Seducing Ingrid Bergman (17 page)

Ingrid feels angry with Capa. She also feels troubled by his question and by her over-solemn response to it. Behind it, the latest letter from Petter rankles. She feels the pressure of his words exerted from thousands of miles away, that implacable sense of will disguised as moral principle.

There’s another thing that bothers her and now batters like an insect inside her head. It represents a hole in their conversation, a gap in their talk, and she can’t ignore it or let it go. ‘Tell me about your girlfriend.’

‘
You’re
my girlfriend.’

She rubs her hands together. ‘The one who died.’

‘Gerda?’

‘Were you with her…?’

His eyes flinch minutely. ‘If I’d stayed, she’d still be alive.’

‘You must have loved her.’

He shifts his weight uncomfortably.

She feels the trace of this other woman upon her like a stain. ‘Am I very different?’

He kisses her on the forehead, puts one hand on her leg, a gesture of tenderness, and as if in a trance tells her how they met in Berlin, how Gerda taught him to dress with style, stopped him drinking and gambling to excess. In return, he gave her a Leica and showed her how to take photographs. Both Jewish, and each fired by a hatred of fascism, they joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The one time he came back to Paris, she stayed on near Madrid.

He read about her death in the newspaper, he says, of all things while sitting in the barber’s chair, waiting to have his hair cut. Afterwards he saw the crushed buckle of her belt and learnt that as she lay dying, delirious with morphine, all she asked about was the camera and whether or not it had survived intact.

He doesn’t need to explain any more. And though she’s moved almost to tears by his story, she feels excluded, and that feeling merges with a deeper sense of him not caring enough about her, and in an unreasoning human way this upsets her. She’s conscious of the unfairness of her thoughts, but can’t help feeling the pain of her unhappy marriage, the pressure on her to return, and the urge within her, increasingly desperate, to do something before it’s too late.

‘What was she like?’ she says. ‘You’re comparing me, aren’t you?’

He says nothing, removes his arm from around her shoulders, maintains a baffled silence.

‘I need to know.’

Things tumble inside her, become mixed up as in a dream. She knows she’s being irrational, but the feeling gathers and quickens inside her, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it. In the silence that follows she takes a deep breath to steady herself. ‘Between the two of us, who would you choose?’

‘What are you saying?’

Her blood bumps. ‘If she were to walk in through that door right now, which one of us would you walk out with?’

‘Ingrid, she’s dead.’

There’s a momentum that won’t be stayed. She hurls the words at him: ‘And you can’t stand the fact, can you?’

He prevents her with his hand from leaving.

She feels the contending pressure of something rising up and pushing down simultaneously, the pull of love, the tug of the studio, the fear of jealousy, the flood of Petter’s letters, the yearning to assert her identity, so that her heart feels squeezed and her lungs are filled with something dense like water.

She pushes him off.

‘You should get your cameras back,’ she says.

*   *   *

The darkness thickens. It’s dead quiet. Once more the nightmares come. Unseen presences swarm. It’s hard to describe the sensation. It’s like being in a plane as it sinks through a gap in the atmosphere and you suddenly plunge a thousand feet. My chest and back are slick with sweat. My head is throbbing, swollen like a drowned man’s. A rawness claws the back of my throat.

Renewed feelings of panic make me turn and look at Ingrid. Fear of not loving contends with a fear of not being loved. She’s still there next to me, motionless, breathing. Her face is in shadow, but there’s an oily shine where her eyes must be, a glisten.

For a moment I think that maybe she’s awake.

Is she looking at me? Can she see me?

I pass my hand in front of her face. She doesn’t stir. It’s hot in the room, and she sleeps naked. As if a lamp is switched on within her, her skin gleams creamily in the dark. There’s a warm smell, the mysterious sweet-sour scent of a woman asleep.

Gingerly, so as not to wake her, I put my bare feet on the floor and pad across the room.

‘Capa?’ The roughness of her voice suggests it’s only now that she’s awake.

I stop, but do not turn around.

‘What are you doing?’ She props herself on one elbow, scratches her head drowsily, squints in disbelief at the clock. She holds the sheets chastely above her breasts. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Just getting a drink. I didn’t mean to wake you.’

There’s a rustle as she puts a pyjama top on, the pattern like the back of a playing card. She switches on a lamp. A small brown spot on the lampshade becomes a full-blown stain projected on the wall. The glass in my hand glints suddenly.

I hear Ingrid walk towards me, feel her fingers cool on my back, sense her register the film of sweat.

‘You don’t have to drink,’ she says.

‘I don’t have to stop myself either.’

With a few simple twists, I open a bottle of Scotch. The sound in the half-dark is an upwards slide, high and tight like a dress slipping off. I pour a large one, stir it with my finger.

‘Are you all right?’

I realize with a shock that my hands are trembling. ‘Sure.’ I take a first sip of the whisky, taste its fire, cling to it as I would any source of heat.

She pulls her hand away from my back. I feel the chill her fingers leave against my skin.

She scans the after-image of terror in my eyes. For a moment she says nothing, just stands there, studying me. It’s very quiet. Little tendrils of rain touch the window.

‘Do you ever pray?’ she says.

‘Only when the water is up to my neck.’

‘Is that often?’

I shrug. ‘Often enough.’

She shifts her weight from one leg to another. ‘You know, Capa, I like the fact that you’re brave. It’s admirable.’ She strokes my hair, my cheek, fixes my gaze. ‘But don’t you see there’s a difference between being brave, which is fine, and being reckless, which is crazy?’ She puts her hands either side of my face and won’t let me look elsewhere. ‘I love the fact that you’re fearless,’ she says, ‘but it also frightens me.’

Reaching over, she tries to remove the glass from my hand. I resist at first, but she won’t give in. Her middle finger and thumb hold it in a kind of pincer. She gives me her stern, schoolmistressy look and tugs again. This time I let go.

For a few seconds my hand holds the ghost of a glass. I hear her set it down on the dresser. Then she walks over and embraces me.

Slow to respond, my arms hang for a moment before coming to rest on her back. I feel the strength of her body pressing hard, pinning me. It’s an attempt, I realize, to drain the menaces from my skin, to absorb them into herself, an effort to inject me with her goodness.

‘Why?’ she says. ‘Why do you do it?’

‘Drink?’

‘Go off to war.’

‘I just go where the excitement is.’

‘Am I really so boring?’

I search for an honest answer, find nothing adequate. ‘It’s in me. I feel it.’

She’s trying her best, I know, to rid me of these demons, performing a kind of exorcism, and I love her for it. I feel grateful. She’s willing to take them on, wrestle them for my sake, sacrifice herself perhaps.

For a moment we just stand there in silence, with only the door and the carpet, and a band of light between.

I ask, ‘Have you ever saved anyone’s life?’

She shakes her head. Her eyebrows flatten, become part of a frown.

‘Save mine,’ I say.

She looks at me for an instant to check that I’m not kidding. Her face shines benignly. She takes the bottle of whisky, removes the top. She stands over the basin and tilts the bottle until what’s left of the whisky is poured away in long gulps. It takes several seconds to drain and leaves a sour stink in the room.

‘Love me,’ she says.

For the moment I feel consoled, but the devils, I know, don’t go away. They merely retreat into a formless dread, vanish for a time inside me, scared away by the kind light of her face.

*   *   *

Capa is pouring champagne into a pyramid of glasses, each layer spilling like a fountain into the next. He’s surrounded by admirers, who cheer him on, enjoying the virtuosity of the act. Even Joe looks on, smiling, won over by the vivacity and charm of the man.

Capa laughs, obviously loving this, a cigarette clamped to the side of his mouth.

Ingrid is astonished to see the transformation, from the chrysalis of fragility in the early hours of the morning to this evening’s butterfly of social exuberance. She stands at a distance from him, chatting to Irwin, who has grown morose after several Scotches. His eyes, she notices, are dark and shining.

She asks, ‘What are you writing?’

‘Trying to write,’ he corrects her. ‘A novel.’

‘You must let me read it some time.’

‘By the time I finish it, you’ll be long gone.’

Ingrid chooses not to answer. Instead she watches Capa finish his trick with the fountain of glasses.

‘Irrepressible, isn’t he?’ Irwin says.

‘You think it’s an act?’

‘You’d know about all that.’

‘I’m just asking what you think.’

Irwin blinks slowly. ‘You give a damn what I think?’

‘You’re his friend. I want to like you.’

‘Is that hard?’

She smiles serenely. ‘You could make it a bit easier.’

‘Some people embellish their lives,’ he says. ‘Capa’s invented a whole personality.’

‘If you don’t like him, why are you here?’

‘He’s the best friend I’ve got.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is, he’s everybody’s best friend.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re jealous?’

He shrugs, the glass at an angle in his hand. ‘Who do you think redeemed his cameras?’

‘Did he thank you?’

‘What do you think?’

She looks away.

He jabs a finger as if ready to interrogate her. ‘Have you ever caught him in the morning before he puts his smile on?’

She doesn’t answer.

‘It’s in his blood. Can’t you see?’

‘See what?’

‘The only time he feels alive is when he’s photographing corpses.’

‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’

‘He’s a great war photographer.’

‘He’s a great photographer,’ she corrects him. She recovers enough to declare with confidence, ‘He’ll come to America.’

‘You think?’

‘I know.’

Irwin laughs out loud. ‘As your poodle? Following you around? He’ll love that.’

‘Like I said, I’m trying hard to like you.’

‘The one time he became attached to a woman, he lost her.’

The stem of her glass feels suddenly fragile in her hand.

‘She followed him. It killed her. And ever since, he’s felt responsible.’ He flicks a bit of ash from his lapel.

Ingrid looks straight ahead, impassive.

Irwin shrugs drunkenly. ‘He can’t help himself.’

‘Then other people have to.’

‘You won’t be the first.’

‘Maybe I’m more persistent.’

‘But no less married.’

Her eyes harden, her face grows tense.

Irwin knows he has over-reached. His eyes are filled with self-loathing. He turns to look at her, his whole face narrowed to a hopeless appeal. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ he says. He tries hard not to slur his words, not to spoil the moment, but the complex effort demanded of his mouth makes it seem all the more awkward.

Ingrid holds his gaze for a few seconds.

What started as a drunken compliment, she realizes, has developed into a clumsy attempt at a pass.

She smiles, but her eyes reveal her disappointment if not her disgust, and following a long silence she walks away, abandoning Capa with his drizzling pyramid of light and leaving Irwin to swig from his glass alone.

11

Ingrid receives her final summons from the studio. They’re calling her back. She signed a contract and can’t delay any longer. There are repeated telegrams, too, from Petter, urging her return.

Light rain soaks the streets and everywhere the green scent of the trees mixes with the dark sweet odour of wet earth. The city is damp and lit.

For dinner, we go to Maxim’s. One last luxury. Afterwards we go to the clubs. Monseigneur first, then Jimmy’s.

It’s still raining when we leave Jimmy’s. We feel the tiny pressure of it on our faces. We walk slowly, arm-in-arm in the mist and drizzle, listening to the sound of the wind like a river in the dark and our footsteps hollow on the cobbles. Tables remain on the pavement outside the cafés, dripping, cane chairs stacked on their metal tops. A barge glides by silently, lights dimmed, disappearing under the low curve of a bridge.

We saunter past the New York Herald building, its windows full of clocks. Each clock tells the time in a different part of the world. We work out that Ingrid will be nine hours behind in Los Angeles, so that when it’s light here, it’ll be mostly dark there and vice versa. Not to mention the thousands of miles of ocean and space in between.

The day dawns. Things start to separate out from their shadows.

In her hotel room, Ingrid’s voice grows thin. ‘Why are we doing this?’

I can’t find an answer.

She begins removing her earrings. They each plink as she places them in a glass ashtray. ‘If you ever get bored…’

‘Why would I get bored?’

What she wants me to say, of course, is that I’ll follow her. And the better part of me wants to agree with this, but the perverse part urges me to say nothing, to withhold any decision, to make no promises, to tell her that if she wants more, then maybe she’d better look elsewhere. But I don’t say this either. I don’t say anything.

She turns so that I see the back of her head in the mirror. ‘I don’t want to play games, Capa.’ There’s a silence. ‘You want to run away like always?’

I try not to blink.

Something brims within her, spills into a wet smile. She’s never seemed so beautiful. ‘I’m scared,’ she says.