Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  One month later, and a few weeks before the date set for our marriage, Montague Stern suffered a heart attack; he died shortly afterward. I learned the news in a long, distracted, and emotional call from Constance. I was in France, and Frank (to Constance’s vexation) was with me, taking two weeks away from the Institute. When I told him, it was a Friday morning; we were sitting on a hotel terrace, over an early breakfast. A most beautiful summer’s day, the sky unclouded. The house I was decorating lay across the valley; the river Loire lay below us, snaking into the distance, mile upon mile. The movement of the water was invisible.

  When I told him the news, Frank rose and turned away from me. There was a long silence.

  “When did it happen?” he said finally.

  “During the night.” I hesitated. “Frank, she’s terribly distressed. She was not acting. I shall have to go back.”

  Frank turned his face away toward the river. He said carefully:

  “She hasn’t lived with Stern—she’s virtually not spoken to Stern—in nearly thirty years. But she is so distressed that you have to go back? You will fly three thousand miles, interrupt your work—after all that has happened?”

  “She is his widow. They never divorced. That one time he came to the apartment, after Bertie died … Frank, if you’d seen her face then … In her way, she loved him.”

  “We’ve discussed the results of her love.” His face stiffened. “Stern deserves to be mourned—but not in her company.”

  “I promised her I would go. The funeral is Sunday. It will be Orthodox. She begged me to be with her, and I agreed. Frank, whatever she’s done, I cannot just turn away from her. She’s losing everyone. She’s lost Stern; she’s losing me—”

  “Is she?” he said sharply. “You are marrying me. That does not mean she’s losing you.”

  “She feels she is. And it’s true, in a sense. We are not close, as we once were. Frank, please—she’s asking for my help. She just wants me there a short while, a week—”

  “She is asking for your help?” His face darkened. “Very well, then so will I. I ask you to stay here. I ask you not to go to her.”

  “Frank, why? What harm can it do now?”

  “I’m not going to discuss this.”

  I think I had never seen him so angry. I watched him fight that anger, and his face—passionate a moment before—became closed. He stood looking down at me. Then, in a cold voice, a voice he had never used to me before, he said: “Very well. You will go back, and I will go with you. I should attend the funeral in any case. I would like to be there. Assist your godmother through her period of distress. I don’t imagine it will be a long one.”

  He was wrong. Constance’s grief was deep. It also lasted for months.

  She insisted, when I arrived, that she would attend Stern’s funeral the next day without me. “I am going alone, in my own way,” she cried angrily when I tried to dissuade her. “He was my husband. Why should you be there? You never knew him.”

  Her manner was imperious and agitated. I knew that if I told her then that I had met Stern, it would have provoked a scene. The next morning I tried to explain that Frank had known Stern and would be at the funeral. I am not sure she listened, or that she heard me. She was pacing up and down the room, dressed in black from head to foot, brandishing a letter sent by Stern’s solicitors. I had already been made to read this letter, which gave the preliminary details of Stern’s will. The bulk of his estate went to charity; his properties, which were numerous, had been left to Constance.

  “Look at this letter! I hate this letter! I hate lawyers! I hate the words they use! Houses—how dare he leave me houses! Especially these houses. Scotland, the house where we spent our honeymoon—he’s left me that. How could he do something so cruel? I know what he was trying to do—make me think, make me remember. It won’t work. I’ll sell it. I’ll sell all of them.”

  I had promised her that I would wait at her apartment for her return. That return grew later and later. The funeral, I knew, would be over by midday. It was late afternoon when Constance made her appearance.

  The black clothes drained all color from her skin. Her face was ashen. She would neither sit nor stand still. She paced up and down, up and down, beginning a sentence, breaking off.

  “I hate time!” she cried out at last, in a violent way. Her eyes looked black, as they always did when she was angry. Her black-gloved hands shook.

  “Why can’t we stop time? Why can’t we wind it back? It marches over us—can’t you hear the sound of its boots? I can.” She covered her ears with her hands. “Tramp, tramp, tramp. It deafens me. It makes my heart ache. I want it to stop. I want it to go back. Oh, I wish I were God!”

  She dropped her hands and began to pace again.

  “You know what I’d do, if I were God? I’d do everything so differently. No one would grow old. No one would die. There would be no sickness, no madness, no accidents, no nasty little tricks. And no memories. Those least of all. We would all be little children, forever and ever. Very small children. Too young to be afraid of the dark. Too young to remember yesterday. That’s how it would be—if I were God.”

  “Constance,” I began, but I doubt she heard me. She scarcely seemed to see I was there.

  “Oh, I feel such regrets. I ache and I ache with them. I want my life back. Where did my life go? I want it back, and I want it different. I don’t want to be alone. I can’t bear to be alone. I want Montague. I want the baby I lost. I did love him. I almost loved him. And he was always so cold. When I think of him, do you know how I see him? Walking through the snow, in Scotland, on our honeymoon. Back and forth. Back and forth. He used to take my arm. Exercising in the prison yard—he called it that. ‘Shall we walk to the wilderness?’ he would say. Well, now I’m there. Oh, God. It kills me just to think of it—”

  “Constance, please don’t. I’m sure you’re wrong. I’m sure he wasn’t cold. I’m sure he loved you—”

  “What do you know?” Constance rounded on me. “What do you know about love? Nothing. Stupid little pieties. You sound just like your mother, do you know that? You think love is happiness. Love has nothing to do with happiness. Love is being on the rack.”

  “Constance, please sit down. Try to be calm—”

  “Why should I? I am never calm. I hate to be calm. Do you know who was at that funeral? That man of yours. Black suit. Black tie. Why was he there? Why is he everywhere I turn, following me about, spying on me—”

  “Constance. He knew Stern—through his work. I told you he would be there.”

  “No, you didn’t. You never said a word. I know what you thought, both of you. You thought I might not notice him, there were so many people—hundreds of people. Well, I did. I saw him, and I thought: I’ll wait. If I have to wait here a year, I’ll wait until I’m the only one left. I am Montague’s wife. It is my right. So I waited in the cemetery. It rained and it rained. He came over to me, that man of yours. He tried to persuade me to leave. But I wouldn’t. I shouted at him, I think. Maybe I shouted. He went away, anyway—they all went away in the end. I stood there all alone—and it was horrible, horrible. All the graves were so white. Why are they like that, Jewish graves?”

  She covered her face. She turned away to the window, then turned back. She stopped pacing and stood still, staring in a blind way across the room.

  “Do you know, I never understood Montague? I discovered that today. I did not understand his paintings. Or his music. I tried, but I never did. Wagner. Tannhäuser—that was the opera he liked best. Yes, Tannhäuser. Why that?”

  She gave a small shake of the head. “The funeral service was in Hebrew. They spoke Hebrew by his grave. I stood there. I listened and I listened. It made me feel so ill. I was a stranger there. I was a stranger to him. The rain poured down. There we were together, my husband and I. I thought, if I listened very carefully, I would understand. One word, one phrase—but I couldn’t, Victoria. Oh, it was horrible. I think Montague did it deliberately.
He did it for me—one last little irony, one last little reminder. I couldn’t speak his language—do you see?”

  “So there it is. Nothing but emptiness.”

  It was over an hour later. Constance was still talking. Nothing I could do would make her stop.

  “We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out of it. Montague and I—we planned such conquests. Where are they now, all those victories? I have nothing and no one. I am a child again. You see—my black dress, just the same, and my black shoes and my black hair. Everything black. Why is that bird in the room?” she cried out. “Victoria—make it go away. Catch it. I know you want to leave me. You want to talk about me—behind my back. You mustn’t do that. Not yet. You must catch the bird first. Quickly. Put it out of the window. Now.”

  She began to cry again as she said this, covering her face with her hands. She still wore her gloves. She still would not sit down. And she was still crying out, about the bird, some ten minutes later when Frank arrived.

  Looking at her from the doorway, he said brusquely, “Call her doctor. Call him now.”

  Then he disappeared. When I got off the telephone and went in search of him, he was in the kitchen. A frightened maid was in the act of collecting all the knives and locking them away in a cupboard.

  “Frank, what are you doing?”

  “The doctor will inject her with a sedative. Sedatives wear off. You’ll have to clear the apartment—no knives, no barbiturates, no kitchen bleach, no razor blades.” He paused. “Does she take barbiturates? I imagine she does.”

  “Yes, Nembutal sometimes, if she can’t sleep. Frank—”

  “Make sure you remove all of them. Go through her drawers, all the closets. Check clothes, and the pockets of clothes. Everything.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “Oh, I assure you it’s necessary. You’ll see. Do it now, and while you do it I’ll sit with her.”

  It took me a long time, going through all those rooms, all those cupboards, drawers, and hiding places. Constance had never encouraged visits to her own rooms, treating them as her lair, her domain. Now, standing in her dressing room, flanked by closet after closet, I could see the extent to which Constance hoarded the past. Dresses she had not worn in twenty years, rack upon rack of shoes, box upon box of gloves, all meticulously color-coded. Even her wedding dress was there, that legendary creation, looped, embroidered, scattered with seed pearls, the material as brittle as paper. It was packed away in a box. To open it made my hands shake. This was trespassing. I felt like a thief.

  By the time the job was done, the doctor had been and gone; Constance had been put to bed. I stood alone in her room, looking down at her. She lay there as still as death, her face as white as the pillowcases.

  On the dressing table I had lined up Constance’s secret armory of weapons. They had been stockpiled, just as Frank said—stuffed inside shoes, wrapped within underwear, concealed in pockets, at the back of drawers, one little lethal container after another. Different doctors’ prescriptions, different dosages, different dates; some of these pills had been prescribed that year; others were older—much older. The most ancient of these pills had been prescribed in 1930.

  There was also something else—one final discovery, also small and lethal. I found it in the pocket of a coat long discarded. The envelope was ripped; the stamp was American; the letter inside was brief.

  My dearest Victoria [it said]. My heart is heavy as I write. I have been thinking that you have forgotten your friend. Do you know how much it hurts, when you do not write? I think perhaps I have made you angry, with all that love I wrote, so today I say—I ask only to be your friend as before, so that we may walk and talk as we did. Look, I send another sum to you, just as I promised. Not too hard, this sum. If you cannot do it, I will help—this I promise! I try to make a joke of this, you see—but it is very hard, to speak and never to be answered. I think if you will forgive me, this will be the last letter and the last sum I send to you, Victoria. If you do not write this time, then I shall know for sure that you have forgotten—

  your friend, Franz-Jacob.

  I read that letter again, then, standing at the end of Constance’s bed. I read it and reread it, until tears made further reading impossible. I was still standing there when Frank came into the room.

  I saw his eyes take in the stacks of pillboxes, then the tears, and finally the scrap of paper in my hand. Without a word he took me in his arms and held me close while I wept over this evidence of love, and of treachery.

  Frank said we must be careful. He said that twenty-four-hour-a-day nurses were not necessarily enough; he said we might have removed that stockpile of sleeping pills, but there were always other methods, other weapons,

  “If she wants to die,” he said, “she will find a way to do it.”

  In this, he was correct. The day before our wedding, Constance smashed a glass and slit her wrists.

  The wedding was canceled. On the afternoon when it should have taken place, I sat with Frank in his apartment. He said, “Victoria, listen. If someone wants to succeed with that particular method, they do it behind a locked door. They cut lengthways, up the artery, not across—and they do not do it in their bedroom, in the certain knowledge that a trained nurse will return within ten minutes. This was not a genuine attempt at suicide. It was a message to you. It was a warning.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “Not entirely. I don’t doubt that your godmother is ill—and has perhaps been ill, in that way, for many years. But I think she has reasons to stay alive, however much she flirts with death. She likes to fight. She is … rejuvenated by battles. As long as she believes that she can take you away from me, she will not kill herself. Not Constance.”

  “But why, Frank—why?”

  “I have no idea. It is the way she is,” he replied simply.

  It was the way she was, and the way she continued to be. Time passed, month after month of it. Summer became fall; Constance’s condition fluctuated.

  Assisted by tranquilizers, by rest and good nursing, she would seem to make progress. She would leave her bedroom one day; the next, she would announce that she felt strong again—she could go out. The day after, she would feel able to see friends; the day after that, she would insist on returning to our showrooms. During these periods, her appetite would return; she would seem lucid, calm—and repentant. She would apologize in a humble way for all the anxiety and trouble she was causing me, for her failure to take on her share of our work, for the postponement of my marriage.

  “I can see now,” she said to me quietly one day, “I was right about Frank to begin with. I don’t know why I took against him like that. He’s been very good to me, Victoria.”

  I did not trust her then, when she said this—but I did begin to hope. I would think: another few weeks, a month at most … and I would be wrong. As suddenly as she had seemed to recover, there would be a relapse. Sometimes these were gradual, a terrifying slow seeping-away of all that regained energy—a process I would watch with dread. Sometimes the relapse would be very sudden, without warning.

  This cycle, from health to illness, from hope to despair, left me with a dragging fatigue. At work I would try to cope with a mounting backlog of commissions, some postponed, like the chateau in France; some canceled by furious clients; some in a state of chaos caused by Constance’s telephoning nervous assistants, interfering, complaining, countermanding instructions I had given.

  I felt I could never escape from her: If I was with a client, she would telephone; if I was with Frank, she would telephone. She might call at three in the morning, then again at four, then again at six. “Why are you there?” she would cry. “Must you be with him now? Victoria, I need you.”

  To begin with, I coped with this because of Frank. He was there always to reassure and to support me. But as the weeks passed, and then the months, I could see that he, too, began to change. He would no longer discuss my godmother’s progress, or l
ack of it, in any detail. His face would harden into a mask of impatience when I did. We were more often apart, as I spent longer and longer hours at work, trying to hold things together, and Frank retreated to the laboratory. On those occasions when the mounting barriers between us seemed about to fall, Constance would interrupt. She seemed to have an intuitive sense for the right moment. On one occasion, when the telephone had rung ten times and I finally reached out in weary resignation to lift the receiver, Frank slammed it back in its cradle.

  “Leave it,” he said angrily. “Just this once—for God’s sake. Leave it.”

  We quarreled that night—it was our worst and most painful quarrel, accusation and counteraccusation. The next morning we sat opposite each other in silence across the kitchen table. I stared at coffee cups, at pots of marmalade. I felt a sense of despair, and of misery. Frank did also; I knew that. Finally he reached across and took my hand. He said:

  “You see what this is doing—to us both? We are never alone. We can never be together. This is what I have done: We have our license. The arrangements are made. We will marry next week. I want your word that this time—no matter what happens—we will not postpone it. Do you promise?”

  I said yes; I promised.

  That same day, Constance came down to the Fifty-seventh Street showrooms, looking well and contented. All morning she worked with her assistants in her old manner, imperious but amusing, inventive. Around twelve some prospective clients were due to arrive, and this made me nervous—but once they were there, she behaved impeccably. Rooms were discussed, color schemes, preferences, schedules. By twelve-thirty Constance and I were leading these clients, a husband and wife, both deeply conservative, around the showrooms. There was, Constance said, a particular table she wanted to show them, a fine piece, Irish Georgian. Approaching this table, Constance stopped. She said, in a quiet voice: