The Secret Lovers (30 page)

Christopher held the letter in his hand, a badly made sheet of foolscap that soaked up the ink of Kamensky’s pen.

“Is this all?”

“
All?
” Maria said.

“I mean just this one sheet. There’s no salutation, no signature.”

“His other letter was the same.”

“This came to your house? When? What postmark?”

“No, not to the house. To a poste restante, one of Otto’s accommodation addresses. Day before yesterday. The postmark was Helsinki, like the other.”

“How did Kamensky get hold of an accommodation address?”

“I’ve no idea, nor has Otto. This mail drop was used strictly for nonsensitive material. Otto gave it to a lot of people. Anyone, traveling in Russia and meeting Kamensky, could have
given it to him. You
knew
this.”

“No.”

“Then Wilson-Watson-Wharton did. I remember going over it, Otto going over it.”

Maria gave Christopher back his wineglass. She held her hand out, palm flat. “Otto would like to keep the original,” she said. “I’ve brought you film of it so
you’ll have all the copies you need.”

Christopher folded the letter, put it back into the envelope, and gave it to Maria. She tucked it back into the neck of her dress. “This is a damn uncomfortable secret hiding place,”
she said. “I only own one bra, and only wear it when I’m smuggling supersensitive stuff. So it’s been years.”

Christopher drank a little of the wine and ate some cheese. Maria had been eating while he read. She wrapped the remnant of her chewed sandwich in its waxed paper and put it away. Then she
turned her face to the sun as Christopher had turned Kamensky’s letter, and, shaking back her hair, closed her eyes against the heat.

“What was Otto’s reaction to this?” Christopher asked.

“Devastation. He didn’t understand at first what Kamensky was saying. He didn’t know the broadcasts had begun—didn’t know there were going to
be
broadcasts. Who’s responsible for that?”

“Not I.”

“I didn’t suppose so, after that scene you played the last time you saw Otto.”

“What would Otto do, if he were still doing things?”

Maria opened her eyes and spun round on the blanket. She crossed her legs modestly under her full skirt.

“What anyone would do—nothing. The situation is irretrievable, isn’t it?”

“I d say so.”

“But you wouldn’t say, would you—being the sort of chap you are—that you were right from the beginning, that there was nothing in this for Kamensky but death?”

Maria waited a moment, her eyes bright with the stony control she had learned in her years as a professional. When Christopher didn’t answer, she said, “You’re not
eating.”

“No.”

“Otto asks me to tell you this: You were right, he was wrong. He apologizes and wishes to see you soon.”

Christopher gave her back his wineglass, still half full. He stood up; Maria remained on the bright blanket, woven of the lightest wool, designed by an artist—like all the
Rothchilds’ possessions, it was a ceremonial object.

“My part of the message is this,” she said. “I’m not quoting Otto but my intuition as a wife. Otto, for the first time, is feeling the sorrow of death. I’ve never
seen him as he’s been since that letter came.”

She paused. She drank Christopher’s wine. She was not like herself; she went on talking, as if Christopher were a man for whom explanations had to be rephrased.

“Do you feel what Otto’s feeling—perhaps a little of it?”

“I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “I’m not a Russian, after all.”

Maria took what he said as a statement of fact, nothing more. Insult was not possible between them. She burrowed in her airline bag and brought out a zippered leather case of the kind that men
use for toilet articles when traveling. She opened the zipper and showed Christopher what was inside—yellow spools of undeveloped film, each with a number pasted on it. “My pictures of
The Little Death
,” Maria said, “the ones I took for Otto. The film has never been developed.”

“What would I do with it?”

“Otto thought you might like to know it wasn’t our copy of Kiril Alekseivich’s novel that was sent to the radio operation.”

“Tell Otto I never thought it was,” Christopher said. “I’ll be around to see him in a week or so.”

Maria was on her knees again, packing the picnic back into the bag.

“Then you really are going to take some time off?”

“A few days.”

“Sunshine and Cathy?”

Christopher nodded.

“Who could ask for anything more?” Maria inquired.

Maria slung her airline bag over her shoulder. She lifted a hand, as if to touch his face; he wondered if the first signs of loss showed in him as new love was supposed to do. Why else was
everyone moved to touch him? Maria didn’t complete the gesture. She blew him a kiss, and swung away through the trees with her rippling athlete’s stride.

1

Cathy had a plan for them to follow in Madrid. On the hotel telephone, when Christopher called her from the airport, she asked if he had any work to do while they were
together. “One thing only,” Christopher replied, “but it will be so mixed up with fun that you won’t know it’s happening.” The line went dead briefly, then Cathy
said, “Im better at reading you than I used to be, Paul. You’ll see.”

In their room, when he arrived, she refused to make love. “Luncheon first, in the cellar of the Nacional Hotel,” she said. “I’ve booked us one of those wonderful booths
with the high carved backs and fronts—do you remember? We’ll eat the entire menu, champagne throughout.”

As she named each of the five courses, she gave him a fluttering kiss. He stepped back, holding her hands, and laughed with the joy of seeing her again. Her eyes darkened with pleasure. Cathy
considered Paris and Rome home ground, but when they met in another city, they gave each other gifts. Christopher had brought her a heavy gold necklace, an antique. She looked at herself in the
glass while Christopher clasped it around her throat. “It’s a necklace for a queen,” she cried. She gave him his present, a tiny drawing. “My God, Cathy, it’s a
Goya—what did you have to spend for this?” he asked. She watched his delight. “In real money, I don’t know.” she said. “Lots and lots of pesetas, though. It
would have been more, but my wonderful Don Jorge got it for me from some ruined nobleman.”

“That’s Jorge de Rodegas?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“I always see him. When I was sixteen I wanted to propose marriage to him, but Mama said it would be incest. ‘Incest?’ I said. ‘He’s no more than a twelfth cousin
by marriage and you and Papa are first cousins once removed.’ She told me Don Jorge would go to hell if he married his goddaughter. He’d already sentenced himself to purgatory by being
godfather to an Episcopalian.”

“Maybe you should have asked Don Jorge his opinion.”

“Maybe,” Cathy said. “He’s more beautiful than you, Paul, and a whole lot richer, and he stays at home. He’s gone to the mountains now, back to his
estancia.”

At lunch, in the cool restaurant with its dark wood and blue tiles, she spoke about her music. She had rented a suite at the Palace Hotel with a piano in the sitting room.
While he was in Paris and Berlin, after she had come down from Pamplona, she had stayed in the suite, alone, playing through the long afternoons.

“Did you see me?” she asked Christopher. “Did you hear the music?”

“I do now.”

“Tell, Paul—all the details.’

In fact he had imagined her seated at the instrument. The picture had come into his mind, along with those of Horst Bülow being lured to his death, when Wilson had come back from the
Schaefer Baths with his report. He had caught a look of puzzlement in Wilson’s face because he had grimaced suddenly, at the incongruity of the mental images, a diptych with
Bülow’s sagging corpse on one leaf and Cathy’s luminous figure on the other.

“All right,” he said. “The shutters were closed and there were bars of light falling on your figure and running across the music rack. The bracelet I gave you in Rome, on the
night we bought the cats, was lying on the little piece of wood at the treble end of the keyboard, and it picked up the light. You were wearing a yellow dress, with the skirt pulled up over your
thighs. Your feet were bare, working the pedals. You were playing Bach and not getting it right; you played a passage from one of the Preludes over and over, and after making mistake after mistake
in the same bar you crashed your fist down onto the keyboard, then sucked your hand because you’d hurt it.”

As Christopher spoke, Cathy, her eyes intent, sipped champagne thirstily, as though the wine were a potion that drew these visions from him.

“That’s absolutely accurate,” she said. “Paul, it’s no wonder I’m living under an enchantment. How do you
do
it? What else did you see?”

Christopher seized her face and kissed it. He said, “I made it all up. Cathy, how many times have I watched you play the piano? It’s a game, this business of the sight. I don’t
have it.”

“You
do.
What else did you see?”

A waiter took away their empty plates; the headwaiter, drinking the sight of Cathy as avidly as she gulped wine, poured more champagne and brought another bottle.

“I saw you, often, when you weren’t alone,” Christopher said.

Cathy returned his gaze without embarrassment.

“I know. You’d come into my mind. I couldn’t turn the others into you, though; you wouldn’t let me, Paul.”

Cathy would not give up her belief in magic, telepathy, curses, second sight; she had grown up in a house filled with ghosts, hearing tales of witches and enchantments. As a child, she had seen
fortunes told with cards and chicken bones, and the future foretold in the liver of a bird.

Christopher held up his hand; they stopped talking. Another course was brought. “If we lived in Spain, Paul, we’d die of gluttony,” Cathy said. “Why
don’t
we live here for a while? You love it so.”

“Live here? All you’d need is an eye for beauty and a heart of stone. Italy is bad enough.”

“Every place is bad enough. Shall we talk about the downtrodden nigras and the white trash and Miss Catherine up in her big ol’ white house on the hill? That’s what they used
to do a lot in school; your pal Maria Custer would invite me to bull sessions so she and the other guilty rich girls would have a Southerner to whip, just like I was supposed to have whipped the
slaves back home.”

“You really don’t like Maria, do you?”

Cathy smiled, a parody of Maria Rothchild’s bold and sudden grin. “I
hate
her,” she said. “I always have.”

“Will you say why?”

“I don’t want to talk about Maria, or anyone except you and me.”

Christopher shrugged. Cathy’s smile had vanished. Her hand had been lying on his thigh, and she took it away.

“All right,” she said. “Maria is a snob. She’s rotten with pride—in her family, her brains, her wit, her looks, and now that old Russian husband. She makes you keep
quiet while she boasts—she’s like de Gaulle talking about France. Everyone sees that utter nonsense is being talked, but it’s so embarrassing that you let it pass.”

“What harm is there in somebody else’s self-delusion?”

“Try contradicting Maria or frustrating her or insulting her and you’ll find out, Paul. If you touch one hair of her silly, transparent, pretentious idea of herself, Maria will kill
you if she can. Literally. She’s an assassin.”

Christopher picked up Cathy’s wineglass and put it into her hand. “I think we’d better talk of indifferent things for the rest of this lunch,” he said.

Cathy told him that she wanted to control their time in Madrid—choose the things they did, select the foods and wines, the times they slept and were awake, the things
they bought, even the clothes Christopher wore. “I’ve imagined it all,” she said. “In
Life on the Mississippi,
Mark Twain tells how the pilot of a river-boat had to
have the whole length of the Mississippi in his mind, every detail in this mental river—sandbars and channels and villages on the banks—exactly as they were in the real river.
That’s what I’ve done with Madrid, made it into a place in my mind for you and me. I’m the pilot, you’re the passenger.”

Christopher laughed aloud again; he thought that he had never loved her so much, taken such pleasure in the flight of her mind, the rise and fall of her voice.

“All right,” he said. “But I’ll have to get off the steamboat just once. There’s something I want to do.”

“Not alone, Paul. With me, every day, every minute.”

“This is something I can’t do without you, Cathy. You’re the key to the door.”

“What door is that?”

He didn’t tell her.

The enormous luncheon, not begun until midafternoon, lasted till after five o’clock. Christopher and Cathy walked hand in hand up the Paseo del Prado, under a sun that
was still brilliant and hot. Coming out of the darkened restaurant, Cathy was stricken blind by the light and covered her eyes with her hands. Christopher led her inside the Prado Gallery, and in
the long, dim galleries her sight returned. They looked at the El Grecos.

“Part of the cruise on the Mississippi is a trip to Toledo to see more of these,” Cathy said. “El Greco does get to you, doesn’t he? He used lunatics from an asylum for
models, and the figures are all stretched out that way because El Greco had a bad astigmatism. That’s what I learned at Bryn Mawr.”

“I thought all you did at Bryn Mawr was play the piano.”

“I had to do some reading, and there were weekends when I did a power of kissing.”

Cathy pulled Christopher’s head down and kissed him, long and searchingly, on the lips. An elderly Spanish guard, shouting his outrage, hobbled across the room and pulled them apart.
Cathy, in her Spanish that kept sliding into Italian, told him that they were married. She showed him their rings.

“It’s all a lie,” Christopher said. “See? The rings don’t match. And, besides, she’s been insulting El Greco.”

The guard was stern; there was a ban, imposed by the archbishop, on the sexes touching one another in public. “The lady must be more modest while she is visible to Spaniards,” he
said.