Title: Jessa Called Jay
Chapter 3: The Sparkle of Sea Glass
Author: Elliott Silver
Note: Again, many thanks to all my readers, for inspiration and comments.
/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /
Phryne Fisher wakes up with the sun in her eyes.
She immediately pulls the duvet over her head and groans. Her head spins and stomach whirls.
She feels vile and thinks, I am too old for this.
Too old for so much green chartreuse and champagne.
The night before is a blur, but she does remember breaking one of her cardinal rules: never drink anything that's a different color than your dress.
She curls under the covers and revels in the silence. Normally the milkman would wake her at six, or the newspaper at seven, but today there are no such disruptions. There are no unruly lovers, ringing telephones, or clattering workmen to disturb her. There's no Mr. Butler to shush them all and fail gallantly. In fact, there isn't even road traffic to break her perfect wall of silence.
She knows why that is. Her side of the street is silent, two houses vacant, left empty by the Depression even in the posh suburb of St. Kilda. She was informed that the Edwards family at the end of the street had pulled a "midnight flit," disappearing into the night to avoid their unpaid rents. Where there were night clubs and gin bars, now there are breadlines and soup kitchens, swagmen and shanties, "bandicooting" and "snowdropping." No one dances now, not the waltz, the Charleston, or the tango; but every day men walk the "hungry mile."
This certainly isn't what she expected when she returned to Melbourne.
Then what had she expected?
Not this, is the only answer she has. Not Melbourne, in tears and tatters. Not Jack Robinson, engaged.
No, certainly not that, she thinks, and feels sick with it.
The world she has imagined, the one she left, has gone sideways under her feet and she hasn't yet regained her balance.
She was hoping Jack would help her with that, putting things right that effortless way he always could, leading as he did when they waltzed together. She was hoping to breathe his scent as he spun her away and then pulled her to him. She was hoping for the touch of his lips, the warmth of his mouth on bare skin, the nip of teeth as they joined, the rush of their hearts as they settled together.
She was hoping for more than waking up alone.
Footsteps tap up the stairs, pounding in unison with her headache, and her bedroom doors squeals open.
"Go away," she says from beneath the bedsheets.
"Yes, and it's nice to see you too, Phryne."
The no-nonsense voice of Elizabeth MacMillan echoes in the room as the doctor throws the covers from the bed and surveys its limp inhabitant with her hands on her hips.
Phryne remains prostrate on the bed.
"What was it this time?"
"Chartreuse and champagne," she groans.
"That'll do it."
She hears Mac floundering in her cases, searching for what she hopes is a robe. She fell into bed wearing only her tap pants, which upsets Mac none but is a bit chilly for conversation. Her dress from the night before hangs inside out on the back of her dressing-chair, a trail of red feathers like bloody footsteps leading from door to bed to chair.
"Coffee?" Mac queries as she delves through a startling array of French lingerie.
Phryne's stomach does a slow roll and she shakes her head.
"Tea then."
Mac finally excavates something with a grunt of approval and throws it to her. Black silk cascades over her arms as the doctor turns and thumps down the steps. The robe is an old favorite, the one with the fighting cocks on it, but it's begun to show its age, a small cigarette burn in the right cuff, the elaborate embroidery unraveling so that the wings of the one bird have come undone, preventing him from flight.
The robe is not unlike herself, she supposes.
She slips the silk over her pale body, ignoring the way her skin has become less taut and more soft in the last years. She's altogether a softer woman than when she left in 1929, one that is plush and sensuous, one that lacks such hard edges.
Below Phryne hears the screech and clatter of the kettle and tea set. She wants to stay in bed, but she knows Mac well enough to know that the doctor will physically throw her from it if she stays here. Mac's done it before. She's a great believer in the idea that exercise cures all.
Phryne pads downstairs in her bare feet to find Mac lounging in the parlor, drinking tea and reading the Melbourne Times. The doctor looks up when she appears and bends forward to pour her a cup, mixing in four sugar cubes and a heavy dollop of cream. She hands it to her with two packets of aspirin.
Phryne takes the cup gratefully, swallows the aspirin, and tucks herself into the mahogany armchair.
"What are you doing here?" she asks, though perhaps it would be more fitting if it was Mac asking her.
Mac folds the paper and sets it on the tea tray. The doctor considers her carefully, almost surgically.
"Jay asked me to check on you."
"Jay Tayler?"
"Yes, why?"
"Why would she care?"
"I imagine because she's the one that drove you home last night, or do you not remember that?"
"She drove me home?"
Phryne sobers up remarkably quickly, and it has nothing to do with the tea.
"So you don't remember."
Mac pins her with a fierce gaze.
The truth is, Phryne does remember, though she very much doesn't want to.
She remembers the way that Jack Robinson walked away from her without so much as backward glance. She remembers reaching for champagne from one of the servers, and then reaching for two more before she was brash enough to ask a bright young constable to dance, and having one more before his partner swung her a bit too enthusiastically into the Charleston. She remembers the feathers on her dress flying; she remembers the room whirling.
Bu she also remembers the darkness behind her as he answered the door, the way Jack stood not in shadow but in light. She remembers how grey his hair is now, not the crop on his head but the whorls on his bare chest when he opened the door. She remembers how she wanted to touch him, to kiss the sleep off his mouth, to take him back to bed.
She remembers the way his ring glitters on another woman's finger, and perhaps, more unusually, his gun in her hands.
"I went to see him," Phryne defends. "I didn't know she would be there."
"She usually is."
"But they're not married."
Mac rests back and her gaze becomes harder. Phryne can almost feel the doctor probing inside her head, and if she is, Phryne wishes she would root around and stop the alcohol from drumming about in there.
"When did you become such a prude?"
Phryne tosses her head, but the movement only makes her skull hurt.
Mac leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees.
"What did you think, Phryne? That you would show up and seduce yourself back into his arms?"
The doctor exhales.
"Into his bed?"
"I've never been in his bed," Phryne refutes honestly, though it pains her to do so. (Truly, he's been in hers, but she wasn't in it at the time.)
"More's the pity," the red-head replies evenly.
"Mac!" she blurts out. "Did you – ?"
The doctor waves her away, but Phryne knows she had always harbored feelings for the detective, despite being a devoted discipline of Sappho. She's always cared for him, sometimes Phryne wonders if not a little too much.
"Then what happened?" she asks.
"You left," Mac answers her simply.
It seems everyone is telling her that, she thinks tiredly.
Phryne can't argue with her. She understands all too well the male need for female company. What she doesn't understand is why it has to be more than that. Why does it have to be about more than pleasure? Why does anything in life have to be?
After all she and Jack have shared, she can't understand what the blonde possesses that she does not.
In the background the front door rattles and the newly-hired maid scuffles towards it.
"What does he see in her?"
Mac opens her mouth and then closes it.
"What did he see in you?"
Phryne twists around to see Jay Tayler haloed in the doorway to her parlor, not having heard the door open or the maid escort her in.
(She makes a mental note to fire the maid.)
The reporter glows in the sun. Her bright hair sparkles as much as her unusual eyes. Today they are the bright color of sea glass, something sharp and broken polished smooth over time. She wears a smart navy suit of Crêpe de Chine, edged with a lavender satin collar and sash that nips in at her waist. A navy cloche sits rakishly on her head. Tiny amethyst drops swing on the lobes of her ears.
The diamond ring sparkles on the third finger of her left hand.
Phryne pushes her head back against the velvet of the chair's upholstery and considers the woman in front her. There's something vibrant about her, a relentless energy that dazzles, that electrifies, something that pulls at you.
Jay lets her look, though Phryne only feels dull in comparison.
"How are you feeling?"
"Fine," Phryne lies through her teeth. Her stomach twists with the effort of it. She knows she should feel embarrassed at being caught out so blatantly, but in the bright morning sun she can't bring herself to feel anything other than an ache that spans from her head to her heart.
Phryne can't bring herself to feel contrite. She didn't come here for that, she didn't come back for this.
"I hear I owe you thanks," she says grudgingly. "For driving me here. Jack could have done that."
She watches the reporter take in the way she uses his name, the intimate way she breathes it in and out, but her eyes do not waver.
Phryne remembers only too late what glass really is – fire and sand burned so hot that it fuses and becomes crystalline, until it sparkles, until it cuts.
Jay looks to Mac, who looks away, and then back to Phryne.
Something shifts slightly. Phryne sees it in the way the woman's spine straightens, the way her eyes narrow. Phryne realizes all too late that Jay Tayler is less a pretty porcelain doll than an Amazonian warrior.
"You don't know what happened, do you?" she asks.
The room seems to hold still for just a second (perhaps a lifetime), before she continues.
"Jack rarely drives," Jay replies. "And he hardly ever dances."
Phryne realizes she is holding her breath, though she doesn't know why.
"Patellar fracture – " Mac begins and is swiftly interrupted by Jay.
"He almost died."
Phryne feels the sharpness of the words as she was meant to. Her lungs burn, and even her heart holds still. It stops beating, then soldiers on, traitorously. It's terrible for her to imagine a world without Jack Robinson in it. In truth, she doesn't want to. She can't.
"I didn't know."
"Why would you?" Jay asks. "You left."
She says it a way that no one has before, reminding Phryne that it was not so much the passive absence as the physical leaving that mattered. There is no malice in her voice, but Phryne feels something even more brutal, honesty.
Phryne rises, crossing her arms around her chest as if it will hide what's breaking beneath.
"You don't want me here."
"I don't want you to break his heart," Jay answers. "Again."
The diamond ring glitters in the light as the reporter turns and leaves.
The door shuts and echoes reverberate in the empty space. The sound ricochets in her head.
Phryne sits back down. She thinks she'd better.
Opposite, Mac pulls a silver flask from her coat pocket and takes a larger swing than just after noon calls for. Then she takes another. She doesn't offer it to Phryne, though she thinks she could use it.
After a silence the doctor speaks.
"You've always cared about your own happiness," Mac tells her. "And it's served you well."
She caps the flask and tucks it into her pocket as she rises.
"But you can't expect life to stand still while you're gone."
"I know."
"No, you don't," Mac replies. "You don't know what he went through, and you don't know what she did."
/ - / - / - / - /
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