It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (11 page)

“No, no. Not move,” the old woman said, wagging her finger at him as though he had threatened her with forcible transfer.

“You move here, my darling,” Lydia said. “We’ll build an addition if you like.”

Her firmness surprised him, but the more he considered it, the more reasonable it seemed. He had given no thought, he realized, to any awkwardness Lydia might feel moving into the house he had shared with Margot. Spending nights there as his lover was one thing, but living there as his wife was no doubt a less enticing prospect. It came to him that if he was to make a go of this new life, he needed a clean break from all the old trappings of his life with Margot. He would sell the house, he decided, auction off the antiques, get rid of all those dusty wreaths and garlands. The decision—he was driving to work as he made it—sent a strange, vertiginous excitement through him. He sped forward, pressing the accelerator as though to drown out any doubt or resistance inside him. A few minutes later, entering his office, he picked up the framed photograph of Margot. She was standing on the balcony of a hotel in Costa Rica: smiling, her dark hair tumbling in the sunshine, blue flowers trailing from the wrought iron bars either side of her. It was shortly after they had returned from this vacation that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she had died later that year. With an abrupt, almost violent gesture, he thrust the photograph, frame and all, into a padded envelope, and carried it down to the storage locker he rented in the basement, where he placed it in a cupboard filled with old contracts and prospectuses. Back upstairs he stood at the window, astonished at what he had done but telling himself that the agitation inside him would soon pass. He had loved Margot and he had grieved for her but a new day was dawning and it seemed to him that Margot herself would have wanted him to rise up and seize it.

Beth, his daughter, flew in a few days before the wedding. Though Conrad looked forward to the girl’s visits, he always began to feel anxious as the time for them approached. The truth was her presence unnerved him; she had turned into a guarded, watchful young woman, with a way of deploying silences that made him feel as if he were constantly being judged and found lacking. He was pleased that she had agreed to come for the wedding, but the thought of her casting her sardonic eye over Lydia and her mother made him nervous.

The meeting was arranged to take place at a dinner two nights before the ceremony, at Lydia and her mother’s house.

They set off at dusk. It was a damp evening, with drifts of

spring moisture in the air. Over the treetops a quarter mile from the house, the glow of the growing lights appeared, deeper than usual, it seemed, as though intensified by the mist. As always the sight aroused a kind of reflexive gladness in Conrad, an answering glow. Here was the fountain, sending up its crimson-lit curves of water like tongues of shiny lava. There were the greenhouses, four fiery crystals rising from the earth, the rose shrubs inside them bathed in gold light. The place seemed to Conrad more mysteriously resplendent than ever, as though some otherworldly force were radiating through it. Even Beth looked impressed as they got out of the car, though she said nothing.

Lydia greeted them at the front door. She took Beth’s hands in hers, kissing her on both cheeks and hugging her warmly. “I’m so happy to meet you at last! ”

They went through to the living room, which was filled with the smell of roasting meat. Olga came out from the adjoining kitchen: her wrinkled face rouged and lipsticked, a black Gypsy skirt under her apron, bordered with garish, angular flowers. She parked her bent frame in front of Beth, staring at her for a moment. “Do you like champagne?” she brayed.

“Uh . . . Sure.”

“I bring bottle.”

She shuffled back into the kitchen, and the three of them sat, Lydia taking charge of Beth with an easy imperiousness. The girl seemed subdued, possibly even a little dazzled, Conrad thought, by the poise and elegance of his bride. Given her usual quickness to assume a posture of contempt, this seemed an encouraging sign. Clasping her hand, Lydia launched into an amused account of all the things that were threatening to go wrong with the upcoming festivities. The two heated marquees had not yet arrived; the ice sculptor wasn’t returning phone calls; the caterer was reneging on a promise to supply fresh carp . . .

Olga came back in carrying a tray with the champagne and four glasses.

“Please open for me,” she said to Conrad. As he stood to take the bottle, he saw through the kitchen window that the lights were on in Mirek’s little cottage at the back of the house. Between the wedding preparations and the distractions of the romance itself, the bridge games had had to be abandoned, and several weeks had passed since Conrad had seen or heard anything of the old man.

“How’s Mirek?” he asked, tearing the foil from the bottle. “Shouldn’t we invite him over sometime?”

There was a silence.

“Mirek?” Lydia said, frowning. “I didn’t tell you?”

“No?”

“He’s gone.”

Conrad, who had begun untwisting the wire from the cork, stopped.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s gone. We had to get rid of him.”

“What happened?”

Lydia turned away. “Ask Mother.”

He looked to the mother, whose orange lips had bunched up in a grimace.

“Three month!” She spit out the words. “Three month he pay no rent. Nothing! I tell him, ‘Mirek, you must pay rent.’ He bring me twenty dollars. Twenty! Next month again nothing!”

Conrad resumed untwisting the wire. He could feel his daughter looking at him, and it seemed to him suddenly necessary to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had been said.

“What about his job?” he asked, feigning a purely casual interest.

The old woman threw up her hands in a gesture of violent exasperation.

Lydia answered: “He stopped going. He hurt his knee, and then it was too far for him to walk.”

“He couldn’t drive?”

“He didn’t want to drive. I offered to teach him when he first came.”

“He did not want to work!” the old woman interjected.

Very carefully, Conrad removed the wire cage from the cork.

“So . . . where did he go?”

“I don’t know, darling,” Lydia said. “Back to New York, I suppose. Anyway, I left him at the train station. Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just. . . interested.”

“Should we have let him stay without paying?”

“Of course not!”

He looked at her, taking care to avoid his daughter’s eye, though he could sense the familiar sardonic light already glittering there.

“Well then . . .” Lydia said, smiling at him. She had put her hair up and was wearing a pale cashmere sweater that clung to her body in softly gleaming curves. Her features in the dim lamplight had an almost Asiatic quality: greenish brown eyes tilting upward at their outer corners, her lips full at the center but vanishing quickly into the curling shadows of two small but luxuriant dimples. She looked ravishing, Conrad thought, confused by the apprehension surging inside him, and she was gazing at him with an expression of pure love.

“Anyway,” she continued, “it worked out for the best. We were able to put Fernando in there, with his wife and their little boy. They were living with another family in a two-room apartment in Troy . . .”

Fernando was the foreman they had hired for the greenhouses.

“I see,” Conrad said. It seemed to him that he had received some momentous intelligence and that he needed to absorb it, but at the same time he was uncertain why any of this should concern him at all, let alone disturb him.

“Is something the matter, darling?” Lydia asked.

“No. Not at all.”

“Well . . . are you going to open the champagne?”

“Yup.”

All three women were looking at him now. They •seemed to be waiting for some explanation as to what was all of a sudden filling him with this apparent reluctance to open the bottle. He was aware of something perilous in his own immobilized silence; that the longer it continued, the more he stood to lose. And yet for some time he was unable to move.

It isn’t known when Lucille Thomas first appeared among us. Who brought her, or at least told her where our circle met, remains equally mysterious. One or two members have claimed the distinction, but with little to offer yet in the way of evidence. Most of her casual remarks from the period before her first performance have passed into oblivion; those that survive have the overcherished luster of apocrypha.

The consensus is that she had been coming to our meetings for perhaps as long as a year before she made her debut. During that time she maintained an attitude of more or less silent watchfulness. I don’t recall her asking anything during question times or taking the opportunity during our less formal discussions to advertise herself by saying something clever or controversial.

I myself had taken little notice of her until just a few days before her first performance, when certain familiar signs—a definite concentration of purpose visible in the outward manner; a sudden close interest in matters of procedure—suggested to me the imminent breaking of a silence.

At that time we were meeting at the Kurwens’ house up near the North Circular. The large double drawing room was crowded with people standing in groups or sitting on the Kurwens’ velour chairs and sofas. We had just listened to a talk, and there was the usual murmur of discussion. I was sitting between Brenda and Donald Kurwen, and I remember gesturing toward the back of the room, where Lucille, as yet unknown to us, sat on the window seat, and saying that I thought we would be hearing from her before long.

“Good, good,” Brenda said. “Any idea who she is?”

“No.”

Donald took his pipe from his mouth and smiled. “All the better.”

There was nothing unusual in our not knowing the woman’s name. Our doors have always been open to any individual who cares to join us. The perplexing and often tedious nature of our presentations tends to put off all but the kind of people whom we would welcome anyway. Occasionally a charlatan has tried to impose on us, usually in the hope of attracting the attention of one of our patrons. Most people, however, come in good faith, and we have never felt a need to regulate our membership with formalities of introduction or recommendation.

The Kurwens and I looked across the room at the young woman. She was sipping coffee with the cup and saucer held close to her lips as if she was nervous about spilling it on the carpet. Behind her slightly bulbous head the afternoon light showed her untidy brown hair to be thin and emphasized the irregularities of her long, bony face. Quite a few similar-looking young women and men have passed through our doors over the years (I was one myself), and there was nothing to suggest that this one would turn out to be any different from the general type— sober and serious, not gifted, but educated enough to make a useful contribution.

On a Saturday afternoon in October, I took the tube to Bounds Green station and walked from there to the Kurwens’ house. It was a cold, damp day, and the long residential streets were lifeless except for the occasional colored flicker of a television screen in a front window. I remember a melancholy feeling from the dreariness of the walk, the gray sky, and the smell of new, wet asphalt.

There were perhaps twenty people in the Kurwens’ drawing room, not a bad turnout for a rainy afternoon. Most of the older crowd were there: Ellen Crowcroft, Marc and Sabine Chenier, Janice Hall, the Kurwens of course. No doubt like me they had made the effort out of courtesy for a newcomer; it had been announced that the young woman, Lucille Thomas, was going to make her debut.

I sat in an armchair next to Ellen Crowcroft. She had put her hearing aid in for the occasion and was wearing face powder, grains of which were visible in the wrinkles around her chin. On the other side of me, in a row of wooden chairs, were several younger people who seemed to know one another. Ellen turned to me, her large, asthmatic chest heaving a little wheezily under her dress.

“New blood tonight,” she whispered, and we shared the skeptical but ever-hopeful smile of a pair of old-timers.

The clock over the raised platform at the end of the room struck four. This was the official starting time, but as always we waited a few minutes for latecomers. A pale, wintry light came through the bay windows, lying with a hard gleam on the Kurwens’ ornate coffee urn, beside w'hich stood rows of green cups and saucers.

Trevor McWilliam, who was giving the first presentation, sat on a chair in the front row, shuffling through his papers. He was a self-effacing man who had been with us for several years. He wasn’t gifted, but his theoretical work was usually interesting, even if it tended more to consolidate ground already covered than actually to take us forward in our investigations.

In the same row, separated by five or six empty chairs, sat Lucille. She didn’t appear to have papers or any other equipment with her. 1 assumed this meant she was going to extemporize a talk, and I remember feeling anxious on her behalf.

Donald Kurwen strolled to the front of the room, puffing at his pipe.