A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Both I hope. It looks nice.’

  I refuse his eyes.

  The coffee in the flask is still hot and tastes strangely better than when I first tried it. By the time I have drained my cup, my resolve is firm again. I must act on it quickly.

  ‘When is your flight?’ I ask.

  ‘Look at me, Maria.’

  I look at him, but I cannot face the troubled perplexity of his expression.

  ‘Isn’t it good between us? Very good?’ he murmurs.

  ‘Too good.’

  ‘I see.’

  I don’t know what he sees. I wish I smoked so that I could do something in this silence. I pace instead, stare blindly out the window.

  He has come up behind me. His hand is on my shoulder. ‘Maria, if it’s my wife that’s worrying you, you musn’t. It’s not like that between us. We have a…’

  ‘Tacit understanding,’ I turn on him. ‘They all say that.’

  ‘Of course!’ He scowls at me. ‘They all say that.’ His tone is flat. There is a look of desperation on his face. ‘But this is not “they all”; this is me. And you. In the law they teach us each case is unique, individual, whatever the similarities with other cases.’

  ‘We’re not in court, Paul,’ I smile. I don’t want to see that despair. I squeeze his hand. He kisses me, too hard. We are both breathless.

  ‘This once I can’t accept, shouldn’t it really in all fairness, at least extend to one whole weekend?’

  His hand is on the small of my back. I like it there. I would like to keep it there. ‘Alright,’ I mouth at him. ‘One whole weekend.’

  It is only after he has kissed me again that I remember. I slip away from him. ‘A slight hitch, though.’ I play with the scarf he has given me, try to squeeze another cup of coffee from the flask. ‘I promised to visit a friend in Cambridge.’

  ‘What kind of friend?’ his voice is rough.

  ‘A very dear old friend. My oldest friend. He… There’s a baby I haven’t yet seen.’

  Paul is studying me. ‘Would I be in the way?’

  I consider this carefully, then shake my head.

  Paul grins his boyish grin. ‘What I like about you Maria, is that even though you tell me nothing, I suspect you of honesty.’

  -22-

  Birds flit and swoop from hedgerows bright with dog roses. Cow parsley flutters in the wind which lifts our hair, caresses our faces. Every now and again the sweet fragrance of hawthorn floods our nostrils. I am happy, happier than I can ever remember being. My hand is on Paul’s thigh. He has placed it there and if I close my eyes I can feel each twist and turn of the narrow road through the tensing of his muscles. I am cocooned in sensation.

  Somehow, in the hour we spent apart, Paul managed to hire this pert white convertible complete with map and find the picnic hamper which rests on the back seat. The toys I bought are in the boot with our bags. We have taken a circuitous route, so lazy and circuitous that the distance from London to Cambridge could well prove as long as the total of crisscrossing country lanes and afternoon sunlight.

  At our side now, there is a little wood, dappled with light. Through the trees I can see a carpet of shimmering blue. Paul slows the car and squeezes it onto a narrow verge.

  ‘Hungry?’ He touches my throat, folds his hand over mine.

  ‘Ravenous.’

  His smile curls deliciously and I have to kiss it. Something happens in that kiss, I don’t know what, perhaps it is simply the pressure of his hand, but our languor disappears and suddenly we are hurrying, rushing into the shelter of the woods, clasping each other, falling onto the first mossy bank so that he can come into me there where I have wanted him since he left.

  It is all so explosive and quick, that afterwards he is apologetic.

  ‘Blame it on the bluebells,’ I giggle, ruffle his hair. I am happy, but perhaps he is more accurate when he grumbles a little and says, ‘So many emotions to squeeze into “once”.’

  I am feeling giddy. I don’t want the gloom. I am about to thrust clichés at him, ‘Better to have loved and lost…’ when I stop myself. After all, I have never done much of the losing. Except that once. I force the image away, hide my face in the hamper, bring out trimly cut sandwiches, salmon and cucumber, roast beef, cheddar cheese, a bottle of wine.

  It is after he has uncorked the wine and poured us each a glass that he murmurs, ‘And what if I were to fall in love with you Maria? had fallen in love?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I laugh. ‘I’m just a pretty face. Long legs and a pretty face. I’m not worth it. And you’re a serious man.’ I am deliberately, assiduously frivolous.

  He is studying me again in that intent way of his. ‘Shouldn’t that be up to me to judge? I’ve worked with you for what is it now, two months, argued with you, watched you…’

  ‘Ssshh.’ I put my fingers to his lips. ‘Don’t.’ I have the sense that if he goes on, I will start to cry. ‘Tell me a story instead. About your childhood.’

  He puts his arm around me and we lean into the trunk of a tree.

  He tells me about a bluebell wood in Brittany. His parents had a country house there and every year from when he was very small, he would go to the wood with his brothers, with friends. Then one year, the wood was gone, had simply been razed to the ground, and amongst the stubs of burnt out trees, only one or two valiant flowers poked their heads. He was too old for crying, eight perhaps, but that night and every night for a week, he had cried secretly in bed.

  ‘My first loss.’

  The tears bite at my eyes. I gather the remains of our picnic back into the hamper. ‘So we shouldn’t be sitting here. It makes you sad.’

  ‘Not at all. I’ve found the wood again. With you. And it’s as magical as I remember it. In fact, it’s made me remember it.’ He smiles softly. ‘Now tell me about your first loss.’

  I am bemused. I can’t think of anything. At last, I mumble, ‘My father, I guess. But I don’t really remember him at all.’

  ‘Lost and half-found again in an endless number of men,’ he murmurs.

  ‘A veritable brigade,’ I laugh, but the laugh goes wrong. I look up at him. The diagnosis is startlingly simple, yet it has never occurred to me. I don’t like it.

  ‘Too facile,’ I say and make a face at him.

  ‘Much too facile,’ he agrees readily, but a moment later he asks with an edge, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a platoon?’

  ‘An army.’

  The turn of the conversation irritates me so I want to irritate him. I don’t like inquisitions.

  ‘And did you, do you, love any of them?’

  ‘All of them.’

  There is a napkin left on the floor and I screw it into a ball and fling it at him.

  He catches it in mid-air. ‘And what did you love about them?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ I am angry now. ‘Tom had a really nice dimple in his chin; Harry’s hair was as blond and fine as desert sand; Dick had a lovely dick, all thick and stubby. Shall I go on?’

  ‘Please,’ he is relentless.

  ‘Tim had a brain; Josh had a matted chest as soft as moss; Seamus had a gift for metaphor and a voice to go with it; Grant purred as deliciously as a big cat; Bill improvised magnificently on any number of instruments; Wayne rubbed my back in the bath, until all thoughts disappeared; Steve tickled me with malicious wit; Arnie could plot monstrous amorous campaigns; Leo was good; Oscar’s laugh was as big as his belly; Tony, well Tony was just Tony and had huge chocolate eyes with thick dark lashes.’ I am inventing madly, I could go on like this for days.

  ‘More?’

  He shakes his head, ‘I get the picture. Humpty Dumpty. And little Maria couldn’t put all the parts together again.’ He pauses. Dark eyes flash at me. Too dark.

  ‘And me? What do you like about me, Maria?’

  Suddenly I want to be cruel.

  ‘You? Why you’re Mr. Once.’

  I get up and walk away. I am livid, raging. I go deeper into the wood, run,
stumble, slip, improvise directions. When I look back he isn’t following me.

  By the time the wood clears into meadow, my mind has cleared too. The sun is low in the sky. He will leave me here, I think. I will have to walk to the nearest village. Or hitchhike. I realise I have left my bag in the car. Never mind, it serves me right for playing the fool. I will ring Robinson and he will come and fetch me. I will write to Paul, no to Madame Duval, and give up the job. It was all too good to be true, anyway. I didn’t deserve it.

  I skirt the edge of the wood and find myself back on the road. In the distance I see Paul’s car. I walk towards it slowly. My heart feels heavier than my mud-caked shoes.

  He must see me coming in the rear-view mirror, for he bends to open the door for me. We stare at each other. He looks as miserable as I feel.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, just as he says it too. He puts out his hand to me. I take it and kiss it softly. I am crying. I did not know I had so many tears left.

  In Cambridge we park the car and walk arm in arm along picture postcard streets, through majestic courtyards, into splendid gardens. The May trees are heavy with flower, the ground beneath them snowy with petals. We stand and look up through branches so lush, they are dizzying. He holds me very tightly as if he is afraid I may disappear again. I don’t want to. I can no longer recapture the nub of my fury.

  We find a hotel overlooking the river. I would like my own room, if only for an hour, so as to collect myself, but I don’t dare say. He would misread it, I think, but in that uncanny way he has, no sooner have we put our bags in the room, than he asks, ‘Would you like a little time on your own, Maria? I can meet you in that pub we passed, by the river, whenever you’re ready.’ I clutch at him then, kiss too deeply, as if I can already taste the sorrow of a future goodbye.

  From our garden table in the pub, we watch ducks paddling, racing away from noisy punters, pink light fading in the milky sky. Later over dinner, we talk. He wants to know about my parents, my childhood, about me. There is a quality in his attention, a stilling of himself, which lulls me. This compounded with the sense I have that I want to make up to him for my earlier behaviour loosens my guard, my words, so that I find myself uttering things I have rarely spoken before - and never to someone who knows the sites of my words, the flavour of the background, the name of street and school.

  I tell him about my mother, her busy, if solitary, life, her white blouses, her goodness, her bravery, the trail of refugees in the spare room, the injustice of her sudden death.

  ‘And the shock,’ Paul murmurs, then asks, ‘And Monsieur d’Esté?’

  For a moment I am confused.

  ‘Your father? The one you lost.’

  ‘Guy Regnier,’ I smile. ‘D’Esté is my mother’s name.’

  ‘You don’t use his?’

  I look away a little nervously. ‘I used to. I’ve just changed recently, in honour of my mother perhaps.’ As I say it, it seems to me to hold at least a grain of truth.

  ‘And what happened to your father?’

  I tell him the little I know. I tell him in almost the same words my mother used. I tell him that my father left us when I was two, oh not for the usual reasons, but to answer a greater call - medicine, war, Vietnam. The story I tell surprises me: my parents emerge as heroic idealists, great and good, so different from myself that it makes me gasp inwardly.

  Perhaps I have the same strained look on my face that my mother used to have when she talked of my father, for Paul says to me when I have finished, ‘They sound wonderful. But for a child wonderfully resentable.’

  I squeeze his hand, strangely glad that he has said it.

  ‘And have you ever thought of finding out what happened to your father? It shouldn’t be impossible anymore.’

  I stare at him. I have never, except for that once when the letters came into my hands, wanted to know. But now the notion appears tantalising. ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘It’s worth a try. There can’t have been that many French doctors who stayed on through the war. I have a friend in the Embassy. If you like, I could ask…’

  Later, when we are lying atop rumpled sheets, moist with each other, he asks me, ‘Maria, what is it that you really won’t talk about?’

  ‘Anything.’ I laugh. I don’t want to be serious. I run my hand along the warmth of his skin, pause in that smooth crevice I love where hip and thigh meet. He pulls me on top of him so that I am forced to look into brooding eyes.

  ‘We’ll have plenty of time to talk after our “once”,’ I say, snuggling into him.

  ‘You can’t stop life like that, Maria.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  I don’t altogether like the sound that comes out of me.

  Robinson and Nina live in a tiny village outside Cambridge. We drive there for lunch. I have spoken to Robinson and told him of Paul’s presence. He didn’t sound overjoyed.

  The house is white and old and graceful and slopes a little precariously in one corner. There are lilacs in front, a spreading copper beach on the side and in the distance, a meadow where horses graze peacefully.

  I hesitate before ringing the bell. Paul squeezes my arm. I don’t know what I have said to him that makes him think I need reassurance, but he knows. What he doesn’t know is that this might have been my life.

  Robinson comes to the door. He is in jeans and shirt sleeves and I feel his nervousness as clearly as I feel my own. He embraces me, perhaps for Paul’s benefit, and I enthuse about the house before introducing them. They shake hands and assess each other while I assess them. They are of a height within a fraction of an inch, though Paul looks taller where Robinson looks sturdier. In fact, they are so unlike, one fair where the other is dark, one laconic where the other is mercurial, that any attempt at comparison would only produce travesty. Their only point in common must be me and I suspect they both know it, for by the time we have made our way through the house and into the sun-dappled back garden Paul’s hand has stolen proprietarily round my waist. I am happy to have it there. I have had visions of feeling like the maiden aunt peering in uncomfortably on the happy family.

  A golden retriever, whom Robinson introduces as ‘Big’ so that I have to grin without being able to explain to Paul, comes lolloping up to us. He is closely followed by a rounded woman with smiling eyes and dark curling hair. She is balancing a toddler on her thigh, all flashing eyes and plump charm like his mother.

  ‘Welcome,’ she says with a Latin lilt to her voice. ‘Say hello to our guests, Jamie.

  Jamie stares at us, then puts up a pudgy arm to wave and in an attack of shyness buries his head in his mother’s bosom.

  We all laugh and start to talk at once.

  ‘Lovely boy.’

  ‘Come to Daddy, Jamie,’

  ‘Can I get you a drink.’

  ‘I’ve got a present for him. In the car.’

  ‘J’y vais.’

  Paul goes off to the car, while Nina fetches white wine.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ I say to Robinson.

  ‘And just like his mother. I know,’ Robinson chuckles. ‘But he has my character.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Blindly stubborn. According to Nina.’

  Our eyes meet and we laugh. It’s alright. It’s going to be alright.

  When Paul arrives with the presents, there is general commotion. Not knowing what to choose, I have, as always, decided on plenty - a big box of lego, a teddy so plump and tawny that he is the epitome of cuddle, a giant milk van, complete with bottles and driver’s seat. For the adults, there are cakes and claret.

  ‘Christmas in May,’ Nina is all ebullience.

  ‘Every day of the year, I suspect, if Maria could organize it,’ Paul says.

  I notice an exchange of glances I cannot read between the two men; then at the side of the garden, beyond a strip of privet, see two old people appear. My breath catches. Chris and Stephanie. An image of a striding big-boned couple flashes through my mind, but these two move in w
hite-haired slow motion, as if the ground wasn’t where they remembered it.

  By the time they reach us and we have all exchanged greetings and Jamie has fallen twice out of the milk van, the shock has dulled and I am able to see Stephanie and Chris in these two aging bodies, now smaller than my own. Her eyes are still clear and candid and he still spreads his hands carefully on his lap as if they belonged to someone else. And they both take in my presence with the same easy warmth making me feel I have only left them yesterday. Though at one point, when I stretch across the table to pass Chris another slice of lamb, he says, ‘Who would have thought gawky little Miss Know-it-all would turn into this superb creature!’

  I rarely flush, but I feel the warmth rising in my cheeks now.

  ‘Was she really little Miss Know-it-all?’ Paul asks, his English suddenly acute.

  Stephanie nods vigorously, ‘And we always thought that one day she and Robbie would…’

  ‘Mother!’ Robinson cuts Stephanie off.

  Nina laughs, ‘But he found this other wretched foreigner instead.’

  Our eyes meet and in that look I realise she knows everything. For some reason, it doesn’t displease me.

  ‘Terrible wretches, aren’t we,’ I smile at her.

  ‘Ghastly.’

  It is only after lunch and when we have tucked Jamie in for a nap with his new Teddy, that Robinson and I have a moment alone. We stroll down to the edge of the meadow and watch the gambolling horses.

  ‘Is Paul the change in you?’ Robinson asks. He is nervous with his curiosity.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I say lightly.

  ‘Aren’t you ever going to settle down, Mare?’

  Now that he is, he would like to see me settled too. Marriage, children, they’re like a missionary faith. Once people like Robinson have become true believers, they insist you join their ranks. Or maybe they simply want you on a shelf, marked unattainable.

  ‘I like Nina very much,’ I answer him. ‘And the house is splendid.’

  ‘Would you have been happy here?’ he asks softly.