Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  After tea, he went to join in the game of lawn-tennis. Thomas had marked off a rectangle with white lime on the grass and Edgar had brought a net which had been stretched between two sticks. Thomas handed him a racquet and explained the rudiments of the game.

  ‘You will find young Henry rather fierce, so perhaps he had better play with you. I shall play with my sister-in-law. Lucy!’

  Lucy, who had already played, was able to launch the ball over the net, and Jacques watched while Henry scurried after it and sent it looping back, the ball having come off the edge of the wooden frame. Thomas hit it back over the net and, as the ball approached him, Jacques swung at it.

  ‘Good hit!’ said Lucy.

  ‘It went up against the net. Does that matter?’

  ‘Perhaps. I am not entirely certain of the rules, but it is a marvellous game, is it not?’

  Sonia and Mrs Midwinter sat beneath the shade of a large chestnut tree.

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Jacques. ‘I like it very much.’

  Thomas threw him the ball. ‘Jacques, it is your turn to have the first hit.’

  ‘I fear the honour is too great for me. Madame.’ He bowed and passed the ball to Lucy, who hit it far over the end-line and into the long grass of a ditch.

  ‘Dido! Fetch!’

  Others came and went, as the heat of the sun began to diminish. Edgar hit the ball firmly into the net; Sonia approached it on pointed toes, then thrust the racquet beneath it. ‘Queenie, you look as though you are serving a fried egg!’ said Thomas. The twins could not manage to hit the ball, which was growing heavy from repeated contact with Dido’s mouth. Mrs Midwinter was the only one who did not play, remaining seated beneath the chestnut tree and dispensing lemonade to those who came off the court, until she declared it was time for her to speak to Miss Brigstocke about dinner. ‘Mr Rebbier,’ she said, ‘we shall gather in the library at seven.’

  ‘Thank you. I will go and prepare myself,’ said Jacques, panting, aware of the grass stains on his bare feet and the sweat on his forehead.

  Sonia lay back in the cast-iron bathtub, and pushed the window open next to her; the casement caught on the growth of creeper outside, but she managed to admit a whisper of breeze. The sun struck lily patterns in the steaming water. She could hear a thrush repeat itself in the elm.

  I must borrow that rustic calm, she thought. I must behave properly.

  She did not know how to manage her emotions, because they were unlike any she had known before. She remembered Jacques clearly enough from Deauville, his dark and worried eyes, his defensive, slightly wounded manner. Somehow he had not registered deeply with her at the time, nor had she thought much about him when Thomas intermittently mentioned their continuing friendship. She had presumed that this was because she was otherwise preoccupied, but now it seemed to her that her indifference could, on the contrary, have been nothing less than a perverse and deliberate flight from something she felt frightened to confront.

  Nothing else could explain how she had forgotten the passion with which he spoke – of Paris, of Charcot – which seemed to suck the oxygen from the air about her head. Or the even more obvious matter of the way he looked. She had noticed Violet’s jaw falling almost to her pinafore and heard her frantic whispering to May, had seen the blushing and the giggling with which they served him. Sonia could not help smiling as she remembered. Yet he himself had clearly never thought of it; and now that she knew more about his life, she could understand why. No one at his home, or at the church, at school or in the hospital clinics where he had studied would have mentioned it, because they were all men, and all had other more important things to distract them. Yet merely looking at him was to her a furtive ecstasy; and the passions that seemed to follow from that looking left her feeling uneasy.

  Sonia splashed water on her face. Not everything she felt for him was regrettable. The truer urge she had was to provide for him what his life had lacked; there was an area of experience, of laughter and domestic pleasure, which was apparently unknown to him; and the shape of that absence seemed to be the shape of her own self.

  Out of the water, she raised one foot after the other to the rim of the iron bath, dried her feet and legs carefully, put on her dressing-gown and walked back to her bedroom, where she stood in front of the window, gazing through the leaded lights over the pond towards the church.

  There was nothing she could do about her feeling because it had come too soon. Even when the divorce was final, she would need to allow a proper interval. Her parents would not approve, because Jacques had even less money than Richard Prendergast; they would probably cast her off completely. She could not trust her own feelings, anyway, because they were so unfamiliar to her, and seemed so threatening. And what was there to suggest that Jacques felt anything for her?

  He was so solitary and so self-sufficient that he needed no one else: everything necessary to him was in nature and in books. And in any case, she was what she had overheard her father call ‘soiled goods’. As a wife, she had failed: her husband had not even wished to continue with her, so she could offer no bright example of previous success in the role.

  She chose, after some thought, a light, cream-coloured dress with short sleeves. She stared at herself for a long time in the glass on her dressing table, adjusting her hair this way and that. There remained the immediate prospect of seeing him, just being in the atmosphere he made, and that was going to happen: that experience at least was legitimately hers to enjoy. But beyond the evening ahead she could not look. To be Jacques’s wife, to be part of his living and breathing; to have his children, as she still believed she might; to be with Thomas, too, her steadiest friend . . . It was not decent for any person to desire so much, and the losing of it was too terrible to contemplate.

  As she opened the door of the crowded library, Sonia found Jacques was the first person to meet her eye. He was talking to Henry and smiled at her above the boy’s head – so she was at once plunged in.

  ‘Are you staying up for dinner, Henry?’ she said.

  ‘I hope so, Aunt Sonia.’

  ‘He is going to sit next to me,’ said Jacques. ‘He has promised to explain to me the rules of lawn-tennis.’

  ‘I thought you had picked it up rather well.’

  ‘And you. I admired your style.’

  ‘The fried egg?’ Sonia smiled.

  ‘I saw no suggestion of the kitchen, though many people consider cooking to be a form of art, so—’

  ‘Aunt Sonia is a good cook. When Mama was nursing the twins, she came to stay with us and she cooked the best meals we ever had. You must ask her to make her chocolate cakes and cheese and bacon pie.’

  ‘I would like that very much indeed.’

  ‘Does your wife cook for you in France?’

  ‘I am not married, alas, so I—’

  ‘I thought all grown-ups were married.’

  ‘Most of them marry in the end, but you have to find the right person.’

  Sonia could see that Jacques was making an effort to be what he presumably considered jolly and sociable; though whether it was for her benefit or out of kindness to the child, she was not sure.

  ‘Not like Aunt Sonia,’ said Henry. ‘Her husband—’

  ‘Thank you, young man,’ said Sonia. ‘No more chocolate cake for you.’

  ‘What do frogs’legs taste like?’ said Henry.

  ‘I have never eaten frogs,’ said Jacques. ‘But I have dissected them. Hundreds of them. Shall I show you tomorrow? If we can find one in the garden?’

  ‘Then Aunt Sonia can cook it. She could even make a frog taste nice.’

  ‘Your aunt is a woman of many talents.’

  ‘She can play the piano. She can make costumes for plays. She can do any sum you give her in her head. Go on, try.’

  ‘All right. One add one,’ said Jacques.

  ‘That’s too easy!’

  ‘Then you tell me.’

  ‘One add one is two!’

  ‘Somet
imes it can still be one. One squared is one.’

  ‘We haven’t done squares yet.’

  ‘Sometimes it can be both. Two can be one and one can be two.’

  ‘You’re funny! Isn’t he funny, Aunt Sonia?’

  ‘I think so, Henry. Sometimes you cannot tell if people are being funny on purpose.’

  ‘Shall I tell you something else Aunt Sonia does? She tells stories with her hands. She pretends they are a family of spiders. In the morning, before breakfast, the twins and I get into bed with her and she makes them walk along the top of the sheets, then they make a hole under the blanket and she tickles us. My favourite spider is Augustus.’

  ‘I have always enjoyed stories,’ said Jacques.

  ‘And I have always enjoyed telling them,’ said Sonia, ‘though only to children.’

  ‘Do you mean that when children grow older they no longer believe in such things?’ said Jacques.

  ‘No, that is not what I meant. But I think it becomes harder for the person who is telling the story to have faith in it herself.’

  ‘But we must continue to believe,’ said Jacques. ‘Even in the most unlikely of stories. Without that hope, without that willingness to hope, then what are we? Am I not right, Henry?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir. Is he being funny again, Aunt Sonia?’

  ‘I cannot be sure, Henry. Perhaps not this time.’ She felt embarrassed by the falsity of the conversation and the way that she was sheltering behind the child’s innocence.

  ‘What I mean,’ said Jacques, ‘is that when you are young you may have a great dream or ambition, which appears to you like a story – the story of your own future. When you grow older you understand that it is not just difficult to achieve, but that it is full of risk and pain that you knew nothing of when you were a child.’

  ‘But you must still believe in it?’

  ‘I know that I do. I always shall. I am like a man playing cards. When the banker asks me if I want to carry on, I always say yes, and increase my stake.’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ said Henry.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Jacques. ‘It is the only way to live.’

  It was time for dinner and Thomas was told to organise their going in. ‘Are you all right, Queenie?’ he said. ‘Are these young men bothering you? You look hot.’

  ‘I feel a little out of breath.’

  ‘It’s cooler in the dining room. We are going through now. Jacques, would you mind taking my mother in? You hold your arm out like that, and in principle keep the other hand free for your sword to fight off attackers. Henry, you come with me.’

  ‘Are we likely to be assaulted?’

  ‘Could be. Appleton looks frisky.’

  The doors of the dining room were entirely open to the night, and the flames of the candelabra flickered in the evening breeze; it was light outside and they could still see across the velvet lawn, down to the shade of the cedar tree and the grass bank beyond.

  Sonia drank the cold hock her father poured for her and tried to calm her flying thoughts by occupying herself with the needs of her neighbours, Edgar on one side, and, on the other, a stout gentleman new to the village whose name she had been too preoccupied to catch. Miss Brigstocke had sent through a dish of sweetbreads and a roast capon with tarragon stuffing and bread sauce. There was burgundy to go with it.

  Something peculiar seemed to be happening to the passage of time, so that when Sonia looked down into the deep red of her wine she seemed to be lost in the infinitely slow process of the grapes, picked years ago from French hills on which Roman legions had once tramped; then when she glanced up, she could find no way in to the numerous conversations around her, where the faces, in the treacherous candlelight, seemed to be accelerating, reckless, towards some headlong destiny, and she saw that piles of fruit were already on the table, and that her mother was pointedly pushing back her chair and inviting the women to follow her out.

  It was not so easy for Sonia to escape from the company that night. When her mother took the women downstairs again, there was something close to rebuke in her voice as she asked Sonia to pay more attention to the new guest from the village, Mr Appleton, who was allegedly a man of property. ‘You seem quite distracted, dear. Take him some coffee, will you, and make a fuss of him.’

  For a quarter of an hour, Sonia hovered over MrAppleton, until she noticed Thomas slip out through an open door. Jacques caught her eye when he followed a few minutes later, but was gone before she could read his expression.

  ‘. . . with at least a thousand acres,’ said Mr Appleton. ‘Are you quite well, Mrs Prendergast?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Well, no. Not really. I have a slight ringing in the ears. If you would excuse me, I think some fresh air might help.’

  Mouthing the word ‘air’ to her mother, Sonia went out onto the terrace and over the dark lawn, down to the cedar tree, where she could see the glow of two cigars. She ran the last twenty yards or so.

  ‘We were wondering,’ said Thomas, ‘whether Switzerland might be a better final destination than Austria. There is a sanatorium near Davos of which I have heard good things. What do you think?’

  Sonia blessed him for easing her so smoothly into their thoughts. ‘Are they not mainly for patients with tuberculosis?’ she said.

  ‘Not always. The Alpine air is good for all manner of illnesses, including those of the nerves.’

  Sonia let out a deep laugh of relief at being outside. ‘I shall allow the gentleman of science to choose. Can you hear that nightingale?’

  ‘Skylarks, nightingales . . . You have a very good ear,’ said Jacques.

  ‘You should hear her play the piano.’

  ‘Henry was telling me of her talents.’

  ‘But the half was not told to you. That is why we call her the Queen of Sheba, though to be literal, it was of course she who—’

  ‘Do be quiet, Thomas. There is no need to laugh, Jacques.’

  ‘I beg your pardon. I was laughing because I am so happy.’

  ‘You have enjoyed your day?’ said Sonia.

  ‘I think it is the best day I have ever lived.’

  ‘There it is again,’ said Thomas. ‘No, that was a thrush. The day does seem to have lasted a long time. Breakfast seems a month ago.’

  ‘A year,’ said Jacques.

  ‘I promised Mama I would do some duty with the Appletons,’ said Thomas. ‘You two have done yours. I shall come back when the coast is clear.’ He vanished into the darkness.

  After a moment, Sonia said, ‘I am so pleased you feel at home here.’

  She could see Jacques’s sudden, huge smile in the night. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think it is the first day of my life that I have not worked.’

  ‘Not even Sundays?’ Sonia was appalled.

  ‘There was always work to do at home, or I did some study in my room. Now I have tasted idleness.’ He appeared to be trying to lighten the tone of the conversation. Sonia was relieved that this meant she was less likely to embarrass herself, but reluctant to let the moment pass too quickly.

  ‘It is a good house, is it not?’ she said. ‘It needs attention. And so perhaps do those who live in it! But I think it is possible for people to be happy there.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Jacques. ‘I imagine that your mother must have worked to make it so.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sonia was puzzled by his direction; she had thought of the house as possessing a more spontaneous power.

  ‘I see that the girls are happy,’ said Jacques. ‘The ones who bring the food. Someone must make this atmosphere. And the man with the horses.’

  ‘Jenkins. Yes. I think he has a good life.’

  ‘So what is this gift your mother has, do you think? This gift to be a good wife?’

  Now, Sonia thought, she could see where he was heading; but she could not presume.

  ‘I am not sure,’ she said.

  ‘But you must have considered it.’

  ‘I considered it a grea
t deal when I was myself married, but evidently without success.’

  Jacques coughed and stopped. Sonia saw that, by being too effectively self-effacing, she had silenced him. She saw her future in the vanishing moment, and moved without hesitation. ‘But you, Jacques, when we were talking with little Henry before dinner, you said that most people do get married but that it was important to find the right person. What would the right person be like in your case?’

  There was a silence while Jacques inhaled on his cigar, and Sonia watched the tip glowing in the night. She felt her life hanging in the balance.

  ‘For me,’ he said, ‘knowing what I am like, the right person would certainly be someone who was a very good cook.’ He paused. ‘Someone who could cook a chocolate cake. And a bacon and cheese pie.’

  ‘You mean—’

  ‘Sonia, from the day I saw you in the hot dining room of that pension in Deauville . . . Oh, I used to watch you in the garden. Then I felt it was not right, so . . . I can hardly hope that you might ever think of me in that way. And then because of Thomas . . . But for nearly ten years you have been in my heart and the reason I have not admitted it to myself before is that I could not bear the thought that you would laugh at me, or feel ashamed.’

  He held out his arms and Sonia clung to him, amazed at the idea that her life could yet be rescued, daunted by the prospect of happiness that he had held out to her.

  ‘But we must not—’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Next year when we go to Paris. It is our secret. But do you . . . Do you honestly love me? Can you?’

  ‘My dearest, dearest boy, I adore you. I will make your life for you. I want no other destiny, just to be with you. Don’t talk any more. Just hold me tighter. Tighter. Always.’