Songs of Blue and Gold

by Deborah Lawrenson

  He stared intently and, heart thudding, Melissa realised how clever he had been. He had never even asked if her mother had ever been associated with Julian Adie. But somehow the fact of it was under discussion.

  She had nowhere to go but to say, ‘She would not have been party to anything that harmed another person – or even an animal. It was not in her character.’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Simply that . . . she was one of the people who was known to have been with him, the summer it happened.’

  Clenching her hands, remembering Elizabeth’s gentleness, Melissa stared into his thick glasses. Her own reflection coiled tight in each lens.

  ‘What do you know about the Songs of Blue and Gold, Melissa?’

  ‘Songs of blue and gold?’ She had never heard of them.

  Dr Braxton observed her reaction with fierce concentration. ‘Your mother never spoke about them, ever?’

  ‘No.’

  He eased back a little, but in the manner of an actor. ‘What if I were to say to you that Julian Adie confessed?’

  ‘It would mean nothing to me.’

  There was a pause. ‘I am going to give you my card. I would sincerely ask you to consider whether . . . there is a possibility . . . you would allow me to see Elizabeth Norden’s papers.’

  He slid the card across the table. She let it lie there, with its string of academic endorsements and a list of telephone numbers.

  It was only then it occurred to her. ‘How did you get my telephone number?’

  ‘It was on a letter from her to him, in university archives.’

  The number for the bergerie was the same as it had ever been. ‘And her address here too, I suppose?’

  ‘She wrote him many times when he was living in Sommières. She used to go see him there.’

  Melissa felt winded. What else was she about to discover about her mother? How was it that complete strangers knew more of Elizabeth’s life than she did? The questions were profoundly unnerving.

  She stood up, cornered but ready to fight. Somehow she managed to sound almost normal. ‘You will have to let me think about this. And let me do it in my own time. If I am going to help you, I will contact you not the other way round. Do you understand that?’

  He inclined his head. In his beard was a damp pink half-smile like a tiny newborn animal in a nest.

  Melissa drove back to St Cyrice, shaken.

  Would Dr Braxton appear unannounced at the door of the bergerie? He had disturbed her peace of mind, already fragile as it was. She was rattled, and resentful that there was nowhere to hide from him.

  He was looking for papers, but Elizabeth did not have any papers, as such. Not in the sense that he meant. As an academic he seemed to have lost sight of the fact that most people were not like the old writers he studied; they did not keep documents of every encounter, correspondence with other old writers, journals and philosophical exchanges. If any of Elizabeth’s papers did exist, they would only have been records of pictures sold or designs executed in other people’s houses. And these would have been in the house in Kent. But Melissa had cleared the study, the desk with its bulging drawers, the cupboard and the bookshelves. There had been very little of interest to find.

  At six o’clock Melissa phoned Richard.

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  ‘Of course. It was only a couple of meetings. You knew it was always on the cards that I’d have to go back at some stage. At least it’s only as far as Paris. I’ll be back soon.’

  He seemed able to act as if nothing had changed, whereas for her, everything had altered.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ she asked, dreading the answer.

  ‘With any luck,’ he said.

  Dr Martin Braxton. Who was he, and was he trustworthy? Melissa was used to dealing with facts. She was thrown by the messiness, the probable unreliability of human testimony.

  She thought about her own trail to find Elizabeth’s connection to Adie in Corfu. Manolis and Eleni; the memory of their unconditional kindness made her smile. She wondered how Alexandros was, how his trip to Egypt had gone – and what had happened with his wife. She wished she could speak to him. She wanted to tell him about her encounter with Braxton – Alexandros might have provided her with some desperately-needed reassurance, but his number and email address were in a drawer back in England.

  III

  IT WAS EXTRAORDINARY that she had not made the connection before. She had realised, of course, that Sommières – Julian Adie’s last and longest-standing place of exile – was close to Nîmes, but not that it was so close to where she was now.

  But there it was on the Michelin map: mid-way between Montpelier and Nîmes, barely twenty kilometres away: the small town where Adie lived for thirty years.

  If Dr Braxton was in the south of France, this had to be the trail he was following. Melissa had no idea what she was looking for, only that – for Elizabeth’s sake – she had to keep up with him.

  As she had managed so many times before, she put all thoughts of Richard out of her head, and got in the car. Taking the main road across the garrigue, she was in Sommières in a little over half an hour.

  The proud Roman bridge of stone arched across the Vidourle river, each leg with its own elegant smaller arch which reflected in the water as a teardrop. A V-shaped weir broke the water’s smooth glassiness.

  On the hill above, wearing a rolled sleeve of trees, rose a tall defensive tower, square and strong, as if the old town were flexing a bicep, in a warning not to overlook its strength and purpose.

  Melissa turned on to the embankment road and parked.

  The river was green and sluggish. Large brown fish drifted fitfully, until they fought for deeper water near the Bar Vidourle, a café-bar with a terrace across the road hanging over the river.

  Sommières was not a smart little town made bijou for Parisians and northern tourists. This was a place of crumbling stones and fortunes, of tall narrow alleyways, cool and damp, with the smell of drains, built on Roman walls and ramparts. Some of these medieval passages were buttressed by primitive arches of pitted stone; walking through them was a country dance under linked arms.

  These houses had been inhabited for centuries. Generations of families squeezed into damp, angular spaces. In one passage, washing was strung across from an upper window. A history and continuity prevailed, but not the one she was looking for.

  At the ends of alleys were bright snapshots of the streets running across: the red awning of a newsagents bearing the ubiquitous masthead of the Midi Libre; a kebab shop from which came the aroma of grilling meat. On all sides, sun-blistered plaster cracked into mosaic.

  The main square was signposted: La Place Jean Jaurès. Ice-cream parlours and bars reached out to visitors, but the bustle seemed purposeful and home-grown. Above the shops, plaster facades were patched and peeling. Shuttered windows hinted at mysterious interiors.

  Melissa went on through, her eyes drawn upwards. By a church, balustraded terraces rose up to the castle and to the blue ribbon of the sky. Inside, high above, noon’s bright hot light pushed and pulsated through intricate stained glass. She emerged blinking. Opposite, a house formed the corner of the alley, its stucco in such a state of decay that a rusting metal strut was exposed, evidence of previous repairs decades ago. A metal street sign, raw and powdery brown with rust, announced the Rue Docteur Chrestien (1758–1840).

  A screech came from a blue-painted window. Behind a screen of chicken wire was a jungle of willow and olive branches, in the middle of which sat a huge macaw, green and blue, and squawking out its raucous commentary.

  A few steps away hid l’Ancienne Impasse du Paradis. A round sticker of a dollar sign had been smacked on it. Below, a silver spray of graffiti read Screw You in jagged psychotic letters. It had competition across the narrow street, where a great devil head in red snarled from a facing wall, with the legend to the side of one jutting cheekbone: On sort faire des bêt
ises – we go out making mischief.

  She suspected Julian Adie would have been amused by that.

  Then, back in the Place Jean Jaurès, she saw it.

  Stuck to the glass of a shop door was a small poster advertising an exhibition of sculpture, currently running at the Espace Julian Adie.

  She pushed at the door and it opened with a smooth click and the ping of a bell.

  Inside it was a narrow librairie, lined with shelves of magazines and books, stationery and plastic toys. The smell of paper and felt pens brought back breaths of her childhood.

  ‘Can I help?’ The woman behind the counter wore half-moon reading spectacles perched on her head like sunglasses. Her expression managed to convey helpful efficiency as well as abruptness.

  ‘I’d like a street map, please.’

  She indicated a circular stand. ‘We have a selection.’

  Melissa pulled out a couple and chose the one which had the largest scale.

  ‘The arts centre, L’Espace Julian Adie – is it marked on here?’ Melissa asked as the woman handed her some coins in change.

  ‘I’m not sure. May I?’ She opened the map, and reached for a pen. ‘Here.’ She indicated a street near the castle. ‘Would you like me to mark it?’

  ‘Yes, please. Will it be open now?’

  A brief glance at a slip of a watch on her slim wrist. ‘It should be.’

  Melissa thanked her and turned to leave. But as there was no one else in the shop, she took the chance to ask, ‘Excuse me, do people still remember Julian Adie well?’

  The woman pouted slightly, then patted the top of her head as if to reassure herself the glasses were still there. ‘M’sieur Adie, he was a famous English writer. He lived here for many years. But he died . . . oh, fifteen, twenty years ago now.’

  ‘But people here still remember him?’

  ‘The older ones, yes.’ How could it be otherwise, her eyes seemed to say. She was on the point of dismissing her, when she added, ‘There is a small collection of his books and diaries on display there. If you’re interested you should take a look.’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’

  A fractious yapping that can only have come from a small, spoilt dog could be heard the other side of an open door at the back of the librairie, calling its mistress to heel. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming, chéri,’ she cooed.

  Melissa took her cue and left with the map.

  Here and there were building works, the restoration of ancient houses, Chantier interdit au public, as if the public were there in any numbers to press its collective nose against the slats in the wooden barrier.

  On one unprepossessing wooden door was a fly-speckled board showing faded photographs of women wearing feathers and bikinis. It was the portal to an old-fashioned Théâtre-Cabaret, open solely on Saturday nights. The pictures might have been taken thirty years before. The women in the pictures might now be pouchy grandmothers, still bumping and grinding out their routine for the same mechanics and farm workers who had slept with them at eighteen.

  Further on, a bar pumped out pungent curls of Gauloise smoke, and strong coffee.

  A window far above exuded the faint melody of a song she recognised. Her footsteps padded across stone to its rhythm.

  And then, just as she was wondering how much further it was, Julian Adie was right in front of her. A vast banner unfurled his face, half-smiling, down the side of an austere solid stone building. A few steps led up to a cobbled courtyard, where a tall, blue-grey door stood open. Inside that, was L’Espace Julian Adie, the town’s arts centre.

  Melissa went up.

  Through the door was a high vaulted hall in bare brick and stone. The space was filled by metallic sculptures. A thin young woman in a short black tunic stood just inside, by a desk covered in leaflets.

  She looked up but did not smile.

  Melissa did. ‘Hello. I understand you have an exhibition of Julian Adie’s books here?’ She made it a question, for politeness’ sake.

  ‘The permanent exhibition, you mean?’ The girl’s dyed red hair was pulled into untidy sprays of hair by elastic bands. She could not have been more than twenty.

  ‘I think it must be.’

  ‘Over there, in that room.’

  Admission was free, it seemed. Melissa went across the cool floor, past aluminium torsos and agonised zinc corpses. The current sculpture display, she assumed. A small room to the side held a large glass-fronted cabinet, scuffed and chipped at its base where the wood had been pecked out by toecaps over the years.

  It held a miscellany of objects. Prominent was a photograph of Adie with Anais Nin at the Bar Vidourle, the cafe she had noticed on the river embankment, its setting apparently unchanged from thirty years previously. In others Adie was grinning at a blonde woman who looked like his third wife Simone Réjane. Several handwritten notes rather than diaries, in English and French, and a scrawl on a programme for a summer art event in 1975 which stated that Sommières had provided him with the happiest years he had ever known. An edition of The Carcassonne Quartet in French translation, the book that won the prestigious Prix de Grenoble, and another of his Collected Poems, open at the title page to reveal his signature.

  Melissa stared hard, trying and failing to make them tell her something, these bits of paper he had touched or blazed to create. But they were random pieces of paper, nothing more. For about a quarter of an hour, no one else was there. But neither was any sense of immediacy, let alone intimacy.

  When she emerged, the girl by the entrance counter had gone. Melissa was alone with the beaten metal torsos.

  Had Elizabeth come and stood here too, with her own private memories? For now Melissa knew – surely – it was no coincidence that she had chosen a house in France so close to where Adie had made his home. When did my parents buy the bergerie? Which year was that first summer at St Cyrice?

  Lost inside her own head, she hardly registered movement at the periphery of her vision. It was the click of heels on the flagged floor approaching that jolted her back into the present.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked a woman.

  Melissa started.

  It was hard to tell whether the rapped enquiry was an offer to impart information about an artist, or concern for a tourist who had strayed out of her depth and looked uncomfortable. She was not tall – hence the stilettos, perhaps – and wore a laminated badge on the lapel of her tailored blue suit, ‘Mme Delphine MASSENET’ along with an air of authority.

  ‘Yes,’ said Melissa, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

  ‘It seemed as if you wanted to ask something.’ Mme Massenet’s tone was matter-of-fact rather than unfriendly.

  ‘Well, actually, I would.’

  She waited, head tilted. The olive skin across her proud cheekbones was smooth and plump.

  ‘I was interested in your permanent exhibition – Julian Adie’s life and work.’ Melissa used the grandiose terms the little display had claimed for itself and tried to keep the disappointed edge out of her voice.

  ‘You know his work?’

  She nodded. ‘I was wondering, as I’m here in Sommières, if you could tell me where his house was?’ It struck her as she said it, that had Adie still been alive, the request could well have been received with suspicion. A stalker’s question. A deranged fan.

  ‘Monsieur Adie’s house? Across the bridge, on the western side of town. Route de Saussines.’

  Pointed in the right direction, Melissa had no doubt she would find it easily. When Adie bought the house it was the largest in the village, the maison de maître. It was a great shuttered nineteenth-century mausoleum straight from the pages of Flaubert. His family named it the Vampire House. There was a photograph of it in the biography.

  ‘Thank you, madame.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I don’t suppose . . .’ she began, then hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was thinking . . . obviously Monsieur Adie is remembered here,’ Melissa waved
a hand around to show she meant the arts centre. ‘But I assume there must be people here in the town who remember him as friends . . .’ She tailed off, unwilling to say what she really wanted. It seemed too presumptuous.

  Madame Massenet visibly raised herself on her heels. ‘I knew him.’

  ‘Well, that’s marvellous—!’

  There was an awkward moment as Melissa’s sudden enthusiasm met her equally unexpected blankness.

  Melissa opened her mouth to say something, anything, when Madame Massenet interrupted. ‘You really need to speak to Annick.’

  ‘Annick,’ Melissa repeated. ‘Is she here? I mean, could I speak to her here?’

  ‘She’s in and out.’

  It was not helpful. This was proving an odd encounter. Yet probably no odder than her questions – or did they have hundreds of people each year, sidling in, faintly embarrassed in their British way, of revealing their interest in a compatriot who wrote books, and some of them dirty ones at that? To this woman, Melissa must have been one more in a long line of tourists, crumpled clothes limp and big feet splayed in shoes suitable for pounding the ancient cobbles and climbing steps.

  ‘I enjoyed the exhibition,’ she said, trying to reinstate their previous roles.

  Madame Massenet nodded, as if dismissing her.

  Melissa was almost at the door before she called out. ‘We have a literary evening here tomorrow. A French author, Gilles Barreau. Annick will be here if you want to find her.’

  ‘Thank you, madame.’

  The girl was back at the counter as she passed. She caught Melissa’s eye and held up an index finger to make her wait a second. Flicking through a sheaf of pamphlets, she extracted a simple flyer. ‘Une soirée avec Gilles Barreau,’ it announced.

  ‘The time is on there,’ she said, handing it over.

  Annick. The name was familiar but just out of reach, like a tune which once haunted and now cannot quite be pinned down. Was she imagining its resonance, mistaking the name of a film star or a parfumier, perhaps, for the answer she wanted?

  Excitement stirred. Melissa walked faster and faster back to the car. Now, again, it was just possible to conjure the spirit of Julian Adie, to picture him on that corner, or disappearing down that alley.