The Hothouse by the East River Read Online Free PDF Page B

you wait half-an-hour and have a drink? He
always hates to miss you, Poppy love.’
    The
Princess waddles respectfully round Elsa’s shadow to avoid treading on it as it
falls across the grand piano and on to the floor like a webby grey cashmere
shawl that has been left to trail and gather dust untouched for a hundred
years. The Princess says, ‘Next week I can stay longer, and then go on to the
opera from here. Today I have to go early —Francesca is away and I have to see
what they are up to, one can’t trust them, they …‘ She kisses Elsa, and is
seen into the lift by both Elsa and her maid, while she is still explaining the
difficulties attaching to her farm. At an earlier time in her life she had
spent her days pining and striving for a moderately slim appearance; she had
been enterprising in her travels and at last she had married an aged Russian
exile who had just lost his job as a pianist in a nightclub in Paris. She took
him to London and started an employment agency specialising in foreign exiles,
placing her clients wherever an alien tongue or an exotic skill was needed.
    After
this marriage the Princess made herself fat and fatter, until, ten years later
at the time of Prince Xavier’s funeral, she had become grand and large, loving
all, and much beloved. She had been a foundling Miss Copplestone from New
Zealand, and might easily have taken a wrong safe turn, ending up as a saggy
supervisor at the telephone exchange. Elsa had never known her differently, having
met the Princess when she was already grand-mannered, large and free, even as
far back as 1944, there in the world of wartime secrets.
     
    ‘He’s
come back,’ says Paul. ‘He’s back.’
    Elsa
says, ‘Now, now. You know he isn’t Kiel, so what does it matter to you, if he’s
back?’
    ‘I’m
convinced it’s Kiel without any doubt. And he’s back in New York. He’s back in
the shoe store. He really is Kiel, after all.’
    ‘He is
too young to be Kiel. You agreed with Garven that people grow older. He’s like
what Kiel was away back in the war, but Kiel now would be very different even
if he hadn’t died in prison, which he did.’
    ‘When I
saw him again today I knew,’ says Paul, ‘that it was Kiel. He must have had
some rejuvenating treatment.’
    ‘Talk
to Garven,’ says Elsa, ‘don’t talk to me. I had enough of this Kiel last
summer. All summer you were on about Kiel.’
    ‘You
saw him first.’
    ‘Well,
you saw him second. If he was Kiel he would have aged a bit like you,’ she
says.
    Paul
says, ‘You didn’t say that when you first saw him in the shoe store. You said—’
    ‘It was
an illusion like any other illusion,’ she says, her shadow falling in the wrong
unnatural direction, ‘so 1 don’t know why you bring it up again. The man’s not
Kiel. So I don’t know why you bother. The man can’t be Kiel, he’s young enough
to be Kiel’s son. So I don’t know why you jumble the facts. All over the place,
you tumble.’
    ‘You
think of everything, my dear, until you think of something else.’ He speaks
softly as if she is becoming dangerous, as indeed she is when she speaks like
this.
    ‘Well
maybe you don’t jumble,’ she says with suicidal mirth, ‘I take it back. Cheer
up, I’m going to bed.’
    ‘No,
it’s mistake a face that I don’t do.’ He speaks to soothe her, but thinks, why
don’t I leave her? Today she’s bubbling with hilarity, tomorrow she’ll be
brooding again. Next week, hysterical gaiety. He says, ‘Did you see Garven
today?’
    ‘Yes,
do you know he’s starting an institute, The Institute of Guidance. He’s the
Guidance Director. His own title.’ She leaves the room, trailing her shadow at
the wrong angle, like the train of an antique ball-dress. She is laughing
rather fearfully all along the corridor and even when she has shut the door of
her room she continues to laugh; her laughter comes straight to his ear as if
she commands the air he breathes.
     
    Here he
is with