“I am seeing a date. It is 1910,” he said, and shook his head. He prodded one particular area of that chart, an area that was beginning to resemble a freeway intersection.
As he prodded, Mr. Chatterjee paled. He seemed unwilling to proceed.
“What else do you see?” I prompted.
Mr. Chatterjee did not answer.
“Bad things?”
“Not too nice. Oh dear, no. Most definitely not.” He resharpened his pencil. The sitar music stopped, then, after a pause, continued. Mr. Chatterjee seemed to have dozed off—his eyes were closed—or possibly he was transfixed by his 1910 intersection.
“Mr. Chatterjee,” I said gently, “that’s twenty years before I was born.”
“A blink.” Mr. Chatterjee opened his eyes. “Twenty years is a blink. A century is a second. However … I think we will be moving on. Try a new tack.”
He bundled up the charts with an air of relief. He replaced them in the metal filing cabinet and locked it. Once the chart was out of sight he seemed cheered. For the second stage of his routine, gold dust would be employed—at least he said it was gold dust.
“If you would be so good. Please to close your eyes and consider most seriously those who are dear to you.”
I closed my eyes and I tried. The sitar music scratched. A powdery substance was sprinkled against my eyelids and my cheeks. A lilting incantation began, in Hindi.
I felt hot. The dizziness increased. My mind began to track off in directions I would never have predicted. When the incantation came to an end and I opened my eyes, the gold dust was being carefully brushed back into its container, an ancient tin for Navy Cut tobacco. Mr. Chatterjee gave me a sad look.
“I am seeing two women,” he said. “One is close, the other very far away. I am telling myself that you will have to choose between them.”
He then told my fortune in some detail. His account of my past was unnervingly accurate. His account of my future was too roseate to be likely. He ended by telling me I was about to make a journey.
I was disappointed by that. I had begun to like Mr. Chatterjee. I had almost begun to believe in him. I became afraid he would move on to speak of tall dark strangers, voyages across water. I would have hated that; I did not want him to be tawdry.
A journey? I made journeys all the time. My work as an interior decorator meant I was always on the move, to the next house, the next commission, the next country. One week from now I would return to England. The next job was in France, the one after it in Italy. Was that the kind of journey Mr. Chatterjee meant? Then I hesitated. There were other kinds of journeys.
Mr. Chatterjee sensed that momentary skepticism, I think. He gave me an apologetic and gentle smile, as if my disbelief were his fault and not mine. He took my hands between his. He lifted them to my face.
“Sniff,” he said, as if this would explain everything. “Smell.”
I sniffed. The pungent substance rubbed on my palms was volatile. It contained oils, but also alcohol. The warmth of the room and of my skin released scents even more pungent than before. I sniffed, and I smelled India. I smelled crescent moons, honey and sandalwood, henna and sweat, affluence and poverty.
“Concentrate. To see, you must first close the eyes.”
I inhaled again, eyes tight shut. I smelled … Winterscombe. Damp and woodsmoke, leather chairs and long corridors, linen and lavender, happiness and cordite. I smelled childhood; my father and my mother.
“Concentrate. Again.”
Mr. Chatterjee’s grip on my palms tightened; a tremor passed through them. The scent in my nostrils was now unmistakable. I smelled the fresh greenness of ferns, then a ranker, more assertive undertone, musk and civet. Only one person I had ever known used that particular scent, and to me it was as individual as a fingerprint. I dropped my hands. I smelled Constance.
I think Mr. Chatterjee knew my distress, for he was then very kind to me. He talked me down. Then, with the air of a priest in the confessional—or, indeed, a railway official untangling a complex timetable—he gave me one final piece of advice. He told me to go back.
“Go back where? Go back when?” Wexton said mournfully over dinner that night.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But I know the route, and so do you.”
The next day I wrote to her. When I received no reply—that did not surprise me; she had not replied when Steenie asked for her and I cabled—I changed my flight plan.
A week later Wexton flew back to England alone. I flew halfway around the globe to New York, and to that other godparent of mine, Constance.
Constance made me. I could say she brought me up, for that was true, since I went to her as a child and remained in her care for more than twenty years, but Constance’s influence upon me was deeper than that. I regarded her as a mother, a mentor, an inspiration, a challenge, and a friend. A dangerous combination, perhaps—but then, Constance herself radiated danger, as the many men who suffered at her hands could have told you. Danger was the essence of her charm.
My uncle Steenie, who admired her and I think occasionally feared her, used to say she was like a matador. You watched her swirl the bright cape of her charm, he would say; the performance was so dazzling, so accomplished, you did not notice until too late how expertly she inserted the blade. But Steenie liked to exaggerate; the Constance I knew was forceful, but she was also vulnerable.
“Think of her dogs,” I would say to Steenie, and Steenie would raise his blue eyes to the heavens.
“Her dogs. Indeed,” Steenie once replied, in a dry way. “I’m never quite sure what to make of that one.”
A puzzle. But then, Constance was full of puzzles. I grew up with her but I never felt I understood her. I admired her, loved her, was perplexed and sometimes shocked by her—but I never felt I knew her. Perhaps that, too, was part of her charm.
When I say “charm” I do not mean that slick and superficial ease of manner which passes for charm in society; I mean something more elusive than that. I mean the capacity to weave spells, to entrance. In this respect Constance was accomplished long before I met her. By the time I went to live with her in New York she was already secure in her reputation as a latter-day Circe. Because of the men, I suppose—although I, being innocent, did not understand about them, or even know of them.
“A trail of them, Vicky, my dear!” Uncle Steenie would later declaim, not without malice. “A trail of broken hearts. A trail of broken men. The debris, Vicky, of Constance’s hectic career.”
It was Steenie’s view that if Constance damaged people, the damage was confined to the male sex. If women were damaged, he claimed, it was incidental and accidental; they were simply harmed in the fallout of Constance’s main attack.
Steenie, I think, saw Constance not just as a sorceress but also as a warrior. She came at men, he claimed, her sexuality punching the air, using her beauty, her wit, her charm, and her willpower as weapons, hell-bent on some private war of attrition. Given his own proclivities, Steenie himself was exempt; this, he would explain, was how he could survive as her friend.
I believed none of that then. I thought my uncle liked to dramatize, and I loved Constance; after all, she had been unfailingly kind to me. When Steenie made his claims, I would say: but she is brave; she is resilient; she is gifted; she is generous. And so she was, all of those things, but in one respect my uncle was also right. Constance
was
dangerous. Chaos stuck to Constance the way iron filings cling to a magnet. Sooner or later (I suppose it was inevitable) Constance’s zest for making trouble would affect my own life.
So it had, eight years before, when Constance succeeded in preventing my marriage. We had quarreled then, and for eight years the break had been complete. I had neither seen her nor spoken to her in that time, and until my uncle Steenie was dying, when she was invoked once more, I had tried very hard not to think of her. I had been succeeding. I was making a new life. Constance, a decorator herself, had trained me well; my career flourished. I grew accustomed to living alone, even grew to like it; I had learned the consolations of a crowded schedule and a full calendar. I had learned (I thought) to live with the fact that all adults coexist with regrets.
Yet now I was going back. I was on a plane flying east, a long journey with a great many stopovers. From Delhi to Singapore, from Singapore to Perth, from there to Sydney. On to Fiji, from there to Los Angeles, from L.A. to New York. So many time zones. By the time I landed at Kennedy, I was no longer certain whether it was yesterday or tomorrow—a state of mind that long outlasted the jet lag.
I was attuned to Constance. As soon as I stepped out of the airport terminal into the heat, I knew she was there, somewhere in the city, out of sight still, but very close. Bucketing toward Manhattan in a yellow cab, my ears buzzing from pressurization, my eyes scratchy from dry air at thirty thousand feet, my nerves twitchy from lack of sleep, filled with that false optimism which is a by-product of adrenaline, I was not only sure Constance was near, I felt she awaited me.
I think I envisaged some kind of final reckoning—not a reconciliation, but questions answered, the past explained, a neat line drawn under a neat balanced sum. This was the moment, I told myself, when Constance’s and my arithmetic finally came out: Q.E.D. I understood myself; I understood my godmother; I was free, at last, to move on.
I was wrong, of course. I thought I was arriving, when in fact the journey was scarcely begun.
Constance never wrote letters, but she loved the telephone. She had several telephone numbers herself, and I called them all.
I called the house at East Hampton, on Long Island. I called all three numbers at the apartment on Fifth Avenue. The East Hampton house had been sold two years before; its new owners had not seen Constance since. None of the Fifth Avenue numbers answered—which was unusual, since even if Constance was away, there were servants who lived in.
Since it was a Friday, and past office hours, it was by then too late to call Constance’s business headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street. I began calling Constance’s friends.
It was late July; I was using addresses that might be eight years out-of-date. Not surprisingly, I drew a great many blanks. Friends had moved or were vacationing—but the reaction of those I did reach was very curious indeed. They were polite; they professed to be delighted to hear from me after all this time, but they did not know where Constance was, could not remember where, or when, they had last seen her. Not one of them expressed surprise that I was calling—and that was odd. After all, the breach between Constance and me was public knowledge, the source, I knew, of continued gossip and speculation. Constance and I had been business partners; we had been like mother and daughter, like the best of friends. I waited for someone to say, “How come the urgency? I thought you and Constance had a fight, way back.” No one did. At first I thought this was tact. By the tenth call, I doubted it.
Around eight in the evening, fighting sleep, I took a cab uptown to Constance’s apartment, the one where I had lived. A surly and unfamiliar doorman informed me Miss Shawcross was away, the apartment was closed up. There was no forwarding address.
I returned to my hotel. I tried to be practical and reasonable. After all, it was high summer and the humidity was way up—Constance was unlikely to be in New York at such a time. If she was not on Long Island, she would be in Newport. If she was not in Newport, she would be in Europe. Either way, there was a limited number of places where Constance would stay—and I knew all of them.
I telephoned them all, those hotels she had always favored, where she would always insist on the same suite. She was at none of them; not one had a booking in her name for the current year, let alone that summer. I was still unwilling to give up, even then. I could feel all the symptoms of jet lag, the false energy and the simultaneous exhaustion. I could also feel a more dangerous incentive—that tweaking of an invisible string felt by anyone who embarks upon a search, or a quest.
Constance was
there;
I could sense her. She was not in Europe, despite the season, but here in Manhattan, around the corner, just out of sight, amused and in hiding. One more phone call could locate her. I made two, in fact, before I admitted fatigue and went to bed.
The first (and I rang the number several times) was to Betty Marpruder, the nuts and bolts of Constance’s workplace, the one person who always knew, without fail, where Constance was. I had never known Miss Marpruder to take a vacation; come to that, I had never known her to leave New York. Her number, the first I had called, had not answered when I dialed it at six; it still did not answer when I dialed again, at ten.
I went to bed. I sat up in bed, exhausted and alert, flicking through the pages of
The New York Times
supplied with the room. There, on the social pages, I found my perfect source. Conrad Vickers, the photographer, was passing through New York. He was preparing a fifty-year retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art which would open that fall with a party for what the journalist described as
le tout New York.
Conrad Vickers had links with my own family that went back many years; he also had links with Constance. Apart from Steenie, Conrad Vickers was Constance’s oldest friend.
I disliked Vickers, and the hour was late. Nevertheless, I called him.
Since Vickers also disliked me, I expected a brushoff. To my surprise, he was effusively welcoming. Questions about Constance were dodged, but not decisively blocked. He wasn’t too sure where she was right then, but a few inquiries, he hinted, would locate her.
“Come for drinks. We’ll discuss it then,” he cried in fluting tones. “Tomorrow at six, dah-ling? Good. I’ll see you then.”
“Dah-ling,” Conrad Vickers said.
He kissed the air at either side of my cheeks. He split the word, as he had always done, into two distinct syllables. It conveyed, in his case, neither affection nor intimacy, since
darling
was a term Vickers used both to close friends and to perfect strangers. He found it useful, I suppose, since it disguised the fact that he had often forgotten the name of the person he was greeting so warmly. Vickers did forget names—unless they were famous ones.