Seducing Ingrid Bergman (28 page)

I wait for her to continue the story, but she takes a sip of brandy, stops.

‘That’s very sad,’ I say.

‘It’s a true story.’

‘Have I heard it before?’

‘I didn’t say it was new.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because…’ She inches her foot away from some ache on the table.

‘You’re not sick are you?’

Her eyes make an unvoiced appeal. ‘You don’t need me, Capa.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I’m stronger than you think,’ she says.

I’m about to answer when, following two sharp knocks, the doctor comes in, play-acting an exaggerated shiver. Bits of powdery snow blow in with him. Behind him, a rectangle of whiteness fills the door. He stamps his boots clean, apologizes for not arriving sooner. Straightaway he removes his gloves and bends to examine her ankle. With the look of a man testing the ripeness of an avocado, he begins manipulating her foot.

‘Does that hurt?’

‘Yes,’ she says, trying to smile.

Ingrid watches me over the doctor’s shoulder, betrays nothing of the pain she must feel.

A few minutes later, Petter rushes in. Lovingly he holds Ingrid’s hand and whispers reassuringly to her. He helps set the ankle in a bandage. Medically expert and attentive, he is quick to take control, performing his duties as both husband and doctor.

He doesn’t look at me. It’s as if I’m invisible to him.

I regard the scene as though I were framing a photograph – a portrait of man and wife, a contented couple, with me in the corner of the picture like a flaw.

*   *   *

Ingrid sits upright on her bed, her ankle thickly strapped. The room is warm, her nostrils tickled by the smell of woodsmoke. Alone for the moment, she looks around her at the elegant sparseness of the chalet. The plants on the sill, she sees, are touched with wilt. She becomes mesmerized for a few seconds by the gauzy shadows of leaves as they shuffle themselves on a shapeless moonlit patch on the wall.

At night before sleeping, she likes to read. But lately she finds that she can no longer lose herself in a book. She fails to be entertained or distracted by the characters. For the moment, her own adventures seem more pressing. She is too eager to participate in her own life to be diverted by figures that exist only in print.

She pictures her house in Benedict Canyon, its rooms laid out as in an architectural drawing. And she tries to remember what the place looked like empty when they first moved in. The image disconcerts her in its shapelessness and vacancy, makes her cling to the covers like a woman nearly drowned.

Just imagine having to start over again. The prospect terrifies her, fills her with dread, sends her compass point spinning.

She thinks of her family, the space of their home together – the fruit in the bowls, the books on the shelves, the lamp with its circle of warmth. And she experiences a sudden blind need to touch and feel, to remember each of the things, to make a space for them in her head, so that when they’re no longer there they can be recalled and she can name them and continue to own them remotely, even though materially they may have gone.

She remembers for a moment her old childhood home, the way she kissed the four walls of her bedroom in a kind of blessing the day she and her father finally moved out. She recalls the grainy texture of the plaster against her lips, the unexpected coldness of the bare patches exposed behind the pictures and the mirrors. She remembers being startled by the way the room looked, stripped of all her things. It was so strange, as if she’d never lived there, this house where she’d grown up and learnt to speak, to read and to dream – every trace of her existence, all the nights she’d slept there, suddenly gone. And with the same sense of foreboding, she thinks of the known spaces of her current home with Petter: the furniture accumulated over the years, the shape of the tables, the longer oblongs of the bookshelves downstairs.

As the seconds tick by and the darkness expands, though, something shifts within her. She finds herself excited by the chance to begin afresh, the opportunity to construct something new. For a minute she even considers which of the many books she’d take with her if she did decide to go, contemplates which ones she’d leave behind.

*   *   *

In today’s ski lesson, the instructor tells me to loosen up, to bend my knees and swivel more, leaning my weight into each turn. Don’t resist the fall, he says again. Accept it.

Later, on the slopes, I notice that Petter, when he turns, keeps his legs very straight. He doesn’t crouch enough. I happen to stand next to him for a moment at the top of one of the runs. He brings his skis round sharply.

I tell him that maybe he should bend his knees more. I say it instinctively because it’s something that I’m conscious of and have been told to notice. I don’t say it to annoy him particularly. At least this is not my aim.

Like Ingrid, Petter is an experienced skier, much more accomplished than I am, and he doesn’t take kindly to me giving him advice. It irritates him, I can tell. He just shrugs, looks away and, if anything, stands even straighter. In his eyes, it’s clear I’m just an upstart, a nonentity, someone he can afford to ignore.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t care, but his last patronizing glance makes something inside me trip. Helplessly offensive, I tell him that his wife looks thin and tired. He looks at me, suddenly alert.

‘She needs to extend her vacation,’ I say. A plume of breath issues from my mouth, wholly at odds with the number of words spoken.

He regards me as if I’m witless, insolent. ‘What business is it of yours?’

The diabolical impulse is still in me. ‘She looked much better in Paris.’ After a moment he begins to realize what I might be saying. I swallow a smile. ‘We saw a lot of each other there.’

There follows a silent clatter of calculation, an invisible whirl of information inside his head as he absorbs what I’ve just told him. The clatter ceases. An answer pings in his eyes. He looks at me and knows suddenly, his suspicions urgently confirmed. He understands everything. It all makes sense.

It’s as if you can see events replay themselves inside his mind. Odd recollections come: half gleams and flashes. A thousand-piece puzzle resolves itself, all the bits fitting instantly. It must be apparent to him now. Those moments, half-remembered, when he glimpsed us together at parties, drinking and laughing. The flaw in the corner of the photograph revealed at last.

His mouth falls open. He puts his fist to his chest as if forcing down a tough piece of meat.

He’s probably cursing himself for not realizing sooner. Why did he not see it coming? It seems impossible that he missed it. But how, he must be telling himself, could he ever have guessed? The male population of the world all itching to seduce her and she chooses this chancer, this gypsy with a couple of cameras dangling around his neck. All those leading men he suspected, those suave and moneyed stars, with their peach-melba voices, their hydroplanes and vintage cars, and after all it was none of them. Instead it was me, Capa, with my Contax, my cheap cigarettes and sideways smile.

Even now he must be denying it, telling himself it can’t possibly be true. One look into my eyes, though, and the dark knowledge he sees there is enough to persuade him. You can see it stretch his face, this sudden understanding, see it widen inside him.

Petter is neither obtuse nor stupid. Gone is his frivolity. The air around us grows dense and heavy. The suddenly charged atmosphere can have only one cause. He directs an intense, quizzical gaze at me. I feel his big-eyed, unwavering stare pin me like a butterfly on a plate of glass, and though he tries bravely to contain it, his whole face fills with fury. There is silence for several seconds, filled with the wind and the scattered brilliance of sunlight on the slopes.

*   *   *

Like a crack ramifying through a crystal, the telephone cuts through the silence in my room.

‘He knows,’ Ingrid says.

My heart turns over. ‘How?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘He interrogated me.’

‘How did he react?’

‘How do you think?’

*   *   *

Ingrid picks up a tangerine from a bowl on the table next to her. She digs her thumbnail into its spongy top, creating a fine spray. A sharp citrus smell fills the room.

Petter stands over her, where she sits in a broad wine-coloured chair, her ankle still heavily strapped. The veins in her lids are purple from crying. Motionless, pale, her eyes stare dead ahead. There is something strange in the air between them, something deep and unfathomable. There’s a smell in the room, too, a familiar odour, though for the moment she fails to place it.

Petter’s expression is one of false cheer. His eyes are lit. It is clear that he’s been drinking. There’s a cruelty beneath his bonhomie. The sinews are busily twisting in him, tightening like wires.

‘I didn’t think you liked scandal, Ingrid.’

Her one good foot taps agitatedly. ‘I don’t want a scene.’

His eyes are full of resentful energy. ‘You play enough of them.’ Again that smile, but beneath it the knowledge of the torturer – the persistent viciousness, the clinical sensitivity to the limits of human skin.

Her chin lifts in profile. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she says.

‘You want me to be brave, is that it? You want me to face things?’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Probably.’

‘Pathetic,’ she says.

‘You’re in love with him?’

Yes, she considers, that’s the explanation; that accounts for everything. It’s so simple. Just hearing him utter these words seems to crystallize it for her, sets it straight in her head. She’s almost grateful to Petter for clarifying it like this.

His steel-framed glasses glint in the light. ‘You admit it, then?’

Her heart thumps. Emotions chase themselves across her face. ‘At least he thinks I’m passionate.’

His voice grows small. Something is broken. ‘Why?’ As if torn from him, the energy seems suddenly gone from his body.

She looks off to one side. Spiders of light in her lashes attach themselves stickily to her sight. ‘It’s not something I planned, Petter.’

His fists clench, an aggressive reflex tenses his arms.

She stiffens, feels his eyes upon her. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘You obviously can’t stand me being here.’

Ingrid is careful not to exaggerate, not to deploy the distortions and half-truths that emerge routinely in a quarrel, that are part of the essential arsenal of a row. She wants her words to be measured, her feelings clear, precise. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

She twists the ring on her finger, feels its weight and power, the tight circle of pain it describes. Her voice grows husky, her hair makes a tent around her face. ‘I’m sorry, Petter.’

‘Why couldn’t you just be honest with me and say you wanted an affair?’

‘It’s not really the kind of thing you say, is it?’

‘Why couldn’t you tell me the truth, damn it?’

‘I suppose I was scared.’

‘Of what?’

She feels around carefully for the right words. ‘I thought it might make a difference.’

‘And has it?’

She sees a lampshade tilted at an odd angle and wants desperately to straighten it.

‘Just tell me it’s nothing, and I’ll believe you.’ There’s a pained silence. ‘Do you want me to beg? Is that it? Do you want me to get down on my knees, and beg?’

‘Stop it, Petter.’

He grabs her hand, taking a certain pleasure in hurting her. She permits the gesture, looks away for a moment as if thinking of something else, then just as abruptly snatches back her hand, folding her fingers together in her lap.

‘Can you tell me it’s been worth it, at least?’

Her voice contracts to a whisper. ‘I need more.’

‘And you think he’ll give it to you?’

‘He might.’

The question emerges as a half-laugh. ‘He might?’

Her voice is so thin, it sounds disembodied. ‘It’s all I’ve got.’

‘You’ve got me!’

Ingrid battles silently with herself for several seconds. She doesn’t want to be cruel, but he’s forcing her into it. ‘Suppose I don’t want you.’

This ignites a fury in Petter. A look of concentrated rage transforms his face. An implacable energy takes over, a masculine talent for destructiveness. Hard and hungry like sex, there’s a ferocity in his body.

The room grows unsteady. She imagines a vase knocked from the mantelpiece, a chair overturned, the light fixture swaying. Blood thunders inside her chest. Her eyes averted for a moment, she tenses, braced for a blow that does not come.

Petter walks towards the window, paces back again.

Seeing his eyes, the light drained from them suddenly, she wants to take back her words. She has gone too far. She doesn’t want to hurt him.

‘What about Pia?’ he insists. ‘Have you thought about her?’

‘She’ll blame me,’ she says.

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head for emphasis. ‘She’ll blame herself.’

Ingrid lifts her big eyes, shining. Her heart falls through the silence.

And it dawns on her suddenly what that smell is in the room. It’s the smell of a family decaying – the smell of a husband and wife fighting, with their daughter asleep elsewhere. The smell of fundamental human corruption. It floods the space around her, inundates every surface, fills the room with a dark sweetness that makes her want to gag.

She rises clumsily from her chair, trying not to put too much weight on her damaged ankle. And then without warning, as she limps past Petter in the doorway, she does something neither of them expects: on an impulse she reaches up to kiss him.

He catches a familiar whiff of her perfume, the scent of her hair. Her face becomes blurry at such close range. But the moment, full of tenderness and regret, is over far too quickly. He wants to slow it down, to repeat it, to prepare himself properly. He wants to seize hold of her in this instant, to recover her somehow. Instead she averts her face and pulls away. It’s over in a second. He’s left with his arms open, beckoning, empty. A shiver runs the length of his body and emerges with an involuntary stamp of his foot.