by Alba Arikha
Mrs Dobbs seemed surprised. “Really? I haven’t read it, so I couldn’t say.” She poured herself another cup of tea. There was a large ring on her finger. Its stone sparkled. I wondered if her husband had given it to her. I also wondered whether she deemed me too young to read The Lover. If she did, she was wrong. There was a lot about me she didn’t know. Like the fact that I had a boyfriend, for example.
“It’s really good,” I repeated. “I like François Mauriac too. Thérèse Desqueyroux. Is that how you pronounce it?”
“Indeed it is,” she replied. “You have a good accent.”
Did she mean it? It was hard to tell. But it didn’t matter, because I was very much enjoying my time in her company. We went on talking about books: she was clearly well read. “What about English literature?” she asked me.
“I love the Victorians. Especially George Eliot,” I said. “I think I know her better than she knows herself,” I added forcefully.
Flora Dobbs looked at me again, and this time her whole face lit up.
“That’s very interesting,” she said. “Very interesting indeed. Would you care to tell me what makes you say that?”
But I didn’t have time to answer, because then there was a knock on the door and she stood up. “Follow me,” she said. “That will be your father.”
She closed the small door between the room and the hallway and we walked towards the door. I gathered my coat, my bag, my shoes, and put them back on; they were still damp.
She lifted that same latch and opened the door. There was my bearded father, wearing his beige raincoat. He looked even taller than usual, standing in the rain, holding an umbrella.
“I’m here to fetch my daughter,” he said to Flora Dobbs. “And I must thank you for looking after her.” he said. I could see that he was trying to crane his neck and catch a glimpse of her sitting room.
But there was nothing for him to see.
“It was a pleasure,” Flora answered, shaking my hand and ignoring my father.
Then she closed the door firmly behind her. The freezing rain had turned to snow.
*
I never got to tell Flora Dobbs why it was I felt such a kinship with George Eliot, or many other writers we hadn’t yet discussed.
I tried to, but she never seemed to be home. Two weeks later, I knocked on her door again. I was carrying a lemon cake my mother had baked that morning. This time I knew she was there, because I had seen her enter her house a few minutes before.
I waited a long time before she came to answer her door. And when she did, she seemed odd, almost as if she didn’t remember who I was. “Yes, hello,” she said, her face upturned towards me. “What can I do for you?”
I was so surprised I fumbled for words and nearly dropped the cake. “I… I just wanted to thank you for the other day. I really enjoyed talking to you. My parents wanted to thank you too, and my mum made this lemon cake.”
I handed it to her with shaky hands, and she hesitated before accepting it. “That’s very kind, thank you,” she said.
Her voice sounded darker than the other day. Sterner. What had happened?
“Is everything OK?” I asked. I couldn’t keep it back. I had to know. Had I done something wrong?
Flora Dobbs rested her eyes briefly on mine. “I’m sorry. Something has happened, I’m afraid. We will not be able to see each other for a little while. Perhaps in the future, but not for the moment.”
“But why?” I exclaimed. “Have I done something?” Strangely, I felt my throat constrict, as if I were about to cry.
“It’s nothing to do with you at all,” she reassured me quickly, her gaze much softer. “It’s all to do with me. I’m sorry. I wish you much luck with all your studies. Goodbye.”
Then she closed the door gently behind her.
What had happened? It was incomprehensible. Nothing to do with me, all to do with her, she had said.
But what could that be? Was she ill? Had she received some bad news?
I was upset. Hurt. We had established a connection that day, in her sitting room. There was something special about Flora Dobbs, and I could tell that she felt the same about me. So why stop it there?
It had to be something serious. No one behaves like that without a good reason. Unless this was a French way of doing things? No, it wasn’t. Of course not. It was a Flora Dobbs way of doing things. I had to accept that I would never see her again. She had mentioned “perhaps in the future”, but I could tell that she didn’t mean it. She was only saying it to be polite, to make it seem less incomprehensible than it was. And after all, I barely knew her. I had a whole lifetime to meet other men and women with whom I could discuss George Eliot and other matters.
She was hardly the only one.
But no matter how much I tried, every time I passed by her house I felt a strange flutter in my stomach, like a longing, or a yearning to see her again. There was something about her that had resonated with me. But I couldn’t put it into words.
*
For a while after my visit to Flora Dobbs, I got into the habit of standing at my bedroom window, searching for hers. I had located her bathroom, to the left of the building opposite. I could see lights going on and off, shadows moving behind a curtain.
And then, one morning, I saw a figure standing there.
It was Flora Dobbs. She was looking in my direction – a short figure wearing a dark blouse. I thought I could even see her eyes flashing at me. I looked back at her, transfixed. I even waved, a short friendly wave.
She didn’t wave back, but drew the curtain abruptly, as if she were frightened.
Not long after I had begun at St Paul’s, she moved out of her house.
It happened on a weekend, when we were in the country.
No one saw her leave, and no one said goodbye. No one knew where she moved to or what happened to her. Her timing was impeccable.
My father took to scanning the obituary pages, in case she had died. “Where the hell has she gone? What made her leave now? It’s such a strange thing to do,” he kept repeating.
After I left Flora’s house that evening, my father and godfather Walter, buoyed by a steady stream of single-malt whisky, had besieged me with questions. “What does her house look like? What did you talk about? What does she do all day? Was she a nice person? Do you think she’s a spy? I think she works for MI5.” (That was Walter.)
But in the end, the conjectures we came up with were insubstantial. She was gone, and we would never find out the truth about her.
The house remained empty for a while, until a bearded television producer and his Spanish wife showed up on our street one day.
I was on my way back from school when I saw them. The woman had short dark hair and was very tanned. The man was dressed expensively and looked serious.
Soon after their visit, there was a “sold” sign outside Flora Dobbs’s house.
The couple dug a basement and added a loft. They renovated the kitchen and knocked down walls. The building works lasted a year, and the noise became unbearable. We decided to go on holiday earlier than usual. My parents had rented a house in the foothills of the Pyrenees. At the last minute Ben had declined to join us, choosing to stay with his friend James instead.
My parents, to their credit, didn’t challenge his decision, and the holiday was all the more peaceful for it.
When we returned to London, trucks were still parked outside our house, and Polish builders smoked and spoke loudly as they hammered and drilled.
By the time the producer and his wife moved in, the whole street was cursing them.
And slowly, Flora Dobbs’s name sank into oblivion.
2
Walter was a tall man with an angular face, bushy eyebrows and hair the colour of straw. His eyes had a continuously mischievous sparkle, as if he were about to do something naughty. As far as Ben and
I were concerned, Walter was like family. A dapper dresser with a preference for red corduroy trousers and pink shirts, he smoked a pipe that smelled of dead leaves. I can still see the small red tin of tobacco – Dunhill London Mixture written on its top in yellow letters – and the way his long and feminine fingers removed the tobacco and placed it in the pipe bowl.
He spoke a cut-glass English and liked to recite dead poets only. “Not interested in the living ones,” he would say. He would declaim Keats and Shelley in slightly bombastic fashion, a habit which seemed to have been put on hold now that he had met Lucie, whose interest in poetry was minimal, as he politely described it.
Since he was an inveterate bachelor, the notion that Walter would ever settle down with anyone seemed unfathomable. But then Lucie Canton appeared, an average French actress from an insignificant French town, as my father remarked – then later tried to retract. Walter declared himself smitten, and the next thing we knew she was wearing a large diamond on her nail-bitten finger.
The wedding was held in our house on the Dorset coast in April 1982, the day after my twelfth birthday. I was the bridesmaid. Lucie wore a pale-yellow dress with matching flowers in her braided hair. She seemed elated and drifted through the room on tiptoe, like a ballet dancer. Her extended French family all came, and a man with an accordion crooned French tunes they all knew by heart and sang heartily, including the bride.
I had never seen Lucie so visibly moved, singing the songs and raising her fist in the air with patriotic ardour.
Ben and I played with some of her French nephews. None of us spoke the other’s language, but we managed to communicate nevertheless. One of them, fifteen-year-old Julien, asked me to dance with him “le rock and roll”. He had a handsome face, though there were red acne spots on his forehead. He wore pointed boots and had very large feet. It was the first time I had danced with a boy, or at least attempted to dance with one. I could smell aftershave on him as he twirled me around and tried to teach me a sequence of steps, which I struggled to follow. In the end he left me to my own devices, and I felt humiliated.
Later on, as I was eating a slice of cake, I caught him staring and he blew me a kiss, and my cheeks burned red-hot.
After the wedding, Walter whisked Lucie off to Italy for their honeymoon. Not long after they got back, we began to see her behind the till at Pebbles, Walter’s antique shop on Bridport’s South Street. “Lucie, my beautiful wife, is now my new manager!” Walter announced enthusiastically to a lukewarm audience.
He had opened his shop in the early Seventies, and it was admired by locals and Londoners alike – not to mention my mother, his biggest fan. She had furnished our house mainly thanks to Walter’s keen eye, and she wasn’t the only one. People came to Pebbles for Walter’s finds, but also for his charm, his humour and his knowledge.
Lucie’s arrival changed the dynamic. It was going to take some getting used to: she was shy, and she struggled with the language. She seemed ill at ease in England, and complained about the weather and the food. She often prefaced her sentences with “in my country”, which irritated my father no end. But she knew about furniture, especially nineteenth-century French, and more than once my mother declared herself surprised by the extent of Lucie’s knowledge.
She and my father stressed how important it was to make Lucie feel welcome, though Ben found it difficult. I tried to be sympathetic, and made a point of asking Lucie questions when I saw her. She would answer in a thin voice, stumbling on her words. I felt sorry for her, though Ben didn’t. “She hates us,” he said. “And I hate her back.”
My mother admonished Ben sternly: “Stop saying such silly things. What’s to hate? She’s lovely. Nobody hates anyone here, and she finds you and Hannah very sweet.”
“Does she?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes, she does,” my mother answered, not entirely convincingly. “Lucy’s main problem is that her English isn’t very good. It’s difficult to move to a new country, and she’s struggling. I would like you to promise me to be nice to her. She makes Walter happy, and that’s the most important thing.”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “I liked Walter better before her,” he said. “He used to play with us.”
“Walter is the same as he always was,” said my mother. “And he loves you and your sister – that will never change. Just promise to do as I say.”
“I promise,” Ben said, sounding serious.
“Good.”
Lucie had olive skin and brown hair cut in a bob, and though her face was pretty, there was something sad about her which I overheard my mother attribute to the fact that she wasn’t able to have children. When I pressed my mother for further details (“How does one know if someone can’t have children?”), she feigned ignorance, and I understood that the comment was not destined for younger ears. We didn’t know much about Lucie’s film career, though my mother said she had been “on the road to stardom” when she met Walter. There was a large poster of her hanging at Pebbles. L’Arrivée du mendiant, the film was called – The Vagrant’s Arrival. It was a swashbuckler set during the French Revolution. Lucie, dressed in a close-bodied purple gown, her hair piled high in enormous curls, was gazing lovingly into her co-star’s eyes, a handsome French actor – who, I was told, “made women swoon”. From the way he was dressed, in a dark coat and matching waistcoat and breeches, I deduced that the waistcoat-wearer wasn’t the vagrant.
Soon after the film was released, Lucie met Walter, and now that she lived in England she wasn’t working as much. “It will do her good to swap the boudin noir for a proper G&T,” my father quipped.
“That’s not funny,” my mother had said. “No one wants to give up a career.”
“What’s noir whatever?” Ben asked.
“Something disgusting the French find delicious,” my father answered. “It’s a blood sausage.”
“Yuck,” I said.
“Barf me out!” Ben shouted.
“No need to shout, and no one’s asking Lucy to give her career up,” my father continued.
“Walter should give her up,” said Ben. “He was more fun before. Now he’s become boring, like all married people.”
“That’s enough, Ben,” my mother said sternly.
Of all the adults we knew, Lucie was the only one Ben taunted. Perhaps he felt her vulnerability. Or perhaps it was his own way of venting his anger towards Walter. Whatever it was, there was something deliberately cruel about the way he shunned her, or left the room when she attempted to speak to him, staring at her with mocking eyes. When my parents were around, he was on his guard. When they weren’t, he took full advantage. A few times, I was able to nip it in the bud, and apologized to Lucie for my brother’s behaviour, but she seemed to take it in her stride. “It is not important,” she’d say, smiling wanly. “C’est pas grave.”
I couldn’t understand why she didn’t retaliate or put him in his place. After all, Ben was only eight years old. Instead, she said nothing, though I could imagine that, had he been French, she would have reprimanded him.
I was never sure whether Lucie told Walter about my brother. Perhaps she had, but Walter didn’t believe her. Or he might have told her that it would sort itself out. And sometimes, despite it all, it was funny. Ben imitated the way Lucie spoke and wiggled his body like she did, smoking an invisible cigarette and pouting his lips – Ben was very good at imitating people, and was often asked to perform in front of my parents’ friends.
Once he went behind Lucie’s back and made horrible faces while she was drinking tea. “Stop it!” I mouthed, as he stuck his fingers up his nostrils.
But it was too late.
Lucie turned around quickly and spilled her tea, burning her leg in the process. She got up quickly and screamed, “Petit con!” as Ben fled to his room, followed by my irate father.
Another time, Ben found a spider in the garden and stuck it i
n Lucie’s handbag when she wasn’t looking. He had heard her mention that she was arachnophobic. When she opened her bag, a large black spider crawled out and she screamed again.
Ben feigned utter surprise, and even offered to fetch her a glass of water.
“Did you do this?” she asked him for the first time, her green eyes burning bright.
They could have been welling with tears, though I wasn’t sure.
“No, of course not!” he cried vehemently.
“Ben would never do such a thing,” said Walter, grabbing Lucie’s hand.
“Yes, he would,” said my father.
He dragged Ben away, and we all heard him shout at him.
Ben cried, but didn’t confess. Only I knew the truth. And when Ben came out of his room a few hours later, his eyes red from crying, I made him promise that he would never do anything of the sort again. “You’re being cruel to her. Imagine if anyone did the same thing to you. How would you feel?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t care,” he said.
“That’s a lie, and you know it.”
“It’s just for fun,” he mumbled.
“Ben,” I said firmly. “It’s not fun. And Walter will never leave Lucie, because Mum says that he loves her lots. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
“Love is boring, and I understand everything.”
My brother had blue eyes, blond hair and an angelic face. I instead had inherited my father’s Mediterranean looks: black curly hair, dark eyes, pale skin. I looked nothing like my brother, and I envied him. A beautiful boy, people often commented.
But to me, he was a monster. A miniature, albeit irresistible monster.
“Be careful,” I warned him. “You’re going to get into trouble. And then you’ll be grounded, and you’ll cry and I won’t care.”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “I won’t care either,” he said.
*
My parents liked to tell the story of how they met, in 1968. My father had contacted my mother, Anita, because she had translated a Norwegian playwright, little-known outside her country, whose play he wanted to direct.
