A Fall from Grace, Maggie Ford [best english novels to read txt] 📗

could she wish him ill? Yet it was becoming more difficult as time went on, even this short time.

For Tony, meeting her once a week was no difficulty. But for her it was growing more worrying as time went on. Lies, pretence, creeping out of the house with excuses of taking the air. Taking the air? February with its cold flurries of snow and biting winds on her cheeks and she expecting it to be believed that she was taking the air?

Mrs Cole, James’s cook for many years, long before he’d lost his first wife but who’d very quickly taken to her employer’s new wife, had expressed surprise the first time she had said she was going out for a breath of fresh air. Today her reaction hadn’t diminished one bit.

‘Surely, madam, you’re not going out again! It’s bitter out there. More than bitter – it’s killing cold! You’ll catch your death before long.’

‘I’m well wrapped up, Mrs Cole,’ she told her with an easy smile. ‘The air’s bracing. It will do me good. Every fire lit, the stuffiness indoors is giving me quite a headache.’

‘Perhaps you should have Doctor Williamson look at you, madam, if it goes on. There’s all this Spanish ’flu about – an epidemic it’s becoming, they say. It’s frightening if you ask me. A couple of my nephew’s friends are down with it and they’re really bad. It’s seeing off so many in such a short while. The papers are full of it.’

Madeleine ignored the diatribe on the influenza business – half smiled to herself as she recalled the current sally: ‘You just watch that girl called Enza because when they opened the window, in flew Enza!’ Yes, it was rife, frightening, getting worse by the day. But she didn’t have it.

‘A short walk in the fresh air will soon clear my head,’ she dismissed. ‘I’ll go to the park. Half an hour or so should do it.’

She hurried out before any further obstacles could be put in the way, albeit well meant. At least it was dry, cold but dry. Soon it would be March, hopefully a little warmer, lessening cook’s over-motherly interest in her well-being. James’s chauffeur too was concerned for her, offering to take her for a drive instead, but she’d evaded his offers saying that with petrol still rationed it shouldn’t be wasted driving her about.

So far James was too occupied with stock market dealings to notice most of her comings and goings. Nevertheless, she’d told Mrs Cole not to bother him with her worries for her well-being, he had too many other things to think about and ought not be bothered with trivialities. But one day it was sure to come out. What would she do when he began asking questions? Lie to him? Break off her meetings with Anthony? No, that was unthinkable.

Quickly she turned her thoughts from that aspect as she hurried the few hundred yards to where she would hail a taxi. It took less than a quarter of an hour to reach the hotel. Tony would already be there waiting and for a wonderful ten minutes or so they would make frantic love, to lie exhausted in each other’s arms, then make love again, more slowly.

How wonderful it would have been to lie in his arms for the rest of the morning. She would dress, hating having to leave him, and go. He would leave soon after, needing to get back to his bank, having started back there two weeks ago. In his capacity he had no one to answer to although he worried about being away for too long, which was understandable. But she had Mrs Cole, the woman quick to badger her should her return seem more delayed than she thought. What if one day it all came out, a chance remark perhaps, the mind immediately making something out of it?

Alighting from her taxi, she took her time walking that hundred yards home, hoping the cold would set her cheeks glowing as if from a surfeit of fresh air, even pinched her nose hard to make it look red. But her outings were becoming longer, dangerously so. Last week Mrs Cole had taken her to task as if she were the mistress and Madeleine the servant.

‘Madam, I thought you’d got yourself lost, you’ve taken so long getting back. You really oughtn’t to have been out so long. You could catch your death.’

‘It’s good for the constitution,’ she told her a little testily.

‘But what would the master say if he knew?’

‘Please don’t tell him.’ She’d begged, feeling like a child in danger of having a treasured toy taken from her. ‘He would worry. I’ve taken to popping into a little tea room for a nice pot of hot tea and a cake; that’s the reason I was a little longer than usual. I so enjoy it, Mrs Cole. I can’t bear being cooped up here day after day.’

‘But you’re not, madam. You have so many friends, appointments, engagements. You’re hardly ever at home, what with one thing and another.’

It was true. Always something going on, always busy organizing this and that party or function, she had become well known for it, her social events now famous. With the war, the Great War as it was becoming known, behind them, people were discovering a new freedom, making sure they were going to enjoy it to the full: dances, charity balls, the joy of loose-fitting garments after the restrictions of only a decade ago. Women had found freedom at last to do as they pleased, at least those with money to do so, and she made sure she was part of it.

‘I look forward to enjoying a walk entirely on my own,’ she told Mrs Cole, ‘and I don’t want others to spoil it for me. You do understand.’

‘I suppose so,’ was the grudging reply, leaving her free to go up to her room to dream over her wonderful moments with Anthony.

But it couldn’t continue this way