Small World (37 page)

Lady Maggie noticed the fidgeting nurse and sent her away, reminding her that it was time for church. A few minutes later, the nurse, who apparently squatted when Lady Maggie said ‘Shit,’ could be glimpsed stumping down the lane in a black hat and coat. Roger refined his sense of this old noblewoman: She might be physically frail, but she had an iron fist.

A little later, Dolly pinched his thigh playfully. It hurt. Roger jumped and almost fell out of his chair when she said, ‘Roger, darling, would you take a picture of Lady Maggie?’

The old woman laughed. 'Might be the last one, eh, Dorothy? Well, I’m not vain. I don’t mind the world seeing what a ruin I’ve become. You sit next to me, and we’ll be in it together.’

Roger clutched the minimizer in its carrycase. Suddenly, he was sweating copiously. The sweets he’d consumed rolled around his stomach ominously. He wanted to wrap the straps of the case around Dolly’s fragile neck. What the hell was she thinking of? Fumbling with the case, he giggled self-consciously.

‘Guess what?’ he squeaked. ‘I don’t have any film. ’ He blushed.

Dolly’s eyes sparked at him. The old lady’s face fell, if it were possible for it to fall any more than it already had under the influence of gravity. Despite disclaimers, she
was
vain.

Roger was miserable. He thought her a handsome old lady, and she had been nice to him. But Dolly was going to take this out of his hide.

Soon after that, they took their leave. Dolly promised to see Lady Maggie again before they left London. The old woman’s obvious loneliness was rather touching.

In the hotel, Dolly slammed her bedroom door on him decisively, after refusing to speak to him on the ride back. It was exasperating and he became, un-Rogerlike, thoroughly pissed off. He ordered an enormous meal from room service and ate every bite, though it was overcooked and tasteless. Then he ordered up some beer, which wasn’t so great either.

Roger took the old woman’s call the next day, because Dolly had left early to spend the day at a fancy women’s club called the Sanctuary. She still wasn’t talking to him. Lady Maggie didn’t have the same compunctions. He was invited to come and call on her, even if Dolly was unavailable.

‘Bring some film this time,’ she told him in her honeyed English voice, and laughed. It was a wonderful laugh. Roger thought she must have been a wowzer of a broad, once upon a time.

To his own astonishment, he heard himself saying, ‘Yes. Yes, I will.’

‘But let’s go out,’ she proposed.

He was relieved. He would buy a real camera and really take her picture. Nothing could happen in a public place. She was, after all, just another lonely old woman, pulling the same strings his mother pulled in him. She wanted to go out and visit the world again. He was his mother’s son still, and could see no harm in it.

He was happy to oblige.

She arrived by cab at the hotel, and they found, nearby, a pleasant, mildly expensive place to lunch, where the maitre d’ fussed over her. She became, with every attention, more grand and gracious. The maitre d’ drew Roger aside to ask who the grande dame was, and Roger told him, but it was obvious the man had never heard of her. He had been doing his job when he met them at the door, cued by her apparent wealth, the extraordinary necklace hanging still on her bony old chest, though she had changed her dress to one of a dark blue color.

Announcing she was allowed a glass of port a day, she settled down to savor it, while Roger had a gin and tonic, a departure for him, but he had developed a dislike for the taste of English beer. Dolly had recommended the cocktail some time ago in her ceaseless re-education of his tastes. It turned out to be inoffensive, if no great thrill, and he ordered another.

He was happy to listen to Lady Maggie’s reminiscences, which were mostly amusing and not too obscure. He had nothing much to tell her; she didn’t seem to expect that. The grub was several cuts superior to the stuff at the hotel, so he ignored the faint guilt that weighted every spoon and fork full. Five pounds heavier than when he left New York, he was beginning to feel himself again.

Roger took her picture on the Embankment. It was going to be a great picture, really memorable. She was perfect. People loitered to watch them, as he posed her on a bench with brilliant flowers in planters to one side. The passersby smiled. The old woman smiled back regally, happy as a pig in poop.

After seeing her into a taxi, he went walking, finally, touring London. The day had turned out lovely, and he savored the unaccustomed sunshine the way Dame Maggie had savored the port. It warmed his bones.

Dolly was smiling like the eat that caught the mouse when he came in. Too excited to tease him, or bare her claws at him, she pounced with her news.

‘You darling! Lady Maggie is having a dinner party for us tomorrow night. Because of you. She said you were a dear boy.’

Roger grinned weakly, watching Dolly dance a little jig in the middle of the room. His hopes of a quick and painless end to the affair of the old lady vanished. His day clouded over. Goddamn the old witch. And his witch, Dorothy, too. Two spoiled women, who never could be satisfied with some of him. Had to have more.

‘That necklace,’ Dolly was musing. ‘That gorgeous necklace. It’s Lalique, Roger. Absolutely priceless. I’d love to have it, darling.’

Roger had heard all about it at lunch, from Lady Maggie. He’d never heard of this Lalique stuff before today and now it had turned into a stone around his neck. Shit.

‘How many other people will be at this shindig? You know it’s not safe to use the device when a connection could be made between us and whatever we zap,’ he protested.

‘Twenty people. Some I know, but they’re all old pals of hers.’

Roger frowned. ‘That’s too many. Forget it. It won’t work.’

He sat down and untied his shoes. His feet hurt from all the walking. But that was that. He wouldn’t do it.

Dolly glared at him. ‘I want it!’

He shrugged and addressed his right shoe. ‘Lady Maggie never takes it off between breakfast and beddy-bye, she told me that. We try for it, it means doing the old woman in, too. You want it

that bad?’

Maybe he could shock her out of it. That old lady. She made him think of his mother. But he could see Nick Weiler in her features, her bearing. Strange to admire the very things in the mother that he had hated immediately in the son.

Dolly had turned her back on him to stare out the windows at the Victoria Embankment below.

Yes,’ she said. ‘I want it. If she lives, there’ll be someone to live :n my dollhouse. If she doesn’t ... I don’t care. You think about !t. You figure it out, Roger.’

Roger dropped the shoe in his hand. The carpet muffled the thud of its impact. He scratched his young beard thoughtfully.

‘Shit,’ he muttered.

The party was bizarre, at least by Roger’s standards. He was the youngest person present. He figured Dolly was next youngest, and then Nursie, whose gray hair and varicose veins placed her in her middle fifties. Everybody else in attendance would have been drawing social security, if they’d been Americans instead of foreigners. A good number weren’t steady on their pins; a couple were in wheelchairs. He was relieved to see no one carted in on a stretcher. Uneasily, he fretted that someone might be carted out on one before the party was over.

Many of the names were vaguely familiar. Dolly certainly seemed to know a lot of them. But looking around at the two dozen ruined faces that, from what Dolly whispered to him, had been movers and shakers in the arts half a century ago, Roger found it easy to imagine that he was surrounded by some antique coven. It might explain the remarkable accumulation of sheer years, close to a milennium, all totted up. He had a vision of them with their fervid eyes, dancing naked on obscene patterns, kissing each other’s, if not the Devil’s, brownies.

Having nothing to say to anyone, Roger took photographs, in between devouring all that was offered to eat. Noticing Dolly casting covetous glances at the old woman’s necklace, he pinched her, delighted to get his own back. The old woman saw it too or sensed it; her skinny, speckled hands sought the necklace instinctively, as if she were modest Venus covering her private parts. The ancient obsidian eyes glittered with anger. When Roger smiled cheerfully at her, she turned away, her lips tight and knowing. Her back was as straight as Dolly’s. She was something, Roger thought; the years had not bent her.

Dolly and Roger were among the first to go, leaving their elders and betters to carry on. Lady Maggie’s farewell was icy but Dolly managed to kiss one withered cheek and squeeze the old woman’s paw. Roger made a stiff little bow and dragged Dolly away. Once out of their hostess’s hearing, Dolly hissed. Roger hushed her. Sometimes he had to wonder if she knew there was such a thing as discretion.

Re-entering the hotel, Dolly dropped her handbag all over the lobby. She appeared to be drunk. The staff, and guests going in and out, were amused and whispering. Just Outside the elevators, she dropped it again, managing to hold on this time to about half of it. Once in their rooms, however, she sobered instantly, and threw herself on her bed.

‘I cannot wait,’ she announced.

‘For what?’

In answer, she threw pillows at him. He ducked and dove and finally shut himself in the bathroom with the minimizer, to check it out.

Somewhat later, he crept out again, wearing a colorless coat and face-shading hat. Leaving by a side door, he walked some blocks to hire a cab. It put him down at a public house half a mile from the old lady’s house.

As he walked through the deserted narrow streets, he considered seriously not doing this thing. He did not think the old woman could live through it; at least, if he did it, his vow to give Dolly no more tenants for her dollhouse would be kept. But he knew that once she had the necklace, she would want someone to wear it. It was in his power to walk out of her life. There was money enough in his pockets to take him home. Back to his

mother’s house. Except he didn’t want to go back there.

On the street corner opposite Lady Maggie's house, he siood apparently lost, looking for street signs. In the dark, the small, discreet signs set into building walls by which the British marked the streets, were virtually unreadable. It was a place and moment calculated to make him feel homeless. The straps of the minimizer’s carrycase bound his chest under his trenchcoat. Looking up one unknown street, and then down the one he had come by, he turned, at last, and went where he had been sent and did not wish to go, to Lady Maggie’s house.

It was blind and still. The party was long over. He rang the bell and waited.

Nurse answered, as he expected, and when he explained that he thought he had left his watch in the lavatory, she opened the gate and told him she would meet him at the door. As he walked up the drive, lights came on in the house and he saw her, a monstrous silhouette in her robe and hairnet, passing the Palladian windows. She was more sleepy than irritated, and closed the door behind him with a heavy sigh.

He started down the hall, where he knew the guest lavatory was located. She followed him with heavy, graceless footsteps, clutching herself as if she were cold, or worried that the belt on her robe would untie.

‘Herself s all worn out,’ she told him. ‘She’s been pleased by all the attention, but I hope you’ll remember, Miss Dorothy and you, her age. She tires quick.’

He smiled conspiratorially at her. ‘Oh, she’s tougher than she looks, though. She’s lasted this long, hasn’t she?’

Nurse recognized genuine admiration when she heard it. She smiled hesitantly back, revealing tremulous dimples.

‘Let me take your picture,’ he said suddenly, and drew the camera case that hung around his neck from the folds of his open coat.

Her hands flew to her netted hair, her bare and flaccid cheeks, back to her old robe.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘I’m a horrid wreck.’

‘There’s some men,’ Roger whispered back, ‘that like fresh-wakened ladies.’

‘Oooh,’ her breath escaped her. She wasn’t sure but she thought this fancy photographer-fellow of Miss Dorothy Hardesty’s was talking sexy to her. She blushed from her hairline to the gathered high neckline of her nightdress.

‘Mother Mary,’ she said at last. Her hands clasped over her mountainous bosom, she backed against the nearest wall and waited her fate, like St. Maria Goretti, to whom she offered a quick prayer, even if that young martyr was an Eye-tie.

Her fate came quickly and not without pain. She knew it and opened her eyes very wide so as to see St. Maria Goretti and the Beatific Vision and the BVM, as she fell into the valley of the shadow's.

She was uglier than sin, Roger thought, looking down at her, and nnd"“d her with his foot. He felt curiously lightheaded, relieved. The decision was made. He consigned her to one of the kitchen matchboxes he carried in his pockets, and set off to find the old woman’s bedroom.

He was forced to open a lot of doors in the big old mansion, and flick a lot of light switches. He hoped the neighbors wouldn’t notice. But it was a dull neighborhood, he knew from the old woman herself, full of the rich and elderly who all went to bed when it was dark under the table. She must have heard him fumbling about and known intuitively or on the basis of the most subtle noises that he was not Connie, her nurse of so many years.