Free In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

“I mean of all that sort of nonsense. The you and Leo sort of nonsense. And while we’re on the subject let me tell you something else: from now on, I don’t want to hear another word about the old monster. I just don’t want you to mention him in my hearing ever again. I don’t even want you to think about him when you’re with me. Is that absolutely clear? Ridiculous,” she finished off.
    But once upon a time, Regi had felt differently about Leo. Louise didn’t remind her—and Regi didn’t want to be reminded—of the night she had found them out. It was a night when, Leo having failed to come home for almost a week, Louise did what was forbidden to her: she tried to track him down. In an uproar at her own daring, she telephoned the escape hatch. But there was no answer. She let it ring and ring; then she tried several times more. The result was always the same. There was a rushing in her ears, or was it a storm in her brain. She lay down next to Bruno asleep. The storm did not abate. She got up, tried again; at the other end the phone rang and rang in an empty room.
    Then she became reckless. She telephoned Regi. It was three in the morning but Regi answered quite soon, and wide awake. “. . . Know where Leo is?” she echoed Louise’s question. She put surprise into her voice but did not take much trouble to make it sound genuine. “How should I know a thing like that?” she drawled and seemed to be smiling—possibly at someone else there in the room with her.
    Years and years later—two generations later—Regi told Mark about that night, and its aftermath, and how jealous his grandmother had been. Regi laughed at the recollection: “She always took everything so seriously. For me it was only an episode, short and not all that sweet, but for her . . . Well,”said Regi, patting down her wig, “each one to his taste, or whatever it is they say.”
    Mark listened to her with pleasure. He always liked listening to Regi and getting her view of the past. When she was in New York, he often visited her in her apartment—the same apartment where Leo had held his first classes. Although she only used it for a few weeks in the year, she kept it because by present-day prices it was what she called dirt cheap. She never allowed anyone else to stay there. When she left, she simply lowered the blinds, and when she returned, she opened them again. She still had the ultramodern furniture of the thirties, all glass and tubular metal legs; the same white wolf rugs yawned on the parquet floors. Over the marble mantel hung an expressionist portrait of Regi in the nude. “Do you really like it?” she asked Mark who always spent a long time looking at it. She felt it didn’t do her justice, although she knew by now that it was worth a great deal of money. It had been painted by a German artist who later became very famous. He had been madly in love with Regi—crazy about her, she told Mark—but she hadn’t had much time for him. “I don’t know why you think it’s good,” she pouted at the picture which showed her geometrically elongated, with green eyes spilling all over the place, and breasts like little icebergs.
    â€œThis is what I really looked like,” she said. She drew his attention to a studio portrait which showed her contemplating in profile. When he admired it, she got into a good mood and brought out her albums. There was Regi in a swimsuit, and Regi in her leopard-skin coat; and motoring in an open sports car, and off to a masquerade as a chimney sweep in tight black silk. Louise was with her in many of these early photographs, and other girls in very short skirts. There was a New Year’s Eve party where everyone held a champagne glass and blinked at the light of the flash. Another time they were on the beach wearing colored swimming tubes. All the young men were dapper, with a tennis racket