Even at the wedding her father did not trouble to disguise his candid dislike for me. That he had a handsome, young, parentless, independently wealthy son-in-law whose devotion to his daughter was both profound and unequivocal seemed to make no difference at all. I asked Golo why he hated me. “Oh, Daddy’s like that,” she said. “He hates everybody. It’s nothing to do with the fact that I’m marrying you.” I asked my best friend, and best man, Max. Doctor Max thought for a while and then said: “It’s obvious. He’s jealous.”
Of course that made it worse. We married in a small rural church stacked with the tombs and effigies of Golo’s ancestors, a short canter from the family home. I had a flaming sword of indigestion rammed down my esophagus for three days preceding the ceremony which miraculously disappeared the moment I said “I do” and I knew that the old man had lost his power to frighten me anymore. I could look at his seamed, haughty face, the thinning, oiled hair and the debonair hidalgo’s sideburns that he affected and feel no fear. I was not at ease, true, but I was no longer scared. “You may call me Avery now,” he said, as we shook hands after the ceremony, but I never did.
At the reception the relief made me drink too much and, feeling myself unsteady, I sought a distant lavatory in which to vomit. I tickled my throat with the thin end of my tie and emptied my stomach. Patting my lips with a hand towel and feeling markedly better, I realized I had wandered into Golo’s father’s apartments. The bathroom was paneled in a knotty and brooding oxblood cherrywood. Many stern, blazered, cross-armed young men sitting in rows gazed proudly out from sepia photographs. Here and there among the cased memorabilia were samples of discreet erotica: breast-baring Gypsy maidens playing the tambourine for languid Zouaves; loose peignoirs slipping off shoulders at midday levées. And a picture of Golo, a thin and pubescent fourteen-year-old.
The room was redolent of expensive hair oils and sandalwood soaps. It was a private shrine to the sort of clubby yet perverse masculinity that I loathed — the beery sexuality of a rugby team’s locker room or the officers’ mess after the port has gone round. Max’s observation now seemed alarmingly apt. I crumpled my face towel and threw it in the wastepaper basket. I had to get out. I opened the door.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” her father — Avery — said. He held a long cigar, ash down, in his five fingers.
“Came to say goodbye, sir.” I offered my hand. “I was told you were in your sitting room.”
Avery was not convinced, but, transferring his cigar, he shook my hand all the same. “They’ve only just started the ball, for Christ’s sake.”
“Ferry to catch.”
I stood in the misted blue dusk with Max, waiting for Golo, standing beside the old burnished Malvern some uncle had given us as a present, our cases strapped into the boot. Fitful orange snakes danced in the glossy bodywork from the flares burning down the drive.
“I’ve got to get her out of here,” I said, a little hysterically. “That man is a monster. No wonder her sisters went to live with the mother.”
“Stepsisters,” Max said. “Golo’s from the first wife.”
“Oh? I didn’t see her here.”
“She committed suicide when Golo was five.”
“Jesus. How do you know?”
“I was talking to a cousin, inside.”
Max offered me a small silver box. I lifted its lid: it was full of small round unmarked pills. “My wedding present,” Max said. “I rarely prescribe them. One has to have an exceptionally healthy heart, but they’re guaranteed to make your honeymoon go with a zing.”
We embraced and I caught a scent of the menthol jujubes Max used to suck to sweeten his breath.
“Where is that girl?” I said, my voice thick with emotion.
Max reached into the Malvern and tooted a brisk cadenza on the horn, redundantly, as Golo, dressed as far as my blurry eyes could tell in a matador’s spangled suit of light, emerged through the front door and seemed to flow luminously down the stairs into my arms.
We honeymooned at my little house on the island. I had had its clapboard exterior repainted a lemony cream the better to offset the regulation bottle green demanded by the mayor’s office. Big cloudy blue blossoms of hydrangea lined the sandy path down to the beach. Across the silver bay I could see the dark stripe of the mainland. A lone yacht slowly edged its way east. In a minute the composition would be perfect. I ached for my sketch pad.
Image. Golo sitting on the lavatory, her skirt hitched up to her thighs, her ankles footcuffed by her impossibly sheer panties. Her long pale thighs angled upward, knees meeting, her satin evening shoes just clinging to her heels as she sits on tiptoes, like a jockey straddling a thoroughbred. Except this jockey is simultaneously painting her lips vermilion without the aid of a mirror. She purses her lips, pouts and turns to offer me her best false smile.
“Mmm?”
“Perfect. I don’t know how you do it.”
She tears off a square of lavatory paper and prints her lips on it. Neatly folded once, it does the work it was intended for down below, before the panties are hoicked to the knee, and then Golo rises in a swoop and rustle of crêpe. There is a millisecond of buttock-cleft on view before the dressing is complete and the chrome knob is pressed and the cistern voids itself.
“Why did you quit medical school?” she asks, apropos of nothing, checking her impassive face in the mirror. Her little finger lightly touches each corner of her mouth.
“What? Because I wanted to be a painter.”
“Can’t you be a doctor and a painter at the same time?”
“I can’t.”
“What about your friend? He’s a doctor and other things.”
“Max? But Max is Renaissance Man. I can’t compete with Max, for heaven’s sake.”
“Can we get a yacht?”
“Of course. But why on earth?”
“I think I want to learn to sail. Where are we going tonight?”
“The maharani’s.”
“How dreary.”
I watched Max dicing the garlic cloves. Each clove was peeled, halved lengthways and then laid flat and held with a fingertip on the chopping board, where, with a small fine knife, the clove was sliced vertically into a fan, turned 90 degrees and sliced across again, tiny neat cubes resulting. The residue left under the finger was discarded.
“Why don’t you use a press?”
“It doesn’t taste the same.”
We were in his garden flat in Kensington, not far from one of the hospitals where he had consulting rooms. He was cooking me supper — scallops. In oil and tomatoes. His kitchen was both efficient and picturesque. Big cleared areas for working, many pan-crowded shelves and racks and, hung here and there, hams and sausage, pimentos, chiles and garlic. Needless to say, Max was a highly accomplished cook and he liked his cuisine flavorsome.
“Thank you for my picture,” he said.
“It’s the view from the sitting room.”
“I know.” He wandered over to peer at the picture, which he had placed on a pine dresser. “You’ve changed the hydrangeas, or is that artistic license?”
“Well remembered. When were we there?”
“Thanks. Two summers ago. Is that the Heliotrope?”
“What’s that?”
“The yacht I used to sail at university. You remember, you met us once at Juan-les-Pins. Something about the spinnaker. That’s a nice thought. Thank you.”