“What do you suppose I am?” he asked quietly.
“Tony, how idiotic!”
“Really?” he said, and started off. A few feet away he turned and called back. “See you,” he said. “See you a lot. Perhaps tonight. If not, then tomorrow and tomorrow and — ”
I watched him walk off. He didn’t really have to skirt Emily and Toussaint, but he did come fairly near them as he walked up the flagstoned path, and I felt admiration for him. Not for a second did his eyes turn their way. He just walked along, with his graceful, lithe step, aristocratic and sure, and I thought, blood did tell, whether you liked it or not … that he could be so lordly, and contemptuous of small minds and prying eves.
Whatever else I might think about him, I had to give him that.
• • •
There was only one day more left of that week-end, and that only half of a day, the Sunday, when I had to leave shortly after four, and drive back to Manhattan. I did have lunch with Caroline and Emily and Anthony, but Caroline was clearly not up to par, and so it was all rather subdued and not at all suited to my own somewhat pensive mood.
But the following week-end brought developments of an entirely different kind.
12.
I had an early morning call, on the next Friday, from Caroline. After her initial hello, she said briskly that there were some people she thought I might like to meet, friends of hers, and suggested that we leave at around one.
“Dress nicely,” she said. “I don’t mean formally, pet, but look beautiful I think you’ll enjoy today.”
“Is it all of us?” I asked. “Emily, and Tony too?”
“No, just you and I.”
“Where are we going?”
“Montauk.”
“All right, I’ll try to look decent. I won’t let you down, Caroline.”
“They’ll give us lunch, so just have an ordinary breakfast”
I was in the Rolls at just after one o’clock.
On the way out, she said we were going to be with people on the literary scene, which she knew would interest me, but she wouldn’t say their names. “You’ll recognize them,” she assured me. “I want it to be a surprise.”
We reached Montauk after the usual pleasant drive there. Then, after bumping along on a rustic road, we came to a quiet and rather wild preserve, where there were some small outbuildings, and a bosky pond, then a mansard-roofed structure that had been renovated and painted, and looked very attractive and inviting.
The Rolls churned up some dust and John, at the wheel, parked a short distance from the house. There was a man outside, bending over some sturdy looking tomato plants, and when the car approached, he looked up attentively.
He was in a blue shirt, really a French porter’s smock, and I recognized him instantly I heard Caroline’s chortle
“Why, that’s Lawrence Portheus,” I said
“I knew you’d be pleased,” she said
He came over to the car and, as John opened the door for us and helped us out, kissed Caroline on both cheeks, took my hands as I was introduced, said I was worth waiting to meet, and invited us in.
And so we spent an afternoon with one of my favorite authors, and with his equally well-known mistress, Yvonne Chartre. Their eminence, and their long-term liaison, were as lustrous as that of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir Leave it to Caroline, I thought, and said as much.
“You seem to know everyone,” I told her.
“Not everyone, but I could if I cared to,” she answered.
Their house was charming, like a French auberge, with one of those kitchens that had a central island in which the range stood surrounded by counter space. On an iron circle over it, suspended from the ceiling, hung pots and pans, and utensils of all kinds. They showed us around like proud parents displaying offspring, and after drinks we had lunch on a weathered sundeck that overlooked a panorama of sky and water.
Lawrence had made lunch: “I’m chief cook and bottle washer,” he announced, “and Yvonne says this is a great trial to her; I’m reputed to be not very tidy in my ways. Grease on the floor, she claims, and a great mess to clean up. But I think I’m a first-class chef, and I hope you’ll think so.”
He was: everything was French; Provençal. First there was a tidbit of creamed mushrooms, then asparagus sautéd in breadcrumbs, and the main dish was a succulent cassoulet. Dessert was one of my favorites, a marron mousse, with riced whipped cream. There was café filtre, and cognac.
After which Lawrence smoked a Gauloise, and Yvonne a small cigar. Then the four of us took a walk along the beach.
Sometimes we walked abreast of each other, and at others, I found myself with one or the other of our hosts, so I had an opportunity to speak to each of them separately.
And study them.
Neither of them was prepossessing looking. Lawrence, whose press pictures clearly flattered him, was terribly sunburned, with peel starting here and there, and he had small, ugly red veins alongside his nose, which was frightfully bulbous. He had a big head and a long torso, but his legs were very short, as were his arms. Yet he had that unmistakable air of authority that justified acclaim. I found him fascinating.
Yvonne, on the other hand, was almost a head taller than he, with a strong, almost masculine face that was beginning to furrow here and there with wrinkles. She was flat-chested, but had hips that were broad and fecund-looking, though all the world knew she was childless. Her fame was not literary, but that of the paramour of a literary man, and although she was far from beautiful, she reflected his eclat, and exuded boundless confidence herself.
They had been living in Montauk for a few summers, absolutely without company or the desire for any. They seemed to adore each other, and called each other “Cheri,” and “Cherie.”
We left at a reasonably early hour, and drove back to East Hampton. “So you enjoyed them,” Caroline said, happy with her little surprise.
“Enormously,” I assured her. “How do you know them, Caroline?”
“Oh, eight or nine years ago I took a house in Provence,” she said. “It was before I began falling apart physically.” She shuddered. “I can’t imagine faring very far now, with all my aches and pains. At any rate, I was summering in Arles, and I met them through someone, and we became friends. He was writing The Istanbul Story, and she was babying him at a great rate, more or less force-feeding him, and seeing to it that he didn’t wreck his health — that sort of thing.”
She dropped her voice and leaned toward me. “Jennie, now this is a deep, dark secret, which you are never to divulge to anyone. I had my solicitors furnish him a rather large sum of money, as he was almost entirely out of funds.”
She looked a little smug. “So you see, my pet, I made some contribution to greatness Without my aid, perhaps The Istanbul Story never would have been completed.”
“I think you’re wonderful,” I said with unabashed admiration, and she glowed
“That’s praise enough for me,” she replied, and took my hand, holding it affectionately.
So we rode back in the Rolls, and I almost asked why Anthony Cavendish had not been included in this jaunt Something stopped me, though discretion, perhaps.
I really had no right to inquire about her decisions, no right to question her in any way, when it came right down to it.
I thanked her when we reached my cottage.
She started to say something and then, turning to John, said she would get out for a few minutes to stretch her legs; would he put the car in the garage, please.
“Let’s just stroll about for a bit,” she said then.
“Fine,” I said, and we ambled toward the lawn and started walking over it. It was newly mown, and I remembered my first glimpse of the Lestrange estate, now months ago. I had thought it looked forlorn then, uninhabited. Now, with the trees in full leaf, with blossoms burgeoning and the grass sleek and green and lush, it was beautiful; it was a wonderful place to be.
“You mustn’t tha
nk me all the time,” Caroline said suddenly, abruptly. “You’re always thanking me. Child, don’t you realize? Having you here? It’s like … it’s like.”
Her still lovely eyes, dark and with that dewy look her flawed vision gave her, gazed into mine so intently and so searchingly that I felt somehow transfixed. Not uncomfortable, really, but unable to look away, even to blink. It was as if her intention were to hypnotize me.
At last she looked away, and straight ahead.
“It’s like having a daughter,” she said, low.
She said it as if admitting to a vice. In an almost shamed, guilty way.
And I?
Somehow then, when she told me that, I did finally feel uncomfortable, uneasy as well. I had cherished our woman-to-woman relationship, her treating me as someone to be reckoned with, someone whose esprit she admired, someone something like herself.
But now … a daughter?
What she said next, however, altered everything, cleared the air of the momentary sentimentality, and gave me a little shock. Still staring straight ahead, she said, “Last year, during a rotten winter, I considered suicide. Not only considered, but began saving sleeping pills, and even thought about a jump from some high place.”
“But why?” I asked carefully. “You have so much, Caroline. Wealth, power, renown, and — ”
“And loneliness,” she reminded me quietly. “Bitter, bitter loneliness. I have nothing but that. I’ve been dead for a long time.”
“But you have inner resources,” I said earnestly. “You’re not a vegetable kind of person! All the things you’ve done, the people you’ve met.”
“You’re not going to tell me to be satisfied with my memories!” she said sharply.
“I didn’t mean that. I meant, you make most people seem vapid and totally uninteresting. You’re so vibrant, and fabulous and fascinating.”
“If you’re not fascinating for yourself you’re a dead duck,” she said passionately, but a second or two later she laughed uproariously. Threw back her head in that characteristic way of hers and laughed. Almost at once a faint color came back in her cheeks and she tossed her good, strong hair girlishly.
“Listen to me,” she cried, through her bubbling laughter. “Doing my best to be anything but diverting, and fascinating, as you so generously put it. Why, first thing I know, you’ll begin avoiding me, as the others do, and I shan’t be able to blame anyone but myself!”
She turned and smiled into my eyes. “My poor Jennie,” she said, fondly. “Forgive me, do. Put it down to other places, other times. Seeing Portheus again brought back so damned much. That summer in Aries … it wasn’t all that long ago, but I was still well, and strong, and yes … still decent-looking.”
“Will you persist in thinking I’m being kind when I insist you’re still far more than decent-looking? I wish you could see yourself with my eyes. When I’m your age I’ll be plain and colorless. I wish it were different, but I didn’t start out with your kind of Rossetti looks.”
“Oh, twaddle,” she cried, and started laughing again. “What do you care what you look like when you’re my age? You’ll only care when you get there.”
She was again in good humor and said she would go in now and have a rest before dinner. “You’ll be over for drinks beforehand, Jennie? Fine, and I’m glad you enjoyed this afternoon.”
I trotted off after I left her at her door, and went back to the cottage. I stood inside and thought what a pleasure it had been to meet Lawrence Portheus and Yvonne Chartre
If only Eric could have been with us.
I could call him and tell him about it.
But, of course — the time difference. Ten or eleven in the evening in Berlin … surely not late enough for him to be trundling off to bed.
I gave it a second thought, and dialed the operator, placing a person to person call. When it came through I was told that Herr Sloane was not in his room. I said “Keep ringing, please,” but after a while the voice came again and repeated the information.
“Herr Sloane is not answering.”
“Thank you, I’ll try again,” I said, and hung up.
I felt lonely, bereft, and reflected on Caroline. But this was the way she felt all the time. Eric would be coming back, but for Caroline there was no one to come back. Her contemporaries, most of them if not all, were gone and could never return. For Caroline, there was no one to await.
• • •
I rested for an hour, then got up, showered, and dressed for the evening. I knew Caroline liked to see me in something soft and feminine, so I got into cocktail pajamas the color of creme de menthe, an Oscar de la Renta I had bought at cost, courtesy of a friend. I looked long at myself and thought, Cavendish will like this too, and then wondered if it was really Caroline for whom I had dressed.
Oh, don’t belabor it, I told myself impatiently, and left the house. I found myself looking for Toussaint over my shoulder, feeling he might be somewhere behind me, but was annoyed at my idée fixe about him, and resolutely stopped glancing around.
It was very pleasant on Caroline’s outdoor patio, and she herself was looking very well, almost rosy. She looked somehow relaxed, unwound, and I thought that confession, after all, must be good for the soul. She had unburdened herself about her suicidal thoughts, and it seemed to have done her good.
So it was a nice evening, though Emily did make a point of commenting, sourly, on what I was wearing. “Are we off to a nightclub?” she asked, eyeing me. “Sorry, I thought this was just another country evening.”
“It’s comfortable,” I said, unoffended.
“Um,” she replied, looking away as if from an unsightly mess on the street. Or as if what I was wearing were see-through, which it definitely was not.
What did it matter? Emily was Emily, and I knew she resented me. I was one more thorn in her side. I was catered to and she was not. Who could blame her for her displeasure?
I couldn’t feel sorry for Caroline Lestrange, but I could, and decidedly did, feel sorry for the Emilys of this world. They had been given the short end of the stick.
And as if to punish Emily for her spleen, Caroline asked, baiting her companion, “What did you do today, Emily?”
“Some of this and some of that,” Emily said shortly.
“Well, isn’t that scintillating,” Caroline said cruelly. “That does sound marvelously exciting, my dear.”
“You didn’t ask me what I did,” Anthony drawled.
“So I didn’t. Well, then, what?”
“Some of this and some of that,” he said, with a faint smile.
Caroline laughed. “All right, what did you really do?”
“Darling,” he said, “if you insist on going off and leaving me to my own devices, you really ought to anticipate that I might be up to some deviltry. And one doesn’t divulge misdeeds, does one? What I did shall remain a deep, dark secret.”
“Were you really naughty, Tony?”
He got up and went to the drink car. “Who is ready for what?” he asked. “Caroline? Jan?”
“You’re dodging the question,” Caroline said.
“No,” he replied easily. “Just not answering, that’s all. There’s a difference.”
“You are vexing,” Caroline cried.
Later Claire appeared and announced that our dinner was ready; we dined, with candles, and stopped hectoring each other. I left before ten and was in bed not long after.
I had had a full, interesting day, and I slept soundly.
So soundly that I don’t know why a thought woke me up, or what sparked it. There are things one notices only subliminally, details that barely scratch the surface of the mind and which often never get farther than that.
Sometimes, however, these seeming trifles do pass the subconscious and spring out, recognizable and disturbing, to confront you.
So it was now.
I woke in the dark, with no idea of what the time was. I lay there suddenly fully awake. There was something,
I thought … something I had to pin down.
What was it?
Nothing I could remember. Nothing I could isolate in my sleep-drenched mind. I closed my eyes again.
But I couldn’t sleep. No sooner had I turned over to the other side than I had the nagging thought again. There was something … something I had to …
Oh, will you knock it off, I told myself, and squeezed my eyes shut once more.
And then it came to me what it was that had brought me out of sleep.
My plant.
The dieffenbachia …
I sat up quickly. Where was the plant?
The moonlight went quite a way towards illuminating the bedroom. I didn’t have to squint, anyway. The dieffenbachia, in its clay pot, should have been sitting right on top of the bureau near the window, which was in my direct line of vision.
I could see that it wasn’t there, but that was only academic. I knew it wasn’t there, and that was what had interrupted my slumbers. I had seen, as I dressed for bed, that it wasn’t there. But my brain had not consciously registered it. This was not the flat I had lived in for some years, where every fixture was imprinted on my mind. This was a summer place, where objects were not permanent … otherwise I would not have taken so long to come to this realization.
I was wide awake by this time, and a little bit dazed. I have never been burgled. My cleaning woman, Elizabeth, is a jewel. She has never broken a single thing, not an ashtray or a candlestick. She leaves the place as she finds it.
I was not used to something missing.
I got out of bed and went over to the bureau, where that bare space was, and stood staring fixedly. I almost felt that, were I to close my eyes and look away, it would be there when I looked back.
For the better part of an hour I searched the cottage.
I looked everywhere. I looked in the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom. I looked in the closets. I felt pure rage, and banged about noisily, infuriated. I was building up to a frenzy of anger and irate disbelief. I had only left the house for a few hours and I loved that dieffenbachia.
After a while I decided to calm down; I lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of my bed. Who could have taken my plant? The plant wasn’t really so important. It was the knowledge that someone had, in my absence, been inside this place, inside my cottage.
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 111