The other woman, waiting under the trees, is excited.
The prose is urgent, the images sickening, obscene in places. Braxton would love to claim this as the final confession, he says, but stops short. Even he admits the danger of assuming a work of fiction must necessarily be an insight into the author’s own thoughts. As we have seen so many times, Adie was a man who used his experiences in his work, but the result was never the whole truth.
So, in his reassessment of Julian Adie, Dr Braxton asserts that he and Elizabeth Norden were implicated in Veronica Rae’s death. He strongly implies (but does not go quite so far as to claim conclusively) that Julian Adie killed Veronica Rae.
His claim that Julian Adie was never to see Elizabeth again after their separate departures from Corfu that summer is, strictly speaking, untrue although in essence, he is correct. Moreover, Braxton’s claim that this sudden rupture was due to Veronica Rae’s death, indicating some form of guilt, perhaps joint, perhaps individual, cannot easily be dismissed.
‘My life is all there, in the books and poems,’ Adie once said, and my mother wrote out that quote in her diary for 1979. I cannot tell how literally she took it.
Perhaps this does explain how Elizabeth became the person I knew as my mother, how it squares with what I understood at the time. When I think back to those years at St Cyrice, I have to peel back layers of my own. Most of the memories are of my preoccupations such as swimming and making camps in the woods with village friends, mending my bicycle or finding someone else’s father to do it for me. She is there, of course, at the table in the kitchen, or working the garden, but she is at the periphery of the main picture, which is of myself, as a child, coming back to the bergerie hungry and dusty, asking what’s for supper.
If Elizabeth had been red-eyed or weeping when I returned, naturally I would have known she was unhappy. But she was not. My mother was herself: calm and capable, slow to show annoyance. The bergerie was clean and bright. She prepared delicious, adventurous food for us to try, chatting about the markets she’d been to and what she had found there, the people she’d spoken to. She drove off on her own expeditions to churches and cheese-makers, brocantes for cheap old furniture which she could sand down and paint. All I can conclude is that, yes, it was possible – in practical terms – for her to have been the person Annick described haunting the streets of Sommières because she had the transport, and the opportunity while I was happily in the company of the neighbours’ children. If I were asked whether I recognised that person, I would unhesitatingly deny it. Yet she was. I have her word for it.
It is true, now I think hard, that we were almost always alone in the evenings, and that she could be very quiet. At the time that did not seem cause for concern. She read a great deal.
I never heard the name Julian Adie from her. Not even when the newspapers were full of his name and the terrible suicide of his second daughter Hero, his ‘Egyptian child’ who hanged herself in 1985 using a pair of silk stockings just as the character of Adele had done in his novel. My mother never uttered a word when the column inches subsequently poured out, picking over Adie’s malign effect on the women who had loved him.
It must have been just as well that she never spoke of him. Imagine how our circumstances might have unfolded if the use of his name had been easy and familiar. It is hard not to conclude that Elizabeth was better off without him, whichever version of his life you wanted to believe. What for her began as a disappointment, many would interpret as nothing less than a lucky escape.
There is another quality she had, which I did not fully appreciate at the time, and that was her quiet determination. It carried her through her marriage to my father to self-sufficiency and a second successful career. It ensured we both held our heads high. It would also ensure she saw Julian Adie just once more.
In 1990 Julian Adie was found dead in his bath, a bottle of rough red wine spilled on the floor, and a bunch of black grapes clinging plumply to the lip of the tub. In his throat, always so busy, always producing words with such brio in life, was lodged a large, whole grape.
For many months afterwards, a rumour ran that a woman had been seen wild-faced and driving erratically away from the house in a small white car at the time of death. The tale was never proved anything but apocryphal although it would have been all too easy to believe.
Before I left France that summer, I did find his house in Sommières. I went on foot this time, knowing I must have missed it first time in the car. Behind high walls it stood, closer to the Roman bridge than I’d expected, the building proud, well-maintained and now divided into apartments. A new road clips the edge of its territory. No longer is there a vineyard to the side, but a municipal football pitch, and to the front, fine wrought-iron gates which open onto the glorious vista of a vast parking lot and a Champion hypermarket.
The picture I was left with was not the golden young romantic on his island, but the gnarled traveller at the end of his journey, and with him only ghost companions. The sensuous pagan who had tried to disengage time had grown old. Not a bad man, but a lost one.
As I stood outside those gates, I thought too of my mother: the summers at St Cyrice and the secret patterns of her life; all those years when I had no idea of her state of mind or intentions. The woman who had come to this great bourgeois house with only the skin and bones of her hopes, was completely different from the mother who cared for me. I had thought it had been just the two of us for so long, I had no concept that there was another person who was with us all the time, informing her decisions, clouding her thoughts and drawing on her compassion. I was there with her, at the time, and yet I did not know.
I knew nothing of the gaps in my knowledge. When I finally realised, and set out to try to fill them, I had to look for Julian Adie first. My search was made all the harder by a poignant imbalance: profound though his impact on her life was, she barely registered in his. It may well have been due to Dr Braxton’s approaches to her during the previous months that my mother gave me the book with the inscription. Peraps I misjudged what I should do with it. In retrospect I wonder whether all she wanted was for me to take it away and lose it somewhere, which was what usually happened to books she lent me.
Travelling in Adie’s footsteps, I pieced together a sad and surprising story which told me a little more about her character than I knew already, although nothing that would alter it profoundly, and a great deal more about myself.
In re-evaluating her life, I discovered a more complex version not only of her personal history but of our joint history. To push the theory further, perhaps that is the point of biography: by reading the lives of others we are only ever trying to find points of reference for ourselves. Their journeys are our own.
Part Eight: Medusa
I
BELL COTTAGE FELT like the inside of a dark cold shell as Melissa went through it room by room. Cupboards and drawers were cleared to bare wood, and furniture labelled for removal.
‘So you’re really selling, then?’
Leonie came down one Sunday. She said it was to help pack boxes, but Melissa knew it was more than that.
‘Yes. It’s . . . a good offer. A family with three children, moving down from south London. They’re really keen. It wouldn’t be practical for me to live here. Especially not on my own.’
Leonie looked around at the long low rooms. The chill of solitude had settled over every surface. ‘No . . .’
More boxes from the flat in Morpeth Terrace, their provenance clearly marked, were stacked against one wall in the hall. They had arrived a week before and not been invited further in. Soon they would be sorted and repacked for storage along with all the others.
‘The divorce is going through,’ Melissa told her. ‘I want it done as quickly as possible.’
Leonie gave a sad frown.
‘I’m fine – really. It’s not great . . . but it’s OK. At least now I really know where I stand.’
So many words and actions at odds with eac
h other which she would not now have to disentangle. No more doubting of her own understanding of a promise or a situation. Never again will I let a man try to control me, blame me for everything so that he could be absolved.
Leonie hugged her. ‘You’re doing so well. I’m so proud of you.’
Melissa nodded. She was proud of herself too, though warily so. She should have heard the snapping sinews of the failed marriage sooner – should never have given him the second chance – but had to comfort herself with the knowledge that she had tried her hardest. She had pushed the anger that came with it into a different channel and now she was trying to keep thinking positively.
‘I’m going to buy somewhere in London. That’s the plan at any rate.’
‘What about work?’
‘Well, there’s a possibility of a contract job at the British Library. You remember my friend Joe Collins? He put me on to it.’
‘That’s good.’
‘It’s just a possibility. Meanwhile there’s plenty to do here. I want to see the sale through before I commit myself to anything. I can manage.’
Leonie held back.
Melissa sensed what she was thinking, though. The madness of those weeks in France when anything seemed possible, because there was so much she did not know, when the past was a place of excuses and misinterpretations, of disconcerting discoveries, and whispered half-truths, stories and sighs, and being caught in the crossfire.
‘Julian Adie – he never could have been my father.’
‘No.’
‘I was clutching at straws.’
She listened intently, without interjecting, as Melissa told her about Elizabeth’s papers, and a brief version of the story they related.
‘That’s . . . good,’ she said at last.
‘Yes . . . it is.’
‘But?’
As relieved as Melissa was, she knew Leonie was right. She was still holding out. There were issues yet to be resolved.
What she missed most of all, now she was in possession of the main story, was the chance of an explanation of all the minor ones; the semi-absorbed stories left hanging in the void in the absence of dates and facts. Who exactly was the great-uncle (or second cousin, maybe) who joined a troupe of actors and made for America, or the one who dropped to his death between two great ships in harbour in New York? Where, exactly, was the obscure ancestral line supposedly come down from William Wordsworth? Now that Elizabeth was gone, there was little chance of joining the dots.
Fighting introspection and in need of his good sense, she met Bill Angell for lunch in a quiet restaurant in Tunbridge Wells.
They had a corner to themselves which accentuated the private atmosphere. Melissa expanded on all she had learned while she had been away.
Bill listened intently, straight-backed and kindly, and suppressed a smile when she told him about the locked library of books at the bergerie, many of which, she surmised, he must have sourced. She expected him to say that he had no idea of the story she had discovered, but he did not. With anyone else she might have asked bluntly whether he had known more than he had admitted, but she suspected she already knew the answer. He was a traditionalist of that generation that sets great store by respecting a confidence.
‘I finally found out how she came to have the book of poems, signed to her,’ said Melissa. ‘It was all there in her diary.’
The main course was cleared and Bill waved a hovering waitress away with polite authority.
‘She went up to London to see him. Adie’s Collected Poems had just been published.’
A slight frown deepened the lines on Bill’s forehead as if he was trying to remember something. ‘So that would have been – when?’
‘Early autumn 1980.’
‘She wasn’t still seeing him then, surely?’ asked Bill, sceptically.
‘No . . . It was a book signing at Hatchard’s.’
Melissa could recall almost verbatim what Elizabeth had written in the densely packed pages of uncharacteristically jagged handwriting describing how she saw the event advertised in The Times: the author would be signing copies of his Collected Poems, long-awaited and complete with a lithograph by Barbara Hepworth on the front cover, at two o’clock on 7 October at Hatchard’s on Piccadilly.
‘There had been reviews in the Sunday papers and a lengthy and serious evaluation of his life and work in the Observer,’ said Melissa. ‘It brought it all back to her. Then she heard him on the radio and she made up her mind to go.’
Sensing that Bill wanted details as much as she herself wanted to go over them again, Melissa set the scene. How Elizabeth agonised over the timing of her arrival (should she arrive early before he tired of all the strange faces and small talk, or wait until the end when the crowd was dispersing and he might be more relaxed?) and how she should dress. She wanted it to seem as if it was a careless encounter, taking her by surprise as much as him.
In the taxi from Charing Cross, she almost asked the driver to turn back. She felt exposed, as if she were going to make a monumental fool of herself. But she had to do it. It was the only way she was going to make contact.
‘When she walked into Hatchard’s the first thing she saw was a poster with his photograph,’ said Melissa. ‘It had been twelve years since she had seen him last. Again, she almost turned back then. She had forgotten all the things she had rehearsed to say. There was so much she wanted to ask, it was like a compulsion to see him. But she knew at the same time she wouldn’t be able to say any of the important things. It was an impossible situation.’
‘But she wouldn’t have left it there, would she?’ said Bill.
He knew her mother well. Melissa was only beginning to realise how well. In Elizabeth’s description of what happened next she was brutally honest about her own apprehension, how she held back when she found where Adie was. She heard his inimitable laughter first. A crowd of people was enclosing a desk where he was sitting. He made some quip, and there were more chuckles. ‘What I dreaded was that he would recoil from me – even worse than not knowing who I was. I could imagine those eyes, those cut sapphire eyes clouding to enamel.’
‘No, she wouldn’t have backed out, not after everything that had happened,’ said Melissa. ‘She had tried for years to see him in Sommières and been denied this.’
In her head she could see Elizabeth edging forward, the knot of people pulling apart. And there he was: Julian Adie like a little yacht in full sail, throwing his arms out and laughing. Just like Elizabeth remembered him: irrepressible life-giver, the sensualist, the performer – back in himself again. He had left the gloomy peasant persona behind in the Languedoc.
‘She hung back, pretending to examine a book, keeping him in the corner of her eye as he signed and chatted. Then she went forward.’ Her body had taken the decision, in the same way she first jumped as a child from a high diving board. Her subconscious made the move. ‘Suddenly she was standing in front of him.’
Bill’s eyes were misting. ‘Did he recognise her?’
‘No. He wasn’t even looking up properly. He was pulling a book off the pile to sign. “Thank you so much for coming,” that sort of stuff. He was giving her the eye and he had no idea who she was.’
Melissa paused, wondering how much to excise from her mother’s intimate account. She felt protective of Elizabeth’s pathetic whisper to Adie, ‘We met once – some years back.’ And the element of farce when she was immediately interrupted by a woman like a well-upholstered barrel who pressed against her back and pushed a book at Adie. ‘Do you mind?’ she said to them both. ‘I don’t have long. Thank you so much. “To Kathleen” if you please. She did like your Egyptian books. Can’t say they were my cup of tea, if you don’t mind my saying. I like a less complicated story. But Kathleen likes that kind of thing.’
On the restaurant table Bill clasped his hands as if to reassure himself. He too seemed upset, feeling empathy with Elizabeth. ‘He must have known who she was – that can’t have been it!’
<
br /> ‘Not quite,’ said Melissa. ‘Adie signed someone else’s book and when he turned back to my mother he seemed to see her for the first time. She reminded him of her name and he gave her a wonderful smile. His eyes creased. The hand went through the hair in the old gesture. He remembered, there was no doubt about it. He told her how attractive she was looking. And she was grinning back, but he didn’t say anything more.’
Bill was absolutely still, listening.
‘She watched his hand as he signed her book. She wrote that it was tattooed with dark age spots.’ Melissa stopped there, sparing Bill the details of how it had made Elizabeth feel to remember the touch of it on her own brown skin, the scent of pines and baked earth. But from his expression, he might already have made the connection.
‘My mother started to say how pleased she was to see him but Adie cut her off. His voice was impersonal again, thanking her for her interest. But she could see his pen moving over the title page of the book though she couldn’t see what it was he was writing.
‘The shop was getting busier. A swarm of book buyers was pressing in on her with their bags and elbows and umbrellas. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said to Adie. And his reply was: ‘So sorry you had to wait.’
‘She was so sure it was a deliberate misunderstanding. She thought how subtle he was, and how like him. The tone of his voice – was there a hint of the old warmth and intimacy, perhaps a tiny hint of mischief? He loved secrecy, the thrill of the illicit. It was such a game to him. He was writing more than just his name.
‘When he had finished Adie handed the book to her, closed.
‘She knew it would be indelicate to read it while she was still in the shop, but he had written her a message, she was sure of it. After all the years she would have her chance to meet him again, and to understand at last what had really happened that night in Corfu.
Songs of Blue and Gold Page 29
