The Darts of Cupid: Stories (19 page)

"May we sit down? There aren’t any tables left," said the girl.

"By all means, Helenka," said the Russian, using the friendly diminutive of Helen. He made a lazy gesture toward a neighboring alcove. "Get yourselves some chairs."

With a resigned smile at me, he shifted his chair closer to mine. After they had joined our table, he made no attempt at introductions. He kept making random remarks to the girl, like, "Did you bring a coat with you, Helenka? It looks as though you’ll need it. It’s turned cloudy again."

After they had ordered ices, we were joined by yet another newcomer, a stranger to all of us, an obese young man who brought a chair over without asking our permission. He told us he had been to the cinema nearby, and was quickly served with a large helping of cold roast beef and
sauce tartare.

"Excuse me for a minute, milostivá paní," said the Russian, "there is someone over there whom I would like to have a word with." He walked away in the direction of the naked statue.

I kept silent. The couple were spooning ice cream out of long-stemmed nickel cups and exchanging remarks whose sense I did not try to grasp. I looked down the room; the Russian had disappeared. "Excuse me, miss," I said, "but will you tell me the name of the gentleman who’s just been with us? I know it’s Konstantin something, but I get so confused with names, being a foreigner."

"Of course," she said with haughty indulgence, "he is Konstantin Goloviev."

"That’s right, Goloviev," I said hastily, trying to control the nervous laughter which rose in my throat. "Goloviev. These Russian names are so confusing. But could you be so kind . . . could you tell me what he is? In the way of his profession, I mean."

"Oh," she said, and paused as though to gather breath before uttering an impressive statement, "he is the managing director of a large concern."

"Really?" I said. "But are you sure? How do you know?"

"How do I know?" she said, contemptuous of my disbelief and enjoying my ignorance. "Because I’ve worked for six months under him. I’ve left now, but he’s still there."

"That’s on cement?" I asked.

"That’s on cement," she said. "He is the top."

We fell silent once more. The obese young man, who was eating his second ice topped with a whirl of whipped cream strewn with grated chocolate, had been following our conversation with undisguised interest.

"Where is he?" I asked a few minutes later. "I think he’s been away now for half an hour." I addressed myself to the girl, Helenka, in particular, established as she was as an expert on the Russian. "Or do you think he’s left altogether?"

Once more she became contemptuous of my ignorance. "He can’t have left," she told me, "because there’s still his wine on the table, and his lighter and his cigarettes."

"Yes, you are right, of course," I said, humbly and admiringly, though in my eyes a packet of cigarettes and a lighter were of too small value to serve as forfeits. I recalled how three years ago the Russian had complained of the loss of his gold fountain pen, and fell to wondering in what circumstances he had left it "lying about."

Seeing my doubting glance, Helenka tossed her head and told her young man, "Go and have a look round. You can see the lady is getting worried. Go and comb out the gents’, perhaps he has been taken ill."

After the imitation-suede-jacketed youth had left, I rewarded Helenka by confiding, "You see, I haven’t seen the Russian for some years, and I was struck by how he has aged."

"That’s right," she said. "When you don’t see people day by day, you notice it much more."

We were silent again, till the young man came back. "I looked all over the place," he said, "and he’s not in the phone booth either. He must have left." He called the waiter and paid, and they went away.

I remained sitting with the obese young man who had been listening all the time with the Buddhalike air of wisdom peculiar to very fat people. Now he remarked, "You do meet odd persons when you are traveling, don’t you?"

I nodded. By then he had finished a triangle of chocolate cake.

He was eating a cube of another kind of chocolate cake when the Russian returned. Seeing him approach the table made me aware again of how monumental he looked, like his own statue in a public square. "They have gone," I said, "Helenka and her swain."

The obese youth called the headwaiter, and we waited in silence till he left.

"The weather is turning bad again," said the Russian. "Eight degrees and it’s the first week of June."

"Like three years ago," I said.

"Do you remember," he said, "how it kept raining all that spring, and how I said I’d rather have it rain on and on as long as you stayed?"

"I remember."

"But this year it will be different," he said. "It will turn very hot. You can rely on me."

"Will it?"

"I think so," he said. "You are a little fool. Don’t you read the papers?"

"Not a lot," I said.

"It doesn’t matter either way," he said, "because even if you did read the papers thoroughly, you’d get nothing out of them. And that’s as it should be, because you are a woman. The trouble is, hardly anybody knows how to read the papers."

"How do you mean?"

"If a monkey looks into the mirror, what does he see?" he asked. "Only another monkey."

"Well, yes," I said, bewildered.

He was smiling, his teeth gleaming like freshly peeled almonds. Then he gave his resigned laugh. "It’s no use sitting here any longer," he said. "The Sunday crowd is obnoxious. And the stuffy air. Shall we go?" He tightened his long straight lips, the way he had that night when expecting to hear that my cousin had said something about him.

Bending over my empty cup and stirring the inside with my spoon, I avoided his eyes.

"Shall we go?" he repeated.

"No."

"You are a little fool," he said.

"We won’t go," I said. "I’ll go. Good-bye."

On the following day it was less chilly, and the day after that there was a heat wave of thirty-four degrees, and the hot weather lasted during the whole of my month’s stay in Prague. The Russian’s forecast had been true. But it was only after the twenty-first of August that I began to think of his "You can rely on me" not with bitterness but with respect.

The Blue Hour

"And don’t flatter yourself, Louise," said Edmund, when I asked him to examine me, and to behave like a doctor, a "practical doctor," as he liked to call it. "He does this to every woman he meets."

"Surely not," I said. "Let’s say, to every other woman. There must be some choice."

"How do you know?" said Edmund. During his twenty years in India, he had been a celebrated cardiologist, and though we’d now been married for twenty-five years, he had rarely treated me. Once, when I had what he thought might be a nettle rash, he had insisted on taking me to be looked at by one of these "real practitioners," saying that it was too much to ask of him to tell urticaria from scabies.

"I don’t know," I said, and began to describe my sufferings: "I feel stabbed by every deep breath I take, pierced with every clearing of my throat, laughter impossible—not that I’d want to laugh—every movement like bending and stretching a torture"—while speaking, I kept my hand over the source of the pain, on my right side. I had waited until now, when Edmund was in pajamas and dressing gown and facing me across the long, low marble-topped sofa table on which he kept stacks of the
Lancet
and the
Herald Tribune,
to tell him what had happened that afternoon with Clarence, my cousin Sylvia’s husband.

"He’s contused my liver," I said. "What if I now get jaundice? The bile comes out of the liver, doesn’t it—"

Edmund started to laugh. "Never mind your liver. I can diagnose you without getting out of my chair. He’s cracked your rib. And there’s nothing one can do about it. If you were one of my former patients, say, a maharajah or an estate owner—one must give the rich the idea they’re getting their money’s worth when they call me—I’d now have them run up so many X rays from so many angles that they’d need a lorry to cart them away." He went on, "Clarence is a fool and he is not quite normal. In my young days we had a name for it in psychiatry. We called it moral insanity. And the worst of it is, you’ve been unlucky in your bad luck. Because you got caught on the cartilage. Instead of on the bone. Bones heal fast because they’ve got what the cartilage hasn’t got— well, never mind. But cartilage is the devil to heal."

I refrained from asking what cartilage had not got as opposed to bones. One did not query Edmund. I had learned my lesson early, during the first week of our honeymoon. In a small hotel, near Malaga, owned and run by an English couple for an entirely English clientele, Edmund had called room service and ordered a bottle of mineral water. It was brought by a waiter, a thin, pale, hollow-cheeked young man. It was obvious that before coming to our room, he had looked up our entry in the register and had seen Edmund’s title, because, as soon as he put down his tray, he turned to Edmund and fastened upon him an insistently beseeching glance. "Doctor, sir."

"Yes," said Edmund, "what’s troubling you?"

"It’s pain," said the waiter, "here, over here." And he ran his hand down one side of his body.

"Quite so," said Edmund. "Hold on a minute, will you?" And he went to the bedside table and opened the jaws of the well-worn Gladstone bag which he took along on all his travels. After some rummaging he brought forth a flat white pill and placed it on the waiter’s tray. "Take this, half an hour before going to bed. With a glass of water. Don’t chew." And then, so as to cut short the waiter’s profuse thanks, he raised his hand in the benevolent wave he had acquired during his travels abroad, with the King of Nepal. And though he had stopped all medical activity after the King’s death, he still retained the mannerisms of a King’s physician.

As soon as we were alone I said, "But Edmund, how could you? You’ve never seen him before. You didn’t examine him. You did not ask him a question. You’ve no idea what he’s got. What did you give him?"

"Just the first painkiller that came to my hand."

"But how could you, when you’ve no idea?"

He said, "No idea? He’s got a tubercular kidney but he does not know it yet. And there’s nothing I can do about it."

Now, watching me as I kept putting my hand to the right side of my waist, he said, "I’d say, four weeks to heal. There’s nothing I can do about it. And it’s no use telling Sylvia, either. You will recall that I—already, all those years ago, when I first met Clarence—I told you then that he was a fool and that he was bats in the belfry. What you are, you remain. Now, how long ago would that have been?"

"Let me think," I said. "I’m forty-five now, that makes Sylvia forty-eight. And when you first met her and Clarence, that was in Westbourne Terrace, they were living in London, and Julie, their first, was only two months old, and Sylvia was twenty-two when she got married, and lost no time getting Julie, so that makes—"

"Twenty-three years," said Edmund.

"Yes," I said. "And already then Sylvia was bitching and bellyaching that she’d rather live in the country but Clarence was still thinking he’d make it as a barrister and was sitting tight on his behind in the City waiting for his briefs. And when he didn’t get on, she always said it was envy—Clarence Demolins, some of the bluest blood in England,
Des Moulins
from Normandy, come over with William the Conqueror, older than the Tudors, the Stuarts, the this and the that."

I recalled well what had happened during this long-ago visit of ours. We had stayed for twenty minutes—twenty minutes too long, according to Edmund. From the start the social climate had been, if not icy, at least cloudy, menacing rain. Sylvia was on her own when we arrived, while Clarence was expected to show up around six from the City. When Sylvia tried to pick Edmund’s brain regarding a well-balanced diet, Edmund told her that he was all for it, meat and greens, say, chicken and green peas—say, one chicken, one pea.

Then it was about a drug Clarence’s mother was taking against high blood pressure. "I’ve heard about it," said Edmund, "and I’m sure it must be very good because it is very expensive." He then added that one had to avoid being selfish, one had to act according to a humanitarian view, that is, that not only the chemist who sold it, but Pfizer, too, who manufactured it, could not be left to starve. It was at this point—while Sylvia continued staring at Edmund, who had been uttering all this nonsense with his customary grave courtesy—that we heard the screech of the front door. Sylvia gave a deep sigh, as though feeling relieved, and Clarence made his entrance. It was a theatrical entrance, like that of a knight in full armor. Why, I asked myself, had he not taken off his hat and coat in the hall? And why, having entered, did he remain planted on the threshold, thus forcing us, who were seated in front of the dismal gas fire, at odds with the decorous marble Victorian chimneypiece, which was a remnant of the former hearth, to turn around, playing the audience, while he was poised as on a stage?

After a murmured "So this is Edmund. How lovely. I’ve been longing to meet you," he went on in a stronger, declaiming voice, "I’ve had just such an encounter, such a scene, imagine it," and he paused impressively, offering himself to our view, as though still drenched in the dew of the law courts, with his bowler hat, black topcoat with narrow velvet collar, dark striped trousers, tightly rolled umbrella, and black briefcase.

"Imagine it. I get out of the tube here in Bayswater, and I’m on the top of the steps when I get accosted by a prostitute. ‘Good evening to you, sir, and do you want a naughty girl?’ So I stop and tell her, ‘Do you know what you are doing? You are soliciting in a public place for immoral purposes. And though I’m only an ordinary citizen of the U.K., it would be within my rights now to seek out a police constable and have you arrested. And do you realize what would be the consequences for you? You’d be taken to jail, you’d be kept in jail for the night, you’d be brought in front of the magistrate in the morning, you’d be charged according to paragraph—,’ " and he continued with a rigmarole of legal shop talk, declaiming numbers, letters, and sections of paragraphs, running on and on, gazing ahead of him and proudly smiling.

At the end of this performance he left the room walking backward, still facing us as though fearing to diminish the weight of his speech by turning to leave in the ordinary way. A short time later, he joined us, having shed his outdoor clothing, went to the drink trolley, and asked us in a matter-of-fact voice what we would care to have. Though he was neither short nor tall, the same height as Edmund, he seemed taller than Edmund. This was owing to his chunky, heavy-boned figure, as opposed to Edmund’s narrow-boned slightness. (And this, inevitably too, was due to the fact that Edmund was almost a generation older.) He had a short, blunt nose, a small full-lipped mouth, and round blue eyes set flat in the face, with a blank stare, as though he never blinked, and an evenly pink complexion, all of which combined to make him, if not exactly handsome, nice-looking, rather like a tailor’s dummy—one who, owing to a malevolent fairy’s decree, had come to life and left the shopwindow where he had been on display. The only odd quality about his looks was his hair. Thick and covering his head in large waves, it seemed chiseled out of pewter. He was prematurely gray.

As soon as we were out in the street, Edmund said, "This man, apart from being a fool, is not normal. This is not a normal reaction. The ordinary man, when he gets confronted in this way, takes no heed, feigns he hasn’t seen or heard, and just walks on. It depends on the mood you’re in. If you are in a really good mood, you might say something friendly. ‘I’ll bear it in mind, when my ship comes home, just now I couldn’t afford a nice girl like you.’ " He frowned. He shook his head. "Sylvia’s in for trouble, you can take my word for it. He’s now playing the young husband and father, so happy, so proud, so everything as it should be. And all the while so tempted, so taken by that tart, that he had to stop to give her a lecture."

OUR CURRENT RUN-IN with Clarence had been brought about by a telephone call three days before. Because Sylvia and I always corresponded by letter, I had been gripped by fear when I heard Clarence’s voice on the phone, expecting bad news about her or one of their children. "Oh, but I’m not in England," he told me. "I’m in Genoa. I’m quite near you, what with you in Bordighera. It’s only two hours by train."

He then explained that there was a congress, sponsored by the Italian state, dealing with Garibaldi and the period of Garibaldi, and that he, as I knew, was a legal historian and had—too long to explain on the phone. He was going to give two lectures, one in English and one in Italian—the Italian he had written in English and it had been translated for him, of course, but he was to read it himself—anyway, there was a window in the wall of lectures and he was to have a whole day free. Could he come and spend the day with us? It would be the fifteenth of May, a Thursday. He would take the train which was due to arrive in Bordighera at two minutes past eleven, a civilized time, wasn’t it? I agreed. I said I’d meet him at the station.

Clarence was sixty now. And when I saw him getting out of the train, even before he set foot on the platform, I saw that the most striking change in his appearance was his hair; still thick and smoothly waved, but now a chalk white, so startling that I suspected it was artificially bleached. When people grow older, their lids tend to droop over their eyes as though they’ve become wary of seeing more than what’s needed. Yet Clarence’s pale blue stare was as wide-eyed as before. The former even rosiness of his complexion was now broken up into a cobweb of red veins, and when he lowered his head there was the beginning of a double chin.

He was not dressed like a tourist but, as on that long-ago London afternoon in Westbourne Terrace, as though he’d just stepped out of a lawyer’s chambers, in a dark-gray, pencil-striped suit, a three-piece, complete with waistcoat, and he was carrying a black attaché case and a tightly rolled umbrella. "But Clarence," I greeted him, "we are on the Riviera and this is the middle of May. It’s more than warm now, it’s getting hot." He replied, "Surely, you cannot expect me to go out for a whole day without an umbrella?"

"We needn’t take a taxi," I said. "Walking fast, it’s about three minutes. We haven’t got a car anymore, Edmund isn’t up to it."

"How is he? When you write to Sylvia, you never mention him."

"What is there to say? He never tells me what’s really the matter with him. He isn’t allowed to make up prescriptions here in Italy, because his English degree isn’t valid, so he sends me to an Italian doctor just across the street from where we live, and whom he’s never met, and this doctor sits down like a child at school taking dictation and copies out the recipes Edmund writes down, and never so much as dares to ask why and wherefore. We know very few people here, a handful of English and Germans, and the odd Italian general, retired, with a bee in his bonnet for painting, but people do talk, and it’s a small place, and everybody knows Edmund for what he was, the greatest cardiologist, for twenty years, in the whole of India. And he does go out and about, nearly every day, on the seafront and to the coffeehouse, but at home it’s mostly between the bed and the easy chair."

"But it must be dull, for Edmund," said Clarence, "after the kind of life he’s led—"

"Well, for one thing, he wanted a place with no snow in winter, and then, he says, he’s really always hated having patients, and if he could have afforded it, he’d have done nothing but research, and only the other day he got a request from the university in Leyden—they wanted a reprint of a letter he’d sent to the
Lancet.
Some of his former patients keep nagging him, they phone from London and York and Calcutta. Last week the Maharani of Kapurthala rang him up from London, on her way back to India, would he come out? She’d pay all his expenses. The Maharajah said he couldn’t travel abroad because he couldn’t afford a whole train for himself anymore and a retinue of thirty, and if he were, say, in a hotel in Europe, on his own, and wanted room service, who would pick up the telephone, even if he would give the order himself?"

Glancing at him sideways, I percieved that Clarence kept looking skyward, a behavior meant to indicate that he found the sky more worthy of interest than Edmund’s India. Sylvia adopted this mannerism, too, when she wanted to express her dislike of a topic. I took the hint and changed the subject. "The street we’re in now," I went on, "it cuts Bordighera exactly in half. It’s called the Bond Street of Bordighera, and the house we live in is the last but one in the street. We’re on the top floor, which is the second floor. All the buildings here must be kept low—it’s urban planning—but even from this low floor, the view we get is splendid, always. In the winter, though, it’s perversely lovely, because down below there are the oranges and lemons, ripe, glowing on the trees, and beyond, in the distance, two chains of mountains, bluish with snowcaps. And that’s not all. They say there are a hundred and fifty kinds of palm trees in Bordighera, but I’ve never believed it. And that there is a corner, here, where the bananas get truly ripe, not just half-baked, as they get in the gardens all around here, and I don’t believe that, either. And Bordighera had the first tennis court in Italy and the first manufactory in Italy—that’s true, that still exists, they still make tennis rackets. And now I’ve told you all the facts and fictions about the place. And then there’s a sort of legend, or perhaps it’s true. There’s a hotel here—it’s a ruin now, at night it’s full of tramps and drug addicts—but at the turn of the century it was the cat’s whiskers, the grandest on the whole coast, better than anything even in Nice and Cannes, and Queen Victoria booked a whole floor for three months in the winter, but it was a washout because there was the Boer War and she had to stick it out at home."