by Belva Plain
“Fern hasn’t been able to shake the cough.” Alex was speaking to someone at the far end of the table. “The children had it first, and it’s gone from one to the other. So I’m insisting she take a week on the Riviera to get over it.”
“You’re not going?”
“I can’t. There’s too much on the fire at the office. But she’ll be happy on the beach with a pile of books.”
A woman called, “That’s the most splendid necklace, Fern! I’ve been meaning to tell you all evening.”
Everyone turned to look at the necklace; a filigree of gold and garnets, it rested as in a velvet case on Fern’s naked shoulders; the heavy pendant lay on white silk between her breasts.
“Her present for my birthday,” Alex explained, with a smile of a fond husband.
Observing that smile and Mary’s answer, Martin felt, among all the converging streams of his emotions, a cur rent of soft compassion. Of all the people in that room, he was almost surely the only one who knew their truth. How capricious, how reckless was life! Once he had seen it as a steady journey: for some a dull plod, for others a triumph, but in any case something with direction, that one controlled. He had, of course, been very young when he had thought so.
For nothing he had done or willed had brought him to where he was now. And where was he now? Quite simply, he was a man in love, a man obsessed with loving, filled with it, driven by it Something had forced him to love this woman from the first moment And never, in spite of all his self-denials, had he ceased to love her.
How was it possible? Who could say? It was, after all, the human condition! A natural phenomenon: a simple thing! But light and water were simple things, too, as long as one didn’t try to explain them.
And, sitting at that festive table, Martin had now a sense of total recall: the white room with her pictures on the wall; her face raised to his when he came in; that incredible blue gaze; the paint spot on the sandal. The moment, the arrested moment, in which everything had changed, although he had not known then how much.
But she? What of her? He had no way of knowing, dared not try to find out. And he thought of her, living her sham; he thought of Jessie—and he thought his head would burst with futile thinking. The warmth and sparkle seeped out of the room, seeped out of his spirit.
Someone was addressing him. “So you’ll be leaving us, going back to America, I hear?”
“Yes, soon,” he replied.
Someone remarked to Fern, “You’ll miss your sister.”
She made some acknowledgment. Glancing up at the sound, he caught her gaze. And a strange thing happened: she did not turn away. Eyes normally move toward the sound of voices; they come to rest on one face, then another; they flicker over a table and across a room. But hers did not. They fastened on Martin’s eyes and held there.
Talk bubbled around the circle as wine bubbles in a glass; still the eyes held to each other. His—his heart was in his eyes, that’s all he knew. Hers—hers had such a look … He wanted to believe it, had to believe it Unmistakably it said: If you want me, I shall not refuse.
Wild, tremendous, reckless joy surged in him.
His right-hand neighbor, an agreeable, gray-haired lady, looked concerned. “Is anything wrong?”
“Wrong?” he repeated confusedly.
“You put your fork down so abruptly, I thought you weren’t feeling well.”
“No, no. I just remembered something, that’s all.”
“Well, as long as it was something happy,” she said brightly.
The talk kept on swirling. He did not hear it. At last people pushed their chairs back and left the table. Then someone put music on the record player. Dancing began in the hall.
From the arc of the bay window in the drawing room a balcony projected, a little space affording room for no more than two or three to stand and look down upon the square. Mary leaned against the railing. When he stepped behind her she did not move.
The square was still. It was late; distant traffic only murmured now, as distant water rushes in a country place, light globes hung among the trees like white balloons and a powerful scent of wet earth rose from the shrubbery.
“Who stole my heart away? Who—” The little tune floated with a poignant sweetness from the room at their backs.
In the tiny space among the potted plants their shoulders touched. Still neither of them moved. Someone inside turned a lamp on; the beam of its light fell over a blossoming azalea in a tub, turning the white buds rosy, the color of flesh.
“My God,” Martin said. He was shaking.
She looked at him.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We have to do something about it. Don’t you know that?”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “I’m starting to cry. I won’t be able to turn around if someone comes.”
He understood that tenderness would bring more tears. So he waited a minute or two and then spoke quickly.
“I’ll be in Paris at a conference next week. I can leave after the second day. Will you—”
“Yes … Yes.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“At the Georges Cinque …”
Voices passed and passed again in the room behind them. Still they stood, hostess and guest, looking out at the lovely night.
“Darling,” Martin said. It was the first time he had said the word aloud. “Darling Mary.”
Chapter 12
They had six days. Eastward through the Provençal spring they drove, past olive orchards and round hills dressed in lavender. On cobbled squares they parked the rented car and drank cassis while old men played boules. They came down out of the hills to the sea on a morning when light showered from the sky and broke into a hundred thousand sapphires over the bay.
How beautiful, oh God, how beautiful!
And they came to a white town, to a house with tall, blue-shuttered windows, where the air smelled of lemons and everything glittered in the sun.
“We’re here,” Mary said. “Menton.” She laughed.
“ ‘Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘Happy as God in France.’ It’s one of the few things I still remember in German.”
“Do you remember enough French to ask for a good room?”
“We already have one.”
“Then shall we go upstairs right away?”
“Do you want to?”
“You know I do.”
Light, coming through the blinds, drew bars of dusty gold across her thighs. Outside it was still afternoon, but within the tall old room dusk had settled.
She made a little sound, an indrawn breath, part sigh, part cry. He turned in the bed and put his lips on the soft hollow where the sound had caught in her throat. His thudding heart had slowed; now it started up again. They had been lying in that sweet peace which follows ultimate attainment. Surely no other woman in the world, he thought, had ever or could ever—Over and over they had dissolved and merged and become one. There were no words for it. All the millions of words that had been written came down to nothing.
In the evening, they sat and talked. They went back to the beginning.
“What did you really think, Mary? Didn’t you know I wanted you? Why didn’t you come home? Why did you marry Alex? Tell me. Tell me.”
“Oh,” she said, “what had I seen or known? I had never been touched by anyone. Yes, you touched me … I thought when I came back from Europe, we’ll see each other again and after a while—”
“But I was dying for you, Mary!”
“But your letter! You were so proud and glad about Doctor Albeniz—”
“You remember the name!”
“I remember everything. I understood then that your work would always come first. I thought perhaps I had imagined the other—about me. And I felt ashamed. Then that same week I met Alex.”
Martin was silent. Yes, of co
urse she would have welcomed Alex then, with all his cheer and strength, with all the color and movement of the life he offered! Offered without postponement!
“I understand,” he said.
“Would your work really have come first, Martin? Would you have asked me to wait three years?”
He wanted to be completely honest, both with her and with himself. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, foolishly I suppose, asking myself whether you would have waited for me, whether I would have given up the offer if you hadn’t been willing to wait or what I would have done if my father hadn’t died. My God, what a tangle it was—and is!”
“And I,” Mary spoke so low that he could barely hear her, “I wanted to get away from that dim house. Would I have waited three years more? I don’t know. You can’t imagine how I wanted to get away and—and live!”
“I can,” Martin said.
“Yet I ask myself, was it really as bad as all that? I’ve told you before, one has no right to be a fifteen-year-old romantic when one’s twenty.”
“You’ve made up for it,” he said gently.
“Oh yes, I’m a hundred years older!” She clasped her hands under her chin; her rings flashed in the darkness. “How easily one throws oneself away! As if one could replace oneself and all the lost days. I would do differently now.”
“You can’t be sure of that. We torture ourselves, all of us do, with questions that can’t be answered.”
“I wonder,” Mary said, “whether my children will ever wonder about me someday and ask whether I’ve been happy.”
“That’s a strange thought.”
“Not really. I often think about my mother. You would have liked her, Martin. She was so different from Father. I never knew why they married. I think he was overawed just because she was so different from him. Sometimes at the table she would talk, and I knew he wasn’t even listening. He didn’t care about any of the things she loved.”
Martin looked down into the trees. The dark pines and her evocation of old memories were suddenly oppressive.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Talk about sad things.”
“I didn’t mean to be sad. You do the talking, then.”
“No, I’d rather hear you. I don’t know you enough, Mary. I should need a lifetime to know you and I won’t have it.”
“Now you’re the one who’s talking of sad things.”
What’s to become of us, he thought, now that we have begun something that can’t go on and also can’t end?
He roused himself. “Come. We’ll go down and walk on the beach. It’s too beautiful to waste a minute of it.”
In Nice they walked on the Promenade des Anglais, while a stream of smart, snub-nosed Renaults went by. Stepping quietly in the hush of grandeur, they looked at shop windows and marble lobbies. From a terrace they observed a nineteenth-century panorama: wide effect of water and gauzy sky, of sails, white dresses, pillars and balustrades. Sprightly music played and no one, Martin saw, noticed that the musicians had threadbare cuffs.
“Let’s go back to Menton,” he said abruptly.
“You’re a funny duck! We just got here!”
“Do you mind? If you really do, I’ll stay.”
“No. We can have a country lunch if you’d rather.”
“Then I’d rather.”
At a market in a walled village on the Grand Corniche they bought food: cheese, fruit, bread and the shriveled black olives of the region. On the side of the road they stopped to eat.
“Better than all that splendor,” Martin remarked.
“It made you uncomfortable?”
“Yes, that sort of thing’s a snare. A doctor must never let himself forget ordinary people. It’s only too easy.”
“For you, do you mean, or for anyone?”
“I’m no different from anyone else. Or maybe I am. I want beauty terribly, and beauty in this world can be expensive.”
“I think you’re too hard on yourself.”
“That’s what Jessie always says.”
Mary looked away. Her face was sad. “I’d managed for at least two hours not to think of her until just now.”
“We’re not going to hurt her,” he protested. “Neither of us wants to or will.”
“But I’ll know when I look at her, or at you, or at myself.”
He closed his eyes, shutting out the noon brightness. “We couldn’t have helped it—the whole thing, from the beginning.”
“I’m so sorry for us all!”
“For Alex, too?”
“No, he’s as happy as possible, in his circumstances. You know,” she said, “I’ve accepted all that … Did you ever think I really would?” There was a spiritual beauty in her face as the sadness ebbed into grave calm.
“Yes,” Martin said, “I did think you would. I remember, on the day we met, how compassionately you spoke of Jessie.”
“But to be truly compassionate, one needs to have suffered. One needs to have been alone. I know that now. I didn’t then.”
“Mary … tell me, is it terribly hard for you now, the way things are?”
She was silent for a while. He did not interrupt her silence.
Then she said, “You might say it’s as if I were a widow, living with a kind brother. Not the worst fate in the world, I suppose. Thank God, I have my children and my art, such as it is.”
But if she didn’t have the children, she would be free. Yet, if she were free and he not free, how would he feel about that? Guiltily, Martin repressed the selfish thought.
“Listen to me,” he said. “We’re overanalyzing. Let’s just accept, instead. What’s past is past. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
She stood up. “You said we mustn’t spoil our days here, and you were right So, no more talk! Let’s go back to the beach and pretend we have all the time in the world.”
Three more days. For long hours they lay in a hidden hollow of the beach, under the escarpment of the hills out of whose rocks these ancient villages had been carved. On a promontory, like a finger thrust out into the sea, the tearing wind had bent pines into the attitude of prayer. But in this windless hollow the warmth was kindly, the air was like silk on the skin and the sand like silk.
He took her hand. It seemed to him that strength flowed from one to the other through their hands. And he thought that ultimate joy would be to lie forever in this sun, to float in this sea—for was the sea not once our home?—and to wake in the first light with this woman next to him.
Coming back to their room one day they found the maid cleaning. “I saw you walking yesterday,” she said. “M’sieur and Madame looked so happy.” She spoke with the awkward boldness of one who is naturally shy. “I watched you laughing, and I felt happy, too. I’m going to be married on Saturday.”
“Oh,” Mary cried, “we shall be gone by then! Is he the young man who waited for you at the end of the drive last night?”
Blushing, the girl nodded. “You could have come to the wedding in my village. It’s not far from here.”
Mary reached into the closet for her dressing gown, white silk embroidered with red Chinese poppies. “I want you to have this,” she said and, as the girl protested, “No, I want you to. I’ve been so happy wearing it. It will bring you luck.”
“I wonder what sort of children they’ll have,” she said when the girl had left. “She, with her round face and pug nose? The boy is thin and has a craggy nose. He looks gentle.”
“You wonder about everything, don’t you? You’re probably the most curious person I’ve ever known,” he answered, smiling at her.
There was a radiant joy in her eyes. He saw that for the moment her spirit was unencumbered. He wished it might always be so …
“I would like to have gone to that girl’s wedding,” Mary said.
“Why would you?”
“I saw a country wedding here once. The bride was a farm girl in a homemade dress. After the ceremony she
laid her bouquet at the feet of the Virgin in the side chapel. I think they pray for many children, I’m not sure. I would pray that I had chosen the right man … Afterward they drove away in an old car with daisy streamers tied on. It was very touching … I cried.”
Could it have been like that for us? Martin wondered.
One more day. In the afternoon they went walking inland. Everything drowsed. Birds were silent. Houses with closed shutters lay sleeping in the heat. Plane trees in long alleys were quiet in the windless air.
“Siesta time,” Mary said.
“I know. But we can’t waste it” And he said, “I’ve never made love on the grass.”
She laughed. The sound was happiness, and this happiness was beautiful to Martin, seductive and yet pure.
“Why wonder? Let’s find out.”
They walked on past a field where cows rested in the shade, then climbed a fence into a dark little grove. Still the world slept; there was no one in sight. Behind a curtain of living green they lay down, in the hush and murmur of the breathing meadow.
The last day. Late in the afternoon Martin came out to the terrace and paused in the doorway. Unaware of his presence, Mary sat with bowed head. She had changed into traveling clothes; their neutral tan was sober in the pastel afternoon. And this sober color, the curve of her skirt and her bent head created a melancholy which, if you were to translate it into music, would quiver into a minor chord and die on the air. He stood there looking and looking. There was something in his throat. He kept swallowing, but it wouldn’t go down. The she saw him.
“The bags are downstairs,” he said.
She nodded.
“They’ve taken the car. Well get a taxi to the station.” He sat down and took her hand. It lay limply in his. “There’s time for something to eat,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“But you must,” he said and asked the waitress for a tureen of soup.
And he sat there wishing, wishing that they were just beginning, that they were going away somewhere, to Afghanistan or Patagonia, where they would shed everything: names, past, everything.
“What have we done?” Mary whispered.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing to hurt anybody, since that’s what you mean.”
