Dead Romantic

by Simon Brett

  The main reason was simply chronological. Madeleine had nursed and stored many of her fantasies so long that, when she examined them, even her indulgent eye could not help noticing that they were full of holes, as if some moth of the imagination had invaded their privacy and feasted on them. The greatest fantasy, of the doomed love affair with John Kaczmarek, had suffered most, and now, when she held that one up to the light, it was almost transparent and she could hardly decipher the outlines of its pattern. Though that great love was still precious, and still probably the most important event of her life, she could no longer claim to receive much support from it.

  Other fantasies also looked a little threadbare in the cold light of day. The image of Madeleine Severn the femme fatale, the mysterious and unattainable woman for whom men lost their reason and committed acts of international folly, now did not even convince its creator. The fact that she could light a spark in Bernard should be particularly valued in the context of few other fires even smouldering.

  She had also come, slowly, to acknowledge the power of sex. Probably in this process of recognition the most important factor had been the change in Laura. The estrangement of her niece had at first puzzled Madeleine. For a time she had dismissed the idea that it was a symptom of the girl’s finding her own independent identity, and certainly dismissed the idea that that identity had a sexual dimension. But gradually the notion took root and grew into a suspicion, a suspicion whose reality had been confirmed at their recent lunch.

  The knowledge that her niece was enjoying (albeit in the backs of cars and on golf-courses) an active sex-life had a complex effect on Madeleine. Partly she experienced a slight shock, as a mother might, but which she, in her accepted role as liberated aunt, knew that she must not express. Also, again as a mother might, she felt a growing gulf between herself and the younger woman and, with this, the need to assert her own sexual identity against the challenge of youth.

  A mother whose daughter drifts away from her may feel pain, but at least she has had the experience of bearing and bringing up the child. A mother-substitute whose daughter-substitute drifts away is left empty, and Madeleine was forced to recognise her own childlessness.

  This recognition ripped a large hole in the fabric of another of Madeleine’s carefully folded and perfumed fantasies. She had always seen herself, not only as an extra mother to Laura, but also, in time, as a real mother. She had seen herself nursing a tiny baby, giving herself to another, imparting herself to a new individual, shaping that individual to her own outlines, regenerating a new Madeleine. In these fantasies there was very rarely a man involved, except as a distant, shadowy presence; the child was always a girl; and always, even at the moment of birth, she had red-gold hair.

  While Madeleine knew she had Laura, she had been content to nurse this fantasy, indulge it as she lay in a warm bath, cosset it as she took a solitary walk along the sea-front. The fact that it was only a fantasy gave her no pain. But now Laura had demonstrated her independence, Madeleine’s need to make the fantasy real was strong. And, like any woman of her age, Madeleine was aware of the pressures of time. Every month she was reminded not only of her reproductive capability, but also of the time-limit which nature had set upon it. The years were slipping away, and increasingly she needed that baby.

  The coincidence of all these feelings with her meeting Bernard had made Madeleine decide to give up her virginity. But it was not a completely cold-blooded decision. She was in love with him. He stirred her in a way that no man before had done. There was a chemistry between them, a kind of chemistry which could only culminate in a physical explosion.

  But it suited both to move slowly. Though Madeleine spoke always in terms of grand passions, loves at first sight and sweepings off feet, she was in reality slow to accept change. She always needed time to adjust.

  Bernard, too, mindful of past failures, had no wish to rush headlong into another. He applied his own tests to Madeleine, assessing her as she had assessed him, and, though his tests were more emotional than social or intellectual, she passed, just as he had.

  But, in spite of her suitability, his feelings for her troubled him. Strong emotions had always troubled him, and what he now felt was the strongest that had hit him for many years. He had contained his life, as most people do, within walls of compromise, evasions and half-truths, and, though he could recognise that the way he lived was incomplete, at least he had achieved something with which he could cope.

  What he felt for Madeleine threatened that circumscribed equanimity. Part of him said: Hold back, it’s never going to work, don’t take the risk, it’ll end in tears. But another part said: This is the great chance of your life. After all the loves that have been frustrated, you are now being offered Madeleine, and the offer will not come round again. Throw caution to the winds, have a little confidence, and retrieve some happiness from what remains of your life.

  Increasingly, he knew that he had to follow the second voice.

  If Madeleine and he went slowly, if they could find somewhere private, somewhere where they could be away from the strident pressures of everyday life, everything would be all right.

  Those were Bernard Hopkins’ thoughts as, on the Friday evening, he walked round for another ‘light supper’ with Madeleine Severn.

  Paul Grigson’s Friday had been utterly miserable. In the morning he had had a call from the hospital to say that his mother was fine, but the results of some of the tests had taken longer than expected and so the doctor wanted her to stay in over the weekend. She would be phoning her son later, and he was welcome to visit her if he wished to.

  This news gave Paul only a temporary pang of anxiety. He was too preoccupied with his own troubles to have any surplus capacity for worry about anyone else.

  In fact, it wasn’t really a case of ‘troubles’ in the plural. One single trouble dominated his thoughts – the shame of his virginity. Tony Ashton’s appearance the night before had devastated him. His shame seemed now to have been made public, broadcast from the rooftops, so that there could be no one left in the world who was unaware of it. Tony would have been bound to tell Bob and Sam and, once it got to them, the news would spread like wildfire. Paul felt ashamed to leave the house, afraid of people in the street pointing at him and sniggering. When the time came for him to go to the hospital for afternoon visiting, he funked it, and was rewarded by an aggrieved, recriminating phone-call from his mother.

  He had always hoped that his recalcitrant virginity could be lost unobtrusively, to a prostitute perhaps, to some nameless drunken girl after a party, and the time-scale subsequently blurred, so that when the topic arose he could speak of his first time as an event from the distant past. But Tony Ashton had ruined that idea.

  The shame was compounded by the other fact which Paul tried to evade, but which constantly rose up to haunt him. Not only had he not made it with Sharon Wilkinson, but Tony Ashton had. There had been no ambiguity in the older boy’s statement. What pained Paul so much was not that he had been aced out, but that Tony had obviously found it so easy. All the time Paul had been going out with Sharon and being so respectful and shy, she had been panting for it. All his good manners and consideration had got Paul precisely nowhere, while Tony had just moved in for one date, no doubt stated exactly what he wanted, and got it. This knowledge made Paul feel utterly abject, as if Sharon had joined in the world’s conspiracy to laugh at him.

  He slumped around the house all day, his thoughts darkening into bitterness. The only image that gave him even a glimmer of comfort was that of Madeleine. She would understand. She knew the sort of pains he went through. He longed for her again to hold his hand as she had at their last tutorial, and to tell him that everything was going to be all right.

  As it grew dark, Paul realised that he hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, but he felt jumpy and nauseous and the idea of food appalled him. He went up to his bedroom, drawn by the books in his divan, but as he made to lift the lid, he realised that they w
ould just press home his inadequacy. Only a man who can’t do the real thing needs pornography.

  Instead, he went to one of his drawers and took out the black-handled sheath-knife. He attached it to his belt and, facing his mirror, again drew it and went through a sequence of attacking movements.

  For the first time in the day, a small feeling of power returned to him.

  ‘We won’t be the first couple to have found love and then had to keep it a secret,’ said Madeleine, her voice thrillingly low.

  ‘No,’ Bernard agreed. ‘The trouble is . . . it feels so good, but at this stage it also feels so fragile. We just need some time on our own, time to get to know each other, without the world coming rushing in with its hobnail boots.’

  ‘We need somewhere magical, somewhere private, that’s just for us.’

  ‘Where do we find that, though?’

  ‘ “The grave’s a fine and private place,” ’ Madeleine quoted wryly.

  ‘ “But none I think do there embrace,” ’ Bernard completed.

  ‘So that wouldn’t do for us.’ Madeleine reached across to take his hand. She liked his hands. They were long- fingered, supple and strong, the sort that she identified approvingly as ‘artistic’.

  He returned the squeeze. ‘There always seem to be people around, watching one, assessing, judging. It’s difficult to feel uninhibited.’

  Madeleine nodded.

  He broke loose from her with unexpected suddenness, rose and paced the room fiercely. ‘I’m sorry. I’m probably not going about this the right way. What do men normally do when they meet someone for whom they feel an unbearable attraction? I suppose they just ask, “Your place or mine?” and that’s it. I’m sorry I’m making such a meal of it.’

  This spurt of emotion took Madeleine by surprise. Till that moment, though she had never doubted the depth of Bernard’s feelings, they had always been expressed quietly, as if through sadness. His sudden energy shocked and rather excited her.

  She went across to him and laid her hands on his shoulders. His eyes, as if ashamed of having given away so much of himself, avoided hers.

  ‘I think you’re going about it in just the right way,’ Madeleine said softly. ‘I’m not the kind of woman’, she continued with some hauteur, ‘who goes for the “Your place or mine?” approach. You recognise the seriousness of what has happened to us, and I respect you for that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Still he did not look at her.

  ‘Anyway’, she went on, in a lighter voice, ‘ “Your place or mine?” doesn’t really fit our circumstances, does it? We can hardly go to your place.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘There are too many memories there.’

  ‘Not to mention your wife.’

  He nodded slowly as he repeated, ‘Not to mention my wife.’

  ‘And here we are in my place, and somehow that too . . . is not right.’

  She did not know exactly why she said this, but she felt it strongly. Her own neat little house did not seem a suitable setting for the great sacrifice of her virginity. She wanted to start the new phase of her life on neutral ground. She loved Bernard, she welcomed him for ‘light suppers’ with the curfew of his appointments at the Metropole Hotel, but she did not want him there all the time. And she had an imprecise but strong feeling that letting him share her little bed upstairs would confer some kind of territorial rights.

  He did not question what she said, apparently agreeing with the ground-rules she had drawn up. There was a long silence, during which he seemed more than once on the verge of speaking, but each time he withdrew. When words finally did come, they were thick with strain.

  ‘Madeleine, would you . . . Please say no if that’s what you mean. I won’t be offended. Madeleine, would you . . . After the hesitations, he spoke the last sentence in a burst. ‘If I were to rent somewhere, somewhere quiet, private, would you come away for a weekend with me?’

  Tension gleamed in his eyes. Madeleine could sense how much he depended on her reply. She smiled and, bountifully, said, ‘Yes, Bernard. Yes, I would.’

  Their kiss in the hall was not long, but it expressed a deep complicity. The agreement had been made. Now only the details remained to be arranged.

  Bernard walked briskly away from Madeleine’s door without a backward glance, so he did not see the figure concealed behind a tree on the other side of the road.

  Paul Grigson recognised the back view of his rival and fingered the black handle of his sheath-knife. For a moment he contemplated following Bernard, but he hadn’t the energy. After the clashing emotions of the day, he now felt exhausted. Apathy washed over him.

  He was not even very clear as to why he was there, what he had wanted to say to Madeleine, what he had hoped for in return. He had just been aware of the dominating urge to rush down to Kemp Town.

  And now he was there, the wave of compulsion had broken. He felt a little stupid and very, very tired.

  Wearily, he started to walk back home again.

  Chapter 12

  Bernard Hopkins was a meticulous planner. He knew himself well enough to realise that loose ends in any arrangements upset him, and so he always made elaborate preparations, checking and rechecking every detail until he felt confident that nothing could go wrong.

  His mother, though now dead for five years, had always been a strong influence on him and he recalled that once, when she had been booking a holiday just after his father’s death, she had consulted the small ads in that organ of gentility, the Lady, asserting that that was where ‘the nicer sort of property’ was likely to be advertised.

  On the Saturday morning therefore he went out and bought a copy of the Lady and, with that and the telephone on the table beside him, he consulted the large-scale AA road map which had belonged to his father.

  He knew enough of Madeleine to be certain that she would not wish to be involved in the arrangements. She would not want to go through the minutiae of choosing an area, finding suitable accommodation and fixing the rental. In her fastidious mind, the word ‘detail’ was almost invariably accompanied by the epithet ‘sordid’. What she would like from Bernard would be a fait accompli, to be presented suddenly with the address of the romantic venue where their love could be allowed to blossom. Bernard was determined that that was how it should be.

  The first priority was to choose an area. Common sense told him that neither of them would wish to travel far and that therefore the property should be an hour’s – or at most an hour and a halfs – drive from Brighton. There were plenty of remote parts of Sussex and Hampshire where, he felt sure, suitable cottages must exist.

  From the start he had known that the place should be a country cottage, though he could not precisely define why. Partly, it was a kind of generalised sentimentality, the influence of English Tourist Board brochures, the illusion of peace that thatch and beams invariably prompt. As well, although he did not realise it, he was being called back to his youth, times when his father had been working and he had holidayed alone with his mother, times of peace before adolescence had shaken into fragments the simple pattern of his childhood.

  Having drawn a mental radius from Brighton to establish his area of search, he turned to the classified advertisement section of the Lady, where he found a profusion of country cottages available for rental. Most of the details specified the location of the property, so he was able within a short time to compile a list of some half-dozen which sounded to be possibilities.

  He began to telephone the owners.

  There was no question of his making the booking in the name of Bernard Hopkins. Caution – even deviousness – came naturally to him, and he had caught some of Madeleine’s excitement at the prospect of a clandestine liaison. Besides, there were people who must remain ignorant of his plans; he had to cover his tracks.

  Identifying himself as Mr Edward Farrar, Bernard enquired courteously of each owner whether their advertised property might be free for rental for the weekend after next, the 2nd to 4th Novembe
r (this being the date which Madeleine and he had agreed as suitable for their great adventure).

  To those owners whose properties were free, Bernard addressed a series of detailed questions about the location, appearance and amenities of their cottages. He made notes of the answers he received, and referred frequently to his map. He closed each conversation politely, having checked methods of payment for the rental, and in two cases said that he would hope to ring again when he had sorted out his own plans.

  The two addresses which remained on his short-list were Sea Spray Cottage, near Sidlesham, just to the west of Bognor Regis, and Winter Jasmine Cottage, near Shorton, some four miles north-east of Pulborough. Both, according to their owners, were remote, the first set on a spit of land into the sea off a shingle beach, the second at the end of a three-mile drive which had once led to some now- demolished farm buildings. The owner of Sea Spray Cottage had a Bognor Regis telephone number, the owner of Winter Jasmine Cottage a London one. The first was a man, with a voice of deterrent heartiness; the second sounded to be an old lady, slightly vague, slightly flustered by the enquiry.

  This last fact put Bernard in favour of Winter Jasmine Cottage. The old lady seemed more likely to swallow the false name and other necessary duplicities. But Bernard was a methodical man. He was not going to make a hasty decision. The real test of the two properties would be what they looked like. He was determined to present Madeleine with an appropriately romantic setting.

  He got into his five-year-old brown Austin Maxi and set off on a tour of inspection.

  As he drove, Bernard’s mind was full of images of Madeleine. These images were sexual, but imprecise, like shots through a vaselined lens in a television commercial. There was Madeleine warm in bed, in a flowing white robe, a Madeleine who looked up at him in gratitude and understanding as he crossed to open the curtains and let the morning light in on the scene of their love. Through tiny leaded windows he saw, alternately, the sparkling splendour of the sea, and then sweeps of downland, brown and russet, half-stripped trees touched by autumn sun. It would all depend on which was the right cottage.