The Invitation(78)

Because there are two women. There is Stella and there is Estrella. I am aware of how this sounds: a little like madness. I am not mad. We all have different selves, I think, that we become, or promote, depending on the company. The difference with me is that in all company – and especially with my husband – I am Stella now. Stella, who wears designs by Balmain and Jacques Fath, who has learned to smoke cigarettes from a silver holder, and to drink champagne with the glass cradled just so. Who has almost all but covered up her history with fluency in this new life. I enjoy being her. It is only when I am alone that I remember Estrella, the child–woman who tried, and failed, to be a mother to Papa and Tino, to keep them safe. Estrella, who had to make decisions, who chose wrong. I am only her when I sleep. I return to that time when I lost everything – when I lost myself, too, and I wake breathing hard, cold with sweat.

At other times I lie in bed awake, and worries that in the day are manageable become looming fears. I don’t know my husband at all, I think. Worse, still, I don’t know myself. I think: Estrella is slipping from me, gradually – but Stella is merely a shell, all surface. Love, once, made me strong. Without it, I am weak. Once, my responsibility was to care for another human being, to make choices that might – that did – mean the difference between life and death. Now my sole responsibility is to present myself well. I don’t even know which are my opinions any more, and which are ventriloquized from those about me. It would be better, I think, to be eking out a penniless existence in Madrid, than to be living this false one. It would be better to be one of those women I glimpsed in the hotel bar.

In the morning, I am always better able to reason. Back in Madrid, I remind myself, poverty would have been the best possible outcome. As Papa’s daughter, I might by now be imprisoned, or dead. Spain could not be a home for me. And the whole of Europe is ablaze with war.

Of course I know my husband. I certainly know him as well as – if not better than – the wives of my acquaintance know theirs. I know his thoughts on opera (Wagner, not Verdi), on the way Southampton society is changing (not for the better). I know what champagne he likes (Tattinger). I know his thoughts on Harry Truman. I know, yes – say it – what he likes in bed. Anyway, how well can anyone know another person, even the one they live with? He is attentive, he is generous – extravagantly so. Though it is perhaps shameful to admit it, I like being looked after. I like being treated like something precious. Wouldn’t you?

Is this not enough? Even if it were not – or at least not enough for happiness – I have no other option. I find that I must always return to that. I don’t think I could get back to Estrella now, even if I knew for certain that I wanted to. Too much has happened in between. Sharp edges have been worn into yielding softness. I am pliable as clay. This life is, on the whole, extremely easy: as easy, as reading from a script. Being her was a constant struggle. It meant caring too much.

Sometimes, for this reason, I think it is for the best that we don’t have children, though I know that this is a source of disappointment for him. He arranged for me to see a doctor about it, but the results came back normal. He doesn’t mention it again for some time after that.

But a few months after the visit to the specialist there is an incident. I know then that he has not stopped thinking about it. We have been intimate, and I am back in my bathroom, getting ready for bed.

‘Spit it out.’ He has appeared, suddenly, behind me in the mirror.

I am so surprised that the opposite happens: I swallow it. He moves towards me. I have seen the look on his face before, in relation to other people – staff, business associates who cross him. Never with me, though.

And suddenly, he has me by the throat, and I feel myself being bent over the sink.

‘Spit it out,’ he says, again.

I try to speak, but his hand is so tight about my throat that I can’t do it. And then he has released me, and I am retching into the basin.

‘What was it?’ he says. ‘What did you just take?’

I pick up the glass bottle, and show him the label. ‘The doctor prescribed them – your doctor – to help me sleep. To stop the sleepwalking.’

His face changes. And then he has dropped to the ground and put his hands around my waist, like a supplicant.

‘Forgive me,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have doubted you. I know you wouldn’t deceive me.’

I find myself on the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Astor Place and Union Square that they call ‘Book Row’. I believe that any volume that you might care to find could be sourced here, if you looked hard enough. My husband can’t understand why I don’t buy books new. I think it is the idea of the lives they have lived before coming into my hands. The pages smell of these past lives. The covers are creased, soft as skin. Sometimes I find the mark of a pencil – occasionally a name – and there is a strange excitement in it.

Usually I only shop at the front of the store, among the English-language novels. I’m not sure what’s different, today, but I find myself drifting to the other end of the shop where there are several untidy shelves of books I have never really looked at before. If you look carefully, the bookseller – an elderly man who I have never heard speak a single word (perhaps he can’t) – has inscribed markers in the wood of the shelves. These are the foreign language books. A surprising number of languages are represented here: evidence of the number of nationalities crowded together onto this small island. I move along the shelves. French. German. Spanish. I stop. I am suddenly aware of my heart beating in my chest. It seems so loud in this quiet space that I’m certain the elderly man must be able to hear it. I’m not sure why I’m looking here, or what for. No: that isn’t quite true.