He said, "I’ll fly to Lugano. That’s near Chiasso, isn’t it?"
I said, "You know, I’ve looked up other lists I found since. There is more silver, unspecified. Dishes and ewers. And three rattles. Children’s rattles. It sounds crazy."
"Oh, yes," he said, unperturbed. "Do not worry. I’ll take everything from you."
"Even the rattles?" I said.
"I will," he said. "The Odiot and the candlesticks I’ll take with me to Geneva, and the rest I’ll throw into Zurich. We have a place there for this kind of stuff. Don’t worry. That’s definite." He added after a pause, "I’m looking forward to meeting you," and I, to disguise my eagerness, rang off with a hurried good-bye.
I blamed myself after this. I must have sounded quite scatterbrained to him, with my senseless "I think, I think" about the train times. And why did I have to bring up those crazy-sounding rattles, as though the uncertain number of dishes and ewers had not been sufficient to get him exasperated at my disordered rambling? And I thought with bitterness how meaningless his formula of politeness, when parting, must have been.
I SHOULD AGAIN make it clear that my negotiations with Forbes about the silver had nothing to do with money, at least on my part. Neither of us had mentioned a price for the Odiot and the rest, but I knew, as he did, that the sum in question could be in the thousands if not the tens of thousands of pounds—a considerable sum but not one that I was required to draw upon at that time in my life. This had not always been the case, or what I believed to be the case, about the state of my fortunes. My husband, who often said, "A life without servants is no life," had in the last years of our marriage moved us from a great villa in Estoril, in Portugal, to the small flat in Bordighera, on the western Italian Riviera. Servantless owing to this move, I had accepted this change in our lifestyle without a question, taking for granted that it was due to our reduced means. I knew all too well his frequent laments about his investments, and his telephone calls to his banker in Zurich, which he always started, disdaining to give his name, like this: "How are you? . . . Fine . . . Same here. Now, look—do I have any money? How much? Oh dear, oh dear. What am I to do? Because I’ve had this idea. I’ve been thinking—" At which point I always ceased to listen, for what followed made no sense to me, except to reinforce my conviction that his finances were in a precarious state. Ignorant as I was of his wealth, I did not know that he could have easily rented an opulent gentleman’s residence, as had been his wont up till then.
I did all the housework. And though he often claimed to regret that I had to do it, his demands and rules did not diminish: a colored tablecloth for breakfast, a white damask cloth for dinner, butter curls in silver shells at each meal, and a separate tiny silver saltcellar with a minute salt spoon in front of each cover. He liked to say that not one day passed without his reading in the news the name of someone he had met and known. It would have been unforgivable if now, believing him to be impoverished, I had denied him his comforts—a man of his distinction and eminence, a man who had been a king’s physician and who had given up, after the King’s death, all medical practice, saying that he could not, after all, advertise in the Times for another royal patient.
In Bordighera, during the last year of his life, he had developed a quirk that I found increasingly hard to bear. He was by then in his eighty-third year, and growing steadily more enfeebled. Although he still managed to get dressed and go to a coffeehouse at night, he used to spend his days alternately lying down and sitting in our drawing room. Forced to save his strength, he avoided moving about, which meant that I had to fetch and carry constantly. Most tiring for me were his continual demands for mineral water, which he took with tiny sips of whiskey. The mineral water had to be ice cold, so I had to go each time to the kitchen, take the bottle out of the refrigerator, and then return it. The constant jumping up and dashing to and fro, the lifting and carrying of the heavy bottle, was for me a backbreaking fatigue.
It was at this point that the quirk would show itself. After his usual request for mineral water, just as I was on the threshold of the room, on my way back to the kitchen, he would call out to me to stop. "Here, come here and take this ashtray with you—it’s full," he would say. And I would return to the marble-topped table in front of his easy chair, take the ashtray, and return in time from the kitchen with the water and the emptied ashtray. Very soon thereafter, almost each time, he would stop me just when I was in the door and make me retrace my steps, with an order, say, to pick up a dropped handkerchief and put it into the laundry basket, or to remove an empty glass, or to retrieve a fallen newspaper, or suchlike.
After a few days I remonstrated. I said, "Please don’t keep calling me back just when I’m halfway out. I’d much rather do one errand and then another."
"But I’m only doing this to save you labor," he said. "As you know, I’m sorry for you, having to do so much, now that there are no maids. I’m only trying to spare you."
I found this reasonable. And yet, after a few more days, his "wishing to spare you" became increasingly obnoxious. And when I complained once more, saying that I’d rather not be stopped in my tracks, he said I was ridiculous to object. I did not argue anymore after this, but, ridiculous or not, I did not feel cared for by him, but on the contrary, choked, hobbled, strangled.
His obsessive halting me and delaying me he practiced, too, every time I got ready to go out to do the shopping. Just as I was about to open the front door, he would call me back two or three times running: "Don’t forget to look in the mailbox when you get down," or "Do look in at the chemist’s for my order," or "Do look in at the newsagent’s for the Herald Tribune." And when I said that I never forgot to look in the mailbox, or that the chemist had said the medicine would not be in yet, or that the newsagent could not possibly have the Tribune because the foreign papers never arrived till four in the afternoon, he would say, "Never mind, you can always try. And with the mailbox you might forget, just this once."
Each day, my going out grew into a desperate battle to leave, but I kept silent. As my resentment smoldered and simmered and felt harder to keep under control, my sense of guilt increased. He was on the point of death, and I reproached myself for not being utterly fond of him.
It did occur to me, of course, that what he pretended was benevolent care was in fact disguised malice. I thought that he had started to hate me for my shortcomings, such as my past unwillingness to supervise the servants and to restrict their wasteful habits. I knew also, though he never blamed me outright, that he held me responsible for the fading and the ultimate cessation of his love life, due to what was, for him, my amorous ineptitude. On the other hand, in my case there had never been any love to bury; Gordon had remained within me forever, even after his suicide.
Perhaps to show me that he had been successful in his relationships with women before our marriage, to the point of gaining their enduring affection, my husband took to inviting his former mistresses to come and stay with us, for two or three weeks at a time, when we were living in plentiful ease and space in Estoril, in our fake fortress of a villa, with a tower and crenellated roof, a cloistered walk, parquets of flowers in front, and a pinewood in the grounds at the rear. I could not plead the excuse of being incommoded by their presence in a house with six bathrooms, a laundry room, an ironing room, a boiler room, and a gardener’s and chauffeur’s quarters. But on these occasions he would reproach me for not showing heartfelt pleasure toward our guests, then saying, "I do not mean this to be critical. It is just a statement."
And when those guests, and other people, too, exclaimed at our grand seigneur style of life, he would brush it aside, saying that the house was only rented, that Portugal was ridiculously cheap, and that for the rent he was paying in Estoril he would not be able to afford even a two-room flat in London.
These visits from my husband’s women had tapered off when we moved to Bordighera. But then there came another occasion. About six weeks before his death, he was rung up from New York by on
e of his former mistresses. That evening, while we were sitting in a coffeehouse, we talked about her, and my husband said, "On revient toujours à son premier amour. We have been lovers ever since I first knew her."
I said, "But that’s way back."
"That’s true," he said. "We didn’t meet often, but whenever we did meet we picked up where we left off. Lugano and Estoril."
I looked at him, speechless, and he said sharply, "That’s none of your business."
Neither of us referred to her again. As is my way, I did not show that I was stunned. What had actually gone on between them the last time she visited Estoril, when he was well into his seventies, I did not want to guess. I did not believe that there had been many of Cupid’s arrows left in his quiver. I was amazed at my benightedness, at my not having noticed what must have taken place on all those visits. But what wounded me was that he had felt compelled to make his disclosure gratuitously. This shattered me, for what it came from was his wish to bring my inadequacy home to me. Marriage is the tomb of love.
NOW, IN THE LAST WEEK in January, as I prepared to meet Forbes in Chiasso and found myself filled with a fierce desire to bring about what he had called our "rendezvous," there came a setback that promised to be disastrous. A series of railway strikes, which would block my journey, was announced. I was so desperate at the news that I asked a taxi driver how much he would charge to drive me to Chiasso, and he said it would come to half a million lire, or two hundred and fifty pounds. Miserly though I am (a quality once much appreciated by my husband), I did not flinch. Never did it occur to me to put off the meeting with Forbes to a later date. At this same time, my hairdresser, who had never yet canceled an appointment during all the years I had gone there, turned me away not once but twice, owing to some sudden unforeseen trouble with her staff. These incidents had no connection, to be sure, but determined as I now was to defy my husband’s wishes about the silver, for no other reason than to meet Forbes, and feeling guilty about it, I began to imagine that my husband was stretching out ghostly hands from his grave, trying to delay me, to choke me. It was much the same sensation I had had many times in the last year of our marriage, when he had hectored and exhausted me with his demands, delivered from his easy chair behind the marble-topped table in the drawing room. As I have said, his seated figure was habitually encased there in a thick, unwieldy dressing gown of Turkish toweling, which made him look like his own graveside monument—a Greek stele, with the head and shoulders of the deceased sculpted and set upon a square, tapering column. He made me shudder.
And then, on the Tuesday, as if Forbes had been wrestling with my dead husband and at least loosening the grip of his hands, the obstacles went away. My hairdresser had a cancellation and fitted me in at the last moment, and news came also that though the railway chaos would continue for at least ten days, there would be one clear, normal day of service in the midst of the strikes, because the various factions of the strikers could not agree among themselves. I rang up Forbes at once, to tell him I would be traveling the next day. I said, "I’ll take the later train from here, at eleven. It is a through train, which will get me to Chiasso at five. I’ll stay there overnight. And I’ll be at Rosecrans on Thursday, before they open in the early afternoon."
After I rung off I was amazed and annoyed with myself, thinking over what I had been telling him. What did he care which train I took, and when I would get to Chiasso? Why tell him I would be staying in Chiasso overnight? For all he cared, I could have slept in a ditch. But soon after, my irritation with myself gave way to shame. I understood that what at first I had taken for scatterbrained, superfluous rambling had been a simple, strong cause. By delivering to him minutely precise information, I hoped to bring about what I dearly wished. I had a vision of alighting in Chiasso on Wednesday at five. I saw myself standing on the platform, haltingly, amid the first rush of passengers speeding to the exit, and then a tall, blond, lean man in his early forties come walking toward me. He was wearing the same smooth, sleek, navy blue topcoat, with a narrow velvet collar, that Gordon had always worn. Stepping up to me with a smile, he wordlessly took out of my hand the small suitcase, the dark blue one I had chosen from among my other cases to be in keeping with his navy blue Crombie coat.
Then he would say, "Let’s go, shall we? I’ve booked rooms in a hotel, just a step across the station square." I am ashamed to admit that my conceit did not stop there. I saw myself and Forbes, after dinner, walk along the corridor and stop in front of my door, and I saw him take the key out of my trembling hand. He opened the door for me.
The next time my husband’s ghostly hand reached out to me, signaling me not to defy the wishes of the dead, came during the journey—the actual train trip, not the one in my dreams. About half an hour before we got to Genoa, one of the passengers, a man, returning to our compartment from the restaurant car, said, "There’s a man next door who’s just died. Not remarkable, considering he was eighty-three."
Taken aback, I said, "How do you know he was eighty-three?"
"His wife said so," the passenger replied.
I said, "My husband died at eighty-three, too."
"It’s quite a good age to die," he said consolingly. And after giving me a swift, telling glance he added, "And he got the best of it, what with having a young wife like you. I bet you were taken for his daughter."
"It did happen," I said.
He said, "Nice—for him, not for you."
When we got to Genoa there was an ambulance on the platform, with two white-coated attendants lounging about. There was a further delay, and we were told that the train would not depart at the proper time.
"Why is this?" I asked, upset. "What are they waiting for?"
"They are waiting for the carabinieri," the same knowledgeable man told me. "Whenever there is a sudden death the police must be called." He laughed and said, "Don’t forget, his wife was with him. She may have helped him on the way."
The train started at last, after only a half hour’s delay, and once more I realized it had been as though my husband had been calling me back from the threshold.
Then there was a further delay—a breakdown before Como—when we stood for forty minutes amid fields and pastures. I was flooded with anxiety, for we would now arrive in Chiasso after six, when the money changers’ booths in the station would be closed, and I had no Swiss money. But when we did get there at last, an off-duty ticket collector, seeing me lingering by the now deserted passport counter, accosted me and then walked me to the very door of a nearby first-class hotel. There, the reception clerk laughed at my offer to give him my gold watch as a guarantee for some Swiss francs until the next morning. He told me that I could pay for my dinner in Italian money and receive Swiss francs in change. And while I was sitting at dinner he even made a point of coming to my table to ask whether I found my room to my liking.
On Thursday morning a chill rain was falling—so thin, so steady and densely threaded, that it looked like a motionless shroud of mist. The elderly, morose driver of the taxicab looked at me with disapproval when told I wanted to go to Rosecrans, grumbling with bad temper that it was far out and out of his way. But I did not care by then, for I no longer felt the touch of my husband’s delaying grasp. The new Rosecrans offices were in the last of a row of new-looking, low buildings oddly set in a stretch of barren countryside. The glass-walled entrance took me into a reception area, subdivided by many doors. At the far end of the hall there was a counter flanked by shiny black chairs. Deserted and soundless, the place made me feel like a trespasser entering a nightclub at midday. Yet as I reached the counter there appeared behind it a plump, smiling woman. She took me in at a glance, seemingly approving of my old coat of Scottish cloth, handwoven and homespun in greens and blues, and made up by a man’s tailor who worked only exceptionally for a few favored women clients; my dark blue cube of a suitcase; my black crocodile handbag; my pale gray, hand-stitched pigskin gloves; my unmistakably non-English look, accentuated by my tweedy, unders
tated, typically English way of dressing.
I said, rushingly, full of misgivings, fearing barriers of denials, towers of refusals, "I’ve come here—it’s rather complicated, I wrote ten days ago—I’ve got a trunkful of silver stored here. That’s to say, not here with you but in bond."
She said, "One moment, please," and returned almost at once accompanied by a young man, who in turn seemed to accept my appearance without question. He was sloppily dressed in sandals, creased flannels, and a lumpy gray roll-collar pullover. His countenance was grave and gentle, and a narrow, dark beard framed his cheeks and chin. By the looks of him I decided he was a pacifist, a nonsmoker, a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a devotee of Tantric Buddhism. Though I am usually contemptuous of this sort, I was glad to see him.
He took me upstairs to a bare room with a deal table, where we sat down on two old wooden chairs. I pulled out the sheaf of my correspondence, which was encased in a folder of transparent cellophane. He said, "As soon as I got your last letter I went round to the bond place and made sure your crate is still there. It’s in perfect condition."
I said, "How marvelous. Over thirty years."
He said, "Madam, that’s what we are here for."
When I told him why I had to wait till the afternoon, he was incurious, perhaps on the defensive. He inquired at last about the stack of letters on the table, and I slid the folder over to him. I knew that by doing so I was giving away the only proof of my claim to the silver, and was even providing him with arguments for delaying the transaction, since the letters made it clear that the silver had been my husband’s property and not necessarily mine, but I was indifferent to these misgivings. I recalled a shred of my first talk with Forbes, when I had told him that I did not even have any receipts for the storage payments. "So you see how dicey it is," I had said, and he had given his faint laugh. "I do indeed," he said. "Don’t worry. When I get there, I’ll wipe the floor with them." And it was his laughing voice that had brought me here, nothing else. I had used the silver as bait to make Forbes meet me.
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 22
