Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
But how? Other than waiting tables, she had never worked. Honora closed her eyes and pressed further into the hard, itchy frieze pillow. She hadn’t slept for two nights, and midthought she drowsed.
Nightmare vignettes swooped at her. She was naked in the middle of a snowy street, unable to move as a tank-treaded snowplow bore down on her. Curt, in an SS uniform, was battering
at her breasts and pelvis while tears trickled down his face. Alexander Talbott was hissing like a snake at her.
The sound of the door opening jarred her awake.
Lissie, coming in with a white bakery box, saw her mother’s alarm. “It’s me, Mommy,” she said.
“Why, you’re shivering so terribly, poor Mrs. Ivory.” The governess held a green-woven plastic bag abulge with vegetables and groceries. “You look as if you’ve caught your death.”
She insisted that Honora get into bed while she heated one of the cans she had just bought.
The aromatic steam of Heinz cream of celery soup roused a twitchiness in Honora’s stomach. She hadn’t eaten anything solid since that ill-fated b’stilla, but Lissie was watching, so she picked up the spoon. Her hand shook, and viscous, greenish liquid dripped onto rental linens.
Miss McEwen went to her room for the thermometer.
The mercury stopped at a little over a hundred and two.
“You poor Mrs. Ivory, I best call Mr. Ivory,” said Miss McEwen with a heavy note of relief.
“No!” Honora cried.
“But dear Mrs. Ivory, there’s many and many strange diseases in Morocco, and I cannot be responsible.” She glanced meaningfully at Lissie.
“Get a doctor, then,” Honora replied weakly.
The nearby physician, a woman retired from
the National Health who still treated patients, diagnosed flu. She prescribed plenty of fluids, complete bed rest, dropping by the Great Carrington Place flat each morning at eleven.
After a week, Honora’s temperature was down to normal. Her wrenched thigh muscles had healed, and the bruise on her hip had faded to a pale but permanent mark. By now she was able to think clearly, and most of the time was spent considering her and Lissie’s future.
* * *
Joscelyn’s taxi turned on Great Carrington Place. Twin rows of horse chestnut trees cast softening shadows on blood-colored brick, but come winter, without this fulmination of leaves, the scrawny attached houses would prove that some Edwardian builder had made obscene profits by cutting corners. As an engineer she noted structural defects, but her professional scorn was tempered by an unwilling remembrance: just before the Sylvanders had left England, Langley’s fiscal ineptitudes had condemned them to a street of the same mean construction and red brick. On this sunny August afternoon, however, with London showing her most benevolent face, even this scrungy neighborhood appeared halfway pleasant.
The taxi halted outside a few houses that had been spruced up into an apartment building. Black paint glittered on spindly iron railings, and potted geraniums with brown edging their leaves flanked the front door.
There were ten buttons. Unhesitatingly Joscelyn pressed the button below the lightly
inked
Weldon.
On the second story a window was thrown up and the black governess’s face looked out. “Who is it? Oh, it’s you, Miss Sylvander.”
Joscelyn, never absolving herself of Malcolm’s death, had felt constrained to delete her marital status and legally revert to her maiden name.
A buzzer sounded. She pushed open the door. The narrow staircase was carpeted with a particularly ugly maroon drugget that was obviously new, and the textured, salmon-colored wallpaper as yet showed no fingerprints. The air, however, had an underlying dankness, as if the place had once been opened to the elements, maybe by a buzz bomb, and no amount of cosmetic renovation could exorcise the musty haunting of that long ago exposure.
Miss McEwen stood on the second floor.
“How happy I am to see you, Miss Sylvander,” she said in her Jamaican lilt. “Do come on in.”
Joscelyn stepped into a room crowded with an overvarnished dinette set, a wood-armed sofa and chair covered with some gray, hideously textured fabric, a dinky television, which was tuned to some type of British game show.
The governess turned off the set, explaining that she had been killing time while Mrs. Ivory and Lissie were out on a picnic. “They go all over in the tube,” she explained, a hardening of her tone condemning both their practice and the plebeian conveyance. “They should be back in a half hour or so. Shall I make you a nice pot of tea while you wait?”
“No, thank you. The tube station’s close. I’ll go meet them.”
Miss McEwen’s face fell. Obviously she had been looking forward to a discreet gossip about her employer’s current situation. “It’s so easy to miss people in a crowd, dear Miss Sylvander.”
“If I do, then you’ll tell them where I am.”
Joscelyn walked briskly in the sun-dappled shade of the horse chestnuts, a tall, thin, bespectacled woman wearing a well-cut sleeveless navy dress of a synthetic-weave linen that would not wrinkle in a suitcase and could be washed without needing the touch of an iron at sites around the world. Her flat-heeled pumps were good for tramping on recently moved earth, but anyone with an eye for quality would notice their elegance—the two vanities Joscelyn permitted herself since Malcolm’s death were shoes cobbled by an expensive shoemaker off Via Condotti and ultra-sheer pantyhose. Her hair was cut in a low-maintenance shag and the wispy bangs blew across her forehead as she walked. Her sole jewelry was the gold Cartier watch she had given to Malcolm as a wedding present. Joscelyn had a pleasant, uncluttered breeziness to her, but when she glimpsed her reflection in the Wimpy’s window she saw a lamentably plain middle-aged American tourist—possibly an overworked social worker—who had somehow gotten lost from her group.
The tube station was a small one, and she positioned herself between the tiled steps leading downward and the Up escalator.
Although Joscelyn’s mathematical mind was
poles away from the realm of psychology, she could not dream up any reason other than a sudden mental aberration—a nervous breakdown—that would cause Honora to take off from a husband whom she adored, four large homes, servants, to live in this de facto slum.
Curt had appeared in Washington late yesterday afternoon looking as if he were in the throes of a bad case of hepatitis, his skin yellowish, his eyes streaked with red. Giving her no clues whatsoever, he had commanded, not requested, that she fly immediately to England and find out what was cooking with Honora and Lissie. “Honora had the flu,” he had said. “She’s been under the weather and I’m too tied up to go over to London.” Joscelyn had been shocked to hear that the duo was in London. The last she had heard from Honora was a hastily scrawled two-sentence postcard mailed from Marrakesh:
It’s too hot here, so I’m taking Lissie on a holiday. We’re not following any itinerary.
Weeks had passed. Her sister’s atypical neglect had roused a welter of anxiety, confusion and hurt in Joscelyn. She had phoned Curt in Los Angeles three times to find out where they were, but his secretary had deflected her, saying he was tied up. He had not returned her calls.
With a shrug, Joscelyn partially cleared away her sense of personal rejection.
It was now abundantly obvious that Honora had left Curt.
The question was why.
Honora was the gentlest most considerate woman. It was impossible to conceive a wrong
that Curt could have inflicted on her which would cause her to leave him stewing in his own misery.
And what about me? She drags away my baby, the child I gave to Curt so he could be her father, and she doesn’t even drop me a note to say where she is.
Nothing about Honora’s behavior rang true. This reinforced Joscelyn’s conclusion:
She must’ve gone temporarily bonkers.
The important thing was to get her back with Curt.
A cluster of people was coming up on the escalator. Joscelyn, brooding about nervous breakdowns, was startled when she saw her sister, looking healthy and normal, rising smoothly toward her.
Honora’s bell-bottom yellow slacks hung loosely, indicating weight loss. Without lipstick, her dark eyes dominating her face, her fine, pale skin slightly flushed by the sun, her thick hair swinging to her shoulders, she looked improbably like a college girl. She held on to the sliding banister, the handle of a green plastic mesh bag looped around her wrist so that the large multicolored ball and thermos inside jounced against each other.
Lissie, in sandals and a grass-stained white sundress, glossy black hair tangled, exquisite indentation of chin smudged with brown that was probably chocolate, gripped Honora’s free hand.
It was Lissie who first saw Joscelyn.
For a near immeasurable fraction of a moment that to Joscelyn seemed far longer, the child’s eyes widened and the stained mouth trembled.
No matter how Joscelyn steeled herself for this millisecond of horror, she could never repress her answering wave of desolation, guilt and loss. An instant later she was consoling herself with the thought that it was far better for Lissie to remember than for that monstrous scene in the pink bathroom to fester in her subconscious.
Then the lovely mouth broke into a smile, showing two large new teeth.
As the escalator steps leveled out, Lissie hurled herself at Joscelyn. Picking up her daughter, Joscelyn buried a kiss in the smooth, chocolate-scented flesh.
Honora spoke over the child’s head. “What are you doing in London?” Her voice shook.
“Nothing like a warm welcome,” Joscelyn retorted.
“When did you get in?”
“This morning I flew BOAC. I’m staying at the Churchill. Anything else you’d like to know?” Joscelyn, replying to her rejecting sister, one-time surrogate mother, was unable to repress the sullen note. Lissie pulled back to try to get a drift on what the adults were saying.
“Lissie,” Honora said. “Tell Auntie Joss who we saw in Green Park today.”
The child eagerly told about infant royalty and neither woman needed to say a word as they walked back to Great Carrington Place.
Leaving Lissie to eat supper with Miss McEwen, the sisters went to the Wheeler’s on Duke of York Street—this branch of the fish restaurants was housed in an extremely narrow, Dickensian old building. They were seated on the string of a third floor, where, since it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, they were alone.
As soon as they were settled, Honora demanded, “How did you know we were in London? How did you get our address?”
In the taxi Joscelyn had thrown up a barrage of small talk to circumvent the question. Her imperative was for Lissie’s well-being, and this meant repairing the Ivorys’ marriage, a task that needed tact, never her forte. She played for time. “Let’s order first, I’m ravenous. How about sharing a bottle of wine?”
Honora nodded, seconding the selections Joscelyn gave their young, fresh-complected waiter. She sat biting her lip silently until he returned to pour their Liebfraumilch.
As soon as he left, she leaned across the table and repeated, “How did you find us?”
Joscelyn took a long, calming drink of white wine. “Curt told me.”
“So he knows . . . .”
“Be realistic, Honora. The man is rich, the man is powerful, the man can find out whatever he wants.”
“How? Miss McEwen?”
“I don’t know, but as far as I can tell, he’s kept perfect tabs on you—you had some sort of bug, right? The real question is why are
you
camping out in that dump?”
“I’ve left him.”
“I’m no moron. But why, Honora? Why?”
Honora turned her head, looking toward the spiral staircase.
Irritated equally by hunger, her sister’s stubborn reticence and the murky problems of her self-appointed role, mender of broken marriages, Joscelyn said sharply, “Okay, fine, you’ve had a major blowup, for an undisclosed reason. But what about
me?
Why didn’t you write or phone
me?
What have I done?”
“You’d have told him where I was.”
“Oh, absolutely. Except he hasn’t been taking my calls.”
Honora looked surprised.
“For God’s sake, Honora.” Joscelyn drained her glass. “He is dying, dying.”
“Dying?” Honora drew a sharp breath. “What do you mean, dying?”
“Oh, you know, in total hell.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Of course not, but it’s obvious to anybody who sees him.”
Honora looked down at the tablecloth, her hair shadowing her face so Joscelyn couldn’t make out her expression. After a minute’s silence, she asked in a low voice, “Did he tell you to come here?”
Joscelyn hesitated.
“Did he?” Honora repeated.
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“What’re you meant to do? Convince me to go home?”
“He’s worried about you.”
“The fever’s been gone for weeks. I thought he was keeping perfect tabs.”
Joscelyn’s annoyance flared. “Why are you treating me like I’m some sort of criminal for being here? And why shouldn’t Curt want to know what’s happening to you and Lissie? Or haven’t you stopped to consider that he adopted her, too? That’s why I gave her up, so she could have him as her father.”
Honora gave a discordant laugh.
“That wasn’t intended as humor,” Joscelyn barked. “What’s with you? I’m the bitchy one here—” She broke off as the waiter returned to slip a half dozen Portuguese oysters in front of each of them.
Joscelyn dabbed hers with horseradish, wolfing two with thin-sliced triangles of buttered brown bread. Honora ignored the food, tapping on the bowl of her wineglass. At each jab, her wedding band, visibly loose, caught the light.
Seeing that the thin fingers were trembling, Joscelyn said in a conciliatory tone, “Try these, Honora, they’re marvelous.”
“I should’ve written.”
“Honora, look, you’re obviously going through a bad time.”
“No, it was rotten of me.” Her murmured apology shook with sincerity.
“Why don’t you talk about it? It helps. And God knows there’s no kind of marital problem
that’d shock
me.
”
“Do you still think about Malcolm?”