The Towers of Love (7 page)

He turned away from the mirror. Well, perhaps he had not changed. And he wondered suddenly why the fact that he had not changed saddened him somehow. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. His mother had not changed; the house had not changed. Oh, of course the rooms changed year by year, from Empire to Directoire to Chinese to French Provincial to Victorian—but the house itself didn't really change. The way the rooms always changed was only a part of the house's changelessness. Nothing had changed at all since he had been away, except possibly Edrita. Was Edrita Everett the only thing that had the luck to be impermanent? And he began to wonder if home had somehow been the wrong place to come back to. But still, as his mother had said, what other place was there to come to besides home when you had to go somewhere?

He walked over to his bed. Pappy had laid out his dinner clothes. Dinner in the house was always black tie. After all, if you lived in a castle, didn't it follow that dinner should always be black tie? It was more amusing that way.

Four

The dining-room had come from some château on the Loire, and stretched across the ceiling between the fruited garlands of carved plaster were four frescoes that were supposed to represent the four seasons. But the frescoes were dim now in the table's candlelight, which were caught and refracted by the pear-shaped prisms of the chandelier, and the gambolling seasonal figures were merely shadows that swam in the vague upper air. He reached the table slightly ahead of his mother and, when she came into the room, he saw that she had put on a long grey chiffon dress and that, twisted in the bracelets of both wrists, she had hung two long matching grey chiffon scarves which floated at her sides as she walked, like strange, gauzy wings.

“Sit down, darling,” she said, waving one plumed arm towards him. And when they were seated, at opposite ends of the long table, he saw that she had disappeared completely behind a large and, he thought, rather pompous arrangement of gladioli that sprouted from a bowl at the centre of the table. Pappy, in his white coat, came from the kitchen with cold soup.

“Pappy, darling,” Alexandra Carey said, “please take away those damn' flowers.” Pappy set down the soup plates hurriedly, bowed and moved quickly towards the centrepiece. “Pappy, I love you dearly,” she said, “but I
do
wish you wouldn't try to do flowers. Leave that sort of thing to the Japanese. And now,” she said, when the flowers had been removed to the sideboard, “champagne. Champagne to welcome home our Hugh. And the
good
champagne, please, Pappy. You know where it is. Ice two bottles quick-quick-quick.” She clapped her hands, which sent sprays of chiffon outwards on either side of her.

“I don't have to have champagne, Sandy,” he said.

“Nonsense. It's your second night home. We want champagne. We want to get absolutely gassed on champagne to-night.”

“Well, we don't need two bottles, do we?” he asked, but Pappy had already left the room, scurrying across the rug in his slippered feet.

“We can't get gassed on one bottle, for God's sake,” she said.

The “we” here, of course, was theoretical because his mother no longer took a drink. And though Pappy now brought two champagne glasses to the table and set them at their places, Hugh knew that his mother would have cold ginger beer, as she always did, from a little crockery bottle. And, sure enough, the next thing that arrived in the dining-room was the champagne cooler with the two green champagne bottles settling in the ice along with the smaller bottle of her soft drink.

“Oh, goody,” she said. “We're going to get positively sozzled, aren't we?”

“I guess we are,” he said.

They sipped their soup.

“Hugh,” she said, “you look so solemn, baby. Are you feeling solemn about something, baby?”

“No, I'm not feeling solemn about anything, Sandy,” he said, smiling.

“Oh, don't be solemn! Gaiety, gaiety. We must have gaiety. Damn it, Pappy, isn't that champagne ready yet?”

“A minute, miss,” Pappy said, bowing.

“You're not angry with me, are you—for dragging you up here?”

“You didn't drag me, Sandy,” he said. “I was glad to come.”

“Were you? Were you really? I thought you sounded—oh, just a tiny bit reluctant when I called you on the phone.”

“It wasn't that,” he said. “I just hadn't quite made up my mind what I was going to do.”

“Oh, you probably wanted to take some nice trip by yourself, or go off to some place like Boca Grande with Anne. The last thing in the world, I'm sure, that you wanted to do was to come up here and spend a few days with your poor old dowager mother.”

“It's always good to be home, Sandy,” he said. “Really.”

“Oh good. Then don't be solemn. Tell me about your walk.”

“We had a nice walk.”

“Where did you walk to?”

“Down to the old field in back—the one we used to call the Enchanted Valley. And to the brook.”

“The Enchanted
Valley
. How charming. I'd forgotten we ever called it that. Who named it that, I wonder?”

“It was Dad,” he said.

“Oh, was it? Was it really? How surprising. That must have been in his extreme youth, mustn't it?”

“Yes, I guess it was—in his extreme youth, Sandy.”

“You're being solemn still!
Hurry
, Pappy.”

“A minute, miss.” He was slowly turning bottles in their nest of ice.

“Well, I'm glad you had a nice walk. I'm glad you had a visit with Edrita.”

“Yes.”

“You're not still
fond
of Edrita, of course. Are you?”

He looked at her down the length of the table.

“What's the matter? Oh, you mean Pappy? My God, don't you know that Pappy can't understand a word we're saying? Can you, Pappy darling? Pappy, what are we talking about?”

“Pardon, miss?”

“You see? He doesn't understand a word. Pappy only understands me when I talk a certain way, don't you, Pappy?”

Nodding, Pappy said, “Yes, miss.”

Pappy and his wife Maria, who was the cook, had been in the house for nearly twenty years. And by now, Hugh supposed, they did understand his mother, when she spoke to them a certain way, and possibly even loved her. Pappy and Maria were another of the changeless things about the house.

“Well,” she said, “you're not, are you?”

Though he knew what she meant, he said, “Not what?”

“Not still fond of Edrita.”

“I've always liked Edrita.”

“Oh, of course you've always liked her, darling. I don't mean that. I mean
fond
of her. That way.”

“No, I don't think I am,” he said.

“Well, forgive me for asking, but when I saw you together this afternoon I couldn't help, you know, wondering, and remembering.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, Sandy.” He spooned his soup, concentrated on it.

“You were wise about that,” she said. “Wise about her. She was never for you, and you were very wise to realise it when you did. You've always done the wise thing. I'm proud of you for that.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Anne was the right one for you, the perfect one. You were wise to see how right Anne was.”

“Yes.”

Behind him, with a soft pop, he heard the first champagne bottle being opened. “Oh, goody!” his mother said.

Then she said, “Oh, I hope you don't think it was too dreadful of me to tell you not to bring Anne. It's just that you and I have always been able to talk so well together, just by ourselves. So I was being selfish. I wanted it to be so that your father and I could have you all to ourselves for a little while.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, Anne's pretty busy right now.”

“I know. She's always so busy with everything. How I admire her. How I wish I had her energy.”

“Yes,” he said.

Pappy stood beside him now and was filling his champagne glass. Then he moved down the table and filled his mother's glass with ginger beer.

She lifted her brimming glass. “To you,” she said, “to the returning conqueror!”

“Thank you.”

“I'm so happy.”

Soup was removed and dinner came. The food was always good in his mother's house. He sipped his champagne.

“Of course,” she said, “when I first heard that you and Joe Wallace were breaking up, that he was buying you out, I was terribly alarmed. Yes, alarmed is the word—and shocked. That was why I telephoned. I simply couldn't believe it.”

“Well, there was no need to be alarmed,” he said. “It was a perfectly friendly thing.”

“I know. And of course, when you explained to me about the financial side of it—how very nicely you had made out—I realised that made all the difference in the world. Getting all that money puts quite a different complexion on it, doesn't it?”

“Well, I suppose so, if you want to look at it that way,” he said.

“My first thought was: How could you? I mean it seemed so terribly sad that you'd invested so much
time
—nearly seven years—with Joe. It seemed impossible that after spending so much time there you could suddenly just throw it all over, just on an impulse.”

“Well, that wasn't quite the way it was,” he said. “It wasn't a sudden impulse. It was something Joe and I had been discussing for a long time.”

“Oh, I know. And it's too late for you to change your mind about it now, anyway, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is,” he said.

“The main thing is,
you're
sure you did the right thing.”

“That's right.”

“But I admit, when I first heard about it, I was terribly upset. I didn't know what you could be thinking of. And when Joe Wallace told me—”

“Oh?” He looked up at her. “I didn't realise you'd been talking to Joe.”

“Oh,” she said, waving her hand, “it wasn't that I was talking to him, really. And it was months and months ago. I just happened to run into him. I was in New York for one of my assignations with Titi, and Titi and I were lunching—where was it? Oh, yes, it was at the Baroque. I'm sure it was at the Baroque. We were lunching there, and Joe Wallace just happened to walk by. And he spoke to me.”

“I see,” he said.

“And he mentioned—oh, he mentioned it only very casually—that you and he were having some sort of disagreement about something, and he asked me to speak to you, and really I guess I wasn't paying any attention to what he was saying because it didn't make much of an impression on me. I've really forgotten what it was he said. I didn't think it could possibly be anything serious.”

“Joe asked you to speak to me?”

“Well, yes.”

“I wonder what Joe wanted you to speak to me about?” he said.

“Well, I suppose he wanted me to try to persuade you to change your mind.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Actually, if I had known what it was you were planning to do—if you'd
told
me—I would have asked you to think it over carefully, and not do anything hasty.”

“Well, as you said, it's too late now,” he said.

“Yes, and I'm sure you've done the right thing. And the important thing now is not what you've done, but what you're going to do next.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I suppose you have some plans.”

“I have one or two ideas.”

“Oh, good. I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what they are, would you?”

“Well, not quite yet,” he said. “I haven't really decided anything yet, Sandy.”

“Of course. Well, there's lots of time, isn't there? Acres of time.”

“Yes.”

“Of course I did have one thought—and don't for a minute think I'm trying to arrange your life for you, darling, because I'm certainly not—but I did have one thought.”

“What was that?” he asked her.

“It occurred to me, now that you have all this money, you might just start an advertising agency of your own, mightn't you? I mean, who needs Joe Wallace? Why not start your own company? I'm not saying you
should
do it, of course. It's just an idea.”

“Yes, it's an idea,” he said.

“But—you do as you wish. You're your own man, darling. You're very much your own man, and I'm proud of you.” She smiled at him. “Drink up!” she said. “And eat. Your dinner's getting cold and your champagne's getting warm.
Pappy!
More champagne, Pappy! No one's had nearly enough to drink.”

He took another swallow from his glass. “Say,” he said, “you were going to tell me about the mystery guest to-morrow night. Who is it?”

“Oh!” she cried. “For
give
me! Well, guess. Just guess.”

“I just can't guess.”

“Try. It has to do with Pansy.”

“I still can't.”

“Well, our little Pansy is
engaged
.”

“No kidding?” he said. “Well, say, that's wonderful.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Unofficially, of course. Nothing in the papers yet. More champagne for Mr. Hugh, Pappy. We're trying to get sozzled. Yes,” she repeated. “I suppose it is.”

“Why do you just suppose it is? Who is the guy?”

“Oh, I mean I suppose our Pansy had to marry
some
body, didn't she? I mean she's too pretty not to marry anybody, and end up an old maid like Reba. So I suppose it is wonderful.”

“Well, who is he?”

“His name is Austin Callender. I've met him. He's very nice.”

“You like him then? You approve?”

“Oh, yes, I approve. He's one of
the
Callenders. From Boston. He's Andover 'fifty-one, Harvard 'fifty-five. Hasty Pudding and all that rot. Spee Club. Too bad it couldn't be Porcellian, but Spee will have to do. Very rich, not bad-looking, very dull—perfect for Pansy.”