“What do you mean?”
“Do you love him as you love Virginia and Connie, for instance, or do you love him as a man?”
Great drifts of silence kept moving between their words, but finally she managed to say, “I’m told there’s no love like that of a mother for her children, a lioness for her cubs.”
“But it’s not enough for you, is it?” Abe persisted. “Or this would never have happened.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Emily, I’ve been like a lost soul, and now I’m found. You can’t push me into outer darkness again.”
She took a step towards him and the car began to sway. She stood still but reached out her hand until it touched the sleeve of his coat. “Oh, Abe,” she said, “It’s not as easy as all that.”
“We love each other,” Abe said. “Doesn’t that help any?”
“Oh, Abe, if it—The trouble is that you’re—”
“I’m what?”
“Of the two of you, you and Courtney, you’re the strong one.”
His voice was bitter, a little angry. “Am I?”
“You know you are.” Silence again filling the car, as tangible as the cloud through which they were drifting. “I can’t do it to him,” she said despairingly. “Not while he’s down and unhappy.”
“Has he told you he’s unhappy?”
“Courtney doesn’t tell people things like that.”
“Suppose the situation changed so that he was no longer unhappy? Could that make a difference to you?”
She continued to hold on to the stuff of his sleeve, unthinking of Pierre standing near them. She whispered, “I don’t know.…”
Suddenly a shape loomed up at them out of the whiteness, a dark shadow that appeared to be bearing down on them. So this was it: death swinging at them from the void through which they were travelling. She gasped. But it was only the opposite car, passing emptily by them at the halfway point. She drew a breath only half of relief and watched as it swayed by them and was lost almost at once in the clouds.
“My wife,” Pierre said, speaking to them, but still turned away from them, staring out the window into nothing, “would not ride the télépherique on a day like this when there is no visibility if you offered her a diamond necklace. It is as safe as any other day, but she has an enlarged sense of danger, and she would be crying and moving about in her fear so that the car would swing and then she would be even more afraid, even though there is nothing to fear.”
Now at last the shape of mountain began to appear out of the clouds, emerging like an island out of the glacial sea of sky, foreign and cold, as though they were moving slowly to another planet. Pierre stopped the car at the platform, asking them, “Would you like to get out?”
Abe shook his head. “No. We had better go back. I don’t want to keep the children waiting too long.”
Pierre reversed the lever, then turned carefully away from them again, and the car started back across the void, out into cloud as alien and cold as outer space.
Moving very carefully so as not to set the car in motion, Abe moved close to Emily, reached down and raised her face and looked into her eyes. “Darling, I don’t mean to do this to you, to make you look like a little, desperate, sticken animal. But I’m desperate, too. I’m pleading with you.”
She looked back into his face and it was no longer a young athlete’s face, ugly and vital. It was tired and it was hurt and yet suddenly it was so beautiful to her that she could hardly bear it. She reached up with one finger and touched the tired lines at either side of his eyes, the strong crooked nose, the lips—
He caught her hand and pressed her fingers to his mouth and kissed them and then she said dully, “We haven’t even discussed the children.”
“I love your children,” he said. “I want your children, too, for myself and for Sam.”
“I can’t do that to Courtney, either,” she said. “You know I can’t.”
Abe reached for a cigarette. This time he did not offer Emily one (and smoking together had been a kind of intimacy with them, an unacknowledged caress). His match flared, the flame almost invisible in the pervading whiteness. He cupped his hand about it and lit his cigarette. He stood there smoking it, and they did not speak. After a while Pierre, still with his back to them, lit a cigarette, too.
Then it began to snow, first a few isolated flakes, then more and more, till they were surrounded by the white falling, large, and soft and beautiful as flowers.
“I am not a person who begs, Emily,” Abe said in a low voice, “but I am begging now. I am pleading for my life. I think you know—don’t you?—that if what is between us were not desperately serious we wouldn’t have been either as happy as we have been this past week—or as reticent.” She did not answer, and after a moment he went on. “If I had been just casually interested in you—as I must admit to you I have been in some women—I would have been better at seducing you. I’m quite sure I would have seduced you. But I’m not casual about you, Emily. I want you as part of my life always. Perhaps that first evening I may have thought fleetingly of a brief vacation affair that we could look back at with intimate nostalgia on my rare visits to you and Courtney. But it outgrew that phase almost before it had started, and that is exactly why it has not been an affair. You must have realized this.”
“I’ve tried not to—not to realize anything about it,” she whispered.
“But now you must, Emily. The time has come when a decision has to be made, and you’re the one who has to make it.”
She nodded mutely.
“I don’t want you to give me your answer now,” Abe said, “even if you feel you can.”
But she shook her head again.
“Tomorrow night,” Abe said, “after I come back from the mountain, we must meet. That will—that will have to be enough time, Emily. I will go to the casino at six o’clock. I’ve gone there with Kaarlo, and you’ve been there often with Gert, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So it will be all right for us to be there together. All right?”
“All right,” she said. She waited a moment and then she said, very low, her voice seeming to be hushed by the snow, to disappear into it, “All right, darling.”
“That’s the first time you’ve said it,” Abe said.
“Yes.”
“Say it again.”
“Darling.”
Then they were silent, moving through whiteness. They were silent as they changed cars, moved back down the mountain. As the station began to loom at them out of the mist Emily took Abe’s hand and whispered, “Darling, I love you.” Then she stepped away from him, almost holding her breath as they drew up to the platform and Pierre unstrapped the door.
Seven
After a restless night Gertrude wakened early. She would not have known morning was approaching in the dark of Kaarlo’s small bedroom if she had not heard him moving about in the big room and the kitchen; and the smell of fresh coffee came through the closed door to her.
She got up and put on her heavy woolen coachman’s robe. It had, she knew, great simplicity and style, and it was the warmest thing she owned, but it was so heavy that it dragged her down and she never wore it except on the rare mornings that she got up so early that the stoves and fireplace had not taken the damp chill from the chalet.
She went into the kitchen to Kaarlo, holding her face up to him to be kissed. He looked down at her gravely, raised one hand and pushed her rumpled, sleep-roughened hair back from her face.
—Dear God, she thought, I would rather have died than let Henri see me looking like this, no make-up or perfume and my hair a mess.…
“Did you have a bad night?” Kaarlo asked.
She nodded.
“Then we will have a cup of coffee together to warm you up, and then when I go to meet Abe and Sam you will go back to bed and try to get some more sleep.”
They sat together in front of the fire. “It’s going to
snow tomorrow,” Kaarlo said.
Gertrude shuddered. “Hell, oh, hell. Another of those filthy closed-in days when you can’t see the hand in front of your face? I hate it when the mountains disappear. There’s no point living with mountains if you can’t see them. When you can’t see them the whole weight of them sits on your chest.” And then, with scarcely a change in inflection, “You don’t eat enough breakfast.”
“I eat as much as I always have.”
“But for a full day on the mountain—”
“I climb better if I haven’t eaten too much.” He put his strong, browned hand for a moment over her fragile, pale one. “You should have wakened me to walk Emily home.”
Gertrude looked at him sharply, then shrugged. “You were sleeping so peacefully and she said not to. Anyhow she’s perfectly capable of getting home by herself.”
“I know,” Kaarlo said. “But if she should slip and fall on the ice—this is perfectly possible. And during the season when there are so many strangers in the village I’m sure Courtney would prefer not to have a woman as attractive as his wife out alone late at night.”
“Do you think Emily’s attractive?” Gertrude asked.
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“Not particularly. But I’m not a man. Hadn’t you better hurry now, Kaarlo?”
“I suppose so. Why do you sound cross all of a sudden?”
“I’m not cross. Just tired.”
“I’ll take you back to bed.”
“No. It’s too cold in there. I’ll lie down on the couch.”
As easily and as gently as though she had been a lamb lost in the snow, Kaarlo picked Gertrude up and laid her down on the couch, covered her with the plaid steamer rug. “Now I must go,” he said. “I won’t be late today. I should be back before six.” He bent down and kissed her forehead and left her.
After he had gone she actually did fall into a fitful sleep, but when she wakened she felt unrefreshed. She lay there for a while staring at the firelight flickering on the ceiling, the cold gray morning light coming in the windows above the couch and bathing her in a pale wash. Finally she heaved herself up and washed and dressed, brushed her hair with slow, dragging strokes as though the brush were intolerably heavy. She put on lipstick, viciously, so that her mouth stood out from her face startlingly red. She looked without interest at the books, at the records, ended up by going back to the couch and sitting there, her elbows on her knees, her chin on her fists, simply sitting there while the minutes slowly moved by her.
When Madame Pedroti came she was actually glad to see her, although her first reaction was usually a smoldering anger, more at herself for allowing Madame Pedroti to come than at Madame Pedroti for coming.
Madame Pedroti settled herself comfortably, the bulk of her enormous thighs spreading amorphously over the zebra-striped chair, the inevitable bag of over-ripe fruit sagging on the table in front of the fire.
“I had such a charming visit with dear Madame Bowen yesterday morning,” Madame Pedroti cooed. “It’s such a pleasure to see her spirits so much improved.”
“Oh, did they need improving?” Gertrude asked.
“And how is Madame de Croisenois today?” Solicitude dripped out of Madame Pedroti’s voice like her flesh out of the chair.
“Madame de Croisenois is very well, thank you,” Gertrude said crisply.
“And is the marvellous Dr. Clément pleased with your progress?”
“Pleased enough.”
“Such a charming man. And, I am told, with a reputation that covers all Europe as well.”
“Yes, indeed,” Gertrude said, wondering,—Now what the hell is she driving at? Is she trying to shove me in bed with him, too?
But Madame Pedroti asked, “A friend of Mrs. Bowen’s, is he not?”
“Of Emily’s? No, I don’t think so. Not particularly.”
Madame Pedroti sighed heavily, gestured with her stubby fingers at the browned sagging flesh under her eyes. “I have suffered sadly from insomnia for the past two years.”
“Oh?” Gertrude said, shutting her mouth tightly to keep from adding—Caused by a guilty conscience, no doubt.
“And so it was,” Madame Pedroti said blandly, her voice soft as the whipped cream she served with her coffee, “that I happened to see Dr. Clément leaving Madame Bowen’s quite late—or rather, quite early. It must have been around four yesterday morning.”
For a moment the anger flashed uncontrolled into Gertrude’s eyes; she lay there on the couch fighting it back, anger at Madame Pedroti, an even greater anger at Emily if this unwarranted reversal of the usual condition of things should possibly have taken place, and she lying on the bed listening always for the sound of Clément’s feet coming through the shed.
“And so,” Madame Pedroti was saying blandly, “I simply assumed that they must be great friends. American women seem to have so many friends.”
“Far more likely that he was there in a professional capacity,” Gertrude said. “Perhaps Connie, the little girl, wasn’t well.”
Madame Pedroti smiled and lowered her heavy, bruised-looking lids. “Perhaps.”
—Is that what she came for? Gertrude wondered. The dirty bitch. I don’t believe it anyhow. Emily wouldn’t have the guts and anyhow she’s not his type.
But then she remembered that according to Michel Clément himself Emily was his type.
“Your friend does seem to enjoy visitors late at night,” Madame Pedroti said. “So often I’ve seen our dear Kaarlo coming or going from her place. And Mr. Fielding, too,” Madame Pedroti leaned back in the zebra-striped chair, stretching her puffy legs bound in by elastic stockings towards the fire. “I believe they have been seen everywhere together, even dancing at the casino.”
With a tremendous effort Gertrude kept her voice lazy. “The day we start paying attention to malicious gossip will really be a dull one, won’t it? If most of your tales have no more foundation in fact than these about Emily I wonder you find them worth repeating. The Bowens have known Abe Fielding for years in New York; he’s one of their closest friends, and the night Emily and Abe went to the casino Courtney was home with a bad throat.”
Madame Pedroti held out her pudgy hands, then dropped them heavily to her side. “You know how it is, Madame de Croisenois. The nicer someone is the more eager people are to talk. I myself feel there is nothing in this talk about Monsieur Fielding. Nevertheless I have often been amused to notice that it is sometimes the quiet ones who are really not quiet at all. In any case I should think it would put your mind at ease to have our dear Kaarlo kept happy and certainly in the long run you could not choose anybody safer than Madame Bowen since she is nicely tied down to her husband and children. A most satisfactory arrangement all round, is it not?”
The color ebbed from Gertrude’s face. She sat up on the couch, shaking. “You—you pismire!” she whispered. “Why do you come here when you know you’re not welcome? You filthy vulgar collaborating neurasthenic pathological liar! Get out!”
“Why Madame de Croisenois! What is the matter!”
Gertrude continued to whisper, rage depriving her of voice. “Every time you come here I have degraded myself by letting you cross the threshold. By listening to you I have sunk right into the slimy pit you wallow in, you—you female hippopotamus bathing in putrefaction, you dunghill, you cesspool, get out and stay out and never darken my door again.…”
With a show of dignity Madame Pedroti rose. “Madame de Croisenois, you are unwell. I shall go now as you suggest and I assure you that I shall remember none of the things you have said in your excited condition, for I am sure you have meant none of them.”
“I meant every word,” Gertrude croaked. “If you come here again I shall throw something at you, you low traitor.”
Now in her turn the color ebbed from Madame Pedroti’s face. “I am not a traitor, Madame de Croisenois. I betrayed no one. Everybody knows that. The Germans had to live somewhere and what would have happened to me if I had refuse
d to allow them in my hotel? But they learned no secrets from me.”
“Do you think you would be alive now if they had?” Gertrude asked contemptuously. “Do you think we didn’t know every move you made while you were getting fat and rich fawning on the Nazi bastards? Is it perhaps because you are ashamed of the way you spent your nights—until you became so fat and repulsive even the Nazis wouldn’t have you—that you feel you have to make up lies now about Emily? Go on. Get out. The only thing I have ever done in my life that I am completely ashamed of is having allowed you to come here.” Madame Pedroti opened her mouth to speak, but Gertrude cut her off. “Get out. At once. And never come back. Get out. Go.” She stood up and took a few tottering steps towards Madame Pedroti.
“You are not well today,” Madame Pedroti said again, nevertheless beating a hasty retreat. “I shall send Dr. Clément to you.”
As Madame Pedroti left Gertrude fell back on the couch, face down on the plaid blanket. She was seized by a violent chill which shook her limbs in uncontrollable spasms. When she finally stopped trembling she fell into a black pit of exhausted sleep, waking only when she felt a strong hand on her shoulder.
“Gertrude.”
She opened her eyes, shuddering. Clément stood by the couch looking down at her, his eyes grave, concerned.
“Gertrude,” he said again, “Madame Pedroti called me in some excitement, saying she feared you were gravely ill.”
Gertrude closed her eyes again. “So she got scared, did she?”
“Scared about what?” He sat down on the couch by her.
“I finally did what I should have done the first time she waddled up here to see me. I threw her out.”
“And got over-excited doing it?”
Pushing aside his hand Gertrude sat up. “Were you at Emily Bowen’s house in the middle of the night last night?” she demanded.
He looked at her in surprise. “No. Last night I was in the hospital all night. As a matter of fact, I was at Emily’s the night before. Why? Did she tell you about it? What is all this about, Gertrude?”
“No,” Gertrude said, “Emily didn’t mention it. But Madame Pedroti did.”
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