Chapter 3. Ian
It was their first morning in the house and the moving van was expected by noon. Scarlet was excitedly making measurements and notes about where everything should go.
Lacking a butler, the butler’s pantry became a “buttery” in Ian’s terminology, a “bar” in Scarlet’s. It had such wonderful oak-shuttered pass-throughs on either side. Did she dare set up barstools? She knew she would have to handle Ian tactfully. Their English friends would be appalled. Bringing the pub home would be so “American” – which was their automatic euphemism for “lower class” as Scarlet had sadly discovered.
“Pomeroy Bronfen invited us to dinner,” said Ian. “The unlucky heir. I can call him from town. Is it a yes?”
“It’s a yes,” said Scarlet. “I just hope it won’t go late. You know I pass out at ten.”
“He said six.”
“Better and better.”
“I may have mentioned that you were a prisoner of early nights.”
A prisoner. Scarlet didn’t like that at all. Hadn’t her sister India warned her: “Beware the house in the country. That’s where Englishmen stick the wives and kids so they can lead a bachelor life in town.”
But Ian wouldn’t be like that! Would he?
“Are you going out? Here’s a list of things you ought to get,” said Scarlet, tearing a sheet from her pad.
He took it like a man.
Another man showed at eleven to install the phone.
“That was fast”, said Scarlet. “I’m impressed.” Rumor was, it took simply forever, my dear – to get a telephone installation in the country.
“I heard it’s both a business and a residence,” said the man in a thick country accent. “New businesses get precedence – there’s not much investment hereabouts.”
So that was Ian’s game! Well, Scarlet could play. ““We’ll be needing one phone in the buttery, one in the upstairs hall and a ringer in the garden,” she directed.
He studied his work order. “The mister requested an office phone.”
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Well, I suppose he must have one then.” She showed him to the library.
Chapter 4. The Battery
What a strange name Pomeroy Bronfen had selected for his new residence, a low mews house located behind the business square – but Pomeroy – “Call me Pom, everyone does” – offered a ready explanation: “This place was first a chicken coop, and then a garage. Part of it is still garage. Battery’s the shared motif.”
The place didn’t resemble either a chicken coop or a garage any longer. A series of low-ceilinged, agreeably furnished rooms rambling around to a picture-window view of rolling hills. The whole town revealed itself as a Potemkin village one-house-deep.
Pom himself was very thin and tall, with prematurely silvered hair. His deep-set eyes and close-cropped hair gave him the look of an overgrown Dickensian orphan. He seemed eerily fine-tuned to Scarlet in a way that unsettled her. He would be a difficult man to think private thoughts around.
Ian’s other friends never guessed what she as thinking; her mind, assured of complete freedom, could range anywhere in their company. By contrast, Pom noticed her eying his trouser stains immediately.
“Battery acid,” he said. “So you see.”
“You seem to have got some there, too,” she gestured at his leather vest. Pom didn’t cock so much as an eyebrow, but regarded the stain thoughtfully. “I’m sorry. I think that might be roofing tar.”
“I can’t figure out why you stay here now that you’re rich and can travel the world,” said Ian, with no apparent realization of the rudeness or even illogic of his statement.
Pom swept the faux pas effortlessly away. “The bank got most of the money,” he said. “This residence at least is still family property.” Ian should understand; the Bronfens once owned everything. Pom smiled at Scarlet as if effortlessly reading her thoughts.
“And one doesn’t need proper clothes but can muck about with cars all day. Drink?”
“Pregnant ladies can’t drink,” said Ian at the same moment that Scarlet answered, “It’s my last trimester, I can have a glass.”
She gave Ian a “married look” which, if he bothered to interpret it, said, “Weren’t you the one begging me to loosen up last night?”
“As long as you’re sure,” said Pom, pouring. “I only have white.”
Scarlet was sorry about that – till she tasted it. Then she was sorry she could only have one glass.
“What flavor!” She gasped. “What do they make it from?”
“Grapes,” said her husband flatly, but Pom replied politely enough.
“Tastes like artichokes, don’t you think? It’s Gruner Veltliner.”
“And peppers,” said Scarlet. “And apricots.” It was simply delicious.
Pom guided them to the terrace where a platter of cheesestraws and apple slices lay underneath a bell jar, like a museum presentation piece.
“Still think I should move?” Pom asked, gesturing toward the seemingly endless swath of green hills. “Selling – if I could even find a buyer – wouldn’t compensate me for losing a view like this.”
“I agree that nature is very healing,” said Scarlet. “That’s why we came.”
Ian agreed, “I take it all back. I just thought for an artist, London –“
“I get as much London as I want,” said Pom. “I only want it about once a month.”
Scarlet was thinking that her husband had buried the lead. “You’re an artist?” There wasn’t a single painting in any of his rooms. “Why don’t you display your work?”
“I’m shy,” said Pom, and instantly Scarlet began constructing a mind’s eye version of Pom’s history where this was true, seeing the fair-haired boy with the wide forehead and the olive-green eyes always standing at a cautious distance from his peers.
“Well, I for one would love to see anything you’d like to show,” said Scarlet. “We’re both writers – we need to get out of our heads. We live in the world of ideas.”
“Not perhaps so much while you’re gravid,” offered Ian. What an irritating thing that was for him to say! She refused to breach the uncomfortable silence while Pom regarded Ian with unflattering solicitude.
“I think the life of the mind is even more powerful now,” Scarlet rebutted finally. “I’m living entirely in the future.” Her eyes dared her husband to reveal how little writing time she’d actually managed while packing and moving house.
“It’s the thinking that’s so important I find,” said Pom. “That’s where the work is. It’s really why I became an abstract painter.”
His work wasn’t mentioned for the rest of the evening because Scarlet didn’t want to see it in front of Ian, and Pom, she recognized, didn’t want to show it to him. Instead they discussed London over a delicious platter of rare roast beef and salad, and gushed appreciatively over the individual trifles offered for dessert.
“Mrs. Ryquist’s work from over at the pub,” said Pom, referring to the Cat and Corncrake, centerpiece of town. “She’ll cook anything for you so long as you don’t expect delivery. You take your glasses and she fills them for you.”
The trifles were particularly wonderful and Scarlet most appreciated the enjoyment of penetrating the perfect layers. She thought she tasted limoncello in the ladyfingers and crème de menthe liqueur at the heart, but she chose not to mention it and the others didn’t either. Was that what contributed to her blissful sense of well-being at the conclusion of the meal? Would she suffer for that, later? Or was it the realization, entirely unexpected at the very end of an exhausting nine-month pregnancy – that another man – a nice man – found her attractive and her husband felt it and was jealous? And would she suffer for that, too?
Alysse Aallyn 