“I suppose you’re right.”
“And having said that, I think you should wear the rose pink thing. You have a quartz necklace that goes fabulously with it. The emerald doesn’t do you any favors. It makes your bust look like two deflated balloons.”
“Oh, you are a friend!” Jennifer said, and the two began to laugh.
The door had slammed, and he had dropped his briefcase on the hall floor, the chill air of outside on his overcoat and skin. He took off his scarf, kissed Yvonne, and apologized for his lateness. “Accountants’ meeting. You know how these money men go on.”
“Oh, you should see them when they get together, Larry. Bores me to tears. We’ve been married five years, and I still couldn’t tell you the difference between a debit and a credit.” Yvonne checked her watch. “He should be here soon. No doubt some unmissable column of figures to wave his magic wand over.”
He faced his wife. “You look very fetching, Jenny.”
“Doesn’t she? Your wife always scrubs up rather well.”
“Yes. Yes, indeed. Right.” He ran a hand across his jawline. “If you’ll both excuse me, I’ll go and freshen up before our other guests arrive.” I don’t suppose one of you ladies could pour me a whiskey? Two fingers, no ice?
“We’ll have a drink waiting for you,” Yvonne called.
By the time the door opened a second time, Jennifer’s nerves had been dulled by a potent cocktail. It will be fine, she kept telling herself. Yvonne would step in with prompts if she was about to make a fool of herself. These were her friends. They wouldn’t be waiting for her to trip up. They were another step to bringing her back to herself.
“Jenny. Thank you so much for asking us.” Violet Fairclough gave her a hug, her plump face almost submerged in a turban. She unpinned it from her head and handed it over with her coat. She was wearing a scoop-necked silk dress, which strained like a wind-filled parachute around her ample contours. Violet’s waist, as Yvonne would later remark, would require the hands of a small infantry company to span it.
“Jennifer. A picture of loveliness, as always.” A tall, redheaded man stooped to kiss her.
Jennifer was astonished by the unlikeliness of this coupling. She didn’t remember the man at all, and found it almost funny that he should be little Violet’s husband. “Do come through,” she said, tearing her eyes off him and recovering her composure. “My husband will be down in a few minutes. Let me get you a drink in the meantime.”
“ ‘My husband,’ eh? Are we terribly formal this evening?” Bill laughed.
“Well . . .” Jennifer faltered. “. . . as it’s been so long since I’ve seen you all . . .”
“Beast. You’ve got to be kind to Jenny.” Yvonne kissed him. “She’s still terribly fragile. She should be reclining upstairs consumptively while we select one man at a time to peel her a grape. But she would insist on martinis.”
“Now that’s the Jenny we know and love.” Bill’s smile of appreciation was so lingering that Jennifer glanced twice at Violet to make sure she wasn’t offended. She didn’t seem to mind: she was rummaging in her handbag. “I’ve left your number with the new nanny, Jenny,” she said, glancing up. “I hope you don’t mind. She really is the most useless woman. I fully expect her to be calling here at any minute to say she can’t get Frederick’s pajama bottoms on or some such.”
Jennifer caught Bill rolling his eyes and, with a flash of dismay, realized that the gesture was familiar to her.
There were eight around the table, her husband and Francis at either end. Yvonne, Dominic, who was quite high up in the Horse Guards, and Jennifer sat along the window side, with Violet, Bill, and Anne, Dominic’s wife, opposite. Anne was a cheerful sort, guffawing at the men’s jokes with a benign twinkle in her eye that spoke of a woman comfortable in her skin.
Jennifer found herself watching them as they ate, analyzing and examining with forensic detail the things they said to each other, seeking out the clues to their past life. Bill, she noted, rarely looked at his wife, let alone addressed her. Violet seemed oblivious to this, and Jennifer wondered whether she was unaware of his indifference or just stoic in hiding her embarrassment.
Yvonne, for all her joking complaints about Francis, watched him constantly. She delivered her jokes at his expense while directing at him a smile of challenge. This is how they are together, Jennifer thought. She won’t show him how much he means to her.
“I wish I’d put my money in refrigerators,” Francis was saying. “The newspaper said this morning that there should be a million of the things sold in Britain this year. A million! Five years ago that was . . . a hundred and seventy thousand.”
“In America it must be ten times that. I hear people exchange them every couple of years.” Violet speared a piece of fish. “And they’re huge—double the size of ours. Can you imagine?”
“Everything in America is bigger. Or so they love to tell us.”
“Including the egos, judging by the ones I’ve come up against.” Dominic’s voice lifted. “You have not met an insufferable know-all until you’ve met a Yank general.”
Anne was laughing. “Poor old Dom was a bit put out when one tried to tell him how to drive his own car.”
“ ‘Say, your quarters are pretty small. These vehicles are pretty small. Your rations are pretty small . . .’ ” Dominic mimicked. “They should have seen what it was like with rationing. Of course, they have no idea—”
“Dom thought he’d have some fun with him and borrowed my mother’s Morris Minor. Picked him up in it. You should have seen his face.”
“ ‘Standard issue over here, chum,’ I told him. ‘For visiting dignitaries we use the Vauxhall Velox. Gives you that extra three inches of leg room.’ He virtually had to fold himself in two to fit inside.”
“I was howling with laughter,” said Anne. “I don’t know how Dom didn’t end up in the most awful trouble.”
“How’s business, Larry? I hear you’re off to Africa again in a week or so.”
Jennifer watched her husband settle back in his seat.
“Good. Very good, in fact. I’ve just signed a deal with a certain motor company to manufacture brake linings.” He placed his knife and fork together on his plate.
“What exactly is it you do? I’m never quite sure what this newfangled mineral you’re using is.”
“Don’t pretend to be interested, Violet,” Bill said, from the other side of the table. “Violet’s rarely interested in anything that isn’t pink or blue or starts a sentence with ‘Mama.’ ”
“Perhaps, Bill, darling, that simply means there isn’t enough stimulation for her at home,” Yvonne parried, and the men whistled exuberantly.
Laurence Stirling had turned toward Violet. “It’s not actually a new mineral at all,” he was saying. “It’s been around since the days of the Romans. Did you study the Romans at school?”
“I certainly did. I can’t remember anything about them now, of course.” Her laugh was shrill.
Laurence’s voice dropped, and the table hushed, the better to hear him. “Well, Pliny the Elder wrote about how he had seen a piece of cloth thrown into a banqueting-hall fire and brought out again minutes later without a scrap of damage. Some people thought it was witchcraft, but he knew this was something extraordinary.” He pulled a pen from his pocket, leaned forward, and scribbled on his damask napkin. He pushed it round for her to see better. “The name chrysotile, the most common form, is derived from the Greek words chrysos, which means ‘gold,’ and tilos, ‘fiber.’ Even then they knew it had terrific value. All I do—my company, I mean—is mine it and mold it into a variety of uses.”
“You put out fires.”
“Yes.” He looked thoughtfully at his hands. “Or I make sure they don’t start in the first place.” In the brief silence that followed, an atmosphere fell over the table. He glanced at Jennifer, then away.
“So where’s the big money, old chap? Not flameproof tablecloths.”
“Car parts.” He sat back in his chair, and the room seemed to relax with him. “They say that within ten years most households in Britain will have a car. That’s an awful lot of brake linings. And we’re in talks with the railways and the airlines. But the uses of white asbestos are pretty limitless. We’ve branched out into guttering, farm buildings, sheeting, insulation. Soon it’ll be everywhere.”
“The wonder mineral indeed.”
He was at ease as he discussed his business with his friends in a way that he had not been when the two of them were alone, Jennifer thought. It must have been strange for him, too, to have her so badly injured, and even now not quite herself. She thought of Yvonne’s description of her that afternoon: gorgeous, poised, minxy. Was he missing that woman? Perhaps conscious that she was watching him, he turned his head and caught her eye. She smiled, and after a moment, he smiled back.
“I saw that. C’mon, Larry. You’re not allowed to moon at your wife.” Bill began to refill their glasses.
“He certainly is allowed to moon at his wife,” Francis protested, “after everything that happened to her. How are you feeling now, Jenny? You look wonderful.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
“I should think she’s doing terribly well holding a dinner party not—what?—not a week after getting out of hospital.”
“If Jenny wasn’t giving a dinner party I should think there was something terribly wrong—and not just with her but the whole damned world.” Bill took a long swig of his wine.
“Awful business. It’s lovely to see you looking like your old self.”
“We were terribly worried. I hope you got my flowers,” Anne put in.
Dominic laid his napkin on the table. “Do you remember anything about the accident itself, Jenny?”
“She’d probably prefer not to dwell on it, if you don’t mind.” Laurence stood up to fetch another bottle of wine from the sideboard.
“Of course not.” Dominic lifted a hand in apology. “Thoughtless of me.”
Jennifer began to collect the plates. “I’m fine. Really. It’s just that there isn’t much I could tell you. I don’t remember very much at all.”
“Just as well,” Dominic observed.
Yvonne was lighting a cigarette. “Well, the sooner you’re responsible for everyone’s brake linings, Larry darling, the safer we’ll all be.”
“And the richer he’ll be.” Francis laughed.
“Oh, Francis, darling, must we really bring every single conversation back to money?”
“Yes,” he and Bill answered in unison.
Jennifer heard them laughing as she picked up the pile of dirty china and headed toward the kitchen.
“Well, that went well, didn’t it?”
She was seated at her dressing table, carefully removing her earrings. She saw his reflection in the mirror as he came into the bedroom, loosening his tie. He kicked off his shoes and went into the bathroom, leaving the door open. “Yes,” she said. “I think it did.”
“The food was wonderful.”
“Oh, I can’t take any credit for that,” she said. “Mrs. Cordoza organized it all.”
“But you planned the menu.”
It was easier not to disagree with him. She placed the earrings carefully inside their box. She could hear the washbasin filling with water. “I’m glad you liked it.” She stood up and wrestled herself out of her dress, hung it up, and began to peel off her stockings.