In her eleven years as translator of French and German manuscripts for Mr Jenner’s family firm, Leda had come to be respected as an artist who worked on her own schedule. She and Mr Melville Jenner had a mutually accommodating relationship. He tactfully ignored her on judgements involving dollars and cents but he was in no doubt about her value to his business. Few people had her concentration. She had appeared in his office a girl not yet twenty with fine brown moleskin hair, fine pale skin and finely formed features, no one you would notice but for her air of permanent panic. It had never stopped reminding him of wildlife fleeing for cover. During her first year at Jenner’s he had frequently found her at work during the lunch hour, her unwrapped uneaten sandwich reposing on a pile of manuscript pages beside her. He had insisted she take the afternoon off, spend it in Central Park. Once he had advised fish liver capsules.
Mr Jenner was a silver-haired Bostonian who cultivated a manner to match and Leda felt rested in his company. He was a graceful sight when he turned his revolving chair a quarter sideways, extended his elegant legs and held his tapering fingers tip to tip beneath his chin. In this ruminating posture he inhabited the timeless zone of the books he published. He specialized in journeys to the far unknown that were no better known at the end of the journey. One she had translated before the war narrated a Bavarian countess’ progress through undulating vistas of desert accompanied by hawk-eyed hawk-nosed servants, camels, tents and cooking gear that materialized goat paprika and green almond mousse for moonlit repasts on the sands. At Leda’s suggestion that the journey be more fact specific, Mr Jenner had demurred over his fingertips. The harsher sights, and indeed sites, need a softer lens, he had said. That aura of dream-like progress through a desert would dissolve at a heavier touch and would lose the special stamp of a Jenner book. Readers did not want to confuse there with here. The Map of the World facing his satin-wood desk admirably preserved the distinction. Early medieval Europe floated in unnamed seas surrounded by blank lands lettered Peopled by Monsters.
For the mood of romance, Mr Jenner maintained, a formality had to be preserved. And come to think of it, Leda, didn’t that rule apply to our modern lives here as well? Europe’s pastmasters at it had understood its worth. Verdi, for example, used to kiss his wife’s hand even if he was taking leave of her for no more than an hour’s stroll. Had it not been for the touch of Boston ice in Mr Jenner’s veins when it came to finance, and the hearty mid-western wife she couldn’t imagine putting up with hand-kissing, Leda might well have concluded he was a man for whom the day does not end, it takes blue-grey flight.
His grandfather, Jeremiah Jenner, a ruggeder character to judge by his high colour and black-whiskered jowls, had established the printing and publishing works some sixty years after the first American clipper set sail from New England to the China coast in 1784. He had been so intrigued by the images it brought thronging to his mind that he had adopted it as his logo and made a name for himself with harrowing, harrowingly illustrated sagas of bygone land and ocean travels. The only one Leda had read had been a sea voyage recording the unspeakable trials and terrors of navigating an uncharted sea by the path of a star. Its awesome veracity included a fairy tale ending: the dungeon and starvation for the navigator, treasure for the king.
After Jeremiah’s death and the firm’s relocation from Boston to New York, the thirst for exploration and raw adventure had got watered down and the present Mr Jenner had recast the travel genre to specialize in allure. His infallible instinct told him this was the surefire prescription for our own day and age. Leda knew it was illogical of her to harp on realism when the lack of it had made Jenner’s the sanctuary it had proved to be, enabling her, among other blessings, to shelter from English. For a year after cutting short her university career Leda had recoiled from the sound of English, whatever its accent or inflection. Her tongue had stumbled over it. English had been a mouthful of stones, the savage tongue of savages, made tolerable only by the presence beside it of the language she was translating.
Her problem once she settled into Jenner’s was how to spend the time outside work in ways that would lead her as surely into some form of oblivion. She joined a cooking class she had seen advertised, conducted by a White Russian with courtly credentials. It proved ideally suited to Leda’s requirement. In the calm of her cathedral-windowed kitchen Madame Ivanovna’s introductory lesson called for an attitude of devotion as the ambience vital to the preparation of memorable food. She asked her class to consider what this could do for the humble egg. What it had done was inspire the great and only sauce, invented by the Order of St. Benedict founded in the year 530, whose monks had vowed to abstain from laughter and the natural appetites. Their cloistered dedication had created a succession of soul-melting flavours in their monasteries crowned by Benedictine, the supreme liqueur. Madame then proceeded prayerfully to Eggs Benedict.
In a simpler second lesson, she broke twelve eggs into an enormous pottery bowl. Patiently whipped to a foaming haze and folded into a pound of powdered walnuts they baked into a traditional Græ co-Russian festival cake. A syrup of fresh lemons, confectioner’s sugar and a light sprinkling of brandy had then to be concocted and drizzled drop by drop into it when it cooled.
Leda’s new friend and neighbour in Greenwich Village, Rosa Mongini, who was a terrible cook and had hoped to improve her skills for the doting Mr Mongini, had given up and quit the course after Gateau Marie Louise. But Leda stayed on, learning to sauté oysters in fresh roasted butter, to disguise the potato with clotted cream and cognac and to fashion the myriad papery leaves of millefeuilles. To her Græco-Russian and French repertoire Madame Ivanovna added her own ingenious innovations, introducing her class to seaweed and saffron, juniper, stem ginger and coriander, infant lamb and aromatic broths.
The course banished anxiety from Leda’s conscious mind. The foaming castles of Madame Ivanovna’s egg yolks, the apricot and aniseed liqueurs, the oils of rare nuts and unidentifiable ambrosial ingredients of her creations removed them from any connection with food on earth to the stratosphere of what a diva and her lover might enjoy at midnight after a taxing Aïda. And not long after the course ended Leda had the good fortune to hear about a lecture series that served the same drugging purpose.
‘The extra-natural force called astral light is said to be responsible for magic and thaumaturgy and is the agent for mystical experience,’ spoke Dr Zoerner through the pitch dark, directing his pointer and his trim pointed beard to the bluish blur emanating from the skull on the coloured slide. His illustrated presentations on the new orientation that would now be required of human thought if it was to comprehend works of wonder and the phenomenon of miracles, released Leda. from herself as effectively as the egg yolks and liqueurs.
‘In the religion of ancient Egypt,’ lectured Dr Zoerner, always in the half-dark, ‘the heart is weighed in the Hall of Osiris and if the soul is found worthy it is conducted to the meadows of Paradise …’
She could find nothing to replace the slumbrous peace of the lectures but a visit to the Metropolitan Museum one holiday proved unexpectedly soothing. After that she kept in touch with the Metropolitan, moving idly through rooms of bland blonde madonnas, flowery grasses and sun-dappled water.
Coming downstairs one day she took a wrong turning into a dim corridor lined with monolithic statuary, massive sarcophagi and winged human-headed bulls. At its far end, a flat-headed colossus crouched with its long stone arms draped around its knees. Terror threatened to engulf and paralyse Leda. She got through the corridor with her eyes glued to the ground only to come out into a vast high room of towering Pharoahs and their catfaced queens. She never knew what effort of will propelled her through it to arrive at last at the top of the Metropolitan’s steps. Taxis, buses and pedestrians moved reassuringly up and down Fifth Avenue. Go home, voices counselled, as though she had any other thought or destination in her head. There are safe precise limits set by the skin-cages we live within. Don’t venture.
Later she had seen no need to give up her art education which she was enjoying. Mentally marking the frontiers on the room diagrams beyond which she must not stray, she had continued her occasional visits.
With fewer manuscripts coming in since the war Leda was using the time to learn Russian at the Berlitz School. Her adaptability to yet another language came as no surprise, nor the ease with which the glottal Slavic felt at home in her gullet. Edgar’s Czech friend Milo’s comings and goings gave her practice in both French and Russian. This time he was here from London for talks in Washington about American defence equipment being earmarked for the Czech and Polish armies in Russia and he had grumbled on the telephone in a voice that fitted his size about the strategists’ catastrophic slowness to move on Europe’s bloodily embattled eastern front.
‘So what would you like to do this evening, sweet Leda?’
‘Let’s go to Oklahoma,’ she suggested, knowing he would have no trouble getting tickets.
A charming musical, I hear. Farm boys and girls leap through the air scattering the chickens and the ducks and sing upliftingly of wheat and corn in the best Soviet style. Forget these entertainments for children, Leda. They take a toll of the nerves. You need an evening out. Allow me.’
On his last trip he had taken her to the midnight-blue gold-curtained dining room of the Stork Club where they had eaten pheasant, the most expensive item on the menu at an exorbitant seven dollars fifty a serving. The ladies’ room, too, was Never Land. The toilet seat was said to be sanitized and sterilized by violet ray attachments. The mirror light had given Leda the chalky face of Chen Yu lipstick ads. She had re-reddened her mouth, printed it on lavender tisssue and taken thankful leave of her reflection.
This time his choice was the Copacabana where they were ushered to a privileged table customarily reserved for him. Apparently he was a habitué. But so, he explained, was he at the Diamond Horseshoe and El Morocco. He relaxed in nightclubs. His mother had got him used to the cosy smoky dark, the rosy lights, the bow trailing off violin strings, when he was a small boy. Fashionable night life in Prague had been the perfect setting for his gay irresistible mother and the gallants who escorted her ….
‘How many men at a time did your mother date?’
Milo shrugged his powerful shoulders.
‘As the spirit moved her, sweet Leda. Two by two is sacred only here in these United States. A hangover from the Ark. In Czechoslovakia we were not so regimented. My father was a very busy man and a woman must have adorers. Now let us have the national drink,’ he said and ordered lethal cocktails.
The floor show had a Latin singer whose volatile hips were swathed in layered ruffles. She had a pile of tropical fruit for a headdress. She joined them after her act minus the fruit. Lean, brown and lustrous at dose quarters she kept throwing her head back in a lioness’ laugh to match her leonine slenderness and her gilded terracotta skin, crying ‘Oh that is droll!’ at Milo’s pedantic remarks. Her brown fingers absently stroked the pink puckered skin of Milo’s right hand while her dark eyes regarded Leda with astonished pity. Then she forgot Leda and laughed herself into streaming tears at his stories of the hostesses he had suffered as a junior diplomat in Washington between the wars. Instead of introducing him as Third Secretary they had hailed him as Thomas C. Masaryk’s uncle’s second cousin’s son, at the end of which scarlet embarrassment he hadn’t known whether he was his own uncle or his mother’s second cousin. When Czechoslovakia began to be overrun by brute force he had refused to indulge the American insistence on information, retreating into ‘As matters stand, I do not know precisely who I am.’ But this had only captivated hostesses and brought him still more invitations. Leda knew from Edgar that Milo’s smashed fingers were the bequest of Sudetenlander Brown Shirts who had plundered and set fire to the houses of the Prague government’s supporters in 1938, rounded up resisters at bayonet point and beaten them up. Milo himself never referred to the incident and a hostess who pressed for facts had been told with a dismissive wave of his mutilated hand that a nod here triggered a bullet there. ‘I want you to meet this man, Senator,’ he heard her say to her guest of honour, ‘he surely is a living saint.’
Milo’s and the lioness’ knives sliced sharply into noisettes of lamb, leaving pools of pale pink grease in their plates. Leda’s went slower.
‘She’s a dreamer, our Leda,’ Milo told the lioness with the tenderness of a man whose patron saints, if he had had any, would have been ill-treated women and neglected children, ‘she collects fairy tales. Myself, I do not care for the genre. I have spent too many years disentangling Czechoslovakia from fairy tale castles, aristocratic ancestors, chandeliered feasts and horse-drawn sleighs bearing aristocrats to the next chandeliered feast.’
It had been incredibly difficult, he said, getting hostesses to see a foreigner as an ordinary person who might be closer to horse than ancestor.
Leda bestirred herself to seem alive. It was the least she could do by way of return for love of Edgar and for Milo’s loving munificence.
‘I don’t know why we Americans treat foreigners like freaks,’ she mustered.
But the hilarious lioness and Milo were well into a joke she had missed while she was still surfacing from fierce plum brandy.
She set about understanding abstract art, its dots and dashes, cubes and hexagons, entire canvases of curlicues. With no idea how to decipher its hieroglyphics she surveyed it from far back and close. She was alone in the roomful of abstractions squinting at what looked like spilled pink paint, except for the man on the circular seat in the middle of the room, when his stifled laugh made her swing round. He was greying-haired, immensely at his lounging ease and no longer able to control his mirth. He apologised for his rudeness and to make up for it invited her to join him for refreshment — his formal way of putting it — in the museum’s caféteria. Over glasses of iced tea he said she had reminded him of a tourist he had seen in Mexico trying to samba. The lady believed she was achieving the authentic Latin touch by jerking her head like a marionette over her left, then her right shoulder with every backward kick.
‘She looked a bit like you. Was it you?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Leda tartly, ‘I’ve never even been to Mexico. And I was just trying to figure out those paintings.’
‘The process need not be so acrobatic,’ he assured her. ‘You can survey art comfortably from a chair.’
His amused clinical detachment put her at her ease. So did the fact that he was an artist, a species she had never yet encountered and therefore could have hopes of. He lived, like herself, in the Village and they took the bus downtown together, getting off at Eighth Street where he had a studio at the end of Macdougall Alley. They crossed a raised ledge into a walled garden strewn with sculpture, walked up a paved path into a straw-matted, sparsely-furnished interior and out again to sit on stone stools with lemonade, talking until dark. Leda confessed the Pharoahs and their tombs had reduced her to craven terror. He said stone could do that. He knew an Inca staircase whose steps weighed a hundred pounds each. But why go far or far back for an example when there were street corners in New York where if one made the mistake of looking up, one’s eyes collided with a mile of menacing architecture poised as if to strike.
Leda took to dropping in at his studio. She liked to sit and watch him folded into deep abstraction as he contemplated a slab of stone, while she worked on a translation. When she began modelling for him they were closeted for hours at a time within the priestlike discipline of his art. No newcomer to solitude herself she had never dreamed it could be shared. She slipped painlessly into his circle of friends whose assorted nationalities — French, Austrian, Chilean, Mexican and others — were the setting she would have chosen, but had never yet found for herself. It was a company the war had flung together, invigorating in its disregard of breed or border. These were people whose religion was line and mass and colour, whose curious untaintedness in this regard made the freedom of their talk a discourse between the civilized and the civilized. The fact that she spoke some of their languages and her acute ear picked up smatterings of others gave her a status of her own in their enchanted circle. She had never heard herself so uninhibitedly articulate in all her tongues. After a time she knew this was where she belonged and must stay.
Desmond called from Brookham — another planet — and groused goodnaturedly about how long it was since she had been home for a weekend.
Desmond stood back to admire the wooden steps he had fitted to his back porch and dipped his brush in paint, mellow in anticipation of Leda’s visit. Mellow, too, in his lobster count, ninety succulent beauties this season. He had distributed them among his friends and given a record number of lobster suppers. Same menu. Martinis. Lobster. Best food there was, seafood. Best brainfood, too, if Leda’s aptitude for languages was any indication. Her high school French teacher had asked if Leda had any French blood. Desmond had guaranteed there was no French blood in his older brother’s grandchildren whom he had brought up because their mother (his niece) had died at Leda’s birth and their father in 1917, saving the Italians from the Germans. He had boasted about her linguistic ability until she went to university down south and majored in French and German. It didn’t seem natural for a born and bred New Englander. He didn’t have any idea why she didn’t go back to university after her first year but she joined a language school nearby. That was when he began to be plagued by nightmares in which Leda went crazy. It was what a traffic block of languages could do to a brain. Leda had assured him Europeans took several languages for granted. And there was no bigger mess than the one Europeans had made out of Europe, Desmond had wanted to say, and now were making it all over again.
He had to admit Leda was earning a living out of her languages. Edgar was making healthy money too but neither of his brother’s grandchildren were like other people. Edgar roamed the world, restless as a drunken monkey. Leda, a spinster past thirty, looked like translating manuscripts and collecting fairy tales for the rest of her life. Edgar’s smitten brand of politics got translated into Leda’s fairy tales and vice versa. But Edgar was a man and would look after himself. It was Leda he worried about, fearing she would go manless to her grave. There was no man around her that he could see except the Czechoslovakian who was more absent than present. Desmond dropped his nagging remarks about her spinsterhood more out of habit than conviction, and as time passed, with the diminishing certitude of the court of the Virgin Queen. But hell, the court at least had known the feisty Virgin enjoyed a slap and a tickle on into her dotage, hired and fired her boyfriends, and had so many of ‘em she could afford to behead the boys who barged in and caught her bald-headed without her wig or makeup. Hey, Leda, he would call over the noise of the lawn mower, why didn’t you bring that Checko-slo-vakian frienda yours and Edgar’s down again. Dammit, he would shake his handsome white head in utter perplexity, Leda’s not getting any fun out of life, and he would fix his bewildered gaze on his ageing child, his sleeping spinster. Leda’s manless status was acquiring, for him, the pedestal and propriety of Queen Victoria’s endless widowhood instead of the sexy bawdy Virgin Queen he would have much preferred her to be.
Leda and Edgar had come here together before Edgar went abroad again on an assignment, and as usual he had called on Florence Burns, the old divorcée across the road, come home and carried on about her mysterious aura — aided and abetted by a devoutly attentive Leda. Desmond was plainly staggered.
‘You talkin’ about that antiquated Peter Pan? I don’t know what you’re going on about.’
‘Of course, you don’t Des,’ Leda soothed, helping him to lay the table for supper on the porch.
Edgar said Florence Burns had told him she attributed her chiselled beauty to having been conceived in a hand-carved bed in Florence, Italy, and that was how she got her name. Why this ageless enchantress had decided to settle in this dull little suburb of Boston Edgar couldn’t imagine but Desmond should rejoice he had Diane de Poitiers living just over the road and get to know her. Desmond rejected this out of hand.
‘She’s gone all quaint and English and planted a hedge nobody else in Brookham wants,’ he said dourly. ‘She could be dead by the time it’s grown. She’s got nothing better to do now that the war has grounded her and she can’t go jaunting off to Europe.’
The brother and sister were paying him no attention. Edgar was toasting Florence Burnses left eyebrow and decreeing her descended from a rose that had bloomed in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and been Nebuchadnezzar’s favourite wife’s favourite flower. Leda was inventing a diet of rose water, rose pudding and rose wine for the old gal.
When Leda came to Brookham this time they were invited to lunch by Florence Burns. If she wasn’t settled in after all these years, she was never going to be, was Desmond’s reaction as he and Leda walked in. There were flowers in the garden but she’d stuck a bunch of dried up brown twigs in a vase on the hall table. There was zero on the hall floor and just floor again, a mile of it, in the living room. The oriental rug was up on a wall. Her sort must need more than a few years and a platoon of unpackers and decorators to hang a picture. They hadn’t advised her about a colour scheme either. There wasn’t any. The drapes looked like smoke had drifted in and she’d hung it. Then he saw one bit of decoration if you could call it that, a wire contraption suspended from the ceiling with coloured doodads dangling from it, turning and unturning in the breeze.
‘It must be bare for your taste, Mr Guthrie,’ said Florence Burns, ‘but I was in Japan once? I love their idea of leaving space empty. Besides I’ve got all the decoration I need out there.’
The living room which was at the back of the house instead of the front had a dense forest up against its glass wall, old gnarled trees whose roots must be buried man-deep, soaring young ones, wild plants madly throwing shoots. She’d be looking at snow-shrouded skeletons all winter but maybe the southern mansion she came from hadn’t heard about snow. In a voice like fur being stroked and pleasurably stretching every syllable to make two she invited him and Leda to help themselves to a drink. He was dismayed to be told nobody else was coming. What in Hades could he talk about to a woman who had nothing in the room he could pick up and comment on easylike? Nothing outside it either, not even a view. It was blocked off by the messy forest, good timber going to waste. She’d lived pretty reclusively since moving here, she was saying, and since her good Ezra’s death from pneumonia help had been hard to get.
‘That butler of yours?’
‘A noble soul.’
The drinks were on a wrought iron table at the forest end and paraded every thirst quencher you had heard of and then some but there were no two glasses alike. Leda’s choice was long-stemmed, thin and crimson. Desmond picked up a bottle of Bourbon by the neck and thrust it in the direction of the matted branches and wild undergrowth. Aside from all that timber going to waste, he asked, did she realize they’d be icicled skeletons all winter?
‘Indeed I do, Mr Guthrie. I can hardly wait. I haven’t spent a winter here yet and I’m longing for that snowlight? Snow has highlights, did you know?’
Desmond didn’t.
‘Snow is so fascinating?’ She turned to Leda, ‘Did you see the Garbo movie about Napoleon? His army is retreating in all that snow? His soldiers are dying on that icy wasteland and then one of them stands himself eerily upright to salute as Napoleon comes by. I will never forget that scene.’
Desmond stared. ‘A corpse does that?’
Mrs Burns already had her drink fizzing in a glass tube within hand’s reach on the naked polished floor beside her low chair, and the floorlight was glancing off her fingernails. Desmond picked up and put down several glasses from the jumble before he found a squat heavy rectangular one his hand felt good around. He carried his drink cautiously across the slippery ice underfoot and sank like a stone — no other way to describe it — into the first piece of furniture he reached. How was he to know, he complained huffily to Leda afterward, that the goddam sofa seat practically scraped the floor or what in hell was in the stuffing? It clamped his backside like a trained octopus and when he tried to heave himself into a position of control the raised silver fanciwork of the upholstery bit his skin so viciously he let go and sank to the bottom again. There he had to stay listening to Florence Burnses mania for empty space until her back was turned and he could lever himself out of the undertow with an almighty heave by gripping the huge iron claw of a table leg near him. He was in control by the skin of his teeth when she turned around.
They went through sliding doors into a dining room opening onto a sunny terrace. Desmond said terraces around here were nice for sun-bathing.
‘Oh I know it’s all the fashion here in the north, Mr Guthrie, but I never did care to look like a baked Virginia ham.’
An overloaded tree had dumped its freight of blossom all over the flagstones. Its petals saturated the dining room with their heavy narcotic perfume. Desmond could have sworn Florence Burns had laid them out there on purpose to muddle her guests’ palates and addle their brains. He, for one, had been in too much of a stupor to know what he was eating.
Leda, opposite her hostess at the round table, saw the silk shine of Florence Burns’ fingernails, the striped silk wall behind her, and the rose and green Chinese plates upon it with exceptional clarity. At the centre of this subtly ordered harmony Leda saw a woman superbly in command.
It must have been the Sunday after Leda left or the Sunday after that that Desmond’s morning went to waste waiting for the weather to clear until it was too late to make ambitious outdoor plans. He took an amble past the church and on an impulse, walked in. It was chockablock but he spotted a pew with an empty seat and squeezed in. ‘Ask and ye shall receive!’ annouced the preacher ringingly. The authority behind the statement was impressive. No wonder the son of a gun was packing ‘em in. He must’ve been talking out of his own successful experience. Desmond had heard preachers were hell-raisers who sent congregations home, with their gizzards fried. He was pleasantly relieved. With no armrests for his elbows he was beginning to wish he hadn’t come when a gloved hand on his left caught his eye. The glove was grey and the bold black stitches on it were evidently meant to show unlike the stitches he remembered his mother making that were not supposed to show on the other side. He lost track of the sermon trying to figure out why his mother’s threaded needle had bothered to push through cloth to its other side, giving its pusher weak eyesight on the way, if it wasn’t going to get the credit for arriving.
When the church emptied he came slap up against Florence Burns on the steps talking to the preacher. She was wearing a bell-shaped hat made out of birds’ wings and pushing her Southern-belle syllables as far as they would go. Going down the steps with him she asked if he wouldn’t mind the informal invitation and come back with her to lunch? And tell her more about his two wonderful grand-charges?
This time he had steered clear of the furniture after walking back with his drink and stayed standing. He couldn’t remember much of what he said except he had no trouble saying it. He opened his mouth and talk came. He was fluent right through lunch. What made him dosey-do like a cowhand up the stairs and into her bedroom after lunch as if he owned the place he didn’t know. She was there already as she had a right to be, in her own bed. The room was all cloud and vapour. What he could see of the sky through the big open window looked like jumbled sheeps’ brains. Feeling devilish muscular he dived in beside her and started behaving like no man ever had, chimpanzees maybe. When he came to, the pink jewels around the face of her bedside dock were winking in a brighter light. It came on a soft breeze through dear blue window space. Far away across the bare shining floor lay a twisted heap he knew had to be his pants. His jacket sprawled halfway to his pants. His shirt hung on the back of a spindly-legged chair. It was bellying out in the breeze.
He had overslept but he wasn’t hung over and he ordered himself to get the hell out of there before she woke, as soon as he could find his underpants. Groping around he located them neatly pressed into a little hollow between him and her. His undervest was on him. The high wide four-poster was more like a rolling prairie than a bed, designed to make the lighter partner roll down to the weightier partner if he so much as took a deep breath. He had to move with the stealth and cunning of a burglar to get out of it, inching his torso one buttock at a time off the mattress. He realized he had his socks on when he skidded getting to his pants. Out and away before he broke a leg became the most fervent short-term ambition of his life and he didn’t care who saw him gallop across the road with a shoe in each hand.
He read the Angler till late that evening, listening to the thick hypnotic tick of the grandfather clock coming out of the dark beyond his green lampshade. It grated like a hoary invalid getting ready to hawk up spittle and delivered its gong accurately on the quarter hour. There was a voice in the old wreck yet. He thought about the Checko-slo-vakian for Leda and ways and means of avoiding Florence Burns. He needn’t have worried about her. When he next met her in the drugstore buying something for bee sting she acted as if nothing had happened.
Could be it hadn’t.
Leda had warned Desmond he’d be coming to an artist’s studio. She had forgotten to warn him about the raised door ledge. Desmond’s toe knocked it. He lifted his other foot over it with exaggerated care, already frowning about just-exactly-what he was doing here, which was his usual attitude toward the unfamiliar, and picked his way stolidly past sculpture. Indoors he tossed his head in the direction of the latticed screen at the sound of bath water being uplugged behind it and its unmistakable gurgle down a drainpipe. Desmond had arrived too early, an eventuality Leda had not foreseen. The bather came out with a towel around his waist, asked Desmond’s pardon for not being ready and extended his hard stonebreaker’s hand in welcome. Desmond stepped back, aghast. He stood foursquare on the straw matting, shoulders humped, swaying his head from side to side like a bison that had blundered into a trap. The sight before him afflicted him with shortness of breath. Leda could see him struggling for it, only half comprehending what he saw, so profound was his disbelief, so violent his revulsion. In this studio where she had been reborn Desmond’s swollen face and clenched fists flatly denied such a possibility, as though by refusing to acknowledge it he could undo what he as yet only scented on the wind. All about Desmond hung the sullen intimations of a savage storm. In other enraging, incomprehensible circumstances, had he been confronted by, say, a deformed or depraved white citizen Leda fancied, his revulsion would have been less physical, less animal. It drained Leda of all will and courage. She could not help Kamei who reappeared, faultlessly attired in cool crisp white. He turned to her for a due as to how they should deal with this dangerous relative of hers and received none.
They took their drinks to the stone stools in the walled garden. Desmond was not sure, only hideously suspicious about why Leda had asked him here. An inner incredulity kept breaking out in sweat on his forehead, the copious sweat of illness. What held him in check was his doubt. Leda could see him wracking his brains for a reason for his presence and rejecting it fiercely. He was so much the cornered beast, assailed and goaded by tormentors, that it was impossible for them to be natural. Attempts at conversation broke down and jutted up between them like gravestones in a vandalized cemetery. Their planned announcement was never made. It would have been unthinkable to make it when he was desperate for an opposite reassurance.
They took Desmond to their favourite Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood where, as they said nothing about themselves, he must have concluded there was nothing to say. There among convivial diners, in the steamy redolence of olive oil, garlic and herbs, his tension visibly eased as he finally persuaded himself this Jap was no intimate of his Leda’s. How could he be goddammit?
‘Did you plan on making a career of sculpture?’ he hazarded.
Kamei considered the question and answered it. He made not the smallest attempt to tailor his remarks to his audience. One does not water down the gospel. Leda had heard him discuss art with a friend’s ten-year-old child with the same adult matter-of-factness, making no concession to age or capacity, and the child animatedly responding, but this was Desmond. She listened despairingly to Kamei expand on his approach to sculpture. She need not have. Now that Desmond did not remotely connect the two of them Kamei was just another village weirdie.
Desmond actually livened up. He was an outsider but the kind he had been before, spending an evening with Leda in her peculiar part of New York. He joked about not minding foreign flavours on a night out but it beat him how they could be anybody’s daily diet. He didn’t care for the taste of Chianti but it lifted his spirits. The heat of the restaurant gave him good reason to sweat. He was willing to try an Eyetalian dessert of fresh peaches in red wine. It was not a success, the wine rough, the peaches raw, but he had not expected it to be. Desmond was back to being himself. Life returned to what is known as normal.
Frighteningly little was said when they had seen Desmond to a taxi. Leda pleaded guilty. She had been prepared to deal with an intractable man, the human being with human quirks and prejudices she knew Desmond to be, not the dangerous beast he had suddenly become. People like Desmond needed time …
Kamei cut her brutally short. ‘Racists have time immemorial. There will always be a racist. You couldn’t face up to one and there’s a thundering herd behind him.’
Leda did not have to be told. It was a matter of history, a terror of memory. Therefore she had known better than to tackle it. She could not make Kamei understand it was him she was securing against disaster. It was her own temerity in asking Desmond here that appalled her. How had she dared? In a blinding dementing fear she thought she had discarded forever she stumbled out of Kamei’s studio, to take refuge in illness at home, leaving his Leda a lump of unfinished clay swaddled in damp cloth. This, the only unforgivable aspect of her defection, had belittled the uncompromising artist in him. When she could summon the courage to get out of bed she went back to the studio, for an artistic project to be harmlessly completed.
The gate was hanging crookedly on loose hinges. Good Riddance Yellow Scum and varieties of abuse had been scratched ferociously into its green paint. The paving stones had been dug up and thrown around. They must have been used to smash the light bulbs and the window glass. Something more massive had reduced the one remaining sculpture to rubble. The studio’s straw matting had been sheared to ragged strips, the bath screen’s latticework had been knifed and rubbished with wads of crumpled paper that had been lamps of Kamei’s design, all of it stamped on in the merry-making. They had partied here. Shards of broken glass mixed with bread crusts, the stink of cheese, rat droppings in scraps of putrefying ham, wine dregs gone rancid testified to drunken celebration.
The stone stools were intact. She sat down shaking uncontrollably. She could picture the herd, horned and shaggy. Their grotesque bison hooves pounded in her ears, obliterating everything in their path. When her head cleared she picked up a page of newspaper flapping against her legs and straightened it. An internment camp in Arizona. A duststorm whirling round its barracks had whipped the Stars and Stripes around its mast. New arrivals were lined up under the flag for army inspection. The caption read: ‘Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off. Let ‘em be pinched, hungry and dead up against it.’
Rosina Mongini had looked in every day of Leda’s relapse into fever after her last meeting with Kamei, bearing floury soup, cologne and news of Pearl Harbour and after. Mr Mongini was all for bringing Leda back to their apartment but Rosina could see Leda was immovable, immobile, not registering that America was at war. Rosina understood little of what exactly had made Leda so ill, but had felt in her bones that sooner or later it had been bound to come to this.
‘Why don’t you go and see him as soon as you feel better?’ she had encouraged out of the kindness of her heart, because no practical plea would work in Leda’s condition. ‘You’ll be able to sort it all out. And if he’s gone away somewhere he will have left an address for sure.’
About that Rosina had been right. Here was his address.
Florence Burns wrote to say she would be coming to the city and wanted Leda’s help shopping for fabric for a very special chair Leda might recall seeing? The slender silver-gilt one with the violin-shaped back?
Leda had been shown it in the course of a tour of the house. Lured from room to room across shining expanses, precious objects she might not have seen on her own had been pointed out to her with their brief histories. At each her comment had been awaited, flatteringly granting her a connoisseurship she was far from possessing.
‘It’s the boudoir chair in which I peruse Dante, Leda, and it’s upholstered in Italian brocade. Brookham wouldn’t rise to a replacement even in peacetime, and I haven’t been able to find what I want in Boston either. But you’ll know where to take me.’
It was no small challenge, and Leda doubted they would find the fabric to suit Florence Burns’ stickler’s taste, but they discovered a length of suitably faded old rose and violet velvet with a thread of drab silver through the weave.
‘I can’t abide definite colours, can you, Leda?’ she said as they were ushered to a window table in a restaurant she patronized.
A waiter seated her, leaving Leda to seat herself, and holding a waterfall of white linen by its starched corner he flowed it deferentially across her lap. She then received the menu like a lowly offering from his hands. Leda who had dealt less ceremoniously with her own napkin, was not presented with a menu.
‘Your gloves must be the only thing you own two alike of, Mrs Burns,’ she remarked, not at all sure what manner of conversation the unique creature expected from a lunch partner, but feeling obliged to make some.
‘So you’ve noticed,’ Florence Burns approved, ‘I see I didn’t underestimate you, Leda. There’s no need to die of monotony, is there? What can Ernie Pyle mean by writing that our boys overseas are all dreaming about the same type medium-voluptuous woman? It makes me seriously concerned about our boys overseas. Now!’ she said with anticipatory glee, ‘what are we going to eat?’ and proceeded to place two different orders without consulting Leda.
Sipping her dry sherry, (Dubonnet for Leda), she thanked her for her invaluable help.
‘I would never have located that piece of perfection without you. Don’t you think it goes with my violet eyes just as if it had been fabricated to match them?’
Edgar would have had something fulsome to say, Leda could only lamely nod.
‘The light from the west window in my bedroom is going to give it the softest opalescent glaze. You know how I treasure my chairs. Have you noticed how some men use a chair, Leda? They back up to it like an automobile going into a parking space, slam their fannies down on it and hunker on down as if they’re carving a dugout like a hound settling in for a last hour of sleep. Now chairs are not supposed to be treated like that. Desmond did it the first time he came to my house. I was afraid he was going to bore tunnels through my seating arrangements.’
Her understated sparkle kept Leda entertained with stories of fabric and furniture. The Tudors being the boisterous royalties they were except poor Bloody Mary had had the good judgement to have their furniture built for carousing. Massive oak beds, solid tables and chairs. She herself preferred Queen Anne or Chinese or Japanese. She had a Japanese lamp she could fold away into an envelope when she wasn’t using it. She approved the greens glistening with olive oil shown her by the waiter who set the bowl down between them. At an appealing glance from her he helped them both to the salad with solicitous one-handed competence.
Over her sole and Leda’s trout she said, We must do this more often. I must take you to the Ritz. Too bad they’ve closed their Japanese Garden for the duration. Plain silly of them. I used to go there for tea.’
‘Wartime,’ said Leda laconically.
‘For some folks it’s always wartime. Down where I come from there was a tiny colony of Chinese who had been chased out of California after they finished building the railroad. Our town gave them a hard time to scare them into leaving. One demagogue told a public meeting they had filthy loathsome habits like “niggers”. That day a gang wrecked a Chinese curio shop with iron rods and threw dead rats into it.’
Leda recalled a Mark Twain piece she had read at Edgar’s about white boys stoning an inoffensive passing ‘Chinaman’ to death in broad daylight in San Francisco, in front of a cheering crowd.
‘But justice fares no better in Dante, Leda. Did you know he puts Mohammed in Hell’s eighth circle and has him torn in two from chin to anus through all eternity?’
This raw imagery from the lips of a southern white rose startled Leda — though one more example of jungle justice, designed for humanity beyond Europe’s shores, should not have done. All in the day’s work men picked up their clubs and came.
‘Are you all right, Leda? Take a sip of water. It must be one of those fine trout bones. That’s better. You know, Desmond is becoming as boring and fidgety as a hen about you. It’s a curious idea people have that a woman’s happiness depends on a man when there’s all of literature to prove just the opposite.’
She laid her sapphire-ringed hand on her heart and intoned with tragic intensity, ‘“And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means for bringing back love for her in his heart.” Now that may be all Mr Tolstoy knew about it but is poor lovesick Anna an example we need to follow? Maybe literature needs Annas but most of us aren’t made for taking true love by the horns and getting gored to ribbons. I made up my mind many years ago not to throw myself on the rails for a train to run me over or fling myself down from heaven to Wuthering Heights. I said to myself, Florence Limoges Lamarr Burns —’
‘Your middle name is Limoges?’
‘Why, yes, I resembled a flawless little piece of porcelain when I was born. So I said to myself, Florence, go out and enjoy yourself.’
Leda’s mind’s eye envisaged the appropriate setting, a high oval-windowed room in a turret on the winding waterway of an old European city, her alluring white rose of a body gliding over, under and around a beautifully synchronized partner. Two dolphins at play, they glided off rumpled sheets to the floor without a break of rhythm, laughing lovingly into each other’s eyes.
Before or after Mr Burns, Leda could not ask.
‘My marriage wouldn’t have ended, Leda,’ spoke the witch uncannily, ‘if Mr Burns and I had been an old married couple. Whatever it is old folks have — habit, empathy, telepathy — makes matrimony that much easier. But to work your way to old age you have to get past being young. Mr Burns was a fine man and neither of us was to blame. Of course I never could say about him here’s a man I will follow to the ends of the earth because that is not where he was going. He was going to board meetings.’
The waiter came to enquire if all was well. It was. Florence Burns ordered miniature tartlets, cherry for Leda, peach for herself. They came set in a teaspoon of confectioner’s custard.
Mr Jenner came into her office after lunch to give her Baroness Stretlitz’s Land of Pomp and Pageantry for translation. P and P was about the Baroness’ pre-war stay in a native state in central India. She had made a useful suggestion that they place the verbs at the end of sentences in the English translation as they were in Hindustani. The ADC speaking to the Dowager Maharani would say, ‘The betrothal rites about to begin are. Your Highness’ presence required is.’ It did add to local colour. What did Leda think?
‘Is she serious? Are you serious?’
Leda referred Mr Jenner to the still popular Jenner edition of The Book of Ser Marco Polo Covering the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East. Marco Polo returning home more Tartar than Venetian after a twenty-four year absence and having all but forgotten the Venetian tongue had ripped open the seams of his Tartar garments and spilled out jewels as evidence of where he had been but he had told his story straight with the verbs in their proper place.
Mr Jenner had a civilized slowness to contradict and a genuine regard for Leda’s professional judgement. He sat down in the armchair he had provided her with and explained. We of the twentieth century did not have the thirteenth century Venetian’s natural propensity to marvel. Our craving for the fabulous must needs find its outlets and found them in far-off places. Remember, Leda, we made our discoveries after difficult and dangerous voyages. What would have been the point of all that adventure had we been content to find human substance no different from our own at the end of it? Mr Jenner’s face took on its gently persuasive smile. These places had to be ‘else’. The explorers themselves had been way off the accurate mark. Columbus claimed he had discovered China when he landed in Cuba. He thought he was in India when he reached America. Did that in any way diminish the enterprise? But to get back to the Baroness’ excellent book, if rearranging verbs could ensure the magic carpet ride readers look for in a Jenner’s book, what harm could it do? And he invited Leda to join him and the Baroness for lunch the following day.
‘Why do they have to become whirling dervishes and do rope tricks to be noticed? Why can’t we take them as they are?’ she asked, exasperated.
Ah, but the voyages put paid to all that,’ smiled Mr Jenner, wagging his finger naughtily, not willing to go into all that again.
Punctilious host and brisk businessman that he was he asked Leda not to be late.
Baroness Stretlitz was a regal Austrian of eighty, distantly related to one of the exiled monarchs of Europe. She was fluidly draped in a cobalt blue garment of crepe de chine and wore a matching turban knotted at the front with a crepe de chine rosette.
‘Have you travelled, Miss Knox?’ she enquired, fixing her soot-rimmed lamplike eyes on Leda.
Leda had not heard the music of the Tartars or scaled the glittering ramparts of the Himalayas or lifted her astounded eyes to the human-headed towers of Angkor Vat, which Edgar classed as travel. And her harrowing excursion through a gallery of Pharoahs would not qualify her in the Baroness’ eyes. She admitted she hadn’t. The Baroness pointedly addressed herself to Mr Jenner thereafter, detailing the rites attending childbirth in the Dowager Maharani’s domain, where the mother squatted to deliver the child and her parts were rubbed with salt after the delivery. Mr Jenner’s eyes shone. He salivated. He greeted her every recollection of native custom with entrepreneurial relish. Her hinted participation in a spiritual experience whose details she was not at liberty to divulge (except to sensitive souls) particularly excited him with its saleability and by the end of lunch the Baroness had been persuaded to divulge it. In Chapter Six.