A Winter's Love Read online

  “You forgot my socks,” Connie said, yawning, her mouth opening pink and wide like a kitten’s.

  “Oh, so I did. Here, baby.” Emily ran her fingers through Connie’s fair curls, thinking idly that she looked more like Mimi’s sister than Virginia’s. “Now run on downstairs.”

  “You fixed the furnace, didn’t you?” Courtney demanded of his wife as Connie scampered out.

  “I was downstairs. And it’s really no job.”

  “We should have someone come in to do it.”

  “But why, Court? It’s money we don’t need to spend and one of us is always up early.”

  “I don’t like your doing it,” Courtney said.

  “That’s nonsense. I’m strong as a horse and still young. Or can you call thirty-eight still young?”

  Courtney looked at her, his eyes moving over her fair hair, her face, the red sweater, the dark ski trousers. Emily stood still under his gaze, looking back at him with her steady gray eyes under well-defined dark brows, much darker than the short fair hair. “You’re extremely well preserved,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t, Court!” she cried. “You make me sound pickled in formaldehyde. Everybody seems determined to make me feel ancient this morning. Mimi was telling me about the nice things Virginia’s thought up to remember me by.”

  Courtney laughed. “That shouldn’t be too difficult. And I think you’d make a very nice pickle. It was fun having Abe for dinner last night, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Emily said. She turned away from him and began straightening the top of her dressing table, putting the lid back on her powder box, lining up her small bottles of perfume, dropping her brush into a drawer.

  Courtney sniffed. “I smell coffee,” he said. “I dreamed about him last night.”

  “About Abe?”

  “About Philopoemen,” Courtney said in surprise. “You asked me what brought him up.”

  As Emily was in the midst of the breakfast dishes, the dishpan in the sink full of hot suds, the kettle on the stove heating for rinse water, Courtney stuck his head in the kitchen:

  “I’ve lost all the notes I made yesterday on Anaximander.”

  “Oh, darling, how awful, I’m sorry,” she said automatically, taking her hands out of the soapy water and wringing off the suds, trying to switch her attention to Courtney’s problem and not quite succeeding.

  “The point is,” Courtney said, “where did they get to? They’re rather important.” His voice was low and calm, but she could tell from the pinched look about his mouth and nose, as though he were very cold, that he was upset.

  “I don’t know.” She turned away from the sink and the half-washed dishes towards him. “Did you take them out of your office?”

  “No.”

  She wiped her hands on her apron. “Then they must be there.”

  “The point is they aren’t. Could Connie have been at them?”

  “She knows she’s not allowed in your office.”

  “I can’t find them,” Courtney said, his voice quiet, even. “It was a whole day’s work. More than that, really.”

  “I’ll come look,” she said, and followed him down the dark passage to his office. In the small room books were piled on the floor and papers were scattered over the desk and falling out of the scrap basket.

  “How can you expect to find anything in this mess?” she asked. Her voice had an edge of sharpness to it.

  “The reason it’s in a mess is that I’ve been looking for the things,” he said. “Did you empty my wastepaper basket this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you burn it all up?”

  “Yes. I always do.” She looked around the room helplessly. “Just an ordinary piece of paper like all the other pieces of paper in here?”

  “Two or three ordinary pieces of paper.”

  “Did you shut them up in the book you were using?”

  “I’ve looked in all the books. Held them up by the spines and shaken them. I wish you hadn’t burned the trash.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I just always do it early. You mean you think you may have thrown them away by mistake?”

  “I can’t think of anything else. Well, you certainly can’t be expected to tell notes I mean to keep from those I’m through with. I’ll just have to do the whole thing over again. But in the future I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t burn my papers.” His voice was still flat, controlled.

  “I didn’t burn anything that wasn’t in the wastepaper basket.”

  “You didn’t pick anything up off the floor?”

  “No. Anything on the floor I always put on your desk.”

  He shrugged. “Well, it can’t be helped.” He turned away from her and sat down at his desk. She stood there by him, but he didn’t speak or turn towards her or in any way acknowledge her presence.

  After a moment she said wonderingly, “You’re angry with me, aren’t you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because you think I burned your papers.”

  “If you did it, you didn’t do it on purpose. I should empty my own basket instead of leaving it to you.”

  “Why don’t you swear?” she asked. “It’d make you feel better.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “You used to swear on occasion in New York.”

  “I don’t feel like swearing here.” Again he turned from her, withdrew.

  Like a child pressing a bruise, wondering if it will still hurt, she persisted. “If you’re mad at me why don’t you be mad at me, Court? I don’t mind, I’d much rather have you angry with me than—than—” He did not respond and for a moment her voice soared. “For heaven’s sake lose your temper with me! Because I’m in this house with you! I’m in this room! I’ve been here all winter!”

  “In this room?” he asked mildly.

  She moved to the door, teetering on the seesaw she had been riding with Courtney, hate and love, never knowing which was which, as she had ridden the seesaws of her childhood and had never known when her companions (always, it seemed, heavier, bigger, crouching close to earth, sneakered feet on the brown patch of ground where they had worn off the grass, leaving spindly Emily dangling high up, her skinny legs waving frantically, her stomach pounding with fear at being so high off the ground) would suddenly slide off the end of the seesaw, letting Emily crash to earth, her legs, her spine, her head jarred almost unendurably by the unexpected impact, so that she would stagger off, acutely sick at her stomach, to recuperate alone in the orchard.

  “I’m sorry about your notes,” she said at last. “I’m terribly sorry you have to do them all over again.”

  He nodded, not looking up, and she slipped out, shutting the door quietly behind her, feeling the familiar sickness as though the seesaw had been dropped. And she felt again, as she had felt so often that winter, agonizingly in the wrong, and lost, as though her identity had been jarred out of her by the crash, and until she found it again she would say and do all the wrong things.

  After the dishes were done she went to the piano in the living room. It was not a good piano, an upright that had once been a player piano; and like all the furniture in the small room it was outsize, so that when she was in the room for any length of time Emily had a sensation of everything closing in on her, the mountains outside, the walls of the villa, and in the living room the four enormous over-stuffed chairs covered in puce plush, and the dark scratched wood of the piano. Several of the ivories on the piano keys were missing, and the others were yellow and stained, but it kept passably in tune except for the bass G which she pulled up every morning with a tuning hammer. She did this now, then sat down on the rickety piano bench. She played a few chords, then went into scales. After a moment Virginia looked in from the dining room where she and Mimi were keeping a promise to play a game of Go Fish with Connie.

  “Oh, not exercises, mother!” she cried. “We can’t hear ourselves think!”

  “I like them,” Mimi called. “I even like it when Jak
e plays exercises on the violin.”

  “Yes, but mother’s not a famous musician,” Virginia said.

  “Jake’s not terrifically famous. He’s—I believe you’d call it distinguished, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Bowen?”

  “Very distinguished, Mimi,” Emily said.

  Connie’s voice, still high in register, and not long out of baby talk, came rather petulantly. “It’s my turn, Virginia. Come on.”

  Emily turned back to the piano again, but she did not play exercises. She opened a battered Beethoven and started the Appasionata. She had played two pages when Courtney stuck his head in the door. “You don’t mind if I close the door, do you, Em? I’m trying to concentrate.”

  Emily sighed and laughed. “No. I think I’ll spare you all and go for a walk.” She went into the dining room. “Will you two girls take care of Connie for me this morning?”

  “Where are you going?” Virginia asked.

  “Just for a walk, I’ll be back in plenty of time to get lunch.” She left quickly, eager as always to get away from the confining walls of the villa.

  On clear days Emily enjoyed the steep climb up the mountain (for always her desire was to climb, rather than to take the path down to the village), moving along slowly on her skis, letting the clear dry air slap at her face, push against her chest so that it was an effort to expand her lungs, and the cold cut like steel against her throat. When she was out of doors the mountains did not seem to press in and down upon her as they did in the house. Out in the open snow she could fling her head back and look up to the mountains and beyond them to the sky, in the daytime an incredible blue, at night a sparkling black as clear and hard as stone with the stars spearing through as though they would hurl themselves down into the valley. But it had seemed, that winter, as though clouds constantly blotted out sky and stars, dropped by day upon the mountains, letting the sharp peaks press into but not pierce their amorphous grayness. Even when it was not actually snowing the clouds leaned down into the valley so that it was as though the village and the outlying hotels and the tuberculosis sanatorium, crouched against the paws of the mountain, were completely enclosed by mountain and cloud, as though there were no escape from this one small thumbprint in the shape of the earth.

  She herringboned up the steep slope to the hotel, grateful for the day’s clarity, and stopped to rest for a moment and look down at their rented villa pressed against the iron fence of the hotel property, with the houses and shops of the village straggling downhill behind it. A group of skiers came out of the hotel, skis over their shoulders, laughing and shouting, and she moved on up the slope. Abe was probably already off skiing, Abe and his son, Sam. How old was Sam? Virginia’s age? Or a year or so older? She didn’t remember. She had never seen a great deal of Sam, who was usually off at school.

  For some place to go, to give direction to the morning, she started on up the path that led past the sanatorium to the chalet where Gertrude de Croisenois lived. The wind hurled itself down from the mountain, seeming to aim directly for her, to be directing its attack particularly against her, and she turned up the collar of her ski jacket and pushed on uphill, her head down against the wind, panting a little with cold and exertion, and saying softly under her breath, “Damn. Oh, damn, damn, damn, oh damn.”

  “And who are you damning?” a voice behind her said, and she turned swiftly, almost falling, forgetting her skis, and there coming up the path was Abe Fielding. He was not on skis but was tramping briskly up the icy path with hobnailed ski boots and a stout stick. He came hurrying towards her, holding out his leather-gloved hands, and she skied down to him, stopping in a swirl of snow, gasping and laughing.

  “Oh, Abe, hello! Was I saying it that loud?”

  “The wind blew it right to me. Who were you damning so fervently?”

  She laughed. “Oh, myself. For letting the wind make me so out of breath and such an icicle. I felt ten thousand years old. I suppose I would have been just as cold and just as breathless ten years ago, but I wouldn’t have put it down to old age then.”

  “My ancient Emily,” he said, still holding her hands, “all rosy cheeks and shining eyes like some college kid on vacation. Where were you off to?”

  “No place. Just escaping.”

  “Escaping what?”

  “Oh—my own evil nature. There’s nothing like the mountains for—for purification.”

  “Do you need purification?”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “Do I!”

  “You’re quaking like an aspen,” Abe said. “Come on down to the hotel and have a cup of coffee with me to warm you up.”

  She looked quickly at her watch. “I’d love to.”

  She skied slowly along beside him, holding herself back on the hard-packed snow of the path. For a moment they did not speak. Then Abe said, “It’s good to see you again, Emily. You and Court. Thanks for having had Sam and me for dinner last night.”

  “You didn’t think I wouldn’t, did you?”

  “It made a lot of difference, our first night here, to both of us. It made us feel warm and welcome, and that’s rather an essential feeling at Christmas-time. Nothing’s going to prevent you and Court from coming to the casino with me tonight, is it?”

  “Nothing could,” Emily said. “I’m anticipating like a kid. Now I really feel like Christmas. Vee and Mimi home and overflowing the house, and now you and Sam here.… Virginia and Mimi are thrilled to the marrow at the thought of having dinner at the hotel with Sam. At least Virginia is. Mimi’s so blasé that her enthusiasm is perhaps a touch milder.”

  “Okay if Sam takes them to the movies afterwards?”

  “I don’t see why not. It doesn’t hurt them to stay up late once in a while during the holidays.”

  “What do you do about Connie?”

  “Françoise Berigot, the tobacconist’s daughter, is coming to babysit. She does, occasionally, when Court and I go out. Though we sometimes takes Connie along when we go up to Kaarlo’s and Gert’s. She’s very good about going to sleep there, no matter how loud we talk or how many records we play.”

  They had reached the hotel now, and Emily took off her skis; they went in through the lower level where Abe put them in one of the ski racks which lined the walls. Then he took Emily’s arm and they went through the big, draughty room, cold and rather dark in spite of the naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. At one end a group of young men was busy waxing skis, and the room was permeated with the pleasant odors of hot wax and damp wool and melting snow and steam heat. Abe turned round so that he was facing Emily and put his hands on her shoulders and stood looking down into her face. But when he spoke his words were incongruous.

  “This Gertrude de Croisenois. Is she good enough for Kaarlo?”

  “Gert?… They adore each other,” Emily started with caution, then: “Oh, I don’t know, Abe. Who’s to say who’s good for someone and who isn’t? It’s a tough situation for them both.”

  “You mean Gertrude’s health?”

  “Yes, that. The whole thing.”

  “She’s not French, is she?”

  “No, American. She married a Frenchman, Henri de Croisenois, and she’s more at home here now than she is at home.”

  “Why don’t she and Kaarlo get married?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. “I think Kaarlo would like to.”

  His hands tightened on her shoulders. “How terribly serious your face can get,” he said. “Your eyes get grayer and grayer and deeper and deeper.… Come on, we’re forgetting that coffee and you’re still shivering.”

  In one of the lounges coffee was being served. Abe led the way through potted palms in enormous Italian pots, blue and yellow and green lions twined about with ivy leaves, to one of the small white-covered tables near the windows, and summoned a waiter. Emily looked up and she could see the enormous hulk of Madame Pedroti, proprietress of the hotel and the Bowens’ landlady, bearing down on them.

  “Ah, Madame Bowen! Monsieur Fieldin
g! You have already become acquainted, I see!”

  “We’re old friends from New York,” Emily said.

  “Ah, but how charming! How delightful! Is everything to your satisfaction, monsieur? Any small way we may be of further service to you?” She clasped her pudgy hands together over her black satin bosom, but moved her fingers slightly so that the diamonds, half hidden in the flesh, glinted in the light.

  “Just see that we have plenty of coffee and cakes.”

  “This instant, monsieur!” She moved slowly away among the tables, swaying a little like a top-heavy ship.

  “Gertrude says she was a collaborationist,” Emily said.

  “Undoubtedly. Things like that aren’t forgotten here, even after all this time, are they?”

  “No. We rent our house from her. She does quite a thriving business in real estate, too. Some of the collabos met with strange and unexplained accidents after the war, but she managed to survive.”

  He smiled across the table at her. “Well, girl, how goes it?”

  “It goes, Abe.”

  “Happy?”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Not more than that?”

  “Ought one to ask for more in this day and age?”

  He mimicked her, but gently. “One ought not to, perhaps, but one does.”

  She looked down at the table. “Don’t laugh at me. A couple of times this winter I’ve felt horribly sorry for myself. I’ve crept off into a hole and wept. And then I think of what other people are going through. In India. And China. And all over. Children with their little bellies bloated with hunger and their legs so weak they can’t stand. People starving and being killed for no reason. And I am ashamed. So I don’t think one should ask for more, Abe. Don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Abe said.

  From the long French windows the cold clear sunshine came into the room and fell in rectangles across the tables and floor. Abe’s head was in a shaft of sunlight and Emily, looking up, saw that his nondescript brown hair was thinning and had perceptibly receded. But his brown eyes were as alert and lively as ever and she thought that his was one of the nicest faces she had ever seen. He took a bright blue pack of Gauloises out of his pocket and held it out to her. “Are you still a non-smoker?”