Catherine Narracott
The Wife
It is cocktail hour, but my husband is making a call to London in the telephone booth in the lobby.
While I wait for him to finish, I step out alone onto one of the terraces outside the great hall, pulling my shawl about me.
My face tightens from the cold: even better for the complexion than an ice bath, I should imagine.
This side of the hotel looks down towards the valley, tiny lights shimmer up from the village far below.
They are like a reflection of the scattering of stars above, very bright in the clear night sky.
It’s hard to believe that snow is supposed to descend on us soon.
I check behind me – no one there – then reach into my little beaded evening bag and draw out my little silver cigarette case.
It’s so slim, so discreet, that looking quickly you would mistake it for a compact.
I light one clove cigarette and draw quickly on it.
The taste is delicious and forbidden: Anthony hates me to smoke, as he says it looks too ‘fast’ for a Tory wife.
Feeling like a naughty child I blow a series of grey rings into the cold night air.
Someone taught me to do this a very long time ago – or so it feels – though I am still young.
‘Mrs Narracott.’ A voice, just behind me.
In my surprise I inhale far too much smoke and cough as it catches in my throat. Then, gathering my wits, I fling the cigarette off the balcony.
An untidy young man with fair hair and glasses stands there, blocking my way back into the hall.
He has not made any effort to dress for the evening, or even for the elegant surroundings of the hotel.
The collar of his shirt is stained and the lenses of his spectacles seem smeared.
He has some sort of nasty-looking rash creeping up the side of his neck.
I have an innate distrust – instilled in me by Nanny – of people who don’t care for their personal appearance.
I take a step back, then realise I am up against the ironwork balcony of the terrace.
‘Who are you?’ I ask, studying his face.
He has a little dimple in his chin that gives him an oddly boyish appearance.
I don’t know him. But at the same time I know I recognise him from somewhere.
Then I have it: ‘You were at the station!’ I say.
‘In Paris … but you were on the opposite platform.’ An unpleasant thought: did he follow us here?
‘There are things you should know about your husband,’ he hisses. His wide eyes and general dishevelment give him a crazed look. He is blocking the door back into the great hall. ‘Things about his past I bet he’d love to keep hidden.’
‘Please,’ I say. ‘Leave me alone.’ I hate a scene, even if we are the only ones out here.
‘Let me pass,’ I say. ‘Or … or I’ll scream.
’ I won’t – because that would be making a scene – but he doesn’t know it.
I step towards him, purposefully. I can be steely when I need to be.
He steps aside but as I pass him he touches my shoulder and I flinch, because I hate being touched by strangers.
‘He’s not who you think he is,’ he mutters, menacingly. ‘I think you should know. He’s a bad—’
I slam the door on him as I step back into the welcome warmth and light of the great hall, and then for good measure I manage to fasten the catch on this side, leaving him mouthing on the other side of the glass.
My heart is beating fast as I try to decide whether or not to tell Anthony, who I can see now emerging from the lobby at the end of the great hall.
I hope the young man isn’t going to make any trouble here. It is really not what we need.
A few minutes later we step down into the hotel’s basement dining room.
It’s so charmingly rustic down here. The whole thing seems to have been dug out of the mountain rock itself.
Torches burn in sconces along the stone walls.
A Swiss folk band plays in one corner: a trio of rather beautiful young women with braided hair playing on a couple of fiddles and an accordion.
Candles have been lit upon every table. The guests’ faces gleam.
My husband walks through the middle of the room to our table, nodding and smiling at people along the way, limping a little as he goes.
I follow, feeling nervy and out of sorts after the scene on the terrace.
‘Catherine!’ A woman calls. I turn and look.
Oh – Harriet Hodgson, who I haven’t seen since Cheltenham Ladies’.
I don’t specially want to talk to her, but she’s seen me now; I don’t really have a choice.
I move to their table, smiling my politician’s wife’s smile.
‘Goodness me,’ she says, ‘don’t you scrub up well!
And you married Anthony Narracott. My husband,’ she nods to the balding, much-older man opposite, ‘thinks he’s absolutely wonderful.
Don’t you, darling? Oh’ – when he fails to hear – ‘never mind. But goodness me. You’ve done so well for yourself.
After …’ she giggles, ‘that little scandal with the gardener!’
I stand frozen in mortification, willing her to be quiet.
‘Oh,’ she puts a finger up to her lips. ‘Sorry, was that indiscreet of me? But I think half the girls were in love with Kit. Those shoulders! Those piercing blue eyes. But then I suppose your husband has very attractive eyes too …’
Luckily Anthony is out of earshot, talking to some other diners several tables down. I tell Harriet that it’s wonderful to see her and that I hope we can all have a drink together tomorrow evening – then am extremely relieved to hear we can’t because they leave in the morning.
Finally, we take our own seats. Then I start. The shabby young man who I just left on the balcony is descending the staircase, staring at my husband like a cat that has just spotted something moving in the long grass.
Anthony must have caught my expression because he turns and looks. ‘Good Lord,’ he says, but rather humorously, as though it doesn’t give him a moment’s pause. ‘That fellow looks as though he’d like to skin me alive. I wonder what I’ve ever done to him?’
My husband’s observer looks quickly away, apparently realising he has been caught out.
When our food comes, I carefully cut a line down the middle of everything on my plate and push each half to one side: trout, potatoes, vegetables.
The waistband of this skirt is a little tight.
Never let the dress out, Mummy always says.
Mummy, at fifty-five, has a marvellous figure.
It is the beginning of the end: the way dignity and husbands are lost. Keep it as is and bring yourself in.
Finishing school was all about bringing oneself in in various different ways.
Smoothing out any rough edges. After the gardener, Mummy and Daddy decided I needed a little of that.
Anthony chews on his steak. It smells divine.
Just for a moment I have the strangest fantasy of picking up the remainder with my two bare hands, and tearing into it with my teeth, letting the blood and cooking juices run down my chin onto the brocade of my dress.
Sometimes the divide between doing and not doing seems as frail as cobweb.
As if I might just brush it aside and tumble head-first into disgrace.
Perhaps everybody feels like that. To distract myself I count to thirty as I chew a tiny morsel of fish, until all moisture has gone from it.
‘Bruno Crane,’ I say, reaching for a topic. ‘How did you say you met?’
‘The war,’ my husband says.
‘But darling … you seem so unlike one another.’
He takes a sip of his wine. ‘There are things that bind men together at such times.’ He doesn’t elaborate any further on this. Then I see his eyes caught by something behind me. I turn to look.
A woman moves through the room. In the candlelight everything about her seems to gleam; as though she herself is a source of light.
Her hair is bleached such a pale blonde it is almost silver.
She has poured herself into a clinging sheath of black velvet that makes my eau de nil Jacques Fath (bought before the money ran out) look like a little girl’s party dress.
An expanse of pale décolleté spills over the restraint of the bodice like a just-risen soufflé.
Two diamond drops glitter at her ears. It’s a ridiculous outfit for dinner in a ski hotel.
Attire for a film premiere or soirée. Like magic, as if acting under an enchantment, every head turns towards her.
She is the sort of woman Mummy would call garish or simply frightful. The sort of woman who looks like she eats the whole plate.
I watch her take her seat. She looks as though she could eat that waiter alive. He looks as though he’d enjoy it.
She glances towards our table and I am sure I see her wink, so quick that if I had blinked myself I’d have missed it. Anthony begins to cough, making a great show of covering his mouth with his napkin, reaching for the water.
‘Who is that?’ I ask, lightly, giving a little nod in her direction. ‘I just know I recognise her, but …’
‘No idea,’ he says, reaching again for his wine.
‘But darling,’ I say, smiling at him, ‘you are funny! You aren’t even looking in her direction! So how can you know?’
‘The truth is,’ he says, sawing at the chunk of meat in front of him, ‘I’m finding it hard to let anything draw my attention away from this magnificent steak … I can’t think when I last ate like this, if ever.’
‘Oh, darling do look,’ I say, touching his hand with mine.
He sighs and throws a casual, fleeting look over my shoulder while I watch him closely. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Sorry! I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘Ah,’ I say, as though I’ve just recalled it. ‘She was in that film, the one set on an Atlantic liner. There was a scene where she dressed as one of the officers, to escape notice—’
Every man in the cinema had sat up a little straighter when she appeared in those navy breeches, that snug jacket with the straining gold button work and epaulettes.
‘Oh,’ he says carelessly. ‘Was she? But they all look the same, those platinum types. Don’t they? The Jean Harlow mode.’
‘You have to at least admit that she’s rather magnificent looking,’ I say.
‘If you like that type,’ he says. ‘My tastes are different.’ And in ‘different’, I hear refined. It is meant to be a compliment. Except oddly enough it makes me want to pick up the steak knife and brandish it at him.
‘I wonder what she can be doing in an out-of-the-way place like this,’ I say. ‘It seems a strange place for a Hollywood star. Do you think she’s filming something here? Oh, like that skiing scene with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman!’
‘I really don’t care,’ he says, his tone dangerous. ‘You are boring me now, Catherine.’
I fall silent. I know better than to say anything else.
He sniffs the air. ‘I can smell cigarette smoke.’
‘Oh?’ I say, lightly. ‘There are probably lots of people smoking down here. Look at that fellow!’
‘He’s got a pipe,’ Anthony says, his voice low and a little frightening. ‘It’s not pipe smoke. I can distinctly smell clove cigarettes.’
Luckily there is a distraction as our plates are cleared and then the pudding brought over: a delicious-looking tart with a caramel-coloured top.
‘Nusstorte,’ the waiter says, with a flourish.
I realise the problem straight away, simply from looking at my husband. As the thing is placed in front of him he begins to wheeze and cough – in earnest this time.
‘Please,’ I say, ‘take it away immediately.’ The waiter hovers, looking confused. ‘But it was ordered specially.’ People are turning to look at us, at Anthony, who has his napkin clamped to his face.
‘Who ordered it?’ I ask. ‘Who did this?’
The waiter looks flustered, confused, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, Madame, I don’t—’
‘Just take it away,’ I say. ‘Please.’
The waiter scurries off with the offending plate.
Anthony removes the napkin. He smiles and puts up a hand. ‘I’m all right now, folks!’ he says, slightly hoarsely.
The other guests return to their food.
‘Darling,’ I say. ‘That was sinister. Who can have done such a thing?’ Anthony never makes public reference to his allergy.
The limp is one thing – heroic – whereas this is an entirely different quality of impairment, something old school tie sorts might associate with weakness of character.
So I lower my voice to ask: ‘Who would know about your … problem?’
‘I’m sure it’s just a stupid mistake,’ Anthony says.
Someone rushes up to the table all of a sudden. It’s the young man I saw on the terrace.
‘Oh,’ I say, shrinking back from him. ‘No. No, go away.’
Anthony gives the young man a once over. ‘Can I help you?’ he asks. But his expression says: you had better have a jolly good reason for being here.
‘I need to speak to you,’ says the young man, as though he and Anthony were already acquainted. ‘Please. I tried earlier—’ He looks at me.
Anthony glances at me, questioningly.
‘He … accosted me,’ I say. ‘It was most unpleasant. He said he had things to tell me about you …’
Anthony turns back to the young man. Then he smiles, less like a proper smile and more like an animal baring its teeth, and for a moment the young man looks a little wrong-footed, takes a step back.
Then he seems to rally and moves forward again.
But as he opens his mouth to speak, my husband cuts him off.
‘If you don’t mind,’ Anthony says, ‘as I am sure you can see, my wife and I are enjoying a private dinner. You couldn’t really have chosen a worse time.’
‘But—’
‘In fact,’ Anthony says, standing up from his seat and looking down at the young man from his superior height, ‘we have to be going, don’t we, Catherine?’
Anthony places a hand firmly in the small of my back and steers me away. You wouldn’t know it from the grin on his face, but he is disturbed. The only tell is that he has forgotten to limp.
‘Sure he’s a Red,’ he mutters as we reach the other end of the room.
‘You only have to look at his clothes and the lunatic light in his eye. God knows how he got in here. Best not to even give them the time of day. About as much use as engaging with a rabid dog.’ Six months ago, my husband was shot at in his car by a Communist lunatic as he was driven through London.
‘Been in far stickier spots in the war,’ is how Anthony dismissed it.
But I suspect it worried him more than he likes to admit.
He has limited his personal appearances since …
and sometimes he cries out in his sleep.
As we leave the room I glance back. The young man is still watching us, mouth set in a grim line. Then as I watch he raises a hand and points at my husband’s back – almost, you could say, like someone sighting a gun.