Free The Jewel Box by Anna Davis Page B

you’re right, that’s his misfortune.”
    He speared a piece of beef, but just sat there with it stuck on the end of his fork, so that she found her gaze attracted tothe hand that held the fork. He had a plain silver ring on his little finger. A sprinkling of golden hairs on his skin. “You’re a hard woman,” he said now. “What made you so hard?”
    “There was someone who died. But that’s not exactly unusual, is it? Not at the moment. Not in this country. Everyone has lost someone, and it’s no real reason for being ‘hard,’ as you put it. Perhaps I’ve always been that way.”
    “Are you trying to present me with a challenge?” That chunk of beef was still suspended there, on his fork.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You want that I should prize my way into your armor? Open you up like a can of sardines?”
    “Can’t you find a more lyrical simile? You’re a writer, after all. If you’re attempting to romance me, you could try to be a little more poetic about it.”
    He leaned forward very slightly. “Come on. You’re not interested in all that flannel, are you? It’s something else that you want from me.”
    “Really? What is it that I want from you?”
    “You want to be known. Really known .”
    “Oh. I thought you were going to say something interesting then.”
    O’Connell chuckled lightly, before putting the forkful of beef into his mouth and beginning to chew. Grace watched his mouth. Thought about his mouth. How it might taste.
    “He went a bit wild after The Vision came out,” said Margaret, over her lunch of curried haddock at the Carlton. “All that money. You know how it is.” (As if either of them could possibly know, Grace thought, toying with a limp salad.)
    “Cars. Women. Parties. Fights. He was always being thrown out of hotels. He got himself banned from a small town inPennsylvania in—oh, I think that must have been about 1920. And he was arrested once, in France. Down on the Riviera. First there was a fight with the proprietor of a restaurant. Fists flying, plates thrown. Then, when they threw him and his friends out, he climbed up on top of a statue of a horse and started shouting and singing. Refused to come down. In the end the police had to fetch a ladder and drag him down. He bought his way out of trouble, of course.”
    “Of course.”
    “There was a woman called…Henrietta, I think her name was. She was with him in France that summer. She was married…to a senator, if I’m remembering correctly. That was quite a scandal. She was the basis for Helena Doherty in Hell and Helena, his third novel. Have you read that one?”
    “I’ve only read The Vision, ” said Grace. “What happened to Henrietta?”
    “She went back to her husband,” said Margaret. “He got quite a lashing in the papers about all that. People were jealous, you see. Of his money—the way he was living. All of it. But then he went quiet.”
    She’d finished her curried haddock and was eyeing the dessert trolley. Grace called the waiter over, but it took a long time for her to decide between some profiteroles, a chocolate and cream gâteau and an apple pie. In the end the gâteau prevailed.
    “You say he went quiet? What do you mean?”
    “Just that. People said he was burned out. You know, in the newspapers and all that. Unruly Son and Hell and Helena —they just didn’t do very well. Not compared with The Vision. The critics didn’t like them much and they didn’t sell so many copies. I liked them, of course, but then I’m not most people. Everybody wanted him to write another like The Vision. Perhaps,in the end, it started getting to him. Or perhaps he just ran out of money—I don’t know. But he sort of vanished. All those stories—the playboy antics—it all stopped. Nobody really knows what he’s been up to these last few years. Every now and then there’s a rumor that he’s written something new. That’s what they’re all waiting for. People want him to fulfill his