“Right.”
“Thursday week, the English would say.”
“They probably would,” I said, “and that actually ties in with what I’m about to suggest. See, I thought—”
“Actually, I’m not.”
“You’re not what?”
“Free. On Thursday week.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is it something you can get out of?”
“Not really.”
“Because if you could postpone it, we could—”
“I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, Thursday would have been best, but I suppose we could let it go until Friday.”
“That’s Friday week.”
“Right. A week from this coming Friday. We could—”
“We can’t.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Actually,” she said, “I’m afraid I’ll be tied up the whole weekend, Bernie, from Thursday evening on.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“I was sort of planning on us spending the weekend together, but—”
“I’m afraid it’s not on. Could you hook this for me, Bernie?”
“Uh, sure. Oh, sorry. My hand slipped.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet it did.”
“Well, an irresistible impulse drew it here. But if you don’t like the way it feels—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Or if you want me to stop—”
“I didn’t say that, either.”
So we made do without Mel Tormé, and I can’t say his absence was much noticed. Afterward I collapsed like a blown tire, and the next thing I knew she had all her clothes on and one hand on the doorknob.
“Wait,” I said. “I can at least see you downstairs and put you into a cab.”
“No need for you to get dressed, Bernie. And I am in rather a hurry.”
“At least let me tell you what I had planned for the weekend.”
“All right.”
“Because we could always do it the following week, if I can manage to get reservations. Or, once you hear what I’ve got planned for us, you might want to cancel your own plans.”
“Well, tell me.”
“Cuttleford House,” I said.
“Cuttleford House.” She frowned in thought. “Isn’t that—”
“The English country house in the Berkshires,” I said. “Exclusive, expensive, and authentic. A coal fire on every hearth. Serving girls dropping curtsies. Serving boys dropping aitches. Tea brought to your room at daybreak. Guests who still haven’t recovered from having lost India. No television in the whole house, no automobiles anywhere on the property.”
“It sounds heavenly.”
“Well, I know what a passion you have for everything English,” I said, “and I saw how much you enjoyed tea at the Stanhope, and I thought this would be the perfect weekend for us. I was planning on telling you on Valentine’s Day, but it had come and gone by the time I managed to get through to them and make the reservation.”
“What a sweet man you are, Bernie.”
“That’s me,” I agreed. “What do you say, Lettice? If you’re positive you can’t shift your plans, I’ll try to switch our reservations to the following weekend.”
“I only wish I could.”
“You wish you could which?”
“Either.” She sighed, let go of the doorknob, and came back into the room, leaning against a bookcase. “I was hoping to avoid this,” she said. “I thought it would be so much nicer for both of us to just make love and leave it at that.”
“Leave what at what? You lost me.”
“In a manner of speaking,” she said, “that’s precisely it. Oh, Bernie, I wish I could go with you Thursday week, but it’s just not on.”
“What else are you doing,” I heard myself say, “that’s so important?”
“Oh, Bernie.”
“Well?”
“You’ll hate me.”
“I won’t hate you.”
“But you will, and I won’t blame you. I mean, it’s so ridiculous.”
“What is?”
“Oh, Bernie,” she said yet again. “Bernie, I’m getting married.”
“‘Oh, by the way, Bernie, I’m getting married Thursday,’” I said. “And my jaw dropped, and by the time I’d picked it up she was out the door and on her way. Can you believe it?”
“I’m beginning to, Bern.”
I suppose she must have been, since she was hearing it for the third time. I’d told her that night, calling her minutes after Lettice crossed my threshold and closed the door gently but firmly behind her. I told her again the following day at lunch. Carolyn’s dog-grooming salon is on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway, just two doors down the street from Barnegat Books, and in the ordinary course of things we lunch together, one of us picking up sandwiches at one of the neighborhood delis and conveying them to the other’s place of business. On this particular day I had bought the sandwiches and we ate them at the Poodle Factory, and between bites I told her the same sad story I’d told her over the phone.
Then, around six, I closed the bookstore and went back to the Poodle Factory, where she was putting the finishing touches on a bichon frise while its owners watched, beaming. “She’s such a darling,” one of them said, while the other wrote out a check. “And you bring out the best in her, Carolyn. I swear you’re a genius.”
They left, darling in tow, and the genius closed up for the night. We walked over to the Bum Rap on Broadway, as we generally do, and Carolyn started to order Scotch, as she generally does, and then she paused. “If you want,” she said, “I’ll order something else.”
“Why?”
“Well, if you want to get good and drunk,” she said, “I could make a point of staying relatively sober.”
“We don’t have a car,” I said. “What do we need with a designated driver? Anyway, why would I want to get drunk?”
“You mean you don’t?”
“Not particularly.”
“Oh. Hey, this isn’t going to be a Perrier night for you, is it?”
Perrier is my drug of choice when my plans for an evening include illegal entry. “No,” I said. “It’s not.” And I proved it by asking Maxine to bring me a bottle of Tuborg.
“Well, thank God,” Carolyn said. “In that case I’ll have Scotch, Max, and you might as well make it a double. They said I’m a genius, Bernie. Isn’t that something?”
“It’s great.”
“If I had my choice,” she said, “I’d just as soon be a genius at something else. Nobody ever got a MacArthur Award for washing dogs. But it’s better than nothing, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely. You could be like me.”
“A genius at picking locks?”
“A genius at picking women.”
“I’m already a genius at picking women.”
“Can you believe it?” I demanded, and launched into my third recital of Lettice’s revelation. “What I want to know,” I said, “is when she would have gotten around to telling me if I hadn’t pressed her about the weekend. I mean, it’s not like she had a date to go to the movies with some other guy. She’s getting married.”
“Did you know she was seeing somebody else?”
“I more or less assumed it. We weren’t in a committed relationship. Actually we’d only recently started sleeping together.”
“How was it?”
“You mean the sex?”
“Yeah.”
“It was wonderful.”
“Oh.”
“Really special.”
“Sorry to hear it, Bern.”
“But it wasn’t a major love affair. I had hopes that it might turn out to be, but deep down inside I think I knew it wouldn’t. We didn’t have that much in common. I figured it would run its course and resolve itself with some sort of bittersweet ending, and years from now she’d be one more tender memory for me to warm myself with as I slid off into
senility. So I was fully prepared for it to come to nothing, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon, or so abruptly.”
“So you’re essentially okay about it, Bern?”
“I’d say so.”
“You’re stunned but not devastated. Is that about it?”
“Pretty much. I feel stupid for having misread the situation so completely. I thought the woman was crazy about me, and all the while she was getting ready to tie the knot with somebody else.”
“He’s the guy to feel sorry for, Bern.”
“Who, the bridegroom?”
“Uh-huh. A week and a half before the wedding, and his wife’s rehearsing with somebody else? If you ask me, you’re lucky to be rid of her.”
“I know.”
“Lettice. What kind of name is that, anyway?”
“I guess it’s English.”
“I suppose so. You know, ever since you started seeing her I’ve been good about resisting the obvious jokes. Like, what kind of a name is that for a tomato? Or, has she got a sister named Parsley? Or, I hope she’s not the original Iceberg Lettice.”
“She’s not.”
“I don’t know, Bern. She was cool as a cucumber the other day. Who’s the lucky guy, anyway? Did she tell you anything about him?”
“Not a word.”
“Or where she met him, or anything like that?”
I shook my head. “Maybe she just walked into his store,” I said. “That’s how she met me. She picked out half a dozen books by Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George, and we got to talking.”
“What’s she do, Bern?”
“All sorts of things,” I said, remembering. “Oh, you mean for a living? She does something in Wall Street. I think she’s a stock analyst.”
“So she’s not just a bimbo.”
“Not in the traditional sense of the term.”
“And she’s English?”
“No.”
“I thought she was homesick for England. I thought that was why you took her for English tea at the Stanhope, and why you were planning on taking her to Cuttleford House.”
“She’s homesick for England,” I said, “in a manner of speaking, but she’s not English. In fact she’s never even been there.”
“Oh.”
“But she has a faint English accent, and she uses some British constructions in her speech, and she’s very clear on the notion that England is her spiritual home. And of course she’s read a whole lot of English mysteries.”
“Oh, right. Martha Grimes and Elizabeth George. They’re both English, aren’t they?”
“Actually,” I said, “they’re not, but they set their books over there, and she can’t get enough of them. And she’s read all the classics, too—Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers. Anyway, I thought Cuttleford House would be just her line of country.”
“‘Just her line of country’?”
“See? Now I’m doing it. I thought she’d be nuts about it.”
“And it’s a lot cheaper than going to England.”
“It’s not cheap,” I said. “But I had a very good evening around the end of January, and for a change money’s not a problem.”
“One of those Perrier nights.”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I know it’s morally reprehensible, but I did it anyway, and I wanted to invest some of the proceeds in high living before I piss it all away on food and shelter.”
“Makes sense.”
“So I actually thought about hopping on the Concorde and whisking her off for a whirlwind weekend in England. But I wasn’t sure I could find the right England.”
“There’s more than one?”
I nodded. “To get to the one she’s mad for,” I said, “you’d need a time machine, and even then you might have trouble finding it. Her England’s some sort of cross between Upstairs, Downstairs and The Body in the Library. If I got off the plane at Heathrow I wouldn’t know where to look for that England. But you can find it three hours from here at Cuttleford House.”
“And it’s some kind of hotel? I never heard of it, Bern.”
“Neither did I,” I said, “until fairly recently. And yes, it’s a hotel of sorts, but it didn’t start out that way. Ferdinand Cathcart built it just about a hundred years ago.”
“That’s a familiar name.”
“He was one of the robber barons, and he made his money the old-fashioned way.”
“By grinding the faces of the poor?”
“How else? After he’d made his pile, and after he’d already treated himself to a limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue and a summer place at Newport, Ferdie decided he wanted a country house. So he built Cuttleford.”
“And lived there happily ever after?”
“I gather he hardly spent any time there at all,” I said, “and he may have lived happily, but not ever after, because within five years of the completion of Cuttleford he had taken up residence in that great English country house in the sky. His heirs fought over the estate, and the one who wound up with it lost all his money in 1929 and the state took the place for back taxes. It passed through various hands over the years. After the Second World War it was a fancy drying-out farm for alcoholics, and I believe some monastic order had it for a while. Eventually it was abandoned, and then eight or ten years ago the Eglantines got hold of it and set about restoring it.”
“The Eglantines. They’re a religious order, too, aren’t they?”
I shook my head. “They’re Mr. and Mrs. Eglantine,” I said. “I forget their first names, but they’re on the brochure. I think he’s English and she’s American, or maybe it’s the other way around. They met when they were both working for a big American hotel chain, and they quit and opened an English-style bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Then they had a chance to buy Cuttleford House, so they sold the place in Bucks County and took a shot at it.”
I told her about the place, parroting back the better part of what I’d read in the brochure.
“It sounds great,” she said.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“It really does, Bern. It’s a shame Lettice couldn’t have postponed the wedding a week or two. She would have loved it.”
“I’d have enjoyed it myself.”
“Well, sure. Who wouldn’t?”
I sipped my beer, set the glass down, leaned forward. I said, “You know what?”
“What, Bern.”
“Let’s go.”
“Just like that? Well, let me finish my drink first, okay?”
“Finish it and have another. I don’t mean let’s blow this pop stand. I mean let’s go to Cuttleford House.”
“Huh?”
“Well, why the hell not? I’ve got the reservations and I already sent them a deposit, which will probably turn out to be nonrefundable. Why don’t the two of us make the trip? You’re not planning on getting married a week from Thursday, are you?”
“Not that I remember, but I’d have to check my book.”
“I hate the idea of canceling the trip,” I said, “just because the person I was planning on taking happens to be marrying somebody else. But it’s not the kind of place I’d want to go to alone.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So what do you say?”
“I don’t know if I can afford it, Bern.”
“Hey, c’mon. It’s my treat.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I thought that went without saying.”
“In that case,” she said, “I can probably afford it.”
“So is it a deal? Are we going?”
“Oh, what the hell,” she said. “Why not?”
CHAPTER
Three
That was Tuesday night. The following day Carolyn bought the sandwiches and we ate them at the bookstore. After she’d washed down the last bite of felafel with the last sip of celery tonic, she cocked her head and said, “About next weekend, Bern.”
“What about it?”
&nbs
p; “Well, I’ve been thinking.”
“We’re still on, aren’t we?”
“I guess so, but—”
“But what?”
“Well, I’m a little unclear about something.”
“What’s to be unclear? We’ll leave here Thursday afternoon and be back sometime Sunday night. If you’re wondering what clothes to pack—”
“I’ve got that worked out.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I’d sort of like to know why we’re going.”
“Why we’re going?”
“That’s right, Bern. That’s where it gets a little unclear for me.”
“I know why I’m going,” I said, “and I thought I’d told you. I’m going because I had it all planned, had my heart set on it, and I don’t see any reason to let a perfidious anglophile leave me stranded. Another reason I’m going is because I need a vacation. I can’t remember the last time I got out of the city, and I’ve been putting in long hours in the store, not to mention the occasional off-the-books enterprise at night.”
“I know you’ve been working a lot.”
“That’s why I’m going. As for you, I figure you’re going because you want to keep your best friend company in his hour of need. And you’ve been working hard yourself. How many dogs got a wash and set from you the week of the big Kennel Club show?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“So you can use a break, and how often do you get a chance to do a good deed for a friend and get a free vacation in the bargain?”
“Not too often.”
“So now we know why I’m going, and why you’re going, and if you put the two together, they add up to why we’re going.”
She considered the matter. I crumpled up one of the sandwich wrappers and threw it for Raffles to chase, then gathered the rest of our luncheon detritus and put it in the trash. When I got back, Carolyn had the cat on her lap and a determined expression on her face.
“There’s more,” she said.
“More what? More lunch? More garbage? What are you talking about?”
“More to the story,” she said. “You know that bit about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Well, I think you’re telling the truth, and I think you’re telling nothing but the truth, but I don’t think you’re telling the whole truth.”