Bellefleur (69 page)

Strange, wasn’t it, people said, that the count had disappeared so suddenly. Evidently he had returned to Europe . . . ? And when would he return, had he said . . . ?

Veronica paid no attention. She knew that people whispered behind her back, wondering if she was unhappy; wondering if there was any sort of “understanding” between them. Would there be a marriage? Would there be a scandal? It did not trouble Veronica in the slightest, that her lover had left the country: for in her sleep he was magnificently present, and nothing else mattered.

During the day Veronica drifted about idly, thinking certain forbidden thoughts, recalling certain sharp, piercing, indefinable pleasures. She sang tuneless little songs under her breath, reminiscent of the songs Norst had sung. She tired easily, and liked to lie on a chaise longue wrapped in a shawl, gazing dreamily out toward the lake, watching the lakeshore drive. Sometimes Norst appeared to her though it wasn’t night: she would blink, and see him standing there a few feet away, gazing at her with that shameless raw hunger, that embarrassing intensity she had not understood at the start. Graciously, languidly, she would lift her hand to him, and he would lean forward to raise it to his greedy lips . . . and then some clumsy heavy-footed fool of a servant would enter the room, and Norst would vanish.

“Oh, I hate you!” Veronica sometimes cried. “Why don’t you all leave me alone!”

They began to worry about her. She was so listless, so pale, the color had gone out of her face and she looked positively waxen (though more beautiful than ever, Veronica thought, why don’t you admit it—Ragnar’s love has made me more beautiful than ever); she had no appetite for anything more than toast and fruit juice and an occasional pastry; she was absentminded, often didn’t hear people speaking to her, seemed asleep with her eyes open, was obviously lost in grief for her poor dead brother. . . . Even when the doctor was examining her, listening to her heart with his silly instrument, she was daydreaming about her lover (who had appeared to her the night before, and who had promised to return the following night) and could not answer the questions put to her. She would have liked to explain: Her soul was swooning downward, gently downward, she was not at all unhappy, she was certainly not in mourning (in mourning for whom?—her boorish headstrong brother who had died such an ugly death?), everything was unfolding as it must, according to the destiny fate had determined for her. She would not resist, would not want to resist; nor did she want anyone else to interfere. Sometimes during the daylight hours she caught sight of a thin crescent moon, half-invisible in the pale sky, and the sight of it pierced her breast like her lover’s kiss. She would lie down, suddenly dizzy, and let her head drop heavily back, and her eyes roll white in her skull. . . .

How sweet it was, this utterly unresisting melancholy: this sense of a downward spiral which was both the pathway her soul took, and her soul itself. The air grew heavy; it exerted pressure upon her; sometimes she found breathing difficult, and held her lungs still and empty for long moments at a time. She would have liked to explain to the nurse who now sat at the foot of her bed, or slept on a cot of her own just outside her door, that she was not at all unhappy. Others might be unhappy that she was leaving them but they were simply jealous, ignorant people who didn’t understand her. They couldn’t know how deeply she was loved, for instance; how Norst valued her; how he had promised to protect her.

There were times, however, when her dreams were confused and unpleasant, and Norst did not appear; or, if he did appear, his aspect was so greatly changed she could not recognize him. (Once he came in the shape of a gigantic yellow-eyed owl with ferocious ear tufts; another time he appeared in the shape of a monstrous stunted dwarf with a hump between his shoulder blades; still another time he was a tall, slender, eerily beautiful girl with Oriental eyes and a slow, sensuous smile—a smile Veronica could not bear to gaze upon, it was so knowing, so obscene.) On and on the dreams went, tumbling her about mercilessly, mocking her pleas for tenderness, for love, for her husband’s embrace. When she woke from one of these dreams, often in the middle of the night, she would force herself to sit up, her head aching violently, and a flame of panic would touch her—for wasn’t she seriously ill, wasn’t she perhaps dying, couldn’t something be done to stop the downward spiral of her soul? . . . Once, she heard her nurse groaning, thrashing about in the midst of her own nightmare.

And then two things happened: the nurse (an attractive woman in her mid-thirties who had been born in the village, and had trained in the Falls) grew gravely ill with a blood disorder, and Veronica herself, already weakened and anemic, caught a cold that passed into bronchitis and then into pneumonia in a matter of days. So she was hospitalized, and lapsed into a sort of stupor, during which busy dream-wraiths took care of her. They took excellent care of her: providing her with fresh, strong blood, and feeding her through tubes, so that she could not protest, and was thereby saved. In fact there was no question of dying, with so much skillful, professional activity on all sides; and in a week or two Veronica was not only fully conscious but even hungry. One of the Bellefleur maids shampooed her hair, which was still luxurious and beautiful; and she too was beautiful despite her pallor and the hollows around her eyes. One day she said, “I’m hungry,” in a child’s affronted voice, “I want to eat, I’m hungry, and I’m bored with lying here in bed. . . . I can’t stand it a minute longer!”

So she was saved. Her lungs were well; the bouts of dizziness had vanished; her color was back. Upon admission to the hospital her doctors had discovered, high on her left breast, a curious fresh scratch or bite, that looked at the same time as if it were fairly old, which must have been made by one of the Bellefleur cats, hugged unwisely against Veronica’s bosom. (For though the Bellefleurs had not nearly so many cats and kittens in those days, as they did in Germaine’s time, there were at least six or ten of them in the household, and any one of them might have been responsible for Veronica’s tiny wound.) Veronica herself knew nothing about it: she belonged to that generation of women who rarely, and then only reluctantly, gazed upon their naked bodies, and so it was a considerable surprise for her to learn that there was, on her breast, an odd little scratch or bite that had become mildly inflamed. Of course it was a very
minor
affair, her doctors assured her, and had nothing to do with her serious problems of anemia and pneumonia.

Indirectly she learned, to her astonishment and grief, that her nurse had died—the poor woman had died of acute anemia only a few days after having left Bellefleur Manor. Most extraordinary was the fact that, according to the woman’s family, she had been in perfect health until she went into the employ of the Bellefleurs: she had
never,
they claimed, been anemic at all.

But Veronica had not died.

Now the disturbing, tumultuous dreams were over. A part of her life was over. She slept deeply and profoundly, safe in her hospital room, and when she woke in the morning she woke completely, well rested, elated, wanting at once to be on her feet. She was ecstatic with good health. In her luxurious cashmere robe she walked about the hospital wing, attended by her personal maid, and of course everyone fell in love with her: for she was radiant as an angel, and that long red-blond hair that fell loose on her
shoulders
—! She was merry and prankish as a child, she told silly little jokes, she even toyed, for a day or two, with the idea of becoming a nurse. How charming she would look, in her prim white uniform. . . . And then, perhaps, she would marry a doctor. And the two of them would be on the side of life.

Yes, that was it: she wanted to be
on the side of life.

She was very happy, and begged to be discharged from the hospital, but her family was cautious (for, after all, Veronica’s nurse
had
died—and she
had
seemed to be in good health), and her doctors wanted to keep her under observation for another several days. For there was something about her case that perplexed them.

“But I want to go home now,” she said, pouting. “I’m
bored
with doing nothing, I hate being an invalid, having people look at me in that condescending pitying way. . . .”

And then one day, an odd thing happened. She was watching some teenaged boys playing football in a field adjacent to the hospital grounds, and though she wanted to admire them, and to applaud their physical dexterity and stamina, she found herself becoming increasingly depressed. They were so energetic, so vulgar . . . so filled with life. . . . Like aphids or rats. . . . There was no subtlety to them, no meaning; no beauty. She turned away in disgust.

She turned away, and began to weep uncontrollably. What had she lost! What had gone out of her life, when they had “saved” her here in the hospital! Her thin cheeks were growing rounded again and her dead-white skin was turning rosy but the mirror’s image did not please her: she saw that it was uninteresting, banal, really quite vulgar.
She
was uninteresting now, and her lover, if he returned, if he ever happened to gaze upon her, would be sadly disappointed.

(But her lover: who was he? She could not clearly recall him.
Ragnar Norst.
But who was that, what did he mean to her? Where had he gone? The dreams had vanished, and Ragnar, Norst had vanished, and something so profound had gone out of her life that she halfway felt, despite her heartiness, her relentless normality, that it was her very soul that had been taken from her. The hospital had seen to that: it had “saved” her.)

Still, she was grateful to be alive. And of course the family was delighted to have her back again. They thought, still, that she had succumbed to a severe black mood as a consequence of Aaron’s death, and she could not tell them otherwise.

Yes, Veronica thought, a dozen times a day, I
am
grateful to be alive.

AND THEN ONE
afternoon as she was being driven to the Falls for tea with an elderly aunt, she saw the Lancia Lambda approaching—saw it appear around a turn in the road, blackly regal, imperious, bearing down upon her with the authority of an image out of a dream. She immediately rapped on the glass partition and told the chauffeur to stop.

So Norst braked, and stopped his car, and came over to see her. He was wearing white. His hair and goatee and eyes were as black as ever, and his smile rather more hesitant than she recalled. Her lover? Her husband? This stranger? . . . He had heard, he said in a nervous murmur, of her illness. Evidently she had been hospitalized, and had been
very
ill. As soon as he returned from Sweden he had come up to see her, and had taken rooms at the Lake Avernus Inn. What a delight it was to see her, like this, so suddenly, with no warning—to see her looking so supremely healthy, and as beautiful as ever—

He broke off, and took her hand, squeezing it hard. A flame seemed to pass over his vision. He trembled, his breathing grew rapid and shallow, she felt, keenly, the near-paroxysm of his desire for her, and in that instant she knew that she loved him, and had loved him all along. He managed to disguise his agitation by playfully pulling her glove down an inch or two, and kissing the back of her hand; but even this gesture became a passionate one. Exclaiming, Veronica snatched her hand away.

They stared at each other for several minutes, in silence. She saw that he was indeed the man who had come to her in her dreams—and that he fully recognized her as well. But what was there to
say?
He was staying at Lake Avernus, a mere twelve miles away; naturally they would see each other; they would, perhaps, resume their daylight courtship. It was harmless, and it gave them something to do during the long daylight hours. Norst was asking about her family, and about her health; and about her nights. Did she sleep well, now? Did she wake fully rested? And would she, just for tonight, wear the bloodstone to bed? . . . and leave the window of her room open? Just for tonight, he said.

She laughed, her face burning, and fully meant to say no; but somehow she did not say no.

She was gazing with a bemused smile at the teethmarks on the back of her hand, which were filling in slowly with blood.

The Proposal

S
now was falling for the first time that winter, out of a leaden sky, when, not a week after the scandalous surprise of the wedding of great-grandmother Elvira and the nameless old man from the flood (an event so resolutely private that most of the family was excluded from it, and only Cornelia, Noel, Hiram, and Della were in attendance—the four of them unified in their outraged opposition to the wedding, though, in deference to their mother’s happiness, as well as to the irrefragable nature of her decision, they were absolutely silent: witnessed the brief ten-minute ceremony with blank, slack, stupefied faces)—and on the very same day that Garth and Little Goldie brought their baby to the manor house, to show him off for the first time (Little Garth was so tiny everyone who saw him supposed he must be premature, but in fact he was not: he was perfectly proportioned and healthy and
almost
beautiful, and had been born precisely on schedule)—when Germaine, in hiding because she had overheard part of a quarrel between her mother and father, and was very frightened, happened, quite by accident, and
quite
to her distress (it was not simply because of the fact that, being an unusually honest child, she disliked spying on adults, but she disliked being trapped as well), to overhear yet another private conversation: and was not able to escape until the participants, after an extremely emotional session of at least ten minutes, finally left the room.

The child had run into one of the downstairs drawing rooms to hide, not from her parents (for neither Leah nor Gideon had had the slightest awareness of her presence—they had been
that
coldly furious) but from the idea of her parents, and their quietly raised voices, and the air all jagged knives and icicles and protruding nails, and that sour black gagging taste at the back of the mouth; without knowing what she did she ran into the room now called, since its renovation that fall, the Peacock Room (for Leah had had it papered in a sumptuous French silk wallpaper that showed, against an opalescent background, peacocks and egrets and other plumed, graceful birds in a style copied from a twelfth-century Chinese scroll), and threw herself down behind a love seat that faced the empty fireplace. There, she lay for some time, motionless, panting, prickling with unease. She did not know what her parents were quarreling about but she understood very well the light, deft, wounding, vicious nature of their banter, especially Leah’s.