East Into Upper East

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Sometimes he joined them, but mostly he stayed in the city, and then Madeleine had Claire all to herself in the house in the country. It made her more happy than she had dreamed, during her bad years, she ever could be again. She got up in the morning and prepared breakfast for when Claire woke up. It wasn’t until she had given the last touch to the table laid cozily in the breakfast nook that she tramped upstairs to Claire’s bedroom. She stood over Claire and said, “Up with you, lazybones.” From within the delicious warmth of her bed, Claire looked up at her; and if Katze was curled on the comforter, then Madeleine would grab and squeeze him hard till he miaowed in indignation.

  “You’ll kill him,” Claire warned.

  “Yes, kill him with love,” said Madeleine, making big threatening eyes at Claire in bed.

  “You will,” Claire said. “You don’t know your own strength.”

  “I’m not like you—look at your ridiculous little wrist.” Madeleine took it and spanned it between two fingers. “I could snap it in two if I wanted,” she said, sounding as though she might.

  “Help,” said Claire lazily; making her wrist go limp, she left it where it was in Madeleine’s big hand.

  At first Bobby had hated Madeleine. He jeered at her appearance—her big shapeless body and the way she dressed it in long peasant gowns. He asked, what was she, an Old Believer, or a prophetess? With this he was also hitting out at the way Madeleine had spent her life. She had been companion-secretary to a philosopher and had traveled around with him all over the world. People thronged to his lectures and workshops, for his philosophy was as attractive as his personality. Both were totally absorbing to Madeleine, and she had dedicated herself to him; but then he took on a younger secretary and the situation changed. Madeleine had returned home to the States, and all that was left of her years of devotion was a trunk full of the peasant gowns that he had encouraged his women followers to wear.

  When Bobby taunted Madeleine, Claire was ashamed and would have stopped him, if she hadn’t known that this would only make him worse. She was grateful for the patient way Madeleine, who was not patient by nature, pretended to take it all as friendly kidding. It turned out to be the best way to deal with him. Losing interest in her, he ignored her, which could be interpreted as tolerating her—anyway, that was how Madeleine and Claire interpreted it, enabling them to continue building up a life together. Madeleine made it scrupulously clear that the house in the country was as much Bobby’s home as it was hers and his mother’s, and that he was free to come there whenever he wanted. But of course it was best when he didn’t come.

  At first Madeleine and Claire used to drive back on Mondays, but one week Madeleine said, “Why not stay till tomorrow?” Claire said nothing, but after a while she went up to her bedroom, shutting the door. Madeleine knew she had gone to phone Bobby, to ask his permission, and she waited nervously. But when Claire returned, she said: “There’s no answer.”

  “He’s out having a good time,” Madeleine urged in false cheer.

  Claire continued to frown anxiously. It may well have been that Bobby had gone out, but equally well he might be at home not answering the phone—for any number of reasons: because he didn’t feel like it; or because he knew it was his mother and it gave him pleasure to think of her worrying where he was, what he was doing. Or he may have been asleep, he often slept through the day after taking God knows what, a legitimate drug prescribed by his doctor or something else. Or perhaps he wasn’t asleep—didn’t Madeleine know every tormenting thought that formed behind Claire’s delicate forehead? Perhaps he couldn’t answer the phone because—well, anything could happen: “We’d better go,” Claire said, and Madeleine knew there was nothing she could say to keep her.

  But the following Monday Madeleine decided to stay back and let Claire return alone. It was both a wrench and a relief: to let her go, and yet not to have to be with her in the city under the cloud of Bobby’s presence. They spoke briefly on the phone several times a day and had long conversations in the evening. In the background Madeleine could hear the rock music that Bobby always played at an earsplitting level. On Friday afternoon Madeleine drove to the station to collect Claire. Her heart leaped when she saw her step off the train—stylish and slim, laughing with some silly thing that had happened to her on the way. They both laughed, like a couple of madcap schoolgirls, Madeleine driving the car rather recklessly. Then Claire said, “Bobby said he might join us this weekend,” and Madeleine said, “Oh good,” getting a firmer grip on the wheel because the front tires had skidded with her careless driving.

  He arrived the next day in a cab from the station. It was early evening, and Madeleine and Claire were sitting idyllically under an apple tree, shelling peas for their supper. Behind them the sun was setting in a mild glow of gold. The moment she saw Bobby arrive, Claire put down her bowl of shelled peas and went to pay the cab driver. She kissed Bobby, who turned away from her to face Madeleine—not with his usual scowl but with a sort of triumphant smile that may have meant no more than “Here I am.”

  He was carrying his big metal stereo. He never went anywhere without it—loud, reverberating sound was his inescapable accompaniment. Madeleine had almost gotten used to it. It was difficult to tell where the music ended and his own personality began, for both hammered mercilessly through whatever space he occupied. That weekend happened to be calm for him. He sat for many hours, frowning over a book of which he rarely turned a page; when he looked up, his eyes were clouded with thoughts that seemed to have welled up not from any reading but from some abyss inside himself. That impression may have been subjective, Madeleine had to admit, formed by her vision of him as a darkly brooding presence. Whenever he went on one of his long solitary walks, she imagined him throwing a sombre, terrible cloud over this golden landscape of streams and hills and immaculate white clapboard houses. But she knew it wasn’t right to think of him that way, for what was he but a youth enjoying a day out in the country? The impression of shadow, of darkness may have been due only to his complexion, which was a throwback to his father’s Italian ancestry.

  They gave him one of the bedrooms on the second floor, a charming, simple room with white furniture and flowered wallpaper matching the curtains. He lay, sweet and pure, with his head on the white pillow. Claire sat on the side of his bed and Madeleine stood in the door, watching them. “How handsome you are, my darling,” said Claire, brushing the hair from his high arched brow, which would have been noble if it hadn’t been for the scowl lowering there. But now he was calm; he let her stroke his face; he loved her. “Shall I read to you, my darling?” she asked. She often read to him—fairy tales of princes bewitched into monsters until redeemed by love; or plays she would have liked to act in—before her marriage she wanted to be an actress—or would have liked him to act in, for wasn’t he handsome like an actor, a star? Again she stroked his face, kissing her own fingertips where they had touched him. She loved his looks, and to draw Madeleine’s attention to them. Sometimes she compared him to his father, whom she had described to Madeleine as pale, emasculated, deracinated, not only in appearance but in character too: a weak, weak man. But Bobby was strong, with a broad chest and back matted in luxurious black hair. His father’s hair had begun to thin before he was thirty; and his father had long thin hands like the artist he had pretended to be, though settling for a safe job with an international organization. Bobby’s hands were huge and strong, they were those of the Italian farmworkers his family had been, several generations ago. Claire stroked them where they lay on the sheet; she said, “Do you like being here? Madeleine loves having you here, she’s so grateful you’ve come—aren’t you?” she said, smiling to her standing in the door, and Madeleine smiled back and said yes.

  By next day Bobby was bored with being in the country, so his mother returned with him to the city. Madeleine stayed through the week—this had become a regular pattern for her, along with her daily calls to Claire. But on one of those calls there was something odd in Cl
aire’s voice, off-key. Madeleine phoned again an hour later, and still that inflection was there, but of course when she said, “Is everything all right?” Claire gave a light laugh and said: “Why shouldn’t it be?” Madeleine knew many reasons why. By evening she was so restless that she got in her car and drove to the city. The moment she let herself into her apartment, she felt a difference. During her absence, Claire always came in to water the plants; but as soon as she opened the door, Madeleine knew that someone else had been there. And not only been there—had lived there—had turned it into his lair! In her bedroom the mattress had been dragged from the bed to the floor; dirty underwear was stuffed into the sides of an armchair. Her photographs, of her parents and a brother who had died as an adolescent, were thrown face down on the dresser. She thrust open the window to get rid of the feral smell that lay thick in the air.

  When she felt calm enough, she went to Claire’s apartment down the hall. She rang the bell and called through the door, “It’s me.” Claire opened and said in a shocked voice, “What happened—why have you come?” She let her in, quickly turning aside her face but not before Madeleine had seen the injury on it.

  Madeleine said in a calm, normal voice: “I have to see my taxman tomorrow, so I thought we might have dinner tonight, you and I.”

  “Oh great,” said Claire; and then: “You haven’t been to your apartment yet, have you?”

  “No, I came to see you first.”

  They moved around each other like pugilists, Claire trying to hide her face and Madeleine to get a better look at it. At last Claire said, “Why don’t you sit down, you’re making me nervous.”

  Madeleine sat down in the center of a graceful little sofa; she occupied almost all of it, for she was big and sat with her thighs apart. Claire stood by the window as though there were something interesting happening in the building opposite. She said, “What do you feel like—spaghetti? Chinese? Or we could just go to Rami’s. It’s up to you.”

  Madeleine said, “Why don’t you turn around and let me see your face?”

  Claire kept on looking out the window. After a while, she said: “I fell.” And after another while: “Leave it; forget it.”

  Madeleine went over to her. She made her turn so that she could study her face. There was a cut over the cheekbone, a large dark bruise around one eye. The way Claire looked at her through this bruise brought a sob welling up in Madeleine’s chest. To stifle it, she pressed Claire against herself, and they stood close together, trembling as with one body.

  When she let Claire go, Madeleine spoke sensibly: “We can’t go on this way. It’s not as if it’s just you and he now—I’m here too. And I’m not going to sit by and watch all this. I can’t bear it.”

  Claire’s disfigured face jeered at her: “You can’t? Then what will you do? What do people do when they can’t bear something?” She gave a dry laugh: “They bear it.” But next moment she changed to a much lighter tone; she said, “I really did fall—all right, don’t believe me, but that’s what happened. All he did was throw a statue at me and it got me—here—and then he was coming after me and I ran and slipped and hit my face against the table.”

  “What statue did he throw at you?”

  “Oh, just that soapstone Buddha you have—” After a pause she said, “Yes, it was in your apartment because he’s staying there. Only for a while, Mad, as long as you don’t need it. Because it’s nicer for a boy, isn’t it, to be on his own sometimes and not have his mother fussing at him all the time . . . Of course I’ll have it cleaned up, you know how messy boys can be—and in fact, that’s what the fight was about yesterday.” She laughed, as at a not unamusing incident: “I was trying to get him to let Teresa in to clean, and he wouldn’t. He’s getting to be really possessive about your place, Mad. He really likes it,” she assured her in a bright voice, as at something to be pleased about.

  Madeleine persuaded Claire to return to the country with her the same night, which was a Thursday, a day earlier than usual. They had several flawless days together. They stayed mostly outdoors where everything was in full summer bloom. Madeleine watered, weeded, and tried to take the scum off the pond, while Claire sat near her in a garden chair, reading and ruminating. Katze chased birds and squirrels. For hours Madeleine and Claire hardly spoke, but then there were moments when they had so much to say that Claire flung aside her book and Madeleine sat on the grass, leaning against Claire’s chair. They remembered their schooldays and beautiful summers like this one, and how they had gone to some romantic spot for a picnic and had looked up at the sky and felt the earth pressing against them through their light frocks. They had spoken of their ambitions and plans, which had been wide open, infinite. Claire was going to be an actress, she was the most talented of their group and also one of the prettiest, so that many girls had wanted to be her friend. Often Madeleine had had to sit dumbly on the outskirts of their circle, with no one taking notice of her; so that when Claire spoke of those years with joy, Madeleine thought secretly how much better it was now that there were only the two of them in her fragrant garden with birds chirping around them, sparrows and swallows, and not excited, jealous girls.

  When Claire talked about the past and the people in it they had known, she made it all so amusing and alive that Madeleine exclaimed: “You should have been an actress!”

  Claire shrugged, smiled—a little melancholy but proud, too, of the talent she had had. Then she said, “Maybe, if I hadn’t been a fool and got married to a fool.” Her face hardened as always at the mention of her ex-husband: “He couldn’t stand it that I did anything better than he. He had to be the one always, no one else. I tell you, Mad, he had a huge personality problem—still has. This is his latest.” Clouds had floated over the sun, she frowned at the sudden shadow and chill and said, “Let’s go in.”

  But Madeleine pressed her back closer against Claire’s legs. Absently, still frowning at her own thoughts, Claire let her fingers play over Madeleine’s crop of hair. “Bobby must have written to him,” she said. “I don’t know what he wrote—he didn’t even tell me about it, but good Lord, a boy has the right to write a letter to his own father, I sincerely hope.” She stopped, and took her hand from Madeleine’s hair. Madeleine waited breathlessly for her to put it back, but Claire was by now engrossed in her own indignation: “So I have this letter from him saying on no account can Bobby come to stay with them in Geneva, going into this long thing about his boys’ school exams—his boys! As if Bobby isn’t! But he’s never understood Bobby; never. He’s just not fit to understand any personality more complex than those vapid kids he has with his little Swiss housewife—oh, they’re okay, I suppose, quite nice if you happen to care for white mice, but nothing, I tell you, nothing compared to my Bobby.”

  Madeleine looked up at the sky clouding over. “Maybe we should go in.”

  “It’ll be an eternal mystery to me where Bobby gets his looks from. Don’t you think he has star looks? Really stunning? Those eyes—and his physique, Madeleine, his shoulders—you can’t deny that he’s incredibly handsome, you can’t deny it, can you? . . . You don’t like him, that’s why you’re not saying anything.”

  “I said yes!”

  “No you did not; you said nothing. Because you’re against him, like everyone. Is it any wonder that he is the way he is, with the whole world against him, including his own father?” She pushed Madeleine aside so that she could get up. She went into the house and didn’t look back when Madeleine called after her. Madeleine stayed sitting on the ground, tearing up clumps of grass with dandelions in them and crushing them inside her fist.

  By the time she followed, Claire was busy pottering around the kitchen. Claire said at once: “I’m fixing dinner tonight—I’m making my pesto sauce, and you just go inside and put your big feet up. Go on now.”

  Claire’s cooking was much better, more subtle, than Madeleine’s, so that night they had a delicious meal for which Madeleine opened one of the special bottles of wine still
left from her father’s cellar. Afterward they stayed in the living room, dark and crowded with old family furniture and family photographs and an oil painting of a very early ancestress in a mob-cap; there was a rosewood piano that Madeleine’s mother had played, with her music still lying on top. Madeleine sat on a hard leather settee where her father used to take cat-naps behind his newspaper. Now it was Claire who squatted on the floor, with her back resting against Madeleine’s legs; and the moon shone in through the open windows between the lined velour curtains they had left undrawn.

  “You’re not like me,” Claire was saying. “You’ve always been self-sufficient. You haven’t needed people.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” said Madeleine.

  “Not in that way,” Claire insisted.

  “What other way is there?” Madeleine said. She knew Claire was hinting at her relationship with the philosopher, so she said: “For all his talk, in the end it came to the same thing. It was all personal. He manipulated us, just like a lover with a lot of mistresses.” Claire reached up her hand and Madeleine grasped and held on to it. She swallowed as though there were a painful obstruction to what she went on to say: “He made us believe it was all for a higher cause, for his philosophy, for a better world . . . Yes, a better world for him,” she sneered, making herself more bitter than she really felt. “He’s the only one who got anything out of it.”

  “But you cared for him; you did care for him.” Claire gave Madeleine’s hand a little shake, to admonish her that it had not been all for nothing.