“Yes, in a way; but for me the important thing about having it over the fireplace is that I can see it in the morning when I wake up. The picture makes me feel close to her.”
“She looks funny in it, I think,” said Thomas, searching for the right words. “Not funny peculiar but two- things-at-once funny. Like she doesn’t care about anything except that she really loves people too.”
“Yes, you’re right. She seems so free. Unlike me. That’s the result of losing your mother when you’re young, I guess.”
Lady Anne caught the look of anxiety creasing her son’s brow as she parked the Aston Martin in front of the house in Chelsea.
“I’m sorry, Thomas. I don’t know what I’m thinking of. I bring you to London to cheer you up and spend half the journey talking about my mother. It’s awful of me.”
“No, it’s not. I just hate it when people die young. That’s all.”
“Well, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m as fit as a fiddle.”
Lady Anne smiled at her son and rummaged in her bag for the key to the house. As she did so, the sun came out from behind a nearby tall building and shone down suddenly on her sapphire ring. The jewel glowed midnight blue and Thomas shivered in the sun.
Chapter 9
It had been a long time since Thomas had stayed in the house off the King’s Road, and he enjoyed running up and down the staircases and opening the doors to the various rooms.
Greta had an apartment in the basement, while the ground floor had been converted to a suite of offices where Sir Peter conducted his government business and held important meetings. All the rooms were empty now, however, because both Peter and Greta were away from home on the weekly visit to Peter’s constituency in the Midlands. They were expected back the following evening, so Thomas had the place to himself for more than twenty-four hours.
The house was tall and narrow, with a small walled garden at the rear. Sir Peter had bought it twelve years before when he was first elected to Parliament, and it had always been very much his house, in contrast to the House of the Four Winds, which bore the stamp of Lady Anne and her Sackville ancestors.
The rooms were expensively but sparsely furnished, and they contained almost nothing personal. The only two photographs in the house were a studio portrait of Lady Anne and one of Thomas, both displayed in heavy frames on a bookcase in the living room. The books were all biographies of statesmen and treatises on economics and foreign policy. Thomas looked without success for a novel on the shelves.
Everything was clean and tidy. Decorative objects stood at exact right angles to their neighbors, and the cushions on the armchairs and sofa were plumped up as if nobody had ever sat on them. Thomas noticed that almost every room except his own contained a clock.
Lady Anne was having a rest after the journey, and the tall house felt cold and unfriendly to Thomas. He unpacked everything in his suitcase and draped his clothes over the furniture in his bedroom on the top floor, but this did nothing to fill the underlying emptiness. It was the sort of place, thought Thomas, where you could die and nothing would happen. Nobody would notice.
Outside everything was different. It was a warm spring day in Chelsea, and the young and the beautiful vied to fit themselves into outfits that revealed more of their breasts and legs than Thomas would have believed possible. It all filled him with a random lust of which he felt ashamed in the presence of his mother, who took him shopping at Harrods in the afternoon.
Later they ate dinner on the other side of the river at a little French restaurant with a view of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Thomas thought of his father and felt glad that he was away from home. About Greta his feelings were more ambiguous. Not a day went by that Thomas did not remember the sight of her breasts as she stood half naked in his mother’s bedroom and pulled him toward her. The girls that had passed so close to him on the sidewalks during the afternoon had made the memory more vivid than ever, and yet at the same time he almost hated Greta. He’d seen the way she looked at his mother and his father like she was greedy for something they had, but then he remembered the way she looked at him when she said: “You’re looking at my breasts, Thomas.” The way she laughed when he denied it.
Back at the house in Chelsea Thomas lay awake in bed listening to the passing voices of the late-night revelers. Someone somewhere was playing David Gray’s White Ladder, and the songs filled Thomas with a sense of longing for people and places he didn’t yet know.
Toward midnight he fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed that he was once again in his mother’s bedroom in Flyte watching Greta in the long mirror, but this time she seemed unaware of his presence in the doorway. She stood with her hands on her hips, wearing the same lemon silk dress of his mother’s that she had worn on that day the previous October, but now Greta had brought it in at the waist with a thin black snakeskin belt that matched her raven hair.
Slowly her hands moved to the buckle of the belt and eased open the fastening. She held the two ends for a moment and then let go. In Thomas’s dream the belt fell slowly to the floor but he didn’t hear it land. It was a dream without sound, but unlike other dreams he’d had, it was full of will. Greta did as she did because he willed it. If he did not will it, then she would stop. No, more than that: she wouldn’t be there at all.
Slowly her hands moved to an invisible zipper at the back of the dress just below the nape of her neck. She had it in her fingers, and slowly, with exquisite deliberation, she pulled it down. He could feel the movement as if he were tracing the line of her spine with his finger, and he knew that she only did it because he willed her to. The effort made him sway and catch hold of the side of the door, but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead she pulled her arms free of the dress and stepped out of it closer to the mirror. The dress was a discarded pool lying on the floor between them.
Her body was perfect. Thomas could feel the strength of it, the muscle tone of the thighs below the rounded hills of her buttocks. He imagined running his hands slowly up the inside of her legs, and as if in answer to his thought Greta slowly moved her legs apart, arching herself forward as she did so.
In his dream Thomas stepped out from the shadow of the doorway and fell to his knees. Groping forward almost blindly, he took hold of Greta’s naked sides, pulling her close so that his fingers soon had hold of her hard nipples as she pushed her breasts down toward him. Almost at the same moment his tongue found the wet softness between her legs and he went forward into a dark, unconscious ecstasy.
Thomas tossed and turned on the bed, throwing the hot duvet onto the floor as he did so, but he did not wake. The dream would not let him go. He felt Greta’s hands on his shoulders pushing him toward his mother’s bed.
He staggered to his feet, asking for release, but as his knees landed on the bed and he arched his back ready to thrust himself deep inside her, he looked down and saw his mother’s sapphire ring glowing midnight blue on Greta’s finger, and his mother’s gold locket hanging from her lovely neck.
He cried out in his sleep, waking as he came, and then lay on the bed like someone pulled half drowned from the sea while the sound of fire engines’ sirens passed the house and then faded into the distance.
Thomas stood washing himself at the sink in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. He was flushed with a confusion of feelings, self-disgust and sexual excitement contending with each other for dominance. Looking down at his body, he felt almost frightened. It was as if he had no control over its workings.
His inner clock had been set to the unchanging rhythms of Flyte. Year after year, nothing changed there except the weather — until Barton died, of course, which was why his mother had brought him to London, where everything was different. The girls in the street, the music after dark, the sound of the sirens. Anything could happen here, and Thomas suddenly felt imprisoned by his father’s house, with its anonymous rooms and high staircases. He needed to get out and walk, breathe the air, if only for five minutes.
He dressed hurriedly and went down the stairs almost on tiptoe so as not to wake his mother. In the hall the grandfather clock gave the time as half past twelve and Thomas realized that he couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour before the sirens had woken him up.
He opened the front door and looked out. The main road to his left seemed as deserted now as the little side street on which his father’s house stood. The music had been turned off and almost all of the windows that he could
