Read Online In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Free Book Online

experiencing its emptiness suffused for her with the feel of him. Overcome sometimes with emotion, she stood leaning her face against the cold window glass. The building opposite was the same heavy, scrolled, turn-of-the-century apartment house as her own; here and there in its dark granite mass a window was lighted up like a watchful eye. The silence in her own apartment was as deep as its darkness, and Bruno slept and slept—or she thought he did. Once, though, when exhausted with watching and waiting, she came and sank next to him again, she saw that his eyes were open and as wakeful as the windows opposite. It was a shock: “Bruno?” she said, but at once his lids extinguished his gaze, and she saw that he was breathing regularly in peaceful sleep, so she must have been mistaken.
    Louise and Leo had become lovers within a week of his moving in with her and Bruno. For her it was a secret that she carried within her like the gardens of paradise—green, blooming, watered by eternal springs; birds sang perpetually. One day she couldn’t stand it anymore—she had to unburden herself: of course to Regi, and in the Old Vienna.
    But Regi, as soon as Louise had made her tremendous, her tremulous, confession, just laughed: “You don’t by any chance think no one knows? ” When she saw the expression on Louise’s face, she laughed more. She made a production of it, throwing back her head and opening her mouth wide with all her healthy teeth and palate flourishing within. Of course the men all around looked at her, hungry as wolves.
    â€œYou’re wonderful,” Regi said.
    â€œYou mean you guessed?”
    â€œGuessed!” Again Regi laughed, but only for a moment. Then she turned serious and cynical: “Well, what do youexpect—what would anyone expect—when someone like Leo moves in with someone like you?”
    Pained and bewildered, Louise protested: “But he’s my teacher. Mine and yours.”
    â€œYes, some teacher. Listen,” Regi went on, “I know Leo. And I know you.”
    â€œNo, Regi, that’s not fair.”
    And it wasn’t: Louise was by no means promiscuous. In giving her hand in marriage to Bruno, she had given herself totally: first as chaste bride, then—after the birth of their daughter (it took eleven years till Marietta was conceived)—as housewife and mother, the Ceres of his household. She adored Bruno, no other man but her husband had ever counted for her.
    â€œOh, I’m not blaming you,” Regi said, blowing cigarette smoke into the air, worldly-wise and tolerant. “It was inevitable. I was just waiting for it—ever since you told me what you told me.”
    For in one of their tête-à-tête sessions at the Old Vienna, Louise had confessed to Regi that now she and Bruno were as father and daughter, or brother and sister, or was it mother and child?—anyway, all possible combinations except husband and wife with each other. Louise had not complained: it made no difference at all to her feelings for Bruno whom she loved as before.
    â€œIf it hadn’t been Leo,” Regi said, “it would have been someone else. Well, naturally, what are you, a nun or something?” She was quite indignant on Louise’s behalf.
    But now Louise got really angry: “You don’t think, you’re not thinking, that it’s nothing more than—with Leo and me—” She couldn’t even bring out what she had to say and ended up with “How horrible of you.”
    Regi shrugged her slender, crepe de Chine shoulders; she lighted another cigarette; she recrossed her long legs by theside of the little marble-topped table. “Sometimes you talk like a child.”
    But just now Louise could hardly talk at all; she continued to stammer, partly in anger, partly in frustration at being unable to express the height and depth of her feelings. At that moment the waiter came up with