Home Truths (21 page)

N
ight after night he fought flies, midges, mosquitoes, and moths, most of which expired on his pillow or on the white bedsheet. They seemed determined to perish upon a white expansion – some mountaintop of their own insect literature and mythology – instead of going and dying in a corner where Ramsay need never see them again. One night a dying fly got in his wastebasket and thrashed and buzzed. Every time he thought it had stopped it began again. At luncheon next day he told how it had kept him awake.

“All you had to do was squash it,” said Anne. She was tall, and still growing. She looked at him intently. The others seemed to concur – piggy Peggy (whom he had just interrupted) and Katharine and her friend Nanette Stein.

“Shut up,” said the cook’s little boy, but they turned to English now, putting a stop to Peggy’s recital, in creeping French, of a visit she had made three days before to the market at Vevey. She rushed into English too: “There was nothing Swiss in Vivey, you know, nothing but vigitables.” They were all sick of her. She was Anne’s guest, but Anne had left her once again for the whole morning. “Time went so fast when you were away,” Peggy went on calmly. “Goodness, it was half past ten before I knew
when
it was. I washed my green woolly
and I wrote Mummy and Phyllis and I went for a lovely walk.” A barely perceptible collective sigh went round the table, a collective breath of boredom. “I went farther and farther, straight on and up and on. The road was so steep! I thought, What if I should slip and fall? What a long way it would be! And so I turned and came back. I saw a herd of lovely Jersey cows, each wearing a bill, and I thought, How lovely! The biggest cow had the biggest bill, and the smallest one had the smallest bill. They made heavenly music.”

“Bell?” said Nanette.

“Yes, bill,” said the crimson child. “I thought, Goodness, why haven’t I got a camera here?”

“I would have lent you a camera,” Nanette said. “For such an original photograph.”

Peggy’s flush now seemed merely gratitude that the subject had been taken up. “If they don’t move the cows, I could find them again easily.”

“Aren’t you afraid, going out alone among a herd?” said Nanette. She seemed subordinate, playing up to the others, and Ramsay wondered exactly what her role had been when the old man was alive.

“Not of cows, no, but actually as I went up and up I was thinking of that English lady who was waylaid and killed on a lonely road in Switzerland. It was near here.”

“Never in Switzerland,” said Nanette.

“And then there was that other one, a younger one. I remember it. You know, knocked down and bashed about. I’m sure it was here. I thought, Well, there’s no use hanging about here waiting for
that.”

“Men do attack girls,” said Anne suddenly. The rest were uneasy, for now the ridiculous obsession had shifted from
Peggy, who was a joke, to Anne, whom they were expected to take seriously. Peggy had touched an apprehension so deeply shared by the women that Ramsay felt himself in league with the cook’s child, and suspected of something. For some reason, confirmation that she had been in danger made Peggy cheerful. She passed around a trunk key found on the road half an hour away from the house. No one claimed it, and so she dropped the key back in the pocket of her blazer and went skipping out of the house and across the lawn, fat and maddening, with Anne behind her. The others sat smoking, watching the pair through the dining-room window.

“I hope her holiday is a success this time,” said Katharine gravely.

“It never will be,” said Nanette. “This is as successful as life can ever be for that girl – going to stay with a friend and talking twaddle.”

Katharine waited until she and Ramsay were alone. “I want to ask you something,” she said. “A great favor. Would you be nice to Nanette? Pay attention to her? She’s a lost, unhappy creature. She was a bright young pianist, though you wouldn’t know it now. Moser encouraged her. Do you notice how Anne ignores her? About two years ago Nanette began writing to Anne, who wasn’t quite thirteen. What could I do? Anne had often seen her here. But I didn’t understand why Nanette should write every day to a child half her age.” Moser was too old to be bothered. What Katharine had done, she said, was slip into her daughter’s room and find Nanette’s letters. Anne had gone out early. She found the letters easily; Anne had her father’s Swiss neatness. She saved programs, menus, anything to do with herself. There was a narcissism about Anne.…

“What happened?”

But Katharine would not be rushed. Her own upbringing, she said, had risen like a wave. She felt watched by her own mother, who would never have done such a thing. She almost put the letters back.

This, Ramsay thought, was a lie. Katharine had sat on her daughter’s bed, like her mother before her, like his mother pursuing his father, and read methodically, smoothing the pages on her knee. What Katharine saw, she said (holding up thumb and finger joined, to show with what distaste she had invaded Anne’s life, and how revolting the letters were), made her see that the correspondence must stop. She drove to Ascona to have a word with Nanette, who was discovered sharing a cottage with a gendarme Englishwoman. She described that too: the rage, the tears, the abject guilt. Katharine looked tolerant and sad.

“What’s Nanette doing here now?”

“But she’s a friend – an excellent person. Besides, Anne has outgrown her. I sent Anne to a school where her letters are surveyed. She needed English, and her manners wanted straightening out.”

Reflecting on Anne’s treatment of Peggy, he thought the school wanting. And he still did not see why Nanette should be here, in the house.

He started to write to someone back home, “Honest to God, the
radar
around here,” but tossed it in his basket. When it disappeared from the basket, he remembered something his father had said about women’s curiosity: “You can’t leave a thing around. They
uncrumple
everything.”

N
anette Stein was a slight woman of twenty-seven, with a small, squashed face and a fringe of curly hair that seemed to start up from the middle of her forehead. She watched Ramsay eating his breakfast, and asked fierce questions about the racial problem in America. She told him that when an African concert tour had been organized for her (and a lot of work it had been, Katharine put in, letting Ramsay know who had been the influence behind it), she had been asked to leave South Africa. She had been shunned by British women in Northern Rhodesia. She was proud of it. Music was a waste of time when you saw the condition of the world.

Katharine, shelling peas under a large hat, seemed grave and interested, and nodded without committing herself. Nanette had gone to Barcelona just to help a strike once. She had been arrested and conducted to the frontier. When she saw the mounted policemen, the horses, something in her, a revolt against injustice (she brought her fist down on the table, remembering), made her scream and curse and fling herself against them, pummelling the horses, swearing at the police.

“I know, they say you made a lot of noise,” said Katharine mildly.

Ramsay’s mind snapped off; he tuned them out. He could see how this would appeal to an extremely bright girl of twelve or thirteen. Katharine might have been wrong. Nanette had perhaps been proselytizing impersonally, politically.

“I decided never to touch a piano again,” said Nanette.

No one touched a piano here. He had expected it to be the house of music, but he heard only the very light quarrelling of women. The music room with its records and library of scores might have been surrounded with vines and brambles. Nothing had been added for years. When he asked Nanette to
play for him one evening (his way of answering Katharine’s request to be nice to her), she fetched a tape recorder and they sat in the garden listening to her repeating one movement of a Haydn concerto. When she stumbled she said
“Merde,”
and that was the clearest part of the tape. He thanked her when she turned the machine off.

“It’s about three years old,” she said. “I was trying to make something decent for Katharine.”

“Does she like music?”

Nanette looked completely scandalized, as if he had been angling for gossip. She scowled and said, “I don’t know what either of them liked, finally. He was old when I met him. He came to a concert in Lausanne. It meant a lot to me. He never came out anymore. It was known he hated crowds and towns. If you wanted to play for him, you had to come up here, and then you might get a telegram at the last minute telling you not to come. He had something like asthma. Some days he lay gasping – there.” She pointed to the chair where Ramsay sat. “He sat with a shawl over his knees, looking down at the lights of towns he never went to. I’d played the Prokofiev Second. I hardly dared ask what he thought. He said, ‘Very pretty, my child, very pretty.’ Pretty! It’s so Swiss – everything is
joli
. But
she
fascinated me. She was in green, in a dress like a sari, with the black hair, and the eyes. I felt like a little provincial. She had so much more than anyone, and he was fine-looking, still. I never had seen a couple like them and never will again. And then she called me and said, ‘We would like to see you again.’ Oh, they were such a couple. People fell in love with them. And Moser – of course, he stopped doing anything here. All that wild grass was bad for his asthma. But
before!
He was a conductor and a teacher and …”

“I know.”

“Look at them now. Look at your hero, Jekel, in Berlin. What does he write? A ten-minute opus every other year.”

“Not my hero – my teacher.” Ramsay was secretly reassured. He admired his teacher but did not mind hearing him attacked.

“My mother thinks activity is genius,” he said, and smiled.

“H
e was a bit dotty at the end,” said Nanette, trusting Ramsay. She walked beside him with the docility of a little dog. As they passed the kitchen – Nanette staring straight before her and talking in a low voice – Ramsay turned and saw the face of the cook, which was frightened and haggard, and so exhausted that, although her eyes met Ramsay’s, she did not see he was there. The kitchen was on the north side of the house, under a long balcony; a single light above the stove had already been turned on, and the cook moved toward it and became saffron-colored. “They dote on her little boy and spoil him,” Ramsay said to himself, “but I have never even been told the cook’s name.”

“He was a bit touched, at the end,” Nanette said. “He was fond of Peggy in a senile way, but she was so stupid she didn’t seem to notice she was being pawed. He would offer to buy her presents, and she would simper and say no. Katharine was deathly afraid the child would tell her mother. That’s why she’s asked her back now; she wants to show it is a normal household.”

“Did Moser like living here?”

“It was his house.”

“You don’t feel he lived here. That piano …”

“He didn’t need a piano. He used to go for walks and be lost or tired, and then he would get some farmer to ring her. She was always rushing off in the car to bring him home. She would find him sitting in a hot kitchen, and he would get in the car smelling of cabbages and cooked fat. His clothes reeked of farm kitchens, but that isn’t to say he felt at home there either. He was never comfortable with country people. He would sit with his hands on his walking stick, waiting for Katharine. Katharine was foreign-looking, but she got to them. She would sit down, and she would just begin telling about herself and her bees, never asking questions. Why, I’ve seen farmers come to help her get a swarm back, and you know they don’t bother about each other, let alone strangers. As for him, oh, presently he began to hate walking. And the doctor said he had to walk, he had so much wrong with him. She had to coax him out, bribe him with caramels – because he wasn’t supposed to have them and they were a treat. ‘Just one ten-minute walk,’ I’ve heard her say, ‘ten out, ten back, twenty minutes in all,’ but he was too muddled to count. It was along here.” She meant the path where stones were now hurting Ramsay’s feet. He also was supposed to exercise, but he hated it. He trudged on with Nanette, counting ten out, ten back, twenty minutes in all. She plunged her hands in the pockets of her leather coat. Her Aberdeen Angus hair seemed to him touching. Old maid at twenty-seven, older than Katharine, she let her hands pull at the shape of her coat.

The old man was dragged for a walk along this road, Ramsay reflected, looking at the silken grasses he did not care to identify, though he knew they were not alike. Like Moser, he craved anything sweet. He would have gone to the village, but if he asked for the car, Katharine would know. She would
have driven him, without reproach, but he did not want her to know. Ramsay saw the old man on a bench on this stony road with smuggled chocolate in his mouth. He broke off only one square and let it melt slowly. If the old man had chocolate, then he would look at anything she wanted – at fields and chalets catching the strong evening sunlight, and clouds going pink, and one cloud pressing like a headache on a peak. If he walked to the village – but that was impossible, he never would again, for it was thirty-five minutes down, even on the shortcut by the tracks, and nearly fifty back, because it was so steep. Perhaps she thought he was meditating here on the bench. He was huddled into his cape because the evening was suddenly cold. His intellect dissolved, his mind was like water, his powers centered only on the things to eat he was forbidden to have.

“This is where the picture was taken,” Ramsay said, stopping before the bench. “The old man, with Katharine beside him. Now I know why he looked in exile. He had to go for walks, and he couldn’t eat what he wanted. Like a kid.”

Nanette looked at the bench too. “Everyone in music is childish,” she said. “Our mothers stand beside us when we practice, from the age of four.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Musicians live between their mothers and their confessors, forever and ever. If they lose them, they find substitutes. They invent them.
Marry
them. They marry one or the other. Always two in their lives, you’ll notice. The mother and the confessor.”