by Joan Taylor
I looked directly into that face, those dark, scientific eyes, and said, “Mr. Prain, we’re not talking about my typescripts.”
His face gave nothing away. “No.”
He would not be prompted. I had an uneasy feeling that I had been lured into a thicket by a false promise, and was now in peril. Doubt made me bold. Rumbling up from a deep pit of suspicion, there was a question I surprised myself by asking, “Then why did you invite me here today?”
As if this line had been the cue for an interruption, Monique entered. There were a few creaks and muted footsteps outside the great double doors at the far end of the room, while Mr. Prain gazed at me. There was a rap of gentle knocks, and one of the brass handles wriggled and turned. Mr. Prain twisted around in his chair with an air of grateful curiosity. I realised then that he did not wish to answer my question, not immediately anyway. He would not tell me the real reason he had invited me to tea on that Monday afternoon, but it was not merely to discuss my work.
Monique moved gracefully through the door, with the kind of delicate and yet assured style of the French that Anglo-Saxon women have seldom managed to cultivate. I knew she was Monique from that walk, that gait. She was in her late thirties, and wore slim-fitting clothes that could be described as classic: a knee-length russet skirt, and a fawn blouse, with low sandals. Her face was a little flushed, I guessed from the heat of the afternoon kitchen, and a few strands of her chestnut hair had come loose from the hair slide that gathered the rest into a sleek ponytail. She was handsome, erect and alert, with dark, equine eyes and a strong neck. She smiled at me indirectly and went to Mr. Prain, saying, “Je m’excuse.” She then proceeded to explain something in exceedingly rapid French, to which he responded in the manner of a lord listening to a portent that told of a rebellion amongst his serfs: with slight anxiety and irritation, but with the sure recognition that this could be forestalled by proper handling.
Monique leaned down, resting her hands on her knees, as she bent towards his ear. He twisted around and stretched up. They both looked uncomfortable and vaguely sculpturesque. I was quite sure he was in no hurry to abbreviate Monique’s explanations. He replied in elastic French, slow and fast, considered and lucid, which bespoke a long stay in France during his formative years, sufficient to acquire more than the public school smattering of the tongue. They were quite absorbed in discussing the situation, and did not look at me for a few minutes. It seemed a long time, especially with my pointed question unanswered. I tried to understand the gist of the conversation, but failed through an inability to distinguish more than about five words. At any rate, I was not in the mood for an oral comprehension test. I felt as if I had been left perched on the top of a fence I had been in the process of climbing over. Mr. Prain was supposed to help me down the other side, and instead he was blithely chatting in French, while I sat there looking at the blue sky framed by the window.
I still played host to the pastry, which suddenly grinned at me from my lap below, indicating that it might be an opportune moment, without conversation, in which to sink my teeth into it. My companions were too engrossed in their problem to notice if I squirted cream down my arm or rained icing sugar on the Persian carpet. But before I lifted the cake towards my lips, Mr. Prain rose, Monique returned to her erect posture, and both appeared apologetic.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you for a moment,” said Mr. Prain. “A domestic problem has arisen which requires my immediate attention.”
The cliché! People actually said such things. I had to chase away a smile.
“Please take as long as you need,” I said. “Would you mind if I snooped about the room in your absence? There’s quite an interesting collection of things here.”
“By all means,” replied Mr. Prain, graciously.
I smiled at Monique, whose manner suggested that she was solitary and capable. But was she his mistress as well as housekeeper? She had, however, used “vous” to him, and her attitude suggested both respect and distance from her employer. Standing there together, they made an attractive couple: not unlike in physical appearance, both with the same self-contained air. Then, all at once, I recognised there was a complicity here beyond that of master and servant. There was something in the way that Monique looked at me, something in her soft mouth, something in her eyes or in her hand as it slowly approached her face to pull back the fallen strands of hair, that made me think she was cognizant of an important fact of which I was unaware, as if she had heard me ask that question and knew the answer, and perhaps could tell me something. I felt I had to make contact.
“Ces pâtisseries sont trés bonnes,” I said, valiantly, half-wondering if I had said, “These cake-shops are very righteous,” in an effort to compliment her on her pastries. Monique smiled in an amused and yet grateful way while Mr. Prain seemed a touch uncomfortable. My accent was hardly that of a Parisienne, after all, more like that which my sixth form teacher described as “somewhat deliberate,” since I always have a feeling that if I run foreign words together in a manner that I myself would not easily understand, then a native speaker might have equal trouble.
I fancy that Mr. Prain found my comment a little false, considering that I had not yet sampled Monique’s fare. Indeed it was. Nevertheless, I was glad to have said something to her, and I had the feeling that this development pleased her as well. They left the room, speaking again in French as they went to the door. It was closed behind them.
I sank back into the armchair and sighed. This afternoon was an effort. I had said to a friend that I would view it as a joke, but that was sheer bravado. How could I be glib about it when Mr. Prain had read the typescript of my novel, my stories, my poems? I had given him the best of my work, and now he had power over me: the power of refusal or acceptance. I was at his mercy no matter how well I tried to appear impassive. I had not been concerned that he was in that British class one step off aristocracy, not titled, but with little to gain by one. The fact that we sat in a room chock full of antiques and antiquities did not impress me either. His wealth, his house, his land: this was all irrelevant. It was the fact that he was a publisher that made me squirm. Things were different now.
I picked up the cream cake and bit into it, allowing the cream to spew out onto the plate, slop after slop, while the icing sugar puffed all over my frock and the armrests of the chair. I devoured the cake voraciously, stuffing it into my mouth, spooning the fallen cream up with a finger. The deed was done. I swallowed, relieved. I wiped myself down with a fine linen napkin.
Then I stood up and looked through the low window, following the line of the wood to the place where it was obscured by the west wing of the house. The tractor lawnmower sat immobile where it had been abandoned, the lawns half done, half striped, half plain. There was a patio below and wide steps flanked by urns which led down to the garden, and all around the house were parterres dotted with colour and rose beds. Box and privet trees cut into platonic solids bore witness to a skilled topiarist and gave the garden an eighteenth century appearance, which matched the date of the main part of the building. The scene was empty, as if it was the beginning of a film. Here was the perfect backdrop to the titles:
Rosinde
un film par Philippe Dubois.
For some reason it had to be French: gold letters on a green background, the camera still, while the titles showed the names of the leading actresses and actors, the editor, the main cameraman, sound engineer, producer, director. The music: Mozart. And then it begins. The camera follows two figures who have emerged from the eastern side of the house, though we must erase the outbuildings with sophisticated computer technology. There is a woman with a parasol, and a man. They are of the mid-eighteenth century, possessing the confidence of the privileged before the French Revolution. Rosinde is visiting her cousins in England, and he is a friend of family. He is in love with her, but she finds him irritating. She wants more from life than to marry this boring Englishman. She walks coquettishly and yet with determinat
ion, quite enjoying the attention of the man, and yet despising him. They amble slowly across the lawn. He tries to entertain her with a circuitous joke, but she is barely listening. She is noting how warm the day is, how the sparrows flitter, how the gentle breeze flutters her clothing. Rosinde is full of vitality and hope. But what will become of her?
The figures vanished suddenly as if someone had torn the film from the projector. Damn, I thought to myself. What was the good of all this imagining? Why did I do it? I had always done it. A search for truth, I had said! But why be a writer if not to harness all the dreams that might otherwise drive me mad? Should anyone pay me for it? Why should anyone read these dreams, these silly fantasies?
I turned away from the window, the closed window, and plodded to the centre of this museum of a room. I counted ten Persian carpets of mixed sizes laid out to cover the parquet floor, some very old, some recent. Mrs. Oliver Marshall’s frustrated gaze permeated the atmosphere of my mind, and I wanted to finger things, accidentally-on-purpose break that Roman glass bowl, or the Royal Copenhagen china pieces in the walnut cabinet, or do something irreverent, disdainful. There was a deep, dark aroma of furniture wax and wood blended with other kinds of cleaning liquids and polishes. Someone spent a lot of time in here bringing to a shine all the bits and baubles. Monique, perhaps. I caught sight of myself in a small, round mirror with scenes from the New Testament in relief on a frame. My expression was a glaring one, judgmental and austere, with a slight frown, the sort of look one never gives to a mirror unprepared.
The room was a complete clutter of objects and furniture, the fruit of someone’s labours at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, or else the inheritance of an antiquarian. Since the room was very full, it seemed smaller than it was. Along the northern wall, in between the two long windows which faced the back garden, there was a huge bookshelf stretching from floor to ceiling, containing old volumes: Byron, Tennyson, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, travel books dating from the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, Galileo, a whole run of classical writers like Cicero, Livy and Aristotle, nineteenth-century picture books illustrating life in Biblical lands, biographies of people unremembered, novels, volumes of verse, first editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Darwin, volumes of early archaeological texts about Egypt and Mesopotamia, books containing etchings of paintings by Dürer, Rembrandt, Michelangelo. But then I knew Mr. Prain liked antiquarian and second-hand bookstores.
Beyond the bookcase and the other window there was a collection of antiquities from ancient Greece and Cyprus, a few small Egyptian gods and scarabs, Hellenistic coins, a black-on-red glazed Athenian vase, odd pieces of glass, gold, bronze, a pottery figure of a man on a horse with his arms raised up, a painted Anubis, a Roman portrait head and a huge, decorated iron knife that seemed rather Nordic. It had an intricate snake design on its scabbard. There were a few paintings near this, and a framed tapestry: a sampler, aged and faded, of the alphabet.
I moved to a place in front of the double doors, looking back down the long room. At the far end, to the west, there was a marble fireplace surmounted by a mantelpiece strewn with Asiatic items: a wooden dragon and two famille jaune Chinese vases, jade figurines and a roaring tiger. The misericord that had so disturbed me was hidden from view by an array of Crusader armour on a model. There were small marble statues of Hermes and Pan, the latter with penis erect. Our round table, and the two armchairs, waited nearby, illuminated by the dismal light of the north-facing window. There were other armchairs, side-tables, lamps, and a chaise-longue, which indicated that the room was supposed to be used. Moreover, to the left of the door there was a sheeny desk and chair, a standard lamp and a bookshelf full of files. There was also a drinks cabinet. Perhaps Mr. Prain used the room as a study, I thought. Perhaps he felt most at home in this dark den, in the company of curios which seemed by their intrinsic qualities to conspire to remove this room from the rest of the house and place it in a timeless zone in which the outside world was peripheral and unimportant. Certainly, he preferred to be here. Why else would he bring me to this room?
My attention was then caught by a large painting on the southern wall, left of the portrait of Mrs. Marshall, reminiscent of Claude. At first, the painting appeared to depict a group of trees, which dominated the foreground, but the subject of the painting lay beyond, over the side of a cliff or ridge. Mountains rose in the distance behind a dark sea. The outline of a castle with numerous round towers was silhouetted against the dusk sky. In the middle foreground a path wound down from these hilly slopes through groves of trees. A cottage, with pigs, sheep and chickens scattered about it, was in the middle ground. At the centre of the painting the small, animated figure of a woman, arms flailing as she rushed along the path, contrasted with the peace of the rest of the picture. And yet, as I looked at it, the whole scene became strange and ominous. The woman rushing down the path was the only human being represented. She was quite alone, abandoned. Gradually, it seemed to me that she was overpowered by the dreadful sky above her. It pressed down on the pastoral landscape, as if suffocating the breath of a summer day, and the woman was not hurrying home but dashing, oblivious, to a murky fate that awaited her beyond the confines of the frame. Was she escaping? Was she meeting her lover? Bruised black and blue, the delicate pink sky was fading, and a darkness was coming, a darkness without stars or moon. A blush of light clung to the long horizon of the sea, but it was being squeezed dead by an oppressive pillow of clouds. I sensed the cold silence as the birds stopped singing, a silence disrupted only by hissing waves along the shore. The hills undulating down toward the ocean were like a sleeping female form, heavy and unsuspecting. I was watching, hidden by a cluster of trees, from a vantage point high above.
I was standing before this painting when Mr. Prain returned. I heard his footsteps coming down the hall, and then the door swung open. I stood there with my arms behind my back and my heart racing, managing, I hoped, to appear composed. He seemed to be the sort of man who appreciated cool women. I tried to smile without tremor. It is one of my most perfected illusions, a strategy of survival to cope with a mind that ducked into fancy at the slightest nudge, and a tendency to over-react to paintings and films. Despite people believing me easy-going, this is in fact the last thing I am. It is not fashionable to feel too much. This is not a romantic age.
“You have so many interesting things here, Mr. Prain,” I said. “Have you collected them all yourself?”
He smiled a relaxed smile. “Good Lord, no. My grandfather collected a few odds and ends, but a lot of it has been in the family for generations. My grandfather was the main one interested in amassing old books.” He gestured with a nod to the bookshelf. “I have a man who bids for this and that occasionally.” Before, at the Market, I would have teased him about saying this. Mr. Prain had “a man.” Mr. Prain has many people who do things for him, I thought. Monique, for example.
“Have you sorted out the problem?” I enquired.
“Oh.” He smiled again, a little nervously. “For the time being. It’s a trifle really. The gardener has been here since I was a boy, but he has developed, with age, a bit of a temper.”
We were speaking of the man who walked from the lawnmower in a fury. I put the two together. “Can the mower be fixed?”
His gaze froze in response to the fact that I had understood the substance of his conversation with Monique, which of course I had not. It was as if I had trespassed. He had, correctly, assumed my French would not be up to the standard of the language they had employed so fast and fluently, and perhaps things had been said that it was improper for me to have overheard. I felt that I should quickly put his mind at rest. “I saw the gardener through the window,” I said. “He seemed to be very upset about the machine.”
Did I detect relief in his face? He turned away. “The lawnmower is in perfectly good order. It’s only a year old.” A curious thing, I thought, sympathising with the gardener. Mr. Prain would not credit him with knowing when a new lawnmower wa
s required. “He does it out of spite,” he added, strangely.
I was about to ask for further explanations, when he strode back toward the tea table saying, “Sorry to be so long. Has the tea gone cold?”
The last thing I wanted to do was once more sit down on that chair to be force-fed another cream pastry and to indulge in further conversation about writing that would tie me up in knots. I felt like a bird provided with swings, seeds and a bath, with permission to twitter but not to fly. I had not been there for more than an hour. It struck me that I could babble some excuse and speed quickly back to London if I wanted. But did I?
“You’ve eaten your cake. You must have another one,” he said.
“Why don’t you give me a tour of the house?” I suggested, shuffling unwillingly to the misericord and the tea set.
“Oh yes. I want to. But not yet,” he said, sitting down on his chair.
“Not yet?” I yelled inside my head. “Not yet?”
“There’s something I want to show you,” he said.
I attempted to suppress a surge of panic with an expression of cheerful expectation. I disliked this feeling of Mr. Prain being in control. I wanted to sit on the floor, lean against a wall, anything so that I did not have to face him over the table. Now I had to wait for the item to emerge, to be docile, to be the audience as he pulled the rabbit out of his hat. Gingerly, I sat down upon the armchair, perched at the edge as if ready to spring up and away at the slightest provocation.
Fortunately, he did not keep me waiting long. He leaned down to the side of his chair and picked up a framed picture that had been lying there with its back to the room. I could not remember if I had noticed it before. If I had, I had given it no thought. It was glass plated, and as he passed it over the table to me the light from the window cast a reflection over its surface, so that it was only when I held it right before me that I saw who it was.
