The Third Angel Page 9

  “Frieda will be wondering where we've gone off to,” Lucy said.

  They walked over the grass, arms linked.

  “I could have lived here,” Allie said.

  Frieda was standing at the back door of Lilac House. She waved to them and they waved back. She wore a blue apron over her black mourning dress. She'd stayed up all night to make a roast so that no one would go hungry.

  “How do I do this?” Allie asked her mother.

  “You do the best you can,” Lucy said. “There's nothing more than that.”

  EVERYONE LEFT BEFORE dark, including Allie's parents, who rode back to London with Mrs. Ridge and her nurse in a chauffeured car. Allie was in the garden, where the lilacs were so tall it was impossible to see the road. The leaves were dusty, the way they always were in August when the weather turned hot. Bill had gone off to bed, but Allie and Frieda didn't want to go inside; they sat on wooden chairs, listening to the birds call. There were still patches of blue sky, even though it was nearly ten o'clock. The air was so heavy and thick that every second seemed to linger.

  “My father told me there were three angels,” Frieda said. “He was a very serious, lovely, practical man. He was always on time. He was someone you could depend upon. He said there was the Angel of Life, the Angel of Death, and then there was the Third Angel.”

  “I've heard of the two,” Allie said.

  “It was either the Angel of Life or the Angel of Death who would ride in the back of the car when my father went on house calls, but he never knew which one it was until he arrived at his destination. Even then he said he was often surprised. It was hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes.”

  They were drinking iced tea that Frieda had fixed. Allie could see the chimney of The Hedges, the house she and Paul should have been living in right now.

  “And the third one?”

  “Well, he's the most curious. You can't even tell if he's an angel or not. You think you're doing him a kindness, you think you're the one taking care of him, while all the while, he's the one who's saving your life.”

  Allie began to cry. She wished she was in the kitchen of The Hedges, trying her best to make a plum pie or cutting up apples for a tart. She wished Paul was on the couch, calling to her, making fun of her baking.

  “We can't imagine the half of it,” Frieda said. “The way he'll find us when we least expect it. The way he'll change our life.”

  “No, we can't,” Allie said.

  “I'm glad you decided to stay the night.”

  They went inside together; they washed the dishes, dried them, then put them away. Allie waited until she heard Frieda go up to her bedroom, then she turned off the lights. The birds were still singing at this late hour, confused by the long summer days. Allie waited at the window, hoping he would walk past on his way to wherever he was going. But she fell asleep in the chair, and when she woke the next morning and looked out across the yellow fields across the road, he was gone.

  SHE STOOD ON the steps to the Orangery. It was her wedding day, the one they should have had. The gates to Kensington Palace had been opened, but the restaurant was still closed. Allie was wearing the white silk suit. There were some robins on the grass. The hedges were so green they looked black. The sky was a pale summer blue with only a few high clouds. Their wedding day had seemed so distant once; now it was here. She had never canceled the reservations at the Ritz in Paris. They had train tickets for that afternoon. The tickets were in Allie's purse, along with her passport. Despite what she'd said and what she'd told herself, she'd been hopeful till the very end, just like the heron bride in the marsh, waiting for her beloved, convinced he would come back. Allie couldn't stop thinking of the way he'd looked in the hospital bed, curled up, so thin, under a white sheet and a hospital blanket. Today, the air was still and humid. The day would be brighter later on, but that didn't seem to matter. She was a widow.

  Tourists had begun to arrive at the palace. There was a display of Diana's dresses, all of those beautiful clothes she'd worn. The inky blue silk dress she had danced in one night with a movie star as her partner. The pink bolero jacket covered with little mirrored charms that she'd worn to India. A groundskeeper collecting trash stared rudely at Allie, puzzled to find her sitting on the patio of the shuttered restaurant in her silk suit, but he didn't say anything. Allie was trying to decide what to do next. The door to her life had closed. She was in her own future, alone. Nothing had turned out as she had expected.

  She looked behind the hedges to the lawn. There was a woman walking toward her. Allie had telephoned and left a message at the desk of the Lion Park. She'd said she wanted her sister to come to the Orangery wearing her maid of honor dress. It was a good choice. It was the perfect dress. Maddy had walked all the way through the park. She sat down beside Allie. She didn't know what to say. She was shivering in the blue silk dress that she felt she had no right to wear.

  “The view from here is beautiful, isn't it?” Allie said. They looked out over the lawn. At the end of her story, the heron was shot by poachers who thought he was nothing but a crow. His heron wife and his wife on earth mourned their husband together. Neither one could bear to be alone.

  “I'm sorry,” Maddy said. Tears were falling on her dress; she knew that once silk was wet it was ruined, but there was nothing she could do. “I'm so sorry. I did everything wrong.”

  There was a line forming at the entrance to Kensington Palace. The hedges gave off a peppery scent. Allie thought about the roses she had bought for Diana on the morning she met Paul, how perfect they'd been even in the summer heat. She thought of the day when she and Maddy tried to break the curse that was upon their mother. She'd never told Maddy that her secret word had been her sister's name.

  “How do people go on living?” Allie said. “That's what I can't figure out.”

  “You're the one with courage.”

  “Me? Don't be an idiot. It was you. You were the one who climbed into that nest up in the tree. You were the one who did as you pleased. You telephoned that woman Dad was living with. I always did what I thought I was supposed to. Until it was too late.”

  “We should go look at Diana's dresses,” Maddy suggested. “That would be a distraction.”

  “I've seen them,” Allie said. “I know what they look like. I have a better idea.”

  They would visit Paris instead. Allie couldn't be talked out of it. They stopped at Maddy's hotel so she could get her passport and luggage, then went directly to Waterloo. In the taxi, Allie leaned her head back. She would buy clothes in Paris. Nothing that belonged to her seemed irreplaceable. If it was indeed true that you could read something backward or forward, she had chosen her direction. Both her mother and Paul's would understand.

  “Are you sure you don't want to change your mind?” Maddy said when they got to the station. “I wouldn't blame you.”

  Allie remembered what the doctor in the hospital had told her. Love had nothing to do with the here and now. That's what Frieda meant when she said it was simple to love Paul, no matter how complicated he might be. You didn't have to think about it, you just did it.

  “You're the only one who understands how I feel,” she told her sister.

  At Waterloo, Allie settled herself on a bench while Maddy went to call her parents' hotel. They were leaving that afternoon and Maddy had planned to travel home with them. She'd bought her ticket to New York and it was nonrefundable. She'd never get her money back now. Not that it mattered.

  “Do you know how frightened we've been?” Lucy said when she answered. “We've been beside ourselves. We're supposed to leave for the airport in an hour and we couldn't find either one of you girls. We phoned the police.”

  “Don't worry,” Maddy said. She had to shout to be heard. “We're safe. As soon as we're through traveling, we'll come home.”

  And then it was time to leave. There was a crush of people; the weekend was going to be lovely and no one wanted to miss the opportunity to spend th
e last few summer days in France. Luckily a porter helped Allie and Maddy find their seats just as the train left the station. In no time they were going more than 250 kilometers an hour. Through the window there were streaks of landscape in blue and black and green. They could see the blur of London that they were leaving behind.

  They were comfortable in their wedding clothes. Silk was perfect for any sort of weather; it wore well for traveling. They didn't dwell on the past; instead they talked about people who were on their train. They made up stories about them, and once they started they simply couldn't stop. They guessed who was in love and whose heart had been broken, who had committed murder, and who had saved a life.

  I I .

  Lion Park

  1966

  EVERYTHING WAS YELLOW IN THE PARK. When it rained, leaves came swirling down. When it was sunny everything looked golden. Frieda Lewis was nineteen and had been working for four months at the Lion Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. Her favorite rooms to clean were the ones on the seventh floor. From there, she could look out the windows in the back and see the little courtyard park with its stone lion. From the front rooms she could see the tops of the trees in Hyde Park. Once she climbed onto the ledge and stood there for a moment, above the traffic and the fumes, mesmerized by the movement of the trees and of the clouds in the sky. Brompton Road seemed as if it was part of a child's game, with tiny cars set out in a row. Then all at once, Frieda felt light-headed and she had to back in through the window. Her head was pounding, but she felt exhilarated, too. She had the feeling that something special was in store for her, a miracle of some sort, something amazing and unexpected. She might be working as a maid in a London hotel, but that wasn't who she was inside.

  She was a headstrong girl whose parents believed that she had ruined her chances at life. She had passed her university exams but had decided that she wanted a real life, and by that she didn't mean marriage and babies. She didn't want anything ordinary. And she certainly didn't want the life her father planned for her. He was a doctor in Reading, and he thought he knew what was best for everyone. If anything, she wanted the opposite, a life that would make her father cringe, that would hurt him. She had even considered that poetry might be her calling. She had something inside her no one understood, that much was certain, and that sort of isolation often led to a poet's life.

  Frieda had broken up with her sweetheart, Bill, who had assumed she would marry him. Well, everyone made assumptions, didn't they? Everyone thought they knew her when they knew nothing at all. She had wanted a bigger life, something spectacular, and now here she was in London, much to her parents' dismay up in Reading. She was a small-town girl who desperately wanted a big-city life. That's the story of a mouse, her father had told her. Not of a bright, talented woman who should be in university.

  Frieda's parents might think she was wild, but she was nothing compared to most of the girls at the Lion Park. Everyone was young and wanted to have a good time. They all wore thick black eyeliner and looked like a horde of Cleopatras when they went out en masse. They dressed in miniskirts or blue jeans with hoop earrings and high boots and they all smoked too much. The girls who worked at the hotel were given rooms on the second floor; the worst rooms had three or four girls crowded into them, but even those were fine. They held impromptu parties every night and went to concerts and clubs in a lovely, giddy group. They frequented the restaurant Cassarole on the King's Road and went to the Chelsea Antiques Market looking for old silk underwear and Victorian blouses ribbed with satin. They traded clothes. Nearly all of the girls had worn Frieda's black dress, bought for eighteen hard-earned pounds at Biba in Kensington, a dress so short you had to hold it down with both hands when exiting a taxi. Katy Horace had managed to snag Mick Jagger for a night while wearing that dress—well, maybe it was only an hour or so, but all the same it was Mick, or so she said, and it was the dress that had got to him.

  The Lion Park was known for its reckless clientele—people in the music world, poets with bad reputations, men in love with other men, women who had left their husbands, drummers on tour who practiced all night and drove people mad by pounding on the furniture, girls who were thinking about suicide, couples who couldn't decide if they loved each other or wanted to kill each other. The hotel was a bit seedy—the furniture was banged up, the carpet was worn—but it was possible to have privacy here. The Lion Park was much like the Chelsea Hotel in New York; as long as you didn't outright murder anyone in your room, anything went. You could be a vampire, for all the management cared, as long as you paid your tab on time.

  On nights when a famous guest was in residence, there were often dozens of girls waiting outside, screaming at the sight of any long-haired young man. The neighbors complained about the groupies, but what could they do? Freedom of speech included freedom to scream, didn't it? When the noise got bad, and the fans spilled onto the street, the authorities were called, but mostly the night porter, Jack Henry, took care of the crowds. Jack Henry joked that he'd had more sex by promising groupies he'd get them in to see some other man than he'd had in all the rest of his life. The girls who worked at the Lion Park thought him a dirty old man, though he was probably not much more than thirty. Jack surely had his flaws, but he could be depended on to keep his mouth shut. For the right tip, he could get a guest most anything: a gorgeous woman, a doctor who wouldn't report a drug overdose, bottles of absinthe or Seconals, and, most importantly, discretion. For instance, no one, not even the girls who worked at the hotel, knew that Jamie Dunn was staying on the seventh floor. But of course not many people had heard of him yet. He wasn't much of anything, not really famous, just an American singer who had signed a record deal. He had come to the U.K. for a few concert dates, all of which had been a disaster. He had a reedy, angelic voice and people complained they couldn't hear him. Audiences wanted electricity; even Dylan had gone for it. Jamie knew he had to get a band together and make some noise. And he needed his own material. That's what the executives had told him at his record company, or at least they were his company at the moment, if he gave them what they wanted, if they didn't ax him the way they did a thousand other talented, hopeful young men.

  Now Jamie was holed up in room 708, trying, and failing, to write. After two days he stopped eating and started in on some serious drinking; that was how his binges always began. Like Rimbaud, he had to burn to create, but he burned without brilliance and he knew it. He just got drunker. He was six foot three and only 165 pounds, so in a matter of days he looked gaunt. His hotel room was a mess. Overflowing ashtrays, cups of coffee, dirty laundry on the floor. He'd stopped showering while he tried to write—even soap and water were possible distractions. He had his long hair tied back with a leather band. He had great bone structure thanks to a heritage that included a Cree Indian and Ukrainian grandmother along with a half-Irish, half-Italian grandfather. His mother was a Polish Jew. His was a New York City heritage, a little of everything. He hadn't cut his hair for four years. He made women swoon without even saying anything. He believed in signs, symbols, luck, fortune—all of it. His bad leg? It meant he was made for something different. The pain he always had? Proof that ordinary life was not for him. If not for his leg, he'd be in Vietnam. He'd probably be dead and gone by now.

  Most of all, he believed in vows. Now he made a pact with himself that if he could write one perfect song, he'd cut off his hair. He'd make a sacrifice of himself and burn his hair on the hotplate he'd had housekeeping bring up. He'd annihilate the part of him that was so weak he often went to bed for weeks at a time when he couldn't create, when the world was just too much for him to bear.

  He'd been weak as a boy, born with a defect in his hip, and had had several operations before the time he was twelve. He'd grown up in pain, spending months at a time in Queens County Hospital; even when he was discharged, he wore a metal brace that had been strapped on so tightly he still had the marks on his skin. When he ran his hand over his leg he felt a line of indentations reminding him of wha
t he had suffered and what he now deserved as reparation. Other boys had made his life hell at school. He hated his own flesh and blood and bones. Most of all, he hated the pain. He'd taken Demerol and morphine all through his youth, then had progressed to street drugs in high school. He favored heroin, and he looked forward to shooting up more than anything. He was in love with the moment before and the moment during. He had his best ideas then, if only he could remember them. His notebooks were filled with scribbles he couldn't understand. Thank God he could function in a vacuum and was able to ignore the noise in the hotel, trained to do so by a childhood spent with three brothers who were endlessly fighting. On his first night in London, there had been a brawl out in the hallway just as he was getting down to work. It felt like home. No problem. Jamie ignored it, exactly as he had ignored his brothers. He'd always been his mother's favorite, set apart; he didn't feel much of anything watching his brothers beat each other. He didn't even take sides.

  When it got to be too much he yelled, “Shut the fuck up.”He pounded on the wall behind his bed and soon enough the racket had stopped.

  It had happened again the next night. It sounded like the same exact argument, but then his brothers had fought over the same things for years. Jamie happened to be drunker that night so he raced into the hall with a lamp he'd grabbed to use as a weapon. But once he was standing there wearing only his torn jeans, Jamie didn't find anyone out there but a startled maid who'd been turning down the rooms. The girl had long brown hair and huge eyes and she looked like an angel out there in the hall. She was so pure and beautiful it was difficult to look at her and not feel humble. It was one of those moments Jamie would have liked to write about, if only he could write.

  “Sorry,” Jamie said. He realized he might look quite threatening, unwashed and tall, limping around and holding the lamp like a spear. He might, in fact, appear to be a lunatic. “I'm hearing things. I think I'm going insane.”