Onyx (20 page)

They had been in London eight days before they dined together. After the dirty dishes were wheeled out, Hugh cracked a pecan, carefully extracting the nutmeat. “I have some news, Tom. Major Stuart is dead.” He spoke without emotion, although inverse grief afflicted him as acutely as ever. “He died of cancer more than a year ago.”

After a long pause Tom said, “I'm not putting on an armband.” His eyes remained on Hugh.

Antonia
, they were both thinking.
Antonia
.

“I'm not in mourning, either,” Hugh said.

“You haven't finished.”

“She lives here.”

Tom's face went slack. His pupils expanded. He rose, moving like a sleepwalker to the window, pulling back the heavy drape. A spring shower had broken: streetlamps and the lights of carriages and motorcars were reflected on the shimmering black streets. “You mean London?” he asked finally.

“Yes. Number twenty Rutland Gate. It's close by.”

“Why here?”

“I don't know. She married an American. Claude Hutchinson. He's dead too. She's a widow.”

“Hutchinson … she knew him before … in Detroit.”

It was Hugh's turn for surprise. “She did?”

“She said he was nice but stodgy, dull. She married him?”

“Yes.” Hugh poured two brandies. “That's all I know. That, and she was generous enough to send us the blueprints.”

“
She
?”

“Yes.” Hugh went to Tom with a snifter.

Tom ignored the drink. “I thought it was the Major.”

“She asked that you not know.”

“Then why are you telling me now?” Tom said.

Hugh did not know what to answer. He had sworn not to tell his brother, and yet here he was, in the most calculating way, blurting out this news. “We're brothers, aren't we, Tom? And brothers don't keep secrets from each other.” He turned away, quickly, knowing that his duplicity would appear obvious to Tom.

But Tom, with a dazed look, was walking stiffly to his bedroom and didn't even hear Hugh's reply.

III

The next morning—Saturday—was unseasonably warm: the sun shone in a clear-washed blue sky. In Rutland Gate, an early Victorian square off Hyde Park, tall, creamy houses linked shoulders around an iron-fenced private garden where pruned elms rustled their new leaves above the daffodils swaying in crescent-shaped beds. Tom's steps seemed to bounce on the glittery pavement, but his smile was dreamy: Hugh's disclosure quite literally had stunned him, and he was drifting in a moony sea of amorous recollections.

Coming to number twenty, he climbed the steps and halted. The brass nameplate was engraved:
Mrs. Claude Hutchinson
. At this well-polished reality his dreamy smile faded. This was her name. Not Antonia Dalzell, a vibrant girl in her teens, but Mrs. Claude Hutchinson. And he was a married man, contentedly married to the person in this world that he considered his best friend. He and Antonia were not the two people they had been ten years before. He touched the nameplate, recoiling at the thought of their last scene together.
What am I going to say to her? What sort of apologies can I make
? He felt a stabbing pain above his eye. It never occurred to him to go back down the freshly washed steps.

Abruptly he raised the mermaid doorknocker.

The door was opened by a short, pear-shaped manservant in an alpaca jacket.

“Is Mrs. Hutchinson home?”

“What's it in regard to?” the servant replied, looking at Tom without raising his eyelids.

Tom forgot he was undisputed owner of a company capitalized at over twelve million dollars. “I'm a friend of hers,” he said, berating himself for not halting at that florist's or—better yet—the elegant confectioner's across from the hotel. “I had business with her late uncle.” He extracted a card from his leather cardcase.

T. K. BRIDGER

ONYX AUTOMOBILE COMPANY

DETROIT, MICHIGAN

The man examined it and then said, “Will you come inside, sir.”

He led Tom up a flight of stairs, leaving him in double reception rooms that ran from the front of the house to the rear: the partitions were folded back, and Tom, alone, stared around. There were no draperies, only lace curtains that curved out in the breeze. On the shining parquet floors, dark and carpetless, rested random chairs and two low sofas slipcovered in pale linen. A copper tub of massed flowers was placed casually near the window. The room had a spareness that deflected the eye to the numerous paintings, and these were brightly colored vistas, rosy family groups, flower gardens, unposed naked women. Naïve paintings drenched in innocent light, rather than dark—and valuable-looking—hues. The drawing room had the happy, transitory charm of a tented summer pavilion.

Tom could not help recalling that even when they were very poor, Maud had saved for heavy, durable furnishings; her motto:
Good things are cheaper in the long run because they last
. Briefly he wondered about Antonia's finances, then reminded himself that she kept a butler and lived in an exclusive square off the park.

A child's laughter rang through the rear windows.

Tom swung around, bewildered.
A child
? How could he not have taken that possibility into account?

A shriller cry. “No! Justin, no! I want my turn over!”

Children
, he amended, going to the long windows.

Below was a small city garden whose walls were hidden by white-blossomed rhododendron bushes. The sunlit part of the lawn was covered by an Oriental rug. And there was Antonia. On her stomach, propped up by her elbows, one leg raised, the pump adangle from her stockinged toes, a pink and white striped skirt falling back to expose a frothy edge of petticoats: from this distance she appeared unchanged by the decade. She faced two children across a gameboard. From his view above and behind the pair, Tom could tell only that the boy had Antonia's shining black hair and was a good deal older than Caryll, while the girl—almost a baby she was—had hair the unusual clear, molten gold of a California poppy. All three laughed as the tiny girl lunged to wrest the dice cup from the boy, who held her off easily.

Tom had the sensation of looking at yet another artlessly happy painting, one into which he would soon be welcomed.

He heard the doors open below. Antonia, pulling her skirt over her ankles—those pretty, delicate ankles—rolled over, sitting. The servant appeared and handed her a card.

A cannon shot might have exploded in the garden.

Even from this distance Tom could see the terror in her eyes as she glanced up at the window—he was positive she could see him through the Brussels lace. Scrambling to her feet, she pulled the boy to his. He came to her shoulder, and something about the boy's height momentarily nagged at Tom. Then Antonia swooped at the baby, who kicked with a small white boot in protest at being lifted. A collie rose from the shade, barking around them as they disappeared.

Tom stood motionless, peering down at the empty garden where the gameboard had spilled onto the lawn. He hadn't been sure what would happen in the way of reconciliation, but the disparity between this cataclysm he had caused and the night's romantically adolescent maunderings made him physically ill. If she hated him this way, why had she returned his blueprints? The manservant's heavy tread echoed up the stairs.

“Mrs. Hutchinson is out, sir.”

“But I just saw her in the—”

“I'm sorry. She's not home.”

“When will she be back?”

“If you'll follow me.”

Tom wiped his forehead.
I've managed fine for years without seeing her
, he thought as he went down the stairs,
so if she still hates me, the hell with her, it doesn't matter, she's nothing to me anymore
. Yet he was remembering the sweet dower of her naked body against his, seeing her pale, drawn face in his dingy apartment. His thoughts came in violent bursts that had nothing to do with indifference.
The hell with her
.

IV

He did not tell Hugh of the debacle, nor did he mention Antonia, but she occupied his mind, center stage, tormenting him like a lecherous succubus in nightmares that were the antithesis of his earlier tenderly erotic dreams. She seduced him with unspeakably loathsome degeneracies, she flagellated him with doubts and self-contempt, she caused his intractably foul humor.

He interviewed the candidates Hugh had selected for the Birmingham dealership, rejecting all three. Monty drove him to building sites endowed with every specification he had outlined: he found fault with each.

At the end of the week Monty said in his most offhand tone, “We're going to the Comstocks' tomorrow night, a ball, and they've asked to meet you.”

A
no
was on Tom's tongue, but weary of his own negative despotism, he replied, “Sounds fine to me, Monty.”

The door to the bathroom was open, and Hugh watched his brother rinse one of those new Gillette safety razors. “I wonder how many strings Edwina Edge had to pull to get this invitation.”

“Why see plots everywhere?” Tom said sourly. “You're a fox, but that doesn't mean everyone is.”

“The Comstocks are in Court circles, Monty is a drayman's son, and in this country the twain never meet. The Edges are out to impress you.”

“Why would they want to impress me?” asked Tom.

Hugh stared at his brother. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that Tom, in his way an ascetic man, had never appreciated the silky steel of power. He ignored its enjoyable aspects. He had very little idea that in ruling thousands of lives his whims and moods were catered to and feared. “The way your disposition's been lately, Edge is positive that British Onyx is a dead issue. Or his part in it, anyway. She's proving to you that her husband is worthy.”

“Good thing you've explained it. Until now I just figured they were dragging me along to a party I didn't want to go to,” Tom said, and began to dress in his new evening clothes: this morning a tailor had been hastily summoned.

V

Oval mirrors on the broad staircase reflected footmen in crimson livery as well as the ascending guests, who spoke to one another in subdued tones: Edwina Edge maintained her pace a step ahead of Tom and her husband. She was two years older than Monty, and in her drab russet lace, her face marked with furrows from nose to mouth, that intractably cold look in her eyes, she might have been ten years older. Yet her air of unflappable assurance convinced her friends that dowdiness and age were the feminine qualities prized by Montgomery Edge—and indeed, Monty was glancing with proud fondness at his wife's angular back. Just as Hugh figured, she had maneuvered this invitation: ambition being the bond between the Edges, they worked more closely than most couples.

Across the rear of the second floor stretched the finely proportioned ballroom with its intermingled resplendencies and shabbiness. Black-insulated wiring cut across the beautifully carved rose garlands of the paneling, gilt eroded from the line of fluted columns, and watermarks stained the magnificent, domed ceiling. By and large the guests were less lavishly turned out than their counterparts would have been at a New York dance: some of the men's clothes were dated, and some of the women's gowns were by no means elaborate, while much of the jewelry was set in the heavier styles of other eras. The mélange of wealth and carelessness could be carried off only by a long-entrenched aristocracy.

Tom, uncomfortable at large social functions, stalked down the three shallow steps to where the host and hostess stood greeting their guests. Lord and Lady Comstock were a stout couple in their fifties, he with a white walrus mustache, she double-chinned, both smiling cheerfully. Edwina presented Tom.

“Ahh, Bridger,” said Lord Comstock, pushing back his shock of gray hair. “I saw you race once. A place with some barbaric name. Rippie something.”

“Rappahannock.”

“Exactly. You drove that slate Onyx like a shot. Are you giving England a chance to see you do your stuff?”

“Sure. It's the way I push the product.”

Monty and Edwina stiffened at this gaffe, but Lord and Lady Comstock laughed heartily. “That's right,” said the hostess. “You
make
the little monsters.”

More at ease, Tom moved into the ballroom. The eddying conversations, the calls and cries of greeting, the footsteps on the waxed floor, made a deafening thrum, and Edwina moved closer to point out the distinguished guests: Prince Louis Battenberg held court in one corner, and in an alcove Princess Louise and her husband, the Duke of Fife, looked slightly bored with their entourage.

A burst of masculine laughter drew Tom's attention to a window embrasure. Five men, three in brilliant uniforms, circled a tall, slender woman in cream silk. She wore no tiara in her China-black hair, her only jewelry a strand of small sapphires around her throat. Tom had caught her in profile. The wall fixture formed a path of light along the delicate contours of her nose, which wiggled as she told what must have been an amusing anecdote.

It took Tom several beats to recognize Antonia, for this was not his solitary love; this Antonia was a creature born to captivate groups, to refract her joie de vivre as a diamond flashes light. She raised her hand, a vivid Highland-fling gesture, and the men roared again.

Edwina noticed the direction of his gaze. “She's a countrywoman of yours, Mr. Bridger.”

“Who? Where?” Monty asked. “Ahh. Mrs. Hutchinson. Delightful woman, delightful. Would you like to be introduced?”

“I know her,” Tom replied. “I was a mechanic at her uncle's factory.”

As Monty turned crimson, a loud waltz burst from the minstrels' gallery. Gentlemen placed hands over shining white waistcoats, bowing to ladies, and couples whirled onto the dance floor: the regular beat of shoes, the jangle of spurs, the rush of skirts, sounded over voices and music. Tom pushed through the crowd to the window embrasure.