Along the Infinite Sea (17 page)

Pepper takes the paper. The dogs have run on ahead, to the kitchen, probably. The note weighs heavily between her fingers, and for some reason she doesn't want to open it here, in front of Clara. Just in case. “Good-bye? That sounds rather dramatic. Did she say when she'd be back?”

“No, ma'am. She usually doesn't. But she did say you're to make yourself right at home while she's gone.”

ANTIBES
•
1935

A
fter a day or two, I could walk again. I was ready to see the world, the good earth I would shortly inherit with Stefan, or at least that little corner of it occupied by the Hôtel du Cap. My trunks appeared, and a note from Papa:
Enjoy yourself, mignonne, and remember my home is always open to you. Kisses, Papa.
I fingered the paper and thought, What a strange thing for a father to write. But then, what else could I have expected?

In the desk drawer, I found an envelope containing ten thousand francs and a scrap of notepaper bearing a name and a Paris address I didn't recognize. I put them both away. I didn't want to look at them; I didn't want to think about what they represented. I put on my sandals and my hat and slipped down the stairs and along the graveled drive to the Eden-Roc pavilion overlooking the bay.

The hotel beach was small and rocky and not much used—most guests preferred the saltwater pool nestled into the basalt—and I had no company when I stripped away my dress and arched across the gathering waves into the sea. I swam for an hour, until my limbs were limp, until
my head was heavy, and then I crawled shivering to the shore and lay there on the stones while the last of the August sun warmed my back.

When Stefan comes back, I thought, we'll lie here together, except the air will be much cooler. We'll put on our robes and curl up together in the shelter of the cliff, and Stefan will bring out a bottle of champagne, and we will laugh about that night on the tiny beach on Sainte-Marguerite, and how we kissed for the first time in the fort while the sun rose over the rooftops.

My skin dried, and then my swimming costume. I stopped shivering. I realized the emptiness in my belly wasn't loneliness but hunger, and I put on my dress and climbed the stairs to the tearoom. I ordered coffee and a small plate of sandwiches. As I waited, I heard a laugh like sleigh bells from the table behind me, and there was something so familiar about the noise and the throat from which it came that I feigned interest in the architecture around me and glanced over my shoulder.

Isn't it funny, the way we know when someone's watching? At the exact instant my eyes found the laughing woman's face, her eyes slid directly to mine, and though she was wearing a beautiful curved hat and an afternoon dress, I recognized her lips and her eyes and the shape of her chin before I turned back to my white tablecloth and my view across the bay, while my breath tripped up in my chest.

Stefan's mistress. She was wearing less kohl, and her lipstick this afternoon was fresh and berry-red, but you couldn't mistake a face like that. The waiter arrived with my coffee and sandwiches, and I drank the coffee without thinking and scalded my tongue.

She hadn't recognized me. Surely she hadn't recognized me.

“I beg your pardon,” said a drawling English voice behind me, “but you're the nurse from the yacht, aren't you? You're Stefan's nurse.”

I set down the cup and looked up into her face, which was less beautiful and more riveting than I remembered. She had languorous green eyes: that was the trick. The rest didn't matter, when you had eyes like that, but the rest of her was still marvelous. Her hair was honey-dark and glossy beneath the crown of her hat, and she wore the kind of
dress that film stars wore, the kind of dress that actually anticipated what everybody would be wearing next year, without really trying. It was navy blue and absolutely snug around a carved miniature waist, and the color made her berry mouth pop out from that silky tanned face.

I rolled my own unvarnished lips together and nodded. “You have an excellent memory.”

“Yes, rather. So do you. You recognized me straightaway, didn't you? How is he?”

“All better.”

“Of course he is. He's such a feral thing. Do you mind if I join you?”

“If you like.”

She turned her head to the table where she'd been sitting. “Peter, darling. I'm going to be a few minutes. Do run up to the room and fetch my bathing costume, there's a good chap.”

Her companion, a middle-aged man in a white jacket, looked us both over and stubbed out his cigarette. “I thought we weren't swimming today,” he said petulantly.

“I've changed my mind. Run along, now, and for heaven's sake stop sulking.”

Peter rose from the table. He had thinning blond hair and a very slight belly interrupting a frame that was otherwise lean. “Your servant, ma'am.” He sighed, and picked up his hat and left the room.

Stefan's mistress turned back to me and smiled. “He's a good sort of egg, really, but awfully dull. Do you mind if I sit?”

“Please.” I gestured.

“My name is Alice. Lady Alice Penhallow.” She sat down and held out a slender hand, weighed down with rings.

I hesitated for an instant and then took her hand. Her grip was soft and uninterested. “Annabelle de Créouville.”

At that, her eyebrows lifted. “Gracious me. Are you really? We all thought you were just a rumor, the prince's cloistered daughter. Well, that's trumped me, for certain. I don't suppose I stand a chance now.”

“Haven't you moved on already?”

“Peter? He's lovely, at least when he's not sulking, but really just an expedient. I won't say I've been hanging about for any particular reason, but perhaps I have. I suppose you've slept with him, however.”

I flinched.

“Yes, of course you have. He's irresistible that way, isn't he?” She plucked a sandwich from my plate and nibbled at the end. “And so fearsomely rich, like all good Jews. I don't blame you a second. I rather thought I was in trouble, when I first saw you on the yacht. And then he didn't invite me back. Did he mention me at all?”

“Not very much, I'm afraid.”

“No, of course not. He's always observed a certain code of courtesy, even when he's juggling us about like ninepins. I've never heard him say a cross word about any woman.” She swallowed and nibbled again, like a glamorous rabbit. “Even his wife.”

You never do see it coming, do you? A shock like that. I suppose that's why it's a shock. Like an automobile collision, like the time I was eight years old and my nanny was taking me to a children's party, not far from this very spot. We were late, and she was driving fast. There had been a calamitous afternoon thunderstorm, and I suppose my nanny was too young and experienced to know that if you were driving fast enough, your automobile (however heavy) would skim like a seaplane across the surface of a good-sized puddle. I sat in the back, watching the landscape go by, thinking about one of the older girls who would be at the party and how she liked to pull my braids and call me the Princess of Crybabies, the Princess of Crayfish (she was American, too, the daughter of one of the rich expatiates who flooded this particular stretch of coast in the twenties), when I heard a sharp noise and I was flying, and then there came a horrific smash of metal and I thought, Someone's had an accident, and the very next instant my head hit the front seat and I realized it was us. I don't know how I survived. I had cuts and bruises and a broken finger; the nanny spent the next two months in the hospital with her leg in traction, contemplating the folly
of speeding through the rain on your way to a children's party. Her head was never quite the same.

Even when he's juggling us about like ninepins,
said Lady Alice, nibbling my sandwich, and I was flying through the air.

Even his wife,
she said, and I heard a crash and thought, Someone's had an accident, and I realized it was me.

“His wife,” I said, after a pause. “Of course.”

But Lady Alice was an old hand. “What, didn't you know he was married?”

“I . . . He never mentioned . . .”

“Oh, you poor darling.” She set down her sandwich, and she really did look concerned. Up close, she was younger than I imagined. The sleek glow of her skin was genuine, not manufactured, and the bosom beneath her swinging neckline had that springy quality you couldn't bring back, once it was lost. “Now I really
am
upset with him. That's the sort of secret a man shouldn't keep to himself. Though perhaps he assumed you already knew. I thought everyone knew.”

I hardly heard her. I certainly didn't comprehend her, not until later. The room was falling in pieces around me. My stomach was sick, rejecting the alien morsels of sandwich and coffee. I put my hand to my mouth.

Lady Alice reached across the table and touched my forearm. “Does it matter so much to you?”

I couldn't speak.
Wife.
The word turned in my brain. My mother had been a wife, until another woman slept with her husband. A very bad woman, a woman I hated, who was now me.

“Where is he now?” she asked gently.

“Germany,” I said. I was too stunned to say anything but the truth, and Lady Alice was so improbably sympathetic, as if we had somehow found ourselves fighting on the same side in a long and muddy war. “He went back to Germany two days ago to . . . he said . . . to settle some affairs. He was going to come back for me.”

Some family affairs, he had said. Some arrangements, which I was
not to mention to anyone. I was not to mention anything about us to anyone, and especially not to his good friend Charles.

Lady Alice was replying, in a soothing voice, “Of course he was. You mustn't doubt that. I'm quite sure he cares for you very much. You're the kind of girl he
would
care for, now that I think about it. You're nothing like his usual sort. I'm sure he'll come back for you. He always keeps his word.” She snapped her fingers. “Perhaps he was going to see her, to tell her he had found someone serious this time . . .”

“She knows?”

Lady Alice laughed. “She's the greatest fool alive if she doesn't.”

A small black fly had found its way to the edge of my plate. The hairlike legs climbed in the direction of the sandwiches, delicately uncertain, hardly daring to hope. I didn't have the heart to brush it away. I listened to the gentle clink of china around me, the patter of conversation, and thought, I am the greatest fool alive.

“My dear girl,” said Lady Alice, “are you quite all right? You look as if you might be sick.”

I said that I was all right, thank you.

She continued. “When he comes back, you mustn't let him off the hook. You've got to ask him very specific questions. I know it's terribly romantic to have a love affair—it's your first, isn't it? I was the same way—but they're like worms, you know, they'll try to find a way to wiggle off, any way they can. What has he told you about himself?”

What, indeed? “Not a great deal,” I said, and I realized how true it was. We had talked for hours, we had spent long days together, and in my newfound wisdom I thought I knew him. I knew the shape of his face and the color of his eyes. I knew that his skin tanned easily. I knew that he was handsome in pajamas and dinner jackets and especially nothing at all, except when he was in a grim mood; I knew that he was about six feet tall and quite lean, that he was made of neat, well-packed muscle, though he wasn't bulky by nature. I knew that he could sail, that he preferred tennis to golf; that he had gone to boarding school in England and university in Berlin, though I didn't know which ones he
attended and I couldn't have said what he studied. I knew that he disliked excessive displays of emotion, though he felt deeply. I knew that he preferred martinis before dinner and brandy after it, that he tolerated whisky only if it was served neat at room temperature. I knew he smoked strong Turkish cigarettes that he had delivered from a tobacconist in Paris. I knew that he spoke German, English, and French with great fluency, that he had a smattering of Spanish and Italian, that he read Virgil in the original Latin. I knew that he had a high tolerance for pain and a low tolerance for nonsense. I knew that he liked women. I knew that women liked him. I knew the way his face grew heavy when he wanted me, the way his eyes filled with smoke. I knew the way his body shuddered when he achieved his
petite mort
. I knew the way he sank upon me afterward, the sensation of his weight, the distribution of his limbs. I knew the smell of his skin.

But I didn't know his father's name. I didn't know the town where he lived. I didn't know what business his family was in, shipping or textiles or banking. I didn't know what, exactly, he was doing the night he fell bleeding into my life; I didn't know if his parents were alive, or if he had any siblings, or if he had any close friends other than my brother. I didn't know his age. I knew exactly where he existed in my heart; I had no idea where he existed in the universe.

I didn't know he had a wife.

“The truth is, they're all beasts,” Lady Alice was saying. “Every man alive, even dear old Peter, would happily get his leg up on another woman if he could, and if he thought he could get away with it. You mustn't let it destroy you, darling. Enjoy him, by all means. Fall in love with him, if you like. I suppose you already have. But for heaven's sake, enjoy him with your eyes open.”

I looked up. “Do they have children together?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “I think there's a son. He doesn't say a word about him, however. I've always thought he isn't fond of children; you know how careful he is.”

“Careful?”

“Yes, always.” She paused and leaned forward. Her beautiful green eyes turned round under the pencil-thin lines of her eyebrows. “My dear girl. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?”

“Of course I know.”

“No, you don't. Oh, the rat. The dirty little rat. I say, he really
had
better come up to scratch, or he'll hear from me about it. You're how old?”

“Nearly twenty.”

“Nineteen. The horror. It doesn't bear thinking about. Well, we'll cross our fingers, won't we? Peter! There you are. I'm afraid there's been another change of plans.”