“I wish I could do both.”
“Viri, I can’t believe it,” Nedra said.
“That we’re going…”
“Finally.”
He cleared his throat and searched for Franca’s face in the mirror. “Next time we’ll go together,” he told her. The car was drifting off the road.
“For God’s sake!” Nedra cried.
“Sorry.”
The day was like a river that began far off. Slowly, fed by streams and tributaries, it became wider, faster, until it arrived at last in a watershed where the noise and confusion of the crowd rose like mist.
The engines had started; the great cabin, lurching slightly, was borne toward the runway’s end. Nedra, already satisfied that nothing of interest was to be seen from the window, was flipping the pages of Vogue, while Viri examined a card that illustrated the plane’s emergency exits. It was as if they had made this flight a dozen times. They waited a while in a shimmering line of aircraft, then, trailing a roar that even within was prodigious, the seats themselves trembling, they took off.
Nedra wanted champagne. “Will you have some?” she said to her husband.
“Of course.”
They spent six days in London and two in Kent in a beautiful house with gardens down to the sea. There was a graveled court and iron gate. The house itself was brick, painted cream and white. It belonged to Thomas Alba, a friend of the Troys’. He had a strong face, wide all the way down, cultured, reassuring. His voice was slow and clear. “We live a quiet life, I’m afraid,” he said.
The house was filled with pictures and prints. The windows in the study had shelves across them, and on these a collection of teacups. The views from every room were thrilling, views of remote, ordered country, of English sea. But the best thing was his wife; she was the real thing of value. She’d lived in Bordeaux. She’d been married before—all the best ones have, as Nedra said.
“Doesn’t this talk of London make you yearn for it?” Claire asked.
“No,” Alba said calmly.
“We haven’t been to London for a month.”
“Has it been a month?”
“It’s at least a month. Tommy hates London,” she said.
“Well, I used to like it, I suppose. I prefer this, now.”
“Oh, her lamps of night! Her goldsmiths, print-shops, toyshops, hardware-men, St. Paul’s Churchyard, Charing Cross, the Strand!”
“You’ve got it all muddled.”
“It’s something like that,” she said. She had a wonderful face.
They were at dinner, the sort of dinner Nedra liked to give, not elaborate but over which one could linger for hours. The windows were open to the garden, the cool of the English night had entered the room.
“I like to garden,” Alba said. “I go into the garden every day. If I don’t, I’m really not happy. I’m bearable, but not happy. Sometimes we travel. We went to Chester, do you remember?” he asked Claire. “I don’t mind traveling occasionally.”
“Providing it isn’t too far.”
“I like to visit botanical gardens, actually. Sometimes a nice ruin. They’re all right if no one is there. You see, the thing is, I don’t drive. Claire does all the driving, and we like to go along slowly. We might go fifty miles in a day.”
“In a day!” Nedra said.
“That’s all.”
“Imagine.”
“Well, we like to stop,” he explained.
Claire was pouring coffee.
“What’s your life like in America?” Alba asked. “What do you do there?”
“Well, I have my family,” Nedra said.
“Apart from that.”
“Oh, I study things.”
“Isn’t that strange,” he said.
“What?”
“American women always seem to be studying things.” Nedra did not protest. She liked Alba, his candor, his faded hair.
“Actually, we talk frequently about America. We even read your newspapers,” he said. “I’m more or less obsessed with the idea of your country which has, after all, meant so much to the entire world. I find it very disturbing now to see what’s happening. It’s like the sun going out.”
“You think America is dying?” Viri asked.
“Darling, could we have a bit of cognac in the coffee?” Alba said. “Is there any?”
He offered the bottle she brought back. “I don’t really think nations can die,” he said. “A place and a history as vast as America cannot disappear, but it can become dark. And it seems to be slipping toward that. I mean, the utterly blind passions, the lack of moderation—these things are like a fever. Well, it’s more than that. Perhaps we’re alarmed over something we just hadn’t noticed before, something which has always existed, but I don’t think so. Do you know the history of the Spanish Civil War? I don’t mean the military aspect.”
“We’re very worried ourselves,” Viri said. “Everyone is.”
“The thing is, we depend on you so. We’re quite small now. It’s over for us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Of course, we have our memories.”
They sat together afterwards, talking on. Alba and his wife were side by side. Her arm lay along the back of the sofa, a long, fine arm, well-shaped, white as bone. Their faces too were white, alike, Standing out against the density of shadowed books, curtains, windows of night. Their life was calm and well-arranged; there was no passion in it, at least not on the surface, but there was great good-nature, almost laziness, as in beasts that are resting.
“We have our little jokes,” Alba said, “don’t we, Claire?”
“Occasionally.”
They were man and woman. They seemed at that moment like an unimprovable photograph, the pear trees invisible in the garden, the seeping gravel of the drive, the problems with her grown daughter all were held suspended, at peace within the regency of this pair.
Viri sat stunned by the image, one with which he had so often stunned others, of conjugal life in its purest, most generous form. He was suddenly vulnerable, helpless. It seemed he knew nothing, had forgotten all. He tried to see the blemishes in their contentment, but the surface blinded him. Her fingers which bore no rings, their slim nakedness confused him, the shape of her cheeks, her knees. He became terrified, that moment of terror which cannot be confessed when one realizes one’s own life is nothing.
Nedra saw it, too, but to her it meant something else: the proof that life demanded selfishness, isolation, and that even in another country a woman utterly unknown to her could confide this so clearly, for the Albas, she was sure, insisted on a certain life and no other, and they had found it—luckily together. On Porto Bello Road, in London, she bought a beautiful Lalique crystal flask, the color of hay. She sent it to Claire as a gift.
It was summer, the blue exhaust from automobiles tinted the airless city. They had cucumber sandwiches at tea. They dined at Italian restaurants. They visited Chelsea and the Tate. In a section of New York that was deserted after five, Danny sat with her god. The streets were empty. The terrible sadness of abandoned days had fallen over everything, but this sadness did not touch them, it was their empty stage. They sat alone at a table, drawing on a paper napkin: inscriptions, an initial, a name. He drew her mouth. She drew his. He made a D that was all leaves and vines, a thicket, and within it she drew the two of them, a sexual Adam and Eve.
“You’re flattering me.”
“That’s how it feels,” she murmured.
They made their way past closed warehouses and pathetic figures slumped in doorways, hands filthy, clothes soiled. The sky was exhausted, bled by the heat. At its bottom edge the gulls sat in rows, the roofs beneath their feet white as chalk.
The room was always cool and dark. It smelled brackish, like the hold of a ship. He had built a table, he had painted the wall near the bed. She was a young girl stunned by love. They were the same age, they were nearly the same. You cannot imagine the depth of those summer days, the silence. She came to his room almost daily. He employed her with the greatest pleasure on earth.