The Hothouse by the East River Read online

  ‘Paul, it’s me,’ says Elsa’s voice.

  ‘What are you doing in Zurich?’ he says.

  ‘Getting into bed,’ she says.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ says Paul. ‘Nothing. It’s bedtime over here.’

  ‘But what are you doing in Zürich?’

  ‘Sleeping with Mr Mueller.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Having an affair with Mr Mueller.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mueller from the shoe shop. The one you call Kiel. He’s on vacation here with me.’

  ‘Be serious, Elsa.’

  ‘I’m sleeping with him to check if he’s really Kiel. It’s the only way to identify him,’ she says.

  ‘Then you did sleep with him during the war?’ he yells.

  ‘Be careful on the phone, Paul. I slept with him last night. I don’t think he’s Kiel. He’s having a shower at the moment. Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know my final reactions.’

  ‘I can have him fired from his job. I can have him arrested as a spy.’

  ‘I own the shop,’ she says. ‘How can you have him fired? I acquired the shop.’

  ‘Did you acquire the State Department, too? He’s a spy.’

  ‘I was saying, Paul, I don’t think he’s Helmut Kiel. This one’s much too eager. Helmut as a lover was not all that lecherous. His basic approach was different, you had to coax. But this one—’

  ‘What’s your hotel, Elsa?’

  ‘The Ritz,’ she says.

  ‘There isn’t a Ritz in Zürich. I’m coming over. I’ll make a declaration to the police and I’ll bring Garven.’

  ‘I think I’ll be home day after tomorrow,’ Elsa says. ‘As soon as I’m sure of my facts, anyway.’

  ‘You believe her?’ he says to Katerina on the telephone.

  ‘Well, Pa, it depends if she’s given him a nice present or something. He’s got plenty of girls.’

  ‘I bet he’s right here in New York.’

  ‘No, they said at the shop he was out of town. On business.’

  ‘That’s Kiel the spy, all right. Your mother’s age.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so, not one bit. His name’s supposed to be Mueller.’

  ‘Did you really date him, Katerina? You had sex with him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Pa. If it wasn’t him it was someone else. Mother could be having a game with you, Pa.’

  ‘He’s having a shower right now, she said.’

  ‘It makes quite a picture,’ Katerina laughs. ‘It’s her with Kiel in 1944 that makes quite a picture,’ says Paul. ‘That’s what you don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh God, what was 1944? It never happened to me,’ she says.

  He is tracking her down on the telephone to Zürich, hotel after hotel, far into the night. At last he talks to her.

  ‘It must be the middle of the night your end,’ she says, ‘because it’s nearly eight by my watch.’

  ‘Where is Kiel?’ Paul says. ‘Pass me Kiel.’

  ‘Kiel?’

  ‘Well, Mueller. Mueller, Kiel, I want to speak to him if you please.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘you’ve got the wrong number. This is not Ecstasy Farm.’

  He says, ‘You called me, Elsa. You told me, Elsa. Take it easy. Try to recollect what you did yesterday.’

  ‘I never do today the same as I did yesterday,’ she says. ‘Why should I remember?’

  ‘Why are you in Zürich? Come home,’ he says.

  ‘I’m expecting my breakfast, Paul. They do an American breakfast here. Why should I come home if I can get American breakfast here? Why should I come home if I can get American breakfasts in Switzerland?’

  ‘Is Kiel in the bathroom?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kiel. Mueller, Kiel — is he having another shower?’

  ‘Just hold a minute,’ says Elsa’s voice. ‘I’ll see if there’s anybody in the bathroom.’

  ‘Elsa!’ Paul shouts, but he hears only the sound of the receiver being placed on its side. He waits, watching the seconds-indicator on his watch creep round the dial and creep again. ‘Elsa!’ he shouts. There is a click. ‘Have you finished speaking?’ says the operator from the American end.

  ‘I’m still talking,’ Paul says. ‘I’m holding on. My wife-’ But he is already cut off.

  It takes more than half an hour for Paul to be reconnected. ‘Can you hold on?’ says the European operator.

  ‘I can bear to suffer,’ Paul says.

  ‘Baby doll,’ says the operator, ‘don’t aggravate me.’

  ‘In the United States of America,’ says Paul, ‘we no longer speak that way.’

  ‘Halo,’ says Elsa. ‘Allo. Vous êtes en erreur.’

  ‘Elsa,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says. ‘Why are you calling?’

  ‘Who’s there with you?’ he says.

  ‘You’re so tribal,’ says Elsa.

  ‘Final, did you say?’

  ‘Tribal,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Elsa. What do you mean?’

  ‘You can’t keep on calling a person from New York early in the morning.’

  ‘Who’s with you in the room?’ Paul says.

  ‘No one,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just thought there might be,’ he says patiently, trying not to frighten her. ‘You did call me yesterday, you know. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘What has yesterday got to do with me?’ she says.

  ‘Elsa,’ he says and he looks out of the window at the dark sky above the East River waiting for her to say something else, a something, any little thing to calm his terror. The line is silent. ‘Elsa, you still there?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, what do you want?’

  ‘Be reasonable,’ he says, and the sound of a police siren wails up First Avenue as he listens to the silent telephone. He says, ‘Be reasonable. You said the man was with you. Remember you said you were having sex with him to find out if he was Kiel or not. That means you must have had sex with Kiel in 1944, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Sex,’ she says, ‘is a subject like any other subject. Every bit as interesting as agriculture.’

  ‘Have you finished?’ says the operator.

  ‘No, we’re still talking,’ Paul says. ‘This., is private.’ The operator disappears, apparently, with a click. Nevertheless Paul adds, ‘Please don’t interrupt.’

  ‘After all,’ says Elsa, ‘we’re paying for the call, aren’t we?’

  ‘I know,’ Paul says.

  ‘There are English tourists here en route to somewhere,’ Elsa says. ‘I passed their table last night and heard one of them saying “Jonathan’s 0-levels …“ That was all, but Christ, it made me want to be sick. The English abroad are so awful and they always bring their own life with them. I mean, what’s the use of going abroad if you don’t get new life from it?’

  ‘I know,’ says Paul. ‘When are you coming home?’

  ‘Tomorrow, I think.’

  ‘Your experiment’s over?’

  ‘Oh yes, the experiment. Well, I can complete it another time.’

  ‘Where’s Kiel?’

  ‘He’s dead, I think. You mean Mueller?’

  ‘Mueller,’ he says, ‘Mueller from the shoe store.’

  ‘Mueller,’ she says, ‘put on his trousers and went away somewhere.’

  ‘Be careful on the phone,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what to believe, Elsa.’

  ‘You never did,’ Elsa says.

  ‘What’s the number of your flight, Elsa?’

  ‘I’ll call you later,’ she says. ‘I’ll let you know. Then you can come and meet me, Paul. See you soon. I want to finish breakfast now.’

  ‘You won’t be coming back with Kiel? Will he be on the plane?’

  ‘Kiel isn’t here.’

  ‘Don’t travel back with him. You’ll get yourself in a mess and you’ll never be able to shake him off.’

  ‘Well, don’t come to meet me w
ith Garven. ‘The operator comes on again. ‘Still talking?’ he says, and cuts them off. Paul looks down on to the dark and quite dangerous street. ‘Help me!’ cries his mind, with a fear reaching back to the Balkan realities. He looks round the room, panicking for her familiar shadow. He wants her back from that wild Europe, those black forests and gunmetal mountains. Come back to Manhattan the mental clinic, cries his heart, where we analyse and dope the savageries of existence. Come back, it’s very centrally heated here, there are shops on the ground floor, you can get anything here that you can get over there and better, money’s no object. Why go back all that way where your soul has to fend for itself and you think for yourself in secret while you conform with the others in the open? Come back here to New York the sedative chamber where you don’t think at all and you can act as crazily as you like and talk your head off all day, all night.

  Come back. He pours himself a whisky, sits down with it, and reflects that after all she isn’t in any wild place but in a first-class hotel in Zürich. He takes his drink, switches off the light and goes into a smaller room where papers litter his desk. He switches on the television and gets the late-late show.

  Garven, however, bangs on the wall. Paul turns off the television, fetches himself another drink, and goes to bed.

  At eleven. next morning Paul is sitting dressed by the telephone in the little room waiting for his next call to Zürich to come through. He has been advised of an hour’s delay and only a three-quarters of the hour has materialised. The hand that marks the seconds on. his watch looks as if it is knitting a sock stitch by stitch. Paul lifts the telephone impulsively and dials a number.

  A woman’s voice answers.

  ‘Annie,’ he says.

  ‘Halo, I was just going to call you,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’ says Paul.

  ‘I wanted to say halo, that’s why. Did you hear from her?’

  ‘Yes, I did. She’s in. Zürich with the shoe salesman. He isn’t Kiel, she said. But why should she go to Zürich? She had to sleep with him to find out, that’s what she said. It means she cheated me in the past, do you realise? I don’t know what to think. Why did she go to Zürich?’

  ‘She would want to contact a new analyst,’ says Annie. ‘She would bring him back home With her and start again.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have got caught following her,’ says Paul.

  ‘Now, listen,’ she says.

  ‘I can’t,’ Paul says, ‘I’m expecting a call from Zürich. I’ll talk to you later, Annie.’ He hangs up, unlocks a drawer in his desk, takes out a set of three keys on a ring and, picking out one of the keys, crosses the room to a glass-fronted bookcase, which he opens. He takes out a large green. leather, gold-worked book in fine and shiny condition, closes the bookcase and takes the book under his arm to the desk. He draws out the telephone on its long wire till it expands to a small table by an armchair. Here he sits by the telephone, and opens the book.

  It turns out to be a photograph album. The first photographs have a brownish look, and are slightly cracked as if they belong to the first amateur Kodaks of 1888, although the dresses of some of the people belong to the early nineteen-twenties. All that the discrepancy means, in fact, is that the photographs were taken in a country where everything was thirty years behind the times. It is a family album. The family must have travelled abroad to buy their clothes. The servants, like the camera which has introduced them, are the old-fashioned ones, the women have long skirts, the men whiskers, and stand in a countrified way around the family and their friends. The album is selective in. the sense that one child, as Paul turns the pages, recurs in every portrait. Now in a nurse’s arms, now with a group of tennis-playing uncles and lipsticked aunts, now alone, holding a tennis racket. Me, thinks Paul, when. I was eight months, me when I was nine, under-exposed.

  It is the next morning and he has failed to locate her. She has not telephoned from Zürich to tell him her flight number. It is seven-thirty when he wakes up in. his restless bed. Garven. is still asleep; he has made no pretence of being a manservant all during Elsa’s absence. He comes and goes, he sleeps late or early as he pleases, pushing the coffee-pot around the kitchen and clattering his breakfast cup as if he owned the place. Paul tries not to coincide with him.

  He reaches for the phone, puts in a call to Elsa’s hotel in Zürich, jumps out of bed and hastens to his bathroom. Paul shaves and listens for the phone while silence continues to break from Garven’s bedroom. He thinks ahead to her arrival at the airport, her fuss with the porter and her luggage, while he waits at the door beyond the Customs’ tables. She will have to tip the porter very quickly at the point between. the luggage reception and the Customs. If you want to tip me, Ma’am, tip me now, the porter will say, just as he is about to wheel forward the piled-up trolley. Elsa will slip the note into his hand which is already on the trolley handle. The hand opens and closes and the porter murmurs ‘ain’t allowed’, cheerfully pressing on, with the passenger following the luggage at the trot.

  Paul thinks ahead, with his ears open for the ring of the phone. She should arrive some time around eight tonight. I’ll watch for her flight number on the board, then stand by the arrivals gate, watching her, busy in her fur coat, through the Customs, showing and explaining and ingratiating herself most suspiciously with the Customs officers. Paul dresses and goes to make coffee.

  A key in the front door. Garven, he thinks. Not in his room at all, no wonder he was quiet. At that moment he hears Garven’s bedroom radio begin to pour forth the morning’s news. The step in the hall must be that of an intruder. It had to happen, Paul thinks, it’s happened to everyone else. He hears a few more steps along the corridor and he hears Elsa at the door of her bedroom. ‘Paul,’ she says. ‘The hall porter’s bringing up my luggage. Let him in..’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Paul says, rushing out of the kitchen.. He kisses her in greeting and shouts, ‘You damn bitch, I was waiting up all night to hear the flight number.’

  ‘You haven’t been to bed?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, well I went to bed. But you said, “I’ll call and let you know the flight number and the arrival time.” I would have met you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, throwing her coat on the bed while her shadow, regardless of the morning sunlight in front of her, makes the same gesture, hanging a moment from her raised arm like a raglan sleeve. Dust motes dance in the light and her shadow falls casually at a different tangent across the bed like the flung coat. There is a ring at the service door and Garven can be heard plopping in his bedroom slippers along the corridor towards it.

  Elsa says, ‘My room needs an airing.’

  ‘We weren’t prepared for you,’ Paul says. ‘Why didn’t you let me know the flight number?’

  ‘Not again.,’ she says. ‘Never again.’ She goes to open wide her hanging cupboard, making it ready to receive her clothes. She says, ‘Remember the last time you met me at Kennedy?’

  ‘The last time?’ He makes an. effort of memory with his forehead, his eyes go absent, all his energy concentrates on his forehead. He frowns and looks towards her for help. ‘What happened the last time? So many meetings at airports. When was the last time at Kennedy?’

  She is saying, ‘I’m going to have coffee. Then. I’m going to have a bath and change. I slept on the plane, all the way. I’m going for a walk.’

  ‘Where to?’ he says. And he wonders, what happened particularly the last time I met her at Kennedy Airport? ‘Where are you going?’ he says, standing there.

  ‘Van Cleef’s,’ she says.

  “What for?’

  ‘To buy a present.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘Myself,’ Elsa says.

  ‘Oh,’ says Paul. ‘Well that’s all right. What happened particularly the last time I met you at the airport?’

  ‘It was some years ago.’

  ‘Years? What are you talking about? I picked you up at Providence last October. I met you at San Juan, September.
Then, July—’

  ‘No, you haven’t been to Kennedy to meet me for years. When I’ve been to Europe these last years somehow it’s happened you couldn’t meet.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, putting his memory straight as she unpacks her jewellery, piece by piece. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. I can’t remember when I last met you at Kennedy.’

  ‘It was Idlewild then, 1960.’

  ‘It couldn’t be so long ago. What happened?’

  ‘You drove me straight to the clinic on Long Island and had me locked up.’

  ‘Now look, Elsa,’ he says.

  ‘You said you were taking me to Poppy Xavier’s. Instead I found myself being expedited in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Elsa!’

  ‘And we pulled up outside the main door of the clinic and I got hustled in by those blue-robed horrors.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Elsa. We were only trying to help you.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘All of us,’ he says, limply.

  ‘That means you alone. That’s what “all of us” means.’

  ‘Well, I tried to help you. Pierre knows that. So does Katerina. ‘What’s the point of going over it all again?’

  ‘Only that I’m sure I wouldn’t let you meet me with the car at Kennedy Airport again. I flew to Paris and chartered a jet from there. Here I am.’

  ‘I was trying to help you. I always try to help you,’ he shouts.

  ‘You’ll be charged with shouting and inveighing. Isn’t that a crime? I’m sure it is. Anyway, the point is, I’d love you not to help me. The point is, I can help myself, thank you.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ he says, quietly.

  She closes her jewel case, smiling.

  He says, ‘Chartering a jet. You need help.’

  ‘Help is a hindrance to me.’

  The hall porter pushes in the door with two suitcases. He is followed by Garven.

  Garven is wearing a bath-robe of pink-striped towelling. His hair, yellow-grey, stands round his head like a lifted halo. He hasn’t had time to put in his contact lenses and is wearing a pair of spectacles which make him look different from usual.