The Darts of Cupid: Stories (23 page)

It was a warm, brightly sunny afternoon, on which one did not remark because one took it for granted. The main hall, with its display of early-nineteenth-century French paintings, starring names like David, Géricault, and Legros, was densely crowded, and, seeking an interval of repose, I wandered off into a narrow adjoining room, brilliantly lit, and lined with glass cases filled with silver. This, too, I learned, was part of the display; the auctioning of the rare silver was to follow that of the paintings, the next day.

Here several young women of the staff were standing about, all cast in the same mold—blond, tall, flat-figured, thin-lipped, their straight hair fastened in ponytail fashion with black velvet bows. They were old-maidish despite being in their early thirties, and I wondered whether Brentford’s had a preference for their kind or whether their kind had a preference for Brentford’s.

It was only then that I noticed that there was one man present as well. He had been hidden from my sight before, standing in a corner, and now he was coming forward to meet me. It was he who triggered and set in motion the fateful events that were to follow, not only because he was in charge but because of his aristocratic looks and large brown eyes with no glimmer of feeling in them. Seeing him, I decided to enter into the game of teasing pretense.

He came toward me in a leisurely way, obviously undecided whether I was worth his customary "May I help you?"

I said in French, "I have an Odiot tea service."

The effect of my words was remarkable. Halting in front of me with flattering abruptness, the young man said, "Oh, yes?" And soon I had a chorus of thin-lipped, ponytailed maidens around me, shrieking with pleasure at the news that I had a case with sixty kilos of silver in deposit in bond in Switzerland for which payments had been made over the past thirty years. Their merriment grew so loud that another of their ilk came in from the main room, telling us off because we were making such a din.

The young man gave me a card with the Paris Brentford’s address, asking me to let him have further details and giving me to understand that my obstinacy in holding on to the silver was both ridiculous and wasteful.

When I got home, I was still in the mood of provocative teasing, wanting to find out what the silver might be worth, without the slightest intention of putting it on sale. I wrote him a letter. I gave the overall weight of the Odiot, which was made up of a stand, a teapot, a milk jug, a cream jug, a sugar bowl, and a cake dish. I gave the weight of the pair of candlesticks as roughly nineteen pounds, and described them as being two-branched figures of nymph and faun. I wrote "nymph & faun," feeling that the entwined ampersand made the letter look more businesslike. I addressed him not as "Dear Sir" but by his name on the card, Du Cross–Lafalaise, noting with satisfaction that I had been right in judging his looks as aristocratic. I put my name and address at the head of the letter.

And now, still sitting on the edge of my bed, and recalling the scene in Monte Carlo, and running through in my mind the wording of my letter to Paris, and feeling the signal of my emphatically beating heart, I suddenly felt like gasping for breath.

The man from Brentford’s in Geneva, whose name I did not know, had called me on the telephone. This meant that he had gone to the trouble of finding out my number after reading my letter, which had been forwarded from their Paris office; that he had not intended to write me a letter, which I might throw away; that he had meant to apply shock and surprise tactics; that he meant to force answers out of me for which I could not have prepared myself beforehand; that he did not mean to let go. And recalling his laugh, and his looks, which I felt sure I knew, I thought how like Gordon he was, in invading and taking possession before one had time to defend oneself.

When I had first met Gordon, in the late afternoon of a mild, gray-skied day in June, he had picked me up in a pub in Mayfair, where I had gone on the off chance of meeting one or several groups of my friends who used to gather there almost daily. Without my being aware of him, he had suddenly stood behind me, taken the glass I was holding out of my hand and placed it on the windowsill, grasped my wrist, and said, "Let’s go somewhere else." And I, as though rendered senseless by the pressure of his hard thumb against my pulse, had found myself outside with him before I could gather my wits. He violated me on the bench in the garden of a house in Kensington where he was living in rooms. He had taken me there to show me the grounds, and I had agreed, believing that as long as we kept in the open air there could be no danger of any amorous advances. I had gone on believing it while strolling with him on the graveled paths of an ill-kept Edwardian garden, with tall old bedraggled trees, and shrubs whose foliage had been blanketed by the sooty London air. I was listening only halfheartedly as he told me of his disgust about his years in the navy, when he stopped in front of a bench. Halting in midsentence, Gordon threw me backward onto the bench and, remaining upright on his feet, showed me without any words how mistaken I had been. On that day in June, just like the man from Brentford’s in Geneva, he had been nameless.

It was four days after the telephone call that I received the promised letter from Geneva, if letter it could be called. There were two cards in the envelope, both printed, the larger with Brentford’s Geneva address and "With compliments," the smaller the card of Brentford’s Mr. E. Byrnes Forbes, with the same address and his direct-line telephone number. He was a Brentford’s man, then—I hadn’t been certain—but was acting on his own in our transaction. He had written a large scrawl on the bottom of the bigger card—his signature, done in a few slanting dashes, in which not even an
E,
or a
B,
or an
F
could be made out. I now sent him a letter saying, "Let’s do it at once," as though harping on our intimacy and wishing to disguise the meaning to anyone else who might be reading it. Then I added, "At your earliest convenience," to mask my feverish desire to meet him.

He rang me up three days later, saying, "Mrs. Richardes," in his precise pronunciation, and without giving his name.

I said, "I wrote you a letter."

He said, "I’ve just got it. I’ve been looking at my diary. Would the first of February suit you?"

I said, "And what—"

He said, "It’s a Thursday."

We both repeated, "Thursday, the first of February," in unison.

He said, "And where shall we rendezvous?"

"At Rosecrans," I said, "because they are in charge."

He said, "How will you get there?"

I said, "By train. I haven’t got a car. There is, I think, a train at a ghastly hour, something like seven in the morning, I’m not sure, but I think, I think. It’s via Milan and change there. I think I’ll get to Chiasso by one o’clock."

He said, "I’ll fly to Lugano. That’s near Chiasso, isn’t it?"

I said, "You know, I’ve looked up other lists I found since. There is more silver, unspecified. Dishes and ewers. And three rattles. Children’s rattles. It sounds crazy."

"Oh, yes," he said, unperturbed. "Do not worry. I’ll take everything from you."

"Even the rattles?" I said.

"I will," he said. "The Odiot and the candlesticks I’ll take with me to Geneva, and the rest I’ll throw into Zurich. We have a place there for this kind of stuff. Don’t worry. That’s definite." He added after a pause, "I’m looking forward to meeting you," and I, to disguise my eagerness, rang off with a hurried good-bye.

I blamed myself after this. I must have sounded quite scatterbrained to him, with my senseless "I think, I think" about the train times. And why did I have to bring up those crazy-sounding rattles, as though the uncertain number of dishes and ewers had not been sufficient to get him exasperated at my disordered rambling? And I thought with bitterness how meaningless his formula of politeness, when parting, must have been.

I SHOULD AGAIN make it clear that my negotiations with Forbes about the silver had nothing to do with money, at least on my part. Neither of us had mentioned a price for the Odiot and the rest, but I knew, as he did, that the sum in question could be in the thousands if not the tens of thousands of pounds—a considerable sum but not one that I was required to draw upon at that time in my life. This had not always been the case, or what I believed to be the case, about the state of my fortunes. My husband, who often said, "A life without servants is no life," had in the last years of our marriage moved us from a great villa in Estoril, in Portugal, to the small flat in Bordighera, on the western Italian Riviera. Servantless owing to this move, I had accepted this change in our lifestyle without a question, taking for granted that it was due to our reduced means. I knew all too well his frequent laments about his investments, and his telephone calls to his banker in Zurich, which he always started, disdaining to give his name, like this: "How are you? . . . Fine . . . Same here. Now, look—do I have any money? How much? Oh dear, oh dear. What am I to do? Because I’ve had this idea. I’ve been thinking—" At which point I always ceased to listen, for what followed made no sense to me, except to reinforce my conviction that his finances were in a precarious state. Ignorant as I was of his wealth, I did not know that he could have easily rented an opulent gentleman’s residence, as had been his wont up till then.

I did all the housework. And though he often claimed to regret that I had to do it, his demands and rules did not diminish: a colored tablecloth for breakfast, a white damask cloth for dinner, butter curls in silver shells at each meal, and a separate tiny silver saltcellar with a minute salt spoon in front of each cover. He liked to say that not one day passed without his reading in the news the name of someone he had met and known. It would have been unforgivable if now, believing him to be impoverished, I had denied him his comforts—a man of his distinction and eminence, a man who had been a king’s physician and who had given up, after the King’s death, all medical practice, saying that he could not, after all, advertise in the
Times
for another royal patient.

In Bordighera, during the last year of his life, he had developed a quirk that I found increasingly hard to bear. He was by then in his eighty-third year, and growing steadily more enfeebled. Although he still managed to get dressed and go to a coffeehouse at night, he used to spend his days alternately lying down and sitting in our drawing room. Forced to save his strength, he avoided moving about, which meant that I had to fetch and carry constantly. Most tiring for me were his continual demands for mineral water, which he took with tiny sips of whiskey. The mineral water had to be ice cold, so I had to go each time to the kitchen, take the bottle out of the refrigerator, and then return it. The constant jumping up and dashing to and fro, the lifting and carrying of the heavy bottle, was for me a backbreaking fatigue.

It was at this point that the quirk would show itself. After his usual request for mineral water, just as I was on the threshold of the room, on my way back to the kitchen, he would call out to me to stop. "Here, come here and take this ashtray with you—it’s full," he would say. And I would return to the marble-topped table in front of his easy chair, take the ashtray, and return in time from the kitchen with the water and the emptied ashtray. Very soon thereafter, almost each time, he would stop me just when I was in the door and make me retrace my steps, with an order, say, to pick up a dropped handkerchief and put it into the laundry basket, or to remove an empty glass, or to retrieve a fallen newspaper, or suchlike.

After a few days I remonstrated. I said, "Please don’t keep calling me back just when I’m halfway out. I’d much rather do one errand and then another."

"But I’m only doing this to save you labor," he said. "As you know, I’m sorry for you, having to do so much, now that there are no maids. I’m only trying to spare you."

I found this reasonable. And yet, after a few more days, his "wishing to spare you" became increasingly obnoxious. And when I complained once more, saying that I’d rather not be stopped in my tracks, he said I was ridiculous to object. I did not argue anymore after this, but, ridiculous or not, I did not feel cared for by him, but on the contrary, choked, hobbled, strangled.

His obsessive halting me and delaying me he practiced, too, every time I got ready to go out to do the shopping. Just as I was about to open the front door, he would call me back two or three times running: "Don’t forget to look in the mailbox when you get down," or "Do look in at the chemist’s for my order," or "Do look in at the newsagent’s for the Herald Tribune." And when I said that I never forgot to look in the mailbox, or that the chemist had said the medicine would not be in yet, or that the newsagent could not possibly have the
Tribune
because the foreign papers never arrived till four in the afternoon, he would say, "Never mind, you can always try. And with the mailbox you might forget, just this once."

Each day, my going out grew into a desperate battle to leave, but I kept silent. As my resentment smoldered and simmered and felt harder to keep under control, my sense of guilt increased. He was on the point of death, and I reproached myself for not being utterly fond of him.

It did occur to me, of course, that what he pretended was benevolent care was in fact disguised malice. I thought that he had started to hate me for my shortcomings, such as my past unwillingness to supervise the servants and to restrict their wasteful habits. I knew also, though he never blamed me outright, that he held me responsible for the fading and the ultimate cessation of his love life, due to what was, for him, my amorous ineptitude. On the other hand, in my case there had never been any love to bury; Gordon had remained within me forever, even after his suicide.

Perhaps to show me that he had been successful in his relationships with women before our marriage, to the point of gaining their enduring affection, my husband took to inviting his former mistresses to come and stay with us, for two or three weeks at a time, when we were living in plentiful ease and space in Estoril, in our fake fortress of a villa, with a tower and crenellated roof, a cloistered walk, parquets of flowers in front, and a pinewood in the grounds at the rear. I could not plead the excuse of being incommoded by their presence in a house with six bathrooms, a laundry room, an ironing room, a boiler room, and a gardener’s and chauffeur’s quarters. But on these occasions he would reproach me for not showing heartfelt pleasure toward our guests, then saying, "I do not mean this to be critical. It is just a statement."