Her belief in me has only ever been matched by Teddy. He always said I would become someone special, that the little girl who twirled and danced her way through childhood when she should have been sitting still or feeding the chickens would find greater things. It was Teddy who found The Adventure Book for Girls in the laneway behind the house all those years ago when we were just children. ‘It’s yours now, Dolly,’ he said, brushing the mud off the cover with his elbow and pressing the book into my hands. ‘Finders keepers.’ And then he ran off to chase a butterfly. Teddy was always chasing butterflies. He never kept them though. Said he just liked to admire them close up before he let them go.
The Adventure Book for Girls was heavy, filled with 236 pages of stories, but it was the inscription inside that intrigued me the most: Wonderful adventures await for those who dare to find them. With much love, Auntie Gert. Those words crept into my heart and since nobody knew who the book belonged to, or who Auntie Gert was, I kept it. My sisters squabbled about it, saying it wasn’t fair. My taunting response of ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers’ only made things worse. Mam eventually put the book out of reach on top of the grandfather clock and told us it would stay there until we could learn to be nice to one another.
It was a week before that book came down.
My sisters soon lost interest, but I read every page, a dozen times at least. As time passed, the book was discarded by all of us in favour of other things – bicycles and boys mostly. The last time I saw it, it was being used to balance out a wobbly leg at the kitchen table, but I’ve never forgotten those adventure stories, nor Auntie Gert’s words. They whisper to me still, blowing my dreams onward despite everything that has happened, and everyone I have loved and lost in the years between.
Shivering against the cloying damp of my clothes, which now feel horrible against my skin, I step out of my shoes and strip down to my underwear, draping my brown serge dress, slip, and stockings over a wooden clotheshorse that stands in front of the fire. They hang there like a wilted version of myself in shades of tea and stout as I place my shoes on the hearth, despairing at the dull practicality of them. More than any cap or apron, I’ve always felt it is a maid’s shoes that really distinguishes ‘Them’ from ‘Us’. I stand in front of the fire, first to the front, then to back, just like I did as a young girl standing beside my two sisters, our reedy bodies convulsing as we tried to get warm after the weekly bath. I smile at the memory. What would they say if they could see me now, standing half naked in The Savoy hotel in London? I squeeze my eyes shut and say a silent prayer to them.
When I’m a little warmer I take the photograph from my coat pocket and set it on the hearth to dry. ‘We made it,’ I whisper, resting my fingers lightly on the image of his face, my heart contracting and expanding in great waves at the thought of him. Beside the photograph and my shoes, I lay out the pages of music, wishing I could understand the black dots and squiggles dancing across the lines. The heat from the fire lifts the faintest scent of him from the paper: whisky and cigarettes.
Perry Clements. Peregrine Clements. Mr Clements.
The name skips through my mind as I picture him staggering to his feet; fox-fur hair, grey puddles for eyes. The thought of our brief encounter sends goose bumps running over my skin and makes me smile, and yet at the same time I am saddened to know that it is someone other than Teddy who occupies my thoughts and sets my heart racing.
I always knew the day would come.
I always knew it would be too soon.
I have to leave, Teddy. For reasons I can’t explain, I have to go away. I will never stop loving you, and if only things were different there is nowhere I would rather be than by your side.
My thoughts are disturbed as the bedroom door flies open and three maids come tumbling in. I shriek and run to my bed, pulling off the counterpane and wrapping it around my shoulders to cover myself. I recognize Sissy from the maids’ room. She takes one look at me and bursts out laughing.
‘I’d get dressed if I were you,’ she says, throwing herself down onto the bed beside mine and putting on a snooty accent. ‘This isn’t one of those hotels. This, darling, is The Savoy!’
‘Hope is a dangerous thing, darling. It is usually followed by disappointment and too much gin.’
The soothing lilt of the piano drifts around the Winter Garden at Claridge’s. With a pleasing jazz medley the pianist captivates us all, the music mingling with polite chatter and the jangle of silver teaspoons against fine china cups. The sounds of afternoon tea. The sounds of luxury.
I sit alone at my usual table for two, my brother being habitually late. One would think I would be used to his tardiness by now, but I find it irksome and unnecessary. Seated behind a huge date palm, I at least have a little privacy while I wait. A little, but not too much. The spaces between the foliage afford the guests an occasional glimpse, sending whispered speculations racing across the crisp white tablecloths. ‘Is it her?’ ‘I thought she was in Paris.’ ‘Yes, I’m certain it’s her.’
I smile. Let them whisper and wonder. It is, after all, part of the performance.
I sip my cup of Earl Grey as I watch the raindrops slip down the windowpanes. Mother always insists that tea tastes better when it rains, something to do with precipitation and dampness bringing out the flavour in the leaves. She is full of such tedious nonsense. It is one of the reasons I visit her as infrequently as possible. The fact that she can barely stand to be in the same room as me being another. In any event, despite the inclement weather, my tea tastes peculiar, and there is nothing more unsettling than peculiar-tasting tea, particularly at Claridge’s.
I sniff the milk jug as discreetly as it is possible for one to sniff a milk jug in public. It has definitely turned. Mother would be appalled by the very fact that I take milk in Earl Grey at all. I look around for a waiter but think better of it. I don’t like to make a fuss. Not at Claridge’s. I’m awfully fond of Claridge’s, and besides I can’t summon the enthusiasm to make a proper fuss about anything recently. I decide to forgive this small oversight, assign the bad taste to too many gin cocktails last night, and reserve my annoyance for my wretched brother.
I’m quite aware that Peregrine tolerates our ritual of afternoon tea simply to humour me. He has complained about it since we first started meeting here when he was a jaded young lawyer and I was a bored society debutante. He thinks it unfair that I only invite him to tea and not our older brother, Aubrey, but as I remind him frequently Aubrey is too busy and too married and too full of his own self-importance to contemplate tea with his little sister and brother. We are better off without him.
‘But must we take afternoon tea every Wednesday, Etta?’
‘Yes, Perry. We must.’
‘Might I ask why?’
‘Because afternoon tea is predictable and charming – qualities that should be preserved wherever possible. Because it is one of the few things in my life that I can do without a chaperone, and because if we stop meeting for afternoon tea, who knows what we will stop doing next. Eventually we’ll stop seeing each other altogether. We’ll become distant strangers, like Aubrey, communicating only through a few thoughtless lines scribbled on tasteless Christmas cards. One day we’ll realize that we miss afternoon tea on a Wednesday terribly, but it will be too late, because one – or both of us – will be dead.’
Perry