The Players Come Again Read online

  “Are we near to the champagne!” Nellie asked. “I don’t want to sound impatient, but I’d like to celebrate Kate’s editing and Gabrielle’s manuscript and get on, the rest of us, with the rest of our lives. I feel as though Gabrielle were giving us a gentle shove into the future. I’m trying to get a job with the U.N. and move back to New York.”

  They wanted to leave it all unsaid. But Kate knew that it had to be said. You cannot ignore bodies: you can only give them proper cremation and scatter the ashes. Ideas are the same.

  “Did Gabrielle tell you in London that day you took the papers, or the day before, Anne? Did she tell you she had killed Emmanuel? Or did she tell you the truth, that Emile had killed him? Or did she fail to mention it at all?”

  Anne recognized necessity when she met it. “She told me. She said I was not to tell Nellie. She said I was to tell no one, just to put her papers away somewhere safe. She said she told me only so that if anyone should come to suspect Emile, I could testify that it wasn’t Emile, it was her.”

  “So she knew Emile was still alive.”

  Nellie spoke: “Oh, yes. She was afraid of what Emile would do even before Poppop died. That was why she urged me to go to America. That was why she asked Eleanor to send for me. She didn’t tell Eleanor why, but she knew Eleanor would manage it. And as I told you in Geneva, I wanted to go. The atmosphere was poison, even before Emile left to join the Resistance, even before Poppop died.”

  Kate said: “And you told no one, Anne? You just put the papers in the vault and tried to forget the whole thing?”

  “Eventually I told Eleanor. I had to tell someone. I didn’t know the right thing to do. Eleanor never blinked an eye. And she helped to pay for the bank vault, which was really a lot of money. She said I should trust Nellie and Dorinda, that they would be my strength. It took me a while, but in the end I followed her advice, which was fine, as always.” Anne smiled at the others.

  “What made you guess?” Dorinda said. “I thought we gave you so many secrets you wouldn’t expect there could possibly be any more.”

  “That’s the first thing I learned when I set out upon the sticky road of detection: when the fellow is asking you to watch the hat, look for what he isn’t asking you to see. That’s where the action is. The rabbit isn’t in the hat; he’s wherever the fellow’s other hand is.”

  “We would have done better not to have a rabbit.”

  “Much better. As a straight literary proposition I would, in all probability, have jumped at it. But, you may notice, I’m still jumping at it. So there isn’t much lost after all.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Dorinda said. “Ever since I was a very young child, I couldn’t ignore a loose thread sticking out. I had to pull on it until I found whatever was at the end. If no one left a thread out, I might well ignore the whole thing. I should have remembered that before we decided to be clever.”

  Kate said: “It’s not many families, however extended, who have two children born on the wrong side of the blanket, as they used to say in old English novels, let alone a murder to account for.”

  “Poor Emile,” Nellie said. “I think when he learned about me—and certainly either Hilda or Emmanuel or both must have told him, or at least made sure he’d guess—it must have been the last straw. His hatred of his father was intense.”

  “It’s enough to make one tip one’s hat to Freud,” Kate said, “something I’m not usually likely to do when it comes to the family romance. He’s quite good, of course, on repression. Do you think Gabrielle helped Emile?”

  “No. I think she probably tried to stop him,” Nellie said, “but she couldn’t know for sure what he was up to. I’m certain he didn’t tell her, not in so many words. I suspect Emile poisoned his father slowly; that was why he seemed ill. Food was short, everything tasted funny, off somehow, we had to eat it however it tasted. But Emile knew he could count on her covering for him. And there was a war, and Emile could go off afterward and be a hero and die. So many people were dying around that time: James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, thousands of young men, and all kinds of people in the bombings. One more death was just one more sorrow.”

  Anne said: “We decided to wait for Emile’s death before we even brought up the subject of Gabrielle’s papers. We didn’t think she would have left anything about Emile there; why would she, when she was so adamant about burning all her letters, burning all the records there were? But that was how Nellie wanted it—to wait for Emile’s death, that was what Eleanor advised, and that was what we did.”

  Dorinda said: “We thought it impressive that Emile let Nellie know he was alive. We thought that was a kind of restitution. It was a kind of kindness. It was a claiming of Nellie even though she wasn’t his.”

  “When did you decide to write your memoir?” Kate asked Anne.

  “After we three had been talking a long while; oh, after we had all learned the truth about everything. Somehow it made the story as I knew it before, as I knew it up to Gabrielle’s death, easier to tell. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was the truth I had lived for most of my life, and I wanted to get it down. Dorinda thought it would help to introduce Gabrielle’s when we decided to do that, and of course it did. Writing it was a real blessing for me. It was like a cleansing, the way people are supposed to feel after psychoanalysis or therapy.”

  “That’s what Virginia, Woolf remarked about writing To the Lighthouse,” Dorinda said. “It doesn’t have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down,” she added, looking at Anne.

  “We will all have our vision,” Nellie said. “If one of us does it, we will all be able to do it. I’ve never believed in friendships that go on from childhood throughout life, unchanged, any more than I believe in very long unchanging marriages. I only believe in rediscovery and reinventing. I’m not putting this well: the three of us didn’t want to remember back to when we were children in order to understand our childhood. We want to think forward together; is there a word for the opposite of remembering? Childhood is an overrated time. I think being fifty allows one to escape from being a child, from all of childhood’s terrors. That was when we escaped.”

  “I’ll get the champagne,” Kate said. She looked at the three women in their sixties, all simultaneously children and mature women, none caught any longer in the past. For them, as for Gabrielle’s novel, it was the future that mattered; more even than that, the present mattered.

  “No,” Kate said to Anne, who was rising. “Don’t help me. I want to get the champagne and present it to you three. We’ll drink to the four of us, and to Gabrielle’s novel.”

  She went, leaving the three of them together for the moment, smiling at each other, anticipating.

  And what would she, Kate, be anticipating? A new kind of job, a new adventure, bringing Gabrielle back to life, as Gabrielle had brought Ariadne back to life. Emmanuel Foxx had had his triumph. No one would ever know his son had murdered him; no one, probably, would ever doubt his genius. And yet Gabrielle’s testimony would remain, questioning his testament, debating it.

  Kate felt as though a rare chance had come to her, one of those moments when all of the missed opportunities, the less than perfect literary accomplishments, the administrative defeats and the triumph of small-minded men devoted to the past, might be redeemed. The moment would not last, but she let it have its force. She had told Dorinda that all English literature was the story of second chances. This, then, was her second chance, and Gabrielle’s, and Ariadne’s.

  The tray was heavy with the champagne in an ice bucket and the four tall glasses, but Kate carried it to the three waiting women lightly, as an offering.

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  Amanda Cross

  Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) attended Wellesley College, class of 1947, and later received her graduate degrees in English Literature from Columbia University, where she joined the faculty in 1960, retiring
in 1992 as the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities. She authored nine scholarly books in the fields of feminist literary criticism and autobiography. As Amanda Cross, she wrote fourteen academic mystery novels and several short stories, featuring Kate Fansler, an English professor and amateur sleuth.

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  Bello

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  First published in 1990 by Virago

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  Copyright © Amanda Cross 1990

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