In Search of Love and Beauty (23 page)

It was peaceful and good to be in the dark. He was asleep before she was. Through the bare window she could look straight up to Mark's house glimmering on its hill, a heavenly vision.

It wasn't only physically that Natasha felt herself to be inadequate. She also failed to come up to other people's emotional intensities—especially at the Academy where every word, gesture, and detail of daily life was invested with a deep charge. There was the question of bedrooms. These were situated on the second and third floors of the house, and their occupation was a matter of finely graded prestige. The second-floor bedrooms were kept up the way they must have been by the original owners, with canopied beds, mahogany
wardrobes, dressers, fine lawn curtains, quilts and counterpanes, Brussels carpets. The third-floor bedrooms were bare except for utilities; the wooden floors had no carpets, many of the rooms had two beds in them, and one of them three. Still, they were more prestigious than the attic where most of the students were housed.

Newcomers were always made comfortable on the second floor, but before long they were moved up to the third to make room for other newcomers or for guests. There was considerable shuffling to and fro between this third floor and the attic. Some students were allowed to stay in the third-floor bedrooms indefinitely—there was one elderly Englishwoman, a Miss Kettlebury, who had never been asked to vacate. Some, moved up to the attic, were allowed to move down again, changing places with others who, for no reason apparent to them, were told overnight to pack up and go to the attic. These arrangements and rearrangements generated considerable feeling.

One day Natasha was on kitchen duty with a woman called Janet, who had just been relegated to the attic from the third floor. The kitchen was as gloomy and cumbersome as the rest of the house, and since Leo did not believe in spending on laborsaving devices, it still had many of the inconveniences of a Victorian kitchen. It was below ground level, and the sunlight was filtered through burdocks before entering by way of the barred rectangular windows. Natasha was cutting onions, and Janet was washing spinach; a big cauldron of stew simmered on the stove, giving out pleasant smells of fresh vegetables, herbs, and cloves.

Janet had the tap on over the sink, so it took some time before Natasha realized that the sounds she heard were not only of water running but also of Janet sobbing. Sobbing was not unusual at the Academy, but Natasha never could get used to it. “Oh, gee, Janet,” she said. Tears were running down her own cheeks, from the onions she was cutting.

“Leo's right!” Janet broke out at last. “I
deserve
to be in the attic.”

“But, Janet, it's only that they needed your room.”

“Then why me? Why not Shirley? How is she. better than I am?” Irresistibly, she went off into Shirley's bad qualities—emotional dependency, and inability to sustain a relationship—also, a particular incident where Shirley had made free with Janet's organic night cream. Halfway, she pulled herself up: “There you are, you see, there you have a good example of me; what sort of a beast I am.”

“Janet, no,” Natasha said. “You're upset, that's all; you're not a bad person.” It was what she usually said to people—the Academy constantly rang with self-accusation—and they always refuted her with a list of their character delinquencies.

Janet went right back to her childhood when she had often been mean to others and had been noted for her neurotic behavior. At school she had had crushes—searing attachments—on teachers and other girls, and she understood now that this was to make up for the terrible lack in her childhood when her mother failed to love her. Janet had adored her mother, and had longed to be like her when she grew up, but instead she took after her father's family where the men and women tended to look alike, all retaining the heavy features of their family portraits. It seemed to Janet that her mother disliked her for her disappointing appearance, so was it any wonder that from loving her Janet grew to resent her and even worse. But all her life after that—it had long been made clear to her by a series of psychiatric and other healers—she had been in search of love and beauty and, in the course of this quest, had recklessly entangled herself in one harmful relationship after another.

The last of these, just before she had come to Leo, had been with an Iranian—or was she an Iraqi?—girl who claimed to be a princess and certainly looked like one. They had met
at a benefit performance that Janet had helped organize. Janet had often involved herself in good causes but never for long, because she couldn't stand the internal politics or the people who sat on the committees with her. The Princess, who was a singer, a chanteuse, had donated her services for one such performance—actually, it was a good opportunity for her because the committee members and the people who bought the tickets were the sort to help further her career. The Princess was very single-minded about her career. Janet admired her for it, how she made it her business to get information about every single person she met, who they were, what sort of family, what sort of contacts they had.

“She was amazing,” Janet said, “the way she'd find out everything, and often about people who couldn't possibly ever be any use to her at all. But if I said that, she'd get mad at me. She said I didn't know what it was like to be on your own and have to make your own way—and I'd say ‘But you're
a princess,'
and then she'd get really mad at me.”

The fact was she was often so irritated with Janet that she couldn't stand to have her around. Janet was sad but understanding; she knew she did have an irritating effect on people. During the days that the Princess banished her, Janet would just stay in the room she had taken in a women's hotel in Manhattan and wait to be called. She knew that sooner or later—usually it wasn't more than a day or two—her friend would telephone and be very sweet and forgiving. On these occasions, she always had some task for Janet—one that was mainly symbolical, signifying reconciliation, but also practical, such as buying provisions and cooking for a party the Princess was giving in the evening. Janet ran around happily, tirelessly, and arrived on the Princess's doorstep dragging a little shopping cart piled high behind her, and after hastily collecting her kiss of forgiveness, she rushed into the kitchen to start cooking.

The Princess had installed herself in someone's penthouse
apartment—Janet never knew whose it was—a brand-new place in a flashy glass block that wasn't quite finished yet. There was practically no furniture, so it was very good for giving big parties and all sorts of people came. Janet did not know any of them, and anyway most of them were younger than she was. She went helplessly from group to group, not finding anyone to talk to or who wanted to talk to her. She knew herself entirely unfit to be there—and worse, understood that the Princess knew it too, that she saw her wandering around, large, dowdy, and awkward, and felt ashamed to have her there. Nevertheless, in her kindness, she tried to draw Janet out, introduced her to people and urged her to talk about herself—or rather, about her family connections —she gave her such a good start on that, so that the other guests would know who Janet was, in spite of her unpromising appearance. But Janet could never carry it any further; she was left tongue-tied, wringing her hands—a cook's hands, a gardener's—and shifting from one large foot to the other, so that the Princess could not bear the sight and turned away.

All this was painful, but a thousand times worse was the jealousy Janet felt toward the Princess's lovers. She had absolutely no right to feel like that, for there was nothing of that sort between her and the Princess. And, moreover, her friend made no secret of her lovers before Janet; she was completely open and aboveboard. She would even call Janet in while she was in bed with someone—in the big onyx and brass bed, which was the only piece of furniture in the room—and she would ask Janet would she be very sweet and make some coffee? She always explained to her companion that there was no one in the world who could make coffee like Janet, so fresh and fragrant. And Janet would make this coffee and bring it—but not with good grace, not with a quiet heart, not with satisfaction in being able to serve the person she loved—no, but burning with torment and fury. And once—the last time—it had been so bad she could not control herself. She had gone
into the bathroom and, taking the razor with which the Princess shaved her legs, she had begun to slash at her wrists—so wildly and clumsily that the blood had spurted up on the mirror and over the Princess's towels. Then she had swept a shelf of glass vials to smash on the floor so that they would hear the noise and come running. Well, of course, the Princess had been furious; but also calm and cool, and she had phoned for an ambulance and then she had called Janet's brother in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to tell him what hospital Janet was going to be taken to, and that he had better get himself down there and take care of her.

“That's the sort of person I am,” Janet told Natasha with a shudder at herself. “I still wake up at night thinking I'm in that bathroom again, smashing the glass and cutting at my wrists—and all the time, what I really wanted to do was run in that bedroom and murder and kill them. So don't you ever say to me again that I'm not a terrible person, because I'm worse than anyone you'll ever know.” She dropped the spinach she was washing and sobbed into her wet, raw hands.

Natasha regarded her with wonder and some admiration: so much strength of love! Her own feelings—for instance, for Mark—seemed in comparison a very small, still pool.

While everyone else at the Academy was busy looking into themselves, Natasha spent long hours looking out the attic window. Up till now she had lived only in the city and her awareness of the changing seasons had been confined to the spindly trees that lined the streets and put out frail tufts of green in the spring. But from the attic she looked out over summer trees and ripened fields and hills; and watched it all changing—first blazing, then fading, and falling and sleeping under snow. Then the trees and the hills were black, the river and lakes frozen, and everything just lay there waiting for the whole process to start again.

All this time Mark's house was progressing. Much of it
was still obscured by scaffolding and building materials; the windows gaped, the interior was ripped open: but by the time one cycle of the seasons had gone round and it was the second summer of Mark's occupancy, the house, rearing above the shimmering trees, was no longer a corpse sinking into the earth but new growth pushing out of it.

Jeff remained in his gatekeeper's cottage. Mark still came every weekend, although after that first summer he and Jeff had ceased their activity in the grass. Never more than an extension of what the insects did through the warm nights, it had died away with them. On a human level, they remained good friends. But by the second autumn Jeff was getting restless, for by then the house had reached a stage that didn't interest him. The rough construction work was over; the painters and decorators were moving in, and Mark was beginning to drive around to auctions to bid for pieces of furniture dating from the period of his house.

One day when Natasha was with her friends in Jeff's cottage, Stephanie told her that Jeff wanted to leave. She and Jeff were on the bed and Natasha on a velvet armchair that Jeff had salvaged out of an abandoned house. It was smelly with age, dirt, and damp, but Natasha felt comfortable. Jeff had stuffed his wood stove with kindling and it blazed away and made the little stone room warm and snug. While waiting for the giant on the hill to awaken, the entire life of the estate appeared to have contracted into the space of its gatekeeper's cottage.

“He wants me to go with him,” Stephanie went on. Although he sat next to her on the bed, she spoke as though Jeff weren't there—which in a way he wasn't. He was engrossed in figuring out an astrological chart.

“Where's he going?” Natasha said.

“Where are you going?” Stephanie asked but had to answer Natasha herself: “To Arizona. He's got a friend there who's started a stone-crushing plant.” Stephanie swept her
hair up to the top of her head and twisted it into a new style. “I wouldn't mind going to Arizona,” she reflected, but after that she didn't seem to want to talk about it any further. Natasha had noticed this about both Jeff and Stephanie: they broached ideas and plans and then dropped them—not out of lack of interest but as if to let them germinate in regions deeper than their conscious minds. Meanwhile, outside, a chill wind blew through the layers of dead leaves on the ground and crackled them, and also through those still left on the trees, so that they sighed and dropped like tears.

Was it the season that was making Natasha feel sad? She longed for things to stay as they were, and above all for people to stay where they were: for a permanence that she imagined to have been there in the past. One only had to look at the furniture of the past—those heavy beds and sideboards—to know that it belonged to people who expected not to have to move. Only permanence wasn't the right word: she had no word for what she meant—what she longed for—and only knew that it was something other than this cottage Jeff had fixed up and was already planning to abandon, and those loosely attached leaves out there ready to fall at a touch of the wind.

The door opened, letting the wind in, and Mark stood there stamping mud off his shoes. His eyes met Natasha's and for a moment they looked at each other fully. This look between them was a lifelong one, as were the feelings it engendered in her. Through the open door she could see the wind whirling the leaves around and it was treating the clouds in the same way, driving them across the sky like sheep to be penned in for the winter. But with Mark's entrance her feeling of shiftlessness and impermanence vanished and did not return as long as he was there.