by Joseph Hone
‘Oh. Can I take you someplace?’
‘I was going shopping,’ I said. ‘I’ve run out of booze.’
‘Oh,’ she said again, nervously looking up at the sky and the approaching storm. ‘I got some – at Kennedy on the way over.’ She turned, rootled about in the car, and took out a bottle of Jack Daniels.
I was surprised. ‘Elsa said you were teetotal.’
‘Did she? Well, I’m not.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Not after six o’clock anyway.’ Then she glanced up at the threatening sky again.
The vast flash of sheet lightning dazzled me, the crack of thunder like the pit of doom opening. She ducked, holding her hands over her head. ‘Oh my God!’ she said. Now she was different: panicky, eyes darting, as if the approaching storm was about to hurl itself upon us and sweep her up into the raging skies. She was adolescent, naïve, frightened, and this appealed to me. Besides, any woman with a bottle of Jack Daniels in her hand couldn’t be all bad.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’ll be better off inside.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m terrified of thunder and lightning. It’s childish.’
‘Nothing to be ashamed of. Joyce was terrified of it, too.’
‘Joyce?’
‘James Joyce, the writer. You wanted to write too, didn’t you?’
‘Elsa told you a lot about me.’
We were in the barn now. The place was in some chaos, the result of a week’s dejection. I turned on the gilded papier-mâché chandelier. Another flash and another crack. The lights flickered and went out. It was almost completely dark in the long space.
I said, ‘Sorry about the lights. The power lines are a bit wonky up the lane. I’m pretty isolated.’
‘Oh no, I like it. I love this sort of place.’
‘I’ll get some light.’
There was no other light but the fire, which I lit. The wood was dry, so that soon the flames were storming up the chimney, a yellow flickering light illuminating the room.
‘I hope the chimney won’t go on fire,’ she said.
‘No. The chimney wall is at least to two feet thick.’
‘It’s not the stone that goes on fire, it’s the soot, and the birds’ nests.’
I was annoyed at this correction. ‘I didn’t know you had birds’ nests and chimneys in New York.’
‘We don’t, but we do in my parents’ farm up in New Hampshire.’ She was immediately enthusiastic, eyes gleaming in the firelight, looking at me. ‘I was brought up there. An old farm and stone barn, quite like this. My mother still lives in the farmhouse, and I made over the barn as a weekend place for me. All in the middle of nowhere, just like here.’
‘Elsa told me nothing of this about you,’ I said. ‘She gave me the impression you were a hard-nosed New York attorney. Never mentioned you were a country girl.’
‘Well, I am.’
‘Said you were shrewish.’
‘Only in court. I hope.’
‘That you had dark, not red hair.’
‘Well, reddish. My father’s family is Irish. From the North.’
‘A red-headed Irish girl – that’s not at all how Elsa made you out to be.’
She laughed. ‘People have to see you the way they want to see you, don’t they?’ She wandered about the room, looking at things, finding security in the long, thick-walled space, until there was another flash and a fearful crack, right above the roof. She put her hands on her head again, came back quickly to the hearth.
Before we sat down I said, ‘There’s no plumbing – no tap water and only an outside privy. If you’re in need of that.’
‘I think I’m all right,’ she said primly.
‘I have enough water for the whisky.’
‘Does one need it?’
She wasn’t that prim. I poured us each a good tot of neat Jack Daniels, and we sat down in the two old armchairs with the stuffing coming out, some distance from the roaring fire.
‘Your health,’ I said.
‘And yours.’ She only half-raised her glass.
I had the feeling that neither of us really meant it. Turning her head to the fire, she smoothed her hair back. A fine profile, straight brow and a nose that angled out smartly.
‘You have a lot of paintings on the walls. Nudes. Are they yours?’ she asked.
‘Yes, though I do portraits as well, when I try to paint the real person.’
‘You don’t seem to have managed that with Elsa.’
‘No, and you’re not giving me the truth. She gave me a very different picture of you.’
‘What?’
‘She said that you became difficult with her,’ I said. ‘For no good reason. That you dropped her to write a crime novel, trying to get one up on her in the writing game.’
‘Not at all,’ she said quickly. ‘It was her idea that I write a crime novel. She encouraged me, but I never wrote it.’
I was surprised. ‘Well, she had this idea that you thought her a maverick, that her cookbook work was frivolous.’
‘Yes, she was unconventional. I’m not. And as for her work – she’d made a big success with her cookbooks. She was famous. How could I ever have thought that frivolous, or tried to better her in writing?’
‘No. I suppose not.’
‘People like to rewrite history,’ she said evenly. ‘Especially when they think you’ve behaved badly to them.’
‘She thought you left her because you were frightened by what the big noises in your law office would say if they found out you were living with a woman.’
‘That’s certainly not true. One of the big noises in my law office – a vice-president – has been living with another woman for twenty years.’
‘I see.’ I didn’t see. ‘You’ve contradicted almost everything Elsa told me about you.’
‘Yes, but …’
She didn’t finish. There was another flash of lightning, another crack right over our heads – the flames storming up the chimney, blazing like hellfire in the big grate. She cowered in the other chair. I gave us both another shot of whisky.
‘I suppose I’m really wondering why you came here,’ I went on. ‘To run Elsa down?’
‘No!’
‘One of you must be wrong about the other,’ I said tartly. ‘I knew Elsa better than I know you. So I tend to take her view of you.’
Another flash and a fierce crack. She ducked again. ‘Why should I want to do that?’
‘Because you feel guilty?’ I said briskly. I was annoyed that I hadn’t made any impact on her, and the drink gave me confidence now.
‘Why should I?’
‘Well, because you left her only the mushy bits of an apricot and meringue tart she made one Sunday evening for a little dinner party when she was late back.’
‘My God! She told you everything, didn’t she? Next it’ll be my not washing up the dishes that evening.’
‘It’s true then?’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t intended,’ she added quickly, defensive for the first time.
‘It never is.’ Silence. ‘And what of your asking her if she’d slept with other women while she was away on her trips?’ She didn’t reply. ‘Did you ask her if she slept around?’
‘I did! And what damn business is it of yours anyway?’ There was fire in her voice. She was rattled. ‘Anyway,’ she took up her cudgels again, ‘if anyone’s guilty, it’s you. And that’s why you’re attacking me. It’s you who took her Nazi hunting round Europe. If you hadn’t she’d never have found out about her father. She’d still be alive.’
‘Exactly, and I certainly feel the guilt. But I’m not attacking you for that. What I’m really wondering about is the truth – why did you leave her, for example?’
‘Does it matter now?’
‘It mattered plenty to Elsa, because you wouldn’t tell her.’
‘So? It hardly matters to her now.’
‘No? Can you sit on a bad conscience forever? Don’t you and I owe Elsa the truth? – now just
as much as when she was alive?’ I was roused. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I swore I’d never go truth hunting again, because that’s what killed Elsa. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe, if I look at it coldly, I was right to uncover the dirt on her father, even though it killed her. Because don’t we owe the truth to the two million Polish Jews her father sent to the ovens? Who speaks for the dead there? Well, maybe I did, by finally identifying the man who sent them there.’
‘You’re arguing that you sacrificed Elsa to a good cause.’
‘Yes, if I’m being honest. So why can’t you be honest?’
Silence. I got up and offered her another tot of whisky.
‘No thank you.’ She stood up. ‘Is this trial over?’
‘As you like.’
‘I’ll tell you one truth,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was curious to see who Elsa had taken up with.’
‘And you’re surprised it was a boozy tosspot – and a man to boot.’
‘Yes.’
‘No accounting for it.’
‘There is. There must be. Elsa was an intelligent woman.’
‘Exactly. Which is why we were happy together. I was the same sort of man, in better times.’
‘Well, everyone has their own way of getting over bad times.’
She glanced at the bottle.
‘What’s yours?’
‘Work,’ she said shortly.
‘And love?’
‘I’ve put that behind me.’
She was about to leave, but there was another flash and a receding crack, and she had second thoughts. She hovered.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘That’s a pity.’
‘You think you – I – can just take up with someone else when you feel like it?’
‘No. You’re right.’ I stood up myself, kicking a log back onto the fire in a shower of sparks. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t just feel guilty for Elsa’s death. I miss her badly.’
‘So do I. And maybe that’s why I came all this way to see you, and if you weren’t just a boozy tosspot you might see that.’
The storm passed. She left, and that was that, I thought. She had her view of me, and I of her, but this hadn’t brought us any closer to the truth about each other or Elsa.
Martha had her head in the sand. She would face any crime in court and expose it, but wouldn’t face the crime in her own heart, about what she’d done to Elsa. She had left the bottle of Jack Daniels. I poured another one, settled the logs on the fire, and put on Traviata.
Next morning I realized I’d behaved badly and called her first thing at the Randolph Hotel. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was rude. No excuse.’
‘You have a good excuse. Elsa. And two million Jews in the ovens.’
Her voice was cold. In a moment she’d put the phone down and we’d never speak again.
So I said very quickly, ‘Look, let’s not leave it this way. Will you have dinner with me tonight? I’ll pick you up at the hotel. There’s a pub I know not far from Oxford, they do very good fish.’
I was sure she’d say no, but she replied ‘Yes. Yes, thank you. That would be lovely.’ Her tone was almost warm.
I picked her up at the Randolph that evening. We went to a country pub I knew, beyond Woodstock. A back room, pine tables, not trendy, good cooking. I gave her the menu. She put on a pair of neat gold-rimmed spectacles to look at the dishes. I asked if she’d like red or white wine. ‘White,’ she said at once, very definite, unlike Katie, who hated to commit herself, even to a choice of wine. Would I tell Martha how Elsa had so resembled Katie, and how much Katie had meant to me? There was no point. I hardly knew Martha and once we’d made things up I was unlikely to see her again. She lived in New York. She liked women.
I looked across at her. In the good light I saw her properly. The face neat and composed, seemly. It was difficult to think of this woman being passionate with Elsa.
‘The haddock pie here is very good,’ I said. ‘Homemade.’
‘I’d like that.’
She got up to go to the Ladies. I saw her figure properly now: slim all over but thinner in the middle, like an hour glass. Her skirt came down to below her knees, and her calves were – how can I describe them? – were scimitar-shaped beneath the folds. Yet I realized I didn’t want to paint her. I went up to the bar and ordered our food, with a bottle of seemly white.
She said later, ‘About last night … you were right, I was avoiding the issue of me and Elsa. And you’re right to want to examine why things go wrong between people.’ She put down her glass. ‘Maybe I can give you some real truths now. She was the person I really wanted to spend my life with. But –’ She stopped. ‘I don’t know, after a year or two I got to feel we weren’t on the same wavelength, and never would be.’
‘She told me that, but you wouldn’t tell her why.’
‘No. Because I didn’t know why. I knew something was wrong between us, so that one day one or other of us was going to have to give it up. And when it came to it, I did and she wouldn’t.’
‘Why weren’t you on the same wavelength?’
‘I wasn’t right for her.’ She screwed up her eyes, frustrated.
‘No?’
‘She was going against her real nature, and you and she are the proof of that.’
She was stalling again. ‘Maybe it would be simpler to say you just fell out of love with her?’
She considered this, as a piece of crucial courtroom evidence that might save her. ‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. I didn’t fall out of love with her. She only had to be near me, and I loved her, and then I got to wonder if it wasn’t just sex.’
‘All right, but why did everything else go wrong for you?’
‘She overwhelmed me with her love and I couldn’t give it back, and this made her vulnerable, gave me power over her. I used that power. I wanted to hurt her because I didn’t really love her, and the more she needed me, the less I needed her. And the more I behaved coldly to her, the more she warmed to me, and so the worse I behaved. Trapped in that awful equation. I should have got out before the cruelty started.’
Silence, so that I went on quickly. ‘Point is, though, you still haven’t said what it was in her character that put you off her.’
‘You should be a lawyer.’
‘Don’t you owe it to her?’
‘To you, you mean.’ She let her shoulders slump, looked down, then up at me. ‘All right – she was so confident, especially in her unwavering loving, so absolutely right and complete about it. And this began to annoy me. I couldn’t match her fine loving character, knew that the only control I was ever likely to have was in hurting her. There, I’ve told you the truth. And I don’t feel any better for it.’
‘No.’
‘And even that’s not the whole truth. You see …’ She paused, as if this time she really had to get it right. ‘We’re back to one reason why Elsa killed herself. It wasn’t just because you took her round Europe Nazi hunting, and she found out about her father. It was just as much because I wouldn’t give her the life she so much wanted with me. That was cruel of me, denying her what I could perfectly well have given her, if I hadn’t always been counting the possible cost to myself. Just selfish. If I’d simply accepted the marvellous things we did have, we could have built a lifetime together on those.’
‘But …’
‘You see,’ she went on, fiery again, ‘What was wrong was that I started thinking it wouldn’t work out with us. So it didn’t. The thought created the fact.’ Silence again. And then in a quieter tone: ‘I think if I’m quite cold about it all, I know I did the right thing in leaving her. It wouldn’t have worked out. There’d have been worse things if I’d stayed, awful rows, hatred. And you did the right thing too, in nailing her father. But then Elsa was doing the right thing as well, for her, in loving me the way she did.’
‘Exactly. I loved Elsa that way too, which is why she and I would have been a real house on fire together.’
‘Yes. I didn’t have her blind guts in loving. Or yours. I wish I had.’
The haddock pie came, and it was damn good, and we felt better about each other. Later, still unsatisfied, I said ‘All the same – my God, Martha, why did she do it?’
‘We know why. She couldn’t face the knowledge of what her father had done in the war. That was the final nail in her coffin.’
‘The final nail?’
‘Well, we both could have stopped her killing herself. If I hadn’t left her she’d never have gone off Nazi hunting with you. She’d have stayed in New York with me. And later you could have stopped her if you’d gone back to New York with her.’
I nearly wept again.
We didn’t say anything more, looking down at the pine table, fiddling with the cutlery. A silence that might have lasted forever, so that I felt I had to say something. ‘Dear Elsa,’ I said.
Martha looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Dear Elsa.’
‘Look,’ she said later, ‘I’m at a disadvantage – you know so much about me from Elsa, and I know nothing about you. I’d like to know what Elsa might have told me about you.’
‘She’d probably have said I was a bounder.’
‘A what?’
‘A chancer, and a drinker.’
‘Are you?’
‘Sometimes. And I’ve blown things that way with women, along with my high-hatted loving.’
‘Your what?’
‘You know – red roses, too much singing and dancing.’
She was puzzled. ‘Let me play the lawyer – it’s dishonourable not to be absolutely full-hearted in loving. And I wasn’t with Elsa. As for being a “bounder”, or whatever, those are misdemeanours. The grand-jury trial is surely for a lack of loving, and that doesn’t seem to have been your crime. You seem to have been a real copperbottomed lover.’
She paused again, looking up over my shoulder. ‘So, members of the jury? Your Honour?’ She nodded, then looked back at me, smiled. ‘Not guilty, case dismissed.’
‘Sounds like special pleading to me.’
‘What did you think lawyers were for?’
I drew back in my chair. ‘You’re funny. I hadn’t suspected that.’
‘Not all the time. And you seemed just a boozy bounder at first, but you’re not. Where it matters you’re sober as a judge.’