Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  My uncle Steenie, who admired her and I think occasionally feared her, used to say she was like a matador. You watched her swirl the bright cape of her charm, he would say; the performance was so dazzling, so accomplished, you did not notice until too late how expertly she inserted the blade. But Steenie liked to exaggerate; the Constance I knew was forceful, but she was also vulnerable.

  “Think of her dogs,” I would say to Steenie, and Steenie would raise his blue eyes to the heavens.

  “Her dogs. Indeed,” Steenie once replied, in a dry way. “I’m never quite sure what to make of that one.”

  A puzzle. But then, Constance was full of puzzles. I grew up with her but I never felt I understood her. I admired her, loved her, was perplexed and sometimes shocked by her—but I never felt I knew her. Perhaps that, too, was part of her charm.

  When I say “charm” I do not mean that slick and superficial ease of manner which passes for charm in society; I mean something more elusive than that. I mean the capacity to weave spells, to entrance. In this respect Constance was accomplished long before I met her. By the time I went to live with her in New York she was already secure in her reputation as a latter-day Circe. Because of the men, I suppose—although I, being innocent, did not understand about them, or even know of them.

  “A trail of them, Vicky, my dear!” Uncle Steenie would later declaim, not without malice. “A trail of broken hearts. A trail of broken men. The debris, Vicky, of Constance’s hectic career.”

  It was Steenie’s view that if Constance damaged people, the damage was confined to the male sex. If women were damaged, he claimed, it was incidental and accidental; they were simply harmed in the fallout of Constance’s main attack.

  Steenie, I think, saw Constance not just as a sorceress but also as a warrior. She came at men, he claimed, her sexuality punching the air, using her beauty, her wit, her charm, and her willpower as weapons, hell-bent on some private war of attrition. Given his own proclivities, Steenie himself was exempt; this, he would explain, was how he could survive as her friend.

  I believed none of that then. I thought my uncle liked to dramatize, and I loved Constance; after all, she had been unfailingly kind to me. When Steenie made his claims, I would say: but she is brave; she is resilient; she is gifted; she is generous. And so she was, all of those things, but in one respect my uncle was also right. Constance was dangerous. Chaos stuck to Constance the way iron filings cling to a magnet. Sooner or later (I suppose it was inevitable) Constance’s zest for making trouble would affect my own life.

  So it had, eight years before, when Constance succeeded in preventing my marriage. We had quarreled then, and for eight years the break had been complete. I had neither seen her nor spoken to her in that time, and until my uncle Steenie was dying, when she was invoked once more, I had tried very hard not to think of her. I had been succeeding. I was making a new life. Constance, a decorator herself, had trained me well; my career flourished. I grew accustomed to living alone, even grew to like it; I had learned the consolations of a crowded schedule and a full calendar. I had learned (I thought) to live with the fact that all adults coexist with regrets.

  Yet now I was going back. I was on a plane flying east, a long journey with a great many stopovers. From Delhi to Singapore, from Singapore to Perth, from there to Sydney. On to Fiji, from there to Los Angeles, from L.A. to New York. So many time zones. By the time I landed at Kennedy, I was no longer certain whether it was yesterday or tomorrow—a state of mind that long outlasted the jet lag.

  I was attuned to Constance. As soon as I stepped out of the airport terminal into the heat, I knew she was there, somewhere in the city, out of sight still, but very close. Bucketing toward Manhattan in a yellow cab, my ears buzzing from pressurization, my eyes scratchy from dry air at thirty thousand feet, my nerves twitchy from lack of sleep, filled with that false optimism which is a by-product of adrenaline, I was not only sure Constance was near, I felt she awaited me.

  I think I envisaged some kind of final reckoning—not a reconciliation, but questions answered, the past explained, a neat line drawn under a neat balanced sum. This was the moment, I told myself, when Constance’s and my arithmetic finally came out: Q.E.D. I understood myself; I understood my godmother; I was free, at last, to move on.

  I was wrong, of course. I thought I was arriving, when in fact the journey was scarcely begun.

  Constance never wrote letters, but she loved the telephone. She had several telephone numbers herself, and I called them all.

  I called the house at East Hampton, on Long Island. I called all three numbers at the apartment on Fifth Avenue. The East Hampton house had been sold two years before; its new owners had not seen Constance since. None of the Fifth Avenue numbers answered—which was unusual, since even if Constance was away, there were servants who lived in.

  Since it was a Friday, and past office hours, it was by then too late to call Constance’s business headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street. I began calling Constance’s friends.

  It was late July; I was using addresses that might be eight years out-of-date. Not surprisingly, I drew a great many blanks. Friends had moved or were vacationing—but the reaction of those I did reach was very curious indeed. They were polite; they professed to be delighted to hear from me after all this time, but they did not know where Constance was, could not remember where, or when, they had last seen her. Not one of them expressed surprise that I was calling—and that was odd. After all, the breach between Constance and me was public knowledge, the source, I knew, of continued gossip and speculation. Constance and I had been business partners; we had been like mother and daughter, like the best of friends. I waited for someone to say, “How come the urgency? I thought you and Constance had a fight, way back.” No one did. At first I thought this was tact. By the tenth call, I doubted it.

  Around eight in the evening, fighting sleep, I took a cab uptown to Constance’s apartment, the one where I had lived. A surly and unfamiliar doorman informed me Miss Shawcross was away, the apartment was closed up. There was no forwarding address.

  I returned to my hotel. I tried to be practical and reasonable. After all, it was high summer and the humidity was way up—Constance was unlikely to be in New York at such a time. If she was not on Long Island, she would be in Newport. If she was not in Newport, she would be in Europe. Either way, there was a limited number of places where Constance would stay—and I knew all of them.

  I telephoned them all, those hotels she had always favored, where she would always insist on the same suite. She was at none of them; not one had a booking in her name for the current year, let alone that summer. I was still unwilling to give up, even then. I could feel all the symptoms of jet lag, the false energy and the simultaneous exhaustion. I could also feel a more dangerous incentive—that tweaking of an invisible string felt by anyone who embarks upon a search, or a quest.

  Constance was there; I could sense her. She was not in Europe, despite the season, but here in Manhattan, around the corner, just out of sight, amused and in hiding. One more phone call could locate her. I made two, in fact, before I admitted fatigue and went to bed.

  The first (and I rang the number several times) was to Betty Marpruder, the nuts and bolts of Constance’s workplace, the one person who always knew, without fail, where Constance was. I had never known Miss Marpruder to take a vacation; come to that, I had never known her to leave New York. Her number, the first I had called, had not answered when I dialed it at six; it still did not answer when I dialed again, at ten.

  I went to bed. I sat up in bed, exhausted and alert, flicking through the pages of The New York Times supplied with the room. There, on the social pages, I found my perfect source. Conrad Vickers, the photographer, was passing through New York. He was preparing a fifty-year retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art which would open that fall with a party for what the journalist described as le tout New York. Conrad Vickers had links with my own family that went back many years
; he also had links with Constance. Apart from Steenie, Conrad Vickers was Constance’s oldest friend.

  I disliked Vickers, and the hour was late. Nevertheless, I called him.

  Since Vickers also disliked me, I expected a brushoff. To my surprise, he was effusively welcoming. Questions about Constance were dodged, but not decisively blocked. He wasn’t too sure where she was right then, but a few inquiries, he hinted, would locate her.

  “Come for drinks. We’ll discuss it then,” he cried in fluting tones. “Tomorrow at six, dah-ling? Good. I’ll see you then.”

  “Dah-ling,” Conrad Vickers said.

  He kissed the air at either side of my cheeks. He split the word, as he had always done, into two distinct syllables. It conveyed, in his case, neither affection nor intimacy, since darling was a term Vickers used both to close friends and to perfect strangers. He found it useful, I suppose, since it disguised the fact that he had often forgotten the name of the person he was greeting so warmly. Vickers did forget names—unless they were famous ones.

  He made a few airy gestures of apparent delight. Conrad Vickers, in his customary plumage: an exquisite figure in an exquisite room in an exquisite brownstone on Sixty-second Street—a five-minute walk from Constance’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. A blue silk handkerchief flopped from the pocket of a pale-gray Savile Row suit; it harmonized with the blue of the shirt; the blue of the shirt matched his eyes. A fuzz of soft white hair, now receding; the complexion of a girl. Conrad Vickers—once, like my uncle Steenie, a famously beautiful youth—had aged well. The vigor of his insincerity appeared undiminished.

  “Such an age! I’m so glad you rang. Dah-ling, you look radiant. Sit down and let me look at you. Years and years. Loved what you did on the Antonelli house—and Molly Dorset’s. Terribly clever, both of them. You are hitting your stride.”

  I sat down. I wondered why Vickers should bother to flatter me now, when he had never done so before … unless he had decided I was becoming fashionable.

  “Isn’t it hot?” Vickers was still in full flood. “Quite unbearable. What did we do before air conditioning? I’m a bird of passage, dah-ling, just flitting through. Trying to finalize these”—he waved a hand toward a pile of photographs. “Sheer hell. I mean, fifty years of work, dah-ling—where does one begin? Who to leave in? Who to leave out? Those museum people are totally ruthless, my dear. They want the Royals, of course. Margot and Rudy, Andy and Mick, Wallis and Lady Diana. Oh, and they want Constance, of course—well, they would. But anyone they haven’t heard of is O-U-T out, dah-ling. I shall lose half my friends.”

  A small wail of distress. The next instant, distress forgotten, he was waving a hand at the arrangement of flowers on the table next to me.

  “Aren’t they divine? Don’t you just love delphiniums? English garden flowers—I insist on them, wherever I am. And now I’ve found this terribly clever young man who does them just the way I want them. Madly original—I can’t bear flowers that look arranged, can you? No, of course you can’t—you’re far too clever. Now, shall we have some champagne? Do say yes. I can’t bear the martini habit—too noxious. One feels quite blind the next day. Yes, champagne. Let’s be madly grand and open the Bollinger—”

  Vickers came to an abrupt halt. He had just pronounced the name of my uncle Steenie’s favorite champagne. Color seeped up his neck; his face reddened. He fidgeted with the cuffs of his shirt. He turned away to give instructions to the houseboy who had admitted me and who had been waiting by the door all this time.

  He was Japanese, a pretty and delicate-looking young man kitted out in black jacket and striped trousers.

  As the young man left the room and Vickers sat down, I understood at last why I had been invited. Vickers was more than embarrassed; he was guilty. This invitation of his owed nothing to Constance and everything to my uncle Steenie.

  Since Conrad Vickers had been my uncle’s friend for more than fifty years, and his lover—on and off—for at least half of that time, and since he had contrived to be conspicuously absent when Steenie lay dying, I could understand that guilt. I said nothing. I wanted to see, I suppose, how Vickers would wriggle out of it.

  For a while he was silent, as if waiting for me to raise the subject of Steenie, and help him. I did not speak either. I looked around his drawing room, which—like all the rooms in all his many houses—was in perfect taste. Vickers’s sense of loyalty might be weak and his friendships facile, but when it came to the inanimate, to fabrics, to furniture, his eye was as unerring as Constance’s. This had seemed to me important once. I had believed there was virtue in taste. Now, I was less certain.

  Vickers fingered the arm of his French chair. The silk that covered it, a clever pastiche of an eighteenth-century design, was one I recognized. It had come from the most recent Constance Shawcross collection. The chair was painted. It had been restored, I thought, and then cunningly distressed. A wash of color over gesso: Constance’s workshops? I wondered. It was impossible to tell—almost impossible to tell—if the wash of pale slate-blue had been applied two hundred years before or the previous week.

  “Last month,” Vickers said, catching my eye. Vickers, for all his faults, had never been stupid.

  “Last month.” He sighed. “And yes—I know I can’t fool you—that restorer Constance always uses. Oh, God.” He leaned forward. He had apparently decided to take the leap.

  “We’d better talk about Steenie. I know I should have been there. But I just couldn’t … face it, I suppose. Steenie, dying. It seemed so out of character. I couldn’t imagine it, and I certainly didn’t want to witness it. Ah, the champagne.” He rose. His hand trembled a little as he passed me the glass.

  “Would you mind terribly if we drank to him? To Steenie? He would have liked that. After all, Steenie never had any illusions about me. I expect you think I’m a terrible coward, and of course I am. Sickrooms make me queasy. But you see, Steenie would have understood.”

  This was true. I raised my glass. Vickers gave me a rueful look.

  “To Steenie, then? Old times?” He hesitated. “Old friends?”

  “All right. To Steenie.”

  We both drank. Vickers set down his glass. He rested his hands on his knees; he gave me a long, appraising look. The blue eyes were alert. Vickers, for all his affectations, was a great photographer; he had a photographer’s ability to read a face.

  “You’d better tell me. I do want to know. When you called … I felt like a worm. Was it easy? For Steenie, I mean?”

  I considered this. Was death ever easy? I had tried to make it easy for Steenie, as had Wexton. We had succeeded only to a limited extent. When he died, my uncle had been afraid; he had also been troubled.

  He had tried to disguise this at first. Once he realized there was no hope, Steenie set about dying in style.

  Uncle Steenie had always valued the stylish above everything. He intended, I think, to greet Hades as an old friend, remembered from past parties; to be rowed across the Styx as carelessly as if he took a gondola to the Giudecca. When he met his boatman Charon, I think Uncle Steenie meant to treat him like the doorman at the Ritz: Steenie might flounce past, but he would bestow a large tip.

  This was achieved, in the end. Steenie went as he would have liked, propped up against silk pillows, amusing one moment, dead the next.

  But that sudden departure came at the end of a long three months, months during which even Steenie’s capacity to perform sometimes failed him. He was not in pain—we saw to that—but, as the doctors had warned, those morphine cocktails did have strange effects. They took Steenie back into the past, and what he saw there made him weep.

  He would try to convey to me what he saw, talking and talking, often late into the night. His compulsion to make me see what he saw was very great. I sat with him; I held his hand; I listened. He was the last but one of my family left. I knew he wanted to give me the gift of the past, before it was too late.

  It was often difficult, though, to understand wh
at he said. The words were clear enough, but the events he described were scrambled. Morphine made Steenie a traveler through time; it gave him the facility to move forward and back, to pass from a recent conversation to another some twenty years before as if they happened the same day, in the same place.

  He spoke of my parents and my grandparents, but only the names were familiar, for as Steenie spoke of them they were unrecognizable to me. This was not the father I remembered, nor the mother. The Constance he spoke of was a stranger.

  One point: Some of Steenie’s memories were benign; some, quite clearly, were not. Steenie saw, in these shadows, things that made him shake. He would grasp my hand, start up in the bed, peer about the room, address specters he saw and I did not.

  This made me afraid. I was unsure if it was the morphine speaking. As you will see in due course, I had grown up with certain puzzles that had never been resolved, puzzles that dated from the time of my own birth and my christening. I had outgrown those puzzles, I thought. I had put them behind me. My uncle Steenie brought them rushing back.

  Such a whirl of words and images: Uncle Steenie might speak of croquet one minute, comets the next. He spoke often of the Winterscombe woods—a subject to which he would return with increasing and incomprehensible emphasis. He also spoke—and then I was almost sure it was the morphine—of violent death.

  I think Wexton, who witnessed some of this, understood it better than I did, but he explained nothing. He remained quiet, resilient, reticent—waiting for death.

  There were two days of serenity and lucidity before it came, days in which Steenie gathered himself, I thought, for the final assault. Then he died, as I say, with a merciful speed. Wexton said Steenie willed himself away, and I thought: my uncle was indomitable, I loved him, and Wexton was right.

  So—would you describe that as easy? I looked at Vickers, then avoided his eyes. I felt that Steenie, trying to stage-manage his farewell performance, would have wanted me to emphasize its bravura aspects.