Perfect Freedom (61 page)

“Yes,” Stuart said.

“I suppose it wouldn't do any good to tell you you're insane.”

“No,” he replied, not taking his eyes off her.

“All right. It'll only take me a minute to pull on some clothes.”

“You don't have to go.”

“I know, but I wouldn't pass up a trip to Toulon. All those sailors.” Her laugh hadn't changed. It came clear, pure, and sudden as she rose and, with a swipe at her hair, went off toward her room.

Her being here was an accident. She had come wandering back to St. Tropez just before Christmas because she had been caught in France by the war and could think of nowhere else to go. There was nothing to take her back to England. When Stuart ran into her on the port, her news was that the admiral had dropped dead a year or so earlier, shortly after the Cumberleighs sailed away at the time of the Munich scare, and that Edward had been killed in a training accident in an airplane. Stuart had hardly known her in the old days, but under the special circumstances of the war she seemed like a real friend and he felt obliged to offer her shelter. It had turned out very well.

He looked around the enormous room with its soft rich old fabrics, turquoise and eggshell white, pale citron-yellow and deep rose, its highly polished wood, its great vases of multicolored tulips. She had brought life back to it. He could look at Helene's ivory-inlaid chess table with the superb ivory and gold figures without wanting to smash it. The figures stood in the positions of a game he and Anne had abandoned the day before. He rose and picked up the rest of his mail and flipped through it. It was a comfort to know that Anne would be with him during what promised to be a disagreeable day.

He left the fire and crossed the carpet and the marble floor beyond to one of the big doors and stepped out onto the terrace. His steps were a trifle heavy but youthfulness still clung to him. His hair was still thick and the gray in it wouldn't show until it had gone completely white and his skin, in spite of premature sagging, was a good color. He took a breath of the crisp air and turned his face to the sun with his eyes closed.

Anne returned to find him so. She paused for a moment to admire him. With his eyes closed and his head tilted back he looked vulnerable. She liked that look; it opened up to her areas of personality that had never existed in the admiral's conventionally unconventional world. Indeed, everything about the Coslings seemed to be on a larger scale; they had the grandeur of figures in classic tragedy so that she couldn't imagine uttering to Stuart the words she had rehearsed so often in her mind. She advanced toward him with her firm smile.

“You'd better take a sweater in case we're late,” she said. He was wearing slacks and a jacket and an open shirt. He looked down at her and took her arm.

“Thank God you're here,” he said.

When they reached Toulon in Stuart's new sporty little Matford, he drove directly to the navy prison. He left Anne in the car with an abstracted wave and went in to begin his inquiries. They took time. He waited. As he was passed from one brusque uncommunicative official to another, his anxiety increased. What had Helene done? And how could she suppose, no matter what had taken place in the past, that he would sit back and do nothing? He was at last granted an interview by the assistant director of the prison.

“I don't quite understand your position in this affair, monsieur,” he said angrily as he shuffled through the papers on his desk.

“I've just heard from my wife that she's been arrested. I want to know what it's all about and I want to see her.” Stuart spoke with the patience that comes with repetition.

“Your wife?” The man put his finger on a sheet of paper and read, “Helene de Chassart, born June etcetera, daughter of etcetera, widow.” He pronounced the word emphatically and looked up.

“Oh, well, that's nothing, we—”

“I don't pretend to understand you foreigners,” he interrupted. He looked again at the sheet of paper. “Mother of Robert Cosling. He is your son?”

“He is.”

“It is nothing that you aren't married to the woman you call your wife? It is nothing that you have an illegitimate son? It is nothing that this woman is in intimate correspondence with a subject of an enemy power?”

“Of that I know nothing. That's what—”

“You call this woman your wife and yet you know nothing of a relationship she has maintained publicly in the region for a year prior to the outbreak of hostilities?”

“Just a minute,” Stuart broke in. “In the first place, that isn't what I said. In the second place, you will stop calling my wife ‘this woman.' My private affairs are not your concern. My wife and I had a friend called Carl von Eschenstadt. It seems to me quite normal that she should write to him.”

“You're an obliging husband, monsieur,” the official said, and Stuart flushed hotly. He clenched his fists and made an effort to control himself.

“That, after all, is my business,” he said evenly. “I'd appreciate knowing why my wife has been arrested.”

The man's manner suddenly broke its stern official bounds. “She has corresponded with the enemy via a neutral country, Switzerland,” he cried. “For a year and a half we have been interested in this man's activities in the region. What is he doing here? He leaves one month before the outbreak of war. She writes. We intercept the letters. Letters of passion, she maintains. But how do we know what they might conceal?”

Letters of passion. Stuart winced and took a deep breath. “And if they're simply what she says they are?” he asked.

“A crime for which she will be tried and imprisoned. If we find that she has communicated information, it will be much worse.”

Stuart felt physically ill. He swallowed several times and straightened in his chair. Helene imprisoned like a criminal? He would get in touch with someone. It would be arranged. “I'd like to see her,” he said.

“Ah, that's absolutely out of the question.”

“But I insist. You have no right to hold her incommunicado.”

“Regulations permit her to see her lawyer on appointed days and members of her immediate family.”

“Very well. Do you mean this isn't the right day?”

“I keep telling you. You have no status.”

“I'm the father of her son.”

“Yes, yes, there is that.” The official pulled at his lower lip and looked at the documents before him. He finally burst out angrily, “Very well. You may see her. Today. But only in my presence, you understand? You must not embrace her or take her hand. If you do, I'll be obliged to hold you, too.” He glanced at his watch. “It's too late now. You must come back after lunch. I'll try to arrange it.”

Stuart returned to the car and settled in behind the wheel without a word to Anne. She looked at him anxiously but forced herself to wait until he was ready to speak. They drove along the port until they came to a sidewalk restaurant.

“We might as well have something to eat,” Stuart said. They sat in the sun, a rare treat in early February. In the distance, the sea sparkled. Stuart could think only of Helene shut up somewhere in that gloomy pile of masonry. They ordered and then, sensing a slight lifting of his spirits, Anne risked a question.

“Did you see her?”

“No, I've got to go back after lunch. It looks serious.”

“How long has it been since you've seen her?” she asked, looking at him bravely, although she didn't like to hear him talk of Helene. Helene was the barrier, Helene made it impossible for her to speak.

“How long? I don't know. September of '38, wasn't it? About a year and a half, I suppose.”

Time meant little to him. Drink had mercifully blurred the past. He knew there had been a disastrous party and that Helene had been gone the next day. He knew that he had cleared out and had been gone for a month, visiting specialists in Switzerland and Germany about Robbie's misfortune. These interviews hadn't led to much. So much depended, he was told, on the degree to which the subject would be ready to cooperate. Stuart knew that Robbie couldn't be counted on to cooperate at all.

He returned to find Helene intransigent. He didn't want to remember that period. She was even more impenetrably armed against him than she had been after Robbie's childhood illness. He could find no part of her that he could reach. Even Carl seemed to have no great hold over her, which puzzled but reassured him. It was a phase; she was making some final effort to discover and rally all her independent resources. When she had acquired confidence, she was bound to turn to him again within the limits of whatever new alignment she was seeking. He couldn't believe that their life had been a total lie, that his quest for truth and freedom had been less than honorable, no matter how faltering it had been at times.

Her ripe beauty had subtly altered, had acquired mystery and a perverse eroticism that he had never felt in her before. He found it very uncomfortable to be with her when nothing that she was becoming or had ever been was directed toward him. Robbie was safely back in school. Stuart hated the house for having misled him even briefly into believing that it might be a substitute for everything that the property had represented to him in the beginning. It contained nothing but reminders of their failures with each other.

He had gone away again, with no purpose or destination in mind. He had wandered from England to Canada, for a pointless visit with his father who had been assured that he would soon be a lord, to New York and back. When he returned, Helene was gone; she and Carl had rented a house in a village farther along the coast. He drank, marking time until she came back to him. Their paths never crossed.

“Poor Stuart,” Anne said. He sat looking out toward the sea, not touching the food in front of him. “I'm sure it's wrong your taking it so hard. Do you think you'll get her back by being chivalrous and forgiving? I like it, but do you think she will?”

Stuart leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “I don't suppose so,” he said. “At least, she'll pretend not to. I don't expect to be thanked.”

“But you want her back, don't you?” She spoke with a disciplined lack of emotion, punishing herself for past triviality. Stuart found it impossible to feel sorry for himself with her. She was brutally childlike and wise.

“I don't think it really matters to me anymore,” he said. “I don't think you can get people back, in that way. But you can't let them go, either. I'm not being chivalrous. I'm doing this for my own sake. You know as well as I do that I couldn't do anything else.”

“I suppose not. And yet it's very odd.” She studied the small fried fish speared on her fork. “You're doing it for your sake. And she'll refuse any help for her sake. I don't know what that means but it makes me feel lonely.”

“It means that the world is lonely unless you know how to break through.”

“Break through?”

“Yes, you can break through with love. I haven't found out yet what you do when love fails.”

Stuart returned to the prison at the appointed hour and was again received by the assistant director. He nodded curtly when Stuart entered and picked up the telephone.

“
Ça va. On attend
,” he said into it, and returned to a perusal of the papers in front of him. The silence was oppressive. Stuart shifted in his chair. It creaked deafeningly. He held himself motionless. There was a knock on the door and it opened simultaneously. Helene stood in the doorway. Her eyes swept over him and came to rest on the window in the opposite wall.

“I don't wish to see this gentleman,” she said.

“Bring her in, bring her in,” the man behind the desk said angrily. “We're not here to cater to the wishes of the prisoners.”

A guard appeared at her elbow and led her into the room. She was wearing a dress that had been made to be worn with a belt. Without one, the dress hung on Helene like a sack, giving her a slatternly look. Stuart rose, keeping his eyes on her face. That was all right. She had altered very little. There was a new fullness under her chin and a slightly haggard look around the eyes, but her hair was rich and dark and she was beautiful.

“You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to,” he said. He was glad he could speak English to her. Even if they could be understood, it gave him the feeling of speaking to her privately. “I wanted to tell you that I'll do anything I can for Robbie.”

“You could have written,” she said, without looking at him.

“I thought perhaps you'd want to talk over—that is, do you think I ought to go to Paris to see him?”

She lifted her clasped hands in front of her. It tried all her control to speak of the boy.

“If you could see him without fighting, I think you should.”

“It is permitted you seat yourself,” the prison official said in English. The guard had withdrawn. Helene sat down but Stuart remained standing beside his chair.

“Good, I'll go,” he said. And then, because he wanted to talk to her and knew that she had always liked to talk about Robbie, he went on, “How's he been? Has he been painting?”

“Oh, yes.” She looked at him impulsively and quickly averted her eyes. “He's made tremendous progress. That's why he's in Paris. He's working with Beauchamps. I'd thought of joining him when—” Her voice broke off abruptly and she concentrated on the picture of Stuart her brief glance had imprinted on her mind. How could he look so old? How could he look so broken and defenseless? She had actually feared his coming, feared his trying to take charge of her with his old slightly aloof kindliness. The glimpse she'd had of him had allayed her fears.

“Listen,” he said gently. “I know you don't want to ask me to help you. But I'm going to whether you like it or not. If there's anything you can tell me about this thing, I wish you would.”