Muriel could recall exactly his words and hers in that telegraphic exchange. He was quoting verbatim, he must have read and reread them many times, and I imagine that isn’t something you forget. ‘He didn’t even write “Lots of love”,’ I thought, ‘still less return her “Love you”. “Best wishes” is what you would say to anyone, especially if they had just suffered a loss. He was watching his back, he must have thought about what he was writing; he didn’t want to be abrupt, to add blow upon blow, but neither did he want to give her any room for hope. Yes, in that respect, he acted honourably.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Nothing. She never answered. Not that there was really any need for her to answer that last telegram. It was simply a matter of waiting for the promised letter. And she would have been busy arranging the funeral, closing up their no doubt rented house, sorting out his will, not that he would have left very much, but there might have been something. Or so I assumed. Besides, she had already said that she needed two weeks to get everything done before she could fly back. I just had to await her reaction to my letter. It would happen sooner or later, but it didn’t. Every day, troubled and fearful, I expected that reaction and wondered how I would deal with it; but the day passed and no response, nothing. I was getting desperate and, at the same time, why deny it, I felt a kind of illusory sense of relief, well, no one wants to face up to the tears he has caused. But she didn’t even take those two weeks of extra time. She hurried everything along as if the devil were after her, as if she were fleeing persecution by the FBI, like Harry and his posh totty.’ He laughed abruptly at the thought of the two of them. ‘She left a lawyer friend to deal with the paperwork, and just nine days later, I received another telegram: “Arrive Barajas tomorrow Wednesday. TWA NY 7AM. Meet me there. Love you more than ever.” ’
‘So she still hadn’t read your letter,’ I said. ‘Arriving from New York the following day, and really early too. She wasn’t giving you much time to make a decision, to get things ready. And what was happening with the other woman meanwhile?’ I couldn’t help asking about her, the love of his life, who, either before or afterwards, had fallen victim to Van Vechten, or so she had told Muriel, when she discovered he was a close friend of the paediatrician.
‘You’re such a pest with your inquisitiveness,’ he said. ‘Hand me another cigarette and pour me a drink, will you? My mouth’s gone dry with all this talking.’ I did as asked and poured myself one too. I placed his on the coffee table, where he could easily reach it from the floor and put it down again. When I got up to go over to the drinks cabinet, the smudged figure again retreated from the glass panes or perhaps crouched down. Muriel took a sip and went on. ‘It doesn’t matter about her, she’s not relevant. She was extremely important once, but she’s ancient history now. She was erased completely and absolutely, at least for many years.’
‘You gave her up.’
‘What else could I do? It didn’t take me long to consider once I received that telegram. There was, quite simply, nothing to be done about it. My letter had got lost somewhere or would only arrive after she’d set off. Beatriz knew nothing of its contents and was flying back to me like someone travelling towards her salvation, to all that she’d left behind, in the belief that nothing had changed, that everything was just as it had been when she flew off to America. It was what had sustained her for all those months, and, although she was a grown woman, she was only twenty-one. I’d written the letter when her father was still alive, although he hadn’t yet recovered from his first heart attack and his future as a teacher was pretty much non-existent after the scandal. But Beatriz was still then in a position to stay put and had a very good reason to remain in America — a mission even — and make a life for herself there. Now, though, she had burned all her boats. She would have spent much of her remaining money on the air fare; she had closed the house in Massachusetts, so she couldn’t go back, she would have nowhere to live; there was nothing to keep her in that country, no strong bond. It was a fait accompli. I could have stood my ground and hoped she would get over it in Madrid. We do eventually recover from everything, and her aunt and uncle would have taken her in, at least initially. Later, who knows? People have, of course, found themselves in far worse situations. Dickens’s novels are positively teeming with orphaned children.’ A remnant of good humour almost always surfaced from his basically jovial self. ‘I didn’t have the courage. I had tried, but it hadn’t worked. I felt that I’d made a commitment, and was in her debt. She was travelling towards me entirely ignorant of what was happening, of what had happened to me; full of excitement and hope, despite her grief, despite several consecutive hard blows. I just couldn’t bring myself to deal her yet another blow, the definitive one, or so I thought. The inconveniences of an old-fashioned upbringing, young De Vere, and I was young then, too close to my childhood self. I’d been brought up to have a sense of responsibility, to believe that one must keep one’s word. The notion of behaving like a gentleman sounds so ridiculous now, but it didn’t twenty years ago. Everything disappears so quickly.’ — ‘Wretched haste,’ I thought; ‘it doesn’t afflict only tongues; time, too, is constantly driving out people, customs, concepts.’ — ‘The belief that you shouldn’t cause any harm if it’s in your power not to.’
He raised the palms of both hands to his face and squeezed his cheeks, distorting his mouth. I didn’t know if he was cursing that old-fashioned upbringing or embracing it retrospectively, if he was struggling to find a place for it again in his heart; after all, we can do little to protect ourselves against what befalls us. Or against our character if we can’t change it. There are, though, more and more people who, every now and then, do reconfigure themselves.
‘And how did the other woman take it?’ I was still interested in the abandoned woman, despite Muriel’s reluctance to talk about her.
Removing his hands from his face, he gave a long sigh, and his mouth returned to its usual shape; then he touched his eyepatch with two fingers to check that it hadn’t shifted.
‘I spent the whole night with her. I told her what had happened, I explained everything, and she cried and cried, but she also understood in part, she didn’t become aggressive or hysterical. She wasn’t even filled with self-pity, she just cried. But as I said before, best leave her out of it, since that’s precisely where she was left, poor thing.’ Muriel had doubtless forgotten that he’d already told me a little about this, and in another context. ‘Do what you think you ought to do,’ I remembered him saying that she had said. ‘Do what will cause you least pain, what you’ll find easiest to live with. But never think of us, of you and me. Never think of us together if you don’t want to be filled with regret day after day and, still more, night after night. Never even think of us apart either, because, by remembering that, you’ll bring us together again.’
‘Yes, you’ve told me about that before.’ And I repeated those words back to him from memory.
He sat up again and looked at me for a moment in amazement, then quickly collected his thoughts.
‘Hmm, very good.’ There was a slight quaver in his voice and he sounded a touch irritated by my perfect recall. ‘You’ve always boasted about your retentive memory. I’ll need to be careful what I tell you, because you register it all like a tape recorder. Yes, she did say something of the sort. But that was at the end. That night, believe me, was very long. It had its ups and downs and I did occasionally waver. But the decision I had made prevailed. I said goodbye to her just after six in the morning and went straight to the airport, straight from her apartment. I closed the door behind me so that she wouldn’t watch me waiting for the lift to arrive, although she may have watched me through the spyhole, I’ve no way of knowing. I closed that door in the knowledge that I was letting passion and the love of my life slip from my grasp. That rarest of things: passion … When I arrived at Barajas, I probably still smelled of her, but it didn’t matter. No one was going to call me to account, that would have been the final straw; and Beatriz was too astute ever to make such a blunder, not after so many months apart.’