In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  All that day Louise was as in a fever. She was always that way when she was contemplating ridding herself of Leo. Regi, of course, could not afford to be drawn in by any of this: the taking of her pill, the eating of her lunch, the hours of rest after her lunch, her walk on the beach, her dressing up for the cocktail hour—it was all like the planets set in their course, and no wild winds whipping up Louise could cause the least ripple in that ordained rotation.

  It happened to be a sultry day, and they had to pull down the shades in their rooms for their siesta. There were little warning rumbles in the air, augmenting Louise’s foreboding that something momentous was about to happen. She took off her dress, she lay on her bed, but she could not sleep. Thoughts as oppressive as the weather simultaneously weighed her down and stirred her up. She felt she had to talk to someone. But when she went next door, Regi, who had disposed herself on her bed in her crimson kimono and with eye pads on her closed lids, was very indignant with her: she said she had never heard of such a thing, to come in and disturb a person who was lying down for her afternoon siesta. Louise quickly shut the door and went back to her own room. She lay on her bed; she shut her eyes. She tried to shut off her thoughts. Regi was right—it was the time for sleep and rest, not for vain speculation on a worn-out old passion. And at this age, she told herself in disgust. She was over seventy, and it might have been expected that by this time her only concern with her heart would be a clinical one.

  In the adjoining hotel room, Natasha was writing in her diary. It was Mark who had advised her to keep a diary and had also given her the book in which to write it. Sometimes she copied passages from it and sent them to him as a letter. This was in addition to the other letters she wrote him. Just now he was traveling in Europe with a friend, and he had instructed her to send care of American Express in Paris. She didn’t know when he would be there to pick up his mail, and it was frustrating for her not to be able to calculate the day when the messages she sent him—though winged, she felt, straight from her heart into his—would actually reach him. She didn’t expect to hear from him, so she really had no reason to keep loitering around the reception desk at the time the mail was being sorted. She knew perfectly well that when he traveled or was with a friend, he did not want to be diverted by unnecessary thoughts of home, and that her letters could only receive his attention when he returned to Cambridge at the start of his semester. But then it would be his full attention: he corrected, commented, criticized, praised. Often she got them marked up in red like a school essay. When he was younger—just a schoolboy himself—his criticisms had tended to be negative, even destructive, but now that he was a college student he was very patient, thoughtful, and encouraging with her.

  At his instigation, she had also begun to write poetry. She was writing some now, induced perhaps by the strange weather outside. She had her blinds up and her windows open: the beach was now as empty as the sea. The wind had risen and not only spurts of sand but every straw and shred of paper lying on the beach were being whirled up as into a dervish dance. The waves were mounting into giant cumulations toward the sky, which hung down low to meet them while frightened sea gulls were tumbled up and down and up again between the two. Pulses of thunder throbbed through the swollen ocean and the swollen sky. All this Natasha was trying to get down in her poem, together with the feelings in her heart which were more tumultuous than one would have suspected from such a small, plain, undeveloped girl.

  After a while she saw her grandmother hurrying down the incline on which the hotel stood. Louise was barefoot and ran nimbly across the sand; seen thus from the back, she might have been a much younger woman. She went as close to the ocean as possible and stood there alone. Her loose gown billowed; her gray hair flew around her head.

  Natasha followed her. As soon as she reached her, Louise fell around her neck. Natasha was used to this, Louise was always doing it in moments of high stress. Often she said nothing at all and Natasha didn’t know what it was about and didn’t ask but only stood there, doing her best to support Louise who was heavy. But today Louise did speak; she said, “Now he wants to have a summer school in the apartment. He wants to live there with God knows how many people; God knows what sort of people.”

  The rising waves sprayed them, the water lapped around their bare ankles. The edge of Natasha’s cotton skirt got soaked and hung down lower. Also, she felt the first rain drops, quite different from the spray of seawater, fall on her neck like round, warm tears.

  “We have to go in,” Natasha murmured. “We’re getting wet.”

  But Louise, though equally wet, only moved back a few steps. She retained her hold on Natasha so she could speak close to her ear; she had to do that because of the noise from wind and water. “If he cared for me, it’d be different—one jot for me—but he uses me, that’s all. That’s all he wants from me. I have to be fair: from anyone. He is like that. It’s his nature. Natasha, I’ve had enough.”

  “But Grandma, if it’s his nature—”

  “I’m going to be with you now. And Mark. And your mother. That’s it. I have to have some peace, Natasha; some peace of mind,” Louise insisted as if Natasha were denying her right to it.

  More raindrops fell and faster; lightning streaked through the mass of clouds and waves, and thunder rolled. Natasha gave up hope of getting her grandmother inside before they were both drenched; also she felt they had to continue talking, the subject couldn’t just be dropped because of a storm.

  “I should have told him this morning on the phone. I should have said to him there and then, that’s it, good-bye.”

  “But Grandma, you like it when he’s there. He makes you laugh.”

  “He makes me scream!” Louise put back her head as if she wanted to do it right there. But she didn’t have to, the storm did it for her.

  “He makes you laugh too. And you run up and down and do things for him. You like it.”

  “I didn’t expect this from you, Natasha: taking his side.”

  “I said you like it. I’m thinking of you. Supposing he didn’t come anymore or phone or anything—”

  “Fine. That’s what I want.”

  They walked out of the range of the waves. There was nothing they could do about the rain. It was coming down in sheets and had drenched them both in seconds.

  “And Regi says I should.”

  “Oh, Regi.”

  “She’s been saying it for years. Why ‘Oh, Regi’? We could learn a lot from her.”

  “I wouldn’t want to learn anything from Regi.”

  “Darling, she loves you; she’s concerned for you. That’s why she’s critical,” Louise urged.

  Natasha wasn’t prepared to go on standing in the rain to talk about Regi. “He doesn’t come all that often,” she got back to Leo.

  “No, only when it suits him. He doesn’t care what suits me. He doesn’t care,” she went on in a different tone, “that I might want to see him; or at least know where he is; when he’s coming; instead of months and months passing and not a sign—”

  “He comes on your birthday.”

  “Big deal,” said Louise and made the same derogatory face she had made as a schoolgirl.

  “He always comes for that.”

  “Now I’m going to tell him not to anymore!” Louise raised her face to the storm. Water streamed from her hair and from her clothes. She loved it. She loved the roar of the thunder and of the ocean. It made her feel very strong and ready for the most resolute action of her seventy years.

  But Natasha caught flu as a result of that day’s exposure, with fever and rheumatic pains, and she had to stay in bed for the remainder of their vacation. Regi was furious. A doctor was called in and altogether a tremendous fuss was made and Louise was preoccupied all the time. Regi had to sit by herself for hours on end with nothing to do except quarrel with the management.

  Natasha didn’t mind too much being sick. She was used to it for she was always catching something. Louise made the hotel room feel ju
st like Natasha’s usual sickroom, with lemonade and flowers on the bedside table and their favorite eau de cologne, the original from Cologne with the blue and gold label, which even Louise’s mother had used. Louise sat on a chair close to the pillow and read aloud from one of the books Natasha had brought with her. These books had been selected by Mark, who always regulated Natasha’s reading, so that in a way it was as though he were there with them in his usual supervisory capacity. Louise read everything he recommended too, and she loved it and didn’t know whom to praise more, the author or Mark for recommending him. This year it was Turgenev, and Louise went into such raptures that often she couldn’t go on but had to hide her face behind the book and call from out of there “That man! That man! How does he know it all?” The smell of the pages as well as the illustrations—it was an old edition with color plates of girls in white dresses playing the piano and moonlight coming in through the windows—reminded her of the time she had read the book, or perhaps some other book that had filled her with the same emotion, all through one summer lying under the apple tree in her father’s garden. She told Natasha an anecdote of that time—how her mother had baked a cake for visitors and had put it to cool on the windowsill. It was her mother’s specialty: Louise could still smell it in her memory, a lemon madeira. She had left Turgenev and gone to the windowsill and cut herself a big warm moist piece; she could still taste it too. But her mother had been annoyed, having to be ashamed before visitors for serving a cake with a slice missing. And for Natasha, fevered, hot, yet not at all unhappy, the book and the anecdote got mixed up forever—the girls in white dresses stopped playing the piano and came out to join Louise in the garden and eat hot cake with her under her apple tree.

  When the doctor came, it turned out he was German too and very old. He was retired, really, but kept being called in by summer visitors. He liked talking to Louise and Natasha and didn’t seem pressed for time at all. He even smoked a cigar—“Very bad, very bad,” he said. “One, for a doctor to smoke, and two, to smoke in the sickroom; couldn’t be worse.” He seemed ready to stay for hours. He and Louise discovered that they used to go to the same place in the mountains for their vacations and had once been there in the same year though not in the same pensione. Then he said that they had better be careful, and he told the joke about the man in the railway carriage who wouldn’t tell his fellow passenger the time because they might get into further conversation and then one thing would lead to another and before long they would discover that they were related. Louise and Natasha were so appreciative of this joke that the doctor at once got ready to tell them another. He had a big store of them.

  But then Regi came in, very cross, and he pulled his gold watch out of his vest pocket and found it was time to visit another patient. Regi hated all sickrooms except her own. She really hated them; they did something to her, she said. And she couldn’t stand the sight of Natasha in bed, her eyes full of fever, her large nose red and rheumy, and wearing nothing more attractive than Mark’s old striped pajamas he had had at school.

  Regi paced the room in her black cocktail gown; she always dressed up in the evening, wherever she was. “Horrible smell of medicine in here,” she said. “What’s he given you? Are you sure he’s a proper doctor? You can’t just take anything anyone gives you, you know.”

  “I think Regi and I will just go and sit in the lounge for our drink,” Louise said. She put a bookmark in Turgenev and gave a secret wink to Natasha.

  As soon as they were outside, Regi said, “I told you long ago—that child is not healthy.”

  “But it’s because she got wet. It’s my fault, Regi, completely.”

  But Regi had always said it about Natasha, that she wasn’t healthy. To outsiders she went further: “Naturally, what do you expect when you adopt a child and don’t know where it comes from. I told them at the time; I said ‘You wouldn’t buy a horse that way, would you?’ So they can’t say they haven’t been warned,”

  Louise and Regi were the only two occupants of the hotel lounge. Everyone else was on the beach, for there was still some sun to enjoy. But although Regi loved nature as much as the next person, everything had its own time and six o’clock was cocktail time.

  Her mood was bad: “We might as well go home,” she said. “I don’t know why we’re still here, spending money uselessly.” The waiter brought her drink. It was called English Rose; it was a concoction she had first tasted years and years ago, in one of the old hotels in New York, and insisted on having made up for her wherever she went. Of course, most people never got it right—certainly not here in this beach hotel where the waiter was just a philosophy student on a summer job, mostly reading a book.

  “I’m not enjoying myself,” Regi declared.

  Louise felt guilty. Not only because of Natasha’s sickness, but for bringing Regi here in the first place. The setting was wrong for her. The hotel lounge was done up simply with white wicker furniture and green cotton cushions. Regi looked a complete misfit in her elegant black. “We can’t go home,” Louise said, biting her lip. “Leo’s there.”

  “You can tell him to get out.” Regi tasted her English Rose and put it down again. “Horrible. They might as well poison me straight out. . . . You said you wanted to get rid of him. Now’s your chance.”

  She looked at Louise out of the corner of her eye. When they were girls, they had often dared each other to do things: to ride a bicycle, to smoke in the street, to sing a song in a café. When she had been in a bad mood with Louise, Regi’s dares became more daring: “Send a note to that officer over there, the one with the red hair, tell him you know his sister: go on, I dare you . . . Oh, I can see you’re just a mealy coward.” So then Louise would toss her head and do what she was dared—and more: called a coward, she would become reckless.

  “Go on,” Regi said now, in the hotel lounge. “You’re always saying you will but you never do. It’s just talk with you. You don’t mean it.” She continued to look sideways at Louise. She saw Louise’s face working with emotion: “Oh,” she said fliply, “you’re just a mealy coward.”

  Louise tossed her head. She got up. She went over to the public phone in the lounge. Her head held high, facing Regi, she called her own number in New York, collect. A strange voice answered, there was some explaining to do, then Leo himself came on. As soon as she heard his voice, Louise turned her back on Regi.

  As soon as he heard hers, he went into a flood of talk: he was so glad she had called, there was such chaos in the apartment, not to be believed—no one could find anything—and he had never, in his life—

  “Leo,” she said.

  —in his whole life seen such a bunch of useless people.

  “Leo, I don’t want you to stay in the apartment.”

  “And I don’t want to stay here. It’s terrible, Louise, you can have no idea. No one can find the towels, they can’t find the sheets, there’s no orange juice, the dishwasher’s not working—I can tell you, you can thank your lucky stars you’re not here.”

  “I want to come home, Leo.”

  “Absolutely unnecessary. I appreciate it—but on no account do I want to spoil your holiday. I’ll manage, don’t worry. It’s not the first load of shithole students I’ve had on my hands.” He laughed bitterly, could be heard to bark out some order, than spoke back into the receiver: “There’s nothing you can do. This is my problem. I’ve asked for it and I’m getting it. Well, don’t worry. Just relax and go on enjoying yourself. I’ll pull through somehow.”

  “There are more towels on the top shelf of the left-hand closet in Marietta’s room.”

  “Towels. Sheets. Would you believe it? That’s what you get for setting up as a goddamn guru. Who wants it. Who needs it. . . . I suppose it’s just wonderful up there. Good food, good sun—you don’t know how I crave it. I tell you what, Louise: if I absolutely can’t stand it here, I might come up for the day on Sunday. Well, I don’t promise anything, but I’ll try.”

  “They do a very good Sund
ay lunch in the hotel. Roast meat, potatoes, and some sort of English savory. Or are you still a vegetarian?”

  “Good God, no. I need meat.”

  He hung up. She turned around and went back to Regi. Regi looked at her with her shaved and penciled eyebrows raised high; one pointed crimson fingernail, hard as a bird’s beak, tapped the table. But Louise couldn’t say anything; her upper lip trembled more. She was afraid she would burst out laughing—the way she had done after sending the note to the red-haired officer—so she turned suddenly, abruptly, and hurried out of the lounge. And once outside, she did more than hurry: she ran—up the stairs, into Natasha’s room. She flung herself on Natasha’s bed, her face on her pillow. She burst out laughing into that. Natasha smiled; she stroked her grandmother’s hair. “You’ve been speaking to Leo,” she said.

  “He may be coming up for the day on Sunday.” Louise’s face was now as flushed as Natasha’s, so that they both looked as if they had fever.

  Mark was immensely enjoying his acquisition of the Van Kuypen house. Nothing—no one—not even Kent could stop him from his weekend expeditions to watch the progress on the place. Fortunately, the part damaged by the fire had been a later addition, and now that Mark had had it stripped away, the original dimensions of the house, simple and grand, could be clearly seen. However, although willing to restore the house to its old lines outwardly, inside, Mark was willing to sacrifice period authenticity in favor of his modern needs. He had an exact idea of what he wanted done, and how it was going to look, and moreover what sort of a life he was going to lead there with his friends.

  One weekend Kent was keen to attend a party with Mark. It was in celebration of yet another newly decorated loft, this one belonging to a dancer and his friend who was a lawyer. It had been done by another friend of theirs, a decorator, and was said to be the most attractive yet in a long line of daring and attractive lofts. Everyone anyone ever knew or had heard of was going to be at the party, and Kent felt it to be important that he and Mark should be there too. But Mark needed to go to his house.