Short Stories: Five Decades (88 page)

“Yes,” Beauchurch said, remembering the times he’d been ready to give her up, furious at her hesitations, her incomprehensible fluctuations. Now, after the long marriage, the children, the closely linked lives, they were comprehensible. He wondered if he would have been happier if he’d known, if the marriage would have been better or worse, if he would have behaved differently, loved her more or less. “Why didn’t you tell me then?” he asked.

“It was my problem,” she said. “It was between him and me. Anyway, I didn’t go back. I didn’t tell him anything until the day of the wedding. I sent him a cable. I asked him not to write me. I asked him to forgive me.”

The days of weddings, Beauchurch thought. The brides at telegraph offices.
Forgive me
. Four thousand miles away.
It is over, it is too late.… You were in the hospital too long. Love
. “Well,” he said, being cruel to her and to himself, “do you regret it now?” He remembered the phrase Mestre had used. “You could have spent your time redressing the demographic imbalance of France, as the man said.”

“It’s not too late,” she said flatly. “Even now.” She was angry and she was reacting to the jibe. “If you must know, he still wants to marry me.”

“As of when?”

“As of this afternoon,” she said.

“Four children and all?” Beauchurch said. “To say nothing of his wife and your husband and
your
children.”

“I told him it was absurd,” Ginette said. “We had it all out three years ago.”

“Three years ago?” Beauchurch said. “I thought you said you’d only seen him twice since 1946—yesterday and today.”

“I was lying,” Ginette said, evenly. “Of course I saw him when I was here before. I would have had to be a monster not to see him. I saw him every day.”

“I’m not going to ask you what happened,” Beauchurch said. He stood up. He felt shaken, confused. The light through the ornate lampshades was dusty and melancholy, and his wife’s face, turned away now, was in evening shadow, hidden, unfamiliar. Her voice was cold and distant and devoid of affection. Whatever happened to the holiday? he thought. He went over and poured himself a drink from the bottle on the table near the window. He didn’t ask Ginette if she wanted one. The whiskey bit at his throat.

“Nothing happened,” Ginette said. “I think I would have had an affair with him, if he had asked me.…”

“Why?” Beauchurch asked. “Do you still love him?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know why. Atonement, restitution.… Anyway, he didn’t ask me. It was marriage or nothing, he said. He couldn’t bear losing me again, he said.”

Beauchurch’s hands trembled as he brought the glass to his lips again. A wave of anger toward the man engulfed him, at the arrogance, the egotism, of that permanent, despairing, broken, unwavering love. He put the glass down slowly to keep from throwing it against the wall. He stood immobile, closing his eyes. If he made the slightest movement, he was afraid of what it would lead to. The thought of Mestre and Ginette sitting at café tables during a distant Parisian summer, conferring, cold-bloodedly offering and refusing terms for the looting of his life, was infinitely harder to bear than the thought of their two bodies clasped in bed together. It was less innocent; it lacked the grace and normality of the pardonable weaknesses of the flesh; it ignored, as though they had never existed, the fair claims Beauchurch had established in the years of marriage; it was a conspiracy against him by enemies who were the more hateful because they had never made themselves known to him. If Mestre had been in the room that moment Beauchurch would have gladly killed him. “God damn him,” Beauchurch said. He was surprised at how routine, how calm, his voice sounded. He opened his eyes, looked down at Ginette. If she said the wrong thing now, he felt that he would strike her and leave the room, the country, leave everything, once and for all.

“That’s why I came home two weeks earlier the last time I was here,” Ginette said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I was afraid I’d give in. I ran away.”

“I’d prefer it,” Beauchurch said, “if you said you ran back.”

Ginette turned her head and stared steadily out of the shadows at him. “Yes,” she said, “that’s better. That’s what I mean. I ran back.”

She said the right thing, Beauchurch thought. It took a little coaching, but finally it was the right thing. “And in the future,” he said, “when you come to France, to Paris, are you going to see him again?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose so. How can we escape each other?” She lay in silence for a moment. “Well, there it is,” she said. “The whole story. I should have told you long ago. Now—are you going to help him?”

Beauchurch looked down at her lying on the bed, the bright hair, the small delightful head, the womanly face with the hesitant touches of girlhood still faintly evident there, the slender, warm, well-known, deeply loved body, the long competent hands lying flat on the bedspread, and he knew there would be no violence, no flight that evening. He knew, too, that he was more than ever inextricably entwined with her, with her memories, her wounds, betrayals, her other country, with her foreign dangers, her decisions, agonies, responsibilities, her lies, her commitments to renounced loves. He sat down beside her and leaned over and kissed her forehead gently. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I’ll help the bastard.”

She laughed a little, softly, and brought up her hand and touched his cheek. “We won’t come to Paris again for a long time,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk to him, though,” Beauchurch said, holding her hand against his cheek. “You make all the arrangements.”

“Tomorrow morning,” she said. She sat up. “I sincerely hope that package is for me,” she said.

“It is,” he said. “It is that very thing.”

She swung lightly out of bed and crossed the room, her stockinged feet making no noise on the faded old carpet. She unwrapped the package neatly, folding the paper carefully and making a little skein of the string. “It is just what I wanted,” she said, as she picked up the book and ran her hand over the cover.

“I was going to buy you a diamond,” Beauchurch said. “But I thought it would be crass.”

“What a narrow escape,” she said. She smiled at him. “Now,” she said, “come in and talk to me and give me a drink while I take my bath. Then we’ll go out and have a sinful, expensive dinner. Just you and me.”

Carrying the book, she went into the bathroom. Beauchurch sat on the bed, squinting at the yellowish patterns of the old paint on the opposite wall, measuring his pain and his happiness. After a while he stood up and poured two good drinks and carried the glasses into the bathroom. Ginette was lying deep in the huge old tub, holding the book out of the water, gravely turning the pages. Beauchurch set her glass down on the rim of the tub and sat down on a chair facing her, next to a large, full-length mirror, whose surface, beaded with steam, mistily reflected the marble, the brass, the shining tiles of the warm, out-sized room, shaped for a more spacious age. He sipped at his drink and looked soberly at his wife, stretched out in the shimmering, fragrant water, and knew that the holiday was repaired. More than the holiday. And more than repaired.

Voyage Out, Voyage Home

C
onstance sat impatiently in the little chair in the first-class cabin, taking occasional sips of the champagne that Mark had sent. Mark had been called out of town and hadn’t been able to come, but he’d sent champagne. She didn’t like champagne, but she didn’t know what else to do with it, so she drank it. Her father stood in front of the porthole, drinking, too. From his expression, Constance could guess that he didn’t like champagne either. Or perhaps he didn’t like this particular vintage. Or he didn’t like it because Mark had sent it. Or maybe it wasn’t the champagne at all but just that he was embarrassed.

Constance knew that she was looking sullen, and she tried to change the set of her face, because she also knew that she looked younger, childish, sixteen, seventeen, when she was sullen. She was sure that everything she did with her face at that moment made her look more sullen than ever, and she wished the horn would blow and her father would get off the ship.

“You’ll probably drink a lot of this,” her father said. “In France.”

“I don’t expect to stay in France long,” she said. “I’m going to look for someplace quiet.” Her voice sounded to her as though it were coming out of the nursery, wailing and spiteful and spoiled. She tried to smile at her father. The last few weeks in the apartment, while the argument had been going on and the hostility had been so close to the surface, had been painful to her, and now, in the last ten minutes before the ship pulled away, she wanted to recapture an earlier, easier relationship as far as she could. So she smiled, but she had the impression that the smile was crafty and cold and coquettish. Her father turned around and looked vaguely out the porthole at the covered wharf. It was rainy and there was a cold wind blowing and the men on the dock waiting to throw off the lines looked miserable.

“It’s going to be a choppy night,” her father said. “Have you got the Drama-mine?”

The hostility returned, because he asked about the Dramamine. At a moment like that. “I won’t need Dramamine,” Constance said shortly. She took a long drink of the champagne. The label on the bottle was impeccable, like all Mark’s gifts, but the wine was sourish and acidy.

Her father turned back toward her. He smiled at her, and she thought, bitterly, This is the last time he’s going to get away with patronizing me. He stood there, a robust, confident, healthy, youngish-seeming man, looking privately amused, and Constance thought, How would you like it if I just got out of here and walked off this precious boat—how would you ever like it?

“I envy you,” her father said. “If someone had only sent me to Europe when I was twenty …”

Twenty, twenty, Constance thought. He’s always harping on twenty. “Please, Father, let’s cut that out,” she said. “I’m here and I’m going and it’s all settled, but let’s spare ourselves the envy.”

“Every time I happen to remind you that you’re twenty,” her father said mildly, “you react as though I’d insulted you.”

He smiled, pleased with himself that he was so damned perceptive, that he understood her so well, that he was not one of those fathers whose children slide irrevocably away from them into mysterious, modern depths.

“Let’s not discuss it,” Constance said, pitching her voice low. When she remembered, she always made a point of pitching her voice low. It sometimes made her sound forty years old on the telephone, or like a man.

“Have a great time,” her father said. “Go to all the bright places. And if you decide you want to stay on, just let me know. Maybe I’ll be able to come over and join you for a few weeks—”

“Three months from now,” Constance said crisply, “to this day, I’ll be coming up the harbor.”

“Whatever you say, my dear.”

When he said “my dear,” Constance knew he was humoring her. She couldn’t bear being humored there in the ugly little cabin, with the weather bad outside, and the ship ready to leave, and the sounds of people saying goodbye, laughing loudly, in the next room. If she had been on better terms with her father, she would have cried.

The horn blew for visitors to go ashore, and her father came and kissed her, holding her for an extra second, and she tried to be polite. But when he said, very seriously, “You’ll see—three months from now you’ll thank me for this,” she pushed him back, furious with him for his obnoxious assurance, and mournful at the same time that they, who had been so close to each other, were no longer friends.

“Goodbye,” she said, her voice choked and not pitched low. “The whistle’s blowing. Goodbye.”

He picked up his hat, patted her shoulder, hesitated a moment at the door, looking thoughtful but not disturbed, and went out into the corridor and disappeared among the other visitors who were streaming up toward the gangplank and the shore.

When she was sure her father was off, Constance went up to the boat deck and stood there, alone in the sharp, blowy rain, watching the tugs pull the ship into the stream. As the ship went slowly downriver into the harbor and then headed into open water, she shivered in the wintry air, and, approving of herself a little for the grandeur of the sentiment, thought, I am approaching a continent to which I have no connection.

Constance braced herself against the crossbar of the lift as she approached the mid-point of the hill. She made sure that her skis were firmly in the ruts as she came up onto the flat section of packed snow where there was a short line of skiers who had come down only halfway and were waiting to pick up empty hooks and go back to the top. She always felt a little uncertain here, because if you were alone on one side of the T bar, the first person in the line would swing into place alongside you and there would be an extra, sudden pull as the new weight caught that could throw you off balance. She saw that there was a man waiting for the place next to her, and she concentrated on keeping erect gracefully as he settled into place beside her. He did it smoothly, and they skidded easily past the waiting line. She was conscious that he was looking across at her, but she was too occupied for the moment with the terrain in front of her to turn her head.