4. 'Clothesline'
Clothesline, noun: 1. One who tells neighborhood gossip, 2. A weaver of tales
Many hours later, the chilled morning breeze had turned into an East Coast midday heat, replete with humidity, and the room was once again stifling. Mary could almost believe their tryst in the cool dawn had been a dream, if it weren't for her recollections in the minutest detail. She pondered this as she reached for more water, the hangover that had eluded her earlier finally, spitefully present.
Mary tried to sit up without waking her partner, but it was rather difficult with his arm weighing across her waist. It was even more difficult when that arm tightened around her as Richard opened his eyes, rather intent on keeping her where she was at his side. She started to roll her eyes in response until she realized the gesture was actually painful when combined with her ringing headache. "Gin is a very bad thing," she commented hoarsely.
"Funny," he replied with a leer, "I feel fine."
"I felt fine earlier," she said enviously, "but the effects of the liquor have made a viscous return."
"Serves you right for tormenting me when I was feeling less than alert."
"I didn't hear you complain too vigorously," Mary stated in as provocative a tone as she could muster. "I'm sure the flapper children are out dancing rings in the garden, as fresh as a spring morning."
He chuckled. "Only because they weren't up at dawn indulging in another kind of dancing."
She quirked an eyebrow, their banter waking her up as a strong coffee might and enjoying catching him in an error: "I thought you said euphemisms were the refuge of the inexperienced."
"True," he conceded. "Let me correct myself: your friends passed the evening… what did you call it? 'Barneymugging,' or something equally horrific. We spent the night fucking each other into oblivion."
"Now that's something for your column. Though I still think the 'oblivion' part is more attributable to the gin."
"Do you?" he asked, nibbling on her ear.
"Well, at least partially," she acknowledged. "I won't say that was the most I have ever had to drink in one sitting, but it certainly ranks high on the list."
"Mm, do tell, Lady Mary," he mumbled against her cheek, always on the lookout for a good story. "I wasn't aware girls of your background were allowed to have a misspent youth."
"Just a misspent marriage," she replied, "seeing as you're intent on corrupting me. One instance was the night after our wedding, if you'll remember."
"Oh yes…" Richard laughed at the recollection. They had been married less than a day, and were holed up in the few partially-furnished rooms of Haxby, when they decided to raid the dusty racks of Mr. Russell's hidden wine cellar. There were some rather good vintages indeed, though by the second bottle Mary did not care about the year or the origin point in France, and she selected the third bottle based solely on the way the charming label design featuring a crenelated medieval tower topped by a lion made her mind wander to an age when knights wore metal armor instead of clacking on metal typewriter keys. Her laugher at picturing Richard in such an outfit led to them conduct a search of the attic for leftover Russell family relics, and though they found no metal suits to fit his title, they did discovered a pair of rusty old swords that led to a disgracefully shoddy fencing match amidst the cobwebs that nearly knocked over the precious bottle of 1865 Chateau Latour.
"But no," she said, "that doesn't take the prize either. The very worst was ages ago…" she drifted off, her mind still fuzzy. "We were in Venice," she explained, "I was fifteen, and the Bartles were taking their daughter on a trip there to celebrate her debut – she was a bit older – and Margaret invited me along. I readily accepted, very pleased with the chance to travel, and even more pleased because my governess would stay behind with Sybil and Edith, and Margaret was too old to need one."
"I think I can see where this is going," Richard chuckled as he nuzzled her neck, and for a moment the incongruity of the situation and her story was almost too much – here she was, lying naked in bed with her shady newspaperman well after noon, hungover from a night of drinking, amongst other things, telling tales of innocent youthful rebellion. She brought his face up to hers to kiss him, wondering what her younger self would have thought of this strange and stimulating future.
"Oh yes the stars aligned," she said dryly, returning to her story as Richard returned to trailing kisses down her shoulder, "because one night the Bartles were invited to attend a ball, one of those licentious Venetian affairs with masks and costumes that went all night long and was utterly unsuitable for us. So they left us in the hotel with Margaret's maid to supervise, under the clear understanding that we would stay in our room with a quiet dinner and come up with an itinerary for the next day."
"Which you obviously did," he murmured against her collarbone.
"Obviously," Mary echoed. "We were already changing into evening clothes as we watched them board their boat from the window, and were downstairs by the time they were around the bend," she laughed.
"What an irresponsible chaperone," he commented sarcastically, "letting you out on your own."
"Oh Bernice borrowed one of Margaret's gowns and came along! Her maid was quite a resource – not very much older than we were, but with so much more… life experience. I don't think we would have gone if she hadn't egged us on," she theorized as Richard's hand found one of her breasts and his thumb began to tease the nipple into a hard peak. "Margaret had read that all the fun took place on the Lido, so all three of us boarded the public ferry amongst the workers and the common people and went out there, unaccompanied." Mary paused to let the scandalous picture sink in, though Richard seemed more amused than impressed by the tremendous daring such an action required. She covered his hand with her own and moved it down to rest on her waist, feeling he was not paying proper attention to her story and determined to not be distracted.
"After Venice, the Lido was wonderful," she continued, propping up on one elbow to fluff the pillows behind her and trying to contain her amusement at his scowling expression. "We went from ancient gas lamps to an electric carnival in the span of a boat ride. There were all these dazzling lights, and all these people, so much life and movement, a world away from what we were used to. And there were dance halls, and little kiosks selling these drinks called 'spritz,' this bitter kind of fizzy wine. So we got swept up in the crowd moving down the street towards the beach, stopping here for a dance or there for a spritz, and repeating again all the way up to the water. And I danced with some of the most unsavory people. It was terribly common, and utterly marvelous." She recalled the joyful atmosphere, the taste of the ice cream she had eaten as they watched the throngs of people moving along the main street, the feeling of liberation she had felt for the first time in her life. It all felt so gloriously present as she thought about that time long ago, though maybe a small part that atmosphere was present here in this dusty roadhouse.
"I gather that was your first time being drunk?"
"Oh yes, and I vowed the next morning, the last." They shared a knowing look before Mary fell back against the pillows with a laugh that made her head hurt, wishing she had taken her own advice from so many years before. "So we made it to the beach at the end of the street, and it was dark and fairly deserted, and I was dizzy already, so we collapsed in one of the little tents with yet another spritz, watching the waves and listening to the music. I almost think that was more fun than even the dancing – being near the fun but not in the center of it, a quiet moment amongst the revelry. Do you know what I mean?"
He nodded, his hand pressing deeper against her waist in reassuring assent. "I always preferred the sidelines."
"But Margaret was determined to squeeze as much out of this as she could, so pretty soon we were back on the other side of the street and continuing the pattern of drink, then dance, then drink," she laughed. "It seemed to go on forever, but I think of it now and it couldn't have been much more than an hour or two. It wasn't very late and we were back at the hotel with plenty of time to spare, but at the moment it felt like infinity was stretching before us and we were on the cusp of an entirely new era."
"Maybe you were," Richard said.
"Yes, I suppose that's true. Though I remember the boat ride back was dreadful. We were the only ones on the ferry; no one else would leave the color and life of the Lido to go back to the grim old city at that hour. The worst part was that I knew the bright illuminations were behind me and the flickering gas lamps were ahead – it was like returning to a medieval castle after an evening on The Strand, and I woke up the next morning thinking I would never know that bright electric world again."
Mary pondered this for a second, and suddenly thought, of all people, about Patrick. If her life had gone as she initially planned, if she had married the heir, perhaps her prediction would have been correct, and at that very moment she would be ensconced in the gothic splendor of Downton instead of the electric carnival of this creaky Victorian inn. "I don't know what's worse," she mused, "to know a taste of a life you won't have, or to have no idea what you're missing."
"Do you miss it now?" Richard asked.
"No!" she said, laughing at her own theatrical reaction to a night of freedom. "I wouldn't have even wanted a common life on the Lido, a carnival every night. But at the time it made me terribly sad that I would not even have the option to decide."
"I find it hard to believe," Richard said, "that a girl with the wherewithal to escape Venice for the Lido at fifteen would ever feel her options were limited."
"Well I agree with you now," she smiled, "but it's a world of jazz and gin, and then it was Strauss and scones. What about you?" she asked, very content to lie in bed exchanging stories with her husband rather than face the glaring light of day. It was a great luxury, this time spent moored to the roadside inn and unable to continue their journey – with no one to see and nothing to do, they could fritter the day away. And she had to admit, she was as curious about his life before her as he was about her life before him; their histories were so far apart they were both like foreigners in a new territory. "I imagine nights of drinking are part and parcel of the newspaper business, but tell me the worst."
"I would happily tell you the worst if I could remember it," Richard joked, before pausing to think it over. "Actually," he began, "I remember it far too clearly." He sat up and pulled her toward him, so her head rested on his shoulder and her leg snaked around his. "It was the night of my thirtieth birthday…" he began with the flourish of someone who told stories for a living.
"…and you were celebrating," she interrupted.
"No," he corrected, "I was miserable,"
"The transition from being a 'hopper' to a 'face stretcher' too much to take?" He looked at her with the same quizzical gaze she must have given her flapper friends the night before in response to the strange vocabulary. "Thirty is apparently a great dividing line in this culture," she noted helpfully.
"In many cultures probably, though the terminology here is a bit different."
"So," she said, returning to the topic, "you were thirty and miserable."
"Abjectly so. You see, I had set myself the goal of becoming a millionaire by age thirty. And I was nowhere near to achieving it."
"But Richard Carlisle doesn't fail," Mary protested.
"I did then," he said with a firm nod. "Rather spectacularly, if I do say so myself. The foundations were all there, the plan was in place, but things were simply not going as I had envisioned. I was owner and editor of a failing newspaper in Edinburgh, deep in debt, with the cash reserves to keep it going another month, tops."
"You couldn't turn the paper around?"
"I had turned the paper around. Over two years I had taken a dismal, conservative newspaper and made it readable and daring, staffed it with good writers and filled it with interesting news items. And readership continued to fall, and advertising with it."
"What was the problem?" she asked, knowing he still employed such a strategy with new acquisitions.
"No one wanted to read it," he continued, "or be seen reading it. The paper had such a dismal reputation when I bought it that no amount of revitalization could convince people otherwise. I had not realized that appearances were at least as important as content, and no matter what I filled the pages with, the Courier-Times would always appear old-fashioned. But I was just starting to understand that at the time."
"What did you do?" Mary enquired, strangely eager for all to resolve itself. Obviously things had worked out, but imagining Richard as a struggling entrepreneur, celebrating his birthday by fighting off disappointment and debt collectors, made her anxious all the same.
"I took the last of the operating money, called a staff meeting at the local pub, told them the paper was folding and got magnificently, stupendously drunk, alongside everyone else. I figured I could either let the thing limp to the finish line in a few weeks' time or end it there and then with a bang. And if there ever was a time for a scorched-earth, ruinous finale, it was then."
She could not help but laugh at the image of an utterly plastered Richard, in a dreary pub surrounded by his staff, throwing the last of his cash in the bartender's direction while scotch and whiskey flowed like water around them.
"So glad my anguish amuses you," he said wryly.
Putting a hand to her mouth to hide her smile, she replied, "I'm only laughing because it is so… in character. You always turn things to your advantage, and in this case you turned a failure into a spectacle."
He returned her hidden smile with a grin of his own, his eyes telling of memories that defied description. "And it was a spectacle – the managing editor passed out on top of the bar, using the sports editor as a pillow, and the political correspondent stood on a table to announce his intention to run for parliament as chairman of the 'Bugger All' party. I daresay it was the start of the Independent Labour Party coalition," he added drolly. "I, somehow, managed to stagger home, and slept for about twenty-four hours straight."
"Did you wake up with a monumental hangover like I have now?"
He shook his head. "I woke up with the clearest head I'd had in a long while," Richard replied. "Shutting down the paper was the best thing I could have done. I could have continued my efforts to keep it open, raising bits of money here and there and struggling on, for Lord knows how long with nothing to show for it. But irrevocably closing it down, spending all the money left so there was no hope of continuing: that was the solution."
"The solution was a drinking binge?" Mary asked skeptically.
"I forced myself into a corner with only one solution, and it turned out to be the right one. The building the paper was housed in had appreciated in value, so I sold that with enough to pay the bank and make a small profit. I used the money to move all the equipment to a cheaper space outside the city, reconvened the staff and founded my own paper from scratch. Being quite good, like The Courier had been but no one appreciated, the new paper was almost immediately a success."
"A millionaire by forty…" she said.
"Many times over by then."
Mary wondered if Louise and her friends would have similar success. While Richard's drunken revelry had been to some sort of purpose as well as celebration, her cousin's set did not seem to have any of the ambition to achieve more. They were simply pleasure-seekers who aspired to glamour, more like Mary's English aristocrats than the entrepreneurial Americans she expected to encounter in this country.
"What does Reggie do for a living?" she asked, realizing the topic had not come up in her conversation with him the night before.
"He's a junior bonds trader. I don't think he's very good at it though…" Richard trailed off. "I asked him about Federal Highway bonds and all he told me was that it is illegal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes."
"Not very useful investment advice," Mary commented. "Though perhaps you may find that knowledge useful in the future. Speaking of immoral purposes…" Slowly she dropped the sheet she had been hugging against her chest to reveal her bare breasts in invitation, hoping her disheveled hair and cloudy eyes were not too unattractive in the glare of the sunlight.
Richard looked at the picture before him covetously, and she gathered her unkempt appearance would not put him off. "You were my hangover cure; now I get to be yours?"
Raising her eyebrows pointedly in response, she cupped his face and pulled him towards her. Their lips met and she pushed her tongue into his mouth, dancing with his and feeling immeasurably better in his arms. He trailed his hand from her waist down lower, as she twined her fingers in his hair. And then they were rudely interrupted by a loud knock on the door.
"Mary! Cousin Mary!" cried a voice from the other side.
Richard grunted with annoyance and Mary could not help but smirk; perhaps his anguish really did amuse her after all. "Just a minute," she called out and he frowned at her deeply in rebuke. Getting up, she ignored him as she pulled on her robe at the side of the bed and walked to the door. She opened it a fraction to find her distant cousin, bright and smiling in a yellow ensemble. "Good morning, Louise."
"Morning?" the other girl chastised. "It's two o'clock! And I refuse to let you act like old fogies and sleep the day away." Mary had to suppress a raised eyebrow at the word 'sleep;' judging from the rumble of laughter behind her, Richard was not so courteous. "There's a scenic sea port about twenty miles away," Louise continued, "with shopping, so we're driving down to explore. See you downstairs in ten minutes." She spun on her heel and bounded down the stairs, not waiting for a response. She really did remind Mary of Sybil sometimes.
"The touring company demands our presence," Mary said as she picked up her cosmetic bag from the nightstand and headed towards the bathroom.
"Now you're feeling miraculously refreshed?" he called out after her.
"Maybe your hangover cure worked too well."
