She felt exhausted, limp. She fell into the soft grey sofa which spanned a corner of her office and let her eyes fall on the single painting the room held. Two figures gazed with incurable melancholy into a windswept sky, a darkening sea. It was an Edward Hopper she had bought a little while back for too much money, but she was transfixed by the mood of the image. The painting had spoken to her, wouldn’t leave her alone.
She took solace in it now. A thing of beauty, fixed against the transience which its very subjects suffered from. No, the thought suddenly crystallised in her. She wouldn’t let that woman take over Thomas completely, whatever her sexual claims. Thomas had given his collection to her. For a reason. She would fight to keep it. Keep Natalie’s inheritance. Keep his wishes, his memory intact. Susannah’s threats were empty. Her descriptions wouldn’t sway any court. That’s why she had come here to bully her today.
Yet Susannah’s words continued to torment her. They conjured up a different Thomas, opened up a window on an intimacy she would rather not have seen. The scenes she glimpsed through that window obsessed her. Sometimes Susannah’s figure, like a vulgar laughing vamp from a Fellini movie, metamorphosed into herself. Her buried escapades with strangers in foreign cities began to flit before her eyes. They laughed at her with Susannah’s red gash of a mouth. Threatened to swallow her. Obliterate her.
Katherine rang her father, asked if she could stop round and see him on her way home. She needed, she realised, to talk to someone. And there was only Jacob.
She didn’t often come to the apartment now. Jacob tended to visit her and Natalie at their home. And it felt a little odd to be sitting opposite him in the room she had sought so fervently to create all those years ago. It hadn’t altered much, though Jacob had got rid of the modern carpets and replaced them with the Persian rugs he favoured.
All this legal business must be getting on top of you,’ he said, reading her mind after they had exchanged a little desultory small talk.
‘It is,’ she tried a smile, but her lips felt stiff.
‘There’s nothing like an encounter with the law to drive you into the arms of an analyst,’ Jacob laughed softly. ‘The legal system is society’s sanctioned dream of paranoia. Tell me the latest.’
She told him. Told him about Susannah’s visit, not everything, but in essence.
‘And you’re distressed because of her vile manner, because you’ve been forced to invade someone else’s secrets. But most of all because you can’t make a retrospective saint of Thomas?’ Dark eyes surveyed her shrewdly. ‘Is that it?’
Katherine began by nodding and then shook her head vehemently. Denied his words. ‘No, it’s Natalie. Natalie would be so upset if all this came out in court, all the detail. And the Estate might lose.’
Jacob studied her, waited for her to go on. When she didn’t he said, ‘Are you sure it’s Natalie you’re worried about and not you? After all, she needn’t be at the hearing.’
Katherine didn’t answer directly. ‘She’s a horrible woman,’ her voice shook. She stood up, paced the room. ‘Nasty, horrible. I don’t know why Thomas…’ she left her sentence unfinished.
‘Kat, look at me. Thomas was a man, not an angel. This woman was his mistress, a consenting mistress. Whatever they did together was their business. She hasn’t suffered from it. He obviously didn’t, since he chose for it to go on. You’re upset because she wouldn’t have been your choice. But then, other people’s sexual preferences are usually a mystery to the outsider. And sexuality is always disruptive, seen in daylight, publicly. That’s why we like to tame it by dressing it up in the language of love.’
Jacob chuckled, ‘What Susannah Holmes has done is akin to parading naked down Fifth Avenue. The secret, the clothed, rampantly displayed. Though I thought your generation had done away with all that. Everything open. Everything permissible. Isn’t that what the sexual revolution is all about?’ He smiled at her kindly as she scowled. Teased her.
‘Thomas has done nothing wrong, Kat. Sex isn’t a moral issue, though people construct moralities around it.’ He paused, ‘It is, though, a way of eluding death.’ He let the phrase hang for a moment, so that she was forced to confront it.
‘Come and sit by me, Kat. You’re overwrought.’
She sat by him, let him put his arm round her, soothe her. She wanted to contradict him, to say that for her sex was a kind of dying, a blotting out of herself. Yes, that was what she felt. And Thomas, the Thomas she knew and loved was being blotted out by Susannah’s crass evocations. But she couldn’t bring the words out.
Jacob chatted, his voice playful. ‘I heard this wonderful Woody Allen line, “Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.”’ He chuckled. ‘You remember your Yeats, “Love has pitched its mansion, In the place of excrement.” And sometimes, according to our wishes, we transform that place into a temple. But it hasn’t altogether moved.
‘I worry about you, Kat,’ he said gently. ‘You split yourself apart. You want things to be either all good or all bad. I guess it’s to do with Sylvie.’
Katherine stiffened. He hadn’t mentioned her mother for a long time. ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked. Her voice felt rusty.
‘You’ve made her into the “bad mother”, which I know she was. In part. To you. Cold, cruel, rejecting. And sexy.’ He stopped abruptly and then hurried on, as if he had exposed too much. ‘And I imagine you’ve made Princesse Mat into the “good mother”.’ He studied her for a moment.
‘And now, I think you’re struggling to maintain Thomas as the “good father”, the perfect man. I imagine, if he was anything like the man I think he was, he would have been the first to reject the idealisation. No man with that ironical twinkle in his eye, no good Berliner of Thomas’s generation, would deny his portion of wickedness.’ Jacob laughed.
‘Remember Kat, the end of that poem, “For nothing can be sole or whole/ That has not been rent”.’ He paused, let her consider it, then laughed again ruefully, ‘And that’s enough of my babble for this evening. Otherwise you’ll have to start charging me for a fifty-minute hour.’
Katherine tried to smile, ‘And my fees are high.’
‘Shall I take you and Natalie out for dinner?’
She nodded, kissed him. ‘Thanks pappy.’
‘Ca ira, petite,’ Jacob switched to French in response to her childhood appellation. ‘Thomas’s testament will sort itself out. That Holmes woman wouldn’t have come to you directly, if she didn’t already sense her case was going badly.’
In herself, Katherine knew that Jacob was right. Right about many things. She needed to ruminate over them. It had helped to talk to him.
But it didn’t eradicate the foul taste in her mouth which that scene with Susannah had left behind. Nor its implications. They festered in her as she waited for the case to be heard, waited for any subsequent moves on Susannah’s part.
Something else happened during those endless months of waiting. Obsessing about Susannah, she began to see her as a type. A type who proliferated in the streets of the city. A type who was the very personification of greed. An all-consuming greed. And that greed was everywhere. It seeped out of the grates of the underground and poisoned the city.
In her corner of New York the greed was cloaked in its most unobtrusive, most modest garb. It wore the muted coat of good manners and good society. Camouflaged greed, with its brothers envy and desire. A trio of endless insatiable craving. She could smell their heated, slightly rancid odour tainting the crisp spring air as she walked to work.
Oh, the greed was well hidden here. Not like in Susannah’s red mouth and her hungry eyes. Here, in this upper East Side of Manhattan, it was kept under control. There were venerable museums and established galleries to disinfect the atmosphere. Stylish boutiques mingled with old world curio shops and ramshackle booksellers. A veneer of European culture to obscure the subterranean greed that propelled the American dream.
But it was still palpably there. She could see it in the women’s f
aces: that leap of hunger as they gazed at the parade of fashions coolly displayed in the shops. The snatched furtive glance at the orgy of freshly baked bread and cakes which diets wouldn’t permit. She could read it in the covert looks of brisk executives, subliminally comparing the attributes of wives and mistresses to those of sleekly groomed passers-by - while all the while tallying up the relative values of stocks and shares.
The greed paid no attention to the weather. It infected the sky which this spring was of a perfect untrammeled blue. It hovered over the pale trees, poised to unfurl their plump sticky buds.
It even invaded her Gallery.
It bore the figure of a fat little man with thinning black sleeked back hair and a vast signet ring displaying four equally fat diamonds. A client. A client with all the proper introductions and credentials. A client with a vast bank account. A client who trailed on his arm a towering lacquered blonde whose fingers and wrists and neck glistened with the trammels of wealth. A blonde who was another incarnation of Susannah.
The two sat and looked unseeingly at the canvases the twins displayed for them from the store room. Katherine looked on and wondered. What had these images to do with this fat beaming figure with his self-satisfied smile, his endless talk of market values and good investments? Nothing, Katherine thought. Nothing. But they were united by the intractable logic of greed. The client’s desire to possess the canvas.
It was not only a desire for money, for financial value. She knew that. She could see it in the wistful expression which sometimes scurried across her clients’ faces. It was also a hunger for something else. The prestige, the status the canvasses conferred with their incontrovertible tag of luxury culture. They were attempting to buy the inaccessible, the unnameable, the spiritual value the square feet of the canvas locked into itself and radiated indiscriminately.
Perhaps that was what Susannah wanted as well. That was why she was set on Thomas’s collection.
Perhaps it was what she, herself, was in search of. Something to take her away from the squalor of greed and sex and ceaseless want.
Katherine sighed, halfheartedly made a sale. Then she went home. Increasingly all she wanted to do was to spend time with Natalie and her school friends. She felt free with them. Greed was kept at bay.
At last, the case was heard. Katherine, her body numb, dimly heard the court rule in the Estate’s favour. Thomas’s will was to stay as he had intended. Katherine unclasped her hands and slowly rose.
‘Bitch,’ Susannah Holmes hissed at her as she crossed her path. ‘Tight-assed rich bitch.’
‘Tight-assed Rich Bitch vs Greedy Scheming Whore,’ Katherine confronted her at last. It gave her pleasure to roll the crude words off her tongue. She threw Susannah a withering look. The woman’s lipstick was askew. She saw her mouth drop. That too gave her pleasure.
‘The court has ruled. Goodbye Ms Holmes.’ Katherine strode away.
She walked home. The streets had suddenly lost their ominous smell of greed. They were simply the streets of New York, shabby, seedy, bewitching, exhilarating by turn. She felt light.
She hugged Natalie and hugged her again. ‘This weekend we’re going to Thomas’s house,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘And we start work. There’s a lot to do.
‘Oh Mommie,’ Natalie bounced.
When they got there, Jacob in tow, the house was ghostly in its covering of white sheets. Katherine paused for a moment, shivering at the signs of Thomas’s absence. Then with a vigorous gesture, she pulled the sheets off the breakfast room sofas, one after another. ‘Come on,’ she urged the others.
That done, she guided them up to Thomas’s bedroom. On the wall, opposite the bed, there was a drawing by George Grosz. She knew it well. A plump prostitute with greedy lips, her private parts bared to the furtive streets of the city. ‘We’ll give this to Susannah,’ Katherine said reflectively. ‘She deserves a little bit of Thomas.’
She looked at Jacob signalling that the words were intended for him, but she addressed Natalie, ‘What do you say, hon?’
Natalie looked at her mother curiously and then met her smile. She nodded sagely.
‘That’s my Kat,’ Jacob beamed. ‘That’s my daughter.’
Chapter
Twenty-Three
__________
∞
A flash of red hair. The briskness of heels on stone. a light, animal quickness. Rosa.
Alexei ran, turned a corner, placed a hand on a slender shoulder.
‘Sorry. So sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘Non fa niente,’ a stranger smiled, recognised confusion.
Alexei loped away, nursing a mixture of disappointment and embarrassment.
A year, one long year had passed since he had last seen Rosa and still her form appeared to him around every corner. In this last week, somehow, it had been even worse. Perhaps because he had finally finished editing his film, a film he would have liked to have shared with her. But it was madness thinking he would suddenly bump into her, here in Rome.
Alexei sat down at one of the tables in the Piazza di Spagna and watched the passers-by.
The shape of a brow here, the redness of lips there, the swing of an arm, the flick of a hip. The pieces of Rosa. But not her.
It was strange the way he now felt he knew her. Knew her better than when she was with him. At those times the mercury in her temperament, the electricity between them had taken over.
A phrase tumbled into his mind. Ready made. Perhaps he had read it somewhere. ‘Knowing people is what we do to them when they are not there.’
If that was the case, he had had ample occasion to know Rosa. He could still taste the despair he had felt when she had gone that second time. A sense of loss so total that he could find no words for it. As if he were a child for whom language had not yet formed.
A distress equal to the wonder of those previous weeks.
The weeks after she had refused his proposal of marriage.
She had been tender then, only playfully argumentative, as if the sex war were over at least between them.
The evening the results of the May 1974 referendum on divorce were declared, they had celebrated with a bottle of champagne.
‘I don’t know why I’m celebrating,’ Alexei had joked. ‘All I want to do is marry you.’
‘You know very well why we’re celebrating,’ she had taken on her sometime look of a stern schoolteacher. ‘It’s a breach in the power of the church. We’re fractionally more free now. Though there’s a long way to go.’ Then she had laughed, her voice rich, dark, unlike her, ‘Anyhow, wanting marriage is a happier desire than wanting divorce.’
That night, as if suddenly she trusted him, she had not risen from his bed after their lovemaking, but slept with him peacefully, her bright hair fanned over his chest. In the morning, she had brought him coffee in bed.
‘You see, you would make an excellent wife,’ he teased her.
‘Don’t joke, Alexei,’ her face was serious. ‘Don’t make bad jokes.’ She had looked so desolate, that he had pulled her to him and covered her with his love.
It was then that he had started to woo her, inventing a coupled future, buying her presents, insisting that she go out with him, go shopping with him. ‘I want to see those glorious legs of yours sometimes,’ he had laughed.
‘You see them in bed. Isn’t that enough?’
‘I want to see them and you in front of my friends, in restaurants, dancing, at parties. I want you to meet Giangiacomo.’
‘You know that’s not possible,’ she had cut off his fanciful flurry.
‘Why? Why not? You think I care if anyone recognises you as a notorious industrial troublemaker? Because that’s what you are, isn’t it?’ he had put words to it at last. ‘That’s what you get up to when you’re not with me?’
She had turned away from him, but he carried on. ‘What do I care if that’s your work? And if I don’t care, they won’t care. I’ll say, “Meet my wife. She goes into factories and makes peop
le think about their conditions. She’s brilliant at it.”’ He had laughed, enraptured of his dream.
‘You don’t understand anything, Alexei,’ she had murmured, still not facing him.
He had wrapped his arms around her, nuzzled her hair, her neck, breathed in her perfume. ‘I understand that I love you.’
She turned in the circle of his embrace. Looked confused, as if she might cry. But then, her eyes had suddenly taken on a mischievous sparkle, the irises ringed, dark, ‘Alright, take me shopping. Keep the system turning. Fulfill your consumerist desires. Just remember that I’m not your possession.’
They had made the rounds of the boutiques. Rosa in dusky blue silk. In emerald green. In a saucy black catsuit. They had gone dancing, gone again to the house by the lake, made breathless love amongst the chattering cicadas. The chemistry between them was so potent that Alexei was lulled into feeling it would never end.
And then, suddenly, one night, she had refused him, refused his touch.
‘Why?’ he had looked at her in bafflement.
‘I don’t feel like it,’ Rosa had shrugged.
‘Don’t feel like it?’ He had run his fingers along the bodice of her dress where it ended to meet the tawny glow of her skin. He could see her instant response. ‘Don’t feel like it?’ he had gazed at her in amazement.
She had run to her room, slammed the door. He had forced his way in.
‘You’re going away. That’s it, isn’t it?’ he had said grimly.
She had shrugged.
‘Why? Why are you going?’ he railed. ‘If you can’t find a job, I’ll find you one. I’ll give you money.’
‘I have to go,’ she said quietly, her eyes on the wall.
‘Who says you have to go? What for? Where are you going?’ he was shouting.
‘You promised not to ask any of those things.’ She met his glare, her face expressionless.
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