“Of course,” she says, and she hates that she’s a little impressed. “You’re shagging him.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” Lara says immediately, but Mari knows she’s only saying it because she thinks it’s the thing to say when you’re having sex with a very famous married man. Knowing Lara, Mari is sure her stepsister would love nothing more than to march through Piccadilly with a sandwich board announcing the fact.
And what a coup for her stepsister. Mari may have her own musician—Pierce’s reputation is growing steadily in the bars and nightclubs of London, after all—but Noel Gordon is in a whole other stratosphere.
That’s probably why Lara slept with him in the first place.
Ever since Jane married Mari’s dad, when both girls were twelve, they’ve been locked in this unspoken competition. If Mari got good marks in school, Lara’s needed to be better. If Mari bought a new 45, Lara would have two the next day.
Mari hadn’t even been all that surprised that Lara had tagged along when they’d left England, and that she had stayed with them when they’d returned. Lara claimed it was because there was nowhere else for her to go, but Jane would’ve convinced Mari’s dad to take her back, Mari is sure of it. It was Mari who’d run off with the married man, Mari who had committed the unforgivable sin. Lara was just being a good sister.
It’s been on the tip of her tongue for months now to suggest this to Lara, but something keeps holding her back. Strange as it seems, given how often Lara irks her, Mari still wants someone else with her on this adventure, someone familiar. A person she can talk to who isn’t Pierce.
“Gotta say, Lara,” Mari says drily as she puts her beer on the counter, “if we spend a summer with him in Italy, I feel people will probably suss out what’s going on between you.”
Lara snorts, waving one hand. “People will think he invited us because he heard about Pierce’s music. Or maybe because of you. He’s very impressed with your mum and dad.”
Mari fights back that familiar, uncomfortable feeling whenever she hears someone gush about her parents. It’s not exactly pride, not exactly apprehension, just a strange brew of both. She admires them, too, of course, has idolized her mother her entire life, but she wonders about these people, people like Noel—hell, people like Pierce—who paint a picture of her parents that probably isn’t all that accurate. And she always worries when they meet her, are they thinking of her mother? Are they thinking about what Mari’s very existence took from the world?
But it doesn’t surprise her that Noel Gordon would be a fan. Her parents were rebels, after all. Not musicians, but writers, philosophers, bohemians. A rare marriage of intellectual equals, a love story of iconoclasts. And Mari’s mother dying early had only burnished the mythology. So tragic, so romantic, all of that tripe.
Of course, her father had not been all that unconventional in the end. When he’d learned his daughter was having an affair with a married man, a married man William had welcomed into his home and thought of as a friend, he’d been apoplectic, and she’d gotten the full “never darken my door again” kind of treatment. Running away had seemed like the only option.
But that’s all in the past now, and the future is this: spending the summer in Italy at a fancy villa with a bona fide rock star. Who could say no to that?
“What are you two doing, hiding away in here?”
Pierce comes into the kitchen, his shirt half unbuttoned, his hair sticking to his face with sweat, and he gathers Mari up to him, nuzzling her neck.
“We’re plotting adventures,” Lara tells him, reaching out to stroke his arm even as he pulls Mari closer.
She’s always doing that, Lara. Touching him.
Pierce is not faithful, Mari knows that, and she also knows she can’t reasonably expect him to be, given that he still has a wife. Sweet, noble Frances, out in some village in Surrey, pining away for him, hoping he’ll come to his senses and come back to her.
But he swears it was just one time with Lara, and it was after Billy had died, when Mari had felt lost in her grief, wondering how she was supposed to get out of bed when someone she loved so much was gone forever. Wondering if her baby dying was the universe’s way of settling the score, since Mari’s birth had killed her mother.
They were dark thoughts, awful thoughts. The chasm she’d fallen into where even Pierce couldn’t reach her.
Mari had left them alone in their pain, Pierce had tried to explain, him and Lara. They had only turned to each other because they were both hurting, because they missed her.
Mari has tried to believe it, forgive them, but still.
She wonders.
And as she listens to Lara tell Pierce about the trip, watches him scoop Lara up into his arms, spinning her in that tiny kitchen so that the heels of her boots hit the cabinets, scuffing the paint, Mari lets herself hope that this trip will be what they need. That in Italy, there might actually be space to breathe.
And maybe, she thinks, looking at her journal, there will be space for her own dreams.
Mari Godwick was born famous.
Her father was the noted writer and bohemian William Godwick, and her mother, Marianne Wolsely, had soared to even greater heights as a journalist during the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from Seville had captured the attention of a nation, and her one piece of fiction, a short story collection called Heart’s Blood and Other Tales, sold quite well, but it was her unconventional choices in love that had made her something of a scandal.
Her first notable lover was the painter Rosa Harris, and Marianne’s refusal to hide this liaison from the world was seen as bold and uncompromising. After that liaison ended, she was rumored to have had affairs with Hemingway, Prince George, Duke of Kent, and the wife of a prominent MP. Lately, more nuanced scholarship about her life has noted that many of these entanglements have been exaggerated if not invented completely, something that has also been suggested about her daughter Mari and her relationships with what became known as the “Soho Set.”
But the most notable connection between Marianne and her daughter was that the day Mari was born, her mother died.
Preeclampsia, a fairly misunderstood condition in 1955, the year of Mari’s birth, was the culprit, and later, Mari would say she felt as though they’d been two souls, intertwined for nearly a year in her mother’s body, only for one to pass out of being as the other forced her way in.
It was a guilt that Mari would carry all her life. When her only child, a son named William who was fathered by musician Pierce Sheldon, died of a chest infection in 1973, Mari told friends that it was what she had deserved. This was the kind of self-recrimination she tended toward, especially later in life, and, some say, the reason why she only published one book in her lifetime. Lilith Rising was a sensation, and it certainly made Mari comfortable for the rest of her days, but there was always a sense that her success was bittersweet, coming, as it did, on the heels of such a massive personal tragedy.
After she passed away in 1993, several manuscripts were found hidden in her apartment, all completed between 1979 and 1992, all of which would go on to be published posthumously.
Her longtime literary agent, Jeremy Thompson, was as puzzled as anyone else as to why she’d chosen to hide the manuscripts rather than submit them but, as he said to The Times, “She was an odd duck, Mari. I knew her for nearly twenty years, but I never felt I actually knew her. I’m not sure anyone did.”