On Green Dolphin Street (29 page)

The conviction that he had exhausted the world’s literary output did nothing to raise Charlie’s spirits. The book he was reading was a biography of Melville; normally, he avoided lives of writers, but his admiration for Melville was such that he overcame his scruples. From what he could gather from novelists’ own diaries and letters, the urge that was common to them all was a need to improve on the thin texture of life as they saw it; by ordering themes and events into an artistically pleasing whole, they hoped to give to existence a pattern, a richness and a value that in actuality it lacked. If after reading such a novel you looked again at life—its unplotted emergencies, narrative non sequiturs and pitiful lack of significance—in the light of literature, it might seem to glow with a little of that borrowed luster; it might seem after all to be charged with some transcendent value.

These poor writers depicted themselves engaged in this heavy task: from people they knew or met, they gathered characteristics for their imaginary humans; from conversations, they pulled out thoughts that could be developed into themes; houses they had visited were relocated and refurnished; other writers were absorbed, assimilated for what they could unwittingly donate; from some less recognizable source the power of pure invention was mobilized, while over it all the artistic intelligence shaped an entity that would thrillingly exceed the sum even of these rich parts.

To Charlie, it looked like very hard work. Then the writer’s biographer took it slowly back to pieces: the magnificently complex heroine, he claimed, was after all a mixture of the writer’s aunt and his mistress; the atmospheric shooting lodge was only the guest house where they took their holidays, moved to Lombardy from Felixstowe; the pained love affair was in fact a sublimation of the subject’s interest in teenage boys. So there was no transcendence after all; there were mixtures, but there were no compounds, because everything could still be reduced by the biographer to its elemental pointlessness. What could conceivably be the purpose of such an exercise? Charlie thought. Did biographers of bridge builders believe that the river was better off unspanned? Did whoever wrote a Life of Newton maintain that the heavens should never have been charted?

At lunch, with wine, Charlie elaborated his theory.

“So after the glorious attempt to make the work float free, to make art, to cut the umbilical cord, along comes this plodder and tries to tie it up again.”

Vernon Williams said meekly that he enjoyed political biography and Marie-Laure looked up once from her piled plate of sausage, cheese and the night before’s fried-up potato. Exhausted by his literary aria, Charlie took himself off for a rest, while the others prepared to drive to the beach.

When he awoke, the house was silent. The alarm clock told him it was five o’clock, which was a good time to ring Duncan Trench in Washington. Morning meetings would be over and he would be at his desk; Charlie reckoned the café in Saint Brioche with the telephone by the WC would also be open. With great reluctance, he hauled himself off the bed, made a cup of tea with two bags of Winston Churchill and some sterilized milk, then went out to the Citroën.

“Répression de l’ivresse publique.”
How many drafty French cafés have I stood in, Charlie thought, reading through this ancient statute about drunkenness? It had taken him a quarter of an hour to reach the international operator and he wondered how a country with such a primitive telephone system could do business with the world.

Eventually he heard the sound of Duncan Trench’s irascible voice. “What? Yes, it is. I’ll have to call you back on a secure line. What’s the number there?”

“Christ knows. I’ll go and find out.”

The woman behind the bar suspiciously supplied the number, and after twenty minutes and two glasses of pastis, the telephone in the pungent vestibule finally rang.

“Right,” said Trench. “What is it?”

“It’s your weekly call, Trench. I’m ‘keeping in touch.’ ”

“Hmm. Not going through Paris, are you?”

“No.”

“Fancy a detour?”

“Don’t bend the rules.”

“I could make it worth your while.”

Charlie looked down at his feet, where the rope soles of his espadrilles had started to fray at the toe. “Good-bye, Trench,” he said, as he replaced the receiver.

On the beach Mary sat with her back to a stone wall looking down toward the sea, where Lauren and Vernon Williams were launching an inflatable boat for the children. With her forefinger, she inscribed Frank’s name in the sand, then looked at it for a long time, stunned.

She wondered if subconsciously she wanted to be found out; had she deliberately left Frank’s pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, which she had come across at the bottom of her purse, where Charlie would see them? She stood up and sighed. With her bare heel, she kicked over the letters of his name and hated the fact that even this small, petulant action gave her pain.

As Richard and Louisa splashed in the shallows, waiting for their turn in the boat, Mary remembered childhood holidays of her own on the beach in Norfolk. She had been alone usually, content with her bucket and spade, her skin itching beneath the woolen costume as she searched for different-colored shells.

What a strange child I must have been, she thought, skipping over the sand in a world where time did not move, believing that my taste of sea air and ice cream and salt water was definitive, that my parents were as enduring as the seawall. Now I see my children and I know that they are figures in a lantern show, that their sense of permanence is an illusion, because all around us time is unstoppable.

When Louisa came back, shivering from the sea, Mary wrapped her in a towel and strapped in her arms so tight that she could not move. She had three small moles below her left ear in the shape of a half-moon and, while she kept her daughter prisoner, Mary kissed each one.

Chapter 14  

I
n New York Mary was woken by an explosive noise, as though the scaffolding on a skyscraper had collapsed and all its constituent parts had hit the sidewalk simultaneously. It had taken her many such awakenings to work out that it was the sound of a dumpster truck going over a pothole, so that its empty container, what in London they would have called a skip, rose and smashed down on the steel chassis. She drifted off to sleep again to be woken in due course by a sweeter sound, the pattering of rain on the air-conditioning condenser outside the window. She looked over from the bed and saw the usual pigeon, a piebald veteran of the gutters, cowering in the lee of the brick shaft, fourteen stories high.

Mary smiled and stretched beneath the covers, delighted not to be in Brittany. She had come in from Washington the night before and had gone without dinner; she felt the call of Nathan’s griddle and its homely waitresses. The rain had eased by the time she went out and made the short walk across town. She settled into her preferred nook, glassed off from the rest of the room, and ordered coffee, “oring juice” and the breakfast special plate, number three. She looked at the paper while she waited,
searching for Frank’s byline. He was covering the Nixon campaign, and she had briefly glimpsed him on a television news bulletin during the Republican convention in Chicago. When Governor Rockefeller introduced Nixon “and his poor wife with half a flower bed on her shoulder,” Mary was still wincing in sympathy with Pat Nixon, the embarrassed wife who did indeed look as though she had been unearthed from a herbaceous border, when a rogue camera caught Frank among other monochrome pressmen. Mary felt obscurely gratified, as though this proved he was not cheating on her. Frank was supposed to be with Nixon as he fulfilled his ambitious pledge to visit every state in the union, but in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nixon had injured his knee so badly in a motorcade that he had had to go to hospital. After a few days Frank persuaded the office to let the local reporter keep an eye on the bed-bound candidate while he returned to New York; he said he would call Mary when he got in that evening.

“So how is he?” said Sadie, filling Mary’s coffee cup.

“Who?” Mary had been so deeply lost in thoughts of Frank that she presumed she must have missed something. “Nixon?”

“No.” Sadie had a harsh, drawling laugh. “Your man. The one you’re here for.”

Mary felt herself coloring. “My God. Is it that obvious?”

“My age, I know the symptoms. You want ketchup with that?”

At least Sadie had not disapproved of her, Mary thought, as she set off after breakfast. She needed to do some shopping, and on Fifth Avenue she turned to walk uptown. Charlie never appeared to notice what she wore and she was not certain if Frank did; in fact the only person she discussed clothes with was Katy Renshaw, who passed on various fashion magazines when she had finished with them. As far as she could make out, Frank liked quite conventional clothes, if only for the pleasure of removing them. His one stated view was a horror of Bermuda shorts, particularly when worn with Shetland sweaters; he had recently discovered that on Madison at 55th there was a Bermuda Shop, several floors dedicated to knee-length shorts.

“My God,” he said, “it’s like those well-bred girls who work at the
White House, named things like Pooky or Fiddle or Squidge. They all wear those things. Pretty girls, but …”

“Oh yes,” said Mary. “Though I don’t suppose that stopped you dating them.”

“All of them,” he said, “except Fiddle. I don’t think anyone dated Fiddle.”

Mary found that the problem with shopping in New York was that there was an epidemic of Dacron. In
Harper’s Bazaar
she saw a “sleeveless blouse of tulip print cotton with a button-through skirt in gendarme blue” at Abercrombie & Fitch; but when you looked closely the dress version was admitted to be a blend of cotton and Dacron. A charming dress at Bonwit Teller was similarly blighted.

As much as anything, however, she enjoyed just going into the shops and putting herself in the hands of assiduous sales staff. An elderly male assistant in Bergdorf’s found her looking with interest at a washbasin in the corner of the showroom.

“It’s to demonstrate our waterproof fabrics, madam. Perhaps you’d care to see one of our raincoats tested?”

There was a gravity in these people, she thought, however opulent or garish the shop in which they worked. They said things like, “It’s a beautiful shoe,” or, “You won’t regret it, ma’am, it’s one of our most luxurious fabrics.” She pictured their rides into work each day from some run-down apartment in Queens or Brooklyn and wondered if at night they took home tales of the rudeness and vulgarity of their customers as they counted off the slow months to retirement.

In B. Altman, Mary sat on a couch, waiting for an assistant to become available. She flipped through a copy of
Vogue
as she sat, wondering if she should buy a Triumph Foundation Garment (“if you dare to be hated by other women,” the advertisement simpered), a Sarong girdle or Dupont nylons, “because every fashion needs a stocking all its own,” pink, blue, green, tan, and “You say, ‘What a feeling of chic,’ and He says, ‘Mmm,’ and need We say more!”

“What can I help you with today, ma’am?”

The attendant was a woman of about her own age, well dressed and impermeably made up.

“I need a dress that I can wear to a restaurant uptown and to a jazz club basement.”

“In the same evening?”

“I’m afraid so. Probably.”

An hour later, Mary stood in the doorway with two packages. The assistant told her she was not tall enough to carry off the amount of petticoat in the black silk organdy dress she had wanted; so instead she bought a sheath of combed cotton with black coin-sized dots on a beige background and a sleeveless silk dress of a dark and shimmering color of which the saleswoman’s description “crème de menthe” fell pitifully short.

The clouds had cleared and the sun was beating on Fifth Avenue as she emerged into the light; yet the first cooling suspicion of autumn in the air tempted her to walk back to the hotel. She found her step light and easy on the huge paving slabs as she approached the public library with its friendly stone lions. She would stay on Fifth until she reached her own cross street because who would actually choose to walk down Sixth?

Mary smiled a little to herself, caught out in the sheer pleasure of the city. The avenues on top of the camber, from Lexington to Seventh, always seemed to her like sprinters in their lanes, muscling and gasping their way up the course—with one just ahead, until you glanced down a cross street to the north side of the intersection, and saw a higher number—all the way up to a finishing line at Central Park South. Broadway swung, louche, from lane to lane, courting disqualification, until, just before the tape, it veered off track completely to be swallowed by the crowds of Amsterdam; Fifth continued suavely north as far as the Harlem River; but unlovely Sixth, the avenue where buildings were always going up or coming down, home of the jackhammer and the pneumatic drill, still blinking at light let in by its uprooted El, Sixth, the avenue of Radio City, of windows of electric gadgets, of Florsheim and Walgreen, was defeated by the race and expired at the finishing line, where it sank unmourned beneath the hooves of the snorting cab ponies.