The Other Side of Love (10 page)

On their wedding night, he took his bride urgently. She was ignorant of the conjugal relationship -

“innocent’, it was called in those days. She muffled her scream, but afterwards she wept. The stifled sobs cut Euan as unendurably as her father’s near-rejection. So she, too, looked down on him, did she? He battered at her again.

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During the war, Euan was sensible enough not to enlist. His two less pragmatic brothers-in-law were killed within minutes of each other at the first battle of the Marne. Later, when conscription came in, his poor vision served him well. By the end of 1916, when Aubrey was born, the Euan Kingsmiths”

marriage had solidified into its ultimate pattern, hurt rage on his part, frightened submission on hers, responses that showed in their rawest form in her canopied bed. Marital rape. Burying his sense of inferiority in the conjugal act never ceased to excite Euan. Beautiful, titled and possibly complaisant ladies shopped at Kingsmith’s, yet Euan never strayed. Why should he? He already owned a lady.

From her birth on, Euan favoured his daughter: he saw himself replicated in her. His son he considered like Elizabeth. He misjudged both offspring. Araminta, though thoughtless and at times foxy, was far less selfish than he. And while Aubrey possessed what Euan called the Frognall idiocy that is, a tendency to act against his own best interests he had also inherited a full measure of the Frognalls”

quiet unassuming courage.

IV

Porteous was at the breakfast-table when his grandson arrived at the tall narrow house in the Bayswater Road not far from Marble Arch.

“Good to see you, my boy,”

he welcomed, beaming as if he could indeed see the young man.

“Mrs Plum’s airing out the front room, so you’ll have a view of the park.”

“You’re being topping, Grandpa.”

“Bosh. You’re obliging me by being h e. No, don’t argue. What this house needs is the sound of young laughter. Now, pull up a chair. The girl”

Mary, the Irish parlour-maid, had been with him for forty years

“will bring you porridge, a nice egg, a rasher or two of gammon.”

It was half-past nine. Aubrey, leaving Quarles before six-thirty, hadn’t wanted to wake the cook, and owing to the fight he had scarcely touched his dinner. Normally he wasn’t much of a breakfasteater. This morning he put away a large meal. Sated, he leaned back in his chair.

Porteous heard the creak.

“You mustn’t think any the less of your father for chucking you out. Euan’s a hard man, but a fair one. To his mind, he’s bringing you to your senses.”

“Has Father always believed that he has the lock on universal truth?”

Porteous chuckled.

“You’ve hit on the secret of his getting ahead. Maybe you need to let a bit of that certainty rub off on you. You’re too modest, too much the gentleman.”

The old man’s smile grew

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pensive”.

“Sometimes I think life would be simpler for all of us if my boys had married in their own class. Before my father opened his secondhand shop in Shoreditch, the family trade was rags and bones. And your grandmother, God bless her, was in service. Mark you, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished with Kingsmith’s, but I know where I come from. And my sons - well, for whatever reason, they all married above themselves.”

“The Frognalls were plain country people.”

“Gentlemen. And Euan’s angry because he can’t evolve into one.”

Porteous took out a cigar and started his ritual of lighting it.

“What do you think of that little cousin of yours - Kate?”

His grandfather was blind, but Aubrey kept his features noncommittal.

“I’m not following you, Grandpa.”

“D’you think she’s happy there in Germany?”

“It’s her country.”

“She said the same thing. All the same, she’s as much English as German. Being split down the middle is hard on a dreamy girl like her.”

“Dreamy? Kathe’s got a lot of spirit.”

“Those Nazis are such swine. You were at the closing ceremony; you heard them. Chilled my blood, it did, thinking two of my grandchildren were down there in the arena. Wyatt’s a strong chap; but my Kate, she’s only a slip of a girl.”

Porteous sniffed at his cigar again.

“I asked her to come to London, but she turned me down. Maybe I should suggest she go to university in the States.”

“No,”

Aubrey said, his voice low and hard.

“America would be a mistake.”

“Funny, you sounded a bit like Euan just then. I never heard it before.”

Porteous took another puff.

“Probably you’re right. She’d end up marrying some American chap. But why shouldn’t I give her a holiday there? Yes. Her and Araminta. Rossie’s got her head screwed on right; she’ll keep them in tow. Wyatt can introduce them around to a few nice young chaps. Maybe once my Kate sees a bit more of the world she won’t be so stuck on Germany.”

The hall clock chimed ten. As Porteous hoisted himself to his feet, he said:

“I’m late for business.”

Although nominally retired, he continued to spend six hours each weekday in the fishbowl offices that overlooked the spacious ground floor of the Bond Street premises.

“Grandpa, I can’t thank you enough for letting me stay here; it’s a lifesaver.”

“Then, show your gratitude by not talking about it. Write your book, Aubrey. Buckle down and write your book.”

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V

“You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King without the help and support of the woman I love …

“

The high-pitched voice, metallic yet emotional, came from the radio.

Porteous, who seldom sat in the drawingroom, had selected the formality to hear Edward VIII’s abdication speech, which marked an end to the crises brought about by his announced intention to make an American divorcee his queen.

Aubrey stared at the fountain pen he still held in his ink-smudged fingers. Araminta, who had arrived only moments earlier, had not yet taken off her coat: her hair showed flamboyantly against the black Persian-lamb collar.

The speech ended. Porteous sighed deeply.

“Poor Queen Mary. First her husband goes, now this.”

Shoulders bowed as if the scandal were resounding in his own family, the normally erect old man paced slowly from the room.

Araminta rushed after him.

“Don’t go to pieces, Grandpa. We’ll have a new king and queen and two lovely little princesses.”

She kissed his nose.

“You girls today wear too much scent,”

he grumbled fondly.

With another kiss, Araminta watched the erect old man climb the stairs. Returning to Aubrey, she said:

“There went the voice of the Victorian age.”

She rolled her eyes at the drawingroom which embodied the same era. Massed bric-a-brac, tall urns filled with pampas grass or peacock feathers, flocked maroon wall-covering, heavy-legged furniture. Araminta, afterAll a Kingsmith, knew the collection of silver birds in the bow-leggJR cabinet was exceptionally fine. Yet her droll expression said the entire roomful of furnishings should be chucked out.

“Are you working beastly hard?”

“Well, this Clive, the main character, has rather taken over, and I scribble away to keep up with him.”

“Mmm,”

she said with a smile.

“Aubrey, you’ll never guess who I bumped into having a curry lunch at Veeraswamy. Your old friend, * the Honourable.”

“Peter Shawcross-Mortimer?”

Aubrey and the Honourable Peter Shawcross-Mortimer had become firm friends at Oxford.

“Yes, Peter. He’s far too young for me, of course”

“A year older.”

“As I said, far too young. But now that his spots are gone he’s quite terribly handsome. He asked about you, and I told him the long sad tale. He said his father doubtless would have behaved with the same stodginess - the only difference being that his father’s a belted earl.”

Araminta pulled a face as if to say that nobody cared about this sort

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of nonsense any more; however, in truth she relished a friendship with an Honourable.

“Aubrey, you are coming down for Christmas, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t been invited.”

“Mother’s petrified to ring you up without Daddy’s permission. And he, poor darling - well, you know it’s impossible for him to make the first move.”

“What makes you think 7 can?”

Araminta’s face grew serious, and the pointed nose and squarish jaw were suddenly evident.

“You’re better than he is,”

she said quietly.

“You always have been a better man.”

VI

That Christmas of 1936, Aubrey took out his Morris Minor and drove with his grandfather through the lightly falling snow to Kent. The spirit of the season prevailed. By the time the enormous Christmas pudding burst into blue brandy-flames, Aubrey and Euan were bickering quite amicably about the Spanish Civil War.

“Didn’t you adore your present?”

Araminta asked.

“The one from Daddy?”

“It was pretty decent of him.”

“Decent. Darling, this is me, Araminta. When you opened that box and saw the portable typewriter, you practically bawled.”

It was late in the afternoon, and the two were taking a drive, she at the wheel of Euan’s pride, a stately Daimler.

Araminta went on:

“Now, my favourite gift, barring the tickets to Intermezzo”

- from Aubrey, who could afford no more than first-run tickets to the Swedish film -

“was from Grandpa. A trip to America! Glorious, glorious America! How I hope that Aunt Clothilde lets Katy come. What a time we’ll have without parents. I’m positive Wyatt will take us around.”

Aubrey peered silently at the thin rime of snow that lay on the fields.

“Ah, Wyatt … That Yank sense of humour, the way he’s always suntanned, the half-smile - he’s absolutely thrilling. The problem is he’s too damn decent to respond to a cousinly offer of my pure white body.”

Aubrey’s gloomy expression altered to a smile.

“Buck up,”

he said.

“America’s not filled with moral paragons. Your maidenhood will be in jeopardy every moment.”

It was Araminta’s turn to stare silently at the wintry countryside.

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I

Kathe was crowded next to Araminta at the rail of HMS Duchess of York. Other passengers jostled around them, shouting to attract the attention of friends or family on the Cunard dock below. Horns honked, porters bawled, gulls cawed. To complete the pandemonium, the ship’s band was blaring

“Sidewalks of New York’. Kathe searched the upturned faces. Had Wyatt come to meet her? His spasmodic correspondence had been filled with f cical titbits about his law professors and the new dance craze calrcd the jitterbug and movies like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. She’d lived for the days the postman had delivered a letter, afterwards fretting that he’d written not a word that couldn’t be read aloud to her parents. Of course she wrote to him in the same vein.

The gangplanks were adjusted, and people on the wharf shoved their way aboard.

“D’you see Uncle Humphrey and Aunt Rossie?”

Araminta cried in her ear.

“Not yet. But…” Kathe’s hand went to the rapid pulse at her throat. There he was. Taller than the other men, he was shading his tanned forehead to search the passengers massed at the rails as he thrust up the gangway immediately below them.

“But there’s Wyatt.”

Araminta squinted short-sightedly.

“Where?”

Kathe was already pushing her way through the crowd.

She met Wyatt in the shade of a lifeboat, halting. The couple of feet of decking between them seemed as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

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‘Hi,”

he said.

Her heart was beating in her throat, and she couldn’t speak.

“Welcome to the New World.”

She nodded.

He was staring at her. She wondered if Araminta was right; she should have done something more elaborate with her hair and put on mascara.

“Mom and Dad are tied up,”

he said.

She nodded again.

“They said they’re sorry.”

Another nod.

“What’s wrong?”

he asked.

“I missed you so much,”

she blurted.

He reached forward to touch her hair.

“Pretty,”

he said, and put his arms around her.

A woman near by was shrilling about baggage. Kathe and Wyatt pressed closer together, his eyelashes fluttering against her cheek.

“Brought you a present,”

he murmured.

“It’s poetry, so put it in your purse.”

And then Araminta was there.

II

New York did not revere age like London or Berlin. New York was an energy-charged city where youth held the ascendancy. New Yorkers hurried as if racing the breezes that fluttered through their granite canyons; they chattered in a babel of accents and languages. The wealthy women were unassailably chic as they stepped in and out of their long glittering automobiles; the working girls looked equally smart in their Seventh Avenue knock-offs and Woolworth pearls. By night, the lights of Broadway twinkled merrily and the smoke-hazed Cotton Club in Harlem tapped and bounced. The precisely timed legs of the Rockettes pistoned in synchronization with the city’s rapid pulse. New York was, in Araminta Kingsmith’s opinion,