A minute after having pushed the gate and tugged the rusted wire bellpull, he found himself alone in a bleak sitting room, from which his hostess had been called by a whistling kettle. He sat down on a faded sofa. The furniture was of popular local design, garnished with marble and ormolu. A television set encrusted with gilt acanthus leaves sat on a sideboard, like an objet d’art. A few rectangular shadings on the wallpaper showed where pictures had hung.
The melancholy tinged with foreboding Speck felt between seven and eight overtook him at this much earlier hour. The room was no more hideous than others he had visited in his professional quest for a bargain, but this time it seemed to daunt him, recalling sieges and pseudo courtships and expenditures of time, charm, and money that had come to nothing. He got up and examined a glass-fronted bookcase with nothing inside. His features, afloat on a dusty pane, were not quite as pinched as they had been the other night, but the image was still below par for a man considered handsome. The approach of a squeaking tea cart sent him scurrying back to the sofa, like a docile child invited somewhere for the first time.
“I was just admiring …” he began.
“I’ve run out of milk,” she said. “I’m sure you won’t mind your tea plain.” With this governessy statement she handed him a cup of black Ceylon, a large slice of poisonous raisin cake, and a Mickey Mouse paper napkin.
Nothing about Cruche’s widow tallied with the Senator’s description. She was short and quite round, and reminded Speck of the fat little dogs one saw being reluctantly exercised in Paris streets. The abundant red-gold hair of the Senator’s memory, or imagination, had gone ash-grey and was, in any case, pinned up. The striking fact of her person was simply the utter blankness of her expression. Usually widows’ faces spoke to him. They said, “I am lonely,” or “Can I trust you?” Lydia Cruche’s did not suggest that she had so much as taken Speck in. She chose a chair at some distance from Speck, and proceeded to eat her cake without speaking. He thought of things to say, but none of them seemed appealing.
At last, she said, “Did you notice the supermarket next door?”
“I saw a shopping centre.”
“The market is part of it. You can get anything there now — bran, frozen pizzas, maple syrup. That’s where I got the cake mix. I haven’t been to Paris for three years.”
Speck had been born in France. French education had left him the certainty that he was a logical, fair-minded person imbued with a culture from which every other Western nation was obliged to take its bearings. French was his first language; he did not really approve of any other. He said, rather coldly, “Have you been in this country long?”
“Around fifty years.”
“Then you should know some French.”
“I don’t speak it if I don’t have to. I never liked it.”
He put down his cup, engulfed by a wave of second-generation distress. She was his first foreign widow. Most painters, whatever their origins, had sense enough to marry French-women — unrivalled with creditors, thrifty hoarders of bits of real estate, endowed with relations in country places where one could decamp in times of need and war.
“Perhaps, where you come from —” he began.
“Saskatchewan.”
His tea had gone cold. Tannic scum had collected on its surface. She said, “This idea of yours, this show — what was it you called it? The hospitality of your gallery? I just want to say don’t count on me. Don’t count on me for anything. I don’t mind showing you what I’ve got. But not today. The studio hasn’t been dusted or heated for years, and even the light isn’t working.”
In Speck’s experience, this was about average for a first attempt. Before making for civilization he stopped at a florist’s in the shopping centre and ordered two dozen roses to be delivered to Mme. Cruche. While these were lifted, dripping, from a plastic pail, he jotted down a warm message on his card, crossing out the engraved “Dr. Sandor Speck.” His title, earned by a thesis on French neo-Humanism and its ups and downs, created some confusion in Paris, where it was taken to mean that Speck could cure slipped discs and gastric ulcers. Still, he felt that it gave a grip to his name, and it was his only link with all the freethinking, agnostic Specks, who, though they had not been able to claim affinity by right of birth with Voltaire and Descartes, had probably been wise and intelligent and quite often known as “Dr.”
As soon as he got back to the gallery, he had Walter look up Saskatchewan in an atlas. Its austere oblong shape turned his heart to ice. Walter said that it was one of the right-angled territories that so frequently contain oil. Oil seemed to Speck to improve the oblong. He saw a Chirico chessboard sliding off towards a horizon where the lights of derricks twinkled and blinked.
He let a week go by before calling Lydia Cruche.
“I won’t be able to show you those roses of yours,” she said. “They died right off.”
He took the hint and arrived with a spray of pale-green orchids imported from Brazil. Settled upon the faded sofa, which was apparently destined to be his place, he congratulated his hostess on the discovery of oil in her native plain.
“I haven’t seen or heard of the place since Trotsky left the Soviet Union,” she said. “If there is oil, I’d sooner not know about it. Oil is God’s curse.” The iron silence that followed this seemed to press on Speck’s lungs. “That’s a bad cough you’ve got there, Doctor,” she said. “Men never look after those things. Who looks after you?”
“I look after myself,” said Speck.
“Where’s your wife? Where’d she run off to?”
Not even “Are you married?” He saw his hostess as a tough little pagan figure, with a goddess’s gift for reading men’s lives. He had a quick vision of himself clasping her knees and sobbing out the betrayal of his marriage, though he continued to sit upright, crumbling walnut cake so that he would not have to eat it.
“My wife,” he said, “insofar as I can still be said to have one, has gone to live in a warm climate.”
“She run off alone? Women don’t often do that. They haven’t got that kind of nerve.”
Stepping carefully, for he did not wish to sound like a stage cuckold or a male fool, Speck described in the lightest possible manner how Henriette had followed her lover, a teacher of literature, to a depressed part of French-speaking Africa where the inhabitants were suffering from a shortage of Racine. Unable to halt once he had started, he tore on towards the edge: Henriette was a hopeless nymphomaniac (she had fallen in love) who lacked any sense of values (the man was broke); she was at the same time a grasping neurotic (having sunk her savings in the gallery, she wanted a return with fourteen per cent interest).
“You must be thankful you finally got rid of her,” said Lydia Cruche. “You must be wondering why you married her in the first place.”
“I felt sorry for Henriette,” he said, momentarily forgetting any other reason. “She seemed so helpless.” He told about Henriette living in her sixth-floor walkup, working as slave labour on a shoddy magazine. A peasant from Alsace, she had never eaten anything but pickled cabbage until Speck drove his Bentley into her life. Under his tactful guidance she had tasted her first fresh truffle salad at Le Récamier; had worn her first mink-lined Dior raincoat; had published her first book-length critical essay, “A Woman Looks at Edgar Allan Poe.” And then she had left him — just like that.