Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

  man’s decline. The work was arduous, but it was good to be out,

  and as she pushed the mower across the tall grass she felt the task was protecting them somehow, that its monotony helped to keep

  things in order.

  She had gained weight during winter, cooking and eating proper

  meals every night. As a girl, she’d always been thin, even gaunt, and her appetite had been very poor. “Don’t brush your hair,” her nan

  had insisted. “Don’t be a piggy,” if she ate with relish. Thus had been Nan’s disdain for the flesh: obscene, likewise, in sickness or health. Nan’s life had been a project of slow self-erasure; Louise felt as though she were drawing herself. Before bathing each night she

  stood at the mirror, pale and naked, her arms growing soft at the

  shoulders. Her hands, scarred where she’d once chewed them raw,

  looked plump. Her wrists, too, where she’d cut them sometimes.

  “Go out of the house when I’ve drunk the thing, girl,” Nan

  had said on that final morning. Her eyes by that time had been

  sunken and grey, their whites the thick yellow of old mayonnaise.

  “Be seen. You’re not to have touched anything.”

  Later, she’d come home to red and blue lights, emergency

  rung, the phone off the hook. When they’d asked her whether the

  body was Nan’s, assent had seemed a betrayal of sorts.

  Before the mirror now, she pinched the skin at her waist. “I

  can get a good deal fatter,” she said, “before I give a thought to slimming again.”

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  When Louise brought Mr. Harris to his weekly

  appointments, she tried her best to accompany him. The seizures

  were causing further trouble with his speech. She answered ques-

  tions, repeated advice, maintaining a weak charade of good health.

  The doctor must have seen things beginning to slip, but perhaps

  he also saw the affection between them, the way Louise held on to

  Mr. Harris’s arm as she guided him through the surgery doors. He

  was gentle with her and with Mr. Harris: he never spoke of taking

  the old man from her charge.

  “Why doesn’t your daughter like to visit, Mr. Harris?” she

  asked him one evening after supper was cleared. “Why does she

  so seldom call?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t look at Louise. “I wasn’t a very good

  father, I think.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I must not have been.” Distress seemed to tighten

  his throat.

  “Were you very strict?”

  “It was a different time, then,” he said. “Everybody was strict

  with their children. We didn’t know anything else. I never drank,

  if that’s what you think.”

  Louise touched his large, papery hand. He still was not looking

  directly at her. “Of course not,” she said. “Of course I don’t think that.” She wanted to say, “I love you, anyway.”

  It became too warm in the evenings for fires. Mr. Harris

  still watched his television programs, and Louise still read her

  books, but things were different without the glow from the hearth.

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  She opened windows, the front door as well. At times, she missed

  winter, but more often she was glad of the change. It felt good to have fresh air in the house. She took further to her work in the

  garden, not only mowing the lawn but spending hours some days

  pulling weeds, examining the grass from many angles until she was

  satisfied with its look. She bought a wheelchair at a secondhand

  shop and brought Mr. Harris outside with her. It was, she some-

  times reflected, the happiest time in her life. They traveled short distances, up and down the block, and the thought of being seen

  with him in this way overwhelmed and delighted Louise. All win-

  ter she had been so fiercely protective of what they were building in the space of the house. Now with each step away from the door,

  she felt as if her heart would take wing.

  “Mr. Harris,” she said one evening in May, “would you like to

  sit outside on the porch?”

  The days had grown to be languid and long; the sky was as

  pale as a scar.

  He said nothing. She switched off the TV and helped him into

  his wheelchair, pushed him silently onto the porch. The concrete

  was swept and she sat down beside him, as she had all winter on

  the living room rug. On the street, cars went quietly past. People walked by with their dogs or with prams. She could hear faint

  music from a radio somewhere, like a whisper from the intimate

  past.

  “It’s dull out here,” Mr. Harris complained. He appeared to be

  chewing at something. The seizures had taken a visible toll, so that he seemed always to be bracing for the next one now, as though

  flinching before a raised fist.

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  “It’s a beautiful night, don’t you think?” Louise said.

  “It is,” he said. “But I need my programs.”

  Louise smiled. Something was brimming inside her; it was not

  happiness, or fear, or love, or pity. It was not any of those things, exactly.

  “Why do you need them, Mr. Harris?” she asked. “Why do

  you say you need them?”

  He was looking down when he spoke. “I just really need them,

  Libby,” he said.

  At once overcome, she entered the house. In the hallway, she

  stood before the large picture, straightening the frame as Mr.

  Harris would do. She regarded it more closely than ever before:

  the faint dusty pattern of light on the bones and the way, even on the black and white film, it was clear that Libby’s eyes had been

  green. A beautiful face. It resembled her saint’s. For the first time, she recognized that. She remembered what Esther had told her at

  Christmas, but it did not change the way she thought about Libby

  or the marriage she had dreamed of these many months.

  In the living room, she scanned the books for titles she knew.

  One by one, she began pulling them down, these dusty old things,

  this literature. As she lifted each book, she fanned through its

  pages, searching for a note, a dedication, anything in an unfamil-

  iar hand. She knew that the light would be falling outside and that the old man would be restless. She worked quickly, the books laid

  in turn on the sofa.

  It was inside the cover of To the Lighthouse that she finally found what she wanted. A careful and elegant script.

  Elizabeth Harris, 1954.

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  Outside, at a distance, fog rolled off the sea, aching with light

  from the red setting sun. She turned on the single bulb next to

  the door to keep the porch lit when night fell in earnest and sat

  down again beside Mr. Harris. He looked at her, his eyes pale and

  opaque. She reached up and smoothed the cotton fabric of his

  shirtsleeve several times with the palm of her hand.

  “Let me read to you, Wendell,” she said, touching him a

  moment longer.

  She began, then, to read aloud in the voice of another woman,

  as she had long imagined it. She felt as though she were taking

  part in a grand and exquisite drama. Mr. Harris remained silent,

  but she could tell he was liste
ning. He had surely called her Libby as a simple slip of the tongue, or perhaps in a momentary confu-sion, but that was no matter. She read on. Her own attention

  faded in and back out, and it was difficult for her to follow the

  story, but that hardly mattered either. She was certain that this

  would be their way throughout the summer. If there came even

  the briefest of moments when the old man might believe he was

  beside his wife again, that would say more for the world than she’d ever have dreamed. And when they finished this book, she would

  find another and another and would read them slowly and quietly,

  until the last sun went down for them, after which it could never

  be said that she had failed to meet a good man, and to wed him,

  and to love him.

  The Patroness

  z z z

  A telegram arrived as we were sitting to lunch, and

  Mrs. Hargreaves excused herself to receive it. I

  never liked it when she was called from the room,

  her presence being the only thing that justified my own, and rely-

  ing as I did upon that skill of hers—which seemed to me a miracle

  then—at managing the conversation in a room or at table as if

  directing a sort of farcical play. I was the youngest there, yet to turn twenty, and already in the months I’d been attending her salon

  Mrs. Hargreaves must have saved me from a dozen encounters,

  whisking me off as though in intimacy, saying, “You’re a saint to

  have endured that man as long as you did. He’s a monumental

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  bore, always has been, which was forgivable when he painted

  tolerably well, but between us, that’s been some decades since.”

  The other guests, now, seemed hardly to notice her absence: claret glasses were fil ed, cold meats and salad brought round on a platter.

  “And your studies, Mr. Elford,” somebody said.

  I looked up, uncertain at first who had spoken. The faces

  arrayed about the table were pale; they blinked with equal mea-

  sures of polite inattention.

  “Going well, are they?”

  The man who spoke was sitting opposite me, wearing the long,

  sober face of a horse: large nose, ears filigreed with tufts of gray hair. His profession, I recalled vaguely, had to do with the theater.

  It was at this moment that Mrs. Hargreaves might ordinarily have

  intervened, reminding everyone about my studies in maths, my

  particular interest in the art of the Bauhaus (the latter of which she had more or less invented for me, having latched on to a few

  nervous comments I’d made). “What Mr. Such-and-such is refer-

  ring to,” she might have begun.

  “Very well, thanks.” I smiled in his direction, sipped water in

  avoidance of further response.

  I had begun attending Mrs. Hargreaves’s salon at the arrange-

  ment of a mathematics professor who had served in the army with

  her late husband. It occurred biweekly on the ground floor of her

  house in Glebe Place, a gathering of what seemed not-quite-first-

  rate artists: playwrights and sculptors who’d sold work between

  wars, collectors and critics whose tastes had fallen from fashion.

  Still, to me it was impressive, indeed, my first glimpse of urban

  sophistication, embodied most of all in Mrs. Hargreaves herself,

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  with her long and still-elegant figure, her pearls white beside the gray coif of her hair. All of this, and her magnificent house: these seemed to me as from a dream of the city, country lad—just in

  from Glass—that I was. I had found myself at university there,

  the closed doors of more ancient institutions having provided my

  young life’s first indication that the world would not be offered so freely as I had sometimes allowed myself to believe. I had been a

  loner during the first term, feeling out of place and being given to worry: about my sister, still living at home; and about my father, who worked at the evaporated milk plant in Croft and who’d suffered some years with an affliction of the heart.

  “She’ll take to you and be a boon, I am sure,” Professor Hastings

  had said of Dolly Hargreaves. “You’re a mathematician by training

  but an artist at heart. Anybody would see that, my boy.”

  He smiled, though I could not help but perceive a small

  condemnation of my progress with partial differentiation.

  Nevertheless, it seemed a kindness that he had placed me in Mrs.

  Hargreaves’s care, a kindness also that she should have accepted (a melancholy one in her case, perhaps, because the Captain and she

  had had no children of their own).

  “Well you’ll not guess whom I’ve heard from,” she said, step-

  ping back into the room. Her voice was like a songbird’s, her face impish and flushed. “Why, it’s Marina Valenska. Listen to this:

  ‘Dolly, darling. In Cannes. Host has had temerity to drop dead at

  breakfast. Will come to visit you in England instead. Arrival by

  taxi in three days’ time.’”

  The other guests laughed, as I did, uneasily, wondering if a

  death had really occurred.

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  Mrs. Hargreaves took her place at the table.

  I was seated beside a Madame Liselle DuPont, who had danced

  for a time in the Royal Ballet. She ate little, smoked from a cigarette holder. About her lips and her eyes were the finest sort of

  wrinkles, to which she’d applied a surplus of makeup. Her dress

  was a silk shift that hung loosely from her, the bones of her neck and her shoulders protruding.

  “Twice divorced and once widowed, this Valenska,” she said.

  I nodded, my mouth full of food.

  “You’ll have known her from films. Or perhaps you are too

  young.”

  I can see now, recalling those days, that in addition to her gen-

  erosity toward me, Mrs. Hargreaves used my presence for a kind of

  sport, for she liked particularly to seat me beside an aging beauty and to watch as I looked unthinkingly past her, performing the sort of casual, unwitting cruelty that the young sometimes do upon the old.

  Ten days passed, and again my telephone rang. It was

  another summons to lunch.

  “You’ll be seated next to Marina, of course,” Mrs. Hargreaves

  declared, and would hear nothing of my attempts to demur. “I

  think you will find her quite a fascinating woman. She was a lover to Stravinsky, Picasso, Valentino. You can talk about Bauhaus.

  She’ll have known them all: Klee and Kandinsky. A great beauty

  in her day. She met Proust in Paris and loved him at first sight,

  though he was half dead and gay as a daisy, of course.”

  In my rooms, I read maths by the dim light of winter. I went

  to lectures, forgetting my umbrella, and came home with sodden

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  clothes, stripping bare to be dried by the electrical fire. The scent of damp wool, the ache of fingers and toes as they warmed, aroused a

  homesickness in me, a want for Glass that my studies were power-

  less to distract. At home, on the hill looking over the sea, a wood fire, crackling, would throw fragile light; there, rain would be falling as well, like a whisper against the ancient thatch of the roof.

  On the boardwalk, neon lights of the penny arcade or the jazz club would be reflected in puddles. In the village, people would hurry

  about
: Chris Blake, at work in his father’s greengrocer, would lift crates or test fruit with unhurried ease, back straight as it had

  been on the pitches of our youth, a beauty which had agitated

  something in me; Pearl Bideford, beautiful also, in silk scarves and trench coat, would smoke beneath awnings. My only refuge from

  the weight of that longing was in dreams of this new, dazzling

  world I had glimpsed, its Turkish cigarettes and crystal decanters.

  And so all through that cold, dismal week, even shivering over

  dinners of baked beans and toast, my heart lifted at the thought

  of Marina Valenska: pitched forward at the edge of a symphony

  box, breast heaving, eyes brimming as she glimpsed her beloved,

  his pale hands and neck, that genius composer.

  The day arrived, and I knocked just after noon on the great,

  shining black door in Glebe Place. It was answered by the same

  man who served at the table, Barnaby, who in the manifestations

  of his lifetime of work, and in the careful way his hair was combed to cover his baldness, reminded me of my father. He took my coat,

  my scarf, and my umbrella, the latter of which had been damaged

  in the wind.

  “Ah, you’re here.”

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  155

  Mrs. Hargreaves swept into the foyer.

  “Good of you to come, braving the weather.”

  “Shocking,” I said.

  “Oh, but it is good. We’ll be without Mr. Parsons,” she said,

  referring, I realized, to the horse-faced man, “who, I’m afraid,

  cannot risk the damp air. And Madame DuPont, whom you

  will remember, has gone to Paris to visit relations. All the better because she’d not have forgiven me for denying her your company,

  and I so want you to speak with Marina.”

  I followed her down a corridor to the library, where we gath-

  ered every other week before lunch. The room was lit by only

  small, shaded lamps; oak shelving ran from ceiling to floor with

  a collection of gilt-embossed cloth and leather editions. A few

  guests sat, languid, on armchairs and ottomans, smoking and

  leafing through the pages in books. A poet, thirtyish, in a worn

  woolen suit, who Dolly had told me owed money to gamblers,

  stood alone by the window and polished his glasses. And there, at

  the center, as if of a vortex, splayed across an overstuffed, rococo settee, sat Marina Valenska, silent, ignored. Immediately, I recognized her, though she wasn’t at all as I had imagined: grown old