, and that happiness, to strike.
I was playing canasta with Long Tom, Stella and Harry when suddenly pincers of red-hot agony closed about my wrists. The cards dropped from my fingers and, involuntarily, I leaned forward, my wrists held tightly against my waist as I tried desperately not to groan.
No! Not tonight. Please, no…
But Catling could not have resisted this, could she?
From the corner of my eye I saw my mother, who had been sitting with two of the Sidlesaghes and drinking a little bit more whisky than was good for her, put her glass to one side and start up.
She and I were closer now, and maybe she would fuss, and maybe not, but suddenly all I wanted was to get away. Not only from my mother, but from that warm, happy room.
I stumbled to my feet, muttered something about wanting to be alone, and managed to get out of the French windows to the terrace without making a complete fool of myself and falling over. I moved away from the doors as fast as I could, wanting to get out of people’s eyesight—
They must all be staring at me.
—now giving in to the luxury of groaning, clutching my wrists to my body so tightly I could feel their heat through my clothes, and wishing I were dead. Catling had left me alone for weeks. The last time she had attacked had been that day at Copt Hall when the deer had been nuzzling me. I’d grown too used to being left alone, too used to feeling useful, too used to feeling.
Damn it!
I burst into tears, lost in misery, and managed to make it over to where the outdoor table and chairs sat pushed against a wall. I sat down (almost falling in the attempt), and it was only then, as the cold of the chair penetrated through to my flesh, that I realised I’d come out dressed in only a thin silk frock, without even a cardigan, and that not only was the air close to freezing, but there was a dusting of snow over the terrace.
I was mortified. I was in agony from my wrists, but for the moment that mortification hurt worse. Everyone inside would be thinking…
How silly.
Poor Grace.
Perhaps someone should go out.
After all, it is Christmas, and she really shouldn’t be alone.
And then, gods curse it, someone did come out. I heard the opening and closing of the doors, the brief murmur of conversation while they were open, and then several sets of footsteps coming towards me.
I couldn’t bear to look, tears were streaming down my cheeks, and I wondered if I would embarrass myself further if I made a dash for the lawns.
In the end, the choice was made for me. As I tensed to rise, Jack and Harry pulled out chairs to one side of me, and Malcolm set a plate of the marzipan fruit on the table, as well as a decanter of whisky and several glasses.
Then, with no comment, he took a blanket he had over one arm and tucked it about my shoulders, poking it efficiently down the sides of my body, and folding it over my front, enclosing me within its warmth.
Then he turned and walked back inside.
Jack and Harry—both well wrapped in thick coats and with hats pulled down low—took no notice of me. Jack poured out whisky for the two of them, Harry grabbed a piece of marzipan fruit and chewed away enthusiastically, and then, well fortified, both began to chat.
Thus began the most extraordinary hour.
Jack and Harry sat there, keeping me company on the terrace, chatting away about friends they had known in past lives, stupidities both had managed to commit, sharing humour and warmth and companionship.
They didn’t once address me, and only rarely glanced at me (Jack once leaned over and, without missing a single beat in his conversation, matter-offactly tucked in a corner of the blanket which came loose when I shuddered under a particularly vile spasm), but somehow they included me in everything they said and did. I felt a part of the conversation, even if I couldn’t speak, and even if the two men rarely looked at me.
I felt included in their company.
Jack and Harry had a shared past that went back thousands of years. They had been enemies, they had been friends, they had shared wives and lovers and adventures and disasters too numerous to tally.
All without me.
By rights I should have felt such an outsider that this conversation would have been a misery for me. But it wasn’t. They gossiped back and forth about people and events I’d heard of, and far more of people and events of which I’d never heard, and yet they somehow made me feel such a part of their entire existence, that anyone listening might have thought me their intimate companion for all these thousands of years.
It was an amazing gift, and I had no doubt at all that it was Jack’s doing (as I had no doubt at all that he’d somehow been the catalyst for my mother’s transformation). Harry had never once done anything like this for me: not when we’d been lovers, not at any other time.
No, this was Jack, and I felt such a surge of gratitude to him that I actually began to weep even more than I had previously.
The men were, by this time, engaged in a spirited discussion about the relative merits of the war stallions both had owned when Jack had been William and Harry had been Harold, and I sat there and wept with happiness as Catling’s fire banded my wrists and the men argued about fetlocks.
It was the best Christmas I’d ever had.
And, as I sat there, and wept in joy, the pain abruptly vanished and I gave a soft gasp.
The pain had lost its effectiveness. Catling had done her worst, and all I had done was weep with happiness.
Jack and Harry barely broke stride (they’d reached withers by this stage). Jack poured out a fresh glass of whisky, pushing it towards me, and Harry picked up a marzipan pear, put it on a plate that had appeared to one side, sliced it into thin layers, and likewise pushed that towards me.
We sat there for perhaps another hour. Gradually, I joined in the conversation which Jack had steered away from his and Harry’s shared past to the problems the Epping Forest keepers had trying to reestablish the resident fallow deer population. That was a topic I didn’t have much knowledge of, either, but somehow Harry and Jack listened to what I had to say (while in no way appearing in the slightest bit patronising), and laughed at some of my weaker attempts at jesting.
That made Jack remember our meeting in the Lyons teashop, and soon he had both Harry and me laughing uproariously with his vastly exaggerated account of how every woman within five hundred yards had offered him her body then and there.
“And yet you were resistant?” Harry said to me, eventually.
I grinned at Jack. “Everyone needs at least one mountain left to scale.”
“Is that a challenge?” he said, his tone light, those dark eyebrows raised.
“It most certainly isn’t an invitation,” I said, and he smiled, and our conversation drifted to other things.
We went back in, eventually, to find most of the others had gone to bed. My parents and I were staying at Faerie Hill Manor that night, going back to the Savoy in the morning, and I walked towards the stairs, thinking to go to bed myself, when Jack called softly to me.
I’d walked up three or four of the stairs by this time, and I turned, and looked down at him.
He was holding out the plate with the remaining slices of marzipan pear on it. “Take this,” he said. “A midnight snack.”