The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  She ran down the Croisette, crossed the double lanes between two palm trees, narrowly missing a racing cyclist who swore at her in three languages, and leapt up the steps of the Bleu Rivage feeling that she had come home. If they had a room here, she could stay!

  The policy of the reception desk at the Bleu Rivage in those days was to be as off-hand as possible to the British, without being actually rude. If you wanted servility, they seemed to be saying, you could pay for it at the Carlton next door. Marie didn’t want servility but she did want some semblance of interest.

  ‘Oui.’ The man hardly bothered to put his paper down.

  ‘Mr David Drummond.’

  ‘N’est pas ici.’

  ‘Mr Drummond? Mrs Drummond?’

  ‘Pas ici.’

  ‘What d’you mean, n’est pas ici? Are they having a swim?’

  ‘Non.’

  ‘Have they gone out?’

  ‘Non.’

  A horrid premonition started to cast its shadow, cypress-like, across her hopes.

  ‘Where have they gone then?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Ils sont partis.’

  ‘Partis?’

  David had said they were staying for at least ten more days.

  ‘Bien sur, Mademoiselle. Partis. Vous savez? Ils sont pas ici. Ils sont allés.’

  She steadied herself against the desk. She couldn’t stop shaking.

  ‘Quand ils sont partis? Aujourd’hui?’

  ‘Ilssont partis il y a deux jours.’

  ‘Where … ou est-ce qu’ils allaient?’

  ‘’Sait pas.’

  It was like a re-run of a nightmare. She muttered something at the concierge and stumbled out towards the street. Then, on a sudden thought, a flicker of a spark of possibility, she turned back and clutched at the desk again.

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘Mr David Drummond. A-t-il laissé quelque chose?’

  ‘Quelque chose?’

  ‘Un message … une lettre…’

  ‘Moment.’

  Fish-face peered down at a cache of hotel jetsam hidden underneath the counter-top.

  ‘Non, non, non, non … Alors, oui … Mademoiselle Marie?’

  ‘C’est moi.’ She tore the envelope from his hand and sat down in a corner of the lobby.

  Dearest Marie, she read, and stopped. Since when had she been Dearest Marie? Darling Marie, perhaps, sweetest most Adorable Marie, certainly. Dearest Marie? What kind of talk was this?

  Dearest Marie, I don’t even know if you’ll get this, but I felt it was the safest bet. My parents have asked me to promise not to get in touch with you, but I feel I must break my promise just this once. It is not your fault, you see…

  The letter floated like a pantomime fairy in front of her eyes. The air seemed suddenly very thick and rich. Not being able to bear the thought of fainting in front of Fish-face, she managed to get up and walk outside. Steadying herself on one of the pillars beside the steps, she spotted a bench shaded by palms and facing the sea. After a restorative series of deep breaths, she felt able to cross the road, sit down and continue the worst half hour of her life.

  ***

  It is not your fault, you see, she re-read, ‘because I am sure that you did not know about this awful thing, this problem that there is. Of course my folks would not have found out if it weren’t for some New York friends who were passing through. You know my folks are the most tolerant of people but they want the best for me, and this thing, well, they just could not live with it.

  Marie went over the paragraph half a dozen times. The message – that he was leaving her – was unmistakable. But it simply did not make sense. She was aware of some man sitting next to her, endeavouring to engage her in conversation, but he might have been occupying a completely different set of dimensions for all the notice she was able to take of him. She read on, hoping for and dreading whatever enlightenment there was to come.

  And now it strikes me that, as you don’t know, it might have been kept from you for good reasons: to protect you from the truth about your father. I feel that they should have told you since you are now of an age to know the truth – and because further evasions will only lead to more heartbreaks. It now falls to me to tell you things that will shock and pain you – and how I wish it could have been someone else. But no, perhaps it is better this way.

  The truth, as I understand it, is this. Your father was a very rich man, half-American, quarter-British, quarter-French; heir to a union of two commercial banks with vast international interests. He had a distinguished Army record during his National Service and won the Military Cross in Korea. Afterwards, I’m told, he patronised the arts, and poured money into the development of the better kind of ‘pop’ in Britain and the US. (It was perhaps this that led him into drugs?) He seems to have taken little interest in the business side of his inherited empire. This also led to problems because the more he amused himself with music and the Californian way of life (he came over in the fifties and more or less settled), the more his business interests began to go wrong. He had some obsession with a particular period in French, and indeed English, history – the time of Joan of Arc and her dashing lieutenant, the Baron Montmorency-Laval, otherwise known as Gilles de Rais, from who he claimed descent. He claimed to have discovered some literary work of this person and spent more and more time and money on this project to the neglect of his family and fortune.

  They were years of tremendous change in the business world, according to my folk, and your father seemed unwilling or unable to come to grips with it. He continued to behave like a baron when he should have been a president. The cash (even his) started to run out, and the more it did, the more he engaged in crazy projects.

  A voice – strangely familiar, though she could not remember from where – interrupted her concentration on the extraordinary story David was telling her.

  ‘There’s this black man. I went to see him at this place in Nice. Like to go along? He just sits and thinks about it and whoosh. You’d go a bundle on it. Weird and wonderful. Know what I mean?’

  Marie turned her head. Her companion from the aeroplane was sitting beside her, gesturing and plucking at her sleeve. It only accentuated her sense of being in a bad dream.

  ‘There you are. Harvey is the name. Thought you were in a trance. I was due for a break so I took a couple of weeks off after the conference. Great place if you know where to go. Got a little apartment up in the hills. Care to come along?’

  Marie shook her head dimly as if talking to a shadow.

  ‘Reading.’ she said. ‘Busy. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Stuck up tart.’

  He said it without rancour.

  She addressed herself again to the letter with its weird combination of David and Oxford essayism.

  It was a strange time in California in the fifties, David told her. ‘There was a growing population of drifters, beatniks and free-love enthusiasts. There were drugs, there was wine. Half of them didn’t know where they were and half of them didn’t care. Your father and his friends started to give parties. He had this castle – it was a real one transported stone by stone from the Loire by some madman years ago – in a remote valley up in the mountains. And word started to get around that some of the kids who went there never came back. As I say, it was difficult to know because no one really knew who was who or where they were at. Hash, LSD, amyl nitrate, coke – minds were blowing all over California. Anyway, some remains were discovered and pretty soon the police were called in, and your father hopped across to Mexico just before they got enough evidence to arrest him. It was said that he was up for no less than forty murder charges and a number of other counts that included rape and kidnap. I’m sorry to have to tell you all this, Marie, but you need to know.

  A couple of his friends were arrested and they testified that your father would take his victims up to a room in the castle, mainly boys around sixteen, seventeen, string them up, sexually assault them and then strangle them. I understand he w
ent from Mexico to San Salvador where he started it up again. But this time they caught him and after a trial, where he first denied everything and then confessed, he was convicted and shot. There was a great deal of publicity about the whole affair. The name Lavell came to be little short of Eichmann as a symbol of evil in those days. It is still remembered.

  My folks are the most liberal people, Marie. But they do not want me to be involved with, let alone marry, the daughter of a monster. They are afraid of bad blood. They will take me away from Oxford, stop their support for my research and disown me if I persist. I love them and I love you. I also love my work. That makes two against one, Marie darling, and I simply don’t have the strength or, I guess, the guts to fight it at the moment. So I must say goodbye. I won’t give you my address or ask for yours. It is better that we don’t see or even write to each other any more. This has been the saddest, oddest letter I’ve ever had to write – and, I guess, that you’ve ever had to read. Please don’t think too badly of me. Believe me, I shall never stop thinking of you and remembering our night under the stars. Your all-too Mephistophelian David.

  The man beside her was babbling something. Words and sentences formed and dissolved in her head. ‘…jeunesse dorée all around. What can you be thinking of? Stood you up, has he?’

  Marie nodded mutely as the tears poured down her face, too numb at the loss of David and the appalling contents of the letter to do anything but weep. She took out the letter and re-read it until her tears started splodging the blue ink and she had to put it away again. Her fragile world had shattered and she could hear the pieces pattering around her. She rose and hailed a passing cab. There was something she had to do. She had to be quite certain.

  ‘Come on, Harvey,’ she said to the man. ‘Get in.’

  ***

  They were all sitting round the pool as the taxi drew up. Then some of them rose to their feet. Only Francesca and Durstine still lay, laughing together. Francesca’s big buttocks, divided by the tight shiny black one-piece, looked strangely metallic, like twin communication transmitters beaming into space. Perhaps it was they who had transmitted to David’s parents the details of her father’s life and death. It was a base enough act. Marie told the taxi to wait, whatever happened, got out of the car and stood fixedly gazing at the buttocks. She was conscious of Hubert and Prelati and the little man Snell advancing upon her. It seemed to take them an age to walk across the grass. Time seemed curiously disjointed, running in fits and starts as though it needed greasing. Hubert was trying to persuade the man and the taxi-driver to go but the man was not to be deflected. Hubert was leading her into the villa. Harvey followed as if he were a paying customer at a walk-in drama or a visitor to a lunatic asylum’s annual pantomime.

  ‘You look pale, my dear. You must have a Cognac.’

  Prelati poured her brandy from the decanter and she tossed it back. There was a sudden false dawn in her throat and stomach.

  ‘Can’t beat a drop of the hard stuff,’ said Snell in a false Irish accent.

  ‘Is it true?’ asked Marie, wildly, looking at them as if they were zookeepers.

  ‘Is what true, my dear?’ asked Hubert.

  ‘Is it true about my father? That he tortured and murdered boys? He was a monster? They shot him? Is it true? IS IT TRUE?’ she shouted.

  The faces exchanged glances, looked grave. Harvey’s eyes flicked between the speakers, Wimbledon-style.

  ‘These are grave matters,’ said Hubert, ‘and perhaps should not be aired in public. I am only thinking of you.’

  ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man,’ she said.

  ‘Who told you this?’ asked Hubert at length.

  ‘Hamlet,’ she said.

  ‘Come, come, my dear. Your father.’

  ‘The king my father…’

  ‘Who told you this about your father?’

  ‘David,’ she said, and burst into tears.

  ‘Aw, c’mon, honey,’ said Prelati, thinking better of proffering his handkerchief and finding a tissue.

  ‘The young man? It was very wrong of him,’ said Brickville.

  She stopped blowing her nose. ‘It was not wrong of him. He was the only one who would tell me the truth. It was right of him.’

  ‘It was wrong of him to tell you, without warning, without … preparation, something your own family for good reason withheld. We didn’t wish to upset you unnecessarily.’

  ‘No one prepared him. If I’d known, I could have done. And you are not my family.’

  ‘I see there is no reasoning with you,’ said Brickville, pursing his lips.

  ‘It is true, then,’ said Marie.

  ‘Yes, it is true,’ agreed Hubert. ‘But I could have wished it to be revealed to you more opportunely. After your eighteenth birthday, I should have told you. But that discussion will have to be postponed. Who were these wicked people who breached such a confidence, who spread such vile…’ he was going to say lies but changed it to

  ‘…rumours?’

  ‘It wasn’t a rumour,’ said Marie, crying again. ‘It was true. Everybody knows now.’

  ‘Perhaps you had better go and lie down, honey,’ suggested Prelati.

  For some reason the suggestion stung her. ‘Lie down?’ she said. ‘I’m not going to lie down. I’m getting out of here. No…’ as Hubert and Snell moved towards her ‘…leave me alone. I’ll kill you.’

  She grabbed a glass jug and swung it wildly.

  ‘Now, now, my dear,’ said Brickville. ‘We don’t want any more killings in the family.’

  She put down the jug and looked at him, at all three of them. ‘I’m going to pack now,’ she said. ‘Don’t try to stop me. I’m going to pack and I’m leaving in that taxi. He’ll hear me scream if you try to stop me.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Hubert, ‘if that is what you wish. Doubtless your money will soon run out and you’ll come back when you’ve had time to reflect. Remember, what I did was for the best. I carried out your aunt’s wishes. Your father’s … fate is not my fault. Meanwhile, may I urge prudence? Find a room by all means. Cannes is full of rooms. Have a good ponder. I believe you’ll find you come around to our – to my – way of thinking. Above all, avoid compromising situations. Cannes is full of compromising situations. Remember there is a certain wildness in the blood.’

  ‘Thank you, Hubert,’ she said. ‘I’m not likely to forget that, am I?’

  While they exchanged glances once more, she left the room.

  Packing took less than five minutes. She simply threw all the essentials and a couple of dresses into a single suitcase, and left the rest for the passionate housekeeper to squeeze into.

  Everybody was lined up in the drive when she came out. Francesca came up to her and threw her arms around her in a Judas-like embrace, squeezing her with her shiny, buttock-like bosoms.

  ‘So long, honey. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. See you soon, I guess.’

  No one made any attempt to stop her. Harvey detached himself from the assembled company and joined her. She and Harvey climbed into the car while the taxi-driver put her case in the back.

  ‘Vous voulez?’ he asked.

  ‘’Sais pas,’ she said. ‘Autre part.’

  The taxi crunched the gravel. No one waved.

  ***

  She had decided to ask the cab to drop her on the Croisette again so she could sit and think some more.

  ‘Chin up, then,’ said Harvey as they slowed down. ‘Tell you what. I’ll buy you a drink at a little place I know. Make you feel better.’

  She allowed him to direct the driver down the road, past the palms and private plages, down towards the public beach and the more regrettable café-bars. She seemed to have no will, and was content to bob along after his whim like a listless dinghy. They turned off the main square and struck up into the old town.

  ‘You’ll love this,’ he assured her as they alighted. ‘Ethnic. You’ll go a bundle on this one.’

  It turned out
to be a perfectly ordinary little bar in a tiny hidden square which held a single tree and five tables.

  The man ordered pastis which she ordinarily disliked but she drained it without even adding water.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re a goer.’

  She was still in a state of shock but after three more pastis she was beginning to feel some return of sensation, chiefly that of the man’s hand on her thigh.

  ‘I like you,’ he said, ‘I really do. Soon as I saw you on the plane, I said “Harvey,” I said, “you’re in luck and no mistakes”. It’s not often I’m moved. Very particular, I am.’

  ‘Could I have another drink, please?’

  ‘Certainly. Garcon!’

  He failed to pronounce the C with a cedilla, and clicked his fingers in a ridiculous travesty of certainty. It seemed to work, for the patron came scurrying out, cocking an inquisitive black olive eye.

  ‘Encore les pastis,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Mais oui, M’sieu.’

  More pastis appeared, this time with a plate of patron’s eyes in oil. Swimminess had now entirely superseded shock in Marie’s sensations.

  ‘But I haven’t introduced myself,’ said Harvey. ‘Harvey Ambrose Sales Manager for the Multifab Organisation. We’re heavily into household products and disposable wipes for kitchen surfaces.’