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CHAPTER 1

It was twilight, that long English twilight that goes on forever in June. London clanged and hummed somewhere above the rooftops and beyond the pendulous, dusty green of the garden square as David dropped his carry-on bag in the tiled portico and fitted his skeleton key in the top lock. The massive black door was swollen tight with late-afternoon heat. The bolt scraped uncomfortably, and then the slim Yale key felt as though it might snap off rather than release the latch. He heard his taxi shudder into gear and pull away. The door swung back on an empty house. No one greeted him; they had left this morning.

He slung the bag into the bare hallway, shutting the door. There was no table and no silver tray to drop his keys on, nothing but the wide limestone paving slabs and a few skittering pieces of the movers’ shredded cardboard stirred up by his entrance. He turned around where he stood, holding the keys in the air, searching, as if the table and the tray might magically reappear. But they’d gone to Virginia with Elizabeth and the children. He decided to put the keys back in his pinstriped trouser pocket.

The hallway seemed enormous. Had the staircase always been so far from the door, he wondered? His shoes echoed on the stone floor; he liked the sound, the sharp, official click of his heavy-heeled black brogues. He put his hands in his trouser pockets, feeling the keys there, and began striding through the dim, quiet rooms, casually, just to see. She’d left him a little round table and a chair in the dining-room, wrapped around by the splendor of her green, oriental silk wallpaper—as if he might want to eat at home, all alone, watched over by printed Chinamen and ferns.

He pulled the keys from his pocket, dropped them on the little round table, then strolled back along the hall and climbed the stairs, his shoes sliding precariously on the thick, woven-straw runner, silenced. He gripped the polished wood banister, and, out of habit, glanced up as he mounted and swung slowly around toward the drawing-room door. The stairwell seemed to swirl away backwards above him, narrower and tighter as it rose, floor upon deserted floor, all the way to the so-called nursery below the rafters.

That word will never fly back in Virginia, David thought. Nursery. The Edwardian childhood thing might charm a few snobby old ladies, but how long will it be before the nanny jettisons her uniform and starts calling herself a babysitter? Or worse, leaves altogether? He pictured Gordon in his white summer shorts and little Hopie in her white linen dress, pleated and smocked across the chest; Elizabeth dressed them as if, any minute now, they would be playing croquet with the Queen. Did they possess any blue jeans? David had no idea.

The drawing-room doors were ajar. Through the high, broad opening David caught sight of the gilded, cornflower-blue silk Louis Quinze sofa. He laughed—at himself and at his wife. A man can’t sit on that, he thought. Surely it was designed to prevent people wearing out whatever expensive fabric it was covered in? It’s like a very thin woman in a couture dress, fabulous to look at, fragile and hard to the touch. Why did she leave me that, of all things?

He entered the room and walked around the sofa, clicking his heels on the newly carpetless parquet. It was a beautiful object, with its bowed legs gracefully pincering the floor, perfect and complete in itself. He sat down on it, gingerly. Its creaks and delicacy didn’t seem familiar. I’ve never even sat on this thing before, he thought, in how many years? Maybe she’d been told it wouldn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic, or the extremes of temperature in Virginia. He was sure Elizabeth loved the sofa; he could remember an imploring telephone call from a Sotheby’s showroom just as the auction was about to begin. He had agreed, as he generally did, that she could spend as much as she liked. Six or eight years ago by now? Was it before Gordon was born? Just afterwards?

David put an elbow on one arm of the sofa and leaned against the back. It didn’t yield, nor did it break. I guess she didn’t want me getting too comfortable, he thought, stiffly perched. His eyes slowly swept the long room, huge, shadowy. The high white ceilings seemed to hover above the thickening glaze of evening light. There above the black-veined white marble mantelpiece was the portrait.

Jesus, he muttered. She left that, too, my tenth anniversary present. All the company I’ll need for the summer. Maybe the paint hasn’t dried and it couldn’t be packed?

Elizabeth, eight feet off the ground, looked down at him, her long, pale arms draped around the children on either side of her, all three of them dressed in white, their blonde heads shining like ridged gold as they lolled on the very same blue sofa where he himself was sitting now, the black Chinese pug at their feet. It was a romantic composition; David couldn’t remember which nineteenthcentury society painter it was that Elizabeth had chosen to model the portrait on, but he had teased her that the elaborate gilded frame looked naked without a little gold plaque, ‘Mrs David Judd and Her Children’. She hadn’t laughed at his joke; the plaque, somehow delayed, had been attached the very next morning. Then a day or two later, a man had come in to rub some of the gilding off the frame; Elizabeth had found it a little too bold.

Despite the artful languor of Elizabeth’s pose, there was a quick energy in the picture, something startling and modern. In the weeks since the portrait had been hung, David had noticed it only half-consciously. He looked more carefully now, trying to see exactly what it was. Maybe Elizabeth was too skinny for a nineteenth-century society matron? You could see her wedding rings slipping toward her knuckle where her left hand hung down over Hopie’s back, as if her fingers, when not posing to be painted, were active, competent, washed dishes or drove a car. Her gauzy white skirt fell about her hidden legs in timeless folds, but there was a hint of edgy tailoring at her waist and neck, something a lady’s seamstress wouldn’t have produced, something that had stalked down a catwalk. Gordon was sitting demurely, tilted just slightly toward his mother, a twist of smile breaking out or just held back at the far side of his gap-toothed mouth, but Hopie was kneeling up on her hands, really, wasn’t she? She was turning sideways toward the painter, defiant, kittenish, ready to pounce. Were polite little girls allowed to sit like that before, say, the nineteen-sixties? Was Elizabeth actually holding Hopie down with one hand?

And their blue eyes, six intensely blue eyes, had to have been rendered by some modern technique of painting. They glowed with the watery, aquamarine light that the ocean reflects from a cloudless blue sky on a hot, still summer day somewhere off the coast of New England; those were American, sunstruck, beachgoing eyes. That was it, thought David. And even though they had sat for the painting during the winter, Gordon and Hopie were far too brown, weren’t they? They didn’t match Elizabeth’s stately pallor. In fact, they looked like wild children or tamed hippie kids beside her. The more he looked, the more David felt that his rather beautiful, playful children with their freckled, unformed faces seemed a little out of place in the ambitious formality of their mother’s fantasy.

He laughed to himself again, benevolently—as he had laughed at the sofa, and as he had laughed when first presented with what he still couldn’t help thinking was an absurd gift. Benevolence felt right. It felt—optimistic. All along, he had assumed that Elizabeth, too, found the portrait just a little bit comical; but she had said nothing to confirm whether she saw any pretentiousness in it. Was it an overt bid to join generations of arriving bourgeoisie opulently displaying their wealth and beauty? He couldn’t ask her; what if it was—in earnest?

Her face in the portrait was creamy, expressionless, weirdly still. The majestic bone structure was all there; it showed just as well in paint, David thought, as it did in glossy photographs. She seemed unaware of the giggling fidgets barely repressed in the body language of her children, or at least she seemed undisturbed by them. Her calm was deep, otherworldly. And yet there was something long-suffering, even beseeching, in the shallow curve of her pale pink lips. Her long brown-gold hair snaked and looped around her face, over her shoulders, into matching loose coils on her chest. Below her fearsome, stylishly plucked brown eyebrows, her famous iridescent eyes were perhaps not exactly the same as the children’s eyes, David thought. They glittered a whiter aquamarine, almost like fabulous slivers of blue ice.

David got up from the sofa, walked to the leftmost pair of French doors, unshot the gleaming brass bolt, threw the doors open, and stepped out on the balcony. He could feel the grit of the city abrading the soles of his shoes; the black wrought-iron railings as he leaned on them with both hands were rough with soot. He liked it. He looked across at the heavy, suspiring trees in the square; for all their green, he thought, they’ll never clear this air. It’s a losing battle.

A car passed just underneath him, kissing and sucking the pavement softly with its rubber-bound weight, moving the twilight. He imagined he could feel particles rising on its wake, entering his nose, his lungs; he breathed in like an addicted smoker. The hot city evening thrilled him; it reminded him of New York, which had been hotter, dirtier, and which, in twelve years in London, he had never really ceased to long for.

The air seemed to rush and swoop in the distance, like voices swelling, shouting, dying. A siren blared to the east, then another, faster one; both faded. He could hear birds, tuneful ones, in the garden, though he couldn’t see them. The pale, narrow band of sky visible between the trees and the houses seemed to soar up into a wide dome spreading over immeasurable life and variety—neon, hopping, embattled, unpredictable.

It still excites me, David thought, the fighting, vulgarity, noise, surging threat and promise of it all. Nobody even knows I’m in town, apart from one or two people at the office. It’s like freedom all over again, being small in it, anonymous. He slapped the railings with the palms of his hands; they didn’t wobble, didn’t even vibrate. So solid, this house, this success.

Here I am, David Judd, a very rich man, in my mansion in Belgravia, about to retire from investment banking and go home. Whatever that is. Somebody said home is a place you can freely go both in and out of. Why does America make me think of my grave? I’m only forty-seven. He slapped the railings again, hard, so that his hands stung and the little bones at the top of his palms ached with the smack.

There on the balcony, David felt like he was on the edge of a precipice. It was a moment of freedom, and a moment of uncertainty. The moment lasted a long time. He looked out at the gathering dusk, feeling the dull continual energy of the city, listening to its throbs of activity, sometimes remote, sometimes nearby. How could anyone engage with it all? A single life was narrow, short. The city was only an idea, he told himself, an endless seduction that nonetheless ended—ended in just a handful of recognized achievements, familiar relationships, habitual activities, done deals, inescapable commitments. He dusted his blackened palms against each other, swept both hands back through his floppy brown hair, holding his thumbs free, stiffly cocked, and went back inside.

There was a light clatter on the parquet in the drawing-room doorway, then the sound of desperate claws sliding and failing to grip. In the small remaining light, David saw the children’s pug right itself on the slippery floor then bound onto the sofa. The dog made a sleek black arc in the gloom, quick, coiled, darting, then stood on the priceless blue silk, snuffling like a happy fool.

‘Why is the dog here?’ David said out loud.

He felt a bubble of unexpected excitement. Elizabeth must have changed her mind! But the excitement passed instantly. It was followed by a shock of fear. Where were the children? Something had gone wrong.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, he chided himself. That’s ridiculous; someone would have phoned. He looked at his watch. After nine. They must be there already; Elizabeth will call.

He reached down and stroked the dog. ‘I hate pets,’ he cooed at it, ‘and you are making me feel pretty fucking lonely.’ The dog whined and fawned, raking the sofa with its claws, daintily slobbering.

Then David said, still gently, ‘I’ve got two more trips to the Far East before I quit, buddy, and meetings all over Europe, and I’m hardly ever home anyway. I don’t know what the hell you are planning to eat. And I’ll tell you what’s worse: I am not going to carry you to Virginia at the end of the summer. Those selfish little kids of mine were only pretending they loved you; that’s what I think. They obviously forgot all about you. God only knows what’s going on in their mother’s head, because she’s been telling me all she wants is dogs and horses and open fields.’ He scratched the dog’s ears and pulled them with both hands.

‘I think you better get off this damn sofa, for starters.’ And suddenly he picked the dog up and dumped it on the floor so that it fell on its side. It sprang up and tottered out of the room.

‘There has to be someone here for the dog—one of her Filipinas. She must have told me.’ David ran unyielding fingers through his hair again, as he made for the stairs following the dog.

There were lights on in the kitchen and he could hear noises before he even got to the bottom of the basement stairs—water running, cabinet doors opening and shutting, then the roar of the garbage disposal.

I was never alone for a second, he thought. Elizabeth has it all organized. He felt a little irritated, a little disappointed. But he didn’t feel surprised.

‘Yes, Mr Judd, good evening, sir.’

She said it with a shy smile, stiffly. David was pretty certain that her name was Francine, but he wasn’t willing to risk it. She already seemed embarrassed, being there in the house with him all alone. He just nodded at her, trying not to notice. But he thought maybe she was a nice woman; she’d been around a longish time; she was, he thought, Elizabeth’s favorite. She had children of her own. Elizabeth was always saying she felt guilty taking a mother away from her family. That’s why there were three different Filipinas, more even; David didn’t know. They all wore the same blue-and-white-striped uniform which didn’t help him with telling them apart.

‘I have some cold drink for you, sir, if you would like a beer. I can open it for you, and I can serve it in your study before your dinner.’

David blinked at her, trying not to look startled. ‘Fine. In my study. What’s the dinner?’

‘Just simple chicken, grilled plain, and some salad, sir. Maybe you like a little rice?’

‘A little.’

David turned around and went back up the stairs. Usually when he arrived home, the children’s supper was long over; there might be something left out that he could pick at if he was hungry. He poured his own beer if he was having one. More often than not, he ate out, either with clients in London or in some foreign city. He hadn’t lifted a finger to cook or clean for years, but he was taken aback by the sudden attentions of a personal servant. How would he stand the scheduling? The scrutiny? The need to be polite? What was Elizabeth thinking?

His study was another surprise. The movers had packed absolutely everything. There was not a photograph, not a book, not a paperweight in sight. Even his desk was gone. The telephone and the fax machine were sitting on the floor beside a small pink-and-green-flowered armchair that David thought might have come from a spare bedroom upstairs. The chair looked absurdly feminine in the walnut-paneled room. His computer, with the screen and the keyboard, had been transferred onto a rickety-looking work station that he’d never seen before; did it belong to the children? Had Elizabeth bought it especially? Such a cheap sort of thing? There were faint black outlines on the beige wall-to-wall carpet where his desk and his files and his various chairs had once stood, a few more on the walls where his maps of London and New York and his New Yorker cartoons had hung. He opened the paneled supply-cupboard door; it was nearly empty—just two reams of copier paper, some stationery, a few pencils. He ran a finger over a shelf in the bookcase. Already dusted. David thought he could still smell cigars, sour and fragrant. Unpackable, he said to himself, the vile, rancid cloud.

Francine came to the door with his beer, in an enormous misty mug, on a tray. David smiled broadly, practically guffawed. A chilled beer mug? He didn’t conceal his pleasure.

‘That’s great, Francine.’ He took a long pull at the inch-high foam and smacked his lips.

‘It’s up to me, the glasses, now the house manager is off. In Peter Jones, I wasn’t sure, but maybe this one is nice for a bachelor—for just a few weeks, I mean. And I have others if you prefer it?’

David ignored the anxiety in her voice. ‘What about the dog, Francine? Did my wife tell you what her plans are for Puck?’

David thought Francine looked a little nervous, but right away she said boldly, ‘Don’t worry about the dog, sir. He’s my responsibility. It’s no problem with me at all. I walk him plenty and the walking is good for us both.’

She was still gripping the tray with both hands, then she released one hand, letting the tray hang at her side for a moment before lifting it again and offering it to David.

‘Do you need this, for your drink, sir?’

David looked at Francine silently and took the tray, placing it behind him on the empty bookcase. He took another sip of his beer, shifting his feet on the carpet, broadening his stance.

Francine was definitely pretty, David thought. Her brown eyes had a soft look at the edges, gentle, lively. And actually, the uniform was appealing; it gave her that aura of sweetness and willingness that nurses sometimes have. Not an aura he felt inclined to disturb, just one he enjoyed. Women go for soldiers, why can’t men go for nurses? David mused. He could see that Francine had on some sort of thick slip underneath her uniform, displaying more modesty than most of the young English nurses he’d seen in their uniforms which were generally notably transparent.