Philippa Gregory - Zelda’s Cut

Isobel blinked and felt her mascara cling to her eyelashes like tears.

‘It’s my way of saying that I don’t have to sit in a pigeonhole. I don’t have to be what people think of me. I can find my own way, I can be someone else. I don’t have to have the identity my parents chose for me. I don’t even have to stay with my first choice of identity. I can set myself free.’

Isobel nodded. ‘I do know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Though it’s not true for everybody. Some people have to stay inside their boundaries. Some people take a choice, which isn’t perhaps the easiest choice, but it’s the right thing to do. Some people want to do the right thing more than they want to do anything else. Some people see the rules and stay inside them. Some people have to.’

Freddie shook his head. ‘No-one has to.’

Back at his flat Troy poured pink champagne. Freddie raised an eyebrow at him and said: ‘I have some stuff on me, if you’d like it?’

Troy glanced at Isobel, who was pretending to examine an antique mirror over the mantelpiece but really admiring in wonder the sheen on her hair and the glow of her skin.

‘Excuse us for just a moment,’ he said to her.

Freddie looked surprised. ‘Wouldn’t Zelda like …?’

‘No,’ Troy said briefly. ‘Allergic.’

Freddie was astounded. ‘Allergic to cocaine? But how dreadful! You poor dear! How d’you ever manage? I would just die …’

‘What?’ Isobel asked, suddenly realising what he was saying.

Troy shook his head warningly at Freddie, but it was too late.

‘D’you take cocaine?’ Isobel demanded, deeply shocked.

‘He doesn’t, I do,’ Freddie said, desperately lying. ‘I’m always trying to persuade Troy to try it, but he won’t.’

‘I should think not,’ Isobel said staunchly. ‘It’s terribly addictive, isn’t it? And bad for you?’

Troy looked meaningfully at Isobel. ‘You surprise me,’ he said carefully. ‘I’d always thought of you as a woman of great sophistication. Everyone says to me that Zelda Vere is very much a woman of the world.’

Isobel checked herself for a moment and then wiped her look of indignation from her face. ‘Oh, of course,’ she said, recovering. ‘I’ve just seen so many people have so much trouble with it.’

Troy nodded. ‘Let’s just stick with champagne, shall we?’

‘Sure,’ Freddie said, agreeably.

Troy poured them all another glass and the two men started to exchange anecdotes, for Isobel’s amusement. Isobel kicked off the pink mules and curled her long legs underneath her, and felt young and bohemian and daring. They laughed together as the level in the bottle fell lower and lower.

‘Now then,’ Troy said as the conversation paused. ‘Let’s see the family jewels, Freddie.’

Isobel followed the two men to the spare bedroom. Troy closed the door behind him and there was a sudden moment of delicious, clandestine intimacy. Isobel, dizzy from the champagne and aroused: by her own new beauty, by the company of two handsome men, by the whole extraordinary circumstances, leaned back against the door and absorbed the fact that she was in a bedroom, rather drunk and quite alone with two attractive young men.

‘I feel quite shy,’ Freddie said.

‘Do show,’ Isobel encouraged him. ‘I really do need to know.’

Freddie unzipped his trousers, let them fall to his knees and then slid his black silk boxer shorts downwards to show her his gently rising penis. ‘Excuse us,’ he said charmingly. ‘It’s just all the attention.’

She regarded it with fascination. This was only the second penis she had ever seen in her life. Philip had been her first and only lover and she had not seen him naked and aroused for more than three years. ‘Why, it’s lovely,’ she breathed.

He had ringed the foreskin with delicate studs of silver and the very peak boasted a delicate silver sleeper. The three of them gazed at it, quietly impressed.

‘Will it be of any help?’ Freddie asked.

The question was too much for Troy. He exploded into raucous mirth. ‘I should think it would be of tremendous help!’

Isobel hesitated, trying to keep a straight face, and then was caught by the wave of laughter, howling with merriment until the tears came into her eyes and smudged her mascara.

Troy bundled Freddie out of the house at ten and then turned to Isobel. ‘C’mon, Cinderella,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get you back into rags to catch the train.’

They were like actors in a play, intent on the work they had to do. He helped her take off the pink jacket and hang it on the hanger, he put shoe trees in the mules. The wardrobe in his spare bedroom was now dedicated to Zelda Vere’s shrouded clothes. There were two stands for the wigs. Zelda Vere’s expensive cosmetics were in the dressing-table drawer. Isobel let Troy draw the plastic covers over the jacket and skirt while she pulled on her linen dress. She realised for the first time that it did not exactly fit. It gaped slightly at the armholes, you could glimpse her old ill-fitting bra from the side, the waist was too long; the fall of the skirt to mid-calf with the flat shoes made her legs look short and fat.

‘I could take one of the suits home,’ she said wistfully.

‘Not one of them,’ Troy ruled. ‘If you overlap your identities at all, someone will see you and make the connection. You’ve got to be like a spy. You’ve got to have waterproof compartments. Zelda waits for you here – in the drawers and in the wardrobe. Isobel is catching the train home tonight and you’d better have some idea where she’s been all evening, if you’re hoping to keep this deception up.’

‘He already knows I’ll be late,’ Isobel said reluctantly. ‘I rang him from Harrods to tell him I was having dinner with my publishers. He isn’t expecting me home.’

‘Just get your story perfect,’ Troy urged her, putting her jacket round her shoulders and opening the front door. ‘Where did you have dinner? What did you eat? That sort of thing. If this deception is to work it has to be totally, totally convincing.’

She hesitated on the doorstep, reluctant to leave him. ‘Thank you for today,’ she said. ‘We’ve never spent so much time together before and you’ve been my agent for – what? – six years.’

In an odd courtly gesture he took her hand and kissed it. ‘It was my pleasure,’ he said. ‘We did great shopping. And I loved sitting on the sofa like a sultan and seeing you modelling things.’

The thought of him enjoying her gave her pause. ‘You liked seeing me?’

He made a little deprecatory gesture. ‘Of course. You were transforming from one sort of woman to another. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be fascinated.’

Her face warmed at the thought of being fascinating. Oh Troy! I always thought that you …’ She hesitated to choose her words carefully. ‘I always thought that you were not very interested in women.’

He laughed. ‘I’m interested in people ,’ he said. ‘I love Freddie because he’s bold and risk-taking and exciting. And I like you because you’re determined and courageous and suddenly you have embarked on some kind of new path here that could take you anywhere – and that’s fascinating for me.’

‘But your preference?’ she asked delicately.

He stepped forward and hailed a cab. The car swung in and Troy opened the door for her. ‘Neither here nor there. Don’t forget to construct your alibi on the way home.’

‘You were late last night,’ Philip said at breakfast. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘I know,’ Isobel said. ‘It went on and on.’

‘You should have told them you had a train to catch,’ he said with disapproval. ‘You must have got the last one home.’