A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error
Page 48
Flavia had felt that nothing more would be able to touch her; now she found that it was not so. That blow reached her more swiftly, more directly than any of the others and it collapsed her last de-fences. For some time she remained in the same place, the same position.
There followed days and nights when waking or under shallow sleep her mind was a passage through which there marched, unhaltably, a succession of set words; unceasingly, the three records turned and turned: Andrée speaking in all the modulations of her moods and voice, now Mr. James, now the unseen man in England whose approval and support had been one more illusion.
The villa was the last house on the hill, once or twice Flavia heard sounds that might be of approaching wheels—Someone to come for me. Constanza has never been the mother who was suddenly by one’s side. Anna is dead. Therese! (She prayed for this.) But the sounds always stopped short below.
She was still able to conceive of one way back, the beginning of a way back, to write step by step, truthfully, of all that happened, a long letter, a difficult letter; a letter difficult to begin. Flavia put it off from day to day.
3.
One morning she heard a klaxon, two light short blasts like a morse signal. She went outside. It was the long car. It was, once more, Andrée. She looked gay, composed, crisp. There was luggage on the back seat.
Flavia wondered whether she was in fact delirious.
Andrée spoke. “I am not a ghost. I’ve come back. I’ve changed my mind.”
Flavia only stared at her.
“Cat got your tongue?”
Slowly, Flavia said, “You have changed your mind . . . it was only a nightmare?” She said it as if she were still talking only to herself.
“Don’t rush to conclusions. I’ve changed my mind about not needing you. I find I want my sorcerer’s apprentice. I’ve missed you. These last days have been dull, there isn’t much point in the game if you’ve got no one to talk about it. I realized how good an audience you are, one of my best since Michel. You and he have that in common—you’re vulnerable.
“So I came back to fetch you. Hop in, off we go.”
Flavia said, “You want me to go away with you?”
“You heard me. You’re not being very bright this morning.”
“For long?” said Flavia.
“A day? A week? Ten years? The timing will be tricky.”
Flavia said nothing. Andrée looked at her with interest but made no comment.
Flavia got a hold on herself. “If I come with you will you let them have the divorce?”
“Horse-trader. Well, I might. I’m not saying I will and I’m not saying I won’t. Let’s see how we get on, let’s see what value you’re going to give.”
Flavia said, “I don’t want to go with you.”
“There’s my bull-dog. I thought we’d lost him. Please yourself. Here’s your chance, not a good one mind, but the last. So go and make yourself presentable, comb your hair, put on some of your pressed pants. Take a bag.”
Flavia went into the house to do as she was told. Andrée followed her.
“Pack some of your nice shirts.”
Under Andrée’s eyes Flavia put a few things into a case.
Mr. James’s letter was visible on a table under a stone for paperweight. If Andrée saw it, she said nothing.
Twenty minutes later they were on the road. As they entered Toulon, Flavia said, “May we stop please so that I can get some money?”
“Money where?”
“From the bank, I’ve got a box.”
Andrée said, “Apprentices need no money of their own.”
“Please,” said Flavia, “I’d rather.”
“Thinking of your return fare?”
Flavia touched her pocket.
They did not stop at Toulon.
They took the inner road. Presently Andrée said, “Want to stop for lunch somewhere?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’ll find some biscuits and an orange in the back.”
“No, thank you.”
Andrée herself did not say much. She drove fast, though not excessively so, and with concentration.
Flavia looked at the quattrocento profile by her side and the beauty of it that was always there, and looked away again. She thought, If we had a crash that would be a solution. But the road was reasonably wide and straight and Andrée’s driving was not of that kind at all.
Andrée said, “When we were young, Michel and I, we and all our friends were coached by a man called Raoul who was a pro and an ex-rally-driver. None of us would have dreamt of taking out a real car just on our official permis de conduire, we all put ourselves through Raoul’s drill. He made us practise cornering on a skating-rink and we had to learn to change gears without using the clutch. I can do it to this day. But what Raoul was really fanatical about was safety. When you are at the wheel, he told us, it’s just as if you were handling a gun: you are responsible, you are in charge. The whole of the time. If you’re below par or worried about something you’re not fit to drive and you don’t. He terrorized us. You can’t imagine what it was like turning up at Raoul’s after one’d been out dancing all the night.”
Drawn into it without her will, captivated by the sheer pleasure of human conversation, the sweet reflection of past ordinary life, Flavia said, “You must have enjoyed it, it sounds such fun.”
Andrée answered in the same simple spirit. “Oh, it was. We worshipped Raoul, we were all car-mad at that time and his training was really wonderful, you can still know a Raoul driver anywhere. Michel was his star pupil, but then he had a natural bent for it. Some day I must tell you about Michel aged eleven and the Hispano. Do I see two and a half inches of shade?”
They stopped and parked the car off the road. As they were sharing the fruit and biscuits under a pine tree, Andrée said, “So don’t expect me to drive myself over a cliff, if you want to get rid of me you will have to do it yourself. I don’t think that you’ll get off, your motive wouldn’t be moral to the jury, It wouldn’t be the guillotine, though, on account of your age.”
“I would not try to get off, I wouldn’t put them through the horror of the trial. Besides——”
“What?”
“Can one live after one has killed someone?”
“So you have thought of it,” said Andrée.
“Yes,” said Flavia.
“A fit beginning for our little outing or lifelong ménage or whatever it’ll turn out to be.”
“I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Your telling me? Or your putting poison in my coffee cup?”
“I couldn’t do that!”
“What can you do? May I ask?”
“Oh,” Flavia said, “it’s all a fantasy.” And, driven on by her need to talk, “Suicide as well. I know that.”
“Isn’t that a mercy?”
“No. Only knowing that a door is locked.”
Andrée took her in with that open interest she so often showed.
“I could shoot you, perhaps, from quite far, without really seeing you, as they must do in wars.”
“Conditions somewhat difficult to reproduce?” “When you think of it,” Flavia said, “some people you see walking in the street must have killed that way.”
“And live on.”
Flavia said miserably, “It’s horrible, I find it horrible, even now.” “Except for the result as far as I’m concerned, you could bear that? You can hope for that?”
“If you were dead all would be as before.”
“I wonder,” Andrée said.
“Not all. But much.”
“Isn’t that a criminal wish?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then aren’t you a murderer at heart?”
“Yes, that too,” Flavia said with such despair that Andrée was moved to say, “I think we’ve gone too far, both of us. Come on, let’s move from here.”
They drove through the Forêt du Dom. There had been forest fires that
week and the air still smelt of ashes and charred wood and the heat was very great. When they came to the turning for St-Tropez, Andrée did not take it. Ten minutes later they stopped at Beauvallon. “I much prefer Ste-Maxime,” she said, “but this is the one hotel this side of Monte Carlo that’s got a suite.”
She seemed to be expected. The manager took them upstairs and saw them in. There was a spacious bedroom with a vast brass bed and several windows shuttered against the sea, a small sitting-room and off it a narrow second bedroom. It was in that room that Flavia found herself; a boy brought in her suitcase, propped it on a stand, saluted, left and shut the door.
She had her watch. The time was ten minutes past three in the afternoon.
She took her things out of the suitcase and arranged them in the cupboard and in the cabinet de toilette. She had brought no book. She sat down on the bed.
Some time later there was a knock at the door, another bell-boy bringing a bottle of Evian water on a tray.
Flavia began to pace—five steps from door to window, five steps back. When she became too dizzy she sat down on the bed again.
No sound came from Andrée’s quarters.
Except for these constraints time in that room was not very different from being alone in the villa.
In the evening there was another knock, a chambermaid this time, Madame is expecting Mademoiselle downstairs for dinner.
The dining-room was lit up but not crowded. Andrée was at a corner table in an open french window. She was wearing a white linen dress and a coral necklace. “They’re having a bad season,” she said, “the slump is beginning to tell in places like this.”
Flavia took her place opposite.
“Have an apéritif, it’ll do you good.”
“No, thank you. It won’t. Do me good.”
“Ah?”
“I found that out. Not even wine.” She could not stop herself from going on. “Perhaps it only works when . . . all is well.”
“Not the general view.”
“I know,” Flavia said solemnly. “Another resource that I haven’t got. My father used to say that it pulled him through anything.”
“Tell me,” Andrée said, “after I left, the week I was away, what did you do?”
Flavia told her.
“You didn’t go to see Therese again?”
“With their worrying and busy with Loulou’s painting and Therese finding me so bad? How could I?” She spoke without disguise; it was the candour with which one soul in hell might address another. “Therese feels I’ve let her down.”
Andrée listened; her expression was not unkindly.
Flavia went on. “I can’t talk to her, words don’t get to her.” And suddenly she told about the time when she had talked all night.
“You don’t choose your audience wisely,” Andrée said.
“Therese isn’t interested in what people tell about themselves, she believes in what she sees, she believes in deeds.”
“So you think she’s dropped you?”
“I love Therese. I shall always love her.”
“Your loyal friend.”
“Loyalty does matter a great deal to Therese.”
The waiter came hovering again. “Yes, give her some more,” Andrée said to him. “Eat up, you need it, you’re getting to look like that boy in the story-book who refused to eat his soup, made of nothing but match-sticks.”
Flavia’s eyes filled.
“Would it surprise you to hear that there isn’t much love lost between Therese and Michel? She has no use for him, he is too finicky for her taste. And Michel, well, he doesn’t like that world, Michel’s no Bohemian, he won’t stand for sloppiness in any form, don’t make a mistake about that because he occasionally goes about in mechanic’s overalls. I was told that when you first saw him you took him for a taxi-driver?”
Flavia was going to say, How do you know? and who told you? but checked herself. She had learnt how much Andrée enjoyed these minor moments of omniscience. “There is nothing . . . sloppy about Therese and Loulou, you can’t know them, you always misjudge her. You said that she is promiscuous, it isn’t like that at all. Friendship is the great thing with her—between friends everything is natural, do you see?”
“I see,” said Andrée.
“Isn’t that as it ought to be?”
“Ought,” Andrée said, “is not is.”
When they had finished their dinner they went for a stroll on the beach. After that they parted for the night in the stiff little sitting-room upstairs. “You must ring for your breakfast in the morning,” Andrée said. “Ring for anything you want.”
Inside her room Flavia found that she could sleep. She slept well. She woke early and her head felt clear. She looked about her and out of the window on to the well-kept, dreary hotel garden, and the situation seemed unreal to her. Unreal and silly. Unreal and ominous. She told herself that she could run away.
Instead she washed and dressed and got herself ready for the day. Nothing happened. At last she rang for some tea. The idea that Andrée was paying for everything bothered her. With the tea, brought by yesterday’s boy, came a copy of the Figaro and the Continental Daily Mail and a couple of uncut French novels. Flavia drank her tea, then paced or sat. Below, people were coming out carrying golf clubs or bathing things. Flavia wondered if it would be all right for her to go out. But that meant going through the sitting-room and she decided to stay put.
She had a second shower-bath in the cabinet de toilette. Every now and then she admonished herself to think hard about Andrée’s behaviour, about what to expect and what was expected of herself, but she got nowhere. She felt confused and she hated Andrée too much. Everything was distorted. The hating would not subside and she nourished it with invented circumstances causing Andrée’s deflation and defeat.
At noon she was summoned into the presence. She responded with near eagerness.
•
The whole of the time that Flavia spent at Beauvallon was divided in that way. The hours in the room, the hours of waiting, uncertainty, total disoccupation; and the actual encounters, the reality, always in a cooler key, not lessening aversion and uncertainty, yet bringing interest, relief, a curious appeasement.
As soon as I’m with her, Flavia warned herself, I eat out of her hand. But the next time it was the same.
On a drive they took on the second day, she was nevertheless able to move to an offensive. “Andrée, what am I supposed to do? What do you want of me?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“You proposed a bargain, you didn’t name the price.”
“The bill comes at the end.”
Flavia was on to that quickly, “The bill for letting them off?”
“You’re so impatient. Don’t start on that subject. Just do as you’re told—it won’t be for long now.”
“But I am not told.”
“The perfect apprentice guesses.” “I am not your apprentice, you are not teaching me your skills and secrets, You are only. . .” it came to her then, “you are only a puppet-master.”
Andrée looked at her without displeasure.
“Oh, you’ve been very considerate,” Flavia said. She thought of the polite knocks at the door and the books and the mineral water always replenished. “And you don’t blow hot and cold any more,” (again that compulsive candour), “you don’t say. . . unforgivable things, you are civil all the time, as if I were a real guest.”
“Some things need never be said twice. Yes, civil, that is the word. This round, it’s going to be that: civil.”
“But I don’t know what it’s all about—it frightens me—why do you want me here?”
Andrée said in her light voice, “Why not for companionship? a sparring partner. Can’t we leave it at that? Don’t think you’re the only one who is ever alone.”
•
That evening Andrée said, “Your mother is in Rome, I mention it in case you haven’t heard. Your grandfather is quite ill.”
And as Flavia still did not respond, “They found a telegram, signed by you, in a pigeonhole down at Almuñecar. That, too, came after they were gone. The detectives grabbed that. Text ludicrously mutilated—you ought at least to have used French, they make less of a hash of another Latin language, and I could have put it shorter—still, it might have served as evidence of . . . your good intentions.”
Flavia said, “You mean my telegram’s been put in a dossier?” “No,” said Andrée, “your telegram has been destroyed.”
•
At their next meeting she let fall a warning. “I think I told you that I made a point of not telling you a single straight lie? That was while you were in the dark as to my identity. Now that this particular card is on the table, we shall play it differently.”
“And may I lie, too?” said Flavia.
Andrée considered this, “Why not? If you have something to lie about.”
On the third day Andrée sent a message regretting that she was unable to join Mademoiselle for luncheon, would Mademoiselle proceed alone.
•
That evening Flavia asked point-blank, “Have you made up your mind—will you let Michel off?”