The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  ‘I’m going to meet him today and I want the picnic to be nice – not just for me, I mean, but a proper one for two, with napkins and glasses and things. Would you say that you’re coming with me?’

  ‘But that’s a lie, dear. We don’t tell lies.’

  Marie thought hard. She knew there were some things that Nanny dug her heels in about.

  ‘Well, then. Could I say that I’m planning a surprise for you because it’s such a lovely day, and I need a picnic for two?’

  ‘You could say that, lovey. I daresay you will. You don’t have to say what surprise. I daresay you will surprise me. You usually do. It’s not exactly a lie but it’s a bit of chop logic.’

  Nanny was satisfied, however, and Marie went off to see Cook after breakfast. She knew that Nanny usually made her own meal in her little kitchen, so no one would be any the wiser whether she came with her or not. In fact, Nanny seemed to live on almost nothing these days and rarely left her sitting-room no matter what the weather was doing.

  Cook was in a good mood and promised to put a nice picnic for two in a hamper with all the trimmings. ‘That’s good of you, Miss Marie. She needs to get out more. She looks so pale. We never see anything of her these days.’

  Marie felt guilty but nerved herself to the next question. ‘Could you put in a bottle of wine?’ she said as casually as possible.

  ‘Wine, Miss Marie?’ Cook looked momentarily shocked. She had known Marie since she was four and still considered her a child. ‘Do you mean…?’

  ‘Wine, Cook, please.’

  There was something very appealing about Marie when she was entreating. Startling blue eyes went very deep and liquid.

  ‘I expect Nanny needs the iron,’ Cook said at last.

  ‘Oh yes, she does,’ agreed Marie, feeling bad about lying to a friend, but in too deep now to draw back.

  ‘In that case I’ll see if there’s some burgundy in the store room up from the cellar,’ said Cook. ‘Mr Brickville likes his burgundy. We don’t want to disturb Mrs McGarrigle, do we?’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ agreed Marie, guilt and excitement giving her the most delicious sensations.

  She passed the morning in a fever of expectation. She picked up a book and put it down; she went up to her studio and tried to paint; she ran out into the garden and paused, irresolute, kicking the gravel; she mooched down to the fountain where the big fat carp wallowed placidly among the lily pads like retired bank mangers moving between restaurant tables. Nothing seemed to calm her or to accelerate the sluggish minutes.

  At last the station clock struck twelve. It was time to go and collect the hamper from the kitchen and start on her way. As luck would have it, Mrs McGarrigle came into the kitchen while Cook was going through the contents.

  ‘There’s ham and chicken and tomato and cucumber. There’s your salad dressing. Then for afterwards there’s … well … There you are!’ she finished hurriedly, seeing the housekeeper. ‘It’s a lovely day for it.’

  ‘Picnicking?’ asked Mrs McGarrigle, nosing nearer. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marie. ‘Bye now. I must be off.’

  ‘I like to know these things,’ she heard Mrs McGarrigle saying to Cook as she hurried out. ‘Mr Brickville left instructions. I insist on knowing.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Cook. ‘It belongs to her now, doesn’t it?’

  Marie left them to fight it out. If there was going to be trouble, she could deal with it when she came back. The most import thing in the world could not be put off for Mrs McGarrigle.

  ***

  Swinging her hamper gaily by the handle, but not without consideration for the good things inside, she set off across the meadows, went over the river by the old packhorse bridge and entered the wood where the chestnuts were beginning to show the green spiky fruits that would turn into marrons in the autumn.

  She had covered perhaps a mile and a half – no small distance carrying a heavy basket – but it might have been the length of a tennis court so buoyant was her step and so lively her imaginings.

  Would she sit down and look at the water as she had been doing when he first appeared, sit there knowing that he was watching her, waiting to be surprised again? Or would he this time be sitting there himself, mimicking her original position, studiously addressing himself to the deportment of the butterflies? Or would it be quite different, some magical conformation which, at the moment, escaped her?

  She was drawing near the clearing now. Between the fuzzy new green of the trees she caught a glimpse of shining water. Her pace slackened. She stopped and then, very quietly, she began to steal forward again, keeping off the main path and following a subsidiary tracklet to the edge of the clearing where she would spy from an unexpected vantage point.

  It wasn’t easy with a heavy hamper, but she accomplished it with a silence worthy of a pirate of Penzance. She parted a frond and peered out.

  The glade was almost exactly as it had been before. It was a little greener. There were a few more butterflies. And there were a couple of ducks on the water. Mephistopheles would like that, she thought. But where was he, the devil?

  She debated whether to stay and wait for him to show himself, but she reflected that he might be doing exactly the same thing himself, and it would just be a waste of time. And it was already one o’clock. So, parting the saplings, she stood up and walked quietly out, hoping her appearance wouldn’t disturb the mallard.

  The ducks were none too keen at the invasion of their privacy, and retreated up to the further end of the water, making low, disparaging remarks to each other. They did not, however, fly off, which Marie took to be a good augur. As for her envelope – so carefully stuck under the bough – that had well and truly flown.

  Spreading the rug, she now seated herself in her previous position at the water’s edge, and amused herself trying to coax the mallards up from their retreat by throwing pellets of white roll out to the surface immediately in front of her. It was infuriating. They would make as if to approach, swim a few yards, look at the bread, look at each other, and then swim back to their safe water. She simply could not get them to come and take it. They reminded her of one of those middle-aged couples who drive miles to the seaside but finally can’t bring themselves to get out of their car.

  So engrossed did she become in her seduction of the duck –seduckshion, she thought, another one for Mephistopheles – that in spite of the pressing nature of her business there, she lost track of time for a while. There was, after all, no hurry; the sun was hot, this was the best place to be on a beautiful day. But after a while she looked at her watch. It was half past one.

  She sprang up, suddenly dismayed, and the ducks rose as one and beat their way across the water, climbing almost too soon, walking upon it with the tips of their wings in their desire to get away from this pellet-throwing precipitator.

  She watched them go, a horrible sense of loss beginning to overcome her, not with the tips of its wings but with great hobnail boots in her heart. He wasn’t coming. If you invited people to lunch at one, it was rude to turn up at half past. He had either been annoyed when she hadn’t shown up on Sunday, or he simply didn’t want to see her again, or both. He couldn’t be bothered. And yet … she could have sworn that he’d really liked her. Perhaps he was a devil after all.

  A tear began to meander down her cheek, followed by another. She knew she shouldn’t cry but she couldn’t help it. A tear for Aunt Claire; two tears for poor Nanny; tears for being alone in the world; and tears for lost love.

  ***

  Mrs McGarrigle greeted her with a long face that evening.

  ‘I understand you lied to Cook.’

  ‘Lied?’

  ‘Lied about wanting a picnic as a surprise for Nanny.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted a picnic as a surprise for Nanny. I said I wanted to surprise Nanny, and I wanted a picnic. The two weren’t necessarily connected.’

  ‘Now look here, Miss…’

  Sud
denly Marie lost her temper. She had had enough. To lose one’s love and nearly lose one’s honour all in one day was too much. ‘No, you look here. If I want a picnic, I’ll have a picnic. I am the mistress of this place now.’

  ‘No, you are not. Mr Brickville is legally responsible.’

  Marie stamped her foot. ‘I am the owner. If I want a picnic, I’ll have one. If I want to lie, I’ll do it.’

  Mrs McGarrigle pursed her lips. ‘Well, we know where we are, then. May I enquire what you were doing in the wood alone with a picnic for two? Not of course that we can be sure of a straight answer.’

  ‘The lovely lady, Christabel

  Whom her father loves so well,

  What makes her in the wood so late,

  A furlong from the castle gate?

  She had dreams all yesternight

  Of her own betrothéd knight;

  And she in the midnight wood will pray

  For the weal of her lover that’s far away,’ said Marie.

  It was in Nanny’s book of favourite verses.

  ‘Lover?’ snorted Mrs McGarrigle. ‘What sort of talk is this? Lying again?’

  ‘Just a friend, Mrs McGarrigle. Not a lover yet, worse luck.’

  ‘Really. I shall have to tell Mr Brickville. He may have to take certain steps.’

  ‘Tell him what you like,’ said Marie, coolly, though inwardly dismayed. There was no knowing what arrangements he might have in mind for her. She wished, not for the first time, that she had a real father to love her.

  Bloody hell, Mephistopheles, why didn’t you show up? She began to hate him for this betrayal of her trust.

  ***

  She spent her last term at the convent in a state of scarcely subdued impatience. The nuns were, with certain exceptions, generally not good teachers, the discipline had become irksome and the other girls were taken up with the picnics, politics and petty jealousies of summer term at a girls’ boarding school.

  One girl, it was true, had developed a considerable liking for her. Rather than the usual crush, this girl’s affection seemed to want to take a more physical form. There were rather too many sidlings up in the changing room for it not to be mistaken for something seamy. Marie agreed once to being fondled in a shower just to see what it was all about but she didn’t like the fixed look in the girl’s eyes and the heavy-breathing noises that went with it so she turned the hot tap on, accidentally on purpose, and that was the end of that.

  The odious Teresa who was still at school and was now in fact Head Girl, did her best to impose her will on Marie, sensing that she had scant respect for the little ritual lunacies of the place. But on the whole Marie kept out of the way, revised, went off by herself with a sketching pad and her set books and lay in the sun and dreamed the dreams of the half-innocent; of shapeless pleasures and opportunities, and the beckoning imminence of life and love.

  She was taking three A-level exams: English, Art and French. And, because she had nothing else to entertain her, she worked hard at them. It was almost unheard of at the convent for anyone to take one A level, let alone three. Higher knowledge was regarded by the Mother Superior rather in the manner of the tree of Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis. The fruit was there but it was of doubtful benefit to pluck it.

  On the eve of her first exam she received two letters. One in a typed envelope, the other in a blue one with Nanny’s handwriting. She saved Nanny’s till she’d read the other one – it looked strangely official and it was in fact from Mr Brickville.

  ‘Dear Marie,’ it read, ‘I hope you are working hard for your examinations. I fear the subjects you are taking are not exactly those most likely to be of benefit in the modern world. Even such qualifications, however, are better than none. I regret to say that Nanny is not at all well, and I am sending her to a nursing home in Dunfermline which I hear is well spoken of. You may of course visit her there when term is over but I feel we should do as little as possible to disturb her. Meanwhile, to provide some entertainment for you during the summer – and because Mrs McGarrigle says she is finding you something of a handful – I would like to suggest you join me at a villa I am taking near Cannes. My secretary will send more instructions as to what you should bring and details of how you should get there in due course. Meanwhile, I send my best wishes for a successful conclusion to your schooldays. We shall be able to discuss your future at length in the pleasant circumstances of the Côte d’Azure. Yours, Hubert Brickville. PS I understand you are known at school as Couldn’t-Care-Less. Is this quite wise?’

  Marie’s first reaction was one of shock. She had known that Nanny was not well, that she was getting thinner and greyer in the face, but it had happened so gradually, and she hardly ever complained; somehow it had never really seemed serious. And now she was moving out of her cosy little room in the castle’s East Wing, and going to some horrible place smelling of death and antiseptic. And what was she, Marie, going to do without her friend and counsellor – her only friend, her only counsellor?

  She started to cry. Then, remembering that she hadn’t read Nanny’s version, she opened the blue envelope.

  ‘My Little Marie,’ she read, ‘I hope this finds you well. By the time you read this, you may have heard from your guardian but I hope to be first. The doctors say I have a lump that has to come out – you know I have been a bit off colour. I never trust doctors. But anyway your guardian says I’d be rather better off in hospital so that’s where I’ll go. I’ll be back soon sure enough, right as rain. Now, I don’t want you to worry with your exams coming up. If you want me to get well, the best tonic I’ll have is to hear you’ve got good results. So don’t mope. Remember, least said, soonest mended. But there’s just one thing I want to say. Just in case anything goes wrong which I’m sure it won’t. I want to say, whatever happens, wherever I go, you’ll always be my little Marie. I shall be there watching over you. I know that. Life has not been very kind to you. To have no father is bad and to have no mother is worse, and there is more that I cannot tell. But I can and I do tell you that nobody on earth could have loved you more than I, so it is not at all bad. You were such a funny little thing when you were small. Remember that “Man in the Wall”? He was your invisible friend. I shall be your Man in the Wall. Buck up now and get on with it. Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action. And remember to get those potatoes out from behind your ears. I must close now, your ever loving, Nanny. PS You can come and see me in hospital if you like, but I don’t want to see any misery-mopes.’

  By the time she had finished reading, Marie was in floods of tears. She became conscious of the dreaded Teresa standing near her.

  ‘I say, the famous Couldn’t-Care-Less is blubbing!’

  Marie sprang up and gave Teresa the most resounding smack on the cheek which made the obnoxious girl cry almost as hard.

  ‘Ooh. I shall report you.’

  Marie felt guilty, but only because she could hear Nanny saying ‘Temper, temper.’

  The exams proved to be difficult but not impossible. She left the convent afterwards without regret. They didn’t give her a farewell tea-party in the Prefects’ Room, which was almost unheard of.

  ‘Tough titty, Couldn’t-Care-Less. No Pre’s Tea,’ they chanted.

  But, quite honestly, she couldn’t care less. She was nearly eighteen.

  ***

  The castle was strange without Nanny in her little sitting-room. Everything still looked just the same but without her comfortable reassuring presence, it did not feel like home. Marie sensed the old walls reverting to some chill she recalled from a time she could not possibly have remembered. The shadows now seemed longer. The tapping of the creeper against her window was not friendly any more, but sinister and threatening. Her eighteenth birthday passed without celebration or comment. It was the age when Aunt Claire had said she could be a Lavell. She felt comfortable in the name no matter what the world said. It was hers and her father’s whom she knew must have been at heart a good man. They could be two agains
t the world. The age of Sinclair was over.

  It was a rainy July. The dark days sapped any urge she felt to paint. She mooched around the familiar places feeling like a stranger, so it was with rather less dread than she had anticipated at the thought of spending a whole month with her guardian, that she began to pack the things so carefully enumerated in a typewritten letter from Denise Tweddle, signed for Mr Brickville in his absence.

  The list included swimsuits (decorous), evening dresses, tennis things (rackets to be provided), a ball-gown and even five changes of summer underwear. It was rather like those lists that schools send out to new girls.

  She did not need her guardian to tell her what sort of, or how much, underwear she should bring. As for decorous swimwear, did he really think she was going to look like a strumpet? Mind you, these days the strumpets looked respectable and the respectable took everything off, so you couldn’t tell where you were, at least that’s what Nanny had said. Marie’s only setback was a minor one: her passport said Sinclair. Fine. She could wear that and take it off when she got through customs at Nice.