The Cranesbill

Chapter 13, It’s A Dance

The Packard returned them to Oak Park, arriving late in the evening.

Ginger was too exhausted by her foray in search of aspirin to face another marathon dinner. She even refused the glass of sherry that Mario offered. She excused herself and quietly retreated to her room where she opened the copy of ‘Vito’s War’ that he had gifted her in the car on the trip home. He’d inscribed the title page with ‘To Ginger Martin with love, Mario.’ She was beginning to think of the mansion as their ‘home’ but for no particular reason. He was merely her host and she was still his guest.

Ginger was not herself. He could sense that something had happened during her time away from him that afternoon.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

She suspected that the passenger compartment of the speeding limousine had ears and that the all-observant chauffer in the front seat was taking in every word of their exchange. When there were servants around, nothing was secret; it was a fundamental premise of romance novels.

She thought of Candida and wondered if the girl had visited her room to water the little cranesbill that sat forlornly out on the balcony. If so, had she poked around among the bits and bobs of Ginger’s life, rummaging through her personal effects, reading the many drafts of her novel, her short stories, even her sporadic and sometimes fictional diary?

It would be exactly like when someone dies, she speculated. Strangers sift through all the small and large evidences of a life, then toss everything away as if one had never existed. It had been that way with Henry, hadn’t it? She’d simply packed up all his meagre possessions into his tattered cardboard suitcase wrapped round and round with coarse string then shipped it collect, straight back to his mother in Tucson. Now, the only evidence that remained was the telegram. She supposed that Candida would read that too. It was sitting in plain view, half tucked under the table lamp alongside the bed.

Getting herself lost along the fringes of downtown and her encounter with the bereaved druggist had shaken Ginger’s resolve. She started to question her own mettle and wondered if she wasn’t running away rather than facing the fact that despite her…

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