I have always been the sort of person who lives in the present. Violetta calls it the “butterfly existence.”
“Fluttering hither and thither,” she said, “round the candle until you scorch your wings.”
It could not last, of course. Though I made myself believe it would. Jacques would not stay forever and then I would return to my old, dull existence.
Then one day Jacques said: “Why not come with me? You’d like Paris.”
I said: “How wonderful!” and let myself believe it was possible.
I suppose Jacques’s nature is really like mine. We started to plan. I love planning. I think up the wildest ideas, which I make myself believe in while they last. In the past Violetta had been there with her common sense. “How absurd you are being!” “How could you possibly do that? You’re not being logical.” And she would have shown me right from the beginning how stupid I was. But she was not there and Jacques and I used to lie in the bed in the inn where there was scarcely room for us both, and float into that world of fantasy. We made plans and deluded ourselves into thinking they were not impossible.
“I have it!” I cried. “The feud.”
Jacques’s eyes sparkled. He was enjoying these plans as much as I was. They certainly helped me to evade the unpleasant fact that parting could not be far off.
I said, “In the feud … this Jermyn girl—I can’t remember her name, so I’ll call her Juliet—was so heartbroken because they wouldn’t let her marry the man she wanted to that she went down to the beach and walked into the sea. Dermot’s first wife was also drowned in that way. Suppose I arranged a ‘drowning accident’? I know. I’ll go down to the beach every morning to have a bathe, and one day they’ll find my bathrobe and shoes and I shall have disappeared.”
Jacques laughed. It was a brilliant idea. His eyes sparkled and he started to plan how we would do it.
We made the wildest suggestions. It was not impossible. They would think I was drowned. I did not want poor Dermot to know I was tired of him. That would hurt him too much. We would fix it all beautifully. I would simply have gone bathing and not come back. Just as Juliet Jermyn had done, and as Dermot’s first wife had done.
We had to make sure that the truth about my departure was never discovered.
We planned and planned. We were caught up in the idea—and then somehow it became a reality. Jacques said: “You can bring a few things with you. Not much, or they’ll get suspicious. There’s a snag. You’ll want your passport.”
We were thoughtful.
“Why should they think to look for a passport?” I asked.
“They might not immediately. But sometime perhaps somebody will.”
“We can’t worry about a detail like that. They’d think I’d lost it. I do lose things.”
So the plan was that I should slip a few things out of the house while Jacques would be waiting for me in the car Hans Fleisch had hired. He would lend it to Jacques without demur. And so we should be ready for the day of departure. I had to make a habit of taking a bathe in the early morning just for a few days before we left. Then on the night we were to get away, I would slip out of the house and join Jacques. First I would put my bathrobe and shoes on the beach and people would believe I had gone for my early morning swim.
Hans Fleisch would drive us to the coast and return to Poldown afterwards, for he planned to stay another week or so. It was all quite simple.
My conscience worried me that night. I was glad Violetta was not then at Tregarland’s. I was sure she would have guessed I was, as she would say, “up to something.” I promised myself that later I would find some way of seeing her. I would write to her and she would come to Paris. I had a miniature of her—a beautiful thing, and she had one of me—and I took it with me.
And it all went according to plan.
I know now that my clothes were found on the beach, just as I intended, and they all believed I had been drowned—except Violetta. There was that strong bond between us and instinctively she knew I was not dead.
Well, she knows the truth now, and when I did come back, she helped me to concoct a story of my loss of memory and being picked up by a yacht. Violetta said this talk would never have been accepted but for the fact that the war had come and such affairs as mine were trivial compared with that.
Such was my nature that I could forget all the difficulties, even the enormity of what I was doing, in the excitement of the moment. I know I am shallow and pleasure-seeking, but I found Jacques so exciting and amusing, and I had convinced myself that I must escape from the eerie atmosphere of Tregarland and that sometime in the future I should be able to justify myself in what I had done.
There is something intoxicating about the very air of Paris. During my first days there I was so exhilarated that I told myself that everything that came after would be worth it. During that period, I stilled my conscience which, in spite of myself, kept intruding. I would think of Tristan, Violetta, Dermot, and my parents all mourning for me—for they would mourn deeply, in spite of my unworthiness. I wished that I could find some means of telling them that I was alive. Violetta will know, I promised myself. She must. And that comforted me a little, and for those days when I walked the streets of Paris, buying the clothes I needed, absorbing that atmosphere which is indigenous to the city, I lived on excitement. I loved the cafes with their gay awnings, and the little tables at which people sat, drinking their coffee or wine. I loved the famous streets and the narrow ones, and the shops, the smell of freshly baked bread which came from some of them, and the remains of the old city before Hausemann had rebuilt it, after the damage it had suffered during the Revolution.
I spent a certain amount of time strolling through the streets, looking at the places which had been only names to me before. I loved the ancient bridges, and I gazed in wonder at the majestic Notre Dame. I wished I had paid more attention to my lessons, and I thought if Violetta were here she would be able to tell me a great deal about these places.
Jacques did not accompany me on these journeys. He was not the type to wander round gaping at everything like a tourist. He had work to do. He had changed a little. He was no less the ardent lover, and that part of our relationship remained. It was just that, when I expressed the excitement I felt in Paris and wished that he would show me certain places, he became remote and evasive. He had some sketches to do. He was not free that day.
“If only Violetta were here,” I said.
He smiled and nodded vaguely. He could not understand what existed between me and Violetta.
I had always imagined that artists lived in attics in abject poverty and went to cafes to celebrate when they sold a picture and there caroused with their impecunious friends.
This was not the case with Jacques.
He had a small house on the Left Bank, it was true, but he lived in a certain degree of comfort. There was an attic in which he worked because the light was from the north. But it was just his working area and below was an ordinary dwelling which one might expect anywhere.
In the basement were a husband and wife who looked after his needs. They were Jean and Marie, middle-aged, eager to please and not really surprised to see me, which was a little disconcerting.
Jacques was clearly by no means poor. He gave me money to buy clothes and, providing I could subdue my conscience, I was happy during those first weeks.
Jacques worked now and then in the attic which he called his studio. People called often. Some of them were sitters, I presumed; others came and he would take them up to the studio to talk. He did show me one or two portraits. I was hoping he would suggest painting me, but he did not.
People sometimes called in the evenings. Marie would cook a meal for them and Jean would wait at table. I would be present on such occasions, of course, but they spoke such rapid French that I could understand little of what they said. When I told Jacques this, he laughed and said I had missed nothing I needed to know. It was all gossip.
“Do they talk a
bout what is going on in Europe?” I asked. “People were always going on about that at home.”
“It is mentioned.”
“They were all worked up about it in England. I expect they are here. Yet usually they all seem so much more excitable than we do.”
He shrugged his shoulders and I sensed he did not want to talk about the possibilities of war. I was in agreement with that. I had grown weary of the subject before I left home.
About ten days after I had been there, Hans Fleisch came to the house. We greeted each other warmly. He had been a great help to us. He bowed, and clicked his heels, which took me right back to that awful time at the schloss. He asked me in his stilted and rather Germanic English if I were enjoying France. I told him I found it most exciting.
“Jacques is very happy that you are here.”
“What happened in Poldown when they discovered I had gone?” I asked.
He was thoughtful and then said: “They believed you were drowned. That you had gone swimming. It was not a wise thing to do, they said. The sea can be treacherous, and you were lost.”
“Did you happen to see any member of my family?”
“No, but I heard they had come to the house.”
“My sister … ?”
“Yes, I think your sister.”
“I see. So … the story was accepted.”
“It would seem so.”
I thought to myself: Oh, Violetta, dear mother, dear father, I hope you don’t mourn me too much.
I think it was then that I began to regard what I had done more seriously.
I was still fascinated by Jacques. The physical relationship between us was perfect—for him, too, I was sure; but I had built up such an image of life in the Latin Quarter that I was vaguely disappointed because ours seemed so conventional. I had pictured artists coming in every day. I remembered stories I had heard of Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne, and the cafe life of the Bohemians. That was completely missing. Jacques seemed quite affluent. This was perverse of me. I should be grateful. Did I want to live in poverty because it seemed artistic for a moment or two?
I began to know one or two people who came fairly frequently to the studio. One of these, to whom I took a liking, was Georges Mansard. He was a tall man with a ready smile and blue, rather penetrating eyes. He was very fair and did not look very French. He spoke good English and was very interested in me. I always was drawn to people who were. It was something to do with an inferiority complex I had acquired, having grown up lacking Violetta’s intelligence. I enjoyed feeling superior to her in the matter of feminine charm.
The first time Georges Mansard came to the house, I was in the house alone, for Jacques had gone out that morning. He had a way of going off suddenly, not saying where, and I learned not to protest when he returned. Jacques was the sort of man who did not like his actions questioned. It was a trait which was beginning to irritate me.
I heard someone talking to Jean and Marie below and I went down to see who it was.
Jean said: “Monsieur has come to see Monsieur Dubois.”
Delighted to have a visitor, I said: “Oh, do come up. It may be he will not be long.”
The visitor looked pleased and turned to nod at Jean, who looked faintly disturbed, but I said: “That’s all right, Jean. Perhaps,” I went on, “you would bring some coffee.” Then to the guest: “Or would you prefer wine?”
The French seemed to consume a great deal of wine, so I was not surprised when he chose it.
He went up into the room which was called the salon. It was not exactly large but was comfortably furnished. I waved to a chair with a little table beside it and went to the cabinet to get the wine.
Then he told me his name was Georges Mansard and he was a friend of Jacques.
“I heard that you had arrived from England,” he said. “Tell me, how do you like Paris?”
“Enchanting,” I told him.
“You have visited the well-known spots, I’ll be bound. Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower. What do you think of Montmartre?”
“I was delighted by all,” I said.
“Your home was … ?”
“In Cornwall. We had a place right on the coast.”
“That must also have been enchanting.”
“It is reckoned to be so.”
He lifted his glass. “Welcome to France.”
We talked easily and his English, being only slightly accented, was not difficult to understand. He knew England. He had even been to Cornwall. He himself came from the south of France, near Bordeaux.
“Where the wine comes from,” I said.
“Exactly so. All the best wine in France … in the world … comes from the Médoc.” He lifted his hands and smiled whimsically. “Of course, there will be many who deny this … for instance those who do not have the good fortune to live among those delectable vines.” He smiled and looked into his glass. “This is a good claret.”
“I am glad. I am sure that Monsieur Dubois, like most of his countrymen, would drink only the best.”
He told me a great deal about Bordeaux and how he came to Paris on business, marketing his wines.
“We have an office here, you see.”
“So I suppose you travel back and forth to Bordeaux frequently,” I said.
“That is so.”
“I thought you must be an artist when you first came.”
“Oh, do I look like one?”
“No … I don’t think so. How does an artist look? One imagines them in flowing smocks, splashed with paint—but I have found them not like that at all.”
“This is the Latin Quarter. This is where they abound.”
“I suppose the days of La Bohème are no more.”
“I expect things have changed now. There is the art of commerce. What do you say, commercial art? This is more now to employ the artists. They are not so poor. It is not a matter of exchanging a picture for a meal, if you understand.”
“I do.”
He stayed for two hours and I felt elated by his visit.
When Jacques returned and I told him Georges Mansard had called, he received the news nonchalantly.
“He’s a charming man,” I commented. “We got on very well.”
“I am sure you did. I knew he would be enchanted by my little cabbage.”
He seized me and swung me round. We danced. Our steps, like everything else, fitted perfectly.
He stopped suddenly, kissed me intensely and said: “It seems years since I saw you.”
That was how it was with Jacques.
Georges Mansard called the next day and went up to the attic where he remained with Jacques for a long time. He greeted me like an old friend before he went up. I guessed they were talking about wine and Georges was going to get an order. He had talked very enthusiastically about his products during our conversation the previous day and had betrayed his pride in them.
“I hope you got a good order,” I said to him as he was leaving.
Georges Mansard smiled broadly.
“Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed.”
He came fairly frequently. I gathered that he was a friend of Jacques besides being his wine merchant, but I met him often in the streets, so often, in fact, that I began to think he sought me out.
Violetta always said that I changed when I was in the company of men. I opened out, she said, like a flower does in the sun or when it is given needed water. She is right, of course. I am frivolous and susceptible to admiration, but I do pride myself in knowing my weaknesses.
When we met he would suggest we take a glass of wine together; he knew the right place to take me. It was a kind of wine bar with secluded corners where people could talk in peace. He told me a great deal about his family’s winery and was quite eulogistic describing the gathering of grapes; then he would tell me about the pests, the inclement weather, and all the hazards that had to be watched.
He knew, of course, that I had left my home to go off with Jacques. He talked
often of Jacques and the people who called at the studio; he was one of those people who is very interested in others and in what is going on.
When I was alone I liked to stroll in and out of the secondhand book shops which abound on the Left Bank. I constantly thought how much Violetta would like to have been there. Then I would grow morbid, wishing that she were with me and thinking how different it would have been if she were and we were on holiday together, carefree, eventually to return to our real home in Caddington. Then the enormity of what I had done would be brought home to me. I thought of them all mourning me.
If I had known then that Violetta would become engaged to Jowan Jermyn and in the course of events would become my neighbor, I might never have left Tregarland. But what was the use? It was done now. Characteristically, I had plunged into this adventure. It was the sort of thing I had been doing all my life—but never so irrevocably as I had now.
I had realized it was a mistake—perhaps the greatest of my life. What I had felt for Jacques was slowly slipping away. Not only for me, but for him. I recognized the signs. As for myself, here I was, in a foreign land, dead to all I had known in the past … my sister … my beloved family … my husband, who, after all, had cared for me, and my child.
It was no use. I deserved whatever was coming to me. I knew I did. But that did not make it any easier to bear—in fact, it only made it harder because of the knowledge that it was my own actions which had brought it about.
One day when I was wandering rather aimlessly round the secondhand bookshops, I met the Baileys. It was one of those encounters which happens simply because one meets fellow countrymen abroad, like that other occasion when we had met Dermot. He had heard us speaking English in the cafe near the schloss and had stopped. Then he noticed me. I believe that he would have found some way of getting to know me, but it was the language which had first attracted his attention.
I had paused by a shelf to look at a book—a very old one called Castles of France. As I stood there, a middle-aged man standing close to me reached out to take a book from a shelf and, as he did so, another book was dislodged. It was a heavy one and it fell, grazing my arm as it dropped to the floor.
We'll Meet Again Page 5
