Alec

by William di Canzio

  Or might not be. If he learned Maurice was dead, Alec decided he would die as well. He immediately laughed at his own bombast, silly as the Mildreds pledging to throw themselves into the ocean after his ship. Or maybe not. Where he was going, wasn’t it easier to die than live? Wasn’t death the purpose of the soldier’s life? His own death, or somebody else’s? Somebody else who was also a lover, brother, son, father … Oh, why the fuck even be born?

  He’d set aside the two last days of his leave for visits to London and Paris. Of course, he hadn’t told the parents that he would be seeing “Mrs. Wentworth” in town. Aderyn had formed an opinion of the lady after one meeting: “Going painted and perfumed among our poor suffering boys.” So now he found himself skulking around the city once more in his clandestine other life. No “illicit” sex involved this time, just supper at the lady’s house on Bedford Square, where he would spend the night as her guest before returning to France tomorrow. Then tomorrow to Paris for a day and a night with Swavely, also on leave, then the two of them back to the front.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the evening’s socializing. At Maurice’s side, he’d gotten along in that crowd as half of a young couple deemed fashionable. But on his own? He guessed he’d be all right. Anyway, he couldn’t refuse the lady’s invitation; she’d been so kind.

  He thought of how silently his father had embraced him before he boarded the train in the village, how forlorn Aderyn had looked. She turned away from the train; Da waved till he was out of sight. Should he have stayed another day with them? He tried to put it out of his mind. There was no winning in this upside-down time when the old were burying their young.

  * * *

  At the blue hour, with evening descending on the city, Alec found himself back in Bloomsbury. The cloud cover had broken: the mugginess escaped, drier air breezed in, and he could see the sunset sky. He’d taken a little detour on his way to the baroness’s. He knew that walking on Bernard Street would make him sad, but he couldn’t help himself. He paused before the building where he and Maurice had lived for ten months, third floor rear. What a time that had been: all day in the stockrooms at Harrods, he’d be eager for their nights together—reading to each other, or screwball political arguments, always food and laughing and sex and hours of rest in each other’s arms in perfect trust. How often had they walked down this street side by side?

  An uncanny feeling stopped him in his steps, of someone close behind him. He gasped and turned his head and started to say, “Maurice,” but there was no one. He paused till his heart stopped racing, then walked on.

  24

  About to enter the salon, Alec heard the piano and the singing:

  Everybody loves a baby, that’s why I’m in love with you,

  Pretty baby, pretty baby …

  He hesitated. He knew the tune and the words. Everyone did. But could he make himself sing along?

  And I’d like to be your sister, brother, dad and mother too,

  Pretty baby, pretty baby …

  The room was dazzling. Seven-branched candelabras burned on stands before tall mirrors. Knots of people were talking, laughing, drinking, among them several men in uniform: staff officers all. One of them noticed the arrival of a member of the other ranks. Unsure of what to do, Alec saluted sloppily; the gesture was acknowledged with a raised eyebrow and a nod. Those around the piano kept singing:

  Won’t you come and let me rock you in my cradle of love?

  And we’ll cuddle all the time …

  He found himself mouthing the words near the end of the chorus:

  Oh I want a lovin’ baby and it might as well be you,

  Pretty baby of mine …

  His hostess approached. “Welcome, darling. Let’s find you a drink.” She took his hand and led him to a credenza, where she poured whiskey into a faceted tumbler; it scintillated when she gave it to him, like her jewels, like the room. “There. Knock it back, have another, and then the noise won’t seem so dreadful. I’m just loitering in the quiet corner.” She steered him around islands of guests and furniture to a table where a plump older woman in a fringed shawl seemed to be playing Patience. Others were paying rapt attention. No, she wasn’t playing cards but reading them, a Tarot pack. She sneezed.

  “Santé,” someone said.

  “Merci,” the lady answered. She dabbed her nose. “I do not find the Hanged Man.”

  “Well, that sounds lucky,” said the subject of the reading, with a nervous titter.

  “Oh, he’s not a bad card. He chooses the higher good over his own pleasure…” She sorted through the deck till she found and revealed him. “See? Le Pendu, he hangs not by the neck but by his right ankle, quite daintily, like an acrobat. His red tights signify pleasure, but his blue jacket, closer to his heart, wisdom.”

  She turned to her hostess. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling well at all, Cornelia, dear. I do regret I can’t stay for supper. I should have stopped at home.” She stifled another sneeze. “Might someone please hail me a cab?” She gathered her cards. When she got up, she saw Alec standing near her chair. She said to him, “This face inspires strong passions—love, envy…”

  “Believe me, ma’am, there’s nothin’ to envy.”

  “Some might think otherwise. Do beware them.” Then, “May I meet your companion?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The one who was with you when you came in. Whenever I looked up, I saw someone beside you…”

  “I’m by myself tonight.”

  “But surely—” About to contradict him, she glanced around the room, then closed her eyes for a moment. She opened her eyes and shook her head: “This cold, such a nuisance in the summer, I should go right to bed.” Other guests closed around her, recommending a hot toddy and rest, and she was gone before Alec could ask about the one she said she had seen.

  After supper, the baroness introduced a soprano from Prague, who would sing a piece from an opera not yet staged in London. The pianist quieted the room with an introduction that suggested the plucking and glissandi of a harp. And then the perfect sound of the singer’s voice. Its strength and beauty gave him chills. He couldn’t understand the words, but did understand the emotion: her whole being vibrated with passion, womanhood, loveliness, and with a longing akin to grief. To Alec, it seemed she was singing about the war. As if for every death on the battlefield, she mourned the death of love itself. She wanted life, life for the young soldiers, for herself, and for all women whose love the war would kill. She ended on a high phrase that blossomed as she sustained it, then floated into the room’s deepened silence. He realized he had been holding his breath to listen.

  * * *

  Later, after most others had departed, Alec and the baroness sat together on a couch by the unlit fireplace. The young woman at the piano played “Clair de Lune.” Risley stood by her and recited:

  And your eyes have caught the light

  Of a moon-enchanted dream …

  He looked over to the pair on the couch and winked.

  And your arms glide round about me,

  And I fade into a dream.

  He stepped away from the piano to join his friends. “Symons’s translation of Verlaine, who was likely writing about that exasperating boy, Rimbaud.” Dissonant chords crashed at the piano, sudden and loud. Eyes widened; heads turned. Risley called out, “Good God, Doris, what’s that?”

  “Stravinsky. Le Sacre du printemps. I got hold of the rehearsal score for the ballet. Isn’t it marvelous? Like I’m pounding drums on the keys—”

  “No wonder it caused a riot in Paris!”

  “A sign of things to come.” She struck a final chord. She swung around on the bench. “Cornelia, thanks a million for a wonderful evening, really. We all needed a break from the endless doomsday of this war.” The men stood as she crossed to the couch. “Good night, Tavy, darling.” She turned to Alec and took both his hands in her own. “Dear, lovely Private Scudder, please, please come back to us safely,” she said with dee
p sincerity. When she started to wipe away a tear with her hand, she realized she was still holding Alec’s. She laughed at herself: “Forgive me, I’m a mess.” She squeezed his hands in farewell. The women left the room together.

  “Well, laddie,” Risley said, decanter in hand, “had enough of this devilish poison?”

  Alec extended his glass for a refill.

  “That’s the spirit.” Risley poured for them both. “Drink up. Cheers. Better, I’m sure, than what they’re serving at the front.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Scudder, I do wish … I wish none of this were happening. I, I—oh, never mind, what’s to say?” He sighed.

  They sipped their whiskey in silence. Alec asked, “Any news of Morgan?”

  “No, and I don’t know why. He’d been writing regularly, then nothing. We do know he’s alive, at least—and not injured. His mother receives one of those damned postcards with the checkmarks once a month from Alexandria, but his signature’s forged. She’s prostrate with worry, poor old thing; I’m baffled.” He took a lumpy parcel from a table. “Here, this is for you.”

  “…?”

  “Something to make you laugh, I promise.”

  Alec unwrapped it and found a drab muffler the color of his uniform, misshapen and homemade. “What’s this?”

  Risley looked up at the ceiling.

  “Did you—?”

  “Yes. Granny has taken up knitting woolens for her troops.” Their laughter started as a chuckle and got louder. “George taught me how to knit—”

  “Aunt Georgie—!”

  “Now I’m cranking these things out by the dozen! You should see the socks!”

  * * *

  Alec and his hostess lingered together in the quiet after Risley had gone home. At last she said, “You know your room?”

  He nodded. “Took my bag up earlier. But if you don’t mind, I’ll sit up a bit yet.”

  “Of course. Just let me—” She struck a match and lit the kindling in the hearth. “This house can be damp at night, even in summer.” She watched the tinder start to blaze.

  Alec sensed her reluctance to leave him alone. He said, “Your friend who sang—that was beautiful.”

  “I’ll tell her you said so. She was in good voice tonight.”

  “It seemed to me about the war.”

  “Ah, but I heard it before the war—in Vienna. The story’s a fairy tale, in Czech; Rusalka, it’s called. She’s a water sprite in love with a mortal boy. She’s praying to the moon in that song, who sees everything, to watch over him and make him think of her and bring him back. So, yes, it could be about the war…” She stared into the flames. The flickering highlighted and shadowed her face.

  “Baroness?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “The fortune-teller, who was she?”

  The question made the lady smile. “I’m sure her devotees would prefer you call her a clairvoyante. A famous one, at that.” She watched the logs catch fire. “Mardash is her name. Armenian, I believe.”

  “… She said somethin’ to me I can’t get out of my head.”

  “Oh?”

  “She said she saw somebody beside me when I came into the room tonight; she said whenever she looked up she saw someone beside me, but when she was talkin’ to me, the one she saw was gone.”

  The lady, still gazing at the fire, said, “The room was crowded.”

  “Earlier, though, before I came to your house, I’d walked down Bernard Street where me and Maurice used to live, and I felt someone near me. I’m tellin’ you I could feel someone there close behind me, the way you can feel somebody next to you. I even turned round to look. But there was nobody. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  Still focused on the fire, she paused, then said, “I have.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes. It’s called a sense of presence.”

  “Sense of—?”

  “Presence.” She turned to face him now. “Alec, there’s something I wish to tell you.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I knew Maurice’s father,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “Years ago, twenty, more—shortly after I married Wentworth. He was a guest at our dreadful business dinners. I had always struggled to hold up among Wentworth’s friends, even more among their wives, but with Maurice Hall, the father, I found it easy to talk. At first I thought perhaps because he’d always come to these occasions on his own. His wife had recently given birth and didn’t like to be away from the nursery at night. But it was more. There was a kind of playfulness in our conversation, you see, a relief in each other, as if we were both outsiders in a foreign city.

  “Alec, listen, the father was like his son, and like you.”

  Alec blinked. “What’s that? You don’t mean—?”

  “Yes.”

  “But no—he had kids—”

  She said nothing.

  “Oh…”

  She continued, “I was planning to tell Maurice in due time, privately of course. But the war took you both away from us so abruptly—I hadn’t the chance. And now … it’s nothing I can write to him, not with censors reading every word, and besides, it’s better said face-to-face.”

  “For certain…”

  “By right the knowledge belongs to Maurice. That’s why I hesitated to tell you. I have every confidence that he’d tell you himself, but it’s not for me to presume. Now, though, if I ever doubted that the two of you are united always, the doubt’s gone.” Again they fell silent watching the fire.

  Then Alec said, “Why do you tell me just now? Do he think he’s dead?”

  “No—”

  “Do you think that fortune-teller sees the dead? That she saw his ghost with me tonight—‘present’?”

  “Alec, stop, please. I believe Maurice is alive, as I believe that you’ll come home safely from the war—to those who love you, to Maurice above all.” She sat beside him on the couch and continued, “But no one can know, certainly not Madame Mardash and her pack of cards.

  “Please listen to me: the father died for lack of what the son possesses—what Maurice possesses in you, what you two have together. Yes, it sounds far-fetched, but honestly, I mean it. The man didn’t kill himself, I’m certainly not saying that, but anxiety may have brought him down, and loneliness. He’d been made to believe he was corrupt and evil. If he’d been less fine a person, perhaps he’d have been able to live with such judgment, but instead his pain worsened over time. He feared he might lose everything—through some misstep or betrayal—that he’d disgrace himself, that his wife and children would come to hate him.

  “One day, at the top of a flight of steps he’d climbed too quickly, he fell. They said it was heart and brain at once, a spasm and a seizure. He survived a couple of days. He was forty-five. The first time I saw young Maurice was at the funeral, a little boy in mourning clothes. For the father’s sake especially, I cherish my friendship with you two.”

  * * *

  After she went upstairs, Alec kept vigil alone before the fireplace, pondering the story of Maurice’s father and the tender image of his beloved as a grieving child. He watched till the flames burned down. He gazed at the moon through the window. The singer had asked the moon to guard her love, to make him think of her, to bring him to her. Her longing, like his, was too deep for words; only music could give it voice. He had no music of his own, so her song comforted him.

  At last, too sleepy either to stay awake or to go to bed, he dozed on the couch till dawn when he trudged upstairs to his room.

  VII

  ELEVENTH DAY, MONTH, HOUR

  25

  Paris had determined to be gay. It wasn’t quite false gaiety. Rather more of a duty? Yes, that was it, the citizens’ duty to carry on blithely in defiance of the war. Musicians played in the streets; children in the parks. Painters painted in the open air. Elders browsed for books and pictures in the stalls along the Seine and stopped to argue the day’s news with much gesticula
tion. Young women, filling in for men as trolley drivers, metro workers, mail-porters, wore their service caps with the panache of the latest millinery and managed to tuck and pin their drab uniforms fetchingly. Meanwhile, shopwindows featured frocks “in the Egyptian style,” which somehow related the wearer to the battles of the Mediterranean and therefore expressed her patriotism. Oo-la-la. As civic virtues go, Alec found gaiety far more appealing than, say, piety. Today he’d been grateful for the city’s hubbub, squeeze-boxes and mandolins and kids yelling back and forth.

  He and Swavely, two Tommies, were now standing in a room of suffocating opulence, agape at a pair of strange objects enshrined there. One was a bronze bathtub in the form of a fantastic beast. It had a woman’s head, the hindquarters of a lioness, and wings along the sides. It was attached to no plumbing because it was meant to be filled by hand, with Champagne. The other was an odd kind of chair, upholstered in brocade and designed to allow a man comfortable access to the private parts of two women at once. The young soldiers were trying to figure out how the thing might function in terms of anatomy. Did he—? And she—? And then the other girl—? The room was dedicated to the memory of Edward VII; the arcane objects had been made for him.

  “No wonder they loved the old king here in Paris,” Alec said. “Sure he donated half the Exchequer to this place alone.”

  “Our fuckin’ taxes at work, the ruttin’ warthog,” Swavely muttered.

  The Parisians carried on with life as if victory were certain. Hadn’t they already beaten back the invaders? Yes, two years ago, when the Germans had advanced to within twenty miles of the towers of Notre-Dame herself! The citizens readied for a siege: they removed masterpieces from the Louvre and sent the government out of town; they stockpiled foodstuffs, even herded cattle in the parks. They reduced the population by offering free train tickets to outlying suburbs. Then the taxi drivers were called to shuttle troops from the squares to the front. And so they did, in their shiny Renaults and Peugeots, five soldiers at a time in each cab, six thousand men in a matter of hours. General Gallieni had even instructed the drivers to keep their meters running and paid them all for their transport service, market rate. Thus the City of Light had dispatched her defenders and drove back the Hun. When Paris deemed the enemy once again at safe remove, she rehung her paintings and brought home her regime. But that was two years ago, and still the war kept on. Nowadays, gaiety required determination.