The First of July(38)

“Marina… .” He had had no idea how to begin to deal with the situation he had known from the minute he had opened the letter. He had known this would happen from the first time he realized he wanted to marry her, at the Aquarium, and yet he had failed to tell her anything about his background except in generalities, which he could never have gotten away with had she been an Englishwoman.

“So how many other lies have you told me?” She spoke in a cooler tone than he’d ever heard from her, although with a tremor that belied her external self-control.

“Not lies—”

“Oh, Harry, I had expected more of you. Lies, omissions, convenient forgetfulness. What else will I find out about my marriage and my husband if I wait long enough?”

“I just didn’t want—”

She was staring at him, fierce and unreachable. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t know why you abandoned these perfectly nice people—because clearly that’s what you did. Maybe your relationship with your father was difficult. It often works out like that. Maybe you just didn’t want to deal with it. But it feels as if you just wanted the easy life. You thought you could come to America with your mother’s money, leave any responsibilities behind you, marry an American wife, young enough, knowing nothing about your country home, to accept your vague accounts of your childhood and. . . .” Her thoughts echoed his, but she was shaking her head in disbelief. “One thing is certain. We can never tell my father. He admires you, trusts you, and you lied to him in circumstances where he might have expected total honesty.”

“No, that’s not how it was—” he began, but it hit him that it was almost entirely how it was. “I’m sorry,” he said. How inadequate.

After a very long silence, she said, politely, as if to a stranger, “And your brother—”

“Half-brother—”

“Your half-brother,” she repeated sarcastically, “he’s, what, eleven years old?”

“Twelve.”

“He’s twelve years old,” she said, nodding to herself. “He doesn’t have any other brothers and sisters, I assume?”

Harry shook his head.

“So you abandoned him too? He can’t know why you vanished out of his life,” she said, sounding less angry now, more sad and perplexed. “Maybe he had a hard time with your father too. If he was a difficult man, maybe a big brother would have helped him.”

“It wasn’t that,” Harry interrupted. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Well, what was it like, Sir Henry? Or can I expect that if we go through hard times, you’ll run away from me too? Perhaps it’s a habit. . . .”

She was close to tears. He desperately wanted to hold her and tell it was all right. But it wasn’t.

“I don’t want to cry,” she said. “It’s not my day for crying. It’s your father’s funeral, and the tears must be your stepmother’s and Edward’s. I don’t want to look as if I’ve been weeping. But later I need to know. I’m a city girl. If you have some plan of coming back here to be a squire on a horse with yellow teeth with peasants doffing their hats, I need to be told. I liked being Mrs. Harry Sydenham. I don’t at all want to be Lady Sydenham.”

“Marina—” he said and then stopped. In New York society, most girls would fall all over themselves to gain an English title, and here was Marina, furious at finding herself the wife of a baronet.

“I do so love you,” he said.

“Then give me the truth,” she said. “Later, after the funeral. Never, ever lie to me again.”





CHAPTER TWELVE


Benedict, London,

August 1914


BENEDICT TRIED TO CONCENTRATE ON The Times and put everything else out of his mind on the journey home; he was exhausted by his own emotions. Sun shone through the smeared windows of the train and fine silvery dust was suspended in the light. Theo sat, his eyes on his book, The Riddle of the Sands, which he’d been enthusing about on their journey up. Benedict noticed how rarely he turned a page and how hot and uncomfortable he looked. In Gloucester, Theo appeared worldly; but in London he had at first seemed younger, excitable yet out of his depth, and then, since the disastrous expedition to Regent Street, subdued to the point of disconnection. He was, Benedict was certain, horribly humiliated by what had occurred, and he wondered which of them most wished it had not.

But where Theo had given in to a moment of temptation, a moment where his longing and his impulsive nature had come together and brought him close to disaster, Benedict was preoccupied with his own, impossibly inaccessible, much more terrible desires. In London he had seen a life of opportunity, of risk. At any point, in a matter of minutes, he thought, he could have vanished out of sight, become a different man. By day he had dwelled on the music and the secret of senses without boundaries, which he was increasingly sure the Russian composer understood perfectly. By night he lay in bed and remembered the youths he had seen hovering about Piccadilly Circus and the man, that man, on the bus.