He made a few airy gestures of apparent delight. Conrad Vickers, in his customary plumage: an exquisite figure in an exquisite room in an exquisite brownstone on Sixty-second Street—a five-minute walk from Constance’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. A blue silk handkerchief flopped from the pocket of a pale-gray Savile Row suit; it harmonized with the blue of the shirt; the blue of the shirt matched his eyes. A fuzz of soft white hair, now receding; the complexion of a girl. Conrad Vickers—once, like my uncle Steenie, a famously beautiful youth—had aged well. The vigor of his insincerity appeared undiminished.
“Such an age! I’m so glad you rang. Dah-ling, you look
radiant.
Sit down and let me look at you. Years and
years. Loved
what you did on the Antonelli house—and Molly Dorset’s.
Terribly
clever, both of them. You
are
hitting your stride.”
I sat down. I wondered why Vickers should bother to flatter me now, when he had never done so before … unless he had decided I was becoming fashionable.
“
Isn’t
it hot?” Vickers was still in full flood. “Quite unbearable. What
did
we do before air conditioning? I’m a bird of passage, dah-ling, just
flitting
through. Trying to finalize these”—he waved a hand toward a pile of photographs. “Sheer hell. I mean, fifty years of work, dah-ling—where
does
one begin? Who to leave in? Who to leave out? Those museum people are
totally
ruthless, my dear. They want the Royals, of course. Margot and Rudy, Andy and Mick, Wallis and Lady Diana. Oh, and they want Constance, of course—well, they would. But anyone they haven’t heard of is O-U-T out, dah-ling. I shall lose
half my
friends.”
A small wail of distress. The next instant, distress forgotten, he was waving a hand at the arrangement of flowers on the table next to me.
“
Aren’t
they divine? Don’t you just
love
delphiniums? English garden flowers—I insist on them, wherever I am. And now I’ve found this
terribly
clever young man who does them just the way I want them.
Madly
original—I can’t
bear
flowers that look
arranged,
can you? No, of course you can’t—you’re
far
too clever. Now, shall we have some champagne? Do say yes. I can’t bear the martini habit—too noxious. One feels quite
blind
the next day. Yes, champagne. Let’s be madly grand and open the Bollinger—”
Vickers came to an abrupt halt. He had just pronounced the name of my uncle Steenie’s favorite champagne. Color seeped up his neck; his face reddened. He fidgeted with the cuffs of his shirt. He turned away to give instructions to the houseboy who had admitted me and who had been waiting by the door all this time.
He was Japanese, a pretty and delicate-looking young man kitted out in black jacket and striped trousers.
As the young man left the room and Vickers sat down, I understood at last why I had been invited. Vickers was more than embarrassed; he was guilty. This invitation of his owed nothing to Constance and everything to my uncle Steenie.
Since Conrad Vickers had been my uncle’s friend for more than fifty years, and his lover—on and off—for at least half of that time, and since he had contrived to be conspicuously absent when Steenie lay dying, I could understand that guilt. I said nothing. I wanted to see, I suppose, how Vickers would wriggle out of it.
For a while he was silent, as if waiting for me to raise the subject of Steenie, and help him. I did not speak either. I looked around his drawing room, which—like all the rooms in all his many houses—was in perfect taste. Vickers’s sense of loyalty might be weak and his friendships facile, but when it came to the inanimate, to fabrics, to furniture, his eye was as unerring as Constance’s. This had seemed to me important once. I had believed there was virtue in taste. Now, I was less certain.
Vickers fingered the arm of his French chair. The silk that covered it, a clever pastiche of an eighteenth-century design, was one I recognized. It had come from the most recent Constance Shawcross collection. The chair was painted. It had been restored, I thought, and then cunningly distressed. A wash of color over gesso: Constance’s workshops? I wondered. It was impossible to tell—almost impossible to tell—if the wash of pale slate-blue had been applied two hundred years before or the previous week.
“Last month,” Vickers said, catching my eye. Vickers, for all his faults, had never been stupid.
“Last month.” He sighed. “And yes—I know I can’t fool you—that restorer Constance always uses. Oh, God.” He leaned forward. He had apparently decided to take the leap.
“We’d better talk about Steenie. I know I should have been there. But I just couldn’t … face it, I suppose. Steenie, dying. It seemed so out of character. I couldn’t imagine it, and I certainly didn’t want to witness it. Ah, the champagne.” He rose. His hand trembled a little as he passed me the glass.
“Would you mind terribly if we drank to him? To Steenie? He would have liked that. After all, Steenie never had any illusions about me. I expect you think I’m a terrible coward, and of course I am. Sickrooms make me queasy. But you see, Steenie would have understood.”
This was true. I raised my glass. Vickers gave me a rueful look.
“To Steenie, then? Old times?” He hesitated. “Old friends?”
“All right. To Steenie.”
We both drank. Vickers set down his glass. He rested his hands on his knees; he gave me a long, appraising look. The blue eyes were alert. Vickers, for all his affectations, was a great photographer; he had a photographer’s ability to read a face.
“You’d better tell me. I do want to know. When you called … I felt like a worm. Was it easy? For Steenie, I mean?”
I considered this. Was death ever easy? I had tried to make it easy for Steenie, as had Wexton. We had succeeded only to a limited extent. When he died, my uncle had been afraid; he had also been troubled.
He had tried to disguise this at first. Once he realized there was no hope, Steenie set about dying in style.
Uncle Steenie had always valued the stylish above everything. He intended, I think, to greet Hades as an old friend, remembered from past parties; to be rowed across the Styx as carelessly as if he took a gondola to the Giudecca. When he met his boatman Charon, I think Uncle Steenie meant to treat him like the doorman at the Ritz: Steenie might flounce past, but he would bestow a large tip.
This was achieved, in the end. Steenie went as he would have liked, propped up against silk pillows, amusing one moment, dead the next.
But that sudden departure came at the end of a long three months, months during which even Steenie’s capacity to perform sometimes failed him. He was not in pain—we saw to that—but, as the doctors had warned, those morphine cocktails did have strange effects. They took Steenie back into the past, and what he saw there made him weep.
He would try to convey to me what he saw, talking and talking, often late into the night. His compulsion to make me see what he saw was very great. I sat with him; I held his hand; I listened. He was the last but one of my family left. I knew he wanted to give me the gift of the past, before it was too late.
It was often difficult, though, to understand what he said. The words were clear enough, but the events he described were scrambled. Morphine made Steenie a traveler through time; it gave him the facility to move forward and back, to pass from a recent conversation to another some twenty years before as if they happened the same day, in the same place.
He spoke of my parents and my grandparents, but only the names were familiar, for as Steenie spoke of them they were unrecognizable to me. This was not the father I remembered, nor the mother. The Constance he spoke of was a stranger.
One point: Some of Steenie’s memories were benign; some, quite clearly, were not. Steenie saw, in these shadows, things that made him shake. He would grasp my hand, start up in the bed, peer about the room, address specters he saw and I did not.
This made me afraid. I was unsure if it was the morphine speaking. As you will see in due course, I had grown up with certain puzzles that had never been resolved, puzzles that dated from the time of my own birth and my christening. I had outgrown those puzzles, I thought. I had put them behind me. My uncle Steenie brought them rushing back.
Such a whirl of words and images: Uncle Steenie might speak of croquet one minute, comets the next. He spoke often of the Winterscombe woods—a subject to which he would return with increasing and incomprehensible emphasis. He also spoke—and then I was almost sure it was the morphine—of violent death.
I think Wexton, who witnessed some of this, understood it better than I did, but he explained nothing. He remained quiet, resilient, reticent—waiting for death.
There were two days of serenity and lucidity before it came, days in which Steenie gathered himself, I thought, for the final assault. Then he died, as I say, with a merciful speed. Wexton said Steenie willed himself away, and I thought: my uncle was indomitable, I loved him, and Wexton was right.
So—would you describe that as easy? I looked at Vickers, then avoided his eyes. I felt that Steenie, trying to stage-manage his farewell performance, would have wanted me to emphasize its bravura aspects.
Avoid those episodes in the wings. Be careful.
“He … kept up appearances,” I said.
This seemed to please Vickers, or to relieve his guilt. He sighed.
“Oh,
good.
”
“He was in bed, of course. In his room at Winterscombe. You remember that room….”
“Dah-ling, who could forget it? Quite preposterous. His father would have had a fit.”
“He wore his silk pajamas. Lavender ones, on the days the doctors came—you know how he liked to shock—”
Vickers smiled. “Makeup? Don’t tell me he kept up with that …”
“Just a little. Quite discreet, for Steenie. He said … he said if he was going to shake hands with death, he intended to look his best—”
“Don’t be upset. Steenie would have hated you to be upset.” Vickers sounded almost kind. “Tell me—it does help to talk, you know. I’ve learned that. One of the penalties of age: All one’s friends—at the party one minute, absent the next. Steenie and I were the same age, you know. Sixty-eight. Not that that’s old exactly, these days. Still …” He paused. “Did he talk about me at all, at the end?”
“A bit,” I replied, deciding to forgive him the egotism. In fact Steenie had scarcely spoken of Vickers. I hesitated. “He liked to talk. He drank the Bollinger—I’d saved some. He smoked those terrible black Russian cigarettes. He read poems—”
“Wexton’s poems?” Vickers had regarded Wexton as a rival. He made a face.
“Mostly Wexton’s. And his letters—old ones, the ones he wrote to Steenie in the first war. All the old photograph albums … It was odd. The recent past didn’t interest him at all. He wanted to go further back. To his childhood, to Winterscombe the way it used to be. He talked a lot about my grandparents, and his brothers. My father, of course.” I paused. “And Constance.”
“Ah, Constance. I suppose he would. Steenie always adored her. The rest of your family”—Vickers gave a small, slightly malicious smile—“I should have said they weren’t too frightfully keen. Your aunt Maud loathed her, of course, and your mother—well, I always heard she’d more or less banished her from Winterscombe. I never found out why. Quite a little mystery there, I always thought. Did Steenie mention that?”
“No,” I replied, untruthfully, and if Vickers noticed the evasion he gave no sign. He poured more champagne. Something, the reference to Wexton perhaps, had ruffled him a little, I thought. Quite suddenly he seemed to tire of the subject of my uncle. He stood up and began to sift through the pile of photographs that lay on the table at his side.
“Speaking of Constance, look at this! I came across it just the other day. I’d quite forgotten I ever took it. My earliest work. The first photograph I ever did of her—terribly posed, too artificial, dated, I suppose, but all the same, I might use it in the retrospective. It has something, don’t you think?” He held up a large black-and-white print. “Nineteen sixteen—which means I was sixteen, and so was Constance, though she subtracts the years now, of course. Look at this. Did you ever see this before? Doesn’t she look extraordinary?”
I looked at the photograph. It was new to me, and Constance did indeed look extraordinary. It was, as Vickers said, highly artificial, very much in the fashion of its time and quite unlike his later work. The young Constance lay posed on what appeared to be a bier, draped in heavy white material, perhaps satin. Only her hands, which clasped a flower, and her head were visible; the rest of her body was wrapped and draped as if in a shroud. Her black hair, long then—I had never seen Constance with long hair—had been combed out and artfully arranged so that it fell in snaking tresses away from her face. Shocking in its luxuriance, as Vickers had no doubt intended, it brushed the floor. Constance lay in profile; a band of contrived light sharpened the strong planes of her face, so that her features, undeniably arresting even then, became a painterly composition, a pattern of light and dark. Black lashes made a crescent against a wide, high, almost Slavic cheekbone. Oddly, since her eyes (which were almost black) were Constance’s most famous feature, Vickers had chosen to photograph her with them shut.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
Vickers, who was recovering, gave a high, whinnying laugh. “That was what I called it. Well, one did things like that then. Constance on a bier, the Sitwells on biers—nothing but biers for a whole
year,
which went down
terribly
badly, of course, because it was the middle of the first war, and people said it was decadent. Useful, though, all that outrage.” He gave me a small glance. “It made me into an
enfant terrible,
always the best way to start. People forget I was ever that, now I’m a grand old man. So I thought I’d use this, in the exhibition, just to remind them. Oh, and her wedding photographs of course. They’re too divine.”
He riffled through the pile of photographs. “Oh, they’re not here. They’re down at the museum, I think. But look at this—now
this
will interest you.”