Random Winds (43 page)

She opened the newspaper to the critic’s column which had so delighted Simon that he had telephoned her an hour before breakfast that morning to read it aloud.

“Not to be missed,” she read again, “is the retrospective exhibit by M. F. Lamb at the Simon Durant Gallery. Once past the collection of her earlier works, sensitive foreground figures, all seemingly in mourning in a gray-black world, and influenced, it is rumored, by depression after the loss of her husband in the war, one can allow oneself to be enchanted by a lyricism which recalls the young Matisse. Her landscapes and interiors alike display a balanced organization and taut harmony. Empty space has indispensable meaning for this painter. It must be said that, unlike Matisse, the somewhat tender colors produce a dreaming, feminine effect which is fortunately never sentimental.

“Of particular charm is the
Girl with Flute
, the muted reds giving a fragile—” And so on.

Well, it was all very fine, very wonderful. It would never have happened if she hadn’t met Simon at a quite casual supper in the country a few summers before. He’d given her a tremendous push, had brought her forth at a time when she had relinquished the possibility of being anything more than a Sunday painter. And in bringing her forth, she saw clearly, he had forced her to grow. Recognition was tonic. She
was
doing better work. And for the first time in years, she could feel the stirring of new possibilities.

The elevator opened and a young couple came out Their glossy leather bags were already waiting for them at the front entrance. These must be the people. Bolivians, Simon had said, honeymooning on a mining fortune. Yes, they were speaking in Spanish. The girl was very young and shy. He was handsome and tough. An arranged match, perhaps? They still did that among important upper-class families in South America.

So that is where my Scottish afternoon is going, Fern thought I don’t think it will bring him any joy!

The elevator opened again, and here was Simon. By his smile she knew that negotiations had gone well. It had probably been trying, since the richest people could drive the hardest bargains.

“Sorry to keep you so long,” he said.

“I haven’t minded. I’ve been watching the crowd. So it went all right?”

“Splendidly. We got our price. It’s a good thing you didn’t come up, though. He even sent his bride out of the room. Apparently money is a dirty subject to discuss in front of women. Shall we have lunch?”

“But I’ve got the car in town, and I wanted to drive home this afternoon.”

“Can’t we at least have a quick salad or a sandwich someplace?”

It touched her whenever his cheerful animation subsided into disappointment. His generosity merited generosity in return.

“All right,” she said, “a quick salad.”

“I never get to see you.”

“You do. We had dinner only last Sunday.”

“Well, but this is Friday, isn’t it?”

She took his arm and they went out onto the street.

“Goodness, there must be a million foreigners in the city this summer, don’t you think?” she said gaily. She was fending him off, leading away from the personal. And a little chill of guilt went through her, as it does when one has ignored a child or been sharp to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

They sat down at a table in a bay window. Fern busied herself mixing oil and vinegar for the salad. Simon gazed out to the street, his lively face gone still, the heavy eyelids dropped like hoods so that he could only have been seeing the bottom half of the passersby.

Ordinarily, he had so much to say. He talked better than anyone she knew, with a great deal of sophistication and yet very little skepticism—an unusual combination of traits. It was not easy to be an optimist without being also something of a simpleton.

He was an attentive listener, too. But sometimes he would
look at her with such close attention, as if he were seeing far inside, as if she could hide nothing from him, that she would feel her thoughts coming to a fumbling halt.

She stole a troubled look across the table. A few gray strands had come into his sandy hair; she had never noticed them. He would stay young for a long time, being of the thin, supple type that at eighty or thereabouts has thick white hair and wears good tweeds and remembers how to dance.

So they sat for a little while until presently Simon found something to say.

“Everyone all right at home?”

“Oh yes, thank goodness.” Fern grasped at conversation. “I heard from Emmy yesterday. She still adores Paris. I don’t suppose she’ll ever come back.”

“You never know.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” she agreed.

“She may marry some sturdy British businessman, and you’ll have her back here again.”

“Maybe so.”

Silence. Why was it especially awkward today?

“Strange how different my daughters are from one another. And they look so alike,” she remarked, feeling instantly embarrassed at her own banality. As if Simon could care about the personalities of her daughters, whom he had seen perhaps half a dozen times! But she went on, “Emmy knows four languages, so she’s perfect in the European business world. I can’t see her satisfied living Isabel’s life, having one baby after the other.”

“I didn’t know Isabel was—”

“No, not yet, but I’m sure she will be. They both want lots of children.”

“The way it looks,” Simon said, “you’ll be rattling around alone in Lamb House, won’t you?”

“Well, I don’t know about rattling around. It was left to Ned, naturally, although I have the right to live there as long as I want. Maybe sometime Ned will marry and come back. Then, of course, I’ll move out Although, I don’t know really.” Now her thoughts ran seriously, for the subject was of genuine concern. “He doesn’t show any signs of
settling down. He’s due back from Egypt soon, does well in every job he’s had, but right now someone’s put a bee in his bonnet about America. So many of the young men want to go where the ‘action’ is. That’s their expression.”

“Where the money is,” Simon said. “I daresay you can’t blame them.”

“I wouldn’t say that was true of Ned. He’s creative and imaginative. I really think it’s just change that he wants, something new. He ought to do splendidly in advertising.”

“Of course, New York’s the base for that.”

“So very likely he’ll be flying off again. I miss him,” she said simply.

“From what I see, children are ungrateful wretches. You put everything you’ve got into them, and all they do is forget you.”

“They have to live their own lives, Simon.”

“I suppose so. Still, I’ve never regretted having none. Margaret did. It must be a much deeper need in a woman, after all. Almost the last thing she said to me before she died was that she was sorry she wasn’t leaving me with a daughter or a son to remember her by.”

“But you remember her anyway,” Fern said softly.

“Shall I tell you something? It’s been ten years, and by now I really don’t remember very much. Yes, I recall how loving and good she was, and that we lived well together. But I don’t really remember her. I can’t quite see her face anymore. Do you understand?”

Fern didn’t answer. Alex’s face? It came back to her only in some swift movement of Emmy’s mouth or when Isabel threw her head back to laugh too loudly. She had never seen Alex in Ned. He might have been of different stock, so different was he, with those musing eyes and that odd half-smile, reminding her, improbably as it was, of Martin.

And suddenly she was aware that her fork was half-raised to her lips. She laid it down.

“I’ve upset you,” Simon said kindly. “I didn’t mean to, Mary. I’m sorry.”

“You just called me Mary,” she said. “No one ever does.”

“You told me once you liked it better. I try to remember that. I try to remember everything you like.”

“You’re so good,” she said. “Just good. There’s no other word.”

“Am I?” He shrugged. He took a cigarette from the pack, choosing it carefully, tapping it, lighting it, pursing his lips and blowing the curled smoke toward the ceiling. Then he ground it roughly out, twisting it in the ashtray, and reached across the table for her free hand. His own was trembling.

“Marry me,” he said. “I’ve been on the verge of asking you so often and you know it, don’t you, Mary? I’ve all but said it a dozen times.”

“I know.” And lowering her eyes away from his gaze which was so intense, so strong that it frightened her, she thought: I am not ready for this.

“With a little push, even a glance, a bit of something in your voice to encourage me, I would have said it long ago. Well, now I’m saying it. Marry me.”

It was too bad, too bad, that tears should spring into her eyes.

“I know I’d always take second place.”

“You shouldn’t be satisfied with second place.”

“But if I’m content, Mary, isn’t it for me to choose? Besides, it’s not like a recipe, is it? Loving, I mean? You can’t measure it: a cup of this, a spoonful of that Loving is different every time.”

She murmured pointlessly, “I don’t know.”

“So even though I understand how you loved Alex, this would be different.”

She didn’t answer.

“Besides, Alex is dead.”

The waitress came to take the plates away. Simon released her hand and she put it in her lap, not wanting to be held, not wanting to be fastened.

“I’m not ready yet,” she said, looking down at her hands.

“You’re not a girl anymore. There’s not all that much time.”

“That’s true.”

“When will you be ready, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

“I would be good for you. I’ve been good for your work already, you’ve told me so.”

“Yes. Yes, you have. You would be.” She looked up. He was so grave, so fine and grave. “Oh, I wish I could,” she cried, and now it was she who stretched both hands across the table and took his. “Oh, Simon, whatever you say about not caring, not minding, you deserve so much better!” Her tears rolled over and slid.

“Don’t cry here,” he said gently. “Well go now. I’ll take you to the car.”

The top was down and the rushing wind, the sound and touch of it, calmed her grieving spirit. That Simon’s proposal should have been so painful! Dear, trusted friend! Considerate, tender, and demanding, too, as one wanted a man to be! What was wrong?

In the late afternoon when she kissed him good-bye on leaving the gallery, his cheeks were rough, for his beard grew quickly. He was clean, so very clean. She knew so much about him. She knew what he liked to eat and to read, the kind of friends he chose. What was wrong?

That ache. That other. Still she saw him as on that last morning when, through the rearview mirror of the car, she had watched him walking down the street in his American uniform, walking out of her life again, going away. She had not been on that street since, had taken care to avoid it. The flat where they had said good-bye had been given up, the excuse being, and it was the truth, that it was too expensive to keep.

Her thoughts ran in tangents. Even Lamb House could only be maintained by opening it to the public two days a week. American tourists came crowding to see how an English county family lived, or had lived. But she had an obligation to keep the place for Alex’s children. The girls wouldn’t want it, but perhaps Ned might one day. He had understood his father’s feeling for it. My feeling, too, Fern thought. The house speaks to me. Martin saw that. “You love each tree,” he told her once. He had understood. It
always came back to Martin. Everything always came back to him. Everything joined in a circle: Alex’s house and Martin and Alex’s son. Her son. Where did it all end?

Circles don’t have an end, she thought And life is linear, with a beginning and an end, somehow, sometime. I’m very tired.

At the toll booth, an elderly man with an automatic smile took her change. For some reason he made her think of an animal at the zoo, imprisoned without having committed any crime. To think of spending your life in a little cage, taking coins! Nothing that lived, animal or human, ought to be confined. She hated zoos and belonged to a committee for their abolition. Alex had always laughed, in a nice way, with mild amusement, and so had Martin, because she had joined so many causes: against the slaughter of whales and seals; for the preservation of the forests; againt drug abuse; for foster homes and battered wives. Well, as long as you lived in the world, you owed it something, didn’t you?

And she felt a piercing compassion for everything that lived, the sort of feeling that flashed through you now and then with such dear intensity that you couldn’t possibly feel like that all the time, or even most of the time. It would sicken your soul. But shall I ever clear my own way, she thought?

The little car moved off the highway and slowed around the curve of the road. It was a lane, really. She still had enough memory of America and its roads to call this a lane. The car crept up the drive at Lamb House and into the garage.

In the burning afternoon the house lay shadowed among hovering beeches. It opened its arms. When she had stepped inside, it would close them around her again, walling the world away.

And she stopped a moment to listen to the infinite buzz and hum of a thousand little creatures busy in the grass. A butterfly, Parnassius, pale crystal gray, lit on her arm, its frail folded wings trembling there before it fluttered off into the light. And a leaf fell, a very small leaf, oval and yellow, spiraling slowly through the quiet air.

Oh, lovely, blooming world! Birth into life, life into death, the leaf and the bird in me, I in the leaf and the bird, unending round of radiance and darkness. But shall I ever clear my own way? she thought again.

The maid, Elvira, one of the last remaining village girls who hadn’t preferred the factory, had seen her from the window and came running.

“There’s a young lady in the hall. She asked for you. She’s been waiting. An American, I think.”

Now, in the summer before their final year at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons—known informally as P. and S.—five young women were traveling through Europe. They followed the route trod by generations of students since the days of the eighteenth century’s Grand Tour: through Italy’s museums, cathedrals and ruins and up over the Alps, westward and northward to the chateau country in splendid summer leafage, and at last across the Channel to London. Together and on foot they went down the guidebooks’ lists, from the Tower and the palaces to Samuel Johnson’s house.