“I think I’ll have to have another pill,” Donna said in a small, scared voice.
Reba too was scared—she hurried to get the medication and water to take it with. She watched Donna swallow it, not taking her eyes off her face; she said, “I’m going to call Dr. Abramson.”
“No no, what can he do? Just stay with me.” She caught hold of Reba’s hand: “You’re not driving back tonight, are you?”
“Of course not. Who wants to drive back at midnight? I was planning to stay with you anyway; that’s why I came.” When Donna guided Reba’s hand to let her feel her heart, Reba pleaded again, “Let me call the doctor.”
Donna shook her head and pleaded in her turn, “Don’t go.”
“I’m not. I told you: I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re all I’ve got.”
“Well, I’m here. I’m not leaving you.”
What was she promising? Reba didn’t let herself think about it. She gave her mother her usual sleeping pill and sat on the bed watching her grow drowsy. Donna was still holding her hand, and whenever Reba shifted even slightly, her mother tightened her grip. But it wasn’t enough, and after a while Donna whispered, “Get in with me.”
Reba hesitated—it was many years since she had slept with Donna, though as a child it had been a great treat to get into this same big bed and lie between both parents.
“Get in with me,” Donna said again. “It’s been so long.”
Reba stepped out of her jeans; she would wait till Donna was asleep and then go to her own bed. But when she slipped under the covers with her, Donna made her put her arms around her and hold her close. Even so, hour after hour, Donna kept murmuring, “Hold me.” Each time Reba answered, “I am holding you.” She became impatient, as well as hot and uncomfortable, but whenever she stirred Donna said at once, “Don’t leave me,” so all night, over and over, Reba had to promise not to leave her.
On Sunday Reba helped Lisette draft a notice to quit her job. Lisette formed her letters very carefully, like a child who has only recently learned them; also like a child she stuck out the tip of her tongue while concentrating on her task. Sometimes she asked Reba how to spell a word—and whereas she used to be defensive about her own ignorance, now she easily conceded that Reba knew better than she. Nor did she mind it when Reba leaned over her to correct some error; she even looked up to smile at her own stupidity, so that Reba couldn’t help kissing her uptilted face. Today Lisette was entirely open to Reba, physically and in every other way. Later they got out a map and sat close together with their heads bent over it. Lisette hadn’t even heard of some of the countries they were traveling to, or had thought they were somewhere completely different.
That same morning Donna had got up telling herself she needed a day in the country. She always fulfilled her own wishes, so it wasn’t long before she had hired a limousine and chauffeur from her usual car service, stopping off at Colette’s to buy a whole lot of cakes and pastries. On arrival, the limousine had to be parked some distance from Reba’s cabin and the rest of the way taken on foot through the wood. Donna walked to the cabin in the floating floral dress and the big white hat she had put on for the country; the chauffeur came behind her, carrying the many boxes she had bought. She called out, “Yoo-hoo!” to announce herself, but already there was a stir in the wood, with a squirrel crackling over twigs to escape up a tree, and the birds changing their tune, so that they seemed to be not singing but shouting in warning.
The girls leaped up from where they sat poring over their map—suddenly the tiny cabin was very full, with Donna in her pearls and shimmering silk directing the uniformed chauffeur where to place the piles of pastry boxes; there didn’t seem to be enough surfaces in that bare little space to accommodate them. The girls watched in silence, and only Donna’s voice rang out as she first ordered the chauffeur around, then argued with him about what time to pick her up again. His departure left an awkward silence—Donna had not yet explained why she had come nor had Reba said she was glad to see her. Donna made herself bustle around a while longer, opening all the boxes to let the girls see what she had brought.
“Why so much?” Reba said at last, in a hard ungrateful voice. “Who’s going to eat so much?”
“It’ll be gone in no time,” Donna urged. “From Colette’s, I went specially. You’ll love it.”
“Lisette doesn’t eat anything with sugar.”
“She doesn’t?” Now Donna’s voice had become hard. “Is she diabetic?” She stared at Lisette, making her shrink against the wall. “I’d have said anemic,” Donna concluded; she licked her finger where a bit of mocha cream had come off the top of a cake.
“Sugar doesn’t do anything for you except clog up your veins,” Reba said hotly. “I’ve stopped eating it too.”
“Then why don’t you just throw it all in the garbage,” Donna said. “I’ll do it right now: where’s your trash can?” She seized a box and stood ready to throw it. Reba took it from her. “I wish I hadn’t sent the car away,” Donna said, “but I can take the next train back if you’ll drop me at the station.”
She spoke with dignity; she was still standing—no one had asked her to sit down—considerably taller in her high-heeled alligator sandals than the two barefooted girls. Then her eyes fell on the map spread open on the table; before she could ask anything, Reba said, “Lisette and I were planning the route we’re going to take.”
“Take where?” Donna’s dignity left her. “You’re not going anywhere. You said you weren’t. You promised!” Her voice had risen; it rang shrilly around the cabin; Lisette shrank further against the wall.
Reba stepped up close to Lisette. “Go outside,” she told her. “Go swimming: I’ll come in a minute.” The light that had been in Lisette’s face while studying the map had faded completely. She looked dull and pale. “Don’t worry,” Reba said. She put her hand on the nape of Lisette’s neck; the skin felt damp with fear. “We’re going no matter what,” Reba promised. She drew Lisette forward so that she could seal that promise with a kiss, right on the lips and right in front of Donna.
When Lisette had gone, Donna sat down at last. She had to, because her legs were shaking. She said, “Let me go home.”
Reba was brisk with her: “You’re here now so you might as well stay. You can watch us swim, if you like.”
Donna said, in a whisper, “You promised.”
“What did I promise?”
“You said, ‘I won’t leave you.’ You said it all night. You did! You promised!” Far from a whisper, her voice had become a shriek.
Reba grabbed her mother’s arm, and held her: “Listen,” she said. “This is the way it is: I’m going away with Lisette. You can shout and scream all you want but you can’t change that.”
Donna didn’t shout and scream. Reba was still holding her arm, but now it looked as if she were supporting her. She even said, when the silence became prolonged, “Are you all right?”
Donna nodded in reply. It wasn’t that she couldn’t but that she didn’t want to speak. There was nothing to say: she saw it was hopeless; she had been through this before, with Si.
She told Reba: “Go and swim. Do what you want.” When she saw Reba hesitate—as Si had hesitated—she added, “I’m okay. Go on. I’ll join you.”
“It’s just at the end of the wood, you can’t miss it.” Reba waited no longer. She was gone in an instant—running to Lisette.
Si had fled in the same way, afraid to look back. That had been almost two years ago, when he had first moved out. He had come in unexpectedly early while she had some friends in for lunch. They were having a Tarot reading, so she was embarrassed by his arrival because he always laughed at her for believing in the cards. Well, he could laugh—but there was something: why else should the Knight of Wands have turned up reversed three times for Wally Roth, before she had even had a suspicion what her then husband was up to? Si had gone straight into the bedroom, and Donna was having such an interesting time—she
was getting the most brilliant reading that afternoon—that she was reluctant to leave her friends and follow him. When she did, she found him with two suitcases open on the bed, packing his clothes. She sat down next to the suitcases.
She didn’t know what it was about. Of course she had been aware he was playing around, but that was nothing new. He had never moved out before: why should he now? Although she was silent, sitting with her pounding heart beside the suitcases, he said: “Don’t try to stop me. You can’t.” He went on packing and she went on sitting. When he had finished, he shut the suitcases and put them on the floor. They were heavy to lift, and his face grew red with the effort. She still hadn’t spoken one word. He said, “I’ll call you. I’ll be at the Pierre if you need me.”
She nodded; they both looked at his suitcases; she said, “You want help with those? I’ll call someone from downstairs, if you like.”
But he was getting his strength together to pick them up himself. Before he could do so, she threw herself against him; she clung to him. At first his body was hard and unyielding against hers; he said again, “You can’t stop me.” But she wasn’t even trying to do that; she was only sobbing helplessly, unable to believe what was happening. Suddenly he too clung to her as she did to him—as though he were parting from her not of his own volition but compelled to do so by some outward agency such as fate.
After Si’s departure, she had gone back to her friends and they had finished their reading. No one suspected anything; and for the rest of the day Donna had remained calm. It was the same now in Reba’s cabin: Donna was quiet and accepting. She ran a comb carefully up her dome of golden hair; she ate one of the pastries she had brought. Then she went to find the girls, stepping out of the cabin straight into the wood. Ancient layers of mould crackled under her high heels. The summer was just past its height, with the leaves too heavy for the branches that had to bear them, and also dusty and unfresh. She could hear the girls plashing around in their swimming hole. When she approached, she didn’t step into the clearing but stood watching them through the shrubbery. They were naked, and Reba was splashing water against Lisette, who had her eyes shut and her arms crossed in front of her. Like a couple of mermaids, Donna thought without pleasure. A stone had lodged in her sandal and she lowered herself on to a mossy patch to take it out. Something pricked through her silk dress where she sat, and something else was creeping up her stockinged thigh. The one thing she regretted at that moment was that she hadn’t asked the chauffeur to come earlier to take her home.
TWO MUSES
Now that my grandfather, Max Nord, is so famous—many years after his death, a whole new generation has taken him up—I suppose every bit of information about him is of interest to his readers. But my view of him is so familiar, so familial that it might be taken as unwelcome domestic gossip. Certainly, I grew up hearing him gossiped about—by my parents, and everyone else who knew about him and his household set-up. At that time no one believed that his fame would last; and it is true that it did not revive to its present pitch till much later—in fact, till everyone had gone: he himself and his two widows, Lilo and Netta, and my parents too, so that I’m the only family member left to reap the fruits of what now turns out to be, after all, his genius.
Max, Lilo, and Netta had come to England as refugees in the thirties. I was born after the war, so I knew nothing of those earlier years in London when they were struggling with a new language and a new anonymity; for it was not only his work that was in eclipse, they themselves were too—their personalities, which could not be placed or recognized in this alien society. At home, in the Germany of the twenties and early thirties, they had each one of them had a brilliant role: Max of course was the young genius, whose early novels had caused a sensation, and Lilo was his prize—the lovely young daughter of a banking family much grander than his own. Netta was dashing, dramatic, chic in short skirts and huge hats. She loved only artists—painters, opera singers—only geniuses, the more famous the better. She never found one more famous than Max, which was maybe why she loved and stayed with him for the rest of their lives. It always seemed to me that it was Netta, much more than his wife Lilo, who fussed over him, adored him, made excuses for him. Lilo sometimes got impatient with him, and I have heard her say to Netta, “Why don’t you take him home with you and make everyone happy, most of all me?” But the moment she had said this, she covered her face and laughed, and Netta also laughed, as at a big joke.
They always spoke in English to each other; it was a matter of principle with them, although they must have felt much more at home in their native German, its idiom packed with idiosyncratic meaning for them. But they had banished that language, too proud to use it now that they themselves had been banished from its precincts. Lilo had had an English governess as a child so that her accent was more authentic than that of the other two—though not quite: I myself, an English child growing up in England, never thought of my grandmother as anything but foreign. Max’s accent was so impenetrable that it was sometimes impossible to understand what he was saying (always impossible for me, but then I didn’t understand him anyway). Yet, although he did not speak it well, Max’s grasp of the English language must have been profound; he continued to write in German but spent weeks and months with his English translator, wrestling over nuances of meaning.
Since Max’s work is so well-known today, I need not say much about it. This is just as well, for his books are not the slender psychological novels I prefer but huge tomes with the characters embodying and expressing abstract thought. Today they are generally accepted as masterpieces, but during his last years—which are those that I remember—this estimate was confined to a small group of admirers. In his own household it was of course accepted without question—even by my grandmother Lilo, although I now suspect that she was not as devoted a reader of his works as she should have been. In fact, I wonder sometimes if she read them at all, especially the later, most difficult ones. But Lilo was not really a reader. She liked to go for long walks, to make odd purchases at antique stalls, and to play tennis. Yet as a girl she had read the classics—mostly German, and Russian in translation—and, with all her desirable suitors, she had chosen to marry a young writer of modest means and background. An only child, she lived—an enchanted princess—in her father’s villa in the salubrious outskirts of the city. Max would bicycle from the less salubrious city center where he was a lodger in the flat of an army widow. He brought his latest manuscript and they sat under the trees in her father’s garden—in their memories, as transmitted to me, it seems to have been always summer—and he read from his work to her till it got too dark to see. He was so engrossed in his own words that he noticed nothing—it was she who cried, “Maxi! A bee!” She saved him from it with vigorous flaps of the napkin that had come out with the coffee-tray. This tray also bore, besides the voluminous, rose-budded coffee-pot, an apple or other fruit tart, so that Lilo was constantly on the alert with the same napkin; and in other ways too she was distracted—for instance, by a bird pecking away in the plum tree, or by Max himself and the way his hair curled on the nape of his strong round young neck where it was bent over his manuscript. Sometimes she could not refrain from tickling him there a little bit and then he looked up and found her smiling at him—and how could he not smile back? Perhaps it didn’t even occur to him that she wasn’t listening; or if it did, it wouldn’t have mattered, because wasn’t she herself the embodiment of everything he was trying to get into words?
After they were married, they lived in a house—it was her father’s wedding present to them—not far from the one where she had grown up; it too had a garden, with fruit trees, bees, and flowers, where Lilo spent a lot of time while he was in his study, writing (it was taken for granted) masterpieces. As the years went by, Lilo became more and more of a home-bird—not that she was particularly domestic, she never was, not at all, but that she loved being there, in her own home where she was happy with her husband and child (my mother). During
the summer months, and sometimes at Easter, the three of them went to the same big comfortable old hotel in the mountains where she had vacationed with her parents. During the rest of the year Max traveled by himself, to European conferences, or to see his foreign publishers; he also had business in the city at least once a week and would go there no longer by bicycle but in his new Mercedes sports car. And it was here, in their home city, which was also hers, that he encountered Netta—or she encountered him, for there is no doubt that, however their affair developed, it was she who first hunted him down: her last, her biggest lion.
She saw him in a restaurant—one of those big plush bright crowded expensive places she went to frequently with her artistic circle of friends, and he only very occasionally, and usually only with his publisher. He was with his publisher that time too, the two of them dining together. They were both dressed elegantly but also very correctly, so that it would have been difficult to distinguish between publisher and author, if it had not been for Max’s looks, which were noble, handsome. “Oh my God! Isn’t that Max Nord? Catch me, quick, I’m fainting—” and Netta collapsed into the lap of the nearest friend (an art critic). Soon she and Max were introduced and soon they were lovers—that never took long with her, at that time; but for him it may have been his first adulterous affair and he suffered terribly and made her suffer terribly. He would only meet her when he traveled to other cities, preferably foreign ones, so that they were always in hotel rooms—he checked in first, and when his business was concluded, he allowed her to join him. She wrote him frenzied, burning letters, which have since been published, by herself—“. . . Don’t you know that I sit here and wait and die again and again, longing for a sign from you, my most beloved, my most wonderful terrible lover, oh you of the arched eyebrows and the—I kiss you a thousand times there and there and there . . .” Years passed and the situation did not change for them: he would still only see her in other cities, stolen luxurious nights in luxurious hotel rooms; and she, who had always lived by love, now felt she was perishing by it. She had divorced her husband (her second), and though she still had many men friends, she no longer took them as her lovers; later there were rumors that she had sometimes turned to women friends, her tears and confession to them melting into acts of love. Her looks, always brilliant, became more so—her hats more enormous, her eyebrows plucked to the finest line; she wore fur stoles and cascades of jewels, she glistened in silk designer gowns slit up one side to show a length of splendid leg.
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