This Is Not for You (13 page)

Andrew came unexpectedly on his first visit late one Saturday afternoon in November. Because a fog had settled, I persuaded him to stay at the flat for the evening. I had a bottle or two of red wine. There must be a can of something that would do for dinner, but at six o’clock there was another knock on the door. Monk, her hair tangled into curls by the dampness, stood holding up a small, bleeding, paper bag.

“Liver!” she said in a regal voice.

“How did you get it?” I asked.

“I simply said to the butcher, ‘But what do you do when you’ve spent your week’s ration and are still thin and hungry?’ ” She did not see Andrew until I’d welcomed her in. “Oh dear, a love nest. I didn’t know. Really I didn’t.”

“There’s enough here for three,” I said.

“But I’ve invited Esther,” she said sadly. “I should have phoned first.”

“I should have,” Andrew said.

“There’s enough for four,” I said, dumping the liver out onto a plate. “Plenty.”

“But Esther won’t want to come with you here,” Monk said to Andrew, then smiled helplessly. “Why don’t you and Esther go out to dinner, and I’ll stay home and cook for Andy?”

“Making it worse only makes it worse,” I said. “Can’t you ever learn?”

“No,” Monk admitted. “What will I do?”

“Take off your coat. Wash the blood off your hands. And have a glass of wine.”

“And I?” Andrew asked.

“More or less the same thing,” I said. “It’s time peace was made. Liver is as good an excuse as any.”

And it turned out to be. You never had any human awkwardness. You greeted Andrew not as if you had expected him to be there but as if it were the natural place for him to be. And you settled at once to talk with him because there really were questions you had to ask about Cambridge and his Ph.D. program. Monk and I listened for a while, my attention shifting from what Andrew had to say to the attentive loveliness not only of your face but of your whole body. You sat on the floor near the gas fire, one knee up to support both hands and chin, your long hair pulled back, then caught before it fell, heavy and dark against a pale blue sweater. There was nothing delicate about you, the bold bones of your hands under your strong chin, full, almost Negroid mouth, flat cheek bones, black eyes and brows. It was a face meant for repose, the fact of it animation enough. Beside you, Monk’s prettiness was not even a distraction, and that night she did not try to compete. She went with me into the kitchen to help prepare dinner, leaving you and Andrew to a peace that did not seem to have to be made.

You left soon after dinner, on your way to a gang party the rest of us could not be persuaded to go to. At around ten o’clock, when Monk also decided that she had taken up enough of our evening, Andrew and I walked her home. I could feel how careful they were being of each other because Monk’s badly timed jokes had stopped, because Andrew paid too much attention to his conversation with me. After we left her, I let the conversation stop, and we walked for several blocks in silence.

“We had a conversation about Canadian social customs once before,” I said.

“Yes, and I should have taken my own advice then.”

“Well, but don’t now, just to try to pay a bad debt. You’d be good for Monk.”

“How?”

“Don’t be irritated with me, Andy.”

“I’m not. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get the hang of being friendly.”

“I have to work tomorrow evening.”

“Okay,” he said, with enough resignation in his voice so that we could both feel the game was being played properly.

I had not really thought about Monk until she telephoned the next day just before I was going out to meet Andrew for lunch.

“That bastard’s asked me out tonight!” she announced. “What did he tell you, that he was going back to Cambridge?”

“Of course not. I told him I had to work tonight. You didn’t refuse, did you?”

“Well… yes, damn it.”

“Never mind. I’m about to have lunch with him. What time will you be ready tonight?”

“Kate, hasn’t anyone ever told you that lending men is a dangerous game?”

“I’m not lending him to you, Monk. I’m giving him to you, to return the favor for the liver.”

“What’s the matter with him?” she asked suspiciously.

“He has an addiction to redheads.”

“Harems more likely,” she said, “a brunette, a redhead, and a… blonde?”

“Not quite. What time?”

“Seven.”

I did not work that night. I barely escaped being paid, however. Amateur standing in some sports is hard to maintain if you’re twenty-one and in good training.

After that Andrew came to London almost every weekend. I often had lunch with him. His work and mine had moved closer together, and I talked with him as I had once talked with you. I was testing patterns in the economics of underdeveloped countries, as they were then called. It is still a more accurate, if less tactful euphemism than “emerging nations.” Andrew had a great deal of information about primitive cultures which threatened to be relevant. We argued a lot, really because Andrew’s interest was theoretical, mine more and more urgently practical.

“You
are
going to be a spy and a humanitarian,” he said with some disapproval.

Occasionally I also went to the theater with Andrew and Monk, but it wasn’t long before they began to isolate themselves, however reluctantly Andrew didn’t talk with me about Monk until just before Christmas when he dropped by for a drink.

“Kate, I’m going to have to marry her.”

“Who?”

“Ramona.” He had stopped calling her Monk almost at once, but I wasn’t used to her real name. He might have been talking about someone else.

“Have to?”

He smiled. “She’s not pregnant, no. And she may have to be pregnant before she will marry me.”

“Has she broken off with Robin?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t hurry it. She is in love with you, as much as she knows how to be.”

“Love’s something none of my ‘harem,’ as she insists on calling you and Esther and herself, learned much about, it seems to me.”

“She’s right, you know. You are a harem thinker,” I said before I could check my anger.

“I should have let us make that pact about not being together when we’re desperate.”

“You’re not desperate,” I said, trying to recover amiability.

“No,” he said, “but I am embarrassed. Sometimes I feel a little too much like community property I hear, for instance, that I was once traded for a bag of liver.”

“You were, yes,” I admitted. “That was a bit of face-saving that shouldn’t have been necessary. I’m sorry.”

“We’re making each other earnest,” he said.

“Just don’t make me nervous, that’s all. Is there anything you want me to do?”

“Come out to dinner with me.”

“What about Monk?”

“She’s tangled up with a late rehearsal.”

Andrew had not been as candid in his explanations with Monk as he had been with you, and, though she was not openly jealous of the time he and I spent together, she was not easy about it. After that particular evening, she wondered if I didn’t owe her a bag of liver (“I can be an Indian giver, too”), but she took the reassurance in a return of rough teasing. When she was feeling particularly safe, she was even generous.

“You know, Kate, you shouldn’t always talk shop with men. They aren’t really terrified of intellectual women if they know how to be women, too. It isn’t that you aren’t attractive enough. You could do something more interesting with your hair.”

“Kate doesn’t need the entire male population in love with her,” you answered angrily.

“I wasn’t suggesting that she did. One would do.”

“One would be too many,” I said. “I haven’t time for that sort of thing.”

“Do you know what I think?” Monk asked. “I think you’ve got a secret lover. Andy thinks so, too. He doesn’t go along with my theory that he’s some sort of important spy or a married man with a tragically insane wife. Andy says it’s sure to be subtler than that, but he’s poor at specific guesses. Where were you last Friday night, for instance?”

“If she wanted you to know,” you said, “she’d tell you.”

“And why wouldn’t she want me to know? I tell both of you where I go.”

“You’d be so disappointed if you knew,” I said. “I have a duty to your imagination. After all, you’re a writer.”

“But I’m supposed to create the mystery, not be baffled by it myself. You don’t behave as if you were in love. But you might have a secret sorrow.”

“Tell us,” you said, “are
you
in love?”

“Oh, perhaps a little,” Monk said. “And don’t give me a lecture about keeping two men on the string. You have three.”

“That’s different,” you said.

“Yes, it is,” Monk agreed. “It’s absolutely regressive.”

“What’s regressive about friendship?”

I could have answered that one, but I didn’t. I wanted to get off the topic entirely.

“Doris wants to know if there are to be more than the four of us for Christmas,” I said.

“Marcus and Clide are both going home,” you said. “But Purple’s going to be on his own.”

“Shall we ask him?”

“Sure.”

“I think one of the beasts is going to be in town, too—Sidney,” Monk said. “That would make us even and give Andy a little competition in all directions.”

“Let’s not have anyone else,” you said suddenly “Just the four of us.”

“What about poor Purple?”

“He wouldn’t fit, not really. He’d rather spend Christmas in a pub.”

Sidney wasn’t even reconsidered, and the number was settled at four.

“Fine,” Doris said. “Then we won’t bother to open the top floor. I can give Andy young Frank’s room. I suppose you want Ann’s room, do you?”

“No, put Monk in Ann’s room and Esther and me into the guest room.”

“I’ve written to Andy to suggest he spend the whole of his holiday with us. It seems silly for him to go to a hotel at all. Wouldn’t you like a real holiday from housekeeping, too? The other two could come for five or six days—”

“No,” I said. “We’ll all three come at the same time. And you must promise me one thing right now—no negative conniving. Andy wants to marry Monk.”

“Does he,” Doris said, not really surprised, simply thinking about it. “All right. It is all right, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” I said. “I think it might be a very good thing for both of them.”

“Such altruism!”

“Masochism,” I said, smiling.

“You tell the truth often enough and someone may believe you.”

I did finally go over a few days before you and Monk arrived because Doris wanted help and companionship while Frank and Andrew played chess, listened to Bach, and talked about what had happened to some of the great European wine cellars during the war. Neither of them in either principle or habit excluded women from their conversation, but they were so content together we often chose to exclude ourselves. I didn’t miss young Frank, whose defense against his father was usually pompous aggressiveness, a tone he couldn’t drop while he was at home; but I did miss Ann, who was perhaps too dully typical of the nicest sort of English daughter, but she had an affectionate grace with her parents that I found charming. I couldn’t imitate it. I didn’t try. And I felt less inadequate because Andrew made himself so attractively at home. Perhaps Frank’s occasionally referring to us as “the children” gave Andrew the right sort of convention to move in with me, one that would be protective of both Monk and me. We went Christmas shopping together for Frank and Doris, Andrew with the addresses of several wine merchants, I with the name of a shop where we could find French gloves, and we gave them the presents we had found jointly, deciding to sign our cards “the children.” I went with him, too, to approve the amber necklace he had found for Monk on a day he and Frank had gone off together. Immediately, when we got home, he went to Doris for her approval, helping her over her uncertain loyalties. By the time you and Monk arrived, we were a solidly established family who could turn our attention entirely to our guests.

If I had not seen Doris working carefully with a calendar, I would have thought that the following five days simply developed with extraordinary natural pacing. Monk, less absorbed in playing her part, could have learned a great deal about play-writing. Doris, however, had generously given her a number of important scenes, hours in the day when she and Andrew would find themselves alone together on leisurely errands or in front of the fire with glasses of champagne while other people seemed to be still dressing or not yet back from calling on elderly relatives and business friends. If Monk did not agree to marry Andrew on the last day of the house party, it was not Doris’ fault.

She planned as carefully for all of us. She invited you to suggest inventive ornaments for the tree, then went off with you to Woolworth’s and Harrod’s and two or three art supply shops for the necessary materials. She might have been mildly surprised that you chose to work under rather than on the library table, but she did not show it. Occasionally we would find you both sitting on the floor, Doris as intent as you on starching and dyeing, cutting and painting. When people dropped in for drinks and Doris had to be hostess, she took them into the library to see you in the workshop. You’d nod out from under the table and behind a growing pile of invented flowers, star-winged angels, and apparently Easter eggs. On Christmas Eve, during cocktails, the decorating began. Frank followed your directions, threading dozens of tiny white lights through the branches. The rest of us followed with ornaments, but none was placed until you had decided where it would go. When we had finished, Doris was the first to speak.

“Esther, it’s marvelous. It’s a barbaric prophecy, as if we really were waiting for the Birth.”

You turned to her, seeing her for the first time. At that moment, dinner was announced. We were reluctant to leave the tree, which was, as Doris described it, crudely splendid.

“Kate,” you said, calling me back for a moment, “do you think I could go back to my place for a few minutes tonight?”

“Of course, if you need to.”

“It’s just that I’d like to give Doris one of my bell ringers. I think maybe she’d like it.”