Other People's Love Affairs
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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
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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 wainscot-
ing and moldings; from the ceiling, at intervals, hung glass chan-
deliers. 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 unac-
customed 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
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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?”
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“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.”
“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 des-
perately, 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
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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 sti-
fled 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.”
The doorway remained open behind me, and with one step
I could have slipped into the darkness. To be invisible, just for
one blessed moment, would have been a monumental relief, but
it would also have been too cruel to Marina, who had turned,
miserably, to face Mrs. Hargreaves. It seemed that a great deal of time passed in silence, broken only by Sir Ian, who snorted into
a handkerchief. At last, Marina, standing unsteadily now, moved
with dignity to smooth the chiffon of her dress. It was easy, watching her then, to believe that here was a woman who had had many
lovers but only one fleeting love in her life.
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“I was reminded,” she said, as though to no one at all. “There
is no crime in being reminded.”
Another interval passed, and she lifted her head. She looked to
Barnaby, who had drawn himself nearer.
“Mr.—” she said.
“Barnaby, Madam.”
“Would you be kind enough to take me to where I might lie
down?”
“Certainly, Madam,” Barnaby said, and he took her by the soft,
hanging flesh of an arm. They walked gingerly, hunched over a
little, like a couple together in the dusk of their life.
Marina leaned closer, whispering something.
Barnaby nodded, whispering back.
Outside, darkness had fallen and I walked in the rain,
only vaguely protected by my damaged umbrella. The orbs of
warm light from the lamps appeared large, distorted, as the green
olive had in her gin. At home, I paused before reaching my rooms
to scrounge a cigarette from a neighbor. “Been out in this?” he
said. “See you don’t catch your death.” I leaned against the frame of his door as if it were the only thing holding me up.
“Thank you,” I said. The words caught in my throat. I left him
without saying anything else.
I lit the cigarette at the electrical stove. I’d left the wireless on, the volume low enough to have escaped my notice before; it carried on now with an orchestral piece. My thoughts wandered but
never strayed very far. The cool touch of Marina’s lips and of her body remained, a presence, it seemed, as real as any other. I’d been
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confronted, as she said every Englishman must, with the physical
form, not nude but shrouded in the most delicate fabrics. This,
she’d suggested, had the power to make one whole. So why, then,
did I feel so totally shattered?
Another week passed; the rain dissipated a little. Exams
were approaching, and I busied myself with my studies. I did not
hear from Marina at all, though there were many things I would
have liked to ask her: about solitude, about the things she regretted, about Proust on a rainy sidewalk in Paris.
I spoke with my sister for a time on the phone. Chris Blake
had taken her out. She was shy, but I heard the note of thrill in
her voice. Cream teas along the boardwalk, a film; he’d loaned her his coat when it rained. “It’s what’s meant,” my father said on the subject. “I’ll manage, sure enough. Don’t fret about that.”
I did not know whether or not I ought to expect another sum-
mons to Mrs. Hargreaves’s salon, nor whether I wished to receive
one. But it came, just as ever it had, in the middle of the following week.
“I didn’t know if you’d want me back,” I said.
“Nonsense. You’ve become a fixture of our little luncheons.
Madame Dupont will be back, as will Naismith, the poet.”
“With the gambling debts,” I said rather vaguely. I was stand-
ing by the window, looking onto the street. It was midday and
people bustled about.
“I’ve paid those, I’m afraid,” Dolly said. “Oh, I oughtn’t have.
He’ll only accrue more, but he’s still young and occasionally turns out a good verse. I couldn’t bear to see him beaten about the knees
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or thrown into the streets. It’s too awful for that sort of thing to happen to a poet.”
“And Mrs. Valenska,” I said. “Will she be at the luncheon?”
“Ah, my dear, no. You needn’t worry. How polite you are, wait-
ing so long to ask. Marina left me at the end of last week. I believe she was off to Italy next.”
I sat down in the small wooden chair from my desk, which I
placed sometimes just next to the window. I experienced, when
she said this, a strange sense of loss.
“I rather thought she’d still be there,” I said.
“Oh, no. She’s not one to linger. Not after she’s got what she
came for.”
“What she came for?”
“Why, money, of course. The same as the poet. Same as all
of them, darling. They come for money; isn’t that what she told
you? Or did she say pity? Well I suppose that’s true, too; a widow must always accept people’s pity. We’re all parasites of one kind
or another. What Marina needed, though, was money. She hasn’t
a bean of her own. The dead husband, it turns out, was simply
buried in debt, and the divorces, well, you can imagine: she was
hardly in a position to ask anything of them. She got what she wanted, but I dare say she paid a fair price. I rather think you
destroyed her, my dear.”
On the street, a man was getting into a taxi. A woman was
standing and watching him go.
“She said she had once been Captain Hargreaves’s lover.”
“Oh, that’s true. Doubtless it is. Marina is proud, and lecher-
ous—sometimes I wonder if she isn’t a bit mad—but if she told
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you she was my husband’s lover, you may rely upon its being the
truth. Why, if I’d had any doubts, I wouldn’t have given her a
tuppence, I’m sure.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” Dolly said. “No, I should think not.”
Certain things about those days would never become
clear: the deepest mysteries of number theory and logic, what a
butler might have whispered to a suffering guest.
But the passage of time can render some things comprehen-
sible. I did, for instance, come to understand what Marina had
meant when she said that all love affairs end the same way. Like
her, I came to know the pain of being reminded, the liquid beauty
of Degas’s ballerinas, the ache that occurs in a scarred, aged heart at the tender depiction of an immodest nude. Such things do, as
she promised they would, make us whole, but for one instant only,
for we are all broken beings and far past repair.
My sister married Christopher Blake and never seemed to
outgrow her shyness about him. I suppose I never really outgrew
mine, either. My father carried on for many years by himself, his
heart proving not so weak after al . When he died, he did so alone, as the papers reported Marina had, too. I read the stories on the
train back to Glass, where in two days’ time we would bury my
father (and where I would find myself estranged by long absence,
unrecognized in that place I had loved). Ruined actress, they said.
Twice divorced and once widowed. A socialite fallen on difficult
times. Nowhere
did they mention a young refugee, a Polish boy,
a gift of leather shoes or a watch. Nowhere either was mentioned
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the kiss she had shared with a student of maths or the impres-
sion of her lips that had lingered on his face to return sometimes for no reason at all as he lay, sleepless, through the years of his life. Unmentioned, lastly, was the salonnière who had shown her
at once such generosity and malice, that woman whose eye had
indeed been sufficient to recognize something fine when she saw
it and who had had, thus, grudgingly to accept that the moment
of joy, of wholeness, that her husband had once found in wanton
embrace had been one worthy, at last, of her patronage.
Other People’s Love Affairs
z z z
For twenty years, Erma and Violet lived together in
Glass, neither simply as friends nor precisely as lov-
ers. If ever a question on the matter was raised, or if
(more often) assumptions were made, they would share a glance,
blushing, without a reply, not having a name for what they were
to each other. Corpulence distinguished them both, indeed was
something that had drawn them together, though Violet carried
hers with superior ease. They shared a room in a half-timber cot-
tage, two twin beds with a table between. They liked books, jigsaw puzzles and games, videos saved of Not Only . . . But Also. Each night, turning out the lamp before bed, Erma would say, not shyly,
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“I love you, Violet,” and then listen for a time to her friend’s moving lips as she proceeded through a whispered nightly devotion.
Had she ever managed the words, what Erma might have said of
their union was that neither of them had ever truly been cared for, except in these last years by the other. There was nothing in them really worthy of love, the world had for so long seemed to say; it had stopped saying that on the day when they met. Now, listening
in the darkness, Erma was often moved, overcome, knowing it was
she who rated highest among Violet’s prayers.
Sex had never come into things, at least not in a conventional
sense. It wouldn’t have, in Erma’s case, being something she had
long ago ceased to consider. (Aged eleven, she’d pined briefly
after Phineas Cork, the only boy in school who hadn’t thought