History of a Pleasure Seeker (25 page)

They made love for hours. They fucked and kissed and explored their once-familiar bodies in a wonder of rediscovery. They did not hear Piet take his trunk down the stairs or pass through the entrance hall for the last time. As he walked to the station with nothing but his tailcoat, his trunk, a set of onyx studs, the clothes he had come in, and two sketchbooks full of careful drawings, they lost themselves in each other, forgave one another, and like a Phoenix from a lustful fire their friendship emerged, purged and renewed.

Piet had been sitting on the cold stone floor of the ticket hall for three hours, waiting for the first Leiden train, before they were finished. It was almost light. As they lay with their faces touching, Maarten’s arms around her shoulders, Jacobina said, “What about Louisa?”

“We shall go to your dressmaker’s this morning and order another gown, identical to the first. We will say that the original is being laundered in the country. When the new one is ready, you shall wear it as if nothing has happened. Every time you do, I will take it as an invitation to make you my own.”

“I am yours.” She kissed his shoulder. “I never wasn’t. I’m glad he’s going.”

“My darling,” said Maarten, “that young scoundrel has already gone.”

P
iet Barol did not hope for comfort from his father and did not confide his transgressions or their humiliating exposure. For eleven months he had thought of Herman Barol only with gratitude for being away from him. He considered this as they shook hands in the sitting room full of furniture his mother had chosen, now woefully rearranged. It had been Nina’s teaching room and the heart of her territory. In the seven years since her death her spirit had gradually leaked from it. Now, though the pretty little chairs and discerningly chosen lamps remained, there was nothing of her left but her portrait, which still hung above the piano.

Piet resembled this painting too closely to be received with anything but suspicion by the woman with dandruff and chilblains who for many years had been his father’s housekeeper and was now his fiancée. Herman announced his imminent nuptials over breakfast as Piet was contemplating the sight of Marga’s chapped fingers on his mother’s tea service. He wished them joy. He doubted he would see his father again after sailing on the
Eugénie
and felt easier to know he would be cared for.

Indeed, Marga Folker cared for Herman Barol with an absorption that brooked no competitor for his affections and was glad to know that her beautiful stepson would not long remain with them. Herman did nothing whatever for himself except dress. Marga cooked and scrubbed and polished and swept and organized the ledgers that in earlier years it had been Piet’s task to fill with methodical accounts of undergraduate perfidy. She was not favored with external charms and this had left her with half a lifetime’s pent-up love. The spectacle of her showering it on Herman, who accepted it without remark, was distasteful to Piet.

He embraced them both and took a boiling kettle from the stove, to which he added icy water from the well in the backyard. The tin tub the Barols used for a bath was in its usual place behind the kitchen door. He took it upstairs. It was not long or deep enough to permit the simultaneous wetting of balls and knees and he washed as quickly as he could. He was out of practice and had added too much cold water.

The discomforts of this procedure reminded him forcefully of the circumstances of his youth and the necessity of breaking free of them. He dried himself, dressed, and went into the bedroom that had once been his parents’. Nina had brought the mattress with her from Paris at her marriage and had often stayed in bed until eleven o’clock in the morning. It was from this bed that she had dispensed to him a wisdom that ran wholly contrary to her husband’s view of life. It was here, too, that she had nursed away his childhood illnesses and sung to him arias from Bizet and Mozart—who were, she said, the only composers who understood women.

Nina Michaud had decided to marry Herman Barol at the end of a painful love affair and had imagined that she could make for herself a companion as diverting as he was steadfast. His Dutch reserve had made a marvelous contrast to the glossy seductiveness of the rakes who pursued her in Paris, and she had left behind the dangerous delights of that city with relief. It had taken her months to understand that Herman was quite unlike the man she had imagined him to be, and years to accept she could not change him. Disillusion, when it came, hit her hard. Nevertheless, she did her best to refrain from complaining of her husband to their son and slipped into doing so only by imperceptible degrees. It was when the eight-year-old Piet began to imitate Herman for her amusement that she understood she had gone too far to bother with stopping. The child caught to perfection the heavy tread of his father as he clumped to the chamber pot to relieve himself. Since Herman did so two or three times every night, at a volume to wake any sleeping soul, she and Piet found his impersonation intoxicatingly amusing. So, too, Piet’s imitation of Herman’s snoring and sudden sleep gruntings, his monotonous exhortations to errant students.

Nina had done all she could to educate her son for the life she had glimpsed, and lost. To have ended his first sally into the great world so dismally seemed to Piet a betrayal of all she had sacrificed for him. He stood in her bedroom, shivering and wishing he could confess and seek her guidance. But here too her spirit had vanished.

C
hristmas and New Year’s Eve came and went. Having been deprived of his fine clothes Piet attempted to stock his wardrobe from the pawnshops of Leiden; but Christmas money had allowed all but the neediest to redeem their best suits and he found only two shirts, both with stains under the arms.

As his departure neared, his dissatisfaction with himself intensified. He thought with amazement of his duplicity in Amsterdam and started to hate himself for injuring a family who had only ever shown him kindness. Egbert weighed horribly on his conscience. He had coaxed the boy into the world of human feeling and become his first friend. To have left without so much as a good-bye was dastardly. Twice he sat down to write him a letter and gave up only because he could think of nothing to say.

Piet did not know that Maarten’s evident delight in his wife had convinced even the skeptical Louisa that she was wrong. Nor did he know that Jacobina’s appearance in an identical apple-green dress, four days after Piet’s departure, had made her daughter burst into tears at breakfast and confess her hatred of him, and the true reasons for it, and beg her mother’s forgiveness.

This scene was excruciating for Jacobina but she did not shrink from the hypocrisy it required. She was extremely sharp with Louisa and rebuked her for drinking in public. Then she said, “Let us hear no more about it,” and later, in a kinder voice, “I forgive you, my darling.” As she spoke she looked at her husband, and the love in his eyes allowed her to forgive herself also.

None of the Vermeulen-Sickertses would ever forget Piet Barol, but as soon as he had left them they began to think of him much less often. It was he who could not shake himself free of them. Their shades pursued him in his dreams, and on the third day of the New Year they were joined by Nina in a ferocious nightmare. He had shared everything but his amorous adventures with his mother. Now her outraged ghost knew all and told him he had failed her.

He woke from this dream in a fit of self-disgust that would not lift. He wanted to hurt himself and slammed his fist against the wall—impulsively, at two-thirds of his full force. The pain was stunning. It made him understand that he did not really wish to break his hand. A more profound expiation occurred to him: to renounce all he had been and start anew. He inched from the wall the loose brick behind which he had stored his treasures as a boy. All that remained in this cavity was a French passport in the name of “Pierre Barol,” which Nina had obtained for him in Paris nine years before and about which Herman Barol knew nothing. With the sense that he was exchanging his soiled identity for a fresh one, he packed it in his trunk and went downstairs.

P
iet took the sleeper for Paris on the sixteenth day of the New Year and arrived early on a dreary morning, while the brass lamps were still burning beneath the vast glazed roof of the Gare du Nord. His trunk was intended for people with porters at their disposal. As he dragged it through the starched, elegant crowds, he began to hate it.

The boat train for Le Havre left the following day after lunch. He had come a night early, despite the expense of a Parisian hotel, because he could find no way to say good-bye to his mother in the house now so scrupulously scrubbed by Marga Folker. They had been in the city once together nine years before, when he was fifteen and she thirty-five—ostensibly to visit one aunt and attend the funeral of another. In fact Nina had hoped to leave her husband and escape with her child to France. It had taken years to gather the courage to conceive this plan and implement its first stage. It took
tante
Maude Michaud twenty minutes to destroy it with the opinion, pronounced as fact, that Herman would pursue her for the boy and wrest Piet from her forever.

In the end Nina had not dared. Instead she spent sixteen years of savings on five days of sophisticated hedonism with her son and returned to Leiden defiant. They stayed in a rickety pension on the rue des Martyrs, beneath the blinding white marble of the Sacré Coeur. Nina had chosen Montmartre so that Piet might observe the perils of
la vie bohème
at first hand; also so that he could imagine the horrors of the Commune and see the church built to atone for them. They went to
tante
Henriette’s funeral and made a day’s worth of family calls. Otherwise they were entirely alone, immersed in each other as in a love affair.

Nina chose three restaurants. The first was a back room with bare wooden benches and crates of lobsters delivered from the
patron
’s brother in Normandy. Here she taught Piet how to drink a carafe of Chablis over a lunch of shellfish while entertaining a pretty woman (herself in an adorable new hat), without feeling giddy or unwell or talking too loudly. The next she chose for its rabbit, which was everything a simple country meal should be. The last was a grander establishment close to the Palais Royale where they ate
timbale de sole
stuffed with chopped truffles.

This meal cost so much that nothing was left for tickets to the opera. They walked through the Louvre and along the pale white paths of the Tuileries, humming together the great duets of Halévy, Gounod and Bizet. It was a night for French composers, Nina said. They reached the Place de la Concorde and paused before the traffic on the Champs Elysées. They had two francs over and Nina knew just the place to spend them. She led Piet up the rue de la Paix, past a perfumier whose scents were so potent neither their crystal vials nor the shop’s closed doors could contain them. “You must face the world as an equal,” she said, drawing him on and climbing the shallow, blue-carpeted steps of the Ritz Hotel with her arm in his.

The doorman did not question them. They had a coffee at the bar and watched the crowds of
élégants
. After some time, a gentleman with curled whiskers invited them to a matinée the following day.

“He takes me for a
demimondaine,
” she whispered when the man had retreated, his invitation refused. “It’s because I’ve nursed my coffee so long.”

“What’s a
demimondaine,
Mummy?”

“Come, I’ll show you.”

They strolled to the Place de l’Opéra and stood beside the steps of the Garnier as the evening’s audience arrived. With great precision, Nina pointed out the leading courtesans of the day and the subtle but significant ways they distinguished themselves from their lovers’ wives.

Piet spent the night wandering the pale, magnificent city, lost in memories of her. With his mother he might have shared his misdeeds at Herengracht 605. Her absence left him to bear his regret unaided, and its burden was so heavy he did not join the conversation on the boat train the next day but hid behind a newspaper feeling profoundly alone.

H
e cheered briefly at sight of the ship. One could not feel entirely deflated on a crowded quay before her. The
Eugénie
had a black hull and a superstructure of dazzling white, repainted for the tropics. A strip of scarlet showed just above the waterline; she had four funnels, black with scarlet bands, and above her anchor gleamed the golden shell and crossed
L
s of the Loire Lines.

High above him on a private gangway, the first-class passengers were entering the ship. He could hear their band’s sparkling music. To his left, the long lines queuing for third class and steerage looked so much happier than he was that he could not feel superior to them. He thought of the sum he had spent on his own ticket and tried to be optimistic, but the tourist-class vestibule, carpeted in violent swirls of green and red, dismayed him. So did the stewards’ demeanor. As one led him to his stateroom with the air of doing him a distasteful favor, the pleasures he had renounced in Amsterdam recurred painfully to him.

“Votre cabine, monsieur.”
The steward opened the door, handed him a receipt for his trunk, and departed with it.

At the Loire Lines offices in Amsterdam Piet had not thought to ask for the specifications of his accommodation. Now he saw he had been unwise not to. His cabin had no porthole and was very hot. Intended originally as third-class quarters, it had been converted to tourist class to cater for additional demand. But its superficial comforts—a mahogany washstand, monogrammed linen, a copied Fragonard in oils—could not disguise its proximity to the engines. As these were fired it shook violently.

Piet sat down on his bunk, aggrieved. Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and a stocky young man with florid cheeks and slick-backed blond hair entered, complaining in a loud English voice. “It will not do. I was promised—Yes, I jolly well
will
speak to the purser.” He shook Piet’s hand forcefully. “Percy Shabrill. An honor. Do excuse me.” Percy Shabrill left again and began shouting in the corridor. Piet hoped he and his voice would find another berth, but it was not to be. He reappeared as the departure bells sounded, his cheeks redder than they had been before. “Damned Frenchies.” He flung himself onto the opposite bunk. “They’ve given us the worst cabin on the bloody boat. Hope you don’t snore, old fellow. I take a dim view of snorers.”

“So do I.”

They went up together onto the tourist-class promenade deck to watch as the ship left the harbor for the open ocean. The wind and the engines drowned the string quartet, but Percy’s voice carried well over the competing noise. “That’s me out of Europe for some time. I won’t be back till they’ve invented an air balloon. I’m not mad keen on the sea.” Percy was going to South Africa to join his brother at Johannesburg. His faith in his prospects emphasized to Piet how drastically his own confidence had dwindled since the day he had sold Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts’ silver man. Perhaps he should have kept him for luck. Percy leaned closer. “You ask how I’m going to get rich.”

Piet had asked no such question.

“What’s wrong with Africa? You tell me. It’s bloody hot and there are too many darkies standing about with nothing to do. Well, I can fix all that. Chum of mine, dashed clever chap, had an idea about refrigeration. I bought the rights off him. There’s a fortune to be made.”