In pink pyjamas from New & Lingwood, a silk dressing gown, and a pair of red slippers, Victor felt almost sleek. He had walked out of the bathroom, through his simple whitewashed bedroom with its green mosquito netting held in place over the windows by drawing pins, and out into the kitchen, where he hovered, not yet daring to call Anne.
While Victor hesitated in the kitchen, Eleanor arrived. The Buick was too long to twist its way up Victor’s narrow drive and she’d had to park it on the edge of a small pine wood at the bottom of the hill. This land did not belong to Victor but his neighbours, the Fauberts, well known in Lacoste for their eccentric way of life. They still used a mule to plough their fields, they had no electricity, and in their large dilapidated farmhouse they lived in just one room. The rest of the house was crowded with barrels of wine, jars of olive oil, sacks of animal feed, and piles of almonds and lavender. The Fauberts had not altered anything since old Madame Faubert died, and she had never changed anything since she arrived as a young bride, half a century before, bearing a glass bowl and a clock.
Eleanor was intrigued by these people. She imagined their austere and fruitful life like a stained-glass window in a medieval church – labourers in the vineyard with grape-filled baskets on their backs. She had seen one of the Fauberts in the Crédit Agricole and he had the sullen air of a man who looks forward to strangling poultry. Nevertheless, she treasured the idea that the Fauberts were connected to the earth in some wholesome way that the rest of us had forgotten. She had certainly forgotten about being wholesomely connected with the earth herself. Perhaps you had to be a Red Indian, or something.
She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral, she was pouring with sweat and getting flashes of dread through the exhilaration. Balance was so elusive: either it was like this, too fast, or there was the heavy thing like wading through a swamp to get to the end of a sentence. When there were cicadas earlier in the summer it was good. Their singing was like blood rushing in her ears. It was one of those outside inside things.
Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle. The feeling of solemnity deserted her almost immediately and a few yards further on her legs began to shake. The muscles in her cheeks twitched back like stage curtains, and her heart tried to somersault its way out of her chest. She must remember not to take so many of those yellow pills at once. What on earth had happened to the tranquillizers? They seemed to have been drowned by the floodtide of Dexedrine. Oh, my God, there was Victor in the kitchen, dressed like an advertisement as usual. She gave him a breezy and confident wave through the window.
Victor had finally summoned the courage to call Anne, when he heard the sound of feet on the gravel outside and saw Eleanor waving at him eagerly. Jumping up and down, crossing and uncrossing her arms above her head, her lank blonde hair bobbing from side to side, she looked like a wounded marine trying to attract a helicopter.
She formed the word ‘Hello’ silently and with great exaggeration as if she were speaking to a deaf foreigner.
‘It’s open,’ Victor called.
One really has to admire her stamina, he thought, moving towards the front door.
Anne, primed to hear the cry of ‘Breakfast’, was surprised to hear ‘It’s open’ instead. She got out of bed and ran downstairs to greet Eleanor.
‘How are you? I’m not even dressed yet.’
‘I’m wide awake,’ said Eleanor.
‘Hello, darling, why don’t you make a pot of tea,’ said Victor. ‘Would you like some, Eleanor?’
‘No, thanks.’
After making the tea, Anne went up to dress, pleased that Eleanor had arrived early. Nevertheless, having seen her frenzied air and the sweat-streaked face powder, Anne did not look forward to being driven by her, and she tried to think of some way to do the driving herself.
In the kitchen, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, Eleanor rummaged about in her handbag for a lighter. She still had her dark glasses on and it was hard to make out the objects in the murky chaos of her bag. Five or six caramel-coloured plastic tubs of pills swirled around with spare packets of Player’s cigarettes, a blue leather telephone book, pencils, lipstick, a gold powder compact, a small silver hip-flask full of Fernet-Branca, and a dry-cleaning ticket from Jeeves in Pont Street. Her anxious hands dredged up every object in her bag, except the red plastic lighter she knew was in there somewhere. ‘God. I must be going mad,’ she muttered.
‘I thought I’d take Anne to Signes for lunch,’ she said brightly.
‘Signes? That’s rather out of your way, isn’t it?’
‘Not the way we’re going.’ Eleanor had not meant to sound facetious.
‘Quite,’ Victor smiled tolerantly. ‘The way you’re going it couldn’t be closer, but isn’t it rather a long route?’
‘Yes, only Nicholas’s plane doesn’t get in until three and the cork forests are so pretty.’ It was unbelievable, there was the dry-cleaning ticket again. There must be more than one. ‘And there’s that monastery to see, but I don’t suppose there’ll be time. Patrick always wants to go to the Wild West funfair when we drive that way to the airport. We could stop there too.’ Rummage, rummage, rummage, pills, pills, pills. ‘I must take him one day. Ah, there’s my lighter. How’s the book going, Victor?’
‘Oh, you know,’ said Victor archly, ‘identity is a big subject.’
‘Does Freud come into it?’
Victor had had this conversation before and if anything made him want to write his book it was the desire not to have it again. ‘I’m not dealing with the subject from a psychoanalytical point of view.’
‘Oh,’ said Eleanor, who had lit her cigarette and was prepared to be fascinated for a while, ‘I would have thought it was – what’s the word? – well, terribly psychological. I mean, if anything’s in the mind, it’s who you are.’
‘I may quote you on that,’ said Victor. ‘But remind me, Eleanor, is the woman Nicholas is bringing this time his fourth or fifth wife?’
It was no use. She felt stupid again. She always felt stupid with David and his friends, even when she knew it was they who were being stupid. ‘She’s not his wife,’ she said. ‘He’s left Georgina who was number three, but he hasn’t married this one yet. She’s called Bridget. I think we met in London, but she didn’t make a very strong impression on me.’ Anne came downstairs wearing a white cotton dress almost indistinguishable from the white cotton nightgown she had taken off. Victor reflected with satisfaction that she still looked young enough to get away with such a girlish dress. White dresses deepened the deceptive serenity which her wide face and high cheekbones and calm black eyes already gave to her appearance. She stepped lightly into the room. By contrast, Eleanor made Victor think of Lady Wishfort’s remark, ‘Why I am arrantly flayed; I look like an old peeled wall.’
‘OK,’ said Anne, ‘I guess we can leave whenever you like.
‘Will you be all right for lunch?’ she asked Victor.
‘You know what philosophers are like, we don’t notice that kind of thing. And I can always go down to the Cauquière for a rack of lamb with sauce Béarnaise.’
‘Béarnaise? With lamb?’ said Anne.
‘Of course. The dish which left the poor Due de Guermantes so famished that he had no time to chat with the dying Swann’s dubious daughter before hurrying off to dinner.’
Anne smiled at Eleanor and asked, ‘Do you get Proust for breakfast round at your house?’
‘No, but we get him for dinner fairly often,’ Eleanor replied.
After the two women had said goodbye, Victor turned towards the refrigerator. He had the whole day free to get on with his work and suddenly felt tremendously hungry.
4
‘GOD, I FEEL AWFUL,’ groaned Nicholas, switching on his bedside table lamp.
‘Poor squirrel,’ said Bridget sleepily.
‘What are we doing today? I can’t remember.’
‘Going to the South of France.’
‘Oh yes. What a nightmare. What time’s the plane?’
‘Twelve something. It arrives at three something. I think there’s an hour difference, or something.’
‘For Christ sake, stop saying “something”.’
‘Sorry.’
‘God knows why we stayed so late last night. That woman on my right was utterly appalling. I suppose somebody told her long ago that she had a pretty chin, and so she decided to get another one, and another, and another. You know, she used to be married to George Watford.’
‘To who?’ asked Bridget.
‘The one you saw in Peter’s photograph album last weekend with a face like a crème brûlée after the first blow of the spoon, all covered in little cracks.’
‘Not everyone can have a lover who’s rich and beautiful,’ said Bridget, sliding through the sheets towards him.
‘Oaw, give over, luv, give over,’ said Nicholas in what he imagined to be a Geordie accent. He rolled out of bed and, moaning, ‘Death and destruction,’ crawled histrionically across the crimson carpet towards the open door of the bathroom.
Bridget looked critically at Nicholas’s body as he clambered to his feet. He had got a lot fatter in the past year. Maybe older men were not the answer. Twenty-three years was a big difference and at twenty, Bridget had not yet caught the marriage fever that tormented the older Watson-Scott sisters as they galloped towards the thirtieth year of their scatterbrained lives. All Nicholas’s friends were such wrinklies and some of them were a real yawn. You couldn’t exactly drop acid with Nicholas. Well, you could; in fact, she had, but it wasn’t the same as with Barry. Nicholas didn’t have the right music, the right clothes, the right attitude. She felt quite bad about Barry, but a girl had to keep her options open.
The thing about Nicholas was that he really was rich and beautiful and he was a baronet, which was nice and sort of Jane Austeny. Still, it wouldn’t be long before people started saying, ‘You can tell he used to be good-looking,’ and someone else would intervene charitably with, ‘Oh, no, he still is.’ In the end she would probably marry him and she would be the fourth Lady Pratt. Then she could divorce him and get half a million pounds, or whatever, and keep Barry as her sex slave and still call herself Lady Pratt in shops. God, sometimes she was so cynical it was frightening.
She knew that Nicholas thought it was the sex that kept them together. It was certainly what had got them together at the party where they first met. Nicholas had been quite drunk and asked her if she was a ‘natural blonde’. Yawn, yawn, what a tacky question. Still, Barry was in Glastonbury and she’d been feeling a bit restless and so she gave him this heavy look and said, ‘Why don’t you find out for yourself?’ as she slipped out of the room. He thought he had found out, but what he didn’t know was that she dyed all her hair. If you do something cosmetic, you might as well do it thoroughly, that was her motto.
In the bathroom, Nicholas stuck out his tongue and admired its thickly coated surface, still tinged with blackish purple from last night’s coffee and red wine. It was all very well to make jokes about Sarah Watford’s double chins, but the truth was that unless he held his head up like a Guardsman on parade he had one himself. He couldn’t face shaving, but he dabbed on a little of Bridget’s make-up. One didn’t want to look like the old queen in Death in Venice, with rouge trickling down cholera-fevered cheeks, but without a little light powder he had what people called ‘a distinctly unhealthy pallor’. Bridget’s make-up was rather basic, like her sometimes truly appalling clothes. Whatever one said about Fiona (and one had said some thoroughly unpleasant things in one’s time) she did have the most amazing creams and masks sent over from Paris. He sometimes wondered if Bridget might not be (one had to slip into the softening nuances of the French tongue) insortable. Last weekend at Peter’s she had spent the whole of Sunday lunch giggling like a fourteen-year-old.
And then there was her background. He did not know when the house of Watson and the house of Scott had seen fit to unite their fortunes, but he could tell at a glance that the Watson-Scotts were Old Vicarage material who would kill to have their daughter’s engagement in Country Life. The father was fond of the races and when Nicholas had taken him and his keen-on-roses wife to Le Nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden, Roddy Watson-Scott had said, ‘They’re under starter’s orders,’ as the conductor mounted the podium. If the Watson-Scotts were just a little too obscure, at least everyone was agreed that Bridget was flavour of the month and he was a lucky dog to have her.
If he married again he would not choose a girl like Bridget. Apart from anything else, she was completely ignorant. She had ‘done’ Emma for A-level, but since then, as far as he could make out, she only read illustrated magazines called Oz or The Furry Freak Brothers supplied to her by a seamy character called Barry. She spent hours poring over pictures of spiralling eyeballs and exploding intestines and policemen with the faces of Doberman pinschers. His own intestines were in a state of bitter confusion and he wanted to clear Bridget out of the bedroom before they exploded.
‘Darling!’ he shouted, or rather tried to shout. The sound came out as a croak. He cleared his throat and spat in the basin.
‘You couldn’t be an angel and get my glass of orange juice from the dining room, could you? And a cup of tea?’
‘Oh, all right.’
Bridget had been lying on her stomach, playing with herself lazily. She rolled out of bed with an exaggerated sigh. God, Nicholas was boring. What was the point of having servants? He treated them better than he treated her. She slouched off to the dining room.
Nicholas sat down heavily on the teak lavatory seat. The thrill of educating Bridget socially and sexually had begun to pall when he had stopped thinking about how wonderfully good he was at it and noticed how little she was willing to learn. After this trip to France he would have to go to Asprey’s to get her a going-away present. And yet he did not feel ready for that girl from the Old Masters department of Christie’s – a simple string of pearls about her woolly blue neck – who longed to exhaust herself helping a chap to keep his estate intact; a general’s daughter used to an atmosphere of discipline. A girl, his thoughts expanded gloomily, who would enjoy the damp little hills of Shropshire’s Welsh border, something he had yet to achieve himself despite owning so very many of them and having ‘farmer’ next to his still unsuccessful candidature for Pratt’s club. The Wits never tired of saying, ‘But, Nicholas, I thought you owned the place.’ He’d made too many enemies to get himself elected.
Nicholas’s bowels exploded. He sat there sweating miserably like one of the paranoid wrecks in Bridget’s favourite cartoon strips. He could imagine Fattie Poole squealing, ‘The man’s an absolute cunt, and if they let him in here, I shall have to spend the rest of my life at the Turf.’ It had been a mistake to get David Melrose to propose him, but David had been one of his father’s best friends, and ten years ago he’d not been as misanthropic or unpopular as he was now, nor had he spent so much time in Lacoste.
* * *
The route from Clabon Mews to Heathrow was too familiar to register on Nicholas’s senses. He had moved into the soporific phase of his hangover, and felt slightly nauseous. Very tired, he slouched in the corner of the taxi. Bridget was less jaded about foreign travel. Nicholas had taken her to Greece in July and Tuscany in August, and she still liked the idea of how glamorous her life had become.
She disliked Nicholas’s English Abroad outfits, particularly the panama hat he had on today and wore tilted over his face to show that he was not in the mood to talk. Nor did she like his off-white wild-silk jacket and the yellow corduroy trousers. She was embarrassed by the shirt with very narrow dark red stripes and a stiff white rounded collar, and by his highly polished shoes. He was a complete freak about shoes. He had fifty pairs, all made for him, and literally identical, except for silly details which he treated as world-sha
tteringly important.
On the other hand, she knew that her own clothes were devastatingly sexy. What could be more sexy than a purple miniskirt and black suede cowboy jacket with tassels hanging all along the arms and across the back? Under the jacket you could see her nipples through the black T-shirt. Her black and purple cowboy boots took half an hour to get off, but they were well worth it, because everybody noticed them.
Since half the time she didn’t get the point of one’s stories at all, Nicholas wondered whether to tell Bridget about the figs. In any case, he was not sure he wanted her to get the point of the fig story. It had happened about ten years ago, just after David persuaded Eleanor to buy the house in Lacoste. They hadn’t married because of Eleanor’s mother trying to stop them, and David’s father threatening to disinherit him.
Nicholas tipped the brim of his hat. ‘Have I ever told you what happened the first time I went to Lacoste?’ To make sure the story did not fall flat, he added, ‘The place we’re going today.’
‘No,’ said Bridget dully. More stories about people she didn’t know, most of them taking place before she was born. Yawn, yawn.
‘Well, Eleanor – whom you met at Annabel’s, you probably don’t remember.’
‘The drunk one.’
‘Yes!’ Nicholas was delighted by these signs of recognition. ‘At any rate, Eleanor – who wasn’t drunk in those days, just very shy and nervous – had recently bought the house in Lacoste, and she complained to David about the terrible waste of figs that fell from the tree and rotted on the terrace. She mentioned them again the next day when the three of us were sitting outside. I saw a cold look come over David’s face. He stuck his lower lip out – always a bad sign, half brutal and half pouting – and said, “Come with me.” It felt like following the headmaster to his study. He marched us towards the fig tree with great long strides, Eleanor and I stumbling along behind. When we got there we saw figs scattered all over the stone paving. Some of them were old and squashed, others had broken open, with wasps dancing around the wound or gnawing at the sticky red and white flesh. It was a huge tree and there were a lot of figs on the ground. And, then David did this amazing thing. He told Eleanor to get on all fours and eat all the figs off the terrace.’
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 4
