Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

globe she was about to blow, watching the firelight reflecting on all the small polished objects in the long, low-ceilinged room so that they sparkled like the lights of a distant city. She knew the answer: gossipy Nestor had gone on at length about Byzantine inheritance disputes, vengeful ex-wives, and drawn-out tantrums by climacteric princes. However, with Edo standing before her so literally small and slight but at the same time vibrant with authority, so that one noticed his slightness almost apologetically—with him playing host with immaculate discretion, yet offering, subtly, an insistent homage—she felt strangely defenseless. She felt, in fact, that she had to buy time. Already she was deliberately displaying herself, as the fire heated the backs of her legs. Before she let everything go she wanted to understand why suddenly she felt so excited and so lost and so unconcerned about both.

“Why do I live here? To get clear of petty thieves,” he said with a smile. “The daily sort, the most sordid kind—family and lovers. When I got fed up with all of them a few years ago, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to go off to live in Geneva like some dismal old fool of an exile. Africa was out, because after a certain age one ends up strapped to a gin bottle there. So I came up here among the fog and the gorse. I like the birds in Scotland, and the people are tightfisted and have healthy bowels, like me.” He paused, regarding her with the truculent air of a man accustomed to being indulged as an eccentric, and Elizabeth looked back at him calmly. “Are you hungry?” he asked suddenly.

“I’m very hungry. Since breakfast I’ve only had a horrible scone.”

“Horrible scones are only served in this house for tea. I have something ready which I’ll heat up for you. No, I don’t want any help; I’ll bring it to you as you sit here. It will be the most exquisite pleasure for me to wait on you. There is some snipe that a nephew of mine, not Nestor, shot in Sicily last fall.”

“What do you think happened to Nestor?” asked Elizabeth. “Could you call him?”

“I’d never call that bad-mannered young pederast. He was offensive enough as an adolescent flirting with soldiers. Now he’s turned whimsical.”

When Edo went off to the kitchen Elizabeth walked back and forth, glancing at photographs and bonbonnières, touching a key on the computer, looking over the books on cookery and game birds, the race-car magazines, the worn, pinkish volumes of the Almanach de Gotha; and she smiled wryly at how her heart was beating. In the kitchen Edo coated the small bodies of the snipe in a syrupy, dark sauce while from her corner the Labrador bitch looked at him beseechingly. His thought was: How sudden desire makes solitude—not oppressive but unwieldy, and slightly ludicrous. It was a thought that had not come to him in the last few years—not since his last mistress had begun the inevitable transformation into a sardonic and too knowledgeable friend. Randy old billy goat, he said genially to himself, employing the words of that outspoken lady; and with the alertness he used to follow trails or sense changes in weather he noted that his hand was unsteady as he spooned the sauce.

The next day, Good Friday, they drove a hundred miles to Loch Ness and stood in the rain on a scallop of rocky shore. Edo broke off a rain-battered narcissus and handed it to Elizabeth in silence. He was wearing a khaki jacket with the collar turned up, and suddenly she saw him as he must have been forty years earlier: a thin, big-nosed young man with a grandee’s posture—an image now closed within the man in front of her, like something in a reliquary.

On the drive back, he asked her abruptly whether she knew who he was, told her that his curious first name (Edo was the third in a procession) had set a prewar fashion for hundreds of babies whose mothers wanted to copy the choice of a princess. It was a rather pathetic thing to say, thought Elizabeth, who from Nestor knew all about him and the family, even down to alliances with various unsavory political regimes. Long beams of sunlight broke through over pastures where lambs jumped and ewes showed patches of red or blue dye on their backs, depending on which ram had covered them; shadows of clouds slid over the highlands in the distance. Edo drove her across a grouse moor and talked about drainage and pesticides and burning off old growth, about geese and partridge and snipe.

Then he said: “I want the two of us to have some kind of love story. Am I too old and deaf?”

“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth.

“I’ve quarreled with nearly everyone, I’m solitary and selfish, and I understand dogs better than women. I have been extremely promiscuous, but I have no known disease. That’s just to prevent any misunderstanding.”

“It doesn’t sound very appealing.”

“No, but I have a foolish, optimistic feeling that it might appeal to you. The thing I like most is a girl from a good family who dresses vulgarly once in a while. Nothing flashy—just the cook’s night out. And schoolgirl underclothes, the kind the nuns made my sisters wear. Do you think you’d be willing to do that for me?”

“I might.” Elizabeth felt as if she were about to burst with laughter. Everything seemed overly simple—as it did, she knew, at the beginning of the most harrowing romances. Yet, laughing inside, she felt curiously tender and indulgent toward him and toward herself. Why not? she thought. During the rest of the trip home they traded stories about former lovers with a bumptious ease startling under the circumstances, as if they were already old friends who themselves had gotten over the stage of going to bed. His were all bawdy and funny: making love to a fat Egyptian princess on a bathroom sink,