Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  “It’s just her way, honey.”

  That was what Prudie always said. Constance’s “ways” explained everything. They explained her moods, which could be unpredictable. They explained her (often sudden) absences. I thought this was inadequate. When Constance took off (she had just done so; she had been away two days) I would think to myself: why?

  “Prudie,” I said in a careful way, “have you heard of the Heavenly Twins?”

  I knew she had; everyone had heard of the Heavenly Twins. Their exploits were in the gossip columns every day. Their real names were Robert and Richard van Dynem, but—as you know—they were always referred to as Bobsy and Bick. Bobsy and Bick were, as we might say now, seriously rich. They were heirs to an unassailable East Coast fortune, but (and this is a tribute to their looks) they were even more famous for their beauty than their wealth. Bobsy and Bick would later come to sad ends: Bobsy killed in a sports car in the late 1950s, Bick studiously drinking himself to death not long afterward. But that was later. In 1944, Bobsy and Bick were twenty, two blond-haired young gods in the full flush of a golden youth. They were not, perhaps, particularly intelligent, but they were immensely good-natured. They had always, both of them, been very kind to me, as had their father and their uncle, also twins, also fixtures at Constance’s frequent parties.

  “Sure. I’ve heard of them,” Prudie replied, still fiddling with the lace mat.

  “Does Constance stay with Bobsy and Bick, sometimes?” I asked. “Is she with them now, Prudie?”

  This put Prudie on the spot. She always knew where Constance could be reached, and she knew I knew that.

  “What—their place out on the Island?” Prudie shrugged. “Why should she? She has her own place.”

  “Yes, but Constance isn’t there, Prudie. She said she would be, but she isn’t. I tried to phone her, Prudie, last night.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.” Prudie became red. “She doesn’t like it. You know that.” She paused. She rearranged some cushions. “She must have been out,” she went on. “At a party. Dinner someplace.”

  It was possible. I wondered if I should tell Prudie that, if so, the party had gone on very late. I had rung Constance’s East Hampton house at three, then again at four. She had not been back. I decided not to say this.

  “Why Bobsy and Bick?” Prudie said in a sudden way. “Why hit on them? There’s hundreds of places she might be—why them?”

  “Something I heard Bobsy say to Constance once. They arranged to meet. Then, the next day, Constance never mentioned him. Or Bick. She said she went somewhere else.”

  “Changed her plans, I expect.” Prudie became arch. “And it’s none of your business, little Miss Pry.”

  “I know, Prudie. And I didn’t mean to pry. But I would like to know—sometimes….”

  Prudie’s face softened.

  “Look,” she said, “your godmother likes to get about. You know that. I know that. She can’t travel so much—not with the war. But she likes … to see people. To have a good time.”

  “Prudie,” I said, in a rush. “Prudie—did you ever meet her husband? Did you ever know Montague Stern?”

  “No,” said Prudie in a gruff voice. “I did not.”

  “Do you think she loved him, Prudie? Do you think he loved her?”

  “Who knows?” Prudie turned away. “But I know one thing. It’s none of my business. Or yours.”

  That was it, a brick wall. We hit it that day; we hit it others. I thought Prudie knew a great deal more than she said. I thought Prudie knew about Montague Stern, and Bobsy and Bick—and she did not intend to explain to me. I thought she knew the reasons for the absences. I thought she could explain the other things—the flowers that would arrive for Constance at the apartment whose cards would be torn up; the telephone calls curtailed if I came into the room; the way (observed at parties) in which Constance became friends with certain men very fast. Prudie could explain why Constance’s face changed when she spoke of her estranged husband. Prudie could explain why my father’s books were at one end of a room, my mother’s another. Prudie could explain, I thought, about love. I knew love was involved in all this, lurking there in the margins. I recognized the signs, and the hints; I’d seen them—in novels.

  But Prudie would not explain—and neither, I was beginning to see, would Constance.

  “Love?” Constance would toss her head. “I don’t believe in love, not between a man and a woman. Just attraction, and a lot of self-interest.” Then she might kiss me or give me a hug. “I love you, of course,” she would say. “I love you very much. But that’s different.”

  I was too young to be told about love, it seemed, at thirteen. I could read and imagine and dream (which I did), but I could not ask questions. Questions about her past marriage, her absences, and love—all these could make Constance irritable. So (I was obedient) I stopped. But I did continue to ask questions about some of Constance’s more intriguing clients, including Rosa Gerhard.

  “What is she really like?” I asked Constance one day. (It was the spring of 1945. I was fourteen. My last letter to Franz-Jacob was still weeks away. We were walking in Central Park, with Bertie. Bertie, defying predictions as to his longevity, was eleven.)

  “Well, let me see. She’s rather grand by origin, and rather eccentric by nature. She was brought up a Catholic, converted when she married Max. She goes to the synagogue every week; she also goes to Mass. She sees no contradiction in that. That’s the kind of woman she is.”

  “Is she still married to Max?”

  Constance smiled. “Heavens, I forget. You know how she collects houses? Well, she collects husbands too. And children.”

  “Husbands?” I stopped. I had no idea then that I was being misled. “You mean she keeps getting divorced?”

  “Goodness, no. I rather think they die. That’s it—they keep dying on her. I’m sure Rosa loves them very much, but she wears them out. Do you know how a car sounds when it’s done eighty thousand miles? That’s how Rosa’s husbands sound. The record-holder was Mr. Gerhard, I think. I believe he lasted a whole decade.”

  “And the children?”

  “Ah, the children. Well, do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually met any of them. They tend to flee. But they are numerous. Nine, ten, maybe a dozen? I know all about them, though. Rosa tells me. Let me see, there’s the movie director, the senator, the mayor of New York, the attorney—he’s moving fast. There’s the daughter who just won a Pulitzer. Oh, and I forgot. The son with the Nobel Prize.”

  I stopped. We had just reached the stream.

  “The mayor? A Nobel Prize?”

  “Yes.” Constance smiled. “Now, was it for physics or medicine? I forget. This was some years back. He was about thirteen at the time.”

  “You mean they aren’t … all those things?”

  “I mean Rosa is a mother. That is her profession. She is also an optimist. The most sublime optimist I ever met in my life.”

  “Do you like her, Constance?” I asked as we followed Bertie down the steps. Constance stopped.

  “Funnily enough, I do. I don’t know why, though. Rosa is the only woman I have ever met who can change her mind about a piece of material thirty times in thirty seconds. Not even I can do that. However, I do like her. She is a force de nature. She is also entirely without malice—and that, Victoria, is extremely rare.”

  We walked on. We paused by the lake. I forgot about Rosa Gerhard. I was not to encounter her firsthand for another five years, except very briefly at parties. That afternoon I had something else on my mind, something far more immediate than Mrs. Gerhard.

  I was watching Bertie. He moved more slowly now. When he ran, he would sometimes cough. I wondered if Constance had noticed this too. I thought she had, for when we returned to the apartment she was unusually quiet.

  She sat down with Bertie on a rug. She looked afraid. She told him she loved him. Then, stroking him, she began to tell him the stories she believed he liked. She whisper
ed into his ear, about icebergs, seals, white gulls, and the cold seas of his Newfoundland.

  The following summer, the summer of my fifteenth year, was a sad one, and a busy one. Those two facts were connected: I was sad because I had recognized the truth about Franz-Jacob, because my mind and heart teemed with all those questions about life and love which no one would answer. Both Constance and I were saddened by Bertie; we could see (though we denied it to each other) that he was weakening.

  “Work!” Constance said. “We must work twice as hard, Victoria.”

  This was Constance’s solution, always, to any form of unhappiness. Work, she taught me, was therapy.

  So, that summer, the touchy, vodka-drinking Igor was given his notice, and all further pretense at education for me ended. Europe was still out of the question. (“You wait,” Constance said. “After the war, we’ll make such journeys.”)

  We decamped, as had become our practice, to Constance’s East Hampton house, but once there, Constance refused to settle. She was in one of her jittery, restless states; not even the presence nearby of Bobsy and Bick could console her. Work, she cried, watching Bertie pant listlessly in a patch of shade—and so, work we did. It was that summer Constance truly initiated me into the mysteries of her art.

  I already knew a little. I had listened to Constance talk. I had. sat in the corner of those showrooms. I had been allowed to run errands and take messages. I had been consulted on the colors of snippets of silk. I was now allowed to prepare sample boards. I could already (Constance said I was quick) measure a room by eye, and I began to understand a little of proportion—but I was an acolyte, only. It was that summer, the last of the war, that Constance admitted me to the rites of the temple.

  She had been commissioned, earlier that year, to redecorate an enormous and very beautiful house, with its own private beach, some ten miles from her own house at East Hampton. The owner was in California. Constance had won the commission against stiff competition. Having won it, her interest had flagged—as sometimes happened. Now, it revived. “The Hope House,” Constance called it; she said if we worked hard enough there, there would be no room for sadness.

  We went there every day, just the two of us. Constance owned a Mercedes coupe then, which she drove fast and dangerously. Every day Bertie would be installed on its inadequate rear seat, and off we would set. Constance wore dark glasses. Her bobbed hair, which I always thought of as Egyptian, would blow in the wind; Bertie’s ears would flutter. Once we arrived, Bertie would be installed in the high, cool, stone-flagged hall, and Constance and I would set to work. Shape, light, color, proportion, form: Constance gave me a crash course. I thought the drawing room was beautiful; look at it again, Constance would insist, and I began to see: Its dimensions were imperfect.

  “The doors—they’re too tall, and they’re not aligned,” Constance said. “And the windows are the wrong style for the period. Do you see?”

  Yes, I began to see. And some weeks later, when the workmen arrived, I began to see more. I had known for a long time that I wanted to be a decorator. It was at Hope House that I started to become one.

  I was learning the pile of velvet, the ductility of silk. Constance showed me color. She taught me that color, like truth, is not a fixed thing but a fluctuating one. Color changes—with lighting, with texture, with position. Take a piece of cloth; it is green, you say? A clear sharp green, like emeralds? Put it against white and perhaps it is—but try it against black; try it against plum, or cobalt, or apricot. You see? Its hue changes.

  You want yellow? Which yellow do you have in mind? Lemon? Chrome? Ochre? Crocus? Saffron? Sulphur? Whichever you want, I can give it to you—but I can also make it shift, transmute. Do not trust your eyes—I was taught, that summer, how to trick them.

  Constance also taught me about shape, proportion. She took the fixed; she gave it a new guise. All things were possible: Make a large cold room seem warm and intimate; make an enclosed space open out. Take a room that is badly built; raise, lower, divide, subdivide—any space can be transformed by the duplicity of decorators. Decorators bend space. Look, they say, at the ugly angles of this room; give me light, give me color, give me money—and I will give you symmetry. Out of angle and ill-proportion, I will give you Palladio, the restfulness of the perfect double-cube.

  A summer in which I learned sorcery; a summer in which I learned disguise. Constance (that inventive storyteller) was a born decorator—she taught me patiently, and well.

  We stayed at Hope House all summer. And it was there, on the long veranda overlooking the sea, in a house I have never revisited, that Constance gave me, at last, her version of what it was that had happened at my christening.

  The account was unprovoked. I had asked no question. It came out of the warm stillness of a summer afternoon, a salt breeze from the ocean, and—perhaps—from the bracelet I was wearing that day on my arm. My snake bracelet; my christening present. It had arrived in New York at the same time as my parents’ books. Constance liked me to wear it, even in daytime.

  “Ah, Winterscombe,” she said. She leaned across and touched my wrist. She looked at me with a sad regret.

  “How lovely you are today. You’re growing up. You’ll be a woman soon. You’ll leave me behind. You won’t need me then, your little godmother.”

  Then, still with her small hand on my arm, and her eyes on the sea, she explained: why she had been banned from Winterscombe.

  I was disappointed, I think. I read all those novels, as you know: I was beginning my father’s favorite Walter Scott. No doubt I expected something very dramatic: some ancient feud, a mistaken identity, an illegitimate birth, a hidden love affair.

  No such thing, it seemed. It was money.

  “Money.” Constance gave a little sigh. “It often is. You’re old enough to know that now. I forget the details, but your parents borrowed; I fear my husband lent. He was a fine man, Victoria, in many ways—but it was not a good idea to be in his debt. There was a quarrel. A rift. Unforgivable things were said on both sides. I had a foot in both camps. It was sad, looking back. Your father was a brother to me. I loved him very much. I loved Montague, too, in my way. Ah, well, it was a long time ago. I miss Winterscombe though, sometimes, even now. Even here. It’s growing late. Bertie is tired. Shall we go? We can call in at the Van Dynems’ on the way back.”

  A few days after this, Constance and I returned to New York. Late September; the war had ended. I had written my last letter to Franz-Jacob. I thought about love, and how you might recognize it when it happened. I thought about kinds of love, and how—in different ways—you might love a friend or a brother or a husband.

  I also thought about death. I had to; I had lost Franz-Jacob; within a month of the end of the war, in Europe I also lost my aunt Maud. She suffered her final stroke sitting upright in her chair in her once-famous drawing room. I would never see her again. Maud and I, it seemed, had said goodbye seven years before. Quick-smart, no more letters.

  Sorrows can come in battalions: That was one of Constance’s favorite misquotations—and that fall, they did. Bertie, too, began to die. You could see it happening. He did so slowly at first, running down like an old clock. Each day he walked less far, more slowly. He coughed when he walked. He became crotchety, then resigned, then sad. He was malodorous; I think he knew this.

  We could not perk him up. Constance cooked him chicken, tiny pieces of his favorite fish. She tried to feed him from her hand, but Bertie would look at her heavily, with reproach in his eyes, then turn his great head away. I think he knew he was dying—animals do—and he wished to do so privately, with dignity. A wild animal, knowing it will die, finds a secret place, a hole, a gap under a hedge. Bertie was in a New York apartment. He began to lie only in corners; he panted; we could see his heart beat.

  Constance became frantic. She summoned vet after vet. She canceled all appointments. She gave no parties. Once it was clear that Bertie was fading, she would not leave his side.

 
One Tuesday—it was a Tuesday, and quite late—Bertie rose from his place in his corner. He stretched. He lifted his head and sniffed the air. Constance, with a cry of delight, sprang up. Bertie had turned to his air conditioner. He looked at it. His tail gave a wag.

  Constance turned it on; a low setting. Bertie stood there, nose to an electrical breeze. His ears blew. Then, rejecting the air conditioner, he moved in a stiff way to the door.

  “He wants to go out! Victoria—look! He wants to go out. Oh, he must be better, don’t you think?”

  We took him out. It was a warm autumn evening, late enough in the year for the air to be fresh, not clammy. We walked up Fifth, into the park, past the zoo, Bertie leading the way. He inspected the fountain. He inspected the stream. He peed on all his favorite verticals.

  He snuffed the air, then turned for home. I promise you, he was very noble, just as Constance had said. Bertie’s farewell to the smells of Central Park. He did not cough once. When we returned to the apartment he found a new space, behind the sofa, next to a screen, obscured by a chair. A fine and private place. Bertie lay down. He went to sleep. He began to snore. His forepaws scrabbled. Constance stroked his webbed feet.

  I knew he was dead as soon as I woke the next morning. It was very early; I could hear the sounds of Constance, keening.

  When I went in, Bertie lay with his head on his paws. His sides did not rise and fall. His huge tail, which could sweep a whole table of china to the floor with one wag, was curled under him. Constance lay on the floor by his side. She had not been to bed, and was still fully dressed. Her arm was around Bertie’s neck. Her small jeweled hands, with their magpie rings, rested in his fur. She could not weep, and she would not be moved. She stayed there like that for another two hours, and if I was to have only one memory of Constance, it would be that, of my godmother saying goodbye to the last and the best of her dogs.

  Her detractors were not right about Constance, do you see? Winnie was not right; Maud was not right—and I have not always been right either. Disloyal, perhaps; unjust, certainly. Those who disliked Constance saw only a part of her—a part that was there, yes, but they did not see her whole. They did not understand … well, let’s just say they did not understand about the dogs.