Dark Angel (95 page)

“The doors—they’re too tall, and they’re not aligned,” Constance said. “And the windows are the wrong style for the period. Do you see?”

Yes, I began to see. And some weeks later, when the workmen arrived, I began to see more. I had known for a long time that I wanted to be a decorator. It was at Hope House that I started to become one.

I was learning the pile of velvet, the ductility of silk. Constance showed me color. She taught me that color, like truth, is not a fixed thing but a fluctuating one. Color changes—with lighting, with texture, with position. Take a piece of cloth; it is green, you say? A clear sharp green, like emeralds? Put it against white and perhaps it is—but try it against black; try it against plum, or cobalt, or apricot. You see? Its hue changes.

You want yellow? Which yellow do you have in mind? Lemon? Chrome? Ochre? Crocus? Saffron? Sulphur? Whichever you want, I can give it to you—but I can also make it shift, transmute. Do not trust your eyes—I was taught, that summer, how to trick them.

Constance also taught me about shape, proportion. She took the fixed; she gave it a new guise. All things were possible: Make a large cold room seem warm and intimate; make an enclosed space open out. Take a room that is badly built; raise, lower, divide, subdivide—any space can be transformed by the duplicity of decorators. Decorators bend space. Look, they say, at the ugly angles of this room; give me light, give me color, give me money—and I will give you symmetry. Out of angle and ill-proportion, I will give you Palladio, the restfulness of the perfect double-cube.

A summer in which I learned sorcery; a summer in which I learned disguise. Constance (that inventive storyteller) was a born decorator—she taught me patiently, and well.

We stayed at Hope House all summer. And it was there, on the long veranda overlooking the sea, in a house I have never revisited, that Constance gave me, at last, her version of what it was that had happened at my christening.

The account was unprovoked. I had asked no question. It came out of the warm stillness of a summer afternoon, a salt breeze from the ocean, and—perhaps—from the bracelet I was wearing that day on my arm. My snake bracelet; my christening present. It had arrived in New York at the same time as my parents’ books. Constance liked me to wear it, even in daytime.

“Ah, Winterscombe,” she said. She leaned across and touched my wrist. She looked at me with a sad regret.

“How lovely you are today. You’re growing up. You’ll be a woman soon. You’ll leave me behind. You won’t need me then, your little godmother.”

Then, still with her small hand on my arm, and her eyes on the sea, she explained: why she had been banned from Winterscombe.

I was disappointed, I think. I read all those novels, as you know: I was beginning my father’s favorite Walter Scott. No doubt I expected something very dramatic: some ancient feud, a mistaken identity, an illegitimate birth, a hidden love affair.

No such thing, it seemed. It was money.

“Money.” Constance gave a little sigh. “It often is. You’re old enough to know that now. I forget the details, but your parents borrowed; I fear my husband lent. He was a fine man, Victoria, in many ways—but it was not a good idea to be in his debt. There was a quarrel. A rift. Unforgivable things were said on both sides. I had a foot in both camps. It was sad, looking back. Your father was a brother to me. I loved him very much. I loved Montague, too, in my way. Ah, well, it was a long time ago. I miss Winterscombe though, sometimes, even now. Even here. It’s growing late. Bertie is tired. Shall we go? We can call in at the Van Dynems’ on the way back.”

A few days after this, Constance and I returned to New York. Late September; the war had ended. I had written my last letter to Franz-Jacob. I thought about love, and how you might recognize it when it happened. I thought about kinds of love, and how—in different ways—you might love a friend or a brother or a husband.

I also thought about death. I had to; I had lost Franz-Jacob; within a month of the end of the war, in Europe I also lost my aunt Maud. She suffered her final stroke sitting upright in her chair in her once-famous drawing room. I would never see her again. Maud and I, it seemed, had said goodbye seven years before. Quick-smart, no more letters.

Sorrows
can
come in battalions: That was one of Constance’s favorite misquotations—and that fall, they did. Bertie, too, began to die. You could see it happening. He did so slowly at first, running down like an old clock. Each day he walked less far, more slowly. He coughed when he walked. He became crotchety, then resigned, then sad. He was malodorous; I think he knew this.

We could not perk him up. Constance cooked him chicken, tiny pieces of his favorite fish. She tried to feed him from her hand, but Bertie would look at her heavily, with reproach in his eyes, then turn his great head away. I think he knew he was dying—animals do—and he wished to do so privately, with dignity. A wild animal, knowing it will die, finds a secret place, a hole, a gap under a hedge. Bertie was in a New York apartment. He began to lie only in corners; he panted; we could see his heart beat.

Constance became frantic. She summoned vet after vet. She canceled all appointments. She gave no parties. Once it was clear that Bertie was fading, she would not leave his side.

One Tuesday—it was a Tuesday, and quite late—Bertie rose from his place in his corner. He stretched. He lifted his head and sniffed the air. Constance, with a cry of delight, sprang up. Bertie had turned to his air conditioner. He looked at it. His tail gave a wag.

Constance turned it on; a low setting. Bertie stood there, nose to an electrical breeze. His ears blew. Then, rejecting the air conditioner, he moved in a stiff way to the door.

“He wants to go out! Victoria—look! He wants to go out. Oh, he must be better, don’t you think?”

We took him out. It was a warm autumn evening, late enough in the year for the air to be fresh, not clammy. We walked up Fifth, into the park, past the zoo, Bertie leading the way. He inspected the fountain. He inspected the stream. He peed on all his favorite verticals.

He snuffed the air, then turned for home. I promise you, he was very noble, just as Constance had said. Bertie’s farewell to the smells of Central Park. He did not cough once. When we returned to the apartment he found a new space, behind the sofa, next to a screen, obscured by a chair. A fine and private place. Bertie lay down. He went to sleep. He began to snore. His forepaws scrabbled. Constance stroked his webbed feet.

I knew he was dead as soon as I woke the next morning. It was very early; I could hear the sounds of Constance, keening.

When I went in, Bertie lay with his head on his paws. His sides did not rise and fall. His huge tail, which could sweep a whole table of china to the floor with one wag, was curled under him. Constance lay on the floor by his side. She had not been to bed, and was still fully dressed. Her arm was around Bertie’s neck. Her small jeweled hands, with their magpie rings, rested in his fur. She could not weep, and she would not be moved. She stayed there like that for another two hours, and if I was to have only one memory of Constance, it would be that, of my godmother saying goodbye to the last and the best of her dogs.

Her detractors were not right about Constance, do you see? Winnie was not right; Maud was not right—and I have not always been right either. Disloyal, perhaps; unjust, certainly. Those who disliked Constance saw only a part of her—a part that was there, yes, but they did not see her whole. They did not understand … well, let’s just say they did not understand about the dogs.

Bertie had a good funeral. He was buried in that well-tended pet cemetery. The tombstone was designed by an orchidaceous young man who had made a name with his sets for ballet. As you know, it was supposed to be an iceberg, and—if you look at it from the right angle—it does resemble one. But it is difficult to convey in stone the simultaneous opacity and transparency of ice; the tomb, even Constance acknowledged, was arresting, but scarcely a success.

The orchidaceous young man claimed a triumph—but then, he was full of praise for his own sets. Constance lost her temper; she said it was a lump of badly carved stone, an insult to Bertie’s memory. The designer, quivering, told her to grow up. Yes, Bertie’s funeral was seemly, but his wake was not.

Constance did remain true to her promise. She never acquired another dog. But the death of Bertie altered her greatly. For several weeks after Bertie’s death she sank into the blackest depression. She would not leave the apartment. She would not work. She scarcely ate. One day when I returned from her showrooms, I found her with her head sunk in her hands, her face without makeup, her Egyptian hair disordered.

She said there was a bird in the room. She had opened the window and the bird had flown in. She could hear its wings beat. It was trapped. It made her head ache.

I could hear nothing. To placate her, I searched the room. Like all Constance’s rooms, it was crowded. I had to peer behind screens, look under tables and chairs, move flowers, lift every one of a hundred objects. There was no bird, of course—but in the end, to satisfy her and settle her, I pretended the bird had been found. I cupped my hands around air. I opened the window. I told Constance the bird had gone, and this seemed to revive her.

It was after this—about three days later—that an extraordinary thing happened.

I had been at Constance’s workshops, still trying to cover for her absence. Commissions and orders were falling behind. There were decisions that had to be made, and only Constance could make them. One of these decisions involved Rosa Gerhard, who, after a lull, was about to move again. She had wanted, insisted on, a blue bedroom for herself. Then she had thought no, pink or lavender might be better. Similar changes were being suggested for all the other rooms in a very large house, rooms for which the color schemes were already completed.

That day, Rosa Gerhard had reverted to the idea of blue for the main bedroom, but could not decide which of two fabrics was the perfect one for the curtains. Knowing that if there was any further delay those two would swell to fifty, I took her call; I said I would seek Constance’s opinion.

I returned uptown, two bolts of material under my arm. I rushed into the lobby. I soared upward in the elevator. I hurried into that hall of mirrors, and stopped.

There—apparently just about to take his leave from a radiant Constance—was a tall elderly man.

I thought, from his clothes, his stance, that he was another of Constance’s erstwhile aristocrats. Another Rumanian or Russian. Certainly he looked foreign; the cut of his clothes would have been fashionable thirty years before.

A tall man, of erect carriage, with strong features and thinning tawny hair. He was wearing a black coat with an astrakhan collar. He held a homburg hat in one hand, a silver-topped cane in the other.

I stopped. He stopped. We regarded each other. I saw Constance move amidst our many reflections in the mirrors. She said nothing. One small quick gesture of the hands.

“This must be Victoria?”

The man had a deep voice, an accent I could not place. Central Europe, I thought, somewhere. He gave a slight formal bow, an inclination of the head.

“Enchanted,” he said.

He passed out of the doorway. The gates of the elevator opened and shut.

“That was my husband,” Constance said.

Stern had come, she told me, to express his condolences for Bertie’s death. Constance seemed to find nothing odd in the fact that a husband she had not seen for fifteen years would return to commiserate for the loss of a dog.

“He’s like that,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing he would do. You don’t know him. He was always punctilious.”

I could understand that—just. I did not understand, however, how Stern
knew
about Bertie’s death. Constance was quite capable of announcing that death in
The New York Times
—but she had not done so. Constance required no explanation.

“Oh, he would know,” she said carelessly. “Montague always hears everything.”

From this moment, Constance began to recover. A lingering sadness remained, but the black depression lifted. She returned to work, and for several months worked with great energy.

I hoped secretly that this meeting would begin a rapprochement between Constance and her husband. I was disappointed. Stern made no further visits; Constance seemed to forget him. Her life became increasingly frenetic.

The end of the war meant she was free to travel again. These were the years of the planes, boats, and trains, the hectic visits to a postwar Europe, the little rushes from Venice to Paris, from Paris to Aix, from Aix to Monte Carlo, from there to London.

These visits, as time passed, became arbitrary. Constance might decide at midnight to leave for Europe in the morning. Her work was abandoned—let the clients wait! At first I made these journeys with her, but as time passed, Constance seemed to prefer to go alone. I was left, as she put it, to mind the shop. “Please, Victoria,” she would say. “You’re so good at it.”

I was slow to see that there was another, obvious reason why Constance preferred me to stay behind. I was sixteen before I realized she did not travel alone; she went with, or to meet, lovers. Even then, I imposed my own form of censorship. I would not call them lovers, these men who passed through Constance’s life at the speed of light, taken up one day, banished a week later. Her
admirers,
I said to myself, at sixteen. I was eighteen before I admitted to myself that not all these admirers were so transitory, and that as a permanent fixture they included those twins more than twenty years Constance’s junior, Bobsy and Bick.

I knew better than to make any comment. Constance’s temper, always on a short fuse, grew more fiery with the passing of time. She could be imperious and irascible; she became furious if she thought she was being questioned or watched.

Constance liked me less, I used to think sometimes, as I grew older. She would return from those journeys, a mock-scowl on her face; she would say, accusingly, “You have grown
another inch.
” At other times she would overwhelm me with affection or shower me with gifts. When I reached twenty-one, she would make me her partner, she said. Meanwhile, this commission—such a lovely house—might I like to work on it? I could begin at once. She would call me, to check on the details, from her hideout in Venice, Paris, or Aix.