Jakob’s Colors by Lindsay Hawdon Page A

smoke, puffing it from the side of their mouths with the exaggeration of two people in stilted conversation. The woman in the blue pleated dress had disappeared. Lor had not seen her go.
    â€œCigarette, darling?” Vivienne asked brightly, swinging her hips as she approached them. She reached out, touched Andrew’s arm. He endured it. Her nails were not as long as the woman’s in the blue pleated dress. He pulled out his cigarette case, silver and discreetlyinitialed, and turned briefly to light the cigarette in Vivienne’s mouth. She leaned forward and looked up at him. Her lips twitched with a smile. Andrew did not see it. He turned away, put his hand back in his pocket, and continued talking. She flinched, was wise, almost wise to it.
    They were discussing tobacco. Lor’s father owned the Trimborne Tobacco Company in the West Country’s Tobacco Valley, and several tobacco shops around London, York, Bath. Now they were branching out toward the Continent with a new establishment in Paris.
    â€œOak-paneled shelves, mahogany floors. Anything you can touch in them, you can smoke,” her father was saying.
    He had taken Lor to the factory for the first time that spring. She’d stood beneath the dark vastness of it, watching black smoke billowing from the towering chimneys above, and then had peered through the iron bars of the elevator, which clanked and creaked, the floor beneath her vibrating as the shaking cables heaved it up the shaft. Down below lay the cavity of the factory—a Dickensian cave of crumbling stone, the machinery rattling with ancient decay.
    â€œSome of this stuff is nearly a hundred years old,” her father had said, his voice echoing around the walls. He sounded younger than he normally did, oddly eager, alert.
    Lor remembered how he had heaved back the metal doors and how she’d breathed in, tobacco fumes stinging her eyes. The back of her throat had burned. The room in front of them was huge. Workbenches that ran from one end of it to the other, rows and rows of hunched backs working in the summer heat. He had led her onward and upward, to giant machines that rolled out cigarettes in their thousands, to pasting floors, sorting floors. He had wandered down the aisles of each, straight backed. She’d never seen him look so tall.
    â€œAh, tobacco, a subject Andrew never fucking tires of,” Vivienne was saying to John, rolling her eyes in despair, half-mocking, half-resentful. Her cigarette was now a line of ash, unsmoked andsmoldering. John was swilling his drink around in his glass. In the garden the light was changing.
    Vivienne dragged finally on her cigarette, then turned away, the smile struggling on her lips as she searched the throng. When she found Lor her face broke with relief and she stumbled toward her. The honeysuckle that hung from the high back wall flattened in a pocket of wind. Lor watched a woman’s hat flutter from her head. Auburn locks fell down her back. Her father’s head turned.
    â€œWant to run away?” Vivienne asked, leaning against the trestle table and crossing one foot over the other. Her cream shoes were grass stained like her back. Lor did not reply. “I want them all to go now. Need some peace,” she said, stroking the hair from her daughter’s face, but more as a show of resilience than as a gesture of affection.
    The garden emptied. Bethany, their housekeeper, was clearing away plates of discarded food, her hair tightly twisted with the narrow rollers that she wore every night, removed every morning. The man in the black dinner jacket was collecting glasses. Five o’clock. The light like melting butter. Andrew turned around in a patch of it, alone now.
    â€œWell, that wasn’t so bad,” he said, his face lit up. He shines, Lor thought. No one left to see it but she and her mother. Vivienne couldn’t take her eyes off him.
    â€œWind’s changing,” she said finally.