The Darts of Cupid: Stories (24 page)

And when those guests, and other people, too, exclaimed at our
grand seigneur
style of life, he would brush it aside, saying that the house was only rented, that Portugal was ridiculously cheap, and that for the rent he was paying in Estoril he would not be able to afford even a two-room flat in London.

These visits from my husband’s women had tapered off when we moved to Bordighera. But then there came another occasion. About six weeks before his death, he was rung up from New York by one of his former mistresses. That evening, while we were sitting in a coffeehouse, we talked about her, and my husband said, "
On revient toujours à son premier
amour. We have been lovers ever since I first knew her."

I said, "But that’s way back."

"That’s true," he said. "We didn’t meet often, but whenever we did meet we picked up where we left off. Lugano and Estoril."

I looked at him, speechless, and he said sharply, "That’s none of your business."

Neither of us referred to her again. As is my way, I did not show that I was stunned. What had actually gone on between them the last time she visited Estoril, when he was well into his seventies, I did not want to guess. I did not believe that there had been many of Cupid’s arrows left in his quiver. I was amazed at my benightedness, at my not having noticed what must have taken place on all those visits. But what wounded me was that he had felt compelled to make his disclosure gratuitously. This shattered me, for what it came from was his wish to bring my inadequacy home to me. Marriage is the tomb of love.

NOW, IN THE LAST WEEK in January, as I prepared to meet Forbes in Chiasso and found myself filled with a fierce desire to bring about what he had called our "rendezvous," there came a setback that promised to be disastrous. A series of railway strikes, which would block my journey, was announced. I was so desperate at the news that I asked a taxi driver how much he would charge to drive me to Chiasso, and he said it would come to half a million lire, or two hundred and fifty pounds. Miserly though I am (a quality once much appreciated by my husband), I did not flinch. Never did it occur to me to put off the meeting with Forbes to a later date. At this same time, my hairdresser, who had never yet canceled an appointment during all the years I had gone there, turned me away not once but twice, owing to some sudden unforeseen trouble with her staff. These incidents had no connection, to be sure, but determined as I now was to defy my husband’s wishes about the silver, for no other reason than to meet Forbes, and feeling guilty about it, I began to imagine that my husband was stretching out ghostly hands from his grave, trying to delay me, to choke me. It was much the same sensation I had had many times in the last year of our marriage, when he had hectored and exhausted me with his demands, delivered from his easy chair behind the marble-topped table in the drawing room. As I have said, his seated figure was habitually encased there in a thick, unwieldy dressing gown of Turkish toweling, which made him look like his own graveside monument—a Greek stele, with the head and shoulders of the deceased sculpted and set upon a square, tapering column. He made me shudder.

And then, on the Tuesday, as if Forbes had been wrestling with my dead husband and at least loosening the grip of his hands, the obstacles went away. My hairdresser had a cancellation and fitted me in at the last moment, and news came also that though the railway chaos would continue for at least ten days, there would be one clear, normal day of service in the midst of the strikes, because the various factions of the strikers could not agree among themselves. I rang up Forbes at once, to tell him I would be traveling the next day. I said, "I’ll take the later train from here, at eleven. It is a through train, which will get me to Chiasso at five. I’ll stay there overnight. And I’ll be at Rosecrans on Thursday, before they open in the early afternoon."

After I rung off I was amazed and annoyed with myself, thinking over what I had been telling him. What did he care which train I took, and when I would get to Chiasso? Why tell him I would be staying in Chiasso overnight? For all he cared, I could have slept in a ditch. But soon after, my irritation with myself gave way to shame. I understood that what at first I had taken for scatterbrained, superfluous rambling had been a simple, strong cause. By delivering to him minutely precise information, I hoped to bring about what I dearly wished. I had a vision of alighting in Chiasso on Wednesday at five. I saw myself standing on the platform, haltingly, amid the first rush of passengers speeding to the exit, and then a tall, blond, lean man in his early forties come walking toward me. He was wearing the same smooth, sleek, navy blue topcoat, with a narrow velvet collar, that Gordon had always worn. Stepping up to me with a smile, he wordlessly took out of my hand the small suitcase, the dark blue one I had chosen from among my other cases to be in keeping with his navy blue Crombie coat.

Then he would say, "Let’s go, shall we? I’ve booked rooms in a hotel, just a step across the station square." I am ashamed to admit that my conceit did not stop there. I saw myself and Forbes, after dinner, walk along the corridor and stop in front of my door, and I saw him take the key out of my trembling hand. He opened the door for me.

The next time my husband’s ghostly hand reached out to me, signaling me not to defy the wishes of the dead, came during the journey—the actual train trip, not the one in my dreams. About half an hour before we got to Genoa, one of the passengers, a man, returning to our compartment from the restaurant car, said, "There’s a man next door who’s just died. Not remarkable, considering he was eighty-three."

Taken aback, I said, "How do you know he was eighty-three?"

"His wife said so," the passenger replied.

I said, "My husband died at eighty-three, too."

"It’s quite a good age to die," he said consolingly. And after giving me a swift, telling glance he added, "And he got the best of it, what with having a young wife like you. I bet you were taken for his daughter."

"It did happen," I said.

He said, "Nice—for him, not for you."

When we got to Genoa there was an ambulance on the platform, with two white-coated attendants lounging about. There was a further delay, and we were told that the train would not depart at the proper time.

"Why is this?" I asked, upset. "What are they waiting for?"

"They are waiting for the carabinieri," the same knowledgeable man told me. "Whenever there is a sudden death the police must be called." He laughed and said, "Don’t forget, his wife was with him. She may have helped him on the way."

The train started at last, after only a half hour’s delay, and once more I realized it had been as though my husband had been calling me back from the threshold.

Then there was a further delay—a breakdown before Como—when we stood for forty minutes amid fields and pastures. I was flooded with anxiety, for we would now arrive in Chiasso after six, when the money changers’ booths in the station would be closed, and I had no Swiss money. But when we did get there at last, an off-duty ticket collector, seeing me lingering by the now deserted passport counter, accosted me and then walked me to the very door of a nearby first-class hotel. There, the reception clerk laughed at my offer to give him my gold watch as a guarantee for some Swiss francs until the next morning. He told me that I could pay for my dinner in Italian money and receive Swiss francs in change. And while I was sitting at dinner he even made a point of coming to my table to ask whether I found my room to my liking.

On Thursday morning a chill rain was falling—so thin, so steady and densely threaded, that it looked like a motionless shroud of mist. The elderly, morose driver of the taxicab looked at me with disapproval when told I wanted to go to Rosecrans, grumbling with bad temper that it was far out and out of his way. But I did not care by then, for I no longer felt the touch of my husband’s delaying grasp. The new Rosecrans offices were in the last of a row of new-looking, low buildings oddly set in a stretch of barren countryside. The glass-walled entrance took me into a reception area, subdivided by many doors. At the far end of the hall there was a counter flanked by shiny black chairs. Deserted and soundless, the place made me feel like a trespasser entering a nightclub at midday. Yet as I reached the counter there appeared behind it a plump, smiling woman. She took me in at a glance, seemingly approving of my old coat of Scottish cloth, handwoven and homespun in greens and blues, and made up by a man’s tailor who worked only exceptionally for a few favored women clients; my dark blue cube of a suitcase; my black crocodile handbag; my pale gray, hand-stitched pigskin gloves; my unmistakably non-English look, accentuated by my tweedy, understated, typically English way of dressing.

I said, rushingly, full of misgivings, fearing barriers of denials, towers of refusals, "I’ve come here—it’s rather complicated, I wrote ten days ago—I’ve got a trunkful of silver stored here. That’s to say, not here with you but in bond."

She said, "One moment, please," and returned almost at once accompanied by a young man, who in turn seemed to accept my appearance without question. He was sloppily dressed in sandals, creased flannels, and a lumpy gray roll-collar pullover. His countenance was grave and gentle, and a narrow, dark beard framed his cheeks and chin. By the looks of him I decided he was a pacifist, a nonsmoker, a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a devotee of Tantric Buddhism. Though I am usually contemptuous of this sort, I was glad to see him.

He took me upstairs to a bare room with a deal table, where we sat down on two old wooden chairs. I pulled out the sheaf of my correspondence, which was encased in a folder of transparent cellophane. He said, "As soon as I got your last letter I went round to the bond place and made sure your crate is still there. It’s in perfect condition."

I said, "How marvelous. Over thirty years."

He said, "Madam, that’s what we are here for."

When I told him why I had to wait till the afternoon, he was incurious, perhaps on the defensive. He inquired at last about the stack of letters on the table, and I slid the folder over to him. I knew that by doing so I was giving away the only proof of my claim to the silver, and was even providing him with arguments for delaying the transaction, since the letters made it clear that the silver had been my husband’s property and not necessarily mine, but I was indifferent to these misgivings. I recalled a shred of my first talk with Forbes, when I had told him that I did not even have any receipts for the storage payments. "So you see how dicey it is," I had said, and he had given his faint laugh. "I do indeed," he said. "Don’t worry. When I get there, I’ll wipe the floor with them." And it was his laughing voice that had brought me here, nothing else. I had used the silver as bait to make Forbes meet me.

It was not yet midday, and there was nothing more to deal with till Forbes’s arrival, which he had told me would be at around three. When I asked where I could have a meal, the young man was astonished. "But there is no need for you to wait at all," he said. "Why should you? Just write out a delegation of authority for him, for this man, and let me have it." And he took a paper from the table drawer, wrote out a receipt, and passed it over to me.

I said, "But I’m going to stay. I want to be with him."

He looked disconcerted, and waved his pen to and fro across the table. Convinced as he must have been that my decision to part with the silver had been forced upon me by straitened circumstances, he had wished to spare my feelings by inducing me to be absent during the handing over. I knew that the truth was quite otherwise, though I had no wish to explain myself to him. Clear in my mind at last, I thought, Why should I hang on to the silver? I’m not going to leave it in safekeeping for God knows how many more years and then after my death have it be taken to where he wanted it to go—to those nephews, his sister’s boys, in Australia. It’s Forbes against him, and Forbes must have it.

But then I reached out for the folder and the receipt and, taking the pen from the man’s fingers, said, "You are right. I might just as well. You never know what’s going to happen. I’ll write out your plein pouvoir."

The young man could not guess my reason for this hint at the possibility of my sudden death. An instant before, as I watched the pen moving in his hands like the ticking of a metronome, my imagination had put in my mind an engraving of Dürer, in which the hooded figure of Death, bearing a scythe and an hourglass, rides a skeletal horse, speeding for the graveyard. But the man was relieved, and he slid the papers into the transparent folder with an air of satisfaction, as though he had gained a point against the imminent man from Brentford’s. It was obvious that he had acquired the conviction, though confusedly, that Forbes was nefarious, that he was taking full advantage of me, that I was a victim and should be defended against him. Whatever happened, now he had a document that would protect his firm against my own willful innocence.

Our business done, we were now kinder to each other. He drove me a few hundred yards across rough country to what he told me was the only inn nearby, apologizing all the time for the chill and the rain; for his small, shabby car, which did not run well; for the lack of a better accommodation. I saw him looking at me more closely—at my well-worn, expensive clothes. As is my custom, I wore no jewelry. My white pallor and the gloss of my black-brown hair, my Egyptian-looking greenish eyes, and the curve of my black eyebrows, which appear to have been brushed on with a stroke of India ink, would look garish if I were to add ornaments. He was not quite sure what to make of me. He probably thought of me as being hard up. Before he let me out, he gave me his name and telephone number, written on a chit torn out of his notebook. His name was Cortona. If I called him anytime after two, he would come and fetch me.

The inn was a humdrum wooden chalet, enclosed by openwork galleries, with the obligatory scarlet geraniums in window boxes. I ate quickly, and had a glass of wine. After lunch, I asked the way to the lavatory. It was in the cellar, and while I groped my way in pitch darkness down a steep flight of narrow stairs, with no rails on either side, I dwelled with bitter satisfaction on the
plein pouvoir
I had written out for Forbes. It had not been an exaggerated precaution after all, and if I broke my neck Forbes would now be in possession. Putting out a toe to find the next step, and perhaps a bit drowsy from the wine, I saw myself—even as I jeered at such a notion—as the sleeping princess in the fairy tale, waiting to be roused and delivered by the prince. And as I thought of the sympathetic commiseration I had sensed from Cortona and the plump receptionist, it occurred to me that they might be right, after all. Forbes might be prince or robber, or both.