For this I had no answer.
Chapter 4
The white house, with its four-sided, steeply slanting roof of blue tiles, rose high above us as we climbed the narrow flight of steps from the road. At the top we followed a paved walk toward the entrance at the side rear. Many of these houses, Gunnar said, had entrances toward the back like this. It was a plan that freed the front of the house for windows and garden doors, all of which let in the light.
While I stood looking about, he climbed the few steps and rang the doorbell. A garden apparently surrounded the house, restrained by a white picket fence on two sides, with the tall supporting wall that rose from the street running across the front. The rear yard ran straight up the hill at a steep angle to end at a neighbor’s wire fence above. All about Laura’s house other houses were set at odd angles to suit the curving of the hillside and the roads that sectioned it into various levels.
Laura herself came promptly to the door at his ring, and opened it in welcome. She wore a flowing, floor-length gown of Burgundy velvet that was too wide in the shoulders and belonged to another day, yet was ageless in its ability to enhance and flatter. I wondered if it was a Paquin or a Chanel. There were gold beads at her throat, and gold earrings dripping from her earlobes. Her makeup had been tenderly cared for, and her darkened lashes were her own, and as long as I remembered them from her portrait. I suspected that she had dressed for me, and she looked thoroughly the movie star.
For Gunnar she had an affectionate embrace—as though she had not seen him for a long while, and to me she gave her hand in gracious welcome. I knew at once that Miles Fletcher had not returned, and that no one had told her anything about me.
On the screen she had never been nervously animated, but always vitally alive, and this was the manner she wore now as she drew us into the dim anteroom that was the inner hall of the house. It was a small square room, with doors opening on all sides, and narrow turning stairs running upward at my right. The walls were of natural wood that added to the gloom, for all that a lamp burned on a table near the foot of the stairs. Somehow I felt a secretiveness about the house, contributed to by shadowy doorways and dark stairs.
A sound on the stairway caught my ear and I looked up to see Donia Jaffe, Miles’s sister, again wearing the green slacks and bright sweater I’d seen her in yesterday. She was small, with eyes that were too big for the delicate oval of her face. She wore her hair in a boyish cut that left its streaks of grey plainly showing in the brown. When she saw me looking up at her, she ran quickly down the remaining steps and pushed past Irene Varos, who hovered in the background.
Laura saw her and introduced me as Miss Thomas, with an apparent reluctance to draw the little woman into the scene.
Donia Jaffe held out her hand and murmured, “Miss Thomas,” politely, but her huge dark eyes told me slyly that she knew better, though for the moment she would hold her peace.
“Irene, will you take care of Miss Thomas’s bag?” Laura said over her shoulder, and Miss Varos came forward to take the bag from Gunnar’s hand. She disappeared with it into a room at the rear, while Laura led me through double doors to a long room that ran across the front of the house.
This was a spacious living room, with doors opening into the garden at the front, and many windows to entice the light. The walls had been painted an off-white, but the gloomy woodwork remained, and overhead the ceiling was timbered with dark wood. Much of the furniture was massive and dark and deeply carved. There was a use of brown leather and brass nails that reminded one of Spain, though I learned this was native Norwegian work.
At one end of the room was a section set slightly apart in a sort of alcove. Gunnar, noting the direction of my gaze, explained that these houses always had a “gentlemen’s room,” where the master used to retire to smoke and talk with his friends.
At this end of the room, above a brown-upholstered sofa, the wall was hung with oil paintings, frame touching frame, most of them old. The backgrounds were predominantly gloomy—dark forests and bristling black mountains, stark winter scenes, storms at sea, animals at bay.
Laura waved a hand at the paintings. “There you have the somber Norwegian character—hardy in dealing with the elements, and with a tendency toward melancholy. I’m thankful this was tempered in me by my American father with his English descent.”
“That gloomy picture Miss Worth has painted isn’t the whole Norwegian, by any means,” Gunnar put in. “You’ll find we have a lighter side as well.”
Laura smiled at him fondly, and went on with her tour of the room. “I have left everything as it was except for a few possessions of my own. My mother’s family built this house. It’s not terribly old, but it belongs to a special time, and I treasure it.”
Donia Jaffe stood back while Laura conducted me about, as if she preferred to watch rather than to join in. Irene had disposed of my bag and stood in the doorway, her eyes not upon Laura, but following Donia’s movements with no liking in them. She scarcely troubled to hide her distrust of Miles’s sister.
Laura seemed oblivious to the tension of others, though it was quickly clear that this was not a contented household. With her Burgundy velvet flowing in lines of grace, she went past the grand piano on which delicate French porcelains had been set, and called me to admire the corner fireplace that was typically Norwegian. Its porcelain front had been rounded in form to fill the corner, and at the back of the hearth was a cast-iron shell with a bas-relief scene of three goats and a troll. When flames were leaping, I could imagine that these figures from an old folktale would come to life.
“I must show you everything,” Laura said. “All of this is a part of what made me—a part of Laura Worth.” She seemed to fill the room with a glowing vitality that denied the pale apathy I had seen yesterday.
“But you didn’t grow up here,” I said. “So how can you feel that this is part of you?” I might have added that I did not feel it was any part of me.
She turned to face me, her eyes warm with happy memory. “My mother sometimes brought me home to visit when I was a child. It was always a delight to come to Norway—Bergen—this house. And of course she returned to it herself to live here later. Look—I must show you something else.”
As she swept past Gunnar, the full skirt of her gown brushing him, he reached out to catch her gently by the arm. “Quietly, Laura—quietly! Irene is already frowning at me for causing all this. You must not burn yourself out in a blaze of energy. Miss Thomas will be here for as long as you wish.”
But she would be not be stilled. The very lines of her face had lifted and the pleased excitement of a child looked out of her eyes. I watched her uneasily and knew it was wise of Gunnar to try to quiet her. Irene, as he said, looked as though she too wanted to interfere.
From the piano Laura took a framed picture and held it out to me. “It is of Norway’s King Haakon—you must look at it!”
The king was in full uniform—a fine and dignified figure. He had signed his name across one corner of the photograph. There was another name above it—Laura’s family name on her mother’s side. My grandmother’s name—Thrane.
“This was signed for my uncle, Einar Thrane,” Laura said. “When the Germans invaded Norway, my uncle helped to hide the king in the forests near what was then our country home. He helped to save him, and the king never forgot.”
She set the picture proudly back upon the piano and turned to Gunnar. “You were a child during the war but you must remember something of that time in Norway. Your father was involved, wasn’t he?”
“I was eleven when the war ended,” Gunnar said. “I remember a great deal. Yes, my father worked with the underground. My greatest regret at the time was that I could not be of adult use.”
“Norway was a brave, small country,” said Laura warmly. “I love all the stories of her courage.”
She moved on, her Burgundy satin slippers stepping lightly across the rug that was clearly Norwegian craftwork—a rust design on beige
, with a wide, rust-colored border.
“Enough of the room—you must admire my view!” she cried.
I had been stealing glimpses of the view as I followed her lead, and now I went to stand beside her at the wide window. We were, I discovered, of nearly the same height. She wore a fragrance that spoke of Paris, and it seemed to drift from her softly waved brown hair, from her gown as she moved, from her hands as she gestured toward the window. I did not any longer question her fascination or her charm. But I was not the right person to respond as she wished.
We could look out over the town of Bergen, with its lakes and indentations of deep bays, its buildings and bridges and mountains. The great long mountain on the far side of town wore snow well down from the peak and below it red-roofed buildings clustered. Laura turned from me to draw Gunnar to her other side, and he came readily as she slipped her arm through his.
“Our city is beautiful, isn’t it, Gunnar? One of the most beautiful in Europe.” She glanced up with a flicker of dark lashes, and he returned her look with an affection laced by a trace of tolerant amusement. She loved to coquette with him, and he responded gravely, playing his role well.
She doesn’t know she’s old, I thought, faintly contemptuous. And he doesn’t seem to know it either.
Then I was aware that his look had shifted to me, and I knew his meaning. It was as if he had said, “You cannot go on fooling her. You will have to tell her soon.” He had less tolerance for me than for Laura.
I stepped back from the view. “All of this is lovely and interesting, but it’s Laura Worth I’ve come to see. When may we begin to talk?”
She came with me away from the window.
“You’re afraid I’ll change my mind, aren’t you? But I shan’t. I haven’t talked to anyone for years about those days in California, and I’m eager to begin. You will have to listen to me for a long while, once I start.”
Her glance moved past me toward the two women who lingered near the door, and I sensed a certain defiance in her words, as if she expected some attempt to stop her. Neither woman spoke, and Laura put her hand on my arm.
“First, I must show you the room where you are to stay while you visit me. Gunnar, have you guessed where I will put her?”
There was no halting this woman on her course. She was like a ship of her own Vikings. She swept past the two women who watched her from the doorway—Irene gloomy with foreboding, but alert, ready to reach Laura’s side at the slightest sign of faltering; Donia, her eyes bright with something like malice, as if she awaited with interest an inevitable collapse.
Gunnar came with me in Laura’s wake. “Be gentle with her.” He spoke softly, but almost severely. “She needs you more than she knows.”
I said nothing. I would not meet his eyes, and I could sense his doubt and mistrust of me.
Laura crossed the inner hallway and stepped to a door at the rear. As I followed her, I had a glimpse on my right of a long, elegant dining room, with glass doors beyond that gave upon a terrace. Then Laura had flung open a door upon a room that stood momentarily in deep gloom. As she flicked a switch an overhead lamp with a Tiffany shade came on, and the room flashed to subdued life. She stepped to its center, her arms outstretched as if she engulfed the very walls, and drew to her with pride and love all that the room contained.
I stood riveted in the doorway and looked about me with a sense of growing fascination and not a little alarm. Alarm because everything here spoke to me emotionally. The room was furnished, in the sense that it possessed a sofa, a low coffee table, and a chair or two, but these things floated upon a sea of what, by this time, were probably museum items. There were dress forms on which gowns from Laura’s past successes were lovingly fitted. There were props that I remembered—a vase that had been featured in one of her pictures, an Empress Eugénie hat tossed upon the sofa. Piled on a long table were scrapbooks, and on the walls were hung endless photographs. There were still scenes from various movies, and picture after picture of Laura Worth as this character or that. Gunnar stood beside me, his fingers pressing my arm in warning, though he said nothing.
Laura dropped her arms to her sides and turned to face me, and I saw tears glistening in her eyes.
“I haven’t entered this room for a long time,” she told me. “I couldn’t bear to look at any of these things. I’ve considered having them all packed up and taken away—burned, destroyed, anything! Anything so that I would never have to see them again and remember the past. Miles thinks this is what I must do. He feels that it’s morbid to cling to all this, when I’ve turned my back on that world so long ago.”
“My brother is right,” Donia Jaffe said, and there was a slight edge to her voice that grated like metal.
“Perhaps”—Gunnar spoke softly—“there may be a healthy medium between a total ignoring of a part of one’s life, a pretense that it has never been, and an angry preoccupation with it because it exists too sharply in memory. There is—acceptance.”
Laura seemed to droop a little under his eyes. The exultation that had filled her faded, but she made an effort and walked to a dressing table that stood against one wall. She did not answer Gunnar as her fingers moved to the makeup mirror with its circle of tinted bulbs.
“This was the very makeup table I used in my dressing room on the lot,” she said. “Imagine what this glass has reflected! I don’t want to look into it any more.”
“If you looked into it,” Gunnar said, “—that is, if you looked into it honestly, you would see a lady of great beauty and courage who has long ago outgrown the pretty girl who once used it.”
Tears swam in her eyes and her lips quivered, but she did not bend to look into the mirror.
I did not want to watch her, and I let my fascination with the room win over my alarm as I moved about.
“If you intend to let me stay here while I visit you, nothing could be more wonderful,” I said. “There’s so much here that I can write about. So much of Laura Worth!”
In her volatile way, Laura brightened and blinked the tears away, but she had tired visibly.
“You can look at all this later,” she said. “Come upstairs with me now. I’ll take you to my room where we can be alone. Gunnar, thank you for bringing this child to me. I’ll say good-bye now. But I hope to see you again soon.”
He took her hand and bowed over it gravely, formally. “I hope you will not be sorry because I have brought her here.” His eyes sought mine for a moment and there was a clear, stern demand in them.
I met it smiling. “I have a great deal to discuss with Miss Worth.”
He gave me a slight nod of the head. “This will be your opportunity. If you need me again, you have only to call.”
I knew what he meant. When I had told Laura Worth what I had to tell her, I might not be staying in this house after all. And that would be too bad, I thought, with another quick glance around the room before I followed Laura back to the hall. The writer in me was eager to absorb all I could.
Donia seemed to fade out of sight as Laura saw Gunnar to the door, but Irene Varos stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting, as though she did not mean to leave Laura alone with me, if she could help it. Laura settled the matter.
“Please see that no one disturbs us, Irene. Miss Thomas and I must begin.” She held out her hand to me. “Come—we’ll go up to my room where we can be alone. Have you your notebook, or whatever you need?”
“I have what I need,” I said, and followed her up the narrow, turning stairway.
The bare wooden staircase had been built against one wall, so that it took up as little space as possible. Its curving, wedged steps and turning rail were polished and decorative, but Norwegian stairs were apparently not meant to deal grandly with space. The steps opened at the top upon an inner hall, like the one below, with doors on all sides. A hanging light fixture illumined the space, and there were Norwegian rugs on the floor, and woven hangings on the walls.
Laura led the way to the open door of a lar
ge front room that ran part way across the front of the house. Here the old-fashioned divided windows had been replaced with a modern picture window that framed the tremendous view. Glass doors opened upon a balcony where one could sit in the sun. The sloping ceiling slanted down on one side to a dormer, and in the alcove formed by the slope of the roof Laura’s double bed had been set. Here all dark woodwork had been banished and the room was done in soft cream and beiges, with bold accents of wine color. The furniture was modern and probably Swedish, light wood, upholstered in a design of beige and green and wine. Laura’s Burgundy gown gave the room heart and focus, and one knew she had planned it that way.
However, there was nothing in this room to remind one of Laura Worth, the actress. This setting had been planned for a beautiful woman, with no thought of the past. On a table stood a photograph of Dr. Miles Fletcher in a silver frame. There were no other photos in the room, but over the chaise longue hung a painting of a ship in distress on a stormy sea. Above its masts the sky was aboil with storm clouds, and dark waves edged with spume leaped against its fragile sides. Dimly seen in the background was a black and rocky coastline. Yet this painting had the touch of more modern execution than those I had seen downstairs.
“More of Norway?” I said. “It’s a stunning picture, but how can you live with it?”
“Live with terror, do you mean? Ah, but this is Norway. The ship will win. I like the picture because it speaks of unquenchable courage. You know, the rest of Scandinavia regards the Norwegians as country cousins, but we are the adventurous ones, the bold ones. The Swedes are too proper, and the Danes too commercial. Not that the Bergensere haven’t done well on the score of commerce.” Where, a few moments ago, she had mentioned her English heritage, now she was identifying with the Norwegians.
Listen for the Whisperer Page 7