The Rendezvous (6 page)

‘I love America,' she said. ‘Are you married, Mr. Amstat?'

‘No, I'm afraid not. So far, I've escaped.' He always said this when women asked him that question. He had said it to Julia the first time they met. He wondered where she was. She was probably looking for him. ‘Have a cigarette?' She held out a case to him, it gleamed in the dim light, and he took one. When she shut it he saw diamonds sparkling on the front. He lit her cigarette and watched her face in the moment while the flame lasted. She had changed very little. It was astonishing how clearly he remembered everything about her. She must be thirty-four, thirty-five, but she hadn't grown hard, or aggressive like the American women of the same age. She had a gentleness about her still – she had always had it.

‘Have you been here long?'

‘Only six years. I was in the Argentine, studying, before that. I like it too. Your sister-in-law was telling me all about India; she was very enthusiastic.'

‘She's a great enthusiast.' Terese looked up at him and smiled. He smiled back; he had seemed very tense and odd when they first met. Now she liked him better. He was more relaxed.

‘She goes mad about people and about things. The trouble is, they don't always live up to her, and she can't understand that. She's such a strong person herself, and she's never married a man who could match her. I hope this one is different to the others. He seems very nice.'

‘Yes, if you like the type. What were her other husbands?'

‘Two Americans and one Bolivian. They were all disastrous, especially the Bolivian.' She gave a little laugh, and in spite of himself he had to laugh too. ‘He was terribly rich and very temperamental. He threw fantastic scenes when he didn't get his own way about everything, and one night poor Ruth called up to say he was running amok in the apartment smashing everything he could get hold of, just because he wanted to go to Salzburg for the festival and she wanted to visit friends in Kenya! It was too ridiculous, really, but they got divorced and she swore it was the last time. The trouble is, she's miserable living alone. She needs a man in her life, and, being a good Presbyterian, she has to marry them, one after the other.'

‘She sounds even more formidable than she looks,' he said. ‘And she looks very formidable. How does she like you? Were you a disappointment too?'

He didn't know what made him ask that. It was all so strange, like a nightmare mixed up with a pleasant dream. The pleasant part was standing talking on the balcony; when they leaned over the parapet their elbows touched. He was very much aware of her. How did she fit into this milieu of an ultra-sophisticated society? It didn't serve any purpose but he wanted to know. It was like playing the children's game, grandmother's steps. He had seen children playing it in the streets in France. It was one of the oldest suspense games in the world, where you crept inch by inch towards the one whose back was turned. If you were seen moving, you were caught. The thrill was in the fear of being caught. That was what he was doing now, asking her questions, instead of getting out of the place as fast as he could.

‘Was I a disappointment?' She repeated the question and then hesitated. ‘I don't know. Not to Robert, my husband, anyway. But probably to Ruth and the others. I've never had any children.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘It doesn't matter. I've stopped minding now,' she said. ‘One can't have everything. I've got the best husband in the world.'

‘It's very rare to hear a woman say that here,' he said. ‘I should think your husband's pretty lucky too. Can I take you back inside now? I have a friend with me – I'm supposed to take her out to dinner.'

‘Oh, I'm so sorry, of course. I'm afraid I've kept you out here talking …' Inside the room, in the bright lights, she turned to him again. She definitely liked him; he was very charming and there was something warm about him. ‘Don't think me rude, Mr. Amstat, but I would like your address, so you can come to dinner with us. It's so seldom one meets another European. Will you come?'

‘I'd be delighted; it's very kind of you. Here is my card.' He shouldn't have given it to her and he knew it. But it was too late. Not that he would ever go, if she remembered to invite him. He didn't even look for Julia – he wanted to get out.

‘Goodbye, Mr. Amstat. I'm so glad we met.'

She held her hand out again and he took it.

‘Goodbye, Mrs. Bradford. Until we meet again.' He didn't shake hands with her; he lifted her hand and kissed it, and he saw what he expected to see. Freischer had broken Terese Masson's fingers. There were small scars on the back of it, where her broken bones had been re-set at some later date. He hadn't even needed to prove it, but now he couldn't try to fool himself. He left the party and went straight back to his apartment. He mixed himself a large whiskey and then rang down to the basement for his suitcases. After four years he would have to start running again.

Terese opened her eyes and listened to her husband breathing in the dark beside her. She hadn't slept; she was waiting for him to fall asleep before she moved away from him. She got free very gently, sliding out from under his arm. He always wanted to sleep lying close to her, their bodies still engaged after they had made love, and she had always had to crawl away from him before she could relax. He had been a little drunk that night, that's what had started it, and when they came home after dinner with Ruth he came up behind her when she was undressing and kissed her neck. When he began feeling her breasts she tried to break away from him, but he either didn't or wouldn't notice. He had undressed her and begun the patient, tender assault on her body which had brought her closer to him over the years without ever carrying her through the barrier into a proper sexual fusion. She hadn't wanted any of it, but she couldn't bear to see him turn away, rejected and hurt, pretending not to mind. She loved him too much and owed him too much not to bear with his need for her; she even pretended to share his enjoyment, imitating his passion.

Now that he was asleep she wanted to lie on her own, to put on a nightdress, because nakedness worried her. It made her feel uneasy, as if she had some reason to be afraid when she was stripped. It wasn't because she didn't love Robert; he didn't repulse her, he had never been a brute or slept with another woman or done anything which could lay the blame for her frigidity on him. She had never tried to blame him; she blamed herself instead. She could be tender with him, respond to affection, enjoy his caresses and return them freely, but the convulsion of intercourse, with its sense of helpless subjugation, was something it had taken her years to endure without horror.

She knew her way round the bedroom without turning on the light. She didn't want Bob to wake up, she needed to be alone before she could hope to relax and sleep. She went into the living room and sat down, lighting a cigarette. It was a beautiful, restful room, and Terese had chosen the décor and furniture herself. Ruth had tried to persuade her to follow the fashion of five years ago and have everything modern from the paintings on the walls to the angular, black leather chairs and cubist tables which were the rage of smart New York interior decorators. Her own house at the time was a riot of violent colours, Swedish sofas and Reginald Bacon paintings. Terese had refused to be influenced. The colour scheme was muted; soft green silk walls were matched by a fine Aubusson carpet and several rare pieces of French furniture, including a Roetger commode which had once been in Versailles. The sofas and chairs were deep and comfortable, the pictures English eighteenth-century landscapes with an exquisite Gainsborough conversation piece Robert bought for her when it came on to the public market in England. Everything in the room was a reflection of the best of French and English taste, and this was only their New York apartment, which was empty three-quarters of the year. The Bradford home in Boston was like a museum. Terese had never felt at liberty to change anything or add anything of her own, and she had never regarded it as her home, though they spent most of their time there. She leant back, drawing in the smoke and thinking about Boston and the house and Ruth. Fifteen years ago she had come there to meet his family, so dependent upon her husband that she was uneasy if he was out of the room. Her mind was a blank. It had reminded her of a piece of paper which had to be filled up with pictures of a past drawn by someone else. She could remember the hospital and waking up, seeing Robert sitting by her bed. She hadn't known who he was or where she was or her own name. Strangely she had felt no panic, and afterwards when they pieced a little together for her she understood that Joe Kaplan had prepared her for this moment by hypnosis, so that she wouldn't be overcome by fear. ‘I am Robert,' the man in American uniform had said. ‘Don't be frightened, darling. I'm Robert.'

Why in God's name hadn't she ever been able to love him properly? And why hadn't he ever reproached her? She got up, threw her cigarette into the grate and called herself an ungrateful bitch out loud.

She lit another cigarette and went into the kitchen. When she switched on the light it was like walking into a room in Provence on a day of the brightest sunshine. Everything was polished wood and brass, with yellow walls and tiles and a pine floor. She and Bob would have liked to eat there, only they never dared because of the servants. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. She stretched her right hand out in front of her; it was white and smooth-skinned, with long pale nails; she looked at the little scars along the back of it. She didn't know how she had got them; Joe Kaplan had told her not to worry about it and she had accepted that. He had treated her for weeks before she married Bob, after she left the hospital and Bob had put her into a hotel with a nurse. Every time she saw Joe Kaplan he drew in a little more past on the blank paper, so that she had a name and a birthplace and she knew how old she was. And her mind accepted the facts, but without any great curiosity. It was odd how little she cared about what she didn't know, and she couldn't make herself care. She had had an accident and lost her memory, and it didn't matter. Even trying to speculate made her feel lost and miserable. Bob had been very good to her that first year; he had made her see that a present and a future were all she needed, and he hadn't tried to sleep with her until Joe Kaplan said he could. She only knew that because of something Joe's wife Vera had said years afterwards. Vera didn't like her; Terese had the feeling that the older woman was holding herself back whenever they were together, like someone trying not to pull a knife out of their pocket and stab to the heart. Perhaps she was jealous of Joe. He had a famous practice and he was on the staff of Belleview as a leading consultant psychiatrist. There were so many neurotics beating on his door that he couldn't possibly treat them all. And he wouldn't treat the bogus rich sick, as he called them. ‘There's nothing the matter with these damned women that a day's washing and six kids wouldn't cure!' He was ruthless with them; Terese had known one or two women and the odd man who had come out of Joe's rooms quicker than they went in. But he was wonderful with people who were really ill. He had been so wonderful with her. He wasn't just her doctor, he had always been Bob's friend and he was her friend too; perhaps the only one she had. It hadn't been easy, meeting Bob's family when they came back to America from France. His mother had been alive then, and she was an older, more terrifying, version of Ruth. The old Mrs. Bradford had been kind, but it was like being received by royalty, however graciously, and Terese had been at a permanent disadvantage. They all knew she had been hurt in the war – it was generally accepted that it was during an air raid, so nobody could ask her questions about herself, and she had sensed how inhibiting this was to her mother-in-law. Mrs. James Bradford II was a terrible snob because she could trace her own ancestry back to an early English settler in the late 1700s, and she was dying to ask her son's little French wife all about herself. If she ever attempted a reference to Terese's family, her son turned the subject on to something else. She had dominated his father and even Ruth, though with some difficulty. But where Terese was concerned she found that she had no authority over her son at all.

Ruth had been kind too; they were all kind when she first arrived, all Bob's relatives and his friends, but she could see them looking at her awkwardly; she sensed that she made them uncomfortable, and in return she clung to him more and more. She had said to herself that Joe was her friend and this was true. Her only friend was truer still. She had a lot of acquaintances, married couples she and Bob mixed with socially, women she lunched with and worked on an odd charity committee with because it was expected of her, but no intimates. No real friends. Only her husband, and Joe Kaplan. It was time to ask the Kaplans to dinner; it didn't matter about Vera. She was a bitch to everyone, and everyone disliked her. She could ask that Swiss she met at Ruth's party. He was nice. Perhaps it was because he was a European that she had found him so easy to talk to; he was a very good-looking man. Ruth said he was Julia Adams' lover; Ruth had thought him attractive too. Terese had met Julia once or twice but she couldn't remember much about her except that she was beautiful and very smartly dressed. She would have to ask Julia with the Swiss. It might make a pleasant combination, especially with Joe, who knew a lot about modern architecture. She had finished her coffee and the mood of restlessness had passed. When she got into bed Terese knew that he was awake. He stretched out his hand, feeling for hers.

‘Where have you been?'

‘Drinking coffee, darling. I couldn't sleep. Would you like me to make you some?'

‘No, thanks. Come here, darling, close to me.'

She went into his arms and kissed him. ‘I love you, Robert. Sometimes I forget to tell you how much. Did I make you happy tonight?'