by Joan Lingard
She moved out from the wall and into his arms and her face turned up to his and the next thing that he knew was that his hot dry mouth had met her soft young one and was drawing in its sweetness. They were locked in a kiss.
Back at the hotel, Emma, Clarinda’s room-mate, awoke at two a.m. – she had not gone to any of the parties on account of a headache – to find the other bed empty. ‘Clarinda?’ she called. She got up and looked in the bathroom but it, too, was empty. She pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and padded along the corridor and knocked on Cormac’s door. When there was no response she went on to Alec’s room and knocked there. He came to the door in red and white striped pyjamas with his hair sticking up at the back. He blinked at Emma.
‘What’s up?’
‘I can’t find Clarinda.’
‘Can’t find her?’ It took a minute or two for Alec to realise what the girl was talking about but then he wasted no time. He pulled on his dressing gown and with Emma following on behind he went striding along to Cormac’s room.
‘I’ve already knocked,’ said Emma. ‘He must be fast asleep.’
Alec knocked firmly and insistently and pursed his lips when nothing happened. He told Emma to run along back to bed and not to worry, then he descended in the lift to the lobby. The night porter was watching a black and white film on his television set. Alec recognised Humphrey Bogart.
‘Excusez-moi,’ he began.
The porter looked round.
‘Have you seen one of the pupils?’ asked Alec in English. ‘Élèves. Oui? Et Monsieur Aherne? L’homme.’ He tapped himself on the chest. ‘Comme moi.’
‘Mais, oui!’ The porter pointed to the door.
‘Gone out?’ asked Alec. ‘Sortis?’
‘Oui, ils sont sortis.’
Alec went to the glass door and stood with crossed arms gazing out into the dark, wet street. He turned, hearing a noise behind him, and saw Emma coming out of the lift with Cathy and Sue.
‘We heard Clarinda was missing,’ said Cathy. ‘We’re dead worried about her so we wondered if there was anything we could do.’
‘There’s nothing,’ said Alec sharply. ‘You’d do better to go and get some sleep. We have an early start in the morning.’
‘Emma thinks Cormac might be missing too,’ said Sue in a voice that was intended to sound innocent.
‘Perhaps they’ve eloped,’ said Cathy and then all three girls broke into giggles.
Cormac and Clarinda drew back from their kiss. He now was the one who was trembling. Ae fond kiss … The line ran through his head bringing with it the terrifying thought of Mrs Bain.
‘Clarinda,’ he breathed, shaking his head. Ae fond kiss, and then we sever. There would be no option but to sever and it must be done quickly.
‘Cormac,’ she said softly, putting up her hand to touch his face. He caught hold of her fingers and trapped them.
‘Listen, Clarinda—’ He could scarcely get past her name. She was looking up at him, her eyes luminous in the lamplight. ‘I’m sorry, I truly am. It shouldn’t have happened.’
‘What – the kiss? Of course it should. It had to! It was destined to, don’t you see?’
‘I want you to forget that it ever did.’
‘How can I forget something like that? Can you?’
‘We’ve got to. It was a moment of madness.’
‘I love being mad! I’m glad it happened. Aren’t you glad, Cormac? You liked it, didn’t you? You know you did. You didn’t pull away from me. You wanted it!’
She wanted him to kiss her again, he was aware of that, how could he not when the signals were so obvious? He was aware also that she was determined to try to make it happen. He felt unnerved by her straightforwardness. She was young, and although not a total innocent abroad she was still able to believe that if you wanted something badly enough you should go for it and to hang with the consequences.
And he wanted to kiss her again, which was unnerving him even more. She was sweet and young and refreshing and, in the middle of the kiss, which had lasted he knew not how long, whether it had been seconds or minutes, he had felt young again himself, freed of all the shackles that bound him. How seductive that was! For that brief spell of time he had felt anything might be possible. But he was not as naive as she was and now that he had drawn back he faced anew what he had known since he was a child: that you could not always have what you wanted, or, if you did, the price to pay would be much too high.
‘I’m your teacher, Clarinda.’ He took hold of her wrists; she was trying to close in on him again. ‘I am here in loco parentis.’
‘My mother wouldn’t mind. She thinks love is the most important thing in life. She says without it the world is grey. She’s very romantic.’
‘You haven’t discussed me with your mother?’ The idea alarmed him.
‘Not exactly. Not discussed. But she knows I admire you. She does, too. She loved your exhibition when I brought her in the summer. She’d have bought your flamingo if she could have afforded it.’
Fleetingly he felt some warmth towards Mrs Bain. The flamingo had been one of his favourite pieces. It had been bought by Rachel’s father, which had embarrassed him for he had felt that his father-in-law was probably doing it in order to encourage him and give their family finances a little pep-up. Two other pieces had been bought by friends of his mother-in-law. He said, ‘I don’t know whether your mother would mind or not, Clarinda, but plenty of other people would, including my wife, whom I love. She is not a Rose Beuret. And apart from all that, I could get into very serious trouble.’
‘How could you? Only you and I know.’ She smiled at him, with the smile of a woman light years older. ‘Only you and I need to know.’
‘What are you up to these days, Sophie?’ he asks his daughter as they sit drinking a late-night cup of hot chocolate together. It is actually two o’clock in the morning and she has not long come in. She has been back-sliding and it will soon be time for him to read another riot act and lay down the rules yet again. With Sophie it is very much a case of giving her the inch with the full knowledge that she will take much more than a mile. He has sat waiting for her, dozing a little, then jerking awake to go out and stand on the top step gazing up the street, listening to the snarl of the wind as it prowled down the terrace. When he heard the hee-haw of a police siren his immediate thought was that it might be Sophie who was in trouble. Since becoming a single parent his anxiety level has risen distinctly.
He asks his question as if he is not at all bothered about what Sophie is up to but, of course, he knows and she knows, that he is.
‘Nothing much,’ she says, cradling her cup between her hands, which look rather grubby. Her long hair falls like a curtain on either side of her face so that he cannot see her expression. She is wearing a bulky greenish-khaki garment which could be either clean or dirty. His nose twitches. She has that mouldy smell again.
‘Where do you go? Discos?’ Surely not, looking like that! But how would he know?
‘I wish you wouldn’t cross-question me all the time.’
‘I don’t, not all the time. I restrain myself often, believe me! But I have a right to ask where you go until this time in the morning. You’re underage and in my care and I do care what happens to you. I don’t expect you to tell me all the details but I’d like to feel you could talk to me, like a pal of sorts, tell me what’s going on in your head. Your life!’ he ends, mock-dramatically, so that she won’t think he’s being too heavy. He often knows that he shouldn’t press on when he does. He is sure Rachel is much more subtle when she pumps the children for information, and more successful.
‘You don’t tell me what’s going on in your life,’ says Sophie. ‘You didn’t tell me about Clarinda.’
She has got the knife in between his ribs now. He wants to fold over, and nurse his wounds. When they told her about his suspension from school and the charge being made against him they had gone into few details and she had asked few questions. And as far as
Cormac knows, they managed to keep it from Davy. But kids have a way of finding out things and understanding more than you give them credit for.
‘You don’t know Clarinda, do you?’ he asks, appalled that she might.
‘No, but my friend Tilda does. She says Clarinda was madly in love with you.’
‘But I am, Cormac,’ said Clarinda. ‘I can’t help it. Why don’t you believe me?’
‘Of course you can help it.’ He spoke gently to her. ‘You talked yourself into it in the first place. It’s just a notion you’ve got.’
‘That’s not true!’ She started to cry, which gave him no option but to put his arms round her and comfort her. She was small and soft against him and her hair smelt of fresh rain. He felt her lips against his neck and a shiver ran up his spine making his shoulders twitch. For a moment he was tempted to bury his face in her hair and forget the world, Alec McCaffy, and all the rest of them. Instead he eased her firmly away from him again and held her at arm’s length.
‘Now listen to me, Clarinda. It’ll pass, believe me it will. After you’ve been home for a week you’ll laugh about all this.’
‘You can’t stop me loving you.’
‘You’re not Gwen John,’ he told her. ‘And I’m not Rodin.’
‘He was often horrible to her but that didn’t stop her loving him. And it didn’t stop him making love to her.’
‘We must go.’ His chest felt tight. ‘Come on!’
She wouldn’t move.
‘All right, suit yourself, stay there,’ he said, using the tone of voice he might to his daughter when his patience was running out.
He turned away from her but after the first dozen or so steps he was forced to look round. She was leaning against the wall again looking like a floppy doll. A man had stopped on the pavement and was looking at her.
Cormac walked back.
‘Clarinda, now you are behaving like a three-year-old!’
‘I want you to make love to me.’
‘Clarinda talked a lot of nonsense,’ he says to his daughter. ‘Her mother filled her head with romantic tosh. She was in love with Burns! Her mother, that is.’
‘What’s wrong with Burns?’
‘Nothing. Not his poetry, anyway. But Mrs Bain was in love with the man, or her idea of the man. Clarinda told me she kept a picture of him on her bedside table as well as on the piano.’ He had seen the one on the piano, on the only occasion that he visited the Bains’ flat.
‘You had a mega-sized blown-up photo of Rodin on the wall of your studio. You said it inspired you. You said you felt he was watching over you and telling you to hang in there. What’s the difference? Maybe the picture of Burns was inspiring her to write poetry.’
‘But I wasn’t in love with Rodin. Mrs Bain recites a Burns poem before she goes to sleep at night. Instead of a prayer, I suppose. My love is like a red, red rose. Trouble is, roses have thorns.’ He speaks jocularly in an effort to lighten the topic but his daughter is in a dogged mood, determined not to let him off the hook.
‘So it was all her mother’s fault? Because she had a picture of Burns on her bedside table?’
‘I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that Tilda should not believe everything that Clarinda tells her. But we’ve wandered rather far away from you. Are you in love with anyone? Or wouldn’t you tell me if you were?’ He tries to smile.
Sophie shrugs and tilts her mug to drain the last drops of her chocolate drink. She runs the tip of her tongue round her lips.
‘So which is it?’ He keeps the teasing voice. ‘You won’t tell me?’
‘You wouldn’t approve of him,’ she says and goes into the kitchen to rinse her mug under the tap.
Eventually he managed to prise Clarinda away from the wall and coax her to come with him. She dragged her feet every step of the way. She was back to being a child again. A petulant, spoilt, sulking child, who could not get her way. His patience was spent and with it had gone his desire for her. He was wet, exhausted, and irritable. He remembered suddenly that he had a fifty franc note in his trouser pocket which he had put there earlier as an emergency back-up. He’d been determined not to be caught out as he had been coming back from the flea market.
‘I’m going to try and get a taxi,’ he said, bringing Clarinda to a halt on the edge of the kerb.
‘I want to walk. And I don’t want to go back to the hotel.’
A taxi was approaching. He stepped out into the road raising his hand. The car pulled up with a squeal of tyres.
Clarinda had retreated into a doorway.
‘Un moment, s’il vous plaît,’ said Cormac through the taxi window.
‘Jeune, eh?’ said the driver, looking past him at Clarinda.
Cormac felt like a dirty old man. He went over to Clarinda and pleaded with her in a low voice. He felt like threatening to abandon her altogether, except that that would offer further opportunities for drama. Was it what she wanted, to be the centre of a drama? It was not the time to try and fathom Clarinda’s motives.
‘If you carry on like this any more you’ll make me hate you, Clarinda!’
‘Don’t be so angry with me!’ She was going to cry again.
‘Then, come!’
She let him lead her to the cab and bundle her into the back seat. She leant against him as they swung hectically through the quiet streets. Cormac was aware of the driver watching them in his mirror, the thin line of his moustache curled into a little smile of amusement.
As they reached their destination the door of the hotel swung open and out stepped Alec McCaffy in his red and white striped pyjamas and blue paisley-patterned dressing gown. He waited on the pavement while Cormac paid off the driver and handed Clarinda out of the back of the cab.
‘Bonne nuit,’ said the driver in a voice that made Cormac want to push in his louche face.
Alec held the hotel door open for Clarinda. ‘I suggest you go straight to bed, Clarinda.’ He let the door swing shut and then he turned to face Cormac. ‘What has been going on, Aherne?’
‘Nothing, Mr McCaffy. Nothing of the sort that you are imagining. Clarinda became hysterical and ran off so I had no option but to go out and bring her back. You would have had to do the same had you been here. But you can take my word for it that I have neither raped nor seduced Clarinda Bain.’
They went into the hotel, said good night to the porter, and got into the lift. They stood side by side. Cormac reached out and pressed the button for the fourth floor. They began to rise.
‘So you’re trying to tell me that nothing at all happened?’ Alec had exchanged his headmasterly tone for a sly, suggestive one. He pulled the belt of his dressing gown in tight. ‘That seems difficult to believe, Cormac. The girl’s gone on you.’
The lift lurched to a stop and after giving a bit of a judder the door slid back to reveal the corridor plunged in darkness. Cormac groped for the wall switch and a weak light came on.
‘Sorry to disappoint you, Alec,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to find your own kicks.’
Now on that last night in Paris, Mr Aherne, we believe that you were absent from the hotel for over an hour, with the girl in question. Would you like to tell us how you spent that hour?
Cormac goes into the kitchen to rinse his own mug.
‘Why wouldn’t I approve?’ he asks his daughter. ‘Try me. What do you think I’d have against your boyfriend?’
‘Everything.’
‘Come now, I’m not that narrow-minded!’
Is she sleeping with him, whoever he is, this pimpled youth, or man of forty? The thought of the latter makes him gulp, but if this lover of hers were simply a boy from school she wouldn’t be so desperate to conceal his identity, would she? He does too much talking to himself in his head.
If she is sleeping with him, whoever he might be, is she protecting herself? Alarm strikes at his heart. If anything bad should befall this beautiful daughter whom he loved from the moment he set eyes on her! He has a vision of her co
ntracting some deadly disease, wasting away. His problem is that he has too much imagination, so the aunts used to say, all but Sal, who had been accused of the same crime herself when she was a child. The trouble is that his imagination is tending to become morbid now that he doesn’t have anything but the making of sandwiches to occupy his mind. Obsessional thoughts about Sophie’s boyfriend and Rachel’s lover have occupied the empty space that used to be filled by his sculpture.
‘You know not to take risks, don’t you, Sophie?’
‘I’m not stupid.’
‘Are you—?’ He breaks off. He cannot decide if he is justified in pressing her like this. But she is underage and he is her guardian, ill-equipped as he feels to guard her against anything. He presumes she must be sleeping with the boyfriend since she has not denied it.
‘I’m almost sixteen,’ she says. ‘I could get married in Gretna Green soon. Or Edinburgh.’ She smiles. ‘I could leave school.’
He bites his tongue to stop himself delivering a lecture on the drawbacks of leaving school without qualifications, and how one would inevitably come to regret it in the future.
Chapter Ten
Clarinda’s sixteenth birthday fell the week after their return from Paris.
She was waiting for him a few blocks from school, in the doorway of an empty shop. He was on foot. She knew his route home and he had not thought to vary it. As soon as he saw her he realised that he should have done. He should have anticipated this. Since coming back to school he had made sure that he was not alone with her and in class tried to treat her like any other pupil. He was aware, however, of the other pupils’ raised interest when he addressed her, which he continued to do, since not to have done so would have also had been noted.
The first class after their return had been especially difficult, for the pupils had understandably wanted to talk about Paris. When it was Clarinda’s turn and she spoke of Gwen John there was some sniggering. Cormac quickly moved the conversation onto more general grounds, asking the pupils if they thought it brought extra insight into an artist’s work to know something about their lives and see the environments they had lived and worked in? Did they, for example, think that their visit to Monet’s garden had added something to their viewing of the water lilies? Clarinda was silent but he already knew what she thought; the rest seemed to think that the visit to Giverny had enhanced their appreciation of the paintings though they were all agreed that that was a bonus and not essential.
