A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘And she never remarried?’

  I shake my head, then tell him about her sudden death, and a little about myself, my life in America, my return here. There doesn’t seem to be much to tell. Peace breeds less stories than war.

  We have reached coffee, but I don’t want to let him go. I want to hear more about this Guy Regnier who has taken on flesh and bone through his words, has grown into something other than the phantom he was in my mother’s narrative. I clear my throat and manage to bring out again the crucial question Pierre has refrained from answering.

  ‘And do you know whether my father remarried? Had other children perhaps.’

  He sips his coffee, doesn’t look at me straightaway. ‘I don’t believe so,’ he says at last.

  Maybe it is because he has taken so long to answer, but I have the sense that he is being polite, isn’t being altogether truthful, doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. We are strangers, after all. I let it pass. I play with my napkin. Then I ask him, though it is oddly hard for me to bring out the words, ‘And do you know how he died?’

  It is the first time I see something like open emotion on his face, a fleeting frown then a twist of the lips.

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he shakes his head. ‘All I know is that it happened on one of those clandestine nighttime journeys into the countryside. I suspect his guide didn’t turn up on time to take him back to the city. And then it was too late.’ He pauses, looks into the distance. ‘Bombs. I guess you could say he died of bravery.’

  The silence between us grows. The waitress hovers. But I don’t want to let him go. Somehow it is as if he carries my father within him. Timidly I ask whether he would like to come back to my place or perhaps go to a café. There is so much more I would like to hear, even though I don’t know what questions to put.

  It is as we are walking that he says, ‘Maria, did your mother ever tell you that Guy Regnier had another child?’

  I stop in my tracks, stare at him. ‘Another child?’ I echo, shake my head. ‘After me? But you said…’

  ‘Before you.’

  ‘Before me.’ The headlights of the passing cars look too bright. They daze me. I want to go into a quiet corner. I need to think about this, feel it. Another child, before me. Another woman, before my mother. The missing link I always sensed. ‘Was that another reason he went back to Vietnam?’ I say at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  I am lost in my own thoughts. I wonder why my mother never said anything. I put it down to her puritanism. She wouldn’t have liked the thought of my father with another woman, even before her. A prostitute perhaps. I think of the statistics I have read. Or perhaps she was simply jealous, knew that my father had left her not only because of work, of idealism, but to go back to the mother of his first child. Then, as if it took a great deal of sophisticated mental algebra to arrive at this solution, I suddenly realise that this other child is my brother or sister. I taste this fact and it makes me strangely happy. My world seems to have spread, shifted its perimeter to include a distant country.

  ‘Do you know this person?’ I ask.

  Pierre doesn’t answer straight away and I suspect that he is weighing his answer carefully. Perhaps this person is someone he is not meant to know, or doesn’t want to know. He works for the embassy, after all. There may be things he can’t tell me, can’t talk about to foreigners. Vietnam has only recently opened to the West. Then I think that maybe this sibling, so new to me, is already dead and he doesn’t want to tell me that.

  We have turned into my street and I ask, my tongue stumbling over the new words, ‘Is this person a brother or a sister?’

  His laugh sounds odd in the quiet of the darkened street. Then he says, so softly that I instantly want him to repeat it. ‘I am that person.’

  We stare at each other. We are standing in front of my door and we stare at each other. ‘You are my brother,’ I repeat twice, tasting it. ‘My brother.’ I smile at him. I feel shy. ‘Welcome to my house, brother.’ I push open the door, gaze at him in the lift, wish I could read his eyes.

  ‘Thank you sister,’ he laughs as I usher him in. ‘The last time I saw you, you were a pesky little creature who was always tugging at my trousers and shouting “Gimme”, so the evidence of my eyes is hardly incontrovertible. But you’re so much like Guy that I think that has to be proof enough. Sister.’

  I giggle. I giggle as I bring out one of the bottles of champagne that Grant has given me to celebrate our new working partnership. I giggle as I pour it into glasses and hand Pierre one and we drink a toast to each other. I giggle as I watch him and he watches me more openly now. Afterwards we talk. We sit side by side on the white sofa and talk into the small hours of the night.

  I learn a great deal then. I learn that Pierre came to France with our father late in 1952 when he was two, that his own mother, Guy’s wife, had died just after giving birth to him. It was not the right time to be French in Vietnam. The war against the colonisers was in full flood. On top of that, everything in Saigon reminded Guy of his wife, who it seems he had loved deeply and too briefly. He didn’t want to leave Pierre behind with his grandparents. But his grandfather had extracted a promise from Guy that he wouldn’t bring the boy up to be solely French. The war would end someday and he must bring him back to his country. Which Guy did, when Pierre was ten.

  In the interim, there was my mother and me.

  Pierre remembers my mother. He remembers her as being very kind to him and very proper and sometimes very stern. He remembers Guy worrying about him feeling left out when I was born. And he did feel left out, though only a little. It was at school that there were problems. He came home with too many bloody noses and each one worried Guy more. Guy and Françoise started to argue. Guy wanted to take all of us back to Vietnam. It was his country, too, after all, he would claim. He was born there. And he could be more useful there than he was in Paris. Françoise could teach. They needed teachers everywhere. And then there was Pierre and his bloody noses. It would distort him to grow up here. The country was racist.

  And then Françoise would retort that she wouldn’t go and live in a country where the slant of her eyes was a sign of her politics. She wouldn’t be identified with the colonists, present or former. And Guy would answer that the days of the French empire were over and she must think of Pierre, for whom life would be better in Vietnam. And she would tell him to think of me, and how difficult things would be for me. And how dangerous it could all be. The arguments went on and on until the very day they left.

  ‘Your stepmother is a stubborn woman,’ Guy told Pierre after they had gone. ‘Almost as stubborn as me. But she’ll come round.’

  ‘I think he believed that for years,’ Pierre murmurs to me. ‘He always thought you would both suddenly arrive on the next flight from Paris.’

  I think of my mother and am glad that she wasn’t betrayed in that easy way my own guilts had led me to imagine. I am glad for both of us.

  ‘And then history took over,’ Pierre says.

  He fills in the gaps in that history for me. He is wracked with guilt because in some way he feels responsible for our father’s death. Though he knows it could not have been otherwise. When the ten-year-old Pierre first arrived in Vietnam, it was no easier for him than it had been in Paris. He didn’t speak much Vietnamese and despite the slant of his eyes, he was more French than anything else. Gradually he learnt, but the more he learnt about his country, the less he wanted to become a part of the South Vietnamese army he was destined for. So he fled, ran off into the countryside when he was almost seventeen, joined the Viet Cong, rose in the ranks.

  ‘And it was because of me, he never went back to France,’ Pierre murmurs to me. ‘He wouldn’t leave me there. Everytime he read or heard of a fresh bombing in the villages, he thought of me. He saw me in every injured child, was poised to save me. And he did, more than once. I would come to see him from time to time when I could, clandestinely, and I would tell him to go
home. And he would look at me severely and tell me he was home. Home was a place one earned. He was a good man.’

  ‘Ong bac si tot lam,’ I repeat the words I have learned and he stares at me. ‘Monsieur Tran taught me,’ I smile. ‘The good doctor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We sit and talk and are silent in turn, mulling over distant lives which are suddenly as close as our own bodies. At one point I say to him, ‘So you were the P. in his letters. I thought once that P. might be a lover,’ I laugh. ‘And then you fell out of the letters.’

  ‘I told him he was to say nothing about me. Letters could be read by the wrong people. Reprisals taken.’

  I think it is after this that I tell him about Françoise, that she was pregnant when he left, that there could have been another one of us.

  ‘That is sad,’ he says. ‘Very sad. I don’t imagine Guy knew.’

  I grin, ‘Stubborn woman.’

  ‘Stubborn all of us, perhaps.’ He looks at me, stands. ‘I really must go. Work tomorrow. We’ll meet again soon. Sister.’ He bends abruptly to place a moist kiss on my forehead. There is something strange about the gesture. And then it comes to me: it is a repetition. If I sit very tight and make myself very small, I can almost remember it. A kiss from big brother to little sister, ordered by parents, not quite wanted, but there nonetheless.

  I stand to his height. ‘Very soon. Saturday, if you like. I’ll cook dinner for you.’

  He smiles.

  Pierre. I lie in bed and taste the name and repeat the word brother to myself. I think of my mother and my father and that brief and fragile little unit that was our family and its fracturing and how the pieces somehow feel as if they are now back in place. Like some beautiful porcelain bowl of eastern design, copied in the west, broken and now put back together again, the cracks still showing, but whole. I can stroke it, mull over its intricate patterns, keep things in it - letters, jewellery, safety pins, lose them and find them again, those mundane but essential little objects of everyday life. I like the bowl. I no longer have any rancour about its splitting. Neither towards Françoise or Guy. Things break. One can’t always stop them. There is no blame.

  -31-

  The reason I don’t rush into the office on Friday morning, throw my arms around Paul and gleefully announce that he has found my brother for me is because of what happened with Beatrice on Wednesday. It is difficult enough to face her after what he has told me, but it is even more difficult to confront him with the hidden knowledge she has given me. Like some overblown shuttlecock I am bounced between them, trapped in a desperate game of no one’s making. The game will have to end very soon.

  On Wednesday Beatrice and I taught in the school in the 13th as usual. After the class, Vesna came up to chat to me outside the classroom. She was wearing the dress I had given her and I told her how well she looked in it. She said ‘Merci’ in that sharp way of hers, then told me she and Jasha wouldn’t be coming over on the weekend or be in class next week. He was having his operation. I kissed her stiff cheek and wished them both luck, told Jasha I had a special surprise for him when the ordeal of hospital was over.

  Beatrice was watching me through all this and when I turned to her, there was the first real scowl on her face I have ever seen.

  ‘You shouldn’t get so friendly with them,’ she said.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘It’s not professional. They won’t thank you for it.’

  I shrugged, told her I didn’t mind, told her I liked Vesna, thought of her as an Antigone leading her blind son out of the gates of the city. She was tough, I said, had to be tough. It was the only way to survive. I didn’t tell Beatrice that I thought I was a little like Vesna. We had both seen too much life, though what she had seen was a million times worse and her armour was thicker, had to be.

  I don’t mind Vesna’s superficial lack of graciousness. Beneath it all, we understand each other. I know that from her reactions. The day I gave her the dress I asked her whether she had heard during the winter that French women had been called to band together and send their Bosnian sisters something that would lift their spirits - perfume, frilly knickers, feminine things. She laughed uproariously. She loved the notion. ‘Let them send us anything, except guns and the men who use them,’ she said. When I had previously asked Beatrice what she thought about this call for frilly knickers, she was scandalised. ‘Medicine is what they need. Warm shoes.’

  I’m afraid that for all my efforts, I am still not like Beatrice.

  Anyhow, on Wednesday my comments about Vesna didn’t altogether pacify Beatrice, but she conceded the point. She also asked me, as if to make up for her irritation, whether I would like to take on a second class in a different school. I agreed, though I said my time might not be so flexible in the autumn.

  Then she came home with me for a drink and her mood visibly shifted. As soon as we were up in the apartment, she started to pace excitedly around the front room. When she had swallowed a few sips of wine, she turned to me and said, ‘You know, I saw you. Saw you naked one night, undressing.’

  She put her hand up to her lips and it was almost as if she were hiding a girlish snicker.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And kissing a man. He looked very handsome.’

  I had thought it was Paul doing the spying. Beatrice must have told him about it. They talk about me. The thought makes me shrivel up inside. I hate it.

  ‘I must remember to draw my curtains.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t mind. Really.’

  She was a little breathless, her eyes all round and shiny. I filled her glass again.

  ‘What’s it like for you with a man?’ she asked then.

  ‘Depends on the man, I guess. Sometimes it’s wonderful. Sometimes…’ I grimaced. ‘And for you?’ I returned the question since she seemed to be waiting for something.

  ‘The same.’ She turned away. I knew from her gestures that this wasn’t the whole truth and that probably she has only ever known one man. Paul. But she has known him. Knows him still, whatever Paul has wanted me to believe.

  I wondered for a moment what it would be like only ever to have slept with one man and concluded you would probably spend your time wondering about all the others, which was what Beatrice was doing now. But if that one man was Paul, it probably wasn’t so bad. I felt rotten as I had this thought and I laughed too cheerily, and then found myself leading her on, since we were being girls together and I’m not a very good girl, ‘Doesn’t your husband mind when you sleep with others?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Beatrice answered. ‘We’re very grown up about it.’

  I know my Beatrice and this didn’t sound like her voice or her words. She’d learnt them. These were words Paul had given her.

  But I carried on, ‘And you don’t mind about him? With other women I mean.’

  ‘Not really. Would you?’

  I thought about this. ‘It depends,’ I said again. ‘Probably though. It’s so hard to generalize.’

  ‘Yes,’ Beatrice nodded enthusiastically, suddenly hugged me. ‘It’s so hard to generalize.’ Then she hesitated. ‘I only mind when he stays out all night. I don’t like being left alone with the children and then suddenly hearing a noise in the night. I like to be told when he’s coming in.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  Beatrice gave me her best smile then and I felt like a worm whose wriggling was really not worth the earth it turned.

  She got up after that and started to pace again while I thought of Paul’s other women and everything she must have been through. Then she startled me by saying in a small voice, ‘Maria, do you think I could try one of your dresses. It’s just that I have this do to go to and…’

  ‘Of course.’ I would have gladly given her my entire wardrobe at that moment.

  We went and looked through my closet and I pulled out a few things that I thought might just fit her and she tried them on hesitantly. They weren’t quite right. Our shapes are so different, b
ut Beatrice seemed ecstatic as she squeezed into a few of my dresses and I was happy to see her with her own eyes. Finally she chose a flimsy, flowing olive green two piece which didn’t look too bad.

  It was while she was trying on clothes that she said to me. ‘You know, Marie-Françoise has been asking me whether you might like to go up to Brittany with them all one weekend. To visit grandmother.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘She scares you too,’ Beatrice laughed. ‘But don’t worry, Paul will be there. He’ll protect you.’

  I could hardly breathe.

  Beatrice trusts me so implicitly that even as I remember the moment, I can hardly breathe.

  After Beatrice went I sat very still for a long time and felt very afraid. And the fear must have followed me into sleep for I had a terrifying dream. It still pursues me. The dream is about Marie-Françoise. We are standing in my living room in front of the billowing curtains and I am getting undressed. Marie Françoise is looking at me. Her eyes are black with a searing hatred. But it is not Marie Françoise who looks at me. It is me as a child. I recognize the untidy plaits.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ I say to the child who is both of us.

  ‘Okay.’ One by one, she slowly takes out her eyes and hands them to me. ‘Is that better?’ she asks.

  This is why I cannot throw my arms around Paul today. Last Monday it would have all been different. It was different. On Monday the current between us flowed so strong and fast that it could have sailed us to the South Seas without a stop. Only the knowledge of Madame Duval’s august presence just a heartbeat away kept us from tumbling on the floor and succumbing to its rush.

  We worked instead. At my behest, we did an update, so that I could map out what research there remained for me to cover. It isn’t so much. Perhaps Paul is cutting corners because he knows I need to be free for the autumn. But in any case he wants to get the bulk of what remains of the writing done over the summer. He said to me then with that compelling look on his face, ‘And if you were to come away with me, Maria, it would be sure to get finished.’