In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  When Kent saw Natasha, he gave the other’s shoulder a slight push. The man raised his face and looked toward her and then quickly looked away again. He got up; he kept his face averted from her and wiped at it with his handkerchief. Kent remained standing by the fireplace, angry and awkward and not knowing what to do; Natasha was also helpless, and there was a profound and terrible silence in the newly painted, newly furnished, carefully restored dining room while they waited for the other to collect himself. Maybe he would know what to do.

  And strangely he did-at any rate, he knew to put on a better face than either of them. When he felt sufficiently recovered to turn around toward them, he managed to take charge. This may have been because he was so much older and more experienced than they were. He even managed to smile as he advanced toward Natasha, holding out his hand and introducing himself by name. She saw that his eyes were washed and dimmed not only by these recent tears but by days and nights and years of them.

  By the time Marietta came to collect her to take her to the Academy, Louise had so many packages that they had to call the doorman up to help carry them to the car. Before starting off, Marietta phoned Eric to tell him to have Regi ready, so that when they got to her apartment house, Eric had her down there sitting in the marble lobby, and he and Regi’s doorman helped her get in the back of the car with Louise. Louise hugged and kissed her for her birthday and pointed out all the parcels and the enormous box holding the birthday cake; and Regi seemed well-pleased—at any rate, she had no complaint. Her only anxiety was for the safety of the birthday cake, until Eric, up front with Marietta, took it on his lap and kept it sitting there the entire way.

  The beginning of their journey was dull—getting out of the city, out of traffic snarls, and through decaying areas full of empty, littered lots and broken buildings with ornate fire escapes. All the windows were boarded up except here and there where a furniture maker or other trader going out of business had put his stock on sale. It hadn’t started snowing yet in the city, but the sky looked grim. People huddled in their coats and walked with their heads down against the wind, which churned up litter from the sidewalks. The river was choppy and ugly brown, and the pleasure cruiser, which still stood on it, looked incongruous with its smart white paint and little colored flags. But Louise, snug in the back of the heated car with Regi, looked out at everything with excitement and pleasure; and so did Eric who loved a ride.

  Then they left the last thinning part of the city and began to strike out into suburbs and scenery. The highway turned into a parkway, and Marietta drove more and more smoothly over better roads: till at last for miles on end there were only trees and little woods to see, and sometimes a field rising to a hill with one house on top. Once, they passed over a bridge and water stretching clear and far on either side; and shortly after that Louise leaned forward in her seat and then she cried: “Look, Regilein, snow!” But Regi was asleep and only grunted; what a pity—except that rest was always good—for Regi too had loved snow and winter sports.

  As they drove farther north, they came into a landscape that was already white, with snow hardening and still falling. Wherever there was water, it had turned to ice; and once Eric looked around at the two of them in the back to point out a little stream that, in falling down a precipice, had frozen midway into icicles. “Oh, they’re both asleep,” he then said to Marietta. Louise heard him, and she wanted to cry out, “No, I’m not!” But she didn’t—was she really asleep? But how could that be, when she was so excited with the snow, and their outing to the Academy, and Regi’s birthday. Too excited perhaps: she couldn’t take that much anymore, and it was exhaustion, not sleep, that had overcome her. She opened her eyes for a moment, but they fell shut again almost at once; and really, perhaps she didn’t need to keep them open—she could see within herself all the snow and all the ice she had ever experienced, and all the fun they had had in it. Louise had been a very good ice skater: not fast and dazzling and swooping like some of the others, but slow and stately as a swan.

  Bruno had proposed to her one day after he had watched her skate on the frozen pond of the Gruenewald. She hadn’t known he was there watching—she always went into a sort of trance when she was skating, she got so much enjoyment out of it. She was warm in her cloth coat with fur collar and hem, her head encased in a fur cap matching the muff that dangled from a string around her neck. She didn’t keep her hands in it for she had her arms folded; she glided around on the ice with the same ease as she danced, not thinking of her feet at all. Her eyes were half shut so that the bright crystal sunlight came to her dimly, and so did the voices of the other skaters. She didn’t notice Bruno till it was time to leave when, with her easy rhythmic glide, she went to the edge of the pond; and there he was, holding out a gloved hand to help her. He sat beside her while she took off her skates; she was aware that he was looking and looking at her, and it made her face glow more. Bruno was also wearing a fur-collared coat, and there were drops of snow melting in it and in his moustache, which was the same color as the fur.

  He didn’t propose to her there and then, but later in Schwamm’s where he took her to warm her up with hot chocolate. Actually, she didn’t need warming up—she was glowing, as always after skating—but she noticed his hands were icy-cold when he drew off his gloves. They sat at a round table in a corner by a magnificent gold-framed mirror in which she could see that he was still looking and looking at her. She was glad she was wearing a dress he hadn’t seen before—a green and rust plaid wool with a bolero and a big black bow; it had been finished a few days earlier by the old lady who came to sew for Louise’s mother every Wednesday. When the chocolate arrived, it was very hot, but Louise had a trick of sucking it out from under the cool cream on top. The only thing was, one had to watch out for a chocolate-and-froth moustache; so she was surreptitiously doing that in the mirror and wiping off a faint trace from her upper lip with her tongue when Bruno began to propose to her. She wanted to get back to her drink—she loved it so—but desisted, for she realized this was a very solemn moment; so she made a solemn face and he talked—oh, so poetically! She was deeply stirred and thrilled and thought to herself it is forever, for life, for the whole of life. And that seemed to her the most beautiful phrase she had ever thought: the whole of life.

  Before going on to the Academy for Regi’s birthday party, Mark drove to his house. He was surprised to see a sleek black sedan standing in his driveway. “Whose is that?” he asked Natasha, who appeared on the front porch the moment she heard him drive up.

  “Did Mother bring Grandma?” she asked.

  “Yes, they must have arrived at Leo’s. . . . Why aren’t you there? Why are you here?”

  With these questions they got inside the hall. Now Mark heard voices muffled from behind the dining-room door; but before he could go in, she drew him away into the opposite room.

  “What’s going on?” Mark said. “Who’s in there with him?”

  “It’s someone called Anthony,” Natasha had to say at last.

  “Oh, I see.” And Mark, looking grim, strode at once to the door.

  Before he could open it, she had run in front of him and held on to the knob.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Natasha.”

  Still holding on to the door, she began to plead: “Let’s go—I was waiting for you to drive me there—Grandma must be waiting. They’re all waiting, Mark. They must have brought the cake. Regi’s cake. Let’s go. They’ll want to cut it.” As she spoke, her eyes searched desperately over his face—as if she didn’t know it already, better than any other in the world.

  Instead of replying, he tried to pry her hand from the door. She knew she couldn’t hold on much longer—he wasn’t very strong, but at any rate he was stronger than she—and she tightened her grasp on it and became more pleading: “Drive me there, Mark. I want to go. Please drive me.” And then she let go of the handle and did something she had not done since their childhood: she flung her arms around his neck and clung to him
, her face touching his. This contact, slight as it was—no more than a brushing of her cheek against his—filled her with a deep and poignant sensation; so that to feel him recoil at the same instant with what was at least distaste was correspondingly painful. But she willed herself to keep her hold on him; she even tightened her arms and said, “You’re not to go in there.”

  Then he fought back. He loosened her arms from his neck and flung her aside. There was a look of wild fury on his face; and when he spoke, his voice was shrill: “I think you’ve gone crazy! You really are crazy! A crazy hysterical woman!” But it was he who sounded liked one.

  “No, don’t!” she cried and again she tried to hold him, interposing herself between him and the door. And, “Don’t,” she said again in a quieter voice as she looked into his pale and twitching face; and what she meant now was not only “Don’t go in there” but also “Don’t look like that. Don’t be like that.” She wanted him calm, manly, himself.

  But at that moment, to be himself was to get rid of her and go into the other room and deal with whatever was going on there. “Get out of the way,” he said, and he didn’t scruple now to push her roughly. At that, all the fight went out of her. She knew she didn’t have a chance. She moved aside, and he opened the door. She followed him into the hallway, and as he went toward the dining room, she went to the front door to let herself out. She didn’t want to hear anything of what was going to happen.

  However, just before opening the door to the dining room, he stopped short and looked after her and had second thoughts. He called to her, and when she didn’t turn around, he went to her.

  “I won’t be long,” he said. “I’ll take you in a moment. If you’ll just be patient and wait.”

  She had turned her face aside so he plucked at her hair as if he were ringing a bell; it was what he sometimes did when he wanted to attract her attention. But now she put up her hand and brushed his aside. “Hey!” he said. “What’s with you?” And he looked into her face, which she tried to avert from him so that he wouldn’t see how sad she was.

  But he knew that very well; he knew it exactly. He stood there, torn between her and what was going on behind the dining-room door: but then a raised voice came from out of there, and at that he could not be held a moment longer. He murmured, “We’ll talk later”—shamefacedly perhaps, but it was with determination that he left her and went straight into the dining room and let her go out of the house.

  The dining room: the way Mark had furnished it was almost an exact replica of what his paternal grandmother’s had been. Yet only the candelabra, some of the Georgian silver, and the carving set on the sideboard had come to him from her, while the rest he had bought at auctions and from antiques dealers. On the other hand, the portraits on the walls really were his ancestors—the senator, the abolitionist, the sweet-faced general’s wife who had died in childbirth—but they had been so carefully cleaned, so tastefully restored that they looked as impersonal as the rest of the furniture and might equally well have been bought in antiques shops.

  Seated at the table where Mark planned to give his dinner parties—he was getting an appropriate set of dishes together—were Kent and Anthony. They were side by side, and Anthony had laid his hand on Kent’s. He left it there when Mark came in—perhaps in challenge: at any rate, the way he looked up at Mark was defiant.

  Kent said in his growling, deep voice, “I didn’t ask him to come here.”

  “But he is here,” Mark said.

  “I didn’t ask him,” Kent said again. He looked down at Anthony’s hand on his and seemed surprised to see it there; and only then did he withdraw his from underneath.

  “I’ve come to take him away with me,” Anthony said.

  “Oh, yes? And what does he say about that?”

  Kent didn’t have anything to say. He stared ahead of him into horizons of his own, frowning, absenting himself from the scene.

  Mark saw that he and Anthony were expected to fight it out between them. He was prepared to do that. He stood by the sideboard (inlaid with matching veneers) and Anthony came to join him there. They faced each other. Trim and fair, with careful haircuts and elegant casual suits, they looked so much alike that they might have been brothers. But there was this difference—that under his boyish haircut and over his young man’s suit, Anthony’s face was strained and old. Looking at him, Mark might have been looking at his own face twenty years later; but not yet, not now.

  Anthony said, “He wants to come and live with me. We’ve been talking about it. You can ask him.”

  Kent had his back to them and gave no one any help. He sat there stolidly and now he even supported his elbows on the table and held his hands over his ears.

  “I don’t think he wants to at all,” Mark said. “If he did, I wouldn’t try to stop him.”

  “You can’t stop him.”

  They kept on glaring at each other. Mark felt at an advantage—in years, strength, everything. He wasn’t even sure that he urgently wanted or needed Kent, but he was certainly determined that no one was going to take him away.

  “Do you want to go, Kent?” he asked.

  They both knew there wasn’t going to be any answer, so instead Anthony spoke. He said, “Leave him out of this. I’m telling you: he wants to go with me.” His voice rose to a falsetto: “Do you think you own him? Do you think you bought him, with this house, as part of the furniture?” Anthony’s mouth twitched, so did his hands; Mark could have felt sorry for him—perhaps he even did, especially as he knew so exactly how he was feeling.

  “Listen,” Mark said. “You’d better drive yourself home now. They said on the radio there’s going to be a very bad snowstorm. I wouldn’t like anything bad to happen to you driving back by yourself.”

  Anthony replied with bravado: “I’m not driving back by myself.”

  This was followed by too long a silence. When Anthony spoke next, the bravado had gone out of him. “Kent?” he said in a trembly voice, turning in that direction.

  Kent let Mark speak for him—and Mark was glad to do so. He felt triumphant and superior, and couldn’t help showing it on his face; and he said, calmly: “You must realize yourself that it was not a good idea to come here.”

  Anthony did something entirely unexpected: he snatched one of the silver-handled carving knives out of the stand—the same Mark’s aunt Mary had used on the Thanksgiving turkey—and he directed it toward Mark’s heart. Now, Anthony knew how to wield a carving knife—he could cut up roast chickens expertly—but not how to plunge it into other people’s hearts. Or perhaps at the last moment caution overcame his rage. He got as far as Mark’s pale blue cashmere sweater and slit into that, crying, “I’ll kill you!” And with that cry the knife clattered to the floor, and both Mark and Anthony stared down at it.

  Mark stooped to retrieve it and, in his tidy way, to replace it on the stand. He touched the tear in his sweater, and Anthony, watching him do that, said, “Good God.”

  “Yes,” Mark agreed.

  Anthony straightened the necktie under his fiercely working Adam’s apple. He said, “I guess I’m sorry,” in a strangled voice.

  “So you ought to be,” Mark said. “It was quite a favorite sweater.”

  He managed to smile, and so, with more effort, did Anthony. But Kent was devastated—he had buried his head in his arms laid on the table. The other two had to comfort him, each placing a hand on one of his huge shoulders, now shaking with sobs. He was still very young, only at the beginning of his career, and knew nothing of what could sometimes happen among people with very strong feelings.

  About these feelings: Leo had once likened them to the voices of the great castrati, in which a man’s vigor was made to give body to a woman’s nervous delicacy. Unhuman voices, Leo called them; unnatural hybrids. “All the same,” Mark had replied, “no one ever said they weren’t beautiful.”

  When they arrived at the Academy, Louise was so excited that she embraced everyone, even people she didn’t know.
“Where’s Natasha?” she asked. Leo looked around: “Yes, where is she?” No one knew. Louise wouldn’t allow Eric to take off Regi’s hat and coat because she wanted to take her out again at once to show her the Academy grounds. “You don’t come,” she told Leo. “I don’t want you with a cold.” He didn’t hear her. He said: “Where’s Stephanie?”

  Louise had taken Regi’s arm and she carefully descended the steps out into the garden with her. When Eric tried to help, she wouldn’t let him; she said they could manage perfectly well, this wasn’t the first time she and Regi had been out in the snow together. “Is it, darling?” she said, squeezing Regi’s fur sleeve. But Regi said, “When are we going to open my presents?”

  Louise took her to the sunken garden. Marietta and Eric and a few students came up behind them, in case they needed help. But the two old ladies seemed to be managing quite well on their own, clinging to each other as they tripped over the hardened snow. Both of them tall and completely encased in fur coats and fur hats, they looked like two prehistoric animals—cumbersome yet graceful because so perfectly adapted to their environment. Their high-heeled suede boots made the first tracks in the virginal snow of the sunken garden. Louise led Regi to the edge of the fountain basin. She showed her the stone nymph, whose curves were now packed with snow; icicles had formed at the stone nipple from which in the summer she pressed a fountain. “Brrrr,” Louise playfully shuddered at Regi. “Aren’t you glad you’ve got your mink?”

  “When are we going to cut the cake?”

  The water in the basin had frozen solid—“Just nice for skating,” Louise said; and still in her playful mood, she stuck out one toe toward the ice and the tip of her tongue emerged between her lips in pleasant anticipation.

  But Regi didn’t want to go skating, she wanted to go in where her cake and presents were. She said crossly, in German, “Let me go, you stupid goose”: and she jerked her arm free—so that Louise, one foot extended toward the ice, the other on the slippery surface of the snow, lost her balance and fell, striking the rim of the basin.