The Keeper of the Walls (2 page)

“
L
ily
,
for God's sake, no one can wait for you f
orever!”

Claude's voice sounded harsh, cutting into the quiet tranquility of the blue-green room with its four-poster bed and its delicate pastel watercolors on the walls of raw silk. The girl quivered, almost imperceptibly, and picked up a white beaded bag and the ermine stole that had been lying on the bed. She slipped the stole around her shoulders and touched her long dark hair, almost as if seeking reassurance from its thick, glossy presence, and opened the door.

Below her curved a stone staircase, covered with dark red carpeting, and at the bottom stood her brother, resplendent in his tuxedo and frilled shirt. Lily lifted her skirt of pale yellow muslin, and went quickly down the stairs. Claude stood looking at her, his head cocked to one side, critical. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks—a moment of acute embarrassment. She was always self-conscious, especially about her height, which, at five feet nine inches, was unusually tall. He said:
^"
Why don't you cut your hair? You're six years behind the times.”

She felt the words like a series of small, consecutive stabs. Her eyelashes stung. She said softly, taking his arm: “I can't think of being without my hair. Don't you remember? Grandpa always said that hair was a woman's ornament.”

“Grandpa died ten years ago, Lily, and he was an old fuddy-duddy. You're eighteen years old—it's time you thought for yourself.”

As tall as she was, he was three inches taller. She looked up at him, and replied quietly: “But that's what I'm doing.”

They were standing in the vestibule, with its mahogany coatrack and umbrella stand, and the grandfather clock ticking in its gleaming wooden frame. Claude said: “I'll get the car. There's no use your getting your feet wet in the puddles.”

As she stood alone, waiting, she glanced at her own reflection in the ornate, gilt-framed mirror. How many guests had done the same, while waiting to be received into the inner sanctum of her father's study or her mother's sitting room? And how had they reacted to their own image? She thought: Why do people think I'm good-looking? Beauty was Madame de Noailles, with her amethyst eyes, or Gabrielle Dorziat, the actress, with her tender face and soft, feline curves. I am too dark to be beautiful.

Outside, a car horn was honking. She pulled the wrap more tightly around her, and ran out the door. In the nighttime, the Renault 40
chevaux
loomed large and gray, like a metal carriage. Claude was opening her door from the inside, and she climbed in. Without a word, he started the motor.

Lily sat motionless, afraid. It had only been six months since she had come home from the finishing school in Brittany and left the comfortable cocoon of the nuns. Women were safer than men, and the sisters, safer than anyone but her mother. They didn't ask her to be sophisticated or dernier cri, just to be docile, obedient, studious. More than anybody else, she feared her brother. She'd left him six years before, she a child of twelve, he already a man at eighteen. They'd lived in different worlds, and seen each other only once in a while, at dinner or a Sunday outing. He'd already been leading a life of his own and she'd been the baby of the family.

Suddenly she'd come to the end of her studies, and the peaceful life she'd grown to love had ended. Passed so swiftly. She hadn't wanted to return to Paris.

She was always glad to be with her mother. But how much of the house was really Mama's? Father was such an imposing man, so loud, so peremptory. She felt she had nothing in common with him, and remembered how, as a child, she'd imagined that her mother had fallen in love with a foreign prince, and she'd been the result of their affair. She'd finally admitted this in confession, and had been severely reprimanded. Now she smiled about it.

Claude's voice sliced into the softness of her thoughts. “The Comtesse de Béhague has a splendid mansion, and receives the most elegant people in Paris. Many are of foreign extraction. Try to think of interesting things to say, Lily. Not just hello, how do you do. You've no idea how much this invitation cost me.”

“I don't understand. You
paid
to be invited there?”

He was lighting a cigarette. “Don't be silly. I didn't pay in money. I paid in favors. I passed somebody a handsome client.”

“But . . .”

She was frankly bewildered, and uncomfortable. Before, they'd lived in a small house in Bougival, on the outskirts of Paris, and her father had handled small to average construction jobs. They'd had one maidservant. But after the war, things had begun to change. Two or three years after the Armistice of 1918, the French government had announced that it would pay for the rebuilding of the north and east sectors of the country, from which the inhabitants had fled one step ahead of the German invaders. Nothing had been left of their properties, and now those in power had proposed to pay four times the estimated value of each lost building, as long as what was rebuilt coincided exactly with what had been razed. Where there had been a house, a house had to be built; where a factory, a factory. And because the franc had been greatly devalued, the government had set the rate at four times the original worth of the property. Those who had fled their homes could return, and industry could begin again in the blighted parts of France. For contractors like Paul Bruisson, Lily's father, a gold mine had been uncovered. And now the family lived in the Villa Persane, in Boulogne-sur-Seine, just ten minutes on foot from Paris, with a butler, two maids, and a cook. Only the chauffeur worked part-time, for the women.

Lily didn't like the Villa Persane. It rose proudly near the beautiful Boulevard d'Auteuil, bordered by old, majestic trees. It was entirely covered with enamel mosaic in small squares of blue, white, and green, with some black ones thrown in for a more modern look. “See how geometric is this design,” her father had expostulated to a guest. “It's the design of the future!” But Lily thought it devoid of good taste, and the turret failed to resemble a Moorish minaret, and seemed, in its pretentiousness, no more than ridiculous.

Lily, in that house, where the furniture was heavy and dark, felt like a small white cloud imprisoned in a dungeon. Only her mother's boudoir and her own room were light and soft and delicate, because everywhere else her father's will had imposed itself.

She didn't like what Claude had told her. Ever since she had returned from Brittany, she'd noted things he'd said that didn't feel right. He worked with their father. He solicited new clients. He drove a medium-priced car “in order not to seem richer than the clients.” He was a young man-about-town, but there was no joy to him except when he could speak of money, of benefits, of contracts. Although he'd inherited their mother's dark good looks, he was, Lily thought, a younger replica of their father.

But it wasn't only that. Father was straightforward, but he was honest. He dealt with facts, with figures. Claude went beyond that. He manipulated. She wondered if there was anyone at all for whom he felt respect, or genuine caring. Maybe for their mother, because no one could remain immune to her gentleness or fineness of spirit. Certainly he didn't love
her,
his sister. Then . . . what was it he wanted with her? Why couldn't he leave her alone, to paint or to read, instead of insisting that she go to endless fittings that made her ankles swell, and to gatherings with people she'd never met, whose extreme stylishness made her feel like a small child peeking into a world where she didn't belong?

“The Comtesse de Béhague won't even notice me, Claude,” she said. “It won't matter what I say. She doesn't know me and doesn't care about me.”

“But I want people to notice you! What do you want to
do
with your life, Lily? You have no profession. In society we don't yet have a name. It's up to you to make this name, because you're lucky, you're a beautiful girl, and men will notice.”

“So what are you hoping for? That some elderly marquis will build a castle for me? In return for what?”

“I just want you to have an opportunity to marry well.”

“And if not, to become a rich man's whore.”

He turned to her, amazed, and started to laugh. “I didn't know they taught you these words at the convent!”

But she wasn't amused. When he tucked her under the chin, in an effort at friendliness, she remained impassively staring ahead of her, at the lighted streets of the Paris winter. He withdrew his hand, and once more they were strangers sharing the same name, the same space, but nothing else.

M
ikhail Ivanovitch Brasilov
plucked a
coupe
of champagne from a passing tray, and leaned against a panel of the wall. From his vantage point, for he was excessively tall, he could peer through two reception rooms clear into the vestibule, where the Comtesse de Béhague's
maître d'hôtel
stood at attention. He was restless, bored. He'd worked all day since six that morning, going over all the company books with the chief accountant, and he'd come here to feel around him the atmosphere of his early youth, in Kiev and Moscow. He'd thought that since the countess entertained a great many exiled Russians, like himself, his usual nostalgia for the golden moments of a dead era would be assuaged through the company of his compatriots. But so far it hadn't been so. He'd been disappointed. Yussoupov had talked endlessly of his antique business, and the delicious prattlings of Tessa de Pulszky, Nijinsky's sister-in-law, had been like thick moths buzzing around his head. He felt tired, irritable. He shouldn't have come—but if not this, then what? He'd had enough of that little model from the Latin Quarter, and nothing new had appeared on the horizon.

He half closed his green eyes, amused, detached. The
maître d'hôtel
was letting in two late arrivers, a man and a woman. The man was ordinary. He might have been any one of a dozen young Frenchmen always on the lookout for an opportunity to mix with the right crowd. They bored him. Every day two or three came to his office and opened the conversation in the same fashion: “My dear Prince, we met two days ago at—” and there would follow the name of a famous hostess, directly in front of a petition for a job. Inevitably he turned them down. On principle. He never mixed work and fun.

But the young woman was different. Mikhail Brasilov's eyes widened. She clashed with everything that spelled 1924. She was too tall, and her breasts and hips were too ample. She wasn't large—merely statuesque, slender but full. He liked that. The woman of today had no breasts worth mentioning, and was flat as a board—Madame Chanel at the forefront of them all. She wore a long gown of lemon-yellow muslin, and her arms were a dark creamy color. Girls of today liked to be white, bleached out.

And this one didn't wear makeup. Her dark, almond-shaped eyes were fringed with curling black lashes, and her complexion was the same bronzed color as her arms. She looked exotic, not French at all—perhaps Arabian, or Greek. Mikhail Brasilov picked up his
coupe
and sipped from it, eyeing the girl.

She had long brown hair, almost black, that undulated down her back and over her shoulders. Her posture was erect, proud. But she looked very young. Certainly, he thought, a virgin. And that, added to all the rest, topped off his fascination. He strode forward, nearly upsetting a passing tray of caviar on toast points, and followed the angle of his vision toward the girl.

She was alone, on the threshold of the first reception room, and nobody had noticed her. Where, Mikhail wondered, was her escort? And, more important, who was he? Her husband? She looked like the sort of person who'd be happily married, who'd never venture anywhere without her cohort. But now she looked confused, ill at ease.

Reaching her, he said, bowing slightly: “Are you looking for someone? May I help you?”

She blushed. What girl had blushed in the last year? She looked up, tried to smile. She was shy, but not overwhelmed. “I was waiting for my brother,” she answered. “He went to say hello to somebody he knew. . .”

Then he must be the last of the boors, Mikhail thought. It was incredible to leave her standing there, not to introduce her! Surely that brother of hers was a nouveau riche social climber of the worst sort. But he said: “Allow me to present myself. Prince Mikhail Ivanovitch Brasilov. You are?”

“Liliane Bruisson.” She was holding out her hand, long and well kept, and he bent over it and touched it with his lips.

“Would you like me to introduce you around? Are you curious about all these people?”

Her smile widened. She said nothing, but he caught the irony in her brown eyes. “You couldn't care less,” he said.

“It's not that. I just—I'm not sure why I'm here. What I can possibly have in common with most of these people.” Then she turned red again, looked aside. “I'm sorry. You're here, and what I just said was terribly rude. . .”

“It was merely terribly honest, mademoiselle. I hope to God that I, like you, don't have too much to share with the rest of this crowd.”

He had laid her fingers over his arm, and had started to walk. She wondered if this was all right, to go with this stranger into another room, without waiting for Claude. But there was something so powerful, so hypnotic, about this man, that she matched his step instinctively. She'd worry about her brother later. Prince Brasilov rose at least six feet four inches, with shoulders that matched, wide and strong. But his waist tapered down, and his hips were no larger than Claude's. He had long legs with thighs that showed muscle under the broadcloth of the evening suit. She liked his largeness—it made her feel small, while at the same time allowing her to walk in her usual bold stride, which Claude had told her was decidedly unfeminine. She didn't feel self-conscious.