The Other Side of Love (3 page)

said Porteous Kingsmith. Through his years of success he had taken no effort to enhance his accent; and Kathe, as always, found the faint trace of cockney endearing.

It was after ten, and the two of them were alone in what her father referred to as his study and that her mother - in the German way called the Herrenzimmer, a smallish dark JJ om with heavy bookcases and a thick arched door which muffled thWbooming of loud convivial conversations in the hall outside. Their plates with the remnants of the supper buffet - thin-sliced cold Rinderbraten and jellied chicken breast with cucumber salad - were on the massive desk.

“Me, with those champions, in front of that crowd! Grandpa, just thinking of the first heat makes sparrows flutter in my stomach.”

The old man smiled, showing strong yellow teeth.

“How well I know that feeling. It comes over me before I dive into anything that takes pluck. It’s a good sign, Kate. When a chap’s too full of himself-or herself-it means he won’t give it a proper try.”

“What if I let the team down?”

“Don’t worry about the others,”

he said.

“That’s your biggest fault, Kate. You must learn to let others take care of themselves. If you want to get anywhere in this life, you have to look after number one. Otherwise you’re a girl after my own heart. Your pluck and determination. The way you never go back on your word.”

He appeared to be beaming at her through his thick spectacles.

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It was a trick.

Porteous Kingsmith probed the direction of a voice with an expression so observant and so filled with interest that even those who knew him intimately forgot that he was legally blind. From birth on, he had been able to make out only light and darkness. Despite this handicap, he had built a large, highly esteemed business on his ability to gauge the beauty of unique objects. His sensitive fingertips and often his lips acted as proxy for sight.

Involuntarily, Kathe responded to his smile.

Porteous, as always, sat erect, his lean height apparent. With his massive domed forehead and fine glossy mane of brushed white hair, his starched, old-fashioned high collar and frock-coat, he might have been - or so Kathe thought fondly - a British prime minister.

Because of his handicap, he found crowds unnerving, and so had requested that Kathe, his favourite grandchild, share her meal with him in privacy. Before her release from the receiving-line, however, she had been subjected to her American uncle and his endless variations on the theme of her cousin Wyatt’s superiority. Humphrey had waved his soft freckled hands expansively as he spun tales of Wyatt’s prowess. Wyatt, according to Uncle Humphrey, was not only the star centre of the United States basketball team but, if he’d tried out, could also have made the track team. Not that he was solely a muscle man. He had graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University this past June and, come autumn, when he would enter the Columbia Law School, he would assuredly rise to the top of the class. Humphrey’s boastfulness made him the butt of family jokes, but he never blew his own trumpet; he was guilty only of praising what he held dear - his adopted country, his son, and his wife, Rossie.

Porteous enquired:

“What is there for sweet?”

“We have Apfel Kuchen mil Schlagsahne.”

“What’s that in English?”

“Apple cake and whipped cream.”

“Too rich for my blood, but you go ahead.”

“I’m meant to eat lightly. Coach’s orders.”

“Stuff and nonsense. You’re thin as a rail. I don’t know what’s come over you girls nowadays. Men like an armful not that you’re ready to think about that sort of thing.”

She was ready. Thus far, though, the Swiss boys who had managed shy kisses at the weekly dancing classes at La Ramee, her finishing school in Lucerne, and the sons of her mother’s staid Berlin circle who brought her small bouquets had roused not a shiver in her soul.

“I suppose you heard about the Opening Ceremonies,”

she said.

“Who could avoid it? Loudspeakers blaring from every lamp-post and tree in the city. That Fiihrer of yours! A hooligan who served

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time in gaol, a gangster urging on his blackshirt swine to kick defenceless old Jews! And here he is, three years after he stuffed the ballot-boxes, showing off and ranting in front of the world!”

Kathe stirred uneasily in her chair.

“The Chancellor said exactly one sentence to open the Games,”

she said.

Porteous took out his cigar-case and small gold scissors: he might have been sighted as he precisely clipped the Havana. But Kathe noted a tremor in the large rope-veined hands. Though filled with chagrin, she could not bring herself to apologize for defending Hitler.

When the cigar was cut and lit, Porteous asked:

“Now that you’re finished with school, why don’t you have a year in London? You could live at my house. Your cousin Araminta could introduce you to her friends - every young man in England falls over himself to be near her. I know Aubrey would come down from Oxford to see you to the opera and museums.”

Kathe’s expression showed that the offer tempted her, but she said:

“Mother would never go for that idea, Grandpa.”

Porteous frowned. He had sent sedate Alfred to Berlin, the easygoing Humphrey to New York so they would fit in with the prevailing atmospheres of the two cities. The boys had never been anything alike. Yet it turned out that they shared one weakness. They both allowed their wives to rule the roost. Alfred let Clothilde make all the decisions about his only daughter, including christening the little thing with a name hunched under two German dots. Humphrey went him one better, giving Rossie a free hand not only at home but also in the Fifth Avenue branch; Porteous often thanked his lucky stars that at least she was a girlA ith a good head on her shoulders. The New York shop did tid . Quite tidily indeed. On the other hand, Porteous’s oldest son, Euan, who now occupied the glass-encased managerial office overlooking the ground floor of the Bond Street shop, was a very cool husband indeed.

Inhaling his cigar appreciatively, Porteous said:

“Well, I’ve kept you away from the other young people long enough.”

As Kathe started to protest that she preferred being with him, he raised the hand with the cigar.

“Go on, Kate, do as I say.”

After she left, he smoked reflectively. He didn’t for a minute believe she admired the Nazis, but at the same time he understood her defence of Hitler, that nasty bit of business. His poor little Kate with her lovely bones, her skin smooth as warm Minton china, her soft low voice, her tender dreams, was a victim of his, Porteous’s, desire for aggrandizement. It was his fault. By sending Alfred to this benighted strutting country he had cursed his granddaughter with divided loyalties.

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The receiving-line had dissolved, and the hall was noisy and crowded. The Servierfrau, who came in to help at parties, bustled around collecting discarded plates. An aroma of camphorated mothballs drifted from the coats that older people were putting on as they stood by the front door. A group of Kingsmith employees perched on the staircase carefully balancing coffee-cups and small Meissen cake-plates as they gazed at the grander guests. Junior Wehrmacht officers and their wives stood in a respectful circle around Sigi’s uncle, Generalmajor Klaus von Hohenau - the general, who had lost his right eye at Verdun, wore a black patch which emphasized the gaunt hollow below his cheekbones. From the drawingroom came the chords of stately music with a jazz idiom. Porgy and Bess. One of the foreign Kingsmiths must have brought along the sheet music, for the opera, concerned as it was with Negro people and composed by a Jew, had been banned in the Third Reich.

Kathe was offered good wishes and congratulations as she moved towards the music. Beneath the carved ceiling beams of the huge drawingroom, the younger guests had congregated in a large group around the piano. Her cousin Aubrey, who had the Kingsmith eyes, frowned through his glasses at the notes as his long fingers swept in skilful chords through

“Bess, You Is My Woman Now’. That’s Aubrey in a nutshell, Kathe thought with an affectionate smile. Worried sick no matter how well he’s doing. Araminta sat atop the piano swinging a slender ankle in time to her brother’s playing.

Araminta was by far the more vivid of the siblings. Her exuberant curls, the shade and lustre of a new-minted copper penny, set off her clear white skin. Her blue eyes sparkled flirtatiously at the younger men close by - she was short-sighted but refused to wear glasses except at the theatre. Aubrey’s subdued russet hair was combed back from his sensitively lean, freckled face. Nineteen, older than his sister by a scant eleven months, he was up at Oxford, at Magdalen reading Literature. Araminta, who hadn’t opened a book since leaving Roedean, swam in a bubbling sea of debutante parties and boyfriends.

Kathe stood in the entry. It was an old game from those childhood Augusts in Kent, waiting for invisible nerve-endings to inform the others of one’s presence.

Aubrey saw Kathe first. Smiling, he missed a note. Araminta turned. With an animated wave, she dropped gracefully to her feet, her evening dress catching on the piano-top briefly to display one shapely leg nearly to the top of the silk stocking. The bias cut of Araminta’s

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aquamarine silk gown discreetly advertised her undulant curves, the full breasts, slender waist and rounded buttocks. Aware that every man under eighty was ogling her, she ran without any hint of self-consciousness to her German cousin.

“Darling, after that stupid receiving-line faded away, I searched high and low. Low and high, too. Where have you been?”

The innuendo lurking in Araminta’s high pretty soprano made it sound certain that Kathe had been romping with a male guest in one of the bedrooms.

“Having supper with Grandpa in the study.”

“A likely tale.”

Linking her arm in Kathe’s, she drew her a bit away, whispering under the music:

“The mystery of the Kingsmiths is solved. At long last.”

Kathe couldn’t help responding with laughter to the way the pointed tip of Araminta’s nose wiggled.

“What mystery?”

she asked.

“The American mystery,”

Araminta emphasized, then fell abruptly silent.

Aunt Rossie - Wyatt’s mother - had come into the drawingroom and was swooping towards them.

“I figured you girls’d be in here!”

With her hair swept on top of her head, her smart black dress with the two diamond clips side by side on the stylish square neckline, Rossie Wyatt Kingsmith looked exactly what she was, a clever, energetic New York career-woman. Bored by her shy, bibulous English sister-in-law, Elizabeth, unable to converse with the German Clothilde, Rossie was seeking out the company of younger, livelier folk. After several minutes of spiritedly regaling her nieces with the latest in American fashion, she moved towards the piano, where Aubrey, who preferred Mozart and Hayjn, was being egged on to play

“Yes, We Have No Bananas’. W

As their aunt left, Araminta grabbed Kathe’s arm.

“Katy darling, I’m dying to see those marvellous new roses your father was telling me about.”

She yanked her towards the glass doors.

The garden was cold, but Araminta, who seemed to exist in her own thermostatically controlled weather, strolled unconcernedly in her thin silk. Knowing that her cousin would tease out the riddle for all she was worth, Kathe wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. The festive strings of Japanese lanterns were twinned on the oil-black smoothness of the small lake, and chinks of light showed from the big houses on the far side. On the path that led to the rose garden, Araminta enquired:

“What did you think of the other teams?”

“I met Wyatt, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“He’s a dream, isn’t he?”

Araminta had spent several weeks in the States three years earlier, when the English Kingsmiths had taken a holiday in New York, and since then had been - in her own soaringly

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emphasized phrase

“absolutely nuts for Americans in general, Wyatt in particular’.

Kathe reached up to a dangling willow branch.

“After we marched out of the stadium, I went over and introduced myself. He hardly seemed delighted.”

“You mean his Heathcliff look? Darling, the very sign he’s wonderful at it, don’t you know. He is divinely sexy, isn’t he? And don’t you adore that American sense of humour?”

“He didn’t waste it on me. Araminta, I’m freezing. Unravel the sphinx so we can go back inside.”

Araminta slowed to mincing steps.

“You know Aunt Rossie she mused.

“So sensible, and from a good family is there such a thing as a good American family?”

“Araminta!”

“Well …” Araminta shrugged.

“It seems Wyatt arrived one month after the wedding.”

Startled, Kathe hit her anklebone on the brick edging of the path. What Araminta had just said was impossible. Aunt Rossie? The smartly turned out American matron? The sensible career-woman who held the reins of the Fifth Avenue Kingsmith’s in her red lacquer-tipped hands? Aunt Rossie having a passionate fling with dear ineffectual Uncle Humphrey? Halting, Kathe stood one-legged like a stork and rubbed her ankle.

“Gossip,”

she said flatly.

“Pure gossip.”

“A few days ago, just before we came over here, I overheard Mother talking to a dreadful old crone - they went to school together or something equally dreary. Mother was holding forth on the fast ways of American womanhood; it had to do with the darling Prince of Wales, and his penchant for American lady-friends. The case that proved her point was our Aunt Rossie and how she married in the nick of time.”