Life Times Stories Part 2

Siggie Bentheim, eating Scotch salmon at Rules, like any other English journalist who can afford to, couldn't remember Carlitta. Who was she? Then Waldeck remembered that the year when everyone got to know Carlitta was the year that Siggie spent in Lausanne.

Another old friend remembered her very well. 'Carlitta! Not in England, at any rate. Carlitta!'

Someone else caught the name, and called across the table, 'Carlitta was in London, oh, before the war. She went to America thirteen or fourteen years ago.'

'Did she ever marry poor old Klaus Schultz? My G.o.d, he was mad about the girl!'

'Marry him! No-o-o! Carlitta wouldn't marry him.'

'Carlitta was a collector of scalps, all right,' said Waldeck, laughing.

'Well, do you wonder?' said the friend.

Eileen knew Carlitta well, in picture and anecdote. Eileen had a favourite among the photographs of her, too, just as she had the one of Stefan in Budapest on New Year's Eve. The photograph was taken in Austria, on one of Waldeck's skiing holidays. It was a clear print and the snow was blindingly white. In the middle of the whiteness stood a young girl, laughing away from the camera in the direction of something or someone outside the picture. Her little face, burnished by the sun, shone dark against the snow. There was a highlight on each firm, round cheekbone, accentuated in laughter. She was beautiful in the pictures of groups, too in boats on the Neckar, in the gardens of the Schloss, in cafes and at student dances; even, once, at Deauville, even in the unbecoming bathing dress of the time. In none of the pictures did she face the camera. If, as in the ski picture, she was smiling, it was at someone in the group, and if she was not, her black pensive eyes, her beautiful little firm-fleshed face with the short chin, stared at the toes of her shoes, or at the smoke of her cigarette, arrested in its climbing arabesque by the click of the camera. The total impression of all these photographs of the young German girl was one of arrogance. She did not partic.i.p.ate in the taking of a photograph; she was simply there, a thing of beauty which you could attempt to record if you wished.

One of the anecdotes about the girl was something that had happened on that skiing holiday. Carlitta and Klaus Schultz, Waldeck and one of his girls had gone together to the mountains. ('Oh, the luck of it!' Eileen had said to Waldeck at this point in his story, the first time he related it. 'You were eighteen? Nineteen? And you were allowed to go off on your first love affair to the mountains. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had announced to my parents that I was going off on a holiday with a young lover? And in Austria, and skiing . . .' Poor Eileen, who had gone, every year, on a five-day cruise along the coast to stay at a 'family hotel' in Durban, accompanied by her parents and young brother and sister, or had been sent, in the winter vacation, with an uncle and cousins to hear the lions roar outside a dusty camp in the Kruger Park. She did not know which to envy Waldeck, Carlitta and Klaus most the s.e.xual freedom or the steep mountain snows.) Anyway, it was on the one really long and arduous climb of that delightful holiday that Carlitta, who for some hours had been less talkative than usual and had fallen back a little, sat down in the snow and refused to move. Waldeck had lagged behind the rest of the party to mend a broken strap on his rucksack, and so it was that he noticed her. When he asked her why she did not hurry on with him to catch up with the other members of the party, she said, perfectly calm, 'I want to sit here in the shade and rest. I'll wait here till you all come back.'

There was no shade. The party intended to sleep in a rest hut up the mountain, and would not pa.s.s that way again till next day. At first Waldeck laughed; Carlitta was famous for her gaiety and caprice. Then he saw that in addition to being perfectly calm, Carlitta was also perfectly serious. She was not joking, but suffering from some kind of peculiar hysteria. He begged and begged her to get up, but she would not. 'I am going to rest in the shade' was all she would answer.

The rest of the party was out of sight and he began to feel nervous. There was only one thing he could try. He went up kindly to the beautiful little girl and struck her sharply, twice, in the face. The small head swung violently this way, then that. Carlitta got up, dusted the snow from her trousers, and said to Waldeck, 'For G.o.d's sake, what are we waiting for? The others must be miles ahead.'

'And when Klaus heard what had happened,' Waldeck's story always ended, 'he could scarcely keep himself from crying, he was so angry that he had not been the one to revive Carlitta, and Carlitta saw his nose pinken and swell slightly with the effort of keeping back the tears, and she noted how very much he must be in love with her and how easy it would be to torment him.'

Wretched Klaus! He was the blond boy with the square jaw who always frowned and smiled directly into the camera. Eileen had a theory that young people didn't even fall in love like that any more. That, too, had gone down under the waves.

Waldeck and his young wife arrived in New York on a Tuesday. Stefan Raines came to take them out to dinner that very first night. Eileen, who had never seen him before in her life, was even more overjoyed than Waldeck to find that he had not changed. As soon as they came out of the elevator and saw him standing in the hotel lobby with a m.u.f.fler hanging down untied on the lapels of his dark coat, they knew he had not changed. He wore the presidency of the public utility company, the wealth and the Fifth Avenue apartment just as he had worn the paper cap in the Budapest night club on New Year's Eve long ago. Stefan's American wife was not able to accompany them that night, so the three dined alone at the Pierre. After dinner Stefan wanted to know if he should drive them to Times Square and along Broadway or anywhere else they'd read about, but they told him that he was the only sight they wanted to see so soon after their arrival. They talked for two hours over dinner, Stefan asking and Waldeck answering eager questions about the old Heidelberg friends whom Waldeck and Eileen had seen in London. Stefan went to London sometimes, and he had seen one or two, but many whom he hadn't been able to find for years seemed to have appeared out of their hiding places for Waldeck. In fact, there were several old Berlin and Heidelberg friends living in New York whom Stefan had seen once, or not at all, but who, on the Brands' first day in New York, had already telephoned their hotel. 'We love Waldeck. Better than we love each other,' said Stefan to his friend's wife, his black eyes looking quietly out over the room, the corners of his mouth indenting in his serious smile that took a long time to open out, brightening his eyes as it did until they shone like the dark water beneath a lamplight on a Venetian ca.n.a.l where Eileen had stood with her husband a few weeks before.

Eileen seemed to feel her blood warm in the palms of her hands, as if some balm had been poured over them. No man in South Africa could say a thing like that! The right thing, the thing from the heart. You had to have the a.s.surance of Europe, of an old world of civilised human relations.h.i.+ps behind you before you could say, simply and truthfully, a thing like that.

It was the moment for the mood of the conversation to take a turn. Waldeck said curiously, suddenly remembering, 'And whatever became of Carlitta? Did you ever see Carlitta? Peter told me, in London, that she had come to live in America.'

'Now that's interesting that you should ask,' said Stefan. 'I've wondered about her, too. I saw her once, twelve more thirteen years back. When first she arrived in America. She was staying quite near the hotel where you're living now. I took her out to lunch not very sumptuous; I was rather poor at the time and I never saw her again. She was beautiful. You remember? She was always beautiful-' he crinkled his eyes to dark slits, as if to narrow down the aperture of memory upon her 'even in a bad restaurant in New York, she was well, the word my son would use is the best for her she was terrific. Minute and terrific.'

'That's it. That's it.' Waldeck spoke around the cigar he held between his teeth, trying to draw up a light.

'We adored her,' said Stefan, shaking his head slowly at the wonder of it.

'So you too, Stefan, you too?' said Eileen with a laugh.

'Oh, none of us was in love with Carlitta. Only Klaus, and he was too stupid. He doesn't count. We only adored. We knew it was useless to fall in love with her. Neither she nor we believed any one of us was good enough for her.'

'So you don't think she's in New York?' asked Waldeck.

Stefan shook his head. 'I did hear, from someone who knew her sister, that she had married an American and gone to live in Ohio.' He stopped and chuckled congestedly. 'Carlitta in Ohio. I don't believe it . . . Well, we should move along from here now, you know. Sure there isn't anywhere you'd like to go before bedtime?'

The girl from South Africa remembered that one of the things she'd always wanted to do if ever she came to New York was to hear a really fat Negro woman singing torch songs, so Stefan took them to a place where the air-conditioning apparatus kept the fog of smoke and perfume and liquor fumes moving around the tables while an enormous yellow blubber of a woman accompanied her own voice, quakingly with her flesh and thunderously on the piano.

It was only two nights later that Eileen came out of the ladies' room to join her husband in a theatre foyer during the interval and found him embracing a woman in a brown coat. As Waldeck held the woman away from him, by the shoulders, as if to take a good look at her after he had kissed her, Eileen saw a small face with a wide grin and really enormous eyes. As Eileen approached she noticed a tall, sandy-haired man standing by indulgently. When she reached the three, Waldeck turned to her with the pent-up, excited air he always had when he had secretly bought her a present, and he held out his hand to draw her into the company. In the moment before he spoke, Eileen felt a stir of recognition at the sight of the woman's hair, smooth brown hair in which here and there a grey filament of a coa.r.s.er texture showed, refusing to conform to the cla.s.sic style, centre-parted and drawn back in a bun, in which the hair was worn.

'Do you know who this is?' said Waldeck almost weakly. 'It's Carlitta.'

Eileen was ent.i.tled to a second or two in which to be taken aback, to be speechless in the face of coincidence. In that moment, however, the coincidence did not even occur to her; she simply took in, in an intense perception outside of time, the woman before her the brown coat open to show the collar of some nondescript silk caught together with a little brooch around the prominent tendons of the thin, creased neck; the flat, taut chest; the dowdy shoes with brown, punched-leather bows coming too high on the instep of what might have been elegant feet. And the head. Oh, that was the head she had seen before, all right; that was the head that, hair so sleek it looked like a satin turban, inclined with a mixture of coquetry, invitation, amus.e.m.e.nt and disdain towards a ridiculously long cigarette holder. That hair was brown, after all, and not the Spanish black of the photographs and imagination. And the face. Well, there is a stage in a woman's life when her face gets too thin or too fat. This face had reached that stage and become too thin. It was a prettily enough shaped face, with a drab, faded skin, as if it was exposed to but no longer joyously took colour from the sun. Towards the back of the jaw line, near the ears, the skin sagged sallowly. Under the rather thick, attractive brows the twin caves of the eyes were finely puckered and mauvish. In this faded, fading face (it was like an old painting of which you are conscious that it is being faded away by the very light by which you are enabled to look at it) the eyes had lost nothing; they shone on, greedily and tremendous, just as they had always been, in the snow, reflecting the Neckar, watching the smoke unfurl to the music of the guitar. They were round eyes with scarcely any white to them, like the beautiful eyes of Negro children, and the lashes, lower as well as upper, were black and thick. Their a.s.sertion in that face was rather awful.

The woman who Waldeck said was Carlitta took Eileen's hand. 'Isn't it fantastic? We're only up from Ohio this morning,' she said, smiling broadly. Her teeth were small, childishly square and still good. On her neglected face the lipstick was obviously a last-minute adornment.

'And this is Edgar,' Waldeck was saying, 'Edgar Hicks. Carlitta's husband.'

The tall, sandy-haired man shook Eileen's hand with as much flourish as a stage comedian. 'Glad to know you,' he said. Eileen saw that he wore hexagonal rimless gla.s.ses, and a clip across his tie spelled in pinkish synthetic gold 'E.J.H.'

'Carlitta Hicks-' Waldeck put out a hand and squeezed Carlitta's elbow. 'I can't believe it.'

'Sure is extraordinary,' said Mr Hicks. 'Carlitta here and I haven't been up to New York for more than three years.'

'Ach, no, darling,' said Carlitta, frowning and smiling quickly. She used her face so much, no wonder she had worn it out. 'Four at least. You remember, that last time was at Christmas.' She added to Waldeck, 'Once in a blue moon is enough for me. Our life . . .' She half lifted a worn hand, gave a little sudden intake of breath through her fine nostrils, as if to suggest that their life, whatever it was, was such that the pleasures of New York or anywhere else offered no rival enticement. She had still a slight German accent to soften the American p.r.o.nunciation of her speech.

Everyone was incoherent. Waldeck kept saying excitedly, 'I haven't been out of South Africa since I arrived there twenty years ago. I'm in New York two days and I find Carlitta!'

There was time only to exchange the names of hotels and to promise to telephone tomorrow. Then the theatre bell interrupted. As they parted, Waldeck called back, 'Keep Sunday lunch free. Stefan's coming. We'll all be together . . .'

Carlitta's mouth pursed; her eyes opened wide in a pantomime 'Lovely' across the crowd.

'And yet I'm not really entirely surprised,' Waldeck whispered to his wife in the darkening theatre. 'It's been happening to us in one way or another all the time. What do you think of the husband? What about Mr Edgar Hicks from Ohio?' he added with a nudge.

In the dark, as the curtain rose, Eileen followed it with her eyes for a moment and then said, 'I shouldn't have known her. I don't think I should ever have known her.'

'But Carlitta hasn't changed at all!' said Waldeck.

Waldeck was on the telephone, talking to Stefan, immediately after breakfast next morning. Pa.s.sing to and fro between the bedroom and the bathroom, Eileen could see him, his body hitched up on to the corner of the small desk, smiling excitedly at what must have been Stefan's quiet incredulity. 'But I tell you he actually is some sort of farmer in Ohio. Yes. Well, that's what I wanted to know. I can't really say very tall and fairish and thin. Very American . . . Well, you know what I mean a certain type of American, then. Slow, drawling way of speaking. Shakes your hand a long time. A weekend farmer, really. He's got some job with a firm that makes agricultural implements, in the nearby town. She said she runs pigs and chickens. Can you believe it? So is it all right about Sunday? I can imagine you are . . . Ach, the same old Carlitta.'

Sunday was a clear, sharp spring day in New York, exactly the temperature and brightness of a winter day in Johannesburg. Stefan rang up to say he would call for the Brands at about eleven, so that they could drive around a little before meeting Carlitta and her husband for luncheon.

'Will it be all right if I wear slacks?' asked Eileen. She always wore slacks on Sundays in Johannesburg.

'Certainly not,' said Stefan gravely. 'You cannot lunch in a restaurant in New York in slacks.'

Eileen put on a suit she had bought in London. She was filled with a childlike love and respect for Stefan; she would not have done the smallest thing to displease him or to prejudice his opinion of her. When he arrived to fetch the Brands he said, equally gravely, 'You look very well in that suit,' and led them to his car, where his wife, whom they had met in the course of the week, sat waiting.

His wife was perhaps an odd choice for Stefan, and then again perhaps she was not; she went along with the presidency, the wealth and the Fifth Avenue apartment, and left his inner balance unchanged. She was not so young as Eileen, but young, and a beauty. An American beauty, probably of Swedish or Norwegian stock. Hers was the style of blonde beauty in which the face is darker than the hair, which was not dyed but real. It was clean and s.h.i.+ny and almost silvery-fair, and she wore it as such women do, straight and loose. She wore black, and when she stood up you noticed that hers was the kind of tall figure that, although the shoulders are broad and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s full, tapers to too-narrow hips and too-thin legs. Her eyes were green and brilliant, and crinkled up, friendly, and on the wrist of one beautiful ungloved hand she wore a magnificent broad antique bracelet of emeralds and diamonds. Otherwise she was unadorned, without even a wedding ring. As she s.h.i.+fted along the seat of the car, a pleasant fragrance stirred from her, the sort of fragrance the expensive Fifth Avenue stores were then releasing into the foyers of their shops, to convince their customers of the arrival of the time to buy spring clothes. When she smiled and spoke, in a soft American voice without much to say, her teeth showed fresh as the milk teeth of a child.

Eileen thought how different were this woman and herself (with her large, Colonial, blue-eyed, suburban prettiness) from the sort of girls with whom Waldeck and Stefan had belonged in the world that was lost to them girls of the twenties, restlessly independent, sensual and intellectual, citizens of the world with dramatic faces, girls such as Carlitta, inclining her dark Oriental head, had been.

The four drove through Central Park, rather threadbare after the snow and before the blossom. Then they went down to the East River, where the bridges hung like rainbows, glittering, soaring, rejoicing the heart in the sky above the water, where men have always expected to find their visions. They stopped the car at the United Nations building, and first walked along on the opposite side of the street, alongside the shabby, seedy shops, the better to see the great molten-looking facade of gla.s.s, like a river flowing upwards, on the administrative block. The gla.s.s calmly reflected the skyline, as a river reflects, murky green and metallic, the reeds. Then they crossed the street and wandered about a bit along the line of flagstaffs, with the building hanging above them. The Brands resolved to come back again another day and see the interior.

'So far, there's nothing to beat your bridges,' said Eileen. 'Nothing.'

They drove now uptown to an elegant, half-empty restaurant which had about it the air of recovering from Sat.u.r.day night. There they sat drinking whisky while they waited.

'I don't know what we can do with the husband,' said Waldeck, shrugging and giggling.

'That's all right,' said Stefan. 'Alice will talk to him. Alice can get along with anybody.' His wife laughed good-naturedly.

'You know, he's worthy . . .' said Waldeck.

'I know,' said Stefan, comforting.

'Same old Carlitta, though,' said Waldeck, smiling reminiscently. 'You'll see.'

His wife Eileen looked at him. 'Oh, she's not,' she said, distressed. 'She's not. Oh, how can you say that to Stefan?' The girl from South Africa looked at the two men and the woman who sat with her, and around the panelled and flower-decorated room, and suddenly she felt a very long way from home.

Just at that moment, Carlitta and Mr Edgar Hicks came across the room towards them. Stefan got up and went forward with palms upturned to meet them; Waldeck rose from his seat; a confusion of greetings and introductions followed. Stefan kissed Carlitta on both cheeks gently. Edgar Hicks pumped his hand. In Edgar Hicks's other hand was the Palm Beach panama with the paisley band which he had removed from his head as he entered. The hovering attendant took it from him and took Carlitta's brown coat.

Carlitta wore the niggly-patterned silk dress that had shown its collar under the coat the night at the theatre, the same shoes, the same cracked beige kid gloves. But above the bun and level with the faded hairline, she had on what was obviously a brand new hat, a hat bought from one of the thousands of 'spring' hats displayed that week before Easter, a perky, ma.s.s-produced American hat of the kind which makes an American middle-cla.s.s woman recognisable anywhere in the world. Its newness, its frivolous sense of its own emphemerality (it was so much in fas.h.i.+on that it would be old-fas.h.i.+oned once Easter was over) positively jeered at everything else Carlitta wore. Whether it was because she fancied the sun still painted her face the extraordinary rich glow that showed against the snow in the picture of herself laughing in Austria years ago, or whether there was some other reason, her face was again without make-up except for a rub of lipstick. Under the mixture of artificial light and daylight, faint darkening blotches, not freckles but something more akin to those liver marks elderly people get on the backs of their hands, showed on her temples and her jawline. But her eyes, of course, her eyes were large, dark, quick.

She and her husband consulted together over what they should eat, he suggesting slowly, she deciding quickly, and from then on she never stopped talking. She talked chiefly to her two friends Waldeck and Stefan, who sat on either side of her. Edgar Hicks, after a few trying minutes with Eileen, who found it difficult to respond to any of his conversational gambits, discovered that Alice Raines rode horses and, like a swamp sucking in fast all around its victim, involved her in a long, one-sided argument about the merits of two different types of saddle. Edgar preferred the one type and simply a.s.sumed that Alice must be equally adamant about the superiority of the other. Although his voice was slow, it was unceasing and steady, almost impossible to interrupt.

Eileen did not mind the fact that she was not engaged in conversation. She was free to listen to and to watch Carlitta with Stefan and Waldeck. And now and then Carlitta, forking up her coleslaw expertly as any born American, looked over to Eileen with a remark or query 'That's what I say, anyway,' or 'Wouldn't you think so?' Carlitta first told briefly about her stay in London when she left Germany, then about her coming to the United States, and her short time in New York. 'In the beginning, we stayed in that hotel near Grand Central. We behaved like tourists, not like people who have come to stay. We used to go to Coney Island and rowing on the lake in Central Park, and walking up and down Fifth Avenue just as if we were going to go back to Germany in a few weeks.'

'Who's we?' asked Stefan. 'Your sister?'

'No, my sister was living in a small apartment near the river. Klaus,' she said, shrugging her worn shoulders with the careless, culpable gesture of an adolescent. Stefan nodded his head in confirmation towards Waldeck; of course, he remembered, Klaus had followed her or come with her to America. Poor Klaus.

'What happened to him?' asked Stefan.

'I don't know,' she said. 'He went to Mexico.'

Her audience of three could guess very well how it had been. When she had tired of Coney Island and the outside of Fifth Avenue shops and the rowing in Central Park, Klaus had found out once again that in the new world, as in the old, he had nothing more than amus.e.m.e.nt value for her.

'After three months-' Carlitta had not paused in her narrative 'I went to stay with my sister and brother-in-law she had been here some years already. But he got a job with a real-estate scheme, and they went to live on one of the firm's housing projects you know, a little house, another little house next door, a swing for the kids, the same swing next door. I came back to New York on my own and I found a place in Greenwich Village.'

Ah, now, there was a setting in which one could imagine the Carlitta of the photographs, the beautiful, Oriental-looking German girl from Heidelberg, with the bold, promising eyes. And at the moment at which Eileen thought this, her ear caught the drawl of Edgar Hicks. '. . . now, our boy's the real independent type. Now, only the other day . . .' Edgar Hicks! Where had Edgar Hicks come in? She looked at him, carefully separating the flesh from the fine fringe of bone in his boiled trout, the knife held deliberately in his freckled hand.

'Did you live in Greenwich Village?' Eileen said to him suddenly.

He interrupted his description of his boy's seat in the saddle to turn and say, surprised, 'No, ma'am, I certainly didn't. I've never spent more than two consecutive weeks in New York in my life.' He thought Eileen's question merely a piece of tourist curiosity, and returned to Alice Raines, his boy and the saddle.

Carlitta had digressed into some reminiscence about Heidelberg days, but when she paused, laughing from Stefan to Waldeck with a faltering coquettishness that rose in her like a half-forgotten mannerism, Eileen said, 'Where did you and your husband meet?'

'In a train,' Carlitta said loudly and smiled, directed at her husband.

He took it up across the table. 'Baltimore and Ohio line,' he said, well rehea.r.s.ed. There was the feeling that all the few things he had to say had been slowly thought out and slowly spoken many times before. 'I was sittin' in the diner havin' a beer with my dinner, and in comes this little person looking mighty proud and cute as you can make 'em . . .' So it went on, the usual story, and Edgar Hicks spared them no detail of the romantic convention. 'Took Carlitta down to see my folks the following month and we were married two weeks after that,' he concluded at last. He had expected to marry one of the local girls he'd been to school with; it was clear that Carlitta was the one and the ever-present adventure of his life. Now they had a boy who rode as naturally as an Indian and didn't watch television; he liked to raise his own chickens and have independent pocket money from the sale of eggs.

'Carlitta,' Stefan said, aside, 'how long were you in Greenwich Village?'

'Four years,' she said shortly, replying from some other part of her mind; her attention and animation were given to the comments with which she amplified her husband's description of their child's remarkable knowledge of country lore, his superiority over town-bred children.

Eileen overheard the low, flat reply. Four years! Four years about which Carlitta had said not a word, four years which somehow or other had brought her from the arrogant, beautiful, 'advanced' girl with whom Waldeck and Stefan could not fall in love because they and she agreed they were not good enough for her, to the girl who would accept Edgar Hicks a few weeks after a meeting on a train.

Carlitta felt the gaze of the girl from South Africa. A small patch of bright colour appeared on each of Carlitta's thin cheekbones. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the wine, too, that made her voice rise, so that she began to talk of her life on the Ohio farm with a zest and insistence which made the whole table her audience. She told how she never went to town unless she had to; never more than once a month. How country people, like herself, discovered a new rhythm of life, something people who lived in towns had forgotten. How country people slept differently, tasted their food differently, had no nerves. 'I haven't a nerve in my body, any more. Absolutely placid,' she said, her sharp little gestures, her black eyes in the pinched face challenging a denial. 'Nothing ever happens but a change of season,' she said arrogantly to people for whom there were stock-market crashes, traffic jams, crowded exhibitions and c.o.c.ktail parties. 'Birth and growth among the animals and the plants. Life. Not a cement subst.i.tute.' No one defended the city, but she went on as if someone had. 'I live as instinctively as one of our own animals. So does my child. I mean, for one thing, we don't have to worry about clothes.'

Eileen said rather foolishly, as if in reflex, 'Stefan said I couldn't wear slacks to a New York restaurant today.'

'Stefan was always a sn.o.b.' Carlitta's little head struck like a snake.

Eileen was taken aback; she laughed nervously, looking very young. Carlitta grinned wickedly under the hat whose straw caught the light concentrically, like a gramophone record. Stefan's wife smiled serenely and politely, as if this were a joke against her husband. She had taken off the jacket of her suit, and beneath it she wore a fine lavender-coloured sweater with a low, round neck. She had been resting her firm neck against her left hand, and now she took the hand away; hers was the kind of wonderful blood-mottled fair skin that dented white with the slightest pressure, filled up pink again the way the sea seeps up instantly through footprints in wet sand. She looked so healthy, so well cared for that she created a moment of repose around herself; everyone paused, resting his gaze upon her.

Then Carlitta's thin little sun-sallow neck twisted restlessly. 'I don't know how you stand it,' she said. 'I don't know how you can live in New York year after year.'

'We go away,' Stefan said soothingly. 'We go to Europe most summers, to Switzerland to my mother, or to Italy. Alice loves Italy.'

'Italy,' said Carlitta, suddenly turning over a piece of lobster on her plate as if she suspected that there must be something bad beneath it. 'Spain.'

'You remember how you went off to the Pyrenees?' Waldeck said to her. From his tone it was clear that this was quite a story, if Carlitta cared to tell it.

'You can't imagine how time flies on the farm,' said Carlitta. 'The years . . . just go. Sometimes, in summer, I simply walk out of the house and leave my work and go and lie down in the long gra.s.s. Then you can hear nothing, nothing at all.'

'Maybe the old cow chewing away under the pear tree,' said Edgar tenderly. Then with a chuckle that brought a change of tone: 'Carlitta takes a big part in community affairs, too, you know. She doesn't tell you that she's on the library committee in town, and last year she was lady president of the Parent-Teacher a.s.sociation. Ran a bazaar made around three hundred dollars.' There was a pause. n.o.body spoke. 'I'm an Elk myself,' he added. 'That's why we're going to Philadelphia Thursday. There's a convention on over there.'

Carlitta suddenly put down her fork with a gesture that impatiently terminated any current subject of conversation. (Eileen thought: she must always have managed conversation like that, long ago in smoky, noisy student rooms, jerking the talk determinedly the way she wanted it.) Her mind seemed to hark back to the subject of dress. 'Last year,' she said, 'we invited some city friends who were pa.s.sing through town to a supper party. Now it just so happened that that afternoon I could see a storm banking up. I knew that if the storm came in the night it was goodbye to our hay. So I decided to make a hay-making party out of the supper. When those women came with their high-heeled fancy sandals and their gauzy frocks I put pitchforks into their hands and sent them out into the field to help get that hay in under cover. Of course I'd forgotten that they'd be bound to be rigged out in something ridiculous. You should have seen their faces!' Carlitta laughed gleefully. 'Should have seen their shoes!'

The young girl from South Africa felt suddenly angry. Amid the laughter, she said quietly, 'I think it was an awful thing to do. If I'd been a guest, I should flatly have refused.'

'Eileen!' said Waldeck mildly. But Carlitta pointedly excluded from her notice the girl from South Africa, whom Waldeck was apparently dragging around the world and giving a good time. Carlitta was sitting stiffly, her thin hands caught together, and she never took her eyes off Alice Raines's luxuriantly fleshed neck, as if it were some object of curiosity, quite independent of a human whole.

'If only they'd seen how idiotic they looked, stumbling about,' she said fiercely. Her eyes were extraordinarily dark, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with brightness. If her expression had not been one of malicious glee, Eileen would have said that there were tears in them.

After lunch, the Brands and the Raineses parted from the Hickses. Carlitta left the restaurant with Waldeck and Stefan on either arm, and that way she walked with them to the taxi stand at the end of the block, turning her small head from one to the other, tiny between them. 'I just couldn't keep her away from her two boyfriends today,' Edgar said indulgently, walking behind with Eileen and Alice. At this point the thin, middle-aged woman between the two men dropped their arms, bowed down, apparently with laughter at some joke, in the extravagant fas.h.i.+on of a young girl, and then caught them to her again.

Edgar and Carlitta got into a taxi, and the others went in Stefan's car back to his apartment. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, but Stefan brought in a bottle of champagne. The weak sunlight coming in the windows matched the wine. 'Carlitta,' said Stefan before he drank. 'Still "terrific". Beautiful.' Eileen Brand, sitting on a yellow sofa, felt vaguely unhappy, as if she had wandered into the wrong room, the wrong year. She even shook her head sadly, so slowly that no one noticed.

'I told you, same old Carlitta,' said Waldeck. There was a silence. 'And that husband,' Waldeck went on. 'The life they lead. So unlike Carlitta.'

'And because of that, so like her,' said Stefan. 'She always chose the perverse, the impossible. She obviously adores him. Just like Carlitta.'

Eileen Brand wanted to stand up and beg of the two men, for their own sake no, to save her, Eileen, from shame (oh, how could she know her reasons!) see she is changed; see Carlitta is old, faded, exists, as Carlitta, no more!

She had stood up without knowing it. 'What's the matter, Eileen?' Waldeck looked up. As she opened her mouth to tell him, to tell them both, a strange thing happened. It seemed that her whole mind turned over and showed her the truth. And the truth was much worse than what she had wanted to tell them. For they were right. Carlitta had not changed. They were right, but not in the way they thought. Carlitta had not changed at all, and that was why there was a sense of horror about meeting her; that was why she was totally unlike any one of the other friends they had met. Under that faded face, in that worn body, was the little German girl of the twenties, arrogant in a youth that did not exist, confidently disdainful in the possession of a beauty that was no longer there.

And what did she think of Ohio? Of good Edgar Hicks? Even of the boy who raised chickens and didn't look at television?

'Nothing,' said Eileen. 'I'd like a little more wine.'

It so happened that a day or two later, Stefan's business took him to Philadelphia. 'Don't forget Carlitta and her husband are staying at the Grand Park,' Waldeck said.

'Oh, I'll find them,' said Stefan.

But when he came back to New York and dined with his wife, Waldeck and Eileen the same night, he seemed entirely to have forgotten his expressed intention. 'I had a h.e.l.l of a job dodging that Edgar Hicks,' he said, by the way. 'Wherever I went I seemed to b.u.mp into that Elk convention. They were everywhere. Every time I saw a panama hat with a paisley band I had to double on my tracks and go the other way. Once he nearly saw me. I just managed to squeeze into an elevator in time.'

And they all laughed, as if they had just managed it, too.