Hannah floated through the servants’ hall and tiptoed into the main house, shoes in hand. She’d started up the stairs to the second floor when she realised I was still following. ‘You don’t need to see me to bed, Grace. It’s far too late. Besides, I’d like to be alone.’
I nodded, stopped where I was, stood on the bottom step in my white nightie like a forgotten child.
‘Ma’am,’ I said quickly.
Hannah turned. ‘Yes?’
‘Did you have a nice time, ma’am?’
Hannah smiled. ‘Oh, Grace,’ she said. ‘Tonight my life began.’
III
They never met at his house. As far as Hannah knew he didn’t have one. They met in borrowed locations, wherever it was that Robbie happened to be staying. It only added to the adventure so far as she was concerned. She found it thrilling to escape into someone else’s house, someone else’s life. There was something delicious, she thought, about captured moments of intimacy in a strange place.
It was easy enough to arrange. Robbie would come to collect Emmeline and while he waited would slip Hannah a note with an address, a time, a date. Hannah would scan the note, nod agreement, and they would meet. Sometimes it was impossible-Teddy would demand her presence at a political event, or Deborah would volunteer her for this committee or that. On such occasions, she had no way of telling him. It pained her to imagine him waiting in vain.
But most of the time she did make it. She would tell the others she was meeting a friend for lunch, or going shopping, and she would disappear. She was never gone for long. She was careful about that. Anything beyond two hours was liable to raise suspicions. Love makes people devious and she soon became adept: came to think quickly on her feet if she were seen somewhere unexpected, by someone unexpected. One day she ran into Lady Clementine on Oxford Circus. Where was her driver, asked Lady Clementine. She’d come out on foot, said Hannah. It was such beautiful weather they were having and she’d felt like a walk. But Lady Clementine didn’t come down in yesterday’s shower. She narrowed her eyes and nodded, told Hannah to be sure and be careful as she went. The street had eyes and ears.
After that, Hannah was always sure to make a purchase on her way home-a new hat, a pair of gloves, a ticket to an exhibition-so that she might hold it up to show where she had been, why she was later than expected.
And so they met. She would leave number seventeen and make her way to wherever the most recent note had told her, careful not to encounter any of Deborah’s spies. Sometimes it was an area she knew, other times it took her to a distant part of London. She would find the street, then the house or flat. Would make sure no one was watching, and then, breath catching in her throat, would ring the bell.
He always came directly. Opened the door and let her in. They’d go upstairs then, away from the world and into their own. Sometimes they didn’t make it upstairs so quickly. He would close the door and kiss her before she could speak.
‘I’ve been waiting so long,’ he would say as they stood forehead to forehead. ‘I thought you’d never get here.’
And then she would hold a finger between their lips, remind him of the need for quiet, and then, oh then, they would go upstairs.
Sometimes, afterwards, they would lie together on the bed and she would guess at the kind of person who might live in such a place. A writer, she would say, eyes scanning the loaded bookshelf. ‘He must be a writer.’
‘He?’
Hannah would look at him. ‘Or she. Is it a she?’ She was jealous then of this phantom woman who lived in her own flat, who was friends to Robbie and saw him when she, Hannah, could not.
He would laugh at her then. ‘You’re telling this story.’
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘It’s a he. But he’s not a writer. He’s a doctor.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Only a doctor would have an entire shelf of anatomical books.’ She would look at him triumphantly, certain she had guessed it right this time.
‘True,’ he would say. ‘Unless he’s an artist. Artist’s need to know anatomy.’
She would nod seriously. ‘I like that. An artist.’ And then she would grin at him. ‘And I was right. Ha! You said “he”. It
After a while they stopped playing guessing games and began playing house. One day, in a tiny bedsit in Hampstead, Hannah was making Robbie a cup of tea and he was watching, amused, as she stumbled with the tea leaves, wondered aloud whether they would still work being so dry and crispy.
‘If we lived here,’ said Hannah, ‘I’d need to work somewhere. To pay the rent.’
‘A sewing shop,’ Robbie said. He knew how badly she stitched.
‘A bookshop,’ she said, eyeing him sternly. ‘And you… you’d write beautiful poems all day, sitting here beneath the window, and you’d read them to me when I came home.’
‘We would move to Spain to escape the winters,’ Robbie said.
‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘And I’d become a toreador. A masked toreador. The greatest in all of Spain.’ She placed his cup of weak tea, leaves swimming on top, on the bedside table and sat next to him. ‘People everywhere would guess at my identity.’
‘But it would remain our secret,’ said Robbie.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It would be our secret.’
One drizzly day in October they lay curled up together. It was a dingy flat, dark and poky, belonging to a writer friend of Robbie’s. Hannah was watching the clock on the mantle, counting off the time before she had to leave. Finally, when the unfaithful minute hand reached the hour, she sat up. Retrieved her pair of stockings from the end of the bed and began to drag the left one on. Robbie walked his fingers along the base of her spine.
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
She bunched her right stocking and slipped it over her foot.
‘Stay.’
She was standing now. Dropping her slip over her head, straightening it around her hips. ‘You know I would. I’d stay forever if I could.’
‘In our secret world.’
‘Yes,’ she smiled, kneeled on the edge of the bed and reached out to stroke the side of his face. ‘I like that. Our own world. A secret world. I love secrets.’ She exhaled, she’d been thinking about this for some time. Wasn’t sure why she wanted so keenly to share it with him. ‘When we were children,’ she said, ‘we used to play a game.’
