Home Truths (19 page)

Wishing for life without its past, for immeasurable distance from the first life on earth, he groped to Sabine and Berlin instead of Katharine and now. In the short daydream, Sabine frowned and turned her head sharply, then felt among the clothes on the floor for a cigarette. She told Ramsay she had had one abortion and would probably never marry. Later, she said she would travel and try a different husband in every country. She was not the doting German girl his father’s crowd talked about in their anecdotes of the war. Her flat was shut up tight except when the janitor’s wife came to clean and flung the windows wide. The janitor’s wife was not concerned about Ramsay (who had not spent an entire night with a girl before) or Sabine dressed in two towels. “I saw a wild beast in the courtyard with black eyes, like an Italian,” she said, scrubbing the sink. This was the only house on the street older than Ramsay, and the courtyard was full of rats and secrets. When it rained the courtyard smelled of ashes. Laughing about the janitor’s wife and the Italian rat, Sabine stood naked before her mirror and said, “Look at how brown I am.” One of her admirers had given her a sunlamp.

The first plant life on earth was spongy and weak; and the sun, in and out of clouds, sucked up every trace of color from Katharine Moser’s hair and hand and eyes. He had seen color paler than Katharine’s hand on angles of brick – was it paint splashed? Car lights washing by? There were no fissures in the brick, no space for fronds and stems, no room for leftovers. Why is brick ugly? Who says it is? Ramsay’s father knows how much gravel per cubic centimeter is needed for several different
sorts of concrete; he wrote his thesis on this twenty years ago, when he came back from the war.

“In Berlin,” Ramsay started to say – something about bright weeds growing – but Katharine saw a magpie. “This is their season,” she said. “They prey on fledglings.” She told of the shrike, the jay, but he was thinking about the black, red-brown, smoke-marked courtyard in Berlin, and Sabine, shivering because she was suddenly cold, tender when it was too late, when there was no need for tenderness, asking what she considered serious questions in her version of English: “Was that all? Worth it? All that important?” She was not looking into space but at a clock she could not bother winding that was stopped forever at six minutes to three.

He and Katharine walked back to the lawn and the breakfast table, and she tipped her head like Sabine’s, though not in remembrance of pleasure, only because the sun was strong again. She spoke to the cook’s little boy, in straw hat and red shorts, pretending to garden; he was at their feet. Then behind and above them a branch rocked. It was Katharine’s cat attacking a nest. The fury of the baffle could be measured by the leaves rustling and thrashing in the windless day. A cat face the size of the moon must be over the nest; the eyes and the paws – there was no help for it – came through sunny leaves. The sky was behind the head. “Stop him, stop him!” Ramsay screamed like a girl or like a child.

“Pip! Naughty Pip!” She clapped her hands. “He’s got one, I’m afraid.” She was not disturbed. Neither was the cook’s little boy, though he sucked his lip and stared up at the tree a moment more. “It is the cat’s nature,” she said. “Some things die – look at the spruce.” (To encourage him.) “We think it is
dying, but those fresh bits are new.” The trees were devoured by something he did not understand – a web, a tent of gray, a hideous veil. The shadows netted on the breakfast table, on cups and milk and crumpled napkins, seemed a web to catch anything – lovers, stretched fingers, claws. He tried to see through Katharine’s eyes: the cat had its nature, and every living thing carried a name.

“Do you notice that scent, Douglas? Does it bother you? It is the acacia flowering down the valley. Some people mind it. It gives them headaches. Poor Moser,” she said, of her late husband, the conductor, who had died at Christmas and would have been seventy-four this summer. “When he began having headaches he thought all trees were poisonous. He breathed through a scarf. That was the form his fears took.”

“It’s only natural to be scared if you’re dying,” said Ramsay. He supposed this; until this moment he had not given it a thought.

“Old people are afraid,” she said, as if she and Douglas were alike, without a time gap. (He had reckoned the difference in their ages to be twenty-five years.) “Although we’ll know one day,” she said, as if they would arrive at old age together. Lowering her voice, in case her adolescent daughter was spying and listening, she told how Moser had made her stop smoking. He did not want her to make a widower of him. He had chosen to marry Katharine because she was young, and he wished to be outlived. He was afraid of being alone. She, a mere child then, a little American girl nearly thirty but simple for her age, untalented, could not even play the piano, had been chosen by the great old man. But he forgot about being alone in eternity. “I told him,” she said, putting the wild flowers in a glass of water on the breakfast table. “Unless two
people die at exactly the same moment, they can never meet again.” With such considerations had she entertained the ill old man. He had clasped her hands, weeping. His headache marched from the roots of his hair to his eyebrows, down the temples, around the eyes.

Ramsay was careful how he picked his way through this. For all his early dash and promise he was as Canadian as his father, which is to say cautious and single-minded. He had a mother younger than Katharine, who began all her conversations on a deep and intimate level, as if coming up for air was a waste of time. That made him more prudent still. He said, “Those the acacias?”

“The plum trees? They can’t be what you mean, surely. That’s the cuckoo you’re hearing, by the way. If you count the calls, you can tell how many years before you get married. Peggy and Anne count the whole day.” He considered the lunatic cuckoo, but having before him infinite time, he let the count trail off. The cook’s small boy, squatting over one mauled, exhausted, eternally transplanted geranium, heard Ramsay and Katharine, but they might have been cuckoos too for all he cared. The only English words he knew were “What’s that for?,” “Shut up,” and “Idiot.” This child, who was a pet of Katharine’s, lunched with the family. Until Ramsay had come, a few days ago, the boy had been the only man in the house. He sat on a cushion, an atlas, and a history of nineteenth-century painting, so as to reach the table, and he bullied and had his way; he had been obeyed and cherished by Katharine Moser and her daughter Anne; by fat Peggy Boon, who was Anne’s friend; and by Nanette Stein, who was Katharine’s. Now Ramsay was here, tall as a tree to the stooping child. When Ramsay said something to him, in French, he did not look, he
went deaf, he muttered and sang to himself; and Ramsay, who had offered dominoes, and would have let the boy win the game, limped on up to the house, feeling wasted.

P
eggy Boon, fourteen, too plump and too boring to be a friend for Anne – unless Anne, already, chose her friends for contrast – had been mooning about the lawn ever since the storm ended, watching for Ramsay to come up the path. She let him look at the Mosers’ view a full minute, and then stepped round from behind a tree. She had been making up a poem, she said flutily. No one made up poetry; Ramsay had never seen anyone making up poems. He glared over her head. She stood there, straight of hair, small of eye, fat arms across new breasts she was flattening at night with a silk scarf – this information from Katharine, by way of Anne. She was an English rose, she feared silence, and pronounced her own name “Piggy.”

“Everyone’s out,” she said, coloring deeply for no reason he cared to know. “Anne is playing tennis. I’m not keen … so … Nanette, well, I don’t know
where
she is. She didn’t say. Mrs. Moser went to visit the bees in case the thunder frightened them. She tells them everything. When Mr. Moser died she told the bees. She told them you were coming, and she’s told them she is moving your things out of the house and into Mr. Moser’s garden pavilion, and that you are his … his …” Unfolding her arms, stooping, she clutched at grass, as though weeding; she straightened up, she took courage, and announced,
“You
are Mr. Moser’s spiritual heir.” He was not listening to her. “If you don’t tell the bees everything, Mrs. Moser says, they go away. But my mother,” she added urgently, “says this is nonsense.”

Like all English voices, hers sounded to him underdeveloped. He stared down at the cardigan, drooping and empty-armed, at the tight belt and bulging seat of what he supposed was a dainty frock. He had avoided one sort of Canadian girl all his life, and here was the pure, the original mold. He asked, “Did you know Adrien Moser?” It seemed impossible.

“Oh goodness, yes. This is the fourth time I’ve been here.” She was gasping, as if he had splashed her with seawater. “I’ve been here a summer, and a Christmas, and an Easter, and
this
summer. Of course, he’s not here now, is he?” If only Ramsay would say, “He must have been charming” – something like that. She pretended he had: “Oh he
was
charming! He used to do so many kind things. Once he offered to buy me a bicycle. I refused, of course. But imagine! He’d hardly known me five minutes then.” Chewing on grass, airy and worldly now, she said, “I’ve been wondering.… No one’s told me. Are you a composer?”

“I’m studying with Jekel in Berlin.” And I am his best and strongest pupil, and if you knew anything you would know that, his mind continued. He had heard, for years, “Are you really only twelve? … only sixteen?” The voices had stopped; no one is ever likely to say, “Are you really only twenty?”

“Don’t you want a chair?” said Peggy, wiping the seat of one with her cardigan sleeve. “You’re not supposed to stand too long. I’ve heard … there’s something wrong.”

“Nothing’s
wrong
. I was in a smash-up about two years ago, that’s all. This girl was driving,” he said. “It wasn’t even her own car. There was all hell with the insurance. No one was killed.”

“Oh,
good.”
Having offered Moser’s kindness, and had news of Ramsay’s health, Peggy said, “Do you like Switzerland?”
But she had lost him. Katharine Moser, with her cat in attendance, came toward them, smiling. The shadows that bent over her hair were cast by trees whose bark was like the skin of a snake. He had imagined another face for her; until a few days ago, he had known her only in letters. He had given her soft hair streaked with white, and humorous, intelligent eyes. His idea of a great man’s wife was very near a good hospital nurse. Even now, when he thought, I am in Moser’s house, he was grateful to the intelligent hospital nurse, who did not exist; at least she was not Katharine. Her eyes were green, uptilted. The straight parting in her hair was coquetry, to show how perfectly proportioned was her face. The only flaws he had seen were the shape of her nose, slightly bulbous at the tip, and the too straight body, which was a column for the fine head. The bees’ scent, which clung to her hands and dress, was like incense. She was impressive, beautiful, fragrant, and until she lifted her arm to point to the pavilion where he would now sleep, and saw the skin of the arm, palely freckled, spotted, slack, he almost accepted her own idea of herself, which was that she was guileless, a child bride, touchingly young.

“I wanted to know you before I put you in the pavilion. You do understand why? It mustn’t be a museum, but I want it kept alive just by people he liked, or might have loved. It’s furnished with – What is it, Peggy?” The smitten girl was following them across the grass. Katharine watched Peggy Boon skip off (pretending joy) and become excluded. “That girl is having a rotten time. My daughter is so rude,” she said, and sighed, and forgot all about it. “Now, Moser’s bed and his tiled stove came from the curé’s room in a château. I bought them at an auction.”

He ducked his head to enter the pavilion. The first thing he
saw was the piano, small and gaily colored, looking like the piano sometimes given a little girl for her first lessons. He could not see the name of the maker, which had been covered over with paint.

“Those engravings belonged to a fervent German monarchist who collected caricatures of the new rich, unaware that he was mocking himself. Moser liked objects that came from rich houses, providing they looked poor. He always thought he might die of hunger any day. He saved screws and tacks and elastic bands – you’ll find boxes full of rubbish, all labelled. Moser told me that the walls of his family’s house were covered with rugs they would not put on the floor, and that there were sheets over the rugs to protect them from light. I hope you will like your bed.”

The bed was carved and bore a coat of arms and an angel’s head. The angel had a squint; Ramsay could not tell if it was looking reproachfully to Heaven or out of the window. The pavilion had been prepared in secret, while Ramsay was down in Montreux at a movie. He saw roses, a reading lamp, and then he saw the last photograph of the old man. The old man sat on a bench, in sunlight, holding a scarf. Katharine stood with one hand on his shoulder. Moser’s eyes were wild and fixed.

“This is a great picture,” he said, taking it up. “It was in the papers when he died. Someone in Berlin said it looked like a famous picture of Freud going into exile.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that. Moser was never in exile. He died in his native country.” She shifted ornaments on the washstand. A shell porcelain soap dish was moved from the extreme left to the far right. The vase of roses took its place. “Now, there are things you can look at, if you want to. Testimonials. All the obituaries. Boxes of caramels – I
found them after his last stroke. He loved them, but wasn’t allowed to have any. When we found the empty boxes I knew he’d been eating on the quiet. I’ve kept them – I don’t know why. This one wasn’t opened.” When she spoke of something she touched it. When she finished speaking she touched Ramsay’s arm.

“Here’s what they’ll find after me,” he said, and tumbled out of his pockets the marbles, the Yo-yo, and the sponge ball that were part of the reëducation of his injured hands. He was arrogant, he never doubted; it was a joke only in part. When Douglas Ramsay died, his Yo-yo and the plastic marbles would be placed on a shelf and labelled and dated, and dusted every day. He had never had parents; there was nothing behind him, nothing to come; the first plant life on earth had never existed; the cities would be reduced to mossy boulders; he would never have children; he would be mourned nevertheless. The curé’s bed, Moser’s bed, was Ramsay’s bed. “How did he sleep in it?” they would say. “He was so big, and the bed is so small!”