by Belva Plain
“Yes,” Pam said rather shortly. “Would you like the whole tour? Upstairs?”
“Of course. You know how I love to see houses.”
On the second floor a narrow hall ran across the back of the house. From it there opened a sunny master room at the end, three more bedrooms, and a small office.
“Eddy’s office,” Pam said. “Eddy’s bedroom next to it.”
The women’s eyes met. Connie turned hers away. Was there something Pam wanted her to know? If so, why not tell her outright?
But no more was said. They went downstairs, had tea with small talk, and waited for Eddy to come home to dinner.
After dinner, when Pam had to talk to a customer in the stables, the brother and sister were for a while alone. And presently, after many circumlocutions, Connie came to her point.
“This retrenchment—I don’t mean that you aren’t living very nicely, but the change is dramatic, isn’t it? What’s the reason? Why?”
Eddy’s faint, short-lipped smile was wry. “Reason? Have you any idea what it cost Pam to outbid P.T.C. Longwood for Davey’s company?” Then as Connie’s flush rose to her face, he said quickly, “It’s a painful subject, I know, but you mustn’t let it pain. It’s past and done with. Business is business. It always was. I blame no one, least of all Martin. Who would I be to cast the blame, anyway?” he finished.
“But I don’t understand,” said Connie in a low, hurt voice, “why she made such a sacrifice. It’s staggering. I can perhaps understand why you would, although even that would be astounding, but why she would hand over almost everything … Was it simply because you asked her to?”
“Because I asked her to.” Eddy’s mouth closed in a hard, stern line.
“Extraordinary.” She looked around the room as if a real explanation might be hidden somewhere behind the curtains. “And you are back where you started. Living on what you earn from day to day, I mean.”
“As most people do. Although for us it’s not quite like that. We have Davey’s payments. He began making them from the start, every month.”
“It’s terribly hard for them, I think.”
“Pam doesn’t press them. It’s they who insist.”
“They would, of course.”
At that moment Pam came back, and the subject was changed.
“You’ll stay a few days, I hope, Connie?” she asked.
“I’d like to, but I have things to do at home. I try to spend every minute I can with Thérèse, so that she won’t miss her father too much. And then I have to look into colleges for Melissa because she wants to come back and make her home here with me. She says she feels happier here.”
All the way home Connie was bothered by what she had seen and heard. It seemed to her that in some way she had inherited a responsibility for making good the damage that Martin’s firm had done. And she said as much the next time she saw Preston, who had taken her to dinner a few times at the Carlyle Hotel, not far from her apartment. Carefully and courteously he listened, as was his way, considering his reply before he gave it.
“Frankly, I can’t see why you or anyone should feel responsible. Your brother-in-law chose to take the hard way. He could have given in and walked off with a small fortune, plus a salary with P.T.C. Longwood, if he wanted. To be rich is no bad thing, and to my mind he was foolish.”
“That’s what Martin said.”
“And Martin was right. So now he’s struggling.”
Connie interrupted. “I hate to see him struggling.”
“What are you thinking? That you should buy up the loan yourself?”
She regarded Preston’s quizzical, amused expression. There wouldn’t be much one could hide from such a man. “You’re a mind reader, Preston. Yes, I have been thinking that. After all, I’m Lara’s sister. Pam’s only a sister-in-law.”
“A remarkable thing for a sister-in-law to have done, especially since you tell me it meant such a sacrifice.”
“Evidently Eddy wanted her to do it.” Yet they’re sleeping separately, she thought. And the atmosphere in that house had been in some way formal, in some way not quite right.…
“People don’t impoverish themselves, relatively speaking, simply because a husband or wife asks them to. Judging by what I’ve seen of human nature, there’d have to be a quid pro quo,” Preston said.
“Meaning?”
“That she owes him something. You look puzzled.”
“Well, I am. Anyway, I really want to buy the loan from Pam. I really do.”
“Go ahead, you can certainly afford to. Especially if you plan to sell all that property. Do you?”
“Yes, what do I want with a huge house in London? It’s just a responsibility. And an Arab has offered me an enormous profit.”
“Take it. The real estate market is about to drop, all over the world. What about Palm Beach, and the ski house?”
“I’m selling them. It’s so much easier to take a suite in a hotel when you want to go somewhere. All I want to keep are the apartment and Cresthill.”
“You’ve done well for yourself in this world, Connie.”
“I guess I have.”
“You guess! You know you have. But you deserve it. Beauty deserves its rewards.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’ve got a lot more than beauty. You make people feel happy when they’re with you. You’ve got heart.”
“Heart? Funny, that’s a thing I really think I haven’t got enough of.”
“What? Why, Berg was mad about you. He talked about you constantly.”
She thought, you’re missing the point. For all the man’s shrewdness he had failed to see that she had not loved “Berg.”
“And look at the good heart you have for your sister, now.”
“That’s different. That’s a blood tie, like Thérèse.”
“It must have been a touchy business for Martin, having to deal with his wife’s family. We all appreciated that in the firm.”
“I’m sure it was.… I was thinking, Preston. I could take Davey’s repayments, after I’ve assumed the loan, and put part away for Lara’s children. It would have to be secret because he and Lara would never accept it otherwise. Can that be done?”
“Easily. We’ll set up a trust. Just tell me when.”
She smiled at Preston. “It’s good having you as a friend. I hate dealing with lawyers. They always come in batches of three or four, and they’re so pompous, taking ten words to answer when two would do.”
She meant what she said. It had become easy to talk to Preston. Even as recently as a few months ago he had still been the slightly forbidding patrician gentleman, a little too distant, too chilly, for a woman who was accustomed to the ebullience of Martin. Something had changed him.
“Then let’s be friends. I’d like that very much, Connie. I was rather waiting for you to emerge a bit from your first mourning.”
They were a distinguished couple. In restaurant and theater lobbies, wherever there were mirrors, Connie glimpsed them in passing, he with the elegant white head and aquiline young face above her head. Women stared at him. Women had never stared at Martin. Once when she heard a woman whisper, “Look at that stunning couple, the woman in white,” a shiver of excitement ran down her back. Power. Preston was power, and unlike some who had it, he looked the part.
One evening in late May, when it was still light after dinner, he said abruptly, “How about driving to my place in the country for a nightcap? It’s only about an hour and a half away.”
“I’d love it. I was never there,” she remarked.
“Well, you know—how shall I put it? My wife had her ways.”
Preston’s Buick sedan was not new. An old blanket had been tossed on the backseat. “For the collie,” he explained. “I took her to the vet yesterday. She sheds like the dickens.”
It was a soft night. Preston put on a tape; the music was as soft as the air; the car whirred softly northward. Neither spoke until they came to a familiar inter
section and went past it, when he said, “The road to your place.”
“I know. I’ll be there for the summer as soon as Thérèse’s school is out.”
“We’re only twenty minutes apart.”
“That’s all?”
Invisible from the road, Stonycroft lay behind a massive border of wild growth that, to Connie’s eyes, appeared unkempt.
“Observe the hedgerow,” Preston said. “It’s not like the ones you see in France or England—they’ve taken centuries to grow—but I think this is pretty good for only seventy-five years’ growth. My grandfather began it.”
It seemed odd that such a tight-woven tangle should be preferable to a landscape architect’s pattern of rare shrubbery, but Connie made no comment. Nor did she remark upon the sheep who were cropping the grass right up to the stone balustrade that encircled the house, nor upon the flagstone entrance hall with its boot racks, dog beds, and foul-weather gear hung on clothes trees.
In the long drawing room two great Newfoundlands and a shaggy collie sprang up from the sofas and came forward to greet them. The chintzes were faded, and next to a wing chair an Oriental rug showed a large hole. Connie, quite taken aback, followed Preston through halls hung with portraits, past a two-storied library darkly paneled, through a vast dining room lined with cabinets in which massive silver gleamed, and finally into an enormous kitchen that had not been altered since the 1920s.
Preston fixed drinks, carried them back to the main room, and shoved a dog off a sofa to make room for Connie and himself. From somewhere again, music played, very low.
“Cozy, isn’t it?” he inquired.
“Very.” She raised her eyes to a portrait opposite; two women, one gray haired with a sweet face, the other barely out of her teens, sat on a rustic garden bench in the shade of a stone house wall. “That’s very lovely. Eighteenth century, isn’t it? By anybody I ought to know?”
“No, some itinerant painter did it in Yorkshire one day just before the younger woman married and emigrated to America.”
“Oh, you actually know the provenance? How exciting!”
“I ought to. They’re my great-grandmothers, five and six times removed.”
Connie felt a flush of embarrassment. “And all those others on the walls? The man over the fireplace?”
“He’s only my grandfather. Yes, all the others. The DeWitt side were Huguenots; we don’t have every one of them because some were too poor to have their portraits done. I don’t like putting up phony ancestors,” Preston added.
“Do you mind if I look some more?”
“Go ahead.”
On each painting a small brass plaque gave names and dates: Amelia Ann Cornwallis, 1767; James Todd Cornwallis, 1880; Marie Laure DeWitt, 1814. These were the real thing, a jumble of the family’s generations. No doubt the furniture was too. No decorator would have juxtaposed this Elizabethan chest with those Victorian Gothic chairs, that was sure. And yet, beside the “cozy” feeling that Preston had pointed out, the whole possessed a certain elegance. Strange. And those huge dogs with their dirty paws on the furniture! Martin would have had a fit, Connie thought, and so would she.
“It’s a lovely house,” she told Preston. “It looks—well, real I can’t think of a better word.”
“It’s lived in, anyway. And meant to be lived in, not to impress people with.”
Had that been, possibly, an oblique rebuke? She looked up quickly, to find that there was nothing in his expression that could indicate anything but an honest statement.
“I wonder,” he said suddenly, “whether you will do a favor for me?”
“Why, you know I will. What is it?”
“A little great-niece of mine is being presented in Charleston at the St. Cecilia Ball, and I’d like to send an appropriate gift. Will you do the shopping? I thought perhaps a strand of pearls, suitable for a girl of eighteen, would be the best unless you have another suggestion.”
“Pearls are always good. And if she should already have some or should receive some, they can be worn wound together. You’ll need to tell me how much to spend, though. Whether you want a diamond clasp and—”
“No, Arabella’s too young for diamonds. Her parents wouldn’t like that. They’re very quiet, conservative people. My niece married into one of the oldest South Carolina families.”
“Oh,” said Connie, who had just bought pearls with a huge diamond clasp for Melissa’s birthday. “I suppose the St. Cecilia Ball is a formal charity affair?”
“Formal, and by invitation only. It’s a local tradition. One can’t buy tickets for it. It’s not a New York charity bash.”
Connie was feeling that she had walked into yet another world. Worlds beyond worlds, barely and only touching here and there when necessary, as Martin’s had touched Preston’s. She had not even been aware that there were people who thought a diamond clasp wasn’t proper.
Back home that night she kept thinking about those people who could live secure in their shabby grandeur and drive an old Buick, while their millions piled up in the bank. “Curiouser and curiouser.” So said Alice in Thérèse’s favorite story, as she explored the rabbit hole.
One stage followed another. Full summer came, Connie moved to Cresthill, Preston stayed full-time at Stonycroft, and the cars traveled back and forth between the two houses. Both had pools and tennis courts. Both had chairs and tables at which, after strenuous sport, a hot afternoon could be whiled away in the shade. They talked. Connie spoke freely about herself and her background. It pleased her that Preston DeWitt would find her so interesting, pleased her to be turned, in his eyes, into someone charmingly unfamiliar and exotic. On her part his casual mention of places to which she could never have gone with Martin, to which even first-generation corporate executives like Bitsy Maxwell’s family had no access, was tantalizing. Mount Desert was where one summered, not Southampton; Hobe Sound was where one wintered, not Palm Beach.
“Of course,” he said, laughing a little at himself, “it all began in America with the Gilded Age after the Givil War. The unspeakable vulgarity of Newport’s so-called cottages! It takes two or three generations to learn how not to show off.”
Damn decorators, Connie was thinking. Telling me that the best houses had to be French! And she wondered what Preston really thought of Cresthill.
One evening in late July he gave a dinner at Stonycroft. Having been at one of his dinners before, she knew this time what to expect: tall men in perfect dinner jackets and tall women in plain, expensive dresses three or four years old. Here were seen no fads like Lacroix’s pouf skirts. So she dressed accordingly in the kind of white silk that Pam had always worn, with a pair of barrettes in her hair, and was rewarded by Preston’s praise.
“Very becoming. Very well chosen. You’ve matured, Connie.”
She understood that he meant, and was too clever to tell her outright, that she was learning to look as if she had been born in a house like his.
After the dinner, when the other guests had gone, he asked her to remain.
“Sit there a minute. I’ll be right back.”
In a curious way, while wondering just what the request portended, she felt that it portended some sort of important change. A few minutes later he returned with a leather box in hand, apologizing for the delay.
“I had to take down a picture to get at the wall safe. Anyway, here it is.”
And on the coffee table he displayed a ruby necklace, an elaborate arabesque of splendid stones set in platinum and diamonds; long pendant earrings matched.
“Caroline’s parure,” he explained. “But it came from my grandmother.”
Nothing in Connie’s possession, no matter how costly, could equal this. These were museum pieces. Royalty could wear them; royalty had perhaps done so. She could only gasp.
“I’d like you to have it, Connie.”
She looked at him, disbelieving. “I don’t understand. It makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does. I have no daughters and no
granddaughters. I don’t need money, so I’m not going to sell it. It lies in a dark vault. Why shouldn’t such jewels see the light of day? Or I should say ‘night,’ shouldn’t I? But don’t wear them in the country, you do know that, don’t you? They belong in a parterre box at the opera on opening night.”
She was bewildered. “Preston, I can’t. I shouldn’t. It isn’t right.”
“At least let me see how you look in them. Try them on.”
Before the mirror she watched him clasp the necklace, his handsome face concentrated. Then she put on the earrings and turned to him, saying in a kind of self-conscious, awkward tension the first thing that came into her mind.
“This dress is too high necked. You can see it’s wrong.”
“Pull it down so the jewels rest on your skin.”
When she did so, he smiled. “That’s better. Actually, do you know how it should be worn? Wasn’t it under one of the Louises in France that women exposed their breasts? I don’t remember. Anyway, that would be sensational.”
Connie laughed. “It’s against the law.”
He laughed too. “Not here and now in this room.”
And saying so, putting both hands on her shoulders, he stretched the white silk down past her breasts, exposed the lace brassiere, and unfastened it. Now at the cleavage lay the largest of the rubies, blood-red, rose-red, hot and glittering. For a moment she stared at it, then slowly turned her eyes toward Preston, who was examining her with questioning curiosity. She had long ago perfected a quiet, steady gaze into which a man might read whatever degree of meaning he wished.
“We’ll go upstairs,” he said.
She followed. It was as if she were watching another woman mount the great curving flight of steps beside him, as if she were clinically analyzing that woman’s emotions, her triumph at having conquered so desirable a man—and at the same time her total absence of desire. To tell the truth, it had been a long evening, and that woman really would have preferred sleep to what was coming. But she also knew what was expected of her and was prepared to perform well.
The room into which he led her contained a high old bed with carved mahogany hung in dark green damask. Sir Walter Raleigh might have bedded Queen Elizabeth in it. Or had he ever slept with Elizabeth? No, not Raleigh. Essex.
