The Oriental Wife (3 page)

“Since you’re stuck with me,” he said, stripping off the checked scarf that was wound several times around his neck, “could I ask you to requisition a cup of tea?”

So she headed for the pantry, to place a request with Birgitta, the Swedish maid. On her return he was seated on the couch she had just vacated, his legs stretched out toward the empty grate. She wasn’t sure if he was really extraordinarily tall or if he just occupied space more emphatically than other people. When Birgitta had set down the tray, and Louisa was handing him a cup of tea, she noticed that his hands trembled slightly, which was curiously thrilling.

“So, Ulian,” she said, feeling bolder. “How long is it you are traveling today?”

“Not Ulian. Julian. Like Jew.”

“I am myself a Jew,” she said stiffly, before he could say something worse.

“Oh, Christ, are you? Sorry. I was only correcting your English.”

There was a pause. Perhaps he would like to see the lake, she said with dignity, when he had finished his tea.

“Actually I’ve seen enough bloody lakes since I came to this country. It’s not exactly short of bodies of water. But thanks anyway. Are you a big chum of Celia’s?”

Not really, she said.

“Wise girl. No one should get too matey with my sister, she’s dangerous.” He leaned back, shutting his eyes. She was about to tiptoe out when he sat up and asked if she could scare up some wood; he would build a fire for them, he said.

By the time Celia returned, two hours later, Louisa’s knowledge of colloquial English had improved exponentially: she managed to grasp that Julian had left Oxford in
disgrace, having missed his tutorial once too often, and that his tutor had been a sexually suspect man who lacked all sense of humor. Since leaving university, two years before, he had had a bit of a disaster with a City firm and now had a job in advertising, writing ghastly slogans about hair oil and beef tea. “It’s vile work, I can tell you. But I don’t mean to stick it out much longer.”

“Oh, no, you must leave there,” she said fervently.

“I can’t chuck it all in for poetry or anything like that, because I don’t write the stuff.”

“But you will find something else. Something better for you yourself.”

He looked gratified. “What about you? Do you have any plans?”

“I am hoping very much to pursue further studies,” she said, so he wouldn’t think she only wanted to get married. She was most interested in art history, she told him.

“Why not study in London? You could practice your English.”

It was at this point that Celia arrived, full of breathless apologies, and swooped down to kiss him on the cheek. Louisa stood to leave.

“You’re not deserting me, are you?” Celia asked, in mock alarm. “I was counting on you to make him behave himself.”

“You can’t keep the girl against her will,” Julian said. “Maybe she’s dying to escape.”

“Not at all. It is only that you may wish to be alone together.”

“Would you wish to be alone with your brother?”

She bowed her head. “Alas, I have no brother. I am a lone child.”

“Well, if you did you’d know that brothers and sisters don’t generally want to be alone together. In fact, just the opposite.”

He was as horrid as ever, Celia said. She would just run upstairs to change for dinner, she’d leave him in Louisa’s capable hands.

“I meant it, you know,” he said, when she had gone. Louisa could still smell her perfume in the air.

“What is it you were meaning?”

“About your coming to London. I think it’s rather a good idea.”

In the end, he extended his visit to four days. His air of dissatisfaction never entirely left him, but that only made him more compelling. He reminded her of the Englishmen in the novels the girls read under the covers at night, moody, restless young men who always seemed to come to a bad end somewhere far from home, though surely that wasn’t true in life. At times his impatience was turned on her—he would go and stare out the window while she was talking to him, or interrupt with some irritable comment on the stuffiness of the room or the beastliness of the Swiss. Once, when she reached over tentatively to push his hair out of his eyes, he shooed her hand away as though it were a fly. But his very crossness seemed proprietary; if she did not spend every minute with him that she wasn’t in class he became crosser still.

He decided he wanted to see the lake after all, and grabbed and kissed her on the far side, also in the red parlor, which the English girls had ceded to them from his first evening, and twice, more lingeringly, behind an orange tree in the conservatory. “It’ll be smashing when you come to London,
you’ll see,” he said on his last evening, and then launched into a description of the white Triumph his friend Rupert was going to sell him if he could raise the money. She could not lure him into mentioning love, however many stratagems she tried; with him, unlike the boys she had danced with back home, the power had been taken from her. The air thickened when he was there, robbing her of will.

As soon as he left she wrote to him, quoting English poetry and describing the snow on the mountains; the letter she got in return was taken up with complaints about the London weather and his vile toad of a boss, who was browbeating him more than ever. “I don’t know how much longer I can stick this. I’m thinking of chucking it in and emigrating to Australia.” But in his next letter he told her about a room to let in Marylebone, quite near the house of his aunt, where he was living. “It’s in a boardinghouse for young ladies. Very respectable.”

She wrote to her father, asking if she could take courses at a new institute of art history that had opened in London. Two other girls from the school were enrolling for the term beginning in January, she said; they would find a place together. It was the first big lie she had ever told him, and she was almost ready to confess when he wrote back approving her plan. The situation in Germany remained unsettled, he said; much though he missed her, it would be wise for her to become fluent in English.

Celia had long since ceased to be charming to her (“Never mind,” Julian said, “some day I’ll tell you the real story of why she was packed off to Switzerland”), but the rest of the school was thrilled with her romance. Ayako, the one Japanese pupil, much admired for her pretty ways and her
boredom with lessons, came and sat on Louisa’s bed one night while she was brushing her hair, sighing wistfully and telling her how lucky she was. “I wish I could marry Westerner,” she said, brushing aside Louisa’s protest that she was not engaged to Julian. “If my parents would not disown me I would go right now and find European to marry. Anyone. Big Swiss shepherd, I don’t care.” She came up beside Louisa and examined her face in the mirror, smoothing down her eyebrows. “Do you think some Westerner would marry me?”

“Of course,” Louisa said.

“I think so too. But is hopeless. My papa has already found husband for me. Another diplomat, like him. He is in Portugal now.”

“But then you can live in Europe, if that’s what you want.”

“Yes, yes, I can live there for time being, but even so, my husband will expect me to be Oriental wife. Always meek, docile, my eyes cast down. Never making my own destiny.”

“Perhaps your husband will be more enlightened than you think,” Louisa said, at a loss.

Ayako turned her head, eyeing her profile in the mirror. “No, he will only pretend to be enlightened. I know what such boys are like.” She knotted her hair at the back of her neck, frowning. “I would love to be actress. Or singer. Something not mundane. Don’t you think that’s best?”

But Louisa could not remember ever having such yearnings; all her daydreams had only been of romance, and now it was upon her. Soon she would escape to London, Julian, happiness.

“Oh, look,” Ayako said, brightening. She snatched up Louisa’s malachite ring from the dresser and put it on her
finger, where it slid around until it was facing her palm. She laughed merrily. “What hands you all have! So large hands and feet. Mine are very elegant, don’t you think?” And Louisa agreed, sincerely, that they were.

In mid-January she arrived in London on the boat train, with three matching pigskin suitcases. It was early afternoon, and as she pressed her face to the window of the taxi on the way to the address Julian had given her, the rows of brick houses, the sodden-looking trees, the marble pillars, all seemed dense with some heightened meaning she felt herself just on the point of grasping. Even the air, so freighted with damp it was a presence in itself, felt pregnant with richness and mystery. People had warned her about the grayness, but nobody had mentioned the constant, otherworldly changes of light.

But Julian was in one of his fed-up moods when he came to fetch her that evening; now his boss was blaming him for losing a client whom, according to Julian, the man himself had alienated with his swinish behavior; worst of all, Julian’s father was on the boss’s side, he being an old classmate from Radley. “That tears it. It’s Australia for me. I’m going to the consulate tomorrow.” Not until they arrived at their destination, an oak-paneled pub with a coal fire opposite the bar, where they joined a group of his rugger mates at a square table, was she able to share her revelation about English damp, which the friends immediately drank to. Wait until she got chilblains, they said. She could hear herself imitating Celia’s laugh, she was reproducing Celia’s inflections as she described the deportment mistress in Switzerland (“You must float, float into the room, girls; never be defeated by
anything so banal as gravity”). All this arduous performance was for Julian’s benefit, to tie him to her with silken threads; if all his friends found her enchanting enough, he would forget about Australia. Afterward, walking her back to her lodging house, he told her that when she was in the loo Clive had said he never thought a German could be so amusing. “Well done you,” he said, but absently, still preoccupied with other things.

Three nights later his aunt went out to a concert at the Albert Hall. First they sat and kissed on the chintz love seat in the sitting room, until Louisa pressed her breasts urgently against him, straining through her blouse. Ever since her arrival in London she’d been waiting for their happiness to start, for the connection between them to be carried onto a different plane. She was no longer sure she could trust him to make it happen.

Breathing hard, he pulled her to her feet and guided her up two flights of dark stairs. His room on the third floor was cluttered with old birdcages and fringed lamps and chairs with broken seats, things his aunt must have wanted banished from public view. But the bed was neatly made, with a white chenille spread—Louisa found herself wondering distractedly if he had made it himself or if his aunt had a maid.

Then he was yanking at her clothes, fumbling with buttons. Jesus, he muttered, when he got to her belt, so that she felt she ought to help him, and did. He kissed her fiercely on the mouth and tumbled her back on the bed, moaning, and wriggled out of his trousers. She lay there in a state of confusion, but felt she must show enthusiasm, and made encouraging noises, until she gasped with the pain, and he stopped. “I’m sorry—am I hurting you?” he asked, and she said he
wasn’t, and bit her lip. Shortly after that, just as she was beginning to feel some stirrings of pleasure, it seemed to be over. He lay panting on top of her, before kissing her on the mouth again; then he rested his head on her breasts. She felt a great relief that they had managed it. When he rolled off her, sighing, she propped herself on one elbow and stroked his hair, feeling tender and womanly, while he told her about the red leather seats in the Triumph and his ongoing quarrel with his father, who continued to side with his boss. She was just getting nicely sleepy when he said they’d better get dressed and he’d take her back to Mrs. Webster’s, his aunt would be returning soon.

And so the pattern of her London life was established: her evenings spent with Julian at the pub or the cinema; her mornings taken up with lectures at the Courtauld, couched in a special, German English clotted with compound words; in the afternoons, solitary excursions to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London and the National Gallery, or solitary wanderings through the streets.

She had imagined that Mrs. Webster’s house would be like school, with the girls running in and out of each other’s rooms, but her fellow lodgers only seemed to communicate through the notes they left for each other in the big drafty bathroom on the second floor. “Personally, I find it extremely offensive to be surrounded by dripping undergarments while I bathe.” “To the girl who’s been using my Floris bath oil: do you think I can’t smell who you are?” It was disturbing to think that all the pink-and-white young Englishwomen who said good morning so politely in the hall should be harboring those secret reservoirs of ill will. She made a running joke of it for Julian and his friends at the pub, saying how very
warlike Englishwomen were, how they terrified her. But it was a little bit true.

There were moments of pure elation, when everything she saw—an old red tugboat on the river, a frilled plaid umbrella—seemed redolent with promise, but the euphoria could not be trusted to last, and for whole days she longed to be elsewhere. While she was dressing to go to the pub, leaning toward the mirror to apply her lipstick, her hopes were always high, but the talk about rugger and MGs and the Prince of Wales could not occupy her mind fully, and the unoccupied parts kept wondering what exactly she was doing there.

On the evenings when Aunt Jilly absented herself, things in the upstairs room always seemed to go too quickly, leaving her agitated in a way she could not bring herself to mention. Sometimes she buried her head in the pillow afterward and responded in monosyllables to the saga of his boss’s and his father’s latest piece of perfidy. But the moment he grew offended, the moment he said
Bloody hell
and flung off the covers, she lost her nerve and started asking lots of questions, until he settled back down and began kissing her, and they started over.

Then, when she had been in London for just six weeks, she got a letter from her father, warning her not to come back. It was an unseasonably warm day in March; the sun had broken through for the first time since she’d come to England, and her period had arrived that morning, after three days of terror and garbled prayers. She was on her way to lunch with a girl from her Neo-Baroque class, a Parisian with short, dyed red hair who had sat beside her in the lecture hall one day and whispered that the professor was all wrong about Poussin. Since then they had spoken together in French several times.
She started reading the letter as she waited at the bus stop; all the women in the queue were commenting on the fineness of the weather for that time of year. Then she read it again, more slowly.