Nell shifted uneasily. "Oh, you don't want to know all that."
"Not if you really don't want to tell me. But I wouldn't - I wouldn't mind, Nell. How could I?" I slid nearer, my head resting just below her chin. She curled her arm around me.
"None of it is as charming as yours," she cautioned.
I snorted softly. "One's own stories never seem 'charming'."
"Oh, I know - and that wasn't the best word, either, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to reduce things like that. But you come out of it perfectly well, and more than that. I... don't." She fell silent, looking up towards the ceiling.
"I'm not going to judge you," I murmured firmly. She turned her face down to mine, kissed my forehead gently.
Several moments passed. "Nell, you don't have to-"
"I want to," she interrupted, her voice as firm as my own had been. "I'm just deciding where to begin." She gave me another absent-minded kiss, smoothed my hair away from my face with those wonderful hands, strong and gentle. My stomach lurched.
"I don't think I was so much like you, Con. I quite agree about the paucity of language - it made it difficult then, and it still makes it difficult now - but I knew, very clearly, that how I felt and what I wanted - who I wanted, and how - wasn't at all what was considered 'normal'. I can't really remember not knowing that I was different. I can't even remember when I first understood it was a difference not to be remarked upon - because it always was, as I knew it; I know what you mean about that trial, and it changed a lot, of course it did. But what it changed most for us was the opportunity for hiding in plain sight.
"There were two women who shared a house two streets away from us. We didn't know them as such, but I saw them about, and they came to our church. I remember thinking they were ancient, though thinking about it now probably neither of them had yet reached forty. I can't have been more than twelve, because the War wasn't over yet, but I knew there was something about these two women, that was about me too. I knew I wanted to grow up and set up home like they had."
She broke off for a moment, and I stayed still and quiet, waiting for her to continue.
"It's hard to explain how I knew it was different from just two friends, living together - because of course so many women were only that, and even more since then. And I really was only a child - it wasn't that I was even slightly thinking about - you know. But I had friends, and I had a sister, and I knew that what I wanted wasn't just to live with a friend, or a sister - and I knew that was what these two women were doing. They weren't filling time, or making do. I suppose they must have been in love, and I must have seen it, even as people much older didn't see it at all - or maybe they only pretended not to."
"Things were much more blurred together then," I speculated.
"Yes," Nell agreed. "Or at least, they could be blurred more easily. They mostly still looked rather clear-cut to me."
I smiled. How Nell! "I expect they would," I agreed. "Anyway, I do think this is quite charming so far. Dreamy young Nell scouting out the aged local inverts and envisaging her own quietly radical life..."
She gave an impressively quiet peal of laughter. "Something like that. That's the end of the charming part, though. Then follows a number of years in which, in spite of keeping my eyes open, I failed to find a likely contender for sharing this quietly radical future with. Then I started at the School of Economics -"
"And what better place to find your co-radical?" I teased, then immediately recalled myself. "Oh, I'm sorry Nell. You listened so quietly to me, and now here I am, rudely interrupting all over the place! I'll hush now."
She shook her head. "You don't have to. Your distractions are always welcome - ahem!" - this last exclamation as I ran my fingertips gently down the far side of her torso.
I tried to sound contrite. "Oh. Not that kind of distraction, then?"
"Well, we could, but it would certainly necessitate a proper break from this yarn..."
"You drive a hard bargain, Nell Wilson. How about you give me the short version and then we..."
Nell's attempts at sternness were no more effective than my contrition. "You were right, child, your manners are appalling. I shall send you off to your own bed in a minute."
I chuckled and removed the offending hand from its precarious position on her hip, laying it gently across her cheek instead and leaning to kiss her firmly on the lips. "All right. Now tell me about the School of Economics."
A smile spread across her face. "'Mid-way through my second term, I met Harry..."
"Harry?"
"Harry was in my Meteorology class. It was some time before we ever actually talked - I was really only interested in the teaching, being content to get my fill of chatter from the hockey club. But I would see him around - he favoured the same corner of the refectory of me, and he was - oh, he was like no one I'd ever met before. He was gregarious and witty. He was so fast - everything about him was fast: his speech, his brain, the way he whirled from lecture hall to bar to members' club and back again. He had a flat of his own just off Kingsway, and took home a different boy every week - not counting the ones he never actually took home." Nell held her breath, waiting for my reaction. I waited, too.
"We had a lot in common, and also a lot we were completely at odds over, but I grasped very quickly that the things we had in common were rarer and more important. I had grown up in London, more or less - my parents' home was in Ealing: but Harry showed me a completely different London - it was like a hidden world, Con. I suspect it was the kind of place your Edith was looking for."
"Was it what you were looking for?" I tried to keep my voice level. Jealousy, distaste and fascinated awe simmered below the surface. I remembered my promise to not judge.
"In the end, not exactly. And I - I lapsed, badly, repeatedly. But it offered so many possibilities, and I learned a lot. I clarified a lot of things in my mind."
I tried to picture it - the gaudy colours and the gay dancing and the shrieks of laughter; the bright lights and the darkened rooms; the relief at being 'home' and the fear of being caught; the gin and the snuff and the men wearing lipstick and the fumbling in corners, and there in the midst of it all, Nell.
"It probably won't surprise you to learn that it wasn't entirely my scene," she continued at this point - had she been there in that reverie with me? - one hand idly running through the loose hairs at the nape of my neck. "I belonged, because they were like me - but I also didn't belong, because it all felt so unlike me. Maybe that's how it was for everyone - I don't know. I had fun, but I knew it wasn't how I wanted to spend my whole life. In any case, I knew I would have to work. There were ways and means of staying in that lifestyle without work, but, well..." She trailed off.
I laughed. "No, I can't quite picture you settling for anything like that."
"No, indeed. I - I had some offers, but I cared too deeply, and I always wanted the wrong things. Anyway, it wasn't so long until Cherry became ill - really ill, this time - and I stopped going out to those places. I went to my lectures and studied my books and every spare moment, I went straight home to see her."
She stopped and I wrapped my arm around her tightly. "Oh, my love. I know. I know."
At length, Nell continued. "I didn't miss it, and not just because I was distracted by more important things. I don't - I don't want to talk about that time, if you don't mind; it's not part of this story, it's just an interruption. Less than eighteen months after Cherry began to sicken, there was nobody left at home for me any more. I had finished my and there was nothing, in every aspect of my life, nothing but this great void. So of course, I went back to Soho, and to Fitzrovia, all the familiar old places, and faces, looking for somewhere that might feel like home...
"It's like a circus, Con. Such bawdiness and hedonism but underneath it all is so much shared pain, mostly unacknowledged. I didn't ever forget myself, even for a moment, but I could at least pretend to. I could fill my time, keep the darkness at bay... There are no names in my story, do you see? I didn't know their names, or if I did I couldn't be sure they were real ones."
She broke off, again, and I waited for her to come back through the mists of time.
"Then a number of things happened, which weren't really connected, but began to nudge me along a little. There was a police raid on a club I was in at the time - I didn't get caught up in it, they were much more interested in the insolvent young men, but it felt like a warning. The Well of Loneliness thing came not long afterwards - it was all anyone talked about, until the lights dimmed and they stopped talking altogether. All the meanwhile, what money I had was slipping away. And then one Saturday afternoon I was walking alone through Hampstead, where I'd spent a night, or maybe it had even been two nights, when I bumped into an old schoolteacher of mine. It was strange, but pleasant, to speak with someone who still knew me from before - who didn't know what had happened - as if it were more authentically me, somehow. After I'd filled her in on my studies since leaving school, she wondered aloud why I wasn't either researching or teaching, and I realised perhaps that would be my way back, because I couldn't go on as I had. So I pulled myself together and got myself a job at a High School down in Devon. I wanted a clean break from everything - I let out the house in Ealing through an agency my father had had business dealings with, and took a room near the school.
"I taught mostly general subjects, with an emphasis on Maths - they were not, I think, much interested in girls learning Science, though I tried to surreptitiously include such snippets as I could. It wasn't entirely a labour of love, but it was good for me: I practised explaining my bereavement, or fending off questions, and I quietly reacquainted myself with God. I liked the local area very much, and I began to think that this new life wasn't such an awful compromise. I was lonely, and grieving, and I even missed the cameraderie of Fitzrovia, but it seemed like a way of living I could get used to.
"I had been there just over a year when a new Senior Mistress joined the staff. She took an instant dislike to me, and I couldn't fathom it at first; it took me more than a month to realise we'd met before. She looked," and here bitter amusement rang through in Nell's voice, "rather different, in her teaching attire. I suppose she was terrified for herself - or disgusted - or both. She never actually spoke to me. I stayed there another year, equally terrified of what she might let slip, or how she might squash me to save her own skin, while I tried to work out what to do next. Everything I had been running away from was catching up with me, and I wondered if it was really possible for an 'invert' to be a teacher. But what else could I do? I knew I certainly couldn't marry. I didn't want to be the dependent companion to some cosseted rich woman. And while I was hugely fortunate to have a home of my own, I wouldn't have had the means to heat it, or eat, without working.
"At that point I saw the advert for the position at the Chalet School. It seemed perfect: I would be able to teach the subjects I actually wanted to teach - they were already proposing a proper set of labs! -and it was further away. How could any awkward acquaintances catch up with me in Austria? Then Madge herself - Madge was loveliness personified. I told some half-truths, rather than outright lies, and of course she had also lost both her parents - much younger than I."
"Oh, Nell," I whispered, moved by the honesty of her account. "You've seen so much."
"Half of it I wish I'd never known," she responded, her low voice even lower than usual, "and the other half is largely over-rated. Still, here I am! Lived to tell the tale." She squeezed my hand gently. "I don't want you to - to worry over what to say, or anything. I'm not so fragile, and I didn't mean for tonight to become so serious, either."
I kissed her again. "We don't have to stay serious, if you don't want to..."
"Now that, my dear, is an excellent suggestion."