I saw the Eiffel Tower but did not go up it, having a dislike of heights. I saw the Pantheon, and Napoleon's tomb. I did not see Notre Dame, because Richard did not favour churches, or at least not Catholic ones, which he considered enervating. Incense in particular he considered stultifying to the brain.
The French hotel had a bidet, which Richard explained to me with the trace of a smirk after he caught me washing my feet in it. I thought, They do understand something the others don't, the French. They understand the anxiety of the body. At least they admit it exists.
We stayed at the Lutetia, which was to become the Nazi headquarters during the war, but how were we to know that? I would sit in the hotel caf © for morning coffee, because I was afraid to go anywhere else. I had the idea that if I lost sight of the hotel I would never be able to get back to it. I knew by then that whatever French I had been taught by Mr. Erskine was next to useless: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne conna ®t point would not get me any more hot milk.
An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me-he had some English-"Why are you sad?"
"I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.
"You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. "It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. "It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. "But none is worse."
The effect was a little spoiled the next day, when he propositioned me, or I think that is what it was: my French wasn't good enough to tell. He wasn't so old after all-forty-five, perhaps. I should have accepted. He was wrong about the sadness, though: far better to have it while you're young. A sad pretty girl inspires the urge to console, unlike a sad old crone. But never mind that part.
Then we went to Rome. Rome seemed familiar to me-at least I had a context for it, provided long ago by Mr. Erskine and his Latin lessons. I saw the Forum, or what was left of it, and the Appian Way, and the Coliseum, looking like a mouse-eaten cheese. Various bridges, various well-worn angels, grave and pensive. I saw the Tiber flowing along, yellow as jaundice. I saw St. Peter's, though only from the outside. It was very big. I suppose I ought to have seen Mussolini's Fascist troops in their black uniforms, marching around and roughing people up-were they doing that yet?-but I did not see them. That sort of thing tends to be invisible at the time unless you yourself happen to be the object of it. Otherwise you see it only later, in newsreels, or else in films made long after the event.
In the afternoons I would order a cup of tea-I was getting the hang of ordering things, I was figuring out what tone to use with waiters, how to keep them at a safe distance. While drinking the tea I would write postcards. My postcards were to Laura and to Reenie, and several to Father. They had photographs on them of the buildings I had been taken to visit-picturing, in tiny sepia detail, what I ought to have seen. The messages I wrote on them were fatuous. To Reenie: The weather is wonderful. I am enjoying it. To Laura: Today I saw the Coliseum, where they used to throw the Christians to the lions. You would have been interested. To Father: I hope you are in good health. Richard sends his regards. (This last was not true, but I was learning which lies, as a wife, I was automatically expected to tell.)
Towards the end of the time allotted for our honeymoon we spent a week in Berlin. Richard had some business there, which had to do with the handles of shovels. One of Richard's firms made shovel handles, and the Germans were short of wood. There was a lot of digging to be done, and more projected, and Richard could supply the shovel handles at a price that undercut his competitors.
As Reenie used to say, Every little bit helps. As she also used to say, Business is business and then there's funny business. But I knew nothing about business. My task was to smile.
I have to admit I enjoyed Berlin. Nowhere had I been so blonde. The men were exceptionally polite, although they did not look behind themselves when striding through swinging doors. Hand-kissing covered a multitude of sins. It was in Berlin that I learned to perfume my wrists.
I memorised the cities through their hotels, the hotels through their bathrooms. Dressing, undressing, lying in the water. But enough of these travel notes.
We returned to Toronto via New York, in mid-August, in a heat wave. After Europe and New York, Toronto seemed squat and cramped. Outside Union Station there was a mist of bituminous fumes, from where they were fixing the potholes. A hired car met us and took us past the streetcars and their dust and clanging, then past the ornate banks and the department stores, then up the slant of land into Rosedale and the shade of chestnuts and maples.
We stopped in front of the house Richard had bought for us by telegram. He'd picked it up for a song, he said, after the previous owner had managed to bankrupt himself. Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.
The house was dark on the outside, festooned with ivy, its tall, narrow windows turned inward. The key was under the mat, the front hall smelled of chemicals. Winifred had been redecorating during our absence, and the work was not quite finished: there were painters' cloths down still in the front rooms, where they'd stripped off the old Victorian wallpaper. The new colours were pearly, pale-the colours of luxurious indifference, of cool detachment. Cirrus clouds tinged by a faint sunset, drifting high above the vulgar intensities of birds and flowers and such. This was the setting proposed for me, the rarefied air I was to waft around in.
Reenie would be scornful of this interior-of its gleaming emptiness, its pallor. This whole place looks like a bathroom. But at the same time she'd be frightened by it, as I was. I called up Grandmother Adelia: she'd know what to do. She'd recognise the new-money attempt to make an impression; she'd be polite, but dismissive. My, it's certainly modern, she might say. She'd make short work of Winifred, I thought, but it brought me no solace: I was now of the tribe of Winifred myself. Or I was partly.
And Laura? Laura would smuggle in her coloured pencils, her tubes of pigment. She'd spill something on this house, break something, deface at least a small corner of it. She'd make her mark.
A note from Winifred was propped against the telephone in the front hall. "Hi kids! Welcome home! I got them to finish the bedroom first! I hope you love it-so snazzy! Freddie."
"I didn't know Winifred was doing this," I said.
"We wanted it to be a surprise," said Richard. "We didn't want you to get bogged down in details." Not for the first time, I felt like a child excluded by its parents. Genial, brutal parents, up to their necks in collusion, determined on the rightness of their choices, in everything. I could tell already that my birthday presents from Richard would always be something I didn't want.
I went upstairs to freshen up, at Richard's suggestion. I must have looked as if I needed it. Certainly I felt sticky and wilted. ("Dew's off the rose," was his comment.) My hat was a wreck; I flung it onto the vanity. I splashed my face with water, and blotted it on one of the white monogrammed towels Winifred had set out. The bedroom looked out over the back garden, where nothing had been done. I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-coloured bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it-the bed I hadn't quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat.