The Real Thing (20 page)

How had pretty young girls got themselves out of all that … how had they survived?

Sarah was a child in the war, and while it went on her view of it was the conventional one presented to her by the necessities of wartime. Her father was in the Air Force. After the war both parents were involved with helping refugees out of the shambles that was Europe. Sarah had known about ‘all that’. But without knowing about it. Still a child she had told herself, ‘Of course one can’t really understand what it is like, all that, not if one is English.’ Meaning, ‘not if you’ve been safe all your life.’ (And will go on being safe, was implicit.) ‘All
that’ was a horror outside ordinary living, and there was no point dwelling on it, because if one hadn’t been in it, one would never understand. Sarah had closed a door in herself. Rather, she had refused to open it. And yes, she believed she was right to do it. One needn’t allow oneself to wallow in horrors.

When she had first heard Rose’s history she had listened and kept the door shut. For one thing she did not believe it. Yes, she knew Rose had been there, had escaped from ‘all that’. Not necessarily, however, in the way she said. Rose was a liar. She lied as she breathed. Rose was one of those people who, if they say they walked up a street on the right side going east, one automatically corrected it to ‘the left side, going west’.

Rose had been – so she had told some people – in a concentration camp. Had told others, more than one. Her mother had died in a camp. Her father was a fabulously rich South American who had had this amazing love affair with her beautiful mother, but he was married and had gone back to his wife. True? Who knew! (Who cared, Sarah had added, in moments of moral exhaustion. There was always too much of Rose!)

Sarah knew that a lot of people who had emerged from ‘all that’ said they were in camps, and perhaps they had been, but the words stood for a horror that people who had not been part of ‘all that’ did not have to enter. Could not enter. A kind of shorthand, that’s what these words were … the camps had only been part of it. They were a black pit into which people were sucked, or thrown, or fell, but around it people had struggled and fought to save themselves, save others, in ways that no outsider could imagine. Rose had emerged from ‘all that’, and if her stories weren’t true, what of it?

She had come out. She had survived. That was enough.

She had three times been the petted, petulant, child-wife, mistress-wife, of adoring men who had got rid of her because she could not fit herself into being ordinary, being a wife.

How had she seen that? She had played a part she had to believe in, because it brought her out of the black pit, because it had saved her, but then it hadn’t been appropriate after all. She had then decided to become a good wife, all home-made bread and noisy children in a family house. But she had had to make the decision to be that. This Rose, the good wife of James, was a construct, a role, just as the other, the petted, pretty, child-mistress had been.

Rose had never understood this world, the safe, ordered world, which was not ‘all that’. She had never ever been able to grasp the rules that governed it. Yes, they were mostly unwritten rules, and yes of course one absorbed them as one grew up, the way Sarah had.

Rose had not.

Sarah stood by the window in a dark room with her eyes shut, and her perspectives had so far changed that she was almost Rose, she was feeling with her. And what she felt (Sarah now knew, in her own bones and flesh) was panic. Fear was the air Rose breathed. She was like someone continually reaching out for hand-holds that seemed solid but gave way. Three husbands, married for safety, had crumbled in her hands, leaving her desperate, determined to find – James.

And now James, this marriage, was giving way.

This love affair (with another poetic young Englishman, so Sarah had heard) was another face of panic – middle-aged Rose was trying to reassure herself that she could still attract.

Sarah began replaying in her mind the scenes she foretold earlier.

Rose, frantic, desperate, distraught with fear, on the telephone to a ‘best friend’, who she had to know by now would suddenly cease to be a friend, because Rose was too much, because of her excessiveness. ‘I have too much vitality, too much energy for the English!’ she would complain, while those great black eyes of hers looked inward, full of incomprehension, wondering what she had done
this
time. You have been lying again, Sarah told Rose’s image. But Rose would never understand what Sarah meant. Rose lied as she breathed about absolutely everything, but for her this was just survival, it was what had saved her, had got her out of the horrible place that was her childhood. Rose wove nets around James, that he would never understand, just as she could never understand him.

Rose would never, ever, understand ordinary decency, common sense, honesty. One did not learn these qualities when part of ‘all that’.

Weaving nets and snares, crazy with fear, using every trick she knew, she would pull her rival Sarah towards her, into that house, that family, and then … The great family table with the children around it, and their friends. James at the head of the table, and sometimes his colleagues. She, Rose, at its foot. Olive … other people … And there, too, Sarah, sitting modestly in her place at the side of the table, with the children, like a visitor. Her husband (Rose’s) with his first wife, the two Northerners, two elderly Vikings, handsome if sun- and wind-dried, humorous, judicious, not commenting on this scene, and not even allowing their eyes to meet (which in itself would be enough to drive Rose hysterical with suspicion for she always and with everyone used those great eyes of hers in glances, connivings, little raisings of the brow, dark meaningful looks – she could not manage without them! Had never managed without them, her atmosphere of me-and-you)
… but there they sat, her husband and Sarah, calm, smiling, undramaric, and at home in a world that Rose did not understand, and could not, for she had been born into that other place, where people survived.

Rose could do not other than weave nets around Sarah, using James to do it. She would plot and plan and intrigue, lay snares for the world she could not understand, and she would pull it into her life and into her home and sit it at her table.

And then?

And then she would kill herself. There was nothing else for her. Her panic, her horror, would not be assuaged, appeased, because Sarah, obedient, amenable, sat at her table, but, on the contrary, it would rise up in her and kill her.

Of course!

It was obvious!

It had been obvious from the start, and that was why Sarah had been in such a panic herself. To get out … to get away … to make sure none of these things would happen.

‘Rose, not Sarah.’ ‘Her, not me,’ she had heard herself muttering, from that part of her (that part of us all) which was so much more intelligent than the slow, lumbering, daylike self.

Rose would ring herself, tonight. Or another of the children would. Or James would, with a message from Rose.

Sarah would simply not answer the telephone.

Meanwhile she switched on the lights, found a certain letter in a drawer, and dialled her old friend Greta in Norway. ‘Greta,’ she said firmly. ‘I want to accept your invitation, but I have a great favour to ask. I want to come now, at once. I want to come and use you as a base for walking trips, yes, all summer, a long time … And I don’t want anyone to know where I am. I don’t want James to
know. Or Rose. Not anyone. All right? Yes, I’ll ring you from Oslo.’

There, it was done.

She briskly began to collect the clothes she would need.

Tomorrow she would put her home into the hands of an estate agent, and go at once to the airport.

Tonight, now, she would go out to dinner at a restaurant, not come home until late, and she would not answer the telephone … which was ringing as she ran down the stairs away from it.

The restaurant is used by publishers, by agents, and – if guests of one or the other – by authors. About the restaurant nothing much can be said: it is yet to be explained why one restaurant is more popular than another whose food is also adequate. It was perhaps too interestingly decorated, but at the same time it aspired to opulence. It is always full.

Midday. People were arriving for lunch. By themselves at a favoured table beside a cascade of cream-and-green ivies were two old women. They were smartly dressed but fussily, with scarves, necklaces, earrings. Actresses? Was there a suggestion of self-parody in those eyelashes, the eye paint?

They sat catercornered. Their table was set for a third. They refused an aperitif, then, as the restaurant went on filling, they asked for sherries.

‘Very dry,’ said one, to the waiter, and the voice announced that she was older than she seemed, for it wavered.

‘Very dry,’ said the other, a good octave lower, in a voice once pitched to be sexy, but now it rumbled on the edge of a croak.

‘Very good,’ said the waiter, and he lingered a moment, smiling. He was a lively young Frenchman.

‘Perhaps we have the wrong day?’ remarked one.

T am sure we have not,’ said the other.

And here came their host, a youngish man almost running to them, blank-eyed with anxiety. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he as good as wept, and ran his hand back over his boyish hair, disordered as it was by apology and by haste. He sat and the same waiter nodded, as he called, ‘Champagne, the usual.’

‘Dear me,’ said one old woman, ‘we are being spoiled.’ She was, perhaps, the prettier, a delightful old thing. Younger she must have been delightful, a rose, blue-eyed, blonde, and her hair even now was silver, a mass of intricate waves, tendrils, not unlike the casque favoured by old Queen Mary.

‘Indeed we are,’ said the other in her deep voice. She had certainly been striking, with dark eyes and, probably, hair. Now it was gold, a pale gold, in a modified chignon, held with a black velvet bow.

Sisters?

‘I was held up on your account – not that it’s an excuse,’ said the host, and reached for the just-filled champagne glass. He waited only long enough for politeness, for as the other two glasses began to bubble and bead he swallowed down his first glass and at once the waiter refilled it. The two women watched and exchanged the briefest glance.

‘It’s all sorted out,’ said the publisher. “There will be two contracts, both on the same terms. It is being assumed you two will contribute equally to the book.’

‘Oh, good,’ said silver-hair. ‘Well, that’s agreed, then. I’m so glad.’ And she put back her champagne, in a gulp, and smiled gently at him.

‘Of course,’ said gold-head, in her throaty voice. I was sure you’d sort it all out.’ And she, too, drank off her glass.

‘How nice,’ said silver-hair, ‘to drink champagne at lunchtime.” Her voice was already more quavery than it had been, and when it reached for lower notes it achieved a reminiscent intimacy.

‘How nice,’ said gold-head, ‘to drink champagne with a handsome young man.’

‘Oh come on,’ said he, bluffly, startled. Quite upset he was. William was his name: call-me-William, but he wouldn’t say this to these two who, it was obvious, would take advantage in some way.

The two women were focusing on him an inspection that he experienced as an intrusion. He was saying to himself, in a moment of panic, that between them they claimed almost a century and a half of years.

He sat staring over his champagne glass at the two old women. He had not met them before, only spoken on the telephone, and as a result of these talks he had personally overlooked every clause of the contracts. He had not expected … well, he was shocked. Nothing in his experience had taught him how to see these two worldly old trouts, now both tight on a couple of swallows of champagne.

‘Darling,’ said silver-hair, ‘we’ve scared him.’ And she put her hand, shapely but blotched with age and full of rings, on his forearm.

‘Don’t mind us,’ said gold-head, it seemed to him with a quite grotesque naughtiness, ‘but it is all going to our poor heads.’

Meanwhile the waiter was observing all this. He filled the three glasses.

‘We both of us live alone, you see,’ said silver-hair, explaining it all to him.

‘Oh, I thought you lived together … I don’t know why I did …’

‘We may be sisters, but we haven’t come to that yet.’

“We’re still hoping for something better, you see,’ said gold-head, and then gave a snort of derisive laughter, Cod knows at what.

‘Living alone with my baby,’ said silver-hair, who in fact was Fanny Winterhome.

‘And I live with mine, and we both love our babies,’ said gold-head, Kate Bisley.

They were widows. They had been theatrical agents for thirty years, had known ‘everybody’, had represented a thousand good troupers, famous and less famous, and now they were writing their reminiscences. The book would certainly sell for its anecdotes about the great, pretty near the bone some of them. ‘But never spiteful, darling, we promise you,’ Fanny had assured him on the telephone. There was also the question of their theatre expertise, past and present. No one knew more than they did, he had been assured.

Yesterday the young (youngish) publisher had been told, quite by chance, by a well-known actor he had asked to help ‘promote’ the book, that the two women had been beautiful.

He sat looking from one to the other.

‘Kate has a Burmese, and my baby is a Siamese,’ said Fanny. And her rouged lips kiss-kissed the air, an invisible pussycat.

‘I think we had better order,’ he said firmly.

It was evident he cared about what he ate, and they did not. But as the waiter approached to drain the end of the champagne into the three glasses the host said, hypnotized into doing it – he was convinced – ‘Another bottle, I think.’

‘Oh good,’ sighed Fanny. ‘One can never have too much champagne.’

‘One can at this time of the day,’ said Kate.

‘Well, we’ll have to support each other to the train.’

‘Or perhaps this handsome man would escort us there?’

‘I certainly would, with pleasure, but I have an appointment I simply cannot be late for’