A Winter's Love

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Go on,” Abe said.

  “She told me she went to New York for a while and then she tried going home to her family in Illinois, but it wasn’t a success. Her experiences during the war had put her in a world completely different from the one she’d left to many Henri, and she and her old friends didn’t speak the same language any more. So she went back to Paris; she didn’t take any care of herself, and it was there she became really ill. So then she came here and stayed alone in the chalet she and Henri had above Kaarlo’s. She knew Kaarlo well, of course, from the resistance, and he used to check on her every day. One day when he went in she didn’t answer when he called, and he found she’d had a hemorrhage and had been alone there, half-unconscious, for several hours. She was in the sanatorium for quite a while after that, and when Clément—her doctor—let her out, there was no question of her going back alone to the chalet, so she went to live with Kaarlo.”

  “She’s had a rough time—” Abe started and then he broke off and half-laughed and said, “We’re talking so nicely and politely about Gertrude and really I don’t give a damn about Gertrude.” She looked up at him, startled, and he said, “But Gertrude’s a safe topic for us, isn’t she? And we have to keep to safe topics of conversation, don’t we, Emily?”

  She looked down, away from him, at the white cloth of the table, at the crumbs of bread that had scattered, a small gravy stain, the fresh rolls and butter, the budding rose, and picked up her wine glass and sipped from it. She had finished the wine and she was sipping from an empty glass and when she put it down a waiter picked up the napkined bottle and filled her glass. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s—it’s an excellent wine.”

  “You know, I’ve always considered Courtney one of my closest friends,” Abe said. “Great admiration for the guy. One of the few human beings I really care about. Sorry things are so rough for him right now.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But they’ll even out,” he said. “They do in the long run for people of Courtney’s caliber. Can’t stand the thought of your going all the way to Indiana, though. Much too far away.… How about a dance? I always liked that tune.”

  They danced and, in spite of the crowded floor and other dancers brushing constantly against them, they moved fluidly together, her body following easily his as it pressed strongly, warmly, against her. They did not talk, now, they simply moved together in rhythm over the dance floor until the music stopped. When they sat down at the table again Abe turned to her, saying, “Why am I always so happy when I’m with you, Emily? Relaxed and at ease and perfectly content to be myself. But happy, that’s the main thing. Actively and positively happy instead of managing to cope, rather grimly, though perfectly successfully, with life.”

  “I’m happy when I’m with you, too,” she said, and added lamely: “I suppose it’s because we’re such good friends.”

  He looked at her and raised his eyebrows quizzically and then his face hardened and he said, “Yes, let’s keep it safe.” And then he said under his breath, so low she scarcely heard, “Damn it. Damn it to hell.”

  She said, again lamely, apologetically, “It’s a wonderful dinner, Abe. I’d always heard the chef here was terrific.”

  “You haven’t been here before?”

  “No. Only in the bar for an occasional drink.” She laughed. “It’s our frugal winter, remember. Someday we’ll come back and stay at Pedroti’s palace and really have ourselves a time. I’m sorry Courtney had to miss this evening. He’d have enjoyed it as much as I.”

  “Would he?” Abe asked.

  “This is a beautiful room,” she said, “without being ostentatious. Much better taste than Pedroti’s dining room.”

  “Do you have to go straight home?” Abe asked. “Or could you come back to the hotel with me for a few minutes? We could have coffee in the lounge or play a game of ping-pong or something wildly exciting like that.”

  “I’d love to,” she said. “It’s been such a beautiful evening I hate to end it.”

  “How about another dance before we go?”

  They made their way to the dance floor and she moved into his arms and Abe said gently, “We fit together, Emily, you and I.”

  They left the big beautiful room with the crystal chandelier and the Christmas tree, and Abe held out her old fur coat and she put on her spiked boots and Abe carried the satin slippers and they went out into the night. In the lights of the crowded street he looked at her and she felt beautiful and this had become an unfamiliar feeling and an exciting one and her pulses and her pace quickened as she walked beside him. They moved out of the lighted streets and there were no clouds and the stars were incredible in their brightness with the mountains rising up towards them, their buttresses and pinnacles gleaming in the starlight.

  They walked side by side, just barely not touching, and suddenly it seemed to her that whether or not their gloved fingers casually met or her coat touched his was terribly important. They moved along as slowly as the cold would permit, not talking, except for Abe to say once in a low voice, “How different this is from the way you and I used to walk together in New York. You’re a good person to walk with, Emily.” Then the village was behind them and they turned up the path by the villa; Courtney had left on a light downstairs and the window of the front bedroom was lit and Emily knew that he was lying there in the cold bed, reading.

  “Court’s still awake,” she said, and Abe made no response but led her on up the path towards the hotel and she was not sure whether or not he had heard. Then he looked down at her with a quiet and reassuring smile.

  In the hotel there was music and light again and voices and the smell of steam heat and cooking and wine and hot house flowers and cigarette smoke. Groups of people were drinking after-dinner coffee in the lounge, and others in evening clothes were moving to and from the ballroom. A group of students in ski clothes streamed out of the elevator and pushed their way, laughing, towards the gamerooms.

  “What a mob,” Abe said. “Let’s go upstairs and talk.” One hand on her elbow he led her through the people towards the elevator. They went upstairs and as each moment flowed into the next Emily felt as though she were moving through a dream, so that the grill work of the elevator, a woman in bright pink satin, a white-bearded old gentleman, the elevator boy with the sad puckered face of a monkey, all were printed indelibly on the retina of her mind. The climate of her consciousness was not a waking one; this seemed to be a moment completely isolated in time, bearing no relationship to the days that had come before it or would come after.

  “Would you like a drink?” Abe asked her as they stood for a moment in the center of the living room of his suite.

  “Just water, please.”

  She stood watching him as he went into the bedroom and poured a glass of water from the carafe on his bed table. She noticed on the chiffonier the double frame containing pictures of Sam and Kristina, his first wife. She felt suddenly terribly sad.

  He gave her the water and she stood there drinking it and he laughed and said, “Aren’t you going to sit down and stay for a few minutes?”

  She laughed, too, and handed him the glass. He put it down and then he turned to her and took her in his arms and kissed her.

  “Abe—” she started, but he kissed her again, a long kiss, a passionate kiss, a returned kiss.

  Then there was a moment of standing apart, of staring at each other rather incredulously, and then Abe pushed her gently towards the sofa. She forced herself to move away from him, saying, “No, Abe, this isn’t a good idea.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Why isn’t it the best idea we’ve ever had? Why didn’t we have it a long time ago?”

  “We did,” she said softly.

  After a moment he took one of her hands and gently held it. “Yes. Why were we good about it till now?”

  “We shouldn’t have stopped being good,” Emily said.

  “We should have stopped long ago,” Abe said, and drew her to him again.
>
  She pressed her face into the darkness of his shoulder. “Oh, Abe, everything is so horribly complicated!” He didn’t answer and after a while she said, “I love Courtney, you know.”

  “Yes, my darling, I know.”

  “I love him quite terribly.”

  “Yes, Emily. Kiss me.”

  And it was true that at that moment all that mattered was their arms about each other and their lips searching and this was still a moment outside time and as long as they could keep it outside time everything was possible.

  And he was saying, “Emily, dear love, I’ve fought this subconsciously for years and I’ve fought it consciously all evening and I can’t fight it any more. How could it possibly hurt anybody? Come.”

  She rose and stood for a moment swaying in an agony of indecision like a stick tossed into the ocean and flung towards the shore by the waves and sucked seawards again by the tide. But because there was the moment of indecision she was thrust over the edge of time again and she whispered, “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Darling,” he whispered. “Oh, darling, darling.” His hand slipped gently inside her dress and rested, tender and strong, against her breast.

  She spoke in a low, almost inaudible voice. “It isn’t because I don’t want to. I want to. Quite terribly. It’s because of Courtney. If he were happy and secure it wouldn’t matter so much. But he isn’t. He’s unhappy. Everything’s gone wrong for him. I told you. And trying to write in that cold little box of a room. And worrying about money all the time. Oh, Abe, it’s the wrong time for us to have stopped being good. Right now it would be—it would be a betrayal. And I can’t, Abe. I can’t.”

  She stood there in the middle of the room and at last he held his arms out to her, smiling at her with great tenderness as though she were a child. “Come and sit by me. That can’t do any harm, can it? Just come and sit by me and let me hold you for a few minutes and then I’ll take you home.”

  She ran quickly to him and sat enfolded in his arms, her eyes closed, suddenly completely relaxed and happy. She opened her eyes and looked at his face close up, seeing and loving with a great rush of tenderness the tired lines beneath the eyes, and the delicate, high-bridged nose, and the mouth, the mouth she had been kissing with such abandon; and she had never noticed before that the teeth were just slightly protruding, like a rabbit’s, and in her mind she said—My bunny, oh, my darling bunny, and then half laughed as he touched his nose gently against hers and then kissed her again, pushing back passion with playfulness. The dark stuff of his suit felt warm and comforting against her cheek, and they sat there on the lumpy seat of the hotel sofa, kissing and laughing, and over and over Abe said, “Why am I so happy? Why am I so happy when I can’t have you the way I want to?” and suddenly for Emily the effort to hold back, the wild struggle of body towards body, the need to crash through the barriers of individual flesh and blend together in one moment of ecstasy, ceased, and she was able to relax in his arms, for somehow at this moment she was spiritually fulfilled; a longing as strong as the physical one had been satisfied.

  Finally she said, “Abe, the children will be out of the movies soon and Sam will be coming back and I must go.”

  With his cheek close against hers he murmured, “All right, my darling, darling, my sweetheart, oh, my darling!” (and it was as though having started calling her the words of love he could not stop and as though she were hearing the familiar words for the first time, as though they had never been said before).

  They stood in front of the elevator and always she would remember the sound of the elevator and the green walls of the hall because she was standing there with him; and forever the trees in the gaudy urns in the lobby would be engraved on her mind and the fluted columns of the lounge and the concierge at the desk, because she was leaving the hotel with his hand against her arm. Everything they had touched that evening, everything they had seen, would forever be different, as though the lens of the camera had changed, as though Abe’s presence had suddenly clarified the focus so that now she was seeing easily what had been blurred only a few hours before.

  They left the hotel and walked down the driveway and at the great iron gates he stopped, saying, “The trouble is that this isn’t the end of this.” He took her hand in his, then, and carefully drew the glove off and twined her fingers in his and then both their hands were plunged into the deep warmth of his pocket and they walked together that way down the steep path. Just as they reached the sharp turn before the villa he bent down and they kissed once more and then she went the last few yards alone.

  Two

  Virginia sat across from Mimi in the small dark dining room of the villa, dunking the heavy local bread into her café au lait. Everyone else had finished breakfast; Emily was in the village with Connie, doing the day’s marketing; from Courtney’s study they could hear the sound of the typewriter. Virginia put her elbows on the table and stared out the window, not seeing the iron fence that ran round the garden, nor the two dark pines, nor the white slope leading up to the hotel.

  “Virginia, Virginia, strong and able,

  Get your elbows off the table.

  This is not a horse’s stable,

  This is a decent breakfast table,”

  Mimi intoned.

  “But we’re not at school,” Virginia said, “and I don’t feel like minding my manners.”

  “What’s the matter this morning? Got a new poem on your mind?”

  Virginia shook her head. “I apologize for my father,” she said shortly.

  “For your father? For what?”

  “The way he behaved last night.”

  Mimi reached for the bread, for the dish of apricot jam. “Virginia petunia, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “His being drunk,” Virginia said impatiently. “I apologize.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which Mimi finished her bread and jam, poured herself more coffee and milk. Then she said, “Virginia, are you absolutely mad?”

  “No! What do you mean?”

  “Your father wasn’t drunk last night. He’d had maybe a drink too many. And he wasn’t feeling very well. But he wasn’t drunk.”

  “You don’t have to see pink elephants to be drunk.” Virginia stood up, collected her breakfast dishes and took them out to the kitchen. Then she came back in, picked up the coffee pot, said, “Want any more?” and without waiting for an answer started back to the kitchen.

  “Look, Vee,” Mimi said, pushing back her chair and following Virginia out to the sink, “you mean when we said good night to your father?”

  “Naturally.”

  “You’re cock-eyed. So he had a drink in his hand. He wasn’t drunk!”

  “For daddy he was. You don’t know daddy very well. It was horrible and I said I apologized. Now let’s talk about something else!” Virginia took the kettle from the back of the stove and sloshed water in the dishpan.

  “Vee, you wrung-out tea bag,” Mimi said, “what’s there to get so excited about if your father gets a little tight? You act as though some terrible tragedy were taking place.”

  “You don’t understand,” Virginia said flatly.

  “Well, I’ve seen my father drunk, and really drunk, plenty of times, if that’s what you mean. Put him to bed plenty of times, too. It’s nothing so frightful. He goes to a party and he has a good time and his glass gets filled a little too often and he has an even better time. It’s not as though either of them was an alcoholic, our fathers, I mean. They’re just ordinary human beings.”

  “But daddy wasn’t at a party,” Virginia said. “Would you bring me the rest of the dishes from the dining room, please?” She leaned against the sink and said, softly, “Daddy’s always been, as far as I’m concerned, perfect.”

  “Then you’d better grow up.” Mimi plunked the sugar bowl down on the shelf.

  “I don’t mean I thought he was perfect,” Virginia said slowly. “I mean just as far as I was concerned. But he’s been different th
is winter.”

  “Or maybe you’re the one who’s different,” Mimi suggested. “You’ve been away at school. You’ve grown and developed. That always makes you see things—and people—differently.”

  “No, it’s daddy,” Virginia said. “He’s changed. Not just the way he talked last night. Or shutting himself up in his office; he always did that anyhow. But he doesn’t laugh the way he used to. At table, I mean, he used to make jokes, and he used to play with Connie before she went up to bed—she used to ride on his shoulders and sometimes he used to dance with me. And he and mother laughed at things. And Christmas—we just seem to be forgetting Christmas this year.” She glared at Mimi. “You’re different here, Mimi. Not a bit the way you are at school.”

  “Oh, school,” Mimi said. “At school I’m like a chameleon. I take on the protective coloring of the other kids. I forget I’m a potential human being and act like everybody else.”

  “But you’re happy at school, aren’t you?”

  “Me? Oh, sure, I’m highly adaptable. I fought like a steer about going, but once I was there the only thing to do was enjoy it. As Confucius says, when rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

  “But you didn’t seem to have any trouble at school,” Virginia said wistfully, “right from the beginning. It was easy for you, wasn’t it?”

  “Easier than for you, I suppose, you mad, introverted poet. At school you’re just like a porcupine, do you know that? Your quills are always out, preparing for the attack. But since you’ve been home you’ve kind of relaxed. One could almost stroke you without getting a palm full of spines. Up to this nonsense about your father. You’re all bristly again. Come on, let’s go for a walk. We can finish up these dishes later. Your mother put lots of holly around yesterday and she said we’d all fix the créche soon. She’s not forgetting Christmas. And your father has a sore throat. No one feels like cracking jokes with a sore throat. As for his being perfect, how deadly dull to have a perfect father. I’d loathe Jake if he were perfect. But he isn’t. Gad no. Come on, old thing, cheer up. I think your father’s quite a boy. I should imagine he’d make a terrific teacher. Do his students adore him?”