Free In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Page B

Mark was glad to do; and he was alsoglad to replace the cameras the previous lover had bought with more advanced and expensive equipment. Although there were some ugly scenes when Kent moved out of the other man’s loft and into Mark’s—at one point it almost came to the police being called in—in the end the older lover had resigned himself, as perhaps he had already learned to do from previous occasions, and Mark and Kent began their life together.
    Mark’s loft was in a late-nineteenth-century building which had once been a warehouse. Each floor had been bought separately and converted into an apartment, and since two of the owners were interior decorators and one was an architect, they vied with each other as to the beauty and ingenuity of their conversions. Mark had the topmost story—an enormous space into which his architect had been able to fit as many rooms as into a complete town house, though at the same time leaving it open to a surge of cityscape. The warehouse windows, tall as a cathedral’s, gave out onto a different scene on every side. There were round water towers and a round Greek Orthodox church, a Romanesque tower, an unconverted warehouse and another converted one, a neon-lighted airline, a building with a silver spire, another like a black glass pencil with an adjacent Gothic old hotel mirrored in its side—all crowding and jostling together as they rolled away toward the horizon where the river flowed into the sea.
    Mark left early in the mornings, leaving Kent to spend the day as he pleased. When Mark came home again—quite late, for his business drew him into many activities—he often found Kent in the darkroom he had fitted up for him. They were both excited by the work Kent was doing, but sometimes, as they looked at the photographs together, Mark’s eyes strayed from the work of art to the artist, inspiring him with a different ardor. And often Mark wished he were an artist himself—for instance when he left in the mornings andgave a last look at Kent still sleeping in the bed they shared. Although this bed was high and gilt and luxurious, Kent, lying naked on the designer sheets, looked as innocent and pastoral as a boy lost in a wood and sleeping on moss.
    Over the years, Mark had worked out a compromise with his mother. She had had to accept the fact that he had his own place; that he was not to be pursued there; that he would be with her when he could—certainly whenever she truly needed him; but that in return not too many demands should be made on him nor questions asked. It had not been easy for Marietta to accept these terms—yet in the end she did, and was perhaps even glad to, for fear of having to accept others that she didn’t even want to let herself know about.
    Natasha moved more freely in and out of the different areas of Mark’s life; probably because he felt safer with her. In earlier days too, when he had gone off on his various trips, although he never told Natasha where he was going or with whom—she didn’t ask—he always took care that she had a number where he could be reached if absolutely necessary. Natasha never told Marietta that she had this number, for she knew that if she did, Marietta would very soon have found it absolutely necessary to use it.
    Now, in these later years, Natasha did not tell Marietta about her visits to Mark’s loft, nor about his friends whom she met there. Some of these friends she did not like, though she never told Mark so—not even later when he broke with them. And she was wary of those whom she did like because she knew from experience that sooner or later something would happen and Mark would suffer. It was strange, his suffering—she had seen it since he was a boy at school and had quarreled with his friends there. Even then it had struck her as so at variance with the rest of him, or with that aspect of him that they knew at home: where, always, from