by Debbie Rix
‘Hi Dad… good to see you. Thanks for coming out so late for us.’
‘No problem… the car’s over here.’
He led the way to a pale blue Studebaker station wagon. As Chuck loaded their luggage into the capacious boot, his father introduced himself to Rachael.
‘You must be Rachael,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘It’s very good to meet you. I’m Eric – Charles’ father.’
Installed with Angela, on the wide leather back seat, Rachael, exhausted from their journey, gazed out sleepily at the moonlit landscape. Deep snow was banked up on either side of the wide country road. They crossed an old wooden bridge on the outskirts of a small town and, peering down, she observed a river rushing like a torrent, cascading beneath them. The main street was lined on either side by little wooden fronted shops - a general store, a tack-shop and a drugstore advertising ice cream sodas. Then they were heading out of town once again and into the open countryside. Rachael dozed off for a little while, and when she woke up, the car was pulling into the drive of a large clapboard house, painted a dark colour of some kind – green or blue… she couldn’t be sure. The windows were picked out in white, and the wide lawn was covered in deep snow and surrounded by a neat white picket fence. An American flag flew proudly from a sparkling flagpole. It looked, she thought, like a house from a storybook – Little Women or The Little House on the Prairie.
Chuck lifted Angela, still sleeping, out of the car, as his father set the luggage down on the large covered porch. Rachael followed Eric and Chuck into the house.
Standing at the far end of the dark red hall was a slender woman whose blonde hair appeared to have been neatly permed into a hard helmet that hovered over her pale face. Rachael noted the woman’s dark red lipstick – her mouth was set in a predetermined smile. But her cool, watery blue eyes told a different story.
‘Oh, there you are…’ she said, ‘You must be Rachael – I’m Constance, Charles’ mother.’
The introductions over, Rachael, who was both tired and disoriented by her twenty-four hours of travel, was invited to sit down in the drawing room. A fire glimmered beneath the wooden fire surround and she sank, gratefully, into one of the large comfortable chintz sofas. Two leather armchairs sat on either side of the fireplace. An upright piano stood against one wall.
‘You must be hungry, dear…’ Constance was saying. ‘I’ve prepared some supper for you all. Perhaps you’d like to freshen up and then come down to the dining room.’
Slightly mortified at the idea of eating so late, and feeling a little nauseous from the journey, Rachael nevertheless accepted the invitation gracefully.
‘I’ve put you in Charles’ room,’ Constance said, leading the couple up the stairs. ‘And I made up the box room next door for your daughter.’
Chuck’s room was at the front of the house overlooking the lawn and the street beyond. The four-poster bed had been draped with filmy white curtains and there was a pale blue bedcover and matching armchair.
‘You did the room over, Ma,’ Chuck observed.
‘Well, I thought your new wife wouldn’t appreciate the bachelor room you left behind…’ said Constance. ‘I’ll leave you to settle, and we’ll see you downstairs.’
Angela, invigorated by her nap in the car, ran, excitedly around the room. Chuck and Rachael took her next door to the box room, where a cot and a bed stood side by side.
‘You can choose,’ Chuck said to Angela. ‘Do you want the cot or the bed?’
Angela demonstrated her choice by clambering nimbly onto the bed and bouncing noisily.
‘Angela no…!’ said Rachael. ‘Get off there this minute.’ She lifted her daughter off the bed, and put her firmly back on the floor.
‘You look tired, Rachael…’ said Chuck, kindly. ‘Would you rather just go to bed?’
‘I am tired, yes… but we ought to be polite. Your mother has gone to a lot of trouble, making supper, and we should eat it.’
While Chuck took Angela downstairs, Rachael washed her face and hands in the bathroom across the hall. In her bedroom, she brushed her hair and changed her dress, before going downstairs.
The family was gathered in the dining room. It led directly off the dark red hall and was painted in the same shade. There was a large antique mahogany dining table and eight matching chairs. A glass-fronted chiffonier filled with porcelain, china and silver stood against one wall. Family portraits in gilt frames covered the remaining walls – pictures of frontiers people, sour-faced women wearing black silk dresses and dour men in dark frock coats which matched their stern expressions. Rachael felt their stony gaze as she came into the room.
‘Ah good, you’re here at last,’ said Constance. Rachael couldn’t help thinking that even this apparent welcome had an air of criticism about it. ‘I thought you could sit here, opposite Charles, and the baby could sit on this high chair – we’ve had it in the family for generations.’
Angela was squeezed, protesting, into the old wooden ladder-back high chair. She wriggled and squirmed and made her reluctance quite obvious.
Rachael, desperate to make a good impression, flushed and fretted.
‘I’m so sorry… she’s not used to a high chair.’ She tried to force the child’s legs through the narrow opening. But Angela was rigid, arching her back, refusing to comply – either physically or mentally.
‘Goodness, what a performance…’ said Constance. ‘So what does she normally sit in when you eat?’
Her question went unanswered, as Rachael tried to reason with Angela.
‘Oh let the child sit on a chair,’ said Eric, impatiently, ‘if that’s what she’s used to. Or our supper will get cold.’ He wore a dark suit with a waistcoat, a fob watch tucked into the inside pocket.
‘Yes, Mom,’ said Chuck, ‘let Angela sit on a chair.’
‘Won’t she drop food everywhere?’ Constance asked, looking down with consternation at her fine silk Turkish carpet.
‘No…’ said Rachael, ‘I’ll be very careful.’
With Angela installed, triumphantly on an adult chair, Constance served up the supper.
‘It’s just a pot roast,’ she said with mock modesty.
‘My mother’s pot roast is legendary…’ said Chuck cheerfully, passing a bowl of boiled potatoes to Rachael.
When the family had been served, and Rachael was concentrating hard on spooning little pieces of meat and potato into Angela’s rosebud mouth, Constance asked, ‘So … tell us how you met?’
Rachael looked across at Chuck. Constance observed the panic in her eyes.
‘Oh sure,’ said Chuck, calmly. ‘We met back in Austria. Rachael and her father – he’s a Professor of Archaeology at London University – top of his field, Dad – well they were getting out of Hungary where there was a bit of trouble. You remember, Dad … you must have read about it over here in The Times. I was in Vienna and the university asked for volunteers to go and help in the camp. It seemed a good, Christian thing to do.’ He emphasised the word ‘Christian’, paused and looked at his mother, challenging her to disapprove of such a charitable act. She smiled faintly between pursed lips. ‘So we met…’ Chuck continued, ‘and Rachael and I fell in love.’
‘But hadn’t she just been widowed?’ Constance asked her son, a look of disapproval spreading across her powdered features. She looked across the table at Rachael, who flushed slightly.
‘Yes…’ Rachael interjected. ‘I had been widowed and I realise it was quite soon afterwards, but I really liked Charles – he was so kind to me, and my father…’ she trailed off, not quite knowing what else to say.
‘So,’ Chuck continued in his usual cheery manner, ‘Rachael and her father went to London. We corresponded. It was a long-distance love affair, wasn’t it, honey?’ He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. He squeezed it and smiled, encouragingly, at her.
‘Yes…’ she agreed. ‘He’s a very good letter writer.’
‘So, when was your daughter born
?’ asked Eric.
‘Oh – when my father and I were living in London.’
‘And when did you get married?’ asked Constance, looking pointedly at the developing bump beneath Rachael’s newly acquired maternity dress.
‘Oh well,’ said Chuck, breezily, ‘Rachael came over with Angela and her father last year to visit, during my final year. And we decided to get married. We had a lovely little ceremony in Vienna.’
‘I’d love to see some photographs,’ said his mother. ‘It seems so odd, Charles, that you didn’t even mention it at the time. We’d have come over to Europe… you know that.’
‘I know, Ma… and I’m sorry. It just all got a little complicated. Anyways… we had a lovely wedding and then Rachael went back to London with her father – he’s a great man, you must meet him sometime, a real intellectual. And now… here we are, expecting our first child. It’s exciting, isn’t it?’ he asked, defying them to disagree.
‘Yes, dear,’ Constance replied, uncertainly.
After supper, while Chuck took Angela upstairs to bed, Rachael offered to help clear up. She followed Constance down the hall, past the staircase and through the swing door to the large well-appointed kitchen that ran along the full width of the house. It bore no resemblance to any kitchen Rachael had ever seen, either in Budapest or in Hampstead. There were glazed cupboards arranged around the walls, filled with glass and china, a large range cooker took pride of place in the old fireplace and, beneath the window, overlooking the garden, was a ceramic sink, where Constance was already washing up.
‘I’ll wash and you can dry,’ she said, handing Rachael a tea towel.
This, at least, seemed familiar. Rachael stacked the dried plates up on the kitchen table.
‘Oh, not there…’ Constance said to Rachael, ‘put them in the unit, dear.’
Rachael looked helplessly around the kitchen.
‘Excuse me…’ she said, ‘but what is a unit?’
‘There, dear – the cupboard over there…’ she pointed to the glass-fronted cupboard on the wall.
As they washed, dried and tidied, Rachael steered the conversation away from herself and onto Constance – how long they had lived in the house, whether Chuck had been born there and where he had gone to school.
When the washing-up was finished, they returned to the drawing room, where they found Chuck and his father sitting on either side of the fireplace, smoking cigars.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ complained Constance, irritably. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t smoke in here, Eric. I have to air the room the next day.’
‘Well,’ said Chuck, observing his wife’s pale complexion and the dark rings round her eyes, ‘we ought to be getting to bed anyway… We’ve not really slept for over twenty-four hours.’
‘Oh goodness,’ said Constance. ‘Well, yes off you go. Sleep well, dear.’
She pecked her son on the cheek. It occurred to Rachael that she had not yet seen Constance hold or hug her son once since they had arrived.
That night, as they lay in the pale blue bed, Rachael whispered her anxieties. ‘I know your mother doesn’t believe our story, Chuck. I can just see it in her eyes.’
‘Relax, honey. It’ll be fine.’ He kissed his wife, rolled over in bed and turned out the light.
Within minutes, in spite of her concerns, Rachael was fast asleep.
Over the coming weeks, Rachael grew used to the routine at the house in Vermont. She and Chuck took snowy walks in the woods with Angela. They helped around the house – washing up, setting the table. Constance even allowed Rachael to make gingerbread men one morning. Chuck and his father spent time together talking in Eric’s study, or in his workshop above the garage. When Constance challenged them about spending so much time together. Eric retorted: ‘Can’t a man spend time with his only son? It’s man’s talk, Constance. We have business to discuss.’ Rachael was pleased to see Chuck so content with his father. There was bond between them that she had not observed between mother and son. One morning, after a particularly heavy snowfall, the two men cleared the drive together with a wide snow shovels. They came into the kitchen afterwards, cold and hungry, laughing and slapping each other on the back, pleased with their morning’s work. The sounds they made – the scraping of chairs, the dipping of spoons into bowls of hot soup – reminded Rachael of her father and József all those years before. The following day Chuck and Rachael built a snowman on the front lawn. Chuck threw himself into the task and when Angela saw it she declared it: ‘the best snowman in the world’. Even Eric became involved – kindly donating an old coat and scarf. Constance did her best to make the family welcome. But from time to time, Rachael caught her mother-in-law studying her through the kitchen window, or from the other side of the room. Rachael had the feeling that the Baileys did not quite believe the story Chuck had told them about the baby she was expecting.
They were good, religious people, who attended the white clapboard church on the green each Sunday morning. Every evening the family said grace before dinner, which was always served in the dining room using the second-best china.
Rachael wondered when the best china was used. She asked Chuck about it one night as they lay in bed.
‘Oh… high days and holidays,’ he replied. ‘Christmas, Thanksgiving, christenings.’
‘So our baby’s christening?’
‘Sure… it’ll all come out then.’
Rachael hoped that he was only referring to the china.
Chuck appeared to be one of life’s inveterate optimists. He had set his sights on a career in finance and within a month of returning to America had landed a job at the German ‘Deutsche Bank’ in New York as a trainee investment banker.
‘I always thought it was a good idea to learn another language. They said my knowledge of German was a real asset. This is it, Rachael. I’m going to earn a lot of money and we can have an apartment in New York, and it’s all going to be grand.’
Rachael was relieved when they moved out of the house in Vermont and were spared the family meals, the saying of grace and visits to church and, in particular, the nightly inquisitions about their courtship and marriage. Chuck found them a first-floor apartment in an old Brownstone in the Upper East Side. With its large graceful rooms, it reminded Rachael of the apartment in Budapest. There was even a huge plane tree visible from the drawing room window that was reminiscent of their view from the attic in Hampstead.
An elderly lady introduced herself to the couple on the day they moved in. As Charles struggled upstairs with their luggage, she inquisitively opened the door of her ground-floor apartment, reminding Rachael of Mrs Kovacs. But there the resemblance ended. Whereas Mrs Kovacs had been a scruffy, rather lumpy woman, this lady was very tall and erect, with fine pure white hair held back in an elegant bun. She wore an old-fashioned high-necked silk blouse with a stiff lace frill that ended just beneath her perfectly formed chin. She had the most remarkable violet-coloured eyes and it came as no surprise when she introduced herself with a cut-glass English accent, as Violet Dreyfuss.
‘You must come and have tea,’ she called up after Rachael, ‘when you’ve settled in.’
Rachael discovered a nursery school on the next block where Angela could go four mornings a week. With her baby due in May, Chuck found them a doctor who pronounced that Rachael’s pregnancy was proceeding well.
During the day, Rachael got huge pleasure from exploring the city – going in ever-increasing circles from the apartment block, fearful she might otherwise get lost. She found a good local grocery store and a druggist – America’s strange word for a chemist shop. She also located a small antique shop nearby and, encouraged by Chuck, bought one or two pieces of furniture: a dining table and chairs, a dressing table and a small desk. She had a pang of regret that she had left her own pale green bureau back in London. Her engagement and marriage to Chuck had been such a whirlwind that she had quite forgotten to retrieve the photograph of Tommaso, hidden behind the panel in the central cu
pboard of the desk. She worried that her father might sell the desk, or someone might find the photograph and throw it away. These thoughts filled her, occasionally, with panic – the significance of which did not escape her. She couldn’t bear the thought, she realised, of losing the photograph. For while she had grown to love Chuck, she was still in love with Tommaso. When Chuck made love to her – something she did not enjoy but felt unable to refuse him – he did so with such tenderness. She tried to block thoughts of Tommaso from her mind, but he came uninvited, unbidden, on every occasion. She was relieved when her growing pregnancy made love-making complicated. Chuck was very gentlemanly about it. He was so delighted to have finally married the woman he loved that he resented nothing. He lived in blissful ignorance of Rachael’s true feelings, and for that she was grateful. She had no wish to hurt him – quite the contrary. She owed him so much.
The trees and bushes in Central Park were bursting energetically into life and banks of tulips formed colourful carpets, as Rachael and Angela approached the pond one afternoon towards the end of May. They had a bag of old bread with them to feed the ducks, and as they sat down on a bench, Rachael felt the familiar cramping sensation of labour.
‘Sweetheart,’ she said, taking Angela calmly by the hand, ‘we have to leave now…’
‘But I don’t want to leave,’ protested Angela.
‘Well we have to… Mummy’s going to have the new baby.’
Rachael took a yellow cab to the hospital and asked the receptionist to call her husband at work. He came to the hospital within the hour, before rushing home with Angela to collect a small bag of nightclothes for his wife. By the time he returned, she was in theatre, being prepared for an emergency caesarian section. The baby was stuck; its heart was in distress, and try as she might, Rachael could not push the child out.
Chuck sat in the waiting room, with Angela on his lap, as the hours ticked by. He prayed for the safe arrival of the child, but, more than that, he prayed for the woman he had loved so long to be spared. The thought of losing her now was unbearable. Sometime after eight o’clock, as Angela lay sleeping in his arms, a nurse arrived with some news.