Grahame, Lucia (40 page)

Again he laughed. "To which of my vices do you refer?"

"To your famous succession of mistresses. And the other
pleasures of the demimonde which you apparently enjoy to the hilt with
God-knows-whom."

I had not missed the knowing, admiring glances my husband had
garnered from some of the bolder-looking girls downstairs, nor the whispers,
which I could not make out, nor the appraising eyes directed at me.

My husband laid down his fork, and resting his left forearm and
his right elbow on the edge of the table, pointed his knife at my breast.

"Oh yes," he said. "Those mistresses whom I have at
least had the decency not to flaunt in your face, although you have never given
me any reason to suppose that you cared anything about where, as you once put
it, I went crawling. I'll have you know, the only time in my life that I have
ever
crawled was in trying to make you happy. And what a thankless task that
was."

My gaze fell, but finally I lifted my eyes back to his.

"Yes," I said very slowly. "You
were
discreet.
And considerate. And I
have
been thankless."

My husband's expression did not soften.

"And if you were sincere about taking the play as a caution
against judging other people harshly," he continued severely, "there
would be no need for me to point out that I had every intention of being
faithful to you until you proved to be such an unsatisfactory wife."

"That's entirely false," I said, my temper flaring
again. "You know as well as I do that you took up with your mistresses
long before you became disenchanted with me."

"But only after you made it painfully clear not only that you
took no pleasure in our marriage bed but that you were perfectly satisfied with
that state of affairs and did not wish to change it," he retorted.
"That account you received of me from Madame Mansard, although accurate in
every other respect, exaggerated the haste with which I broke my vows. It took
me somewhat longer than a
week
or two to swallow my pride and admit to
myself that I could never thaw
your
frozen heart."

"How
much
longer?" I whispered.

"How
much
longer? Well, if you must know... perhaps
you recall the night you told me outright that I could never give you any
pleasure?"

I shadowed my face with my hand and did not reply.

"I did not break my vows to you until the following
evening."

"The
very
next evening?" I whispered.

"The very next evening," he repeated without even a hint
of remorse.

I turned my head away and pressed my fingers against my lips.

But still he continued.

"Before you upbraid me further, ask yourself this. Why do you
suppose all my mistresses had black hair? And why do you think I turned to
those other diversions you are so eager to condemn? One must do something to
whet one's appetite for a woman when she is not the woman one wants... one
wanted."

I reached for my champagne glass, but it was already empty and my
husband, who valued privacy above service, had dismissed the waiter. I twirled
the stem slowly between my fingers as I considered his admission.

My husband took the glass from my hand. He filled it, set it down,
and after he had returned the bottle to the ice pail, he covered my hand with
his for a moment.

"Drink," he said.

So I did. I took one sip, and then another; slowly the sparkling
anodyne dulled the edge of my distress.

"I hoped the play would make you laugh," continued my
husband more gently. "And once or twice I think it did. Now tell me
truthfully, heathen that you are, did you not like Lord Illingworth in spite of
yourself?"

That
did
make me smile.

"Very much so," I admitted. "And didn't you, in
spite of yourself, find Mrs. Arbuthnot's mother love somewhat excessive?"

"Cloying," he agreed. "But I think I have every
right to call the grapes sour. What about you? Were you no luckier in your
upbringing? Didn't your grandmother love you like a mother?"

"I really know nothing of how mothers love, but I suppose she
loved me in her way," I said. "Unfortunately, it was a way that made
me desperate to escape her plans for me."

"What plans were those?" he asked.

I had told him so little about her—he knew what she had been, but
nothing of what she had intended for me. I recalled his scathing remark, made
only a few weeks earlier, about my "unfortunate antecedents." But it
was all water under the bridge now. The champagne, and the sense that I had
nothing left to lose, unfettered my tongue. I began to speak with astonishing
candor about my girlhood, about my grandmother. But now a cascade of soft,
unfamiliar feeling for her washed over me. I recalled the play's gentle
admonitions against moral inflexibility. I wanted to defend my grandmother from
my husband's contempt.

"You can have no idea what it was like for her, to be so
poor—how hard she had to work and how much she had to sacrifice. She took in
washing. She took in sewing. She helped out when there were dinner parties at
the vicarage —not at the dinners themselves, of course, for her past was no
secret and her presence would have outraged everyone, but before and afterward.
Sometimes she would be there most of the night, washing up and cleaning. For
her betters. They thought they were being charitable."

And I had been ashamed of her.

"She was so bravely determined that I should never
want," I continued, despite the lump that had risen to my throat as I
thought of how ready I had been to judge her, and of how much I owed her.
"She made everything possible for me, everything."

Without doubting the sincerity of Frederick's love for me, I felt
pierced by the sudden, painful realization that, had it not been for the
sophistication, the education, and the grace with which my grandmother had
endowed me, I could never have commanded the attention of such a pampered
aesthete.

My husband was silent as I sat lost in thought, vainly regretting
my thanklessness.

Finally I lifted my head from my reverie to notice that my glass
was empty once again and my husband was refilling it.

I took another swallow and said to him, rather shakily, in what
must have seemed to him a complete non sequitur, "Perhaps you would have
judged me less harshly, as well, had your cocoon of wealth not given you such
glib notions of integrity."

The bright color flooded his cheeks again. He said nothing to
defend himself.

I lifted the glass to my mouth yet again: It seemed that I was
tearing through the bottle at a phenomenal rate.

"Well,
she'd
have been pleased with me, at any
rate," I continued tactlessly, as my thoughts turned back to my
grandmother. "She would have felt I had surpassed even her hopes for me—in
the very moment that I was going down for the third time."

My husband's color rose even higher.

"So that is how you felt about marrying me," he said
after a long silence, as if to himself. "Well, perhaps the fish will have
to be content with his four nights and cast Jonah back upon the shore."

At this I was overwhelmed by confusion. Very likely it was due to
the vast quantity I had imbibed. I looked away and found myself wondering
whether Jonah had sometimes missed his fearsome intimacy with that great
creature, had ever awakened in the dark of night longing for the belly of his
devouring protector once he had been flung free of it.

But of course I did not say this.

My husband may have had a little too much champagne himself, for,
although we did not say much more across the table, later, when we had climbed
into his carriage for the journey back to Grosvenor Square, he said, "You
know, for a moment or two tonight you reminded me of the way you looked the
first time I ever saw you."

"When you called on me with Neville?" What could have
reminded him of that fateful day?

"Oh no. It was long before that."

At first I was puzzled. Then I understood. "Oh, you mean
Neville's painting from
The Winter's Tale."

"No. Not the painting. You. It was in Paris. I was dining
with a friend—it was Phil Harborough, as a matter of fact. You may remember
meeting him at the reception for Caylat."

"Oh yes, Philip. The talker."

My husband laughed.

"No, Fleur," he corrected me gravely. "Philip, the
raconteur. In any case, we were at the Coq d'Or. It was the autumn of
eighty-eight. You were across the room with your husband and Marguerite and
Théo and another couple. You were in an emerald green dress and you had a red
rose in your hair."

My mind shot back across the years to that ancient tavern in the
Rue Montmartre. If my husband had gone down on his knees to me, then and there,
and declared his undying love, he could hardly have astounded me more. How
could I not remember that joyous night at the Coq d'Or? Even now I can see the
candlelight dancing over Frederick's laughing face, I can reel off the names of
everyone who stopped by our table. I recall everything—everything except the
pale Englishman who must have been gazing at me from across the room.

"You were positively incandescent. I thought your husband
must be the happiest man on the face of the earth. I remember making some
idiotic remark—well, I was still very young—about understanding for the first
time in my life why a moth would fly into a flame. Phil told me who you were.
Of course, I ought to have recognized you from Neville's painting, but I
hadn't—there was no comparison between the painting and... the real thing.

"Neville knew how much I admired that particular masterpiece,
not to mention the others he owned. I had been urging him to introduce me to
your husband—I had hoped to commission something equally magnificent for
myself. But once I had seen you, it was out of the question. I was

forced to recognize the wisdom of the Tenth Commandment."

The carriage rattled us softly through the dark London streets. I
thought of my husband's cold mother, of the civilized cruelty in which he had
been raised, and of how stingingly that, and his purchased pleasures, must have
contrasted with the mellow, tender joie de vivre of the love feast he had
witnessed in Paris.

"Your face was glowing. I attributed that to the warmth of
your nature." Now his voice had taken on its familiar, ironic edge.
"But I suppose you were just full of champagne, which seems to do as much
for you as paint."

I shook my head, still lost in that bittersweet remembrance.

"I'd had nothing to drink. Frederick had just gotten a
commission for a group of paintings that would pay more than anything he'd ever
done before. We were celebrating. It seemed like the happiest night of my
life—I didn't know it was the end of everything."

"The end?" said my husband, puzzled.

"Yes, that was the night I lost my daughter."

I stopped, my voice catching. I had said far too much.

My husband turned toward me. I could not read his expression.

"Your daughter!" he exclaimed.

I could answer only with a sharp little nod.

"So you
did
have a child," he said softly.

Again I felt that vague surprise at how little he knew about me.
But of course I had never mentioned her to him.

"What happened?" said my husband.

"She was born three months too early," I said, now in
the toneless voice I had found safest to adopt at the time of her death.
"She died."

"How devastating for you."

"I am afraid I took it a little too hard," I said, still
in the same flat voice.

"Too hard? What do you mean?"

"Well, it isn't as if she were ever truly a person," I
lied as crisply as I was able to. "But I grieved excessively. Why, I can't
say. I hadn't actually
known
her so, of course, there was really no
reason to feel quite so—"

"My God, Fleur, how can you say that! You carried her in your
body for months! How much closer could you have been to her?"

I glanced at him, amazed. But already tears, idle tears, useless
tears, had begun to spill from my eyes. I turned my head and brushed them away
angrily.

"You must think I do nothing but weep. I don't know what is
wrong with me these days. I used to have
some
self-control. I never
cried."

"Surely you wept for your child?"

I thought about that rainy night on the Pont-Neuf. Even then, I
had not yielded fully.

"Hardly," I said with a certain pride. Everyone I had
ever loved hated tears. My grandmother regarded them as a sign of weakness,
unless they were used deliberately and with the greatest caution and
self-control as a weapon. Frederick had regarded them as one of the grotesque
and depressing excesses of the previous generation. "I mean, one would
hate to be like the Queen, making a fetish out of mourning, parading one's
sorrows endlessly—it's so morbid and undignified," I explained, thinking
of my husband's air of dignity, which I had come to admire greatly, and which I
longed to emulate.