Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

  and run to billowing fat, draped in black chiffon and glistering

  jewels. I’d have laughed had I not been so strangely unsettled. She was posed for all the world as the star she had been: posture of

  sybaritic repose; cocktail glass, empty, held to her lips; expression of exaggerated, regal indifference.

  She lifted her eyes when we entered the room.

  “Marina, darling, here is the boy I told you about. A student,

  which no salon is rightly without.”

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  Mrs. Valenska offered one hand to be pressed.

  “Dolly’s latest discovery,” she said. “Dolly is forever making

  discoveries.” Her pronunciation of the words was drawn out and

  British, marked with only the faintest Eastern European lilt, con-

  sonants softened as though by habituation to French.

  I sat down on the extreme end of the sofa, nearest to where

  Mrs. Hargreaves still stood.

  “Well, I don’t know. There isn’t anything to discover, I’m sure.

  We were introduced by Professor Hastings,” I said.

  “Well then you are a discovery of this professor, and Dolly has

  taken the credit. Very naughty of her to do that, but how can we

  blame her? You are a student she says. The mathematics, is it?”

  I nodded. She went on.

  “My father was friendly with Georg Cantor at one time,” she

  said, and shifted her body a little, so that she sat more upright and nearer to me. Barnaby passed with a tray of fresh drinks, and she

  replaced her empty glass with a full one. “He came to the house a

  number of times, for parties rather like this.” She gestured broadly, spilling some liquid. “I was, of course, too young to understand

  who he was, but I remember he had a bald head and behaved very

  strangely. He’d become a lunatic by that time, you know.”

  “I’ve heard that that happened.”

  “It is often the way.” She said this and then seemed to grow

  pensive. There was an olive in her glass, and she regarded its distor-tion through the medium of the gin. From another room, down

  the long corridor, came the first tentative notes of a waltz, tapped out as though by a shy amateur asked to play for a professional’s

  pleasure.

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  “Mrs. Hargreaves tells me you have known a great many

  important and interesting people.” I glanced over my shoulder,

  vainly expectant of being rescued again, but our host had made

  her way to the window, where she spoke to the poet, who looked

  away, still not wearing his glasses.

  “I’ve been acquainted with thousands, married to three.

  It would be truthful to say I’ve known some number between, though it’s beastly of Dolly to have said so to you.” She laughed.

  Naive as I was then, I gathered her meaning. I could feel myself

  blush. “I have interest in the arts myself,” I said, grasping. “The Bauhaus, for instance. Perhaps Dolly’s told you.”

  “Yes, and I said it showed good taste, my dear. For my own

  part, of course, I have always adored Renoir, Seurat—people eat-

  ing picnics, dancing and such. But for you, Mr. Klee is the better thing. The most mathematical of all the schools, would you not

  say?”

  There had come into her eye a certain ghost of intelligence,

  an insouciant wit that must once have been attractive, in the days when it was more readily accessed.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s the trick of it,” I said. “Appealing to the rational as well as to the artistic.”

  It might have been something I’d heard Dolly say; I don’t really

  recall. I do believe I must have borrowed the thought, and yet

  saying it aloud seemed to make it my own. It was true I’d been

  moved by an oil on burlap hung in a modern gallery here. Why,

  then, should I not claim special interest? Why should I not hold

  an opinion? I had lifted, I realized, one foot from the floor, so that I was half recumbent, as Mrs. Valenska was. She reached listlessly

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  as the drink tray passed on its return to the bar, removed the last remaining glass, and handed it to me. I drank, and she said, “Sense and sensibility, an Englishman might say. Always these go together, and always they are warring. It is true, isn’t it, that the most difficult things in maths are often the simplest? One follows the line of most intricate thought, and finds that it leads back to the most basic truths. I think this is perhaps what drove poor Georg mad.”

  “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

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  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 compris-

  ing 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

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  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.”

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  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 read-

  ing 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.

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  “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 al .

  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.”

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  “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.

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  “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 satis-

  faction as far as the Edwardian stiffness of her dining chair would allow.

  The critic’s wife stabbed at her fish with displeasure. The dress-

  maker laughed mildly, said, “I should hope we never become

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  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,