The Hothouse by the East River Read online

  ‘Thank you, Paul.’ He casts the pencil aside, and rises.

  ‘Not at all, Colonel.’ Paul gets up to go and, between the chair and the door, is about to utter a curt request to be addressed more formally, when he decides sharply that he might sound like a chauffeur, tangled with umbrage, carping that his name is Mister. He withdraws silently, tangled indeed, but without having assumed inferiority.

  Nor does he call off work for the rest of the day and go back to flop in his billet as he longs to do. He takes a bus as far as it can take him towards the Compound. Then he walks the rest of the distance, straight through two villages over a distance of four and a half miles. The gate-keeper greets him, ‘Fine day, sir,’ then looks at his watch as Paul walks past. ‘It’s going to rain, though,’ says Paul, looking up at a collection of white clouds. There is no reason why the man should not look at his watch, but Paul forbears to look back and see whether the man is returning to the gatehouse, there perhaps to telephone, under orders, to report Paul’s arrival, and the time of it. It is just possible, it is infinitely possible, even probable, that Colonel Tylden, the security officer, has wanted to find out how far Paul has been put off his stroke. However, Paul’s jitters are not available to human eyes this afternoon in the early spring of England, 1944.

  ‘So I said to John, if Harry and Giselle come with us, Howard can go with Harry to Pearl’s and John could come with Gene for the Sunday night before we leave. But if Ray stops over at Nantucket then I have to be there for Merlin and Jay as they have nowhere to go. That’s if Pierre goes to Italy. If not I don’t know what we can do. I know Katerina can’t be back till September, but suppose Pierre comes the last week in August, then we’ve got to find somewhere for Jay or Merlin, one or the other. But John said, let them go to California and get a vacation job like Elaine Harvey and Sam last summer. Why land on us? Garven says—’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ says Paul.

  ‘You,’ says Elsa, her eyes still fixed on the East River. ‘We’ve got to plan, we’ve left it late enough and the house will be overcrowded if all these people come to light. Garven says I’ll make myself ill.’

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ Paul says, coming boldly to look out of the window over her shoulders.

  ‘Don’t shout,’ she says.

  ‘I wasn’t shouting,’ he replies, softening his voice which hardened a moment ago with the effort of approaching her look-out station in the window alcove. He says, ‘A lot of mist this evening.’

  ‘Really?’ she says, as if she cannot see for herself the heat-fog that has lowered over the city of New York all day.

  He withdraws, sideways and backwards, and stands at a distance from the window between one sofa and another.

  He says, ‘Where did John call from?’

  ‘Some campus, I think. It was just before lunch.’

  ‘Who is John, anyway? John who? And all those kids, who are they?’

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ she says. ‘They might be anybody.’

  ‘I’m sorry I took that house,’ Paul says. She says, ‘If you want me to go into a clinic just as an excuse to put them off, nothing doing.’

  ‘Who’s talking about a clinic? For God’s sake, Elsa. It’s one of your bad days, isn’t it?’

  She puts her head on one side and makes her eyes wide, flirtatiously, at the window. She says, ‘Yes, but I feel better already since you came in. Just in that short space I feel better already. What about a drink?’

  Paul says to his son, ‘Pierre, your mother’s anxious about the prospect of having too many people to stay this summer.’

  ‘Keep them away,’ says Pierre. ‘These people don’t exist as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘But it’s her anxiety — she has these fits of worrying. Then it’s all over as soon as she has a chance to talk to me. She needs my presence.’

  ‘Oh, they all worry about people coming to stay. All women do — everyone does. I do.’

  ‘Why isn’t she anxious about me? I’m in danger, ‘says Paul.

  ‘Look,’ says Pierre wildly. ‘Talk to Garven. I’m not an expert on these feelings.’

  ‘My God, it’s a rational normal fear. Why should I talk to Garven?’ Paul says. And he thinks, as one who hopes to still the tempest: Now let us turn to something else. ‘Listen to me,’ his voice is saying…. In the summer of 1944, he is telling his son, life was more vivid than it is now. Everything was more distinct. The hours of the day lasted longer. One lived excitedly and dangerously. There was a war on.

  Pierre looks ahead at the painting on the wall opposite and wonders if the annual allowance that his mother gives him on the condition that he keeps on good terms with his father is worth it.

  ‘We really lived our life,’ says Paul.

  It’s like the electric fixtures in Peregrine’s apartment, Pierre meanwhile is reflecting. In Peregrine’s apartment, which is a long barn-shaped room on the third floor of a barn-like warehouse off lower Broadway, the main lighting fixture in the ceiling is fitted with a three-way adapter into whose sockets are fitted, in turn, the light bulb, a cord leading to a two-plate cooking stove and a longer cord leading to a further three-way adapter which is hooked on to the wall. The adapter on the wall also has three sockets; one for an electric razor, another for a bright lamp which Peregrine uses when he works at his drawings at night, and the third is a free-lance receptacle for an iron, a coffee-pot, an electric cork-opener, and various other electrical things which Peregrine uses alternately. When Peregrine first put up this rigging, it was expected to fuse within a few hours, a few days, any time; it was predicted that the whole neighbourhood would have a black-out, maybe the whole of Manhattan, or the eastern seaboard. But more than two years have passed and Peregrine’s fuse has not blown. It must happen any time, any moment, thinks Pierre. Perhaps it is happening now. My father and mother, and the rest of us, will blow a fuse and the current will stop flowing, thank God. Useful as it is, it’s all too precarious. I’ll get my vital juice from some other source.

  His father says, ‘You don’t seem to take in how real it all was. And now it’s caught up on me again, you don’t seem to believe that I’m in danger.

  You’re like your mother, Pierre, during the war when we were on secret work. She was careless.’

  Pierre gets up and bends over the long window-seat to look down at the street. He says, ‘Do you see that man going up towards Fifth? Come and look, Father.’

  Paul joins him, his nose peering forward.

  ‘There,’ says Pierre, ‘the man in the light suit just now passing the pharmacy, there.’

  ‘Yes, why?’ says the father.

  The stared-at man stops at the corner and turns his head for a meaningless moment to look across to Pierre’s building as people generally do, as it were obligingly, when picked on by chance to be looked at from afar. Pierre says, ‘He’s there every night. Usually he stands on the corner for a while then walks back up the street. He’s watching the entrance.’ It is all just a fabrication, but in Pierre’s ears it sounds better than his father’s kind of truth.

  ‘My God!’ says the father, still watching the corner where the man has disappeared.

  ‘Did you recognise him? You know his face?’ says the tall son who still holds up the edge of the nylon curtain somewhat sweetly between his thumb and his index finger.

  ‘No,’ says Paul. ‘Drop the curtain,’ he says. ‘He’ll know we’ve seen him.’

  Pierre lets it fall from his fingers and pats the curtain into place like a devoted housewife.

  ‘This is serious,’ says Paul.

  The son sits down and looks at his watch. ‘Yes, really,’ he says. A police siren swoops past their hearing like a primitive bird and wails on the wing far into the traffic.

  ‘What kind of a daughter are you?’ Paul says. ‘Just what kind of a daughter?’

  Katerina says, ‘I did you credit at school. What did you do for me that’s so special?’

  ‘I caused you,�
�� says her father.

  ‘Not all by yourself.’ She smiles with her white teeth seeming to leap from her sun tan.

  ‘I always took the initiative with your mother.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘that is an interesting piece of data.’

  ‘Data is plural. Datum is the singular. I don’t know how the hell you did well at school. You don’t know a thing.’

  ‘You’d be surprised, Pa,’ says Katerina. ‘You really would.’

  She had been lying in bed listening to the church bells and the air-conditioner when her father arrived. Her apartment is, for the present, at East Sixty-fourth Street off Madison Avenue.

  When he has gone she writes a letter to her mother asking for money. After some thought she addresses the envelope to Mrs Paul Hazlett, H.C.F. The letters stand for Highest Common Factor. Katerina feels her mother might ponder as to their significance and so be moved to read the letter. Katerina delivers it herself later in the day, slipping it into her parents’ mailbox on the ground floor, there by the East River where they live.

  III

  It is winter time in Elsa Hazlett’s apartment; the rushing summer purr of the air-conditioner has ceased; the air quivers with central heating that cannot be turned off very far, and which is augmented by heat from the flats above and below and in the north flank.

  ‘Garven? — Who is Garven?’ says Princess Xavier.

  ‘My guidance director,’ Elsa says.

  ‘Liberate yourself from all such people,’ says the Princess, gathering together her large-lady folds.

  ‘You aren’t going yet? — Stay a while,’ Elsa says.

  The Princess murmurs, while she settles herself back among the cushions, ‘I have to get home to my mulberries.’ She says, ‘I once was in the toils of a priest, my dear Elsa. I liberated myself from him forty years ago and I never regretted it. The first week and the fourth week that I refused him the door were the worst. He had been my anchor and when I gave up this man I felt like a little boat tossing on the great sea of life. But I found my course — I have never regretted cutting loose from that priest.’ She leans back, puffing her sails like a very big ship, so that one can well believe what she has said.

  ‘Oh, Garven has no religion,’ Elsa says, ‘he’s not a priest.’

  ‘Religion makes no difference,’ the Princess says. ‘You should never take guidance from one man only. From many men, many women, yes, by watching them and hearing, and finally consulting with yourself. It’s the only way. Life should be one’s guidance director.’

  ‘Oh, Garven amuses me,’ Elsa says.

  ‘If you enjoy going to visit him then the more reason that you should give him up. You will miss him, and the more you miss him the stronger you will be. Guidance director! You’re better off with your window—thing.’

  Elsa laughs and goes over to the window, looking out. She says, ‘It keeps me free,’ leaving a doubt whether she is referring to Garven or to the window-thing.

  But Princess Xavier is not about to be perplexed on any point whatsoever. She is now interested in something else, far away in her thoughts, probably Long Island, where her farm of sheep and silkworms will be shivering for want of her presence and, of course, the cold. She opens one of the folds revealing a pink bulge of bosom. She puts her hand within the crease; her eggs are safe. She is in the habit of keeping the eggs of her silkworms warm between and under her folds of breasts; she also takes new-born lambs to her huge ancestral bed, laying them at her feet early in the cold springtime, and she does many such things. She now folds herself back into her coverings and starts the process of rising from the sofa.

  Elsa says, ‘Paul will be in soon. Can’t you wait half-an-hour and have a drink? He always hates to miss you, Poppy love.’

  The Princess waddles respectfully round Elsa’s shadow to avoid treading on it as it falls across the grand piano and on to the floor like a webby grey cashmere shawl that has been left to trail and gather dust untouched for a hundred years. The Princess says, ‘Next week I can stay longer, and then go on to the opera from here. Today I have to go early —Francesca is away and I have to see what they are up to, one can’t trust them, they …‘ She kisses Elsa, and is seen into the lift by both Elsa and her maid, while she is still explaining the difficulties attaching to her farm. At an earlier time in her life she had spent her days pining and striving for a moderately slim appearance; she had been enterprising in her travels and at last she had married an aged Russian exile who had just lost his job as a pianist in a nightclub in Paris. She took him to London and started an employment agency specialising in foreign exiles, placing her clients wherever an alien tongue or an exotic skill was needed.

  After this marriage the Princess made herself fat and fatter, until, ten years later at the time of Prince Xavier’s funeral, she had become grand and large, loving all, and much beloved. She had been a foundling Miss Copplestone from New Zealand, and might easily have taken a wrong safe turn, ending up as a saggy supervisor at the telephone exchange. Elsa had never known her differently, having met the Princess when she was already grand-mannered, large and free, even as far back as 1944, there in the world of wartime secrets.

  ‘He’s come back,’ says Paul. ‘He’s back.’

  Elsa says, ‘Now, now. You know he isn’t Kiel, so what does it matter to you, if he’s back?’

  ‘I’m convinced it’s Kiel without any doubt. And he’s back in New York. He’s back in the shoe store. He really is Kiel, after all.’

  ‘He is too young to be Kiel. You agreed with Garven that people grow older. He’s like what Kiel was away back in the war, but Kiel now would be very different even if he hadn’t died in prison, which he did.’

  ‘When I saw him again today I knew,’ says Paul, ‘that it was Kiel. He must have had some rejuvenating treatment.’

  ‘Talk to Garven,’ says Elsa, ‘don’t talk to me. I had enough of this Kiel last summer. All summer you were on about Kiel.’

  ‘You saw him first.’

  ‘Well, you saw him second. If he was Kiel he would have aged a bit like you,’ she says.

  Paul says, ‘You didn’t say that when you first saw him in the shoe store. You said—’

  ‘It was an illusion like any other illusion,’ she says, her shadow falling in the wrong unnatural direction, ‘so 1 don’t know why you bring it up again. The man’s not Kiel. So I don’t know why you bother. The man can’t be Kiel, he’s young enough to be Kiel’s son. So I don’t know why you jumble the facts. All over the place, you tumble.’

  ‘You think of everything, my dear, until you think of something else.’ He speaks softly as if she is becoming dangerous, as indeed she is when she speaks like this.

  ‘Well maybe you don’t jumble,’ she says with suicidal mirth, ‘I take it back. Cheer up, I’m going to bed.’

  ‘No, it’s mistake a face that I don’t do.’ He speaks to soothe her, but thinks, why don’t I leave her? Today she’s bubbling with hilarity, tomorrow she’ll be brooding again. Next week, hysterical gaiety. He says, ‘Did you see Garven today?’

  ‘Yes, do you know he’s starting an institute, The Institute of Guidance. He’s the Guidance Director. His own title.’ She leaves the room, trailing her shadow at the wrong angle, like the train of an antique ball-dress. She is laughing rather fearfully all along the corridor and even when she has shut the door of her room she continues to laugh; her laughter comes straight to his ear as if she commands the air he breathes.

  Here he is with the colour photograph in his hand and here, again, he holds the negative up to the light. Katerina, still at school; Pierre, a first-year student; Paul himself in his tennis clothes, shorter than his son, smiling in profile; and Elsa, blonde with the parting of her hair showing dark, trim in her white shorts. Elsa’s shadow falls brown in the photograph, grey-white in the negative; it crosses his shadow and the children’s as if to cancel them with one sharp diagonal line. Elsa had laughed at the photograph when she first saw it; the children had
said nothing about the shadow, they never seemed to notice anything. Only Pierre had said, ‘The Princess always takes photos out of focus; what a waste!’

  ‘Mother is no fool,’ says Pierre. ‘Mother is intelligent. More than one can possibly calculate, she’s intelligent, it gives one a jolt sometimes.’

  The father feels a sudden panic because it is infinitely easier for a man to leave a beautiful woman, to walk out and leave her, and be free, than to leave a woman of intelligence beyond his calculation and her own grasp. ‘No,’ Paul shouts. ‘She’s crazy. I have to think for her, I have to do her thinking all the time.’

  ‘All right, Father. All right.’

  ‘She’s cunning, that’s all. When she wants to be.’

  ‘I went back to the shoe store today, Poppy,’ Elsa says to the Princess. ‘I bought some boots,’ Elsa says, ‘fur-lined, that I don’t need, Poppy, because I wanted to have another look. The other day I bought these shoes I’m wearing — do you like them? He looks like Kiel, too young. Could he be Kiel’s son, do you think?’

  ‘He’s Kiel,’ says Poppy. ‘Kiel with a face-lift. When I went to the store I looked close, my dear, and I saw it was truly Kiel. After all, he was very young when we knew him during the war; very young. He must have had his face lifted, it looks quite stretched at the eyes. You go again and look close, Elsa. You look close. He’s stiff at the waist. I bought a pair of evening shoes to be sent C.O.D. but naturally I gave a false name and address. I’ve got five pairs of evening shoes already. What do I want with more? I rarely wear them. Did you notice how he bends, stiff at the knees, thick at the waist, like a prisoner of long years. As he has been.’

  ‘I know he’s Kiel,’ Elsa says. ‘I know it very well. I wish you would be more obliging, Poppy, and pretend he’s someone else. If Paul could be induced to believe this man’s somebody else, then he will become somebody else. It’s a matter of persevering in a pretence. Paul must be persuaded against his judgment and persevere against it.’