Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  A mellow voice insinuated itself into his consciousness.

  ‘You, Dr. Jardine, have got it bad.’ Amy was sitting at his side. He had not noticed her come in. He smiled, slowly coming back to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, answering her in English. ‘I think I do.’

  She followed the line of his gaze. After a moment she said in a weary voice, ‘I think I can see why.’ Then her tone changed. ‘I can’t bear all this good music going to waste,’ she challenged him.

  Jacob laughed. ‘Will you do me the honour?’ He had forgotten how good it was to be with this woman whose eyes looked directly into his, how sinuously her firm body moved against him. He forced his mind into emptiness, let the music drive them. They stopped only with its last throb.

  Sylvie and the others were already back at the table. Her eyes shone with a strange agitation. There was a cigarette in her hand. ‘Who is that blonde witch you’ve been swooning over?’ she said in a low voice. Her hand as he sat down, clasped his leg under the table. She dug her nails into him. Jacob stopped her. How frail her hand seemed, despite her savagery, how cold. He held it firmly. He had not touched her for weeks and desire bounded through him.

  ‘We must go home now, or the parents will complain. Jacob will take us,’ Sylvie suddenly announced in the tone of an obedient daughter.

  They rose, bid everyone goodnight, Amy, he noticed, gave him a lingering look. He shrugged, all but imperceptibly, and followed after Sylvie and Caroline.

  At the door, Sylvie suddenly stopped. ‘Oh I forgot.’ Jacob’s eyes followed her as she went back into the room and planted a kiss full on Michel’s lips.

  In the taxi, Sylvie instructed the driver. Rue St Honoré. He hadn’t even known where she lived. She leapt in first, ordered Caroline to sit beside her. The two girls nestled against each other. Sylvie took Caroline’s hand and held it, excluding him. His jealousy leapt indiscriminately. He imagined the two girls in a narrow bed, wrapped in each others arms, whispering secrets. His face grew grim. When they left him, Sylvie offered only a casual, ‘A bientôt.’

  Jacob in bed tossed and turned, enmeshed in fitful dreams and waking fantasies, the one indistinguishable from the other. At their centre was always Sylvie, her hair tumbling wildly over his naked body. Or was it his? Was it Michel’s or, his breath was dry, a woman’s? The doorbell peeled so insistently that it finally penetrated his consciousness. He opened the door to see her standing there. He pinched himself, checking to see whether he was still dreaming.

  ‘So you are here,’ she said, her eyes fiery.

  ‘Where else might I be?’ he held her fiercely in his arms. Her face was pale, cold; her hair moist in winter drizzle.

  ‘I thought since I wouldn’t, can’t…’ she stumbled for words, ‘that you had gone. To her.’ She hissed the last words and raked her nails over his chest.

  He smiled, strangely pleased. Gently he undressed her, his passion mounting as her golden skin emerged beneath the loosed dress. In the simple white shift she wore beneath it, she looked as if she had come fresh from a morning bath in some rippling stream. He carried her to his bed. She was unusually calm, almost passive, letting him take the lead. He caressed her slowly, searchingly, waiting for her response. None came. He reached for her full breast; his lips lingered over her nipples. She gasped and pulled away from him. ‘Just hold me,’ she said softly. ‘I feel so alone.’

  With greater forbearance than he knew he possessed, he cradled her in his arms. She snuggled into him, like a child. He realised she was crying. He held her gently until the evenness of her breath told him she was asleep.

  Later that night, Jacob woke to the exquisite sensation of lips trailing over his body, of hands caressing him fervently. He was erect. Sylvie. Her kisses came in hot little moans. She was sitting astride him, her head now arched back wildly like a Walkyrie. He pulled her down on him, kissed her achingly on the lips and then without thinking turned her over and pressed, pressed into her with the passion of a man who had held back his desires too long. Shudderingly her heat enveloped him. Seconds before it was too late, Jacob withdrew with a groan. His seed spilled over her golden mound. His voice was hoarse. ‘I won’t let you be alone again, Sylvie. Never again.’ His arms entwined her.

  When he woke, she was gone. It was only then in the cool grey light of a winter dawn that Jacob realised there was no telling stain on his sheets. And it was only then that he knew that he must either stop seeing Sylvie or he must link his life fully to hers. By the end of a restless day when he had paced the length and breadth of his flat over a hundred times like some caged beast and still, mind and body, despite the dictates of common sense, cried out for her, he accepted the only course open to him.

  The next day he went out and bought her an emerald ring surrounded by small diamonds. The way in which the lush underwater green and cold glitter mingled somehow reminded him of her. With the determination of a strong man finally bent on action, he also rang Paul Ezard.

  Chapter

  Three

  __________

  ∞

  Jacob Jardine was a man who always pursued his goals to their end. If that end was sometimes bitter, he braced his shoulders, thought deeply about what he had felt and observed, and tried to salvage a small parcel of truth from the episode. He was not afraid of experience. His father had already pronounced about him, when he was five: ‘Watch our eldest, Marie. He has a hunger for truth. It will either make him a great man or a very disappointed one.’

  The episode which had provoked the comment had been Jacob’s summer pursuit. At the age of five, he was obsessed by the phenomenon of flight. The spacious grounds of the family’s summer home in the Alpes Maritime provided ample opportunity for him to pursue his interest. He would sit on the first spreading branch of an ancient beech and drop things - an apple, a small toy, a sheet of paper, a feather. Only the feather and the paper, if the wind were blowing, travelled anywhere but down. For hours he lay on the ground watching birds. Without moving, in an intensity of concentration, he would emulate in himself the sensation of their flight. One day he found a dead swallow in a copse of trees. He brought it home. Cook allowed him to spread it out on the large kitchen table. He measured the wings spread, drew them on a sheet of paper, cut them out and fixed them somehow to an old rag which he felt was as light as the bird’s frail body. It was thus that his father, who had come to take him for their afternoon walk, found him. Jacob led him to the beech tree, climbed up to his usual bough, and released his rag bird. When it flopped to the ground, the disappointment on the boy’s face was acute.

  ‘We shall have to wait for the wind,’ he said to his father.

  Gently, patiently, Robert Jardine explained. He was impressed by his small son’s observations and his ingenuity. From that time on, the tone he took with him was always that of a rational equal. Sometimes his wife would grow irritated with him: ‘You’ll drive him mad with your explanations and your reasons,’ she would say. But Robert Jardine persisted. Even when Jacob had done something which necessitated punishment, Robert Jardine would always explain in full why the punishment was needed and why it took the particular form it did. By the time Jacob was an adolescent, he had a vast repertoire of why’s and wherefore’s and an understanding of motive far beyond his years.

  Jacob might have rebelled, but since he saw his father for extended periods of time only on summer holidays, his company was always both stimulating and respected. In any case, his mother, whom he saw far more often, provided such a marked contrast to his father, that he was in no danger of suffocating from too much reason, too many words. She doted on her three children, watched over their welfare with a careful eye, and managed their country residence and Paris home with a perfectionist’s grasp of detail. She spoke little and laughed a great deal, and when the children were small, she was quick to hug or occasionally to slap. Her only interests aside from her family were her porcelain, her music, and, latterly, her religion.

  Marie
Jardine was as pretty as the eighteenth century porcelain figurines she collected. Petite, blonde, curly-haired, with a mole on her left cheek, just above the dimple she frequently showed, she was the daughter of a wealthy Parisian banker. By an accident of circumstance, her mother’s early death, she had been raised, a solitary child, by grandparents who lived in retirement in their country home in the Auvergne. It was a mining district and it was here that she had met Robert Jardine, already a campaigning doctor, who was investigating the prevalence of emphysema in miners. He was a friend of her older brother, had been with him to university. In Paris, their parents knew each other. The instant attraction Robert Jardine felt for this irresistible creature found its ready solution in a sanctioned courtship and marriage.

  Robert Jardine was the third son of a wealthy Jewish banking family. As the youngest son, there was no pressure for him to go into the family firm and his early decision to study medicine was welcomed. Tall, dark, with piercing eyes and determined step, he quickly made a mark for himself, not only as a practitioner amongst the brightest and wealthiest of Parisian families, but increasingly as a crusader for medical reform. He was particularly interested in health in the work place and he campaigned ceaselessly for safety measures and better conditions for workers, pointing out with indefatigable common sense, that the funds spent in prevention would be more than recouped by the good health of the work force.

  The family home the young Marie and Robert established just after the turn of the century in the newly elegant 16th arrondissement, bordering on the greenery of the Bois de Boulogne, was a gracious and happy place. As Marie gave birth first to Jacob and then at intervals of two years, to his brother Marcel and his sister Nicolette, the house filled with the sounds of children’s games and laughter. In the evenings, it echoed with the sterner tones of debate and argument as increasingly the Jardine home became a salon for reforming politicians eager to hear of Dr. Jardine’s researches into social medicine. The two old bankers would occasionally come to these gatherings and shake their heads wryly, commenting to one another that their fortunes were at last buying them a seat in heaven.

  In the summers, the family would remove itself to their retreat in the Alpes Maritime. The house, the extensive grounds where the children lost themselves in day-long uninterrupted adventure, was Marie’s father’s wedding gift to the young couple. The estate had belonged to a wealthy eccentric, who in the middle part of the 19th century had decided to recreate for himself an English country house in the style of John Nash. The porticoed entrance, the gleaming white columns, the gracious floor to ceiling windows and the twenty or so well-proportioned rooms sat happily in the blue Mediterranean light. It was a house which suited Marie, with her taste for the eighteenth century, perfectly. And Robert, as he beavered away the summer mornings in his book-lined library could cast his eyes over a resplendent garden of English design, complete with sunken lake and distant folly.

  It was the time he spent in this house which Jacob remembered as the happiest of his childhood. The constant presence of his father, the uncannily green grounds and the shady copses set against the brilliantly blue sky, the treasure trove of medical and physiological tomes, normally housed in his father’s Paris cabinet but here accessible to his eager young mind, all combined to make the summers perfect. Even the miseries of the First World War cast only a scant shadow here. The flowers in the garden gave way to vegetables. His father handsome in his blue uniform visited them all too briefly, since his first duty was to his hospital on the front. But the Mediterranean sun continued to shine and the children played their carefree games and adventured up hills and down valleys.

  It was also in the Alpes Maritime that Jacob’s childhood ended. He was fourteen and had almost reached his full height, a tall youth with a shock of black hair that tumbled over intense dark eyes. His bronzed skin gave an added severity to his regular features and his chin already had that firm determined set which was to characterize him in later years. He had noticed in the village that the market girls turned to look at him from beneath lowered lashes. His younger sister would giggle and tease him, and this, combined with the sensations the girls’ looks produced in him, made him flush with embarrassment. His mother now had to look up to him to proffer the customary goodnight kiss which he began adamantly to refuse. At night his dreams were filled with limbs intertwined with his and he would wake in a hot sweat, guilty of crimes he had not committed. He pored over his father’s medical text books, trying to transform their clinical two-dimensionality into a reality he could only half-imagine.

  Towards the middle of that summer, his mother introduced a new maid into the house. She was a small curly-headed young woman with a pert face and laughing dark eyes who moved with quick dancing steps through the house. When she served them at table, Jacob was intensely conscious of her presence and if she brushed against him, the blood would race to his cheeks. He could barely bring himself to mumble a thank you when she placed what was always an inordinately large portion on his plate.

  One particularly hot afternoon when he had excused himself from table saying he felt unwell and was lying in the coolness of his shuttered room, she knocked at his door and came in. ‘Votre mère m’a demandée de vous apporter ceci,’ she placed a tall glass of lemonade on his night table. Startled out of secret thoughts, Jacob murmured incoherent thanks. She was wearing a light, flowered summer frock which exposed the curve of her full breasts. Jacob could feel the shaft of his penis filling. Embarrassment gnawed at him. He was lying naked but for white shorts atop rumpled sheets and as her eyes trailed over him, he knew that she could see the shaming bulge. Jacob gripped the sheets and kept himself very still. Their eyes met. A little smile fluttered around her full red lips. She bit them. The boy was beautiful, his legs already muscled and strong from the miles of cycling, his chest sinewy, but still smooth.

  It was that bite that gave Jacob courage. As she turned on her heel with a little, ‘C’est bien, monsieur’, he called to her, ‘Wait.’ When she faced him again, speech deserted him. His hand fled to his crotch. He wanted to hide the throbbing tumescence.

  Slowly with a smile spreading over her lips, she unbuttoned her dress. Her breasts emerged pink-tipped from their confinement. ‘Is this what you want to see?’ she asked in a teasing voice. She moved towards him, bent over his rigid body, and swung her breasts over his chest so that their hard nipples brushed against his skin provocatively. She bent lower and for a split second let them rest against his taut penis. Jacob gasped. ‘Oh yes, quite the man already,’ she said and then with a laugh and a little skip she was gone. Jacob hid his hot face under the sheets. He could easily have stayed there for the rest of the day and the night. And the summer, he thought shamefacedly; but he knew that if he didn’t emerge for dinner, his mother would fuss, ask if he were ill, take his temperature.

  So he sat down at the dinner table and kept his eyes firmly fixed on his plate whenever the maid came into the room. Somehow he managed to get through the innumerable courses and make his escape, mumbling that he needed some fresh air after the heat of the day. Just outside the door of the room, the little maid was waiting for him. ‘I can meet you later, by the lake, if you like,’ she said her eyes taunting him. Jacob grabbed her wrist, almost making her drop the tray she was holding. ‘Will you?’ he raced out of the house and threw himself down on the cool grass at the edge of the pond. The night sky seemed immeasurably bright as he gazed up at it and waited.

  When she arrived, she bent over him and brushed his lips lightly with hers. Then she laughed, leapt up and whispered, ‘catch me.’ She was off, with a merry tripping step, her flower-sprigged dress fluttering round her. Its colours led him through the dark to the far side of the lake, where the heavy pines scented the night air. Here she let him catch her. The perfume of her breath, her hair, the heave of her bosom against him gave Jacob such delight that he forgot all his embarrassment. His adolescent yearnings over the pages of his father’s books had given him no glimm
er of the sensation of skin, the silk of her thighs, the crisp triangle of hair to which she teasingly guided him. And when he poured his young manhood into her and she stroked him so that he grew full again inside her and this time thrust more surely, more deeply, he felt as she lapped and surged against him that he had entered a country he never again wanted to leave.

  Every night that summer, except on Sundays when she went home to her family, Jacob and Mariette met somewhere in the spacious grounds of the house. They would make love on the cool grass or on ground springy with pale grey pine needles or, sometimes, in the secret recesses of the folly. They would plunge into the silvery water of the pond and embrace, their hair streaming, their bodies deliciously wet. For years after, the heavy scent of pine and the croaking of frogs would fill Jacob with a poignant joy.

  In the daytime, Jacob would retrace the path of their nighttime encounters. He would stare for hours at a crushed campanula or a patch of grass to see whether he could elicit from it the sensation of that secret experience. He took to reading poetry. The lines committed to memory were one of the presents he would bring to Mariette. Amongst the cry of the cicadas, his voice would take on a serious sonority. Looking at his strong young face etched against the moonlight, Mariette would run her fingers gently along the back of his head, until he turned to crush his full lips against hers.

  When Jacob’s mother announced one day near the end of the summer that that Friday they would have a celebratory drink with Mariette who was leaving them to get married, he was aghast. He waited for her with mounting impatience at the meeting place they had appointed the previous evening. When she arrived, he railed at her. Why hadn’t she told him? In his imagination, he had never thought beyond the next meeting. She fondled him. Words were not her element. Wasn’t it enough that they had had this much? She would never forget him. In the elegiac quality of their lovemaking that night, Jacob took another step towards manhood.