Dark Angel (12 page)

It seemed to me, though, that I had reached an impasse. I believed Constance to be in New York, and I believed her to be avoiding me. If Miss Marpruder would not help me in this search, there was no one left who would—or so I thought. Then, gradually, an idea came to me. I was thinking of the flowers on Bertie’s grave, their similarity to the flowers I had seen in Vickers’s house the previous evening.

I thought of Constance and Vickers over the years, their shared worship at the altar of style. I thought of them forever swapping the names and telephone numbers of clever, talented young men: young men who could restore French chairs, drape curtains, paint
trompe l’oeil,
dye fabrics—or arrange flowers so they looked as if they had just been picked by the chatelaine of an English country garden.

I telephoned Conrad Vickers at once. He sounded wary at first, as if expecting more questions on the subject of Constance. When he discovered all I needed was the name of his marvelous florist, he relaxed at once.

“Dahling, of
course
! They’re for a client—a potential client? My dear, say no more. His name’s Dominic. He’ll do them
perfectly.
One millisecond—I have the number here…. Oh, and when you call, do mention my name. He can be the
teensiest
bit difficult. Last year he couldn’t be helpful enough, but this year—well, you know how it is! A touch of the temperaments.
Folie de grandeur.
He’s beginning to drop names to
me
now—which, when you think about it, is really rather silly. Oh, and by the way,
don’t
be fobbed off with his frightful assistants. Speak to Dominic himself—he’ll melt before your charms. Yet another feather in his cap. Byeee …”

“Ye-es?”

Dominic spread the one word over several syllables. With those syllables, he contrived to convey languor, grandeur, and incipient obsequiousness. Cooperation
might
ensue, said that voice, in certain circumstances: if a duchess were on the other end of the line, for instance, or should it turn out that the First Lady happened to be calling Dominic, in person, at seven o’clock on a Monday morning.

I considered. In my work I had to deal with many Dominics. It seemed to me I had a straight choice: Be assertive or be flustered. Fluster might create an ally; it seemed worth a try. I used my English accent, not my American one; I gave a Knightsbridge wail.

“Dominic? Is that Dominic himself? Thank heavens I’ve reached you! There’s been such a
flap
…”

“Calmez
-vous
,” said Dominic in a very bad French accent.

I gave him a false and resounding double-barreled name.

“
Love
it,” he caroled. “
All
of it.
And
the accent.”

“Dominic—I do hope you can help. You see, I’m the new assistant—and you know how Miss Shawcross is. One mistake and I’ll be the
ex
-assistant. She’s in a terrible state about the order. You
are
working on the order?”

“Dah-ling!” It was a near-perfect imitation of Conrad Vickers. “Of course! I’m working on it now.”

“You are sending delphiniums?”

“Sweetheart, of
course
.” He was now, definitely, an ally. “Delphiniums, the most
gorgeous
roses, some
cheeky
little pansies—”

“No lilies? You’re sure, no lilies?”

“
Lilies
? For Miss Shawcross?” He sounded rattled. “
Would
I? My dear, she
loathes
them—more than my life’s worth.”

“Oh, thank goodness. There must have been a mistake. Miss Shawcross thought someone mentioned lilies….” I paused. “Last problem then. Dominic. Which address are you sending them?”

“Which address?”

A note of wariness had crept into his voice. My heart was beating very fast.

“Are you sending them to the Fifth Avenue apartment?”

It worked. It was Dominic’s turn to wail.

“Fifth, dah-ling? No.
Park.
The same as last week. And the week before. Look, it’s here, right in front of me: Seven Fifty-six Park Avenue, apartment Five-oh-one.
Don’t
tell me it’s Fifth, because if it is I shall
crucify
that assistant of mine—”

“No, no, it’s not. Park is correct,” I said hastily, writing down the address. “Oh, what a relief! And they’ll be there … when?”

“At ten, sweetie. You have my
word.
”

“Dominic, you’ve been marvelous. Thank you so much.”

“
Rien,
dear, absolutely
rien.
Oh, by the way …”

“Yes?”

“Did Miss Shawcross like that special bouquet I did for her? She needed it Sunday—to take out to her little girl’s grave, you know? She rang me
personally.
I could hear the tears. It really got to me—
un frisson,
dear. I mean I guess I never thought of her in that way. As a mother. I never even knew she’d
had
children….”

There was a silence.

“No,” I said. “No, Dominic. Neither did I.”

Constance had never given birth to a little girl—or a little boy, come to that. Constance—and she had once explained this to me, at length—had been unable to have children of her own. I was her daughter, she would say. She had always insisted on that.

Had she been embarrassed to explain that the flowers were for a dog she once loved very much? If so, why elaborate? Why make up a story like that when no explanation was necessary? I thought I knew the answer to that one: Lies were part of Constance’s nature. She once told me a very terrible lie, and I had realized then that Constance lied for one very simple reason: Lies delighted her; she reveled in their ramifications. “What is a lie?” It was one of her favorite maxims. “A lie is nothing. It is a mirror image of a truth.”

I was standing outside her apartment building on Park as I thought this. It was nine-thirty, and under my arm was a huge box of flowers purchased earlier, in my American accent, from Dominic’s. A flamboyant box, it bore his name in large green letters. It seemed appropriate, I thought, that I should find Constance at last through duplicity.

I had tracked her down at last. This, then, was where she was hiding. I looked up at the building. Presumably the apartment must be borrowed from a friend; even so, it seemed, for Constance, a curious choice.

Constance was full of irrational strictures—one could stay here but not, for some reason, there—and on the subject of Park Avenue she had always been cutting. It was a dull, safe, predictable, bourgeois place. “Park,” she would say, “is unimaginative.”

It was not particularly imaginative to live on Fifth, of course, but I knew what Constance meant. Furthermore, if Park was respectable and dull, this building she had selected was the dullest, the most irreproachable for blocks. Twelve stories of red sandstone; a grandiloquent doorway reminiscent of the Knickerbocker Club. It seemed an odd place for Constance to hole up. Still, it was a temporary arrangement, I told myself as I entered an august lobby. I was nervous. Another few minutes and I would be speaking to Constance herself. Would she welcome me? Reject me? I advanced on the front desk.

“I’m from Dominic’s—with the flowers for Miss Shawcross. I’m a little early, I guess. Can you check if it’s okay to go up?”

I was inept when it came to falsehoods. I blushed as I spoke. I waited to be denounced as an imposter. I was astonished when the man replaced the phone and said, “Five-oh-one. Go right on up.”

I counted to fifty outside the apartment door. My hands had begun to shake.

It was not Constance herself who opened the door; it was a maid. Worse than that, it was the same maid, the Lilliputian termagant of the day before. I should have foreseen that possibility, I suppose, but I had not. In despair, I waited for her to recognize me.

I am five feet ten inches tall; her gaze began somewhere mid-chest. It mounted slowly. I waited for more miniaturized rage, for a door shut in my face. To have come so far and then to fail was more than I could bear. I put my foot in the door. I looked down to do this. When I looked up I saw something astonishing.

No sign of hostility. The maid was smiling.

“Victoria—yes?” She gave a tiny giggle. “On time—very good. You come in. Through here—quick.”

She took the box of flowers, disappeared behind them momentarily, set the box down, and set off at a smart pace down a narrow corridor. She opened a door with a flourish, then stood back to let me pass.

The room beyond, overlooking the avenue, was empty. No Constance stood there. I turned back to the maid in bewilderment. A telephone in the hall began to shrill.

“You wait. One minute. Please excuse.”

The maid disappeared. She closed the door behind her. From the hallway beyond I heard long silences, mouselike maid squeaks.

Confused, I walked across to the room beyond: a bedroom. No one lurked; no Constance waited just behind the door. Both rooms astonished me. I could not imagine Constance, even
in extremis,
living here.

You should understand: Constance was a decorator, an obsessive arranger of rooms. Everything in her rooms, even her hotel rooms, had to conform to her taste. Constance would no more sit in a room she found unsympathetic than a concert pianist would listen to an amateur mangle Mozart.

Could Constance, in any circumstances, live here?

Constance liked flamboyant rooms; she liked strong, vivid, daring colors: budgerigar yellow, finch green, Prussian blue, or—her favorite, this—a garnet that gave a womblike effect and that she called, inaccurately, Etruscan.

She liked these vivid rooms to be enclosed, sumptuous spaces, crammed with rare and surprising things. Out of colors that in less sure hands would have clashed, out of furniture whose derivation and date were discordant, Constance made harmony.

Japanese screens—she had always loved them, indeed loved screens of any kind. An abundance of flowers, always. Chinese porcelain. Some charming curiosity—a birdcage, say, shaped to resemble a pagoda, a bowl filled with shells, an antique wooden toy. Painted furniture, always; and mirrors everywhere, old ones, their mercury stained and foxed. Could Constance live here? No, she could not.

This room was painted off-white. It was a symphony of Syrie Maugham creams and beiges. It sang the song of the cocktail age, 1925 to 1930 at the latest, a period Constance had always detested. It was rectilinear, chaste, with a nod toward Bauhaus brutalism. Constance could not be here, I decided. I had come to the wrong place. As I turned to the door, the maid reentered and I discovered my mistake.

Constance
was
here in this room with me. This was, I suppose, where I found her, and—as I might have foreseen—she was waiting to play another trick.

“Present.” The maid gestured across the room toward a table of bleached wood. She gave another little giggle. “Miss Shawcross—on phone. Flight being called. Big hurry. Left present for you. You take it with you, yes?” She gestured again at the table. She gestured toward something on the table.

I walked the length of the room. I looked at it. It seemed a curious kind of present. There on the table was a stack of notebooks—about twenty or twenty-five of them, I estimated. Each was about twelve inches by fourteen; all had identical black covers. They resembled an old-fashioned school exercise book. The top book in the pile bore no label or identifying mark of any kind; the rest, I was later to discover, were similarly anonymous. They had been carefully and neatly stacked, the pile tied with well-knotted string.

In case there should be any doubt that this was a present, and intended for me, a note had been attached with my name on it. Heavy white paper; familiar handwriting: the strokes of the letters were bold, the ink black, the message brief.

Whistle and I’ll come to you,
Constance had written.
You’ve been looking for me, dearest Victoria. Well, here I am.

I went back to England. Back to Winterscombe. I took Constance’s present with me, the notebooks still unopened, still tied together with string. I suppose I knew there was no point in pursuing Constance herself any further, no point in calling friends or hotels or airlines. I had the notebooks instead:
Here I am.

Even so, I was reluctant to undo that parcel. I was made uneasy by the manner and the circumstances in which it had been given. I was also irritated by the note Constance had attached:
Whistle and I’ll
c
ome to you.
It was a quotation, I thought, and a familiar one, but I could not place it. A line from a poem? I was not sure.

When I arrived at the house I put the parcel of notebooks away in the library. I avoided the room; I avoided them. This was easy enough at first; Winterscombe distracted me.

In order to come here I had had to postpone some commissions, delegate work to others. Better not to delay, I told myself as I locked up my town flat; several weeks had already passed while I extricated myself from London. It was, by then, September. Winterscombe was in a poor state of repair. It would not do to leave it closed up, empty, another winter—that was the argument I used to myself. It was not the whole truth. The truth was that after years of avoiding it, my home pulled me back.

Memories should not be monkeyed with—I had felt that. I had wanted Winterscombe to remain the house of my childhood, the house I had loved between the wars. Even when Steenie lived there I had been reluctant to visit it. During the years I lived in America, avoiding Winterscombe was easy. I had avoided it still, even after I returned. It was simple enough; I purchased the London apartment, though I spent less time in it than I did in hotel rooms. If Steenie pressed invitations upon me (and he did, at first) I could always plead pressures of work. Until the months of his final illness, I had revisited the house no more than three or four times. I had never spent a night under its roof. I had dreaded the house, dreaded to see its proof of change, of time passing. Yet now—and I felt this very strongly—it called to me.

A matter of practicality, I told myself. Winterscombe would have to be sold. But before it could be sold, before I telephoned Sotheby’s or Christie’s about auctioning its contents, I would have to go through the house. I did not want the dispassionate hands of an auctioneer or an appraiser sorting through the trunks and boxes, examining old clothes, old toys, papers, photographs, letters. That sad task—one with which anyone middle-aged will be familiar—was mine. This was my past, and my family’s. Only I could decide what to discard and what to keep.