The House of Dreams (33 page)

She touched her hair, the delicate circlet of gold leaves. “It's a coronet of myrtle leaves. I made it myself, modeled on the Macedonians.” She swayed in perfect rhythm to the music, her hips undulating with the liquid grace of a cat. “Dance with me.”

“I don't know how.…”

Vita dragged me into the heart of the crowd. “Just feel the music,” she yelled in my ear, and swung away.

I remember now the drums, the thump of the drums reverberating in my chest, how the swirling masked faces swam before my eyes, and at the heart of it all was her, jiving and swinging, so terribly alive. That is what I remember most about her, how much her name suited her. I had never met anyone like her. “Who are you?”

She stepped closer to me, ran the nail of her index finger over my lips. “I am the poisoned chalice. I am Helen astride the Trojan horse.”

“You're certainly melodramatic.”

“No, this is the bit where you are supposed to say: ‘Of course you are, Vita, quite as lovely as Helen,'” she said, waving her fingers in the air. “You're not terribly good at this, are you?” She tilted her head. “Have I seen you before?”

“I don't think so. I'm just passing through.”

“Oh goody,” she said, and took my hand, pulling me toward the garden. We were breathless by the time we found a quiet dark spot beneath the trees.

“No, really, who are you?” I said again, catching her by her waist.

She pulled off the cascading blond wig and ran her fingers through her dark bobbed hair. “Does it matter?” she said. She backed away from me and slipped the toga from her shoulder. She was naked and lovely, moonlight dancing through the leaves, across her skin. When you look at all the art deco paintings and sculptures of her now, they are alive with that grace.

I'd like to say I seduced her then, but the truth is I was clueless. Vita took charge. She placed my hand on her breast and kissed me. “We could die tomorrow,” she whispered, her lips tracing my jaw beneath the mask, my neck. “I don't want to die without having made love tonight.” I pulled the mask from my face, and in the darkness, my blood coursed with the distant beat of the jazz band, the hypnotic buzz and hum of the cicadas in the grass around us. I felt my whole being contract to my lips as she kissed me, like running the film of a firework exploding in reverse, and then, predictably, in sudden, wonderful release I came the moment she touched me.

“Oh God, I'm sorry, I—”

“Don't apologize.” She laughed softly. “We have all night.” She curled herself around me, skin on skin. “Forget everything. The future doesn't exist tonight, nor the past.…”

“Only memories?”

“They change.” She slid her hand down my stomach. “All that matters now is you, here with me, tonight.”

War is like that for some, you see. It heightens everything, makes you more of what you are, makes you want to do something life affirming, the most natural thing in the world. We were young, and crazy with fear, I think. She was the first woman I had ever been with, and dazzling is the only word for her. When I woke at dawn, I was alone, sleeping on the dew-wet grass with a canopy of leaves above me and a fragile gold coronet placed over my heart.

 

FORTY-FIVE

F
LYING
P
OINT
, L
ONG
I
SLAND

2000

G
ABRIEL

“Gabriel,” Sophie says, “we're running out of time. Tell me about the house where you lived with Vita. Tell me about what happened at the Château d'Oc.”

“It was a magical place, but of course I sold it after the war,” I say to her, and begin to rattle out the same old lies I've told over the years to anyone who was curious enough to delve back that far.

“Stop it. Tell me the truth, Gabriel.”

“I…” Oh God, the truth. The blood is singing hot in my ears, a volcano surging.

*   *   *

The truth is I hated the Château d'Oc. I was terrified the first time I walked up the dirt track to my father's house. There was no paved road in those days, just an earth track cut through the trees, climbing up the mountainside. Someone at the party gave me directions, and at dawn I stumbled off along the driveway lined with burned-out torches. I heard them laugh and say, “My God, Lambert must be pissed.”

It didn't take long to walk there, an hour or so, in spite of my lungs. You have to remember I was an eighteen-year-old boy and all sinew and muscle then. It would take a month of Sundays for me to do that walk now. Each step brought me closer to the village, to the address my mother had written so many times on letters begging for help that I knew it by heart.

All I knew about the house, about my father, was hearsay and gossip. He had run away the moment my mother became pregnant. They were little more than children themselves, so perhaps it's no surprise he ran like a scalded cat. He became a fashionable artist, grew wealthy in the early 1930s, and married some young heiress, Rachel West. She died in a car crash, and he took up with one of his models. His society clients couldn't get enough of his paintings of languid nudes and his flattering portraits of society women with their strings of pearls and greyhounds. Then, he disappeared.

My mother was relentless, though, and finally tracked him down to the Château d'Oc. We never visited, of course. Ignoring her letters was one thing, but I think she couldn't have borne it if he had rejected her face-to-face. I could see its turrets and pink-tiled roofs above the tree line now as I walked, snaking round and round its fortified base, the road coiling in like the track of a labyrinth. I passed rough cottages built into its base, where scrappy, boss-eyed dogs stared at me with their yellow eyes, yawned, and stretched. Beyond a small chapel, I caught my breath. I stood for a while, looking out across the open hills just beginning to tremble with the dawn chorus of birds and crickets, a red sun flaring over distant mountains. I'd imagined this for years, his home, his land. Finally, I was going to meet my father. Sometimes I pictured myself embracing him, sometimes thumping him on my mother's behalf. I'd never expected to feel so uncertain. My footsteps crunched across the stones littering the road. I remember thinking clearly that I had come to the end of my journey. More fool me. It was only just beginning.

*   *   *

A peeling piece of paper was tacked to the gate with a rusted thumbtack. I could just make out the name “Lambert.” I thought the blue gate looked rotten, its paint flaking at my touch. The château wall seemed to grow organically from the hillside, and the gate was flanked by ferns and ivy that brushed my arm. The swollen gate swung open, dragging on the earth beyond, and I hesitated.

That was my moment. The split second that time seemed suspended and gut instinct or my guardian angel told me to walk away. To keep going. To head to Spain, or Marseille, or some other way out. But, what did I do? I shouldered it open, walked straight in, and the trap sprang shut.

Across a courtyard littered with broken chairs and a dried-up fountain, the first person I saw was Vita. She was sitting on the kitchen doorstep, eating a baguette with strawberry jam smeared on her lips. Wasps muzzed around the open jar at her side, and a bowl of black coffee steamed patiently by her ankle. I remember the shock on her face, how her silk flowered robe gaped open and she knocked the coffee over as she ran toward me. The empty white bowl spun on its side.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she whispered, glancing back over her shoulder. She pulled the robe tight and belted it with a scarlet sash. “I couldn't believe it when I woke up and saw your face. Christ, what a mess. What a ghastly, hideous mess. He'll kill you if—”

“Can I help you?” A man leaned in the kitchen doorway, a burgundy paisley robe doing little to conceal his nakedness. His hair was wet from the bath, and he looked at me with pale, myopic eyes. I recognized him from the party—the faun with the camera. A smear of green still edged his jawline. Was this him? The man I had hated and loved my whole life?

“I'm looking for Lambert,” I said. There was a strange expression on Vita's face, something I couldn't place.

“Are you indeed?” The man sauntered over. “Well, I'm Alistair Quimby, his dealer. Any business you have with Monsieur Lambert, you can discuss with me.” He pulled a lorgnette from his pocket and grimaced as he settled it on his nose. He stopped short. “Good God,” he said, and stepped closer to me. I recoiled as he paced around me, felt his gaze snaking from my ankles up to my face. He pursed his lips in amusement. “Let me guess.”

“I believe he is my father.”

“Do you? Well, you wouldn't be the first one, lovey, but we've never seen one quite as good as you before, have we, Vita? This divine creature is Lambert's muse,” he said, waving a pale hand in her direction. He looked me over one more time as if he were inspecting a prize bull, then beckoned me to follow him into the house and walked away.

“Go. Go now,” Vita said under her breath, and pushed me away. “I never would have spent the night with you if I'd known who you are.”

“I don't care,” I said, my heart already full of desperate longing for her. “I don't care if you're married to this Quimby fellow.”

Vita gasped out a short laugh, little more than a breath. “I'm not married to
him
. I'm with Lambert, you fool.” She looked up at me in the dawn light as the sun rose over the dark bulk of the château's walls and struck me. She raised her hand, shielded her eyes. “It's incredible.”

“What's your name?” Quimby called.

“Gabriel Lambert,” I said.

“Ha. Of course it is.” He turned to me. “And your mother is…?”

I told him, and that she had died recently.

“Condolences,” he said without much conviction, and clapped his hands. “Well, Gabriel Lambert, prepare to meet your father.”

*   *   *

The first thing I noticed about the house was the smell. Even now, when the calibration of mothballs, dust, cigars, and garlic is just so, I go time traveling back to that old château on the hill. The second thing was how dark the house was. The windows were little more than glazed arrow slits, cut into the walls of the château, so deep a man's arm could barely reach the glass. Clearly there was no housekeeper. The frames of the engravings hung in the entrance lobby were thick with dust, untouched for years.

The kitchen was clean enough—whitewashed stone walls, a long scrubbed pine table with benches either side, and a high-backed settle hard up against the open fire, which was lit and dancing even at this hour. Above the table, a Bec Auer gaslight shed its greenish glow. “I'll make some more coffee,” Vita said, and stalked off toward the scullery, swinging a metal kettle in her hand to pump some water.

“Follow me, young man,” Quimby said, his pale finger dancing over his burgundy shoulder like a maggot on a steak. Out in the hallway was where it started to get a little crazy. Kilims littered the large flagstones, slipping beneath my feet as I walked after him. Every wall was hung with African masks: beady, glassy eyes and gaping mouths with ivory teeth everywhere I looked. Every tabletop was piled with yellowed journals and papers. “Lambert is quite the collector, as you can see,” he said airily. “Primitive art has been a great inspiration to him.” I glanced down a curving flight of stone steps.

“What's down there? The dungeons?” I thought of the old woman who babysat me at night when my mother was working. She told me once that in the old stories, the monster is always driven out. Our Minotaurs and Calibans live alone in their labyrinths on the edge of town.

“Once upon a time. Now Vita has her studio down there. She says it's ‘womblike.'” He turned to me. “Frankly it gives me the willies.” He brushed some dust from the shoulder of my jacket and flattened down my collar. Close to, he smelled sour. His breath was stale with cigarettes, and his lips were chapped and stained from too much red wine the night before. His eyes were cold as a pike's as he smiled, and his yellow pointed teeth reminded me of the horns he had worn to the party. “Smarten yourself up a bit, old boy. Lambert still cares about appearances in spite of everything.”

In spite of everything?
I wondered what he meant, but as we passed an old gilded mirror glimmering darkly above the open fire in the hallway, I paused and smoothed down my hair. I hadn't shaved for weeks, and the dark beard made me a stranger to myself. The silvering on the old mirror had worn away at the back, and I had to weave my head around to find a patch that did not show only a partial reflection.

“Come on, you'll do.”

I followed him upstairs and craned my neck to look up at the wide spiral of mahogany banisters disappearing into the darkness of the house like a nautilus shell.

“Most of the château is closed up,” Quimby said, padding noiselessly up the stone steps ahead of me in his purple Moroccan slippers. “It's hard to keep these old places going without staff.” We reached the first landing. “Right. Wait here. I'll go and wake him.” He knocked softly on the double doors at the heart of the landing and opened the door. A draft of warm air breathed across the landing like a sigh, sickly and sweet.

I remember pacing the landing for some time. I could hear Vita knocking around in the kitchen downstairs, the crackling of the fire in the hallway below, and, from within the room, the rise and fall of male voices. I remember thinking it strange that you couldn't hear any clocks ticking. Houses like that always have a few longcase clocks knocking around, marking off the hours. It was like time stopped. I don't know what I was expecting—sure, part of me hoped my father would walk out of his bedroom, bleary with sleep but delighted to discover he had a son. For a moment, I let myself imagine some guy embracing me, holding me at arm's length, exclaiming, “Well, I never!” The bedroom door opened again, and I heard Quimby say: