Page 12 of These Old Lies

A good half hour later, Betty arrived back at their table, flushed and smiling. “You were magnificent!” Sophie cooed. “However do you move your legs like that? I always find myself getting tangled up.”

“It’s nothing. Charlie and I go down to the local dances quite a bit. Nothing as elegant as this.” Now that Betty was fully relaxed, Ned realised with a start that, unlike his friends, Betty was probably closer in age to Ned’s and Charlie’s near thirty than she was to Sophie’s shiny twenty. It once would have been an oddity for such a lively woman to be unmarried at that age, but not after the war. Ned felt a pang of unexpected kinship. This woman also knew what it was to come to age when the world had turned upside down.

“We count ourselves lucky to have been graced with your presence tonight, Betty.” Ned forced a smile to his face.

“I thought I was going to faint when Charlie told me where he had tickets to. I didn’t even know he knew someone like yourself.”

Ned tried to hide the flinch at hearing that Charlie had never mentioned him.

Betty put her hand gently on his arm. “That came out all wrong. I guess I should have said that Charlie never talks about the war.” She spoke so genuinely that Ned couldn’t help but be happy for Charlie to have found someone like this.

“There’s never as much to say as people think.”

“That’s exactly what Charlie says.” Betty paused. “But I know he was sure happy when you walked into the shop a few weeks ago.”

Ned could only hope. As if sensing what he was thinking, Betty tilted her head towards the door. “He said to tell you he had gone for some fresh air.”

???

Ned found Charlie standing on one of the terraces, back to the twinkling lights of the ballroom, looking out to the busy Park Lane. He walked toward Charlie, enjoying the relief from the heat and the noise inside. “Betty’s lovely. Truly,” he said quietly.

Charlie lit a new cigarette, took a puff, and then passed it over to Ned. “I understand.”

“What?” Ned tried to stifle a cough. Why did Charlie insist on smoking these horrible cheap things?

“Why you spend your time with these friends, with Hugh. They are so… joyful.”

“Do you think we were ever like that?”

Ned could feel Charlie shrug. “I enlisted in August ’14, two days after my eighteenth birthday.”

“You were twenty when you first propositioned me in that French alleyway?”

Charlie grinned. “I was a quick study.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been seduced that efficiently before or since.”

“Well, you’d been staring at me the whole evening, so I don’t think my skills really made any difference. You could barely walk with that cock-stand. Fucking indecent, it was.”

Ned snorted and then took a few more puffs of the cigarette. “I had finished university when the call went out. But I don’t think I had perfected the art of happiness. Maybe I would have if I’d been given the time. There are those that came back from the war who rage at these parties, at the inconsequence of dancing and champagne. I cling to them.”

Charlie nodded. “You taught me that.”

“I thought we were talking about your precocious nature? I shan’t be so bold as to think I taught you anything.”

Charlie glanced over to Ned with a sly smile. “Do you remember that night outside of St. Riquier? In that god-awful tavern? You taught me a lot about what makes life worth living that night.”

Ned remembered every minute of that night. “Yes, of course I do.”

Charlie stomped out the cigarette butt. “I always wondered what the name of the novel was. It was set in Italy.”

“A Room with a View.”

Ned could hear a peal of laughter from the ballroom. He really should be back inside, not baring his soul to someone he once knew. He looked towards the inky blackness of Hyde Park. “We seem constitutionally incapable of having a normal social conversation.”

Charlie barked out laughter. “Like you would even want to have one.” And then he said, “Ned?”

“Yes?”