by David Plante
She promised.
The next morning she woke alone and saw that rain was falling in the garden, and she went to the window to see the rain so heavy on the roses that the petals opened and dripped, and she felt very alone. In her robe she wandered about downstairs, thinking, this is my home now, but at the double doors to Tim’s study she hesitated, listened, then quietly opened the door.
She saw first the Torah in the middle of the room, and then, beyond, Tim at his desk, and she stepped back. Leaning forward, he said, “Nancy, Nancy, come in,” and he smiled.
“I suppose I was curious,” she said.
He rose from his desk to go put an arm about her and draw her to him, and she leaned against him.
She said, “I watched the rain fall in the garden, making the roses so wet that the petals opened and dripped.”
“Beautiful,” he said.
“You like beautiful things?”
“I do, yes, I do,” he said, and kissed her temple. “Come sit with me on the sofa.”
She did as he asked, and there he covered her with another Scottish plaid, which appeared to come from a country that had nothing to do with the house.
As though he’d held off until they were married and at home, he said, “Darling, you must understand about me that I’m awkward with feelings, and, really, that’s the reason why I can’t use words to express them.”
“I do,” she said.
“Listen to me, please, darling, because I may never be able to talk to you in this way again, which I have to admit I’ve been preparing myself for. You must believe that I love you, and always shall, and that’s a principle.”
She said, “Do you like poetry?”
“I do.”
She smiled and said, “I’d like to go out into the garden with you.”
“In the rain?”
“The roses look so beautiful in the rain.”
He stood and looked at his desk and said, “I must return to my work.”
“Then when you’ve finished.”
“Come back in an hour.”
She sighed and quietly said she would, and she drew the plaid from her, folded it neatly, and left the room as he returned to his desk; she quietly closed the double doors.
She went back an hour later, dressed and carrying a large umbrella. Tim was slumped forward on his desk, in the midst of papers. He was asleep. But she felt something more for him than his dedication to his work; she felt, seeing him there asleep, the helplessness in him in the world that she felt was not his, that she was sure he had little or no faith in.
As soon as she tapped him on a shoulder, he sat straight up, wide awake, and looked at the papers on his desk, then at her, and frowned a little.
“We’re going into the garden,” she said, “and I’ve brought an umbrella.”
Still frowning a little, he looked at his desk, then at her.
She said, “Come on.”
“Very well,” he said, “for a moment, then I have to get back here.”
And out in the garden, she did remark on the smell of the mass of roses in the rain, but he said nothing, and she asked herself if she was overdoing her attention, which was meant for him.
The house of Tim’s parents, in St. John’s Wood, was closer to what Nancy had imagined Tim’s house to be: it had clarity and space, and the parquet floors shone in the light through the tall, wide, many-paned windows, their inside wooden shutters folded back to let the sunlight in. The pictures were old-master prints.
Mrs. Arbib, her hair parted and combed back into a chignon, wore a stark black dress, her husband a dark suit, the buttoned jacket a little cinched in at the waist. Mrs. Arbib’s very dark eyes seemed to embrace Nancy sadly, bringing her into a world of sorrow with a frail embrace and soft kisses on both her cheeks. She stood back while her husband held out his arms to Nancy just enough to grasp her elbows and said, “Welcome to London.”
Mrs. Arbib poured tea, which a maid passed around, then brought little diamonds of baklava on fine china plates with fine silver forks. The tea napkins were white linen with crocheted lace around the edges.
Nothing in the room suggested where Mr. and Mrs. Arbib were from, and even their accents, though not English, could have been formed by any number of languages, as, no doubt, they were.
“Tell me about Alexandria,” Nancy said. “I really want to know.”
Smiling a slightly ironical smile, Mr. Arbib said, “Alexandria has a long, long history.” He seemed to be announcing that Alexandria had a longer history than any history Nancy could claim.
“I was born in Cairo,” Mrs. Arbib said. “Cairo has even a longer history than Alexandria.”
Her chin raised, Nancy asked her, “What do you remember most of Cairo?”
“You’ll laugh. When I was a little girl, out for a walk with my English nanny, I was fascinated by the way the men in the laundries who ironed would take water into their mouths and spray it out over the sheet or shirt or whatever they were ironing to dampen it. Now, why do I remember that?” Nancy showed off a little, saying, “My mother had lovely memories of Berlin.”
She had the sudden sense of being in the wrong place here in London, in the wrong place with Tim’s parents, in the wrong place with Tim. There was no Vinnie around who would listen to her say she found Mrs. Arbib, for all her apparent solemnity, a slightly silly woman. And as for Mr Arbib, wasn’t he slightly too seriously pretentious?
The tea things were cleared away, but Tim remained to talk lightly about a recent auction of old-master etchings. Nancy considered herself well educated, not only by college but by her parents, but she did not know the artists referred to by the Arbibs, and she began to tire from having to pay attention to a conversation she didn’t understand and wasn’t interested in, talk, between Tim and his father, about how much the collection was worth.
She asked to look at the pictures, which couldn’t have been a better way to ingratiate herself with Tim’s father; with a hand held out graciously, he showed her to a dead white wall on which etchings hung one above another in thin black frames. Nancy exclaimed, in a slightly affected voice, “There’s a Piranesi, I love Piranesi”—one she recognized because the etching was of his fantastic prisons—but she did not know who Giulio Carpioni was, or Michele Marieschi, or Giuseppe Zocchi, about whom Mr. Arbib knew a lot.
Mr. Arbib said, “We have been able to keep the collection together, but I can’t say for how much longer.”
The collection made Nancy think of the Arbibs as refugees in London, and she wondered if they mingled with no one but other refugees from Egypt.
When they were sitting again, Mrs. Arbib asked Nancy what she had read at university, and she answered that she had her degree in literature. She had concentrated on the works of Henry James.
Mr. Arbib pressed a knuckle against his chin and said his favorite writer was Somerset Maugham.
The doorbell rang, and Nancy was introduced to friends of the family, two men and a woman, who had arrived to play music in the sitting room. They came regularly, Mr. Arbib told Nancy, and would stay on for what Mrs. Arbib called a simple supper.
Listening to the trio, Nancy saw Tim raise a hand—a poised hand—to touch a cheek with an index finger. Yes, he was handsome, in profile sharply angled, his close-cropped hair clearly defined at his nape, at his sideburns, along the receding hairline, his head seemingly set into his stiff white collar with its carefully knotted tie. And though he looked severe, he had a right to his severity, because he was superior not only intellectually but emotionally, for here, now, listening to the rapturous music, he was at the highest level of emotion, higher than she would ever be able to go, higher for no greater outward expression than a finger touching his cheek.
While the piano kept up an insistent, slowly repeated rhythm, the stringed instruments seemed to rise up from and float above the
piano to a height of great, swooning freedom, and she rose up there with that swooning music. Tim, lowering his hand, turned to her and smiled a smile that she understood was a recognition that she, too, was on the high level, where she was accepted, and where, yes, she was loved. He turned again to the trio. He would not have used the word love any more than anyone could use one word to describe the feelings roused by the music, but for the duration of the movement she felt an expansiveness that longed to be called love, however much she thought she could not use a word that Tim would not use.
She assured herself that everything was going to be all right. Everything would come together, and coming together would make it all whole. She longed above all for that: for everything to come together and be whole.
She found herself swaying a little, and stopped.
Leaving, Tim said to her, “My parents told me how much they like you.”
At home—what she felt must be her home—he told her to go up to their bedroom and sleep, she was exhausted. He would go to his study alone for an hour or so at his desk.
Alone, Nancy tried to sustain the sense of wholeness, as if the sense could be sustained by intention long enough for her to fall asleep and wake up next to Tim, in bed beside her, holding her.
She always slept in the morning after Tim got up, but before he left for the law courts he did wake her enough to tell her to go on sleeping, he wanted her to have all the rest she needed for their child.
When she had a miscarriage she said, “You’ll want to divorce me.”
“Of course I’ll not divorce you,” he insisted. “The fact is you can become pregnant, and you’ll become pregnant again, and you’ll carry the baby to term. This, I am certain, is a certainty.”
But she didn’t believe him; she never believed what he said to her, and she never believed what she said to him.
Nancy at first thought the invitation cards Tim placed on the mantelpiece—what he called the chimneypiece—were pretentious, but she thought she had to allow Tim his pretensions. Then, in the sitting rooms of homes they were invited to for dinner parties, she saw invitation cards displayed on the mantels of other fireplaces, and thought that what she had taken to be a pretentious display of social connections—some of the cards had raised gold crests on them—was actually an English custom. One evening, she found on the mantelpiece a large invitation card from someone she had never heard of to a charity event to raise money for music in country churches: a famous pianist was to play in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Kent at the Middle Temple, Champagne 7:00 p.m. Recital 7:30 p.m. Supper 8:30 p.m., Carriages at 10:30 p.m., Black Tie. She picked it up.
Tim came in with a silver salver of champagne flutes and an open bottle.
“When did this come?” she asked.
“In this morning’s post.”
“I don’t know the person who’s inviting.”
“But I do.”
“What are ‘carriages at 10:30’?” Nancy asked.
“We’ve got to be out by 10:30.”
“That doesn’t seem polite.”
He laughed a rough laugh. “Would you rather they rang a bell and shouted that it was time, as in a pub?”
Tim filled a flute and handed it to Nancy. She said, “I guess I’m just beginning to learn what it is to be English.”
Not waiting for her, Tim drank, then said, “You’ll never be English. Nor will I. I’m not English. I’m a Jew.”
The early autumn evening when they were to go to the Middle Temple was hot. Nancy liked to take a long time to bathe and make up and dress, but by the time she was sitting on the bed, putting on her shoes, Tim had not yet come home to change into his black tie. Because of the heat, the window of the bedroom was open onto the back garden. She was putting on her second shoe when Tim came into the room, taking off his suit jacket, and said, frowning, “You’re not wearing stockings.”
She raised a bare leg and lifted the skirt of her long, tight, black dress to admire her calf and ankle, and she moved her shoe from side to side. “Don’t you like the look of my leg?” she asked. She badly needed to joke with him because, really, it was ridiculous that he didn’t approve of her not wearing stockings. He would never have approved of the casual way she had dressed in New York.
He grasped one of her ankles. Startled, she began to lose balance, and threw out her arms and shouted, “Tim.” He raised her leg higher, and she fell backward onto the bed. He let go.
“Put on stockings,” he said.
She was still too startled to know what he meant. She asked, “Stockings?”
“You are not going to that party with your legs bare.”
Her dress was rucked under her and her bare legs were exposed. One shoe had fallen off.
“It’s too hot for stockings,” she said.
He appeared, suddenly, to expand, his head to become larger, his shoulders broader, his chest deeper, his hips wider, his raised hand huge, but it was particularly his head, with thick black hair and the dark shaved beard shadowing his white skin, that became so large it shocked her. His voice was equal to his size.
He shouted, “You had fucking well better get up from that bed and put on stockings.”
Stunned, she sat still for a while and noted there was a patch high on one of his cheeks where he hadn’t shaved his beard. Slowly she got up from the bed and, with one shoe on and one off, she limped to a bureau, opened a drawer, took out a crumpled pair of panty hose, and held it out to him. “Will this do?” she asked.
“It will do.” But he kept watching her as she took off her shoe, hitched up the skirt of her dress, pulled off her underpants, and, all her lower body exposed, drew on the panty hose.
She asked, “Should I wear a hat?”
“A hat will not be necessary,” he said.
They wouldn’t go by car, Tim said, but taxi, and, without asking why, Nancy simply followed him, clutching a little purse covered with black jet beads. In the taxi, as if nothing had happened between them, he told her, as he told her every evening, about his day in chambers. She listened but said nothing.
When they got out of the taxi and Tim was paying, the driver asked, smiling, “Important do this evening?” Tim grunted, all he would allow in response to the taxi driver, and Nancy, to make up for her husband, said to the taxi driver, “Come on in for a glass of champagne,” which made Tim smile at her, and he took her by the arm. Tim approved of her solicitude. She did want Tim’s approval.
The Middle Temple had stone-paved passages with polished wood-paneled walls and portraits of men in old frames. Just within the entrance was a round table holding place cards arranged in circles to indicate at what tables and in what rooms people would sit for supper. Tim looked for his name and hers. After he found them, he continued to study the seating of the guests. Then she followed him down a wooden staircase with a thick wooden banister and a red runner patterned with large blue flowers out into a garden where men and women in evening dress were gathered along a stone parapet, a wide, deep lawn extending beyond the parapet. A waiter came with a tray to offer Tim and Nancy flutes of champagne from a silver tray.
There was nothing for Nancy to do but be social. Tim introduced her to Christopher Swire, a young, bald man with large black eyes who had organized and was paying for the party, who stood before them for a silent moment before looking beyond; without excusing himself, he went off to speak to another couple standing near by.
Tim said to Nancy, “Really, Christopher only gives a do like this to be able to invite the Royals.”
Nancy looked around for the Royals.
“We’d better go up to the recital hall,” Tim said. “The seats are unreserved.”
The hall was large, with a groined ceiling and high, wood-paneled walls, and painted on every wooden panel was a coat of arms. Along a high shelf that went all round the hall were pl
aced breastplates and helmets.
Tim saw his old friend from his Oxford days, Toby Tonks, who had been best man at the wedding in New York. Toby kissed Nancy on both cheeks, and she sat between him and Tim, who talked to one another past her.
Tim, shocked, said, “Toby, you’re wearing a clip-on bow tie.”
Toby touched his tie.
“In our Oxford days you wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing a clip-on bow tie.”
The pianist came in, sat at the grand piano, adjusted the height of the stool by turning knobs on either side of it, and then held his fingers over the keys for a moment before he struck the first chord. All the while he played, people in the audience coughed.
Nancy got through the supper, seated between two men whose names she hadn’t been told. Acting to amuse them, with sassy sensuality she knew how to project, she touched their arms to make a point and shook her breasts a little when she laughed. They were barristers, and she told them she thought the law should be reformed to allow women to batter their husbands, even to castrate their husbands, and, seeing that the more outrageous she was the more they liked it, to murder their husbands. Both men were sweating. Tim was sitting across from her at the round table, and whenever the barristers laughed she saw him look toward her and smile and nod to let her know he was pleased that she was doing such a good job.
She was deliberately acting out of her own character, and thought she was having her little revenge on him for forcing her to wear stockings on a hot night by impersonating an American seductress. Tim didn’t seem to sense this, but she knew how to get the better of him by being a social flirt in a world he had once told her he couldn’t properly behave in because he did not know how to be social, but had to rely on her.
While acting, Nancy saw through the people at the table, and what she saw, to her own strange awareness, was that there was no darkness behind these people. Shouldn’t she prefer being among people who had no darkness behind them? It did amuse her in some way that they lacked deep character because they were without darkness, for darkness behind a person authenticated that person’s character. She would make her home among these characterless people. She would be as amusingly superficial as they—would learn their habits of speech, would smile the vague smile of a duchess at people she didn’t know. She would even learn to know her place as a Jew, a place that at home she was never sure of—that being to consider herself privileged to be accepted and to appreciate the privilege, and always, always to be amusing.