“They don’t look like Thorne’s work,” said Julia flatly. The tiles illustrated scenes from fairy tales: Cinderella by her hearth, Rose-Red and her bear, Red Riding Hood and the wolf. There was a stylized sweetness to them that was a far cry from the wild romanticism of the printouts Nick had shown her of Thorne’s work.
“No, they don’t,” Nick agreed, rising easily to his feet. “Pity. It would have made a nice twist, a mad artist in the attic instead of a mad wife.”
“We’re the only ones who are mad here,” said Julia sourly.
All her joy in exploring had been sapped by the feeling that there were price tags being appended to everything. Which was silly. That was what she had come out here to do, to appraise and sell up. But it felt like a violation all the same.
She moved hastily forward as she saw Nick prowling towards the easel. “I don’t think that’s anything to do with what we’re looking for.”
“Too modern,” Nick agreed, but he was already peeling back the cloth that covered it. Julia’s hand fell back, too late to stop him.
It was a watercolor, not an oil, the colors light and delicate but as clear as the day they had been painted, protected from light and grime by the cloth that had been draped over it.
“I don’t think anyone’s touched this since it was painted,” said Nick, and Julia could only nod, her throat suddenly tight, her vocal cords not working properly.
In the picture, it was autumn, the leaves on the trees just beginning to turn, the grass still bright and green. The grounds had been better maintained then, but Julia could still recognize the view down the slope in the back. In the center of the scene, by the summerhouse, a little girl was spinning in circles, her fluffy pigtails whipping around, her arms flung wide with the joy of movement. She wore a navy corduroy pinafore over a long-sleeved blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and on her feet were a pair of shiny red Mary Janes.
Julia remembered those shoes. Big-girl shoes, like the ones the girl in the flat upstairs had. Julia had wanted them so. Her father had said, Why not brown? They would wear better. But her mother had just smiled and said, Let her have her spot of color.
So she had had her red shoes, shiny and new, with the pricked-out tracery on the tops and real buckles on the side. Red shoes. Big-girl shoes.
“Julia?” Nick was looking at her, not the painting. “Are you all right?”
“That’s me.” The words came out as a croak. Spinning and spinning, the wind in her hair, and Mummy, with her easel, standing halfway up the hill, laughing. “She was painting me.”
Flopping on the grass, breathless, giggling, the ground cool under her back. Squirming and laughing as Mummy pounced, tickling her.
Julia stuffed a fist in her mouth, fighting to hold back the sobs that seemed to come out of nowhere, that rose up from the pit of her stomach, bending her double, a quarter century’s worth of sobs stampeding their way through her.
She could remember the feeling of the autumn air on her cheeks, the slosh-crunch of damp leaves beneath her feet, the scent of cigarette smoke in the air. And not just that. Memories were flooding back. Mummy, tucking her into bed, with that horrible, battered stuffed rabbit Julia used to take everywhere with her, Peter Rabbit, his coat permanently unbuttoned and one ear off. Mummy, holding her hand in the Tube, herding her through an underground tunnel on some sort of outing, a holiday outing.
That horrible crunch and those flashing lights.
Where’s Mummy?… Mummy’s left us.
Julia’s entire body was trembling; she was powerless to fight it, overwhelmed by grief that had no words, no voice, the grief of the child she had been, shaking, and scared, and so painfully lonely.
There was an arm around her shoulders, a hand rubbing circles on her back, a low voice saying, “Julia?”
She didn’t hear it at first; the pounding in her head was like the howling of the waves, carrying all else before it.
“Julia?” whoever it was said again, and she remembered, disjointedly, where she was and who was with her.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m all right,” she croaked, keeping her eyes down, her face hidden. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. The pain was still so strong, strong enough to keep her from thinking how she’d made a fool of herself.
“No, you’re not.” Julia lifted her head and saw Nick, blurred and indistinct, like a watercolor that had run in the rain. One arm around her shoulders, the other holding her elbow, he guided her forcibly to the couch. “Sit,” he said.
Julia sat. Heavily. The ancient springs creaked beneath her, sending up a wave of dust. She coughed feebly, a cough that turned into a hiccup. Her eyes were red and her nose was running and she felt drained, drained beyond imagining.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. It sounded painfully inadequate. She blinked at Nick, rubbing the salt from the corners of her eyes. “I feel like an idiot. I never—” She shook her head unsteadily. “I never cry like that. I don’t know— I didn’t realize—”
Nick didn’t push it. Gently, he said, “Who painted that?”
“My mother. A long time ago.” Julia pressed her lips together, not trusting herself to say anything else.
She felt—better now. Not good, but better. “Better” being a very relative term. She felt drained and hollow and thoroughly miserable, but herself again, not a howling mass of jelly. She wondered, abstractedly, if that was what possession felt like, that sense of being so entirely swept away from oneself, from one’s own thoughts and behaviors. She had always prided herself on her self-control, on her poise.
“She was an artist?” Nick’s voice was soft, undemanding. His arm sat loosely around Julia’s shoulders.
She nodded, not looking at him. “An art student.”
The arm behind her back shifted slightly. “She was good.”
Julia kept her eyes on her hands. Same old hands. Same old freckles, same old school ring. “She died. A long time ago. When I was five. That’s why we moved to New York.”
The words came out jerkily, painfully. She wasn’t sure why she was telling him this.
“Not easy, is it?” Nick’s hand dropped to her shoulder, squeezed, lightly. “Mine walked out on us when I was seven.”
Julia looked up at him, so abruptly that her head nearly collided with his chin.
Nick held her gaze, nodding as if in answer to an unspoken question. “She’s an actress, in LA. I used to visit her there, summers, but it didn’t suit either of us.”
And she’d thought she had it bad. Julia’s voice came out in a croak. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Nick kept his voice light. “I have a trio of very interfering aunts. They made sure to take up the slack.”
Julia looked back down at her hands. “I have a very nice stepmother.” Somehow, saying it made Julia feel weirdly teary again. “But we’re not particularly close.”
Her fault, not Helen’s. Thinking of all those years of tentative overtures that Julia had so blithely brushed aside made her feel obscurely guilty.
“It’s hard to be, after something like that.” Nick spoke matter-of-factly. He retrieved his arm from around her shoulders and sat back, looking her full in the face. “Better?”
Julia nodded, biting her lip. “Sorry to melt down on you. I didn’t realize that the attic would be so—booby-trapped.” She managed a wobbly smile. “I feel like I tripped an emotional land mine.”
Nick tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear for her. There was something oddly soothing about the gesture. “Do you think you can cope with going through some old boxes?”
Julia breathed in deeply, feeling the new air filling her lungs. She felt completely wrung out, but not in a bad way. More like when she was small and would come home after a day of camp, half-asleep on her feet after a day of sun and chlorine and pool water.
She considered. “As long as they’re at least a hundred years old.”
“Good.” Nick shifted forward, and Julia thou
ght he meant to stand up.
But he didn’t. He stayed where he was, his eyes resting gravely on her face.
“I’m all right,” Julia said. “Really.”
“I know,” he said, and leaned forward to brush her lips with his.
SIXTEEN
Herne Hill, 2009
Nick’s kiss was light, undemanding.
For a few happy moments Julia’s brain shut down, leaving her to float on sensation alone: the gentle touch of his lips, the warmth of his palm against her cheek, the heavenly sensation of being cradled, cared for, the cushions of the sofa soft against her back, Nick’s shirtfront crisp against her hands.
She wasn’t aware of having reached out to him until he pulled back, just a nose length away. There was a fine dusting of blond hair on his jaw, like gold dust. She wondered if she touched it whether it would be soft or scratchy.
“Hi,” he said softly, not moving. His blue eyes were intent on her face, watching her, waiting for her reaction.
It would be so easy to slide her hands up from his chest to his shoulders, to lean back against the cushions and draw him with her, back into that pleasant floatiness, where neither the recent nor the long dead past mattered, just two bodies—and, from the feel of it through the thin, linen shirt, his was a very attractive body.
So easy. But she didn’t trust herself right now. She felt off-kilter, unsure of her own emotions. Seizing on an easy excuse, Julia heard her own voice saying, hoarse and breathless, “What about Natalie?”
Nick blinked and blinked again. “Natalie?”
Should she take it as a compliment that he sounded quite so befuddled? “Your best friend’s sister. Tall, brunette, gorgeous?” Madly in love with you?
Nick sat back. “I know who she is,” he said in a tone of understandable irritation. “What I don’t understand is what the—what she has to do with this.”
This? Julia decided not to explore that. That way madness lay. She hitched herself up to a more vertical sitting position. “It can’t have escaped your notice that Natalie has a huge thing for you. I don’t want to”—Julia almost said tread on her turf but quickly amended it to—“hurt her.”
“Trust me,” said Nick flatly. “It’s not her heart that would be bruised.”
“That’s pretty presumptuous.” Julia was offended on Natalie’s behalf. She didn’t even particularly like Natalie. But it was easier to be offended for Natalie than tussle with her own feelings, so she waded merrily in on Natalie’s behalf. “Have you seen the way she looks at you? The girl has a class A crush on you.”
Nick drove his fingers through his hair. “Natalie doesn’t have a crush on me, as you so eloquently put it; she has a crush on the idea of me. She wouldn’t know what to do with me if she had me.”
Well, then. Julia folded her arms across her chest. “You just keep telling yourself that, big boy.”
Nick pressed his eyes shut and then opened them again. “I didn’t mean it that way.” His gaze, as his eyes met Julia’s, was disconcertingly frank. “Look, I’m not even sure how to explain it.”
“There’s no need,” said Julia hastily. She was confused enough as it was; she didn’t need him going all likable on her again.
“No?” Nick arched a brow. “Andrew is the best bloke in the world—and Natalie used to be such a decent kid.”
Ouch, thought Julia. Decent kid? That was the kiss of death if ever she’d heard it.
Oblivious, Nick went on. “But her mother’s gone and filled her head with all these ideas about my aristocratic connections—and it’s not like that,” he added forcefully. “I’m not like that. My family are normal people. Barking mad, the lot of them, but otherwise normal.”
Tentatively, Julia leaned an elbow against the back of the couch. “What was all that stuff about if you had your rights? Cousin Caroline made it sound like you were the lost heir to the royal family or something like that.”
Nick smiled grimly. “Not even near something like that. One of my ancestors did a favor for Charles the Second back when he was in exile—probably helped smuggle a woman into his rooms—and was rewarded with a title for his pains. Viscount Loring.”
Julia raised her brows in mock awe. “Snazzy.”
“And that, as they say, was that. My ancestors went on being generally charming and not particularly interesting until the beginning of the last century, when my great-grandfather created rather a fuss by running off with an actress.” Nick pursed his lips. “Which, given the origin of the family title, seemed rather an appropriate way for it to end. As James the Fifth of Scotland said, ‘It came with a wench, it shall gang with a wench.’ I paraphrase, of course.”
It all sounded strangely familiar. Not the James V bit, but the viscount running off with an actress. Julia remembered that pile of old Tatlers in the back bedroom, the ones she had so guiltily devoured, such a strange and foreign world, debutantes and bolters and errant viscounts. It had been all over the front of one issue.…
Julia sat up so abruptly that the couch springs creaked. “Wait, that was your family? ‘Viscount Runs Off with Gaiety Girl’?”
Nick looked at her strangely.
Julia shrugged, saying a little sheepishly, “I found a pile of 1920s magazines when I was cleaning out one of the back bedrooms.”
“Don’t you know better than to believe everything you read in the papers?” Nick breathed out a long-suffering sigh. “She wasn’t a Gaiety Girl; she was an actress, from an acting family. She got her start playing Cordelia. Although she did perform in some pretty risqué comedies in the twenties. That’s how my great-grandfather met her. Met her, fell for her, shacked up with her, and, eventually, married her.”
It all sounded pretty tame by modern standards. “I didn’t realize they could un-title people for things like that.”
Nick’s lips quivered. “Un-title?”
Julia waved a hand, feeling strangely buoyant. Something about that glint in Nick’s eye … “Or whatever you call it.”
“Whatever you call it,” Nick agreed. “And they can’t. There’s no removing titles for inappropriate liaisons, or half the House of Lords would be out on their ear. No. It’s … a bit more complicated than that.”
Julia burrowed down into the cushions. “I don’t have any snooker to watch.”
Nick acknowledged the point with a nod. “It’s not all that exciting, mostly just a legal tangle. My great-grandmother was something of a Bohemian. She didn’t believe in marriage as an institution, love should be free.… So my grandfather was born out of wedlock. At some point, she must have relented, because they were married in time for my great-aunts to be legitimate, but … Too late for Grandfather.”
Julia had hung out with enough lawyers to pick up some of the lingo. “If they were married after, wouldn’t that solve the problem? Retroactive legitimation?”
“Not back then.” The answer was immediate and authoritative. “The law changed in 1926, but that was three years too late for my grandfather. And all the rest of their children were girls. So the title went the way of the dodo.”
“That sucks,” said Julia eloquently.
Nick shrugged. “I don’t miss it. I don’t think my great-grandfather did, either. It saves a lot of bother from title hunters.”
Like Natalie? “What about the rest of your family?” said Julia quickly. “Did they mind?”
A slight reminiscent smile curved Nick’s lips. “The only one who minded was my grandfather. He was a conventional old soul, for all that he was practically raised at the stage door. In his heart of hearts, he would have rather liked to be a viscount. He wouldn’t say so, of course. But he did his best to get back on the straight and narrow, married a baronet’s daughter from an unimpeachable county family—and then discovered that she had a secret passion for poetry.”
“Reading it?” Julia asked, charmed.
“No, writing it.” She could hear the laughter in his voice, laughter and love underneath it. “Granny used to have month
ly readings. Salons, she called them. She’d dress up in flowing draperies and recite, while striking positions. It was atrocious. But everyone suffered through them and would tell her how wonderful it all was, because she was otherwise such a lovely person—and she played a very good hand of bridge.”
“What did your grandfather think?”
Nick’s expression softened. “He adored her. If she had taken up the ukulele, he would have been the first one sitting there in the front row, applauding.”
Julia’s throat felt suddenly tight. “They sound wonderful,” she said.
She’d never known her grandparents on either side, and while she’d never felt the lack of it before, now she wondered what it would have been like to have that kind of family. Maybe the retelling made it rosier; maybe there would have been discontent and disagreements. But it would have been nice to have known.
“And your parents—I mean your father?” she amended quickly, remembering what Nick had told her about his mother. “What’s he like?”
“Dad?” Nick overlooked her slip. “He’s an actor. He did some stage stuff in his youth, but now it’s mostly bit parts in costume dramas. That’s how he met my mother,” he added. “He did a brief—and not very successful—stint in LA.”
“Blood will tell?” said Julia lightly. “Your actress great-grandmother’s talent coming through?”
Nick snorted. “Hardly. I bolloxed my star turn as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream back at school. And it’s hard to make an arse out of yourself when you’re already wearing an ass’s head.”
She laughed, as he had intended her to, but as their laughter faded their eyes met and the tension that his family stories had kept at bay rose again between them. A dozen phrases ran through Julia’s mind, only to be discarded again.
“Well,” she said awkwardly, just as Nick began, “Julia, I—”
They both broke off. “You first,” Nick said.
Julia chickened out. She fussed with her cuffs. “I was just going to say that we haven’t made much headway on the attic.”
“No, we haven’t.” For a moment, he looked at her, and she thought he might say something more. Whatever it was, he thought better of it. In one fluid movement, he rose from the couch and held out a hand to her. “Shall we?”