Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

“Very pleasant.” I hadn’t told him about the Alka-Seltzers and the tightness around my waist.

“Eventually, though, it will begin to pall. Going from hotel to hotel, even the best ones in the world, and living out of a suitcase is finally dreary. Traveling is only amusing when you have a home to return to. Even at your age…”

“Please don’t make me sound as though I’m ten years old,” I said.

He laughed. “Don’t be so sensitive. Naturally, to me, you seem enviably young.” He became more serious. “Actually, our differences in age are an asset. I doubt if we would be able to continue for long if we were both fifty or both thirty-three. Rivalries would develop, differences in temperament would arise. This way you can be impatient with me and I can be patient with you. We achieve a useful working balance.”

“I’m not impatient with you,” I said. “Just scared shitless from time to time.”

He laughed again. “I take that as a compliment. By the way, has either Lily or Eunice asked you about what you do for a living?”

“No.”

“Good girls,” he said. “Real ladies. Has anybody asked you? I mean, since the happening in the hotel?”

“One lady. In Washington.” Good old Evelyn Coates.

“What did you answer?”

“I said my family had money.”

“Not bad. At least for the time being. If the question arises in Gstaad, I suggest you tell the same story. Later on, we can invent a new one. Perhaps you can say you’re a managerial consultant. It covers a multitude of murky activities. It’s a favorite cover for CIA agents in Europe. It won’t do you any harm in most circles if that’s what people believe. You have such an honest face, no one will be inclined to doubt anything you say.”

“How about your face?” I asked. “After all, people will be seeing us together all the time. Finally we’ll be held responsible for each other’s faces.”

“My face,” he said reflectively. “Quite often I study it for hours on end in a mirror. Not out of vanity. I assure you. Out of curiosity. Frankly, I’m not quite sure I know what I look like. Moderately honest, perhaps. What’s your opinion?”

“Aging playboy, maybe,” I said cruelly.

He sighed. “Sometimes, Douglas,” he said, “frankness is not the virtue it’s cracked up to be.”

“You asked me.”

“So I did. I asked you,” he said. “I’ll remember not to ask you again.” He was silent for a moment. “I’ve made a conscious effort through the years in a certain direction.”

“What direction?”

“I have tried to make myself look like a semi-retired, English gentleman farmer. Obviously, at least as far as you’re concerned, I haven’t succeeded.”

“I don’t know any retired, English gentlemen farmers. We got very few of them at the Hotel St Augustine.”

“Still, you didn’t guess that I was an American by birth?”

“No.”

“A step in the right direction.” He smoothed his mustache gently. “Have you ever thought of living in England?”

“No. Actually, I haven’t thought of living anyplace. If my eyes hadn’t gone wrong, I suppose I’d have been happy staying in Vermont. Why England?”

“Many Americans find it attractive. Especially in the country, perhaps an hour or so away from London. A polite, uninquiring race of people. No hustle or bustle. Hospitable to eccentrics. First-class theater. If you like horses or salmon fishing…”

“I like horses all right. Especially since Rêve de Minuit.”

“Brave animal. Although I wasn’t thinking in exactly those terms. Eunice’s father, for example, rides to the hounds three times a week.”

“So?”

“He has a handsome estate which happens to be just one hour from London…”

“I’m beginning to catch on,” I said flatly.

“Eunice is quite independent in her own right.”

“What a surprise.”

“For myself,” he said, “I find her extraordinarily pretty. And when she isn’t under the dominating influence of her sister, a lively and intelligent girl…”

“She’s barely looked at me since she arrived,” I said.

“She’ll look at you,” he said. “Never fear.”

I didn’t tell him about the lascivious thoughts that had crossed my mind, with Eunice as target, as we drove steadily through the neat countryside. “So,” I said, “that’s why you asked Lily if she thought Eunice would join us?”

“The notion might have flickered through my subconscious,” he said. “At the time.”

“And now?”

“And now I would advise you to consider it,” he said. “There’s no great hurry. You can weigh the pros and cons.”

“What would Lily have to say about it?”

“From what she’s let drop here and there, I would say that on the whole Lily would react favorably.” He slapped his hands briskly together. We were approaching the outskirts of Bern. “Let’s say no more about it. For the time being. Let us say we’ll allow matters to take their natural course.” He reached forward and took the automobile map out of the glove compartment and studied it for a moment, although wherever we went he seemed to know every turn in the road, every street corner. “Oh, by the way,” he said offhandedly, “did Priscilla Dean slip you her telephone number that night, too?”

“What do you mean, too” I nearly stuttered. “She did to me. I’m not vain enough to suppose she was all that choosy. After all she’s an American. Unfailingly democratic.”

“Yes, she did,” I admitted. “Did you use it?”

I remembered the busy signal. “No,” I said, “I didn’t.” “Lucky man,” Fabian said. “She gave the Moroccan the clap. You turn right at the next corner. We’ll be at the restaurant in five minutes. They make excellent martinis. I think you can indulge yourself in one or two. And have wine with lunch. I’ll drive the rest of the afternoon.”

We arrived in Gstaad in the early dusk. It had begun to snow. The lights were just being lit in the chalets scattered along the hills, their glow behind curtained windows cozy and warm in the twilight. In this weather and at this time of day, the town looked magical. There was an instant of nostalgia for the harsher slopes of Vermont, for store signs in English rather than German. I wondered what Pat was doing at this moment.

Fabian had not brought up the subject of Eunice again on the trip from Bern, and I was grateful to him for it. It was a problem I was not yet ready to face. The lunch in Bern had been as good as he had promised, and I had had the two martinis and half a bottle of wine and had felt that my defenses were weakened and I could too easily have been persuaded to take a course of action I might later regret.

We had to slow down on the main street for a group of boys and girls, all in jeans and brightly colored parkas, who were streaming out of a confiserie [14], their laughter ringing bell-like in the icy air. It was easy to imagine the heaps of chocolate cakes and mounds of whipped cream they had just consumed in preparation for dinner.

“That’s the nice thing about this place,” Fabian said, as he maneuvered around them. “The kids. There’s three or four international schools here. A ski resort needs young people. It gives an atmosphere of innocence to the sport. And the clothes are designed for youthful bottoms and the climate for adolescent complexions. You’ll see them all over the hills tomorrow and you’ll mourn that you had to go to school in Scranton.”

The car climbed a twisting hill, the wheels spinning erratically in the new snow. On top of the hill, dominating the town, was the huge fake castle of the hotel. Inside and out, the hotel gave no impression of innocence. The standard joke runs, Fabian said, “that Gstaad is trying to be St Moritz and will never make it.”