The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  Nanny had been moved to a hospital in Edinburgh, so the first thing Marie had to do was visit her. But when she arrived, her old friend was heavily sedated and all Marie could do was smile at her and hold her hand. Nanny managed to give a little smile in return, and press her hand weakly. She murmured something which Marie could not hear, and fell asleep. The nurses said she had had one operation and was going to have a further one shortly. They said she was poorly but was sure to pull through. Marie left grapes and a letter for her, telling her of her love for her and eternal gratitude, and that she would visit her again as soon as she returned from France.

  She then did some shopping in Edinburgh – underwear, swimsuits, party frocks and all, whether Mr Brickville approved of it or not – and bought a smart, dark-blue suitcase.

  On her return home, she packed, took a last circuit of the castle and its grounds to remind herself of her youth and said goodbye to the cook and Mrs McGarrigle. She had an irrational feeling that she would see none of them again, and that a chapter of her life was closing. Next morning, the rat-faced factor, Bain, drove her to the airport in almost total silence (for which she was grateful), and she was finally off.

  Apart from a visit to Paris and Bruges with the sixth form, she had never been abroad before. The Aunts had deplored travel. It was one of Aunt Bertha’s favourite dictums that ‘travelling narrows the mind’. No one quite knew what it meant, but Bertha thought it the height of acuity, and she refused to budge.

  ‘We live in a beautiful home in a beautiful county in the most beautiful country in the world. You may keep your air-crashes and your controllers’ strikes and your little plastic trays. I shall stay at home where peace and beauty flow. And so shall you, Claire and you, too, child. Time enough to gad about later. The most important discoveries lie within us. He that is tired of Fife is tired of life. Ha ha.’

  Anyway, as Marie sat in her window seat, and sipped a glass of white wine, she reflected on poor Aunt Bertha’s and Aunt Claire’s wafting to Heaven in a situation rather like this, but the little plastic trays were made of pearl, and the surroundings were even more beautiful and congenial than the sight of the sparkling sea and the little fluffy clouds far below, and the air was full of angels, eternally crying ‘Hosanna’ and things.

  Her thoughts turned to Nanny, too, hopefully still on earth. Marie had sent her flowers and a bottle of her favourite vintage-style port, ‘the best is wasted on me, lovey’, and promised to go and see her on her return; but she still felt worried about her, and a little dismayed to be leaving her in the lurch, waking up from her operation without a friendly face or a glint of glee.

  A smooth voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘We are approaching our final run-in to Nice Airport. Please extinguish your safety belts and fasten your cigarettes.’

  The Captain, it seemed, was a joker. She hoped he was a better flier than humourist.

  Suddenly they seemed to be flying very close to the sea and Marie braced herself for a watery grave, and an imminent confrontation with The Aunts, but they came down to earth with the mildest of bumps on a long promontory of a runaway built low over the water.

  It looked exceedingly hot outside.

  The man next to her winked. He had been trying to talk to her all through the flight. ‘First time you been to Nice, is it? Nice by name and nice by nature. Know what I mean?’

  She didn’t know what he meant but it reminded her with a pang of Nanny, and how they’d laughed over her milk and Nice biscuits when she was little. ‘But Nanny. A place can’t be called Nice. It’s silly. Is there another place called Horrid?’

  ‘Oh yes, lovey. There’s lots of Horrids. But I don’t expect you’ll ever go to them. Would you like a Horrid biscuit?’

  Peals of laughter, and then, ‘I hope I go to Nice one day. It sounds niece.’

  And here she was. And there Nanny was. And one day she’d be in horrid hospital and somebody else would be in Nice. The man handed her a card as they got up.

  ‘Harvey Ambrose, Multifab Sales Manager. I’m off to the Media Conference. Get in touch if you want to take in a show. Ooo la la! Nice? It takes the biscuit. But you’ve got to know where to go. I know a place … it’d make your hair stand on end. There’s this negro … he sits and thinks about it, bollock naked he is, and after about five minutes he does the doo … you know … does the doo like a ruddy Niagara. That’s what I call a show.’

  She looked at the man with curiosity as though he were a recondite weevil but all through passport control he kept adding little extra titbits.

  ‘He doesn’t touch himself, mind. Nothing like that. It’s very dignified, very tasteful. Philosophical almost. Then after five minutes … whoosh…’

  She was afraid Mr Brickville might be there and she would have to explain her embarrassing companion, but fortunately she caught sight of a solitary chauffeur holding a board with her name on it, while Harvey Ambrose spotted some fellow delegates. She could hear him regaling his companions on his latest conquest as she walked off after the chauffeur.

  ‘I was sitting next to this little cracker. You could see she was longing for it…’

  People, she thought, were like dogs. They couldn’t see a pathway without wanting to foul it. Even so, there had been something rather sad and touching about him.

  ***

  Mr Brickville’s villa was up in the hills above Cannes.

  All around it were flowering hibiscus hedges of bright whites and reds, and in front, far below, was the yacht-dotted sea.

  The car sent by Mr Brickville, after passing a number of discreet little driveways turned in at the most discreet one of all, crunching decorously on the gravel in front of a large white house, shuttered against hot sun. Marie got out, grateful to leave the ambient chill of the air conditioning for the faint blood-warm breeze charged with herbs and flowers that ruffled the curtains of the noonday heat.

  Mr Brickville appeared at the front door and came down the steps to greet her. It was a shock to see him in white trousers and a short-sleeved, white shirt like a bowls player. There was not even a hint of a pin-stripe or indeed of a slightly pained expression.

  ‘Welcome to Le Bavelot,’ he said. ‘I trust you had a not too taxing journey.’

  She thanked him and assured him this was the case – or was it that this was not the case? The man was full of litotes. He could never say something outright. It always had to be the opposite of the appropriate sentiment, and then qualified with a negative, as if the full-on truth were too painful to bear. She had resolved to try and be pleasant to the man whom she thought she might have misjudged. It wasn’t his fault that he was a dry old stick. She thought perhaps she could cheer him up a bit. It was certainly not difficult to feel cheered herself. Bright green lawns composed of that curiously coarse-textured continental grass sloped down to where she could see an azure swimming pool flanked by shaded tables. Far below, Cannes glittered, its traffic moving like jewelled beetles. A delicious aroma wafted suddenly from an unseen kitchen.

  ‘Claudine will show you your room,’ he indicated a uniformed middle-aged maid, dark of hair and eyes, ‘and then perhaps you would like a swim after your travels. Lunch will be served at quarter to two.’

  So began a holiday that was, to one brought up in the cloistered company of maiden aunts, a vision of another kind of paradise. There were days of lying in the sun beside the pool, eating delectable meals – Mr Brickville was particular about his food – and drinking the fresh and fruity wines of Provence.

  Mr Brickville must have made some similar resolve to her own, for within his powers, he put himself out to be obliging, even attentive. It was true, he found it difficult to laugh – his laughing muscles had all dried up – and he would use expressions like ‘I trust’ when ‘I hope’ would do.

  And there were days when he had to spend much of the time on the telephone, and when tidy men in short shirts would come to the house and talk about money. On these days she would sometimes go down to Cannes with Maxim
ilien the chauffeur who would stay while she went down and lay on the Plage Sportive watching the antics of the oiled bodies and the little sailing boats that plied from the jetty and trying to ignore the attentions of the brilliant black Algerians who sold beads and rings and belts and bags and strange sugared nuts. The owner of the place was a hawk-eyed, leather-faced Frenchwoman called Marguerite who also paid her one or two discreet attentions.

  Sometimes too, later, after a drink at seven on the villa’s terrace, she would come down with Mr Brickville and they would eat at one of the restaurants on the Croisette in the smooth night under the stars, or they would drive into the hills and dine at Mougins or the Colombe d’Or at St Paul de Vence with its vine-covered terrace under the ancient walls where Picasso and Braque had stayed and painted, and the swimming pool where the rich showed off their costly, golden bodies.

  ‘I’m afraid it must be boring for you, Marie,’ said Mr Brickville on one of these occasions. ‘Just an old stick like me for company.’

  Eating good food in such a beautiful place didn’t seem dull at all in spite of the old stick but she wondered momentarily how old the stick actually was. Probably something really old like fifty? It was difficult to tell. There was something about him you couldn’t quantify with years. She assured him that she wasn’t bored, and that he wasn’t boring.

  ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘I have some amusement for you. A colleague of mine from Los Angeles is coming over with his daughter next week. I think you will find them good company. She is about your age.’

  Marie felt not altogether happy about this development. She was so used to being on her own that she found company something of a problem. One of the good things about Mr Brickville was that he was generally unobtrusive. However, she politely expressed pleasure at the prospect.

  Next day, she went down to the Plage Sportive alone again, choosing her favourite vantage point, segmented between the two low windbreaks of woven lath, with her private beach umbrella and just one mattress, merci, Marguerite.

  She had spent some time being amused by the action of two very tanned French boys throwing a ball at each other and leaping about in their exaggerated way to the annoyance of a very white English couple in the front row, when she saw him. He had been sailing one of the little boats and was just bringing it along the jetty. He climbed out, paid the little wizened peanut of a chap who looked after the flotilla and paused for a moment, surveying the beach, his red-brown hair ruffled by the strange Cannes breeze that always seemed to die on the stroke of midday.

  It was unmistakably Mephistopheles.

  Without thinking, she stood up and waved. Then she thought, why am I so pleased to see him? He let me down, the rat. The same variety of emotions seemed to be crossing his features as he gazed at her, with the added ingredient of initial puzzlement as to who should be signalling at him from a plage-ful of strangers.

  Finally, advancing, he greeted her with modified rapture.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘It’s my old friend Impervious.’

  That was the name she had given when first she met him. Full marks to him for remembering.

  ‘I am not entirely impervious,’ she replied tartly, not waiting to go into all the ritual questions. ‘Not to being left high and dry when I had arranged to meet someone. What are you doing here?’

  It was clear what he was doing here. He was on holiday, sailing a skiff from the Plage Sportive. How dare he look so blameless and beautiful? He was a little puzzled by the heat of her retort. It obviously wasn’t what he was expecting.

  ‘Why…’ they both began at once.

  ‘You first.’

  ‘No, you.’

  They couldn’t help smiling at each other, and felt better about it.

  ‘Why didn’t you turn up?’ she asked at length.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ he replied.

  ‘But … my great-aunt died and I had to go to her funeral. I left you a note asking you to come back on the Wednesday.’

  ‘I never saw a note.’

  ‘I left it on the tree with that big overhanging bough.’

  ‘I thought you might have left something. I looked everywhere.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d have seen it,’ she said. ‘Unless you’re blind as a bat.’

  ‘I’m not blind as a bat. I am noted for extreme beadiness of gaze.’

  ‘In that case,’ she said, suddenly having a disturbing thought, ‘somebody must have taken it.’

  ‘I thought you’d stood me up,’ he said. ‘I felt an absolute fool – and I missed my lunch.’

  ‘Well, I wasted ours.’

  ‘Tell you what, have lunch with me here and we’ll talk. I’ve got to go and see my parents – we’re staying at the Bleu Rivage – and then I’ll come back.’

  ‘Mind you do come back,’ she told him. ‘I won’t forgive you a second time.’

  ***

  As it happened, he did come back.

  They had lunch in the shade of Marguerite’s veranda, piling their plates from a long table of salads, Bayonne ham, salamis, pâtés, chicken, stuffed tomatoes, tuna, anchovies, salmon, loup de mer, cous-cous and selecting a pichet of Marguerite’s waspish house rosé to wash it down.

  As they tucked into the assorted delicacies – legendary for price as well as excellence – they exchanged histories.

  His name was David Drummond. His parents lived in San Diego, just about as far away as it was possible to live from Castle Cowrie, but he had relations nearby – Perthshire was thick with Drummonds – and he had simply been taking a day out on his own, as it happened in the wrong wood. He had been looking for a small loch where some osprey were nesting in a forest a mile or two up the road, and had stupidly forgotten his map. He had got lost, and found her instead. He was now a Rhodes Scholar reading Economics at Oxford, though he had started as a chemist. Term had finished and his father and mother had suddenly decided to visit him and take him on a quick holiday in Cannes, and happily found rooms at the Bleu Rivage because frankly they couldn’t afford the Carlton.

  Marie in turn told him what little there was to tell of her life. The details were all fairly prosaic but there was no mistaking, for a chemist, the chemistry that was going on across the dapper pink tablecloth that Marguerite favoured.

  The unshaded plage become hotter and hotter, scorching the feet of the unwary. Marguerite’s little waitress started to take the dishes from the long table. Marguerite herself disappeared into her booth under the Croisette pavement. None but the diehards were left on the mattresses to fricassée themselves, but still the two of them talked on.

  Finally, Marie looked at her watch and saw with horror it was four o’clock. Maximilien liked to be back home by half past three for his afternoon devoirs with his wife.

  ‘I must go,’ she said, ‘dear David Drummond from San Diego, alias Mephistopheles.’

  ‘What shall I call you? Couldn’t-Care-Less?’

  ‘Uh uh,’ she shook her head, ‘because I could care, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But what are we going to do?’

  ‘Meet here tomorrow?’

  ‘I shall try. But if I can’t, you mustn’t fly into a fury, you know. My guardian can be tricky although he’s being unaccountably good at the moment.’

  ‘You have probably won his heart.’

  The idea was ridiculous.

  ‘Tu plaisantes, Monsieur.’

  ‘On ne badine pas avec l’amour.’

  He had done some French, it seemed.

  ‘It would be awful. Like being kissed by a moth.’

  ‘Moth doth corrupt.’ He was serious for some reason.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Bit of luck, you being here.’

  ‘Luck, nothing. I tracked you down.’

  But she couldn’t decide if he was serious.

  ***

  She grovelled to Maximilien who didn’t seem to be too distressed, sitting in his air conditioning looking out at a wilderness of pretty, ambulatory bottoms an
d thinking without enthusiasm of his sloe-eyed spouse’s, though Marie was in such a state of joy she could have appeased raging Giant Polypheme himself.

  She had always felt, in spite of her isolation and loneliness, that somewhere out there was someone who was her exact counterpart, who would make all the loneliness worthwhile. Perhaps there is someone like that for everyone, she thought, but the tragedy is that they never meet. Here, against all conceivable odds, she had found hers, lost him, and found him again. The very fact that he had reappeared so magically (whether or not he was telling the truth about the tracking) was proof that destiny, after so many quirks and cruelties, was at long last on her side.

  As they drew up on the supertax gravel outside Le Bavolet, Mr Brickville appeared looking slightly pained. He hadn’t looked like that for a week and Marie had thought she might have cured him of the habit, but no, it was back.

  ‘I thought I made it clear, Marie,’ he said, as Maximilien took the car round the back, ‘I thought I made it abundantly clear that Maximilien should be back here for 3.30. I cannot expect him to be on duty to take us out in the evening if he has no time off in the afternoon. His wife Claudine is most emphatic about it. He must not become enervé. Really, I am most displeased.

  ‘I’m sorry, er, Hubert.’ She hated calling him Hubert, but it was a sacrifice she was prepared to make. ‘I’m sorry, Hubert, but I met a friend on the plage.’