by Maisie Mosco
“This evening I have to eat dinner with my agent, jet-lagged though I am. I’m here on business. If Marianne had come along you’d have seen a lot of her this week. All she had scheduled was a lunch with someone from her US publishers.”
“It’s time Marianne had a real break. She works too hard,” Diane declared.
And that isn’t all, thought Simon. “I’m not yet sure what my own schedule will be,” he said. “If I don’t manage to drop by your home, I’ll get the tea to you somehow. It would be useful to have the clinic phone number, in case when I call again you’re not at home –”
For the next few days Simon’s time was fully occupied, the ageing rock star whose autobiography he was commissioned to ghost write expecting the attention that went with fame and wealth.
Had Marianne been present she would have noted Simon’s quizzical expression, while night after night over dinner and the brandies that followed he listened attentively to a still handsome man, whose youthful face implied he had had it lifted, talk on and on about himself.
There was big money in this one for Simon, his agent kept reminding him when they met for lunch, or in one of the pep talks he delivered to reluctant clients before meetings with lawyers to discuss the bartering that drawing up a contract usually entailed, a process that Simon preferred to leave to his agent. But on this occasion the guy who handled his affairs had wanted him in on it – possibly he thought it was time Simon saw how hard he worked! Having seen it for himself, Simon wouldn’t swap places with him.
Money, though, had never been Simon’s incentive any more than it was Marianne’s. At first he had envied her the creative rewards she had achieved that he hadn’t, but you didn’t go on envying the woman you loved. Admiration had fast replaced it.
All thoughts led him back to Marianne. And he couldn’t bring himself to go spend a cosy evening at home with her relatives. Nor had he time to.
Eventually he called Ronald at the clinic and invited him for a drink at the Plaza.
“I was leaning on the bar, waiting to be paged,” he said after Ronald had introduced himself and they had shaken hands.
“But you didn’t know I’d seen a photo of you! Laura took some at Bessie’s bonfire party. On the one she sent us, you and Marianne were both clutching sparklers.”
That evening had seemed to Simon a turning point for him and Marianne. The welcome he had received, the glow from the leaping flames lighting her face and the rockets zooming skyward along with his hopes.
“Having a photographer in the family helps keep my wife and me in touch,” said Ronald. “As Marianne may have told you, we’re a very close clan.”
“If that weren’t so she’d be here with me.” Did Simon’s tone sound as bitter to Ronald as it had to him? “What can I get you to drink?”
“A cola will be fine, I’m a soft drink guy.”
They sat down on a couple of stools just vacated.
“Like you, I can’t stay long,” Ronald said. “There’s a patient at the clinic I must keep an eye on tonight.”
“Don’t let me forget to hand over the tea.”
“Is that what the something you mentioned on the phone to Diane is? What a treat! When we’re offered a cup of tea over here, we say no thanks.”
“In case I do forget, there’s enough of your favourite brand, in the bag I’ve dumped beside my stool, to keep you going for quite a while.”
“Are you that absent-minded?” Ronald said with a laugh.
“Not as a rule. But right now your cousin has me so distracted I barely know what I’m doing!” Simon added though he had not intended to. “There’s a strong resemblance between you and Marianne, by the way.”
“So we’ve always been told. But her hair isn’t yet pure silver!”
“Mine was getting there when I met her and she’s sure as hell now speeding it on its way,” Simon declared after gulping down his Scotch. “Why am I telling you this?”
“Could be you need to tell someone, and I happen to be her cousin and handy. Marianne, bless her heart, isn’t a woman many guys would find easy to live with.”
“We’re not living together. I’ve asked her to marry me.”
“And she’s struggling to hang on to her independence?”
“How did you guess?”
“I’ve known her all my life, haven’t I? Too much independence has always been her trouble, though I reckon the guy she married in her youth learned to live with it. Ralph was a terrific person. An artist who never made it but didn’t let that sour him.”
Simon’s first intimation of the similarity between himself and the man whose replacement he wanted to be. If you didn’t count that Ralph hadn’t let disappointment sour him!
He glanced around at the happy-hour throng in the bar. “Yuppie” described most of them. Young executives, male and female, and some not so young, uniformed in the slick suits that went with their workaday scene. A sprinkling too of those for whom cocktails at the Plaza or wherever was a nightly ritual of their sophisticated world. They would afterwards dine here in the lavish surroundings that matched their own image, or go on to some smart restaurant, not just to eat but to see and be seen, while the large chunk of citizens on welfare, some without roofs over their heads, continued on a route known only by those at the bottom of the heap.
Simon was beginning to think like Marianne! Reminded again in her absence, as so often in her presence, that knowing her had changed how he saw things.
“Are you as loyal to your family as Marianne is?” he asked Ronald.
“It’s an affliction all of us suffer from!”
“Why did you put it that way?”
“Perhaps because that’s how it sometimes used to feel to me,” Ronald said reflectively. “I’d find myself doing something inconvenient and think to myself, ‘Damn the family!’ The sort of thing I’m talking about is all behind me now, though.”
“It isn’t for Marianne and I have to tell you her family involvement is damaging our relationship.”
Ronald drank some Pepsi and rattled the ice in his glass. “My answer to that is that it’s up to you not to let it.”
“If I knew how!”
“The only advice I can give you is to accept Marianne the way she is. Let me add, though, that if she marries you, you’ll be getting a rare gem.”
For the remainder of the half-hour they spent together they chatted, like the strangers they were, about the ghost still stalking Wall Street after the crash, Mr. Gorbachev’s “glasnost”, and the implications of the Holocaust Memorial in London having been defaced.
It was the personal topic they had briefly discussed that remained with Simon after Ronald’s departure and allowed him no sleep that night. He had not needed telling that Marianne was a rare gem. But how was he now to prove how highly he valued her? And that there was more to the man he was than she supposed. That, though, he must first prove to himself.
Chapter 14
Though Ronald had called Marianne to thank her for the tea, she had not heard from Simon. Christmas, which they had anticipated spending together in idyllic surroundings, came and went without a word from him.
New Year’s Eve too, for which Marianne had refused all invitations in order to remain by the telephone, hoping that Simon might see the beginning of another year as a good time to set things right between them.
After two more weeks had slipped by without his contacting her, her own hope of setting things right began to fade. Why had she let love put her at the mercy of a man! She was old enough to know better.
Marianne could not have known that Simon had not called her lest she hang up on him and had gone to spend some time at his sister’s home in New England, hoping that the quietude of surroundings less frenetic than New York and London would settle his nerves and help him think things out.
Meanwhile Matthew had survived to return home, and Janis and Kurt had announced their engagement. They had not done so until Matthew was pronounced out of danger and on t
he day he was discharged from hospital had gone immediately to let him congratulate them. Marianne was present when that moving scene took place. Janis and Kurt as radiant as young lovers were known to be, their presence lighting up Matthew’s sickroom. And he with a smile on his face like the splendid actor he still was.
The almonds together with the raisins once again, Marianne had thought. And she herself not going short of the former right now.
At such moments memories of her grandmother returned to her and she would recall their private chats in Sarah’s kitchen, the heart of her home. Women like Sarah Sandberg, though, weren’t bred any more. Few nowadays displayed the single-minded devotion to what nature was said to have intended our purpose on earth to be. Instead we’ve sought and many of us achieved the equality with men for which we’re neither biologically nor emotionally equipped. The price is the conflicting priorities career women have to live with.
On the last day of February, Marianne finally heard from Simon. A typed message and without a signature in an envelope postmarked “Wellesley”. “Just to let you know I haven’t forgotten you.”
He had gone to ground at his sister’s but who cared? She had better begin forgetting him. The nerve of the man!
Marianne resorted immediately to her personal therapy, burying herself in her work as she had after losing Ralph. She began editing the first draft of her new novel and by March was immersed in writing the manuscript she would deliver to her publisher.
As always her strict régime was interspersed with family crises. Matthew was briefly hospitalized yet again. Martin and Andy had a difference of opinion that seemed to herald the end of their long partnership and Marianne’s son spent two days at her flat discussing it with her. She was relieved when the matter was amicably settled and she able to resume work. No sooner had she done so than Ann called from Israel with a problem.
The Palestinian uprising, now said to be in the control of PLO agitators, had impelled Kate and her husband to throw in their lot with the militant West Bank settlers, with whose biblical views of Judaea and Samaria they agreed.
“How can they take their kids where the violence is?” Ann had said with feeling. “I’ve tried to dissuade them till I’m blue in the face. All Kate says is it’s up to me if I return to England or go with them.”
Ann had not returned to England to live alone. She could not have brought herself to live in Germany had Howard suggested it. In many ways, Marianne had reflected, Ann was a throwback to those previous generations. Without a husband and children, what would they have had to live for?
Having family on the West Bank was a disquieting thought, another anxiety at the back of Marianne’s mind, though her work remained at the forefront and she would have no trouble meeting her deadline.
She had told herself she could live without Simon. But not without a garden and had expended money, and time on Sundays, on replacing the bushes injured beyond hope by the freak hurricane, splurging too on a flowering cherry and a quick-growing Russian vine for the patio wall.
She had paused at her typewriter before beginning a new chapter, noticing the first touch of pink, a sign of approaching summer, on the cherry tree, when Janis appeared outside the window.
“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell?” Marianne said with a smile.
“I know your study is at the back and thought it’d be less bother for you to let me in through the patio door, like you have.”
“I could use some tea. You’ve come at the right time, Janis.”
“No time’s the right time for you when you’re working, Marianne, and we all know it. But I need to talk to you.”
Janis said as they went to the kitchen, “This is something I can’t discuss with Laura.”
Marianne put the kettle on to boil. How often had she done so in similar circumstances? When she’d lived up north, too, and this was the same kettle. What a tale it could tell.
“I’m pregnant, Marianne.”
Old-fashioned girls were the kind who still got pregnant by accident. “Why can’t you tell that to Laura? And leave dealing with your dad to her –”
“I’m thinking of having an abortion and she’s dead against it.”
For highly personal reasons, thought Marianne.
“I couldn’t tell her even if she weren’t,” Janis went on. “She wanted another child so much and it didn’t happen. How can I say to her that I want to get rid of one?”
Janis burst into tears and Marianne gave her a paper tissue and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t want to get rid of my baby, Marianne –”
“Are you absolutely certain you’re pregnant?”
“The result of my test was positive. I got it today.”
“Why can’t you and Kurt bring forward the date of your wedding? You wouldn’t be the first couple to marry while you’re still students and you finish your courses this year –”
“Kurt knows nothing about this, and you must promise me that you’ll never tell him.”
Marianne’s reaction was, “I’d advise you, love, not to start out on your married life by trying to hide from him what you’ve told me.”
“I’m not going to marry Kurt. He doesn’t know that yet, either.”
Marianne made the tea and brought it to the window alcove where Janis had seated herself.
“If ever there were a love match it’s you and Kurt,” she declared. “What on earth’s gone wrong?”
Janis blew her nose and said after a pause, “I couldn’t live in Vienna, Marianne, that’s what’s gone wrong. When Jeremy and A. P. got back from their trip, they told me that being in Germany didn’t have the effect upon them they’d expected it to. It probably wouldn’t on me, either. But it’s a different matter to live somewhere than just to visit, isn’t it? Uncertain of the people around you.”
Had Janis but known it she was voicing Laura’s private fears for her in that respect, when it became plain that Janis might one day marry Kurt.
“Uncertainty breeds apprehension, doesn’t it?” Janis went on. “As you know, Kurt and I were staying with his parents in the spring, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss was commemorated. There was Nazi graffiti everywhere, though the official commemoration was designed to display quite the opposite. And slogans we used to think long dead were shouted amid some of the scuffles resulting from police intervention.”
Janis drank some tea and paused again. “Kurt has since heard from his parents that an exhibition chronicling the history of the Viennese Jewish community, mounted with the co-operation of the city authorities, was patrolled by armed guards and everyone had to deposit bags if they were carrying them, coats too, I think, with the attendant before entering.”
“Security has to be maintained all over the world, nowadays, Janis. I had to deposit my briefcase when I once spent an hour at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, between appointments.”
“But anti-Semitism wasn’t involved in that. The attendant at the exhibition I mentioned apologized to Kurt’s mother for her having to leave her bag with him. She was reluctant to do so, some notes concerning one of her patients were in it. He said that it was just for that particular exhibition the precautions were considered necessary.
“Kurt was as sickened as I was by it. But I knew long before then that I couldn’t live in Vienna, when on a previous visit Kurt’s parents weren’t able to meet our plane and we took a taxi. The driver spoke English. I was my usual talkative self, making conversation about what a beautiful city Vienna is.
“The route to Kurt’s home took us past the Hotel Imperial and the driver pointed to it and told me proudly that Adolf Hitler had slept there. He must have seen my reaction to that through his mirror, and hastily added a list of royalty and the like who had slept there too. I think it was that that finally did it, Marianne. An ordinary middle-aged man driving a taxi saying what he had to me in the adulatory tone impossible to mistake.”
“Okay, Janis. I now know how you f
eel and why. What I don’t understand is why you afterwards got engaged to Kurt.”
“I was still fighting it, it’s as simple as that,” Janis replied. “What it took to finally decide me was getting pregnant. I hadn’t looked as far ahead as bringing up the children I didn’t yet have, in Austria. With a foetus now inside me, I have to think of that. It made me think of Howard, who had no choice, his child was already in Germany and of course he now has another. To inflict the tensions I couldn’t live with myself on my kids is something I just can’t do.”
“Kurt loves you, I’m sure he’d do anything rather than lose you,” Marianne said quietly, “including making his life in England.”
“No need to tell me that. But supposing things don’t go right for him here, Marianne? He has a place waiting for him in Vienna, after doing his post-grad course, that will assure him a consultancy eventually. Given the state of the National Health Service, shortage of money for research and all that, he could be old and grey by the time he makes it and there’s no guarantee that he’ll have done so, even then.”
“What you’re saying is that his brains and his parents’ contacts combine to ensure his future.”
“In a nutshell, yes. Why should someone of Kurt’s ability go to waste because of me? He means too much to me for me to let him make that sacrifice.”
“But the choice should be his.”
“I’ve already made it for him.”
Marianne surveyed the girl’s fragile beauty, seeming the more so when tragedy had overtaken her. Tragedy of her own making. How more selfless could love be than hers for Kurt?
“What shall you give as a reason for breaking your engagement, Janis?”
“One lie is as good as another, and only you will know it is one.” Janis got up and kissed Marianne. “Thank you for listening. I had to tell someone.”
“In return I want you to promise me that the abortion necessary for this deception will be done competently.”
“I shall make use of some of the money left to me by my mother.”