The Hothouse by the East River (5 page)

‘You
saw him first.’

‘Well,
you saw him second. If he was Kiel he would have aged a bit like you,’ she
says.

Paul
says, ‘You didn’t say that when you first saw him in the shoe store. You said—’

‘It was
an illusion like any other illusion,’ she says, her shadow falling in the wrong
unnatural direction, ‘so 1 don’t know why you bring it up again. The man’s not
Kiel. So I don’t know why you bother. The man can’t be Kiel, he’s young enough
to be Kiel’s son. So I don’t know why you jumble the facts. All over the place,
you tumble.’

‘You
think of everything, my dear, until you think of something else.’ He speaks
softly as if she is becoming dangerous, as indeed she is when she speaks like
this.

‘Well
maybe you don’t jumble,’ she says with suicidal mirth, ‘I take it back. Cheer
up, I’m going to bed.’

‘No,
it’s mistake a face that I don’t do.’ He speaks to soothe her, but thinks, why
don’t I leave her? Today she’s bubbling with hilarity, tomorrow she’ll be
brooding again. Next week, hysterical gaiety. He says, ‘Did you see Garven
today?’

‘Yes,
do you know he’s starting an institute, The Institute of Guidance. He’s the
Guidance Director. His own title.’ She leaves the room, trailing her shadow at
the wrong angle, like the train of an antique ball-dress. She is laughing
rather fearfully all along the corridor and even when she has shut the door of
her room she continues to laugh; her laughter comes straight to his ear as if
she commands the air he breathes.

Here he
is with the colour photograph in his hand and here, again, he holds the
negative up to the light. Katerina, still at school; Pierre, a first-year student;
Paul himself in his tennis clothes, shorter than his son, smiling in profile;
and Elsa, blonde with the parting of her hair showing dark, trim in her white
shorts. Elsa’s shadow falls brown in the photograph, grey-white in the
negative; it crosses his shadow and the children’s as if to cancel them with
one sharp diagonal line. Elsa had laughed at the photograph when she first saw
it; the children had said nothing about the shadow, they never seemed to notice
anything. Only Pierre had said, ‘The Princess always takes photos out of focus;
what a waste!’

‘Mother
is no fool,’ says Pierre. ‘Mother is intelligent. More than one can possibly
calculate, she’s intelligent, it gives one a jolt sometimes.’

The
father feels a sudden panic because it is infinitely easier for a man to leave
a beautiful woman, to walk out and leave her, and be free, than to leave a
woman of intelligence beyond his calculation and her own grasp. ‘No,’ Paul
shouts. ‘She’s crazy. I have to think for her, I have to do her thinking all
the time.’

‘All
right, Father. All right.’

‘She’s
cunning, that’s all. When she wants to be.’

‘I went
back to the shoe store today, Poppy,’ Elsa says to the Princess. ‘I bought some
boots,’ Elsa says, ‘fur-lined, that I don’t need, Poppy, because I wanted to
have another look. The other day I bought these shoes I’m wearing — do you like
them? He looks like Kiel, too young. Could he be Kiel’s son, do you think?’

‘He’s
Kiel,’ says Poppy. ‘Kiel with a face-lift. When I went to the store I looked
close, my dear, and I saw it was truly Kiel. After all, he was very young when
we knew him during the war; very young. He must have had his face lifted, it
looks quite stretched at the eyes. You go again and look close, Elsa. You look
close. He’s stiff at the waist. I bought a pair of evening shoes to be sent
C.O.D. but naturally I gave a false name and address. I’ve got five pairs of
evening shoes already. What do I want with more? I rarely wear them. Did you
notice how he bends, stiff at the knees, thick at the waist, like a prisoner of
long years. As he
has been.’

‘I know
he’s Kiel,’ Elsa says. ‘I know it very well. I wish you would be more obliging,
Poppy, and pretend he’s someone else. If Paul could be induced to believe this
man’s somebody else, then he will become somebody else. It’s a matter of
persevering in a pretence. Paul must be persuaded against his judgment and
persevere against it.’

‘If you
weren’t an old friend of mine that I know so well I’d think you were sinister,’
states the Princess agreeably, as she takes out her powder compact and looks
closely at her face as if to verify to herself that she has uttered no lie. She
looks back at Elsa again and says, ‘utterly unscrupulous.’ She then pats her
nose and jowls with creamy powder, while the central-heating quivers in the air
and, outside the window, snowflakes begin to fold into clouds descending as
they have done, off and on, for so many weeks.

Neat,
orderly Delia, who has been the Hazletts’ daily maid for more than six years
comes in, looking as usual, to collect the tea-tray and get the washing-up done
before going home. She rarely speaks except to say good-afternoon and
goodbye-now. She came originally from Puerto Rico with her sister, married a
Puerto Rican night-porter, and now lives in the Bronx, returning to Puerto Rico
every two years at Christmas-time with her husband, their suitcase and their
twin daughters. This being a Thursday, Delia has had her shiny hair done before
coming to work, because Thursday is her husband’s night off.

‘Your
hair looks very good, Delia,’ Princess Xavier says as the young woman bends
over the tray and picks it up. Delia then stands up straight, holding the tray
at a little distance from her waist in a manner unusual to her. She waits in
this position for a little moment, then spreading her fingers she lets the tray
drop from her hands.

‘Oh!’ says
the Princess.

Elsa
and the maid say nothing. The three women stare at the wreckage on the carpet,
at the silver teapot on its side oozing leafy tea, the cream crawling its way
among the jagged fragments of Elsa’s turn-of-the-century Coalport china, the
petit-fours and scones from Schraffts, Fifth Avenue, and the pineapple
preserves from Charles’s, Madison Avenue; they stare at the sugar cubes
scattered over the carpet like children’s discarded playing-blocks seen from a
far height. Then Delia says, ‘You people are lousy. Katerina and Mr Hazlett is
lousy, your son Pierre is lousy, my husband is lousy and the kids is just so
lousy as well, this rat in my home is lousy and his lice is lousy.’

‘She
has never said such a thing before,’ Elsa says.

Delia
then runs to the window and wrenches at the latch-handle, scratching with her
little fingers and freshly painted nails to get it open; it is stiff, for it
has not been opened for the past eight weeks.

‘She’s
going to throw herself out!’ says the Princess, rolling like a ship to rise to
her feet.

‘Don’t
open the window, Delia,’ says Elsa, ‘because it upsets the central heating.
One should never open the windows when the central heating or the
air-conditioners are turned on, as it creates an atmospheric imbalance. If the
room is too hot, Della, you can turn down the heating by means of that tap by
the side of the radiator, you turn it to the right. If that fails to reduce the
heat—’

‘Elsa,’
says the Princess, ‘come and hold her!’

Delia
is trying all the windows in turn and now she is fighting off Princess Xavier
while attempting to reach the East window behind Elsa which looks out on the
dark daylight full of snow, a swirling grey spotted-muslin veil, beyond which,
only by faith and experience can you know, stands the sky over the East River.

In the
end they get the girl to sit down, then to lie down on the sofa, then to sip
water, while Elsa telephones to Garven. Delia says nothing but just lies and
looks sourly about the room with the corners of her mouth turned down
exceedingly, distorting her usual prettiness, in an expression of entire
disgust. The Princess sits by her side making remarks intended to soothe, such
as ‘We all feel that way sometimes,’ and ‘It will all have blown over by
tomorrow.’ So she must have sat many hours at her desk of Princess Xavier’s
Agency in Bayswater, dispensing into the nerve-racked ears of Europe’s refugees
sentiments which were all the more hypnotic in effect for having been unintelligible.

Elsa
goes and brings a brush and pan, and starts sweeping up the mess on the carpet,
her shadow weaving as she kneels. ‘When Garven arrives,’ she says, as she
sweeps and gathers up, ‘he will say to Delia “What’s your problem ?“ Those will
be his words, I would place a bet on it. So she will have to think of a problem
whether she has one or not.’

Delia
does not respond, even with a lowering of her frown or a lifting of it. The
Princess says, ‘I dare say the poor girl does have a private problem.’

‘Not
necessarily,’ Elsa says. ‘It doesn’t follow, really, at all, that she has a
problem.’

The key
in the lock away in the distance of the front door lets in Paul. The Princess
gazes down at Delia, settling herself so as to present a tableau for Paul’s
appearance in the room. Elsa stands up, brush and pan in hand; she looks out of
the window at the obscure snow-sky, giggles, and again kneels to her
sweeping-up. Paul enters and stops in the doorway: ‘What have you been doing,
Elsa?’

‘1
knifed the girl,’ Elsa says.

‘Nothing
of the kind,’ says the Princess. ‘Keep quiet, Paul. Delia has had a nervous
crisis.

‘Lousy
people,’ Delia says, breathing heavily.

‘Just
lie quiet, my dear,’ the Princess says. ‘Mrs Hazlett’s own doctor is on his way
to see you.’

‘I feel
bad,’ Delia shouts. ‘Lousy, like my head falls off.’

‘Let
her go home,’ says Paul. He moves closer and is staring at his wife who,
kneeling with her back to him, is now attempting to remove the effects of cream
from the carpet.

‘Give
her some water,’ Paul says, still staring down towards his wife’s behind.

‘I
don’t want no more lousy water,’ Delia screams. The Princess grips Delia’s
wrists in her expert way. ‘Paul, don’t just stand there,’ she says, ‘staring
like that. It isn’t Elsa’s fault. Get some brandy for the poor girl. She’s
going to have another brainstorm.’

Delia,
however, for a while subsides. Paul says, ‘Elsa, there’s something on the soles
of your shoes.’

Elsa
goes on doing what she is doing.

‘Did
you know,’ says Paul, ‘that there’s writing on the soles of your shoes?’

Elsa
giggles.

‘Take
them off. Give them to me.’

The
doorbell rings. ‘That’s Garven,’ says Elsa. ‘Go and let him in.’

But
Paul has got down on the floor beside her. He grasps an ankle which overturns
her. Then he starts to pull off her shoes. They are fixed by straps and will not
wrench off. Elsa kicks mightily, the shadows of her legs waving in his face,
whereas by right they should be waving in her own.

‘Lousy
devils!’ Delia shouts, as she has never done on any other day in all her six
years with them. ‘Answer that door! I got to talk to a doctor.’ The bell
pierces long.

The
Princess heaves to her feet and hugging her folds paddles off to admit Garven
with whom she returns, whispering heavily to him.

Paul
has got one of Elsa’s shoes off and is trying to unstrap the other while Elsa,
lying back among the broken china, tugs his black and grey hair. Delia, supine
on the sofa, growls through her lower teeth.

Garven
surveys the scene with satisfied disapproval.

‘What’s
your problem?’ he says.

Elsa
looks over to the east window and starts to laugh. Paul gets the other shoe
off.

‘Take
it easy,’ says Garven, helping Elsa to her feet. He goes over to Paul who is
examining the soles of the shoes under the light of a lamp. Garven murmurs,
‘Was she kicking? Did she have a fit?’

Paul
does not look up. ‘The maid fainted or something. Go and do something for her.’

‘I have
to know,’ Garven says, ‘what exactly

Elsa
has done. We may have reached a crisis.

Elsa
brushes past them, in her stocking feet, carrying away the tea-tray of wreckage
in a businesslike manner.

Garven
goes over to the maid whose eyes are now shut, her hand held by the Princess.

‘Now
what’s the trouble?’ says Garven with a policeman’s authority.

‘The
girl’s had a fit of nerves. She dropped the tray. Elsa was sitting over there
quite calmly.’

‘It’s
too hot in here,’ Garven says. ‘Stiffing. Can’t you turn down your heating?’ He
feels the girl’s head, but his eyes are on Paul. ‘Elsa called me,’ he says.

‘I
know,’ says the Princess. ‘Paul arrived later, didn’t you Paul?’

‘This
is in code,’ says Paul, coming over to the Princess with the under-soles of
Elsa’s shoes held out to her. ‘It’s a means of communication for secret work.
You mark a pair of new shoes in a certain way, practically invisible until they
are worn in the street. When the soles get dirty the markings show up and you
can read the message. There’s writing on the soles of these shoes — can you
read it?’

Three
rows of faint white scratchings can be seen on each of the under-soles.