History of a Pleasure Seeker (9 page)

“
Mevrouw
 …”

“I am a believer in actions over words.” Jacobina continued to write. “If you are not at liberty this afternoon, I will quite understand. Though I confess”—and now she smiled at him—“that I should be a little disappointed.”

Hilde Wilken knocked at the door, entered and curtsied.

“Please ask Monsieur la Chaume to come up and send some pear cordial with him. It’s terribly hot today.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Thank you, Hilde. And thank you, Mr. Barol. You may both go.”

A
s Piet went down the stairs, he found himself impressed and aroused by Jacobina’s manner. He had never encountered patrician disdain from a conquest and it was highly stimulating. He waited until Egbert had finished his translation, then checked it and set him another, all the while valiantly supporting his conscience in its struggle against more animal instincts.

As they worked, Egbert’s passivity and pampered helplessness began to exasperate him. He might have taken a normal boy to the Vondelpark and played chase with him until it was dark and the danger had passed. He understood that if he did not keep his rendezvous with Jacobina she would never again suggest one. But he could not leave the house and this left him in uncomfortable proximity to temptation.

The only available remedy was preemptive self-relief, but this had its dangers too. Piet knew well that desire peaks in the moments before it dies, and the dispassionate mood that succeeds a climax did not always last long with him. He feared it would not last long at all in this instance. He waited until a quarter to five. Then he sent his charge to have his supper, locked himself in the entrance hall cloakroom, and opened his flies. Images of Jacobina rose irresistibly. He took himself to the brink, but this state is the riskiest of all; and though he knew that he should, and wished earnestly that he would, he could not bring himself to abandon it.

His conscience, having done its best, abruptly gave up in the face of insuperable odds. He buttoned his flies and washed his hands and went upstairs.

S
ix weeks later, Constance Vermeulen-Sickerts turned twenty-two. The hospitality dispensed to celebrate this occasion was high and generous, and ostentation was not its chief motivation. Good nature was, because it pleased the Vermeulen-Sickertses to please others. That their guests would also be impressed was not the point of the enterprise, merely its inevitable by-product. A dance was given for two hundred, and for several days before it the house was full of workmen in the green-and-white overalls of the Amstel Hotel, hauling palm trees, polishing glasses and rails and door knobs and the parquet boards of the sprung floor in the ballroom. The wall that divided this apartment from the pale gray and gilt music room, though seemingly as solid as any other, could be lowered into the basement by a system of ingenious pulleys. Piet watched it disappear with unconcealed admiration.

He wanted desperately to be invited and would have been annoyed to know how strenuously Jacobina had opposed her husband’s idea of including him. She did not at all relish the prospect of watching Piet flirt with her daughters’ friends, and her objections were so strident that Maarten became indignant. “This is the twentieth century, Jacobina,” he said one evening as, tight lipped, she brushed her hair before bed. “Piet Barol is an absolute gentleman. I will not have the snobberies of the past brought into my house.”

So Piet was invited—not to the dinner, but to the dance that followed.

“You lucky bastard,” was Didier’s verdict. And the next day, when Piet received a check from Maarten “for shoes and a tailcoat; ask the women what you need,” he felt very lucky indeed. He spent the money in a darkly paneled shop on the Kalverstraat and enjoyed the experience immensely, for it was the first time he had ever bought a brand-new suit of clothes.

On the night of the ball he dined on sandwiches in his room and listened to the sounds of merriment drifting from below in a state of mounting excitement. Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts owned an interest in the Café Royal in London, and had brought that establishment’s orchestra over in staterooms on the
Queen of Holland
. The music they played was modern and wildly glamorous. He went down, resolved to conquer, and the first person he countered was Louisa.

“Well, well, Mr. Barol.”

“Good evening, Miss Vermeulen-Sickerts.”

Louisa was dressed in aquamarine, with diamond pins in her hair. It was only when she moved that he saw silk trousers beneath her overskirt of metallic silver lace. The sight shocked him. “I like to move freely when I dance,” she said sharply, as if he had challenged her on this point; and before he could make a compliment of it she had sauntered into the crush. He lacked the courage to follow her and went instead to get a glass of champagne from Didier.

“This is the night to find yourself a rich wife,” his friend remarked, staring straight ahead.

This idea had occurred to Piet, but the thought of what Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts would say if he pursued any of her friends made him desist. He believed, in any case, that he could earn large sums of money on his own and did not need to marry it. He drained the champagne so quickly it stung his throat, then followed the band’s riotous summons to the dance floor.

Nina Barol had taught Piet to dance and he was good at it. Conscious that Jacobina was there to observe him he chose the ugliest of the four girls watching the revelers from a gilt sofa and asked whether she would give him the honor. The young lady was so astonished to be selected that for a moment she gaped at him, and his stomach tightened with fear that he had broken one of the invisible rules of the rich and would be refused. But he had not. They danced the waltz and then another; and then, seeing a young woman with fine dark down on her upper lip, to whom Jacobina could not possibly object, Piet extricated himself and asked if she would care to polka with him.

Observing Piet’s selection of neglected partners, Maarten took his choices as further evidence of innate nobility. Jacobina watched him too and the prickings of jealousy that had made her laugh sound hollow all evening subsided. Constance’s friend Myrthe Janssen said: “Who is that divine man who dances only with ugly women? Do you pay him, my dear?” To which Constance replied, after a moment’s hesitation, “As it happens, yes. But not for the reason you suggest. He’s Egbert’s tutor.”

“Adorable.”

“I suppose. Rather a dry fish. He’s terrifically sensible.”

“Sensible men don’t dance like that, darling.” And Myrthe, who had a beautiful figure and a mass of natural blond curls and was used, like Constance, to getting her way with men, did her best to catch Piet’s eye but did so in vain.

T
he band took a break a little after midnight. Piet broke free of his companion and went out into the velvet dark of the garden, in which the smell of the canals had been sweetened, if not quite obliterated, by banks of hothouse roses. He took with him a glass of champagne and drank it beneath a sky thickly spattered with stars. His shirt front was wet from dancing. As he stood in the cool air, a sense of superb well-being settled over him. With it came a surge of love—for the Vermeulen-Sickertses, who had given him a pass to this enchanting world; for life, and the splendors of standing alone in a rose-filled garden; for his mother and all she had taught him.

His conscience reminded him that his adventures with Jacobina were hardly consistent with affection for her husband; but in fact the contradiction troubled him less with each passing day, and two glasses of champagne were sufficient to still it entirely tonight. She did not, after all, permit him to take any but the essential liberties, and he approved of his self-restraint in not pressing the matter. He thought of her as she had been the afternoon before, almost unconscious with pleasure on her aunt’s chaise longue, and grinned broadly. Then the orchestra struck up again and he turned towards the sound, resolved that this time he would not only dance, he would speak—as any equal would.

He entered the ballroom to find Constance and Louisa at the center of a crowd and loitered at its edges.

“When my grandfather went to New York in ’42,” a young man with straggling mustaches was saying, “it took three months to make the crossing. When I went on the
Celtic
in ’03, it took eleven days.”

“Took me six days on the
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
,” said another, who had bright pink cheeks. “Steam triple-expansion engines geared to twin screw. But I must say I prefer the
Amerika
. First ship to have an elevator in first class.”

“Damn elevators. What matters is the food. I went on the
Kronprinzessin Cecilie
last year. The restaurant has a fish tank so you can choose your dinner. I ate nothing but lobster for five days.”

“Lobster!” cried Constance, with a significant glance at her sister. “I prefer apples.”

“Bread and butter,” said Louisa, “is all I need.”

“Chocolate, my dears, for every meal,” remarked Myrthe Janssen.

“Dreamlike, to have chocolate for every meal,” said another young woman.

Only the faintest trace of a raised eyebrow from Didier, who was serving them drinks, alerted Piet to the commencement of the alphabet game. Lacking such coded assistance, the young stags rattled on boastfully. They discussed the charms of rival liners while their opinions were elicited on
English
engines, and
French
cooking, and
glamour
, and whether or not a suite on a Loire Lines Château of the Atlantic was a close approximation of
heaven
.

Now it was Constance’s turn. She hesitated a moment and then said: “Investment. Who provides the investment for these ships?”

This was a topic on which the pink-cheeked gentleman, whose name was Norbert Breitner, and whose father was chairman of the Holland-America Line, had been eager to hold forth for some time. “The big competition’s between the Germans and the English, of course,” he explained with condescension. “No sooner has one country produced the biggest, fastest ship afloat, but the other must outdo it. When J. P. Morgan was trying to gain control of Cunard, the British government offered enormous subsidies if the company would remain independent and build the two biggest ships the world has ever known. The first one’s called the
Lusitania
. She’s well over thirty-one thousand gross tons. She’ll be in service by the autumn.”

“Of course,” interjected his mustachioed friend, “the small print says they must be convertible for war use, in the event of a conflict.”

“
J
. P. Morgan,” said Louisa, stressing the first initial, “was in the box next to ours at Beyreuth last year.”

“
King
of Wall Street, surely,” added Myrthe.

“
Lusitania
’s going to be the world’s grandest ship,” said another young lady. “My parents have already booked passage on her—”

“
Maiden
voyage!” interrupted Louisa, in English and out of turn; and to the surprise of the two young men the girls around them burst into hysterical laughter.

Piet, who had been nerving himself to make an interjection, kept silent. But now another fellow stepped into the center of the group with the unstudied assurance of a handsome man who is also very rich. His face was thin and finely wrought, its expression disdainful. “You won’t catch me on the
Lusitania
,” he said. “The only ship worth the trouble is the
Eugénie
.”

The appearance of this attractive oracle inspired an abrupt cessation of feminine hostilities. “And why is that, Mr. van Sigelen?” asked Constance, who assumed the right of first response.

“I don’t care a fig for speed or size. Comfort and service are all I consider, and the French are best at both. Albert Verignan’s a genius. He built the Loire Lines Company from scratch and sees to every detail himself. She is the only ship to have a theater. The grill room is the most spectacular at sea. And the first-class suites rival those of your father’s hotels, Miss Vermeulen-Sickerts. I recommend the Henri de Navarre, which has an enormous bath. Each is decorated for a figure from French history.”

Piet listened as Mr. van Sigelen elaborated on the liner’s charms. To disguise his awkwardness at lingering so long, he accepted another glass of champagne from Didier. He heard that the
Eugénie
’s first-class grill room, a miniature of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, with fourteen-foot windows running the length of one side, was located so high above the sundeck that only the horizon was visible. “It’s like dining on a cloud,” van Sigelen told them. “One half expects to see angels strumming harps.”

This little joke provoked laughter of an altogether more sympathetic kind, and under cover of it Myrthe Janssen slipped her arm through Mr. van Sigelen’s and led him to the dance floor.

“The
Eugénie
’s steam triple-expansion engines don’t compare at all well with, say, the quadruple expansions of the
Kaiser Wilhelm II
,” said Norbert Breitner, in an attempt to reassert his authority. “Forty thousand people came on board to inspect her the first time she docked at New York.”

“No!” exclaimed Constance; and it seemed to Piet that her real objection was to Myrthe’s deft removal of Mr. van Sigelen.

“Believe me, my dear Miss Vermeulen-Sickerts, that is absolutely true. I was there.”

It was not clear to Piet that Constance, by employing a word that began with
n
, was resuming the alphabet game where Louisa’s “maiden” had left it; but a third glass of champagne sanctioned daredevilry and in a clear, confident voice he said: “
Opium
. You must have smoked it to hallucinate such a crowd.”

There was silence.

The young women turned to him, aghast to have their machinations exposed by a stranger. Louisa said nothing. But Constance, observing the intensifying pink of Norbert Breitner’s cheeks and aware that she was looked to for leadership, said: “
Passion
is a wonderful quality. Don’t tease, Mr. Barol.”