A Fox Inside (15 page)

She never made the mistake of teaching him anything. She let him learn by example. But she did want to overawe him, for the kick of it, and it annoyed her that he was not overawed.

They made Monterey in three and a half hours,
driving
fast, with the radio going full blast, and she did the driving, singing to herself when she felt like it. Once they were out of the San Jose valley she forgot about Jerome and the house and the whole mess of her life. To forget made her feel younger. She hoped it made her look younger as well.

However, bright sunlight did not suit him. His flesh was too pale and his body too cerebral, and his beard looked ridiculous. Probably he had an adolescent, eggshell chin. They were out of the north and getting into the stage-set country of Carmel, Monterey, and the Big Sur. She was beginning to be a little puzzled about him. His reactions were not quite what she expected them to be. She didn’t really like anyone round her who was astute. They had lunch at the wharf at Monterey,
watching
the white sand curve into infinity and the filthy,
shipshape
fishing vessels bobbing at anchor. The mountains were behind them. The sea was a flat but not transparent blue. She felt better. She did not like crowds; she was
not afraid to be alone with people, but unless she could be alone with them in her own house she felt safer
behind
a barricade of waiters and busboys.

After lunch they drove into the Del Monte
properties
. They didn’t stay at the hotel but at the lodge, for the lodge was the more exclusive. The properties were designed to give an impression of undisturbed
immemorial
time, with the pine trees and the monterey cypress, the soft indistinct shadows on the pine needles on the ground, and the long ectoplasmic streamers of Spanish moss hanging in searchlight colours from the trees.

He was not a sexual animal, she found, and was both relieved and disappointed. He preferred people with their clothes on; and in a curious way he only existed when he did have his clothes on. There was something unpleasant and empty about his nakedness. It was like the nakedness of nineteenth-century statues. He was competent in bed, but with a sort of disdainful, mutual contempt that at first she had found amusing, thinking it was a defence mechanism to cover up what he would never admit he did not know—which was his attitude about most things. Later she got to dread and avoid him. She was not in love with him. He fascinated her. And she got a special pleasure from watching him walk into a room, from seeing how he was dressed, how he held a highball in his hand, exactly how he would say
something
, knowing that he would say it properly. It was a pleasure she had looked for from Maggie and never found. She always knew that Charles would do the right thing, the acceptable, understandable thing in the right way; and Maggie was totally undependable. She could not read Maggie’s mind. But she could follow his.

If there was anything wrong, it was that he was not an animal. An animal helps pass the time. You can watch an animal for hours. An animal crawls into your lap when you don’t want it to and licks your face, until when you thought it was only five-thirty it was really a quarter to eight. He was not satisfactory that way. It was idle to be alone with him.

So she introduced him to everybody she knew and that was what he wanted. At night they stayed up late and drank, or went visiting, after a while as much on his invitations as on hers, and visiting bored her. She was always at a disadvantage in other people’s houses, for she never knew where everything was. In other people’s houses she knew she was there because of Jerome.

She did not want to think about Jerome.

It all happened so effortlessly that at first she did not even notice what was going on. She did notice it when she realized how nervous she was while she waited for him. At first he had been her lover. Now she was his. He had outmanœuvred her. That made her thoughtful. Usually she had got round any attempts men made to control her by going to bed. Ultimately, lazily, very deliberately, as she had long ago learnt, she could have a good quarrel and then stretch out a firm arm and say, oh, darling, drawling it slightly, give that special smile of hers that always worked, turn out the light, and down there in the animal darkness, when everything else failed, she always managed to get back the upper hand, if she really wanted it. But Charles didn’t have any animal darkness. She was only beginning to learn what kind of darkness he did have. Whatever it was she did not understand it.

She felt angry. She banged her glass down on the coffee table and split it. The waiter mopped it up. Her only anxiety was that he should get the pieces out of the way before Charles came downstairs (he took longer to dress than she did), because Charles was astute at
deciphering
accidents like that.

She did not want him to realize how she knew that their relationship had changed, for she did not want him to go away. She looked at the mirror hanging on the opposite wall and saw herself sitting neatly and tidily
inside
a trap. It wasn’t even her own trap. It was the one she had so carefully built for him. She practised smiling. If it came to a showdown she thought she could be just as sincere as he.

But not quite. She was a woman and she was restless. They had a corner room overlooking the golf links to the sea, and she would wake early, because the light from the windows hit her from two directions, hear the golfers down below, see him sleeping in the other bed, and wonder what in God’s name there was left this morning that she could possibly go out and buy. On the last morning she saw suddenly that he was awake and was watching her with that vaguely evasive smile of his that though it was sensual had no comfort in it.

“I was thinking”, she said, “that we haven’t been to Marsh’s. I’d like to go.”

“Okay.” He was suspiciously affable. He got out of bed. He was so tall and thin that his pyjamas hung around him like a flag on a motionless day, and when he tied on his robe his hips were so wide, his waist so thin, that the skirts of the robe hung round him like a
farthingale
. There was something sexlessly Elizabethan about
him, an exotic Italianate taste for intrigue and
deliberately
dirty clothes. If he must use cologne she heartily wished that it would not be musk.

Outside the golfers made their ritual noises above the sound of the surf.

The reason why she wanted to go to Marsh’s was it was part of her childhood to go there, not part of his, if he had ever had a childhood. He never talked of that part of his life and she could not imagine him as a child, but only as an homunculus that had gradually outgrown itself. She wanted to get her own back.

Marsh’s was an oriental store. More than that it was an institution. It was the only Orient she had ever known, a rich, expensive Orient of dark corners filled with things to buy. Their establishment in Monterey was a conceit of plaster and lath, in emulation of a Chinese house, though more baroque. It had that special, hushed,
reverent
, attendant silence luxury stores have everywhere, in so far as they emulate luxurious houses and, of course, luxuriant houses, them. There was a miniature garden in a courtyard more Japanese than Chinese, and defaced statues stood everywhere. It was the kind of store where you can sit on a sofa and out of the canny half darkness be brought things to see. And more important, they knew her there and remembered her more as Miss Smith than as Mrs. Barnes. It was the type of store that gave you a surrogate past; and in her case, having been brought up in hotels and right now not knowing what the present or the future would be like, a surrogate past, she felt, was what she needed. They brought her boxes of feeling stones. She took off her gloves to look at them.

“What are they for?” asked Charles. She knew that he wouldn’t know what they were for. Fascinated, his long fingers stole out over the twenty-four plush
compartments
and fondled the smooth stones, lapis, carnelian, jade, carved in abstract or vegetable shapes.

“That’s what they’re for,” she said, looking up at the clerk, who seemed fascinated by Charles’s fleshless fingers that dabbled down among the stones like chopsticks.

She took one of the stones, a carnelian fig, in her own plump hand and felt how cold it was against her flesh. But Charles would not be conscious of the cold. He would like it. And she let the stone warm in the palm of her hand and grow ripe, reluctant to put it back. He himself had strayed towards the white, abstract jade, delicately veined or cloudy as smoke. Disgusted with him she decided to keep the fig and slipped it into her pocket.

“Do you want them?” she asked. She wanted to
disconcert
him.

“Yes.” He was not at all disconcerted. “I want them.”

She sat very still feeling that she had been trumped, and again she fingered the fig. “Very well,” she said, “you can have them. Except for this.” She rolled the fig in her fingers, not showing it to him. He did not try to see it. Instead he stared at the empty purple plush pocket of the carrying case. “I can find another,” he said. He looked up at the clerk with that smile that could be
winning
if he wished it to be. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a stray,” he said.

After half an hour of choosing he had the box filled up and she knew by then that she hated him. They put
the box in the car with the rest of the luggage and she realized that he had checkmated her again. They drove back to town. In town she put the fig in a drawer and pretended to forget about it. She remembered it all the same and so did he. These days he always smiled blandly at her. She was afraid that he was tired of her and wanted to get out from under. She did not want him to do that.

So she let him do what he wished about Jerome, which was the worst mistake she ever made, and she did not know even now how she had made it, except that, once back in town from Monterey he seemed nicer and kinder’ and somehow more understanding of her. All the same she began to be afraid of him. She felt now that even on that first night on the stairs, when she had met him, she had known that she would be afraid of him. And he had known it, too.

It was very quick about Jerome. Charles had pushed his advantage. He had not left her alone for a moment. He even insisted upon following her when she drove behind the ambulance all the way up to Napa. Of that trip she did not remember a thing. She did remember the drive back. They made the trip in the Cadillac. He watched her. She did the driving, as usual, but it did not seem to her that she was really doing it. It seemed to her that he was doing it. Napa was in the wine country. The green vines were fresh over the parched yellow hills that rose so slowly they were scarcely hills at all, but an oceanic swell. The day was bright, clear and warm. They passed not only the vineyards, but also the abandoned ruins of Italian stone presses, now roofless and inhabited by gypsies. She did not want to return to San Francisco. When she saw its dingy but sun-sparkled towers
assembled 
at the water’s edge she felt she would stifle when she reached it. It was stronger and more recent than she was. Charles lit her a cigarette which she did not accept because she did not want him to know that her hand was shaking. She thought she now knew what a guilty criminal must feel, who knows what the verdict will be but hopes against hope for a different sentence.

Charles was her verdict. She still could not quite
understand
how he had been a crime.

The day they finally got rid of Jerome he did not offer to come back to Atherton with her and she did not want him to do so. She wanted the illusion of being able to get away from him for a while. The drive alone, once she had dropped him in town, was harrowing. When she got into the house she knew at once, without Ethel telling her, that someone was there. She even thought she knew who. She marched through the rooms without taking off either her hat or her coat and found Ford sitting in the library with his gloves in his lap, looking at the portrait over the mantel. He did not get up when she came in.

“Are you going to take that down, too?” he asked.

She pulled off her gloves, eager to get a drink, and feeling somehow that he was not being fair. His heavy face was angry, and when he was angry he could be pretty bad. That was the way he had always won out over her in the old days.

“No,” she said. “Why should I?”

He did not stir. Anger made him motionless; but his eyes grew hard and his shoulders shook the way a cat’s do, tracking a sparrow. He seemed to crouch down in his chair.

“Jerome was my friend,” he said. “And there’s
Maggie
. You won’t get away with it.”

Her nerves were far from steady. She knew she had done wrong, but what really bothered her was the knowledge that now Charles had a real hold over her. “You silly old fool,” she said. “What could you do? You haven’t anything left yourself.” She wondered, even then, why she had said “yourself”.

“Maybe not,” he said. He was visibly wounded. “But maybe I don’t have to do anything. You bought yourself a barracuda this time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Charles,” he said softly.

Her hands shook on the lid of the liquor cabinet and when she threw it up it hit the wall. She looked down at the necks of the bottles, like capped guns.

“Anytime I feel like it I can,” she began.

“No, you can’t. It’s too late now. He’s got you right where he wants you. You poor fool woman. I don’t have to do a thing but watch.”

“You’ll enjoy watching, won’t you?” She picked up a bottle, slipping her hand round it.

“Yes, I’ll enjoy that.”

She heaved the bottle at him. She saw his face clearly. He frowned and drew his head to one side. The bottle sailed over the sofa and shattered the window, but fell inside in a tinkle of mingled glass. “Get out,” she shouted at him. “Get the hell out.”

He glanced at her and then at the cabinet, calmly. She knew she was going to have hysterics. She was afraid to be alone.