That evening, after Natalie was tucked up in bed, Katherine turned on her father, ‘You shouldn’t encourage her like that, tell her stories about Daddys she’s going to have.’
‘And why not?’ Jacob let the full force of his gaze fall on his daughter. ‘You don’t intend to mourn forever, do you?’
‘I’ve told you before, I’m not mourning.’
‘Well then, what is it?’ He poured her a drink, handed it to her, watched her groping for an answer. ‘What is it, Kat?’ he murmured again.
‘Nothing,’ she lowered her eyes.
‘You haven’t become a man-hater, as the papers would put it?’ he smiled at her gently.
‘Of course not,’ she was adamant.
‘Well then,’ Jacob prodded.
‘I just haven’t met anyone I like.’
‘I see,’ Jacob said, not believing her.
‘Don’t use that tone on me,’ Katherine over-reacted. ‘I haven’t seen you exactly rushing to get remarried.’
Jacob mused, fondled his glass. ‘I’m an old man. It’s not the same. Even so, I haven’t cut myself off altogether. As I suspect you have.’ He shook his white leonine head, ‘Eh my little Kat,’ he stroked her hair fondly, ‘Sometimes one has to let go. Otherwise the future…’ his voice trailed off.
On the whole, these days they got along extremely well. Katherine felt none of the rancour she had once had for him. He was her mainstay and a bantering camaraderie prevailed between them. But after that night, every few weeks or so, he would ask if he could bring a friend along to Sunday lunch. It was invariably a far younger male friend, nice enough, intelligent enough. Katherine froze. Froze doubly in the presence of Natalie and under the strength of her father’s obvious intent. It spoilt those occasions for her, made her relations with him tense.
Leo, too, when he was in New York, began to come round with one friend or another. Irritated, she chided him, ‘I’m not in the marriage market, you know.’
‘Well, you should be,’ he responded sedately.
‘I don’t see a ring on your finger.’
He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t suit my line of work. But you, with Natalie, there’s no excuse.’
To evade their purposes, Katherine started to invite Betty Alexander to join their family Sundays. They had become, since that inauspicious meeting of the women’s group, fast friends. Betty’s little boy, Tim - the product of a teenage fling whom Betty had insisted on keeping - was two years older than Natalie and the children played happily together while the women chatted. Shared their frustrations about work, about the conflicting demands of children and jobs, about the satisfaction they took in their children which it seemed unfashionable to voice, almost as if that were the most guiltily secret of pleasures in the heyday of liberation.
When they had first met, Betty, who was a legal secretary, had been in severe financial straits. Katherine, always generous to a fault with her closest friends, had lent her the key money which enabled her to get a decent apartment in a co-op. She had done the same for Doreen and her family. Carlo’s legacy had been substantial and though she had at first considered refusing it so that all ties with him were severed, Thomas had convinced her that this would be a wholly idiotic move. ‘Why should your daughter suffer because of your puritan conscience?’ he had told her off emphatically, and Katherine had seen the sense of it. Still, she was careful to keep what she thought of as Natalie’s legacy intact: the brownstone was in her daughter’s name.
During the winter of 1975, Katherine was particularly busy at work. She hadn’t seen Betty for some weeks, when they finally determined to meet one evening for coffee. Katherine thought her friend looked a little nervous.
‘What’s wrong Bet?’ she asked. ‘Having trouble with one of your beaux?’ Betty, unlike Katherine, had a string of boyfriends, most of them altogether unsuitable and the women often spent hours laughing over the foibles of her love life.
‘It’s not quite that,’ Betty demurred. She was quiet for a moment and then she looked directly up at Katherine from amidst the tumble of her blonde curls. ‘I’ve decided to get hitched up,’ she blurted out.
‘Oh,’ Katherine gazed at her, before turning abruptly away and fumbling with some dishes. ‘Who’s the lucky man?’ she asked in as bright a voice as she could manage.
‘Dave. David Thompson. I think I’ve mentioned him before. He’s a junior partner in the office. He gets on brilliantly with Tim,’ Betty’s words raced, almost as if she were offering apologies.
‘I’m very happy for you,’ Katherine’s tone sounded false even to her own ears. She felt like crying, felt absurdly betrayed.
Betty put her arm around her. ‘I think I know how you feel, hon. But soon, it’ll be your turn.’
‘No, Betty,’ she shook her head bitterly. ‘It’s not what I want.’
A few weeks after the turn of the New Year, Katherine packed Natalie into the car and set off to Boston for a weekend with Thomas. They had become fast friends again after her return to New York. Katherine had relegated her distant proposal to Thomas to the sphere of a childish aberration which they could occasionally joke about. He, ever tactful, simply assumed that her marriage with its unfortunate end was private business. A year after Carlo’s funeral, he quoted Wittgenstein at her. ‘Death is not part of life.’ It was time for her to move on to other preoccupations.
Katherine, driving, with Natalie safely belted into the back seat, remembered his perfunctory tone on that occasion and smiled. Thomas was her mentor, the one close friend with whom she shared her work, her ideas about art. And he was as besotted with Natalie as Jacob, spoiled her with presents, talked to her as an equal, read her Grimm and Kästner, allowed her to play with the magic little Feininger villages that she herself had once been so in love with.
Sometimes Katherine reflected that she could solve all her problems, put Jacob and Leo and Natalie’s anxieties to rest, in one fell swoop by marrying Thomas. The husband and father everyone but she seemed to want. But the moment for that, if it ever had been there, had passed.
Two years ago Thomas, in order to replace his English butler, had acquired a housekeeper whom Katherine suspected also served other purposes. She was a rounded blonde of about forty, with the features of a doll-like Fragonard shepherdess. She spoke with a Southern drawl, but beneath the sweetness, Katherine sensed a bullying will.
Susannah Holmes. She put Katherine’s nerves on edge. Susannah always managed to appear in a room when Katherine and Thomas were deepest in conversation. The way she tidied Natalie’s toys away at the merest opportunity and followed her around with a falsetto ‘darling’ drove Katherine mad. She didn’t know how Thomas could put up with the woman, though it was true that the house seemed impeccably run.
As a result of Susannah, Katherine had stopped coming to Boston with any regularity. She saw Thomas in New York, for dinner, for a vernissage, for an occasional expedition with Natalie. This weekend she had made an exception. There had been too few opportunities to see him of late. He made the trek to New York less regularly. She had to remind herself that Thomas was getting on. He would be 70 this year, though to her he seemed to have changed remarkably little over the years.
‘Schätzchen. And my little Natalie. Welcome.’ Thomas answered the door himself and Natalie bounded into his arms.
Katherine smiled. Natalie was all warm enthusiasm and lack of inhibition. A happy, lively girl in the normal course of things. Not at all like herself at that age. For that she was constantly grateful. She had done one thing right in her life, at least. The slightly plaintive tone of her reflection surprised her.
‘Come, come, my two beauties. First some lunch, and then, before the sun goes down, we must build a snowman. I have tested the snow in the garden and it is perfect.’ Thomas romped round them as if he were as young as Natalie.
Lunch was brought by a young man.
‘Mmm,’ Natalie gorged herself on soup and crispy rolls, only pausing to answer Thomas’s quest
ions about school, about her dancing lessons.
Katherine, curious about the young man, inquired casually at one point, ‘Has Susannah gone?’
Thomas chuckled, ‘Only until tomorrow. To visit her sister. I know you don’t like her, Schätzchen,’ his look teased her. ‘You are not quite as unreadable as you choose to believe.’
‘Mommy is perfect,’ Natalie, thinking she sensed criticism, rushed to Katherine’s defence. ‘Well almost,’ she burst out laughing at the face Thomas pulled.
They played away the afternoon in Thomas’s garden, pleased at the vast snowman they created and at Natalie’s behest, a snowlady to keep him company.
‘There,’ Natalie patted her mittens together, ‘Now tomorrow we can make them some snowchildren.’
Thomas sought out Katherine’s eyes.
Later, after a game of monopoly, and dinner, and countless stories - which Natalie still wanted Thomas to read to her, though usually now she read for herself - the two of them lounged in front of the fire. They chatted idly about this and that, about the vagaries of the art world, about Thomas’s decision at last to sell his publishing firm.
At one point, he said to her, ‘I don’t know Schätzchen. You seem to me a little bit strained.’ He examined her face.
Katherine shrugged, ‘I’m working hard. Perhaps it’s my age.’ She laughed, the sound too shrill. ‘I’m thirty, now, as you know.’
‘Yes, a ripe old age,’ he teased her, seemed to let it pass. But then he said, ‘Perhaps you need a man, a regular man. You have thought about it, I’m sure.’
Katherine prickled. ‘You’re as bad as Jacob. As bad as Leo. Always trying to marry me off. I thought we had now agreed that the nuclear family didn’t work.’ Her voice was contemptuous.
‘I wasn’t necessarily suggesting marriage,’ Thomas murmured. He stood to fill her glass, gazed down at her reflectively. ‘Perhaps just, what do you call it these days, “a relationship”.’
She snorted. ‘What is it with you men? If a woman’s a little off-colour, all you can think of is that she isn’t getting it regularly.’ She scoffed at him, ‘Is that it, Thomas? The infallible cure for all female maladies. A regular dose of cock. I didn’t know you were a closet Freudian.’
‘Now, now, Schätzchen,’ Thomas said softly. ‘There’s no need for such a reaction.’ He sipped his brandy. ‘It’s strange. You remember when we first became friends, I said to you a beautiful woman has to be careful not to play down her intelligence in this country? And, of course, I meant play it down in the interest of possible sexual partners.’
Katherine nodded.
‘I almost wish now that I had said something a little different. Now, I would say something different. I would say to you that an intelligent woman shouldn’t perhaps defend herself too much against the beauty of her sexuality.’
Katherine swallowed her brandy, made as if she were about to retire for the evening.
‘Don’t go, Schätzchen,’ Thomas held her back. ‘I am not attacking you.’
‘But you wouldn’t talk like this to a man?’ She confronted his eyes, challenged him. ‘You wouldn’t say to him, “Max, all your problems will be solved by the regular exercise of your penis.”’
Thomas chuckled, ‘I might. You forget that I have always been in favour of a little sexual liberation. You children inherited it from my generation, my compatriots, Marcuse, and the others.’
‘I’m tired Thomas, I’m going to bed.’
‘Sit, Katherine. Forgive an interfering old man. I don’t like to see such beauty as yours wasted. Come, I will tell you a funny story which will amuse your women friends. Perhaps it will prove to you that I am not just an unreconstructed sexist. I was gossiping with a woman friend of mine in the publishing house the other day about a colleague of ours who is having problems with his marriage. He is a man of about sixty and some twenty years ago, he married a woman much younger than himself. A very pretty woman. He would bring her to office parties and parade her round, show her off, hungry for other men’s eyes to fall on her. “Yes, show her off. Like a penis,” my woman friend said to me. “And now, now that she’s older, there are problems. After all, what can you do with an aging wrinkled penis”? Thomas laughed loudly. ‘That is good, no? “What can you do with an aging penis?” ’
Katherine smiled, ‘As I said, you’re just a closet Freudian. Jacob would be pleased with you. Both sexes enamoured, obsessed, by the mythical, magical phallus.’ She stretched, ‘Well, here’s one lady who’s opting out.’ Katherine rose and kissed him goodnight lightly.
He held her back, his face unusually grave. ‘Tomorrow, Katherine I am going to make you a proposition I have been thinking about.’
‘Oh?’ she queried him, lingered.
It was at this moment that Susannah Holmes flounced into the room. Two red spots burned in her cheeks.
‘What proposition?’ she looked at Katherine with unrestrained hostility and then turned suspicious eyes on Thomas.
Katherine stiffened. The odious woman was an eavesdropper on top of everything else.
But Thomas smiled calmly, ‘I didn’t expect you back this evening, Susannah.’
‘Well, I’m here,’ she drawled.
‘So I see.’
‘Goodnight Thomas,’ Katherine moved away, pointedly avoiding Susannah. But then, at the door of the room, she turned back. ‘If you think, Ms Holmes, that Mr Sachs is proposing that I take your place as his housekeeper,’ she emphasized the word, ‘then you are sadly mistaken.’ With that she nodded curtly and left.
How she disliked that woman.
Thomas’s proposition, as Katherine found out the next afternoon, was not of the kind she had half-imagined. He With a seriousness which spoke of considered reflection, he proposed to her that she leave the museum and set up her own gallery. ‘Enough of the old art bureaucrats,’ he said to her. ‘They are tiring you out. You want something different. More stimulating. I can see it now, The Katherine Jardine Gallery. I will help you with the business side. You’ll learn quickly enough, I’m sure. I can be a sleeping partner. What do you say, Schätzchen?’
She demurred at first. It would be too risky. Too risky for him. She couldn’t accept that. But the more they talked, the more the idea appealed to her. Her own space. An adventure with Thomas. And she could see that he was excited by the notion. Something to replace his publishing interests.
‘Why are you so good to me, Thomas?’ she asked him as they sipped the fragrant tea Thomas preferred. ‘I’ve done nothing to deserve it.’
He patted her shoulder, ‘You have been like a daughter to me, an interesting daughter, and you have given me a wonderful granddaughter,’ he looked at Natalie who was peacefully working on a large drawing. ‘That is more than enough.’
‘Well, well, well. Playing happy families again,’ Susannah Holmes walked noisily in on them and surveyed the scene. With rapid irritation, she picked Natalie’s paints and water and brushes off the floor and urged her into the kitchen, ‘We don’t want a mess, do we, child?’ the Southern tones sat oddly with her quick gestures.
‘I was finished anyhow,’ Natalie proclaimed, bouncing into Thomas’s lap and giving him a hug.
Susannah’s eyes showed distaste, but Thomas grinned.
The next day at home Katherine wrapped up two Robert Natkins she had purchased and had them sent to Thomas. ‘We love you,’ she wrote on a card. ‘Thank you.’
She was excited about Thomas’s idea of the gallery. It wouldn’t leave her. Over the years since her return to New York, she had slowly acquired a small collection of her own, buying the work of young artists here, there and everywhere, whenever she fell in love with a canvas. Having her own gallery would mean that she could spend more time exercising her own tastes, rather than fulfilling the needs of an institution.
She mused about the gallery during her next solitary trip to Europe, thought through details. It should be possible. It wouldn’t even necessarily be that much of a gamble if sh
e were cautious. She knew people, knew artists, knew the business.
The thought of the gallery kept her buoyant. But within her there was also a kernel of something else, something she didn’t want to face. Thomas’s words about her state of being had hit home, despite her spirited defence. And they came on top of her father’s, on top of Betty’s announcement of her marriage. She felt something akin to desperation. She transmuted it into activity. In Paris she filled every inch of space in her diary with appointments, visits to galleries, even a trip to Neuilly to see her Aunt.
Then one night over dinner with a group from the Musée d’Art Moderne, something happened to her. She didn’t know quite what it was. Perhaps she had drunk too much, was too tired, but she found herself returning the glances of the man opposite her. When he asked if he could see her back to the hotel, she nodded. Nor did she deny him her room. Or her body. A wildness gripped her. Another Katherine took her over. One she didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to make the acquaintance of. Passionate, frenzied. A woman who took as much as she gave. And then forgot about it. Love with a stranger. Uninvolved. Inconsequential. Secret. Even from herself.
She stopped in London to have a quick look in at the Tate, the Whitechapel and the ICA. She went to see Portia who was sharing a house in Islington with another woman.
‘Still no man?’ she said brazenly to her friend.
‘They’re not good enough yet.’ Portia grinned. ‘Soon perhaps. There’s one on the cards. He claims he loves cooking and washing up. And you?’
Katherine shook her head. ‘Still just mothering and working.’
‘And waiting for your father to grow up,’ Portia laughed at the surprise on her friend’s face. ‘I’ve started to think Freud might have had something.’
Katherine groaned.
‘Well, whatever you’re doing it suits you,’ Portia grew more serious, examined her friend closely.‘You look terrific. I’ll end up thinking you’ve done it the right way round, if you’re not careful. First marriage and a child. And then the rest. My lot are all going to be geriatric mums.’
Memory and Desire Page 59
