Home Truths (22 page)

“No, it is not childish,” Ramsay was saying to himself. “I know that
I
am not childish, I am older than my parents, but sometimes, even when I am not hungry …” He stopped; it was too secret. Then, crossing his mind, unsummoned, came
“cruelty.” It was only a word, a tag on a tree; it was like Katharine’s voice saying “larch,” “spruce,” “acacia.”

“He should have been in a city,” said Ramsay. “It’s as simple as that. That mania he had for collecting, even. It’s a clue. They are all things you use in cities – pieces of metal, paper clips.”

“A simple case of thrift,” said Nanette. “Very Swiss.”

He looked down at her face. “Where’s your home?” he said. “Where are you from?”

“I’ve told you. Ascona.” Her face seemed smaller all at once. “All right. From Vienna. Before that, Poland. Now you know everything. If you want the whole truth, the real truth, he didn’t like foreigners. He made horrible jokes about Jews in front of me, to see if I would laugh.” All Nanette had done was apply a new name, just as Katharine had said grass was millet. Ramsay would see her now wearing a tag. They heard cowbells from the valley. “Katharine thinks they sound like Oriental music,” she said, smiling miserably.

“Shows how much she knows about that.”

But she would not follow up what she had been saying. Without meaning to, he had made her unhappy. She talked as if they had only just met, and began all over again about the racial question in the United States.

R
amsay had accepted the old man’s bed, but the bath repelled him. He was glad when, one day, the taps ran nothing but rust and he was obliged to share one of the bathrooms in the house. He came into an early-morning house, with the cook stirring and the little boy eating bread on the stairs, and Nanette, encountered in the hall, wearing a striped bathrobe.
Nanette had left the room full of steam and lavender. Wet washcloths festooned the tub. He removed a wire hanger holding six stockings, and, just before he turned the shower on, he listened to church bells and to thunder. Ten minutes later the lawn was obliterated by gray smoke. The tree where Pip had hunted was still. Over the thunderclap came more bells, as if to silence the sky. The wind rose all in a moment, and the first drops of rain were flung against the house. By the time he had finished shaving, soft silent rain fell from a bright sky. The air was cold. Birds sang, but the strongest sound was a brook. Now a voice covered it – Katharine’s voice, complaining about last night’s supper. “The soup was out of a can, the hamburger was cooked black, and I don’t call half a slice of tinned pineapple on a bit of rusk a pudding. It really is unfair – I take the boy over entirely. I keep him out of the kitchen. You’ve got nothing to do but the meals. As for the salad, there was too much vinegar
and
too much oil. I don’t know how you manage to have too much of both.”

In the room where the young girls slept, light came through flimsy curtains. Ramsay, coming into the room, saw Peggy hunched, sheet up to her forehead, tufts of coarse fair hair showing like bristles. Her pillows were on the floor. Anne lay with a leg and an arm and a small breast outside the blanket. On the pillow a wreath of dead wild flowers was half crushed by her head. Her brown smooth face was lightly oiled. Watching the sleeping girl, he knew what he could be capable of, provided she loathed him, or was frightened of him. Better fear than hate. When he touched Anne her breathing changed; he thought he saw a gleam between her lashes. Watching, she made no move. She was waiting to see what could happen. Outside, Katharine called, “Pip, Pip!,” beating her hands.
Peggy awoke and, with a rapidity he would never have thought possible in the dull girl, sat up and looked. There they were, Anne cold and excited, her heart like a machine under his hand, and Ramsay the vivisectionist, and poor Peggy, who had been in love.

T
o amuse Ramsay, Katharine now organized excursions. She took them to restaurants where they lunched sitting on balconies brilliant with roses, where she ordered the food with frowning care, putting on her glasses to read the menu, suggesting and planning for them all. She had noticed that he was greedy. She watched him, sagely and fondly. She had wakened something – perhaps only a craving for strawberries and cream – she later intended to curb. Nanette looked at her, and at Ramsay, and began having headaches, and finally dropped out of their party altogether. She looked dark and wretched when she was left behind. “The truth is, she gets carsick,” said Katharine, as if some other excuse had been offered and was a lie. The young girls looked through Ramsay and round him and not much at each other. They played an acquisitive game called Take It Home and fought over museums, ancient jewelry, ski lifts, whole restaurants, a view, a horse, other people’s cars, but stopped short of people. Peggy was pink with joy at being included, but Ramsay knew that she, and not Anne, had been scared to death that morning in their bedroom.

After these excursions he was stiff and sore, and could hardly move his arms and legs at night or turn in bed. His memory of each day was of eating and drinking beer on blowy terraces and of parasols knocked down by wind. Katharine took him to see a famous church treasure, and to Zurchers for
tea, where they sat next to Noël Coward, and to Lausanne for an exhibition of French sculpture and painting. She brought the cook’s child this time, and the two girls went to a movie. Katharine wore her glasses, and looked at the catalogue in her hand before examining any of the paintings. The two men of the household walked one on each side of her. Ramsay, shut up in a series of large rooms full of paintings, rid of three out of four of the women, began to breathe.

“These Impressionists,” he began. “They seem kind of tied to their wives, you know what I mean. They were limited to their wives’ gardens. You feel they all had something wrong with them and that the wife was waiting with a cup of tea and some medicine.” Katharine glanced at him. That had been her role, and she knew that he knew it.

“Sit down, Douglas,” she said, suggesting the circular sofa in the middle of the room. “You must be tired, after all this walking around. There is nothing more tiring than looking at things that don’t interest one.”

Ramsay found himself sitting and looking at the headless statue of an adolescent girl. He looked at the small breasts, slightly down-pointed. The hips were wider than the chest, the legs columns. A piece of bronze, he told himself. No one had ever been like that. He put Anne’s head on the bronze neck, and presently was conscious of being watched. It was the boy, who was running round and round the sofa. The little boy circled closer. He sat down, and Ramsay smiled into what seemed an open face. The child breathed something difficult to hear. He pointed at Ramsay (and he had to bring his hand all the way from a far place to do so; he liked great gestures). He breathed again – something that sounded like “Idiot.”

“What?”

“Idiot,” the child said. The index finger still pointed; the arm was a soft arc.

“Who?”

“Vous
.”

Ramsay stared down at him in fury and outrage. “Idiot, am I? What do you think you are? You supposed to be clever?”

The child did not understand English, but he understood the tone. A mistake had been made; he had been bolder than he intended. “You, for instance,” said Ramsay. “What are you supposed to be?
Tu n’es pas un peu idiot?”

“Moi, je suis gentil,”
said the child, sliding off the sofa and beginning to back away. His face trembled. He said
“zentil,”
but this evidence of his age – his inability to pronounce some letters – did not endear him to Ramsay, who rushed on, “You’re a rude little bastard.
Gentil!
You’re a little bastard, that’s what you are.”

From the safety of Katharine, the child looked boldly back. What a fool I’ve been, Ramsay thought. Of course the child had not remarked he was looking at the statue of an adolescent girl and thinking spellbound thoughts about Anne.

“P
eggy wants to go back to England,” said Katharine, and sighed.

“But she hates her family,” Nanette protested.

“She may not know she does.”

“She’s fourteen and old enough to admit that her father isn’t a god and her mother an angel,” said Nanette.

“That is true.” Katharine bowed her head with simulated meekness.

Anne appeared, with wet hair plastered on her cheeks. She
washed it daily. She was struggling with a pullover. “Are you talking about me?” she said as her head emerged. “I thought I heard my name. Peggy is packing, by the way.” She plunged down on the grass at their feet and said, “We’ve decided she’s leaving because I’ve been so awful to her.”

“I shall speak to her,” Katharine said, looking oddly like the woman Ramsay had imagined before he ever saw her.

“I have been awful to her,” said Anne. “You won’t make her change her mind.”

“It is the same story every time she comes here,” said Katharine. “That wretched girl always threatens to leave because of some nonsense she has imagined. It used to be –” Nanette stopped her. “Now it is Anne she complains of,” Katharine said.

“I want to see you alone,” said Anne to her mother casually, “when you’ve finished with Peggy.”

Katharine was already walking across the lawn, in her striped dress, in an old, large straw hat, with all her bracelets rattling. Throughout this exchange Ramsay might as well have been invisible. The group was disintegrating. The cook’s child no longer came to lunch. Ramsay could observe all he liked now, for there was no one to catch him at it. Even the old man’s phantom had vanished. Ramsay no longer saw or felt him, demanding chocolate, querulous and lost, too cosseted, smothered, destroyed. “Yesterday,” said Nanette’s small radio, “was the hottest twenty-second of June since 1873.” Ramsay isolated three birds by sound: one asking a question, one cackling derisively, one talking to itself in a conversational tone.

P
icked out in the headlights, a badger crossed the road, steadily, like an enormous dachshund. It turned and looked into the lights, and Ramsay, sitting next to Katharine, experienced the revulsion he felt in the presence of animals and wild creatures in particular. They had taken Peggy to the airport at Geneva and there – as at the exhibition of French paintings – he had felt completely himself and at home.

Back at the chalet was the incomprehensible language of birds, and the cat with its savage nature, and the cannibal magpies, the cannibal jays.

“If we park here, the car will be in shade tomorrow,” he said.

“No, the trees are on the wrong side,” Katharine said.

“There must be some shade, no matter which side they’re on.”

“You would have thought that after years of this, they would either have enlarged the garage,” Ramsay remarked to himself, “or built another, or figured out which side of the trees received the morning sun.” The car lights were put out, and flashlights distributed. Larch branches pressed on the car windows, white in the night. Katharine sat as the others – Anne and Nanette – got out. Ramsay, holding the door for her, shone his flashlight on her face.

“Do you think much about that girl in Berlin?” she said.

No. He thought of his mother in a camel-hair coat, her legs thrust out, staring straight before her. He said, “Most of the time I never think about her.”

“Anne had a conversation with me today,” she said. His stomach contracted; his hands were without strength. He released the switch of the pocket light. “Never mind about it,”
said Katharine. “There’s a moon. Anne wants to go to Ascona with Nanette this week. She wants to stay all July. She and Peggy have funny holidays – school in August.”

“Are you letting her?”

“Why not?” she said, without looking at him. “She wants to get away from home, which is normal. I told her she could go wherever she liked. She is old enough. I can’t …”

You can’t read her mail forever, he thought.

“What are your plans, Douglas? You can stay as long as you like. I feel there have been too many people around. We’ve never had a real conversation, have we? I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with my cooking in July. I’ve fired the cook.”

T
he cuckoo, at daybreak, was an interruption to his sleep.

He saw the notes – not as notes of music but as a new kind of shorthand. He did not know enough of the shorthand to read the notes, or enough of the new language to reply. He dreamed that everyone was skeletal, while he had got enormously fat. He got up and dressed – by flashlight, to avoid doing battle with insects – and packed, not caring much what he left behind, and stepped out into the garden. Across the front of the house was a carved inscription, naming the builder, and giving a date – 1780 – and reminding Ramsay, or anyone who stopped to read it, that death waits for life. The motto did not belong to this chalet but came from another region. Katharine had bought it and put it there about a year before Moser’s last stroke. The chalet – like a bison, like a bear – watched him slip and slide down the path with his two suitcases. He sat down in the station shelter in a state of
such lunatic joy at his deliverance that presently he was close to tears.

A
t the pension he went to in Montreux, a tall, dignified woman wearing a white apron greeted Ramsay. His cases were put in an ice-cold room with a linoleum floor. He looked through the north window at another pension, then at the varnished bed, the eiderdown, the table, and the clean, unironed checked cloth. A small Buddha, the only ornament in the room, sat on the chest of drawers. Ramsay picked him up, but no matter how he tried he could not catch Buddha’s eye.

“That was left behind,” the woman said, “by a Professor Doctor. The meal hours are eight, twelve, and seven. Breakfast in your room will be fifty centimes more. With the prices we charge we cannot afford extras.” From the kitchen came a crash of plates and loud cursing. When that died away he heard the soft silent crunching, like silkworms feeding, that came from the dining room, where the others were all at breakfast.

The first thing he unpacked was the unopened box of caramels: Caramels à la crème de Gruyères. He tangled with the Scotch Tape and pulled the box open. It’s only fudge, he thought. He did not know what he had been expecting. He ate half the box – Moser’s legacy – and felt sick, and drank tap water. “Good thing I left,” he told himself, realizing indignantly what he had been driven to. By now they would know he had gone. He had left them up there with the cat and the cannibals. He was down where there were signs of life and work. He found one of the signs in a drawer, left by the Professor Doctor – a drawing of a naked and faceless woman wearing a pearl necklace. At ten he went to a film and watched
a pretty German girl mixed up with some man who looked like a toad. But they were all so comfortable and so well dressed, and their problems were real problems, such as money lost and found. He could not sit in the cinema forever, but first things first: his room in the students’ residence in Berlin was taken by someone else until July. He said, “Look here, Katharine, I’m not interested in weather and the color of the sky. I hate knowing what the weather is. I don’t know what you mean by having inner resources. Are you supposed to recite poems from memory while the whole world dissolves into fog, goes away, and stays gone?” He blinked at the sleepy noon streets, the petunias in tubs, the brown balconies with washing under the eaves. He bought a newspaper and saw a prime minister wearing a miner’s helmet. In the middle of the front page, boxed to show its importance, was this: