The Players Come Again Read online

  The Goddards never knew quite why she had returned. She wrote them only that she was now living in rooms in Kensington, address provided so that the allowance could be sent, and hoped they were well; she was as ever grateful to them for their kindness. Eleanor had once told me there was nothing in Gabrielle’s gratitude to suggest that the Goddards were providing more than her due. I was still too uncertain of my own gratitude to the Goddards to be able to judge Gabrielle’s. I liked to think that my gratitude was uncomplicated, but my moments of resentment, however disguised as resentment at Dorinda for having turned out so disappointingly, warned me that a high moral tone toward Gabrielle was hardly justified.

  The romantic story of Emmanuel and Gabrielle was as well known to me as any romance in literature—and literature comprises more of romance than of reality. If Romeo and Juliet had not died at the end of the play, how would they have lived? Did Shakespeare suggest, in The Winter’s Tale, that a man can love his wife twenty years hence only if she is preserved in the fullness of her twenty-year-old beauty? Emmanuel and Gabrielle were almost Shakespearean in their love, or so it seemed still in 1955 when I went in search of sixty-six-year-old Gabrielle. Her son was dead; her husband was dead, after a short, painful, ultimately fatal illness; her granddaughter was an ocean away. Only I, the least connected to her of the three in our generation, was on my way to visit. Gloomy enough she might be, but still, even I expected her to be redolent of a great love. I had read somewhere that the old looked backward into the past, rediscovering and reliving. What a great past to have, what a great love. True, I would have wanted no such love for myself. But if one had to fling oneself thoughtlessly, carelessly, into the torrent of passion, how much better that passion’s object should be a great writer, the great creator of a female hero.

  Gabrielle had met Emmanuel when she was sixteen. It was always assumed, on the basis of family (Goddard) gossip, that she had allowed him “everything” on their first encounter. Emmanuel had been a visitor at Gabrielle’s family home, a huge castlelike place (it may have become grander in the telling), brought there by one of Gabrielle’s brothers who introduced Emmanuel as the great writer of the future. How often are such introductions prophetic? If Emmanuel was not yet a great writer, he was already a man of extraordinary appeal, especially to women; a man, I have always supposed, like Rodin, or Augustus John, larger than life, large in his form and in his claims on life. Gabrielle adored him at first sight. “Whoever loved who loved not at first sight?” I have always assumed that Marlowe’s line (my view is reinforced by the context in which Shakespeare quotes it) applies only to philanderers or those who know nothing of marriage.

  She offered to show him the park, the lake with the ducks, the wild garden, and lay with him under a grove of beech trees, in the dappled shade beneath their thick leaves. When she ran off with him to Paris shortly thereafter, she must have been already pregnant with Emile, who was born nine months later. They were married in Paris by an official when they knew her to be carrying a child. Emmanuel had not been caught in marriage before, but this was (so the Goddards said) the first, or at any rate the youngest, virgin he had taken, and this fact convinced him that she was bearing his son and heir to carry on his name. Perhaps because Emile was such a disappointment, he welcomed Nellie’s gender; that, at least, was my surmise.

  Gabrielle’s family was utterly unforgiving. Her father followed her to Paris, but when he caught up to the fleeing couple, which took some weeks, Emmanuel told him Gabrielle was pregnant and about to be married. The father, according to Goddard legend, announced that from that moment on he had no daughter, turned on his heel and departed. I always wondered if the brothers had made any attempt to see her—they were older, and certainly had some money of their own—but apparently they were conventional, or as jealous of family position as their parents. Gabrielle’s mother died soon after—from a broken heart, the Goddards assured me. She had loved her daughter, and blamed herself. Had she lived she might have understood Gabrielle’s impulses, and supported her later in life. But she was wholly under her husband’s thumb, and lost, with Gabrielle’s elopement, her only reason for living. A romantic story, if ever there was one.

  The Goddards supposed, on whatever evidence supported their wonderful stories of Emmanuel Foxx, that Gabrielle had, from time to time, written to her relatives for help, but none was forthcoming. Her letters, in the best English manner, were returned unopened. A second baby was stillborn, and the Foxxes had no more children. Considering the mess they made of Emile, that was probably just as well, or so I thought in 1955 in my arrogantly intolerant and jejune way.

  But what, I remembered having asked Dorinda sometime after Nellie arrived, did they do in the war? I prided myself on being the historian in the group, tidy with facts as I liked to think myself, and aware that my father had been in the war before he ever met my mother. Dorinda did not know, but she asked at dinner, and her father said that Emmanuel had been almost forty at the time of the war, not conscripted by the French at first, and eventually found to have a heart murmur and an ulcer, which kept him out of the army. He retreated to the French countryside with his family, and continued to work on his novel, of far more importance, in his opinion, than the war.

  One of Gabrielle’s brothers was killed, and the other wounded, but that did not soften her father’s heart, nor that of the surviving brother. Gabrielle helped Emmanuel with his writing, and tried to find enough food for him and the boy. It must have been a hard time. When I tried to picture it, I always thought of what I heard of the French countryside in World War II movies and stories, so that, in a strange way, Emile as a boy in one war and Emile as a member of the Resistance in another blurred in my mind.

  The demands of my boss in London were many, and my time was filled with helping him to set up his office there and generally playing what was, in the fifties, considered the proper role of a woman assistant to an editor: the role of wife. Academic wives played the same role, of course, often to an extent unknown or unsuspected at the time. I well remember when, many years later, Queenie Leavis, the wife of that most terrifying and influential critic of his time, F. R. Leavis, admitted in an interview years after his death that she had done all the research for his famous books and written the greater part of them. So we who assisted the male publishers and writers did the research and typing and sometimes the writing, leaving them to get the credit and scurry about, meeting people. In those days Time and Life magazines were widely read, and on their staffs the men were the writers; the women, banned from that title, were “researchers.” In my ease, I eventually ran the office of the top men, not only as a secretary (they had a secretary separate from me) but as chief accountant, publicist, and, in many cases, decision maker.

  It was thus not until I had been in London several weeks that I attempted to telephone Gabrielle, requesting an appointment. She turned out not to be, as the English said, “on” the telephone. Not to be on the telephone was less surprising then, less unusual than it would be now, but still amazing to my American self. I was forced, therefore, to write a letter, which, the blessed English mails not yet having achieved, like postal Service everywhere else, their nadir, reached Gabrielle in the morning. She wrote an answer immediately which reached me the same afternoon, perhaps, as I look back on it now, the most unlikely event of all, looked at from this time to that. She asked me to come and see her at three o’clock the next day. Leaving my boss in a frenzy I could well imagine but did not go into the office to witness, I took the day off, walking the streets to think what I would say, to plan how I would begin my letter to Eleanor, and to buy some delicacies for Gabrielle.

  I discovered her home was a ground-floor flat in a converted house on the edge of Kensington which the landlady, whom I met when I rang the bell, declared to be really in Knightsbridge. The landlady had lain in wait for me, Gabrielle’s first visitor ever. Gabrielle must have told her I was coming, but little else. My American accent i
n no way precluded her immediate assumption that I was family; perhaps she thought I was Nellie. She told me how worried she was about Gabrielle, who never stirred from her rooms, who paid the “girl” to get her groceries and other necessities, who really was not the sort of lodger she, the landlady, really wanted, but after all the money came regular, didn’t it, and you couldn’t just put the poor thing out on the streets. Still chattering, she led me down the hall and past a stairway to Gabrielle’s door. I thanked her, and stood there, staring her down, forcing her to leave me before I knocked. I wanted to be alone when I faced Gabrielle.

  When I finally saw her, when Gabrielle opened the door and stood aside for me to enter, she claimed my attention with a sudden pungency no one, not even Nellie when she arrived in America, not even Dorinda when I first saw her, had equaled. All of that, I now understood, had been preparation for this moment. My life was, after all, more like a romance than a realistic biography. I had often thought about this, and discussed it inwardly, as I discussed most things once Dorinda resigned (as I saw it) from our childhood, once Dorinda and Nellie and I were separated. It is in romances, in fairy stories, in the kind of tales girls imagine, that events happen, fetching the young woman from her mundane destiny and placing her in a different, richer, more adventurous world. So it had happened to me: first, the Goddards, then Nellie, now Gabrielle. There was, furthermore, a reason why it was persistent, slightly dull, hard-working I, Anne, to whom all this happened, rather than Dorinda or Nellie, who seemed so much more obviously chosen by destiny for a starring role. Gabrielle required someone receptive like me. Eleanor, I surmised, would have done, but Eleanor was too entangled in her husband’s life, too ancillary, too much a creature of the Goddards.

  To me, just short of thirty, Gabrielle looked old and disreputable that day when I first caught sight of her. That is the right phrase: “caught sight of her.” As though I had her at last in my vision, captured from my imagination. No doubt I had passed each day in New York or London women of sixty-six whom I would have thought neither old nor haggard because cosmetics and dieting had preserved their youthful appearance. Gabrielle looked every year and more of her age. It did not take me long, however, to discover her vitality, the vigor that is not the imitation of youth, the passing as young, but is genuine, having nothing to do with the impersonation of youth as fashionable women represented it. Gabrielle’s hair, a mottled gray and white, had been cut off at her ears; I was conventional enough at that first meeting to yearn on her behalf for a “good” haircut. She wore a long, formless dress, with an old cardigan over it: this house, like all English houses at that time, was cold. Her feet, with stockings of some thickish, peasanty material, were in what looked like men’s slippers; her hands were large, with closely clipped nails and thickish fingers. All this I took in at a glance, without the words, as a revelation. Why is it that figures who appear in revelations are always beautiful, like angels? Why for that matter do we think of angels as always beautiful? I do not mean I instantly thought of Gabrielle as an angel; I mean that something in me assented to her, something recognized her, something said: “So here you are.”

  “Come in, then,” she said. Her accent was pure upper-class English, the sort you hear less of now in England than you did then. In those days all the announcers on the BBC talked with Oxford accents; the Beatles, like the now ubiquitous intonations from Australia, Yorkshire, the Midlands, the East End, were in the future. Yet the purity of her speech struck me even at that time.

  There was an electric fire in the fireplace, into which she popped a coin taken from a dish of them on a table nearby. I understood from that action that she kept her money for what mattered to her: warmth, a large room, her own bathroom, tips for the “girl” who fetched food and other items. She did not waste it on appearances or what did not directly serve. She had a radio, on which, in a few hours, she would listen to the news, and, in the evening, to music. Even at first glance, hers seemed to me a remarkably sensible arrangement.

  My plan had been to ask her out to dinner; I relinquished it almost immediately. Her life was here and nowhere else. She had access to a garden in the back belonging to all the houses surrounding it. I supposed, or chose to believe, that she went out there from time to time to catch a breath of air. When I asked her, she told me that she stood at the open window sometimes at night, but never went out in the day. There were children there for whom she was a natural victim: she seemed to accept this as inevitable. She did not like children. As she said this, I realized that I did not like children either, had not even liked them when I was a child, except for Dorinda and Nellie, who were not children but, like me, small adults waiting for their transformation.

  “Sit down,” she said. I sat in a chair on the other side of the fireplace with its electric bars, a chair she had clearly put there for me before my arrival. There was no permanent need for two chairs by the heat. I sat down, still in my coat: the room was far from warm. “How is Nellie?” she asked.

  “Nellie’s fine,” I said. “Just fine.” It seemed inadequate as a response let alone as news, but she accepted it. Nellie, with her quiver of languages, had gone to work for an international bank and was doing very well. Like me, she had not married, seeing it as a trap. Neither she nor I had been fooled by the marriages of the world Dorinda belonged to; only Dorinda had been fooled by that. Perhaps one needed my mother and Hilda as models in order to have sufficient strength to avoid marriage, which every woman of our generation pursued as the golden fleece it so obviously, to them, was.

  “Single like you,” she said, echoing my thoughts. “Working; supporting herself. Good girl. And she made use of her languages, which Emile only saw as depriving him of a mother tongue. It broke my heart to let her go to America, but I knew if she stayed with me she would be doomed like me. Like Emile.”

  “Are you still doomed?” I asked. I have often, again and again, thought back to that question and why I asked it. It came to me as an inspiration. Inspiration is rare: a form of telepathy, or insight, a revelation that may be unique in a lifetime, requiring a lifetime’s preparation. Certainly everything in my life had prepared me to ask, as though inspired, that question.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not. That’s why I agreed to see you. You are the messenger.”

  Of course, being not yet thirty, I wondered for one frightful moment if she were mad. She must have seen that speculation in my face. “Perhaps more than a messenger,” she said. “Perhaps a friend. You are exactly Nellie’s age,” she added in what was clearly, for her, a sequitur. “Would you like some tea?”

  I accepted the tea gladly, real English tea, strong, with milk in it. She had, I now noticed, a kettle on a hot plate. We sipped our tea, and looked at one another; I had a sense of possibility that nothing, not even coming to live with Dorinda, had given me. I waited for her to speak, just to hear her voice, not expecting at this point anything profound.

  “Foxx used to say the English upper classes drink tea as a sacrament. He was right; he was always right about the English classes. It’s certainly better than wine; it’s nobody’s blood except the lower classes’, no savior mixed up with it.” And she let out a hoot. For the first time I saw her smile, reassuring me after the loud sound. Hers was a smile of overwhelming sweetness, redeeming the chopped-off hair and the ruined English skin filled with tiny broken veins; a smile of love and intelligence, rare as large rubies. I sipped my tea and a sensation of pure pleasure swept over me, like a rush of contentment, but far more pervasive than contentment, joy I suppose. When my mother went through the menopause she suffered from hot flashes; she described them as subsuming her, capturing her body as thoroughly as pleasure might, if only hot flashes were pleasure. Subsumed, I felt that pleasure now.

  We did not hurry. I had placed my bag of delicacies on the floor soon after I entered, and I never knew what became of them. Perhaps Gabrielle gave them to the landlady, or to the “girl.” I never saw Ga
brielle eat, she did not invite me to a meal, I did not think of food when I was with her. We only drank tea, endless cups of it. Now I sat, drinking my tea and looking around the large room.

  There were papers everywhere, on every chair, table, even next to the hot plate, in fact on every surface, including most of the floor. I had followed the path between the stacks of paper to the electric heater and the chairs almost by instinct; I was used to this sort of disorder; Dorinda had never put anything away, and I had to battle with myself at first to restrain the sense of tidiness imbibed with my mother’s milk. Gabrielle took it for granted that, once having looked around, I would understand that this was not disorder but discovery, and the ordering of her life.

  “They have started coming again,” she said. “All those scholars, all those academic snoopers, hoping for letters, for memories, for my stories. You’re the only one I’ve agreed to see. The landlady acts as though she does me a favor, letting me live here. Perhaps she could get more for this set of rooms. But I bribe her, all the time, with money and anything else (her eyes went to my bag from Fortnum and Mason.) And she turns them all away; all but you. I told her to let you in. The truth is, until you came, I couldn’t decide if it was you or Nellie. I’m glad it’s you; Nellie has her life to get on with.”

  I don’t know why I failed to find offensive this assumption about my life as being something there was no need to get on with. Partly because it was true: I pretended greater interest in the world of publishing than I felt or, if not greater interest, greater commitment. Also, I had always the sense of awaiting a destiny, and this might be it.