by Susan Barrie
Perhaps it was because she had spent half a night in a chair while the atmosphere grew steadily colder around her that she woke up a couple of mornings later feeling hot, and with a sore throat.
Lucien came and sat on the side of her bed, looking at her anxiously. “You’ll stay in bed,” he told her. “I’ll send you up something that will make you feel less sorry for yourself, and if you’re good you’ll probably be right again in no time!”
He smoothed her hair, dropped a kiss on her brow and then went out and left her. At eleven o’clock a mass of scarlet roses arrived from the nearby florist, and Frau Bauer arranged them on the dressing table and beside the bed. Tucked inside the roses there was a card that ran:
I wish you could be my only patient today, but as I can’t be with you all the time, these roses will let you know how much I’m thinking of you.
Lucien
Caro felt tears of sudden acute happiness spring to her eyes, and she felt distinctly better. But Lucien kept her in bed for the better part of a week, though it was a week she thoroughly enjoyed because she luxuriated in his care and his attentiveness, expressed in many ways apart from flowers and books and unexpected gifts.
And so the summer burned itself out beside the lake, and Caro lived through all the splendors of flaming dawns and golden noons and scented, starlit nights. She met many people and visited many beautifully furnished homes, gave dinner and luncheon parties herself, acquired lots of new clothes and saw, on the whole, very little of her husband. He flew away from her on several short trips to places like Rome, Oslo, Madrid and even Paris, where they were one day to enjoy a belated honeymoon.
The trip to Paris was not one on which Lucien felt it was possible to take Caro, so she remained behind. Caro sometimes felt that she knew nothing at all of what went on behind the imperturbable mask of his face when he was sitting opposite her and appeared to be reading a book or a newspaper, when he took her out to dinner and she fell to watching the people around her and sometimes looked up and found him watching her, or even when he greeted her smilingly at the breakfast table in the mornings and made a point of inquiring politely how she proposed to spend her day.
She received cheerful letters from Beverley, who was finding married life and a home of her own very much to her taste, and she also received little notes from Mrs. Moses, who assured her that the flat was as spick-and-span as ever.
She had got to know Brian Woodhill very well after so many weeks. He had spent almost the whole of the summer in the mountains, and his visits to Oberlaken had been frequent. Caro had met him often by accident when she was shopping in the mornings and at the houses of other people, where he seemed to be extremely popular. Sometimes they had coffee together and on one or two warm afternoons they listened to the orchestra in the Krusaal gardens, and on those occasions, before he drove her home, he took her for a spin along the lakeshore. One afternoon when they were both visiting Frau Maler he took her out in a boat on the shimmering surface of the lake, and that was an afternoon she enjoyed very much.
When they returned to the landing stage, with its time-worn steps, Caro felt exhilarated and there was a bright color in her cheeks. Her slim legs were bare, and her white buckskin sandals had been swamped by a wave they had unfortunately shipped when Brian turned the launch for home. He was kneeling on the jetty to shake the water out of one of them for her when Lucien appeared on the steps above them.
“If your shoes are wet you’d better let me drive you home,” he said.
“I’m awfully sorry we shipped that wave,” Brian apologized. He stood looking after them thoughtfully as the car glided away down the drive.
When they reached home Lucien said, “I’d be glad if in future you’d refrain from that sort of thing.”
“From what sort of thing?” she asked.
“Going out on the lake. It doesn’t matter who offers to take you—whether it’s Brian or any other man—I’d still prefer it if you didn’t go.”
Her eyes widened indignantly.
“But I wouldn’t be likely to accept an invitation from any other man. Brian is an old friend—of yours, at least—and as Frau Maler raised no objection I can’t think why you should.”
“Can’t you?” But he turned away. “I shan’t be dining at home tonight. If you think you’ll be lonely would you like me to ring Olga and get her to come and spend the evening with you?”
“No, thank you,” she answered.
She stood feeling angry because Brian, who was always so kind and understanding and had made bearable many lonely hours for her, had been unnecessarily snubbed that afternoon.
The one person she found it difficult to get to know was Olga. They managed on the surface to appear as if they had become good friends, and Caro genuinely admired the other woman’s unerring instinct for the right kind of clothes, and even the right kind of conversation and food when she had invited guests to the flat.
One day after Caro had been in Oberlaken for more than two months, and the ripples of excitement her unexpected marriage to Lucien had caused were beginning to die down and be forgotten, Olga brought up the subject of his first wife.
“I do hope you don’t think I left that photograph of Lucien’s first wife on his dressing table deliberately. I really didn’t know what to do about leaving it there. But it did strike me as rather an awful thing—rather a brutal thing, I have thought since— to leave it there for you to see when you returned. Or did Lucien remove it before you had a chance to see it?”
“No.” Caro felt suddenly disturbed by the line the conversation had taken. “He did put it away afterward.”
Olga looked across at her as if she were considering her deliberately.
“You do know about Lucien and his first wife, of course?” she said.
“Naturally I know he was married before.”
“But do you know the circumstances of the marriage? And the circumstances of Barbara’s death?”
“No.” Caro’s fingers grew icily cold.
Olga explained how Lucien had met his first wife, and how delicate she had been and how happy they had been for that one year of their marriage.
“It was quite perfect,” Olga said. “Lucien adored the very ground she walked on. He hated to let her out of his sight, and he would have done anything to make her happy. When she died I know that he thought his own life was over.” Olga paused, and then concluded with perhaps unconscious melodrama, “Shortly after she died he told me that he would never love any woman again—that it was quite impossible to love twice in a lifetime in the way he had loved Barbara. But I suppose time does soften things.”
“Yes,” Caro agreed.
Olga’s eyes studied her.
“I did honestly feel you ought to know these things,” she said, “because you may find Lucien a little detached sometimes. And you’ve got to share him with other things, as well—a highly successful practice, and a large circle of acquaintances. But so long as you don’t expect too much—”
“You don’t think it would be much use expecting very great deal from Lucien, do you?” Caro suddenly inquired, looking directly into Olga’s eyes.
Her hostess inserted a cigarette in her long holder and lighted it carefully before she answered.
“My dear,” she replied, “only you know whether your expectations of Lucien have already fallen short! If they have, at least you are married to Lucien, and there are quite a lot of women who probably envy you your position. And if you don’t mind making do with a diet of crumbs instead of the main feast...”
When Caro returned home she felt as if instead of being an ordinary human person she was a balloon from which someone had released all the air. That someone, she knew, was Olga. Olga had been waiting to do this for weeks—and she had done it at last. It wasn’t that she disliked Caro, but she was in love with Lucien herself, and it must have upset her a good deal that he had married a woman he had known only a few days when she herself had been ready to become his wife—a com
pletely undemanding and understanding wife—for years.
Caro went up to her husband’s dressing room. Deliberately she opened the drawer into which he had slipped the photograph, and there it still lay, on top of a pile of silk scarves and handkerchiefs. Every time Lucien went to that drawer he must see it.
She took it out and studied the pictured face carefully. She took in all the details of the pure oval face, the faintly petulant mouth, the large eyes. Then she put the photograph away and went upstairs to a little room at the top of the house that she had recently begun to turn into a studio for herself. Lucien did not even know that she had begun to work there.
She produced the various materials that she needed, including an ivory oval, and then sat down to do a miniature of Lucien’s first wife from memory. She found it absurdly easy, because the subject was one that for some reason was temporarily carrying her away. She might not have possessed any feelings as she worked; and since Lucien telephoned about six o’clock to say that he would not be home until late she went on working for as long as the light lasted, and by that time the miniature was well on the way to completion.
The next day she finished it, working with a kind of feverish pleasure, and then she set it aside while she started on another one of Lucien. Here it was even easier to work from memory, and the pleasure was even more painfully acute, for every feature of Lucien’s face delighted her and she knew every slight eccentricity of those features by heart.
She finished the second miniature on the third day. On the fourth day she took them to have them suitably framed, and at the end of another week they were back in her hands. The finished results were so admirable that her heart labored heavily with pleasure. The tiny beaten-silver frames, the small ebony mounts, were quite perfect. Her own work looked infinitely exquisite under glass.
She was sitting gazing at the miniatures lying in front of her on her worktable when Lucien opened the door and walked in without preparing her in any way for his visit. She felt like a small animal hopelessly trapped, and as he came up behind her the color first left her face and then flamed into it so that it seemed to scorch her neck and her brow, as well. Lucien bent over her and picked up the miniature of himself, studying it silently for several seconds, at the end of which time he remarked that it was extremely flattering, but he hadn’t known she was quite such a genius. Then he picked up the other miniature.
“But why this?” he asked.
Caro, quite unprepared for the question, didn’t know how to answer him. Then she found herself saying simply and huskily, “I thought you might like to have it!”
“I see,” he said.
He had another close look at her work and then he returned it to the table in front of her. He started to pace up and down the room. His eyes were taking in all the simple appointments of the retreat in which she had elected to work. In addition to the table drawn up close to the window there was a solitary armchair and a bookcase filled with a few of her own books, a colorful rug and a vase of flowers. The window was uncurtained, in order to admit all the light, and it looked very bare.
“Before we discuss what you’ve been doing,” Lucien said, “will you tell me why you’re working up here? And why, in any case, you never told me that you proposed to do so?”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested,” she answered quite truthfully. “And I didn’t think it was important enough to mention. Also you ... you said that you didn’t want me to go on with this sort of thing.”
“I have no objection at all to your doing a little of it for your own amusement, but you could have found yourself somewhere pleasanter to work. There are other rooms—”
“I like it here,” she said quickly. “As it is, it feels as if it ... as if it’s my own room!”
Lucien went on walking up and down.
“I don’t understand you,” he exclaimed at last. “Do you think I would carefully copy a photograph of your former husband in order to present it to you?”
“No.” She turned from the table and regarded him with a faint smile on her lips. “But that would be rather different, wouldn’t it?”
“In what way would it be different?”
“Because you’ve never seen a photograph of my former husband, and I don’t carry one about with me. I don’t even keep one in a dressing-table drawer!”
He looked at her strangely. “For all I know,” he said, “you heart is buried down there at the bottom of the sea with the man you first married—Beverley’s father!”
“It might be,” she agreed, gathering together some of the litter on her table, “only I don’t really think it is.”
But his expression did not lighten at all.
“Tell me exactly why you painted this miniature,” he said. “Not the one of me—the other one!”
“Because I thought you’d like it. Because I thought you’d be pleased.”
“There was a time in your life,” he said quietly, coming up behind her, “when you would have been very pleased if someone had presented you with a woolly rabbit, or a chocolate Easter egg. But you’ve got past that sort of thing now, haven’t you?”
She looked at him in perplexity.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
A tap came on the door, and he swore softly. The next moment he called out to whoever it was to enter, and Fraulein Neiger put in an apologetic head.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, doctor,” she said, “but Dr. Ducroix is on the telephone, and you said that you particularly wanted to speak to him.”
“Oh, yes, Liesel,” he answered, “I do. And I’m sorry you’ve had to climb all those stairs.” Then, as she almost instantly withdrew, he looked again at Caro. “If you must fit yourself up a studio,” he told her, “at least have it on a lower level than this, so that if others wish to come anywhere near you they don’t have to climb to the top of the house.”
That night dinner had to be kept waiting because Lucien was late, and during the meal neither of them had much to say to each other. Caro had the feeling that whereas before there had been an unacknowledged gap between them, now there was a kind of open chasm, and that if one or the other of them did not do something about it, the chasm might become unbridgeable. She felt a little frightened because she was so plainly the one to do something—she who had to be content with a meal of crumbs instead of a main course! Olga’s words were so descriptive of what she was prepared to accept, having falling in love with and married Lucien.
“I’m going back to the clinic and I may be late tonight, so don’t wait up for me,” Lucien told her when they rose from the table. “And I really mean don’t wait up for me!”
“Very well,” she said.
She went to bed early because there was nothing much else to do, and she had no idea what time Lucien came in, for he slept in his dressing room. The next morning he had already finished breakfast when she went downstairs, and Fraulein Neiger told her he had gone straight to the clinic.
Lunch had to be held up again because Lucien was late. Caro noticed that he ate little, and when the coffee was brought in he declined it and walked to the window to stand looking out at the quiet street.
The feeling grew upon Caro that something was amiss.
“Is there anything wrong, Lucien?”
“Wrong?” He looked around at her vaguely, as she had known he would. It was as if she were an intrusive element in his strictly private and secret life just then. “No. Why?”
“I thought you seemed—you do seem as if you’ve got something on your mind.”
He flicked ash from his cigarette into an ashtray at his elbow.
“Little Maria Ferenza died this morning,” he said.
“Oh, no!” Caro exclaimed. “Oh, no, Lucien!” She felt an acute sensation of pity for him welling up in her. “Oh, Lucien, I’m so sorry!” she told him with a tremor in her voice.
“Perhaps it is just as well,” he replied. “I was fairly certain at one time that I could save her, but about a we
ek ago I really began to lose hope.”
“You never told me,” she said. She sat absolutely still. She could see the tiny Italian face so clearly, the large eyes in their hollow sockets, the waxen skin, the blue shadows around the mouth. She could also see the smile Maria had given her before she told the doctor that his wife was very pretty.
Lucien turned around and looked at her for a moment.
“I wouldn’t let it upset you,” he recommended. “It was more or less inevitable.”
But Caro still sat unmoving, and despite the warmth of the afternoon she still felt cold. She was badly shocked by his news, and the tears pricked painfully behind her eyes, but just now her main thought was one that made her feel colder than ever. He had known all about Maria last night, and at breakfast, when he might at least have left a message for her. He had known about Maria for a week, but he had said nothing to her. He had deliberately shut her out from a thing that mattered to him acutely, and even now he wouldn’t have told her if she hadn’t asked.
“Well, I must go,” Lucien said, and crossed over to her chair to drop a light kiss onto the top of her head. “Go out somewhere and forget about Maria,” he said. “She wouldn’t want you to be miserable on her account.”
When he had gone she made her way up to her room. She felt that she had to go out and very soon she was walking beside the lake, with a little of the summer sunshine taking the chill out of her bones and the beauty of the lake itself soothing and consoling her. Then she saw Brian Woodhill’s car approaching her.
“Come and have tea somewhere,” he suggested. They went to a restaurant, renowned for its rich cakes and pastries, where an orchestra played softly. The atmosphere was relaxed and Caro began to look less as if something had hit her an unexpected blow. But nevertheless Brian studied her closely, and all at once he told her, “Do you know that you’re thinner. Doesn’t that clever doctor of yours think you’re not quite as bonny as when he first met you?”