At the End of the Century

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Frances was silent; she drew in her lips. ‘Don’t ever think you have to save mine.’

  After a moment of surprise, ‘Of course not!’ Brigitte said. ‘Why should I think that? Why should anyone?’ But in her heart she thought, yours most of all. A rush of love and pity filled her, and she kissed her sister.

  There was a very brief knock – for courtesy, not permission – and then Shoki came in. It was exactly the time he appeared every day. Wherever he might have been all night and this morning, now he was fresh, rested, smiling and terribly pleased to meet Brigitte’s sister. As for Frances, whatever prejudice she might have had was entirely swept away: it was as if she herself was swept clean of all negative thinking. If she had come to assess the situation, she would have to start all over again with entirely different premises.

  How to explain anything to Marshall? He had never in all their life together been so attentive with phone calls; and never had she been so negligent in return. It was the first time she had actually enjoyed Los Angeles. Before, on her visits to Brigitte, she had disliked being here, and so had Marshall, though he had insisted on coming with her. Everyone they met – the actors, agents, producers, publicists – appeared to them to be social flotsam. The town itself was flotsam, its houses ready to be razed as quickly as they had been put up, or collapsing into the earth quaking beneath them. But now that she was having fun with Brigitte and Shoki, all that was changed for Frances.

  Shoki had accepted Frances completely. He loved the idea of family, and a sister was something almost sacred to him. With the intimacy that came so naturally to him, he at once adopted Frances and became the only other person besides Brigitte to call her Frankie. ‘Doesn’t Frankie look marvellous?’ he would say about some new outfit. Between them, he and Brigitte had decided to change Frances’ style; and although Brigitte herself loved brilliant orange and purples, for Frances they chose discreet and lighter colours, with a hint of California playfulness. Accompanying them to a boutique, Shoki sat outside the dressing rooms chatting up the salesgirls; and when Frances emerged, he said, very thrilled, ‘It suits you.’ Then the years dropped away from Frances.

  She confided to Brigitte that, with Shoki, it was like being with another sister – though at the same time he was so manly, in the best way. Unlike other men, he was not hard and insensitive but the opposite. ‘He must have grown up with a lot of sisters,’ she guessed, ‘that’s how he knows about women, what we have to put up with.’

  Brigitte agreed, but she too was guessing. Although Shoki had a high regard for the notion of family, he hardly ever mentioned his own. When he did, it was with a wistful, almost sad air. They speculated with each other – perhaps he was too homesick, perhaps the subject was too sacred for him. But Ralph said it was because he was too damn secretive.

  Ralph – for Frances he had become as disturbing an element as was Marshall with his constant phone calls. Ralph often turned up in one of the restaurants where they had booked a table for three. ‘May I?’ Ralph said, having already drawn out a chair for himself. He knew a lot of people there and sometimes he took Shoki away to introduce him to a useful contact. This was very irritating to Frances – ‘Shoki is with us,’ she complained. But Ralph was dissatisfied too, as if it wasn’t enough for him to be professionally useful to Shoki. Shoki was always as nice to him as he was to the two sisters, and seemed anxious that all of them should be comfortable and happy with one another. But Ralph rarely was. He talked too much, telling some insider anecdote that made him laugh or sneer. He became brittle, malicious, assuming a role that perhaps belonged to his profession but was not in his nature. Sooner or later, and sometimes before he had even finished laughing at his anecdote, he became gloomy and was silent. When Shoki tried to cheer him up, Ralph brushed this good-natured attempt aside. Instead he said something that the two sisters could not and Shoki perhaps would not hear. Then all three avoided looking at Ralph, the way a squeamish person avoids looking at someone in pain.

  Marshall asked questions over the telephone. ‘So what’s he like – the little friend? The lover?’

  ‘There’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Come on.’

  There was always some threat in his attitude to her that prevented Frances from holding out when he wanted something. ‘He’s only a boy, Marshall.’

  ‘A substitute son? I knew she’d pick one up sooner or later . . . What about you?’

  ‘I have a son,’ Frances said with dignity. Marshall hadn’t spoken to their son for two years, and gritted his teeth when he had to write out cheques for him and his dependants from various relationships.

  In a thoroughly bad mood now, Marshall told her: ‘Just get yourself back here. I don’t want you hanging around there. In that atmosphere.’

  Atmosphere! Frances thought to herself. What about the home, the heavy, empty, costly apartment he wanted her to come back to and live in with him? And as if guessing the new desire arising in her heart, that same day Shoki suggested: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you stayed with us?’ He turned to Brigitte: ‘Wouldn’t it?’

  Brigitte said, ‘Frankie’s husband really needs her. They’ve been married for – how many years is it, Frankie?’

  ‘Thirty-two,’ Frances said, and Shoki made a gallant joke: ‘I don’t believe it. You’re not a day over thirty-two yourself.’

  ‘My son is thirty. And Gilberte, my daughter, is twenty-eight. They’re both married. And divorced.’

  Brigitte said, ‘He twice, and now he’s in Hong Kong with another girlfriend. And Gilberte? We don’t know about Gilberte. The last time we heard she was in Buenos Aires, and that was almost six months ago. So at least she doesn’t need money – unlike her brother who needs lots. He even comes to me for it.’

  ‘I wish he wouldn’t,’ Frances said, speaking as freely before Shoki as when she and her sister were alone.

  Brigitte laughed. ‘He knows I’m loaded.’

  ‘This is the family today,’ Shoki commented. But although they waited, he still did not speak about his own family. Instead he said, ‘That is why everyone is making their own arrangements.’

  As though aware of this subversive conversation, Marshall arrived the next day. He had taken an early flight and went straight to his wife’s suite in the hotel. Brigitte and Shoki had started on their room service orders – neither of them could ever wait for meals; that day it was not Frances who joined them but Marshall. ‘What a surprise,’ Brigitte said, calmly continuing to eat her croissant. But Shoki leaped to his feet, in deference to an older man. He appeared flustered, not emotionally but socially, like a hostess with an extra guest. ‘Should we send for more coffee?’ He lifted the lid to peer in. ‘Frankie needs at least three cups.’

  Marshall’s eyebrows went right up. ‘Frankie?’ Then they went down again. ‘Frances has a headache.’

  ‘Then there’s enough.’ Shoki was already pouring for Marshall. ‘But Brigitte has finished the entire breadbasket. So greedy.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Brigitte said. ‘Marshall has to watch his weight.’

  Marshall was certainly a weighty man. This was never so obvious at home in New York, or in his office, or at his club lunches with other weighty men. But here in Brigitte’s hotel suite, where the furniture was gilded and frail and the flowers seemed to float without support of vases in a cloud of petals, Marshall in his thick business suit imposed a heavy burden.

  He didn’t consider Shoki worth addressing, so it was Brigitte he asked: ‘Is he an actor?’

  Of course Brigitte knew that to identify anyone as a possible actor was, in Marshall’s view and intention, to insult him. Shoki, however, answered as though he had been paid a compliment, and it was regretfully that he admitted he wasn’t – although, he added, he had done some acting in college. ‘What college?’ Marshall said, asking an idle question to which no adequate answer was expected. Anyway, Shoki apparently didn’t hear, he went straight on – ‘Just smaller roles in stu
dent productions, but the experience was very helpful to me as a writer.’

  ‘You’re a writer?’ Marshall spoke like one picking up an unattractive insect between pincers.

  Shoki began to bubble over with enthusiasm. He spoke of his screenplay, which his agent was placing for him – at the moment it was with Fox, who were showing interest. Of course it was a difficult subject, he confided to Marshall, partly symbolic and partly historical. The history reflected contemporary events so it was very topical, though one did have to know something of India’s past as well as of her not always perfect present. Marshall consulted his watch and shifted his big thighs where he sat. He tried to catch Brigitte’s eye, the way he always did, had done through all their past together, to communicate the fact that he desired her and wished to be alone with her. Shoki appeared completely oblivious of this tension – he carried on expounding his story as though Marshall’s sole intention in travelling to Los Angeles was to listen to it.

  But sooner or later, Brigitte knew, Marshall would create the opportunity of being alone with her. He might give the impression of being unwieldy, but he was also subtle, at least in mental calculation. By next morning he had discovered the arrangement that his wife and sister-in-law had made with Shoki for their morning meal together. By the time Frances woke up, he was fully dressed and on the point of going out.

  ‘I need fresh air,’ he told her. ‘A stroll by the ocean.’ He didn’t usually tell her his plans, so she didn’t think it worth mentioning how far they actually were from the ocean. ‘How’s your headache?’ he said. ‘You had a headache. You’d better stay in bed and rest.’

  ‘Who is he anyway? Your little friend?’ was his first question to Brigitte. After opening the door to him, she had gone back to bed and he sat by the side of it, the vast hotel bed with the padded satin backrest.

  ‘He’s a prince. From one of those old Indian princely families. What do they call them? Maharajas.’ She had only just thought of this but it made sense.

  ‘Yes, and look at you: a Maharani.’

  She did look royal, leaning against her pillows, one side of her silken nightie slipped down from her broad shoulder – divine even, a goddess emerging out of a flood of rumpled shiny satin sheets. He murmured to her in a voice that had gone thick, so that she knew soon he would be climbing in next to her, and she would let him. It had happened before in their many years together as in-laws, and the only thing surprising to her was that it should still be happening.

  ‘Frankie will be here any minute,’ she said afterwards to Marshall, who showed every indication of staying right where he was next to her.

  ‘My wife has a headache and I advised her to rest.’ But he was good-natured about letting her push him out of bed and smirked a bit as he climbed back into his trousers.

  Then he became practical. He said he wanted her to return with them to New York – why wait? Everything was ready for her arrival.

  ‘Oh, you bought it, did you? The apartment Frankie was talking about?’

  ‘You don’t need an apartment. We have one. It’s enormous. It’s big. Much too big for just two people now that the kids are – where are they?’

  ‘In Hong Kong.’

  ‘Yes, and Buenos Aires. What are Frances and I supposed to do rattling around by ourselves in a place that size? It’s ridiculous.’ He frowned at the impracticality of it, and she laughed at his impudence.

  ‘So you and I would be like this every day of our lives from now on?’

  ‘It makes perfect sense. We shouldn’t be wasting time, having to commute from one apartment to another, secret rendezvous and all that nonsense.’ He spoke with the decision of a man of business, the chairman of the board. She smiled a bit, but she said, ‘You really have to leave now.’

  He took his time about it, strolled around the suite, stood at a window to frown at the city of Los Angeles and its giant billboards. ‘I don’t know how you can live in a place like this. No climate. No history.’

  ‘I didn’t know you cared about history.’

  ‘Only my own. Grandmothers, and so on. Great-grandmothers. New York.’

  ‘What about Poland and Russia?’

  ‘That’s too far back. By the way, I saw him this morning – your princely friend.’

  ‘He has a room in the hotel.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have spent the night in it. I’m just guessing of course – but he looked like someone sneaking in after a night on the tiles.’

  ‘What would you know about tiles, Marshall?’

  ‘Nothing. And I won’t have to, if we make this arrangement I mentioned to you. No sneaking out, or back in.’

  On his third and last evening in Los Angeles, Marshall hired a limousine to take his two ladies to dinner. The restaurant he had chosen was one known to other East Coast bankers and to West Coast attorneys from old established family firms. It was very different from the ones Brigitte usually went to, but she didn’t mind; it was Frances who said, ‘Why do we have to come here? We might as well have stayed in New York.’

  Brigitte was surprised; she had never heard a note of rebellion from Frances in the face of any decision made by Marshall. And what was also surprising was that Marshall did not wither her with one of his looks but concentrated on reading the menu.

  ‘Don’t you hate it?’ Frances asked her sister. ‘I hate it.’ She was actually sulking, and still Marshall continued to read the menu.

  The restaurant was a fantasy of an opulent New York eating place recreated by earlier settlers in the Californian desert. It was dark with antique lamps throwing insufficient light, and thick carpets and velvet drapes shutting out the rest of it. There was a buffet table overloaded with silver dishes and with giant fruits and flowers that appeared to be a replica of those in the varnished still lifes on the walls.

  ‘Lobster,’ Marshall said, returning the menu to the waiter. This waiter was no out-of-work actor but an elderly professional, Italian or Swiss, who had been with the restaurant for over forty years and would soon be mourning its closing. He hovered over Frances, who was unable to make a choice of dishes, but when Marshall said, ‘You could have the lobster too,’ she quickly ordered a green salad with a light dressing.

  ‘You know what?’ she said to Brigitte. ‘He’s let that apartment go. And it would have been so perfect for you! Now where are you supposed to live in New York? In another hotel? Then you might as well stay in Beverly Hills – I should think you’d want to stay here. My goodness, who wouldn’t. And I don’t suppose it’s occurred to anyone that I’d like to be near my sister. That I’m sick of having her live at the opposite end of the world.’

  ‘Not the world, darling,’ Brigitte said. ‘Just the country.’

  ‘Frances has always been a dunce in geography,’ Marshall said. He tried to sound playful but was too saturnine. He had tucked his table napkin under his chin and was expertly excavating the meat from a lobster claw. He ate and drank the way he had done throughout his life and would continue till he could do so no more. It was natural for a man like him to be companioned by a handsome woman, even by two of them.

  These two were no longer discussing the pros and cons of living in New York or Los Angeles but whether Shoki was a prince. Brigitte had raised the question, and Frances had taken it up with such pleasure that Marshall felt he had at once to squash it. He said, ‘They don’t have princes any more. They’ve been abolished. They’re all democratic now, whatever that might mean. And they’re all poor. No more jewels and elephants.’

  ‘Money’s got nothing to do with it,’ Frances said. ‘Anyone can have money. Anyone. But look at the graceful way he moves.’

  ‘And the delicate way he eats.’

  Marshall wiped the butter from his chin. He said, ‘It’s time I took you two back to New York.’

  ‘I found a lovely apartment for Brigitte and you let it go.’

  Brigitte felt Marshall nudge her knee under the table. She was used
to this gesture from him, though today it was another kind of plea. She denied it in her usual way, by moving her knee out of his reach. But she said, ‘Why don’t you tell her your grand plan?’

  ‘It’s simple common sense,’ Marshall said, losing no ounce of authority. ‘Our apartment is big enough for ten people, let alone three.’

  After a moment of shock, ‘You’re completely insane,’ Frances told him. She turned on her sister. ‘And you listened to him? You sat and listened and didn’t say a word to me?’

  She pushed back her chair, rushed from the table. No one looked up from their plates; even when she stumbled against their chairs, the diners carried on dining. The waiters too kept their eyes lowered, so did the maitre d’ while guiding her towards the ladies’ room, where he opened and held the door for her.

  ‘Ah, the pièce de résistance,’ Marshall said as their waiter came towards them bearing the chocolate soufflé. The critical moment of its departure from the oven had now been reached and it rose above its dish in a splendidly browned dome.

  Brigitte said, ‘You are a fool, Marshall.’

  ‘Today is not my lucky day,’ Marshall said. ‘She calls me crazy, you call me a fool. Why fool? How fool? She’s always telling me how she misses you, and you I guess miss her. Sisters, after all . . . I wonder how they get it to this consistency; I suppose that’s why it has to be ordered in advance.’

  Brigitte too was enjoying every bit of the soufflé, but she said, ‘I’m going to see how she’s doing.’

  ‘Explain it to her – how it’s best for everyone.’

  ‘Best for you.’ Under the table she moved her knee further away. ‘I’ll explain that to her; after all these years maybe she ought to know.’

  ‘Did you ever tell Louis?’

  ‘Tell on you? He’d have laughed. He knew how I wouldn’t give you the time of day.’

  ‘Sometimes you give it to me. The time of day.’ Over the table his lips curved in a smile; under it his knee went in pursuit of hers.