by JH Fletcher
6
Afterwards, every nerve and tendon was at peace. The future was as uncertain as ever, yet for the moment she did not care. For her there was neither past nor future nor prospect of despair. She had waited for this so long. There had been times since his return when she had feared they would never find each other again and her grief had wounded her. Now that was past, nor would she think of future traumas that might never arise. Now was all.
She slept, feeling even in her dreams his hands upon her, his body inside her own, the flame of fulfilment and release incandescent in her spirit and her flesh.
They still had over a week; they had for ever. Peace pulled her down.
7
It was a magic time. She said it repeatedly, not caring how trite a phrase it was. The magic of love and desire was as real as the woods that enfolded them, the days that spun their golden threads to entwine them gloriously. Lucy and Jacques … They were cupped by wholeness. The universe existed only as an echo of their own being. Their world was new and the knowledge that millions of people had felt the same did not make it less true. The world was new, they were new, love itself was new.
After a night when little time had been spent in sleep, she awoke full of energy and delight. Every particle of her being sang. Jacques was asleep. She was tempted to wake him but at the last moment took pity on him. She slipped out of bed. She stood on the balcony, looking out at the hills. The sky was flushed with predawn light. The air was cool enough to dimple her naked flesh, yet seemed delightful to her. The whole world was delightful. She watched the light brighten, changing from blue to apricot, while behind the distant hills the invisible sun turned the crests to gold.
She went back into the bedroom, where Jacques slept on. Out of respect for Carlo, who might be pottering in the garden even at this time of the morning, she put on her swimsuit, took a towel and went out and down the stairs.
The pool felt icy. She swam up and down, quietly at first, then thrashing the water, using all the force at her command to drive herself on. Many people had told her she must have oxygen tanks in her legs to hang on to her notes the way she did, but eventually she ran out of breath. She climbed out of the pool, dried herself with the towel, rubbing herself vigorously until her body glowed, and went into the kitchen to make herself some coffee.
There Jacques, stealing soundlessly on bare feet, found her.
‘Stop it!’
He did not stop. Nor did she wish him to.
‘Not here, for heaven’s sake!’
So up the stairs they went again, her body flaming beneath the cool smoothness of her skin.
Gianna could bring them coffee later.
8
Five days, three …
Jacques said: ‘We can’t just finish. What shall we do?’
Brave in her confidence in them both and the emotions that bound them, she laughed at him and his anxiety. ‘We shall go on loving each other. We shall speak to each other every day. We shall see each other whenever we can.’
Still he looked doubtful, yet her courage was too strong for doubt. She reached out her hand. She smiled wickedly. She took hold of him. She drew him close. She whispered: ‘You think for a moment I’ll be willing to forego this?’
9
Rather than lose any of the precious time that remained to them, Lucy had arranged a hire car to bring Helena from Parma. She arrived, very dignified, eyes everywhere.
‘A journalist?’ And she sniffed, making it plain her famous daughter could have done much better. Yet Jacques set out, wickedly, to charm her, and Lucy saw that her mother was soon won over. The day after Helena’s arrival she drove to the airport to meet Khieu Pen off his flight from Lyons. She had wondered how Jacques would take this new man, but he was untroubled.
‘From Cambodia, did you say? That’s great. There are some questions I’d like to ask him about Cambodia.’
It seemed that his interest exceeded the conductor’s. When, after supper, Jacques tried to question him, Khieu Pen put him off.
‘I left there when I was twenty-two years old.’
‘How often do you go back?’
‘I’ve never been back.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘What’s there?’
‘Your family.’
‘I bring them over to France once a year. All except my grandmother. She’s too old to make the journey. Besides, she isn’t interested in seeing new places. She’s reached the stage in life when she spends all her time praying.’
‘Don’t you miss it?’
‘Not really. Perhaps the temple bells. You can’t step outside the door without hearing them. And sometimes a trick of the light … I have a statuette in my house in Lyons, it’s an apsara: a temple figure of a dancing nymph. I look at it sometimes to remind myself of my origins. But my life is here. There are times when you have to choose, and I have made my choice.’
Choice, Lucy thought. That was what it always came to, the choice between one thing and another. Or perhaps a third possibility: a fusion that kept both options alive.
I shall make it so, she thought.
She said: ‘Jacques spent time in Indochina, reporting the war.’
‘Did you get to Cambodia?’
‘No.’
‘If you ever go back, you must call on my family in Phnom Penh. My sister Somaly speaks fluent French.’
10
She sat on the terrace, knowing that each second was slipping like sand between her fingers, that the present that she held close to her heart was fading. By rights she should have been sad, yet was filled only with a sense of life and joy. A tuft of grass was pushing up bravely between the bricks of the terrace. She knelt to inspect it, examining each blade, life fighting for survival amid the arid stones.
She heard a footstep on the terrace; looked up as Jacques came over with two glasses of wine. The wine had captured the colour of the sunlight; the hot afternoon had beaded the glasses with moisture.
‘I knew you would come to me.’ Although she had not believed it at the time. She took the glass, smiling.
Jacques smiled back at her, his eyes empty of shadows. ‘How did you know?’
‘I sat here alone and thought, he will come because he is the man he is.’
‘And because you are the woman you are. Do you know Montaigne?’
‘Only the name.’
He thought for a moment, took a sip of wine, then said: ‘Si tu me presses de dire pourquoi je t’aime, je résponds, parce que c’est toi, parce que c’est moi. Not word for word, but that’s the sense of it.’
She sat tasting the words, as she had earlier tasted the wine. In her head she translated them into English.
If you press me to explain why I love you, I can reply only that it is because you are you and I am I.
Perhaps that was the truth; perhaps that was all it was. No explanations or reasons. No mysteries. Just you and I.
What else could it be? she asked herself. That was all anyone needed, and it was glorious.
She looked up at him and caught him staring at her, his face sombre. She said: ‘What is it?’
‘I feel I’ve let you down, these last few days.’
‘Let me down?’
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
‘The way I’ve been. The fact that I haven’t been able to explain. I want you to know everything about me, to share it all with you. Yet somehow, when I come to the point of telling, I can’t do it. Can you understand that?’
‘I knew that something happened to you. But I don’t ask for explanations. You’ll tell me one of these days, when you’re ready. Or perhaps not; either way, it doesn’t matter.’
She threw the Montaigne quotation back at him: ‘Je t’aime parce que c’est toi, parce que c’est moi.’ You and I: that’s enough.
11
There was one day more, one final night when passion warred with the prospect of loneliness. In the morning, Jacques’ face was haggard, the li
nes in his cheeks like razor cuts. She suspected she looked no better.
Carlo put the bags in the boot. Jacques tried to joke.
‘By rights you should have a chauffeur. I’m sure a real prima donna wouldn’t drive herself.’
She laughed at him. ‘And you a Communist? The whole point of this place is to get away from being a prima donna.’
The car trailed dust all the way to the highway and there was no more laughter. For the first time she dared speak of the future.
‘Algeria again?’
‘Looks like it. At first.’
‘And then?’
‘I’m not sure. But I’m more and more convinced we haven’t heard the last song sung in Vietnam.’ Even the name had a fatal resonance. She remembered what in truth had never left her mind since the moment it had happened: the frenzied gestures upon the terrace, Jacques’ voice crying to the stars.
Why? How? What?
He had never explained. Perhaps now, in the moment of parting … But, glancing at him as she drove down the highway, she saw once again the flicker of flame in his eyes and knew that this was still not the time. It would be so hard to say goodbye. There was only one way she could handle it. She turned onto the access road while she explained to him what they were going to do. He listened, nodding, saying not a word. She dropped him outside the departure entrance. She did not speak or look at him. He got out, fetched his bag from the boot. She drove away at once, without looking back. Only when she had turned onto the main road was she safe. She glanced in the mirror but by then Jacques, the other passengers, the airport building itself, were all out of sight.
She wondered when she would see him again. She would permit no question of if. She drove back through the warm day towards her farm, her mother, her friend Khieu Pen and a future as unknowable as the furthest stars.
Why? How? What?
Jacques’ face kept her company through all the kilometres, as it did through the months and years ahead.
12
‘I heard the car. Has he gone?’
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘He never said goodbye.’
‘That was the way we wanted it. No goodbyes. No endings.’
‘No goodbyes to you, either?’
‘I dropped him at the airport and drove off without looking back. It was how we’d planned it.’
‘He’s not Italian, which is a pity. But he was good company, very polite. A good man, I would say. Good for you, too, I think.’
‘I love him.’
‘Of course. I may be getting on; I’m not blind. You’ll miss him.’
She was doing so already, most terribly.
‘Is he coming back?’
‘Not for a while.’
‘Where’s he going?’
‘To Algeria. Then, perhaps, back to the Far East.’
‘Always to war.’
‘It’s what he does. He writes about war.’
‘Then I fear he will never be out of a job. All my life … It never ends. Even in the mallee, it was war of sorts. That never ended, either.’ The hooded eyes watched her. ‘You hated me for bringing you here.’ It was not a time for lies.
‘I did.’
‘And now?’
‘Now we are both much older.’
Which was an answer of sorts.
‘And you?’ Lucia asked. ‘Have you forgiven me for Eduardo?’
Her mother’s lips, much thinner than they had been once, twitched in what might have been a wry smile. ‘Now we are both much older.’
13
Jacques had gone. Lucia got on with her life; what else was there to do? With Khieu Pen she strolled in the woods through a gold and green dappling of sunlight and shade. Inevitably, they talked of music but not only of that. Lucia made sure that Indochina also came into their conversation because to talk about this place she had never seen made her feel closer to Jacques.
Again Khieu Pen spoke of his sister. ‘When we were children we were very close. We still write to each other every month. She was very impressed when I told her I was spending a week in the house of the famous diva Lucia Visconti. I explained your mother would be here, also; I think that disappointed her a little.’
They laughed together. There was a good feeling between them; the warmth of what both knew was the burgeoning of friendship.
‘Perhaps I’ll get to your part of the world, one of these days.’
‘To Lyons? I hope so.’
‘I meant Cambodia.’
‘Ah. Well, why not? As I said to Jacques, you must be sure to look up my sister if you do.’
And Jacqui, she thought. If he’s there.
14
She returned to the endless peregrinations of the opera singer’s existence. Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Dallas, Palermo: the word globetrotter might have been coined to describe her life. Then, at last, a drum roll of triumph with Monty Cardozo’s rasping voice exulting in her ear. A season of four operas at La Scala. The citadel had finally fallen.
She heard from Jacques from time to time, brief notes scribbled on aerograms or bits of scrap paper. The war in Algeria was getting worse, each side trying to outdo the other in terror. French settlers were hacked to pieces, French soldiers ambushed, whole villages and their inhabitants destroyed by units of the Foreign Legion, who were seemingly determined to carry flame into every corner of the province.
Jacques wrote: They’ve already lost the support of the people. Now they’re losing the settlers. Yet they refuse to understand that, by bringing terror to the general population, they are losing the moral right to be here at all.
She took to reading Le Travailleur again. She read Jacques’ reports and found it strange to think of her relationship with this man who was plagued by unexplained shadows, and who wrote with such passion of the world’s wrongs.
One article in particular remained with her, about the children who were victims of war across the globe, and what he described as the scarlet sword of retribution hanging over the future.
In killing and maiming the children, in depriving them of security and love and life itself, we wrong not only them but ourselves. We destroy the future of a species for which the future is the only hope, for we have already destroyed the present. The blood of the innocents stains the earth, yet we heed it not; their cries fill our ears, yet we hear them not.
In his earlier letters, he had always spoken of coming back to her, of longing to be with her, but after a time he said no more about that. There came months of silence. She knew from his bylines that he had left Algeria. Now his reports came from Cyprus, Hungary, Africa: all the trouble spots. Finally a letter arrived, the envelope bearing Jacques’ well-remembered scrawl. It had been a month coming, having been posted in Prague and sent to her Rome apartment, then forwarded to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was appearing. When she saw the writing on the envelope, she felt a moment’s delight, then she picked it up and her excitement passed. She held it, turning it in her hands.
It was a cold March day. They’d had a foot of snow the previous week but the temperature had risen over the weekend and now rain was lashing the windows of the building.
Somehow she knew. It was impossible, yet she did. The room became still. The world … Even the noise of the rain ceased. For an instant she could not move, the letter clutched in fingers as stiff and cold as stone, while she waited for feeling and life to come back. The gears engaged; once again time began to pass.
Her thumbnail split the envelope. She took out the letter that Jacques had sent her and began to read. Halfway through, she groped her way to a chair and sat, fearful that if she did not she might fall.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
1
You told me that it was not important for you to know what had happened when I was in Indochina but it matters to me because that is the only way you will ever understand and in time, perhaps, bring yourself to forgive me. All my life I have supported the peasant, the worker. As a Communist I’ve fought
against colonialism and the excesses of the capitalist class. Always I thought I’d be happy to sacrifice my own life to the cause. I know differently, now.
I was with a platoon on its way to relieve a fortified village that the Viet Minh had attacked in the night. There were four armoured vehicles, six men in each, everyone crushed together with a mortar, rifles, a couple of stens and a bren gun. It was early in the morning. On either side of the highway the rice paddy was as green as emerald, every shoot distinct in the gathering light. I felt contemptuous of the soldiers with whom I was riding. I had it both ways. I wasn’t on their side in this colonial war, yet I knew they would protect me if the need arose. I could enjoy the luxury of moral superiority while at the same time knowing I was quite safe. We nearly made it. Then the lead vehicle hit a mine. The blast blew the soldiers to jelly. All but one. The lieutenant was unlucky; he merely had his legs smashed. I was in the second car. We came under heavy machine gun fire. We swerved off the road and overturned. When we scrambled out, the machine guns found us, there were anti-personnel mines exploding along the sides of the road and soon I could hear nothing from any of the men who had been with me. The only sounds were the lieutenant screaming and the rasp of cicadas in the paddy. At the time I did not know what had happened to the other two vehicles. Later I discovered they had escaped by retreating as fast as they could for a kilometre down the road, where they stopped and radioed for back-up.
For a while nothing happened. I expected the Viet Minh to find me any minute. I was on their side politically but I knew that wouldn’t help me. I didn’t dare call for help. Up to my shoulders in water, I waded deeper into the paddy. I found another member of the platoon. He was dead, still clutching his sten gun. I examined it. There was a lever that could be set either to single shot or automatic. It was on automatic and I left it where it was. I doubted I’d be much good with it but automatic would give me a better chance of hitting something. I saw the paddy jerk, then figures came splashing towards me. I caught a glimpse of dark hair and slant eyes. I opened fire at once. The morning was full of the clatter of the gun, the stink of cordite, the flash of cartridge cases cascading golden in the sunlight. The rush ceased, the attack was not pressed home. Later a French column advanced along the road. By this time the Viet Minh had withdrawn. I was rescued: shaking, covered in mud and leeches, but alive. Only then did I discover the identity of the enemy I had mown down so courageously.
