Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  It was a spacious room on the second floor of the house overlooking the garden. The furniture was of glowing mahogany, the bed spread with a thick white cotton cover of intricate design. There were always freshly cut flowers in a blue vase on the table. But what Katherine liked best were the corner shelves which housed three miniature cities, carved out of wood and painted by an expert hand so that they evoked future urban landscapes. Dream cities, she thought of them as and wondered at them.

  On her first evening at Thomas’s house, after the shopping spree, she had shyly come down to dinner in one of her new dresses. She was selfconsciously aware of the silk slip, the new bra next to her skin and she had walked stiffly into the room the butler ushered her into. Thomas, sitting in a deep armchair in front of an open fire, was browsing through the newspaper and he took off his reading glasses to look her over. ‘Very nice, Schatzie,’ he said, his eyes twinkling, ‘Very nice.’ But now you must forget you are wearing new clothes and relax into what I know is your natural grace.’ He motioned her towards the sofa and abruptly began to talk about politics.

  ‘Have you heard about this new senator everyone is proclaiming as the next President, John F. Kennedy?

  Katherine nodded vaguely.

  ‘I am going to put my money on him. He seems to have a slight democratic, even a socialist cast to his conscience. In this country it is only the older, the inherited rich or a few intellectuals who are relaxed enough to think about the unprivileged. The rest are too busy worrying about holding on to what they have or getting more.’

  Katherine looked at him quizzically. ‘But Thomas would you give away everything you had?’ she gestured at the richly appointed room.

  ‘And what makes you ask that?’ he looked at her shrewdly.

  ‘I thought you suggested you were a socialist.’ Katherine said hesitantly.

  A booming laugh came from his wiry frame. ‘Even if I had said I was, which I am not, though I admit to certain sympathies, I can see that you are prey to the usual set of misconceptions. Socialism does not mean the equal distribution of misery; but simply the desire for a little more wealth, a little more justice all around.’ He laughed again.

  Katherine flushed. Thomas noticed her discomfort. ‘I am not laughing at you, Schatzie. You are right to speak your thoughts. I like it when you question me. You are also right to suggest that I would not like to part with all of this. Come,’ he took her arm and led her to the dining room, where the gleaming long rectangular table had been impeccably set for two. The food was exquisitely cooked and discretely served. The wine would have delighted a connoisseur.

  Thomas Sachs was indubitably a hedonist. But he was as much a voluptuary of the intellect as of the senses. He bored easily and though he loved beautiful women of all dimensions and aspects, he had rarely bothered to see them twice if there was not some fire of the spirit or intelligence to intrigue him. He said as much to Katherine on their second evening together. She had been asking him about the little wooden cities which adorned the shelf in her room.

  He looked pleased. ‘Ah, you have noticed them. They are by a fine German artist called Feininger. I have some of his paintings as well. He led her into his study where she had never yet been. Katherine was moved by the delicacy of the paintings, the playful motion of shapes which suggested rather than depicted. ‘But this one, this one is splendid.’ She stopped in front of a small canvas. ‘It’s not by the same artist, is it?’

  ‘Yes, you definitely have an eye, Schätzchen,’ Thomas beamed. ‘That is one of my great favourites. A Paul Klee. And to think I almost sold it just before the war to pay for a meal and a tawdry hotel room.’

  Katherine looked at him in disbelief.

  ‘Oh yes, Katherine. The world changes. In London, just before the war, almost no one had heard of Paul Klee, although in Germany he had been famous for some years. I had taken two of his canvases out of the country with me. I was in transit in London. By some mix-up, my papers didn’t seem to be in order and I had to hold on there until the proper American visa came through. I hadn’t planned that and what funds I had were coming here to the States. So I was desperate. I went to the National Gallery and offered to sell the two Paul Klees I had carried with me, to tide me over. Only one person at that great institution had heard of Klee, a poet and art critic by the name of Herbert Read. His committee told him he could offer me two guineas for each picture. I was hungry. I considered it carefully. Finally I decided to decline politely and throw myself on the mercy of an acquaintance instead.’ He chuckled. ‘And now these pictures are worth a small fortune and I would part with them even less. I am glad you appreciate them.’

  ‘They’re exquisite,’ Katherine breathed. ‘So wistful and sad, yet playful. I like them very much.’ She found herself telling him about the Vermeer she had been painstakingly copying, and then with a shudder of its destruction.

  Thomas took her hand in both his and stroked it gently.‘Schatzie, I am going to pay you what for a man of my years is a great compliment. The more I see of you, the more I esteem you. Too often with young women here it is not the case. You are not only lovely, you also have fire and intelligence. Do not let anyone stamp either of those out.’

  On Friday Thomas left the house before breakfast. He had warned her that she would be on her own, with only the butler for company until Saturday when he returned. He had given her a book to read, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which he recommended highly. It would serve as a substitute for school. She also had the run of the library and she could of course go out, as long, he warned her with a sardonic look, as she didn’t wander off with strange men. Katherine remembered this with a smile in the midst of her reading. The house felt lonely without him, but she realised that the strange feeling she had was one of happiness. She thought she could stay here for ever in this big solid house where Thomas translated the world for her. It would all end very soon though now. Her father would be back in New York on Sunday and Thomas had already carefully explained what he intended to do. She had stopped being so afraid once she had heard him talking to her mother. Thomas, she sensed, could convince anyone of anything.

  On the Saturday evening she dressed carefully in her favourite of the outfits Thomas had bought her: the white silk shirt with its lace collar and cuffs and a full blue skirt. Beneath the shirt, the mirror showed her the small fine flowers of her delicate bra could be seen. Katherine was pleased. Before the fire in the sitting room, she waited impatiently for Thomas and his approval. He gave it as soon as he appeared.

  ‘It does me good to come home to you, Schätzchen. You are looking more lovely than ever tonight.’ He bowed to her a little formally and then with only a hint of self-mockery kissed her hand. After the butler had served him a whiskey and her a lemonade, Thomas came to sit beside her ‘And how have you been in my absence, Katherine.’

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ she replied politely and then with a trace of irony in her voice, added, ‘I finished Buddenbrooks and walked only in the garden. There wasn’t a single strange man in sight.’

  He cocked a shaggy eyebrow, ‘Really? You astound me.’

  She giggled and suddenly in the softly-lit room felt brave. ‘Thomas, that night in the car, when you drove me to my brother’s, you …’ She paused, changed her mind.

  Thomas looked down at his drink. ‘I thought you might ask me about that sometime,’ he murmured. ‘I believed you were older than you are, perhaps a little bit more experienced, because of your bravery in accepting a lift. No, let us be quite honest. I hoped both those things. I desired you and - how shall we put it - I am as they used to say a little bit priapic.’

  Katherine looked at him incomprehendingly.

  He shrugged. ‘How can I explain it to one so young? I like women, Katherine. I like to give them pleasure and to take it. I am no Puritan. Women excite me and I am not frightened of them. I respect them. Sex need not be a big loaded word, burdened with anxieties and fears and emotions. Sometimes, of course, it is; but somet
imes too, it can be simply pleasure, equally shared. No,’ he looked into her eyes, ‘when you are older we shall talk about it some more.’

  ‘But now,’ Katherine pressed him, ‘now you don’t desire me any more.’

  There was a hoarseness to his laugh. ‘Now, Katherine, it is different, though you shouldn’t, in your innocence, provoke me too much.’ His eyes played over her blouse and she noticed that his hand around the whiskey glass trembled a little. He stood up. ‘I am not a monster. And you are a girl, let us even say a young woman, who is a guest in my house. Very soon, I shall meet your father who is certainly younger than me. What shall I say to him? That I have been seducing his daughter? No, no, that would not do.’

  ‘But if I were older…’ something in Katherine drove her to make him more explicit.

  ‘When you are older, we shall see. Perhaps we shall talk again. Now stop behaving like an arch temptress and let us go to table.’

  With the dessert, Thomas brought up the topic again of his own accord. There was a peculiar sparkle in his eyes. ‘Katherine, I am glad we had that little talk before dinner, even if it made me a trifle nervous. It was intelligent of you to bring it up. It is better to speak of such things than keep them hidden.’ He raised his glass to her. ‘Now I shall tell you something which I wish you to remember, even if we do not meet soon again after this week.’

  Katherine’s spoon tumbled from her hand. It seemed an impossible thought.

  ‘Even if I go away to school, I shall want to see you. Please,’ she added.

  He smiled reassuringly. ‘Yes, yes, but listen to what I say. I have noticed in this puritan America of ours that beautiful women are rarely permitted to be clever. There is a division of labour. Silliness is for the beautiful, intelligence for the homely. It is because the men here are too often afraid of women and seek to control them. Intelligence would make them more difficult to control. And to please them, the women dampen their intelligence. Where I come from, we were taught to prefer the best of everything. I want you to promise me that you will keep your intelligence as alive and as visible as your beauty.’

  His eyes bore more seriousness than she had ever read in them. ‘I promise,’ Katherine said in a small voice, not quite sure what it was she was pledging, though in later years she would have ample occasions to reflect on what he said.

  ‘And now, for once, we shall both drink to that.’ Thomas Sachs poured her a glass of wine.

  ‘Kat, ma petite, Kat,’ Jacob Jardine paused at the door of Thomas Sach’s gracious living room and looked at his daughter. She rose and came towards him shyly. There was something different about her. Her walk, perhaps. Her manner. Her expression. She looked, yes, the thought troubled him, like a woman. Then he smiled and opened his arms to her. She ran into them and pressed her face against his chest.

  ‘I had to do it,’ she murmured, ‘had to make you believe me.’

  He patted her reassuringly. ‘You were right. I was obtuse.’ Jacob released her and greeted his host and his son, whom he had asked Thomas to invite to this reunion. As the evening proceeded and conversation unfolded, Jacob was haunted by a sense of strangeness which he couldn’t quite pinpoint. It was not only that his daughter in this prepossessing dining room seemed an unfamiliar creature, that his son was slightly uncomfortable, and that Thomas with his mercurial wit and ironic eyes felt like a friend recovered from a distant past. It had more to do with the easy communion between Katherine and Thomas Sachs, the way his eyes sometimes fell on her when she wasn’t looking.

  That was it, Jacob suddenly thought. They were like a couple of newlyweds, fondly excited by each other’s company, by the experience of their first dinner party. The notion shocked him. The matter of Katherine’s school had to be sorted out quickly. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Katherine, I have spent the afternoon ringing round a variety of schools in the New England region.’

  Katherine looked at him expectantly.

  ‘None of them were prepared to take you on in the middle of the semester. Nor even, without a great deal of fuss, before next September.’

  Katherine’s face dropped and Thomas was about to intervene when Jacob hushed him.

  ‘Then I had an idea which I would like to try out on you. I spoke to Princesse Mathilde and asked her about the school Violette went to in Switzerland. It is a proper school, not just a training ground for debutantes. Princesse Mat says she is certain that they will have you. She will ring me back about it tomorrow.’

  Katherine’s features registered her surprise. She met her father’s eyes, then Thomas’s. ‘I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It’s very far away.’

  Again Jacob prevented the other man from speaking. ‘Yes, but it is a good school. I could fly over with you at Christmas, or even before. You could get to know Princesse Mat and Violette again. They would be like a second family to you. Their home is not far from the school. My only worry is that the majority of your classes would be in French. Do you think you could manage?’ Jacob spoke it as a challenge.

  Katherine was torn. She could see that a simple yes would please her father. But Switzerland. It was so remote from everyone. Yet the alternatives seemed dismally uncertain. After a moment she looked up from her plate and directly at her father, ‘Yes, Pappy. I think I can. Let’s give it a try.’ She was rewarded by the pleasure which suffused Jacob’s face.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  __________

  ∞

  On the eve of her departure for Switzerland, Thomas Sachs had given Katherine Jardine a little parcel and a brief, admonitory speech. ‘In here, my dear, you will find the standard guide for innocents abroad,’ his eyes had twinkled. ‘Never forget you are leaving the continent of dreams for the land of memory. And things there are rarely quite what they seem.’

  ‘Are they here?’ Katherine had asked.

  ‘No, no, perhaps not,’ he had grinned devilishly. ‘But then the world has grown smaller since Mr. James cruised on his ocean liner.’

  When Katherine had opened the parcel, she had found a copy of Henry James’s Daisy Miller, but she had been too excited to read. She had been even more excited as the blue flames whipped from the bulky Boeing’s engines and New York’s familiar skyline was metamorphosed into a dark sea of twinkling lights.

  And now, now as they descended on Geneva, she pressed her forehead against the panes of the oval window and breathed deeply. Beneath her hills grew into majestic mountains and a lake glistened in early morning light.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Katherine clutched Jacob’s hand. ‘Beautiful. I’m glad you talked me into it.’

  In the month since the decision had been taken that she would come to school here, her feelings had turned from foreboding to anticipation. One of those weeks had been spent at Thomas’s house and then her father had come to fetch her home. ‘Your mother has gone off on a little holiday,’ he had announced vaguely and Katherine had returned to New York and to school. She was happy to see Antonia again. The girls had so much to discuss. And Antonia’s enthusiasm about a Swiss school ‘like all those glamorous women in the magazines’ had infected a more cautious Katherine. ‘I shall convince the parents to let me come and stay with you in the holidays,’ Antonia had promised.

  Katherine’s mother had only come home the day before they were due to leave. She had been pale, listless, disaffected and Katherine was stricken by remorse. Was it her fault? Had she imagined the violence of the previous months? No, the pain surfaced in her mind all too readily. She wiped it away. Nonetheless, guilt pricked at her. And Sylvie’s pallid face and lustreless eyes as she said goodbye to her daughter stayed imprinted on her memory.

  The bustle of passport control and customs clearance over, father and daughter emerged into the pristine arrivals lounge. A slender grey-suited man instantly walked over to Jacob, ‘Docteur Jardine. Soyez bienvenu. La Princesse vous attend chez elle.’

  ‘Is that the Prince?’ Katherine whispered to her father
.

  Jacob smiled, ‘No, that’s Pierre, the chauffeur. There hasn’t been a Prince for some years. Mathilde doesn’t like getting up too early these days. We should be at the Château just in time for breakfast.’

  As they drove through the frosty morning light along the winding borders of the lake and up, up, into the mountains, Jacob chatted to the Chauffeur about his wife Thérèse, about the forecast for skiing conditions, about Pilkou and Martine, the Princesse’s dogs. Katherine was suddenly acutely aware that he sounded boyish, happy. Though she knew that her father travelled to Switzerland, she had had no idea that he was so well acquainted with the Princesse’s household. Somehow that was a comforting thought. It made the meeting with the woman, whom she had often heard referred to but whom she only remembered meeting once briefly in New York less daunting.

  Soon, as the large Mercedes climbed narrow roads, the magic of the landscape erased all else from Katherine’s mind. Hillside pastures dotted with cows and steep-roofed chalets gave way to dramatic slopes. Mont Blanc, sixty miles distant, loomed massively present. And when the Château the Princesse had now occupied for over twenty years emerged from amidst snow-clad trees half way up an escarpment, she felt dizzy with the beauty of it all. For Katherine the landscape bore none of the familiarity of a picture postcard. Everything from the vertiginous slopes to the twin spires of the Château which gracefully echoed the greater majesty of the peaks was breathtaking, awesome.