The Great and the Good Read online

  ‘So?’

  Brustein smiled, swallowed a spoonful of ice cream and pushed his plate away. A mischievous gleam shone in his light-coloured eyes.

  ‘Don’t put pressure on him. Let him make his bid. He’ll relieve us of a lame duck. Jansen and I will find a way to show our gratitude.’

  ‘And what if there’s really oil in Amazonia?’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  In the afternoon Getulio phoned Jansen and Brustein. Arthur gave him a green light, partly because Brustein had charmed him, partly because he had loathed de Souza’s manners. When the contract was signed he found, on top of his salary for that month, a discreet envelope that resolved the material question of his escape with Augusta in September. Brustein looked contrite when he thanked him.

  ‘I’m sorry for Mr de Souza, though. The rumours about test drillings for oil are more than premature. It would be more accurate to say they’re non-existent.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Does one ever know anything with absolute certainty? I’ve always lived on doubt and chance.’

  *

  Elizabeth continued to appear late in the evening, irregularly, with a casualness that he did not hold against her any more than her absences or her unannounced appearances. Finding Arthur in the middle of working for his October exams, she would undress in a twinkling.

  ‘You’re too serious. It’ll be your downfall. I’m beat. Goodnight.’

  Rolled up in his sheet, she fell asleep immediately. An hour later she was lying on her back with the sheet thrown off, a hand across her bust, the other across her pelvis like the coy Eve on the Foscari Arch at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. What was she looking for when she sought him out? In the morning when he came back from his jog in Battery Park, she was either still asleep or gone. Slowly Arthur began to do as she did. He took what she offered, which was both very little and a lot: she was a presence in a gargantuan town that paid him as much attention as a gnat. When they found themselves talking to each other, their conversation stayed suspended between them in a kind of no man’s land, even when Getulio and Augusta’s names came up. Rehearsals went on. Jerry, the new recruit, was learning everything with disconcerting ease. Thelma showed no imagination, but was an adornment. As soon as she appeared a fragrance wafted across the small stage that had been set up in the apartment, where the play was slowly taking shape. Piotr and Leigh were now on tour on the West Coast in a bourgeois production, lost to the real theatre. Their departure meant that Elizabeth had given up their diet; she also, Arthur suspected, occasionally drank more Chilean wine than she should. As to where they would stage their show, Elizabeth had decided on a disused warehouse at the docks.

  ‘You can’t imagine how beautiful the space is: huge beams, broken windows, a sort of sticky dust all over the walls and the corrugated-iron roof, packs of rats that fight all night, squeaking like mad. All the imagery of a dead civilisation on a dead planet. The audience will feel completely at home. It’s the world they live in, carefully averting their gaze to forget that they’re trampling filth and ruins underfoot.’

  ‘Sheer madness!’

  Who would she end up with? One morning, as he showered with the door of the small bathroom open, she called out, ‘You have a nice back, and real cherub’s buns.’

  He admired how supple and perfectly muscled she was, without ever doing any exercise. She could do the splits and headstands. They teased each other like children. As she drank coffee and ate fresh croissants (whose scattered flakes he would carefully brush out of the sheets after she had left) he said to her, ‘I’m unbelievably lucky. I’ve discovered the mythical androgynous woman in you. I’m simultaneously your lover and your mistress.’

  ‘Who are you with Augusta?’

  ‘We’re still in the world of make-believe.’

  ‘Be careful when you fall.’

  ‘You’ll rescue me.’

  ‘Don’t mistake me for a nurse.’

  He had no illusions about this chapter in his life. He knew that Elizabeth would disappear when he was least expecting it, and then maybe he would start to understand her better. But what an odd introduction to life’s ambiguity it was, this affair without passion, possibly even without love, certainly without lies, if not without omission. Why didn’t she want him to come to her apartment? When she did invite him, no more than twice during that long summer, he had the feeling that before he arrived she had hidden all traces of a stranger’s presence, apart from the props for her play: a screen, a hospital bed, a wobbly chair.

  Later Arthur was to remember these two months of suffocating summer in New York as a turning point in his life. At Jansen and Brustein he experienced the aggression of the business world and the ferocity of the competition. His colleagues hardly spoke to him, mostly because they felt anxious about the friendship shown by Brustein to a young foreigner who was too quick to learn everything, and a little too because they feared he would stay, even though he had on several occasions tried to quell their fears by talking about his second year at Beresford and his trip back to France.

  Gertrude Zavadzinski, the colleague who concealed a hearing aid under her thick red hair, had been the only one to exchange a few words with him outside the office. Everyone called her Zava, an easy, androgynous nickname that matched her sturdy figure: broad shoulders, wrestler’s hands, a round face and flattened nose covered with freckles, mannish manners, an air of being always on the defensive. With the natural politeness of the milieu in which he had grown up, Arthur had stepped aside in a doorway to allow Zava to pass. To his surprise, she spoke to him in French with an accent that had no American twang.

  ‘I recognise French manners.’

  ‘You could have let me know sooner.’

  Shortly after five o’clock they were sitting in a bar on lower Broadway, drinking beer.

  ‘I was born in Warsaw in 1930. We all spoke French at home.’

  Her family had been in New York for a holiday the month before war was declared, and had stayed.

  ‘My father worked in a bank in Warsaw. Here he has swept streets, driven a cab and a bus and been a janitor. My mother has been a lady’s companion. I studied at Brooklyn College. We still live together, and speak French together.’

  Her hand kept going to her hair to make sure that it hid her hearing aid, as she spoke in short little sentences that left no room for replies.

  ‘I’m a black belt in judo. Twice a week I box at a ladies’ gym. People know. No one jerks me around for long. In any case I hear much better than people think. Come and have dinner with us one night. My parents will be so happy to talk to a Frenchman.’

  He had gone, touched to find in the family’s misfortune such loyalty to a European education that America, with all the weight it carried in the world, its jeans, its chrome-plated automobiles, its Coca-Cola, its museums stuffed with masterpieces, its galloping technology, made – poor Europe! – a bit more obsolete each day, abandoning its pitiful wreckage at the side of the interstate highways of its new civilisation. It had taken barely fifteen years to crush Mr and Mrs Zavadzinski, who had perhaps been refined once, and in any case, thanks to their command of French, proud to belong to a privileged Europe without frontiers, the Europe that Stendhal and Joseph Conrad had known. Now closeted in a cramped three-room apartment in Brooklyn, opposite a neon sign whose red light inflamed the dining room every ten seconds despite the strip of black linoleum that covered the window in an attempt to block it out, the Zavadzinskis were awaiting a minor apocalypse. Their only reason for going on was the daughter who had triumphed over her disability, destined, they hoped (with their taste for fairy tales that was so typically Polish), for a great future that would avenge their failure in the land of plenty.

  ‘The American dream … the American dream!’ Thadeus Zavadzinski repeated in a voice full of rancour. ‘What a very great lie for people like us, who had two maids, a car, and a house in the country!’

  His wife grasped his hand and
stroked it with her thumb to calm him.

  ‘You’re being ungrateful! If we’d stayed in Warsaw, we would be dead or destitute by now. Gertrude is our happiness. She’ll be everything that life hasn’t let you be.’

  The somewhat painful evening had ended on a note of melancholy. Gertrude had seen Arthur to the bus stop. No one could sleep in the damp, unhealthy heat. Whole families squatted on the steps of apartment buildings or just lay down on the pavements, hoping for the slightest breath of fresh air.

  ‘That was nice of you, Arthur. They’ll talk about it for a long time. They don’t see anybody. Our relatives all left for the West Coast. One of my two cousins is at West Point, the other’s a surgeon in San Francisco. They don’t speak French or Polish. We don’t see them any more. We don’t live in a smart enough neighbourhood.’

  When they got to the bus stop he had wanted to see her back to her door.

  ‘Then I’d have to show you the way again. We’d be going backwards and forwards till the morning.’

  ‘I’m perfectly able to find my way around, and if I get lost, to ask someone’s help. It looks like everyone’s sleeping outdoors tonight anyway.’

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘You might survive, but two minutes after you closed your eyes you’d find yourself in your underwear, without a cent, and not having the faintest idea what happened to you.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘We understand each other. I’ve knocked down two or three of them, and now there’s peace. I walk around with my hands in my pockets … Don’t tell anyone at the office that you’ve met my family. I may be no beauty, but it won’t stop them making up God knows what stories to ridicule you, to ridicule me. We don’t deserve it. We’re better than they are … aren’t we?’

  She was made of granite, physically and morally built with the determination to survive in a pitiless world. She would not go under; she had her secret garden, that dreary apartment in Brooklyn where her parents brooded over their defeat, with her their only hope.

  ‘Why do I want to confide to you the things that even my father and mother don’t know? An ear, nose and throat specialist examined me six months ago. There’s an operation that can cure my deafness. Another two or three years and I’ll be able to afford it … One morning I’m going to walk into the office with my hair cropped, and everyone will see I don’t have a hearing aid any more.’

  So that was her dream. Arthur compared it to the poverty of his own. What was daydreaming about Augusta in comparison with the victory Gertrude had set her heart on? Nothing. The bus was coming. They hugged each other like two warriors. Through the back window he saw, cut in two and distorted by the reflection of the neon signs, Gertrude’s tall, masculine form marching away like a grenadier.

  *

  As it opened, the lift door’s yellow light revealed Elizabeth sitting in the darkness on the top step of the staircase, her head resting on her arms.

  ‘You’re home late!’

  ‘It’s not midnight yet. Mrs Paley could have let you in.’

  ‘And told me her life story! No thanks.’

  He hardly had time to shower before she was curled up, naked, wrapped in the sheet as she always was, sleeping or feigning sleep. On his return from Battery Park the next morning, already gone, she had left the smell of her chic and expensive perfume behind in the bed and a scribbled note on the table: ‘Thank you. E.’

  For what? How she protected herself! They had not exchanged more than three words, and not a single caress. The fact that at some moment that evening she had had the sudden urgent need for a presence next to her while she slept bothered Arthur more than if she had dared to risk an admission. A shadow had crept between them, when they had naively thought themselves above such mawkishness. But then one never is; experience proves it. We barricade ourselves against our feelings in vain. A suspicion passes, pauses, seeps in, digs subterranean shafts, and then erupts like a ferret flushed out by a terrier.

  Arthur had a bad day, his work routine haunted by an unease that he would banish for a time only to feel it returning as soon as he raised his head. He waited in vain for a sign from Gertrude Zavadzinski. Engrossed in the Stock Exchange telex feed, she appeared to be as unaware of him as every other day, and at five o’clock, leaving the building ahead of him, she disappeared into the crowds streaming out of their offices. The storm that had been threatening since the morning burst as he was walking back to Rector Street via the docks. Within minutes the streets were transformed into torrents as women dashed for the subway, their light summer dresses clinging indecently to their bodies as a result of the rain and the jets of dirty water the cars were splashing up from the potholes in the cratered streets. Arthur arrived at his room soaked. Mrs Paley was waiting for him on the landing.

  ‘Give me your suit, I’ll dry it out in the kitchen. The lady from the other day, you know … the Spanish one—’

  ‘She’s Brazilian, actually.’

  ‘Oh! I’d have thought … from her accent … She left a note for you.’

  Arturo meu … it’s happening … Getulio is going away on 1 September for two weeks. I’ve told Elizabeth; I’ll meet you at her apartment with my suitcase. Do you know where we’re going? The best thing would be a desert island with all mod cons. I shan’t say I love you, you would start being horrid straight away. Miss Augusta Mendosa sends you fondest regards.

  The rain had come in through the window he had left open that morning and made a pool on the parquet floor, soaking several books and a notepad on the table where he worked. Following hard on his heels, Mrs Paley rushed to the mess with a cloth and bowl in her hand.

  ‘It’s my fault … I should have known. Let me do it.’

  On her knees she mopped the floor, displaying a bottom that Arthur fleetingly thought must once have received its fair share of compliments.

  ‘I hope the letter that came in this morning’s mail isn’t too wet.’

  Arthur recognised his mother’s handwriting. The rain had begun to dissolve the ink on the envelope with its French stamp, smudging his name and leaving only, on the left, the words ‘America, by airmail’. Despite having been lectured several times about her error, Madame Morgan continued to believe firmly that a single ‘America’ existed, the one where her son was being initiated in the ways of the great and the good.

  ‘Don’t stay there dripping like that! Get changed, come on. No need for modesty! I’m not of an age to take it as an invitation any more.’

  Wrapped in a bath towel, he handed her his soaked shirt and suit. The storm stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving the ordinary sounds of the city to start up again: the fire department’s sirens, the droning of a long-haul flight descending to LaGuardia, the foghorn of a tug going up the Hudson. Mrs Paley wrung his soaked rug out in the basin.

  ‘In New York,’ she said, ‘even the storms are oversized. Ten years ago there was an earthquake in California, two hundred dead, ten thousand homeless. Last summer a cyclone hit Florida: a hundred dead, millions of dollars’ worth of damage. They don’t know how to do anything like everyone else. When I met Stephen in Budapest in 1920, he told me he was a diplomat. Eventually I found out he was just the ambassador’s bodyguard, but it was too late … I’d followed him to Wyoming where he owned thousands of acres … The truth was that he lived with his parents on a little farm with two cows and two pigs. No pearl necklace for me! I left him, my dear Stephen, and went to work. After the war I’d happily have gone back to Hungary if it hadn’t been for the Communists. At least I can tell myself that I’ve known love … Do you know what love is, Mr Morgan?’

  ‘I’m learning.’

  ‘If you’d seen me in the yard of that farm with the toothless old man, the mother who read the Bible all day long and my diplomat Stephen who didn’t wash any more and drank ten pints of beer every night … me, ex-star of the Budapest ballet, who had packed my ballet shoes and my tutus and pink tights in my suitcase! To dance in the yard of that fa
rm among all the pig manure and cowpats! I left it all behind when I ran away.’

  Elizabeth was right, you didn’t want to get Mrs Paley started. Even on her knees, with her sleeves rolled up and her skinny, spotted arms working away, she was ready to tell you everything that had happened to her. Arthur stopped listening, turning the envelope from his mother over and over in his hand, and, with his silence failing to supply the necessary encouragement, the ex-star of the Budapest ballet got to her feet, her joints cracking joyfully.

  ‘That’s how it is! Life goes on … We get older.’

  ‘At every age.’

  She darted out of the room with her bowl, cloth and sponge and Arthur’s clothes.

  The letter weighed more heavily in his hand after she had gone, demanding to be opened.

  I wasn’t very well last week, but the thought of seeing you arriving here soon perked me up. [she was the only person Arthur knew who used expressions like ‘perk up’]. I’ve had your bedroom painted. Your suits are back from the dry-cleaner, looking like new. I hope you’re not overdoing it with all those exercises. When you’re back you’ll be able to play tennis again. A string on your racquet had popped [did she think she was coming down to his level by using the word?] and I took it to get it restrung. The man in the shop fixed it and didn’t charge me. He asked after you. You’ll be able to play at the de Moucherels’ [how had she managed, living in military circles, not to learn that you leave out the ‘de’ when you just use the surname?] with Marie-Ange and Marie-Victoire, you haven’t seen them for years. We’ve also been invited to spend a week-end (is that how you spell it?) at Laval with our Dubonnet cousins. Antoine Dubonnet has gone into politics – you must remember him, he’s a town councillor now – and he’s very interested in America and wants you to tell him about it. His daughter Amélie, who you met on holiday at Bénodet, is about to become a nurse specialising in “geriatrics”. I expect you know what that is. She’s cut her hair – do you remember how you used to pull her plaits when she was little? The pensions for widows of officers who died on active service have been increased. I managed quite well before, I’ll manage better now. What do you need? You told me you were earning a good salary at that Jansen and Brustein (with that name he must be Jewish). So it won’t hurt you to pay for your ticket back home. Sending you all my love, my darling son, for me you’re still my wonderful companion in my great loneliness, Jeanne, your Maman.