She chuckled, ‘Not tonight. Not now.’
They stayed in the villa for two days. Two long days and longer nights in which they walked along the borders of Lago Maggiore, sat in the grounds, talked, made love, and talked some more, about life and justice, politics and revolution. He was again startled by the force of her convictions, the vehemence of her beliefs. That force gave her a fire which sparked him, warmed, even when he disagreed.
When Sunday evening caught them by surprise, Alexei knew that now more than ever he could not bear to let her go. Panic gripped him with the thought of her disappearance.
He concluded for the first time that he was in love. The logic of that thought led only one way.
He asked her while they were taking a last stroll through the grounds. Took her hand and formed his lips round the words. ‘Rosa, will you marry me?’
He heard the startled breath which escaped her.
‘I love you,’ Alexei said simply.
She didn’t reply for a moment, but she didn’t drop his hand. Then, she said in a low voice. ‘I could say I will never be another in the list of your possessions, a piece of Gismondi chattel. But I won’t say that.’ She paused. ‘I think we understand that now, between us.’
When she didn’t speak again, Alexei turned her towards him, gripped her shoulders, sought out her lips. She lowered her head away from him, shook it. ‘No, Alexei.
Sex, yes. Marriage, a machine to keep society stable. No,’ she shook her head again. The sweep of her hair tickled his face.
‘And love,’ she shrugged, ‘I don’t know what it means. It doesn’t enter into my plans.’ her voice took on a husky passion. ‘Life is about more important things than a little cosy twosome.’ She looked at him, a little sorrowfully, her face earnest.
But he was angry. ‘There’s nothing to say, then,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s go.’
He insisted on doing the driving and he raced, too fast, dangerously winding through the traffic in the hours that it took to get back to Milan.
By the time they reached the apartment, his anger was spent.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ he turned to her as she sat on the bike, his eyes holding a plea.
‘It’s better if I go. I’ll only be trouble.’
‘Where will you go?’ his voice was harsher than he had intended. ‘Do you have anywhere to go?’
‘I’ll find somewhere,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t concern yourself about it.’
He grasped her shoulder. So frail. So strong. He met her eyes. ‘I can manage a little trouble. Please. Stay.’
A smile spread over her lips. ‘But not forever.’
‘No,’ he met her on it. ‘Not forever.’
Chapter
Twenty-One
__________
∞
Portia Gaitskell addressing a large crowd in a dusty hall in midtown Manhattan. Portia, her hair cut functionally short, her face devoid of make-up, her eyes glowing, her voice sure, authoritative as she led her audience through a hidden history, the real history of women. Portia, invoking man as the enemy. Men as the perpetrators of systems which oppressed women. Systems of knowledge which legitimated male power and mutilated women. Made women into objects - objects of hatred or desire - but always and ever passive objects, robbed of their subjectivity. Robbed of the ability to act, to take control of their lives, to construct their destinies.
Katherine, watching, listening, from the audience was proud of her. Proud of Portia’s mastery of the crowd. Proud of the confidence with which she mustered her arguments. Proud to know her. Portia, her friend.
She was also a little in awe. It had been almost three years since she had seen Portia. There had been letters, of course, the occasional phone call. But somewhere in those three years, Portia had learned how to weave her tongue round words which had never passed Katherine’s lips. Words like patriarchal, phallocentric, sexist. Words which carried keys to the workings of the world, which explained the relations between the sexes. Words which resonated with purpose, direction, certitude.
Katherine in contrast had no certitudes, no explanations. Except where the specificity of her work was concerned.
It made her feel strangely out of step.
Portia, invoking Ibsen, The Doll’s House, written almost 100 years ago. Nora, refusing the ‘sacred duty to husband and children’ and proclaiming another duty, just as sacred - ‘My duty to myself.’
It was odd, Katherine thought. She didn’t consider Natalie in terms of duty. She loved her. She didn’t want to be made to feel guilty for that love. It came first. Natalie came first. And then her work, a different order of things, which she adored, which was necessary.
Later, there were drinks. Women, milling, congratulating Portia. Women in baggy overalls, in loose dresses, faces animated, breasts unbound. There were a few men, too, feet shuffling. A little uncomfortable, but their faces poised in smiles. Good men, gentle men. Men trying hard not to be part of a hated category. Men nervously prepared to be part of a future which wasn’t only theirs.
Katherine stood on the sidelines. She didn’t look right. Her dress was too good, her lipstick too much in evidence, her tights too smooth. Her manner too reserved. There was a little circle of quiet around her.
Portia broke through it. ‘Katherine, you made it. I’m so glad.’
‘You were wonderful, remarkable.’
They smiled at each other, still two girls from Madame Chardin’s School. Embraced. Portia introduced her to others, many others. ‘Katherine Jardine, the new true force in the Museum of Modern Art.’
Katherine flushed, demurred. She had only been at the Museum for a year, a stripling of an assistant curator. But Portia’s approval felt good. She basked in it.
It wasn’t, as she found out later that night, after they had had a crowded, noisy and jovial dinner in Chinatown, by any means a wholesale approval.
Portia accepted Katherine’s invitation to come home and stay with her rather than in her hotel. Katherine proudly showed her round the brownstone she had moved into just a few months ago and which was still in the process of being done up. They tip-toed into Natalie’s room and looked at the warm sprawl of the small body amidst cuddly toys. Katherine kissed the sleeping form, hugged her.
And then, a bottle of wine between them, they sat and talked and caught up.
After a while, Portia went on the attack. ‘All you can tell me is Natalie this and Natalie that. What about you? I want to know about you.’
Katherine baulked, ‘She’s my daughter. I love her. I’m not one of your Noras, you know, abandoning my child so that I can set off on a long and arduous struggle for self-fulfilment.’ Acid came into her voice.
‘Your daughter? Surely you mean your and Carlo’s daughter? His little treasure. You’re just perpetuating his memory, living in his shadow, by investing all your emotions in your daughter. You haven’t mentioned a single other human being except Natalie since I arrived.’
‘That’s utter tripe, Portia. I’ve never heard such tripe,’ Katherine was angry. ‘I never think of Carlo. You know nothing about it.’ Katherine knew too well how she had made an active task of forgetting Carlo after his funeral. She didn’t want to remember. Only forgetting made life possible.
But then Portia knew nothing of her relations with Carlo. She had never told her, not on the occasion when she had fled Rome, nor afterwards.
Still her friend’s certainty was deeply irritating.
‘You’re just obsessed by men,’ she said in a slightly calmer, but still terse, voice. ‘Yes, yes, you talk about women, but the source of everything, the motive cause of everything, the measure of everything, is Man.’
Portia’s face grew contorted. But Katherine wouldn’t for once let her interrupt.
‘Well, I don’t know Man. I know a few very specific men. My father, Thomas, my brother. I don’t hate them. But there are no men in this house, not in fact or memory. Just Natalie, and Doreen, who helps take care of her
, and me.’
Suddenly Portia burst out laughing. ‘Katherine Jardine, that’s the longest speech I have every heard you make. And who knows, there may even be a little truth in it.’ She took a long, reflective sip of her wine. ‘Still, it’s not quite right. I mean you, you don’t seem quite right. It’s all too disciplined, too closed off. I know, I know, there’s work. And then there’s Natalie. Where are your friends? Why aren’t you part of things? There’s a huge women’s network in this city.’
Katherine sat back in her chair, fingered thick, pale brocade. She shrugged, ‘I’ve never been a good joiner. You remember that. I’m hopeless at the general. Remember in London, you were always trying to get me to join this group and that? She paused, looked at her friend with a trace of irony. ‘But at that time, if my memory serves me, the cause was Vietnam. I still remember the refrain at the demo, “Where has Harold Wilson gone?/ Crawling to the Pentagon”. Then it was revolution, liberation for everybody. Now it seems it’s liberation for only half of everybody. Just us women.’
Portia grinned. ‘I got tired of stuffing envelopes and being tea lady and having men only half as intelligent as me giving me orders. So I’ve graduated into the women’s movement. Men can take care of themselves. In any case, they need us more than we need them. Otherwise, no more Natalies.’
It was Katherine’s turn to laugh, ‘You’ll meet her tomorrow and then you’ll see why she takes up so much of me.’
Because she had promised Portia she would, Katherine went a few weeks later to a consciousness-raising group she had recommended. It took place in an airy, but slightly ramshackle apartment on West End Lane. The women were mostly her age or slightly younger, a mixture of post-grads and students from Columbia and NYU, some teachers, a social worker, a painter. She exchanged a few words with one, then another, sipped her instant coffee and sat, a little nervously, at the edge of her chair. Others positioned themselves on the floor, squeezed into sofas, a desultory gathering, so that Katherine was not quite certain that the session had begun, when in fact it had. She was surprised by its content. Somehow she had expected that they would talk issues. Talk about inequalities, about women’s role in the workplace, about the need for independence, about rights. She had done her homework, gobbled up since Portia’s departure Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.
But this was more like a group confessional, a sharing of experiences, most of them to do with sex and with their own bodies. A woman began by saying how her boyfriend had left her life when she had suggested that they try something other than the missionary position, do it with her on top.
Men were threatened by women’s desire, another commented, it robbed them of their power, their potency.
They talked of the experiences they had had of men hating women’s bodies, telling them their ‘twats’ were smelly or large, doctor’s refusing to examine them, assuming complaints were psychological, hysterical; their own sense of abasement.
‘But remember, sisters, we’re beautiful,’ another said, ‘blood, secretions, smells and all. We’re not plastic dolls, men’s masturbatory fantasies.’
And so it went on, through men, menstruation and masturbation.
Katherine was terrified lest someone ask her to speak. She had never been adept at confession and she felt that to do so in front of a group of strangers would be a breach of everything she was. She found it distasteful, an invasion of privacy. Then, too, she felt that she had so little experience compared to these women. She had thought about so little. There had really only ever been Carlo. And that was in a different time and a different place. Another world. She didn’t want to think about him, about that. She had buried his memory with his body.
Yet the women’s words forced those years back on her. She too had felt abased. And how. She had been not only a prisoner of an old-fashioned marriage but a prisoner - and she had realised it at the time - of sex. Of her own desires. She remembered how, when the telegram had come announcing Carlo’s death, there had been, amidst the tears, a jolt of relief. She would never now have to confront the implications of that last terrifying scene with him. Never have to see him again. Never have to think about it.
She had gone back to Rome, been a dutiful widow, stayed for two months with the Contessa. Visibly, she had mourned. Inwardly, she had cut herself off, detached herself. And then, when she could face the world of the Palazzo no more, she had fled with a bad taste in her mouth, a taste to which she gave the word decadence.
She had made no decisions at the time, but simply led her new life. The life of a widow. Everyone kind to her, everyone sorrowful. But inside herself, she was happy. She was free. She had given herself over first to the care of Natalie and then gradually to work. She had never consciously determined not to involve herself in other relationships, but that will had grown within her. There was no need for that whole murky world, that tangled undergrowth of sexual relations. She was fine as she was.
And, Katherine thought, as she fled from the group, though it was comforting to know that other women might share her feelings, she really didn’t want to explore those feelings any more.
Waiting at the bus stop she recognized one of the other women, a woman who, like her, hadn’t spoken.
‘Hi,’ she smiled, ‘pretty heavy stuff.’
Katherine nodded.
‘I was petrified,’ the woman admitted. ‘It was my first time.’
‘Mine too.’
They sat together on the bus. ‘I’d hoped we might talk about children, but I don’t suppose anyone but me has any,’ the woman grinned.
‘I do, a little girl,’ Katherine beamed.
They both suddenly laughed.
‘Have you got time to come back for a drink?’ Katherine asked.
The woman nodded, ‘By the way, I’m Betty Alexander.’
Katherine had made a friend.
The months rolled into years. Katherine was promoted. She was good at her work. She had a highly attuned sense of the visual. If in the mounting of exhibitions, she said one picture should be hung next to another, or an object placed in a particular position, her decision inevitably turned out to be right one. She was meticulous, without being pedantic. Her catalogues could never be faulted. And she had a composure with seemed to be unbreachable. No matter what the pressure of work, she never ruffled or raised her voice. Then, too, she was good with artists and collectors, a beautiful woman who listened to them attentively and intelligently so that they felt cared for, looked after.
Increasingly, she was asked to travel, to Paris, London, Cologne. She stayed away from Rome. As often as she could, when these trips were to last more than a week, she took Natalie and Doreen with her. She liked being in Europe. Sometimes she thought she preferred it. But New York was home.
Her work blended into her social life. There were countless openings, dinners to meet someone or another, business lunches. It wasn’t that she refused to go out with men. She did go, when she found them agreeable. But when it came to anything more than conversation, she simply said politely, ‘Oh no, I’m not interested in that.’ The way she said it, her grey eyes intelligently directed at them, her composure intact, her voice quietly dignified, meant that they didn’t dare confuse her ‘no’ for a partial ‘yes’.
Increasingly, though, she found she preferred to go out with her gay or women friends.
In her relations with men, as in so much else, she knew that she was buoyed up by the women’s movement, without ever having directly been a part of it. It made the flow of her life seem to have been the result of conscious choices. By all appearances, she seemed to be a woman who had determined on a career; a woman who had decided to bring up her child single-handedly; who had chosen to live alone.
Katherine knew it wasn’t quite like that, though gradually she began to believe in the Katherine of appearances as being all of herself. Even her move into the field of modern art and away from her academic specialisation in the Renaissance, which ha
d been propelled by her wish to have nothing to do with Carlo’s world, with Rome, now took on the gloss of being a deliberate aesthetic choice. She relished the clean bright lines of the contemporary, the hard intellectual edge of conceptual art, the ironies of pop. Preferred it to the textured world of the Renaissance, with its sense of the sacred and of sin.
Only her father sometimes jarred her into remembering that she wasn’t everything that she now seemed. And Natalie.
When Natalie was six, she asked her mother over the Sunday lunch, which was as often as possible a family event, ‘Mummy, how come I’m the only girl in my class who doesn’t have a daddy?’
Katherine caught the conspiratorial glance which flew between Jacob and Leo, felt the interrogator’s beam of those liquid dark eyes which her daughter had inherited from Carlo.
‘I’ve told you, sweetie, your Daddy died when you were very little.’ She kept her voice even and didn’t flinch before Natalie’s gaze.
The girl frowned, pushed her food round her plate.
‘But when people die, they don’t come back,’ she said reflectively.
‘That’s right, darling. They don’t come back.’ Katherine watched that little face with its perfect skin, watched it straining, wanting to hold her, to embrace her. But she knew she had to let her finish her thought.
‘Does that mean I’ll never have a Daddy?’ she asked, the tears clouding her eyes.
‘Never is a long time, Natalie,’ Jacob interjected. ‘You might acquire a Daddy before then,’ he winked at her.
She leapt into his lap. ‘I wish you could be my Daddy, Gramps. But you can’t cause you’re my Grandpa. And Uncle Leo, can’t be, can he, cause he’s my Uncle?’ She looked at Leo seriously.
‘That’s right, Natalie,’ Leo murmured.
‘That’s too bad. Cause I’d like a Daddy of my own, like the other girls.’ She threw her arms around Jacob’s neck.
‘And I’m sure you shall have one, one day.’
Katherine pushed her chair too noisily away from the table and stiffly went to fetch the pudding she had spent half the morning making.
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