I said, "Surely, this can’t be yet the fast train to Genoa, it’s much too early, isn’t it?"
He said, "I shall not contradict you. For two reasons. First, because you are right. It’s the slow train to Savona. Second, because even if it were not true, it would be true. Whatever a lovely woman says is right."
He had a way, when pausing, of closing his long narrow lips and smiling with his eyes, which tore at my heart. I said, "How many times before, to how many women, have you given this very same answer?"
"And what if I have? It’s true, and is a truth less of a truth because it’s been said before?"
I knew we were engaging in sheer marivaudage. It was like a cat’s cradle: the strings could be crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed, forming forever the same recurring pattern, for as long as required.
He now said, "It is true and I am sincere. When it is a case between a man and a woman there comes a point when the man cannot lie." He gave me a deep smiling look. "As you know." His lips twitched faintly. "Or don’t you?"
I did not speak.
He said, "How many years is it since you don’t know?"
I did not speak.
He said, "But that’s not the worst of it, is it? Before that, you did not like it. It was forced. On your part. Now it’s even worse. Because you get the bitterness from him. He’s blaming you. It’s all your fault, isn’t it. It’s you who flattened him out. It’s the old, old story, forever new. You needn’t tell me. I’m doing the talking now."
I said, "Have you been reading this, between arrivals and departures?" He said, "I lead a double life. At night I do the rounds and I listen behind doors."
I said, "I do believe that you’re doing the rounds at night. But I do not believe that you are behind doors, listening. Wasting your time."
He said, "What? Me? Having a woman in my bed at night? What do you take me for? I’m not a husband. One hundred and twenty seconds. The clock above me will tick it off in two minutes. Then roll off, turn your back, and drop off to sleep. And what does that make you feel like? It makes you feel like a prostitute. I only make love in the late afternoon. In the gloaming, when the light must melt away and the dark has come to rule. It does not last long. It is the blue hour."
I said, "Is that what they call it? How odd. Because the only scent I use is l’heure bleue, by Guerlain. The blue hour."
His lips twitched. "That friend of yours, that one you’ve come to see off. I saw you from my office. He’s anglicissimo, isn’t he?"—we were speaking Italian, and what he meant was, superlatively English. "He keeps looking our way."
"Let him," I said.
He said, "I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you ladies. It’s that you cannot understand—you’ll never be able to understand— that when you get married to a man you get a husband."
Now in the distance, though I could not tell how far away, there appeared, like a bumblebee, and faintly humming, crawling out of the chalice of a flower of which the petals were formed by the overlapping layers of mountain ridges and swathes and streaks of the sea, the "slow one to Savona."
The stationmaster raised two fingers to his cap, sketching a salute. A last smiling look, both sarcastic and tender. "Husbands," he said, and stepped to the edge of the platform.
I turned my back to the train as it was drawing in. I should have made sure that Clarence did not mistakenly board it. But the rage glowing within me turned all my decent feelings to cinder. Welcome to Savona, I thought, while taking up, once more, my feigned study of arrivals. Or departures. I could not tell. I said to myself, Let’s have the truth. Just for once. When someone says, "To tell the truth," it’s always something unpleasant. And don’t ask for the pure and simple truth, because it doesn’t exist. The stationmaster is a tripehound. Edmund is exceptionally distinguished. He was even a celebrity. And yet. I never, not even in the beginning, when he was head over heels about me—I was never drawn to him, there was no seduction. The stationmaster, whose name I don’t even know, has in his little finger more than most men have in the whole of their body. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be explained. It’s not science, it’s magic. As Edmund would say, there is nothing one can do about it.
It was sometime after the departure of the Savona train that I, giving a look to see whether Clarence was still on his bench, saw that Edmund had arrived. He was talking to Clarence, who was now on his feet. I went over to join them.
Edmund was saying, "You are in first class, aren’t you? When the train comes in, you must walk ahead, where the locomotive is, because there are only two first-class coaches, and they are always right in front."
"How very knowledgeable you are, Edmund," said Clarence.
Edmund said, "That’s because now, when we haven’t got a car, one still wants to get about a bit. San Remo, Nice, Monte Carlo."
Clarence said, "Why don’t you apply for a job as a stationmaster?"
"I’m afraid I would not be found acceptable," said Edmund. "For one thing, I’m over the age limit, whatever it might be, that’s for sure." He did not notice the look Clarence gave me—reproachful, once more the willful little boy who wants to snatch and grab and has been foiled. No doubt he had observed that my conversation with the lithe man in the tight-waisted uniform had lasted much longer than the usual inquiry about trains.
On our way home we were silent except for one remark by Edmund. "It’s not really fair on Clarence. He doesn’t drink that much. Only two whiskeys before lunch and two before dinner. And yet he’s already starting a drinker’s nose." NOW EDMUND CONCLUDED, reaching at last for the newspaper, "And it’s no use either, telling Clarence what he’s done to you. If you did, he’d either laugh or say you made it up and that you are a liar."
I said, "I can understand why he’d call me a liar. But why would he laugh?"
"It’s the pride, the vanity—look what I’ve done, look how strong I am, and how cunning. It’s, in miniature, the case of that Italian madman Luigi Luccheni, who killed the Empress Elizabeth of Austria as she was boarding the steamer in Geneva. He was very pleased with himself. He told the police that he wasn’t an ordinary killer, he’d never have bothered to kill a washerwoman. No, he was special."
"But I still can’t understand it. What went on in his mind, in the first place, when he tried it on, here, in the drawing room? What if I’d played along with him and fallen into his swinish arms? What with you down the corridor and not one hundred miles away, and liable to come in any moment? What then?"
Edmund said, "You must understand the drive taking over, drowning the reasoning faculty. And there is this element of vanity I’ve just mentioned, that he’s special, he’s protected. He’d snatch a kiss so fast that there’d be no risk."
I said, "But in the lift. What pleasure is there, I ask you, my cheek and my waist—it isn’t like getting the thrill of really and truly laying a woman."
Edmund said, "The way I see it, he doesn’t want that kind of satisfaction. I’d say it’s a case of kleptomania, of stealing sex, but it isn’t actual sex, it’s only a symbolic gesture. You might say he had the satisfaction—in his mind—of raping you. And don’t forget that he, as you told me, when he started driveling all along the way to the station, kept saying, ‘Meet me so that I can rape you!’ And for the real thing he’s got Sylvia, hasn’t he, and they’ve got three children who may be his—it’s a clever child which knows its own father—and this grab-and-snatch he plays is a godsend to him, because it sustains his vanity and at the same time it makes him feel virtuous. Because—what’s a kiss? It isn’t adultery. But maybe what I’m telling you is wrong. Give me a nice coronary thrombosis and I’ll tell you what’s what. When it’s a case of madness one should not try to seek a reason, a logical behavior, where there is none. That’s what madness is. If it were reasonable it would not be madness." And before picking up the Herald Tribune he cautioned me once more not to tell Sylvia.
There was one more remark Edmund made regarding Clarence, and that was sometime later in
the evening, when I told him that there was hardly anything left of the osso buco and asked him what kind of a stopgap dish he would like for dinner. "Mind you," he said, "there would have been one way of dealing with Clarence."
I said, "Do you mean I should have given him just one slice on a plate?"
"It’s an idea, but it’s not what I meant. I’ve been thinking that another woman in your place would have kneed him."
"What’s that?" I asked.
"Raised a knee and hit him in the balls."
"I’ve never heard of it before," I said. "But if I had, of course, when he went for me here in the flat I could have managed it. But not in the lift. It would have been too much of a narrow squeeze, I’d say."
Edmund said, "Why not invite Clarence over once more and try it out? Theories aren’t much use. If we hadn’t done any experiments we’d still be believing in the phlogiston theory, wouldn’t we?"
IN THE DAYS to come I did not speak to Edmund about Clarence, though my rage about him did not abate, especially as the recurring piercing pain, which stabbed me even when I turned lightly in bed, kept it aglow. I was convinced that Edmund was right that I should not tell Sylvia. And this not for her sake but for mine. Because I was sure that if I did, it would create an abyss of feeling between us.
Sylvia had always been what Maupassant called "a fanatical mother," and this admirable love, all-forgiving and all-accepting, she extended to Clarence as well. But I have never believed the wisdom of the phrase "What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," for the obvious reason that, as the goose is different from the gander, the sauce cannot retain, when applied, the same flavor. I was certain that Clarence in his turn would not have been equally forgiving if confronted with any amorous waywardness on Sylvia’s part.
Edmund had once told me, after reading about a case of passionate crime, that there were two patterns when a triangle was involved, made up of husband, wife, and the wife’s lover. He said, "When the husband kills the lover, that’s all right. That’s where it stops. But when the husband kills the wife, he’s got to kill himself afterward. Because he sees the wife as part of himself."
Two weeks after Clarence’s visit, we went to the station to get a train to Monte Carlo, and there was another stationmaster posted under the clock on the platform. I also saw that the hanging flower baskets suspended from the narrow roof, formerly filled with petunias, were now filled with geraniums. My first thought was that the dishy stationmaster had been killed by a husband. Then I convinced myself that I was being idiotic and that the reason for the change was that he had been posted away, probably to a bigger, busier station. I did not inquire. I never found out.
IT WAS IN the late autumn of that year that I heard Edmund say for the last time, "There is nothing I can do about it."
It was one o’clock in the morning. Edmund was in the drawing room and I told him I was going to bed.
"I’ll go to bed later," he said, "there may be some more news on the wireless."
"Well, good night," I said. "Oh, my God."
He said, "What is the ‘Oh, my God’ for?"
I said, "The state you’re in. If nothing else, the look in your eyes. No, I don’t mean the way you’re looking at me. I mean the way your eyes appear—all clouded over."
He said, "There is nothing I can do about it."
On the following morning, as usual, I took the small radio into the kitchen, so as not to disturb him, and drank my coffee. Edmund would have his scrambled eggs, toast, butter, and coffee and cream much later, in the dining room. The news I heard from the English radio in Monte Carlo was that Indira Gandhi had been murdered. Edmund had known her. He had also known her sister, married to a lawyer in Bombay. And he had known her father. He had met Nehru at a lunch party in Kapurthala Palace and had been told by the Maharani that Nehru, upon leaving, had said to her, "The doctor has such an interesting face."
I knew that Edmund would be stunned by the news. I looked in on him. He was in bed, asleep I thought at first. Then I realized that he was unconscious. He never got to know the news. He died three days later.
AFTER EDMUND’S DEATH, on the fourth of November, and again before Christmas, Sylvia wrote and asked me to stay with them. "Clarence also keeps saying, ‘Why don’t you ask Louise?’ He keeps telling me how he enjoyed that day he spent with you in Bordighera. He was fascinated by Edmund’s stories, too."
I took this as a hint to me from Clarence, to keep my silence with Sylvia. But then I thought that I was seeing guile and guise where there was none. He was, as Edmund had said, morally insane. He probably imagined that, if I’d come to stay, he would be able to "do something" as he called it, and not be caught, or if he were he would have passed it off as a harmless prank.
In the beginning of the New Year, Sylvia sent me a letter telling me about Clarence’s accident. It had happened on Boxing Day. Clarence had been pulled out of his car, unconscious, and even now could not recall what had happened to him. He had been on his way to a party in Brighton, to which they both had been asked, but Sylvia, who did not care for standing about in a crowded room with a drink in her hand, had decided to stay at home.
As it had happened in a narrow, bumpy, sandy country lane, enclosed on both sides by high tightly knit hedges, the police had been able to ascertain that no other car was involved when he veered off the lane and drove into the hedge. It had been his fault entirely.
The car was irretrievably damaged, and it was a miracle that he had survived. He had broken multiple ribs and a thighbone, but the doctors were sure he would soon be up and about with a stick and crutches.
But what was more amazing, Sylvia wrote, was Clarence’s cheerfulness and high morale. He knew it had been God’s will to save him. The car was a dead loss. God was not interested in cars. God was interested in Clarence and had not wanted him to die. It was truly a miracle, and was it not wonderful, wrote Sylvia.
I recalled that several years before, an old Englishwoman, one of our few acquaintances in Bordighera, told us how she’d had a quarrel with her neighbor. His cat had got into her garden and soiled and messed up one of her flower beds. On the next day the neighbor had been run over and killed by a car as he was crossing the road. "And when I heard about this," she concluded, "I thought, Dear me, I hadn’t meant it as badly as all that."
Edmund had told me afterward, "She’s a textbook case of paranoia. She sees herself as invested with magical powers. Her thoughts can kill."
I said, "But she’s not a charwoman. She is an admiral’s widow."
He said, "That’s nothing to do with it. You might just as well say she can’t get flu because she is an admiral’s widow."
As this came to my mind, I thought that if I were the Admiral’s widow I would say, measure for measure: having slyly broken one of my ribs when I was imprisoned in the lift, Clarence was now punished manifold. But I knew this was rubbish. And the fact that he was certain that his life was precious to God was only further confirmation of Edmund’s diagnosis of those many years ago, in Westbourne Terrace, that Clarence was "bats in the belfry."
Edmund had been outstanding. Edmund had deserved his celebrity. It could not be denied. No one had ever denied it. Yet Edmund had not been admirable.
And there arises before me the vision of the lithe figure in the tight-waisted uniform. He raises two fingers to his scarlet cap, sketching a salute. His smile is tenderly sarcastic. "Husbands," he says. And then he steps to the edge of the platform.
Nymph & Faun
There is a kind of woman, rich and looking it, climacteric, widowed or divorced, who when faced with an empty afternoon panders to her gnawing malice and dissatisfaction by going on a fake expedition in the nearest well-to-do shopping district. There she will enter one or two opulent shops dealing in jewels or dresses. She will pretend to be searching for one particular item. She will be ingenious in telling the sales staff why a piece is "almost what I had in mind, but—," and leave, after half an hour or more. She will call thi
s sport "turning their heads" or "giving them a runaround," adding, "There’s no harm in it, is there? That’s what they’re here for, aren’t they? After all?"
I have always despised women like that. I hate being teased or teasing. There was once a time when I did enter into this kind of game, though. And when I did, I was first curious, then touched, then hooked, then trapped, then dragged along, and finally brought to realize that my husband was really dead—that my marriage no longer existed and that he was not absent, as I had been feeling, but gone forever.
I must plead the excuse that in my case the game playing was not premeditated. I was drawn into it by chance, and I played it conversely, not pretending a wish to buy but a desire to sell. Outwardly I was well suited to play the game. I was rich, I was widowed, I was fifty-two, the sand in my hourglass running short, with ever-scantier bloodstains marking the passage of each month. I had been widowed after a marriage of some twenty years. But though the marriage had gone, I did not feel that it was finished. I still brushed and aired my husband’s suits with more care than I gave to my own garments. I never sat at his desk, I never sat in his favorite chair, and in the winter, instead of using my eiderdown, I huddled in the heavy brown striped dressing gown of Turkish toweling which he had continually worn indoors during the last year of his life. And I never took a decision without asking for what I imagined might be his approval.
I had not, as people thought (considering that he was old enough to be my father), married him because he was rich. I did not know that he was rich when I met him. Nor did I know it during our marriage. I only found out after his death. What I did know, as soon as I met him, and what did not fail to fill me with admiration forever after, was his distinction.
I have the conceit that an admiral or a field marshal may be bottle-nosed, paunchy, or knock-kneed, but he must have such an air of command that he could walk stark naked out on deck, or stand that way facing a platoon, and still be obeyed and venerated for what he is. My husband, who was a physician, possessed this air of indubitable, unquestioned authority, no matter whether his slight body was draped in a bath towel or disguised by the discreet elegance of his Savile Row suits. This rare quality, as mysterious as it was impressive, seemed to me, who was not English, the acme of English distinction, and it shone through even in trite circumstances. Thus he could say to a servant, "I’ll have to engage another maid to walk behind you and switch off the lights you have left on," and this would be received with a deferential smile. If I had made the same remark, using those very same words, the maid would have given notice.
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 20
