The Hothouse by the East River (4 page)

‘So I
said to John, if Harry and Giselle come with us, Howard can go with Harry to
Pearl’s and John could come with Gene for the Sunday night before we leave. But
if Ray stops over at Nantucket then I have to be there for Merlin and Jay as
they have nowhere to go. That’s if Pierre goes to Italy. If not I don’t know
what we can do. I know Katerina can’t be back till September, but suppose
Pierre comes the last week in August, then we’ve got to find somewhere for Jay
or Merlin, one or the other. But John said, let them go to California and get a
vacation job like Elaine Harvey and Sam last summer. Why land on us? Garven says—’

‘Who
are you talking to?’ says Paul.

‘You,’
says Elsa, her eyes still fixed on the East River. ‘We’ve got to plan, we’ve
left it late enough and the house will be overcrowded if all these people come
to light. Garven says I’ll make myself ill.’

‘What’s
going on out there?’ Paul says, coming boldly to look out of the window over
her shoulders.

‘Don’t
shout,’ she says.

‘I
wasn’t shouting,’ he replies, softening his voice which hardened a moment ago
with the effort of approaching her look-out station in the window alcove. He
says, ‘A lot of mist this evening.’

‘Really?’
she says, as if she cannot see for herself the heat-fog that has lowered over
the city of New York all day.

He
withdraws, sideways and backwards, and stands at a distance from the window between
one sofa and another.

He
says, ‘Where did John call from?’

‘Some
campus, I think. It was just before lunch.’

‘Who is
John, anyway? John who? And all those kids, who are they?’

‘I
didn’t ask,’ she says. ‘They might be anybody.’

‘I’m
sorry I took that house,’ Paul says. She says, ‘If you want me to go into a
clinic just as an excuse to put them off, nothing doing.’

‘Who’s
talking about a clinic? For God’s sake, Elsa. It’s one of your bad days, isn’t
it?’

She
puts her head on one side and makes her eyes wide, flirtatiously, at the
window. She says, ‘Yes, but I feel better already since you came in. Just in
that short space I feel better already. What about a drink?’

Paul
says to his son, ‘Pierre, your mother’s anxious about the prospect of having
too many people to stay this summer.’

‘Keep
them away,’ says Pierre. ‘These people don’t exist as far as I’m concerned.’

‘But
it’s her anxiety — she has these fits of worrying. Then it’s all over as soon
as she has a chance to talk to me. She needs my presence.’

‘Oh,
they all worry about people coming to stay. All women do — everyone does. I
do.’

‘Why
isn’t she anxious about me? I’m in danger, ‘says Paul.

‘Look,’
says Pierre wildly. ‘Talk to Garven. I’m not an expert on these feelings.’

‘My
God, it’s a rational normal fear. Why should I talk to Garven?’ Paul says. And
he thinks, as one who hopes to still the tempest: Now let us turn to something
else. ‘Listen to me,’ his voice is saying…. In the summer of 1944, he is
telling his son, life was more vivid than it is now. Everything was more
distinct. The hours of the day lasted longer. One lived excitedly and
dangerously. There was a war on.

Pierre
looks ahead at the painting on the wall opposite and wonders if the annual
allowance that his mother gives him on the condition that he keeps on good
terms with his father is worth it.

‘We
really lived our life,’ says Paul.

It’s
like the electric fixtures in Peregrine’s apartment, Pierre meanwhile is
reflecting. In Peregrine’s apartment, which is a long barn-shaped room on the
third floor of a barn-like warehouse off lower Broadway, the main lighting
fixture in the ceiling is fitted with a three-way adapter into whose sockets
are fitted, in turn, the light bulb, a cord leading to a two-plate cooking
stove and a longer cord leading to a further three-way adapter which is hooked
on to the wall. The adapter on the wall also has three sockets; one for an
electric razor, another for a bright lamp which Peregrine uses when he works at
his drawings at night, and the third is a free-lance receptacle for an iron, a
coffee-pot, an electric cork-opener, and various other electrical things which
Peregrine uses alternately. When Peregrine first put up this rigging, it was
expected to fuse within a few hours, a few days, any time; it was predicted
that the whole neighbourhood would have a black-out, maybe the whole of
Manhattan, or the eastern seaboard. But more than two years have passed and
Peregrine’s fuse has not blown. It must happen any time, any moment, thinks
Pierre. Perhaps it is happening now. My father and mother, and the rest of us,
will blow a fuse and the current will stop flowing, thank God. Useful as it is,
it’s all too precarious. I’ll get my vital juice from some other source.

His
father says, ‘You don’t seem to take in how real it all was. And now it’s
caught up on me again, you don’t seem to believe that I’m in danger.

You’re
like your mother, Pierre, during the war when we were on secret work. She was
careless.’

Pierre
gets up and bends over the long window-seat to look down at the street. He
says, ‘Do you see that man going up towards Fifth? Come and look, Father.’

Paul
joins him, his nose peering forward.

‘There,’
says Pierre, ‘the man in the light suit just now passing the pharmacy, there.’

‘Yes,
why?’ says the father.

The
stared-at man stops at the corner and turns his head for a meaningless moment
to look across to Pierre’s building as people generally do, as it were
obligingly, when picked on by chance to be looked at from afar. Pierre says,
‘He’s there every night. Usually he stands on the corner for a while then walks
back up the street. He’s watching the entrance.’ It is all just a fabrication,
but in Pierre’s ears it sounds better than his father’s kind of truth.

‘My
God!’ says the father, still watching the corner where the man has disappeared.

‘Did
you recognise him? You know his face?’ says the tall son who still holds up the
edge of the nylon curtain somewhat sweetly between his thumb and his index
finger.

‘No,’
says Paul. ‘Drop the curtain,’ he says. ‘He’ll know we’ve seen him.’

Pierre
lets it fall from his fingers and pats the curtain into place like a devoted
housewife.

‘This
is serious,’ says Paul.

The son
sits down and looks at his watch. ‘Yes, really,’ he says. A police siren swoops
past their hearing like a primitive bird and wails on the wing far into the
traffic.

‘What
kind of a daughter are you?’ Paul says. ‘Just what kind of a daughter?’

Katerina
says, ‘I did you credit at school. What did you do for me that’s so special?’

‘I
caused you,’ says her father.

‘Not
all by yourself.’ She smiles with her white teeth seeming to leap from her sun
tan.

‘I
always took the initiative with your mother.’

‘Well,’
she says, ‘that is an interesting piece of data.’

‘Data
is plural. Datum is the singular. I don’t know how the hell you did well at
school. You don’t know a thing.’

‘You’d
be surprised, Pa,’ says Katerina. ‘You really would.’

She had
been lying in bed listening to the church bells and the air-conditioner when
her father arrived. Her apartment is, for the present, at East Sixty-fourth
Street off Madison Avenue.

When he
has gone she writes a letter to her mother asking for money. After some thought
she addresses the envelope to Mrs Paul Hazlett, H.C.F. The letters stand for
Highest Common Factor. Katerina feels her mother might ponder as to their
significance and so be moved to read the letter. Katerina delivers it herself
later in the day, slipping it into her parents’ mailbox on the ground floor,
there by the East River where they live.

III

It is winter time in Elsa
Hazlett’s apartment; the rushing summer purr of the air-conditioner has ceased;
the air quivers with central heating that cannot be turned off very far, and
which is augmented by heat from the flats above and below and in the north
flank.

‘Garven?
— Who is Garven?’ says Princess Xavier.

‘My
guidance director,’ Elsa says.

‘Liberate
yourself from all such people,’ says the Princess, gathering together her
large-lady folds.

‘You
aren’t going yet? — Stay a while,’ Elsa says.

The
Princess murmurs, while she settles herself back among the cushions, ‘I have to
get home to my mulberries.’ She says, ‘I once was in the toils of a priest, my
dear Elsa. I liberated myself from him forty years ago and I never regretted
it. The first week and the fourth week that I refused him the door were the
worst. He had been my anchor and when I gave up this man I felt like a little
boat tossing on the great sea of life. But I found my course — I have never
regretted cutting loose from that priest.’ She leans back, puffing her sails
like a very big ship, so that one can well believe what she has said.

‘Oh,
Garven has no religion,’ Elsa says, ‘he’s not a priest.’

‘Religion
makes no difference,’ the Princess says. ‘You should never take guidance from
one man only. From many men, many women, yes, by watching them and hearing, and
finally consulting with yourself. It’s the only way. Life should be one’s
guidance director.’

‘Oh,
Garven amuses me,’ Elsa says.

‘If you
enjoy going to visit him then the more reason that you should give him up. You
will miss him, and the more you miss him the stronger you will be. Guidance
director! You’re better off with your window—thing.’

Elsa
laughs and goes over to the window, looking out. She says, ‘It keeps me free,’
leaving a doubt whether she is referring to Garven or to the window-thing.

But
Princess Xavier is not about to be perplexed on any point whatsoever. She is
now interested in something else, far away in her thoughts, probably Long
Island, where her farm of sheep and silkworms will be shivering for want of
her presence and, of course, the cold. She opens one of the folds revealing a
pink bulge of bosom. She puts her hand within the crease; her eggs are safe.
She is in the habit of keeping the eggs of her silkworms warm between and under
her folds of breasts; she also takes new-born lambs to her huge ancestral bed, laying
them at her feet early in the cold springtime, and she does many such things.
She now folds herself back into her coverings and starts the process of rising
from the sofa.

Elsa
says, ‘Paul will be in soon. Can’t you wait half-an-hour and have a drink? He
always hates to miss you, Poppy love.’

The
Princess waddles respectfully round Elsa’s shadow to avoid treading on it as it
falls across the grand piano and on to the floor like a webby grey cashmere
shawl that has been left to trail and gather dust untouched for a hundred
years. The Princess says, ‘Next week I can stay longer, and then go on to the
opera from here. Today I have to go early —Francesca is away and I have to see
what they are up to, one can’t trust them, they …‘ She kisses Elsa, and is
seen into the lift by both Elsa and her maid, while she is still explaining the
difficulties attaching to her farm. At an earlier time in her life she had
spent her days pining and striving for a moderately slim appearance; she had
been enterprising in her travels and at last she had married an aged Russian
exile who had just lost his job as a pianist in a nightclub in Paris. She took
him to London and started an employment agency specialising in foreign exiles,
placing her clients wherever an alien tongue or an exotic skill was needed.

After
this marriage the Princess made herself fat and fatter, until, ten years later
at the time of Prince Xavier’s funeral, she had become grand and large, loving
all, and much beloved. She had been a foundling Miss Copplestone from New
Zealand, and might easily have taken a wrong safe turn, ending up as a saggy
supervisor at the telephone exchange. Elsa had never known her differently, having
met the Princess when she was already grand-mannered, large and free, even as
far back as 1944, there in the world of wartime secrets.

‘He’s
come back,’ says Paul. ‘He’s back.’

Elsa
says, ‘Now, now. You know he isn’t Kiel, so what does it matter to you, if he’s
back?’

‘I’m
convinced it’s Kiel without any doubt. And he’s back in New York. He’s back in
the shoe store. He really is Kiel, after all.’

‘He is
too young to be Kiel. You agreed with Garven that people grow older. He’s like
what Kiel was away back in the war, but Kiel now would be very different even
if he hadn’t died in prison, which he did.’

‘When I
saw him again today I knew,’ says Paul, ‘that it was Kiel. He must have had
some rejuvenating treatment.’

‘Talk
to Garven,’ says Elsa, ‘don’t talk to me. I had enough of this Kiel last
summer. All summer you were on about Kiel.’