The Secret Lovers (31 page)

“Let’s go indoors, then,” said Cathy.

But in the hotel bed she lay rigid, and shuddered at Christopher’s touch. He moved away. “No,” she said, “go on, Paul. It’s nothing to do with you. I’ll be
all right.” He touched her but came no closer. She spoke the words she had spoken when she had come back to their bed and awakened him, weeks before, in Rome. “Help me,” she
said.

They slept, woke in the dark with the sounds of evening coming in at the shutters, made love again. Cathy had changed; there was a difference in her body. Christopher, unable to see her face,
and still confused by sleep, thought for an instant that he was with a strange woman. He pulled away from her spasmodically, so suddenly that her fingernails raked his back. He fumbled with the
bedside lamp, turned it on, and, crouching, looked down into her face.

“Paul, my God—you’ve got murder in your eyes.”

He rolled away, onto his back. She followed him, pushed the hair back from his forehead. She asked no questions; six months before, she would have insisted on knowing what had happened in his
mind. Then, he would have put her off.

“I had a hallucination,” he said now. “I must have been asleep when we started. I thought it wasn’t you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You feel different to me. It panicked me, to think I might have lost control and had another woman against my will.”

“Panicked you why—because you lost control, or because you thought it was somebody else?”

“Both.”

Once more he saw the image of Cathy, lifting her breast toward a lover’s lips; he saw the man’s dark face. He told her what was in his mind. “That happened in Capri,” she
said. “Can you go on, knowing that?” Christopher touched her lips. And, as Cathy began to cry out, he said, “I love you.”

2

Cathy was as silent about her lovers as Christopher about his spies. What had happened to him in bed, he thought, was not entirely a trick of the mind: Cathy had changed, or
awakened in herself a second identity. He began to understand why she had been excited by his own hidden life. His desire for her, which had always been almost unbearable, became stronger. Now,
sometimes, it was Cathy who smiled at his ardor. He had never felt sexual jealousy, and he did not feel it now. Cathy, nevertheless, reassured him constantly, in silent ways, accomplishing what she
wished as she had always done, with her flesh. But she was more graceful, more gentle, more aware of Christopher. The mystery had begun to run both ways. Finally, as they lay resting one afternoon,
he asked her if she knew these things. For a long time she remained silent, one long leg lifted and flexed in the shaft of lemon-colored light that traced a diagonal from the window to the bed.

“Yes,” she answered.

‘What made you change?”

“The others,” Cathy said, gazing at the play of the sun on her calf. “I know you don’t believe it, but you really were my first lover. I wasn’t prepared for anyone
like you.”

Her leg fell of its own weight. She turned over, looked into his face, pushed back his hair, traced the line of his features: all the old gestures. Something was gathering in her brain; Cathy
had been trained to be amusing and musical and elusive, never to be honest with a man. Christopher, withholding from her part of his own honesty, the portion that had to do with his agents, had
caused her to thirst for the truth. She had come, after only a year with him, to the point where she would accept almost any pain to have the whole truth. She would even speak it herself.

“What these affairs have been, Paul, is like dancing lessons. Sleeping with these men, so clumsy and so selfish, has shown me the mistakes I made with you. The same thing happened when I
took ballet—I couldn’t dance until I saw someone else making the errors I’d been making. After that, I knew what
not
to do. Is that the secret of life?”

“It may be.”

“You’re never going to ask me anything about the others, are you?”

“No.”

In the end, he knew, the others would ruin them. Cathy hadn’t the equipment to go on submitting herself to them without sensuality, in order to intensify the taste and scent and the
visions of their life together. She was too open to pleasure, too conscious of physical beauty, too new at living in secret. Sooner or later she would begin to love her new self, which was separate
from Christopher, as much as the old; the two lives would spill into each other. Christopher knew. He was trained, and experienced, and cold; but, with all that, he could not control the
spillage.

Cathy, already trading information, wanted to ask him a question. Their lives had changed, something had happened to her mind as well as Christopher’s, on the train between Paris and Rome.
It was then, as she looked out the windows into a hypnotic whorl of snowflakes, that she had decided that she must commit, as she put it to him, some act of madness in order to break through to
him. She wanted to know what had happened in Germany—why he was so shattered. “I saw cruelty in you that night,” she said. “Not just your old hardheartedness.
Cruelty.”

“An agent was killed.”

Cathy was neither surprised at the statement, nor surprised that he would tell her; he had told her other things that she had no need to know, in the beginning when she required signs that he
trusted her as much as the men and women with whom he spent his real life, and whom she never saw.

“How? Did you kill him?”

“No, I didn’t commit the murder. But I caused it. I was stupid about something. I made a mistake.”

“And while I’ve been doing all these things you’ll never ask about, you’ve been trying to avenge your own mistake—is that it?”

Christopher didn’t answer, and Cathy, with her new senses awake, drew back.

3

The next day, Christopher asked her to introduce him to Jorge de Rodegas.

They were seated together under the awnings of the café in the Plaza de las Cibeles. Cathy liked to go there in the forenoon, to hear the great clock strike eleven and twelve, to watch
the crowds, to observe Christopher’s pleasure in the small glasses of cold draft beer that were served there; she liked the thick disks of brown felt on which the glasses were set—she
liked all small things, such as precious metals and common rocks and cats, that had more weight, when held in the hand, than their mass suggested.

When she heard Christopher utter Rodegas’s name, she came out of a reverie—the clock had been striking eleven.

“Don Jorge de Rodegas?” she said. “Why?”

As always when she was taken unawares, her accent thickened; she spoke several sentences in her natural drawl before the intonations she had been sent north to learn returned to her.

“I want to know him,” Christopher said.

Cathy put a finger on Christopher’s arm. “No one knows Don Jorge. He’s worse than you for secrets.”

“Let’s be spies, then,” Christopher said. “Brief me about Rodegas.”

Cathy spun the story in the air between them. She was as amused and as animated as her mother, and loved a colorful character as much. She came from a society in which the language was still
used to express wonder at the comedy of life. Of Rodegas, she said that he had come to the Kirkpatrick’s farm just after the war, when she was still a young girl, to buy horses. Her father
had asked him to stay with them; there were no decent hotels in the nearest town, and Don Jorge carried a letter of introduction from a man in France who was much liked by her father. The two men
spoke about horses all day. It was Cathy’s mother, of course, who drew Don Jorge’s story from him at the dinner table. He was a grandee of Spain, the childless head of an ancient
family, a man of such sureness that he never, for an instant, mimicked the manners of his hosts; he was what he was. “He wore a coat and tie and never a hair was out of place from sunup to
bedtime,” Cathy said. “He was, in those days, twelve years ago this spring, incredibly handsome, with a high forehead and a great arched nose—not unlike Maria’s husband in
looks, if Otto were in perfect health and fifteen years younger.” Don Jorge knew all about the Kirkpatricks’ connection to Eugénie; he, too, was related to the fallen empress
through the Spanish branch of her family, and considered the Americans cousins. “And, Paul, he is once a duke, four times a marquis, and I don’t know how many times a count.” On
Cathy’s thirteenth birthday, she and her parents and Rodegas had gone riding to hounds. Cathy’s horse, a birthday present, had fallen as he tried to take a limestone wall that was too
high for him, and Cathy had broken her leg. They were miles from the nearest telephone. Rodegas had carried her in his arms, guiding his horse with his knees only, at such a smooth canter that she
had felt virtually no pain. “Had I been the last glass of wine in the world, Paul, Don Jorge wouldn’t have spilled a drop of me,” Cathy said. “He had arms like steel. If
I’d’ve had any sense I would have given him my virginity at the end of the ride. Instead, I cried because they had to cut off my new boot. My father made me drink bourbon for the pain,
and it gave me a terrible crying jag—I couldn’t stop. Don Jorge brought me, in the hospital,
five dozen
white roses, and the most beautiful pair of boots I have ever
owned—he had them made in London and flown over for me. That was in the days when I thought flying was something boys in the Air Corps did; everyone else took ships. It was too
romantic.” No one knew why Don Jorge kept so much to himself; not even Cathy’s mother had been able to draw the secret from him. He stayed in Spain, never leaving except to buy breeding
stock in America and in Ireland. He visited no other countries; evidently he had no foreign friends except the Kirkpatricks and a family of horsemen in Kilmoganny. He raced his horses only in
Spain. His name never appeared on the card as owner; he used one of his lesser titles instead. He was almost never seen in public.

Cathy was radiant with remembered affection and with the vitality of the anecdote. To her mind, stories were like living creatures with hearts pumping blood. To speak about an absent friend was
to bring him into the company, living and breathing and as much
there
, Cathy said, as those who were present in body. Then her expression became colder.

“Why do you want to meet Don Jorge?” she asked, again.

“First, can you arrange it? If you call, will he ask us to his house?”

“His estancia. Yes. But why?”

“He knows something I want to know.”

Cathy frowned. While she had been talking, the clocks on the post office had rung the half and three-quarter hours, and now she listened to the striking of noon. She toyed with the felt
coasters.

“You told me you’d never involve me in your work,” she said at last. “Why is this different?”

“Because there’s no other way. No one knows Rodegas.”

“What does Don Jorge know, Paul? What do you think he knows?”

There was no one at the neighboring tables. The waiters stood together by the bar, talking in brittle Madrid Spanish of the next day’s soccer match. Christopher leaned toward Cathy, took
her hands, told her parts of what he knew.

“They might kill
him
,” she replied, whispering.

“I don’t think so. They think he’s dead these twenty-five years. I’ll find a way to conceal the source.”

“But you can’t be sure, can you?”

“No,” Christopher said. “You can never be sure.”

Cathy could not make the decision at once; she was frightened by Christopher’s information, unsure of his purposes. She had never known murderers. And now murder seemed
real, as she told Christopher, because she knew what she herself was capable of doing in cold blood. Had she been in truth an agent, he would not have told her about the chain of deaths in which he
was involving her—it was an error in handling, it put in jeopardy his single chance to find the truth. Because he loved Cathy, he could not deceive her. He realized that he was, all the same,
using her as he used agents. With them, too, it was fear of loss, and sometimes even love, that made the hideous risks they took seem worth the danger.

For the remainder of the day, they followed Cathy’s plan; got back aboard the steamboat, as she said. She wanted to walk in the Retiro and go for a boat ride in the artificial lake.
Christopher had had enough of parks, but he went with her. Gradually the light came back into her face, and she began to talk again. Everything she wished to do was something they had done before,
and while they were reliving scenes she had loved she spoke of others: How, in Palma de Mallorca, they had found their way through silent, sun-scorched streets in the last minutes of the hour of
siesta, and had come down a long flight of worn stairs as a clock had struck five; and, at that exact moment, as they stepped out of the sun and into the thick shade of the trees on the Borne,
hundreds of birds had burst into song in the branches above their heads. And how she had recovered her childhood fear of sin, seeing jeweled rings on the chipped fingers of the wooden virgin in the
cathedral at Palma; the offerings told her that this smiling city was filled with women—the rings had all belonged to women—who went in shame and in fear of death. She remembered meals,
drinks, a certain line of surf as they had swum together in the sea. No event of their honeymoon, the spring and summer before, which could be recorded on the physical senses had escaped her
memory: they had driven from city to city and from fiesta to fiesta, from San Isidro in Madrid in May to San Fermín in Pamplona in July, seeing bulls killed in the ring and idols and relics
carried in the streets, and touching and speaking to no one but one another. It was then that Cathy had told Christopher, as they walked at sunrise on a beach near Valencia, having spent the whole
night drinking manzanilla, alone with a troupe of musicians and dancers in a flamenco bar, that she had achieved what she had always desired, perfect union with a man.

Now, a year later in Madrid, after they had eaten tapas in the warren of streets between the Puerta del Sol and the Plaza de Santa Ana (mushrooms in one place that Cathy remembered, grilled
shrimp in another, gazpacho in another, pinchos moruños in another; vino tinto in all), they sat together in a café among the sickly trees of the Plaza de España that seemed,
at night, to be an enclosing forest, and drank glasses of weak Spanish cognac that a footsore waiter brought to them, pouring Cathy’s glass half full and Christopher’s to overflowing.
Cathy had been sunk in a long silence. Then, in a small voice, she said, “All right, Paul; I’ll phone Don Jorge in the morning, or wire, or whatever is quickest.”