The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  Inside is the nest all the lamp-post banners flew from: UN SPECTACLE, in bunting, all around the stage. The audience doesn’t seem to be very large. It seems in fact to be composed of visitors to Geneva, perhaps all stuck here for the weekend. They have a hangy look and seem to be searching each other’s faces to find out why they are here. The great glasshouse is boiling hot but glitters cold. The audience is very quiet.

  Potted palms. White flowers. A white piano. MOZART HAYDN BRAHMS on white posters. Silence. Coughs. Whispers. A man in evening-dress walks upon the stage. We clap. He holds out a beckoning hand and a woman in evening-dress walks out to join him. He sits at the piano and she prepares to sing. She wears a long black dress and her arm is in a sling. A white sling.

  The woman next to me takes off her glasses and looks at me. ‘A broken arm!’ she says, eyebrows high. After the woman has started to sing she turns to me again, and says, ‘In a sling! She must be German. She could not be Swiss.’

  As the woman sings—smooth, faultless, bland, douce—I see that she is small and thin, so thin, and her mouth opens in a cave. I get up and make for the door, then out of the glasshouse, down the dark paths, through the tropical trees weeping for the sun. The iron gates are locked.

  ‘Who’s there?’ cried the gate man.

  ‘I want to get out.’

  ‘Were you at the Spectacle?’

  ‘Yes. I have to get out.’

  ‘Sorry, Madame, nobody is allowed to leave the Spectacle until the end. The gates are locked until the end of the Spectacle.’

  ‘Is there some other way out?’

  He shrugged with a Swiss shrug that has to do only with the neck and jaw.

  ‘Only the wall.’ He goes back in his box.

  Beside the locked gates the wall is low, for the earth for the park has been banked up against it. I step up on it in my Emil Rodin boots, then sit with legs dangling. The other side of the wall drops ten feet and I drop down.

  But it is farther than it looks and I have drunk from the fairy-godmother fridge and I feel the heel of my boot break under me. I lie twisted on the grass in my black-silk dress and fur jacket. People passing along through the Jardin Anglais look at me quickly and do not stop. After a time I get up and hop along, slowly, stopping often, holding on to railings, to benches, at one time to the back of the bench on which the fly had sat and wept. In the hotel foyer the concierge sees me and busies himself about his desk. Back in my room I shake, stagger as I try to run a bath, make a grotesquerie of undressing, hobble to the phone to ring my father. There is still no reply so I send for a room-service omelette, turn on the television, watch unseeing. Later I go to bed and my ankle plays a steady tune. Very much later I sleep.

  I wake at five-thirty by the lighted digits on the bedside clock and there is another little light, a message-light, beside them; a red dot pulsating from the bedside telephone. Here then it is. It has come.

  Dial three for front desk.

  ‘Hello? There is a message for me?’

  ‘Message, Madame?’

  ‘On the telephone. My message-light on the telephone is showing.’

  ‘Ah, just one moment, Madame. This is still the night staff.’

  How long I wait, sitting upright on the bed in the dark. I feel about for the light-switch but it turns on a blast of music. ‘Hello—hello? Yes?’

  ‘Yes, Madame, there was a call for you last night. While you were out.’

  ‘While I was out—but I was in before ten o’clock.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Madame, this is only the night staff. Shall we send it up, Madame?’

  ‘Yes please, at once.’ My voice is steady. Most commendable.

  I take the message as it is flicked under the door. ‘Shall you be attending the party today? If so I shall call for you, Helmut.’ (Another translator.)

  But I must ring my father, for this is a crossed line. It has some meaning. Party? What party? There is no party that I’ve heard of. I don’t go to parties. I must find the real message.

  The phone rings and rings among the tables and chairs, the sideboard, the lithographs, the brass ornaments, the big black group-photographs of my dead mother’s dead relations. The hearth-rug is turned back against sparks. Ashes are fallen in the grate. Cold. The tap drips as it has since my childhood. Cats lift their heads, eyes alight at the noise in the dark. Cold. Wind under the front-door. The passage cold, the staircase cold, his bedroom cold and fusty, piled high with his clothes and old boots and old newspapers and gardening magazines. The familiar smell in it of them and of him. In the bed the small hump, the old man gone.

  ‘Hello—what in hell—?’

  ‘Pa!’

  ‘Who the hell? It’s four o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘It’s me. I’m sorry. It’s nearly six here.’

  ‘It’s four o’clock!’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What? Yes, I’m all right. I need my shopping doing. Mrs. Aylesford’s going to do it if she doesn’t forget. She’s a very funny woman. You have to watch your step with her. I’m in her power of course. If she forgets, I’m finished. Finished. Her and Myrtle. If they’ve turned funny you’ll have to do it tonight, or tomorrow morning at a Sunday-shop. Better get yourself over here this morning. You can stop over the night.’

  ‘I’m in Geneva. I’ve rung because—’

  ‘You’re ringing from Geneva? It’ll be twenty pound.’

  ‘I’ve hurt my foot.’

  ‘You mean you won’t be coming?’

  I say with assurance and release, ‘No.’

  ‘So who’s to get my dinner?’

  I have fallen silent.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Well—this is the finish, isn’t it? You won’t be home the weekend. You won’t be home for another week. I’m out of Fairy Liquid.’

  ‘Father—where you are is not my home.’

  ‘Oh, we know that. No two ways about that. Your mother and I realised that long ago. You made your mother very unhappy.’

  ‘I’ll see you next week. I rang because I was worried.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I thought you were dead. You weren’t answering last night.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. It was the Euro-Vision Song Contest.’

  ‘Goodbye. I’ve had about enough.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure of that. We’re not good enough for you now, your mother and I.’

  ‘But Mother’s dead.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Helmut is waiting for me in the foyer at twelve o’clock, drinking brandy and staring at the floor. He is a solemn man, a failed barrister, failed everyone thinks because of a profound seriousness that affected the clients. It is said that he insisted on settling every case however clear-cut its impending victory on the grounds that victory in this world is as dust. He is clever, quirkish, can translate into Farsi and, from the gathering gloom on the faces of the unmistakably Iranian delegates in the arbitration in which we are at present engaged, it is possible that his interpretation of some of the admissions carries a whiff of judgment more terrible than this earth can compass. He is a devout Christian and hates travelling on a Sunday, a dear man of enchanting contradictions. At present one hand is knocking back the brandy and the other holding a book of meditations.

  We stand waiting for a taxi. Overnight, Geneva has swept up to a peak of cold. A pitiless wind blows the snow and only a few people are about, walking hunched and head down under a white sky. ‘What is the party, Helmut? I didn’t know about a party. Are you sure I’m invited?’

  ‘He said “all the translators”. I think we’re the only two here, though.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The Austrian. The expert-witness. He lives here.’

  ‘What does he do when he’s not being an expert-witness?’

  ‘Adjusts his monocle. Remembers hap
pier days as interrogator first-class, Sieg Heil, out with the fingernails. God knows what they all do with themselves, the ex-pat Genevois. Machinate. Fornicate. Play Bridge. The English arbitrator was at church this morning,’ he added approvingly.

  The taxi is taking us out of the city towards the French side of the lake. Near the frontier it veers inland and we are among trees. Large houses stand in clearings, their windows protected by steel mesh. We turn down a narrower road, then a lane, then a gravel drive and at the end of it stands a perfect gingerbread cottage gleaming with fresh paint under the snow, shutters ripple-striped and glossy, window-boxes with heart-shaped rustic cut-outs, burglar-alarms clamped to the eaves. The front door has a peep-hole in it and is surrounded with leaves and berries so highly scarlet they look enamelled. Fabergé. A hen’s egg in diamonds. A butler opens the door and from behind him floats the sound of the international Diplomatic elite at play.

  We are in the midst. Silk walls, shiny floors, Persian rugs, cherry-wood fires, waitresses with trays of crystal, women in suede as soft as silk and silk as rough as straw. Helmut says, ‘You’ll be all right here, Krista. You will fit like a glove.’

  ‘I won’t. I’m a wreck. I didn’t sleep.’

  ‘Always I think, Krista, that you are dressed ready at any time to meet the Queen.’

  ‘Ah!’ A broad, powdered woman looms in muted tartan. Experienced mouth, experienced eyes. A face that has quelled wars. That has countermanded the launching of a thousand ships.

  ‘We are the translators.’

  ‘Ah!’ She looks expertly about for the right people for us to meet. It will not be easy. She smiles conspiratorially at Helmut, in a way that means I shall provide for you in a moment, and I am led towards a group where the men are languidly inclining their heads and the women exhaustedly moving their mouths. A man turns to me—vermilion-cheeked, collapsed old mouth, ageing, not well. The woman beside him turns away towards a looking-glass and is gone. A sad smile, mouth turned down at the corners, some hint of a white triangle . ⁠. ⁠.

  ‘Oh! Was her arm in a sling?’

  The red-cheeked man looks puzzled.

  ‘I believe I heard her sing yesterday.’

  He looks alarmed.

  ‘Oh, I hardly think so. Not many musicians at these do’s of ours you know. She’s nobody we know. Visitor here. You’re English, aren’t you? Good guess. Translator at this jamboree at the Metropole?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well—very well paid, isn’t it? Jolly good. Like Switzerland, do you?’

  ‘Yes, very—’

  ‘Get a bit of skiing on the side? Jolly good. Know the Mitfords? Not many of them left now. I’m W.H.O. Great place. Air so good. Feel so well. Just married again, how about that? Sixty-six. She’s about your age. Heh? Come and meet some people. Here’s Sergei.’

  Glasses are re-filled. Laughter is louder. Sergei looks Slav. Tall. With eyelids. He holds one arm bent at the elbow across his back. He bows from a great height. He and the vermilion cheeks converse. I am nowhere.

  ‘You are leaving?’ the Slav says, surprisingly beside me at the door. ‘It is soon.’

  ‘Yes, I must.’

  ‘I too.’

  He kisses the powdery woman’s hand. I thank her but she is looking over my shoulder. At the door we stand for a moment, watching the snowflakes as his car slides up and his chauffeur approaches with an umbrella. We sink in soft cushions and lie back.

  ‘You are going to a luncheon appointment? Where may I drop you?’

  ‘No. Oh, anywhere near my hotel.’

  ‘Certainly not. You shall lunch with me. Have you your passport? Then we shall go to France.’

  Near Yvoire we leave chauffeur and car beside a bistro at the edge of a village and walk up the middle of an empty street, snow gathering in chunks on the toes of our boots, to the gateway of a chateau. One great gate leans from a broken hinge. Snow paints its delicate iron roses and plumes. Fastened across the back of the ironwork is old wire-netting and a menu behind a yellowing plastic sheet is tied to it with string. The menu, all but the word MENU, has faded away.

  Across the courtyard the door of the château is being opened by the oldest maître d’hotel in the world. He bows. There is a marble and wrought-iron staircase, a black and white marble floor, a desk with a Meissen vase of French graveyard flowers, a dozen clocks—long-case, short-case, ormolu, bell-jar, enamel and gold. Their ticks are water-drops. There is a harp standing outside the dining room door, two strings gone.

  And this dining room must once have been a ballroom. It has long windows looking at the white lake and three tables near them, round, large, all arranged in one corner, thick damask cloths (darned) to the floor. We have a bloomy field of parquet to cross to get to our chairs. The silver forks were forged for Titans, the napkins, small counterpanes dimly patterned with lilies. There are no other diners, no sound of life, no smell of food but a tiled stove with little eighteenth-century scenes of Vaud reaches the ceiling and the great room is alive from it, pleasant and warm. Pad, pad across the parquet comes the ancient with wine upon a tray. We talk of Sergei’s childhood home in old Bohemia.

  And then the caviar. And then the borscht. And then woodcock. And then a camembert. And then a cream pudding. And then a glass of candied fruits that shine in the snowy light. And then coffee and a bilberry liqueur.

  And then, I supposed, bed.

  But this is my misfortune. I do not now like bed.

  I go to find a cloakroom. I sit at a dressing-table with silver brushes, look at my face in a glass so old that it is exploding with bronzy stars. A flattering, greeny light. This is a brothel for international moguls, for giants, for great white whales (I am woozy with wine) and I am a minnow, a sprat, a wafer of plankton to float almost invisible through their jaws.

  Not that he looks like a whale. He looks a gentle man.

  He is waiting for me on a sofa in the hall and there is nobody else anywhere to be seen. He gets up, takes my elbow, draws me down beside him. He says, ‘I believe that the answer will be no.’

  I say, ‘I’m afraid so,’ through a wave of disappointment. And memory.

  ‘Let’s sit here a moment until the car comes. Where may I take you home?’

  We sit on in silence. He is looking at me all the time and says that I am beautiful. ‘Beautiful,’ he says. ‘But so frightened. I understand it,’ and he stretches out his left hand. ‘You must look.’

  ‘I—yes, I noticed.’

  ‘You didn’t like seeing me eat.’

  ‘I—no. I don’t mind—’

  ‘Some women of course like it. It thrills them. Hold my hand.’

  I stretched out and took the gloved hand and under the leather it is hard and wooden. Hard and dead.

  ‘It is the result of Stalingrad.’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘How could it be made?’

  ‘It’s an old miracle now. A German miracle. Before its time, like Ming china.’

  I close my eyes and try to think of things that are living and complete. Un-secretive and open. My father’s face keeps getting in the way. I stroke the hand and he says, ‘You are thinking of the contraption at the wrist when I take it off. And what happens at night.’

  ‘I was thinking nothing of the sort,’ I say and hold the glove all the way back to the hotel. As he kisses my living hand on the steps of the hotel he says, ‘I believe you to have been very unhappily married.’ Then he kisses my cheek and the snow-flakes swim past us, large and light and lacy in front of the glitzy revolving doors.

  There are four carrots in a row, nose to tail. Six potatoes. Four rashers of bacon and a gigantic chicken on a plate. Nearby stands a jelly-square upon a saucer. The old linoleum on the kitchen floor, the cupboard tops, sink, look as if they have been scrubbed daily for several hours. Cats sit outside on the sill with frantic dinner-time
eyes. I unpack the food I have brought, light the gas.

  ‘You may as well know—’ he calls through.

  ‘Yes?’

  No reply.

  I go back to the sitting room. He doesn’t move. ‘Did you see the chocolates I brought you?’

  ‘You may as well know—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m getting married.’

  ‘Oh yes. Who to?’

  ‘Mrs. Aylesford.’

  There is a tapping at the back door. It is Mrs. Aylesford with pots of marmalade. ‘How d’you find him?’ She leans forward, bright-eyed.

  ‘He says you’re going to be married, Mrs. Aylesford.’

  ‘Me? Whoever to?’

  ‘To him.’

  ‘Yes. He’s getting worse. I’ve brought you some marmalade. He ought to be cared for, Krista.’

  ‘But he’s perfectly all right. He’s very well.’

  ‘Not if he thinks he’s getting married to me.’

  ‘But he doesn’t. Not really. He has to say things like that. It’s boredom—boredom. Look how he’s arranged all those carrots.’

  We survey the line of carrots.

  ‘Last week,’ I say, ‘he was thinking of going on a cruise. Oh, I do wish he would go on a cruise.’

  ‘You ought to take him off foreign with you,’ she watches me. Interested. Examines my clothes. ‘Eh. Krista?’

  He appears in the kitchen doorway and seeing Mrs. Aylesford says, ‘Oh, God,’ and shuffles off again.

  ‘Can’t even keep away when I’ve got my daughter here,’ he says. ‘My only daughter. My only child. It’s a pity you weren’t a boy. Where’s my dinner?’

  ‘If I was a boy you wouldn’t have me cooking your dinner. You wouldn’t get a son doing what—’

  ‘And what’s this about me going off foreign? I can’t do with foreign stuff,’ he says, scooping away at Movenpick Black Forest cake.