dance the shimmy-shake.
‘No, no,’ Emmeline said, laughing. ‘You shift on the count of three, Harry darling. Not two. Here, take my hands and I’ll show you.’ She restarted the gramophone. ‘Ready?’
Hannah picked her way around the room’s rim. She was so distracted by the casualness with which Emmeline and her friends had colonised the room (her room, after all) that she had quite forgotten what it was she came for. She made pretence of digging around in the writing bureau as Harry collapsed on the sofa, saying, ‘Enough. You’re going to kill me, Em.’
Emmeline fell next to him, threw her arm around his shoulders. ‘Have it your way, Harry, but you can hardly expect me to dance with you at Clarissa’s party if you don’t know the steps. The shimmy-shake is all the rage and I’m going to dance it all night.’
‘And all morning,’ said the girl in the lime chiffon.
All morning was right, thought Hannah. More and more, Emmeline’s late nights were becoming early mornings. Not content with dancing the night away at the Berkley, she and her friends had taken to continuing the party at someone’s house. Even the servants were beginning to talk. The new housemaid had been cleaning the entrance hall when Emmeline swept in at six the other morning. Emmeline was just lucky neither Teddy nor Deborah knew. That Hannah made sure they didn’t.
‘Jane says Clarissa’s serious this time,’ said lime chiffon.
‘Think she’ll actually go through with it?’ said Harry.
‘We’ll see tonight,’ said Emmeline. ‘Clarissa’s been threatening to bob her hair for months.’ She laughed. ‘More fool her if she does: with that bone structure she’ll look like a German drill sergeant.’
‘Are you taking gin?’ said Harry.
Emmeline shrugged. ‘Or wine. Hardly matters. Clarissa intends to throw it all into the bath so people can dip their cups.’
A bottle party, thought Hannah. She’d heard of those. Teddy liked to read her reports from the newspaper when they were at the breakfast table. He’d lower the paper to attract her attention, shake his head with weary disapproval and say, ‘Listen to this. Another of those parties. Mayfair, this time.’ Then he’d read the article, word by word, taking great pleasure, it seemed to Hannah, in describing the uninvited guests, the indecent decorations, the raids by police. Why couldn’t young people behave as they had when they were young, he’d say? Have balls with supper, servants pouring wine, dance cards.
Hannah was so horrified by Teddy’s insinuation that she herself was no longer young that although she thought Emmeline’s behaviour a little like dancing on the graves of the dead, she never said as much to her.
And she made particular care to ensure Teddy didn’t know Emmeline attended such parties. Much less help to organise them. Hannah became very good at inventing excuses for Emmeline’s nocturnal activities.
But that night, when she climbed the stairs to Teddy’s study, armed with an ingenious half-truth about Emmeline’s dedication to her friend Lady Clarissa, he was not alone. As she neared his closed door, Hannah heard voices. Teddy’s and Deborah’s. She was about to turn, to come back later, when she heard her father’s name. She held her breath and crept toward the door.
‘You have to feel sorry for him, though,’ said Teddy. ‘Whatever you think of the man. Dying of stroke, at his age. Not even fifty.’
‘Stroke? Drink more like.’ This was Deborah. Hannah’s lips tightened as she continued. ‘Oh yes. He’d been doing his best to drown his liver for some time. Lord Gifford told me one of the servants found him when she took his breakfast: propped against the pillows, empty bottle of whisky on the mattress beside him. Place stank like a brewery.’
Lies, thought Hannah, her breaths grown hot.
‘That so?’ said Teddy.
‘So says Lord Gifford. Oh, the servants were doing their best to cover the fact, but Lord Gifford reminded them it was his job to protect the family’s reputation and that he needed the facts to do so.’
Hannah heard glass scraping against glass and then the burbling of sherry being poured.
‘He was still in his clothes,’ said Deborah in an eager whisper, ‘and his room was a mess. Papers everywhere.’ She laughed. ‘You’ll love this, what do you think was lying in his lap?’
‘His will?’
‘A photograph,’ said Deborah. ‘An old formal photograph from late last century. Family and servants.’ The last was said meaningfully, Hannah thought, though she couldn’t understand why. She knew the type of photograph to which Deborah referred. Grandmother had insisted on one each year. Was it so strange that in his last hours Pa would seek solace in the faces of the people he’d loved?
‘Lord Gifford had quite a time finding Frederick’s will,’ Deborah was saying.
‘He found it, though,’ said Teddy quickly. ‘There were no surprises?’
‘It was as we discussed,’ said Deborah. ‘He was true to his word in that.’
‘Excellent,’ said Teddy.
‘Going to sell the place?’ said Deborah.
There was a pause and the squeak of leather as Teddy rearranged himself in his desk chair. ‘I don’t think I will,’ he said. ‘I’ve always fancied a place in the country.’
‘You could seek nomination for the seat of Saffron,’ said Deborah. ‘Country people do love their lord of the manor.’
There was a pause and Hannah held her breath, listening for footsteps. ‘By God, Dobby, you’re a genius! I’ll call Lord Gifford immediately,’ said Teddy breathlessly, and the telephone cradle rattled. ‘See if he’ll have a word with the others on my behalf.’
Hannah pulled away then. She had heard enough.
She didn’t speak to Teddy that night. In any event, Emmeline was home by the comparatively early hour of two. Hannah was still awake in bed when Emmeline stumbled along the hall. She rolled over and closed her eyes tight, tried not to think any more about what Deborah had said, about Pa and the way he had died. His desperate unhappiness. His loneliness. The darkness that had claimed him. And she refused to think of the letters of contrition she’d never quite managed to finish.
And in the isolation of the bedroom Deborah had decorated for her, with Teddy’s contented snores drifting from the room beyond, noises of night-time London muffled by her window, she fell into dreams of black water, abandoned ships and lonely foghorns floating back to empty shores.
II
Robbie came back. He gave no explanation for his absence, simply sat down in Teddy’s armchair as if no time had passed and presented Hannah with his first volume of poetry. She was about to tell him she already owned a copy when he drew another book from his coat pocket. Small, with a green cover.
‘For you,’ he said, handing it to her.
Hannah’s heart skipped when she saw its title. It was James Joyce’s
‘But where did you-?’
