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They leave the club at just about closing time – the more savoury elements of the city are fast asleep, and Jean’s got her hand tucked under Millie’s arm. Their goodbyes have been said, when -
“Shall I walk you home, ladies?”
Bill’s polite in an already old-fashioned way – a dashing cowboy, really, like Millie’s seen in the movies. Jean opens her mouth, but Millie’s quicker; there’s a line to be drawn here, and it’s taken her long enough. The game’s been fun, but its natural end was a while ago – and should have happened, as she’ll remember to her dying day, long before she came home to find Jean gone.
She turns around, looks him straight in the eye. Her voice is husky, soft, but sure.
“I’m going to walk Jean home myself, Bill, if you don’t mind.”
She can tell he’s not sure what to say to that, and yet – and yet. They’ve taught him, he told her, the value of flying under the radar, and Millie’s got a history of making best buds with men who thought they’d be something more. She stands up straight.
“I think you know why.”
His reaction is minute, but she recognises acknowledgement, and a twitch around the right corner of his mouth. Maybe there will, after all, be something to be saved, here – something to outlast one heated, spur-of-the-moment kiss and a lot of misunderstood banter. She hopes so.
He lets them go, and Millie smiles to herself as they walk into the fog, her and Jean, arm in arm, in companionable silence.
Of course it’s Jean who breaks it, minutes later.
“Well,” she says, in that irritatingly upbeat, self-effacing, no-nonsense, Scots way she has, “That’s no way to catch yourself a husband!”
And suddenly – it’s probably the booze – Millie’s had it. She’s utterly and completely had it, and a few dozen generations of post-Conquest Harcourts twist and turn in their graves as she stops short, grabs Jean by the upper arms, turns them face to face, and raises her voice in the middle of a steep, dark San Francisco street.
“I don’t WANT a husband.”
It is, word for word, what she’d thrown in her mother’s face, one evening in late 1938, her debutante dress a crumpled, off-white heap on the floor of the largest room she’s ever called her own. Back then, she knew what she didn’t want, but she’d no idea what she wanted; now, she knows both with blinding clarity.
Jean looks up at her with something of the impatience she’d shown girls sneaking off for unauthorized smoke breaks, back at Bletchley. Millie forces herself to stay calm, to lower her voice.
“Jean, what’s the goal, here? You said it yourself. I’m a raving vagabond – and that’s, frankly, the nicest phrase anyone’s ever used for what one of my aunts once called ‘an invert trollop’, but both are equally true. Yet you keep pushing me at Bill – why?”
Jean starts walking again; Millie follows, what else can she do? A moment goes by, then –
“Well, dear, perhaps I don’t want you to end up like me.”
Millie stares – Jean goes on:
“I’m fifty years old, Millie, and my only romantic options are a girl young enough to be my daughter and that – that utter dolt Nigel Beamish.”
It’s vaguely satisfying to hear Jean describe her would-be suitor in those terms, and there’s something heart-breaking about the whole statement, but it’s late or maybe it’s early, and mostly Millie’s distracted by the first bit of intel.
“Hailey? Really? She tried… she asked – did you…”
It’s Jean’s turn to be out of patience. She’s no longer self-effacing, nor particularly upbeat, and they face one another once more. The people of San Francisco, Millie thinks vaguely, should be riveted, riveted, at the lesbian drama happening underneath their very windows.
“Of course I bloody well didn’t, Camilla, the whole thing’s too ridiculous for words. And I apologize, my dear, if I have tried to encourage your relationship with an eligible young man whom you seemed more than a little fond of. I am so very sorry, dear, if I tried to be a good friend and to-”
Her anger, her irritation, come as a relief. This is lesbian drama, Millie realises with an unexpected warmth coursing through her body, and they are talking the same language. Sappho be thanked.
“What about the third option?”
She turns forward again, tucks Jean’s hand underneath her arm again, and starts walking. Jean follows, and Millie, because that’s what Millie does, keeps talking.
“I’m thirty-six; five foot ten in my stockinged feet, I’ve always been skinny but have been told I am nicely formed. My grandfather was an Earl; I was, aged eighteen, presented to the King of England, and some would say I was the belle of my season. Admittedly, those some have all turned out to be either homosexuals or just plain scoundrels, but they do exist, and I believe that, with my romantic history, I probably shouldn’t discount the homosexuals among them, since some of them turned out to be my fastest friends. I ran away from home on Christmas Eve, 1938, and spent the next year wandering around Europe, selling the family jewels and learning a thing or two about the world. I was in Poland when the Germans invaded and escaped by the skin of my teeth – which are, to this date, all my own, by the way. Upon my return to the scepter'd isle, I -”
Jean stops following, possibly because they’ve arrived at the flat. The anger’s gone, the irritation, too, and she’s just smiling, her hair looking wonderful in a way Millie finds grossly unfair.
The younger woman unlocks the door, switches on the light, and suddenly they’re home and she can’t go on like this.
She takes a deep breath. She’s done shouting, arguing, done crying, even, and sits down, tired and with painful feet to remind her that even she is no longer twenty.
“Jean, I don’t want a husband. I want a wife.”
Jean sits down beside her. The quiet of the apartment feels sacred; their voices, loud each in their own way, are muted now.
“So do I.”
Millie smiles sideways at her as her left hand finds Jean’s right and pulls her a little closer. Then:
“Edward calls you my wife, you know. The other day – before all this – he came by the diner asking me when my wife was finally going to make him the pea soup she promised him that time he was arrested for being a communist.”
Jean snorts, her cheek against the sofa, her eyes on Millie. Millie grins and reaches out her thumb to tuck a strand of hair behind Jean’s ear.
“Needless to say, it was a great conversation to have in the workplace – Rusty’s clearly good and bad for him, all at once.”
“And you said - ”
“To be honest, I was annoyed at you for your idiotic fawning over that clot Nigel Beamish and I sent him out with a flea in his ear. He seemed entirely cheerful about the whole thing even so.”
“We’ll have him over for Sunday lunch, perhaps.”
It’s a quiet suggestion, domestic, perfect, and everything Millie wants. She smiles, a little sleepily, and is unsure at which moment, exactly, she realises her arm is around Jean, but Jean seems to like it, and it’s getting light outside, and she’s pleasantly buzzed, and they’re home.
“Sunday lunch sounds nice. Jean?”
“Mmm?”
The kiss lasts, Millie later recollects with some pleasure, a damn long time.