History of a Pleasure Seeker

by Richard Mason

  Nina had done all she could to educate her son for the life she had glimpsed, and lost. To have ended his first sally into the great world so dismally seemed to Piet a betrayal of all she had sacrificed for him. He stood in her bedroom, shivering and wishing he could confess and seek her guidance. But here too her spirit had vanished.

  Christmas and New Year’s Eve came and went. Having been deprived of his fine clothes Piet attempted to stock his wardrobe from the pawnshops of Leiden; but Christmas money had allowed all but the neediest to redeem their best suits and he found only two shirts, both with stains under the arms.

  As his departure neared, his dissatisfaction with himself intensified. He thought with amazement of his duplicity in Amsterdam and started to hate himself for injuring a family who had only ever shown him kindness. Egbert weighed horribly on his conscience. He had coaxed the boy into the world of human feeling and become his first friend. To have left without so much as a good-bye was dastardly. Twice he sat down to write him a letter and gave up only because he could think of nothing to say.

  Piet did not know that Maarten’s evident delight in his wife had convinced even the skeptical Louisa that she was wrong. Nor did he know that Jacobina’s appearance in an identical apple-green dress, four days after Piet’s departure, had made her daughter burst into tears at breakfast and confess her hatred of him, and the true reasons for it, and beg her mother’s forgiveness.

  This scene was excruciating for Jacobina but she did not shrink from the hypocrisy it required. She was extremely sharp with Louisa and rebuked her for drinking in public. Then she said, “Let us hear no more about it,” and later, in a kinder voice, “I forgive you, my darling.” As she spoke she looked at her husband, and the love in his eyes allowed her to forgive herself also.

  None of the Vermeulen-Sickertses would ever forget Piet Barol, but as soon as he had left them they began to think of him much less often. It was he who could not shake himself free of them. Their shades pursued him in his dreams, and on the third day of the New Year they were joined by Nina in a ferocious nightmare. He had shared everything but his amorous adventures with his mother. Now her outraged ghost knew all and told him he had failed her.

  He woke from this dream in a fit of self-disgust that would not lift. He wanted to hurt himself and slammed his fist against the wall—impulsively, at two-thirds of his full force. The pain was stunning. It made him understand that he did not really wish to break his hand. A more profound expiation occurred to him: to renounce all he had been and start anew. He inched from the wall the loose brick behind which he had stored his treasures as a boy. All that remained in this cavity was a French passport in the name of “Pierre Barol,” which Nina had obtained for him in Paris nine years before and about which Herman Barol knew nothing. With the sense that he was exchanging his soiled identity for a fresh one, he packed it in his trunk and went downstairs.

  Piet took the sleeper for Paris on the sixteenth day of the New Year and arrived early on a dreary morning, while the brass lamps were still burning beneath the vast glazed roof of the Gare du Nord. His trunk was intended for people with porters at their disposal. As he dragged it through the starched, elegant crowds, he began to hate it.

  The boat train for Le Havre left the following day after lunch. He had come a night early, despite the expense of a Parisian hotel, because he could find no way to say good-bye to his mother in the house now so scrupulously scrubbed by Marga Folker. They had been in the city once together nine years before, when he was fifteen and she thirty-five—ostensibly to visit one aunt and attend the funeral of another. In fact Nina had hoped to leave her husband and escape with her child to France. It had taken years to gather the courage to conceive this plan and implement its first stage. It took tante Maude Michaud twenty minutes to destroy it with the opinion, pronounced as fact, that Herman would pursue her for the boy and wrest Piet from her forever.

  In the end Nina had not dared. Instead she spent sixteen years of savings on five days of sophisticated hedonism with her son and returned to Leiden defiant. They stayed in a rickety pension on the rue des Martyrs, beneath the blinding white marble of the Sacré Coeur. Nina had chosen Montmartre so that Piet might observe the perils of la vie bohème at first hand; also so that he could imagine the horrors of the Commune and see the church built to atone for them. They went to tante Henriette’s funeral and made a day’s worth of family calls. Otherwise they were entirely alone, immersed in each other as in a love affair.

  Nina chose three restaurants. The first was a back room with bare wooden benches and crates of lobsters delivered from the patron’s brother in Normandy. Here she taught Piet how to drink a carafe of Chablis over a lunch of shellfish while entertaining a pretty woman (herself in an adorable new hat), without feeling giddy or unwell or talking too loudly. The next she chose for its rabbit, which was everything a simple country meal should be. The last was a grander establishment close to the Palais Royale where they ate timbale de sole stuffed with chopped truffles.

  This meal cost so much that nothing was left for tickets to the opera. They walked through the Louvre and along the pale white paths of the Tuileries, humming together the great duets of Halévy, Gounod and Bizet. It was a night for French composers, Nina said. They reached the Place de la Concorde and paused before the traffic on the Champs Elysées. They had two francs over and Nina knew just the place to spend them. She led Piet up the rue de la Paix, past a perfumier whose scents were so potent neither their crystal vials nor the shop’s closed doors could contain them. “You must face the world as an equal,” she said, drawing him on and climbing the shallow, blue-carpeted steps of the Ritz Hotel with her arm in his.

  The doorman did not question them. They had a coffee at the bar and watched the crowds of élégants. After some time, a gentleman with curled whiskers invited them to a matinée the following day.

  “He takes me for a demimondaine,” she whispered when the man had retreated, his invitation refused. “It’s because I’ve nursed my coffee so long.”

  “What’s a demimondaine, Mummy?”

  “Come, I’ll show you.”

  They strolled to the Place de l’Opéra and stood beside the steps of the Garnier as the evening’s audience arrived. With great precision, Nina pointed out the leading courtesans of the day and the subtle but significant ways they distinguished themselves from their lovers’ wives.

  Piet spent the night wandering the pale, magnificent city, lost in memories of her. With his mother he might have shared his misdeeds at Herengracht 605. Her absence left him to bear his regret unaided, and its burden was so heavy he did not join the conversation on the boat train the next day but hid behind a newspaper feeling profoundly alone.

  He cheered briefly at sight of the ship. One could not feel entirely deflated on a crowded quay before her. The Eugénie had a black hull and a superstructure of dazzling white, repainted for the tropics. A strip of scarlet showed just above the waterline; she had four funnels, black with scarlet bands, and above her anchor gleamed the golden shell and crossed Ls of the Loire Lines.

  High above him on a private gangway, the first-class passengers were entering the ship. He could hear their band’s sparkling music. To his left, the long lines queuing for third class and steerage looked so much happier than he was that he could not feel superior to them. He thought of the sum he had spent on his own ticket and tried to be optimistic, but the tourist-class vestibule, carpeted in violent swirls of green and red, dismayed him. So did the stewards’ demeanor. As one led him to his stateroom with the air of doing him a distasteful favor, the pleasures he had renounced in Amsterdam recurred painfully to him.

  “Votre cabine, monsieur.” The steward opened the door, handed him a receipt for his trunk, and departed with it.

  At the Loire Lines offices in Amsterdam Piet had not thought to ask for the specifications of his accommodation. Now he saw he had been unwise not to. His cabin had no porthole and was very hot. Intended originally as third
-class quarters, it had been converted to tourist class to cater for additional demand. But its superficial comforts—a mahogany washstand, monogrammed linen, a copied Fragonard in oils—could not disguise its proximity to the engines. As these were fired it shook violently.

  Piet sat down on his bunk, aggrieved. Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and a stocky young man with florid cheeks and slick-backed blond hair entered, complaining in a loud English voice. “It will not do. I was promised—Yes, I jolly well will speak to the purser.” He shook Piet’s hand forcefully. “Percy Shabrill. An honor. Do excuse me.” Percy Shabrill left again and began shouting in the corridor. Piet hoped he and his voice would find another berth, but it was not to be. He reappeared as the departure bells sounded, his cheeks redder than they had been before. “Damned Frenchies.” He flung himself onto the opposite bunk. “They’ve given us the worst cabin on the bloody boat. Hope you don’t snore, old fellow. I take a dim view of snorers.”

  “So do I.”

  They went up together onto the tourist-class promenade deck to watch as the ship left the harbor for the open ocean. The wind and the engines drowned the string quartet, but Percy’s voice carried well over the competing noise. “That’s me out of Europe for some time. I won’t be back till they’ve invented an air balloon. I’m not mad keen on the sea.” Percy was going to South Africa to join his brother at Johannesburg. His faith in his prospects emphasized to Piet how drastically his own confidence had dwindled since the day he had sold Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts’ silver man. Perhaps he should have kept him for luck. Percy leaned closer. “You ask how I’m going to get rich.”

  Piet had asked no such question.

  “What’s wrong with Africa? You tell me. It’s bloody hot and there are too many darkies standing about with nothing to do. Well, I can fix all that. Chum of mine, dashed clever chap, had an idea about refrigeration. I bought the rights off him. There’s a fortune to be made.”

  As they went back to their cabin, Percy expanded on this theme. “You build a cube out of chicken wire, then a bigger cube around it. Fill the gap with charcoal. Get a darkie to pump water over the charcoal on the half hour. As the water evaporates, the space inside the smaller cube cools. Quite good enough for most foods.” He began to sketch this invention for Piet. He was not a talented draftsman. Soon the paper was covered in squiggles and arrows. Percy’s eyes were shining with a convert’s conviction. “See?”

  Piet said that he did see.

  “Can’t fail, won’t fail.”

  It was a relief to Piet that Percy’s interest was wholly self-focused. When they went to dinner two hours later, he was still talking. Like their cabin, their table was small and inconveniently situated just behind the swing doors. The two other passengers assigned to it were an English lady named Miss Prince, going out to teach at a mission school, and a German widow whose recent bereavement appeared to have left her buoyed and cheerful. Their common language was English, since this was all that the two English people spoke. Piet’s was proficient, Frau Stettin’s less so, which meant that the burden of conversation with the others fell on him.

  A wicked look or smile at the hideousness of it all from Miss Prince might have lifted Piet’s spirits, but in fact she seemed rather impressed by Percy Shabrill.

  He was sitting with his back to the wall and had a full view of the dining room. There were no bare boards, as in third class. There was a carpet and electric light, but for all that it was dingy and overcrowded and for some structural reason its roof was supported by pillars every few feet, which made it claustrophobic and cramped. His fellow passengers were dressed with the careful pretension of the rising middle class. They seemed greatly pleased by everything, as he might have been had he never met the Vermeulen-Sickertses or grown accustomed to their way of life.

  But he had, and this robbed him of the naïveté necessary to delight in the second rate.

  Other disadvantages swiftly emerged. Piet yearned for solitude, but this was not available to a man in a shared cabin on the Eugénie. Percy’s constitution was delicate and he spent much of each day in bed. A full complement of 450 tourist-class passengers left the public rooms crowded, as the decks were too except in the foulest weather; and an unwritten convention entitled anyone to strike up a conversation on the slenderest pretext.

  Frau Stettin was the least unbearable of his new acquaintances, because she was artless and sincere and happy to talk with very little prompting. Her cheerful voice, rambling on irrelevancies, was a soothing distraction from his self-reproach, and Piet exerted himself to inquire after her grandchildren and to remember their names and ages, with something of his old attentiveness. Miss Prince’s moods were highly erratic. Only a disciplined childhood in a Warwickshire vicarage had trained her to present to the world a façade of calm, conventional womanhood. This façade expertly achieved, her conversation contained nothing to snag Piet’s interest and meals eaten at her side passed slowly. He spent one afternoon expressing polite approval of the textbooks with which she intended to teach native children English. It appeared that she and her father had devised them and paid for their printing. “One so wants to help the kaffirs to be useful. Deep down, that is what they wish for themselves,” she said, opening a section titled “Phrases for the Home” which included the constructions May I direct you to the drawing room? and Her ladyship is indisposed.

  “It would be hard for a kaffir to manage without such knowledge,” he observed, thinking how unjust it was that this woman should have the freedom denied to Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts. Miss Prince detected nothing at all ironic in his tone and prattled on, warming to her theme of native self-improvement. As he listened to the stories of her colonial acquaintances’ troublesome servants, and the importance of training their children to do better, he searched the room for someone to share and appreciate the ghastliness of his situation, but confronted nothing but well-scrubbed faces beaming good cheer.

  Percy Shabrill’s voluble self-certainty, even when gripped by seasickness, sapped Piet’s remaining reserves of optimism. It seemed a dangerous folly to be crossing the world without an idea of what he would do at the other side, and this thought preoccupied him as he played bridge with Frau Stettin or listened to Miss Prince’s theories on education. Though he had vowed to spend no money on board, restraint was difficult in practice. Only the food was included in the price of passage. When a steward appeared after dinner with a tray of brandies, already poured, it was embarrassing to refuse. He accepted one, and when the others exclaimed over its excellence he did not tell them how awful it was.

  On the third day out there was a violent storm. The impact this had on Percy was briefly cheering. It pleased Piet to see him laid so low and for once the reading room was empty after lunch. But the next day, as they passed through the Bay of Biscay, the seas calmed and the crowds returned. He woke early, roused by the rattling of his cabin. The ship was picking up speed and with each knot the vibrations grew more violent. One of the shelves was inadequately screwed to its bracket and clattered unendurably.

  He dressed and went to breakfast, followed by his grumbling cabinmate. The eggs were fried in the English manner and had been left too long in the warming tray. As he sawed into one he observed that Percy and Miss Prince had taken a close interest in each other, and their clumsy flirtation was as irritating as the rubberized yolk. Piet spent the morning playing piquet for low stakes and losing. Then he went to his cabin. It was mercifully empty. He lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes.

  Piet had not cried since his childhood, but when Percy opened the door ten minutes later he felt briefly as though he might. Percy was speaking of Miss Prince in low, ardent tones. He gave every sign of taking Piet into his confidence until lunch. Piet excused himself and went on deck, past the ranks of deck chairs, the shuffleboard players and strolling couples. At the aft section was a spiked trellis, separating tourist from the roomier portion assigned to first class. He went there and leaned over the rails, staring
at the sea. His expression was so tragic that a bold little girl asked if he was all right.

  “Thank you,” he said. “My eyes are just stung by the wind.”

  And then he heard his name.

  Like a wish granted by a fairy godmother, Didier Loubat had materialized not two feet away. In a tailcoat with the line’s shell and crossed Ls on the lapel, he was standing on the other side of the barrier. His hair was shorter than he had worn it at Herengracht 605. He looked older and more glamorous.

  “Don’t show you know me.” He took a soft cloth from his pocket and polished a spot of rail. “You look awfully glum.”

  “I am.”

  “Life on board not up to your standards?”

  Piet turned out to sea, as if unconscious of his friend’s presence. “It’s dreadful in every possible way. I should have gone steerage and saved my money.”

  “I can change your mind about that.” Didier returned the cloth to his pocket. “You can’t see any part of steerage from first class, and it has no open deck. If you’d been in there I’d never have found you. As it is, I’ve been freezing my balls off hoping to catch sight of you.” He began to fold up a deck chair, pretending to have trouble with it. “Now listen carefully. The tourist-class reading room will be empty while everyone’s at lunch. If you go through the service door outside it in twenty minutes, you’ll find yourself in a corridor with a grille gate at one end. I’ll meet you there. Go to your cabin and put on a better tie.”