In December, something happens to him. He finishes an interview with an up-and-coming actor (physical, intense, brooding - the new new Brando?) and is walking across the lobby of the Dorchester hotel when he sees her.
She's standing near the reception desk, surrounded by monogrammed luggage and black-suited minders, wearing a spotless cream suit which even he can recognise as Chanel. Her hair is swept up in a chignon as it always is in photographs these days. She looks small and fragile in the cavernous art deco space, like a fine porcelain figurine out of its cabinet, but it's unmistakably her. He stops dead in his tracks, chest suddenly short of oxygen, and just stares. For the first second or two she's otherwise occupied, giving a curt instruction to one of the black-suits, then her gaze drifts and she looks directly his way.
Her dark eyes remain flat; pools of still water, betraying nothing. Her face – that face, he thinks – gives no indication she has registered his presence but her eyes don't turn away from his. Brief seconds pass like leaden hours before there's a bustle among the black-suits and she's being swept across the lobby followed by a heavily laden porter's trolley, stacked with suitcases and swinging with dress bags.
There's no acknowledgment as she passes by. Her eyes refocus firmly in the direction of her movement. He swivels to keep her in his sights, but she's marshalled swiftly into the elevator and disappears from view in matter of moments. Against his every hope, but in line with his every expectation, there's not even the slightest suggestion of a backward glance.
He makes it outside without being conscious of his movements. The winter days are short and the daylight already darkening into night above him. He commands the shakiness which appears to have infected his legs and lungs to cease, and, in an instinctive protective movement, turns up the collar of his coat against the chilly air. As he walks away, a lonely scout snowflake spirals sedately from the sky. Its fellows follow soon after, dusting the pavements with a thin layer of icing. His leaden footsteps leave black holes in the delicate white sheet.
.
He writes a story about a snow queen who lives alone in a land of ice. One day the greatest of the powerful northern gods, a spirit made of steel and molten liquid fire, comes across her in a forest glade and will not rest until he has captured her and made her bend the weather to his will. Under the furnace of his touch, she melts a little, water droplets dripping from her wrists and cheeks to the forest floor. But the fire god cannot control his desire to have her, to hold her, until one day he puts out his flaming hand only to grasp at nothing. Her rivulets run around his ankles as she escapes downstream, dampening the power of his destructive heat, extinguishing his smouldering cinders as she flows.
.
He sells the story to a London literary magazine and doesn't complain when Freya pulls him around estate agents' offices for the third Saturday in a row in her quest to hunt down the perfect family house. The days grow incrementally longer and Hyde Park is decorated with a sprinkling of yellow and purple crocuses. He begins to think that maybe nothing happened to him after all, but then it arrives.
The envelope is thick, cream, obviously expensive but completely plain. No printed crest or embossed monogram, just a smudged continental postmark. Inside the single sheet of card is equally unremarkable, save for the seven brief words inked across it in a careful, flowing hand.
"I always was a sucker for fairytales."
There's no signature, not even an initial, but there doesn't need to be. He doesn't know how she found out about the story or tracked down his address, but it's her. He knows it's her.
.
He writes about an old brownstone house on a New York square and the affable inconstant man who lived there long ago with his sharp-tongued wife and dark-haired daughter. The little girl, clever and intense, is constantly pushed and harried by her ambitious mother, and consequently finds it much easier to adore her genial mercurial father who, in contrast, demands so little. Every night she calls out for him at bedtime and can't sleep if he doesn't tuck her in, singing a soft low lullaby as he carelessly tousles her hair. One night she calls out and her father doesn't come. He never comes again. The little girl learns to live alone in the dark with her night terrors.
.
Freya's parents express their disappointment that their daughter will not be marrying in church. Freya expresses her disappointment in more violent language, but he refuses to budge. He'll compromise on the music, the guest list, the honeymoon destination, but on this point he remains firm. The Yates book is released to warm, if not gushing, reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Freya demonstrates a new-found satisfaction upon introducing her fiancé at the book launches they attend. He starts asking the waiting staff for whisky rather the proffered wine. Angela calls to say his latest short story has been picked up in the US this time, adding that a contact at the New Yorker emailed, interested in seeing more. According to Angela, the renaissance of Daniel Humphrey could be pebble-sized splash in the literary scene's paddling pool. He gives her non-committal replies, and waits.
.
Eventually, his patience is rewarded. A second thick cream envelope arrives on the doormat the morning he and Freya are due to fly to Venice for a romantic early summer city break. He hides it in his inside jacket pocket, unopened. It's a whole day and a half until he manages to steal an hour by himself, while Freya lies down in their hotel room, recovering from the aftermath of a long lazy lunch washed down with three-too-many bellinis. He sits on the marble steps of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, looking across the Grande Canale toward the intricate façade of the Doge's Palace, and reads the card that's been burning a hole in his chest since they set off for the airport. The message is longer than the last.
"I can't waste my time tracking down every pathetic little collection of pretentious sub-adolescent out-pourings ever written, so my people have had word with the fiction editor at the New Yorker. You can send the next one straight to her. I subscribe."
He laughs, blindsided. He didn't know what he expected, but he likes it that behind the stings and back-handed compliments she surprises him still. He leans back and lets the shimmering lagoon sun-kiss his eyelids. With his eyes half-closed he can pretend, just for a little while, that she's there basking with him.
.
Back in London he writes about a Venetian courtesan. Her beauty and her wit make her the most admired and lauded woman of her age. She is courted by lords and magnates, feted by their wives, painted by artists and immortalised by poets. So esteemed is she for her exquisite loveliness, her vivacity and charm, that she begins to believe herself far, far above all other people. A heavenly goddess with sensibilities too rarefied to mingle amongst ordinary earth dwellers. Even the courts of kings seem to her filled with bores and philistines, so she retreats to her magnificent palazzo where she has a room in which the glimmering reflections of the sun on the canal outside the windows bounce off mirrored glass walls, creating a dazzling salon of flattering light. She orders more looking glasses and has her servants position them around the room so that in every direction her gaze is met with no lesser sight than the stupendous vision of her own reflection. She creates a coterie of reflected selves who are never base in their movements, or coarse in their language. They never wear ugly fashions, or read books she doesn't favour. They agree with her every whim, gracefully nodding their delicate dark-eyed heads, and artfully laughing at her every quip. In time she tires of their lack of new opinions, their endless re-treading of the same old stories. She becomes impatient and cross and her sonority of selves grow petulant and angry in return. She takes to cursing them furiously for the ugliness of their frowns. In response the reflections' once-lovely visages bare their teeth, twisting their features into horrible shapes of disgust and contempt. Half-mad with rage and disappointment she flings herself at the panes of glass, smashing into them with her fists and hands until broken shards fly into the air; into her cheeks, brows and arms. Her tormenters disappear, leaving her lying alone on the sun-streamed floor of her room, bloody and bruised. Centuries later, a legend persists that her spirit still walks the alley ways of Venice at night, a hood raised to cover the scars on her disfigured face.
.
The card comes more quickly this time. "So that's ill-advised power-couple relationships, absent father issues, and Queen Bee complexes done. What's next, Humphrey?"
.
Jenny flops down into her seat at the coffee house, looking exhausted. He expresses concern and asks if her taking on a capsule collection for Liberty is proving too much. His sister retorts tartly that it's not the collection as much as her foolish offer to dress his bride-to-be and her wedding party. He winces in apology. "I'm sorry, is Freya being a nightmare?" "No, it's not that – I like Freya, you know that. It's her uber-conservative mother that's driving me nuts. Her understanding of hemlines is firmly rooted in the 1950s." He pulls a sympathetic face, and momentarily rests his eyes on the steamed up window as Jenny places her order.
"Hey," she begins unexpectedly, jolting him out of a reverie, "I meant to say, I really liked your story."
"Which one?"
"The last one, about the two sisters – the busty blonde and the brainy brunette?"
"The characterisation was a little more subtle than that."
Jenny grins wickedly underneath her fringe as she lowers her head to sip her latte. "Yeah, well. Your codes aren't all that hard to crack. I can spot veiled references to a fatuous former step-sister and her bitch best friend a mile off."
The allegory had been a tad obvious, he had to admit - the cream card that had followed it had practically contained an eyeroll – however, he still stood by the execution.
"At least you're safe from reprisals," Jenny continued, "I mean, the only magazine Serena buys is Vogue, and as for the Princess, well… she might have a minion read the society pages of Paris Match to her while fanning her with a palm leaf, I suppose, but other than that…"
He holds up a warning hand. Jenny shuts up, shooting him an incredulous look. "Really, Dan? Still?"
He gulps a larger than necessary mouthful of coffee and mutters, "She's not what you think."
His sister raises her eyebrows, indicating her disbelief, but leaves it there.
.
Some of the postmarks are from Monaco but most are from Paris, indicating that she spends more time away from the marital seat than in it. He takes to scouring the pages of Hello for scraps of information about her life, but while he learns a great deal about her choice in handbags, he gleans very little about the Grimaldis' living arrangements. In the end, he admits defeat and calls the only person he can think of who can be trusted to help him and ask no questions.
Eric is surprised to hear his voice, they haven't really spoken since their parents' divorce, but he's still Eric – open, accepting and ready to do what he can. Within two days, Eric sends him an email with the address he asked for. Eric, sage as ever, signs off with the words, "Be careful."
While Freya is with her mother at the florist, he sits at the study desk in the Georgian town house Richard Yates inadvertently helped him buy, and dashes off a note. He can hardly explain to himself why it's so important to tell her. Why he's gone to these lengths to find the means. He has no expectation that anything at all will be changed by her reading the words. He visualises her disinterested frown as her eyes skim the page, he sees the fingers of her hand close carelessly around the paper, and imagines the crumpled remains tossed lightly into a waste paper basket, before she continues, unperturbed, with the business of her day.
He stares at the hastily written sheet in front of him, its message striking him as falling somewhere between pathetically plaintive and bathetically banal. "I'm getting married next Saturday. Dan" Before he can change his mind, he shoves the paper in an envelope, scrawls her married name and the Parisian apartment address acquired via Eric on the front, and adds "PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL" for good measure in the top left-hand corner. He deposits it in a post box on the high street and drinks a double scotch in the pub on the corner before returning home.
.
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