Kiss Kiss (5 page)

All her life, Mrs Foster had had an almost pathological fear
of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain.
In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman,
but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these
would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would
begin to twitch. It was nothing much—just a tiny vellicating
muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink—but
the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear until an
hour or so after the train or plane or whatever it was had been
safely caught.
      
It was really extraordinary how in certain people a simple
apprehension about a thing like catching a train can grow
into a serious obsession. At least half an hour before it was
time to leave the house for the station, Mrs Foster would step
out of the elevator all ready to go, with hat and coat and
gloves, and then, being quite unable to sit down, she would
flutter and fidget about from room to room until her husband,
who must have been well aware of her state, finally emerged
from his privacy and suggested in a cool dry voice that
perhaps they had better get going now, had they not?
      
Mr Foster may possibly have had a right to be irritated by
this foolishness of his wife’s, but he could have had no excuse
for increasing her misery by keeping her waiting unnecessarily.
Mind you, it is by no means certain that this is what he did,
yet whenever they were to go somewhere, his timing was so
accurate—just a minute or two late, you understand—and his
manner so bland that it was hard to believe he wasn’t purposely
inflicting a nasty private little torture of his own on the
unhappy lady. And one thing he must have known—that she
would never dare to call out and tell him to hurry. He had
disciplined her too well for that. He must also have known
that if he was prepared to wait even beyond the last moment
of safety, he could drive her nearly into hysterics. On one or
two special occasions in the later years of their married life,
it seemed almost as though he had wanted to miss the train
simply in order to intensify the poor woman’s suffering.
      
Assuming (though one cannot be sure) that the husband was
guilty, what made his attitude doubly unreasonable was the
fact that, with the exception of this one small irrepressible
foible, Mrs Foster was and always had been a good and loving
wife. For over thirty years, she had served him loyally and
well. There was no doubt about this. Even she, a very modest
woman, was aware of it, and although she had for years
refused to let herself believe that Mr Foster would ever
consciously torment her, there had been times recently when
she had caught herself beginning to wonder.
      
Mr Eugene Foster, who was nearly seventy years old, lived
with his wife in a large six-storey house in New York City, on
East Sixty-second Street, and they had four servants. It was a
gloomy place, and few people came to visit them. But on this
particular morning in January, the house had come alive and
there was a great deal of bustling about. One maid was distributing
bundles of dust sheets to every room, while another
was draping them over the furniture. The butler was bringing
down suitcases and putting them in the hall. The cook kept
popping up from the kitchen to have a word with the butler,
and Mrs Foster herself, in an old-fashioned fur coat and with
a black hat on the top of her head, was flying from room to
room and pretending to supervise these operations. Actually,
she was thinking of nothing at all except that she was going to
miss her plane if her husband didn’t come out of his study soon
and get ready.
      
“What time is it, Walker?” she said to the butler as she passed
him.
      
“It’s ten minutes past nine, Madam.”
      
“And has the car come?”
      
“Yes, Madam, it’s waiting. I’m just going to put the luggage
in now.”
      
“It takes an hour to get to Idlewild,” she said. “My plane
leaves at eleven. I have to be there half an hour beforehand
for the formalities. I shall be late. I just know I’m going to be
late.”
      
“I think you have plenty of time, Madam,” the butler said
kindly. “I warned Mr Foster that you must leave at nine fifteen.
There’s still another five minutes.”
      
“Yes, Walker, I know, I know. But get the luggage in
quickly, will you please?”
      
She began walking up and down the hall, and whenever
the butler came by, she asked him the time. This, she kept
telling herself, was the
one
plane she must not miss. It had
taken months to persuade her husband to allow her to go. If
she missed it, he might easily decide that she should cancel the
whole thing. And the trouble was that he insisted on coming
to the airport to see her off.
      
“Dear God,” she said aloud, “I’m going to miss it. I know, I
know, I
know
I’m going to miss it.” The little muscle beside
the left eye was twitching madly now. The eyes themselves
were very close to tears.
      
“What time is it, Walker?”
      
“It’s eighteen minutes past, Madam.”
      
“Now I really
will
miss it!” she cried. “Oh, I wish he would
come!”
      
This was an important journey for Mrs Foster. She was
going all alone to Paris to visit her daughter, her only child,
who was married to a Frenchman. Mrs Foster didn’t care
much for the Frenchman, but she was fond of her daughter,
and, more than that, she had developed a great yearning to set
eyes on her three grandchildren. She knew them only from
the many photographs that she had received and that she kept
putting up all over the house. They were beautiful, these
children. She doted on them, and each time a new picture
arrived she would carry it away and sit with it for a long
time, staring at it lovingly and searching the small faces for
signs of that old satisfying blood likeness that meant so much.
And now, lately, she had come more and more to feel that
she did not really wish to live out her days in a place where
she could not be near these children, and have them visit her,
and take them for walks, and buy them presents, and watch
them grow. She knew, of course, that it was wrong and in a
way disloyal to have thoughts like these while her husband
was still alive. She knew also that although he was no longer
active in his many enterprises, he would never consent to
leave New York and live in Paris. It was a miracle that he had
ever agreed to let her fly over there alone for six weeks to
visit them. But, oh, how she wished she could live there
always, and be close to them!
      
“Walker, what time is it?”
      
“Twenty-two minutes past, Madam.”
      
As he spoke, a door opened and Mr Foster came into the
hall. He stood for a moment, looking intently at his wife, and
she looked back at him—at this diminutive but still quite
dapper old man with the huge bearded face that bore such an
astonishing resemblance to those old photographs of Andrew
Carnegie.
      
“Well,” he said, “I suppose perhaps we’d better get going
fairly soon if you want to catch that plane.”
      
“
Yes
, dear—
yes!
Everything’s ready. The car’s
waiting.”
      
“That’s good,” he said. With his head over to one side, he
was watching her closely. He had a peculiar way of cocking
the head and then moving it in a series of small, rapid jerks.
Because of this and because he was clasping his hands up high
in front of him, near the chest, he was somehow like a squirrel
standing there—a quick clever old squirrel from the Park.
      
“Here’s Walker with your coat, dear. Put it on.”
      
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” he said. “I’m just going to
wash my hands.”
      
She waited for him, and the tall butler stood beside her,
holding the coat and the hat.
      
“Walker, will I miss it?”
      
“No, Madam,” the butler said. “I think you’ll make it all
right.”
      
Then Mr Foster appeared again, and the butler helped him
on with his coat. Mrs Foster hurried outside and got into the
hired Cadillac. Her husband came after her, but he walked
down the steps of the house slowly, pausing halfway to
observe the sky and to sniff the cold morning air.
      
“It looks a bit foggy,” he said as he sat down beside her in
the car. “And it’s always worse out there at the airport. I
shouldn’t be surprised if the flight’s cancelled already.”
      
“Don’t say that, dear—
please
.”
      
They didn’t speak again until the car had crossed over the
river to Long Island.
      
“I arranged everything with the servants,” Mr Foster said.
“They’re all going off today. I gave them half pay for six
weeks and told Walker I’d send him a telegram when we
wanted them back.”
      
“Yes,” she said. “He told me.”
      
“I’ll move into the club tonight. It’ll be a nice change
staying at the club.”
      
“Yes, dear. I’ll write to you.”
      
“I’ll call in at the house occasionally to see that everything’s
all right and to pick up the mail.”
      
“But don’t you really think Walker should stay there all the
time to look after things?” she asked meekly.
      
“Nonsense. It’s quite unnecessary. And anyway, I’d have to
pay him full wages.”
      
“Oh yes,” she said. “Of course.”
      
“What’s more, you never know what people get up to when
they’re left alone in a house,” Mr Foster announced, and with
that he took out a cigar and, after snipping off the end with
a silver cutter, lit it with a gold lighter.
      
She sat still in the car with her hands clasped together tight
under the rug.
      
“Will you write to me?” she asked.
      
“I’ll see,” he said. “But I doubt it. You know I don’t hold
with letter-writing unless there’s something specific to say.”
      
“Yes, dear, I know. So don’t you bother.”
      
They drove on, along Queens Boulevard, and as they
approached the flat marshland on which Idlewild is built, the
fog began to thicken and the car had to slow down.
      
“Oh dear!” cried Mrs Foster. “I’m
sure
I’m going to
miss it now! What time is it?”
      
“Stop fussing,” the old man said. “It doesn’t matter anyway.
It’s bound to be cancelled now. They never fly in this sort of
weather. I don’t know why you bothered to come out.”
      
She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to her that there was
suddenly a new note in his voice, and she turned to look at
him. It was difficult to observe any change in his expression
under all that hair. The mouth was what counted. She wished,
as she had so often before, that she could see the mouth
clearly. The eyes never showed anything except when he was
in a rage.
      
“Of course,” he went on, “if by any chance it
does
go, then
I agree with you—you’ll be certain to miss it now. Why don’t
you resign yourself to that?”
      
She turned away and peered through the window at the
fog. It seemed to be getting thicker as they went along, and
now she could only just make out the edge of the road and
the margin of grassland beyond it. She knew that her husband
was still looking at her. She glanced at him again, and this
time she noticed with a kind of horror that he was staring
intently at the little place in the corner of her left eye where
she could feel the muscle twitching.
      
“Won’t you?” he said.
      
“Won’t I what?”
      
“Be sure to miss it now if it goes. We can’t drive fast in this
muck.”
      
He didn’t speak to her any more after that. The car crawled
on and on. The driver had a yellow lamp directed on to the
edge of the road, and this helped him to keep going. Other
lights, some white and some yellow, kept coming out of the
fog towards them, and there was an especially bright one that
followed close behind them all the time.
      
Suddenly, the driver stopped the car.
      
“There!” Mr Foster cried. “We’re stuck. I knew it.”
      
“No, sir,” the driver said, turning round. “We made it. This
is the airport.”
      
Without a word, Mrs Foster jumped out and hurried
through the main entrance into the building. There was a
mass of people inside, mostly disconsolate passengers standing
around the ticket counters. She pushed her way through and
spoke to the clerk.
      
“Yes,” he said. “Your flight is temporarily postponed. But
please don’t go away. We’re expecting this weather to clear
any moment.”
      
She went back to her husband who was still sitting in the
car and told him the news. “But don’t you wait, dear,” she said.
“There’s no sense in that.”
      
“I won’t,” he answered. “So long as the driver can get me
back. Can you get me back, driver?”
      
“I think so,” the man said.
      
“Is the luggage out?”
      
“Yes, sir.”
      
“Good-bye, dear,” Mrs Foster said, leaning into the car and
giving her husband a small kiss on the coarse grey fur of his
cheek.
      
“Good-bye,” he answered. “Have a good trip.”
      
The car drove off, and Mrs Foster was left alone.
      
The rest of the day was a sort of nightmare for her. She
sat for hour after hour on a bench, as close to the airline
counter as possible, and every thirty minutes or so she would
get up and ask the clerk if the situation had changed. She
always received the same reply—that she must continue to
wait, because the fog might blow away at any moment. It
wasn’t until after six in the evening that the loudspeakers
finally announced that the flight had been postponed until
eleven o’clock the next morning.
      
Mrs Foster didn’t quite know what to do when she heard
this news. She stayed sitting on her bench for at least another
half-hour, wondering, in a tired, hazy sort of way, where she
might go to spend the night. She hated to leave the airport.
She didn’t wish to see her husband. She was terrified that in
one way or another he would eventually manage to prevent
her from getting to France. She would have liked to remain
just where she was, sitting on the bench the whole night
through. That would be the safest. But she was already
exhausted, and it didn’t take her long to realise that this was
a ridiculous thing for an elderly lady to do. So in the end she
went to a phone and called the house.