A Beautiful Dare Read online

  The rest of the lecture continued on, words filling Evie’s ears and mind with wonder. She leaned forward, making sure to catch everything the professor said and her fingers turned the pages of the anatomy book faster and faster, eyes taking in diagram after diagram, marvel after marvel. All too soon, the lecture came to an end.

  Rose squeezed her hand. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I loved it,’ Evie said, beaming.

  ‘I thought you would.’ Rose nodded approvingly.

  *

  They caught the subway back to Cambridge, disembarking at Harvard Square. Rose stopped at a coffee shop and waved through the window to a group of three women seated near the back. They were smoking, drawing disapproving stares from some of the patrons, and Evie saw a flash of silver as a flask was slipped from a pocket and its contents emptied into a coffee cup.

  ‘Come and join us,’ Rose said.

  Evie hesitated. She hugged her books to her chest and picked at the corners. ‘I’ve never smoked a cigarette before. Nor had more than a glass of wine with dinner, and very little of that lately, with Prohibition. I’ve hardly stepped beyond the walls of Radcliffe, not without my mother or father or sister to chaperone.’

  ‘Too many new things for one day?’ Rose asked sympathetically.

  ‘Maybe. Although perhaps we should have started the day here. On balance, I think my parents would probably be more forgiving of illicit drinking than going to a lecture at Harvard Medical School.’

  Rose burst out laughing. ‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you?’

  ‘You probably could,’ Evie admitted with a rueful smile. ‘But I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Not even for the chance to make eyes at him?’

  Evie followed Rose’s finger and the jolt of surprise she felt when she saw who Rose was pointing to made her step away from the window. ‘That’s Charles Whitman.’

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Rose said archly. ‘A girl could spend all day dreaming about running her hands through that gorgeous dark hair.’

  ‘Dark hair?’ Evie moved back to the window and looked more closely at the table where two men were sitting. There was Charles, his blonde hair and way of sitting, reclined in his chair, body expansive with self-confidence, enough to catch anyone’s eye. He was talking, or rather listening, to a dark-haired man who was leaning stiffly forward as if trying to command Charles’s attention, face furrowed with annoyance. ‘Oh, I think that’s Charles’s brother. Thomas.’

  ‘So you know them both? Lucky you.’

  ‘My mother wants me to marry him,’ Evie admitted.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Charles. The blonde one.’

  ‘Oh.’ Disappointment scribbled over Rose’s face. ‘Although he is handsome too. Preppy, but still easy on the eyes. It’s just that the other one is air-tight.’

  ‘Air-tight?’

  ‘Luscious.’ Rose smiled wickedly.

  Evie began to shake with laughter again but she stopped when she saw Charles wave at her. ‘I should go and say hello,’ she said, realising that she’d been given the perfect opportunity to mollify her mother, to explain the fact that she was running a little late and to lay to rest the doubts her mother had driven into her mind that morning. Because what if Charles, her handsome and wealthy summertime neighbour, was persuaded by the current way of referring to Radcliffe women? What would that do to their developing attachment?

  Rose kissed her cheek. ‘I won’t go with you. I’m too hard to explain.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Introducing me as the woman who took you to an anatomy class mightn’t go down well with someone your mother wants you to marry. Do you want to marry him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Evie said honestly. ‘Not yet. Maybe when I’m finished at Radcliffe.’

  ‘Well I’m selfishly glad you’re not ready to be swept off your feet by him yet. Because I want you to come with me to class again. Friday?’

  Somehow, leaving the lecture theatre and all of its mind-opening drawings and vocabulary behind them, had brought back Evie’s doubts. Disquiet raked her belly and she held onto her books even more tightly. Here was Rose on the street beside her, wanting to take her to a place she’d never known existed, until today. There was Charles, on the other side of the glass, which is where her mother would want her to be. ‘I’m … I’m not sure,’ she said.

  ‘Do you want to come again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll wait at Harvard Square for you until half-past nine. See you Friday, Evie!’ Rose called as she walked into the shop.

  Evie waited a moment and then pushed open the door herself. Charles’s eyes were wandering all around, away from the conversation he was having with his brother, and he saw her immediately. ‘Evie!’ he called, delighted.

  She waited for two ladies to pass in front of her, watching as Thomas spoke sharply to Charles and then strode out the side exit before Evie had reached their table.

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes!’ Charles said, smiling at her.

  Evie’s heart squeezed in an extra couple of beats at seeing Charles smile. But his beam turned to a frown and she clapped one hand to her hair and the other to her skirt as she remembered what she must look like.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  Evie hoped his frown was of concern rather than horror. But she was wearing a cream wool coat that had turned beige with damp, and a less-than-stylish navy serge skirt. She’d chosen an outfit that would withstand the rigours of the bicycle ride, rather than with any thought of bumping into Charles and needing to look her best. If only she’d worn an extremely impractical but decidedly more flattering white voile afternoon dress instead. ‘I was caught in a shower of rain,’ Evie said playfully.

  ‘You look like a bedraggled mermaid,’ Charles said cheekily, frown fading. He touched her cheek lightly with his finger. ‘What an afternoon I’ve had,’ he said. ‘First Thomas coming here to chew me out for not studying and then you appear.’

  ‘I thought it was your brother. He looked as stand-offish as ever.’

  Charles shrugged. ‘He wants me to be as much of a pill as he is and spend my whole time here with my nose buried in my books. He’s going back to New York now, thankfully.’

  ‘But he must have been worried to come all the way here just to talk to you. You haven’t been suspended again have you?’ she asked lightly, trying to appear unruffled by Charles’s propensity to spend more time on practical jokes than his studies, knowing if she had half the chances he had, she wouldn’t be frittering them away.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said a little grimly and then changed the subject. ‘But what are you doing here? I thought your parents forbade you from stepping beyond the walls of Radcliffe.’

  She opened her mouth to tell him, to let it all pour out, what she’d been doing and how enlivened she was by it all. ‘I’ve been …’

  Her words were drowned out by the noise of a group of men rattling through the door, shaking off rain into large puddles on the floor and laughing uproariously.

  Evie spoke louder. ‘I went to …’

  One of the men pushed past her. ‘Cliffie,’ he muttered and every man in the group stared at her, taking in her dishevelment, smirking.

  Evelyn swallowed everything she’d been about to say. Her heart sank and her books dropped to the table, utterly mortified at the knowledge that her appearance did nothing but bring to life the caricatures from the Harvard newspapers that ridiculed the stringy hair and pragmatic dresses of the Radcliffe women, apparently the most unattractive in the country.

  ‘Don’t let me keep you,’ Charles said quickly. ‘You might catch a chill.’

  Shame beat down on Evelyn with all the force of the morning’s rain, colouring her cheeks red. Her throat tightened, not from unease this time, but from the tears that sat at the back of her eyes, tears she wouldn’t let herself shed. In her head pounded the question: was Charles being a gentleman in his concern for her, or was he too emba
rrassed to be seen with a Cliffie?

  She pressed her lips together. She couldn’t risk telling Charles anything about her day. Not in a world that believed women should aspire to nothing other than marriage, and that those women who strived for more were ugly, unwomanly and unmarriageable. What a fool she was. To have gotten so carried away with Rose, to have tricked herself into thinking she was having an adventure, a glorious escapade from her confined and predictable days. And even though she knew she should just leave it, she couldn’t help asking quietly, ‘Is it really so bad?’

  Charles didn’t answer right away. But then he reached down and took her hand. ‘Going to Radcliffe was meant to be a lark, Evie. A few months of fun. But you’re so serious about it all.’

  ‘I’ll be graduating soon,’ Evelyn said brightly. ‘Then I won’t be a Cliffie anymore.’ But what would she be? Her stomach twisted at the thought. A fine lady like Viola, sleeping late and hunting for a husband? She forced out the laugh Charles was expecting, the giddy laugh of a woman who’d gone to Radcliffe as a bit of a joke—to study Literature, which was at least refined—and who would have put herself to rights by the next time they met.

  ‘No. You won’t be.’

  His tone was expressionless and Evelyn had no idea how to read it. All she knew was that she had to leave before she began to cry. ‘I should go home and tidy myself up,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you soon?’

  Charles nodded. ‘Hopefully next time you’ll be much drier.’ He smiled as if to show that he meant it to be funny.

  ‘Of course I will!’ she said, waving and smiling, hoping he’d mistake the glitter in her eyes for merriment.

  She hurried out but when she reached the corner she had to slow down to scrub at her stupid tears. She waited for a moment for them to stop, for her red cheeks to cool, and she was about to walk on when she saw Thomas Whitman just ahead, getting into a car, a breezer; a soft-top, midnight blue Packard. As he settled into the seat, she watched for a moment, imagining being able to drive away to New York whenever she chose, roof open to a much sunnier sky, leaving behind everything familiar.

  Then she started. Thomas was turning his head and if she didn’t move he’d see her and she hadn’t the inclination for any more embarrassing encounters. She promptly dashed into the nearest store and began to browse the shelves, to look as if she had some business being there. Her eyes fell upon the cover of a book she’d heard spoken of in the same breath as whiskey at midnight and jazz-dancing with a man. This Side of Paradise, written by the most notorious author in America, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her hand jumped out before she could stop it and picked up the book. It fell open at a page and her eyes found, amongst all the words written there, the line: It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

  She shoved the book back onto the shelf. It was as if it had read her heart. Today she’d started to have dreams of becoming too. She took the book down again, turned to another page and began to read: There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word …

  ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’

  Evelyn dropped the book. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, bending down to retrieve it. ‘You gave me a fright. I was reading and …’

  ‘Lost in a book?’ the sales clerk said.

  ‘Yes,’ Evelyn smiled. ‘Yes I was. I’ll take it, please.’ Because she had to know: what happened in the moment just before the first kiss?

  ‘Certainly.’

  As she gave the clerk some money, a Victrola recording propped on a shelf near the counter caught her eye. Aptly enough, given what she’d been reading, Hot Lips was its title.

  The sales clerk saw her glancing at it. ‘Jazz record,’ he said. ‘It’s a good one.’

  Without knowing why, Evelyn said, ‘I’ll take that too.’

  *

  Later that night, Evelyn slipped into the parlour downstairs. Everyone was asleep. She turned on only one lamp. She traced the words Hot Lips with her finger and placed the recording on the Victrola, smiling as the trumpets bounced into the room, making her body sway as she walked over to the sofa, where she opened her new book and plunged right in.

  The Victrola had been quiet for hours and it was three o’clock in the morning when Evie finally emerged from This Side of Paradise. She was still smiling, not in the least bit tired, but as exhilarated as she’d felt when she was with Rose that day. Being with Rose, and now reading Fitzgerald’s book, made the world seem wrong-side up.

  Her mother was surely mistaken. While Mrs Lockhart might think that what constituted a desirable lifestyle was decided by the Astors and the Vanderbilts and it then trickled down through the ranks of the wealthy and into the middle class, perhaps it was women like Rose—whom her mother would say were badly behaved—who might reshape the world with their anatomy classes and opinions about men’s intelligence. What would it be like to be as excited about something, as passionate, as Rose was?

  Evie closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the arm of the sofa. Images swirled into her mind: of meeting Rose at half-past nine on Friday; of going to an anatomy lecture and understanding what was being said; of dancing to jazz music in a room full of people, rather than shifting her body alone in a parlour; of sitting in the passenger seat of a car, beside a man she felt more than fondness for, who kissed her in a way she’d never thought it was possible to be kissed, in a way that could sustain her for a lifetime.

  Her eyes flew open. There was a different future out there. A future that mattered. A future where a woman could learn two strange languages: one filled with words like corpora cavernosa; and the other used by the restless generation that Fitzgerald wrote about, a generation Evie hadn’t even known she might belong to.

  None of those things fitted with Concord and marriage and the end of college in three months’ time, the path her mother and father had been leading her down, blinkered, so she’d hardly realised that she’d reached the edge of a dock over a vast expanse of water. She could dive off into the beautiful danger of a new kind of everything, or she could retreat to the shore, to all she’d ever known. But when she shut her eyes, she could almost feel the delicious lap of the wild water against her skin.

  If only she dared.

  Read on for a sample of Natasha Lester’s full-length novel

  A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald.

  A captivating, tragic love story set amid the fragile hearts and glamour of 1920s New York.

  In the Manhattan of gin, jazz and speakeasies, Evelyn Lockhart is determined to follow her dream to study obstetrics, even if it means turning her back on her family and the only life she’s ever known.

  In a desperate attempt to support herself as one of the first female students at Columbia University’s medical school, Evie auditions for the infamous Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. But if she gets the part, what will it mean for her fledgling relationship with an Upper East Side banker – a man Evie thinks she could fall in love with, if only she lived a life less scandalous …

  If you loved The Paris Wife and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald you will devour this deliciously evocative story of a young woman ahead of her time.

  Available 26 April 2016

  ISBN (print edition): 978 0 7336 3463 5

  ISBN (ebook edition): 978 0 7336 3464 2

  A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald

  A novel by Natasha Lester

  Sample chapters

  Prologue

  NEW YORK, 1925

  How did I get here? How did I get here? The words reverberated between each click of Evie’s heels as she stepped off the moon and executed a perfect Ziegfeld strut. Her arms were extended as if to lift the skirt of a dress she wasn’t wearing, and her head was pulled back by the halo of a hundred silver-dipped stars. She smiled at the audience, who thought that what she did was, at the least, entertaining and, at the most, foreplay. Her neck ached but she concentrated on the sound of the dollar bills that Ziegfeld would flick into her hand at the end of the night, like a baccarat dealer at a
high-stakes table.

  The music changed to the big, belting fanfare of the finale and Evie curtseyed, then took her place near the centre of the line of showgirls. She knew what she had to do: join arms, scissor-kick the legs, emphasise the breasts, and damn well make herself look so delicious that no one in the crowd remembered the New York that existed beyond the doors of the theatre. That was a place of discreet money and manners and hidden mistresses, where a woman called Evie Lockhart fought a battalion of men every day for permission to become a doctor.

  Inside the theatre, the men had no manners, the mistresses were out on show, the money was splashed around like whiskey, and Evie Lockhart was once again fighting, this time to remember that an exchange of dignity for college fees would be worth it.

  Where did it all go? Evie thought as she spun around. All my joy, all my wonder. New York used to knock the breath right out of her. Now it was a daily struggle just to get enough air. But she slapped her smile back on, because Florenz Ziegfeld was glaring at her, and Evie needed to be a Ziegfeld Girl more than Ziegfeld needed her. She’d better give someone in the audience a sultry wink to show she was still playing the game. As she looked for a man to dazzle, she got a feeling like an itch at the corner of her eye; she blinked once, twice, but the irritation was still there, narrowing her focus to the man in the fourth row from the front – centre seat so he must be important.

  When she saw who he was she got what she wanted – the breath knocked right out of her. It was Thomas Whitman. Tommy. Back from London.

  Would he recognise the girl from Concord, Massachusetts, who used to live next door – oh, such a long time ago? He’d never expect to see Evelyn Lockhart dancing a cancan with a line of beautiful girls whose long legs shimmered from toe to thigh in a way you’d never see in a drawing room on the Upper East Side.