The Keeper of the Walls (26 page)

“If this is what you want.”

Slowly, Lily put her fingers on Mark's face, and forced him to look at her. She said: “Mark. For the sake of my children. And ... of the child that hasn't been born yet. Think a little, Mark. I wouldn't ever want my children to be rejected.”

At that moment, Misha, against his better judgment, entered the room. He stood, very white, like a magnificent intruder on a very private scene. Lily's hands fell from Mark's face, and she began to tremble. Misha said, matter-of-factly: “Hello, MacDonald. Care for a drink?”

“It's all right, your Excellency,” Mark replied, extending his hand. “I just dropped in on Lily ... to see how she was. I have to leave now.”

“Won't you stay for dinner? I'm sure Lily would be delighted.”

“No, thank you. I really must be going.”

The two men shook hands. Lily stared at them, frozen, her heart thumping. How long had Misha been listening? And he was so pale, so quiet. She'd never seen him like this. When Mark left the room, she realized that she was filled with terror. She stood like a statue, unmoving, no words coming to her. Finally, Misha asked: “Why was he here, Lily?”

“To drop off a package.”

“What package? A present, maybe?”

She shook her head, bewildered. “No. Just some things I'd bought for the children.”

“And tell me, however did Mark MacDonald happen to have these items in his possession?”

“I—I had coffee with him, yesterday. And—I forgot the package on the chair of the café.”

“You had coffee with Mark, yesterday? Why didn't you tell me?”

His green eyes were like cold marbles, without feeling. Her mouth fell open. “I—”

He came up to her then, and stood very close, towering over her. In a still, hard voice, he asked: “And for how many weeks, months, years, have you been meeting Mr. MacDonald?”

Then he
hadn't
heard. He'd only
seen
them, together. A flood of relief washed over her. She put her hand on Misha's shoulder, laughed hesitantly. “I've never met him. I hadn't seen or heard from him since before we were married. But yesterday, on the street, we ran into each other. And so we stopped for a quick
café express,
and I forgot the package.”

With a vehemence that she didn't expect, he pushed her savagely away from him. She fell back, caught herself on the back of a chair, stared at him with disbelief and naked fear. “Misha—”

He grasped her arm, twisted it until she writhed in pain, then let it fall. “You goddamned liar,” he said in a dead voice. “Get out of my sight!”

Terrified, she ran from the room, blinded by her tears.

S
he hadn't moved
since the terrible confrontation in the study. She sat on her bed, silent tears falling and falling over her cheeks, her body shaking. What had gone so wrong? He'd called her a liar. Then, he really believed she'd been . . . with Mark. It didn't make any sense. He should have known she'd never be unfaithful. He knew
her.

Misha had always been so gentle, so protective. Yet hours ago he'd been brutal and ugly. He'd been unfair. Lily wanted to run away from the house, to go to the safety of the Ritz, where Claire would be having a quiet dinner with Jacques—

But she couldn't leave the house, because her children were there, asleep.

The doorknob moved, silently, and she sat, mesmerized, staring at it. The door opened. Misha, his eyes bloodshot, entered the room. Instinctively, she recoiled on the bed.

“It's all right,” he said, in an unusual, singsong voice, blurred a little by alcohol. And he sat down beside her. “I'm sorry I was rough with you, Lily.”

She said, blushing: “But I told you the truth. Mark only came here to return a package. Our story ended years ago—and you know I was never really in love with him. He was always . . . just a dear friend.”

“Relationships change. He's a clean-cut, attractive young man. Why shouldn't you have liked him?”

She stammered: “But—I told you! I never liked him—as a man.”

“Then why did you ever become engaged?”

She turned away. “Because Claude told me that
you
were already married.”

“And . . . this time?”

“But, Misha, there is no ‘this time.' I hadn't seen him in four years!
You must believe me!”

Now his features set in the same ugly expression that had so frightened her in the study. His green eyes seemed unfocused, his complexion too ruddy. Cords stood out on his neck. He seemed a man unhinged, and the nameless panic of the hunted animal seized Lily, paralyzing her on the bed.

Leaning forward, his voice rose a pitch, and he cried out: “But I
don't
believe you! I
heard
you! You're going to have
his baby,
Liliane. You slept with another man, and now you're carrying his child, wanting to pass it off as one of mine. Oh, God, God—why did you have to turn into a slut, like all the others? Why
you,
the only woman I ever loved?”

Her mouth fell open. In her shock, and disbelief of what she had just heard, she found no words to answer him. And then, to her mounting horror and amazement, she saw him sag against one of the posters of the bed, and, leaning his forehead against his arm, begin to sob.

Trembling uncontrollably, Lily stared at him, incapable of reacting. This had to be a nightmare. Things like this didn't happen. She recalled, in vivid images, some of her father's rages. They had been rainstorms compared to this tempest, which had ravaged her simple life and ripped it to pieces. Misha stood and sobbed, great racking sobs that sounded as savage as his accusing words, each a small sword thrust at their marriage. But she couldn't, wouldn't, go to him. There were some things even she couldn't see forgiving, couldn't see explaining. How he could have
thought,
for a split second, that she could have betrayed her vows, betrayed not only him but herself, and then tried to pass off another man's baby as her husband's—this was beyond forgiveness! She, who had always refused to hear echoes of gossip about other women in his life, who had loved him more than mother, son, daughter, and God!

“Yes,” she said, her voice harsh and angry: “I'm going to have another child. But not in this house. I'm going to take Nicky and Kira to my mother's, tomorrow!”

Slowly, his large, leonine head raised itself from his arm. There were ugly seams in his cheeks, and a dull flatness to his eyes. Remnants of tears clung absurdly to the pinpricks of his beard. She met his stare with one of her own, defiant now.

“You aren't going anywhere with Nicky and Kira,” he simply declared, no emotion at all in his voice.

“I'll go where I want to with my children. I'm their mother!”

“You're their
unfit
mother. And I think you'll see it my way, Lily: whatever you've done, you still love them both enough to wish to spare them an ugly scandal. I'll demolish you, and ruin Mark MacDonald—and you know I can, and will.
If
you try to leave this house with my son and daughter.”

She sat on the bed, shaking her head like a puppet: No, no! But no words came out, no cry, not even tears. She simply couldn't stop the shaking of her head like a mad puppet on a wild, uncontrolled string.

“And one more thing,” he said to her, swaying a little as he drew himself up to his full height. His pupils had shrunk to the tiniest of points in his irises. “You'll go with me to a woman tomorrow, to have this pregnancy taken care of. I want to live in a clean house, do you hear me?”

All at once she found her voice, in a great, resounding shout: “
No!
”

He sighed, and pressed weary fingers to the bridge of his nose. “You'll just have to balance this against the children,” he told her. “Just as we both will have to live with this marriage. For the sake of Nicky, and Kirotchka.”

He turned the doorknob, and was outside before she could jump off the bed and do something, anything, to stop the nightmare. And so she stood, shivering, in the tasteful bedroom hung with raw silk, that denied, in its quiet decorum, that anything uncivilized had ever threatened the denizens of this household.

M
isha paced the floor
, fully dressed, his face flushed with perspiration. On the mantelpiece, the delicate Louis XVI ormolu clock, adorned with carved cupids, sat pitilessly ticking off the minutes of his life, irretrievable minutes that he felt dropping away inside his very body. He pulled at his stiff collar, drew it off, and tossed it down on the bed.

Never before had he been forced to examine his life with such unforgiving scrutiny. Misha found that tears, unexpected and unwelcome, were swelling his eyes. He'd felt secure with Lily, knowing that with the infinity of her love, she would always shield him, make him the center of her existence without, like Vava, giving him cause to worry that she would leave him when the passions of her tempestuous libido would sway her to a new and more exciting partner. This was why, when he'd come upon her holding Mark's face, when he'd seen her eyes, so wide and filled with unabashed supplication, he'd felt doubly betrayed. She'd betrayed him once, as his wife; and twice, as the human being in this world he'd come closest to giving the key to his heart's emotions.

But I didn't hear everything, he thought. And afterward, she'd seemed so sincere, so like the Lily he had always known. But all women, when it came to their self-preservation, were born dissemblers. Lily wasn't stupid. She would have known just how to sound convincing . . . just how to bring him back to her.

How could he know if Lily had lied?

He remembered what she'd said, about Mark MacDonald. That she'd agreed to marry him, four years ago, because he, Misha, had disappointed her expectations. That's what it had amounted to, anyway. His kind, sweet Lily had actually admitted that she'd consciously
used
a man, another human being. She'd come to a man she hadn't loved, Mark MacDonald, to soothe her own broken heart, to heal her own wounds. This didn't say much for Lily, then.

Or maybe this had also been a lie. He tried to recall the first time he'd taken her, in the prairie near the little chapel, in the Loire valley. She'd behaved exactly like a virgin. But, of course, these last four years he hadn't been with any virgins, and it was possible she'd fooled him. Maybe she'd loved MacDonald, and left him for reasons of her own. Maybe she'd listened to her father and brother, and decided that she'd have a better life as Princess Brasilova than as Mrs. Mark MacDonald.
Still loving Mark.

And if she'd
loved
the American novelist, that love might well have carried through into the years of her marriage to him, Misha. He sat down, uttering a sound of anguish as he envisioned them together, meeting time after time in small cafés . . . like yesterday. She must have been terribly agitated to forget her parcel, he thought.

Anger, outrage, and self-pity constricted his throat, and he could feel the blood vessels stretching. Of course she'd been beside herself.
She'd had to tell Mark about the baby!
And he had come today. Why? To clear things up? “. . . you'll have to break the news to Misha.”

I could still be wrong, he told himself. Maybe this is all circumstantial evidence stacked against her. But he'd seen her face. He'd seen how she had looked at Mark MacDonald: her whole life in her eyes, pleading. For what?

Misha hunched over on the bed, his hands falling limply between his legs. He thought: I am a pathetic animal, whimpering pitifully in the night.

All right, then. He had, after all, no real, tangible proof. She wanted this child. But the question would always remain: Whose child was it? And so he had to ensure that the question would never come up again, that the memory of this traumatic night never be brought out again.