Page 11 of These Old Lies
A reminder that was immediately forgotten when Ned saw the latest guest to enter the ballroom.
Charlie was wearing a freshly pressed, sober brown suit. His haircut and close shave showed he must’ve gone to the barber for the occasion. Ned tried not to read too much into the effort Charlie had made—dancing at Claridge’swas one of the most exclusive events in all of London, after all. On his arm was a petite woman looking every bit the Cinderella out at the ball, immaculately done up, eyes like saucers as she took in every inch of the elegant ballroom. As Charlie navigated his way across the ballroom, he had that cocky half smile that Ned recognized as the one he used to hide his nerves.
Ned locked eyes with Charlie and nodded. He could feel Hugh sigh beside him.
Charlie approached the table stiffly. “Good evening, Mr Pinsent. I wanted to thank you again for the invitations.” He glanced towards the woman beside him with a mixture of pride and affection, giving Ned a surprisingly sharp pang of jealousy that he knew he had no right to feel. “Please let me introduce you to Miss Elizabeth Townsend.”
“The pleasure is all mine, especially when you bring lovely visions like this.” Ned smiled and extended his hand. “I wish I could match Charlie’s elegant introduction, but we aren’t very formal here. You simply must promise me that you will call me Edmund.”
Charlie’s date wasn’t dressed in the latest fashions, but there was a vibrant colour to her flowing dress. She extended her own hand in a firm grip. “In that case, you must call me Betty. I don’t think I would know Elizabeth Townsend if I met her on the street.”
Ned found himself laughing. Nervous this woman might be, intimidated she was not. “I would be delighted and honoured. And please, join us for a drink. We can’t finish this champagne all by ourselves. Or rather we could, but then we wouldn’t have an excuse to get another bottle.”
There was the obligatory shuffling around the booth as everyone made room, then Freddy asked, “Any bets about whether dashing Prince Edward will show up?”
“Ignore my brother, he wants to make the gossip pages as having been in the same event as one of the royal mistresses. Mother will have absolute kittens!” Sophie responded with a roll of her eyes.
“Exactly, darling. And remove you from your pedestal as the most shameful child. You’ve been there far too long after that swimming incident!” Freddy teased.
“I maintain those swimming costumes were at the height of fashion. The amount of leg shown was incidental.” Sophie waived her hand as if she could physically dismiss the objections.
“The other swimmers at the lido didn’t agree. You nearly caused a riot, Soph,” Hugh continued.
“Maybe you should start making fancy bathing caps, Charlie,” Betty bantered without hesitation. “Clearly they are at the frontier of fashion.”
“Who says I’m the one that makes the custom orders?” Charlie replied flippantly.
“I would eat my own hat if it were anyone else.” Where did Ned’s certainty come from? Except he knew, the way he knew the sky was blue, that it was Charlie who had crafted those damn hats. “What I don’t understand is why you don’t put them out at the shop’s front.”
Betty nodded. “I keep telling him the same thing. They would sell like ice in July.”
Charlie ducked his head. “Those hats would send my father to an early grave. I take on the custom orders to just keep myself from getting bored.”
Ned leaned forward. “If you’re bored, why don’t you go do something else?”
Charlie’s blue eyes flashed with challenge. “Why don’t you, Ned?”
“Ned?!!” Freddy almost spilt his drink. “What?”
“Don’t look at me, first I have ever heard of this.” Hugh raised his hands in the air, protesting innocence.
“Stop being so dramatic, you two.” Ned tried to keep his voice casual, secretly thankful that he didn’t have to respond to Charlie’s question. “Ned is a perfectly normal nickname for Edmund. It is what they called me in the trenches.”
It wasn’t. They called him Pinsent in the trenches. Ned was what his brother had called him. And then Charlie.
“Is this where you reveal he has been a Bolshevik spy all along?” Sophieasked archly.
Charlie laughed and turned to Betty. “I think we’ve created enough chaos here. Shall we dance, my dear?”
Betty’s face broke out in a matching grin. “What took you so long to ask?”
There was no hesitation between Charlie and Betty as they started twirling and kicking the energetic Charleston. They might not have been the most fashionable or flashiest couple on the dance floor, but even Ned’s untrained eye could tell they were some of the best dancers out there. They had a joy, a grace in their movements, that no one else could match. They knew instinctively where the other would be. It was like watching a single form twirl. Male and female, moving together exactly as society expected.
A vivid memory of what it felt like when Charlie’s physicality had been turned on him sprang to Ned’s mind. How their legs intertwined, how Charlie’s hands had gripped and guided him. Watching Charlie’s easy comfort with a woman in his arms showed how much Charlie had turned to Ned as a make-do solution, nothing more.
If Ned was honest with himself, Charlie wasn’t classically attractive. His bone structure was a bit too big, his hair too curly, his freckles too working class. But seeing Charlie dance reminded Ned of all the reasons he found the other man so magnetic. He had this physicality, a combination of strength and grace, that Ned had seen in no other man. Charlie was a man comfortable in his own skin, in its imperfections and flaws as well as its capacities and strengths.
Ned finished off his cocktail in one gulp and turned back to Hugh, Freddy, and Sophie and their ping-pong of witticisms.