The Other Side of Love (13 page)

79

into the stagnant air. Boys torpidly played stickball in the street.

Across the blackened bricks directly in front of them was painted: Carson Hotel. As the cab pulled away, the front door opened. A floridly made-up woman in a tight orange dress teetered down the steps clinging to a short sailor. The couple’s drunken laughter joined the other racket trapped in the mugginess.

Wyatt reached for her hand.

“Let’s get away from here.”

“The place isn’t important.”

“To me it is. Well, this time it is. Besides, you’re sorry for me.”

“That’s not the reason”

“No?”

“I love you,”

she said in a low clear voice.

He continued to stare at her.

“I’ve loved you from that first time I saw you,”

she said.

A ball came hurtling at them, and he reached up, catching it, tossing it back to the boys.

“There’s a subway entrance in the next block.”

He tucked her hand under his arm.

“Come on. Buy you a drink at the Plaza.”

They walked along the mean street and descended the steps. Wyatt dropped nickels into the turnstile.

On the platform, he thrust his hands in his pockets.

“Ever thought of coming to college in New York?”

he asked.

“My parents would never let me.”

“So you have given the idea consideration.”

“It’s impossible.”

“I could get a part-time job in a law office,”

he said.

“You could learn to eat less.”

She gaped at him in bewilderment.

“Marry me.”

He dropped to his knees on the tiles, one hand over his heart in a parody of a suitor.

“Marry me.”

“Wyatt, stop it. Get up. Please get up. Everybody’s watching.”

“So what? It’s an honourable proposal.”

He raised his voice.

“Come on, say yes. Please say yes.”

A subway attendant shouted:

“Say it, blondie. Put the poor slob out of his misery.”

Kathe couldn’t help laughing.

“Good,”

Wyatt said.

“That’s settled.”

The train was roaring through its tube. Jumping to his feet, he said close to her ear:

“Ich Hebe dick, Kathe.”

She forgot the spectators, forgot the shadowy image of an old man bent over a thin tallow-white old woman, forgot her jealousy of the girls he’d taken inside the battered door of the Carson Hotel, forgot the mountains of time piled up behind her in Germany. Til love you always,”

she said into the roar of the train.

“Always and for ever.”

80

They sat at one of the small wicker tables in the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel, slowly sipping cold torn Collinses while a string trio played

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. Neither of them said much, their words trailing away as they gazed at each other. The yearning desire between them was so palpable that she imagined a halo had formed around them, an aura of sensuality that was surely visible to the people relaxing amid the cool palms and slow romantic music.

After the waiter brought their bill, Wyatt took her hand, caressing the ring-finger.

“Kathe, there’s one thing you should know. Two, actually. First, I’ve been intending to ask you to marry me for over a week now. And, second, forget the insult. When I get hot under the collar, I hit out.”

“Insult?”

“Hey, come on.”

He held her hand against his cheek.

“You’re hardly the sort of girl I’d take to that fleapit.”

“But I asked.”

“Don’t look so worried, love. Getting you in the hay is high on my agenda, too. But since we have the rest of our lives I vote we have the ceremony first.”

They walked languidly home through the twilit heat, halting several times to embrace.

IV

The foyer and the big living-room were dark. The corridor lights were off.

“It’s all this Sturm und Drang. I forgot,”

XA’att said.

“Mom mentioned that they’d be working late, cleaning upfflieir desks. And Martha’s already taken off. So we scrounge in the icebox. No, I’ve a better idea. We’ll head over to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central.”

“Wyatt… ? Katy … ?”

Araminta’s voice came down the bedroom corridor.

“Hi,”

Wyatt called back, switching on the lights.

“Are you primping up to paint the town red with Charlie?”

He stopped abruptly.

Araminta had padded shoeless into the foyer. The skirt of her two-piece linen dress was awry, a wet strand of vivid hair snaked down her cheek, her eyes and the pointed tip of her nose were red. Obviously she had been crying for some time.

“Have a fight with Charlie?”

Wyatt asked sympathetically.

Araminta held out a wad of yellow paper.

Wyatt uncrumpled the cable.

“

“Father suffered massive heartattack”,”

he read.

“

“Stop. Imperative you come home. Love, Aubrey.”

“

“Oh, poor Uncle Euan,”

Kathe whispered.

81

Araminta drew a shuddering breath to compose herself.

“How do I get home? Oh God, what do I do?”

Wyatt patted her shoulder consolingly.

“Let me call around,”

he said.

“Find out what’s sailing. If there’s anything available tonight, shall I go ahead and book?”

Nodding, Araminta began to weep again.

Rathe put her arms around her cousin.

“Two passages,”

she said over the dishevelled red hair, silently pleading for Wyatt’s understanding. ,

His features seemed to become more prominent, his mouth tensed, and he nodded.

“Two passages coming up,”

he said.

V

A festive midnight crowd thronged through the brilliantly lit Manhattan, the same liner that had carried Wyatt and other athletes to Germany for the Olympics. The ship had been booked solid, but an outside second-class cabin had been cancelled at the last minute.

Humphrey and Rossie had rushed home from Kingsmith’s. Rossie had packed the old and new clothes in the steamer-trunks, while Humphrey - shaken at this felling of his powerful oldest brother

- had leaned against the telephone-alcove nodding as Wyatt made the arrangements. Now they were both in the small cabin consoling Araminta, who kept bursting into tears of frustrated anxiety that she was still nearly a week away from Euan’s sickbed.

Rathe and Wyatt stood outside in the companionway, his hands pressed flat against the bulkhead so that his arms sheltered her as laughing champagne-odoured voyagers and their guests shoved by.

Til be over as soon as humanly possible,”

he said.

“Law school starts on the first of September.”

“The American judicial system won’t crumble if I start a week or so late.”

“You can’t miss your classes.”

“All it takes is a bit of cramming to catch up. The important thing is my talk with Uncle Alfred.”

“What about your parents?”

“We have here a situation too important and too tricky not to follow protocol. My folks second. Uncle Alfred first. There’ll be a bit of a muck because we’re cousins.”

“Will you explain?”

“Never,”

Wyatt interrupted.

“Hey, aren’t you the gal who promised you wouldn’t say anything to anyone?”

He waited until she nodded.

“But watch me mow down all such objections. You won’t even have to change your name.”

“Married

“Us,”

he said in the same bemused tone.

82

A tinkling rang close to their ears. A steward was manoeuvring down the passageway with a little bell as he called:

“All ashore that’s going ashore.”

Araminta was too distraught to go topside to wish her American kin farewell. Kathe stood at the rail waving at the brightly lit pier as hooting tugs towed Manhattan farther and farther from land. The other passengers drifted off, and finally she was alone. The salt breeze had chilled her bare arms. Shivering, she went below.

83

Aubrey met them at Southampton. As they came down the gangplank, he shouted through megaphoned hands:

“Father’s on the mend!”

The chauffeur drove them up to London through bright August sunshine, and Araminta bubbled over with droll stories of New York and Charlie,

“my American conquest’. To look at her now, it was impossible to guess the tensions of the passage. Either she had been fretting about the liner’s slow movement across the calm blue Atlantic or visiting the purser’s desk to make certain there were no dire undelivered cables. She had needled Kathe, who missed Wyatt to the point that everything rubbed her raw. In the hot little cabin, quarrels between the cousins erupted, followed by copious tears and reconciliations.

When the Daimler pulled to a halt in Harley Street, Araminta wrenched open the car door, and before the chauffeur could come around she was darting up the shallow marble steps of the private hospital.

“You certainly were a long time driving up from Southampton,”

Euan said to his daughter after their greetings, hers emotional, his gruff with pleasure.

“I’ve been expecting you for hours.”

“It took simply eons to get through Customs.”

“You should have let Aubrey handle it.”

She had. Aubrey, though, lacked his father’s bullying panache with

84

officialdom of the lower order.

“They were baffled by all our new American clothes. Did you know Katy came home early with me?”

“A good thing, too. I don’t even like to think what the pair of you laid out for fripperies, but it must have been a pretty penny.”

“Not at all, Daddy. You would have been proud of me.”

Araminta told bright tales of her shopping forays at New York discount-houses, mimicking accents, blowing out her cheeks to describe the fat customers in the Klein’s dressing-room. Her vivacity overlaid fear. The sight of her father’s tough greyish face beaming at her from the pillow chilled her.

“Daddy darling, how could you have let such a thing happen to you?”

“My ticker’s been acting up a bit, that’s all,”

Euan said.

“It’s the limit the way these doctors build up every minor ache. I s’pose they must justify their fat fees. They’ve terrified your mother. She sits and frets over me until I have to comfort her.”

Euan’s idea of comforting Elizabeth was to bark at her to go shopping, go to the theatre or cinema, go anywhere, but get out of his room.

“Believe you me, the real problem’s at the business. How the staff must be dancing round the Maypole.”

“Aubrey said Grandpa’s taken charge.”

“A blind man over eighty! And as for your brother - I’ve been trying to talk some sense into him. High time he stopped cadging and gave up this book-scribbling nonsense.”

“You’re worrying over nothing, Daddy. As far as I can see, you’ll be back in harness next week - September at the latest. Anyway, you’ve always complained how slow business is in the summer. Why not pretend you’re in the south of France, lounging about?”

Euan formed a grim little smile at the tfcught of himself lounging about.

“The young men nowadays, no seJfse of duty,”

he grumbled, tightening his grip on his daughter’s hand.

The feeble fluttering of his fingers reached a place inside Araminta, and her own heart felt weak.

The late-August dusk was falling when Araminta stuck her head out of the door and told the others to go on home; she would have supper with Euan.

Euan kept a London pied-a-terre just off South Audley Street. Set amid aristocratic old Mayfair mansions, the large apartment-block new and ultra-modern, with curves of white marble along the street and above the ground floor - reminded Kathe of the ocean liner from which she’d disembarked this morning. Aubrey had left his grandfather’s house in the Bayswater Road and was staying here with his mother. As the three of them were borne upwards in the mirrored lift, Elizabeth said she would have a bite of cold chicken

85

in her room. Aubrey sighed, knowing that this meant she intended to spend the evening with the bottle, yet at the same time an unfilial shiver of delight ran through him. He would have Kathe to himself at the round, pale ash dining-table.

He sat opposite her.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you cut short your holiday,”

he said.

“Araminta was mad with worry.”

“She adores a good time, but she’s not shallow, not by a long shot.”

After he poured the Spanish wine, he looked across the table at Kathe. The candles that threw a silvery light on her hair also shadowed her eyes.

“What is it, Kathe? Since you stepped off the boat you’ve been in a brown study.”

Just then the maid came in with the cutlets.

Waiting until the door had swung shut behind the woman, Kathe blurted out:

“In February when you were doing your research on the concentrationcamps, who put you in touch with that violinist from Munich?”

“That’s private, Kathe.”

“There’s … somebody … I need to find out about.”