Grahame, Lucia (38 page)

"Your first marriage is really no business of mine. If I have
impugned it, I had no right to do so. As for the paintings you went to such
lengths to keep secret from me for so long, my opinion—which I know is worth
very little to you —is that they are extraordinarily lovely and certainly no
cause for shame."

His words, with their ring of sincerity, stripped me of yet
another of my assumptions. My conviction of his hypocrisy and the sense of
superiority it had once given me to believe that he had condemned not only me,
but Frederick as well, had already begun to crumble under the fusillade of the
evening's revelations. My skin burned.

But it was his next remark that completely demolished me.

"If you had simply told me the truth," he said, "I
would have spared you everything."

"What?" I said with a short, disbelieving laugh.
"Before
we were married? Without judging me? Without demanding anything in return?
You don't—"

He turned toward me on the dim, rain-soaked quai. The light from
the lantern above our heads glistened on his hair and in the little puddles at
our feet.

"I
loved
you," he said with an intensity that
seared me. "Yes, I would have protected you. With or without marriage.
With or without your love in return. What else could I have done? How could I
not
have admired a woman who would pose like that to please the man she loved.
And herself. But what did you do? You sold yourself—no, not
that
self,
but an empty husk of a woman—in a purely mercenary transaction, and based our
marriage on a lie. And
that
is something I swear I will
never
forgive."

I was exhausted when we arrived back at the hotel. I felt as
bruised and sore as if the sky had pelted me with stones instead of having
merely misted my cheeks and hair with that fine, gentle rain. As for my
husband, my emotions bounced between implacable rage at his presumptuous
remarks about Frederick one moment, and a curious and humbling sense of
astonishment and regret the next.

As we entered our suite, I stole a glance in his direction. His
expression was set and remote as he helped me out of my coat with perfunctory
politeness. I slipped quickly away to my bedroom, closed the door, and leaned
against it, feeling dazed and bone-weary. I could hardly move, much less think.
After a long time, I began to unfasten my dress and let it fall to the floor.
My petticoat followed. Then, clad only in the silly, frivolous orchid-colored
satin-and-lace underclothes I had selected that evening from the collection I
was now obligated to wear in tribute to my owner, I sank down upon the edge of
my bed. I felt too faint to go on. I wanted something—I needed something—but I
couldn't think what it was.

A moment later I realized that I was only hungry.

I remembered having seen a large basket of fruit on a table in the
sitting room. I supposed it was safe to go back there; surely my husband would
have retired to his bed long ago.

But there he was, stretched out in a chair, his eyes closed. He
had shed his wet topcoat but still wore the evening clothes in which he had
dressed for the theater; his rain-soaked hair clung to his cheeks and forehead.
I noticed, with a curious little pang, that his shoes were muddy.

I started to slip past him, toward the side table. I had my eye on
the largest and rosiest apple.

My husband stirred slightly but did not open his eyes. I glanced
downward. He looked so drained and pale that, had he been soaked with blood
instead of merely rain, I might have supposed that he had been carried in from
a battlefield, mortally wounded.

I reached down and laid my palm upon his damp forehead. He must
have been half dreaming, because, without opening his eyes, he lifted his hand,
took mine gently, and brought it to his lips.

"You don't look well, Anthony," I whispered. "Is
there anything I can do for you?"

He stirred again, opened his eyes, and dropped my hand.

"What are
you
doing here?" he said. "I
thought you'd gone to bed."

I wondered whose hand he had pressed to his mouth in his dreams.

"You look so wet and tired. Can I get you anything?"

"No. I'm all right. Thank you."

His tone was distant and dismissive.

I glanced across the room at the polished, gleaming apple and then
back at the mud-caked patent leather of my husband's shoes.

"I don't think you are all right," I heard myself say.
"You look half drowned."

I knelt down and took his left foot in my hands.

"You'll get dirty," he murmured in faint protest.

"It doesn't matter."

I slid off his left shoe and then lifted his right foot as he
resigned himself, with an air of reluctant gratitude, to these ministrations.

After I'd removed his shoes, I went to my bath chamber to wash my
hands and returned with a thick towel. He did not open his eyes as I came round
behind him and gently began to dry his hair.

"What are you doing now?" he whispered.

"I'm drying you. Why aren't you in bed?"

"I'll go in a minute.... You're no better off yourself."
He stood up wearily, took the towel from my hands, and hung it over my bare
shoulders. Then, one by one, he pulled the pins from my own rain-wet hair. As
it tumbled down, he toweled the dampness from it.

"Where is your comb?" he asked.

I brought it to him. He began to ease out my tangles.

At last he laid down the comb and the towel.

"That's better, isn't it?" he said softly. He stood so
close to me that his breath moved my hair.

A wave of weakness swept over me. Only an hour earlier I had
longed to throw him off the Pont-Neuf and watch him sink beneath the waters
forever; now I felt softened, and tired, and so bereft of any comfort beyond
the small ones he had just given me that it was all I could do not to move into
his arms.

In spite of the warmth of the room, I shivered.

"You're chilled," said my husband. "Come with
me."

He slipped off his evening jacket and laid it over my shoulders.
Then he took me by the hand and led me to his bedroom.

"Sit down," he said. I did, but not on the chair he had
indicated. I sat upon the edge of his bed, near the headboard. He took a
decanter of Cognac from the little cabinet at one side of the bed, poured
hardly more than a thimbleful or two into a snifter, and handed the glass to
me. Then, as if once again overcome by exhaustion, he stretched out on the
opposite side of the bed and closed his eyes.

I swirled the amber liquid slowly, inhaled the fumes, and idly
surveyed my surroundings. Well within reach of my fingertips, on top of the
little cabinet at the bedside, lay a small volume, open and facedown. I looked
at it curiously. Except for his newspapers, and that incendiary Roman poet, all
I had ever observed him reading were such things as treatises on progressive
methods of crop rotation and soil reclamation, and tomes on the medicinal uses
of native plants by the inhabitants of the Amazon rain forest.

But this was a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets. I turned it
over to see what it might tell me.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

I laid the book down, but the familiar, once-loved words sang on
in my mind. That sonnet to steadfast, immutable devotion was practically a
taxonomy in its description of love as I had known it once, in my lost other
life:

O,
no, it is an ever-fix
è
d mark

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken,...

Oh, why did the words offer me no comfort now? Why did I feel so
shaken, so desolate, so robbed of every consolation. I thought of the things my
husband had said. Perhaps he had imagined that he had loved me thus, before the
revelation of my deception had altered the emotion into something that would
never again be miscalled "love."

It is the star to every wandering bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

I took a fiery sip of the brandy.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come....

I glanced down at my husband. His long dark lashes lay across his
cheeks. Otherwise he was as pale and elegant as a sarcophagus.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

I emptied the snifter, put out the lamps, and lay down beside him.
Only a little light from the wall sconce in the passage came through the open
door to fall upon the carpet.

I moved closer to my unconscious spouse. I couldn't have said why.
All I knew was that I did not want to be alone that night and that, since in
any case he was now dead to the world, he could scarcely object.

He turned sleepily and put his arms around me. I laid my head
against his shoulder and began to drift toward oblivion. His hand glided under
the jacket that still covered me and came to rest against my breast. I sighed,
lifted my arms to wrap them around his neck, and moved closer.

He pulled away, suddenly fully awake.

"Fleur? Why are you still here?"

"The brandy must have put me to sleep," I started to
lie. Then I thought better of it. "I don't want to be alone." What a
pathetic admission!

"But you can't stay here." The abruptness of my
husband's words did more to chill me than any rain had ever done. I sat up and
drew his jacket more closely around me.

"Why not?" I whispered finally. Oh, shameless me!

"You know why," he said. "Or, if you don't, you
ought to."

"I am afraid that mind reading is not one of my
accomplishments," I said after a while. "If there is something I
'ought' to know, but don't, I think you 'ought' to tell me plainly."

"If you insist," he said. He leaned up on his elbow and
looked me straight in the eyes. "Nothing," he said, each word as hard
and well formed as a little hailstone, "would distress me more than to find
that, in a moment of sheer folly, I had gotten you with child. I thought you
understood that."

I felt a little pang—it was an unsettling possibility. But I
reflected for a moment upon my inhospitable womb and decided there was not much
danger of
that.
Besides, it was a very specious declaration on his part.

"That has scarcely inhibited you in the past," I pointed
out.

"Regrettably, no. It ought to have. I have been unbelievably
thoughtless."

I stood up. It was too much to absorb in one night—the mistresses,
the horrible insinuations about Frederick, and now the unmistakable implication
that my husband intended never to take me into his arms again. I couldn't even
pretend indifference.

"Well," I said in a low voice, "obviously you have
no qualms about scattering your seed in every brothel in London. But you won't
defile yourself with your unworthy wife, is that it?"

My husband got up from the bed, switched on the incandescent lamp,
and faced me across the rumpled counterpane.

"You had better go," he said. He sounded wearier than
ever and dangerously taxed. "I really have nothing more to say to you. Nor
have I the patience to listen to any more of your accusations and complaints. I
might be tempted to say something very cruel, which you would undoubtedly take
too deeply to heart and nurture in your bosom like an asp."

Thus dismissed, I congealed into myself and started toward the
doorway. But when I reached it, a vision of my lonely room stopped me, as did
the vague but unpleasant foreboding that I would very likely spend the night in
sleepless and unhappy ruminations on all that had occurred in the last few
hours.

I swallowed my pride, pulled the double doors together, and turned
back to my husband, who had already drawn off his tie and was now halted in the
midst of unbuttoning his waistcoat. I felt a deep, if sadly mistimed, surge of
pure sensual hunger for him.

"Please, Anthony," I said stumblingly. His face had gone
frigid with annoyance, making it nearly impossible to continue. "You
needn't worry that your worst fears will be realized." I felt my voice
start to break, so I turned and leaned my forehead against the door frame.
"Really, I should be so lucky," I said with a shuddery little laugh.
"It can never happen."

I closed my eyes and sagged against the lintel, feeling utterly
drained.