William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

“Camel.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Why a camel? Do camels smoke? Why not a … a hippo? I ask you.”

I laugh. “A pack of Hippos, please.”

He grins and cuffs the headlamp nacelle. He makes a tsssss sound, and shakes his head, incredulously. He looks back at me.

“Goddamn factory. Must be something on the highway.”

“Can I buy you some breakfast, Spencer?”

Paul met Tobias only once in Gudrun’s company. It was one afternoon at four o’clock when the workshops closed. The weavers worked four hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. The workshop was empty. The big rug was half done, pinned up on an easel in the middle of the room. Paul stood in front of it, the fingers of his right hand slowly stroking his chin, looking, thinking. From time to time he would cover his left eye with his left palm.

“I like it, Gudrun,” he said, finally. “I like its warmth and clarity. The color penetration, the orangy pinks, the lemons … What’s going to happen at the bottom?”

“I think I am going to shade into green and blue.”

“What’s that black?”

“I’m going to have some bars, some vertical, one horizontal, with the cold colors.”

He nodded and stepped back. Gudrun, who had been standing behind him, moved to one side to allow him a longer view. As she turned, she saw Tobias had come into the room and was watching them. Tobias sauntered over and greeted Paul coolly and with formality.

“I came to admire the rug,” Paul said. “It’s splendid, no?”

Tobias glanced at it. “Very decorative,” he said. “You should be designing wallpaper, Miss Velk, not wasting your time with this.” He turned to Paul. “Don’t you agree?”

“Ah. Popular necessities before elitist luxuries,” Paul said, wagging a warning finger at her, briefly. The sarcasm sounded most strange coming from him, Gudrun thought.

“It’s a way of putting it,” Tobias said. “Indeed.”

We sit in a window of a coffee shop in Westwood Village. I’ve ordered a coffee and Danish but Spencer has decided to go for something more substantial: a rib-eye steak with fried egg.

“I hope the Koenigs don’t come back,” Spencer says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have ordered the steak.”

I press my cheek against the warm glass of the window. I can just see the back end of Spencer’s crane.

“I’ll spot them,” I say. “And I’ll see the truck from the factory. You eat up.”

Spencer runs his finger along the curved aluminum beading that finishes the table edge.

“I want you to know, Miss Velk, how grateful I am for the work you’ve put my way.” He looks me in the eye. “More than grateful.”

“No, it is I who am grateful to you.”

“No, no, I appreciate what you—”

His steak comes and puts an end to what I’m sure would have been long protestations of mutual gratitude. It’s too hot to eat pastry so I push my Danish aside and wonder where I can buy some more cigarettes. Spencer, holding his fork like a dagger in his injured left hand, stabs it into his steak to keep it steady on the plate and, with the knife in his right, sets about trying to saw the meat into pieces. He is having difficulty: his thumb and two fingers can’t keep a good grip on the fork handle, and he saws with the knife awkwardly.

“Damn thing is I’m left-handed,” he says, sensing me watching. He works off a small corner, pops it in his mouth and then starts the whole pinioning, slicing operation again. The plate slides across the shiny tabletop and collides with my coffee mug. A small splash flips out.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Could I do that for you?” I say. “Would it bother you?”

He says nothing and I reach out and gently take the knife and fork from him. I cut the steak into cubes and hand back the knife and fork.

“Thank you, Miss Velk.”

“Please call me Gudrun,” I say.

“Thank you, Gudrun.”

“Gudrun! Gudrun, over here.” Utta beckoned her from the doorway of Tobias’s kitchen. Gudrun moved with difficulty through the crowd of people, finding a gap here, skirting around an expansive gesture there. Utta drew her into the kitchen, where there was still quite a mob of people, and refilled Gudrun’s glass with punch and then her own. They clinked glasses.

“I give you Marianne Brandt,” Utta said. She smiled.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s resigned.”

“What happened? Who told you?”

Utta inclined her head toward the window. “Irene,” she said. Standing by the sink talking to three young men was Irene Henzi, Tobias’s wife. Gudrun had not seen her there. She had arrived at the party late, uneasy at the thought of being in Tobias’s house, meeting his wife and other guests. Tobias had assured her that Irene knew nothing; Irene was ignorance personified, he said, the quintessence of ignorance. Utta carried on talking, as Gudrun covertly scrutinized her hostess, hearing some business about amalgamation, about metal, joinery and mural painting all being coordinated into a new workshop of interior design. Irene did not look like an ignorant woman, she thought, she looked like a woman brimful of knowledge. “—I told you it would happen. Arndt’s going to run it. But Marianne’s refused to continue,” Utta was saying, but Gudrun did not listen further. Irene Henzi was tall and thin, she had a sharp long face with hooded, sleepy eyes and wore a loose black gown that seemed oddly Eastern in design. To Gudrun she appeared almost ugly, and yet she seemed to have gathered within her a languid, self-confident calm and serenity. The students laughed at something she said, and she left them with a flick of her wrist, making them laugh again, picking up a plate of canapés and beginning to offer them around to the other guests standing and chatting in the kitchen. She drifted toward Utta and Gudrun, closer, a smile and word for everyone.

“I have to go,” Gudrun said, and left.

Utta caught up with her in the hall, where she was putting on her coat.

“What’s happening? Where are you going?”

“Home. I don’t feel well.”

“But I want you to talk to Tobias, find out more. They need a new assistant now. If Tobias could mention my name to Meyer, just a mention …”

Gudrun felt a genuine nausea and simultaneously, inexplicably, infuriatingly, an urge to cry.

Spencer frowns worriedly at me. I look at my watch, Mr. Koenig looks at his watch also and simultaneously the truck from the factory in Oxnard rumbles up Wilshire. Apologies are offered, the delays on the highway blamed — who would have thought there could be so much traffic on a Sunday? — and Spencer maneuvers the crane into position.

Tobias ran his fingertips down her back to the cleft in her buttocks. “So smooth,” he said. He turned her over and nuzzled her breasts, taking her hand and pulling it down to his groin.

“Utta will be home soon,” she said.

Tobias groaned. He heaved himself up on his elbows and looked down at her. “I can’t stand this,” he said. “You have to get a place of your own. And not so damn far away.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Gudrun said. “I’ll get a little apartment on Kavalierstrasse. So convenient and so reasonable.”

“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “What am I going to do? Dear Christ.”

Gudrun had told him she was going to take the dyeing course at Sorau. They met regularly now, almost as a matter of routine, three, sometimes four times a week in the afternoon at the apartment on Grenz Weg. The weaving workshop closed earlier than the other departments in the Institute, and between half past four and half past six in the afternoons they had the flat to themselves. Utta would obligingly stop for a coffee or shop on her way home — dawdling for the sake of love, as she described it — and usually Tobias was gone by the time she returned. On the occasions they met he seemed quite indifferent, quite unperturbed at being seen.