“Only a fool would do that,” said Didier. He was sitting on the radiator in the attic bathroom, in his dressing gown, while Piet lay submerged to his neck in the water Didier had just vacated. “You can’t let her know that you know she’s keen on you. Especially if you’re going to reject her.”
“But I can’t let it go on this way forever. If her father suspects—”
“Suspicion’s one thing. If you
say
anything, it’ll go badly wrong.”
Piet agreed with his friend, so he continued to feign obliviousness as Constance’s attentions became more frequent and less subtle. When, one day, she fainted at tea and compelled him to lift her in his arms and deposit her on the sofa, a new and horrifying possibility occurred to him: that she might make an overt declaration that necessitated a plain response. What could he possibly say that would close forever the possibility of a liaison while sparing her the kind of embarrassment that so often demands vengeance? He did not wish to be her enemy. As the danger increased he began to prepare a little speech on the subject of his religious scruples, which would not permit him, etc. etc. But in the event this was not necessary, for two days later, as Didier Loubat and Hilde Wilken served the coffee and petits fours, Constance put him on the spot in a public yet deniable manner that demanded respect.
His first thought, as she told him he was handsome and that he pleased her, was relief that her father was not there to observe the interaction; but this was followed by the certainty that, if he did not make himself clear to her now, he might not have the opportunity to do so again without Maarten present. “Would you like to sing?” he asked, playing for time.
“I’d enjoy it much more if you would,” said Constance.
Piet hesitated. The erotica of
Carmen
was not at all appropriate. It would be better to speak through music, but what could possibly serve? His choice should be moving, to avoid making light of Constance’s feelings, but not melodramatic. Ideally it should end cheerfully but convey an emphatic rejection. What on earth …?
And then, as inspiration so often did, it came as he needed it. He raised his eyes to Constance’s and very, very gently played the first haunting chords of
La Traviata
.
Jacobina, who had observed the entire exchange, smiled and bent over her embroidery. Louisa was impressed too, though she also experienced a strange and contradictory desire to puncture Mr. Barol’s improbable perfection, and see him fail. Hilde Wilken had left the room, and Didier, who never went to the opera, did not understand until Piet explained later. But Constance understood and as she listened to Piet play the overture to a story about disastrous liaisons between the classes and the tragedies they lead to, and as he looked at her firmly, making his meaning plain, she abruptly abandoned the effort of seducing him—because she preferred to renounce a challenge rather than fail at it. She picked up a copy of
La Mode Illustrée
and buried herself behind it and later submitted to Louisa’s scalding mockery without much minding. For this was Constance Vermeulen-Sickerts’ essential genius: that she was able to desist from desiring what she could not have—a trick that, had they emulated it, might have saved her male acquaintances much misery.
P
iet was right: Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts was watching his behavior closely, and when Maarten saw him resist Constance’s assault he too wondered whether he was a uranist. But no. He was not like Mr. Blok. This made the young man’s restraint all the more creditable and induced in Maarten a warm paternal regard he demonstrated in all sorts of touching ways. He explained to Piet how successful enterprises are run: with iron confidence, flexibility, and a willingness to innovate. He took him over every inch of the house, describing its contents with the delight of the self-made connoisseur, and lingered in particular over the cabinets in his office and the statues of Paris, Athena and Aphrodite that reigned over the staircase hall.
It was Paris’ task, at the request of Zeus, king of the gods, to decide which of the goddesses was the most beautiful. “And that is why,” said Maarten, pointing upwards, “I never take sides between my daughters and my wife. Paris’ decision started the Trojan War.”
It did not occur to Maarten, as he watched Constance lay unsuccessful siege to Piet Barol and steeled himself to intervene if necessary, that it was not his daughters’ virtue the young man threatened but his wife’s. Jacobina betrayed no indication of remembering Piet’s first afternoon in the house, but she thought of it constantly and was not entirely relieved that Piet seemed to have forgotten it.
Jacobina was a woman who had lived her life correctly, even strictly, but this was because she had gradually lost the imagination to conceive of it otherwise and not the result of any great interior piety. Her youth’s sole act of rebellion had been to accept the proposal of the cunning, boisterous Maarten Vermeulen, when she might have made a titled alliance. This had been rewarded by her husband’s runaway success. But she had not been very impulsive since and Piet’s arrival made her rather regret this.
Jacobina had gone to bed on his first night quietly proud that a handsome young man had stared so saucily at her. The next morning she was horrified by what had happened and resolved to censure any future impudence. At first she was relieved when no opportunity to do so arose. For several weeks she rehearsed the chilling speech she would deliver when Mr. Barol made protracted eye contact with her again. When he did not she grew rather indignant, and her contradictory emotions annoyed her. She began to embroider a great deal, which gave her something to do with her hands in the evening while Piet and Maarten sang duets at the piano. During these impromptu performances, she found herself noticing the young man’s physique and contrasting her husband’s unfavorably with it. After one evening of particular study, she began to imagine Piet naked, and then to do so with a frequency that alarmed her. She rejoiced when Constance set out to seduce him, because any incorrectness on Piet’s part would get him dismissed and remove the temptation forever.
But Piet Barol did not behave incorrectly; and just once or twice she thought that it was at her, rather than her charming daughter, that he looked with the hunger she felt and tried not to show. She dreamed about him for the first time a month after his arrival, and in the dream he put his strong young body at her disposal. She woke from it aroused, and when Maarten had left she dismissed Agneta Hemels and spent the morning in bed, defying the prohibitions of her youth and pleasuring herself until the lunch bell sounded.
I
t was the custom of the household to attend church together and to sit in the same pew—for on Sundays all men are equal in the eyes of God. One Sunday near the end of May, Jacobina woke from a dream of wild abandon that chimed with the cheerful weather and made her wish, as Agneta did her hair, that no one, not even God, were watching her.
She found the servants waiting in the hall and Piet’s smell provoked a spasm of longing. To have the fantasy companion of the night incarnated in all his earthly glory was an unfair temptation on the Sabbath morning. She turned from him and got into the Rolls-Royce, calling rather sharply for her daughters. Maarten was already in his seat and said “Good morning, my love” with a tenderness that painfully stimulated her conscience.
The clash of unsatisfied desire and self-reproach put Jacobina in a filthy temper. She said nothing during the short drive to the Nieuwe Kerk and once there hurried through the throng, bowing briefly to her friends, and sank to her knees in the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ pew. But Jacobina was not praying. She was thinking about Piet Barol, and the sound of his deep, happy voice inquiring after Mrs. de Leeuw’s rest made it hard to banish the image of him, bare chested and ready, that had followed her from her sleep.
The choir came in and the minister after them. During the first hymn she permitted herself the briefest glance in his direction and caught his profile, his dark brows and blue eyes, his full red lips parted in song. A wild, impulsive wish to touch him, if only for an instant, came over her. She redirected her attention to the hymnal but the thought persisted. Piet’s resonant echoing of the prayers sustained it. She threw herself into atoning for her sinful flesh but this did not cleanse her—because a secret voice, from deep within, told her that she did not sincerely repent.
The sermon drew on the Beatitudes, as recounted in the Gospel of St. Matthew. Of the eleven people in the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ pew, only Maarten and Piet listened to it with any attention, and both automatically evaluated themselves against the standards it outlined. Neither man considered himself poor in spirit, but only Maarten accepted that this might bar him from the kingdom of heaven. Piet was not sure he believed in the kingdom of heaven and wondered whether he was the only one in the congregation to harbor such doubts.
No
. According to Didier, Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts was a passionate atheist.
He looked at her and understood from the quick movement of her head that she had been looking at him, too. He had not yet found a way into her affections. He had been too distracted by the dangers of Constance’s infatuation to risk a full assault. Louisa was exquisitely dressed, in a tailored linen coat of her own design that made the dresses of the other women look ostentatious and foolish. Since his second day in the house, when he had resisted the impulse to hate her, he had been struck by the confidence of her taste. Louisa’s small straw hat this morning shamed the millinery of the women around her, which was heavily burdened with flowers and dead birds. It was Constance whom the young bucks had watched as the party walked up the aisle; but the true beauty of the family was the grave, inscrutable Louisa.
His attention returned to the sermon. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” the minister was saying, and this was a point with which Piet emphatically disagreed. It seemed obvious to him that the strong took advantage of the meek and left them nothing. It was better to assert oneself against Fortune, as Machiavelli advised, and as he himself had done so profitably.
As she heard the words “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” Jacobina snapped to attention rather crossly. She had spent much of her life being pure and had not seen God yet. Her childhood nanny had been a devout Catholic, and from her she had absorbed the idea that sins are precisely quantifiable, with calibrated penances capable of removing their stain forever. As a little girl, she had secretly said a hundred Hail Marys every Saturday morning to atone for the gluttony she would display as soon as she received her pocket money, which she spent on hard, brightly colored sweets she did not share. Rising for the Eucharist, she wondered whether she might now make a similar bargain with God and win the right to think sordid thoughts without regret.
Nonsense, Jacobina,
she said to herself, but the censoriousness of her tone was undermined by the sight of Piet’s buttocks as he waited to receive the Host.
When the service was finished she greeted the minister more absently than usual and was so flushed that Maarten asked if anything was wrong. “I’m perfectly well,” she said; but in fact she felt afraid because she had decided to touch Piet Barol, come what may; just a little touch that no one would notice. The opportunity arose as they waited for the car, because Piet happened to be standing in front of its door as it drew up. She held out her hand to him quite naturally to be helped in. His grip was firm and dry. When she leaned against his arm, she saw his bicep swell as he took her weight. “Thank you, Mr. Barol,” she said, and their eyes met, and in that meeting was the knowledge of what had gone before.
“Je vous en prie,”
said Piet.
I
t was insanely stupid—Piet knew this as he spoke the words, but spoke them anyway—to refer, however obliquely, to the hidden undercurrents of his first interview with Jacobina. As he followed the Rolls-Royce on foot with the other servants, he understood that he had acted dangerously, and yet … He watched Jacobina emerge from the vehicle and ascend the steps of the house.
She was undeniably an attractive woman.
He went into the hall feeling reckless. Fortunately he had Egbert’s prayers to attend to, and he turned to this chore with relief because he knew it would calm him. Egbert’s refusal to leave the house required Piet to take him through the morning service before Sunday lunch, except on the first Sunday of the month when the minister called in person to give him the sacraments. The boy was in his bedroom, his face so red Piet thought he might have a fever; but Egbert was perfectly well and red faced only because he had spent the morning in an ice-cold bath.
Between the child and the young man a wary ease had arisen, the result of Piet’s scrupulous refusal to ask Egbert to explain himself or behave as other children did. This was convenient in many respects, but the persistent avoidance of frank discussion had prevented them from becoming friends. Piet knelt on the floor and asked Egbert to open his prayer book. Together they went through the service, and the boy sought the Holy Spirit’s aid so fervently Piet felt sorry for him. He read him the Beatitudes, giving no hint of his own views, and when they had finished he sent him to his father’s study to receive a homily.
He was on the landing outside Egbert’s room, about to go to his own, when Jacobina emerged from her bedroom. Piet had loitered perhaps a little longer than he ought to have done, daring Fate; and Fate had not only called his bluff but doubled its money because Jacobina was wearing the dress of apple-green wool she had worn at their first encounter.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Barol. Will you be lunching with us?” Before changing, Jacobina had written a check for fifty guilders and asked Agneta to take it to the Civic Orphanage in the manner of a medieval merchant buying a papal indulgence. The money was drawn on her own account and had come from her father, not her husband.
“I should be delighted to,
mevrouw
.”