History of a Pleasure Seeker

by Richard Mason

“Very well, Papa.” Louisa did not intend to owe her solitude to Piet Barol. She turned on her heel and left the room and despised herself.

  The doorbell rang and the first guests were announced. Among them, to Constance’s relief, was her friend Myrthe Janssen (shortly to be van Sigelen), who could always be relied on to cheer people up. Soon laughter and high, excited talk were bouncing off the room’s stone walls, and the family recaptured its spontaneity.

  Louisa came downstairs, inscrutable once more, and they went into dinner. The table had been opened to its fullest extent and Maarten had sanctioned the use of the Sèvres porcelain. Piet was directly opposite Frederik van Sigelen. It amused him to see that this ungenerous young man could not for the life of him fathom why anyone should go to such trouble for a servant. This heightened his pleasure at the saumon Dorne Valois, baked in lobster butter and decorated with coquilles of oysters. As the poached purée of Bordeaux pigeon was served, he remarked that he would shortly be sailing on the Eugénie. “I remembered your ardent recommendation.”

  “I’m sure even steerage is more comfortable than on other ships.”

  Myrthe Janssen looked at her plate. She was already beginning to dislike her fiancé, whose malice made her uneasy for her own future. “How thrilling to be going to New York,” she said, lightly.

  “My destination is Cape Town, in fact, Miss Janssen. The ship is making a special voyage.”

  “But I know all about it.” Myrthe laughed the merry laugh she was known for. “Frederik’s parents are going too, aren’t they darling?”

  “I believe they were invited. Albert Verignan, who owns the line, is a personal friend. But my father cannot be away from Amsterdam so long.”

  “Oh Mr. Barol, what fun you’ll have. I’m told there’s to be a fancy dress ball on St. Helena.”

  “Only for the first-class passengers.” Van Sigelen tapped his glass and a footman bent to refill it.

  “My means don’t extend so far.” Piet smiled. “I was fortunate to get the last berth in tourist.”

  Frederik saw Myrthe’s warning look and forbore from asking Piet where he had got the money. “I’m sure it will be worth every centime.”

  “If it’s not, I shall have you to blame.”

  As she left the table after the last course, Constance whispered, “Join us soon, Papa.” And after the port had gone round once the assembled men surged up the stairs. In the drawing room Piet was presented with his trunk and made a witty and affectionate speech of thanks, which was met by a request from Maarten for “one last song at the piano, Mr. Barol.”

  “Something jolly!” called one of the young men, who had inveigled himself onto the sofa beside Constance.

  “A song of farewell,” said Myrthe Janssen.

  Piet bowed. “Figaro’s farewell to Cherubino, then, from the Marriage of Figaro.” He struck it up merrily. Everyone knew the tune and there was much thumping of feet. “No more, you amorous butterfly, will you flutter around night and day,” Piet sang, “disturbing the peace of every beautiful woman.” The words made him think of himself, for he had conquered Jacobina, and resisted Constance, and provoked from Louisa a proposal of marriage.

  His performance was met with rounds of applause and calls for an encore. He resisted modestly but at length allowed them to persuade him. “This was a huge hit in Rome a few years ago. If you want a farewell scene I can’t think of one more moving. A man is in his cell, awaiting execution. This is the letter he writes his lover, a dazzling beauty named Tosca.” He played a sprinkle of notes, feeling pleasantly invincible, and at once the atmosphere altered. Those watching were seized by a glorious, uplifting sorrow. “Oh! sweet kisses, oh! languid caresses!” Piet sang, and for a moment in the crowded room his eyes met Jacobina’s, and they said good-bye.

  Louisa saw them. She blinked and looked again. Piet was now concentrating on the piano and her mother had turned to a friend. All was as it should have been. Louisa accepted a cup of coffee from Hilde and tried to turn her mind to her own troubles, but certain facts abruptly forged a hazardous whole: an ugly dress, a potent smell, a green button lying on a blue carpet.

  She said nothing as the guests began to take their leave and did not join her parents and Constance and Piet as they saw them off downstairs. As soon as she was alone she went into her mother’s dressing room and opened her closets. The little green button had been fretting at the limits of her other sorrows; now she was sure she knew the dress it had come from. If the garment was undamaged she would know she was wrong.

  But the gown of apple-green wool was not in the wardrobe. Nor was it in the laundry or the sewing basket. Louisa had a couturier’s natural inventory for clothes and traced her way through a fortnight of her mother’s discarded garments. Everything was there, either cleaned or about to be, but not the apple-green dress she had worn the day Constance and Egbert and her father went to the country. She bit her knuckle. Surely that was the day her mother had appeared in a hideous mauve concoction. This was in her wardrobe. She took it out. It was not at all Jacobina’s size. When she put her nose between the ruffles of its neck she was met by the unmistakable smell of her great-aunt Agaat. Why should her mother wear her great-aunt’s clothes? And why should she have damaged her own dress, apparently beyond repair, in Aunt Agaat’s bedroom?

  Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts had no acquaintance with the odors of masculine arousal. This did not mean she was oblivious to them, and now she remembered the odd smell Piet had brought with him into the entrance hall that day. She began to understand other things, too: why Piet had not been dismissed for shaming the family by carrying Egbert into a crowded street; why he had been permitted to behave with total freedom, as no tutor before him had done.

  Jacobina, Maarten, Constance, and Piet re-entered the drawing room to find Louisa standing by the fire, very pale. They were pleased with the evening and themselves. His daughter’s pallor inspired penitence in Maarten. What if she really had a fever? He was about to order a hot chocolate for her to take to bed when she said: “Where is your green wool dress, Mama? The one with the small train?”

  Jacobina had given much thought to how to dispose of sixteen yards of satin-lined wool—no small challenge in a house full of servants and sweet smells. She had decided against burning it in her aunt’s bedroom fireplace, which someone would have to clean. Neither could she burn it in her own room, for fear of the smell. She had considered dumping it in a canal, but what if it floated? In the end, she had stolen down to the kitchen at two o’clock in the morning and stuffed it into the furnace. All this flashed into her head as Louisa spoke. “It’s in my cupboard, I suppose.”

  “No it’s not. I’ve checked.”

  “Why ever did you do that?”

  “Because of the way you and Mr. Barol looked at each other when he sang about sweet kisses and languid caresses.”

  “What an idea, darling!”

  “I found a button from that dress in Aunt Agaat’s bedroom this afternoon. What were you doing there?”

  “No one goes into that room, as you very well know.”

  “Well someone did, wearing a dress that now cannot be found.” Louisa spoke levelly. “You were wearing it the day Constance and Egbert and Papa went to the country. You went next door in it, after lunch. Why did you come back in one of Aunt Agaat’s dresses? And why did Mr. Barol follow you, smelling like—like—someone who has taken strenuous exercise?”

  This last detail had the ring of truth. Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts said “Louisa!” but he was looking at Piet Barol. And on Piet’s face, where he expected indignation, he saw fear.

  “Where is it, Mama?”

  “I don’t keep track of all my clothes.”

  “Have you destroyed it? Was it ripped or damaged in some way?”

  Now Constance lost her temper. “Do shut up, Louisa. Are you drunk?”

  “I am upset, Constance.”

  “But why, my sweet?”

  “Because Piet Barol has seduced our mother.
”

  Maarten took charge. “My dear, let us go to bed.” He offered his wife his arm. “Louisa, I will deal with you severely in the morning. You have had too much wine. Mr. Barol, my apologies.”

  But he left the room without shaking Piet’s hand.

  Jacobina went with him. She knew she should protest, but truth boldly stated is hard to contradict to those who know us best. She climbed the stairs behind her husband and her silence confirmed to Maarten what the terror in Piet’s eyes had already told him. Both of them feigned calm. Jacobina called for Hilde and began to unpin her hair. Maarten went into his dressing room and took off his clothes.

  He was eight years older than his wife: stocky and strongly built. He did not pay much attention to his appearance and the studied avoidance of personal vanity had taken its toll. His legs were greeny-white, almost hairless now. He turned sideways to observe himself in profile. His belly was the size of a woman’s in the sixth month of pregnancy. He thought of the marvelous suits Jacobina had bought him long ago, which he would never wear again: suits that now hung in the closet of Piet Barol. He sat down on a stool, dazed by his daughter’s revelation, and waited for a surge of rage to carry him through to morning.

  But instead a very different emotion took hold of him. To his surprise, and at first against his will, he began to see things from his wife’s point of view.

  Maarten had never considered that his sexual abstinence might have a cost for Jacobina. Now he saw that it inevitably did. Piet Barol was a tempting proposition to a woman. Was she not human, after all? She had enjoyed the carnal side of love in their first years of marriage. What if she missed it? What if Piet had laid siege to her, as he had once done, and reminded her of the attentions she no longer received from him? He put on his nightshirt and rang the bell. When Mr. Blok appeared, he spoke a few low words to him and went into his bedroom.

  Jacobina was already in bed. They had shared this same bed for twenty-eight years and the moment of settling into it beside her was often the happiest of Maarten’s day. He had never told her this. As he repeated the familiar movement, the fact that he had lain so close to her for ten years without once embracing her no longer seemed admirable. He was an intelligent man and loved Jacobina deeply. Abruptly he understood how wounding these bedtimes had been for her: the long sequence of days brought to a close by nothing more intimate than a chaste good-night kiss. He remembered the occasion, many years before, when she had asked for what she wanted; the way he had refused her, proud of his own restraint. What sorrow he must have caused her!

  He turned towards his wife. Jacobina was propped up on her pillows, eyes closed. She had made her pain clear to him in many subtle ways. He understood this now and was overcome by remorse. To have put his own salvation before the happiness of one whom he had vowed to cherish was abominable. He leaned closer to her. Jacobina could sense him. She could not imagine what he was doing. She was torn between apology and accusation. That Louisa should know! Her clever, self-contained Louisa. The little girl whose dolls she had once helped dress. It appalled her. She felt the mattress tilt. Surely he would not hit her? She had several times been slapped in the face as a child by the sullen English governess who succeeded Riejke Vedder. Her body tensed. But to her astonishment, which was followed by an outpouring of long-seasoned love, Maarten did not hit her.

  He kissed her neck and said, “Forgive me.”

  For the first time since their son’s birth, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts ran his hand under his wife’s nightdress. He buried his face in her hair and inhaled. Jacobina’s smell was familiar to him, complex and sweet and reassuring beneath her Parisian perfume. It excited him. He pressed against her and his fingers edged up her thigh. They tickled her and she jerked away.

  “Kiss me there,” she whispered.

  With creaking joints he shifted place and pushed her nightgown to her waist and obeyed.

  Maarten had never been as assured in bed as he was in business. He had too little experience to trust himself, which made him an anxious, perfunctory lover. Fortunately Jacobina was no longer as unsure as he was. She suggested what he should do and shifted her body until his tongue found the right spot. Maarten was grateful for direction. It was the first time anyone had used forbidden words to him and they charged his imagination. The impact his attentions were having on his wife gave him confidence. Each time he came close to spending Jacobina pulled away, and calmed him, and so subtly asserted her authority.

  Jacobina had expected many things from Maarten, but not penitence. To receive an acknowledgment of the part he had played in her transgressions inspired an explosion of love, for his acceptance of her humanity was more profound than any man-made law or church-made vow. The idea of refining with him the lessons she had taught Piet Barol, night after night for the rest of their lives, overthrew her fears of the future. She pulled her nightdress off, then his. His body was not as hard as Piet’s, nor his skin as smooth and taut; but it was his body, and his skin, and for this reason alone she loved them.

  While Piet Barol packed his trunk on the floor above, prevented by Mr. Blok from taking anything that had once belonged to their employer, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts hoisted himself over his wife. As Jacobina opened to him he almost came, but did not. He began to press into her, tenderly but surely. She opened her eyes and smiled.

  If God exists, thought Maarten, then He is here.

  They made love for hours. They fucked and kissed and explored their once-familiar bodies in a wonder of rediscovery. They did not hear Piet take his trunk down the stairs or pass through the entrance hall for the last time. As he walked to the station with nothing but his tailcoat, his trunk, a set of onyx studs, the clothes he had come in, and two sketchbooks full of careful drawings, they lost themselves in each other, forgave one another, and like a Phoenix from a lustful fire their friendship emerged, purged and renewed.

  Piet had been sitting on the cold stone floor of the ticket hall for three hours, waiting for the first Leiden train, before they were finished. It was almost light. As they lay with their faces touching, Maarten’s arms around her shoulders, Jacobina said, “What about Louisa?”

  “We shall go to your dressmaker’s this morning and order another gown, identical to the first. We will say that the original is being laundered in the country. When the new one is ready, you shall wear it as if nothing has happened. Every time you do, I will take it as an invitation to make you my own.”

  “I am yours.” She kissed his shoulder. “I never wasn’t. I’m glad he’s going.”

  “My darling,” said Maarten, “that young scoundrel has already gone.”

  THE EUGÉNIE

  Piet Barol did not hope for comfort from his father and did not confide his transgressions or their humiliating exposure. For eleven months he had thought of Herman Barol only with gratitude for being away from him. He considered this as they shook hands in the sitting room full of furniture his mother had chosen, now woefully rearranged. It had been Nina’s teaching room and the heart of her territory. In the seven years since her death her spirit had gradually leaked from it. Now, though the pretty little chairs and discerningly chosen lamps remained, there was nothing of her left but her portrait, which still hung above the piano.

  Piet resembled this painting too closely to be received with anything but suspicion by the woman with dandruff and chilblains who for many years had been his father’s housekeeper and was now his fiancée. Herman announced his imminent nuptials over breakfast as Piet was contemplating the sight of Marga’s chapped fingers on his mother’s tea service. He wished them joy. He doubted he would see his father again after sailing on the Eugénie and felt easier to know he would be cared for.

  Indeed, Marga Folker cared for Herman Barol with an absorption that brooked no competitor for his affections and was glad to know that her beautiful stepson would not long remain with them. Herman did nothing whatever for himself except dress. Marga cooked and scrubbed and polished and swept and organized the le
dgers that in earlier years it had been Piet’s task to fill with methodical accounts of undergraduate perfidy. She was not favored with external charms and this had left her with half a lifetime’s pent-up love. The spectacle of her showering it on Herman, who accepted it without remark, was distasteful to Piet.

  He embraced them both and took a boiling kettle from the stove, to which he added icy water from the well in the backyard. The tin tub the Barols used for a bath was in its usual place behind the kitchen door. He took it upstairs. It was not long or deep enough to permit the simultaneous wetting of balls and knees and he washed as quickly as he could. He was out of practice and had added too much cold water.

  The discomforts of this procedure reminded him forcefully of the circumstances of his youth and the necessity of breaking free of them. He dried himself, dressed, and went into the bedroom that had once been his parents’. Nina had brought the mattress with her from Paris at her marriage and had often stayed in bed until eleven o’clock in the morning. It was from this bed that she had dispensed to him a wisdom that ran wholly contrary to her husband’s view of life. It was here, too, that she had nursed away his childhood illnesses and sung to him arias from Bizet and Mozart—who were, she said, the only composers who understood women.

  Nina Michaud had decided to marry Herman Barol at the end of a painful love affair and had imagined that she could make for herself a companion as diverting as he was steadfast. His Dutch reserve had made a marvelous contrast to the glossy seductiveness of the rakes who pursued her in Paris, and she had left behind the dangerous delights of that city with relief. It had taken her months to understand that Herman was quite unlike the man she had imagined him to be, and years to accept she could not change him. Disillusion, when it came, hit her hard. Nevertheless, she did her best to refrain from complaining of her husband to their son and slipped into doing so only by imperceptible degrees. It was when the eight-year-old Piet began to imitate Herman for her amusement that she understood she had gone too far to bother with stopping. The child caught to perfection the heavy tread of his father as he clumped to the chamber pot to relieve himself. Since Herman did so two or three times every night, at a volume to wake any sleeping soul, she and Piet found his impersonation intoxicatingly amusing. So, too, Piet’s imitation of Herman’s snoring and sudden sleep gruntings, his monotonous exhortations to errant students.