The Darts of Cupid: Stories (25 page)

ONCE I HAD RETURNED to Rosecrans, I was led to an office on the first floor, glass-walled and so vast that I could not see the end of it in the farthest shadows. I was installed at a table near the door, and the kind, plump woman brought me a local newspaper and a cup of amazingly good, strong coffee. It was by now twenty past two.

Reading the paper, I heard a swift, swishing rustle behind me. Then silence. By the time I looked around, he was there, standing by the wall, sidewise to where I was seated. Dazzled as I was at the sight of him, as though by the flare of a fork of lightning, I could see only dimly, planted in the open door, the figures of Cortona and the woman, humble and reduced in size, like the figures of donors in old sacred pictures.

He was gazing straight ahead, as though unaware of my presence, and yet he must have been taking me in upon entering. He was, of course, exactly as I had known he would be. I would have been able to pick him out in any crowd— in the foyer of a theater, at a vernissage, in a lecture hall— among all the other men dressed in similar style.

Nettled by his silence and his refusal to look at me, I fought down the nervous laughter rising in my throat, and the temptation of a sarcastic "Together at last" or "Mr. Forbes, I presume." At the same time, I took advantage of this pause to trace him line by line, tint by tint.

He was fair, with the same faded, bleached, washed-out fairness as Gordon’s. He was as tall and lean as Gordon, but more heavily boned. His ash-blond hair fell in strands, untidily, to the edge of his forehead. He had pale skin, a short, blunt nose, and a hard-looking face, with strongly marked bones of brow and cheeks, and a square chin. He was standing relaxed, with his legs slightly apart, and his magnificently broad shoulders and splendidly wide, deep chest hinted at a menacing strength, yet for me it meant protection.

His topcoat of cinnamon-brown herringbone tweed was wide open, to reveal a suit that could have been Gordon’s: a pinstripe of dark, black-tinged brown, like bitter chocolate or black coffee. It was a three-piece suit, with a waistcoat— the dress of a man in the professions. His brown tie glittered with a pattern of tiny silvery half-moons.

I saw that he was smiling—a tight-lipped smile, as if to say, "Here I am. I might just as well look pleasant, while I’m about it, but if you don’t find me to your liking, too bad."

Still more unsettled by the unspoken arrogance of his bearing, I said, at last, "You’ve made it earlier than I thought you would. Do you feel like the dog’s dinner? Did you have to get up at some ghastly hour to get here?"

"Not at all," he said, looking me full in the face for the first time, and changing his smile into one of harmless cheerfulness. He had crossed to the table where I was sitting, and stood in front of it. "I got up at eight this morning, my usual hour. And I’ve put in a lot of work on my way," he said. "I had a meeting in the airport in Lugano. Then I went to see a client there. Then I drove across the lake to see another client in Campione. Then I came here."

Facing him from so near, with only the table between us, I was overwhelmed by the presence of this young man of less than thirty—who could have been Gordon’s younger, stronger, tougher brother. I was in a state akin to drunkenness, in which one listens to oneself uttering remarks that are forbidden. I said, "But you are so young."

He seemed disconcerted, as if I were doubting his expertise, his competence. "I’m sorry for being so young," he murmured.

And I, still flooded by recklessness, now said what could be taken as relating to our business, but what was, in fact, something quite different: "I am in your hands now."

Forbes straightened to his full height, and looked at me at length. A few heartbeats later he said in a low voice, "Yes, you are in my hands now."

He now abandoned his stance in front of the table, and murmuring, "They don’t overwhelm you with hospitality, do they?" he took the only chair in sight, turning it to face me.

I said, "The Rosecrans man, you know, when I told him there’d be a gentleman from Brentford’s coming to help me, he hadn’t an earthly what I meant. Never heard the name. Unbelievable."

He said, "Unbelievable."

"I didn’t tell him, though," I said. "Why should I? Brentford’s is Brentford’s."

He said, "Thank you."

I said, "You know, when you called me, I liked your voice on the phone. If I hadn’t liked it I wouldn’t have come."

"You wouldn’t have come?" he said, with his indulgent, smiling voice.

I said, "No, I wouldn’t have come."

"Are voices important to you? Do you judge people’s characters by their voices?" he said in the same light tone.

"No, not on the whole," I replied. "Not really. Or, perhaps, yes. Though I’ve never really thought about it." And something came to me suddenly that I had never known before: that I had not liked my husband’s voice on the phone. It had sounded weak and querulous.

Feeling that I had run into a cul-de-sac, and aware of how increasingly foolish I must appear to Forbes, I said, hurriedly, "A voice can be fateful, though. Now, take Sibyl Hunter, the wife of Sterling, they had the flat above me when I was still living in London, in Hunter’s Lodge—"

He said, "Where exactly was that?"

"In Hammersmith, on the towpath," I went on. "I lived beautifully in a Queen Anne house, the garden giving onto the towpath. The house was Fine Arts and Monuments."

"You mean under the protection of the Ministry of Fine Arts and Monuments?" he said.

"Yes, and Sibyl—she told me, you see—was in publishing, and she rings up the
Architectural Review
and there is this man on the phone, and he says he’ll mail it to her—the stuff she has been asking for—and she says, ‘Don’t, I’ll come over straightaway and fetch it myself,’ and slams the receiver down because she’s fallen for him on the spot and is dying to meet him, and that’s how they got married, and because Sterling was Daisy’s cousin, and Daisy owned Hunter’s Lodge, they got the flat above me."

"Remarkable," he said, in his smiling voice. "And how did it turn out?"

Together, starting with "the dog’s dinner," we had slipped into a trifling, bantering way of talking—a form of exalted gossip that we both knew very well. I said, "Mr. Smith, the plumber, he comes down to me one day and he says, ‘I’ve just been to the Sterling Hunters up above, their sink is blocked, and, if you ask me, that marriage is going down the drain.’ "

He said, "Remarkable. And would you have said Mr. Smith was to be trusted?"

"The trouble with Mr. Smith was that he was so devastatingly handsome, though he was a bit long in the tooth, but that’s what saved him with Daisy. She couldn’t stand men, but you’ve got to have a plumber, and his getting on in years made him more digestible to Daisy, if you see what I mean. She used to say, ‘Mr. Smith is simply devoted to his face. He can’t pass a glass without stopping and having a look at his face.’ And once when Mr. Smith is in hospital with his heart, Daisy goes to see him—she was very good that way, with servants and workmen—and she comes back and says to Caroline and me—Caroline was a cousin of hers, just staying—so Daisy says, ‘My dears, you know how handsome Mr. Smith is, but, my dears, in bed he’s simply heaven.’ And we were both in stitches, Caroline and I, because Daisy didn’t know what she’d been saying."

Forbes said, "And what was this with men and Daisy?"

"That’s from when Daisy was a young girl and she went to stay with friends in India, and there is this major and they fall for each other, and he has this sick wife, and it’s understood between them they’ll get married as soon as. And then Daisy gets back to London, and she learns—not from him, mind you, but from friends—that the major’s wife did peg out, all right, but he upped and got married to someone else. But I never did believe it—I mean, that Daisy got off men altogether because of that. I mean, it’s a bit too easy, isn’t it?"

He said, "I agree."

"For me it was lucky," I said. "What with being a woman on my own, and out of the top drawer, as Daisy said. Even with foreigners like me, you can tell straightaway, so I got the flat. But before me she’d had a colonel from the War Office, with his wife, in that flat, and when the wife goes to the nursing home to have a baby, the colonel puts on his wife’s clothes at night and goes out on the towpath and then he tells the Sterling Hunters what divine adventures he’s been having—not that they’d let on to Daisy, heaven forbid. But you see, she did take it out on men—just think of little Harry. She took him on as a tenant because she was pally with his mother, who was a Lady in her own right, and little Harry—he wasn’t little, really, just a grown-up little boy, if you get me—he puts red-checked curtains on two of the front windows when he moves in, and Daisy gives him notice and he has to leave, because it’s demeaning to the character of Hunter’s Lodge, and out he goes. And after this, there was one more man, who didn’t last out the first stay of his week, even."

"Why was that?" Forbes said, encouraging me, either out of politeness or genuine interest.

"He moves in on the Monday, and on the Tuesday a woman comes and she stays the night and she leaves soon after six, but Daisy is up and watering the garden, though it’s pouring with rain—you wouldn’t expect it, would you?—but you don’t know Daisy. Then Daisy gets on the phone to him, and she says, ‘Sir, when I let you have the flat I understood that you were a bachelor.’ He says, ‘That’s true.’ She says, ‘How then can you explain why you had a female person staying with you last night?’ He says, ‘I’m a bachelor, that’s true, but I’m not a monk.’ She says, ‘In that case, will you please put a month’s rent on the table in the hall downstairs and the keys, and leave this day.’ And after that there were no more men, and Caroline got the flat, because she wanted to be in London to study the piano."

Forbes said, "And you stayed there for how long?"

I said, "For five years, till I got married."

He said, "Those were the happiest years of your life."

I did not reply. Then I said, "Caroline stayed there, too, till she got married, but, mind you, even though she was a girl and a Hunter, there was a time when things looked very dicey for her, too."

"How was that? Do tell me," he said.

"It’s like this. Daisy is what one calls ‘being so very brave,’ not having got any live-in servants and making do only with charwomen, and this morning she cooks her breakfast and carries it into the dining room and trips over an odd foot and stumbles and nearly comes crashing down with her tray, because there is a young man on the floor, in evening dress and fast asleep. Daisy gives him a kick between the shoulder blades, and she says, ‘Young man, I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, only I do want to know how you got here, but I’m going to have my brekkers first.’ Now, wasn’t that wonderful of Daisy?"

"Wonderful," he said. "But do go on."

"It turned out Caroline had brought him home from a do," I said. "A dinner dance and then the Bag of Nails. He was seeing her home in a cab, and by the time they’d got to Hunter’s Lodge he’d passed out, and the cabbie refused to carry on with him. He follows Caroline inside and shoves in the body before she can slam the door on him, and that was what saved Caroline, really, from being thrown out by Daisy—his being on the floor downstairs and fully dressed. But even then it was touch and go for Caroline."

Forbes said, "And you, yourself, you always kept out of trouble?"

"I always minded my p’s and q’s in Hunter’s Lodge," I replied. "But still, I did have a very awkward moment once, and it really wasn’t fair of Daisy—it wasn’t as though she’d ever told me before, and so how could I guess?"

Forbes said, "I’m sure it wasn’t fair of Daisy, and you couldn’t possibly have known if she hadn’t told you before. And what exactly was it? I think I should be told in case I meet Daisy, too."

"It was to do with Caroline’s admirer—she’d asked him over to tea, and you couldn’t fault him, because he’d stayed at Sandringham and Osborne—he had been in the Buckingham Palace crowd when the Queen was still Princess Elizabeth. The tea was in Daisy’s drawing room, downstairs—Caroline couldn’t have had him in her own rooms, naturally—and there I was in my own living room, reading the
Sunday Times,
because when I moved in, Daisy said she wouldn’t tolerate my having the
Observer,
it being liberal, practically Bolshie, and it’d give the house a bad name."

One more glance at Forbes made it clear to me that he knew I didn’t usually babble on in this fashion, and that he and I were speaking in a private tongue, almost a code, that we had both learned long ago.

"In he comes without knocking," I went on. "This young man, like carved-in-one-piece-out-of-an-oak-trunk-looking, and he says, ‘Excuse me, is this the loo?’ And I remember Daisy’s got some unmentionables she’s washed that are now drying in her bathroom, and I show him the way to my own. And next time I see Daisy I remark on it, and Daisy stares at me, wide-eyed, and she says, ‘You don’t mean— You let him use your own bathroom?’ And I say, ‘But Daisy, what on earth, you wished him on me, didn’t you?’ And she says, ‘How ghastly preposterous. How could you ever let a man use your bathroom?’ That’s why she had sent him out of the house and to the garden loo—we did have one in a wooden hut in the rear, with a stone figure of a cat perched on the roof to make it more wistful-like, not crudely looish. I’d never given it a thought. I thought it was only for persons, not for people—persons like the window cleaner and the gardener, and suchlike creatures, if ever. Later, the oak trunk said he was longing to meet me, and even Daisy couldn’t object, and he took me out a lot after that, mostly to parties given by ladies-in-waiting, till I got married. He got married, too—actually to a lady-in-waiting to the Queen."

Cortona came in, passing between us, raising both hands in a gesture of apology and shaking his head, giving us to understand that he was not yet ready for us. When he’d gone down the long room, Forbes said, "That fellow was creeping round before, too, taking a peep at us, but you didn’t see him—you’ve got your back to the door."

We both kept silent, following Cortona with our eyes till he was out of sight in an adjoining office. I was sure that though he had not quite heard Forbes’s words, he had felt the contempt in them.