Life Times (7 page)

‘So far, there's nothing to beat your bridges,' said Eileen. ‘Nothing.'

They drove now uptown to an elegant, half-empty restaurant which had about it the air of recovering from Saturday night. There they sat drinking whisky while they waited.

‘I don't know what we can do with the husband,' said Waldeck, shrugging and giggling.

‘That's all right,' said Stefan. ‘Alice will talk to him. Alice can get along with anybody.' His wife laughed good-naturedly.

‘You know, he's
worthy
. . .' said Waldeck.

‘I know,' said Stefan, comforting.

‘Same old Carlitta, though,' said Waldeck, smiling reminiscently. ‘You'll see.'

His wife Eileen looked at him. ‘Oh, she's not,' she said, distressed. ‘She's not. Oh, how can you say that to Stefan?' The girl from South Africa looked at the two men and the woman who sat with her, and around the panelled and flower-decorated room, and suddenly she felt a very long way from home.

Just at that moment, Carlitta and Mr Edgar Hicks came across the room towards them. Stefan got up and went forward with palms upturned to meet them; Waldeck rose from his seat; a confusion of greetings and introductions followed. Stefan kissed Carlitta on both cheeks gently. Edgar Hicks pumped his hand. In Edgar Hicks's other hand was the Palm Beach panama with the paisley band which he had removed from his head as he entered. The hovering attendant took it from him and took Carlitta's brown coat.

Carlitta wore the niggly-patterned silk dress that had shown its collar under the coat the night at the theatre, the same shoes, the same cracked beige kid gloves. But above the bun and level with the faded hairline, she had on what was obviously a brand new hat, a hat bought from one of the thousands of ‘spring' hats displayed that week before Easter, a perky, mass-produced American hat of the kind which makes an American middle-class woman recognisable anywhere in the world. Its newness, its frivolous sense of its own emphemerality (it was so much in fashion that it would be old-fashioned once Easter was over) positively jeered at everything else Carlitta wore. Whether it was because she fancied the sun still painted her face the extraordinary rich glow that showed against the snow in the picture of herself laughing in Austria years ago, or whether there was some other reason, her face was again without make-up except for a rub of lipstick. Under the mixture of artificial light and daylight, faint darkening blotches, not freckles but something more akin to those liver marks elderly people get on the backs of their hands, showed on her temples and her jawline. But her eyes, of course, her eyes were large, dark, quick.

She and her husband consulted together over what they should eat, he suggesting slowly, she deciding quickly, and from then on she never stopped talking. She talked chiefly to her two friends Waldeck and Stefan, who sat on either side of her. Edgar Hicks, after a few trying minutes with Eileen, who found it difficult to respond to any of his conversational gambits, discovered that Alice Raines rode horses and, like a swamp sucking in fast all around its victim, involved her in a long, one-sided argument about the merits of two different types of saddle. Edgar preferred the one type and simply assumed that Alice must be equally adamant about the superiority of the other. Although his voice was slow, it was unceasing and steady, almost impossible to interrupt.

Eileen did not mind the fact that she was not engaged in conversation. She was free to listen to and to watch Carlitta with Stefan and Waldeck. And now and then Carlitta, forking up her coleslaw expertly as any born American, looked over to Eileen with a remark or query – ‘That's what
I
say, anyway,' or ‘Wouldn't you think so?' Carlitta first told briefly about her stay in London when she left Germany, then about her coming to the United States, and her short time in New York. ‘In the beginning, we stayed in that hotel near Grand Central. We behaved like tourists, not like people who have come to stay. We used to go to Coney Island and rowing on the lake in Central Park, and walking up and down Fifth Avenue

– just as if we were going to go back to Germany in a few weeks.'

‘Who's we?' asked Stefan. ‘Your sister?'

‘No, my sister was living in a small apartment near the river. Klaus,' she said, shrugging her worn shoulders with the careless, culpable gesture of an adolescent. Stefan nodded his head in confirmation towards Waldeck; of course, he remembered, Klaus had followed her or come with her to America. Poor Klaus.

‘What happened to him?' asked Stefan.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘He went to Mexico.'

Her audience of three could guess very well how it had been. When she had tired of Coney Island and the outside of Fifth Avenue shops and the rowing in Central Park, Klaus had found out once again that in the new world, as in the old, he had nothing more than amusement value for her.

‘After three months—' Carlitta had not paused in her narrative

– ‘I went to stay with my sister and brother-in-law – she had been here some years already. But he got a job with a real-estate scheme, and they went to live on one of the firm's housing projects – you know, a little house, another little house next door, a swing for the kids, the same swing next door. I came back to New York on my own and I found a place in Greenwich Village.'

Ah, now, there was a setting in which one could imagine the Carlitta of the photographs, the beautiful, Oriental-looking German girl from Heidelberg, with the bold, promising eyes. And at the moment at which Eileen thought this, her ear caught the drawl of Edgar Hicks. ‘. . . now, our boy's the real independent type. Now, only the other day . . .' Edgar Hicks! Where had Edgar Hicks come in? She looked at him, carefully separating the flesh from the fine fringe of bone in his boiled trout, the knife held deliberately in his freckled hand.

‘Did you live in Greenwich Village?' Eileen said to him suddenly.

He interrupted his description of his boy's seat in the saddle to turn and say, surprised, ‘No, ma'am, I certainly didn't. I've never spent more than two consecutive weeks in New York in my life.' He thought Eileen's question merely a piece of tourist curiosity, and returned to Alice Raines, his boy and the saddle.

Carlitta had digressed into some reminiscence about Heidelberg days, but when she paused, laughing from Stefan to Waldeck with a faltering coquettishness that rose in her like a half-forgotten mannerism, Eileen said, ‘Where did you and your husband meet?'

‘In a train,' Carlitta said loudly and smiled, directed at her husband.

He took it up across the table. ‘Baltimore and Ohio line,' he said, well rehearsed. There was the feeling that all the few things he had to say had been slowly thought out and slowly spoken many times before. ‘I was sittin' in the diner havin' a beer with my dinner, and in comes this little person looking mighty proud and cute as you can make 'em . . .' So it went on, the usual story, and Edgar Hicks spared them no detail of the romantic convention. ‘Took Carlitta down to see my folks the following month and we were married two weeks after that,' he concluded at last. He had expected to marry one of the local girls he'd been to school with; it was clear that Carlitta was the one and the ever-present adventure of his life. Now they had a boy who rode as naturally as an Indian and didn't watch television; he liked to raise his own chickens and have independent pocket money from the sale of eggs.

‘Carlitta,' Stefan said, aside, ‘how long were you in Greenwich Village?'

‘Four years,' she said shortly, replying from some other part of her mind; her attention and animation were given to the comments with which she amplified her husband's description of their child's remarkable knowledge of country lore, his superiority over town-bred children.

Eileen overheard the low, flat reply. Four years! Four years about which Carlitta had said not a word, four years which somehow or other had brought her from the arrogant, beautiful, ‘advanced' girl with whom Waldeck and Stefan could not fall in love because they and she agreed they were not good enough for her, to the girl who would accept Edgar Hicks a few weeks after a meeting on a train.

Carlitta felt the gaze of the girl from South Africa. A small patch of bright colour appeared on each of Carlitta's thin cheekbones. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the wine, too, that made her voice rise, so that she began to talk of her life on the Ohio farm with a zest and insistence which made the whole table her audience. She told how she never went to town unless she had to;
never
more than once a month. How country people, like herself, discovered a new rhythm of life, something people who lived in towns had forgotten. How country people slept differently, tasted their food differently, had no nerves. ‘I haven't a nerve in my body, any more. Absolutely placid,' she said, her sharp little gestures, her black eyes in the pinched face challenging a denial. ‘Nothing ever happens but a change of season,' she said arrogantly to people for whom there were stock-market crashes, traffic jams, crowded exhibitions and cocktail parties. ‘Birth and growth among the animals and the plants. Life. Not a cement substitute.' No one defended the city, but she went on as if someone had. ‘I live as instinctively as one of our own animals. So does my child. I mean, for one thing, we don't have to worry about clothes.'

Eileen said rather foolishly, as if in reflex, ‘Stefan said I couldn't wear slacks to a New York restaurant today.'

‘Stefan was always a snob.' Carlitta's little head struck like a snake.

Eileen was taken aback; she laughed nervously, looking very young. Carlitta grinned wickedly under the hat whose straw caught the light concentrically, like a gramophone record. Stefan's wife smiled serenely and politely, as if this were a joke against her husband. She had taken off the jacket of her suit, and beneath it she wore a fine lavender-coloured sweater with a low, round neck. She had been resting her firm neck against her left hand, and now she took the hand away; hers was the kind of wonderful blood-mottled fair skin that dented white with the slightest pressure, filled up pink again the way the sea seeps up instantly through footprints in wet sand. She looked so healthy, so well cared for that she created a moment of repose around herself; everyone paused, resting his gaze upon her.

Then Carlitta's thin little sun-sallow neck twisted restlessly. ‘I don't know how you stand it,' she said. ‘I don't know how you can live in New York year after year.'

‘We go away,' Stefan said soothingly. ‘We go to Europe most summers, to Switzerland to my mother, or to Italy. Alice loves Italy.'

‘Italy,' said Carlitta, suddenly turning over a piece of lobster on her plate as if she suspected that there must be something bad beneath it. ‘Spain.'

‘You remember how you went off to the Pyrenees?' Waldeck said to her. From his tone it was clear that this was quite a story, if Carlitta cared to tell it.

‘You can't imagine how time flies on the farm,' said Carlitta. ‘The years . . . just go. Sometimes, in summer, I simply walk out of the house and leave my work and go and lie down in the long grass. Then you can hear nothing, nothing at all.'

‘Maybe the old cow chewing away under the pear tree,' said Edgar tenderly. Then with a chuckle that brought a change of tone: ‘Carlitta takes a big part in community affairs, too, you know. She doesn't tell you that she's on the library committee in town, and last year she was lady president of the Parent-Teacher Association. Ran a bazaar made around three hundred dollars.' There was a pause. Nobody spoke. ‘I'm an Elk myself,' he added. ‘That's why we're going to Philadelphia Thursday. There's a convention on over there.'

Carlitta suddenly put down her fork with a gesture that impatiently terminated any current subject of conversation. (Eileen thought: she must always have managed conversation like that, long ago in smoky, noisy student rooms, jerking the talk determinedly the way she wanted it.) Her mind seemed to hark back to the subject of dress. ‘Last year,' she said, ‘we invited some city friends who were passing through town to a supper party. Now it just so happened that that afternoon I could see a storm banking up. I knew that if the storm came in the night it was goodbye to our hay. So I decided to make a hay-making party out of the supper. When those women came with their high-heeled fancy sandals and their gauzy frocks I put pitchforks into their hands and sent them out into the field to help get that hay in under cover. Of course I'd forgotten that they'd be bound to be rigged out in something ridiculous. You should have seen their faces!' Carlitta laughed gleefully. ‘Should have seen their shoes!'

The young girl from South Africa felt suddenly angry. Amid the laughter, she said quietly, ‘I think it was an awful thing to do. If I'd been a guest, I should flatly have refused.'

‘Eileen!' said Waldeck mildly. But Carlitta pointedly excluded from her notice the girl from South Africa, whom Waldeck was apparently dragging around the world and giving a good time. Carlitta was sitting stiffly, her thin hands caught together, and she never took her eyes off Alice Raines's luxuriantly fleshed neck, as if it were some object of curiosity, quite independent of a human whole.

‘If only they'd seen how idiotic they looked, stumbling about,' she said fiercely. Her eyes were extraordinarily dark, brimming with brightness. If her expression had not been one of malicious glee, Eileen would have said that there were tears in them.