The Door Page 7

  I stared at her. “You want to receive a guest in our home?” The question was superfluous. Emerence had planned everything down to the last detail. Of course that was what she wanted.

  “But you must do all you can to make the person think I live there, with you. I’ll bring everything, the cups, coffee, drinks. You won’t have to provide anything, just the space. Say yes. I will repay you. By the time the master gets home, we’ll be gone. Wednesday at four o’clock. Is that all right?”

  In the doorway Viola gave a deep sigh. Outside, it was drizzling softly. The international situation had been normalised for some years, so Emerence’s guest could have been the French President himself without her fearing political consequences. The fact that she couldn’t receive him here on her own doorstep did little to deepen the mystery in which she wrapped herself like a shawl. I shrugged my shoulders. Yes, this person could come. I only hoped I wouldn’t have to hang around waiting — she’d already asked me to be at home so she wouldn’t be alone with the visitor.

  Walking home, I asked myself how I was going to get my husband to agree to it. He loathed anything that was not straightforward, especially situations that were open-ended, uncertain, ill-defined. But instead of raising objections, or putting his foot down, he laughed. He found something bizarre in the idea. It stirred his writer’s imagination. Emerence and the visitor she wanted to entertain here! Perhaps she was looking for a husband. Maybe the visitor was replying to a lonely hearts ad, and Emerence, who never opened the door to her own home, was bringing him here to look him over? Let him come! He was almost sorry he wouldn’t be there himself. He wasn’t worried about leaving us in the apartment with a perfect stranger. Viola would tear anyone who attacked us limb from limb. Hearing his name, the dog gave my husband’s hand an enthusiastic lick and rolled over for us to rub his belly. It was difficult to get used to the fact that he understood everything.

  On the appointed day, Emerence was like a madwoman restraining herself with an iron will. Viola, who picked up everyone else’s mood, was also far from normal. The old woman brought plates and bowls of every sort, all on covered trays. This infuriated me and I asked her why she was parading her things down the street if the banquet required such secrecy? She wasn’t a leper, and clearly neither was her guest, so why couldn’t they use our plates and forks? There was the sideboard — she could take whatever she wanted. She could lay the table with my mother’s best crockery and silver. Did she think I’d mind?

  She didn’t thank me, but she took note. She never forgot a gesture, friendly or otherwise. She replied that she wasn’t trying to hide anything, she just didn’t want the person to see that she lived alone, without any family around her; and she didn’t wish to explain why she never opened her door, or why she lived the way she did.

  As she was laying the table in my mother’s room, I suddenly decided to say something that I had been meaning to for ages. She was setting out the cold meat and salad — she could bring a touch of magic even to the laying out of food — and I asked her if she had ever considered the idea of speaking to a medical expert about her symptoms: shutting the world out of her home couldn’t be called rational behaviour. Doctors would have a name for this compulsion, or whatever it was; it was obviously curable. “A doctor,” she said, fixing her eyes on me as she polished the long-stemmed champagne glasses she kept for special occasions. “I’m not ill, and the way I live doesn’t hurt anyone. Anyway, you know I can’t stand doctors. Let me be. I don’t like it when you lecture me. If I ask for something and you give it, do it without preaching a sermon, otherwise there’s no point.”

  I left her, went into the bedroom and put on a record so as not to hear what I couldn’t see. By then I had had quite enough of this arrangement. One day, I thought, Emerence would get us into real trouble. She was clearly off her head. Who was she bringing here? If I hadn’t known the dog was there I would have been really worried. And why on earth did she need champagne glasses for this clandestine meeting? I didn’t like my own secrets. I liked other people’s even less.

  The music that flooded out from the record screened everything. Two rooms stood between mine and my mother’s, where she had laid out her feast. I’d read, or rather leafed through, about fifty pages when I began to be suspicious. Emerence had indicated that she wanted me to meet the stranger, but where was this guest? And what was going on all this time, in total silence? Even Viola was quiet. Had the person arrived? Almost an hour had passed since the appointed time, when finally I heard him bark. I thought, how practical of her to wait for her visitor to arrive with cold meat rather than hot food, with all its problems — at least it would stay fresh. I continued listening to the music. Suddenly the door burst open, Viola bounded in and danced in agitation about the bed: he was very clearly telling me something. This was very odd. If her guest was afraid of dogs Emerence would have sent him into one of the outer rooms, not further into the apartment. So what were they up to, to make the old woman no longer want him around?

  I found out soon enough. Seconds after the dog appeared, so did she. Her face gave nothing away — she certainly knew how to behave like a deaf mute. By now Viola was sprawling beside me on his stomach at the head of our bed. Emerence didn’t even see him. She announced that the caller hadn’t been the one she was expecting. That person wasn’t coming. The handyman had run over from the villa to say that the hotel where the visitor was to stay had got his phone number and left a message with him for Emerence. The visit had been cancelled at the last minute, for business reasons, and she wasn’t even coming to Budapest, though if the trip were to happen at some future date she would send word nearer the time.

  So I had missed all my official engagements for a visitor who, in the end, failed to appear. Well, I didn’t see anything tragic in that, apart from the fact that Emerence had laid out a small fortune for nothing. But the old woman went out of the room like a typhoon, slamming the door behind her. I heard her screaming at the top of her voice at the dog (who had slunk out after her), so loudly that I felt obliged to go and see what she thought she was doing with him. After all, he hadn’t done anything. From my mother’s room came a loud clattering sound, and, for the first time ever, I was shocked by Emerence’s language. Curses and obscene insults were pouring from her mouth. I pushed the door open, then stopped dead. It wasn’t the dog she was abusing, it was someone else. Viola was sitting at the table, in my mother’s chair, eating. Emerence had pulled the platter in front of him, he had grabbed a slice of roast meat and was wolfing it down. He had one paw planted on the place mat, the other scrabbling for a grip on the Murano mirror tray — on which I had never, in all my life, not even on the greatest occasions, placed anything — while the five-branched silver candelabra rocked unsteadily back and forth. Every so often Viola would drop a mouthful and scramble after it, leaving greasy paw prints on the tray. I don’t think I have ever been so angry.

  “Get off, Viola! Get down! My mother’s mirror! Her porcelain! What’s going on here, Emerence? Have you gone mad?”

  I had never before heard Emerence cry, and I never would again. But now she wept openly. I didn’t know what to do, because the dog never obeyed me at crucial moments unless she repeated my command. He calmly carried on eating, while Emerence stood sobbing on the other side of the table. Viola gave her regular sympathetic glances, but ate on regardless, unable to resist the delicacies. There was no denying that Emerence had taught him how to behave at table. He might have been an actor in a play, so almost perfect was the way he ate, sitting on his haunches, the way humans do, with both front paws leaning on the table. It was just that he wasn’t eating from a plate, and he was helping himself with his mouth rather than his paws. The picture was so absurd, and made me so furious, I was lost for words. Our own dog, sitting and eating at my mother’s table, laid out for a feast in her very room, was refusing to obey me. Every now and then he cast a sidelong glance at a large cake that stood on the sideboard, visibly calculating how he would
get it down; and all the while Emerence wept inconsolably. The dish was now almost empty, but from what was left of the food I could tell it hadn’t been cheap. The hoped for guest must have been highly regarded. I felt the anger continuing to rise in me, and was on the point of exploding, when Emerence suddenly wiped the tears from her face and dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Then, like someone coming round from sedation, she shuddered violently, then hurled herself at the happily munching dog and beat him all over with the handle of the serving fork. She called him everything — an ungrateful monster, a shameless liar, a heartless capitalist. Viola squealed, jumped down from the chair and lay on the rug, for her inscrutable judgement to be carried out upon him. He never ran when she beat him, never tried to protect himself. The horror, with all its unreality, was dreamlike. Viola cowered and trembled under the blows, so terrified he couldn’t even swallow the last mouthful. It fell from his jaws on to my mother’s favourite rug. The way Emerence went after him with the serving fork, I thought she was going to stab him. It all happened in a flash. I was so frightened I began to scream. But just then the old woman crouched down beside the dog, lifted up his head and kissed him between the ears. Viola whined with relief, and licked the hand that had beaten him.

  No, I thought, this was too much. She could find another audience for her outbursts. I turned on my heel and requested that she kindly remove the debris from my mother’s room and, if it wasn’t too much to ask, refrain from casting us in supporting rôles, or use our home as a theatre for these impossible episodes in her private life. I didn’t quite say it like this, I put it in terms she could understand. She understood.

  From the bedroom, I could hear her moving around. I couldn’t know what she was actually doing, but I discovered later that she had been putting things in the fridge: the sweets, the champagne and the untouched platter of mixed roast meats, all for us. The dish Viola had eaten from was emptied into his food box. The animal didn’t move a muscle. Finally all was silent. I thought she had gone, but she was getting ready, and was attaching Viola’s collar and lead. Always, when she had upset him, she instituted an especially long walk; she would do this even if it meant giving up her ironing or preparing dough. When she called out to let me know they would be going in the direction of the woods, she was her usual self, standing with the dog in the doorway, offering her apology. I never heard anyone do so with so much dignity, and so little servility or self-reproach. I felt ever afterwards that she had been mocking me, as if it wasn’t her but I who was in the wrong. Of course no explanation followed, and off she went.

  That evening, when I described Emerence’s afternoon to my husband, he just waved his hand. I brought that sort of thing on myself, I heard him say — I took everything and everyone so seriously, and I was for ever getting myself mixed up in other people’s business. She should have received her secret visitor on her porch club — this wonderful person who was so much more important than the Lieutenant Colonel, for whom only my mother’s room was good enough. She’d cooked and baked until she dropped, and it was all to no end, because the guest hadn’t come. I would have to give her back whatever she’d packed in the fridge. He had no wish to eat the failed visitor’s leftovers. He wasn’t Viola.

  I felt he was right, but also that he wasn’t. I did what he wanted, and piled the tray with as much as I could carry, to take back. I too was angry with the old woman, but I had also seen in her eyes that whatever it was that had happened that afternoon, had been the worst of horrors. And I had heard her sobbing. In the few hours that had elapsed since her departure I had calmed down enough for a new suspicion to stir in me. Perhaps there was a deeper issue here than nursing our mutual grievances. What I had seen, as Viola sat eating, might not have been the idyll it seemed. The banquet might have expressed a deeper level of feeling, something more properly mythological. When I thought about it, the pair of them at that table weren’t at all like a mistress giving her good little dog his reward, they were more like figures from a Greek myth, taking part in some horrific celebration. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice — as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings. The person who hadn’t come that afternoon, who had merely sent a message, had wounded that most important part of Emerence about which she would never speak, not to anyone. Viola was the unwitting Jason. Beneath Medea-Emerence’s headscarf glowed the fires of the underworld.

  So I wasn’t at all happy about having to return the food, and even less pleased that she had treated us to the remains. I’m a countrywoman too. I have the same country sensibilities. I knew I would give her deep offence. But there was no more unequivocal way of letting her know she had overstepped the mark.

  The tray was heavy, and I had difficulty opening the front door. People stared as I carried it across the street. Emerence was nowhere to be seen, but from behind her door came unmistakable sounds of movement. I could hear her talking, apparently in discussion with her cat, explaining things the way she did with Viola. I called out that I was sorry, but I couldn’t keep the leftovers from her banquet, so I was returning them; they were on the porch table; she could come out and get them. Emerence squeezed herself through the narrow gap of the open door, to stop the cat coming out and her visitor peering in. She was in her everyday clothes, no longer dressed up. She said not a word, but reached into the little lobby where she stored things, brought out a huge saucepan and scraped everything into it. She mashed the cake in with the meat and the salad, and marched off to her bathroom, where I heard her spooning it into the toilet and flushing it away. Viola was beside himself, but she gave him none of it, and wouldn’t allow him near her. It was as if she had never known him. She even kicked him away.

  Once again I was afraid of Emerence, truly afraid. I tightened my grip on Viola’s leash, though I knew that if she did suddenly launch a hysterical attack, the animal would defend her rather than me. Next, she disposed of the drinks, taking the bottles by the neck and hurling them against the doorframe. The champagne exploded, and the dog began to howl in terror. She threw the bottles in the rubbish bin, and swilled the porch down with the spilt wine and champagne. It smelt like a tavern. During that quarter-hour chance brought Sutu, Adélka and Polett along, but the moment they spotted us each turned away. They couldn’t follow what was going on, but none of us inspired confidence — Emerence silently spreading the blood-red wine across the stone floor, the dog howling and me standing there like a statue — the further away from us the better. They didn’t hang about.

  By now I was convinced that what had taken place over my mother’s table that afternoon had indeed been a murder. Emerence had used the feast to symbolically settle her account with the guest. Some years later I actually got to know the sacrificial victim, a slim, attractive young woman stumbling along beside me in that tumultuous All Souls’ Day procession. She may have known how to cope with greater challenges than visiting Emerence’s last resting place, but she could hardly have picked a more inconvenient time to conduct her business in Budapest, or indeed to visit the cemetery. She laid her bouquet in the fairy-tale crypt, quite unaware (only I ever knew) that it would make no difference — that very night, the long-stemmed roses in their cellophane wrapping would be stolen. She told me she was sorry she wasn’t able to come that day. She could have got to see Emerence, but she was a businesswoman, and since her father and uncle who lived abroad had retired she’d been running the factory, and her promised visit had happened when the European deals which would have brought her to Budapest were put on hold. There was no point in coming just to visit the old woman. That would have to wait for another time, when she could deal with the business meeting and the visit to Emerence both at once. New York wasn’t exactly a stone’s throw away.

  She was having dinner with us. It was only what I found in the fridge, not quite Emerence’s festiv
e outlay, with candles admiring their reflections in the Murano mirror. I told her how deeply the old woman had been upset by her failure to arrive. It surprised her. She didn’t understand how a mere change of date could cause so much pain. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in business. But earlier, at the cemetery, I had noticed a kind of damp, unpleasant chill blowing around us. It was as if the old woman were refusing to accept the candle she’d lit for her. As she reached the grave the wind gusted, the birches shook the drops from their branches on to her neck, and every candle flame died the moment it flared into life, as if Emerence were blowing it back in her face with the full force of her lungs. And on countless other occasions after her death it was as if Emerence turned on her ghostly heel and put two fingers up at our guilty consciences, and our attempts to approach her. Each time it was as if yet another undisclosed facet of her million secrets glittered before us.

  The most distressing thing of all was that, if they had managed to meet, Emerence might well have both understood and accepted her visitor’s explanation, that she hadn’t meant to hurt or insult; that she wasn’t some immature adolescent who set all those feverish preparations at nothing. She was no longer an infant, but a full-grown businesswoman striking a balance between her commercial and personal life; someone who, as an adult, could accurately reconstruct the feelings once aroused by her total dependence on Emerence, and who realised how much she and her family were indebted to their one-time servant.

  But there were no tearful reminiscences, as she shared our low-calorie supper. She was sorry that she never met the old woman. It would have been like seeing her for the first time, because Emerence, for her, had been a faceless person. She was very small at the time, and however fond she might have been, she had quite forgotten her. I wondered what this well-disposed young person would have said were she told that Emerence, her common sense dethroned for fifteen minutes by blind rage at the rejection of her love, had figuratively killed her, by throwing the meat — symbolising her, the child she had once saved, now found utterly unworthy — to the dog, and ordering him to eat it.