Too Much Too Soon (54 page)

In the beginning of their separation she had been panicked by the thought that he would come after her, but within six months her fears had changed into a hollow hurt that he had not even made the faintest gesture toward a reconciliation.

Curt avoided publicity, but Mavis, who frequented the ultra-lavish watering spots, occasionally saw him with some highly noticeable girl, and Vi read aloud the gushy sentences in her movie magazines—such and so film princess was dating “a famous international building tycoon.” For her friends to pass on the gossip meant that she, Honora, managed a good act of mature indifference. Inwardly her jealousy raged as green as when she was nineteen.

She pushed to her feet, rubbing her lower back. Her soft, full lip drew down, and her glance was calculating as she surveyed the garden. After a minute she nodded decisively. An echo of the tulips was needed in the far corner by the wisteria, and a few additional clumps of both tulip and iris should be worked around the Cotswold stone loggia.

The gardeners, alike as gnarled twins, were knocking off for the day and one offered her
the tea remaining in his thermos. She refused. “Rather have coffee, would you?” he said cheerfully, and his mate chimed in, “You Americans!”

In England everyone called her an American. In the United States she had always been thought of as English. Honora perceived this as symbolic. She was a dangling woman. Suspended between countries. Between careers—was she a landscape designer or a day laborer? Between motherhood and fostering. Between marriage and grass-widowhood. Several men had asked her out, and one, a successful barrister married to a child psychologist for whom she’d done an office terrace, had been resolutely persistent, phoning or dropping by the flat. He was a colorful and amusing man, his marriage was one of the open kind—her client had already informed her of that. She was achingly frustrated. So why had she refused his every pass until eventually he gave up?

After the two old men left, while the long English dusk fell and the last light faded, she finished planting the tulips. A few crates of plastic pots stood on the low stone wall, but the outdoor fixtures cast an uncertain, shadowy light and she couldn’t make out which plant was needed where.
I’ll have to come back tomorrow morning
, she thought and went to wash up in the potting-shed sink, skinning off her filthy, moisture-laden sweater and jeans, putting on a three-year-old trouser suit.

In a jammed tube she lurched to Knightsbridge. At the station’s fruiterer she paid two
pounds for dusky purple grapes, temporizing the extravagance by telling herself such little luxuries were all her father had left to live for.

A few years ago Langley’s liver and kidneys had given way. His doctors had warned him away from alcohol. Though barely past his seventieth birthday, he had become a hunched, yellow-faced, querulous hypochondriac tended by nurses and his elderly manservant.

The central heat in the pricey Sloan Square flat was stifling, yet Langley’s chair was pulled close to the drawing room’s electric fire; he wore a black woolly vest beneath his dinner jacket, and a plaid mohair rug wrapped his long, spindly legs.

“Hello, Daddy,” Honora said, bending to kiss his soft, beautifully combed white hair.

“What d’you have in that bag?” he asked.

She flushed, realizing she had shoved her work clothes into a bag from Marks and Spencer, where Vi searched out bargains with the same enthusiasm she had once pursued tips. Langley considered both the chain and the ex-waitress common beyond redemption.

“Just dirty clothes,” Honora said. “I brought you a lovely bunch of grapes—Nurse is washing them.”

“I had grapes for lunch; they were quite tasteless,” he said. “Well, I suppose now you’ll be rushing off.”

“Don’t be silly, Daddy. I just got here. How are you?”

“My heart was pounding terribly last night. Thump, thump, thump. I would have called,
but I don’t like worrying you. And I had that cold again, but I took several glasses of hot lemon and cured myself.”

“Did you go out?”

“With my cold? In this terrible weather? But it’s much worse abroad. There were dreadful rainstorms all across Europe.” He paused, peering at her hands. “Honora, your nails.”

She curled her fingers, hiding the black rims. “Daddy, tell me what was in this morning’s
Times?
”

“You’d have a chance to read it yourself if you weren’t a gardener.”

“Landscape designer,” she murmured.

“I don’t understand people anymore. Maybe Curt had no proper background, and I never liked the way he swanked any more than you did, but in my day we stayed married.”

Langley’s persistence that the Ivorys had split because Curt’s riches were too
nouveau
for a Sylvander irritated and stung Honora, but she had long given up correcting him. Clutching her elbows, she sank deeper into the wing chair.

Langley’s lips assumed a vestigal hint of his old, whimsical smile. “My poor Portuguese, I always say that you’re doing quite your best.” And with this he launched into the daily disasters: a hearing into international bribery to be conducted by the United States Congress, an earthquake ravaging Guatemala, crime in Italy, unemployment in the Midlands.

When the buhlwork clock on the mantel chimed seven, she said, “Daddy, I really must
be going home.”

“When will I see you again?” he asked anxiously.

“Tomorrow at the same time.”

He strung out her departure with further tidbits about his ossifying blood vessels, his migratory cold symptoms, the unfolding of a letter from Joscelyn that he’d already read to her twice.

Defeated and guilty, she trudged back to the tube station.

Vi had found them a much larger, nicer flat in a tree-filled, sequestered square in Fulham—oh, how Langley’s aristocratic nostrils had curled. Fulham, indeed!

As Honora climbed the stairs, Lissie, waiting for the vibrations of her footsteps, flung open the door.

Even now, with the bulges and distortions of pre-adolescence, the child remained beautiful. Alas, though, the lively abandon and lack of self-consciousness of her early childhood was gone. Though her oral skills had improved tremendously with the school’s elaborate auditory trainers, in the presence of outsiders she held her shoulders tensed as if warding off a question she might have to answer. When she went out she left off her aids and had developed a sad little repertoire of means to avoid conversation with strangers. Telling Honora, who sat carefully in a ponderous straight-back chair, about her day, however, she chattered vivaciously.

The large, squarish room was friendly and
pleasant, the heaviness of the department store furniture that Vi had shipped from San Diego having been vanquished by Honora’s large, lush houseplants and ferns, her collection of books, the bright posters for art openings that she’d had framed.

Vi padded in from the kitchen. Her orange dye-job was frizzed into an Afro and she had gained eighteen pounds. “Welcome home, stranger,” she said cheerfully. “What kept you?”

“I tried to finish the job.”

“And then, of course, you dropped in on your pop, right? Kid, some nights why don’t you give yourself a break?”

“What smells so wonderful? Fried chicken?”

“Yep, good old Colonel Vi’s best. It’s in the oven. And you’re right to change the subject; when you’re beat’s not the best time for advice. I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”

Vi and Lissie, who had already eaten, sat at the table with Honora and soon she forgot her filial guilts, her weariness, her lower back, her loneliness and inadequacies.

She shared the front bedroom with Lissie, and planned to hit bed at the same time as her child. But when Lissie went to brush her teeth, Vi whispered, “I got something to tell you. Private.”

Though Lissie couldn’t eavesdrop, the child had another sense that telegraphed when they were hiding something. Honora nodded, opening her library copy of
Far Tortuga.

Vi waited ten minutes after the bedroom door had closed on Lissie. “Today I picked up the
American
Time
,” she said. To assuage an occasional bout of homesickness, she patronized a news stall that stocked a wide spectrum of American papers and magazines. “Your ex’s in it.”

“What’s he building now?” Honora tried to sound breezy, but to her own ears every remark she made about her estranged husband was tempered by a vague fraudulence.

“Nothing like that. There’s going to be another round of them Congressional hearings. He’s been called.”

“Oh yes, Daddy mentioned something about it. But he didn’t say a word about Curt.”

“The papers here ain’t so hot on our news.” Glancing toward the closed bedroom door, Vi extracted the magazine from her large, navy plastic bag. “Page fifty-six.”

Honora rustled the slick paper, halting at a column headed “Scandals.”

“Well?” Vi asked.

“It was good of you not to let Lissie see this,” Honora said in a stilted voice. “May I?”

“Help yourself.”

Paper rasped as Honora tore out the page.

“What do you figure’ll happen when he goes to Washington?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” Vi bristled. “This ain’t a picnic. They’re gunning for him.”

“He’s always refused to do business where payoffs were involved, so there’s nothing they can find out.”

“But this Arab joker—”

“Fuad and Curt have been friends since Berkeley. Vi, my back is killing me. A good long soak is what I need.”

“Try Epsom salts, hon,” Vi said sympathetically, lumbering across the room to turn on the television.

Ripping the page lengthwise several times, Honora watched the ribbons of print swirl down the toilet. Supine in a scalding bath, she was bludgeoned by envious loathing for those young Hollywood beauties.

God, how those quiet evenings alone with her must have bored him!

In 1975, Curt had formed a separate corporation to handle the venture capital, naming the new company Ivory Investments, putting Joscelyn on the board as the only director minus an MBA. The nine members gathered every other month at the Los Angeles headquarters. The other eight, glowing with an excitement that seemed indecently sexual, discussed shelters—oil, cattle, real estate, airplanes. Ignorant of evasive tax action, Joscelyn remained silent. She had an unpleasant sensation of weightlessness. In her social life she had forever formed a large zero, but being a nonperson at work was new to her: she concealed herself behind a yellow legal pad on which she scratched an occasional memo to herself, and had no inkling that the smart money, her confreres, assumed her on the board as a spy for her brother-in-law.

An Ivory Investment board meeting fell ten days before Curt was scheduled to appear before the Morrell Subcommittee. Nobody mentioned it, and this struck Joscelyn as typical of the cautious, money-oriented group—everyone else at Ivory was circulating jokes about the upcoming hearing, and the Conrad cartoon of a thousand-dollar-bill folded like a tusk into an Arabian headgear was pinned to half the office bulletin boards.

The meeting ritually concluded with lunch at the Windsor, whose flawless, high-protein cuisine and generous drinks attracted the expense account crowd. The men drove over in their air-conditioned cars, but Joscelyn always showed her stuff as a hearty outdoor engineer by walking the dozen or so level city blocks to the restaurant. Today Martin Sterret did not continue on the elevator with the others to Ivory’s subterranean garage but got off with her, accompanying her down the main steps to the sculpture garden that Honora had planned in happier days.

“My internist,” Sterret said, “has ordered more exercise. Mind a little company?”

“If you want,” Joscelyn said ungraciously.

“What did you think of that bit in
Time?
” he asked.

“A hatchet job.”

“
Newsweek
was worse. They just about called Mr. Ivory a combination of underworld godfather and manipulator of foreign governments.”

“I saw it,” she said acidly. “Imaginative
reporting.”

The two deep lines running down Sterret’s cheeks were like strings wiggling his jowls. “Joscelyn, this kind of publicity is disaster for a company.”

“This isn’t a financial corporation,” she said pointedly. “In engineering it’s strictly a matter of cost and ability.”

“We’re talking politics here. I don’t need mention to
you
how much of Ivory’s backlog is in government contracts.”

She nodded glumly. “Nearly ten billion, and revenues of over a billion.”

“I’ve denied this until I’m blue in the face, but there’s a rumor going around that it’s more than smoke that Ivory has paid large sums to the Abdulrahman family.”

“I told Curt he ought to sue
Time
—how dare they print that kind of crap! Fuad would no more take a bribe than Curt would offer one.”

“
We
know that.” They had halted for a red light at Wilshire, and Sterret leaned toward her so close that she could smell the sourness of his breath.
He’s frightened
, she thought. “But, Joscelyn, if Mr. Ivory gets the press’s full treatment, it won’t matter whether he’s innocent or not. Whatever comes out at the hearing, he’ll be guilty.”