Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  It was some while before I understood: These tales were also cues. I became aware that they would be followed by silences, by looks, by hints. Rosa was waiting for my story, my romance. There was none—a fact I bitterly regretted. When, under onslaught, I admitted this, Rosa became very knowing indeed. English reticence again, she suggested. Well, well, she understood. In time, I would confide in her perhaps. No, no, she would be good, not another word; she would ask no more questions….

  She asked another question, next breath.

  “On the other hand—a special friend?” We were sitting in her drawing room. I had silk samples spread out at my feet, a plate of superb Sacher torte on my lap. Sweet tea, sweet cake, sweet confidences. “I feel sure”—she looked at me wistfully—“a lovely girl like you, so young, all her life ahead of her—there must be someone. You wait for him to call, yes? Your heart beats faster when you hear his voice? He writes perhaps, the way my Max used to write to me, and when you get his letters—”

  “No, Rosa,” I said, as firmly as I could. “No calls. No letters. I told you—no special friend—”

  I stopped. Frank Gerhard had just come into the room. He asked his mother some question, then, without a glance in my direction, left.

  “Such a blush!” Rosa said as the door shut. She gave a smile of maddening complacency. “You’re hiding something. Ah, well—you’ll tell me in time.”

  Rosa was right: I did tell her in time. By the time that confession came, many months later, the work on Rosa’s house in Westchester had long been completed. That work, which continued for some eight months, cemented our friendship, though it often did so via quarrels.

  I should explain that Rosa’s taste was very odd indeed. Rosa’s rooms, like Rosa herself, were a hybrid. From her own family she had inherited a great deal of fine, though somewhat heavy, furniture and some excellent paintings. There were tapestries that might have suited a Schloss but which looked unhappy in Westchester. There were antique black oak German cabinets, towering ecclesiastical candlesticks. These were expected to complement the furniture Rosa herself had acquired, much of which was florid.

  Rosa loved gilt and curves. She worshipped the rococo. She had a weakness for buhl. She had a whole collection of costly (and, I suspected, fake) Louis Quatorze chairs. Room had to be made for a collection of Steuben glass animals on the one hand and, on the other, for some exquisite Meissen. Finally, there was the influence both of Max and of those numerous children. There were books, stacks of pamphlets, a creeping tide of papers, records, musical instruments, toys, sports equipment, academic journals. Order, in this house, fought a losing battle with clutter. I might have liked to be there, but to work there was to abandon all my own principles.

  I tried to explain this from time to time to Constance, but Constance merely laughed. “Oh, don’t be such a purist,” she said. “Finish the work and forget it. Then you need never go back.”

  But I would go back—I knew that. Rosa drew me back; her family drew me back; step by step I was being taken into her family circle. I would return for a family supper, for tea with Rosa, for discussions on the next set of rooms—and I would find that the work I’d done had already been destroyed. Rosa wore down each room within a week of its being completed.

  One of the ubiquitous frilly lampshades would reappear, then some truly terrible piece of cut glass. (Rosa loved anything that glittered.) A Meissen figure would inch back in—and that was fine, except Rosa put it next to a Steuben glass pelican. I would look around at a once-beautiful room and see a rash of things.

  “Rosa,” I would say, “what am I doing here? What on earth is the point?”

  I have a hot temper; Rosa had a hot temper also: these arguments would flare up into loud, prolonged, impassioned fights. At least twice I walked out, saying I would not work with her again. At least twice, Rosa, shaking with indignation, clutching to her bosom the offending glass pelican or cushion or lampshade, would fire me. It made no difference. She always rehired me the next day; I always went back.

  Toward the end of the eight months, when the house was almost completed, we were both beginning to realize, I think, that we half-enjoyed these rows. That did not prevent our having another—a truly major one on this occasion, one that left us both out of breath and scarlet in the face.

  It was of such splendor, volume, and length that it drew witnesses, although neither Rosa nor I realized that at the time. I would later discover that several of Rosa’s younger children, drawn by the hubbub, were watching from the safety of the doorway, convulsed with laughter. I would also learn that they were caught there by their elder brother Frank and shooed away—as a result of which he overheard the end of the row, the part when I said nothing and Rosa a great deal, the part that left me chastened.

  “I know what you think!” Rosa was saying—or, rather, shouting. “You think I have no taste. No, worse than that! You think I do have taste and it is horrible! Well, let me tell you: Not everyone wants to live in a museum. You know what’s wrong with you? You have too much taste. Lieber Gott! A perfect eye, yes—you have a good eye, I admit that, but no heart. I have to live in these rooms. My children, Max—they live here, too, you know. This isn’t a shop window. It isn’t a photograph. It’s my home—”

  Rosa stopped on a high and indignant note. Then, quite suddenly, she began to laugh.

  “Look at us, will you—the two of us? Eight months—and still shouting. Listen, and I’ll explain. When you finished this room, I looked at it. It was so simple, so lovely—and I thought: Rosa, you will reform. Learn from Victoria. Try. But then, you see, I sat in here, and it seemed so very empty! I missed my little things. I like my pelican you hate so much—Max gave me that pelican! I like to see Frank’s books, Max’s pipes, all the children’s photographs. All those fat cushions—my mother embroidered those cushions. When I look at them, they bring her back. So”—she crossed the room and took my hands in hers—“we’ll never agree—do you see that? We look at the world different ways. If we continue like this, we’ll say something we both regret—and that will be that, phut! I shall lose a good friend. I don’t want that. So, now, listen to me, yes? I have a suggestion to make….”

  The suggestion—that we sever our professional relationship in order to preserve our personal one—was a good one, and we acted on it. I decorated no more rooms for Rosa; we became closer friends. Rosa had taught me something that day. If I am less autocratic as a decorator now, and I hope that I am, it is because of Rosa. It was she who showed me something very simple and very obvious, something missing from Constance’s tuition: A house is a home.

  A home. Shortly after this I began to understand: Perfect rooms in a perfect Fifth Avenue apartment did not constitute a home. Much as I loved Constance, I had had no true home since Winterscombe—and I wanted one.

  Constance sensed this, and it made her irritable.

  “There, again?” she would say, when I was leaving yet once more for Rosa’s. “Is there some special attraction in Westchester that I don’t know about? This is the second time this week. Anyone would think Rosa had adopted you.”

  In a sense, I suppose Rosa had. Constance was often away; for all her virtues, she had never been motherly. Rosa was. Perhaps I went to her house so often hoping she could fill a gap I was only just beginning to realize existed. Perhaps I went simply because the evenings I spent at her house, the noisy family dinners, the games, the arguments, were such fun—and so different from the hard-edged, somewhat brittle chic I found with Constance’s friends. Perhaps I went in order to see Frank Gerhard.

  That may have been it; if so, I did not admit it then. Besides, by that time Frank Gerhard had completed his medical degree and moved on to Yale for a further doctorate in biochemistry. He was rarely in Westchester—never, I noted, if he knew I had been invited. On the few occasions on which I did meet him there, he watched but rarely spoke to me.

  Once I partnered him at bridge—at Rosa’s insistence—and played very badly. On
another occasion, at a party for one of his sisters, he was persuaded—to the accompaniment of much raillery—to dance with me; a smoky room, smoky music, an improvised space so crowded it was impossible to do more than shuffle; one dance, performed from a clear sense of duty, grip firm, head averted. On a third occasion, at his father’s suggestion this time, he was prevailed upon to give me a lift back into the city, and on that drive, to my relief, he did unbend a little. It was spring, a beautiful evening; I remember feeling a sudden exhilaration, a wish that the evening might continue in his company. Approaching Manhattan was like approaching a future; I could glimpse its towers and its avenues. They beckoned through a haze of inexplicable happiness—to me, not (it became clear) to Frank Gerhard.

  I had been, at his prompting, talking about England, and Winterscombe; we had reached Fifth Avenue and were driving south. As we passed that entrance to the park where I used to take Bertie for walks, Frank’s manner changed with a startling abruptness. His face became closed once more, his manner formal and distant. Yet again, it seemed, I had done or said something to reawaken his hostility. I was dropped off at Constance’s apartment with chilly politeness; his car was already halfway down the block before I entered the building.

  Mystified, it was shortly after this that I tackled Rosa; I wanted to understand what I could have done to provoke this dislike. Rosa was dismissive. It was, she said, nothing to do with me. Frank was difficult, she said; just now, he was impossible. He was moody, preoccupied, short-tempered—even his family found him so. There was a reason, however; an obvious reason. Frank Gerhard was in love.

  With one of his colleagues at Yale, it seemed: a woman scientist. She was—Rosa had met her—very beautiful.

  I can remember when we had this conversation—over tea that June. I can remember, all too clearly, the consequences. Rosa described this woman at some length. The more her virtues were enumerated, the more I disliked her. Dark hair, Rosa said; dark eyes; a brilliant future. I was filled with a most unreasonable detestation.

  Yes, in love, Rosa continued in a thoughtful way—she was almost sure of it. It had been going on, she saw now, for some time. Frank was displaying all the symptoms. Of course she was pleased; she was also anxious. Frank, she said, was the kind of man who could not love lightly.

  “An idealist,” she continued, a little sadly. “He never learned to compromise. So obstinate! With Frank, it is all or nothing.”

  This seemed to me a virtue. Rosa was less sure. It could be, she said, dangerous. Supposing Frank was putting his trust in the wrong woman?

  There was a silence after this. I leaned forward.

  “Rosa—the symptoms. What are the symptoms?”

  Rosa duly listed them. They made being in love sound like a case of the flu.

  “You’ll know them when you feel them,” she said.

  “Are you sure, Rosa?”

  “I am a woman!” This, on a note of triumph. “Of course!”

  It was at this point, in a sudden fit of rashness, that I told Rosa about Bobsy van Dynem.

  There was, in fact, very little to tell. That, I’m afraid, did not stop me.

  As you know, I had been friends with the Van Dynem family for many years; of the younger twins, I had always liked Bobsy the better.

  That summer, when I made my confession to Rosa, Constance was in Italy. I suspect, looking back, that Bick van Dynem, drinking increasingly hard, was with her. Certainly Bick was absent from Long Island, and his parents kept the reasons for his absence vague.

  Without his twin, Bobsy van Dynem seemed easily bored. His spirits flagged; his taste for pranks diminished. He seemed to tire of the attentive girls, the tennis parties, the competitive games that made up the Van Dynem family summers.

  He seemed inclined to talk—and inclined to talk to me. I was invited to the house one weekend; I went a second. Bobsy liked to walk with me along the beach, where he would take up his position, staring in silence at the ocean. He liked to drive fast at night, in his new car (a Ferrari, but not the one he would later die in). Sometimes he would park by a jetty not far from his house, and sit there with me, dance music drifting downwind; he would talk about Bick, sometimes about his friendship with Constance, often in a roundabout way, as if there were a mystery here and it puzzled him.

  On one of those evenings, parked by the jetty, he had—after a long silence—kissed me.

  It was a sad, gentle, and regretful kiss, but I did not know that then; I had little experience of kisses.

  I might have forgotten the incident (I’m sure he had done so) had it not been for my visits to Rosa, had it not been for those long, foolish, and inflammatory conversations. Those conversations made me want to be in love; from wanting, from being anxious to experience at last all those sublime and terrible feelings that I read about in novels, it was but a step to believing I was in love—particularly with Rosa on the sidelines giving advice and encouragement.

  Fictions—both those I read and those Rosa provided—urged me on. Invited to the Van Dynems’ again, not long after that first discussion with Rosa, I threw myself at Bobsy van Dynem in a way it still shames me to recall. My efforts were probably inept; they were certainly confused and desperate; they were successful.

  Bobsy, easygoing, not too highly principled, and (I see now) deeply unhappy, obliged. I flirted with him; he flirted with me in return. We drove more often to the beach; we sat more often by the jetty. There, by the ocean, some weeks later, Bobsy kissed me once more. He said, in a weary way, “Oh, why not?”

  By the ocean: that was where it began and where it ended, my first affair.

  It was brief. If I was anxious to persuade myself I was in love, Bobsy was desperate to be diverted. I was gauche; Bobsy was immature. Neither of us understood, at that point, very much about the processes of self-destruction. Bobsy continued to drive his fast car too fast; he tried hard to be debonair and gallant. I tried hard to ignore the widening gap between reality and expectation.

  For some weeks we played our respective roles. We would dance cheek-to-cheek to Frank Sinatra records. We would go for those long nighttime drives. We would walk along the beaches by moonlight. We tried hard to obey all the conventions, and at the end of the summer, when we both knew it was not working, the affair ended.

  I was fortunate in that I was not hurt as much as I might have been by someone less considerate. Bobsy began the affair with kindness; he parted from me with grace. We extricated ourselves in such a way that we remained friends until the time of his death, some years later—and it was during the years of that friendship, not the brief weeks of our affair, that I finally came to understand the obvious. I was not an accidental choice of distraction; I was a substitute, the nearest thing Bobsy could get, that summer, to Constance.

  Rosa, I think, never understood exactly what happened. I knew she would have disapproved of my actions (these events were not as she would have scripted them) and so, in a cowardly way, I did not enlighten her. Rosa, benevolent and in many ways innocent, believed that a romance (not an affair) had begun. I did not tell her when it ended. It was becoming a rather long romance, she would hint sometimes, but no doubt there were reasons. Once or twice, long after the affair was over, when I saw Bobsy only as a friend, Rosa would hint that I let things run on too long, that it was time the Van Dynem heir made up his mind. She would mention weddings. By then, it was useless to protest that I was not in love. Just good friends. Rosa would listen to those protests and smile; she would not believe me.

  I had become one of her stories; I had entered her repertoire of fictions. Rosa (I was later to learn from Frank Gerhard) confided her hopes for me to her family. A brilliant match! She would expatiate upon it at length, seek the advice of her husband and children as to how best she might promote it.

  As a result, when Bobsy van Dynem accompanied me to Rosa’s house, as he did both that first summer and on later occasions, our visits were accompanied by a chorus of smiles, knowing looks, and meaningful silences
. Bobsy found this amusing; I did not. And on two occasions, when Frank Gerhard was present, he made it very clear that he both disliked and despised Bobsy van Dynem.

  Poor Heavenly Twin! We would sit at that noisy supper table of Rosa’s, surrounded by her clever and argumentative progeny, and Bobsy, with the confidence of his class, would put forward his inherited ideas, his ill-formed political opinions. Often he would lose his way mid-sentence. Although he had charm, he did not possess wit, nor was he gifted at analysis. I knew that several of Rosa’s children—not children now, but young men and young women—found Bobsy foolish. At least they had the manners to disguise what they thought; that was not true in the case of Frank Gerhard.

  He would sit opposite Bobsy, frowning, watching him intently. Once or twice, when Bobsy had made a particularly asinine remark, Frank would come back at him with a quick wit and an insolence of phrase that emphasized Bobsy’s inadequacies.

  Bobsy’s background had bequeathed him a thick skin; I think he scarcely noticed these episodes. Had he done so, they might not have worried him, for Bobsy had the complacency of his class. They did worry me. They made me protective toward him. I knew Bobsy’s failings, but I also knew his virtues: He might be foolish and indolent, but he was also capable of kindness and solicitude. I was also beginning to understand how deeply unhappy he was. An Adonis, courtesy of Brooks Brothers, who had lost his way through life. I hated Frank Gerhard for his sarcasm; I thought him rigid and arrogant.

  Bobsy, for his part, liked—as he put it—to “get along with” people. Once or twice he made attempts to overcome Frank Gerhard’s cold reserve, to engage him in conversation. I remember the last time Bobsy tried, late one evening, when he had taken my arm and we were both leaving. In the doorway he asked Frank about Yale. (Bobsy’s father was a Yalie.) I stood at his side. I looked at these two men, one so tall and fair, the other so tall and dark. Bobsy’s easy charm was not being well received; Frank Gerhard looked ready to punch him.