Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  Avoid those episodes in the wings. Be careful.

  “He … kept up appearances,” I said.

  This seemed to please Vickers, or to relieve his guilt. He sighed.

  “Oh, good.”

  “He was in bed, of course. In his room at Winterscombe. You remember that room….”

  “Dah-ling, who could forget it? Quite preposterous. His father would have had a fit.”

  “He wore his silk pajamas. Lavender ones, on the days the doctors came—you know how he liked to shock—”

  Vickers smiled. “Makeup? Don’t tell me he kept up with that …”

  “Just a little. Quite discreet, for Steenie. He said … he said if he was going to shake hands with death, he intended to look his best—”

  “Don’t be upset. Steenie would have hated you to be upset.” Vickers sounded almost kind. “Tell me—it does help to talk, you know. I’ve learned that. One of the penalties of age: All one’s friends—at the party one minute, absent the next. Steenie and I were the same age, you know. Sixty-eight. Not that that’s old exactly, these days. Still …” He paused. “Did he talk about me at all, at the end?”

  “A bit,” I replied, deciding to forgive him the egotism. In fact Steenie had scarcely spoken of Vickers. I hesitated. “He liked to talk. He drank the Bollinger—I’d saved some. He smoked those terrible black Russian cigarettes. He read poems—”

  “Wexton’s poems?” Vickers had regarded Wexton as a rival. He made a face.

  “Mostly Wexton’s. And his letters—old ones, the ones he wrote to Steenie in the first war. All the old photograph albums … It was odd. The recent past didn’t interest him at all. He wanted to go further back. To his childhood, to Winterscombe the way it used to be. He talked a lot about my grandparents, and his brothers. My father, of course.” I paused. “And Constance.”

  “Ah, Constance. I suppose he would. Steenie always adored her. The rest of your family”—Vickers gave a small, slightly malicious smile—“I should have said they weren’t too frightfully keen. Your aunt Maud loathed her, of course, and your mother—well, I always heard she’d more or less banished her from Winterscombe. I never found out why. Quite a little mystery there, I always thought. Did Steenie mention that?”

  “No,” I replied, untruthfully, and if Vickers noticed the evasion he gave no sign. He poured more champagne. Something, the reference to Wexton perhaps, had ruffled him a little, I thought. Quite suddenly he seemed to tire of the subject of my uncle. He stood up and began to sift through the pile of photographs that lay on the table at his side.

  “Speaking of Constance, look at this! I came across it just the other day. I’d quite forgotten I ever took it. My earliest work. The first photograph I ever did of her—terribly posed, too artificial, dated, I suppose, but all the same, I might use it in the retrospective. It has something, don’t you think?” He held up a large black-and-white print. “Nineteen sixteen—which means I was sixteen, and so was Constance, though she subtracts the years now, of course. Look at this. Did you ever see this before? Doesn’t she look extraordinary?”

  I looked at the photograph. It was new to me, and Constance did indeed look extraordinary. It was, as Vickers said, highly artificial, very much in the fashion of its time and quite unlike his later work. The young Constance lay posed on what appeared to be a bier, draped in heavy white material, perhaps satin. Only her hands, which clasped a flower, and her head were visible; the rest of her body was wrapped and draped as if in a shroud. Her black hair, long then—I had never seen Constance with long hair—had been combed out and artfully arranged so that it fell in snaking tresses away from her face. Shocking in its luxuriance, as Vickers had no doubt intended, it brushed the floor. Constance lay in profile; a band of contrived light sharpened the strong planes of her face, so that her features, undeniably arresting even then, became a painterly composition, a pattern of light and dark. Black lashes made a crescent against a wide, high, almost Slavic cheekbone. Oddly, since her eyes (which were almost black) were Constance’s most famous feature, Vickers had chosen to photograph her with them shut.

  “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Vickers, who was recovering, gave a high, whinnying laugh. “That was what I called it. Well, one did things like that then. Constance on a bier, the Sitwells on biers—nothing but biers for a whole year, which went down terribly badly, of course, because it was the middle of the first war, and people said it was decadent. Useful, though, all that outrage.” He gave me a small glance. “It made me into an enfant terrible, always the best way to start. People forget I was ever that, now I’m a grand old man. So I thought I’d use this, in the exhibition, just to remind them. Oh, and her wedding photographs of course. They’re too divine.”

  He riffled through the pile of photographs. “Oh, they’re not here. They’re down at the museum, I think. But look at this—now this will interest you.”

  The photograph he held out was an informal one, the kind of picture Vickers used to call a “family snap.”

  I recognized it at once. It had been taken in Venice in 1956. Constance and a group of her friends stood by the Grand Canal; behind them you could just discern the buttress of a church—it was Santa Maria della Salute. An elegant group in pale summery clothes; it included the legendary Van Dynem twins, both now dead. A moment before the picture was taken, I remembered, there had been some horseplay between the twins with a panama hat.

  On the edge of the group, a little separated from them, were two younger figures. Caught in that golden Venetian light, with the shadows of the church just to their side: a tall, dark-haired man, his expression preoccupied, a man of striking appearance who might have been taken for an Italian but who was not, and a young woman at whom he was looking.

  She, too, was tall. Her figure was slender. She wore a greenish dress above bare legs, flat sandals. Her most striking feature was her hair, which she wore long and loose. It waved about her face; the Venetian light intensified its color to red-gold, or auburn. A strand of hair, blown across her face, obscured her features. She looked away from the camera and away from the dark-suited man. She looked, I thought, poised for flight—this young woman, who had once been myself.

  I had been twenty-five then, not quite twenty-six. I was not yet in love with the man standing next to me, but I had sensed, that day, a possibility of love. I did not want to look at this photograph, at the man, or at myself. I put it down without comment and turned back to Vickers.

  “Conrad,” I said. “Where is Constance?”

  He prevaricated. He twisted and turned. Yes, he had made some calls, just as he had promised, but—to his great surprise—had drawn a blank. No one seemed to know where Constance was—which was unusual, but surely no cause for alarm. Constance, he suggested, would pop up suddenly, just as she always did; after all, hadn’t she always been unpredictable?

  “One of Constance’s fugue states, isn’t that the term? You know how she likes to take off. There’s probably a man behind it somewhere.”

  He then showered me with suggestions. The apartment was closed up? How strange. Had I tried East Hampton? What, it was sold? He had had no idea…. He rushed away from that one very fast, leaving me quite sure he knew the house had been sold, for all the energy with which he denied it.

  “She’ll be in Europe,” he cried, as if the idea had just come to him. “Have you tried the Danieli, the Crillon? What about Molly Dorset or the Connaught?”

  When I explained that I had tried all these familiar ports of call, and others, Vickers gave a good impression of profound mystification.

  “Then I’m afraid I can’t help. You see, I haven’t set eyes on her, not for almost a year.” He paused, gave me an appraising look. “She’s been getting very strange, you know—almost reclusive. She doesn’t give parties anymore—hasn’t for ages. And if you invite her, well, you can never be sure she’ll turn up—”

  “Reclusive? Constance?”

  “Perhaps that’s the wrong word. Not reclusive exac
tly. But odd—definitely odd. Plotting something, I’d have said, the last time I met her. She had that rather gleeful, secretive look—you remember? I said to her, ‘Connie, I know that face. You’re up to something. You’re up to no good.’”

  “And what did she reply?”

  “She said I was wrong—for once. She laughed. Then she said she was taking a leaf from my book, embarking on her own retrospective. I didn’t believe her, of course. And I said so. I knew a man must be involved, and I asked her who it was. She didn’t tell me, naturally. She just sat there, smiling her Sphinx smile, while I played guessing games—”

  “No hints? That’s not like Constance.”

  “Not one. She said I’d find out in the end, and when I did, I’d be terribly surprised. That’s all.” Vickers hesitated. He looked at his watch. “Heavens! Is that the time? I’m afraid, in a minute, that I’ll have to rush—”

  “Conrad …”

  “Yes, dah-ling?”

  “Is Constance avoiding me? Is that it?”

  “Avoiding you?” He gave me a look (an unconvincing look) of injured surprise. “Why should you say that? Obviously, you quarreled—well, we all know that. And I must say I did hear some rather titillating rumors: a certain man’s name bandied about—you know how it is….” He gave me an arch smile. “But Constance never discusses that. And she always speaks most warmly of you. She loved your recent work. That red drawing room you did for Molly Dorset—she adored that—”

  In his efforts to convince me, he had made a lapse. I saw the realization in his eyes at once.

  “The Dorsets’ drawing room? That’s odd. I finished that room four months ago. It was the last work I did before Steenie was ill. I thought you said you hadn’t seen Constance for almost a year?”

  Vickers clapped a hand to his brow; a stagy gesture.

  “Heavens, what a muddler I am! It can’t have been the Dorsets’ then. It must have been some other room. Age, you know, dah-ling. Advancing senility. I do it all the time now: muddle names, dates, places—it’s a positive scourge. Now, you mustn’t be cross, but I’m going to have to shoo you away. I’m due down in the Village in half an hour—just a gathering of old friends, but you know how the traffic will be. The whole city quite clogged up with the most dreadful people—tourists, you know, car salesmen from Detroit, housewives from Idaho, grabbing every available cab….”

  He was steering me, a firm grip above the elbow, in the direction of the hall. There, the Japanese houseboy hovered. “Love you in that blue—too wonderful with the Titian hair,” he chirruped, and, since Vickers often used flattery to secure a quick escape, it was no surprise to find myself, a moment later, out on the sidewalk.

  I turned back, but Vickers, so famous for his charm in certain circles, had never been afraid to be rude.

  A white hand waved. The Japanese houseboy giggled. The aubergine door of the smart little town house shut in my face.

  I found that interesting: such a precipitate departure. I was then quite sure that Vickers, loyal to Constance if not to my uncle Steenie, had been lying.

  Before going to Conrad Vickers’s house, I had spent a disappointing and frustrating day, much of it on the telephone. The rest of the evening was similar. It had been a mistake to drink champagne, which left me with a thirst and renewed jet lag. It had been a mistake, also, to discuss with Vickers those three months I had spent with Steenie at Winterscombe. Above all, it had been a mistake to look at that Venetian photograph, to see myself as I used to be and was no longer.

  There were people I might have called, had I wanted company, but I did not. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to decide, I suppose, whether to continue my search or abandon it and return to England.

  I persuaded one of the windows in my hotel room to open. I stood there with the warm urban air on my face; I watched Manhattan. The transition hours, between day and night. I felt myself in transition, too, poised just this side of decisive change—and perhaps for that reason I became obstinate again. I would not be beaten this easily. I knew Constance was here; the sensation that she was close was more intense than it had been the day before. Come on, said her voice, if you want to find me.

  Before I went to bed I telephoned Betty Marpruder again. I telephoned three times. I checked with Directory Assistance. I checked there was no fault on the line. I dialed a fourth time. Still no reply. I found that very curious.

  Betty Marpruder—Miss Marpruder to everyone except Constance and me; we were allowed to call her Prudie—was quite unlike the other women Constance employed, since she was neither young nor decorative and no member of her family had ever adorned the Social Register.

  Constance, like many decorators, was careful to employ women—and men—whose accents, clothes, and demeanor would impress her clients. She did so with a certain scornful pragmatism—window-dressing, she called it—but she did so nonetheless. Miss Marpruder, therefore, with her chain-store necklaces, her jaunty mannerisms, her brightly colored slacks, her aging invalid mother, her defiant yet sad air of spinsterhood, was always confined to a back room. There, she ruled the roost: She supervised the books, she tyrannized the workshops on Constance’s behalf, she put the fear of God into manufacturers, and she never, under any circumstances, met the clients. Constance had always supplied the inspiration within the company, but it was Miss Marpruder, compensating for Constance’s undeniable capriciousness, who did all the practical work.

  In return for this, she had been granted certain favors; I was sure she would enjoy them still. Chief of these was that knowledge of hers of Constance’s whereabouts. Miss Marpruder alone would be given the address of the villa or the number of the hotel suite; she would be entrusted with the details of the flights. She was given these privileged pieces of information because Constance knew how jealously she guarded them; Miss Marpruder, a worshipper at Constance’s temple, was also Constance’s high priestess.

  In any decorating business there are constant crises; people relish them. In Constance’s workplace they happened daily. Her clients were very rich; their riches made them whimsical. Costly material, a year on order, would arrive and fail to please. Rooms, hand-lacquered with sixteen coats of paint, would be completed and would disappoint. A drama would ensue. Assistants would scurry back and forth. Telephones would shrill. Clients would insist, demand, to speak with Constance, no one else.

  In the midst of this melee, secure in her little back room, Miss Marpruder would wait. No, Miss Shawcross could not be contacted; no, she was not available; no, she would not telephone Venice or Paris or London or the airline—not just yet.

  “Prudie has a perfect nose,” Constance would crow. “When it comes to crises, she’s a Supreme Court judge.”

  I listened to Miss Marpruder’s telephone. I could see it quite clearly, this instrument, as I listened to it ring. I could see the lace mat on which it stood, the rickety table beneath, all the details of that sad room which Prudie, in her jaunty way, liked to refer to as her bachelor den.

  I was parked with Prudie often as a child. She would take me down to Thirty-second Street, bring me through to say hello to her invalid mother, install me in her small sitting room, bring me little treats—homemade cookies, glasses of real lemonade. Prudie would have liked children of her own, I think.

  Her sitting room was garish and brave. It had an air of scrimping, of insufficient money stretched to the limit by medical bills. There was a defiant couch, in an unhappy shade of red, draped with a shawl in a manner designed to imitate Constance’s expensive, throwaway techniques. In Constance’s rooms the shawl would have been a cashmere throw or an antique Paisley; in Miss Marpruder’s it was Taiwanese silk.

  She was exploited by Constance. When had I first understood that? To be loyal and indispensable, yet not to be well paid—or even adequately paid. How old was I when I first saw that as wrong? Whatever the age I was when liking fused with pity, it must have been in that small sitting room of Prudie’s that my doubts about my godmother began.
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  There was the telephone, still ringing; there was its little lace doily, which Constance would have shuddered to see. It had been made for Miss Marpruder by her mother. Whenever she used the telephone she would smooth it into place.

  “I love nice things,” she said to me once, and I must have been in my teens, because her tone had made my heart ache. “Cushions, mats, doilies—it’s the little touches that count, Victoria. Your godmother taught me that.”

  The memory made me angry. I went to sleep disliking Constance, rehearsing to myself the damage she did. But when I slept, I dreamed, and in my dreams my godmother came to me in a different guise. I woke to a sense of my own disloyalty. There had been reasons to love Constance, once.

  A new direction to this search. I rose, showered, dressed. It was still very early. I telephoned Miss Marpruder one more time, and when there was no reply, impatient with the confinement of the room, I went outside to the heat of the streets. Brilliant light and clammy air. I hailed a cab. I think I decided where to go only when I climbed into it. I gave the driver the address.

  “Queens?” Signs of reluctance, possibly resentment.

  “Yes, Queens. Take the Triborough. Then I’ll direct you.”

  “Green Lawns?”

  “That’s the place.”

  “Some kinda house?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a pet cemetery.”

  It was years since I had been there, and it took some time to find Bertie’s grave. I walked past neat white tombstones, memorials to dogs, cats, and, in one case, a mouse.

  ABSENT THEE FROM FELICITY A WHILE, it read. I turned, and almost fell over Bertie’s iceberg.

  There it was, just as I remembered: a grieving caprice on Constance’s part, an attempt to re-create, at Bertie’s final resting place, the landscape Constance saw as his ancestry. Bertie was a Newfoundland dog; Constance’s knowledge of Newfoundland itself was poetic, also vague. Bertie dreamed of icebergs, she used to say; let an iceberg mark the place.