The hairs on his legs stood on end, the sand clinging to his damp skin. He brushed himself down. She watched every move he made, quite unselfconsciously.
‘A great many mistakes are made in the name of loneliness,’ he commented.
She raised her gull wing eyebrows above the rim of her shades.
‘William Holden says it on the beach. In Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.’
‘What does he mean?’
‘Recklessness in matters of the heart is dangerous, I suppose.’ He picked up his water bottle and swigged deeply, emptying it in two large gulps.
She put down her book and rummaged in her bag for another bottle. ‘There’s more water if you want it.’
He glanced at the book’s front cover: it was a biography of the photographer Lee Miller. He could see from the bookmark sticking out that she hadn’t got very far.
‘Fascinating woman,’ he said, screwing the lid back on the empty bottle, ‘unusual love life … I went to an exhibition of her photography once at the V & A.’
Anne Marie waved to her son who was now scrabbling amongst rocks near a jetty. ‘You and I have similar interests,’ she said. ‘I admire this woman, so do you: ballsy, gutsy, an eye for the surreal.’
He picked up the book, flicking through the photography plates until he found the picture of Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bath. He wondered if Anne Marie was going to continue to flirt with him. He wouldn’t have minded a duelling of wits, a parrying of suggestive comments. But it wasn’t very professional.
‘Right,’ he said, settling himself more comfortably on the blanket. ‘Tell me the rest. What do you want from me?’
She curled her toes in the sand. ‘We are down to business, are we?’
‘I think we’d better.’
She assessed his mood, gave a little sigh. ‘How does it work? I don’t understand. You’re what, susceptible? Is that what you say?’
He stretched out. ‘I need to connect. Then again, too much sensitivity or emotion will conflict with the process; it won’t be a clear image, or easy to interpret.’
‘Who do you think you are, Jeanne d’Arc? It sounds very peculiar.’
‘Oh, it is,’ he said, ‘extremely. It might work, it might not. You’ll have to give it a go. It does rather depend.’
‘But it will allow you to see into the past? Make sense of things?’
‘It might fill in some gaps. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘Maybe you look for complexities where there are none,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘It’s a moot point.’
‘At this precise moment,’ she said, stretching out her long legs, ‘I am willing to try. But not today. Not in front of Roman.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘No, tomorrow we do Les Baux. We’ll hire mountain bikes. A day at the beach followed by a day in the mountains. What do you say?’
Her enthusiasm was infectious. He pondered the offer. It was tempting. ‘And then what?’
‘After that,’ she said. ‘We’ll see.’
Chapter Six
Charlie hadn’t ridden a bike since university. After one too many early morning punctures he’d banished his unreliable rust machine to the back of the shed, never to gaze on its hateful form again. But the high-tech mountain bike he was currently pedalling was an altogether different proposition.
Stamina might be an issue. The roads were easy to cycle along at first, the surfaces relatively smooth, but as the slope increased, the muscles in his legs began to sit up and take notice. Heading west out of town towards Les Alpilles – the ‘little Alps’ – with the breeze whistling past his face and his legs pounding the pedals, the steady pace gradually became more serious in intent.
Anne Marie was already some way ahead. ‘Charlie! Ça va?’
‘Oui, ça va!’
He put his head down and pedalled furiously. The road’s incline grew; he could see the route ahead snaking away into the mountains, circling the distinctive white rocks of the limestone massif. His panting breaths were conspicuously audible.
After half an hour’s steady slog through the vineyards and olive groves, they paused for a rest and a drink. He skidded to a halt, scattering rocks and dirt, propped the bike against his waist and gulped greedily from a water bottle. Away behind them he could see St Rémy, partially obscured now by trees and the stunted-looking foliage. Ahead of them the mountains loomed, and alongside the road flowers grew amongst the rocks – blue trumpet gentian, and yellow Alpine poppies.
As they set off on the next leg the traffic increased and the road became harder to negotiate. Steeper and steeper was the incline, more and more laboured the task, and yet the scenery became more spectacular round every twist and turn. The short bursts of speed cycling were interspersed with slow lagging dismounts where they were forced to get off and push, but then they were up again cycling the zig-zag route through the mountain crags. He marvelled at the way the landscape had changed so dramatically within a matter of a few kilometres, and how impossibly different it was from the flat swampland of the Camargue, which was yet visible in the distance.
Perched in the hollow of some jutting rocks, overlooking the plains below, they stopped to eat lunch in the shade.
‘Too hot?’ said Anne Marie. ‘Want to go back down?’
‘Jelly legs,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Another kilometre or so to go. You can see the escarpment from here. Ice creams when we get there.’
The ruined tenth century citadel stood high on the escarpment above the “village perché”, the quaint, higgledy piggledy, red-roofed buildings clustering together on the hill as if for warmth and security. Les Baux, Anne Marie reminded him as they locked their bikes in the car park, was the second most popular tourist attraction in France. He could see why. The cobbled streets were filled with herboristeries and shops crammed with terracotta figures, lavender bags, scented soap and olive wood spoons, but away from the tourist traps the narrow winding lanes and hidden alcoves hinted at secrets and intrigues from a time long past.
‘The Seigneurs at Les Baux,’ he read from the guidebook, ‘maintained an impregnable grip on the area over several centuries, whilst waging war on the rest of Provence. “A race of eaglets, vassals never”, was their motto, several of their number meeting violent ends. The troubadours at the court meanwhile entertained the noble ladies with their poetry and songs.’
‘Romantique, non?’ she said.
The citadel itself was a skeletal mass of tumbledown walls, fragments of buildings, and tantalising remnants of carved masonry – a dead fortress with its entrails on display in the blazing sun, to be picked at and discarded by the tourist insects swarming over it.
‘We won’t stay up here too long,’ said Anne Marie. ‘Just long enough to admire the view.’
They studied the reproduction medieval siege engines, the holes left in the walls by Cardinal Richelieu’s explosives, even the apertures left by the pigonniers.
Climbing the many steps up onto the castle ramparts, or what was left of them, they found themselves teetering over the asymmetrical whimsy of the village’s corrugated red and brown roof tiles where they nestled between the white limestone walls.
‘It’s dangerous up here when the Mistral strikes,’ she remarked.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll hold on tight.’
The views were truly spectacular – the plains, the vineyards, the mountains – but Anne Marie wasn’t looking at any of it: she was looking at him.
He leaned across the railings, his elbows propped apart, his eyes slightly squinting. ‘I know. Casual insouciance is a style I carry off particularly well.’
‘With that profile,’ said Anne Marie, ‘you should have been an actor. Dark hair, blue grey eyes, quirkily handsome features: you’re a casting agent’s dream.’
He fluffed his hair away from the back of his neck, and stroked the hint of beard on his chin. His brother always told him he was appallingly badly dressed, but
his mother had often praised his slim build and good looks. Obviously she’d been biased.
But there was something else happening. Somewhere nearby he could feel the presence of a woman, listening to her paramour, her knight, high on the top of the donjon, as he sang songs of courtly love: a combustion of emotion, a raging mass of desire – and later in the inky blue moonlight under a pattern of gold stars, they meet, alone and in secret, to plight their troth …
How quickly and quietly it had stealthily taken him over. It was this place, the colour, the light, all playing tricks on him. He’d start roaming around in cornfields soon, deranged and out of his wits, like van Gogh.
‘It’s an unusual line of work,’ Anne Marie said. ‘Psychic historian. Not your run of the mill, small business.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘Your visions are full of drama, I suppose?’
‘That’s right. Everything is in motion, in flux, the action filling the frame, as it were.’
‘Yes, but does it make any sense?’
‘Eventually, it does. It all comes together, in the end.’
‘Like a jigsaw?’
‘Clichéd analogy, but I don’t know a better way of describing it.’
Her eyes roved about his face, as if searching for somewhere to rest while she formulated her next utterance. Her eyebrows contracted very slightly. ‘The other night,’ she said, ‘I left one out.’
‘Left one what out?’
‘Relationship. There’s one more. The dancer.’
‘Actor, director, writer, dancer,’ he said. ‘Who’s next – the producer?’
She didn’t reply. Didn’t even smile. Touchy subject.
‘Sorry, not funny, obviously … Do you want to tell me about him?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you.’
He hooked his arm round the rail and waited for her to begin. She pushed her sunglasses over her hair. ‘Drugs, alcohol, affairs,’ she warned. ‘It’s got the lot …’
‘Go on,’ he said, not sure he should encourage his own prurient curiosity.
‘Love of my life,’ she added quietly. ‘Broke my heart … and then he broke his own.’
He might have dismissed melodramatic hyperbole from anyone else, but he could tell by the tone of Anne Marie’s voice that she was deadly serious, and utterly sincere.
‘I was introduced to him at a party by a mutual friend. I forget now what play I was in. Glengarry Glen Ross I think it was … or was that earlier in the year …? Doesn’t really matter. He’d already been cast in several West End shows. You might even have seen one of them: Aspects of Love, Mamma Mia, Cats—’
‘I always thought Cats was a bit odd,’ he interrupted. ‘No plot. Just songs.’
She gave an impatient shrug.
‘Sorry. Is this before or after Francois?’
‘Before,’ she said. ‘Definitely before. He was working steadily, had a brilliant reputation in the musical theatre world, but hadn’t quite had a major breakthrough. He wasn’t yet a big name.’
‘Which was?’
‘Thomas Harrington.’ She waited while he trawled his memory banks.
‘No … I don’t think I’m familiar …’
‘Tragic Tom?’ she prompted. ‘That’s what the tabloids called him. I was very taken with him, right from the word go. As far as I was concerned something had come into my life that needed paying attention to. So much so that I began to think that he might be the one. But I was just beginning to get some attention myself. Professional attention, I mean. I got kind of distracted; I was getting good write-ups in the national press – nothing too flashy – but it was getting me noticed. I was happy, I had a beautiful boyfriend, I had work; everything was going fine. Except this beautiful, vivacious boy was getting mixed up in all kinds of stuff behind my back, and by the time I realised how serious it was, he was too far in. And of course, he didn’t think he needed any help. Or rather he wanted help,’ she backtracked, ‘but I wasn’t able to give him the kind of help he needed. He drank too much,’ she went on, ‘he took drugs, and the more I tried to help, the worse it got. He’d had a tiny bit of press in his own right before we got together, but when I started to get rave notices, and the spotlight was on me, everything changed. All of a sudden the papers turned their attention to him: “Anne Marie’s troubled boyfriend,” “struggling with alcohol”, “coping with depression”, “battling addiction” – you know how it works. A tabloid journo’s dream.’ She broke off. ‘I’m surprised you never read about it.’
‘I told you I don’t take much notice of those celebrity things.’
‘That’s very laudable of you …’
‘So, what happened?’ he asked.
‘He went for a bath,’ she said. ‘I could hear the hair dryer going and then it went quiet. I thought he must have gone for a lie down.’ She stopped, absently brushing imaginary dust from her arms. She shifted position, faced him more squarely. ‘I found him on the bed.’
‘Unconscious?’
‘Dead. Heart failure. At twenty-seven.’
‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’
‘Hey,’ she smiled thinly. ‘Why would you? A brief flurry of interest, and then it becomes old news … Anyway, I moved on, met someone else. Got married to Francois. It wasn’t like it was a rebound, or anything, I mean it happened over a year later …’ She faltered. ‘I came out here thinking it would be peaceful, away from all the mania – but Francois was getting jobs and I wasn’t. Not that I cared. I didn’t care if I never acted again. I was just happy to be out of the limelight.’
Not true obviously. ‘You didn’t regret giving up the stage?’
She blew through her lips, puffing out her cheeks. She grabbed hold of the railing and leaned backwards. ‘The only things I miss about England are the teabags.’
Another lie, but now he understood why she’d been so cagey with him about her identity.
‘When you Google me,’ she said, ‘the first thing that comes up is the punch in the face.’
‘What punch in the—?’
‘The one time that I react – the one time it gets to me and I hit out, all hell breaks loose. Right in front of the press in the lobby of the Royal Court Theatre! But he asked for it! Spewing forth meaningless, ill-informed babble. Tripe! No other word for it. Except maybe arse and wank.’
He genuinely didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘You’ll have to help me out …’
‘That bastard critic, Angus Malone! I got slaughtered by him. Not once, not twice, but all the time – the pretentious, self-satisfied, pompous idiot!’
He started to laugh. ‘You assaulted a critic?’
‘What?’ She was annoyed. ‘You think he should have been allowed to get away with it?’
‘I don’t know what he wrote,’ he said reasonably, ‘I don’t know what he was commenting on. It might have been perfectly legitimate criticism.’
‘Oh I’ll tell you what he wrote. “She sucks up all the oxygen around her, leaving nothing for the gasping actors stumbling in her wake.” How about that?’
‘That’s one of his?’
‘One of the kinder ones. There were more of that ilk, and worse. “She leaves nothing for her co-stars, hammering them into resistance with her overpowering presence. Not one of them has a hope matching her loud, strident, selfish style of acting.”’
Her sensitive actor’s nerves had been mortally offended, and she’d never got over it. ‘It does sound a bit harsh …’
‘He had a vendetta against me.’
He wondered if her mannered way of talking was the same on stage as it was in real life. He regretted never having seen her in action. She’d left an entire career behind, perhaps willingly, perhaps she felt she had no other choice, but when the work dried up, so had she. Bored, lonely, and disillusioned, she lived in a beautiful part of the world with no one to share it. No wonder she’d spent two weeks pretending to be Australian: she had nothing better to do.
>
‘And now you think it’s time you went back?’
She looked drained. ‘I don’t know if I can. I mean I do want to, but … You hungry?’ she asked. ‘This isn’t a good place to find somewhere to eat. Too touristy, too expensive.’
For the time being the confessions were over.
By the time they’d wandered from the summit to the car park, the tourist numbers were dwindling, and everybody’s thoughts, like theirs, were turned to home.
‘I reckon we’ll get a beautiful sunset on the way down,’ she said, undoing the bike lock and swinging her leg across the cycle frame. ‘Should be a sight to behold.’
She requested a slight detour via the Cave Vignoble Sainte Berthe to buy a bottle of the local wine. By the time she’d purchased her Coteaux des Baux de Provence, the heat from the sun had died away, and the breeze was growing stronger. He looked skywards; perhaps the weather was on the turn. It had been glorious up till now. Accompanied all the while by the sound of the tyres on the road, the spokes whistling in the air, the occasional squeak from a touch on the brake, he kept his thoughts on dinner in the Duc. He could see Anne Marie’s bright red reflector panel bobbing in front, could see the little bumps it made as it bounced over undulations in the road. In another half an hour they had passed through the largest crags and traversed the windiest part of the route, and were then aiming north again, towards the town. It was dusk now, the sunset spectacular against the cool blue sky, but with the dimming of light came the loss of landmarks. He kept a lookout for lights through the trees. The thickly forested slopes had presented themselves as perfectly benign in the hot sun of the day, but now their dense impenetrable mass seemed to menace the road.
Anne Marie glanced back once more and raised her hand to wave. In the second it took her to resume her grip on the handlebars she lost vital concentration and her bike veered dramatically to the right. In the process of righting herself, she encountered some sort of obstruction in the road. Charlie heard a loud popping noise, and then in a split second, her tyres had hurtled out of control, the bike swooped sideways, and with gravel and stones flying she careered into a heap at the edge of the tarmac.
The Dragonfly Brooch Page 4
