The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 10

  “For what?”

  She said, “All right,” and unfolded the next phase.

  Many of the American officers were billeted in the Ritz Hotel, she said, although “Mr. Miller,” as she still called him, hadn’t been staying there. Nor had he disclosed his address. She said, “This is all I know. He wants me to go to the Ritz Hotel at noon and meet a woman named Claudia.”

  34

  I’ve been looking back over my account so far of Kate Begley and myself in that year, 1943. What hasn’t come across yet is what I later called the “quicksilver” between us. By that I don’t mean the verbal challenges, the benign sparks that we sometimes struck off each other. I mean that quicksilver is another name for mercury, one of the densest metals in the world, and it has a very narrow range from cold to hot—and back again.

  We arrived at the Ritz so early that we had to dawdle in the park nearby. How different we looked—Miss Begley a tube of dark red serge in her trim jacket and mid-calf slim skirt, fashionable beyond the powers of Lamb’s Head or Kenmare, and I like a half priest or young undertaker in my trademark black suit. I towered over Miss Begley. She claimed five feet four inches, but it always looked doubtful, especially when she stood beside me—or Mr. Miller.

  At the Ritz reception desk, we asked for Claudia and our inquiry caused a stir. The clerk fluttered, and a senior figure overheard. The lady was, he said, “in residence and expecting two visitors,” to which Miss Begley said, bright as a breeze, “That’ll be us.”

  “I’ll just call through, if I may,” said the Ritz man.

  Miss Begley whispered to me, “This Claudia must be some big shot.”

  No matter what we may claim, we don’t anticipate most of the major events in life. Accidents, prizes, sudden betrayals—they crash into us. Or they break slowly over us, as in this case, where I had no inkling, no flicker of premonition. Nor did Miss Begley, no matter how fey she liked to be; months later, when I asked her, she admitted as much.

  Yet, when the Ritz man escorted us down a long, thoughtful corridor, why did I offer to stand back and wait outside as he knocked on the door? Why did I, with a rush of urgency like blood to the head, think about getting out of there fast? The Ritz man, one of whose eyes was blank white, shook his head.

  “You’re very much included, sir.”

  ——

  Let me tell you about Claudia, who lived to the age of ninety-six. A very specific and elite grapevine knew her as “Claudia at the Ritz,” and she found classy English wives for foreign men, including officers and diplomats. Up to the time we met her, she’d been having modest success, but felt that she should have been doing better—or so she told us.

  You may now be saying to yourself, “Huh. Bombs falling everywhere and people matchmaking? Bit doubtful, if you ask me.”

  But I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Not only that, Claudia wasn’t alone—and she may even have copied the idea from a woman named Sylvia, well documented and mildly famous, who plied an identical trade over at London’s other posh hotel, the Savoy. And although they called it “matchmaking,” who can say whether other wartime services weren’t on offer—but that only occurred to me many years later.

  Through “army connections” (Mr. Miller, obviously), Claudia at the Ritz had heard of Miss Begley, and “perked up,” as she said, at the idea of help from an expert. That was the story she gave us. It didn’t feel improbable at the time, but it makes me laugh when I think of it, because Miss Begley never asked Claudia a question, or inquired as to how we got there. It took me months to grasp that both women knew the score all along, knew what the game was and who the players would be. I was the only one who didn’t.

  Claudia had sufficient height to look me in the eye. Long after these events, I said to her one day, “Why does such a tall woman need such high heels?”

  She said, “Every little bit helps, darling.”

  As with much of what Claudia said, I never quite figured out what she meant.

  “Goodness,” she said, gazing down on Miss Begley at our first meeting, “the Management does get it right.”

  By “the Management,” I would discover, she meant God; Claudia prayed often. When she shook my hand, I saw that she swallowed as though her mouth was dry, and I felt that she didn’t like me. Claudia looked like a large, walking duchess in blue silk. In we went, to an office furnished with ormolu, inlay, and jade.

  I felt uncomfortable. Claudia reminded me of my erstwhile mother-in-law, the actress Sarah Kelly. Also nearly as tall as I, elegant and groomed, Sarah hadn’t one trustworthy bone in her body. Claudia felt equally dangerous, and in the beginning I wanted to shy away from her. Maybe it was the English upper-class accent, a sinister matter in Irish race memory. Within a short time, though, she behaved so warmly that Miss Begley and I moved toward her like swimmers to a shore. We must have sensed her abundant moral courage.

  “I love the Irish,” Claudia began, “though you have a million reasons not to love us. Frankly, if I were Irish, I’d find it difficult ever to talk to an Englishman, given what we’ve done to you.”

  “But you yourself, you didn’t do it,” said Miss Begley in a stout, courteous defense.

  “India was my family’s playground. I think we behaved ourselves out there. At least I hope we did.”

  Every time Claudia looked at me that day, she ran a hand through her hair and turned away. Perhaps she found me distasteful—but my father swore that English nostrils had a defect, that they smelled many things as rancid, which explained why they grew so many roses. My father aired a lot of doubtful theories.

  I, on the other hand, couldn’t take my eyes off Claudia; I have to admit that I quickened when I saw her—her superior air, her grooming. And I found myself fascinated to see how little, parochial Miss Begley—“Dear Kate” as Claudia began to call her—might change under the influence of such a cosmopolitan woman.

  “Have you been traveling all night? Poor dears. Traveling’s calamitous for the bowels,” said Claudia. “Do you need a bathroom?”

  Her desk shone with details of silver, brass, and copper; little carved swags of golden cord formed the handles on the drawers; pearl medallions glistened at the corners. She saw me looking at a large marquetry cartouche of a tiger in the center.

  “Aren’t the stripes hectic?” she said. “Hickory inlay, I believe.”

  She kicked off her shoes—she had impeccable hose, worth a fortune that year in that war.

  “It’s all right, my dears. My feet don’t sweat,” and she rested them (scarlet toenail polish peeping through the nylons) on a red lacquered footstool that was alive with dragons, trees, and waterfalls. I had the idle thought, Will Miss B. read Claudia’s palm?

  On the walls hung large mirrors, so that when Claudia turned her head in any direction she had a full reflection of herself. Her skin had the creamy sheen of old English money. Directly in front of her desk sat two wide, carved armchairs covered in turquoise velvet. On these Miss Begley and I sat, like a couple of children summoned before the headmistress.

  Claudia pushed back her hair, clutched her diamond earrings, and wiggled them free.

  “You both have to learn French. Very quickly. Can you do that?”

  Miss Begley said, “Mais oui. Immédiatement.”

  Claudia looked at her in delight and flung out several phrases; Miss Begley retaliated; back and forth they nattered like French monkeys; Claudia laughed.

  “My dear! You need no more than a teeny-weeny little polish. And you, dear boy?” she asked me, and I said, “Non. Not a word.”

  Claudia pursed those red-velvet-bow lips. “Very well. Dear Kate, I’ll move you straight into German. Then you’ll help me here in the afternoons. I have some lovely eligible fellas and gels looking for partners, and I have some so stupid, heavens above, it’s a wonder they know how to use the lavatory. And Ben, dear boy”—she turned her beam full on me—“you will learn the beginnings of French and German.”

  To which I said
, “But I have work to do.”

  “Oh?”

  I recall thinking, What is this? Do these women stand in front of a mirror and rehearse their eyebrows? One at a time, then lift both together? And note Claudia’s assumptions: no “Will you?” Just said, “You will.”

  “I’m collecting stories from Irish immigrants working in London.”

  Claudia’s manners were too good to allow her distaste to leak through—but the tongue touched the red lips. And I never did go into the Irish communities; had James Clare not been my mentor I’d have lost my job.

  In her diary that night, Miss Begley wrote this entry for that first day in the Ritz:

  I feel I was born to come here. CM did say he wanted me to do something “very important” for him. Why did he ask me so many questions about poor Hans-Dieter? What was that about? Question to Myself: Will CM be decent and do the QPQ? At least I’ve said it to him, and he didn’t flinch. He didn’t say “no.” He didn’t say “yes” either. Did I use the right words? Should I have said, “I’ll do this important thing if you’ll do something for me”? Ben would have called that too blunt, too crude. Question really is: Will he write her a letter? Her name is Janie Sonnhalter. What kind of a name is that? He spelled it for me. Is intimacy all that important? After all, he is a Protestant, and they do the bold thing all the time. Maybe I’ll ask. But he’ll have to show me the letter when he’s written it.

  Had I seen that entry next morning, I wouldn’t have understood a blind word of it. Hans-Dieter? Not a clue. Janie Sonnhalter? Must be the girl of the “intimacy” back in the States. “QPQ”? I couldn’t translate it.

  Here is the note I made that night:

  London after dark, and not a light to be seen; this is what they call “the blackout,” where every curtain is closed tight and every shade drawn down to within an inch of its life. Today at the Ritz Hotel, I met a lady name of Claudia who asked Miss Begley to become her assistant and “train her,” as she put it, “in the arts of love.” I will be allowed to sit and make notes. And I have to try to take on board some basic French and German. I’m going to love that, because it means I might one day get even closer to my “friends,” the scholars, and know better Rahingus of Flavigny, Heriger of Mainz, and Froumund himself on the road outside Tegernsee.

  35

  In her jewel-box office, with its shining wood and profound velvet, Claudia asked us many questions.

  “Now whence do you hail, my dears?”

  “Schools? I believe the Irish are very well educated. I myself, I had a girl’s education, I can’t tell B from a bull’s foot.”

  “One of you is married and the other isn’t, I believe—yes?”

  This jarred me. How much did she know about us, and how had she learned? More crucially, why? But I didn’t have the moral strength to ask; everything so far intimidated me—the rich surroundings, Claudia’s power, the startling incongruousness of being there at all. A week earlier, I had been down on my knees in the corner of a farmyard in County Monaghan, looking at a family’s amulet, a curved stone with two “eyes” in it, which they rubbed against any beast that fell ill.

  I did manage to say, “Given where we come from, I find all this very strange. Can you tell me why we’re here?”

  Miss Begley glared at me and looked uncomfortable. Claudia said, lighter than a butterfly, “My dear, there’s a war on.”

  Which, I was given to understand, would embrace every possibility under the sun. And it did.

  Now that I look back on it, I can see, plain as a white plate, the smoothness of the entire operation. Claudia was part of a machine that, like any good part of any good engine, was supposed to work without calling attention to itself. There she sat, large and pleasant, writing our answers in a red book. When she finished, she closed the book, raised her head, and tapped the leather cover.

  “They’ll want records,” she said, “for when they’re handing out the medals. Now.” She stood and stretched; today I know enough to call it a display gesture; she looked like a very big pouter pigeon with a blue silk chest.

  “I’m giving you lunch,” she said, “and a friend or two may join us. Remind me not to eat something that would make me belch.” Claudia could have sold that smile of hers to a toothpaste company.

  We walked from her office to a large dining room overlooking the river. Uniforms shone all over the place, and every table seemed full. Was this some kind of joyous war? The far corner to which she led us had been set for five people, with two already there. One looked not unlike my father, that is to say, a tall, jovial-seeming man with bulging red hair. The other—no surprise—wore an American uniform.

  “I believe you know Captain Miller,” said Claudia.

  “Oh, ’tis ‘Captain’ now, is it?” said Miss Begley.

  “Last week,” he said, beamed a great wide smile at her, and shook my hand like a pal: “My friends call me ‘Chuck.’ ” He directed Miss Begley to the chair beside him.

  The pair of them dominated lunch. Claudia said almost nothing. From time to time she wrote in her red book, which she now held on her knee. She had introduced the big, red-haired man as “Mr. Howard,” who asked only one question: “Do the local people in Ireland feel more hostile to Britain or to Germany?”

  Miss Begley and I looked at each other and she said, “Don’t we want our side to win?”

  Captain Miller laughed. “What I think Mr. Howard is asking is—which is your side?”

  Miss Begley put it beyond argument or doubt. “Your crowd, of course. We’re no friends with that Hitler fellow, although mind you, we’ve nothing against him.”

  “Isn’t he a little toad?” said Claudia. “I should like to slap his bottom.”

  When Captain Miller asked how we felt about the Japanese, Miss Begley replied, “I don’t know anybody from Japan,” and I said, “No, I’ve never met anybody from Japan.”

  Miss Begley added, with a helpful air, “I was in The Mikado in school,” which Mr. Howard seemed to find very amusing, as did Claudia.

  “Tell me,” said Captain Miller, “what does it feel like to be neutral?”

  I think about that question often; it came to have such a personal resonance for me; yet, that day, Miss Begley and I shrugged and we said that it didn’t really feel like anything.

  Looking back at my notes, I find that I wrote:

  Capt. Miller asked us about fishermen on the southwest of Ireland. I told him, with interjections from Miss Begley, about Bawn Buckley and the smuggling. Is he very interested in fishing? In Irish fishermen and how they work? I was able to answer most of his questions, even when he wandered into politics. As before, he seemed most interested in whether we thought Ireland would ever allow Mr. Churchill to use our ports for the British navy. I told him the theory that Mr. de Valera was playing the ports as a bargaining chip—if Mr. Churchill gave us back the six counties of Northern Ireland, then he could use our ports. Mr. Howard said, “I doubt that will happen.” Miss Begley at lunch was happier than I’ve ever seen her. Excited and alert. Delightful. Claudia kept glancing at me. Is she afraid that I’ll object to something?

  After lunch, with Miss Begley flushed and a little out of true with adrenaline, Claudia led us through the labyrinthine Ritz to a door that somebody answered from within.

  In the middle of a sitting room ripe with antique furniture and golden fabric, stood a large desk. Behind the desk, shuffling some papers and books, sat a woman with blue lipstick. Nothing else about her proved as startling; the lipstick shone like a violet on a stone, because she was herself otherwise gray—of hair, face, dress, and personality.

  Claudia had never met her, and asked—in French—“Madame Samadey?”

  The lipstick lady said, “Sama-dett.”

  She spoke English with almost no accent. For a moment I thought that she could have been Irish or American. This was the woman in whose company we would spend every morning for the next two and a half months, and many Saturdays and Sundays, Miss Begley honi
ng what French and German she had, me studying afresh.

  That first night, as we walked back to our little hotel to collect our luggage, I said to Miss Begley, “Did it worry you that Claudia mightn’t have thought us sophisticated?”

  She said, “I hope she didn’t.”

  I said, “Why?”

  “Look it up.”

  “Look up what?”

  “The word sophistication.”

  “I can tell that you’ve looked it up.”

  “I didn’t need to,” she said, waving her hands like a princess. “I already knew.”

  Nobody could get attention like Miss Begley could.

  I said, “So what does it mean?”

  “ ‘A thin veneer of artificiality.’ ”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” she said. “And who’d want that?”

  36

  They gave us spending money in Ritz-crested envelopes; they gave us adjoining rooms in the hotel, with a connecting door we never locked. We lived in circumstances opulent beyond our norms, and we should have defined it all by words such as strange and weird—because it was strange and weird, and I still think so.

  Compare it to how remote, how small, how local was Miss Begley’s home at Lamb’s Head, a place that she had never left and where she could never have met upper-class English people of opaque purpose. Or an enigmatic American officer—who now came back into our lives with some emphasis.

  One morning, when we had been studying with Madame Samadett for some days, we found a new student waiting—Captain Charles Miller, tawny and huge, had draped himself across the sofa like a lion.

  As usual, we launched into our greeting ritual with Madame, in which she asked us how our evening had been, had we heard from our parents, how we had slept—all in French. As Madame spoke, Captain Miller tried to make us laugh from behind her back. He turned his eyes inward, stuck two fingers up his nostrils, then tweaked his ear like a key that made his tongue pop out and back in again. To round off this performance, he made a goofy, bucktoothed face with a drooping eyelid.