All life is random. All life is absurd. A snap of the fingers and it's gone. A shooting star is already dead by the time we see its light. There is no reason, no purpose; except reproduction. The animals know that. Our cells know that. Sibylle Durfort's last exposition was in Villebleven, sixty kilometres from Beaune. She had hung the show with her new work. The catalogue had gone out. It was January 2000. A new year. A new millennium. Snow coating the hills. Ice on the road. She skidded at speed, the car struck a tree and she broke her neck.
C'est la vie.
Such is life. Such is death. These things happen and when they happen it seems in some strange way as if they were meant to happen, that synchronicity has an eerie will of its own. The conjunction of the car, the ice and the tree rely on the human element – an excess of speed, alcohol, fatigue, the gift of self-determination that makes us the masters of our own fleeting pause upon the planet.
Forty years before, almost to the day, Albert Camus, at the age of forty-six, was the passenger in a car that likewise hit a tree outside Villebleven. Like Sibylle Durfort, he died instantly from a broken neck. The coincidence – celebrated author, celebrated artist – turned the mills of the national press, and they kept on turning. A book was published a year later. A production company acquired film rights. Was it an accident or suicide? Had someone tampered with the car brakes? Who was Kamarovsky, that éminence grise whose name appeared in blood on the Durfort canvases? There was no note, just an abiding mystery, an unquenchable suspicion.
No doubt because her mother was showing in Villebleven, Marie-France had received at Christmas a copy of Camus's L'Étranger. Was it coincidence, to use that fateful term again, that I, at the same time, was reading The Outsider, the English translation? Or is this particular novel a life experience that girls of a certain age and class inevitably meet, a reminder, like menstruation, of the absurdity of life and the irrationality of death?
The Outsider explores the premise that man's search for the meaning of life makes no sense in a world devoid of eternal truths or values. Meursault, the book's antihero, is a lowly French clerk who kills an Arab on the beach without apparent motive and is condemned more for absurd than rational reasons. The novel is a wake-up call, the moment for putting childish pleasures behind you, and, once awake, you never go fully back to sleep again.
I felt sick. The red wine had turned sour in my stomach. While Tom told the story it was hard to focus on the lives of Sibylle Durfort, Camus, of Villebleven, a minute dot on the map. I could only think about Marie-France. While she was fifteen, I was fifteen. She had a brother four years younger than her, as do I. Tom was four years younger than his sister. We were boxes within boxes. Russian dolls. We were joined by geometry, a cat's cradle of curving looping lines of invisible thread. We were finger puppets with someone else's finger in our rectums. Marionettes with palms and soles connected to strings and we danced to tunes we could almost but not quite hear. All that I was and all that I did was charted and tainted by the inevitable, an inescapable connection to providence. We are free to choose, but choice is hidden within the cage of luck and happenstance.
Kamarovsky became the children's guardian. The housekeeper and English nanny maintained continuity and the earth circled the sun, or was it the sun that circled the earth to mark the movement of time? Marie-France joined Le Conservatoire de Lyon. She grew a long fringe to conceal her eyes and hid herself in her music. The death of her mother had given her focus and sealed her destiny as a concert cellist. Nicolas moved to Paris to live with an aunt and attended boarding school where he wet the bed and wrote long letters to his sister that she never read. They saw each other during the holidays at Grand-Moulin and, late at night, with the moon's glow seeping through the shutters the pitter-patter of footsteps echoed once more along the upstairs passage.
They met at a concert in Paris. Tom had just joined Médecins Sans Frontières. Marie-France was quarter part of an all-girl quartet playing to raise funds for the charity. They had both entered new phases of their lives and were drawn together as stars are drawn by the pull of the moon. They met again two weeks later when she performed in London and while the two violins and viola travelled back to Paris, the cello stayed. They found a flat in Putney with curving windows overlooking gardens and trees, and I pictured his cello tongue licking her cello body with mist sliding over the Thames and Bach's Air on a G String in the background.
That was two years ago, a little more, time enough to see those parts of a partner that at first remain hidden. Marie-France was distant, reserved; she kept a tight grip on her emotions, and what Tom said he admired was her ability to make decisions with scant reflection, to leap without looking back at her reputation as a musician in Paris and start again in London. His long weeks away with Médecins Sans Frontières suited her new life as a jobbing cellist, the work never hard to find when you have the good fortune to be a beautiful woman.
That summer when they visited Grand-Moulin, Tom came to understand why Marie-France had readily abandoned her career to move to London. Yes, there was a spark, a fire, a passion – he avoided the word love with its disturbing connotations, a word the English don't like to use except when they talk about their horses and dogs.
He had noticed during those months together that the pale blue moons below her eyes and the furrows tracing her brow had faded and gone. At Grand-Moulin, they came back again, the indistinct bruising that follows restless nights, the lines on her brow fine as cracks on old photographs. Marie-France turned into another person; she spoke differently, dressed differently, she looked different. She became the girl-woman bound to the past by Nicolas and Kamarovsky, by the knotted chain of their shared history, by the memory of standing beside a brass regaled oak coffin in the graveyard at Saint Symphorien, the church in Nuits Saint-Georges, among strangers and ghouls with autograph books drawn by the charisma of celebrity and death.
Neither Marie-France nor her brother or guardian had ever been interviewed and had read the book about Sibylle's death as if it were a palimpsest scavenged from the waste basket of Albert Camus, an early draft of something that should have been burnt. They had watched like passengers peering down through clouds from an aeroplane the film version that had gathered up the fragments of that icy night of the new millennium and cast on screen a noir mystery in the monochrome images of a retro nouvelle vague, the art director drawing upon Sibylle's autoscapes that, against market trend, and confirming the investors' sense of self-congratulation, had risen ten-fold in value and become icons.
They partnered for tennis. Kamarovsky played each point as if life and death hung in the balance. He doubled with Tom so that Nicolas could play with his sister and I imagined her in a short white skirt with long legs and agile movements spinning the ball in ways that were complex and unreadable. They swam in the pool. I dressed her in a white bikini, and imagined the eyes of the three men following her every move, every shrug, her expression hidden by a straw hat, her feet bare, lively as fish.
They sat below the trees at a table set with salad, saucisson and local cheeses. The sunsets were long and golden. They watched the swallows turn hoops in the sky, the birds joined as if by a single consciousness. Kamarovsky added ice to the wine, a sacrilege, and they clinked their glasses in tribute to health, wealth and the time to spend it, a Spanish toast, he said, his eyes orange in the twilight, his bare arms thick with coarse black hair like fur.
Kamarovsky was charming, loquacious, in a good mood. Since the death of Sibylle, he had begun to write, he said, to the sound of old recordings of Marie-France playing the cello and had devised what he considered was a unique way to reach a private utopia. He wrote poetry in French, translated his words into Russian, then translated the Russian back into French. He had published a compilation of his work under the title L'âge de Conséquences. He gave Tom a copy, the book bound like a bible in black with gold-leaf titling, his broad signature in red a one word psalm to the past.
'Read. It will help,' he said,
and Tom didn't know what he meant.
'Help what?'
'Why, everything. It will help you understand.'
The heat of the day had warmed the vines and their scent wafted in the air. It was early July, the light lingered and stars burst into the pale green sky. They drank a great deal, old burgundies from another century, and Tom's head was spinning like the universe domed above his head.
'It's like a painting,' he observed.
'Magritte,' said Marie-France and Kamarovsky smiled.
'You remembered.'
'I remember everything. '
'You remember that time at the Louvre, when Sibylle had her show?'
'No.'
Kamarovsky glanced at Tom and threw up his shoulders as he came to his feet. He left the table and returned with the cello from the music room.
Marie-France was balanced on the back legs of her chair, her heels on the table. Nicolas was stroking her feet.
'Play, petit poisson, play some Tchaikovsky,' Kamarovsky said. He straightened her chair. 'Careful, you will fall and break your pretty head.'
Nicolas refilled his glass. 'Always Tchaikovsky. I hate Tchaikovsky.'
'The man who hates Tchaikovsky, hates life.'
'Who said that? Not you.'
Nicolas's face was ghostly in the pallid light and Tom was struck by the paleness of his blue eyes, the fineness of his skin, the little twist of his narrow mouth as if he were sucking on a sour olive.
Marie-France tuned the cello, musicians seldom say no when asked to perform. She turned the pegs, the tone of each string variations on a heartbeat. She hoisted up the skirt of her sleeveless white dress and clutched the instrument between her bare legs. Tom had observed this same motion many times, but that night in the feudal air of Grand-Moulin it felt carnal, primitive, something normally hidden rashly and unexpectedly exposed. She played the Nocturne in D minor, the notes like stars slipping into the night sky. Her eyes pressed shut, her playing face a mask as she entered the esoteric world of the music.
'Look, she doesn't play the cello, she has sex with it. She fucks it.' Kamarovsky's words rasped like a wind from the north. 'Art is either political or sexual. I am right, no?'
Nicolas smashed his glass on the table and waved his bloodied fingers at Kamarovsky.
'You're repulsive. You're an animal. You disgust me.'
'Not so much that you don't take my charity.'
'You, you, you piece of shit.'
Nicolas rushed off. Marie-France played. Kamarovsky refilled Tom's glass.
'Ignore him. He is in love with her,' he said.
'And you're not?'
Kamarovsky thought about that. 'I am a man. The whole world wants to fuck her and she only wants to fuck the cello.' He paused, a smile touched his features. 'And you, you have her. Vous êtes un homme intelligent, Doctor Thomas. A clever man. You didn't answer my question. Art, it is political or sexual? Or what's the point?'
'Maybe there is no point.'
'Then you are an existentialist.'
'I should check he's alright. He cut his hand.'
'Leave him. He is a mummy's boy with no mummy's breast to suck on. A man has to be a man. This boy has never become a man.'
Marie-France opened her eyes and her piercing gaze across the table sent a shock like a pulse of electricity through Tom's bones. It was like she was another person, a stranger. That look could have been great love or great hatred; he would never know which.
'Take no notice. He likes to be insulting.'
'Nicolas cut himself.'
She shrugged. 'Do what you want,' she said.
She spoke in French, which she never did. Kamarovsky switched from French to English with an ease Tom envied. It seemed the British were born to hoist their flag over every nation where the sun rose and never learn their language. He struggled with Tamil and often missed nuances in French.
Kamarovsky drummed his fingers on the table. He glanced at Marie-France. Then he turned with a concentrated, slightly irritated expression, back to Tom.
'All art has to move you, whether it is on canvas, in the cello, in the words of the poet. If it doesn't move you, what is the point? And if it does move you, what is the point? Ah, you see, perhaps I, too, am an existentialist. But maybe not. Maybe there is a point. The point is to touch your senses, your soul,' he picked up a knife. 'To carve as a knife in the right hands carves beauty from a block of wood. To do this, to move you, art must be sexual or political. I am right, no?'
Marie-France stopped playing, the Nocturne in D minor complete. 'You are always right. Even when you are wrong you are right.'
'Is that why you love me?'
'That's why I hate you.'
Kamarovsky laughed. He cut a piece of cheese, pared off the rind and dropped it in his mouth. Marie-France closed her eyes. Her hair fell over her face and she started to play a piece she had been developing. Tom had followed its evolution when she practised in the bay-windowed room overlooking the river and perceived in the notes the sound of moving water and night planes gliding over the city.
Kamarovsky spoke softly. 'It's new, no?' he asked.
Tom nodded. Kamarovsky leaned closer and listened like a bird watcher listening for the song of a rare bird.
'Art is a gift. You have to keep asking,' he pointed at the sky, 'before the gift is given. She doesn't compose music, she channels it. It comes from up there,' he said and switched back to his former thesis. 'Political movements are driven by the sweat and spit and semen of words. We have Lenin and Trotsky to thank for a century of war and chaos. Trotsky, he was a fine writer, you know that?' he asked. 'It is rubbish now, just history. You can't change the past or the inevitable. Marxism was doomed to fail.'
'Didn't Marx say the same about capitalism?'
'Of course, and he was right. They are both doomed to fail as we are all doomed to die. Just as politics is dying,' he continued, raising his finger. 'We live now in L'âge de Conséquences. Politicians serve the corporations, the banks, the vested interests that keep them in power. The world has lost its way. There will be more disasters, more terrorism – one day, the banks will collapse and our money will be as Voltaire said, worthless scraps of paper. Artists do not know this. They do not think, they feel it in their souls. They can't express themselves through the issues of the day, there are no issues, and they are left with just one life-line to hang on to: the sexual.'
He glanced at Marie-France. The bow was going back and forth across the strings of the cello. Sweat darkened in rings on the dress below her armpits and ran in slippery beads between her breasts. Her skirt had risen up. You could see the feathery pink wisp of her pants, her thighs tightening, the muscles glossy with damp.
'Look, look now. Look at her play and you will see yourself.'
Tom glanced quickly at Kamarovsky and back again at Marie-France. The Russian continued, his voice a chant, a prayer, a poem.
'You are moved and that which is moved is between your legs. I am not mistaken. You suffer an insatiable hunger. You want to be the cello gripped by her thighs. You want to feel the bow crossing your flesh as it crosses the strings like a whip across your back. You want to pay penance to your desire. Why did God in his infinite folly give her such beauty? Such ability? What was he thinking? What did he want to do to us, we mortals?' He paused. 'He wants to kill us with her beauty. That is what she does when she leads the orchestra, our petite Jeanne d'Arc, our virgin leading the hordes into battle. Every man wants her. Every woman wants to be her. It is a burden only a very special woman could carry. Marie-France is that woman. You are a lucky man, Doctor Thomas.'
Their eyes met for a moment and Kamarovsky was silent. A bird landed on the table, snatched a crust of bread and flew off again. Marie-France bowed frenetically, as if drugged, as if sawing through metal bars, her music unknown, haunting, the chords pounding, seductive. Her dress was soaked, her breasts visible through the fabric, her legs drawing the cello deeper inside her. Kamarovsky was right. She was making
love and Tom watched, mesmerized by this display of auto-eroticism. The choreography of her fingers fretting the arm of the instrument was a ballet, the bow was the tongue of a whip flashing in the hot sirocco night, and Tom that moment didn't feel as if they were in the middle of everything, but on the edge of everything. He was holding his breath, as you do before orgasm, and when her composition came to an end, his brow burned in fever.
He heard the soft clap of hands behind him and turned. Nicolas was standing like a ghost among the trees. Marie-France propped the cello against her chair. Her hair was wet, her face silvery in the moonlight. He watched her cross the grey flagstones and throw herself into the pool, a fallen angel in her white dress. Nicolas pulled off his shirt and slid into the cool green water.
'Come in, it's beautiful,' she called. She was smiling, girlish, fourteen years old.
Kamarovsky was watching him.
'Now you see,' he said. 'To understand something is to be liberated from it.'
Tom was drunk. It was like a dream he couldn't fathom. Marie-France slipped out of her dress and left it on the side of the pool.
'Come, come. Take your clothes off.'
He stripped naked and dived into the water. She kissed him on the mouth and kissed her brother on the mouth. It was strange but not so strange. It was the age of consequence. He understood. The stars folded and when they made love in her childhood bedroom, the moon peered through the shutters and white tears ran down her cheeks. She cried for her mother, she cried for the past and she cried because, for a moment, she was happy.
Next day, the sun high, the sky lazuline, they drove to Lyon, left the hire car and flew back to London. They never spoke of that night. The present is quickly the past and Marie-France had to prepare for her first major performance playing the solo in Bach's Concerto in C Minor, the purported Casadesus forgery. Kamarovsky sat at his side and I was reminded once more of Svengali as Tom described the packed house at the Royal Albert Hall coming to its feet like the flock following the call of Jeanne d'Arc. She shared her mother's genes and, like her, Marie-France Durfort was born to have her name picked out in lights.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 14
