Jakob’s Colors (4 page)

H
er house lay in a Somerset valley that on fresh summer mornings was covered with a blanket of mist. It was a high Georgian building, three stories, with a whitewashed facade and a mass of wisteria that each spring bloomed purple flowers over the large ground-floor windows, blocking out the morning sunlight and casting a ghostly lilac hue throughout the ground floor. Only the back of the house showed the paint peeling, the exposed stone bruised with age, rivulets of rust running down from roof to ground. Not for the lack of money, but rather for the indulgent foreboding that this lack might one day arrive.

Inside, the house was decorated grandly, too grandly some would say, for the size of the interior, which was not as vast as the imposing furniture implied. There was so much of it; a mahogany breakfront bookcase dwarfed the living room doorway. It held no books, instead a collection of Wedgwood miniatures, a gift passed down through the generations, admired and vaguely fondled. A dining room table, a George IV oaken slab, fumed but too long. The chairs sat cramped against the wall around it. Surreptitiously, the thinner guests were seated upon them. A Liberty washstand, one of a kind designed by
Archibald Knox, sat redundant in the marble-floored hallway, scarred with cigarette burns, a scattering of silver, daily polished picture frames of family long perished smiling up from the marble surface. Persian rugs covered the oak floorboards. Indian shawls draped across worn leather ottoman chairs. Elaborate tapestries hung from the walls above reams of glossy magazines that lay unfingered, unread. Everywhere there was too much clutter, crowded trinkets that no one was allowed to move, bought with a compulsion, the easy delight of spending, that could take hold weekly, daily even.

By the time Lor was eleven years old, she was used to finding her mother, Vivienne, standing amongst these possessions, poised in the center of a room as if she were one of them. She would be silent, her neck bare, her head slightly bent, staring at a place where the floor met the baseboard as her long fingers toyed with the silk of her dress. Still young enough for her dreams to cling to her, unchallenged, unrealized. Her ambitions lay in art, vast canvases that she streaked with brilliant color but struggled to fill, alternating between bouts of intense activity that were driven and frenzied and this dreamy languor that held her locked in thoughtfulness in the center of a room. Watching from doorways, Lor felt in those moments that her mother was lost to them, that if her name were called out, she would not hear it. But then, as swiftly as they had come, the reveries would break. Her mother's hand would drop, and she would wander the room, manicured fingertips caressing the smoother objects, a high hum of a tune absentmindedly resonating from her lips as she returned to her surroundings.

There was this, this blissful inertia of youthful ambition, before age threatened to make her regretful, but then there was the other. Days, sometimes weeks, spent coiled up on the bed in her room. A shadowy obliqueness, a void, where the world was dark, as if already life had left her stale and wanting.

“Her father was killed in the war, you know? Her mother was Polish. An heiress, apparently. She drowned herself,” Lor had heard people say in hushed tones into their cocktail glasses as if that explained something. Lor had found her once in the river, standing with the water lapping against her thighs, her coat pockets full of stones.

“It's beautiful,” Vivienne said. “This moment before. Exquisitely so.”

“Before what?” Lor had asked.

“Before after.”

Lor had looked out at the ripples and the currents that circled in wide slow pools.

“Will you swim?” she asked.

“No, I won't swim. I shan't swim a single stroke.” Vivienne let her fingers rest on the surface, let the water rush between them. “My mother always told me there was a family of kingfishers who lived here. I've never seen them. In all the years I've been here, from childhood to now, I've never seen them. Not once. What do you suppose that says about me?”

Lor took off her shoes, waded across the currents to her mother, linked her arm through hers.

“It's not so very strong,” she said. “The current. We shan't be swept away.”

“No, perhaps not,” her mother had said vaguely. “
Zyli wsrod roz
,” she whispered. “
Nie znali burz
.”

“What are you saying, Mother?”

“We live amongst roses, darling. Know of no storms.” And with that they had made their way back to the shore.

“You are good, you know that, Vivienne, don't you?” they said of her half-finished paintings. “You could be great if you were more prolific. If you weren't so afraid of mediocrity.”

Often she would take Lor to the antique market in town that, now that the Great War had ended, was overflowing with lost and unclaimed objects, with widow's wares. They never came home empty-handed. The house was filled with silver spoons, Worcester china, George III silver-shelled ladles, a baluster coffeepot, boxes of war memorabilia, a dead soldier's medals. They bought sketches in gilded frames and faded photographs of people they had never known: a group of scholars in top hat and tails, standing on the steps outside St. Paul's Cathedral; a crowd of Welsh rugby fans, cheering beneath newspapers held over their heads in the rain. There was an African pot in the hallway that still smelled of the sour cheese that had
fed a nameless village; an oriental rug lay by the fireside still stained with soil from Kerala; a portrait of someone's beloved family horse. Vivienne said she had a tale for each and every object, that war was the best time for stories, but somewhere, deep in the tone of telling this, there was the sad half-acknowledged truth that they weren't her stories. That she had simply found them in a town hall that smelled of the rain brought in on the soles of other people's shoes. Of her own story there was very little. Such was the glossy monotony of her life.

Lor's father, Andrew, listened to his wife in silence. A heavy silence that could last for days. Like Vivienne, he was tall, broad, with dark, almost black hair, slicked back with a defined right parting that he combed meticulously into place each morning. He had a way of standing that exuded confidence rather than arrogance, a quiet authority that was unchallenged, unassailable. And though it was Vivienne who filled the chatter of a room, though it was she who delivered the stories that entertained, there was about him an unconscious shine that had him stand out amongst a crowd as if he were made of some other metal. People fell silent when he spoke, fell silent simply when he appeared. He ignored Vivienne's reveries. Chose not to witness her bouts of decline. They were a tall, graceful couple who locked arms when people were watching.

At the end of the summer, they planned a party in the hope of prolonging the frivolity that came with the warmer weather.

Vivienne took Lor to buy new wineglasses from the market, five different sets: Waterford glass, Baccarat glass, Boston Crown, Steuben, and Bohemian crystal, a mishmash of double- or single-footed rims and baluster stems. Some were perfectly intact; others were chipped.

“It isn't the done thing,” she had said. “But let's start a trend. Pretend it's some new fad from America.”

On the day of the party the skies were clear and filled with birdsong. Vivienne wore an ivory chemise that was matte in the shadows but which shone in the light. The garden was full of orange blossoms that did not smell of oranges. The new glasses gleamed, filled to the brim with white wine the color of her mother's dress. Lor and her mother picked handfuls of honeysuckle and sat on the lawn together,
their legs tucked up beneath them, sucking up the sugar water that came in such tiny quantities they were left always wanting for more.

“Nature's sweets,” Vivienne said. Her dark hair was cut sharply around her face, bobbed just below her cheekbones. She wore lilac eye shadow that flashed when she blinked. Her lipstick was so red it looked as if it hurt. “Stay close,” she whispered in Lor's ear. “Stay close.” Then she tipped back her head and laughed at nothing at all. Her laugh was something that should be discarded. Like a veil. But Lor did not know that yet.

“
So I walk a little too fast
,” Vivienne sang. “
So I laugh a little too loud. But what else can you do, at the end of
 . . .”

Andrew stood by the rose garden that was due its second bloom. He stood tall, his dark hair shining. The woman he was now talking to wore a blue dress, pleated just below the knee. Her calves were long. Her ankles slender. She was almost as tall as he. They stood side by side, she touching his sleeve, just a forefinger on the cuff, the nail manicured and sharp. They were both smiling.

“Don't stare, darling,” Vivienne said, smoothing down her dress. “Why don't you get Mommy another drink? Gin, please.” She held out her glass and cocked her head playfully. Lor took it, wove waist high through the chatter and the lacquered air. There were a multitude of shoes, stilettos that punctured the grass and soiled brogues. The man in a dinner jacket who exchanged the wineglass for a crystal tumbler, which he half filled with gin, half with lemon bitters, smelled of the oranges the orange blossoms should have smelled of.

Lor took in the faces around her. She was familiar with them all. They came and went from one another's parties, a vision of solidarity against whatever it was they were against. Conversation amongst them was like a story. It strove to be intellectual, but their intelligence was something that was sought out, muddled together and hoped for, rather than something they had been naturally blessed with. Quietly they competed with one another, each victory of erudition rejoiced over behind smiles of platitude. But within the confines of their group they remained obliviously unchallenged, and the superiority with which they spoke was merited only by the fact that they were
wealthy—moneyed up, jazzed up, boozed up, “fabulous” as long as they believed it. Not one of them lived fully the life that they had. They spent their waking hours dreaming of living an entirely different one, one not filled with the legacy of war and the quiet guilt that accompanied having survived it unscathed.

When Lor returned with the glass of gin and lemon bitters, her mother's eyes were full of tears.

“Thank you, my love,” she said as she tipped back her head and took a large loud gulp, a single ice cube clanking. Lor reached for her hand. “They liked the glasses. Remember, darling, you can sway anyone to believe anything if you speak with enough conviction.”

A shadow fell across them. It was John, a man with a handlebar mustache, whom Lor had not seen amongst their crowd before. Her mother seemed to know him already. He was slightly older than Lor's father, his hair tinged with gray, and immaculately dressed. Uncreased and polished. His navy suit was so dark it was almost black.

“You look well, Vivienne,” he said, standing tall above them.

“I am well, John. The summer suits me. How is Maggie?”

“Much better, thank you.” He was softly spoken, a look in his eye that held a quiet weariness, an ambivalence almost about wanting to be present at all. “Been told to rest. Excitement best avoided,” he added.

“Oh, and our house is simply spilling with it.”

They both fell silent. John cleared his throat self-consciously. Then momentarily he and Vivienne stared at each other, a moment that almost openly acknowledged the failure of their conversation.

“Nice to see you again, Vivienne,” he said quietly. It was only as he walked away, vanishing into the crowd, that Lor saw the twisted gait to his left leg, the slight drag to it as he moved.

“He was shot, two days before the war ended,” Vivienne said as though it was something vague and distant. Lor sucked at the honeysuckle. “Mommy's pretty, isn't she, darling?”

“Yes, very pretty.”

“He brought lilies. A huge white bouquet of them.” She sighed. “Tell me a story. I need a horse, a blue-black horse of a story.”

“Othagos?”

“From the hunting accident?”

“Yes, the stray arrow that came from a bow no one had fired.”

“Yes, I remember him. He'll do just fine.” She lay back on the lawn, her ivory dress grass stained where her shoulder blades met the ground.

“Everyone knew that Othagos had a glass eye,” Lor began. “But no one knew that he could see through it, that he could see into the heart and mind of anyone who rode him and could judge therefore whether to go fast or slow, to go left or right, be lost or found, before he was told to do so.”

“Never bring lilies to a party, darling,” Vivienne said quietly. “That's what the dead smell of—they are the flowers left to rot on the lid of some beloved's coffin, for God's sake. Stay close to Mommy, won't you? Stay close.”

People left in dribs and drabs. Bottles emptied. Discarded glasses, lipstick stained, glinting in the tender heat of the late sun.

“To the survivors,” Larry, one of their oldest friends, drawled, swaying in the center of the lawn. “To the ones who made it rich while all around them tumbled down. Are they all in this garden?” He laughed, lurching forward. “All's fair in love and war,” he slurred.

Gini, his wife, dressed in a cream trouser suit that looked as if she were naked in certain lights, started pulling on his arm.

“Larry, shut up. No one wants to hear your lamenting. Vivienne, I'm taking the child home,” she said. “Can't hold his damn drink.”

Vivienne wasn't listening. She was looking across at Andrew. Lor caught the light in her eyes, a glint of tears welling again at each corner. He was talking to John. Both of them stood in a cloud of cigar smoke, puffing it from the side of their mouths with the exaggeration of two people in stilted conversation. The woman in the blue pleated dress had disappeared. Lor had not seen her go.