He stood up and crossed the room to kneel before my chair.
‘Archie,’ I said, pretending to scold, ‘what if someone comes in?’
‘No one will come in.’ He put his arms round my waist and laid his head in my lap. I wore a pleated skirt, a button-up blouse, a loose cardigan and stockings. Fake pearls and a smart new hat. I stroked Archie’s head but gently pushed it away as he pressed his face against me.
‘Not here,’ I said, but without urgency. Cheerful, cheerful, cheerful. A girl who’d never been sick or sad a day in her life.
Archie kissed me. He tasted like pipe smoke. I closed my hands on the lapel of his jacket and didn’t object when he cupped his hand around my breast. Tonight he would be going home to his wife. If the course I’d planned so carefully were to continue, it was best to send him to her thinking of me. A sponge soaked in quinine sulphate – procured by my married younger sister – stood guard inside me, protecting against pregnancy. Never once had I encountered Archie without preparing myself in this way, but for the moment my precautions proved unnecessary. He pulled my skirt modestly back into place, smoothing over the pleats, then stood and walked back round his desk.
Almost the moment he returned to his chair, in walked Agatha. She rapped lightly on the door and at the same time pushed it open. Her sensible heels made the barest sound on the carpet. At thirty-six, she was much taller than me and nearly ten years older. Her auburn hair had faded towards brown.
‘Agatha,’ Archie said sharply, ‘you might have knocked.’
‘Oh, Archie. This isn’t a dressing room.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Miss O’Dea. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’
Archie’s strategy had always been to hide me in plain sight. I was regularly invited to parties and even weekends at their home. Six months ago, he would at least have made an excuse for my presence in his office. Stan’s loaned Nan to do some shorthand, he might have said. Stan was my employer at the Imperial British Rubber Company. He was a friend of Archie’s but never loaned anybody anything.
This time Archie didn’t offer up a single word to explain me, perched where I didn’t belong. Agatha’s brows arched as she realized her husband couldn’t be bothered with the usual subterfuge. She gathered her composure by addressing me.
‘Look at us,’ she said, pointing to her outfit and then mine. ‘We’re twins.’
It was an effort not to touch my face. I was blushing furiously. What if she had come in two minutes earlier? Would she have pretended ignorance despite all evidence, just as doggedly as she did now?
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s true, we are.’
That season nearly every woman in London was a twin, the same clothes, the same shoulder-length hair. But Agatha’s suit was authentic Chanel, and her pearls were not fake. She didn’t register these discrepancies with any disdain, if at all. She wasn’t that sort of person, a virtue that backfired when it came to me. Never once did Agatha object to the daughter of a clerk, a mere secretary, entering her social circles. ‘She’s friends with Stan’s daughter,’ Archie had told her. ‘Excellent golfer.’ And that was all the explanation she ever required.
In photographs from this time, Agatha looks much darker, less pretty than she really was. Her eyes were sparkling and blue. She had a girlish sprinkling of freckles across her nose and a face that moved quickly from one expression to the next. Finally, Archie stood to greet her, taking her hand as though she were a business associate. And I decided – the way someone who’s doing something cruel can decide – it’s all to the good: she deserves better than Archie, this pretty and ambitious woman. She deserves someone who’ll collect her in his arms with unabashed adoration and be faithful to her. As guilt crept in to discourage me, I reminded myself that Agatha was born on her feet, and that’s how she’d always land.
She told Archie, likely for the second or third time, that she’d had a meeting with Donald Fraser, her new literary agent. ‘Since I’m in town, I thought we might go to luncheon. Before your weekend away.’