The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  There was an impenetrable pause before Holdsworth answered. ‘There is but … she has not been well.’

  ‘Say, that’s too bad. Would she like to come and have a quiet drink with us? Or lunch or something?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but that’s out of the question.’

  Marie liked the look of the young man. He reminded her slightly of the young man with the truck. She started to rap at the window. Holdsworth looked up and his face went an unpleasant mottled colour. He turned the young couple round and got them into their car in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

  When Felix returned he gave her a long lecture. The Holdsworths were her friends as well as caretakers of the house. She must not embarrass them. He took the key away. He hoped it was not going to be necessary to send her to a home. There was a very good one, he believed, in Santa Monica.

  ‘Full of film stars,’ he said.

  ‘But I am in a home.’

  ‘This is your home. The home I am talking about is rather less home-like. But it may be necessary to accelerate your care.’

  This finally brought her up short. ‘But you said you loved me. You said this was my home. I don’t want another home.’

  ‘It would be for your own good, darling. You are becoming uncontrollable. I heard you thrashing about the other night and groaning.’

  That must have been the young man in the truck, thought Marie. He was making his way in rather regularly.

  ‘I will be better,’ she promised. ‘See if I’m not.’

  She wanted to do what would make him happy. He had done so much for her. She quietened down so considerably that they stopped giving her many of her medicaments and let her out into the garden where she wandered vaguely about.

  ‘She has stabilised,’ she heard them say.

  It made her sound like a land-yacht. Yes, she was a skimmer now, no deep thought, no port of departure or destination, just an endless stable trundle around this sea of plastic green. It was better this way.

  She watched old films on the television a great deal. She swam, lay in the sun, ate what she liked and grew quite fat. It was like being a superior kind of battery hen only there were no eggs. Not a day passed without the thought of her child crossing her mind, but there was nothing she could do. She rather thought Felix had not believed her when she said she’d had a baby. He regarded it as a phantom, part of her sickness.

  As for her father – the architect of her misfortunes; monster and failure – she wished she could cut him out of her, that she could have all her blood changed. She asked the Holdsworths.

  ‘Can I have all my blood changed?’

  They looked at her askance.

  ‘Blood is not oil as in an engine,’ said Mrs Holdsworth. ‘One does not change blood. Ugh! What a mess!’

  ‘Not unless there is a very good reason,’ said Mr Holdsworth.

  ‘I have a very good reason,’ said Marie.

  ‘What is your good reason?’

  But she could not bring herself to say. They reported her aberration to Felix.

  ***

  Her twenty-fourth birthday on the old Midsummer’s Day, June the twenty-fourth, the most magical day in the year, was celebrated with champagne for Felix and the Holdsworths, but not for her, as it would have interacted adversely with her medication. Felix gave her some diamond earrings.

  As a special treat, they took her, wearing her earrings, for a drive in the Bentley Corniche. Holdsworth took the wheel. What fun it was. How they rolled along! People in the suburbs waved when they saw the old Bentley and the earrings.

  ‘A change of scene is good,’ said Felix.

  They trundled sedately down avenues fringed with well-heeled grass where similar houses nestled amid recommended foliage.

  ‘I bet they don’t have pleached walks,’ said Marie, with a sudden memory of a castle.

  ‘They don’t even know what a pleach is,’ said Felix

  ‘I don’t suppose they even know the meaning of quincunx?’

  ‘What is the meaning of quincunx?’

  ‘It is a group of five trees arranged as four in each corner of a square with another tree in the middle.’

  ‘We shall have some in the garden. Holdsworth!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Felix?’

  ‘Order a quincunx.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Felix.’

  ‘There you are, my dear. You only have to ask.’

  Holdsworth asked to make sure she had got the name right, and would she write it down. She did so, specifying medlars. Next day fifteen medlar trees arrived. It struck her as being the definitive symbol of the absurdity of her life in the house in Beverly Hills where time and indeed life itself seemed to have no meaning.

  ***

  And so the months passed, sliding like care-home trolleys, one into the other, carefully stacked, summer into autumn, autumn into winter – Christmas was celebrated in the minor key, champagne was opened and she was allowed a thimbleful – winter into spring. Her carers were slowly reducing the medication, they told her, but she still felt as though she were living behind Perspex. The idea of escape gradually formed in her mind. Her predicament was not dissimilar to her stay with the Izzards, at least there was no fist; but in a way what there was, was worse. She wandered about the garden, hatching vague plans and taking in the terrain.

  The front gate, which gave on to a discreetly winding tree-lined avenue was electrically operated, very high and shut. It opened and closed, with two halves meeting in the middle, like the mouth of a crocodile, which welcomed little fishes in with gently smiling jaws. There was a camera, mounted to monitor who came and went, and there was wiring across the bars of the gates, which looked as if it could provide a nasty shock if the monitor didn’t like the sight of you.

  Marie looked at the gate. The monitor looked at her. ‘Open sesame,’ she said.

  Mr Holdsworth appeared as if by magic, asking if there was anything wrong.

  ‘Nothing wrong. Where does the road lead?’

  ‘To Beverly Hills, Miss.’

  The name seemed familiar. ‘Where’s that? Is that a person?’

  Mr Holdsworth permitted himself a slight smile. ‘You must be the only person in America who doesn’t know where Beverly Hills is.’

  ‘Or are.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Marie?’

  ‘Beverly Hills plural. Where Beverly Hills are.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see. It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, fractionally losing patience as well as grammar, ‘it just don’t that’s all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Beverly Hills,’ he began again carefully, as if ashamed of his lapse, ‘is – or are – a place in California outside the city of Los Angeles.’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘You must ask Mr Felix that. You have been unwell. The climate here is very good. May I suggest the garden might provide a pleasanter outlook for you if the gardener were to put in a pleached walk at the back.’

  Later she asked Felix the same question. ‘Why am I here?’

  Images, more and more, kept coming and going in her mind. It was as if she were surrounded by all manner of things she might know but that were hidden from her in a cloud of debris, or ‘debree’ as the Americans said.

  ‘You are here because you have been unwell, my dear. The climate here is very good. Besides, I have work in Los Angeles. The Other Judas – TOJI – owns a great deal of real estate in Television City. Have you seen the pleached walk the gardener has put in?’

  Suddenly there was something coming out of the debree that she recognised. A pleached walk! A pleached walk at … a castle. She held on to it. Felix noticed the change in her expression. It made him look sharply at her.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’

  Something stopped her telling him. It was too vague. She didn’t want to raise his hopes.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘We don’t want you
overdoing things.’

  ‘I’m all right. Really. Better every day. I shall walk in the pleached walk gathering pleaches.’

  ‘That’s great, honey. But you’ve still got to take it easy. You have all your life ahead of you. You’ve had a tough time. Relax.’

  She could spend the rest of her life taking it easy, relaxing. She thought about it for a moment. It had not been easy so far.

  ‘Why is the gate so high?’

  ‘So people won’t get in.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they get in?’

  ‘Because they might want to do us harm … steal things … We are very rich, honey. There are seriously envious people out there.’

  ‘J’ai envie de toi,’ she said.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Something the French say. It means “I want you”, not “I envy you”.’

  He seemed pleased with her progress. ‘If only more people would like and not envy,’ he said.

  She was fortunate to be with such a kind, rich man, Mrs Holdsworth said.

  ***

  Another day when she was in the garden, strolling, doing nothing in particular, waiting for the end of the morning – waiting for the end of the world – when there would be lunch and then a sleep which would take her well towards evening and another day would bite the dust, she saw Mr Holdsworth instructing a workman, a tree surgeon with a motorised saw. He was showing him where to cut the yard-thick, unnaturally green natural hedge, which bordered the property, separating the garden from the next house’s immaculate lawn.

  ‘What sort of hedge is that, Mr Holdsworth?’ she asked, approaching the two men.

  She knew Mr Holdsworth liked questions about his garden.

  ‘It is a wax-leaf privet,’ he replied, giving her a wintry glance. ‘We can remember its name because it gives us privetcy.’ It was the nearest she had ever heard him get to a joke, but still he did not smile. Felix paid him not to smile. Felix was allergic to smiles.

  Instructions to the garden operative complete, Holdsworth retired to the house to continue his gloomy offices. These consisted of attending to the fax machine which now and then spewed out instructions and information; running errands for Mrs Holdsworth who was, for a woman who favoured a put-upon expression, errand-heavy; and doing small repair and upkeep jobs around the property. None of these were as much fun for him as monitoring Marie, which was hardly a full day-job since she slept through much of it – but it was this supervisory activity which loomed large in his regime, only exceeded by his duties at the fax machine. It gave him a challenge and a purpose to see what she was up to and also, she had begun to think, it provided him with some kind of voyeuristic satisfaction. She sometimes had the feeling that he came into her room while she was sleeping and monitored her there, monitoring her underwear, although she locked the door.

  It was a measure of her fiancé’s new confidence in her recuperation that she was allowed now to be in the garden at the same time as an outsider like a tree surgeon, but it seemed to make Holdsworth nervous. He moved in and out of the house like a Mr Noah on a day of April showers. The fact that instructions had apparently been issued by Felix to be less obtrusive made him more nervous still.

  He let his feelings be known to Marie, talking to her as if she were a wall.

  ‘I can be obtrusive or I can be unobtrusive, there is no middle way,’ he said.

  The middle way left him on edge. A telephone started to ring inside the house and a shrill voice pushed a cry, summoning him indoors.

  The arborist started the motor on his saw, as if in acoustic sympathy, and began to nibble up the wax-leaf privet. It made quite a racket, but Marie approached the fellow – he was on the elderly side, stubbly, with a peaked hat and sad eyes – and she smiled at him. The hedge reminded her of a dream long ago when she had played a game of hiding from the grown-ups. The operative showed interest in her approach.

  It turned out the operative was deaf, but she managed to persuade him with hand signals that she wanted him to cut a niche in the hedge, by the fence, which, when she squeezed into it, would make her invisible to the ever-seeing eye that swept the lawn, while allowing her to see through the fence to the outside. Not that she had any particular outsider she especially wanted to talk to, apart from the elusive boy with the truck, but it was good to know she could if the opportunity arose.

  She had played like this when she was a little girl, hide and seek with the grown-ups – although they usually didn’t know they were playing – and now they had made her a child again. The man, evidently an artist in his way, caught on immediately; perhaps he had been asked to do the same thing many times in other predicaments. Anyway, he carved the most unnoticeable little cubby-hole you could imagine. It was simply asking for her to slip into it, though she realised that it must not be a regular retreat or it would be discovered.

  Perhaps the young man with boxes might come by again, or a star like Kirk Douglas, or someone like Roman Polanski. This was Hollywood, wasn’t it? Though it had shown few signs of its celebrity-quotient so far. Not so much as a bit part in Ben Hur had come by, so far as she knew. Of course, they might have come by and she hadn’t seen them, in which case they might as well not have come by at all.

  She slipped into the niche now, just to try it, and found it would do very well indeed – but then she heard Holdsworth calling. Luckily he was looking in the wrong direction when she emerged, and when he looked back she was lying on the grass behind the operative’s hand-cart.

  ‘Let’s go to hell on your hand-cart,’ she said to the operative, but he was dumb and could not speak, although he twirled his hands like the Lady Jingly Jones.

  ‘Ah. There you are,’ said Holdsworth.

  ‘I do so love this garden,’ she told him, ‘and the smell of the grass and the cuttings of the wax-leaf privet.’

  He allowed himself a thin opening of the mouth, the nearest he ever got to a smile – the garden was his pride, but not his joy, since joy was not on the Holdsworth menu of emotions. He didn’t spot the niche at all. He went back into the house again. Marie renewed her conversation with the operative and motioned to him that she wanted him to cut a tunnel through the vegetation that would emerge at the other end of the hedge, nearer the house, but right up against the fence the property shared with its neighbour. That way, she thought, I can puzzle the Holdsworths all the more: sometimes here and sometimes there, tripping hither, tripping thither, nobody knows why or whither. Just a little bit of fun, which was in short supply. She had had tunnels in the laurel hedges in the castle gardens back at home, all the way down to the lumpy tennis court – a good place to eavesdrop on the grown-ups when there were any around.

  The man received the idea with enthusiasm. She motioned to him that it should not be observable. It was a game. It could be their little secret. She smiled at him again, and he made the most perfect little tunnel you could imagine. She had expressly gestured to him that it should not be visible from the outside. It was just the sort of tunnel Alice’s White Rabbit would run down. So before the man packed up and went his way, she gave him a little kiss which made his arboreal day, although he too tried to look up her frock which was not part of the arboreal plan.

  ‘I don’t like you looking out on to the road too much,’ Holdsworth said, when he came out. ‘It gives people the wrong idea.’

  What would be the right idea, she wondered.

  ‘It’s good for me to see a little life,’ she told him. ‘Mr Middelburg wants me to find more energy. I draw energy from life. The passing cars, the trees, the breeze, the people, the animals…’

  ‘Watch them but do not talk to them. We do not want to have to turn people away.’

  He spoke about her as if she were an attraction at a fair.

  ‘I am not the fattest lady in the world,’ she told him.

  It was as if she had never spoken.

  She came out onto the lawn near the fence quite regularly now, sketching and pretending to be sketching. She had
asked for pencils, crayons, watercolours, art paper. They had even bought her an easel. Sometimes she turned around and painted the house and sometimes she painted the houses across the road, and at odd moments she hid in the wax-leaf privet hedge and enjoyed the moment of power it gave her to be invisible.

  Sometimes she drew the young man who came to her in the night, but she took care to hide the drawings in the wax-leaf privet.

  ***

  One day when Holdsworth was tending a flurry of paper from the fax machine and Marie was leaning her elbows on the fence, well hidden from the house and looking out across the road to the opposite neighbour’s garden beside it, she was reflecting – not for the first time – how everything in LA looked too perfect. Even the grass, like the hedge, looked artificial, and wasn’t.

  ‘Too blue, too tender was the sky,

  The air too soft, too green the sea.

  Always I fear, I know not why,

  Some lamentable flight from thee,’ she said.

  The words floated into her mind like pollen. It was a translation of a Verlaine poem by Dowson. The English mistress at school had been one of the better nuns. She’d said Verlaine was somewhat regrettable. Marie found she was talking and quoting to herself quite often these days. The advantages of talking to yourself, she thought, was that you could always be sure of a sympathetic ear.

  ‘Wine and woman and song,

  Three things garnish our way,

  Yet is day over long.’