You who know, p.18
You Who Know, page 18
But she is a bit knocked out. “You know I know this, but I thought it was in Moscow.”
“I’ve had it for some years. I won’t let go of it. But I’ve allowed it to be reproduced because it is really very good indeed and one must share these things. The one in Moscow is a variant. No—I must be honest—mine is the variant.”
She turned around then, as tigerish as himself. “You like, I believe, straight talking. You are the picture collector. I am a painter, a very small one. You are a murderer. You came within a hair’s breadth of killing my man.”
“My dear Madame Castang—”
“That will do very nicely. But I’m your guest; I’m in your house. You may say Vera.”
“Pedro. I have apologised; I do so afresh in front of you.”
“Thank you. But it’s not quite good enough, you know.”
Good God, thought Castang. But the man is unscratched.
“I accept your reproof. I acted in ignorance, and since that is culpable I feel due shame. But may I in turn put you to the proof? Here on this table is paper. Here is a pencil. Will you make me a drawing?”
“Yes,” said Vera. “I will.” Jo intervened with glasses. The apéro. The magnum was swathed but it was Krug, thought Castang, accepting a small cigar; or something as good “which he gets from the grower.” Pray, Heilige Maria, that Vera is not about to get pissed; she did promise but in this mood there’s no holding her.
She took a small drink without noticing, the pad on her knee.
“I don’t guarantee this. It’s Jean Cocteau, isn’t it? Sergei Diaghilew on a menu card.” Her hand moved in quick lines. So he has seen her a few hundred times. Even at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour on the autobahn, a building … It is her training, her five-finger exercises. And she has the whole room paralysed. Castang makes meaningless conversation to Coralie: they have nothing to say to one another. The room is full of static electricity; it is as though they were all standing under one of the high-tension pylons that carry unimaginable quantities of current across the Rhine, over the Pyrenees.
“There,” tearing it off. “May I do Jo? Will you allow me, please?” as he stood, a little taken aback, by his serving table. “You are perfect so. I beg you not to feel put upon.”
She is full up with the charge. In fact she could be underground, in the linear accelerator near Geneva. She is being bombarded with particles at extremely high speed. They bounce when they hit a bit of carbon like in a pencil. They make remarkable curves when they hit. Very simple, very beautiful.
“This is most remarkable,” Subercaseaux was saying. “No you mayn’t see it. I don’t quite know even whether I can send it to be framed. No, I’m keeping this, you can all look at the other. Jo, my boy, tell yourself that a girl one day in this house was looking at Matisse, took you on at a speed-game of chess; you’re a pretty good chess player but I think you’ll agree that she has astonished you.”
You turned it nicely, thought Castang, but you were hit, weren’t you. He’s not showing the drawing, he’s putting it away. And that-is-my wife, that-was; bravo Vera.
“May I kiss your hand, Madame, to thank you?” said the well-trained butler. “May I keep this?”
“Give it me back then a second,” and wrote, For Jo from Vera. Lugano ‘92. She signed Vera Castang and he felt enormous pride and went to pour himself another glass, because goddammit, the company is transfixed.
“You talk to pictures,” said Vera. “But what do they say back? Who talks to you? My man tells me you talk to trees. They too are metaphysical. They talk only to those with ears to hear.”
Coralie looked puzzled, understanding little of this. She would like to say “Draw me” and doesn’t dare. She is accustomed to being the centre of attention.
Vera finished her glass and said, “No more, thank you.” Castang who would have liked more, a lot more, hardens himself. Subercaseaux put down his glass and said mildly, “I think we can move to the table.”
The table was outside on the terrace, under an awning. From here there was a very fine view, downward to the lake and the roofs glimpsed behind their screen of cypresses of “Favorita” at the water’s edge. From this height of anonymity, prudence, a little at a time, did the perfectly successful man at the peak, surely, of material achievement look down, very quietly, upon Baron Thyssen? “You have more pictures. Yours are more famous. Yours were more easily acquired. But I’ll match you. Yours was a nineteenth-century world. Mine is the twentieth. All this is mine, mine, mine.” Or would he never be satisfied? What is there to do now but go on living and moving towards the end? Like old Maugham all those long and weary years in Cap d’Antibes. Westward one looked along the lakefront. The angle cut off, naturally, the “poor” quarters of Lugano huddling up the slope; the railway station; the autoroute. One went as far as the other mountain at the opposite end of the town, and one only bothered with that because of the sunsets, which are spectacular and romantic.
It is most remarkable and one will have to say so to the Master of “all this” who has heard it so many times and receives the most extravagant praise with utter impassibility. Castang has been wondering whether a boat out there on the lake would provide a solid enough platform for a marksman with telescopic sights over a really high-class rifle. An extremely difficult shot, across the deceptive distances of water and up the rocky hillside. One would start with a bit of elementary trigonometry; a three-point fix from the shoreline, to begin. But there would be those to be found who would attempt it, and a good few more ready to pay for it, and pay well. It was too obvious though, wasn’t it. A case long foreseen, and an elementary defence: don’t go too near the edge, and above all don’t stay there. This careful, controlled man—how do you get him to the edge? He occupies a lot of terrain, but there are edges to it. Castang wonders where.
The sunset duly displayed—my lake, my sunset, my rather tiresome little town (the noise scarcely above a murmur, this high, the stink dispersed by pleasant on-shore breezes; Italy, over there, a back-drop, just scenery)—everyone’s attention was called to the serious business of eating. A round table, large enough for six, and since we are four, quite informal, two men and two women, there are no precedences to be considered. Master will sit next to Vera and Castang to Coralie and we’re all perfectly cosy. Nor is there any nonsense about pompous grand-hotel food which looks good, but tastes of nothing at all. This was home food, simple, beautifully cooked, plentiful, and startlingly ordinary. Rich people are very often mean. You are invited out, looking forward to this, and you get deep-freeze shepherd’s pie and Jugoslav Riesling. Here one could have confidence. Whatever he was—a great deal and mostly pretty dreadful—he wasn’t mean.
Nor pretentious. The plates were good Limoges porcelain but no gold-edged Sèvres. The soup-tureen was certainly silver but plain and of a shape to please even difficult Vera. The soup was cold without being icy and tasted quite delicious. A little cream, a few chives. Country bread. There was only one kind of wine: admitted, a very good one. Jo came and showed the label to Master (Castang craning but in vain from opposite, trying not to crane and getting caught) with a very faint smile and the murmur, “I think, Jo, we’ll need another of those … Are you skilled?” wickedly, to Castang. “Do you want to guess the year?” (Castang properly crushed.) Coralie, wary, says nothing; had Vera even looked at her? What is one to make of this thin, plain woman, who must be close to fifty and looks it, too?
“Yes, I will have a little more soup, please.”
“Castang?”
“Decidedly.” Becoming uncrushed but the more wary. A pause.
“I like to smoke, between courses. A Russian habit, it’s said, but I don’t wish to hurry my cook.”
“We will be Russian,” said Vera, “but not Gollivud—Nabokov’s name for La Houssaie.” A chuckle, from Master.
“Have you ever been to Los Angeles?”
“No. No occasion. Don’t think I’d dare, anyhow, not at least without Swifty Lazar to represent me.” Gradually, the dinner party begins to warm. Conversation, he said this morning, he wanted. Not too much to eat, and plenty of time to digest it.
Duck, plain, in the “Tours” style, served like underdone roast beef; Jo expert with the very sharp knife. Four different vegetables, at which Vera expands like the wine in the big glass. She has not noticed that she is the dominant personality around this table; she is not self-conscious and said only, “I wish I could cook,” when the second duck appears and a plain lettuce salad follows. Master eats duck, but like her prefers the vegetables.
“There’s only cheese to come, so don’t hesitate. Or is there pudding, Jo?”
“A little, for the sweet tooth, or will it be teeth?”
“Me, anyhow,” said Coralie.
Vera smiled and said, “You tuck in while you can.” Ambiguous expression.
There is only one cheese, but what a beauty. Vera took a cigarette, she’s been smoking all evening; the occasion demands it. Master smiles paternally upon “the child’s pudding”.
“What is it?”
“Sort of vanilla cream, bavarois, is it? I really don’t know. And wood strawberries, yum.”
“Tempt you, Vera?”
“Yes, but no.” She has had a perfect dinner and now that has to be put in proportion. “Suppose I’m dead. Do I look back, and count on my fingers the times I’ve had a good dinner? Would I be any the less happy if I were a Beduin and got a very hard scrap of cheese, and perhaps a raw onion?” She put her elbows on the table.
“You—you kill people.”
“Does that shock you?”
“I don’t think it shocks me. It affronts me.”
Castang who had—ridiculously—held his breath, let it out and pinched his nose, the bridge of which now hurts with an effort not to laugh. A Vera-word! Dates from reading Beatrix Potter to a five-year-old Lydia. Odd, the memory! Mrs Tabitha Twitchet had been affronted by the kittens taking off all their clothes …
“I’m rude, am I?”
“Not rude … I don’t mind greatly if you are.”
“I’m not a bore?”
“No, you’re not a bore.”
“This is important to me. No, it’s vital, I can’t keep it in.”
“Then you must let it come out, mustn’t you.” He has decided to treat her as a “silly woman”—which, thinks Castang, is a mistake.
Jo had brought the cigar box. Castang took a slimmish R & J but Subercaseaux took a big one, and was listening to it, clipping it, holding it for Jo to light, but he didn’t take his eyes off Vera.
“To kill people is so very poor a human response—at such a very low level.”
He was turning it, had it burning evenly now. “You know that I won’t do you any injury.”
“Not here, no. Probably not even in Switzerland. But we’ll be going home in a day or so. To Brussels and there of course you had Eamonn killed. You have an instrument there, just as you had here, along the road.” They were sitting in the open air, or Castang might have thought “the room was holding its breath.”
“What did my man say to you this morning? That he felt affronted too? No, he’s polite, he might have expressed himself as a scrap aggrieved about having his ribs broken. That tickled you and you chuckled at it and said you liked people with courage, you liked things put direct, you don’t like a picture with too much varnish on it—you asked us to dinner because you were bored and it would amuse you. But now you’ve got me and that’s different. You can throw me out of course, that will be easy. Rather languid—‘see these people out, Jo, because they affront me.’” That gentleman had put the coffee things on the table and vanished. Knows when to be tactful.
Subercaseaux had pushed back his chair, leaned back in it. He was still not quite satisfied with the way the cigar was drawing, giving it quarter-turns, the face still, the eyes level.
“You were bored because you’re always bored. You’ve everything, have you? Or is it nothing at all?” Vera is sitting forward with her elbows on the table. The painter’s hands make swift decisive movements, as they did when she was drawing, as sharply professional as a butcher cutting up meat on the block.
“Can you even go down to the village without making it unforeseen and unexpected, because fear will always accompany you?” Other people talk about the “village” meaning Greenwich, or Highgate; this village girl would use the word about Manhattan. “Since you never know, do you? Maybe the Company, or the Kahjaybay or the Stasi have taken a dislike to you, people who are quite as good at killing as you are. I don’t speak of your friends; there’s no possibility you would ever have any. I’m probably as close as you can get to a friend, because I don’t hate you at all, I only remember that Eamonn was a friend of mine. I’ve nothing to do with any Secret Service. Nor has my man. Eamonn was a friend of his too. I probably haven’t understood but as I see it he got exploited by the English, who were anxious to find out whether an Irishman might not have been in the IRA. Believe me, I’m not trying to insult you.”
She took a cigarette from the crystal box at her elbow and smoked it nervously. There was a crystal ashtray at her other elbow; everything had been so beautifully arranged before Jo left. The coffee pot sat on a silver lamp, waiting for a hostess to pour it out. The other three sat there in silence. Remarkably, the Master didn’t budge or utter. She was aware that her voice had risen, brought it back to conversation level, to her normal soft contralto.
“Mostly you stay here, in this house. It’s a wonderful house, I admire it. I’ve never seen anything like it, no doubt I never will again. It isn’t very likely I’d be invited into Baron Thyssen’s house down the road, is it? That’s conceivably grander but I shouldn’t think it’s any better. But a house can be a palace and you still judge it by the people who live in it. The Queen’s got a palace, hasn’t she, and she has better pictures even than you and she’s richer. But nobody envies her and probably nobody’s even looked at the pictures since George the Fourth; it’s all a nothing.
“So now I have to come to my point, it’s taken me long enough, hasn’t it.
“What have you got? Nobody speaks to you, nobody contradicts you. You speak to the pictures, to the trees. What do they say? You’ve a girl here. Do you love her? Does she love you?”
Coralie said, “Vera …” A soft, even timid voice. But she had to say something, didn’t she?
Vera stabbed the cigarette out and took another without thinking.
She turned a little to face Coralie, looked directly at her for what seemed the first time that evening, but without anything harsh or bitter in her face or voice.
“Yes,” she said. “You. I know you. Eamonn loved you. Poor Thomas Lhomme loved you. Ah, it’s one of these tricks of the Belgian language, schizo at best. Paul de Man … I know about that, you see; an acolyte, a German acolyte, of this gentleman here, my host and yours, because you’re not going to claim him as a friend, are you?” still perfectly gentle.
“You know my man too, don’t you? Yes, I knew that also. How do I know? I know many things, I am a magician. How is that? Because I love. You should start learning about love, because you should have felt it, that’s not something one learns from the intellect but out of the heart. Do you remember in Mozart, Cherubino sings about love, and everybody thinks oh, silly girl, she falls in love with absolutely everyone in sight, what can she possibly know about it? But she’s talking to the Countess, and she says ‘You—you who know.’ Because the Countess, she knows all about love and has suffered for it. And out of her instinct—does it matter at all whether it’s a boy or a girl, the singer or the song? The water, or the wave? That is the magic, isn’t it?”
Vera’s voice is in a low register but she has sunk it too to a near-whisper.
“Look at this house. Who could ever sing here? Who could ever be happy?”
Subercaseaux had never said anything at all and even now, consciously or unconsciously, he avoided the slightest drama. His chair was pushed back already and did not grate on the tiles of the terrace. He got to his feet; the cigar was in his mouth, giving an immobility to the lip, the jaw. The eyes had gone blank. From a standing position they did not dwell on any of the three persons present. He put his hands in his pockets. None of his movements lacked dignity, but he did little. No smile, no frown. He walked away across the terrace to one of the inside doors. It was not a “tired” walk, it was not expressive of anything at all. Simply—he walked away.
“We’ve stayed too long,” said Vera to the paralysed Castang. “Come on, we’d better go home.”
Coralie stayed sitting at the table because she found nothing to say. Castang got up, automaton. Vera walked back through the salon to the “lobby” doorway. Jo was there, polite and impassive, holding her little jacket for her.
“Would you like me to call a taxi, Monsieur? I can have one within five minutes.”
“I think we’d like to walk.”
“Isn’t it rather a long way?”
“I think so, yes. But downhill. And walking, it’s a nice night. And one needn’t bother about the one-way streets, am I right?”
“If you like to walk,” impassive, “you need only follow the contour of the hill. Thank you, Madame, goodnight to you; come safely home.”
It was not late. The town hummed and glowed beneath them. Sometimes the road turned at acute angles and the world below could be seen. Twinkle; the distance seems greater than it is. Up here is quiet, with the quietness of Swiss wealth; there are restaurants and night-clubs, bordels and gambling-houses, but it is understood that they shall not be noisy. Behind walls people are drinking, fornicating and planning to get richer; swallowing pills in the pursuit of joy and power, wit or energy, and also to relieve constipation or tiresome little problems with the prostate. Others look for oblivion. What did Lady Dedlock do, all those years in London? When she went to Paris, she was just as bored. What was there to amuse her?
