Forbes said, "So you were with Daisy for five years, weren’t you, till you got married? And then you left London. Why was that?"
"My husband didn’t like snow in the winter," I said.
"And then you went where?"
I said, "First, six months in the south of Spain. Then two months in London. Then—oh, twice—summers in Salzburg, then twice in Lugano, six months each time. Once we took a house in Lausanne. Then three winters in Bordighera."
"And Portugal," he added. "You told me this—the English lawyer in Lisbon, last will and testament."
I said, "Yes, that was when we were in Estoril. There we stayed longest, because there is no snow and lots of servants."
"And you were always renting places—you never did own a house, did you?"
I did not reply.
He said, "So much shifting about, why was that?"
I said, "Because my husband didn’t work. He gave up work before I met him."
"Even if he didn’t work, why didn’t he settle down?"
"I don’t know."
He said, "Look, you were talking so charmingly a few minutes ago about Daisy, and the loo with the stone cat on the roof, and Caroline being in stitches, and Mr. Smith who was devoted to his face. And as soon as we get to your husband you dry up. Why is this?"
I did not reply.
He said, "Look, I want to get to the bottom of this." His voice, lower than before, had lost its smiling indulgence.
I drew a sharp breath to stifle the sob that was rising in my throat. I had now been with Forbes for less than half an hour, and already he had put a finger unerringly on what I had never been conscious of before—that I had never dared to ask my husband why we could not settle down for good, anywhere, just as I had never dared to question any of his other decisions. And I knew now that the choking and strangling he’d made me undergo in the last year of his life had merely been a continuation of what had gone on before.
Not only this. Forbes, in this short span of time, had shown more interest in me than my husband had done during all our years together. In the beginning, whenever I had wanted to tell him about my family and my background he had always cut me short with, "Who wants to know what your mother said to Clara, your parlor maid? Who wants to know what the cook said to your grandmother, and why your mother and your grandmother had a row about it afterward, and what Clara said to you? Who cares about the time when the Hungarian count first came to dinner and didn’t leave a tip for the maids?"
Forbes now said, "I ask you, and you say you don’t know. Or you don’t even reply. Why is this?"
"I can’t reply, because I’ve never thought about it," I said.
He said, "Do you want me to believe that you never gave a thought about the way you were living, that you never thought it odd?"
"I didn’t let myself think," I said. "My husband was a great doctor. He was so distinguished, so superior, and I’m so inefficient, even with servants."
He said, "What you are really telling me is that he made you feel inferior all the time—is that it?"
I said, "Yes, even— I’ve got some good qualities, too, you know. He’d praise me, like saying, ‘You do make an excellent pot-au-feu, I’ll say that for you,’ but it was backhanded praise, as though it were astonishing that I could ever do anything well."
"So that was how he kept you down," Forbes said. "An old man with a beautiful young wife. Quite systematic, wasn’t he, in running you down?"
"And he was jealous," I said. "He didn’t love me, but he was jealous."
Forbes said, "Jealousy lasts longer than love."
We both kept silent for a while. Then I said, "Yes, it’s all true, but it never occurred to me before. And you give me the creeps."
"Why do I give you the creeps?"
I said, "You are living in Geneva. How long have you been living in Geneva?"
He said, "Two years."
I said, "Then you must know. You can stay in Geneva for weeks and see nothing spectacular, and then one morning you look across the lake and there is Mont Blanc, with its monumental crown of snow, the highest peak in our part of the world. It’s been there all the time and you never knew it. And this gives you the creeps. Do you understand me now?"
He gave his faint laugh. He said, "I do, indeed."
CORTONA CAME IN at last, getting between us, stopping and nodding his head. We both got up. As I rose from behind the table he came hastily forward and helped me into my coat and picked up my suitcase, looking pointedly at Forbes all the while, to show that he, Cortona, was more caring and attentive than Forbes was. And Forbes met his eye with his tight-lipped, arrogant smile. I waited till Forbes was beside me and then I let Cortona precede us. I could tell that this annoyed Cortona, who would have wanted me to walk with him, with Forbes tagging behind.
As we walked out, I remembered something I had once heard about the Maharaja of Nepal, who had an anteroom in his palace in Kathmandu where visitors who came with petitions and demands were required to wait. The room was lined with distorting mirrors, convex and concave, diminishing or enlarging, but always rendering the beholder as a grotesque monstrosity. The room, though apparently designed to amuse those who waited there, was calculated to make them feel ridiculous and humble before they were admitted to the presence of the princely ruler. And while we went along the landing and descended the stairs I thought that during all my marriage I had seen myself as reflected by my husband, as inadequate and humble, and had taken it for granted that this was my true image, so I had no right to expect his interest and esteem.
Outside, Forbes and I stopped while Cortona went to his car, and he looked at me for a long time. "Are you still thinking of Mont Blanc?" he said at last. I did not reply. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were brown and not pale gray like Gordon’s, which had reminded me of stale ice on a wintry river.
Cortona drove up and stopped before us. "The car doesn’t run well," he said again, getting out.
"But you’ll soon get a new one," I said. "That’s good."
He said, "It’s not good, because the new car will be just as ugly as this one." And we both started to laugh. I was glad of that, for his sake—happy to share a joke from which Forbes was excluded.
Cortona held the rear door open, and Forbes got in and sat in the backseat. I knew I must not get in with him. It would be unforgivable to let Cortona be alone in front as if he were our driver. Forbes ostentatiously leaned back in the far corner, filling all the space available with his diagonally outstretched legs, and making no move to close the door. Cortona slammed it shut under his disdainful glance.
I got in front, and as we started off I said to Cortona, "I was given such excellent coffee in your office. I was quite amazed. Was it brewed, or out of an urn?"
He said, "Out of an urn. Reserved for our special clients." He looked pleased. It occurred to me that Forbes had not been served with coffee. I had been speaking Italian with Cortona, and I wondered whether Forbes had understood. It came to me, of course, that I was being attentive to one man in order to disconcert the other. I looked over my shoulder at Forbes’s sarcastic countenance, and I said, in English, "I was just remarking that I got such excellent coffee at their place."
"Why did you say that, slap on, about my being so young?" he said abruptly.
"But you are young," I said.
"That’s no answer. Why did you say it?"
I said, "I can’t possibly tell you."
He said, "If you think that our chap here understands a blessed word of what we are saying, you are mistaken."
I said, "I wasn’t even thinking that."
"I want to know," he said.
"Don’t be silly," I said.
"I am silly, and I want to know."
I said, "It’s to do with your voice on the phone. It’s— I made a mistake. I couldn’t tell your age from your voice. I thought you were older. Forty-two or so."
"I’m beginning to see. But not quite yet."
; "Let it be."
He said, "You were trying to figure me out. What I looked like."
"Yes."
He was silent. I said, "No, I wasn’t trying to figure out what you looked like. I didn’t have to. Because I knew."
He said, "You are telling me you knew what I looked like? Before meeting me?"
I said, "Of course I did."
"And do I look like what you knew I’d look like?"
I said, "Of course, but—"
He said, "But younger. That’s it."
Startled by his astuteness in penetrating me, I said, "But your eyes are wrong. They are brown. They should be gray."
"I stand convicted for being young instead of forty-odd and for having brown eyes instead of gray," he said. "Not Dr. Richardes redivivus, was it to be? Hubby?"
I said, "Don’t be beastly."
"Who was it?" he persisted. "How long ago? Hunter’s Lodge vintage?"
"I can’t possibly tell you," I said again.
He said, "You can possibly tell me. And you know as well as I do that you will tell me in the end if I keep at it long enough."
I said, "That’s true, you have not only his looks. You have—the same way of torturing me."
For a while we were silent. Then I said, in a louder, brighter voice, for Cortona’s benefit, "Lascia perdere, as the Italians say. Let it go."
Looking at Cortona, I saw that he was pleased. He seemed to have gathered that Forbes had been tiresome and that I had snubbed him.
WE STOPPED AT LAST in front of a shed and Cortona, with attentive speed, came running to my side of the car to open the door for me. Then, seeing that Forbes made no move on his own, he opened the rear door as well. Watching Forbes get out without a sign or word of thanks, and then straighten his magnificent shoulders and throw out his wide chest while he looked into space, I thought that in Cortona’s place I’d have hit him.
We entered the windowless shed. It was bare and brick-walled, with a stone-paved floor smeared with damp earth and streaked with grease. There was a long trestle table in the center of the room, and an old-fashioned slope-fronted stand-up desk in one corner.
Forbes said, "There’s our reception committee," raising his chin toward a group of elderly, morose workmen, perhaps half a dozen of them. Some were lounging against a table, some leaning against one wall. In the gloomy twilight, with their earth-colored, muddy-looking clothes, they could have been posing for a picture by Cézanne. None of them moved. They were pretending not to have seen us.
"Bright-looking lot," murmured Forbes, and Cortona, crossing over to the desk in the corner and placing on it a ledger he had brought with him, cast him a resentful look, guessing the nastiness of his remark.
"How do you speak to him?" I said to Forbes. "Have you spoken to him yet? Does he speak English? I suppose he must have some commercial English?"
"How should I know?" Forbes said. "He does believe that he speaks English. His very own brand."
There must have been a door in a hidden space at the rear of the shed, because now I saw a crate being carried in by four of the men and put down lengthwise on the trestle table.
The workmen stepped back, and two others came forward. The crate’s lattice of wooden laths was hammered at, splintered and broken, and flung on the floor. The sacking beneath it was ripped off. There stood revealed a beautifully made tin trunk, about five feet long, undented and glossy, with the black-painted metal shimmering red and green like the backs of some beetles. One of the men said to me, "I’m telling you, this chest is valuable. It’s worth more than anything you have inside it."
I would not have been surprised if Forbes had been thinking in the same vein, suspecting me of having lured him to Chiasso on false pretenses, now that he had prized out of me what I had never intended him to know.
I said, "You know, I’ve seen only snapshot pictures of those candlesticks. But I do remember them as being filthy black."
"Oh, I like it black," Forbes said caressingly. And I saw myself with Gordon, standing in front of his door, saying what I had been saving up to say all evening, in the pub and during dinner, and looking forward spitefully to his being disappointed: "It’s no go, tonight. I’ve got the curse." And how stunned I was at his reply: "Oh, I like women with the curse." I said, "You mean, you will?" And he said, "Of course I will."
One of the men, crouching by the chest, had been hammering with his fists at the hinges, and now said to me, "Have you got the keys for the padlocks?" I shook my head. I recalled the two cigar boxes, in a drawer in the desk at home, filled with keys, with purposes unfathomable to me, but each known and meaningful to my husband, who had disdained labeling them. The man rummaged in a bag on the floor by his side and took out a long, clawed metal bar. We listened in silence at the grinding, squealing, and screeching as the locks were burst open.
Forbes gave a short laugh, hard and bright. The man who had been crouching was now on his feet, with one hand clutching the other.
Still laughing, Forbes said, "Look, now he’s hurt himself. He’s bleeding. Now he’s running outside. Now we’ve got to wait till he’s stopped bleeding. What a nuisance."
Disconcerted, I raised my face to his ironic, knowing smile. I smiled, too. I felt myself blushing. I knew I should have shown distress and concern. It was like a duel between me and Forbes. He was forcing me, wordlessly, to admit that I was not nice—that I cared as little as he did. I saw his hard smile change into one of indulgent amusement, and I seemed to be once more with Gordon, who, after torturing me to make me admit one of my ugly, shameful secrets with his relentless questions, disregarding my reasonable explanations and finding the true meaning behind my senseless and foolish remarks, would then be delighted and take me to his bosom. Forbes said, solicitously, in utter contrast with his former hardness, "But aren’t you getting cold, standing here on this damp stone floor?"
We both looked down at our feet, standing so well-behaved side by side—my pretty white boots, with the sheepskin forming a white, frothy rim above my ankles, next to his dark brown, laced leather shoes, and I was flooded with deep gratitude I had not felt since Gordon’s death. We did not speak again or look at each other till the chest was prized open and the lid raised.
I HAD EXPECTED to see a layer of wood shavings, or that synthetic straw used by professional packers, or sheets of corrugated cardboard. There was, instead, an expanse of linen—white, fawn, pale blue, and all creased and tired-looking. Forbes said to me, over his shoulder, "Someone’s shirts and pajamas," perfidiously reminding me that he knew I was violating my husband’s wishes. He kept his eyes on me a few heartbeats longer, and then moved to the rim of the chest and swept off the swaths of linen. I saw him bending over some tightly packed rows of woolly nests—brown, black, gray—which I suddenly recognized as my husband’s rolled-up socks. Forbes did not seem to be taken aback. Bending low, he delved speedily among the socks, bringing some out and unfurling them unhesitatingly. His wide shoulders were blocking my view.
I went and stood close behind him. On the ledge of the table, near the chest, there was the silvery glitter of flat, square, and oblong cigarette cases, already a half dozen or more, each different. While I tried to count them he kept unrolling one sock after another, each time yielding one more case. I stopped trying to count them.
I picked up one of the pieces, worked in a pattern of basket weave. "Oh God, look at this," I said in dismay. "All this modern rubbish. It’s nothing—just its weight in silver."
"And who are you to cast contempt on this glowing example of patients’ gratitude toward their beloved doctor?" he said, with mock solemnity. Then, in his ordinary voice, he said, "Don’t worry," and again gave his faint laugh. "I told you I’d take everything." He went on digging and probing in the depths of the woolly nests, with a calm greed that made me shudder. I watched his hands—pale and lean, with long, bony, square-tipped fingers—and sensed that my shudder came from the voluptuousness of a forced surrender. I felt Gordon’s fingers probing
and penetrating me, and I heard Gordon say, "I never go myself where my hand has not gone before."
Trying to hide the tears I felt welling up, I turned away, dabbing at my eyes, and then slid out and replaced a few of the tortoiseshell hairpins that were stuck in the twisted strands of the chignon on the nape of my neck.
"Now," I heard Forbes say, and he drew in his breath sharply. Then, in a very low voice, "I’ve got the Odiot."
When I turned to Forbes, he was standing motionless and upright by the table. As though for my pleasure, he had swiftly placed the teapot on its stand and had grouped the jugs and bowl around it like a wreath. In one glance, I took in fluted, bellied curves and embossed garlands of leaves and dog roses. A rage of disappointment flooded over me. Instead of the austere swanlike elegance of the Napoleonic silver I had been visualizing, I was met with the cozy prettiness of some opulent merchant’s tea set. There weren’t even the engraved initials that would have told us it had been manufactured to order.
"Not even a crown, or a coat of arms," I said.
"You thought your—"
"No, no," I said brusquely. "It came to my husband from his sister. She bought it, God knows where."
He said, "As an investment, obviously."
"What on earth did my husband imagine he’d got?" I said. "Empire, my foot."
"It’s 1860," he said without hesitation. "You won’t get more than fifteen thousand francs for it."
I said, "So what? It’s not the— You understand."
"Yes, yes," he said, soothingly. "But it’s quite pretty, really. Look, it’s got that plug on the chain attached to the stand, with the hole on the side, you see. That’s for keeping the tea warm on the stand—now, isn’t that nice?"
I said, "Don’t be beastly. My uncle had an oil sketch by Rubens, but when he took it to Christie’s they said it wasn’t; it was by a contemporary of Rubens. But that’s different, whereas here a child of five could have—"
He said, "It happens all the time."
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 24