Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  “And so Klee makes a harmony of them.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “For you, he does. For me, it is perhaps Degas who does so. Or Renoir, or Manet. A simple portrait of a mistress, a whore. I have not so much of the analytical mind.” She reached with two fingers to the bottom of her glass and lifted the olive into her mouth, pausing for an instant to savor the taste. “It is a wonder to me that your people seem only ever to paint landscapes and clouds, because it is they who need most of all to be made whole.”

  She rested the empty glass against the exposed skin of her chest, the other hand beside it, still wet with the gin. She was nearer still to me now; I saw the dye in her hair. The sharpness that had been for some minutes in her eye receded slowly, replaced by something vague but insistent.

  “Ah,” she said. “But you remind me of someone.”

  At lunch, I was beside her as promised, she nearest to Mrs. Hargreaves, who presided again at the head of the long table. In form, everything was just as it had been two weeks before, and as it had been two weeks before that. The faces around the table had changed, as the subject of conversation surely would also, but the arrangement of bodies and the hierarchy it established, the way opinion was offered and deftly turned back, words spun out playfully and famous names tossed about, the repartee comprising a sort of battle to which my young mind could never quite measure but whose relation to the combatants’ position within the salon I perceived—these things would be ever the same. Mrs. Hargreaves never meted out judgment or evinced her own opinion on these matters of hierarchy; to have done so would have fallen beneath her. She merely reflected in her delicate administration a consensus that the salon had already formed. Only I was allowed to exist apart from the fray, to offer nothing but my youthful and ragged appearance, and to sit, week after week, at the honored end of the table, indulged by Mrs. Hargreaves as a pet might have been, while professors and peers vied for approval.

  Across the table, the poet sat furthest from her, with a literary critic and his wife, a Spanish tenor, and a journalist from a daily paper between them. To my left was an elderly man, a collector of antique figurines, whom Dolly always called Sir Ian, but with an ironic curl of the lip that made me wonder if his knighthood weren’t somehow disputed; to his left was a dressmaker of some apparent repute; to my right, nearest Dolly, sat Marina Valenska.

  Our glasses were filled by turns with white wine, and I gestured my acceptance when Barnaby paused, enquiring because I didn’t usually drink. I thanked him. “Very good,” he replied. There was a spot, I saw, near to his mouth that he’d missed with his razor and where a thin line of graying stubble remained. Again, briefly, I thought of my father; in Glass, he’d be smoking his pipe, perhaps recounting—while my sister half listened—a white flock of terns he’d glimpsed off the coast. (He fancied birds, the shock of their flight. Seeing them, tears might spring to his eyes.)

  “A toast, then,” Mrs. Hargreaves announced. “To Marina, who joins us today from abroad.”

  We lifted our glasses and drank.

  “How many years, darling, since last you were here? We met, you understand,” she said, addressing the room, “in Paris when I was there with Harold after the war. The Great War,” she added, turning to me. “Marina was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

  There was a brief murmur of agreement with this, which Mrs. Hargreaves and Mrs. Valenska seemed equally to relish.

  “Already, I had been to Hollywood then. I did not stay after falling out with Valentino. One is far too sensitive at that age, and I could not bear it. Of course it did not really matter: Talking pictures were anyway coming, and they would soon have found that my English was broken. How many years, Dolly? I think fifteen, perhaps.”

  “Well it’s eleven this year since poor Harold is gone, so I should say that makes it a dozen at least.”

  “I recall, Mrs. Valenska,” the dressmaker said, “seeing you in The Golden Temple. I was a girl, and I’d saved to go to the pictures. Of course I was taken with all of the costumes.”

  “Yes, I wore a dress with so many silks. They appeared golden and iridescent in the film, but in fact they were the most hideous green. You would not have approved of the design, I am sure. I took all my dresses home in those days—I liked them, and who was to stop me?—but I never took that one.”

  She smiled, revealing narrow, gray teeth, and afterwards took a long drink of her wine.

  “I wonder what has become of them all.”

  We ate fish in a pale and rich sauce the likes of which I had not before seen. The wine was likewise rich and perfumed and seemed to me like the other finery in the house: something that I had no right to touch.

  The critic and his wife had a child at Eton who would be reading greats at Oxford next year. “We hope he’ll not try for highest honors,” they said. “We feel it best he take up broader pursuits.”

  The journalist expressed his agreement. “Of course, I’ll venture we took firsts ourselves. These ideas always occur to one later in life.”

  “Yes,” said the critic, “but in our day the curriculum demanded wider reading. I fear that today it has narrowed, somehow.”

  Mrs. Hargreaves looked at me when this was said in the same ironic way she referred to Sir Ian, as if to say, “Are you not lucky to find yourself here, instead of surrounded by the sons of such people?”

  “Ah, but we are quite left out of this talk of firsts and seconds, are we not, Señor?” Marina said to the tenor.

  He was a man of about sixty years and a slightness of build that belied his profession. “It is true that we have not the same system,” he said, not quite meeting her eye. “But I am in agreement that a formal education is insufficient alone. Do you not agree with this, Madam?”

  “Do I not agree?” she said softly.

  An uneasy silence presided. She might, for a moment, have been back on the stage. We watched her with a kind of hushed vigilance, as one would something dangerous, coiled.

  “I, who was educated nowhere but in the drawing room of my father and on carriage rides through the streets of Vienna and Paris?”

  She shifted, her voice increasing in force, red lips moistened with spittle and wine.

  “Who have read the finest stanzas not inside of books but on pages torn from the manuscripts of the poets? Do I not agree? I, who claim no special knowledge of your field, Señor, but who have known the beauty of being serenaded under the moon by Caruso? Who felt the very voice of him tremble with longing? Who heard him later, after we made love in Venice, singing to himself in the bath? Do I shock you? Yes, I should say I agree. With such an education, how could I not agree?”

  “A third it is, then?” Mrs. Hargreaves put in.

  Audibly, our collective breath was released. We all laughed, except for Marina.

  “I must apologize for the lack of discord. It would make for a livelier afternoon if there were some, but it is my principal weakness as host always to invite guests who agree with each other.”

  Discussion continued on similar topics, the critic and his wife holding dull court while the others offered occasional comment. Only Sir Ian and Mrs. Valenska showed no apparent interest at all. At length, she turned to me and said, too loudly, even as the critic’s wife carried on, “And so, dear boy, you do not paint, yourself, but merely admire, as I do?”

  “Oh, I’ve only done a bit of sketching,” I said, whispering, trying not to draw further attention. “It’s nothing to speak of. Maths is really the field of my study. I’ve no real expertise outside of it.”

  “It is good you should draw.” She drank. Her glass had been refilled a number of times, and I saw that her sharpness, so briefly manifest earlier, had dulled further, and that the volume of her voice rose and fell as she spoke. “It is very good to be an admirer of art. This is all I have been since they stopped taking my picture. An admirer only. Always I surround myself with beautiful things. But to have attempted at least once to make something beautiful of your own:
this is important. Dolly, the dear one, has not ever done so.”

  I looked at Mrs. Hargreaves, so near to us both, but saw no indication that she’d heard what was said.

  “She has this salon, but she really knows nothing at all. It is an act. A play she puts on. That butler, he comes for these luncheons only. He is the man who trims the hedges outside. The cook, too. It is otherwise meat paste and rice. What other use has she got for a staff? But she feels she must give us this show. Oh, her eye is good enough; that much is true. It could not help but become so because of the Captain. He was very fine. People come to see her now because they need money or because they know they will encounter somebody they have interest in seeing. Others, like me, come because we were her husband’s lovers, and we remember how he spoke of her in the darkness, how he pitied her and repented of all the bad things he had done, the cruel things he had said about her. We remember how he wished that she not be forsaken.”

  She placed a hand on the back of my own.

  “But you do remind me of someone, dear thing.”

  I began to stammer something by way of response but faltered. A lull in the general discourse had left mine the only voice in the room.

  “Marina,” Mrs. Hargreaves said, “do include us in what you’ve been saying to Johnny.” She smiled, and I could see, in the light of what Marina had said, that Mrs. Hargreaves, for all the elegance she had attained in her advanced age, all the knowledge and social skill she displayed, had been plain.

  “The young boy and I were speaking about how strange it is that the British should not have had more painters of note,” Marina said. She gestured in the direction of the Spaniard. “Of course, the same might also be said of their music.” She paused a moment, waiting for the first inarticulate notes of objection to be raised, and when they were, politely, by the startled voice of the critic, she continued: “Ah yes, I know what you will all say. There are your darlings, like Constable and Elgar, whom you love because they tell you a fairy tale in which you are the princes. This is not the sort of art that I mean. Why, I ask, had Sisley to return himself to Paris in order to paint a proper picture of London? And why, for instance, has there been no great British painter of nudes, when the British need so desperately to be confronted with the nude form?”

  I was aware painfully of her nearness and of the color that rose to my cheeks as everybody at the table turned their eyes on Marina. Her hand still rested on top of my own, and the certainty that they could all see this overwhelmed me with both thrill and revulsion. She drank again from her glass and reclined with satisfaction as far as the Edwardian stiffness of her dining chair would allow.

  The critic’s wife stabbed at her fish with displeasure. The dressmaker laughed mildly, said, “I should hope we never become too comfortable with such things, or I shall find myself out of a profession.”

  Mrs. Hargreaves clapped her hands and said, girlishly, “Ah, some disagreement, at last!”

  “So you will approve, then,” the journalist said, “of the young Freud, who seems to paint almost nothing but nudes.”

  “I approve of all Freuds, Monsieur. And yes, I thank God for the painter. But do not forget: He is born on the continent and so, I say, belongs to the continent forever.”

  “And Eliot, then?” the poet said, in a tentative voice. His fish, I noticed, had scarcely been touched.

  “An American, of course. But I say nothing of your authors, who have always written well. I once played the part of Ophelia, you know.”

  Sir Ian, beside me, ate without taking notice. His hands were possessed by a delicate tremor and made noise when he applied fork and knife to his plate. Mrs. Hargreaves sat upright with a luminous smile, the strain of which was visible to me only later, in memory. I disengaged, gingerly, from Mrs. Valenska’s grasp and lifted the glass of wine to my lips. I saw then, before I felt, that pale hand of hers removed from the table and placed gently upon my inner thigh; had I not, I might have choked at the sudden weight of it there. The critic was making a good show of keeping up conversation, expressing the rather pompous opinion that what Freud’s work owed to his ancestral home was not nudity but its expressionistic aesthetic.

  I excused myself from the table. The lavatory was at the far end of the hall onto which the dining room opened through a broad sort of archway; I moved quickly in its direction, conscious of the sound my shoes produced on the floor. I knew well my way about the downstairs and so was momentarily confused to find myself intercepted by Mr. Barnaby under pretense of his showing me to the washroom.

  “See she doesn’t have too much, won’t you, sir?” he said, almost under his breath, when we were safely alone in the narrowness of the corridor. The walls were everywhere adorned with wainscoting and moldings; from the ceiling, at intervals, hung glass chandeliers. I must have looked perplexed by his question, because he added, “The Madam. The Russian lady, I mean. She’s a good bit into the vin blanc already, and that’s atop of what was served before luncheon.”

  “But I can’t do a thing about that,” I said. “You must see that I can’t.”

  “Well if you don’t mind, sir, she’s taken with you, I’d say. That’d be a start. I’m obliged to serve her as she likes, aren’t I? Only I don’t like to see a lady suffering so.”

  His face, I could see now, was weathered and tan.

  “And Mrs. Hargreaves? Surely she will say something.”

  “I’m rather afraid she’d welcome the show.”

  In the lavatory, I let cold water run over my hands. I was unaccustomed to even the small amount of drink I had had, and my reflection in the mirror over the sink seemed familiar and yet somehow not quite my own. The voices in the dining room were faint, indistinct, obliterated entirely when water rushed from the tap. I should have liked to stay there in the lavatory for some time, in its cool tranquility. I should have liked to stay until all the guests had gone home, until the lunch had been cleared and Mrs. Hargreaves retired, but soon there came, first vaguely and then with insistence, a tap on the door from outside in the hall. I wondered if it might be Barnaby, lurking, and inwardly I cursed him for slinking about, for having asked this thing so unfairly of me. I was a guest, and he had given me work, entitled because he knew I was a working-class boy. Because he could see that I didn’t belong. It was just the same as when, one year before, I had cursed my father for coming with me to Cambridge when I was to have an interview there: it had not been that I was embarrassed by him, or that I felt him unworthy of anything, but rather that his presence had spoiled an illusion.

  I dried my hands and opened the door. Before me stood Marina Valenska, her face pale and vacant as half-leavened dough. I had opened the door with some force, and she startled, a hand demonstrably brought to her breast.

  “Ah, I’ve found you. But do not be angry,” she said. One eye seemed to wander while the other was fixed.

  “Not at all, only perhaps—”

  She put the hand that had been on her breast to my lips, a clumsy gesture as suggestive of violence as seduction.

  “But you remind me of him. It is a hard thing for an old woman to be reminded. Perhaps she can be forgiven it. He was my dearest lover, you know. The only one I would gladly have laid down my life for.”

  “Stravinsky?”

  “A brute.”

  “I don’t understand. Captain Hargreaves?”

  “No.” She made an impatient wave of the hand. “No, the boy. Boleslaw. My little William. I knew him in Paris. A Polish boy; a student, like you. I was thirty, and he was only seventeen. He was so wretched. He had only one suit of clothes, the poor thing. I bought him leather shoes and a wristwatch, but he was too shy to wear them. I made him drink coffee at Les Deux Magots. I heard many years later that he’d become a soldier. Ah! How frightened he must have been. He used to lie between my legs like a puppy, you know.”

  She said this wistfully and in a moment grew somber.

  “I was beautiful then. They will have told you.”

&nbs
p; “And what happened to him?”

  “How can I know?”

  “How did the love affair end?”

  “As they all do, my boy. How stupid you are. How lovely, and stupid, and exquisite, and cruel.”

  She had begun to weep, and the billows of black fabric draped over her person lifted and fell again irregularly so that she looked like something wounded but living, glimpsed at some distance amid a desolation. When she kissed me, I allowed it to happen, allowed the full drunken weight of her to fall in upon me. It was not pity that compelled me, or not that alone. She smelled of perfume and gin; she was clammy to touch. She kissed me desperately, urgently, right there in the doorway to Mrs. Hargreaves’s lavatory, and all the time she whispered, “Ah, my dear, my lovely.”

  It was the first time I’d been embraced by a woman since the day, ten years before, when my mother had died.

  When, at last, she drew away and my faculties reestablished themselves, I became aware of the black and white figure of Barnaby looming just beyond the rise of her shoulder. Behind him, where the dining room gave onto the corridor, stood the whole of Mrs. Hargreaves’s salon, assembled: the dressmaker stifled a laugh; the critic and his wife did their best to feign scandal; the writer cast about his professional eye, taking in every sordid detail; the tenor yawned as though he’d seen such things before; the poet merely adjusted his glasses; Sir Ian puzzled over the face of his watch, embarrassed or maybe indifferent; and over them all presided our host, Mrs. Hargreaves, as ever composed. She clasped her hands at her waist and tilted her head in a school-matronly posture of mock disapproval.

  “Why, Marina, you really are too incorrigible. I shouldn’t think a love affair had commenced over a bit of talk about painting and a few bites of haddock. Did I not say you were free to seduce whomever you liked, with the sole exception of Mr. Elford, who is far too young and too good for such things? You’ve frightened him half to death, my dear woman. He looks like a hare that’s heard a step in the grass.”