A Misalliance (17 page)

In the lobby of the Dorchester bowls of stupendous flowers stood in alcoves bathed in artificial light which almost exactly duplicated the quality of the light outside. In the noiseless lift, Blanche began to feel, uneasily, the lack of air. There was a tiny edge of panic in her mind at the idea of all that she must accomplish before she could be safely at home again. I have been too much alone, she thought; it has weakened me. An impulse to turn tail, to flee from this business which, after all, had nothing to do with her, was beginning to mature, but before her hand started to reach for the button that would take the lift down again the door slid open and there stood Paul.

At least, she assumed it was Paul. His smile was sunny, welcoming, and his hand was held out. He was larger than she had expected, taller, sturdier. He was even older. He was, she saw, a man of about thirty-six, handsomely barbered, and kitted out in a pale safari suit. He did not look like anybody’s employee. Nor did he look like anybody’s husband. He looked entirely temporary, like a stage character. Perhaps it was something to do with the smile, Blanche thought, that radiant smile and that cocked head. He seemed to be in excellent health and entirely unconcerned. But the smile, with its intimation of childish, unprocessed, good nature,
and a desire to please unmitigated by any sort of probity, began to worry her, as did the angle of the head, held slightly on one side. It was the angle which Van Gogh had captured in his extremely disturbing portrait of an actor, a man whose very thick hair and eyebrows and strained tilting head convey an impression of madness. But Paul was clearly not mad, or if he was then so was everybody else; it was simply a long time since anyone had smiled at her with such religious eagerness. She noticed, as he turned to open the door of the suite, that he was wearing very expensive shoes.

The sitting-room into which he ushered her was palely opulent, immaculate, upholstered, and decked with more flowers, not quite serious; the resemblance to a stage set and to actors increased, as did her claustrophobia. When Mrs Demuth appeared, with excellent good manners, almost at once, it was as if she too had made an entrance.

‘Mrs Vernon?’ she asked, in a lilting, little girl’s voice. ‘Do sit down. My husband is on the telephone. I’m sure he won’t be long.’

The immediate impression that Mrs Demuth made was one of pained abstraction and uneasy cosmopolitanism. She was a tall plump woman with a blood-red discontented mouth and wondering eyes. She was dressed in a green silk caftan which brought out greenish lights in her improbably blonde hair, and much gold jewellery. There, at least, Blanche had been right. Everything else about Mrs Demuth confounded her. There was an artlessness about the woman that she had not expected. Mrs Demuth looked in need of protection, as if she were in some subtle way disabled, although her figure was upright and her gaze direct. The artlessness came out in her gold kid sandals, her tiny hands, the aroma of scent and alcohol that her gestures displaced, and the handkerchief with its deep border of lace with which she dabbed her chin from time to time. It was clear to Blanche that this woman, trained to idleness, had been
married for her money and humiliated ever since. Like certain people who never forgive their creditors, Mr Demuth had never forgiven his wife for being the only available rich woman capable of tiding him over at a difficult point in his earlier life. She had bored him in proportion to the degree in which his affairs had prospered ever since. Idle and innocent, Mrs Demuth did not appear to understand her unhappiness. Blanche saw her, abandoned by harsher women friends, who only appreciated her husband’s company, thoughtfully eating cakes in deserted salons. On her swollen childish wrists her bracelets had a mineral heaviness.

‘It is so good of you to come,’ she said. She had a faint accent, not quite French, Belgian perhaps. ‘Bernard is calling the States. We are going home for six months. Paul, dear, get Mrs Vernon a drink. Will you have some champagne? I always drink it around this time. It is very good for low blood pressure, you know?’ Paul, still smiling, moved with boyish alacrity to the ice bucket on a side table and expertly opened a bottle of champagne, the muffled pop heard with evident relief by Mrs Demuth, who dabbed her chin with her handkerchief. ‘Is it hot?’ she asked. ‘We haven’t been out today. I get fearfully tired travelling. And London does seem so noisy after Paris.’

‘Will Paul be going to America with you?’ asked Blanche, accepting a glass of champagne, an inferior drink, she always thought, and one which invariably gave her a headache.

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ said Mrs Demuth, with evident feeling. She held out her hand, and Paul clasped it, still smiling. ‘He is like a son to me, you know. I don’t know how I would manage without him.’

It was clear that wealth had rendered her helpless. Her large eyes and sad gestures had a mute and haggard appeal that could only be met by Paul’s smiling confidence. She would always, Blanche could see, be uneasy with men of her own age, with their orders and expectations, and would
yearn for companionship of a more compliant and sexless nature. She dabbed her chin and handed her glass to Paul, who, still smiling, refilled it. He looked enquiringly at Blanche, whose head had begun to throb: he seemed to invite complicity, as if the two of them might be united in this work of soothing and protecting Mrs Demuth. But that is not what I am here for, thought Blanche, as the headache began its ominous shift into her left eye. At least, I don’t think it is.

‘I am really longing to get home to the States,’ confided Mrs Demuth, who seemed quite uninterested in Blanche’s purpose. ‘We have a lovely place on Long Island. Do you know it?’

‘I once visited there with my husband,’ said Blanche, but was interrupted by the entrance of a small but powerfully built man in a light tan suit and smoked glasses.

‘Well, Colette,’ he said. ‘That’s settled and I hope you’re happy. You sail next week. This was not accomplished without difficulty, I may tell you. They said there was no room, and they expected me to believe them. It has taken me’, he glanced at a wafer-thin gold watch, ‘exactly twenty-five minutes to get them to change their minds.’

‘Why, Bernard, that’s wonderful. When do we leave?’

‘You leave. I don’t. I fly home later, when I have finished here. I can’t spare the time, as you should know, for deck games and tea dances.’

‘But Bernard …’

‘That’s it, Colette. Let’s hear no more about it. Good evening,’ he nodded to Blanche. ‘You must be Mrs Vernon. I’ll be with you in a moment. I have one more call to make. Come with me, Paul.’

‘Bernard …’ trailed Mrs Demuth helplessly, but he was gone, leaving behind him an impression of violence. Nothing he had said had been out of the way and yet all his remarks had been edged with an apparently motiveless
sarcasm. His voice was very faintly accented, American overlaying something more guttural, European. His faultless appearance gave out messages of the most expensive appointments available from several countries. Behind the smoked glasses which hid his eyes Blanche could sense a mind working furiously to keep ahead of everyone else, and the frustration of finding too little opposition. Here was a man not notably gifted for domesticity, since domesticity did not mean the dynasty he had originally envisaged. Unlike his wife, he would accept no substitutes. It was clear that he hated Paul, for the same reason that Mrs Demuth loved him: Paul and Mrs Demuth were recognizably akin, while Bernard Demuth was irreducibly alien. What a life he must have, thought Blanche through her headache, in the fondant atmosphere that Paul and Mrs Demuth had arranged so lovingly for themselves. And yet she did not like him, any more than she liked Paul. Mr Demuth, she knew, was tough, impatient, even cruel. What he most decidedly was not was the gross primitive of her imaginings. She saw now that Paul’s function was to take Mrs Demuth off Mr Demuth’s hands. In her mind’s eye she could see the two of them, window shopping in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, buying useless articles that Mrs Demuth might not wear. No doubt on these expeditions little presents for Paul or for Sally had been acquired. Who knows if even the red fox coat had been passed on by Mrs Demuth, a gift that was probably disputed by her husband? And money, too, would have been acquired in the same way since Mrs Demuth, resigned, knew from her marital experience that such attentions must be paid for. Was this the answer to the charge of embezzlement, or was embezzlement a kinder word for extortion? The handsome Paul would be a great asset to a lonely and vulnerable woman; as long as he waited on her with the devotion which no son could sustain and no lover would volunteer, he might make his own arrangements in his free time. Yet Blanche
saw that Mrs Demuth and Paul were also alike in their apparent, or even their real, sexlessness. Life had frightened them; now they merely desired approval, and were willing to pay for it.

She cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter, since the headache was now threatening the vision in her left eye. ‘It was about Paul that I came,’ she said firmly. ‘I expect you know that his wife and his little daughter miss him very much.’ As soon as the words had left her mouth she wondered if they were true. She went on, ‘Sally, his wife, gave me to understand that there were certain difficulties, and she so very much hopes that these can be cleared up.’ Mrs Demuth dabbed her chin and looked round her for support. ‘Financial difficulties,’ said Blanche firmly. She could see that it was going to be very difficult to talk about money to Mrs Demuth, who denied all knowledge of it, and equally difficult to talk about it with Mr Demuth, who almost certainly kept accounts down to the last penny.

‘It’s all too silly,’ said Mrs Demuth, who, Blanche now realized, was very slightly drunk. She had probably started earlier in the day. And that might be an additional duty for Paul, to keep an eye on her. ‘Paul, darling,’ she called. ‘Come here and give Mrs Vernon another drink.’ Blanche shook her head with some difficulty as Paul reappeared noiselessly and refilled Mrs Demuth’s glass. ‘I’ve ordered you a nice little supper,’ he said, the first words he had spoken. ‘A club sandwich, just like you had last night. We’ll have a cosy evening right here.’

‘Just the two of us?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Just the two of us. Bernard has to go out.’

They both seemed infinitely relieved at this prospect. Blanche saw opportunities for sensible discussion melting away. ‘If I could just have a word with your husband?’ she said. ‘Before he goes out?’

‘I doubt if there’ll be time,’ said Paul, placing himself
firmly under Mrs Demuth’s wavering protection. ‘He has to see someone at seven.’

‘Oh, but I should so like to reassure Sally that everything is all right. Is everything all right, Paul?’ she asked, desperate to get home before the full force of her headache was unleashed. She had not had such a bad one for some time: the airless room, the acidity of the champagne, the muffled but ceaseless sound of traffic, were building up to a nightmare. She had visions of being as becalmed in this room as she habitually was in Sally’s basement.

‘Of course, everything’s all right,’ said Mrs Demuth. And, ‘Tell Sally not to worry,’ said Paul. Again they clasped hands.

‘You can tell Sally that her husband will be home with her next week,’ said Mr Demuth, coming back into the room. ‘I am going to have to let him go. I can’t afford him any more. He has turned out to be a very expensive young man.’

‘But Bernard,’ wailed Mrs Demuth. ‘You know I can’t do without him. Especially as you’re not coming home with me. How am I going to manage?’

‘You will have to manage,’ he said. He had obviously said this many times, and had now and then given up. Although in his late sixties, he was clearly a man of vigorous and furious purpose, and his purpose was elsewhere. It was probably to his advantage to have Paul in his household, even if it did cost him a great deal of money. Blanche saw that it was not the money he minded so much as Paul’s dishonesty in not acknowledging the situation. He would rather that Paul colluded with him instead of with his wife. As well as being massively irritated by the two of them, he was, as a man of business, insulted that his employee chose to be fully accountable to his wife rather than to himself. That had not been what he had in mind. He had come up against Paul’s flavourless affability, his refusal to admit to anything
dubious, anything that might alter the appearance of his filial good manners. Paul, like his handwriting, was not only weak but full of euphemisms. This euphemism, of thought as well as of behaviour, had finally got the better of Mr Demuth’s hard-headedness.

‘But Bernard,’ said Mrs Demuth, two tiny tears slowly making their way down her powdery cheeks, her very red mouth a little smeared. This was obviously how all her sentences began. ‘Who’s going to open the house? Who’s going to take care of the luggage?’ She did not ask when he would be home, not particularly wanting to know. There were several varieties of absence in play here, Blanche noted. Mr Demuth would be absent from Mrs Demuth. Paul would be absent from Sally. As far as she could see, nobody would experience a serious degree of discomfort. Paul, who must obviously be frightened somewhere beneath his uninflected smile, preferred to leave his life unexamined and no doubt hoped for that large final payment in much the same spirit as he had always hoped for it; in the meantime he would place himself under the guardianship of Mrs Demuth, whose beleaguered state cried out for his continued attentions. Blanche also saw that although Mrs Demuth was in need of Paul she had lost the ability, if she had ever had it, of pleading his or her case. With the awful passive expectancy of the weak she had a good chance of getting her own way, but this might take more time than Blanche had to offer. For her immediate purpose she must do battle with Mr Demuth: behind her, Mrs Demuth, Paul, Sally and Elinor lined up with their demands.

‘I don’t know how things stand at the moment,’ she said cautiously, ‘but it looks as if it might be in everyone’s interest if Paul stayed on with you for a bit. I’m sure that matters can be regularized without much difficulty. And I know that Sally would be very relieved if they could.’