When Louise brought Mr. Harris to his weekly appointments, she tried her best to accompany him. The seizures were causing further trouble with his speech. She answered questions, repeated advice, maintaining a weak charade of good health. The doctor must have seen things beginning to slip, but perhaps he also saw the affection between them, the way Louise held on to Mr. Harris’s arm as she guided him through the surgery doors. He was gentle with her and with Mr. Harris: he never spoke of taking the old man from her charge.
“Why doesn’t your daughter like to visit, Mr. Harris?” she asked him one evening after supper was cleared. “Why does she so seldom call?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t look at Louise. “I wasn’t a very good father, I think.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said.
“I’m afraid I must not have been.” Distress seemed to tighten his throat.
“Were you very strict?”
“It was a different time, then,” he said. “Everybody was strict with their children. We didn’t know anything else. I never drank, if that’s what you think.”
Louise touched his large, papery hand. He still was not looking directly at her. “Of course not,” she said. “Of course I don’t think that.” She wanted to say, “I love you, anyway.”
It became too warm in the evenings for fires. Mr. Harris still watched his television programs, and Louise still read her books, but things were different without the glow from the hearth. She opened windows, the front door as well. At times, she missed winter, but more often she was glad of the change. It felt good to have fresh air in the house. She took further to her work in the garden, not only mowing the lawn but spending hours some days pulling weeds, examining the grass from many angles until she was satisfied with its look. She bought a wheelchair at a secondhand shop and brought Mr. Harris outside with her. It was, she sometimes reflected, the happiest time in her life. They traveled short distances, up and down the block, and the thought of being seen with him in this way overwhelmed and delighted Louise. All winter she had been so fiercely protective of what they were building in the space of the house. Now with each step away from the door, she felt as if her heart would take wing.
“Mr. Harris,” she said one evening in May, “would you like to sit outside on the porch?”
The days had grown to be languid and long; the sky was as pale as a scar.
He said nothing. She switched off the TV and helped him into his wheelchair, pushed him silently onto the porch. The concrete was swept and she sat down beside him, as she had all winter on the living room rug. On the street, cars went quietly past. People walked by with their dogs or with prams. She could hear faint music from a radio somewhere, like a whisper from the intimate past.
“It’s dull out here,” Mr. Harris complained. He appeared to be chewing at something. The seizures had taken a visible toll, so that he seemed always to be bracing for the next one now, as though flinching before a raised fist.
“It’s a beautiful night, don’t you think?” Louise said.
“It is,” he said. “But I need my programs.”
Louise smiled. Something was brimming inside her; it was not happiness, or fear, or love, or pity. It was not any of those things, exactly.
“Why do you need them, Mr. Harris?” she asked. “Why do you say you need them?”
He was looking down when he spoke. “I just really need them, Libby,” he said.
At once overcome, she entered the house. In the hallway, she stood before the large picture, straightening the frame as Mr. Harris would do. She regarded it more closely than ever before: the faint dusty pattern of light on the bones and the way, even on the black and white film, it was clear that Libby’s eyes had been green. A beautiful face. It resembled her saint’s. For the first time, she recognized that. She remembered what Esther had told her at Christmas, but it did not change the way she thought about Libby or the marriage she had dreamed of these many months.
In the living room, she scanned the books for titles she knew. One by one, she began pulling them down, these dusty old things, this literature. As she lifted each book, she fanned through its pages, searching for a note, a dedication, anything in an unfamiliar hand. She knew that the light would be falling outside and that the old man would be restless. She worked quickly, the books laid in turn on the sofa.
It was inside the cover of To the Lighthouse that she finally found what she wanted. A careful and elegant script.
Elizabeth Harris, 1954.
Outside, at a distance, fog rolled off the sea, aching with light from the red setting sun. She turned on the single bulb next to the door to keep the porch lit when night fell in earnest and sat down again beside Mr. Harris. He looked at her, his eyes pale and opaque. She reached up and smoothed the cotton fabric of his shirtsleeve several times with the palm of her hand.
“Let me read to you, Wendell,” she said, touching him a moment longer.
She began, then, to read aloud in the voice of another woman, as she had long imagined it. She felt as though she were taking part in a grand and exquisite drama. Mr. Harris remained silent, but she could tell he was listening. He had surely called her Libby as a simple slip of the tongue, or perhaps in a momentary confusion, but that was no matter. She read on. Her own attention faded in and back out, and it was difficult for her to follow the story, but that hardly mattered either. She was certain that this would be their way throughout the summer. If there came even the briefest of moments when the old man might believe he was beside his wife again, that would say more for the world than she’d ever have dreamed. And when they finished this book, she would find another and another and would read them slowly and quietly, until the last sun went down for them, after which it could never be said that she had failed to meet a good man, and to wed him, and to love him.
The Patroness
A telegram arrived as we were sitting to lunch, and Mrs. Hargreaves excused herself to receive it. I never liked it when she was called from the room, her presence being the only thing that justified my own, and relying as I did upon that skill of hers—which seemed to me a miracle then—at managing the conversation in a room or at table as if directing a sort of farcical play. I was the youngest there, yet to turn twenty, and already in the months I’d been attending her salon Mrs. Hargreaves must have saved me from a dozen encounters, whisking me off as though in intimacy, saying, “You’re a saint to have endured that man as long as you did. He’s a monumental bore, always has been, which was forgivable when he painted tolerably well, but between us, that’s been some decades since.” The other guests, now, seemed hardly to notice her absence: claret glasses were filled, cold meats and salad brought round on a platter.
“And your studies, Mr. Elford,” somebody said.
I looked up, uncertain at first who had spoken. The faces arrayed about the table were pale; they blinked with equal measures of polite inattention.
“Going well, are they?”
The man who spoke was sitting opposite me, wearing the long, sober face of a horse: large nose, ears filigreed with tufts of gray hair. His profession, I recalled vaguely, had to do with the theater. It was at this moment that Mrs. Hargreaves might ordinarily have intervened, reminding everyone about my studies in maths, my particular interest in the art of the Bauhaus (the latter of which she had more or less invented for me, having latched on to a few nervous comments I’d made). “What Mr. Such-and-such is referring to,” she might have begun.
“Very well, thanks.” I smiled in his direction, sipped water in avoidance of further response.
I had begun attending Mrs. Hargreaves’s salon at the arrangement of a mathematics professor who had served in the army with her late husband. It occurred biweekly on the ground floor of her house in Glebe Place, a gathering of what seemed not-quite-first-rate artists: playwrights and sculptors who’d sold work between wars, collectors and critics whose tastes had fallen from fashion. Still, to me it was impressive, indeed, my first glimpse of ur
ban sophistication, embodied most of all in Mrs. Hargreaves herself, with her long and still-elegant figure, her pearls white beside the gray coif of her hair. All of this, and her magnificent house: these seemed to me as from a dream of the city, country lad—just in from Glass—that I was. I had found myself at university there, the closed doors of more ancient institutions having provided my young life’s first indication that the world would not be offered so freely as I had sometimes allowed myself to believe. I had been a loner during the first term, feeling out of place and being given to worry: about my sister, still living at home; and about my father, who worked at the evaporated milk plant in Croft and who’d suffered some years with an affliction of the heart.
“She’ll take to you and be a boon, I am sure,” Professor Hastings had said of Dolly Hargreaves. “You’re a mathematician by training but an artist at heart. Anybody would see that, my boy.”
He smiled, though I could not help but perceive a small condemnation of my progress with partial differentiation. Nevertheless, it seemed a kindness that he had placed me in Mrs. Hargreaves’s care, a kindness also that she should have accepted (a melancholy one in her case, perhaps, because the Captain and she had had no children of their own).
“Well you’ll not guess whom I’ve heard from,” she said, stepping back into the room. Her voice was like a songbird’s, her face impish and flushed. “Why, it’s Marina Valenska. Listen to this: ‘Dolly, darling. In Cannes. Host has had temerity to drop dead at breakfast. Will come to visit you in England instead. Arrival by taxi in three days’ time.’”
The other guests laughed, as I did, uneasily, wondering if a death had really occurred.
Mrs. Hargreaves took her place at the table.
I was seated beside a Madame Liselle DuPont, who had danced for a time in the Royal Ballet. She ate little, smoked from a cigarette holder. About her lips and her eyes were the finest sort of wrinkles, to which she’d applied a surplus of makeup. Her dress was a silk shift that hung loosely from her, the bones of her neck and her shoulders protruding.
“Twice divorced and once widowed, this Valenska,” she said.
I nodded, my mouth full of food.
“You’ll have known her from films. Or perhaps you are too young.”
I can see now, recalling those days, that in addition to her generosity toward me, Mrs. Hargreaves used my presence for a kind of sport, for she liked particularly to seat me beside an aging beauty and to watch as I looked unthinkingly past her, performing the sort of casual, unwitting cruelty that the young sometimes do upon the old.
Ten days passed, and again my telephone rang. It was another summons to lunch.
“You’ll be seated next to Marina, of course,” Mrs. Hargreaves declared, and would hear nothing of my attempts to demur. “I think you will find her quite a fascinating woman. She was a lover to Stravinsky, Picasso, Valentino. You can talk about Bauhaus. She’ll have known them all: Klee and Kandinsky. A great beauty in her day. She met Proust in Paris and loved him at first sight, though he was half dead and gay as a daisy, of course.”
In my rooms, I read maths by the dim light of winter. I went to lectures, forgetting my umbrella, and came home with sodden clothes, stripping bare to be dried by the electrical fire. The scent of damp wool, the ache of fingers and toes as they warmed, aroused a homesickness in me, a want for Glass that my studies were powerless to distract. At home, on the hill looking over the sea, a wood fire, crackling, would throw fragile light; there, rain would be falling as well, like a whisper against the ancient thatch of the roof. On the boardwalk, neon lights of the penny arcade or the jazz club would be reflected in puddles. In the village, people would hurry about: Chris Blake, at work in his father’s greengrocer, would lift crates or test fruit with unhurried ease, back straight as it had been on the pitches of our youth, a beauty which had agitated something in me; Pearl Bideford, beautiful also, in silk scarves and trench coat, would smoke beneath awnings. My only refuge from the weight of that longing was in dreams of this new, dazzling world I had glimpsed, its Turkish cigarettes and crystal decanters. And so all through that cold, dismal week, even shivering over dinners of baked beans and toast, my heart lifted at the thought of Marina Valenska: pitched forward at the edge of a symphony box, breast heaving, eyes brimming as she glimpsed her beloved, his pale hands and neck, that genius composer.
The day arrived, and I knocked just after noon on the great, shining black door in Glebe Place. It was answered by the same man who served at the table, Barnaby, who in the manifestations of his lifetime of work, and in the careful way his hair was combed to cover his baldness, reminded me of my father. He took my coat, my scarf, and my umbrella, the latter of which had been damaged in the wind.
“Ah, you’re here.”
Mrs. Hargreaves swept into the foyer.
“Good of you to come, braving the weather.”
“Shocking,” I said.
“Oh, but it is good. We’ll be without Mr. Parsons,” she said, referring, I realized, to the horse-faced man, “who, I’m afraid, cannot risk the damp air. And Madame DuPont, whom you will remember, has gone to Paris to visit relations. All the better because she’d not have forgiven me for denying her your company, and I so want you to speak with Marina.”
I followed her down a corridor to the library, where we gathered every other week before lunch. The room was lit by only small, shaded lamps; oak shelving ran from ceiling to floor with a collection of gilt-embossed cloth and leather editions. A few guests sat, languid, on armchairs and ottomans, smoking and leafing through the pages in books. A poet, thirtyish, in a worn woolen suit, who Dolly had told me owed money to gamblers, stood alone by the window and polished his glasses. And there, at the center, as if of a vortex, splayed across an overstuffed, rococo settee, sat Marina Valenska, silent, ignored. Immediately, I recognized her, though she wasn’t at all as I had imagined: grown old and run to billowing fat, draped in black chiffon and glistering jewels. I’d have laughed had I not been so strangely unsettled. She was posed for all the world as the star she had been: posture of sybaritic repose; cocktail glass, empty, held to her lips; expression of exaggerated, regal indifference.
She lifted her eyes when we entered the room.
“Marina, darling, here is the boy I told you about. A student, which no salon is rightly without.”
Mrs. Valenska offered one hand to be pressed.
“Dolly’s latest discovery,” she said. “Dolly is forever making discoveries.” Her pronunciation of the words was drawn out and British, marked with only the faintest Eastern European lilt, consonants softened as though by habituation to French.
I sat down on the extreme end of the sofa, nearest to where Mrs. Hargreaves still stood.
“Well, I don’t know. There isn’t anything to discover, I’m sure. We were introduced by Professor Hastings,” I said.
“Well then you are a discovery of this professor, and Dolly has taken the credit. Very naughty of her to do that, but how can we blame her? You are a student she says. The mathematics, is it?”
I nodded. She went on.
“My father was friendly with Georg Cantor at one time,” she said, and shifted her body a little, so that she sat more upright and nearer to me. Barnaby passed with a tray of fresh drinks, and she replaced her empty glass with a full one. “He came to the house a number of times, for parties rather like this.” She gestured broadly, spilling some liquid. “I was, of course, too young to understand who he was, but I remember he had a bald head and behaved very strangely. He’d become a lunatic by that time, you know.”
“I’ve heard that that happened.”
“It is often the way.” She said this and then seemed to grow pensive. There was an olive in her glass, and she regarded its distortion through the medium of the gin. From another room, down the long corridor, came the first tentative notes of a waltz, tapped out as though by a shy amateur asked to play for a professional’s pleasure.
“Mrs. Hargreaves tells me
you have known a great many important and interesting people.” I glanced over my shoulder, vainly expectant of being rescued again, but our host had made her way to the window, where she spoke to the poet, who looked away, still not wearing his glasses.
“I’ve been acquainted with thousands, married to three. It would be truthful to say I’ve known some number between, though it’s beastly of Dolly to have said so to you.” She laughed.
Naive as I was then, I gathered her meaning. I could feel myself blush. “I have interest in the arts myself,” I said, grasping. “The Bauhaus, for instance. Perhaps Dolly’s told you.”
“Yes, and I said it showed good taste, my dear. For my own part, of course, I have always adored Renoir, Seurat—people eating picnics, dancing and such. But for you, Mr. Klee is the better thing. The most mathematical of all the schools, would you not say?”
There had come into her eye a certain ghost of intelligence, an insouciant wit that must once have been attractive, in the days when it was more readily accessed.
“Yes, I suppose that’s the trick of it,” I said. “Appealing to the rational as well as to the artistic.”
It might have been something I’d heard Dolly say; I don’t really recall. I do believe I must have borrowed the thought, and yet saying it aloud seemed to make it my own. It was true I’d been moved by an oil on burlap hung in a modern gallery here. Why, then, should I not claim special interest? Why should I not hold an opinion? I had lifted, I realized, one foot from the floor, so that I was half recumbent, as Mrs. Valenska was. She reached listlessly as the drink tray passed on its return to the bar, removed the last remaining glass, and handed it to me. I drank, and she said, “Sense and sensibility, an Englishman might say. Always these go together, and always they are warring. It is true, isn’t it, that the most difficult things in maths are often the simplest? One follows the line of most intricate thought, and finds that it leads back to the most basic truths. I think this is perhaps what drove poor Georg mad.”
Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Page 13