‘Busy. Working. Baby. New house. You can imagine.’
‘Flown the coop, that one.’ Molly’s grip tightened on Prue’s arm as she lurched round treacherous mud patches. ‘You’d never think she once lived here.’
Violet’s gilded, expensive qualities did not belong in Dainton — as perceived by Dainton. This was a little unfair as the village contained a significant number of commuters who were well aware of the world, rather than rural labourers who had never been out of the valley.
Prue steered Molly into the village square which had broken out in a rash of ‘For Sale’ signs and caught sight of Clive Carter standing motionless in his front garden, which he had taken to doing since he lost his job from his engineering firm. Prue waved at him. Clive did not wave back.
‘Time I made the old man’s lunch,’ Molly said, and added that he was damn well going to have cabbage because she had heard on the radio it was good for heart conditions. Since Keith Greer had made a career out of his bad heart, it did not bode well for Keith. Prue suggested that it was unwise to believe everything you heard. Molly looked her straight in the eyes and said that was true, and one did hear an awful lot of things, didn’t one?
While Prue was washing up her lunch, she listened to the radio and Schubert’s violin concerto filled the kitchen. Its beauty made her catch her breath and dealt a blow to her heart. She dropped the washing-up brush back into the unecologically acceptable suds. Then she gave up and finished the dishes with tears running down her cheeks into her neck.
Jamie [she wrote]
When Thackeray finally met Charlotte Bronte he expected to meet in the notorious author of Jane Eyre an Amazon. Instead he encountered ‘an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives and our easy morals’.
How infuriating the Joans and the Charlottes of this world are. Except, I think Thackeray’s assessment is wrong. Joan was not so much concerned with the world as with what she made of herself. She tilted at the commonly held idea of what a woman should be, should think, should do, succeeded in doing so and suffered atrociously.
But she had her moments. I like to think of her dressed up in breeches, tight boots and the golden huque that she enjoyed so much (Joan liked clothes), riding off to battle. That and her communication with God. Joan was lucky, she lived in an age that allowed a dialogue with God, you were allowed to speak to Him and Him to you. Much more than our own, it was an age that, if it knew it or not, made allowances for the richness and variety of the human psyche.
Yes?
Nevertheless, I shall take Joan/Charlotte’s rebuke to the easy life to heart, and ask you not to phone me again. You do see, don’t you?
Prue knew perfectly well that she was not going to send this letter, but got as far as addressing the envelope before she tore it up and threw it in the dustbin.
When Prue opened her eyes the next morning, a fully dressed Max was standing by the bed looking down at her.
‘I thought you were crying,’ he said.
He seemed even more impassive than usual - a sign that he was in the grip of strong feelings.
‘No,’ she said and forced a smile. ‘I’ve a bit of a snuffle, that’s all.’
‘You won’t forget to pay the gas bill.’
‘No,’ she said, trying to hide her misery and failing.
Max assessed her expression, then turned and went over to the window and stood gazing out. Outside the wind blew in great racing gulps and exuberant whorls of air. Prue watched his back, so large so contained, so easy, she knew, to wound. Max always hid his wounds well.
‘Good luck for today, Max.’
He swung round from the window. ‘You remembered?’
She felt ashamed at the pleasure in his voice and the panic that underlay it. ‘Of course, darling. You’ve got the big brainstorming session on the European set-up. Have you got your notes?’
‘Yes.’
Max sat down on the bed and took her hand. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? I’ve been a bit worried about you.’
Treachery sat in her heart like soggy mixture in an unsuccessful sponge cake. Prue rubbed his fingers with her own and said, ‘Everything’s absolutely fine. Don’t worry about me.’
Again he watched her and then bent down and gathered Prue in his arms and held her close. ‘Is it, my Prue?’ he said into her neck, and kissed the hair spilling over her shoulders. ‘You must always tell me.’
How lucky, he had said, when Prue had eventually prodded him into proposing. How lucky I am to be given a second chance.
That was twenty-one years ago when Prue had been working as a legal secretary in Stephenson Blackwell’s in the City. A bored, underdeveloped, unrealized Prue.
How many women do what Prue did? Mark time. And how many women look up from an uncongenial desk, light on a male figure and listen to the click in their head (not their heart) which tells them it is time to take action?
Max was tall - a definite plus for tall Prue - well dressed, with the additional advantage of suffering. Two years previously, Helen, his wife, had left him and, in doing so, had rammed her car into an oncoming lorry and taken a further six weeks to die. Max was now struggling to bring up his small daughter by himself, a situation made more difficult by his refusal to move out of Dainton to London.
‘It was whisky,’ Max said later when Prue had finally willed him into inviting her out to dinner, a process that had taken a great deal of trouble and a fortune in scent and stockings. ‘Helen had been drinking for some time and I was drinking it like water too.’
Prue considered. ‘It was not your fault that Helen chose to leave. Or your fault that she chose to have half a bottle of the best malt before she did so.’ In those days, Prue was armour-plated with youthful righteousness.
Max sat back in the chair. The restaurant was noisy and full, but he was quite still and removed. ‘She was so beautiful,’ he said at last. ‘And my dreams were full of her.’
And Prue had turned away from such feeling and such grief and fled to the ladies’.
Later, she made it her business to find a photograph of Helen and was disappointed for she looked artificial and Prue was forced to conclude that her beauty had been the sort that had to live before it revealed itself. Either that, or the idea of beauty was like Bostik: once it had been applied it stuck.
Still, since competing on that front was out, it left her the task of scoring over Helen on character. Tell me about Helen, she coaxed a reluctant, reticent Max. Tell me.
Clever Prue. For, in the end, Max talked as much as he was capable of, and got Helen out of his system and into proportion. It was not comfortable listening, for Max had inflicted wounds as well as suffering them, but none so deep as the one that Helen made when she told him she was leaving.
‘I remember,’ said Max, struggling for the precise words, ‘the moment she told me. I felt as if a knife had been driven under my ribs. I remember thinking it had reached my backbone and was scraping along it.’ He held out the hand marked by Helen’s Wound. ‘I even drove a knife into my hand to test which hurt most.’
Oh, God, thought Prue, and shut her eyes.
Jack was younger than Helen which, Max said, surprised him. Helen preferred the strong, older types. She had accused Max of growing old before his time, and said it was making her feel old, while Jack was both young and vigorous. Then people grew older younger than they do now, if Prue saw what he meant.
‘The irony is,’ said Max, putting down his knife and fork at one of their weekly dinners, ‘Helen won’t be growing old. Unlike me. She will never wrinkle or droop and when I meet her again she will be in her time, and I will be in mine. So, you see, it was a final parting.’
Prue did not think she could bear any more and dropped her head over her wine-glass while she decided on a course of action. When she looked up, it was to corner Max’s dark eyes with her own and to ask, ‘Will you marry again?’
Max caught on at once. For the first time, he smiled
properly. Then he ordered a second bottle of wine. ‘It will have to be someone who does not mind growing old.’
‘Good God,’ said Prue - who by now had fallen thoroughly in love - with all the emphasis of the nineteen-year-old. ‘You’re only thirty-nine now.’
Their future was set from that conversation. Max would marry Prue, they would grow old together and Prue was determined that the age-gap would make no difference.
For their honeymoon, Max, having been prised from a screaming Violet, bore Prue off to a country hotel tucked away on a Devon estuary. Throughout the short summer night, he told Prue how lucky he was and how he loved and needed her, and this was the beginning of the rest of his life. Then he fell asleep.
Rasping-eyed from fatigue and nerves, Prue lay until pink light slid under the chintz curtains, held her sleeping husband in her arms and wondered why it had not been just a little more, well . . . cataclysmic.
Within a month, she felt as if she had been married all her life -falling into a comfortable sofa where she had been expecting a Louis Quinze fauteuil. Except for Violet, of course, who set her face against her stepmother with the determination of a seven-year-old.
She had been lucky. But when friends, such as Kate, asked her if she minded about Helen and Violet, she replied, ‘No,’ and crossed her fingers as she had been taught by her friends when she first went to the convent school.
Knowing the past, it’s terrible mistakes and the penalties incurred, knowing she had a great obligation to guard Max and Jane, knowing that she endorsed the behaviour that she had perfected over twenty years, knowing she was content in a marriage and in a community, why was it that Prue’s flesh felt so firm and expectant this early summer, this growing season, and her eyes hid secrets?
Why not?
Why not?
High Summer
Chapter Eleven
What sort of man was Joan’s Dauphin, the king-in-embryo, for whom she risked so much? What fusion of lasciviousness, political nous, religious gift and insanity had he inherited from the stockpile of Valois genes?
‘The Dauphin’s father,’ Prue noted, ‘had been subject to fits of madness which effectively caused breakdown in the French government.’
The first attack took place in 1392 when the King went berserk and killed four of his attendants. Subsequently, he suffered at least forty-four attacks, ‘crying and trembling as if pricked with a thousand points of iron’. The verdict today would, in all probability, point to schizophrenia.
Isabeau of Bavaria, his mother, was not much better. Despite being embarrassingly short in the leg (a characteristic she passed on to her son), Isabeau had been attractive in her youth but also subject to wobbles in her mental equilibrium. Phobic and agoraphobic, she was terrified by thunder, by the slightest suggestion of disease (not unnaturally given the mortality rate of the period) and could not be persuaded to cross a bridge unless it had railings — a quirk which, again, her son shared.
At first, the quality of Isabeau’s mothering was not questioned, but, after 1425, statements wriggled into the records accusing her of neglect. Her extravagance was notorious and so was her intimacy with Louis d’Orléans, her husband’s brother. By 1417, jewelled, plumpening disgracefully, Isabeau was the centre of a dissolute court at Vincennes, and scandal reached fever pitch. Rumour was saying that the Dauphin was not the King’s son, but his uncle’s bastard.
You see, a small but insistent voice spoke to Prue, once a family begins to break down, the effects never end. Think of the stone thrown into the pond. Think of dominoes. Think . . . of what?
The telephone rang in the study where Prue was making these notes.
‘Mrs Valour?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Emmy speaking.’
‘Oh, hallo.’ Prue went over various disasters in her mind. ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
‘Everything’s fine, but Mr Beckett asked me to call you as he had to leave for the early train. He’s coming down to Winchester today for a meeting and wondered if you would like to meet him for lunch at the Coaching House Hotel? He says just turn up any time after 12.45.’
Prue supposed that Jamie supposed that by making the assignation above board, it became acceptable. If you insist black is white, then so it is.
Sophistry.
Somewhere in the recesses of Prue’s chest, a spring released.
‘Thanks, Emmy,’ she said. ‘I might just do that. I’d like to catch up on the news.’
I bet, thought a sharp, less peaky Emmy, as she put down the phone. It sounds all too matey to me.
Prue scanned the reference books on the shelf above her desk where she had been writing up her notes. Vita Sackville-West’s Joan of Arc, a self-help manual on jealousy and a critical appreciation of nineteenth-century women writers.
How dare Jamie do this? Put her on the spot. Force her to make a choice.
Would you rather, then, that choice was taken away?
What would Emmy make of her role as the pander? Lucky it had been Emmy and not Molly Greer, whose curiosity was as sharp as a predatory bird’s beak inserted into his prey. Jab. Jab. Plucking bloody bits of information to wave at the world.
Jamie had counted on her saying yes.
Prue picked up her biro and wrote ‘Rouen’. The biro had been part of a job lot bought in Andover market and showed its dicey provenance by its uneven flow of ink. She shook it and a glob landed on the clean page. She stared at her fingers whose secret identification was now whorled and circled into stained relief.
How dare Jamie send messages via a third person? Most of all, how dare he expose her flimsy defences?
She made herself continue.
It can only be imagined how the quicksand of doubt, sown with phobias and madness, hampered the thin, weak, pendulous-nosed Dauphin. Couple that with high intelligence, bouts of drunkenness and physical unattractiveness, and the ground becomes almost impassable. He was capable of attracting great loyalty but, more often than not, only - in the manner of his parents - to betray it.
This was the man Joan sought to ratify as king.
Footnote, wrote Prue: Isabeau became obese, so much so that she was prevented from being regent because it was considered that her size would impede her.
Second footnote. Although she was ostentatiously pious it was doubtful if religion nourished her life. Nevertheless, in one of those curious biographical and historical collusions, Isabeau commissioned an illuminated life of St Margaret of Antioch for her library, a great jewelled tome. Unlike St Catherine who was associated with virginity, St Margaret was associated with motherhood. Perhaps that was why Isabeau (in hasty retrenchment? fit of conscience?) chose her.
St Margaret was, of course, with St Catherine and St Michael, one of Joan’s voices.
Prue looked at her watch and stopped writing but declined to read through her work for, she knew of old, it was at this point that she plunged into a crisis of doubt about her ability to handle the project. Perhaps Rembrandt experienced this blankness half-way through the Night Watch? Certainly, Tolstoy did not spare Sonya his artistic doubts throughout forty years of writing masterpieces. Why would she be different?
Max was good at urging Prue not to give up when the doubts became an impediment to progress. He was punctilious in encouraging her efforts, talking things over, even doing a spot of research — and it drove her frantic. Joan was hers; her private property. Sometimes Prue dreamed that Max was taking over the project himself.
Quite often he rang in his lunchtime on the days she was at home. ‘How’s Joan?’ he would ask.
Don’t, she wanted to say. Don’t.
Plato argued that everything has its appropriate nature. Joan came up against that one when she declared her voices had bodies, wore clothes and talked in French. In the medieval Church’s view, abstract things should remain so and the Church condemned her for suggesting otherwise.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Prue contemplated the appropriate nature of herself in
the mirror. The outer woman, arranged in the scoop-necked Viyella blouse that suited her so well, complete with the unfurled fan of lines at the corners of her grey eyes and the long fingers which were reddened from too much washing up.
The inner, hidden woman? Hesitating over a course that, until recently, had been unthinkable. Unthinkable because it had not existed, said a voice in her head. Prue turned away from the mirror. She began to undress. On went jeans and a white T-shirt. Over those went a navy blazer, which used to belong to Max but, if she rolled up the sleeves, looked stylishly baggy. Prue’s role model was the scene from Pretty Woman where, thus attired, Julia Roberts signalled that she was now a serious, decent woman united with Prince Charming.
Unfortunately, she did not possess the Roberts haunch but the T-shirt, made of Sea Island cotton, looked expensive and flattering against her skin. Deciding on the jewellery took several minutes. Wedding ring, of course. Pearl studs? Far too small but fake ones did not seem right. Gold chain?
The silver-topped pots on her dressing-table needed cleaning and she rearranged them, thinking what a bother they were. When she opened the drawer containing her scarves, she was as usual confronted by a swirl of materials. Prue fingered the silks and wool, old, of second-rate quality and bought when Max was not earning as much as he did now, drew out an expensive new red one and shut the drawer with a little bang.
The eyes in Max’s photograph on her dressing-table followed Prue around the room. She had not noticed them do that before.
Hanging on the handle of the wardrobe Max’s ties, mostly striped, established his territory in the bedroom as surely as if he had been there. To Prue, they now seemed thin and worn - like the skin that stretched over his elbows and knees and folded, just a little, over his stomach.
She avoided the photograph and sat down to brush her hair which she tied back with a black velvet ribbon. As she lifted her arm, Prue noted its fullness and the slack which should have been taut. Fear of her age gnawed at her briefly and was routed by a shiver of excited apprehension.
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