by Maisie Mosco
Who would turn in her grave if she knew that, thought Marianne. Another secret in the family and one that will go with me to my own grave.
Chapter 15
Janis wasted no time in putting her plan into operation. Her little sister, much recovered but still easily distressed, had today gone home from school with her friend Val and was spending the night there. Jeremy was safely out of the way in Oxford. Only her parents and Kurt were seated with her at the dinner-table when she aimed her verbal dagger at her lover. But there is no way to do this kindly, she thought in the silence that followed.
Jake was the first to find his voice. “Left it a bit late to change your mind, haven’t you? Your wedding date is fixed for October. I’ve already reserved a suite at the Savoy for the reception, and Kurt’s parents have spent time looking for a flat for you –”
“All that,” Laura cut in, “is the least of it!”
Jake stared down at the lamb chop on his plate. “You’re right, dear. It is. What I’m doing is letting the practical inconveniences stop me from thinking of my daughter’s suddenly –”
“It isn’t sudden, Dad.”
“Is that a fact? Well, you could’ve fooled me!”
“Me also,” said Kurt, his complexion a deathly white. “And I do not believe that Janis means what she has told us.”
“She had no right to do this the way she has!” said Laura angrily. “You are entitled to have been told first, Kurt, and privately.”
Circumstances Janis had chosen to avoid, lest Kurt take her in his arms and her resolve fail her. “This seemed a good opportunity to get it over,” she said.
“Get it over?” Kurt’s expression was as if she had slapped his face. “How can you be so cruel, Janis?”
“I’m beginning to think I didn’t know my own daughter,” said Jake.
“That isn’t surprising, Dad, since I’ve found out I didn’t really know myself. But I’m still only twenty-one. That’s too young to settle down for life. Well, it is for me. I know that now. After I get my degree I want to see a bit of the world.”
“I would gladly do that with you,” Kurt told her.
“You’re missing the point,” Janis replied. “Freedom to be my own person, to find out what I really want, is what it’s all about.”
“Another Henry Moritz in the family!” Laura exclaimed.
“I like Henry and I’m sure he’d put me up at his place if I happened to be passing through where he’s living at the time,” Janis rattled on. “Howard and Karin would, too, if I decided to spend some time in Munich. And I wouldn’t mind seeing for myself what’s going on on the West Bank. I might do that first. I think I’ll give Kate a ring –”
“That girl,” Jake said to Laura, eyeing Janis anxiously, “has gone clean out of her mind –”
“On the contrary, Dad, I’ve just come to my senses. And by the way, I’ve decided to spend a week or two in Switzerland. I shall leave at the weekend and do some of the required reading for my finals there.”
“Who the hell do you know in Switzerland?” Jake thundered.
“Not a soul. That’s what I’m looking forward to. If nobody minds, I shall now leave you all to recover in my absence.”
Janis got up and left the room. Those remaining stunned at the table could not have known that she was unable to maintain her cruel charade for a moment longer. Or what it had cost her to lie as she had with Kurt’s hurt gaze riveted to her.
Jake poured himself some water and drank it. Suddenly his throat felt parched. This is just like the time we found out what was going on with Bessie, and that Jeremy knew, and he hadn’t told us, he wanted to say to Laura.
They exchanged a glance and he knew that she too was recalling that traumatic occasion. Did anyone know their own kids? What went on inside their heads? Nathan had somehow set Bessie on the road to recovery. Janis though – well where would she go from here? Hers wasn’t a sickness, it was a newly-discovered thirst for life.
Meanwhile the casualty of that discovery looked as if he might break down if one more word were said to him. It would have to be a careful word.
Jake cleared his throat. “All Laura and I can do, Kurt, is apologize to you for our daughter’s behaviour. On the good side, and it will be some time before you’re able to believe there is one, there’s an old saying with a lot of common sense to it: Better before than after.”
“We don’t want you disappearing from our lives,” Laura added kindly. “We were looking forward to your being our son-in-law, and girls have been known to change their minds. Whatever comes or goes, though, you and I are cousins. The day you appeared out of the blue was a happy one for me.”
“For me also, Laura. But if we are to see each other after I have graduated, you must come to Vienna. I shall never return to London. Janis will not change her mind. And if she were to say that she had, how could I ever again believe in her?”
Kurt rose and managed to smile politely. “If you would now to excuse me, I have not the appetite for finishing my dinner and shall take myself for a walk on the Heath.”
Laura and Jake went with him to the front door. On the hall table was the aquamarine engagement ring he had given Janis.
Kurt paused for a moment gazing down at it. “When I put that ring on Janis’s finger, I told her that I had chosen it because it matched her eyes. But who is to know what truly lies behind the eyes of their beloved? Nor, as poets would have us believe, are the eyes the mirror of the soul. That I now do know.”
He departed with the ring in his pocket, leaving behind him a couple again confronted with the unseen hazards of parenthood.
“He’ll get over it,” Jake said heavily.
“But will we?”
“All I can say to that, Laura, is one expressive word. Kids!”
Laura added an adjective. “Bloody kids! Even when they grow up they’re not out of your hair –”
Jake strode towards the stairs.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To give Janis what she deserves. How dare she destroy Kurt and leave us to pick up the pieces like she did!”
Laura took his hand and led him back to the kitchen. “Pour me a brandy, would you? And have one yourself. The bottle’s on the counter; I used a drop in the sauce for the chops.”
Jake stemmed his anger and did as he was bid.
“I shall never make that special sauce again,” said Laura, removing the unfinished meal from the table. “It will always remind me of this. Like I haven’t been able to look at chocolate truffles since the terrible night we both remember. They were what Jeremy was noshing and Bessie in the bathroom throwing up when we got back from Berlin.”
“Jeremy is now the only one of the three who hasn’t put us through the mill,” said Jake.
“But his day will no doubt come. Nor is there any guarantee that what Bessie’s put us through in her childhood will be her one-off contribution to what we’re discussing.
“I’m coming to think, Jake, that picking up the pieces is one of the things parents are for. Janis, though, has staked her claim to freedom, to put it mildly. She must be allowed to get on with it, learn from her own mistakes like I had to. You of course, darling, never made any!”
“I certainly didn’t make one when I married you.”
They took their drinks into the living-room and sat together in shared and silent contemplation, unaware that their daughter lay on her bed consumed by sorrow, the familiar objects of her girlhood all around her and the future seeming a vacuum stretching endlessly ahead.
Chapter 16
In the aftermath of Janis’s charade, Marianne thought her own thoughts and maintained a philosophical veneer that belied her apprehension as to what would now become of the girl who had wrought sudden and drastic change to her own life as well as to Kurt’s.
The news of the broken engagement had reverberated on the family grapevine in person and by telephone, the manner of Janis’s ending a romance that had seemed
written in the stars as incredible to all as her having done so.
Weeks later the family was still trying to fathom what would always remain for them a mystery – how had the girl they knew changed out of recognition as if overnight? By then, both Janis and Kurt had written their final examinations, he afterwards departing immediately for Vienna, and she to Paris where Henry Moritz was still based and had, of course, offered her the makeshift accommodation to which all his young relatives and friends were welcome.
She had remained in Switzerland for ten days and on her return had come immediately to tell Marianne that the deed was done, and she felt fine. Physically, perhaps. But for how long would she wear the air of bravado which only Marianne knew was a mask? Time was a faster healer for some than for others.
A breezily worded postcard from the girl who had confided in her arrived with Marianne’s mail on one of the wet August mornings that characterized the summer of 1988 as it had last year.
Rain, rain, rain! And no further word from Simon Newman since he sent that one-sentence reminder of his existence. Unfortunately for Marianne, she needed no reminding.
An hour later, while she was reading the proofs of a novel to be published later in the year – and cursing the printer for playing games with her prose – the doorbell rang, and she included in the cursing whoever was interrupting the most tedious and exasperating task required of an author.
When she opened the door sarcasm leapt to her tongue. “The ghost writer again appears in the flesh. Well, well!” A gust of anger impelled her to add, “Where the hell have you been and what have you been doing?”
“Thinking of you from afar. The rest is a long story and I’d rather not tell it standing on your doorstep.”
“Then you had better come in and while you’re here you can listen to a few things I have to say to you.”
“How is Matthew?” Simon inquired following her to the living-room.
“He’s been in and out of hospital several times since the crisis that brought about our crisis. Right now he’s home again. Thank you for asking,” Marianne replied tersely.
They sat down opposite each other, Marianne on the sofa and Simon in the armchair that once was Ralph’s. Marianne felt like telling him to get up and sit somewhere else. He had almost succeeded in inserting himself into the place Ralph had occupied in her life – but not quite! And assumed that all he need now do was make excuses for his lengthy absence and she would accept them like the gullible female he evidently thought her.
“Kindly get on with it,” she said to him. “I have to finish proof-reading my new novel.”
“With a bit of luck, this time next year I might be reading the proofs of my first,” Simon replied. “You asked what I’ve been doing since we last saw each other and now you know.”
Marianne was astounded.
Simon smiled at her expression. “If you thought me holed up with a broad, I have to tell you it was with a typewriter, working on a first draft I’ve since sent to my agent that he thinks is promising.”
She could not but congratulate him. Nor was it false, she really was pleased for him.
“But I’ve told you the end of the long story before the beginning and the middle,” he went on.
“I’m still listening.”
“Something happened to me in New York, Marianne, and it set me thinking along with feeling sorry for myself. I began seeing everything differently from how I had before. Looking beneath the surface is one way of putting it, and that includes my own surface, the veneer I’d worn for years though I didn’t know it.”
Part of which was the mocking smile Marianne had quickly realized was self-deprecation, and not the one on his face now.
She said frostily, “So you decided to take yourself off and have another go at writing a novel? Leave our affair hanging in limbo except for the brief communication I received from you.”
She added when Simon got up to gaze through the window, “I hope you’re noticing the roses in the garden opposite. It was winter when you left for New York –”
“And mild for the time of year, I recall.”
“I was referring to how long you’ve been away and taken for granted I’d still want you when you returned.”
“Do you?”
“Unfortunately, yes. But I’m old and wise enough to know that what I want isn’t always what’s best for me. There’s going to have to be a good reason for your behaving towards me the way you have.”
Simon turned from the window to look at her. “I took nothing for granted. On the contrary. I stayed away until I’d proved something to myself, or I wouldn’t be worthy of you. You’d told me on the phone I wasn’t the man for you –”
“What I said wasn’t attached to how you earn your bread.”
“But it seems to’ve served as shock treatment in more ways than one. I’d given up on myself, hadn’t I? Done what some would call prostituting my art, though I knew it was in me to be what I’d set out to be. Taken the easy way out.
“Once I began work, though, it was as if I was driven,” Simon went on reflectively. “There was no way I’d have given up and come back to you empty-handed, so to speak. My not calling, or writing you, was part of the state of suspended animation I was in –”
A state familiar to Marianne. A harsh word from someone you cared about, and bang went the creative high you were on.
“If you’d hung up on me –” said Simon.
“I understand. But you could have explained by letter.”
“I didn’t want to let you in on it until it was all done,” he replied, “it’s as simple as that. Your being the incentive for the whole thing makes that kind of weird, I guess, but it was how I felt. If the book doesn’t get published and you still don’t marry me, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I tried. Will you, or won’t you, Marianne?”
“I’d be a fool if I didn’t. Come and sit beside me –”
Tears were stinging Marianne’s eyes. Simon not worthy of me? Few men would have bared their soul to a woman as he had, nor found the grit at his age to try again. Minutes slipped by while they held each other close, passion firing the kiss that followed but the thankfulness for each other in that first embrace still there.
“My sister’s loft was where I spent the whole time,” Simon afterwards resumed his story. “Norma, like you, is a sucker for her family – but let’s not get into that again! The loft was her daughters’ playroom when they were young kids and later Norma had it adapted as their private apartment.
“Each of them had her own telephone up there,” he added dryly, “one between them wasn’t enough! Also there’s a house line to the kitchen. If the girls felt hungry, they’d ring down and Norma would load up the dumb waiter that was part of their American dream set up.”
“Was their father still alive then?”
“If he had been his daughters might not have grown up thinking the world owes them a living, an idea they got from how their mother has always been with them.”
Simon paused reflectively. “Norma’s husband was a bit like Jake Bornstein. The sort who doesn’t see his children go short but makes sure their feet are kept on the ground.”
“That’s an accurate assessment of Jake, but you hardly know him, how did you sum him up so well?”
“Evidently my vision had begun to undergo a change before I went to New York. How could it not with you at my side, though you weren’t when I realized it?”
Simon straightened Marianne’s hair, awry from their lengthy embrace. “Remember me telling you you’d changed my life? What I’m now saying has to be included in that. My perceptions have heightened, it seems, along with the rest of your effect upon me! Where was I?”
“Discussing your sister and what you evidently consider her folly.”
“Which in a nutshell is that Norma inherited her husband’s business, put in a high-powered manager, and is still spending the dollars that continue to roll in on her daughters, not to mention on their kids.
Our parents sure didn’t spoil Norma and me, nor would they have if they’d been well off,” Simon added.
“That could account for your sister’s spoiling her own children.”
“But back with my story, I went to Wellesley for Christmas, got the idea for my novel, mentioned it to Norma and she offered me the loft to work in. I sometimes worked evenings as well as days, but she never made me feel I was just making use of her.”
“I’m looking forward to having her for a sister-in-law,” said Marianne.
“But first we have to get married. How about a quick elopement? I only flew in to Heathrow this morning, my bag is still packed.”
“I couldn’t do that to the family.”
Simon laughed. “No, hon, of course you couldn’t.”
Chapter 17
The third love affair of Marianne’s life was with the island of Bermuda, where she and Simon spent a delayed honeymoon.
Sweet-scented blossom dripping from trees forming natural canopies overhead, frangipani mingling with honeysuckle in tall hedges lining the narrow lanes, the plethora of flowers of delicate hue and of a shimmering brilliance upon which to feast the eye, combined with the overall air of repose to enthral her.
“Bermuda truly is paradise,” she said to Simon when they had returned from a morning stroll to the balcony of their suite, which afforded a view beyond the hotel’s terraced garden of an ocean too blue to believe it was the Atlantic lapping the creamy pink shore.
“So you keep saying, hon,” he replied with a smile.
“And if I lived in New York, I’d take time off to spend some long weekends here.”
“Given it’s such a short flight, a lot of folk who live on the East Coast do that. Only a cancellation could have got us this suite at such short notice at this time of year.”
“Short notice is right,” said Marianne, “and I remain uneasy about nobody knowing where we are. Not even your agent and I told the family if they needed to get in touch with me they could do so via him –”