JACK OF DIAMONDS, REDUX

Chapter 4 (The edited version)

Photo by Shpëtim Ujkani on Unsplash

CHAPTER 4

Jenny pulled her dressing gown tight, sitting in the half darkness of her boudoir. There was a chill outside and the French doors were open, but she didn’t care; not tonight. Not now. She stared at her reflection in the bevelled mirror of the dressing table, sipping a large glass of whiskey—neat, of course—wondering how everything had gone so wrong in her life. How could she have let herself fall for a man she knew nothing about?

Sometimes, she wished it was more than her just being beautiful. Men had always been drawn to her—they had gravitated toward her, to be honest—and as a result, she’d always had an easy time of things. It may have had something to do with her long, dark hair, she told herself, and how it cascaded down the middle of her back in rings and curls. Men had always complimented her and her hair. But she also had smokey grey eyes her mother said were meant to captivate a man’s soul. Add to that the high, chiselled, cheekbones that cut into a man’s heart and the single dimple on her left cheek whenever she smiled, and she was almost complete. Her complexion was more than just pale, it was milky white—opaque—with full bodied lips that kissed her glass, leaving a smear of lipstick in the soft light of a waxing moon.

The light came into the room at a slant, while the slats of the blinds cast long shadows across the parquet floor, as if they were bars in a cage—bars do not a prison make, she remembered reading somewhere. So much like a prison, she told herself. She searched for a cigarette from somewhere inside the folds of her dressing gown. Straightening the cigarette out once she’d found it, she picked up the lighter from the table beside her. It took more than a moment for the lighter to catch, and when it did, the flash of light forced her to shut her eyes. But she did it, releasing a large cloud of smoke at the moonlight coming in through the doors, and letting slip a silent tear.

It was obvious Roger wasn’t coming home from the Club tonight, and why would he, she wondered? Why should I be expecting him to? she asked herself. It wasn’t a matter of him missing the last train out of London, but more a matter of how he might be spending extra time with the mistress she was convinced he had. A voice she recognized as that of her mother's told her that a man had to be free to have his dalliances. She wondered just how much of that was true; she wondered if her Father had had dalliances in the past. Was it even possible? How about her mother? Somehow, she doubted that would’ve ever happened. Her brothers, maybe; her grandfather, certainly. There weren’t a lot of men in her life she could point a finger at and say they’d led by example.

But I'm supposed to be his wife, damn it! You’d think, if a man's going to be dallying with anyone, it’d be his wife.

She stabbed her cigarette into the oversized ashtray on the small table beside her. At twenty-three, she felt very much as if her life was spiralling out of control. Why was that? She knew she had to do something to catch hold of it again. Roger was seven years older—seven years her senior, her sister Maggie would say—which meant that when she was being introduced to London society at the height of the Great War, Roger was scrambling through the mud and the muck in the trenches of France. While she’d flirted, laughed, and filled her dance card, he sat huddled in terror as the big guns pounded into the earth around him. She could never pretend to have understood what it had been like for him, except that he often had nightmares and seldom slept more than four hours a night.

Is that any reason for him to abandon me here?

I should've never agreed to coming home in the first place, she told herself. I should've stayed in London, with him, no matter how hard he argued against me staying. He needs me.