The Last Words of Madeleine Anderson

by Helen Kitson

  ‘It would only be for a night, two at most,’ he added. ‘I mean, it can’t snow for ever, can it?’

  ‘No; I suppose not.’ I sensed right there that inviting Simon into my home – into my life – constituted a grave error of judgement.

  Chapter Three

  Our lives are composed of stories. Memories are stories and there are also the inherited stories, true or not, which add colour to our lives. My grandmother always insisted that her mother had been seduced and left pregnant by Lord Such-and-Such and that we were, therefore, possessors of blue blood. Doubtless such things happened in big houses filled with randy young (and not so young) men and a constant supply of domestics – ignorant, often far from home, economically and socially powerless.

  The man who’d been my last lover, Russell Poole, had been unable to understand my attachment to family stories. I expected – wanted – some expression of sympathy when I told him I’d unearthed a document that proved my great grand-aunt had been sent to prison for concealing the birth and subsequent death of an illegitimate baby, born (aptly enough) in a stable. Russell had laughed, perplexed, holding up splayed hands.

  ‘But it was all so long ago! You never even knew this woman.’ He poured two glasses of rosé, offering one to me. Perversely I shook my head, though I’d been looking forward to the wine. From necessity we always met at my place, but Russell provided the drink.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he muttered, ‘if you’re going to be silly about it—’ He placed my glass on a coaster, assuming I’d soon change my mind.

  He was a science teacher. We’d met when I took a temporary clerical job at the local secondary school. The evening to which I just referred was the one, I subsequently realised, which marked the unravelling of our relationship. Shortly afterwards he took me to Paris for a long weekend. Only later did I realise he’d intended the trip to be a sort of parting gift – a final happy memory of our affair, one I was meant to treasure.

  A woman is in no position to complain when her married lover decides to end it. “Making another go of his marriage” is the correct thing to do, and the abandoned lover must, if she has any decency, grudgingly accept this and let go. I refused to abide by the rules. I made scenes, threatened to tell his wife about us, deleted every one of the photographs I’d taken in Paris; pleaded, begged, threatened to kill myself…

  The stupid, embarrassing nightmare ended only when he and his family moved away to Devon. Russell had tried to be kind to me, tried to make allowances, and I had no excuse for having behaved like a tiresome adolescent. At no point had he ever intimated that he intended to leave his wife for me.

  ‘Be reasonable,’ he told me. ‘I made you no promises.’

  And he hadn’t. I’d clung to him because he was there, because he offered companionship and some measure of affection. Finally I understood why the last line of the Fleetwood Mac song “Man of the World” always made me feel so bleak. I had never been in love. Lovers, yes, but only the simulacrum of love.

  Madeleine had been the one with the boyfriends, I the friend ready with a tissue to mop up the tears when it all went wrong. I was there to listen to outpourings of grief, offering chocolate and comfort, never daring to tell her I could have wept for joy every time she split up with someone, because then she was mine again.

  Russell hadn’t understood what I’d felt for Madeleine. ‘A bit unhealthy, this obsession you have with her,’ he’d said.

  ‘I’m not obsessed!’

  ‘It sounds very much like it to me.’

  His training – scientific, everything to be tested, nothing taken on trust – had given him, or so it seemed to me, an inhuman disregard for emotions, intuition, the more “feminine” virtues. He said he was calm; I accused him of being cold.

  ‘I’m a reasonable man,’ he’d said, ‘not an unfeeling one.’

  We were too different, too driven by different desires. If I no longer missed him, I did occasionally wish I had more of his ability to consider logically any difficult situation.

  Russell’s distaste for Paris ensured our trip there would never have been a success. The city’s associations with romance made it anathema to him, and he frankly admitted he never felt at ease in any place where he didn’t speak the prevailing language. Our itinerary, too, was an unsatisfactory compromise. He was interested in buildings I scorned as bombastic – the Pantheon, the Palaces of Justice, the Arc de Triomphe. With bad grace he trailed after me through the cemeteries of Montmartre, Père Lachaise and Montparnasse, stubbornly refusing to understand why I found them so appealing.

  It rained on the morning we were due to fly back to England – heavy, crashing rain falling from a school-uniform-grey sky. We sat in the breakfast room of the hotel, transfixed by the rain lashing against the glass; depressed by the weather, the stale croissants and tepid hot chocolate.

  Russell was too rational to interpret these disappointments as omens or pathetic fallacy. ‘Just as well we’re leaving; the forecast suggests the rain’s set to last.’

  ‘It will be worse in England,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  ‘Everything must come to an end,’ he said in that insufferable schoolmaster’s tone of his.

  ‘That’s not the point!’

  And so began one of those pointless tiffs about nothing that leave both parties enervated, injured and resentful.

  My spare bedroom would become Simon’s until he could leave. It was decorated neutrally, walls a conventional magnolia, the carpet beige, the furniture basic: bed, dressing table, chest of drawers, chair. No ornaments or pictures on the walls, the lampshade a purely functional one from Ikea.

  No one had ever slept in this room. I’d deliberately decorated it in budget-hotel-room fashion to avoid indulging a sentimental urge to decorate it for Madeleine, she who had never seen my home or slept under my roof. This room no shrine, then, except to the gods of blandness. Simon would temporarily bring his personality to bear and I would welcome the change, for the room was studiously dreary.

  Would he expect us to eat together, or would he trip in and out of the kitchen as it suited him, heating up a plastic tray of chicken korma in the microwave or pouring boiling water on to a Pot Noodle? And would he then slouch in front of the TV watching repeats of Top Gear while he refuelled? I wasn’t used to sharing my home. I’d lived with my parents and then I lived alone.

  ‘You’ll hardly notice I’m here,’ he’d assured me, but of course I would. It didn’t matter how quiet, tidy and considerate he was, I would feel his presence eating into the space that was mine alone.

  ‘I think I’ve become very selfish,’ I told him. ‘I never was good at sharing. It’s because I’m an only child.’ Glib, probably not true, but how else to account for the pathological fear I experienced at the prospect of someone else taking charge of the remote, possibly filling the house with unpleasant food smells, and all those other trivial things that now seemed more weighty than whether or not he was a psychopathic stalker?

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘I don’t want to make a big deal of this, it’s just that I’m so unused to having anyone else in the house. I don’t like staying in other people’s houses, either. It’s nothing personal.’

  What if we were snowed in for days, even weeks? Perhaps he’d want to have intense literary discussions long into the night. He’d ask what I thought of the current thinking in post-colonial theory and I would be forced to admit I had no clue what he was on about. He would make me feel like some wretched Jean Rhys heroine, for ever out of kilter with the people around her. I would be another sad-eyed woman listening patiently while her male companion tells her she’s stupid. Too sad, too lonely, too patient to object.

  That wasn’t me, surely. But neither were Jean Rhys’s women stupid or even pathetic. Beaten by life, that’s all. By circumstances.

  To him it was a game. Playing house. I wished I knew for certain what my role was to be. I needed a script. I wasn’t particularly house-proud, belo
nging to the Quentin Crisp school of dust management, but I would have wept unreasonable tears if he’d broken anything I treasured. Everything I owned meant something; everything mattered.

  ‘I’ll stay out of your way entirely, if you like,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

  Of course he wouldn’t break anything or steal the silver, and of course that had never really been the issue any more than I’d seriously worried about him cooking junk food or wanting to watch telly programmes I didn’t enjoy.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry that I’ll think you’re rude. I understand. This is your home, your space. I’ve invaded it and haven’t even given you time to prepare. But you won’t offend me, whatever you do.’

  Did he really think I was concerned only that he shouldn’t think me rude or ungracious? That was, after all, the most logical conclusion to be drawn from my apparent reservations. The truth was something I must never reveal. Simon was simply the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting him go. I’d memorised every part of him – the shape of his mouth when he smiled; the way his hair fell over his right eyebrow; his particular smell that defied description. I couldn’t look at his hands without imagining how they would feel against my face. I couldn’t look at his neck without wanting to kiss it.

  ‘Gabrielle? What’s up?’

  ‘Sorry. Thinking.’

  ‘You think too much. The snow’ll be gone in a day or two.’

  ‘Your room is very small. The cottage is quite dark. I have a cat.’

  He laughed. ‘But I like cats.’

  I was being ridiculous. Of course it would be all right. We’d sit up late, drinking wine, talking about books, art, love, maybe some music in the background. We’d become good friends – the best!

  But how could we? How could we?

  In a moment of largesse, I’d agreed to help out with the church Christmas fete. Mr Latham’s most stalwart helpers (virtuous tenders of flowers, pourers of tea, providers of biscuits) had both succumbed to flu.

  ‘I know you’re not a great joiner-in,’ he’d said, ‘and I’m not a person who generally takes advantage of ladies,’ (I smiled, biting back a crude rejoinder to this singular admission), ‘yet I know you to be a most reliable person and I should take it as a great favour if you could force yourself, just this once.’ He said no more, but his eyes pleaded his case and pleaded well, for I needed no further persuasion to pitch in, as he put it, like the trouper I was.

  The day after Simon arrived I found myself standing behind the cake stall in a musty church hall decorated with the bright rainbow and fanciful Noah’s Ark beloved of Sunday school painters everywhere. A dove hovering over my head, I accepted the greetings of the stallholders either side of me (white elephant to the left, knitted goods to the right). During slack moments, one or other of these excellent women offered to fetch “refreshments” (lukewarm beige tea in a thick china mug and a couple of stale digestives) and, somehow or other, I found myself telling them I had a friend staying with me until the trains were running normally again.

  ‘A friend? You should have brought her along.’

  ‘A young man, actually.’ Rashly, ‘And I barely know him from Adam.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ Not crass enough to suggest Simon was a potential axe murderer, the knitted-goods lady was moved to remark that one couldn’t be too careful these days.

  ‘Well, on your own head be it,’ was her response to my feeble protestation that the majority of people were basically good and the odds were against Simon being either psychopathic or a kleptomaniac.

  Word got round, as it always does, and Mr Latham requested a quiet word in my ear on the subject when we took the unsold goods back to the vicarage at the conclusion of the fete.

  ‘You of all people ought to approve of looking for the best in people instead of assuming the worst,’ I said. ‘The Good Samaritan and all that.’

  A tight frown, a hint of annoyance. The clergy, too, are only human.

  ‘Or is it my morals you’re worried about?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re too modern a person to care about such things, my dear.’ A mild reproach? But why, indeed, should I have cared? ‘My only concern is that this young man will take advantage of your kindness. I shouldn’t like to see you being upset.’

  He seemed to appreciate the risk Simon posed. I had no fear that Simon would murder me or rob me or ruin my reputation. The danger was that I’d fall in love with him, and I was more than halfway there already.

  Mr Latham gave me a sad smile. ‘I preach the power of love all the time. Often I think I should remind people that love can be as destructive as hate.’

  ‘We all know that, deep down,’ I murmured.

  ‘You’re a writer, of course, which doubtless makes you unusually perceptive about such matters.’

  ‘I’m no longer a writer. I haven’t been a writer for over twenty years.’

  ‘You don’t dabble at all?’

  A curious word. One dabbles in the water because one is afraid to submerge one’s whole self, or because one can’t swim. My debut novel had been acclaimed as wholly assured, perfectly realised; not the work of a tentative writer, but of one who held out her arms to embrace the riptide.

  ‘All or nothing,’ I said, echoing Simon’s avowed attitude to his writing career.

  ‘A pity. When one has a vocation, it seems a great shame to renounce it.’

  ‘I didn’t. It renounced me. But anyway, to get back to the point, I’m not a silly schoolgirl and I’m quite alive to the dangers posed by handsome young men to vulnerable women of a certain age.’

  Mr Latham blinked rapidly several times like one of Trollope’s timid clergymen when confronted with foreign ladies of charm and dubious taste.

  ‘Any passion could never be requited,’ I added. ‘I’m too old to be one of those interesting mature women who capture the imagination of young men in French novels. Unrequited love won’t kill me, I do assure you.’

  No, it wouldn’t kill me, but I suspected I was trying to convince myself as much as Mr Latham. I told him I recognised the risks I was running, but it wasn’t true that I was indifferent to those perils. Hadn’t I found consolation in the fact that the President of France was married to a woman twenty-four years his senior? The twenty years between Simon and I were nothing!

  I wondered if Mr Latham had ever been in love and how much he knew from personal experience of the lusts of the flesh. He must have been in his late thirties, but he was one of those men who give the impression of having always been an old soul, never entirely at ease in the modern world, the whiff of the vestry clinging to him like cigarette smoke. He took his job seriously, but more, I suspected, from reverence for the office than because he felt any great fatherly love for his congregation.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if he knew the pangs and pains of romantic love; I was restrained only by a glimpse at his bony fingers worrying a corner of pink blotting paper on the desk. They were not, surely, hands that had ever caressed the skin of another person. Hard, cold fingers more accustomed to cradling a Bible as he intoned the funeral rites than to offering succour to the still vertical.

  Fearful of saying something neither of us would be able to forget, I forced a cheery smile and closed the conversation with a few brusque words to convey thanks for his concern, assurance that no great harm would befall me, and certainty that his anxiety was misplaced.

  ‘I trust you’re right,’ he said eventually. ‘I hope… That is to say, I realise you’re not a person inclined to confide in others, but my door, you know, is always open.’

  What kind of advice did he imagine he could dispense that would be of any use? His shoulders were hardly there to be cried upon and any outpouring of emotion would have ruined our sterile but satisfactory working relationship. A formula; the kind of thing he believed he was expected to say, and I accepted it in the same spirit.
Or was I doing him an injustice? I’d always believed him to be as little inclined to make a friend of me as I was of him, but I might have been wrong.

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind. Thank you.’

  Chapter Four

  I returned home bearing two cakes: a seed cake and a Victoria sponge oozing buttercream and jam.

  ‘Sorry I had to whizz off like that,’ I told Simon after asking if he wanted a slice of cake.

  ‘It’s okay. I checked the weather forecast. Doesn’t look likely to get above freezing for another day or two. I hate imposing on you like this,’ he said, pushing back his silky blond hair. ‘Stupid of me to travel in the first place, but the forecast is usually wrong.’

  ‘I tried to phone to stop you coming. You never answered.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that. I gave you the number for my old mobile by mistake. I’ve got a new one now.’

  ‘You could have rung me. My number hasn’t changed.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s done now.’

  He said he’d never tried seed cake but would like to, so I cut us each a hefty wedge. I thought about bringing out the best tea cups from a set (blue and white, decorated with dragons) inherited from my grandmother, but decided on mugs in the end. Men often find fiddly handles a trial. I was fussing, I knew I was, and that would make me seem strange, but I couldn’t relax.

  ‘My grandmother always had seed cake whenever we visited,’ I said. ‘I suppose she made it herself, although I’m not sure. You can’t buy it now – not in supermarkets anyway – but it’s very easy. Just a Madeira with caraway seeds thrown in. The recipe calls for two teaspoons, but I use more than twice that amount to give the proper flavour.’ All this was nonsense. He’d likely never made a cake in his life and there was no reason to suppose he’d care how a caraway seed cake was made.

  There were so many things we needed to talk about. He could be living under my roof for a week or more. Should we mention money? I’d never intended to rent out a room, I wasn’t that hard up, but he’d eat a lot, wouldn’t he? A young man of his age? What had I done?