That world would not deal kindly with a woman who had always been too tender, too trusting, and might now be diminished. Her return to life would be further threatened by the difficulties that awaited her. She would have only the clothes I had managed to rescue for her, and which I had packed too hastily into the suitcases now in the rue de France. She would have nowhere to live. Even if she had never liked Les Mouettes it was her home, and a rather enviable one at that. I knew that she had always preferred her earlier home, and had been impatient with this view, but now I saw that for a woman of her disposition a modest way of life, and the company of a child, might be preferable to the challenges of a late marriage. This was not a popular view, nor would it be understood. And if she were to be exiled to one of those outer suburbs so favoured by Mr Redman, would she ever find company again? And would the memory of her life at Les Mouettes seem so bizarre a construct that she would reject it altogether?
‘The telephone,’ Marie-Caroline reminded me. I must go back to the rue de France and give some account of myself to M. Cottin. I was the bearer of information which no one could share. The sheer desire, indeed the need, to involve witnesses, did not preclude prudence. It would not do us any good to confess the various humiliations which had befallen us. And we had been so recently, so splendidly, endowed that we would not attract sympathy. As a chatelaine of sorts my mother would have been welcomed anywhere. In her present condition she would be avoided.
M. Cottin wrote down the number of the telephone in the room behind the shop, and indicated how I might pay for the calls. We had exchanged no information; he was still cautious. I merely told him that my mother was not well, and that I would only use the telephone as and when necessary. He nodded gravely. A hero among men, whom I might trust. Like Blanche Dubois I would now be dependent on the kindness of strangers, no bad thing in the life I was now obliged to live.
10
The obedience with which my mother submitted to the attentions of Marie-Caroline alarmed me. It was the extreme docility of those struck down by illness or immobility in the course of a process of which they were no longer fully conscious. Her hair was now brushed, her nightdress was clean, her appearance more or less restored. Yet she showed no desire to leave her bed, though a chair had been placed next to it, which she was surely expected to occupy.
‘Today,’ she told me beatifically, ‘I am to have a purée, like the ones I used to make for you when you were a baby.’
‘You do know, dear, that Simon has . . . died?’
Her face clouded again. ‘I think so. Was it an accident? Was he in the car?’
‘He was in the house. You both were.’
‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember coming here. Did he bring me?’
‘No.’
‘Then you did. What happened?’
‘Simon had a fall. You called Dr Thibaudet. Do you remember that?’
‘I remember Dr Thibaudet, of course.’
‘You don’t remember waking up beside Simon?’
A look of extreme horror replaced her earlier expression of slightly infantile acquiescence. This was the change I had been hoping for. Now I was by no means sure that I could deal with it.
‘Then he died at home?’
‘At Les Mouettes, yes.’
She reached out and clutched my hand. ‘I can’t go back there, Zoë. I can never go back.’
As gently as I could I disengaged her fingers. ‘We can’t go back there, Mama. The house has been repossessed, by Simon’s nephew.’
She sank back on the pillows, alarmingly pale. I was unprepared for, and despite myself shocked, by her next remark. ‘Thank God,’ she said.
‘But weren’t you happy there? Simon was so proud of it.’
‘I was happy with Simon. I never liked the house. I should never have thought I could be happy there. I wanted to please him, but really I should have stayed at home. Maybe we could go home now. But are you sure he is dead?’
‘Quite sure, I’m afraid.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Such a good man. I hope I made him happy.’
‘I’m sure you did. And you were happy, weren’t you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she replied languidly. ‘I was very happy. In a way I shouldn’t have been. He gave me freedom, and then took it away again. And I missed that freedom. I dare say you think me worthless. Worthless and absurd.’
‘It was a new way of life for you. You would have got used to it.’
‘No, darling, I never would have got used to it. I was used to being alone, that was the truth of the matter. A very sad truth, no doubt.’
‘Don’t distress yourself.’
‘He was such a marvellous man.’ She was crying freely now. ‘So generous with his feelings. So unselfishly anxious to make me feel at home. But how could I? He was a stranger to me. And it is possible to love a stranger, Zoë, a great deal, so much so that all I wanted was to make him happy, and to make him think that he had made me happy. He made me lonely in a different way, and I never became familiar with that kind of loneliness.’
‘I thought marriage was a cure for loneliness.’
‘So did I. And there was a longing in him that made me want to comfort him. He looked so upright, so impressive, but in fact I was stronger than he was. My task was not to let him see that. We had a pleasant life, certainly, but it was like being cast in a play, without an audition. And perhaps I wasn’t always as responsive as I might have been. I don’t mean . . . ’ She blushed. ‘I mean appreciative. I was always trying to do what I thought would please him. And sometimes I just longed to get out of the house, to be on my own again. I was happier when you were there. You didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with me.’
‘There wasn’t anything wrong with you.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘And now that I have my freedom again I don’t want it. I long for that dear stranger, and I dare say I always will, even though I hardly had time to get used to him. Had I known how short a time we were to have together I should have refused him. Maybe I should have done that anyway. It was not right to have expected so much, and then to have rejected it.’
‘But you didn’t.’
She gave a tired smile. Marie-Caroline shook her head minutely. ‘I hope I gave a creditable performance. Do you think he knew?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘I think he did. My poor darling.’ She was too exhausted by now to shed more tears.
‘Has Dr Balbi been to see you?’
‘Dr Balbi will be in tomorrow,’ said Marie-Caroline. She advanced purposefully towards the bed. ‘If you could come back then?’
‘We’ll talk about it when you are less tired,’ I said. My heart sank. I saw us both in my small flat in London, myself trying to work, my mother idle and dispossessed. My work had never seemed so attractive to me, and so elusive. In those years, for women, work had as much dignity as marriage; old archaic longings had been relegated to the musty attics where they had always lingered. Or perhaps cellars was a better metaphor. These desires were subterranean, out of sight. But no woman can be unaware of them, no matter how persuasive her propaganda.
To deny a right true end is to deny nature, but nature is also, or can be, the enemy. I understood my mother’s false compliance, but it evoked little sympathy in me. By an odd reversal she seemed more up to date than I was, able to live without a man, able to live with one, even on his terms, but in the knowledge that what she was doing was consciously willed, a debt she owed to her upbringing, rather than to her inclination. I found this horrifying. In her place I should have behaved differently, I told myself. But how? Was my own desire for love exacerbated by her confession, by her reliance on me? I had no wish to play the man, to be the strong one in an unwanted alliance. Had I been free I should have scorned such weakness as I was feeling in the wake of my mother’s somehow shocking explanations. The fact that I had understood them seemed to point to a further weakness of my own that I was not anxious to probe. I shou
ld have liked matters to be simpler. I should have liked my mother to have retained her enigmatic reserve. Above all I should have liked to remain a child. This, however, is no longer possible once the age of childhood is past. Any attempt to counterfeit the condition of childhood is dishonest. It is also immoral.
I kissed my mother, whose eyes were closed, and told her that I should be back soon.
‘Tomorrow,’ supplied Marie-Caroline. ‘Now she must rest.’
I left the clinic in a state of some perplexity. I did not understand, nor was I willing to understand, an illness so subjective, so open-ended, so voluntary. I could understand Simon’s demise because it fitted in with the apocalyptic view that any young person has of death. I remembered a dire sermon in the school chapel, in which the preacher had enjoined four hundred little girls to remember their Creator in the days of their youth, and had gone on to detail all the systems that would eventually fail. The windows, he had said, indicating his eyes, the grinders—here he had ground his teeth—the keepers of the house, and here he clamped his hands to his chest as if to show us his lungs. Ignoring the stifled giggles of the congregation he informed us that the grasshopper would be a burden and that desire would fail. A restlessness at the back of the chapel was a discreet signal to him that none of this could be appreciated or understood, but he was not finished. If ever the golden bowl be broken, he said, tapping his forehead with a bony finger, or the silver cord be loosened—here he pressed his hands to his windpipe as if to strangle himself—we should do well to consider such matters. At this point I had found the words so beautiful that I had paid attention, and I was not much dismayed. If this happened to everyone then surely everyone would know how to deal with the decline, or rather, the collapse, that he seemed to know so much about. I imagine that he was in fact a sick man; he was certainly an angry one. He disappeared shortly after that particular warning and was replaced by a nervous youth who told us that Jesus was all-merciful and that the end was merely the beginning. But I had been more attracted to that account of the dissolution of the body. I still think of it as authoritative, and of Ecclesiastes as the most convincing book in the Bible. With those matters in mind I could come to terms with the oblivion that awaited me, and awaited us all.
But my mother’s sojourn in a hospital bed made me impatient, and also ashamed of my impatience. Surely, with a warning of the inevitable, any right-minded person would cling to life, would fight off the desire to collaborate with any degenerative process? Yet my mother did not seem so inclined. She had suffered a shock and a bereavement, and although affected by the death of her husband, as any woman would be, was strangely willing to look on it as if it had happened to somebody else. Even the relief, to which she could hardly confess, but to which there were unmistakable pointers, should have given her the impetus to conclude the matter, to get up and get dressed, and to prepare to take charge of her own destiny (and of mine). There were plans to be made, and she should show signs of wishing to make them. She was free, as she had never been in her life, free of the burdens of both child and husband. In time, I hoped, she would look back ruefully as she calculated the loss that Simon represented: loss of comfort, loss of protection, of status. For I did not underestimate the latter. Even if she were secretly glad of her new freedom she must realize that no one is actually free, that freedom is a concept, an ideal, with which everyone seeks to come to some accommodation.
She had, or seemed to have, an unrealistic idea that all could be as it had been before this intemperate introduction into her life of a man who had been her opposite in every way. She had even expressed a desire to go ‘home’, as if that early home still survived. Her recent home she had dismissed without regret. This was in fact a blessing in disguise: she would not mourn for Les Mouettes as I should; she had walked out of it, metaphorically, as if released from prison. I wondered at what point I should have to tell her about the Speddings, if at all. As an anecdote she might find it amusing, but only if she had been successfully transferred to a place of safety. She might miss her possessions, but very little; Simon’s gifts to her would be counted as fairy gold, not to be turned into common currency. And her brief life in the sun had been, or would seem to have been, an interlude, an entr’acte, whereas the serious business would resume in known surroundings, where the long task of introspection could be undertaken at her convenience. Maybe that task was already under way, and her present inanition a pointer to it.
But she had other duties, other business. It was too much to expect her to tell me what to do, for it was obvious that I was in charge. The fact that we were without a home had somehow slipped her notice. There was nothing for it but to do as she wished, to go ‘home’. Yet that home, which to her was real, as Les Mouettes had somehow seemed imaginary, did not exist either, or not in the dimensions she required. That home had vanished when the lease of the flat in Edith Grove had expired; what had followed it belonged to me. Here was where the fantasy broke down, for I did not wish to be dispossessed even by my beloved mother, particularly not by my mother, who might oversee my life as Simon had once overseen her own. At close quarters there would be no escape, no place for the occasional overnight guest. And I had no intention of restricting my life to her company alone.
Before all this could be concluded, if it ever could be, I should have to find some way of lodging her until she was strong enough to travel. I thought the best, indeed the only, thing to do was to find her a decent room in a decent hotel, where I might visit her every day, much as I visited her in the clinic. Simon had always directed potential visitors to the Westminster or to La Pérouse. He was not keen to let anyone stay in the house. Even I must have seemed intrusive at times, although I think he loved me. I now saw that the existence of Adam under his roof represented an outrage, and I blushed when I was thus brought face-to-face with my own lack of understanding.
Since it was such a fine day, and since I had little to do, I walked along the Promenade des Anglais to the Westminster, which seemed to be filled with healthy, rich, noisy tourists. The season had begun and the hotel was full. My timid inquiries at the desk, after I had tried explaining my story, brought little in the way of sympathy. In addition, an enormous sum of money would be required. I retraced my steps and went in search of La Pérouse, in the old secretive part of town. Here the visitors were more discreet, but even in the foyer I could see that they were wealthy, even if they were not much in evidence. Again I was told that there were no rooms free, but was directed to a small pension a few streets away. This seemed a possibility, but with some kind of resolution in sight I put off my decision for another day. I was tired, I was hungry. I went into a café, ordered a sandwich, and went down to the telephone in the basement.
Mr Redman, in his peaceable way, seemed moderately pleased to give me more news than he had managed to do previously. A surveyor had been sent into the warehouse in Walthamstow and in the course of his work had come across a large iron safe. On Mr Redman’s instructions this had been opened with the help of a local safety expert. Inside the safe were a number of documents: share certificates, he told me, and an insurance policy which should be left to mature. I ignored this, and asked him to realize the lot, once my mother’s consent had been given, as I knew it would be. Had he found a buyer, I asked him, to be told that two rival concerns were interested, which might send up the price. If I could be prepared to wait . . . I could not, I told him, without much finesse. Had he any news of the account in Switzerland? Ah, that would take a little longer: the Swiss were willing to disburse only the accumulated interest, which would amount to very little. In which case, I said, we were reliant on the stock options in the safe. I reflected how odd it was of Simon to have allocated his interests in this way: the panache of the Swiss account backed up by the secret hoard in a disused warehouse. I told Mr Redman that the money was needed quite urgently, as I was looking for an hotel for my mother. I might have to pay quite a lot, I warned him, as if the money were in fact his and I was in the b
usiness of extortion. His professional calm was, I could tell, slightly disturbed by my tone, but I was finished with politeness, which had not done much for me at the reception desk of the Hôtel Westminster. I also told him that I should telephone on the following afternoon. Then I sat down, ate wolfishly, drank two cups of coffee and smoked two cigarettes. I rarely smoked, since I regarded smoking as an act of defiance, but now I was impenitent. A certain insensitivity seemed to be called for in my dealings with others. I did not like this, but I bowed to the inevitable.
When I returned to the clinic I was told that my mother was less well. She had had a disturbed night; they had been obliged to administer a sedative, and it would be better not to pay my daily visit. Perhaps I could return that evening? The door to her room was shut quietly in my face. Alarmed, I went in search of Dr Balbi. His secretary seemed affronted that I had no appointment, but such niceties were now beyond my reach.
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