‘I wanted to take a nice walk along the river.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You debs are all the same. You like to keep up appearances in those pretty little dresses, but deep down you all want it.’
Without thinking, she slapped him across the face, hard.
‘You bloody little bitch,’ he snarled.
‘Believe me, you deserve a lot worse,’ she said, struggling to open the car door.
‘That’s right, get out.’
‘What a gent!’ she shouted after him as the engine gunned to life and he roared off into the night.
As she stood there on the embankment, watching the tail lights of Harry’s car disappear, it started to spit with rain. Shivering, she folded her arms around her body and cursed the weather, cursed Harry and cursed the whole damn Season. She had no idea where she was and there was no one around to ask. Ahead of her she could see a tramp coming towards her. He shouted something and it frightened her. She turned to walk towards the bridge, but her shoe slipped on the wet ground and she fell on to her hands and knees, smearing the front of her dress with slime.
Picking herself up, she suddenly felt lopsided, and as she looked down, she saw that the heel of one of her shoes had broken off. She kicked off the shoe and threw it angrily into the river, then, realising that it would be easier to walk barefoot, threw the other one in as well.
She hopped off the cobblestones and on to the pavement, which was cold and grainy underfoot. Away from the river the street was busier, and when she stopped and asked a man where the nearest bus stop or tube station was, he pointed across the river, where Putney Bridge station was apparently located.
She shook her head as she walked. How could she have been so stupid, getting herself into that position? She knew that she wasn’t exactly experienced when it came to the opposite sex, but she wasn’t completely clueless either.
When she had finished at Madame Didiot’s school, she had moved into a small rented room belonging to a friend of a friend. Liberated from flower-arranging classes and shorthand tuition, she had begun slipping in to lectures at the Sorbonne – she wasn’t officially enrolled at the famous Parisian university, but her French had been good enough to talk her way out of trouble on the one occasion she had been asked for her student card – and it was here, in the back row of a lecture theatre in her last week in Paris, that she had met Jacques.
Afterwards they had shared a post-lecture cigarette in the quadrangle, where he had invited her for coffee to discuss the finer points of Molière. He was twenty-one, from Nice, and liked to think of himself as a communist. A few days later he had taken her to a jazz club, and then to a dive bar on the Left Bank, where they had stayed until 3 a.m. with a group of his friends discussing freedom of the arts in the Soviet Union.
On her last night in Paris they had gone for beer and moules in a café on the Left Bank where Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to drink. They had wandered over the Seine, across the Pont des Arts towards the Louvre, where they had kissed quite passionately in the doorway of the museum. She had rather panicked about the kiss before it had happened. At Madame Didiot’s, the girls had crept into each other’s rooms after lights-out and talked about their sexual experience – or lack of it – practising their French kissing with their hands, tongues pushed through the slim hole between thumb and forefinger. But when it had happened for real, it had all been rather instinctive and very enjoyable, even when Jacques’ hand had slipped under her blouse. He had invited her back to his studio apartment in the Bastille, and when she had refused, he took it like a gentleman, which was why she had been so surprised at Harry Bowen’s lack of grace and manners.
It was raining harder now. She looked down and saw that she was leaving a trail of dark fuchsia paint behind her.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said out loud, as tears began to well.
She could hear a car slowing down behind her. For a moment she dared not look around. That was all she needed – to get picked up by the police under suspicion of being a woman of the night.
‘Are you all right?’
Turning around, she saw that a dark red sports car had stopped on the bridge. The passenger-side window had been wound down and she peered through to look at the driver. He looked vaguely familiar but she couldn’t instantly place him, and her pulse started to speed up in panic.
‘Are you okay?’ the man repeated.
‘I’m fine,’ she stammered, knowing that she should carry on walking.
‘We were both at Emily Nightingale’s party earlier. In Belgravia. My name’s Edward Carlyle – we didn’t officially meet, so I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’
‘Georgia. Georgia Hamilton.’ She hesitated, then remembered what Sally Daly had said about him – VSITPQ – and stepped closer to the car.
‘Look, do you need a lift anywhere?’ he asked, shouting to be heard over the rain.
‘Honestly, I’m fine. I think the tube is just across the bridge.’
‘If you don’t contract tetanus beforehand,’ he said, looking down at her bare feet.
‘Then I’ll watch out for any rusty nails.’
Raindrops lashed against her face and she had to wipe her eyes to see him.
‘Look, I don’t wish to be rude, but I don’t know you from Adam. You could have been drinking. You could be a complete sex-obsessed pervert . . .’
She watched one of his heavy brows rise in the darkness.