‘What, in front of you?’ said Bridget, round-eyed.
‘Quite. Eleanor did look rather confused and I suppose the word is betrayed. She didn’t protest, though, just got on with this rather unappetizing task. David wouldn’t let her leave a single one. She did once look up pleadingly and say, “I’ve had enough now, David,” but he put his foot on her back and said, “Eat them up. We don’t want them going to waste, do we?”’
‘Kink-ky,’ said Bridget.
Nicholas was rather pleased with the effect his story was having on Bridget. A hit, a palpable hit, he thought to himself.
‘What did you do?’ asked Bridget.
‘I watched,’ said Nicholas. ‘You don’t cross David when he’s in that sort of mood. After a while Eleanor looked a little sick and so then I did suggest we collect the rest of the figs in a basket. “You mustn’t interfere,” said David. “Eleanor can’t bear to see the figs wasted when there are starving people in the world. Can you, darling? And so she’s going to eat them all up on her own.” He grinned at me, and added, “Anyway, she’s far too picky about her food, don’t you think?”’
‘Wow!’ said Bridget. ‘And you still go and stay with these people?’
The taxi drew up outside the terminal and Nicholas was able to avoid the question. A porter in a brown uniform spotted him immediately and hurried to collect the bags. Nicholas stood transfixed for a moment, like a man under a warm shower, between the grateful cabbie and the assiduous porter, both calling him ‘Guv’ simultaneously. He always gave larger tips to people who called him ‘Guv’. He knew it, and they knew it, it was what was called a ‘civilized arrangement’.
Bridget’s concentration span was enormously improved by the story about the figs. Even when they had boarded the plane and found their seats, she could still remember what it was she’d wanted him to explain.
‘Why do you like this guy anyway? I mean, does he sort of make a habit of ritual humiliation or something?’
‘Well, I’m told, although I didn’t witness this myself, that he used to make Eleanor take lessons from a prostitute.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Bridget admiringly. She swivelled round in her seat. ‘Kink-ky.’
An air hostess brought two glasses of champagne, apologizing for the slight delay. She had blue eyes and freckles and smiled ingratiatingly at Nicholas. He preferred these vaguely pretty girls on Air France to the absurd ginger-haired stewards and frumpish nannies on English aeroplanes. He felt another wave of tiredness from the processed air, the slight pressure on his ears and eyelids, the deserts of biscuit-coloured plastic around him and the dry acid taste of the champagne.
The excitement radiating from Bridget revived him a little, and yet he had still not explained what attracted him to David. Nor was it a question he particularly wanted to look into. David was simply part of the world that counted for Nicholas. One might not like him, but he was impressive. By marrying Eleanor he had obliterated the poverty which constituted his great social weakness. Until recently the Melroses had given some of the best parties in London.
Nicholas lifted his chin from the cushion of his neck. He wanted to feed Bridget’s ingenuous appetite for the atmosphere of perversion. Her reaction to the story about the figs had opened up possibilities he would not know how to exploit, but even the possibilities were stimulating.
‘You see,’ he said to Bridget, ‘David was a younger friend of my father’s, and I’m a younger friend of his. He used to come down to see me at school and take me to Sunday lunch at the Compleat Angler.’ Nicholas could feel Bridget’s interest slipping away in the face of this sentimental portrait. ‘But what I think fascinated me was the air of doom he carried around with him. As a boy he played the piano brilliantly and then he developed rheumatism and couldn’t play,’ said Nicholas. ‘He won a scholarship to Balliol but left after a month. His father made him join the army and he left that too. He qualified as a doctor but didn’t bother to practise. As you can see, he suffers from an almost heroic restlessness.’
‘Sounds like a real drag,’ said Bridget.
The plane edged slowly towards the runway, while the cabin crew mimed the inflation of life jackets.
‘Even their son is the product of rape.’ Nicholas watched for her reaction. ‘Although you mustn’t tell anyone that. I only know because Eleanor told me one evening, when she was very drunk and weepy. She’d been refusing to go to bed with David for ages because she couldn’t bear to be touched by him, and then one evening he rugby tackled her on the stairs and wedged her head between the banisters. In law, of course, there is no such thing as marital rape, but David is a law to himself.’
The engines started to roar. ‘You’ll find in the course of your life,’ boomed Nicholas, and then, realizing that he sounded pompous, he put on his funny pompous voice, ‘as I have found in the course of mine, that such people, though perhaps destructive and cruel towards those who are closest to them, often possess a vitality that makes other people seem dull by comparison.’
‘Oh, God, gimme a break,’ said Bridget. The plane gathered speed and shuddered into the pasty English sky.
5
AS ELEANOR’S BUICK DRIFTED along the slow back roads to Signes the sky was almost clear except for a straggling cloud dissolving in front of the sun. Through the tinted border of the windscreen, Anne saw the cloud’s edges curling and melting in the heat. The car had already been caught behind an orange tractor, its trailer loaded with dusty purple grapes; the driver had waved them on magnanimously. Inside the car, the air conditioning gently refrigerated the atmosphere. Anne had tried to prise the keys from her, but Eleanor said that nobody else ever drove her car. Now the soft suspension and streams of cold air made the dangers of her driving seem more remote.
It was still only eleven o’clock and Anne was not looking forward to the long day ahead. There had been an awkward, stale silence since she’d made the mistake of asking how Patrick was. Anne felt a maternal instinct towards him, which was more than she could say for his mother. Eleanor had snapped at her, ‘Why do people think they are likely to please me by asking how Patrick is, or how David is? I don’t know how they are, only they know.’
Anne was stunned. A long time went by before Anne tried again. ‘What did you think of Vijay?’
‘Not much.’
‘Me neither. Luckily he had to leave earlier than expected.’ Anne still did not know how much to reveal about the row with Vijay. ‘He was going to stay with that old man they all worship, Jonathan somebody, who writes those awful books with the crazy titles, like Anemones and Enemies or Antics and Antiques. You know the one I mean?’
‘Oh, him, Jesus, he’s awful. He used to come to my mother’s house in Rome. He would always say things like, “The streets are pullulating with beggars,” which made me really angry when I was sixteen. But is that Vijay man rich? He kept talking as if he must be, but he didn’t look as if he ever spent any money – not on his clothes anyhow?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Anne, ‘he is so rich: he is factory-rich, bank-rich. He keeps polo ponies in Calcutta, but he doesn’t like polo and never goes to Calcutta. Now that’s what I call rich.’
Eleanor was silent for a while. It was a subject in which she felt quietly competitive. She did not want to agree too readily that neglecting polo ponies in Calcutta was what she called rich.
‘But stingy as hell,’ said Anne to cover the silence. ‘That was one of the reasons we had a row.’ She was longing to tell the truth now, but she was still unsure. ‘Every evening he rang home, which is Switzerland, to chat in Gujarati to his aged mother, and if there was no answer, he’d show up in the kitchen with a black shawl around his frail shoulders, looking like an old woman himself. Finally I had to ask him for some money for the phone calls.’
‘And did he pay you?’
‘Only after I lost my temper.’
‘Didn’t Victor help?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Victor shies away from crass things like mo
ney.’
The road had cut into cork forests, and trees with old or fresh wounds where belts of bark had been stripped from their trunks grew thickly on both sides.
‘Has Victor been doing much writing this summer?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Hardly any. And it’s not as if he does anything else when he’s at home,’ Anne replied. ‘You know, he’s been coming down here for what? Eight years? And he’s never even been over to say hello to those farmers next door.’
‘The Fauberts?’
‘Right. Not once. They live three hundred yards away in that old farmhouse, with the two cypresses out front. Victor’s garden practically belongs to them, but they’ve never exchanged a word. “We haven’t been introduced,” is his excuse,’ said Anne.
‘He’s terribly English for an Austrian, isn’t he?’ smiled Eleanor. ‘Oh look, we’re coming up to Signes. I hope I can find that funny restaurant. It’s in a square opposite one of those fountains that’s turned into a mound of wet moss with ferns growing out of it. And inside there are heads of wild boars with polished yellow tusks all over the walls. Their mouths are painted red, so it looks as if they could still charge out from behind the wall.’
‘God, how terrifying,’ said Anne, drily.
‘When the Germans left here,’ Eleanor continued, ‘at the end of the war, they shot every man in the village, except for Marcel – the one who owns the restaurant. He was away when it happened.’
Anne was silenced by Eleanor’s air of crazed empathy. Once they’d found the restaurant, she was at once relieved and a little disappointed that the dark watery square was not more redolent of sacrifice and retribution. The walls of the restaurant were made of blonde plastic moulded to look like planks of pine and there were in fact only two boars’ heads in the rather empty room, which was harshly lit by bare fluorescent tubes. After the first course of tiny thrushes full of lead shot and trussed up on pieces of greasy toast, Anne could only toy with the dark depressing stew, loaded onto a pile of overcooked noodles. The red wine was cold and raw and came in old green bottles with no label.
‘Great place, isn’t it?’ said Eleanor.
‘It’s certainly got atmosphere,’ said Anne.
‘Look, there’s Marcel,’ said Eleanor desperately.
‘Ah, Madame Melrose, je ne vous ai pas vue,’ he said, pretending to notice Eleanor for the first time. He hurried round the end of the bar with quick small steps, wiping his hands on the stained white apron. Anne noticed his drooping moustache and the extraordinary bags under his eyes.
Immediately, he offered Eleanor and Anne some cognac. Anne refused despite his claim that it would do her good, but Eleanor accepted, and then returned the offer. They drank another and chatted about the grape harvest while Anne, who could only understand a little of his midi accent, regretted even more that she was not allowed to drive.
By the time they got back to the car, the cognac and tranquillizers had come into their own and Eleanor felt her blood tumbling like ball bearings through the veins under her numbed skin. Her head was as heavy as a sack of coins and she closed her eyes slowly, slowly, completely in control.
‘Hey,’ said Anne, ‘wake up.’
‘I am awake,’ said Eleanor grumpily and then more serenely, ‘I’m awake.’ Her eyes remained closed.
‘Please let me drive.’ Anne was ready to argue the point.
‘Sure,’ said Eleanor. She opened her eyes, which suddenly seemed intensely blue against the pinkish tinge of frayed blood vessels. ‘I trust you.’
Eleanor slept for about half an hour while Anne drove up and down the twisting roads from Signes to Marseilles.
When Eleanor woke up, she was lucid again and said, ‘Goodness that stew was awfully rich, I did feel a little weighed down after lunch.’ The high from the Dexedrine was back; like the theme from The Valkyrie, it could not be kept down for long, even if it took a more muted and disguised form than before.
‘What’s Le Wild Ouest?’ said Anne. ‘I keep passing pictures of cowboys with arrows through their hats.’
‘Oh, we must go, we must go,’ said Eleanor in a childish voice. ‘It’s a funfair but the whole thing is made to look like Dodge City. I’ve never actually been in, but I’d really like to—’
‘Have we got time?’ asked Anne sceptically.
‘Oh, yes, it’s only one-thirty, look, and the airport is only forty-five minutes away. Oh, let’s. Just for half an hour. Pl-ea-se?’
Another billboard announced Le Wild Ouest at four hundred metres. Soaring above the tops of the dark pine trees were miniature imitation stagecoaches in brightly coloured plastic hanging from a stationary Ferris wheel.
‘This can’t be for real,’ said Anne. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? We have to go in.’
They walked through the giant saloon doors of Le Wild Ouest. On either side, the flags of many nations drooped on a circle of white poles.
‘Gosh, it’s exciting,’ said Eleanor. It was hard for her to decide which of the wonderful rides to take first. In the end she chose to go on the stagecoach Ferris wheel. ‘I want a yellow one,’ she said.
The wheel edged forward as each stagecoach was filled. Eventually, theirs rose above the level of the highest pines.
‘Look! There’s our car,’ squealed Eleanor.
‘Does Patrick like this place?’ asked Anne.
‘He’s never been,’ said Eleanor.
‘You’d better take him soon, or he’ll be too old. People grow out of this sort of thing, you know.’ Anne smiled.
Eleanor looked massively gloomy for a moment. The wheel started to turn, generating a little breeze. On the upward curve, Eleanor felt her stomach tighten. Instead of giving her a better view of the funfair and the surrounding woods, the motion of the wheel made her feel sick and she stared grimly at the white tips of her knuckles, longing for the ride to be over.
Anne saw that Eleanor’s mood had snapped and that she was again in the company of an older, richer, drunker woman.
They got off the ride, and walked through a street of shooting arcades. ‘Let’s get out of this fucking place,’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s time to collect Nicholas anyhow.’
‘So tell me about Nicholas,’ said Anne, trying to keep up.
‘Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.’
6
‘SO THIS ELEANOR WOMAN is a real victim, right?’ said Bridget. She had fallen asleep after smoking a joint in the loo and she wanted to compensate with a burst of belated curiosity.
‘Is every woman who chooses to live with a difficult man a victim?’
Nicholas undid his seatbelt as soon as the plane landed. They were in the second row and could easily get off ahead of the other passengers if, just for once, Bridget did not unsheathe her compact from its blue velvet pouch and admire herself in its powdery little mirror.
‘Shall we go,’ sighed Nicholas.
‘The seatbelt sign is still on.’
‘Signs are for sheep.’
‘Bahaha-a-a,’ bleated Bridget at the mirror, ‘I’m a sheep.’
This woman is intolerable, thought Nicholas.
‘Well, I’m a shepherd,’ he said out loud, ‘and don’t make me put on my wolf’s clothing.’
‘Oh, my,’ said Bridget, cowering in the corner of her seat, ‘what big teeth you have.’
‘All the better to bite your head off.’
‘I don’t think you’re my granny at all,’ she said with real disappointment.
The plane stopped its creeping progress and there was a general clicking of opening buckles and discarded seatbelts.
‘Come on,’ said Nicholas, now all businesslike. He very much disliked joining the struggling tourists as they jostled each other down the aisle.
They arrived at the open door of the plane, pale and overdressed, and started to clank their way down a flight of metal steps, caught between the air crew who pretended to be sorry at their departure and the ground crew who pretended to be pleased by their arrival. As she went dow
n the steps, Bridget felt slightly nauseous from the heat and the smell of spent fuel.
Nicholas looked across the tarmac at the long queue of Arabs slowly climbing on board an Air France plane. He thought of the Algerian crisis in ’62 and the threat of betrayed colonists parachuting into Paris. The thought petered out as he imagined how far back he would have to begin in order to explain it to Bridget. She probably thought that Algeria was an Italian dress designer. He felt a familiar longing for a well-informed woman in her early thirties who had read history at Oxford; the fact that he had divorced two of them already made little difference to his immediate enthusiasm. Their flesh might hang more loosely on the bone, but the memory of intelligent conversation tormented him like the smell of succulent cooking wafting into a forgotten prison cell. Why was the centre of his desire always in a place he had just deserted? He knew that the memory of Bridget’s flesh would betray him with the same easy poignancy if he were now climbing on to the bus with a woman whose conversation he could bear. Theoretically, of course, there were women – he had even had affairs with them – who combined the qualities which he threw into unnecessary competition, but he knew that something inside him would always scatter his appreciation and divide his loyalties.
The doors folded shut and the bus jerked into motion. Bridget sat opposite Nicholas. Under her absurd skirt, her legs were slim and bare and golden. He detached them pornographically from the rest of her body, and found he was still excited by the idea of their availability. He crossed his legs and loosened his entangled boxer shorts through the stiff ridges of his corduroy trousers.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 5
