by James Lasdun
This was an old man with little startled red-rimmed eyes and wisps of white hair standing upright as though he’d seen a ghost. His name was Mirek, and he too was Czech, a distant relative of theirs, who had managed to emigrate in the sixties and lived in Brooklyn, running a used book business until a few years ago, when the lease on his tiny store expired. When Olga and Lydia had looked him up, he was doing menial jobs for a coin and stamp dealer in Manhattan. He had complained so bitterly of the difficulty of keeping body and soul together in the city that later, when the time came for the women to find a tenant for the one-room cottage on their new property, they had decided to ask Mirek if he would like to move there himself. At first he had refused, even less certain of how he would make a living outside the city than inside. But in quick succession two things had happened to change his mind: he had been mugged on the subway, and then the dealer he was working for had moved to Florida. And so he had decided to take his chances with the women. The only job he had found so far was bagging groceries at a Grand Union two miles away, but he seemed cheerful and optimistic about his prospects.
All this came out over the course of several evenings as the bridge games developed into regular weekly events. The four of them sat at a card table in the front room, which had been furnished in an ornate, old-fashioned style, with net curtains, gold-striped wallpaper, and a crimson plush sofa with lace antimacassars. The stakes were small, though the mother saw to it that debts were paid promptly, and she kept a tin box full of change for the purpose. Conrad and the old man partnered each other, and as they almost always lost, a rueful bond established itself between them, and they were able to make up for the sometimes awkward fact of their being barely able to understand a word each other said by an ongoing pantomime of commiserative gestures—sighs, grimaces, outstretched hands.
After the game coffee would be served; then Olga would gather up the cups and withdraw to the kitchen, which would be the old man’s cue to leave. Conrad and Lydia would linger on in the front room, talking together with growing comfort and familiarity.
One evening after Mirek had gone home and Olga had disappeared off to the kitchen, the two of them found themselves sitting together in an unusually charged silence. What was there to say? They knew as much about each other as conversation could reveal. Conrad had told her all about his past: growing up in Troy the son of an appliance dealer and an assistant school principal, his steady luck as an investor in local businesses, the feelings he still had for his wife, the brief relationships with other women he had had since her death, the unaccountable tension between him and his daughter, eleven years old when her mother had died and now studying some subject he had never heard of at a college two thousand miles away. For her part Lydia had talked dispassionately about her impoverished childhood; her alcoholic father, who had died when she was young; her ex-husband, a former party official who had punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant, causing her to miscarry. These things she had described in a deliberately detached manner, with faint disgust, as if her father’s decline and the behavior of her husband were subjects that offended her because they reflected badly on herself. A woman of her worth, she seemed to imply, ought to have done better than this with the men in her life.
All of which had made a strong impression on Conrad. The thought of this attractive, intelligent woman, whom nature had clearly designed for a life of luxury and ease, living under such circumstances had awakened a protective instinct in him, while her lack of self-pity filled him with admiration.
Looking at her in silence now under the warm light of the pink-shaded lamps, her eyes resting candidly and unflinchingly on his own, he felt bewitched and at a loss for words. With every second the silence seemed to move them more deeply into a place of mysterious communion. It was Lydia who spoke.
“Why don’t you show me your house? We’ve never been there.”
“Now?”
“It isn’t far …”
“All right. I will.”
He drove her into Albany, her presence beside him registering itself as a bright vibrancy, the source of some new power that seemed to be surging into his life, driving out the heavy loneliness that had hung inside him like some gray immovable cloud since his bereavement.
The house was on a quiet street in one of the older parts of the city. Lydia took his arm as they climbed to the front door. She stepped inside ahead of him, walking slowly through the downstairs rooms while he switched on lights behind her. The place was clean and orderly, furnished simply in Margot’s taste: a few primitives and Federal-era antiques; a porcelain washstand with enamel jugs and bowls; arrangements of dried flowers that she and their daughter used to make, from which all but the last ghost of color had faded.
Lydia turned to him with a smile. “You haven’t changed anything, have you?”
“Since Margot? I guess not.”
“Do you feel strange bringing me here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
“I would feel a little strange.”
She moved on, climbing the stairs past the utility rooms on the first landing and on up the next flight, looking into the room Margot had used as a study, the daughter’s old bedroom, an upstairs parlor with a tiled Dutch stove, Conrad turning on the lights as she moved from room to room. At the threshold of the bedroom that he and Margot had shared he held Lydia back and placed a kiss on her lips. As she moved softly against him, he felt that he had been favored by fortune with a piece of extraordinary luck. He was not a gregarious man, certainly not the type who found it easy to strike up new relationships. The few women of his acquaintance who had flung themselves at him after Margot’s death had not attracted him, and despite a few brief affairs, he had begun to suspect he was too old or too uninteresting for the ones who did. He had his businesses to occupy him—shares in a carpet warehouse, interests in a chain of Laundromats and a storage rental company—and there were couples from the days of his marriage who still invited him to join them for dinner. But he had come to think of his life as a man, a member of the male sex, as essentially over. Now, however, as Lydia responded to his embrace in the doorway with tender, uncomplicated warmth, he sensed the possibility of this life beginning again, keen as ever, perhaps even richer for its shadows of loss and grief, and as he drew her across the threshold into the bedroom, a feeling of great joy came into him.
They entered then on a phase of rapidly deepening intimacy. Was this possible, at the age of fifty, to have desire suddenly running through your days like a torrent from some underground spring? Such things apparently had a life and logic of their own. Before long every trace of reserve had vanished from their lovemaking. No woman Conrad had known before, not even Margot, seemed quite so sheerly, so poignantly naked as Lydia when she undressed, and none had ever come to his bed with such open delight. The effect on Conrad was intoxicating. He walked into his office each morning feeling as though he had spent the night drinking at the fountain of youth. That winter he proposed and was accepted with an unhesitating serenity that seemed to confirm his feeling of a deep judiciousness in the prospect of their union, a convergence with the forces of destiny.
Meanwhile the greenhouses were finished: four in a row, the clean panes of glass glittering in the steel frames of their walls and pitched roofs. A Mexican foreman had been hired, and he and his workers had planted several hundred shrubs in the carefully prepared soil. There was a gravel courtyard out front with a fountain in it that sent up thick, petal-shaped curves of water from a granite bowl. At night the water was lit from below with a powerful crimson light. The women had seen such a fountain at one of the greenhouse operations they had visited in the course of planning their own and had resolved to build one just like it. Now, as you approached the house along the winding county road after dark, you saw first the reddish gold glow of the night growing lights illuminating the sky above the treetops, then the sparkling, light-filled glass of the greenhouses themselves, with the fountain in front shimmering like an enormo
us, glowing rose.
There was some discussion about where they would all live after the wedding, which was set for the following April. Conrad had assumed that Lydia and her mother would want to move into his house, which was larger and grander than theirs, but they wouldn’t hear of moving away from their greenhouses.
“No, no. Not move,” the old woman said, wagging her finger at him as though he had threatened her with forcible transfer.
“You move here, my darling,” Lydia said. “We’ll build an addition if you like.”
Her firmness surprised him, but the more he considered it, the more reasonable it seemed. He had given no thought, he realized, to any awkwardness Lydia might feel moving into the house he had shared with Margot. Spending nights there as his lover was one thing, but living there as his wife was no doubt a less enticing prospect. It came to him that if he was to make a go of this new life, he needed a clean break from all the old trappings of his life with Margot. He would sell the house, he decided, auction off the antiques, get rid of all those dusty wreaths and garlands. The decision—he was driving to work as he made it—sent a strange, vertiginous excitement through him. He sped forward, pressing the accelerator as though to drown out any doubt or resistance inside him. A few minutes later, entering his office, he picked up the framed photograph of Margot. She was standing on the balcony of a hotel in Costa Rica: smiling, her dark hair tumbling in the sunshine, blue flowers trailing from the wrought iron bars either side of her. It was shortly after they had returned from this vacation that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she had died later that year. With an abrupt, almost violent gesture, he thrust the photograph, frame and all, into a padded envelope, and carried it down to the storage locker he rented in the basement, where he placed it in a cupboard filled with old contracts and prospectuses. Back upstairs he stood at the window, astonished at what he had done but telling himself that the agitation inside him would soon pass. He had loved Margot and he had grieved for her but a new day was dawning and it seemed to him that Margot herself would have wanted him to rise up and seize it.
Beth, his daughter, flew in a few days before the wedding. Though Conrad looked forward to the girl’s visits, he always began to feel anxious as the time for them approached. The truth was her presence unnerved him; she had turned into a guarded, watchful young woman, with a way of deploying silences that made him feel as if he were constantly being judged and found lacking. He was pleased that she had agreed to come for the wedding, but the thought of her casting her sardonic eye over Lydia and her mother made him nervous.
The meeting was arranged to take place at a dinner two nights before the ceremony, at Lydia and her mother’s house.
They set off at dusk. It was a damp evening, with drifts of spring moisture in the air. Over the treetops a quarter mile from the house, the glow of the growing lights appeared, deeper than usual, it seemed, as though intensified by the mist. As always the sight aroused a kind of reflexive gladness in Conrad, an answering glow. Here was the fountain, sending up its crimson-lit curves of water like tongues of shiny lava. There were the greenhouses, four fiery crystals rising from the earth, the rose shrubs inside them bathed in gold light. The place seemed to Conrad more mysteriously resplendent than ever, as though some otherworldly force were radiating through it. Even Beth looked impressed as they got out of the car, though she said nothing.
Lydia greeted them at the front door. She took Beth’s hands in hers, kissing her on both cheeks and hugging her warmly. “I’m so happy to meet you at last!”
They went through to the living room, which was filled with the smell of roasting meat. Olga came out from the adjoining kitchen: her wrinkled face rouged and lipsticked, a black Gypsy skirt under her apron, bordered with garish, angular flowers. She parked her bent frame in front of Beth, staring at her for a moment.
“Do you like champagne?” she brayed.
“Uh … Sure.”
“I bring bottle.”
She shuffled back into the kitchen, and the three of them sat, Lydia taking charge of Beth with an easy imperiousness. The girl seemed subdued, possibly even a little dazzled, Conrad thought, by the poise and elegance of his bride. Given her usual quickness to assume a posture of contempt, this seemed an encouraging sign. Clasping her hand, Lydia launched into an amused account of all the things that were threatening to go wrong with the upcoming festivities. The two heated marquees had not yet arrived; the ice sculptor wasn’t returning phone calls; the caterer was reneging on a promise to supply fresh carp …
Olga came back in carrying a tray with the champagne and four glasses.
“Please open for me,” she said to Conrad. As he stood to take the bottle, he saw through the kitchen window that the lights were on in Mirek’s little cottage at the back of the house. Between the wedding preparations and the distractions of the romance itself, the bridge games had had to be abandoned, and several weeks had passed since Conrad had seen or heard anything of the old man.
“How’s Mirek?” he asked, tearing the foil from the bottle. “Shouldn’t we invite him over sometime?”
There was a silence.
“Mirek?” Lydia said, frowning. “I didn’t tell you?”
“No?”
“He’s gone.”
Conrad, who had begun untwisting the wire from the cork, stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s gone. We had to get rid of him.”
“What happened?”
Lydia turned away. “Ask Mother.”
He looked to the mother, whose orange lips had bunched up in a grimace.
“Three month!” She spit out the words. “Three month he pay no rent. Nothing! I tell him, ‘Mirek, you must pay rent.’ He bring me twenty dollars. Twenty! Next month again nothing!”
Conrad resumed untwisting the wire. He could feel his daughter looking at him, and it seemed to him suddenly necessary to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had been said.
“What about his job?” he asked, feigning a purely casual interest.
The old woman threw up her hands in a gesture of violent exasperation.
Lydia answered: “He stopped going. He hurt his knee, and then it was too far for him to walk.”
“He couldn’t drive?”
“He didn’t want to drive. I offered to teach him when he first came.”
“He did not want to work!” the old woman interjected.
Very carefully, Conrad removed the wire cage from the cork.
“So … where did he go?”
“I don’t know, darling,” Lydia said. “Back to New York, I suppose. Anyway, I left him at the train station. Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just … interested.”
“Should we have let him stay without paying?”
“Of course not!”
He looked at her, taking care to avoid his daughter’s eye, though he could sense the familiar sardonic light already glittering there.
“Well then …” Lydia said, smiling at him. She had put her hair up and was wearing a pale cashmere sweater that clung to her body in softly gleaming curves. Her features in the dim lamplight had an almost Asiatic quality: greenish brown eyes tilting upward at their outer corners, her lips full at the center but vanishing quickly into the curling shadows of two small but luxuriant dimples. She looked ravishing, Conrad thought, confused by the apprehension surging inside him, and she was gazing at him with an expression of pure love.
“Anyway,” she continued, “it worked out for the best. We were able to put Fernando in there, with his wife and their little boy. They were living with another family in a two-room apartment in Troy …”
Fernando was the foreman they had hired for the greenhouses.
“I see,” Conrad said. It seemed to him that he had received some momentous intelligence and that he needed to absorb it, but at the same time he was uncertain why any of this should concern him at all, let alone disturb him.
“Is somethin
g the matter, darling?” Lydia asked.
“No. Not at all.”
“Well … are you going to open the champagne?”
“Yup.”
All three women were looking at him now. They seemed to be waiting for some explanation as to what was all of a sudden filling him with this apparent reluctance to open the bottle. He was aware of something perilous in his own immobilized silence; that the longer it continued, the more he stood to lose. And yet for some time he was unable to move.
ANNALS OF THE HONORARY SECRETARY
It isn’t known when Lucille Thomas first appeared among us. Who brought her, or at least told her where our circle met, remains equally mysterious. One or two members have claimed the distinction, but with little to offer yet in the way of evidence. Most of her casual remarks from the period before her first performance have passed into oblivion; those that survive have the overcherished luster of apocrypha.
The consensus is that she had been coming to our meetings for perhaps as long as a year before she made her debut. During that time she maintained an attitude of more or less silent watchfulness. I don’t recall her asking anything during question times or taking the opportunity during our less formal discussions to advertise herself by saying something clever or controversial.
I myself had taken little notice of her until just a few days before her first performance, when certain familiar signs—a definite concentration of purpose visible in the outward manner; a sudden close interest in matters of procedure—suggested to me the imminent breaking of a silence.
At that time we were meeting at the Kurwens’ house up near the North Circular. The large double drawing room was crowded with people standing in groups or sitting on the Kurwens’ velour chairs and sofas. We had just listened to a talk, and there was the usual murmur of discussion. I was sitting between Brenda and Donald Kurwen, and I remember gesturing toward the back of the room, where Lucille, as yet unknown to us, sat on the window seat, and saying that I thought we would be hearing from her before long.