The Great and the Good Page 16

  Arthur almost cried. Just as she would cry when she got his letter announcing that he would not be coming back to France until the following year. Their lives were going in different directions, but why did it have to happen so cruelly? The worst was that she would hide her enormous disappointment under a mask of cheerfulness and face it with a smiling bravery that had never fooled him and only intensified her son’s remorse. Disappointed? No, of course not, not a bit. But his cousins would be, and so would all his distant relations who were so looking forward to seeing him – every time she said so she believed it a little more – Arthur, her messenger from the modern world, America its beacon. He picked up the accusatory photo of the young newly-weds on their honeymoon in Venice and turned it to the wall.

  In the trattoria, still half empty at that hour, the waiters in aprons and striped waistcoats wandered nonchalantly between the tables, picking their nails and teeth. He chose an isolated table at the end of the room and called Elizabeth from the cloakroom. The telephone rang on, then, ‘Oh, it’s you, Arthur … where are you?’

  ‘In the trattoria downstairs. Come down.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Make an effort.’

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence. She must have been covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

  ‘I can’t hear you.’

  ‘All right … I’ll be down in a quarter of an hour.’

  He ordered a bottle of Frascati that he had almost finished by the time she appeared, in a lavender-blue dress and wearing silver-blue eye shadow, coral-pink lipstick and a Native American headband. Utterly different. And visibly pleased by Arthur’s slack-jawed reaction.

  ‘I can make an effort. For important occasions.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid you may be disappointed.’

  ‘I was outside when the storm started. I got soaked.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I got dry and curled up in bed. I was fast, fast asleep when the phone rang.’

  ‘You come back down to earth easily.’

  ‘And now I’m hungry.’

  The trattoria filled up with the usual Village wildlife. Elizabeth knew most of the couples and Arthur enjoyed their surprise at seeing her in her make-up and girlish blue dress, she who had pioneered, long before it was fashionable, the uniform of jeans and bleached singlets and exotic necklaces and silver nails.

  ‘There’s nothing more reassuring than a woman who’s hungry. Marie-Ange and Marie-Victoire are never hungry.’

  ‘Do I know those particular Maries?’

  ‘Two skinny nags. No, and you never will. They live in Laval and they’ll never leave.’

  Elizabeth lit cigarette after cigarette, taking a few drags before stubbing them out in the rapidly filling ashtray.

  ‘Don’t you worry about your voice?’

  ‘My voice is too sharp. I need to make it more throaty. An artist’s life is full of such pleasant sacrifices. How do you think a Murphy can hold an audience if she talks like some affected girl from Park Avenue?’

  ‘It depends on the role.’

  ‘Trust me. This one’s not an affected girl.’

  Some time later, after a third bottle of Frascati that was no improvement on the previous two, Elizabeth took Arthur’s left hand and placed it, palm upwards, on the table to study it with knitted eyebrows.

  ‘Do you read palms?’

  ‘Madeleine, my old French nanny, is really good. When she was twenty she used to go to fairs and earn her living by telling farmers’ fortunes.’

  ‘Did she read your palm?’

  ‘She always refused. She doesn’t want to know, or me to know.’

  Arthur was not sure he wanted to know either. He tried to withdraw his hand. Elizabeth held it tightly.

  ‘Now’s not the time to pull away. Anyhow you can’t any more. I’ve seen.’

  ‘What?’

  She ran her index finger along his lifeline, which extended well past his palm.

  ‘No complications. A perfectly geometrical curve. Who wouldn’t envy you?’

  ‘Me.’

  No complications? He could see plenty multiplying along his future path.

  One of the waiters, sitting sideways on a table, was tuning his guitar.

  She was still examining his open hand.

  ‘A happy love life—’

  ‘Thank you, you’re too kind.’

  ‘Wait … short relationships.’

  ‘That’s a happy love life, by definition. Come on, Elizabeth, please let’s go before he starts singing “O sole mio”.’

  A couple entered: a young Asian woman with her neck in a surgical collar, and a man in his thirties wearing a beige corduroy suit and a shirt that was unbuttoned to reveal his hairy chest. They both gave the same hint of a wave in Elizabeth’s direction and sat down at a distant table.

  ‘Those two love each other,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She was a dancer, he writes novels which all the publishers have turned down. A month ago they were so desperate that they made a suicide pact and hanged themselves. The beam broke. He fell down and broke his coccyx, the dummy. He called for help. The neighbours came and cut her down. It’s possible she’ll have to wear a surgical collar for the rest of her life, and she’ll never dance again. But a publisher read an article on the hanged couple from Greenwich Village and offered to publish the novel he had turned down six months earlier. You see, love can be useful.’

  The waiter strummed his guitar, repeating over and over again ‘Capri, petite île …’

  ‘To us?’

  ‘Not to us, no.’

  She smiled innocently and laid her palm on top of Arthur’s.

  ‘I don’t know where I am any more,’ Arthur said.

  ‘In your hand I can see evidence of a rare duality, as if you have two men living inside you.’

  ‘I’m not two men. I’m sometimes one and maybe sometimes another.’

  She took her hand away and with her index finger traced a line that cut across another line that was very faintly marked.

  ‘But there’s still a minute or an hour or a day when the two men are the same man. What’s happening this evening?’

  ‘I’m a monster. I’m going to hurt, horribly, the only woman in my life. And she’ll forgive me and send me an unwearable sweater that she’s been knitting on the long summer evenings, looking at my photo. Have I said enough?’

  ‘More than enough. Not everybody’s lucky enough to be an orphan. But apart from that – which you’ve already decided and which is done and will spoil, just a bit, your pleasure at having Augusta all to yourself – apart from that, do you know what’s waiting for you afterwards?’

  ‘I have no illusions.’

  ‘It’s a big risk.’

  ‘I’m ready for it.’

  ‘You’re brave.’

  In front of the steps up to the brick building, whose door and window frames were painted an aggressive green, she put her hands on Arthur’s shoulders.

  ‘I’m not going to ask you in.’

  ‘You can come to my place.’

  ‘We have to let some time pass.’

  He wanted to tell her that he found her infinitely more desirable like this, in a shift dress that left her neck and arms bare and a headband that made her look ten years younger. How old was she actually? Twenty-five, twenty-six at the most, and outspokenly mature.

  ‘The first of September, she’ll be upstairs. In the morning, around eleven. Don’t come before and don’t keep her waiting. I don’t want it to be too difficult. Do you know where you’re going?’

  He had no idea yet. Brustein’s envelope would not be big enough for any extravagances. He had thought of a few days at Cape Cod or, even more simply, Long Island, but she hated the sea.

  ‘If you like, I’ve got a bungalow at Key Largo that I inherited. I’ll phone and they’ll get it ready for you. The beach is thirty yards away and the yacht club two hundred. The restaurant’s all right
.’

  ‘She doesn’t like the sea.’

  ‘Just make it so that she only sees you. She wanted a desert island with all mod cons. Key Largo in September is just about that. Aren’t I heroic?’

  ‘I’d like to say all sorts of sweet things to you, and plenty of them, but I’m scared you’ll laugh and it won’t work.’

  ‘You need to wait. I don’t know what’s going on either. We’ll see each other at the end of September. Or in October. Don’t forget, my premiere’s around 30 October.’

  ‘I’ll be at Beresford.’

  ‘So skip your classes. Arthur, sometimes, just sometimes, you’re too serious.’

  She had already climbed two steps and stood a head higher than he. Her slender, lavender-blue outline had a candle-like grace in the feeble light over the steps.

  ‘You’re very lovely,’ he said stupidly, then shrugged because he was so ashamed at the platitude.

  ‘People don’t often tell me that, but it’s not important … I prefer not to be. Lovely women are ten a penny. Dolls. The United States is a huge warehouse of dolls of all ages. Can you see me at a widows’ club with purple hair, festooned with glass jewellery and reeking of Parisian perfume? I want to escape all that. I’m trying a different sort of life.’

  ‘At least promise me you won’t hang yourself like that Chinese woman.’

  ‘That takes two.’

  She climbed the steps quickly, and as she did the hem of her dress lifted, revealing the back of her fine bare legs. At the door she turned round and placed two fingers to her lips to blow him a kiss.

  ‘Adios caballero!’

  *

  Was that all they talked about that evening? Definitely not, but Arthur did not forget the essentials, her hand laid on his palm to cover up the lines that said too much, her unequivocal firmness in drawing a boundary between them from now on. In a game as free as theirs had been there is always one who without warning, and to the other’s complete surprise, refuses to go along with the rules when they suddenly become aware of their dangers and artifices. Arthur no longer doubted that Elizabeth’s arrival the previous night, her sitting on the stairs outside Mrs Paley’s in the darkness, their night together without touching or speaking, the empty bed he had found on his return from Battery Park holding croissants that suddenly felt ridiculous, had a significance far beyond any words they could have exchanged. The picture of Elizabeth was magnifying. At the outset it had been little more than a sketch, but slowly she had added to it here and there, some delicate touches, some harmonies to the colours and nuances to the vibrato of her voice. How much did she regret having pretended she was impervious? Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she had never stopped trying to make people forget who she was or how rich, or her American society background that she rejected so vehemently. Once – Elizabeth had told him – when she and Madeleine had had a heart-to-heart talk, her nanny had said to her in her rough, provincial, country way, ‘Just don’t go getting too far ahead of yourself, young lady.’ Elizabeth had hugged her fiercely, hidden her face in her large bosom and, clinging to her warmth and wisdom, wept and wept. ‘Oh you’re lucky, my duck,’ Madeleine told her, ‘so lucky to cry properly and let everything out! Lots of people can’t really cry and they just pretend. You’re a proper girl, you know how to cry when you need to, and I know I’m the only one you dare to show your tears to.’

  Apart from Arthur, with whom Elizabeth occasionally let herself go, telling him about her nanny with sudden unguarded candour, nobody knew about her relationship with the mythical Madeleine, whose common sense had never been shaken and whose goodness had remained as it always had been, stern and all-encompassing. Being French, he was the only one who could understand Elizabeth’s boundless attachment to, and appreciation of, Madeleine, who had not only taught her to speak the perfect French of the Loire valley but a string of startling colloquial expressions that sounded irresistibly comic in a foreigner’s mouth.

  Arthur returned to Rector Street on foot, breathing the smell of wet dog and flint that rose between the buildings after the lightning and the storm that afternoon. From the roadway and pavements the tons of heat that had been stored up over the past two months began bursting out of manholes and basements in clouds of vapour pierced by the headlamp beams of automobiles and yellow cabs creeping uptown to the theatres and music halls. Drenched by the violent rain, the town was now tipping silently into sleep in the resplendent night, refreshed, cleansed of its miasmas, hardly disturbed by the rare pedestrians who emerged like ectoplasm out of one cloud of vapour and disappeared into another that immediately closed over them.

  There is nothing like walking in a city at night for talking to yourself, rebuilding your life and the world at the same time, writing yourself the perfect speech, saying the perfect words to the girl you left a moment before without giving her a chance to come back at you, or composing with magical ease a particularly hard letter. ‘Dear Maman, I’m afraid that I’m going to disappoint you very much. Everything was arranged for me to come and see you in September, and now, firstly, Mr Brustein has asked me to carry out an inquiry into an investor in Miami, and secondly, the Beresford term starts earlier than I thought. If I came, it would be for two or three days at the most, which we can’t really justify financially. Much better to put it back to Christmas, which we can both spend in Paris without having to visit Uncle Whatsisname and the Thingumajig cousins. Believe me when I say …’

  It was not so terribly hard to lie at a distance, and she would be proud of his conscientiousness and of the confidence that Jansen and Brustein’s was already showing in him after such a short time. He was moving among the great and the good! With Elizabeth things were not so simple. She answered back, for a start, and her answer did not have to cross the Atlantic before it reached Arthur, and then everything about her self and her character announced her readiness for combat, for aggressive defence. She might have been more of a woman than she wanted to be, but she clung to that privilege. ‘You should have talked to me,’ he said, ‘and I should have talked to you. We thought we were being clever, and in the end our paths hardly crossed at all. I felt we’d invented an exceptional relationship, between two people with no hang-ups …’ No hang-ups? It was trite, and wide of the mark. He had hang-ups galore, despite Elizabeth’s behaviour having swept them aside from the first time they met. He was not even sure that he didn’t blame her for having, with her disarming spontaneity, invited him into her bed (after her initial procrastination with the vanished George). ‘Surely you can see how annoying it is for a man of my age to realise it’s you who decides everything: the day, the time, practically the way we’re going to have sex. You come to my place without warning. Tonight, when you wouldn’t ask me in, I’d never felt as close to you as I did during dinner, despite that guitarist singing, “Capri, petite île …” Do you want us to slide into clichés, staring into each other’s eyes and murmuring sweet nothings like Mimi and her student? Oh, and if I hadn’t found Augusta so attractive, would you have paid me the slightest attention?’ The answer was missing. He discovered that he was incapable of making it up.

  In the lift that took him up to his twelfth-floor room, with Augusta’s accent and tone of voice in his head he scanned the obscenities that defaced its panels. What had she really thought of the drawings: a rash of obelisks, piled-up heaps of stone archways, here and there an obelisk diving into a stone archway? Mrs Paley claimed that she knew the author of the graffiti, a retired accountant who had four locks on his apartment door and went out, summer and winter, wearing a raincoat and carrying a newspaper. One evening they had met on the stairs and he had twitched his newspaper aside, revealing the limp trace of his already elderly pretensions. ‘I told him I didn’t mind. Everyone needs to get some fresh air once in a while. He looked very disappointed, and since then he doesn’t say hello to me any more.’

  Sliding open the lift door, Arthur saw, in the dim light, Elizabeth sitting where she had sat the night before, on
the top step of the stairs.

  ‘You took your time! I’ll bet you walked.’

  In his room, she said, ‘Don’t turn the light on … it’s so much nicer … undress me … don’t say a word … stay where you are …’

  In the morning she was asleep when he got up and, barefoot and in silence, tidied up, folded her blue dress and laid it on the back of his one armchair, put her underwear on a chair next to her high heels, and pinned a note on the door that said WAIT FOR ME in capital letters.

  *

  She did not wait for him; she was already in the street, her arm raised for a cab, when he appeared in his tracksuit, sweating, with a paper bag of croissants in his hand. He offered her one and they ate them standing there, next to the taxi’s open door.

  ‘Tonight?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Not before midnight. I’m having dinner with Brustein.’

  ‘Wonderful! You’re already having business dinners. My little Arthur will go far.’

  ‘It’s not my doing.’

  She stroked his cheek tenderly.

  ‘The boring thing,’ she said, ‘is that our lives aren’t going in the same direction.’

  ‘I have no talent at all. I mean, none like the ones you like.’

  ‘Yes you do. You do have one. A major one. We’ll talk about it tonight.’

  She laughed and was suddenly shy, like a child who has said something terrifically rude. She blew Arthur a kiss on one finger, got into the cab, and gave him her croissant paper.