The Rendezvous (8 page)

‘She's earned it,' her husband said: he slipped the gears with unnecessary force and left the standing traffic twenty yards behind. ‘Believe me, Vera, you'd never understand what Terese suffered unless you'd been there to see it for yourself.'

She didn't answer, because she would only say that she was sick of hearing about it, and the only difference between Terese Bradford and thousands of other people was the lucky way her life had turned out. Europe was full of camps where Nazi victims rotted away what was left of their lives, scarred in mind and body, unacceptable anywhere because they were casualties of a war which nobody was interested in any more.

‘You don't need to be jealous of her,' Joe Kaplan said. ‘I wish you'd see that. I admire her, I like her. To me she's a kind of symbol, one of my biggest successes. There's nothing personal in it for me, darling, and there never has been. If you can't like her, be neutral. For tonight anyway, and see how it works.'

‘I'll try,' Vera said. She smiled at him, and for a moment it was like it used to be and there was a warmth between them, a moment's unity. She made a joke of it and this was an old means of communication between them. ‘I'd better, hadn't I, if I don't want to get a poke in the eye!'

Karl Amstat had never meant to accept the dinner invitation. He had gone out of town for a few days on an assignment in Chicago for a department-store project, when the night he flew back, the phone rang and he heard her voice at the other end asking if he remembered meeting her and inviting him to dinner. Julia had already accepted and she was so looking forward to meeting him again. He had said yes, that would be delightful, and then reached for the telephone to call back and cancel it. But he hadn't gone further than dialling the first two numbers. He wanted to go, and it was perfectly safe. He had brought the subject up several times to Julia and everything she told him confirmed the fact that he had nothing to fear. Terese hadn't remembered him and never would. It was an ironical situation and he made the excuse to himself that it amused him to exploit it. It would be interesting to go to dinner with them, meet their friends and talk to her husband. He had known by instinct that he wasn't going to like Bradford, and within a few minutes of arriving at the apartment he felt antagonism towards this impossibly rich, nice, good-looking man who had married Terese Masson. He tried not to go near her, but she sought him out immediately, taking him by the hand to show him the Gainsborough portrait her husband had bought her as a present.

‘Isn't it beautiful.' She didn't ask the question, she stated it, looking up at the picture.

Personally he thought it very English, very stylised and didn't care for it at all. It gave him the chance to look at her, while she was looking at it. The lack of change was remarkable; time had improved her without altering the air of frailty which he found so sexually disturbing. ‘It's magnificent,' he said. ‘But I'll be honest with you, Mrs. Bradford, I prefer landscapes.'

‘Most men do,' she said, and smiled. ‘Please call me Terese. You know, I'm so glad you could come tonight. We had such an odd conversation that first evening, all about my sister-in-law's husbands, do you remember?'

‘I found it fascinating,' Amstat said. ‘You haven't invited them tonight?'

‘No, you'll have to meet them again another time. It's just you and Julia and Joe and Vera Kaplan. They're old friends of ours. He's the sweetest man – you'll like him.' She wanted everyone to like each other; she wanted this particular small dinner party to be a real success, and she had taken a great deal of trouble over the food and wine, and spent the afternoon arranging flowers, which was an extra she usually left to the parlourmaid. Terese turned away from the portrait and Amstat followed her back into the small study where they gathered for informal parties. Immediately Bob came towards them.

‘Darling, come and have a drink. Karl, you need a second helping of Martini – I know Terese when she starts a conducted tour!'

‘And this is only a little pied-à-terre – you should see maison Bradford in Boston!'

Vera Kaplan said it with a laugh that only emphasised the sting in the remark, and held out her glass to Bob. ‘It's like a museum. Every piece of furniture came out of somebody's palace, and as for pictures – my God, that latest acquisition you gave Terese would find itself hanging in the john!'

It was so rude that for a moment nobody said anything. It was Terese who took the empty glass out of Vera's hand and filled it.

‘I have always heard your family were very rich and very distinguished. I'm sure
they
wouldn't hang a Gainsborough in the lavatory. See if you need more ice in this.'

‘I think there's enough ice around already,' Julia remarked to Amstat. She had taken a place beside him as soon as he sat down, and she let one hand rest on his shoulder, casually, with the long painted fingernails showing up like drops of blood against his dark suit. She was smiling, leaning back and looking up at him. ‘This is going to be a hell of an evening, my sweet,' she said. ‘Our Vera just can't help being an eighteen-carat bitch. Give me a cigarette, will you?'

‘Mrs. Bradford said they were old friends,' Amstat said.

‘He
is.' Julia drew on his lighter and inhaled. The others were talking and the incident had passed over now, but the atmosphere was acrid. ‘She apparently hates Terese, God knows why, there's nothing to hate about her.'

‘No,' Amstat said, ‘there isn't. Except perhaps that she's very beautiful. Maybe that's what annoys the other woman.'

‘It'll annoy me too, if you say it like that,' Julia said. ‘I think she likes you. Every time I look up she's looking at you.'

‘Darling,' he said quietly, ‘don't be ridiculous.'

‘Oh I don't mind,' Julia said. ‘I enjoy other women giving you a nod. Just so long as you don't give it back.'

‘Come on, you two,' Bob Bradford came over to them. ‘Stop acting like you were married and talk to the rest of us.'

‘We're not doing anything of the kind,' Julia corrected him. ‘We're just acting like very good friends, as that bastard Winchel calls it.'

She said it for Terese's benefit, in case she didn't know that Karl and she were lovers. It was all very pleasant and sophisticated and it said ‘Hands off'. The next moment Amstat had moved away and was talking to Joe Kaplan. The hand Julia had left resting on his shoulder suddenly dropped as its support was taken away. He hated her making their relationship public and he would be angry and they might even have a row, but she had done it just the same. She didn't like the way Terese Bradford took hold of him as soon as they came in. And she was looking at him, most of the time. Julia was not seriously afraid of losing him. She had enough experience of marriage and lovers behind her to compete with someone like this Frenchwoman, who apparently had never looked at anyone but her own husband. She had just made it awkward for her to monopolise Karl, that was all. The last fifteen minutes before dinner passed without incident. At the table, Amstat found himself on Terese's right, and he was aware immediately that at last he was going to enjoy himself, that being left with that unpleasant wife of the Jew, or even with Julia, would have meant the party was a total failure. He could look at Terese and talk to her and it would seem quite natural. He admired the way she had reduced Mrs. Kaplan; it was so dignified, so un-American. It showed the same deliberate courage that he had seen in an exhausted girl twenty years earlier when she turned his cup of coffee upside down to show she wouldn't take his bribe. He could think back on that with pride; he could sit beside her, smelling her expensive scent, making social talk to her and to Kaplan the Jew, on her left, and remember how she had spilt the coffee during that interrogation. The difficulty was to keep the memory from going on, from gathering momentum into the re-living of that early physical experience. That was foolish and dangerous; it could have been enjoyed if it hadn't been so much a potential on his part. He hadn't gone to bed with her then; he hadn't done any more than hold her to him, but the desires were moving in him, waking and beginning to trouble, like the details of an old dream.

He could sense Julia watching him across the table; she was very clever, making Bob Bradford laugh, keeping Vera Kaplan a little at bay too, and still watching him without making it obvious. He had made love to Julia so many times in the course of the last two years; since the evening a few weeks ago when he had been packed, ready to run because of meeting Terese Bradford, he often spent all night with her and they had breakfast together before he went to his office. But only because she asked him to, and made everything easy and attractive for him. He knew her so intimately that there were no surprises left. He thought how unwise she was to reveal herself completely to a man, and then remembered that this was because she was in love with him. And lovers, as she so often said lately, had no secrets from each other; they were one. The biblical expression coming out of Julia's mouth, usually in the post-coital phase of extreme sentimentality, made him smile. He had secrets; she might explore her childhood, bore him at times with revelations of her life with other men, but he said nothing, because there was nothing he could say except the lies he had learnt off by heart. His birth and childhood in Berne, the school he went to, his parents' professions, their deaths, his decision to start a career in the Argentine and study there – it was all part of the façade, and he could recite it with slight variations while thinking intently of something else. Julia knew his body as intimately as he knew hers, but she was completely ignorant about him, and her own passion for self-revelation did not attract him. Contrary to her motive, it created an additional barrier between them. He found himself hoping he wouldn't be asked to go back with her that night.

‘It's so lovely to have you here, Joe,' Terese was saying. Kaplan looked so strained in his efforts to be amusing after the clash between her and Vera that she went out of her way to be nice to him, to show that none of it mattered. He had very dark brown eyes, and when she looked into them they always held a sad look.

He was very unhappy with his wife; they had no children either, and someone had once hinted that this was Vera's fault. A deliberate choice, because she wouldn't be embroiled in family life, by which was meant Joe's family and the additional problem of half-Jewish children.

‘It's always nice to be with you and Bob,' he said. ‘And you get prettier every day.'

‘I heard that,' Bob said from the other end of the table, ‘and I can tell you what does it. Me!' There was a laugh, and he added, ‘Not to mention Terese's dressmaker! That's new tonight, isn't it, darling?'

His wife blushed, as if she had done something guilty. ‘Why yes, it is. But it came from Bergdorf's. I bought it this morning.'

‘Very nice,' Joe Kaplan said. ‘It suits you.'

‘In fact,' Bob went on, ‘she's taken a lot of trouble with herself this evening, haven't you, my sweet – and you look like a million.'

He looked down the table length at his wife and smiled; for some reason there was an added lustre to the effect she usually created. She was still young, with the kind of pointed, unlined face that didn't age for years, but that night she seemed unusually animated, less of a foreigner with a pronounced accent which she couldn't understand was an attractive thing to have. He was particularly relieved to see that Vera Kaplan's bitchery hadn't affected her. She seemed very relaxed, as if she were enjoying herself. She was talking to the Swiss, and they were laughing about something. He decided to make an effort with Vera for Joe's sake and started a conversation with her. It was only because of the close ties they both had with Joe that Vera was allowed in the door. It was such a pity Joe had married her; he could never visualise her as Kaplan had once described when they talked over this problem, a year or two earlier. Bob couldn't see the gay, attractive Vera Calston Hughes who had thrown up everything to marry him, and Joe had emphasised that everything was the right word. Bob couldn't see the courage or the charm, or any of the things which his friend insisted were still in his wife and only stifled by outside factors. He just saw a woman who was socially ashamed of her own husband and took her feelings out on the world. Just to watch his own wife made him feel good. He didn't give a damn about not having children any more; he didn't think of her in connection with the war, or that hellspot at Buchenwald. For Bob it was all over and forgotten. Terese was there, created instantly like Pygmalion's Galatea, by Joe Kaplan. He adored his wife and he had one of the nicest guys in the world as his best friend. His self-satisfaction was so intense that he spilled some of the warmth of it on to Vera without knowing, and she responded like a shut flower being prised open by the sunshine.

In the study after dinner they sat round drinking coffee, and Amstat took the place next to Terese; he didn't wait to be invited, he just sat down beside her.

‘Cigarette?'

‘Thanks, Karl – oh, wait, have one of ours, there in that green box on the table. Anyone want more coffee?'

‘I'd love some,' Julia said. ‘Don't get up, Karl can bring it to me.'

But the manoeuvre was defeated by Bob, who took the cup and brought it back. Julia sipped it slowly, and lit one cigarette off the last, while she watched her lover with Bradford's wife. No wonder Vera didn't like her. Maybe there was something in her suspicion that Joe and she had been more than just doctor and patient. She'd never really seen her giving a man a workout before and it was quite something to watch. Karl was right, she was beautiful. Not in a flamboyant movie-star way – so many of those camera-perfect types were as sexless as cheese when you came close to them. This woman had something different, not just looks, because New York was full of beauties, but a kind of fragile femininity, a sort of wanton helplessness that invited outrage. No, Julia decided, she didn't like her either.