husband did odd jobs, and a smeary-faced boy appeared in the mornings to clean the shoes and run any necessary errands.
‘There’s only cold cuts, mum,’ Cook called after Eliza as the sisters went upstairs to take off their hats. ‘I reckon I could boil up a few spuds, if you really need me to.’
In her bedroom Eliza drew the hatpins from her plumed toque and set it on the dressing table. Faith steered her to the chair at the window.
‘There. Sit for a moment.’
‘Matthew …’ Eliza began.
‘… will be glad to read the newspaper in peace for half an hour,’ Faith finished for her. ‘Shall I ask Cook to bring us a pot of tea?’
‘By all means. She will certainly give notice if you do. It will save me the trouble of dismissing her.’
Faith only laughed. She was well used to the state of semi-warfare between Eliza and the cook.
‘No tea, then. Something stronger?’
A silver tray with a bottle and glasses stood on Devil’s dressing stand. Faith placed a weak gin and water in her sister’s hand and watched her take two swallows.
‘I don’t know where I’d be without you, Faith.’
Eliza and her sister were close, and had become even more so in recent years. As a young woman Eliza had dismissed Faith’s choice of marriage and motherhood as unadventurous, but she was generous enough now to acknowledge that for all her youthful insistence on freedom they had ended up in more or less the same place. How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.
Faith said, ‘You’d do perfectly well, but you don’t have to because I am here. Is it bad today?’
Eliza closed her eyes. Her fingers splayed over her lower belly as if to support the failures and collapses within.
‘My back aches, a little.’
‘What else, then? Is it Devil?’
There was a long pause.
‘No more than usual.’
Faith didn’t ask, ‘Who is it this time?’ but she might well have done.
There was always someone: an actress or a dancer from the theatre, a waitress from one of the supper clubs, or a young girl met across a shop counter when he was choosing a pair of gloves or a bottle of scent for Eliza.
That was the strange thing.
Apart from the few years at the beginning of their married life, before Cornelius was born, Devil had been incapable of fidelity. Yet even when his pursuit of women was at its most fervent, Devil had always been – so it seemed to Faith and Matthew – utterly obsessed with his wife.
Faith said, ‘He adores you.’
Eliza gave a thin sigh. It was not the first time the two of them had discussed the matter.
‘That’s partly the trouble. I can’t satisfy his craving, and the more I fail in that the more he longs for what he imagines I am withholding.’
It wasn’t just sex, although sex lay at the root of it. Once they had been well suited. But then Cornelius had come, or rather a brutal doctor with a pair of forceps had dragged him into the world, and after that there had been a change. Pain and distress made Eliza hesitant, even though she had tried to pretend otherwise, and although Devil had done his best he had in the end read her hesitancy as reluctance. He was cast as the importuner and Eliza as the withholder, and although the front line of their battle constantly shifted, sometimes dressed up as comedy and at others bitterly rancorous, there was always a battle.
Almost five years after Cornelius Nancy had arrived easily, but Arthur’s birth hardly more than a year after that had been almost as difficult as his brother’s.
Nowadays Devil propitiated his wife with expensive comforts and sea air. Accepting her reliance on new doctors and patent cures, he squandered too much time and energy on the Palmyra, arguing that otherwise the theatre could not generate the money he needed to care for his family. Devil regarded the diversions of motor cars and women as just that, and would have claimed – in the circumstances – they were nothing less than he deserved. Eliza didn’t see it the same way, and she was angry with him. All the images of herself that she had created as a young woman had been to do with strength and freedom, and now she possessed neither. She was little better than an invalid, and she had become dependent on her unreliable husband for everything.
Eliza sat upright. She squeezed her glass so tightly that it might have shattered.
‘How has this happened to me? Here I sit like a wilting girl. I’m ashamed of myself, Faith.’
‘There is no shame in what you have suffered.’
‘I am weak.’
Faith shot back at her, ‘We’re women. We’re all weak. You don’t have a monopoly on the condition.’
Faith was not usually so blunt. Eliza stuck out her glass, still miraculously intact. They were both smiling, almost girls again.
‘We’ll have to endure it, I suppose. Give me some more gin before we go down and feast on the boiled spuds.’
On the floor above Lizzie stuck her head out of Nancy’s bedroom window and – to Nancy’s astonished awe – smoked a cigarette.
‘Do you want one?’
‘No. I mean … I don’t mind, but I don’t smoke.’
‘Terrible, isn’t it? I caught the habit from some of the girls at work and now I’m completely hooked.’
Cornelius rapped on the door and Lizzie quickly ground out the cigarette on the windowsill before tossing the end into the grey air.
Cornelius called, ‘Cook says to come now if you don’t want it cold.’
‘It was cold to start with, wasn’t it?’ Lizzie laughed.
The stage door was in a narrow alley that ran from the Strand towards the Embankment. Devil stepped inside. The doorman in his wooden cubicle passed over a sheaf of post and wished him a good evening.
‘Who won the match, sir?’
‘Eton, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Mr Arthur’ll be disappointed.’
‘That’s hardly the word.’
Devil made his way down a dark passageway lit by a single overhead bulb and up a short flight of bare wooden stairs. There was a strong smell of worn clothing, congealed grease, and mice.
The theatre owner and manager’s office had brown-painted walls and was hardly wide enough for a cluttered desk. The lighting was no better or brighter than in the corridor outside. He propped himself on a corner of the desk and quickly shuffled through the mail. It
