The Oriental Wife (5 page)

In August she was to accompany her employers to their house on the Norfolk coast. Julian, it seemed, was going to his parents’ place in Suffolk, something she only learned
when he mentioned it to a couple at the next table. She was always nerving herself to speak to him, rehearsing impassioned speeches as she went over French verbs or the geography of Africa with her charge. But he seemed to know, every time, when she had summoned the courage to ask to talk to him alone. Just as she was going to touch his hand, he would turn away and call out a remark about the rugger to someone at another table, or push back his chair and ask who was ready for the next round of drinks.

So she went to Norfolk and walked up and down in the garden between lessons, still making up things to say. She wrote him pleading letters—
At least talk to me, at least tell me how things went wrong between us, surely you can do that much
—and furious ones—
How dare you behave like this? What kind of coward are you?
In the end, they all landed in the wastebasket, but then she could not sleep.

He did not write to her. She had known he wouldn’t, even as she gave him the little slip of paper with her address in the country. But still, every morning, sitting on the terrace with her coffee, watching her charge being led around the sloping lawn on his pony, she strained her ears for the sound of the mail landing on the mat inside the front door, the bronze flap banging shut. Then the maid would bring it through to her employer in his study. On those few occasions when there was a letter for her—it was always, only, from her father—he would bring it to her on the terrace, handing it over with a small flourish; then he would call out encouragement to his son, who was attempting small jumps over a low hurdle they had erected on the grass.

On her return to London, she stayed away from the King’s Head, and from every other place where she had gone with
Julian. There were whole streets she had to avoid walking down, perfectly innocent buildings from which she averted her eyes. In her room at the top of the house, with the housekeeper snoring next door, she lay on the bed, trying to conjure up a future, or switched on the light and examined her face in the mirror, appraising her chances of happiness. At four in the morning, she was full of defiant plans—she would be a spy, or a chorus girl, or a kept woman—and wild energy surged through her. With daylight, though, it always sputtered out again.

On some nights, she remembered people she had not thought of in years: the French mistress in her first school, the boy from her dancing class who had trembled as he kissed her. When she wrote to her father she sometimes asked what those people were doing now, but he rarely told her. More and more, his letters were devoid of real news; they were filled with silly jokes, as though she were twelve years old.

The sisters from Nuremberg, who had moved on to Holland, had told her about a café in South Kensington where refugees from Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna went to drink wine and coffee and carry on running arguments. The first time she went there, she drank her coffee in silence and left quickly, meaning never to go back; she was shocked by their flippancy about the English. “It’s astonishing how they all still believe in their schoolboy code.” “That’s because they never really cease being schoolboys. No proper Englishman ever outgrows his childhood.” But a week later she returned, to eavesdrop further. She was the youngest person there. The women were mostly in black, and waved their cigarettes as they talked, and interrupted each other. The men, so much darker and shorter than Julian, wore shabby suits and highly
polished shoes. As in the pub, conversations spread from table to table. Mockery was the order of the day, even running to jokes about Hitler: “It’s because he’s an artist, you see, that he hates the Jews so much. He wants to get rid of the competition.”

There came a day when she felt impelled to speak out, to register a protest; they had been laughing about J. B. Priestley: “He is too nice a man,” they said, “to be a novelist. So sweet and nice, so adorable, one wants to strangle him.”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “He really loves his characters, their goodness is real,” a statement that amused them greatly. Another time she defended English cooking: “It’s because they don’t really mind what they eat; they’re indifferent to material comfort.” Her romance with England became a running joke with them; they made up grand love affairs for her: “Our little Louisa,” they said, “will wind up a duchess.” She bought a silver-gray dress with flowing sleeves and black satin cuffs, a dark gray hat with a rakish brim, long jet earrings; she took to wearing her hair in a chignon at the nape of her neck, like her employer’s, thinking it made her look older, until they insisted she unpin it again. It was comforting to be petted and teased like that, though it did not solve the great question of what would become of her.

It took her months to figure out that many of her new friends were Communists. Her own political activity was confined to giving sixpences to canvassers for the Independent Labour Party—because they were anti-Fascist—and signing a petition for relief for the unemployed miners. She was more affected by the sight of the whey-faced little girl who stood begging at the entrance to the Tube on certain winter nights; to her she gave whole shillings, and sometimes
rolls, wrapped in napkins, that she took from the baskets at the café.

Not everyone who frequented the place was a refugee. There were also painters from Chelsea who rolled their own cigarettes and consumed vast quantities of cheap wine; there were bearded Oxford graduates in scruffy tweed jackets and stained ties who wrote for the left-wing journals and carried on tremendous political arguments, though they were all ostensibly on the same side. Sometimes the more erudite of the refugees were called on to settle a question about collectivization, or Rosa Luxemburg, or the peregrinations of Trotsky, always referred to fondly as the Old Man.

One of the café’s English denizens was a backer of the
New Examiner
, a quarterly that had recently published an account of the Nazi persecutions. But he was also a poet, he told her, on the night he first sat down at her table, in fact primarily a poet, only he could no longer turn his back on what was happening in the world. Even poets had to get their hands dirty now, he said, somewhat incongruously, since his own looked very soft and clean, with pale stubby fingers. He had been noticing her, he said, for some time: what would she like to drink?

His name was Phillip Hallowell. He had a house in Bloomsbury and manufacturing relations up north who wanted him to go into the business, an idea he referred to with scorn; he had studied law at Cambridge, but quit in disgust. Disgust and scorn were things he expressed very often, but not when it came to her. She was delicious, he told her, the first time he took her out to dinner—they were on their way to an Italian place in Soho, which he assured her she would love, and she was telling him about a Goya show at the National Gallery
that she’d been to the previous Sunday. “How did I ever find someone so delicious?” he cried, interrupting her, and said how marvelous it was to be around people who weren’t English, how irredeemably boring he found Englishwomen in particular. “The very sound of their damn voices makes me wince.” After their third dinner, when he was taking her home, and the cab was stopped at a red light in Torrington Square, he gestured at a handsome brick house opposite. “Would you like to live there? Shall we buy it when we’re married?”

She never really knew why he had decided to love her; there was much in her character he seemed to object to. When she was feeling high-spirited, talkative, when she made fun of anything, or imitated someone she’d met, he sat there tapping his foot, a frown of disapproval on his face. Flippancy didn’t suit her, he declared. “You mustn’t try to be sophisticated in that awful way; it’s nothing but a pose.” She was one of nature’s innocents, he told her. “My little waif,” he called her sometimes, or “my poor wee lamb,” in a mock-Scottish accent.

If she rebelled then, if she told him she wasn’t his poor wee lamb, would he please stop saying that, he only laughed. He seemed to enjoy her little bursts of defiance, knowing they would not flare into anything serious. And it was true that she could not bring herself to walk away. She felt heavy and torpid in his presence, yet oddly comforted. The stillness in his dusty house, with its shabby Turkish rugs and piles of books on the narrow stairs leading to the bedrooms, blotted out the pervasive sense of dread that she had carried for so long. The hungry way he looked at her when he’d had too much to drink, the way his voice went husky then, restored to
her something she thought Julian had taken away for good, though it made her uneasy too. If she did not desire him exactly, she was excited, nevertheless, by his desire.

When they became lovers she could never stay with him overnight, she had to get back to her employers’ house. So he would take her home in a taxi, holding her hand in the back seat, explaining things to her, as he liked to do (the class struggle, the proper way to tie a fly, the use of the broken-backed line in Renaissance poetry). She felt perfectly peaceful during those journeys through the darkened streets, lighter and freer than in bed with him, and content just to listen, or half-listen, without speaking, as she looked out the window.

One June evening when she arrived at his house—she always timed her arrivals to avoid seeing Nellie, his daily woman, who had taken a dislike to her, based, according to Phillip, on nothing more than her red hair: Nellie’s wicked husband had had red hair—he was standing on the steps, a tumbler full of Scotch in his hand, looking out for her. “We’re going to America,” he announced, as she climbed toward him. And when she only stared, bewildered, he laughed with delight. “Yes, we’re going to join the vast migration, the huddled masses … though only temporarily, of course. I’ll tell you all about it.”

It seemed that the
New Examiner
wanted an article about a Collective Security Congress due to take place in Chicago, which the antiwar socialists threatened to boycott. But the journalist they’d commissioned had left for Spain abruptly, to cover the war that was brewing there. Phillip and his editor had been talking about whom else they could get when Phillip suddenly decided—had the inspiration, he said—to
go himself. “It’s not my kind of story, of course, but perhaps it’s time I made it my kind of story.” They would stay in New York for a few days, he said, before heading for Chicago. “And we may as well keep forging on and visit my brother.” (His younger brother lived in California with his wife and small daughter, and taught geology at a university there.) “Though of course there’s his cow of a wife. But I really ought to meet the infant.”

She couldn’t go, she said; she could never ask her employers for leave to go traveling in America with a man.

“It’s time you gave your notice anyway. We might even stay a bit longer. I’ll say you’re my secretary and get you a proper work permit. And then I had a rather good idea: why don’t we get married over there? The Yanks are much less strict about that, you know. There’s no nonsense about special licenses for foreigners.”

It was the first time in months—the first time since the night in the cab—that he had mentioned marriage. They had reached his study; he was watching her intently, waiting, and she felt the panic rising. She groped for the right words, a way to say no while blaming herself alone: she was so confused, she’d tell him, she didn’t know what she wanted. Then he said, “We’ll get your parents out too. When we get back, and we’re married. I’ll start looking into it.”

He said it in the same casually kindly tone he might have used to offer her a ride to the bus stop. That was what made her want to cry: that he should be doing this enormous thing for her without even making her ask, without demanding gratitude. She imagined the letter she would write to her father:
You don’t have to worry any more. I’m getting married, Phillip is going to get you out
. Because of course she would
marry Phillip; at that moment she was weak with love, her whole body was flooded with it.

“Thank you,” she whispered, taking his hand. She turned it over and kissed it.

“Don’t,” he said in a thickened voice. “Don’t be humble.”

“It’s just I didn’t know how frightened I’ve been until you said that.”

“Of course you were. Are. It’s hardly surprising.”

Now she could not stop the tears. “Ssshhhh,” he said. “It’s all right, everything is going to be all right.” He had his hand under her elbow; he was steering her upstairs. In the doorway to his bedroom he kissed her ears, her throat. “Yum,” he said, making smacking noises. “My own little Jewess.” She felt the echo along her spine; a small cold space opened in her brain, like a third eye, and the panic returned. But then she shut her eyes and kissed him back.

S
he had forgotten, when she dialed Otto’s number in New York, that he was living with Rolf. When a man answered the phone she began babbling excitedly: “We’re here,” she said, “I can’t believe it, you have to come down to the hotel right now.”

“I believe you want to speak to Otto,” the man said stiffly.

“Oh my God, is that Rolf? This is Louisa. How are you?”

He was well, thanks, he said, in the same stilted voice. Should he ask Otto to phone her when he came in?

“Of course,” she said brightly, still trying to strike a spark. “But tell me how you are, really. Do you love it here? You always wanted to come, remember?”

Yes, he said, he did remember. That was a very long time ago now.

“Well, it would be lovely to see you,” she said, in her best English voice. She had felt luxuriantly English since arriving in America. Here she could finally be what in England was out of her reach.

A few minutes later Otto phoned, and she gave him the address of their hotel. “You might have consulted me first,” Phillip said peevishly. “I’m not really in the mood for this.”

“But Otto is like my brother. And I haven’t seen him in four years.”

“Well, I haven’t seen my brother in five years, but I wouldn’t have invited him round on our first night in New York.” Phillip’s mood had been curdling ever since they boarded the ship, where their fellow passengers had never heard of the
New Examiner
, and the men at their table ignored him, preferring to flirt with Louisa. They despised him for betraying his class, he said, the poisonous smug bastards; they were all Fascists at heart, he insisted, secret anti-Semites also; they took her for a whore.