‘And the children?’ I asked.
‘The children are well taken care of, all their holiday plans firm.’ He started to enumerate them: a few weeks in Brittany, a computer camp for Nicolas, Marie-Françoise to the coast to see her cousins.
And Beatrice? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to say her name, didn’t want her to exist for us at that moment. All I wanted was to bask in the fantasy of it. So instead I touched his hand and said, ‘We’ll see.’
And today the winds have changed. The current today is between Beatrice and me. And though it isn’t so strong, I have the sense that it could easily flood the house.
So I don’t rush into the office and tell Paul. I phone Madame Duval instead and say something has come up and could she convey to Paul that I won’t be in. Then I set to work. And daydream about Pierre and my father and my mother. In the afternoon, on an impulse I walk up to the Cimetière Montparnasse. This time I bring flowers, not a bouquet since she wouldn’t like the waste, but a large potted rose which will last and last. I talk to her. It is easy to talk to her now. I tell her I don’t mind her having being such a proud and stubborn woman, but she could at least have told me that I had a brother. She tells me I was too young to tell to start with and then as time passed, it became too hard to tell. She tells me some things aren’t secrets but somehow they never get told. It’s in the nature of family life. All life, maybe. But she is happy I have met Pierre now. If it hadn’t been for Guy’s stubbornness… I laugh.
Before I go, I confess to her that I find it a lot harder than her to tell right from wrong and then act on it. She doesn’t answer me right away and then in her best schoolteacher’s voice, the one she used when I used to despair of maths problems, she says, ‘Just keep trying, Maria.’ I am about to turn away, it is not my favourite voice, when she adds, more softly, ‘Your father used to say that the only thing he ever found clear was the position of the liver and the pancreas. And usually when the owner was dead. For the rest, we all just muddle along best we can.’
I say goodbye to her. I feel oddly at peace. I know that I have imagined her words, but they felt real enough. Perhaps memory has dredged them up from somewhere.
I have only been back in the apartment for some ten minutes when the doorbell rings. Marie-Françoise, I think and wonder whether I have any ice-cream left. But the voice on the ansaphone is Paul’s and for a moment, I hesitate. I don’t want him here. Here where I sat with Beatrice just two days ago. Her perfume is still in the air. But I let him in. There are some things that can’t be said over an ansaphone.
When I open the door he is all smiles and warmth and irresistible charm. He is still on the shore where I last left him and he doesn’t know I have crossed to the other side. He hugs me and I move away before it becomes something else. He doesn’t notice my withdrawal. He is still smiling.
‘Lovely here. Airy,’ he says as he follows me into the front room. ‘First place I’ve seen you in that’s your own.’ His eyes play over me. ‘And I like your jeans. The ones you wore to Cambridge.’
I draw the curtains with a swish and he frowns slightly. ‘I know you’re uncomfortable, Maria, but I’ve only come to give you this.’ He puts a diskette on the table. ‘You said you wanted to hurry along with things and I thought you might have some time on the weekend to look it over.’
I nod.
‘And I wanted to find out how things went last night with the man from the Embassy. Am I allowed to sit down?’
‘Please.’
He doesn’t choose the chair Beatrice always sits in, which is something of a relief. He sinks into the sofa instead, gestures comically, ‘And will you offer me a drink? A glass of water will do.’
‘Of course.’ I stand there for a moment, watching him and his brow creases. ‘What’s wrong Maria? Has something happened?’
‘Everything’s happened.’ My laugh is too shrill.
He is beside me in a moment, his arm round my shoulder. I shake it off.
‘Your father? Was it bad?’
‘No, yes.’ I flounder, then tell him because I want to tell him above any one else. I tell him quickly about yesterday evening, about my father, about the brother I have found whom I never knew I had lost.
‘But that’s extraordinary Maria, wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.’
‘And all thanks to you.’
He shrugs. ‘A lucky contact.’
‘Thank you for the luck.’
‘Here I brought you something. I guess now it will be all the more fitting.’ He takes a brightly wrapped package from his case and hands it to me.
I shake my head. ‘You shouldn’t give me things.’
‘Why not? I want to give you things.’
‘You shouldn’t.’
He drops the package on the table. It makes a small plop. Those intelligent eyes examine me. ‘Something else has happened Maria. You’ve changed again. I don’t understand.’
‘Nothing’s happened.’ I start to pace. ‘It’s just that I’ve seen Beatrice.’
‘So.’ There is a wary look on his face.
‘So you lied to me. Lied to me about the two of you.’
‘I didn’t lie to you,’ he is adamant. ‘I don’t lie to you. I just omit things. Have to omit things it isn’t discreet to talk about. Why believe her rather than me?’
‘And then all those women,’ I start to pace. I am angry for Beatrice. As angry as if it were me he had wronged. ‘You’ve been cruel to her. It’s cruel, no matter what kind of arrangements you’ve made. Even if she’s remarkable. She doesn’t like it. Not Beatrice. She isn’t your New York or Paris sophisticate. She’s afraid at night. She’s a gentle soul. Naive. She doesn’t know how to tell you. She’s afraid of you. Of your mother.’
I go on and on. I can’t stop and he sits there rubbing his forehead as if there is a pain in it that won’t go away.
‘I wish it had never started between us. It would have been better all round.’ I say it bluntly and then I curb myself, think how much Paul has meant to me all these months, think how without him I would never have found Pierre. I go into the kitchen, make noise with glasses, find the mineral water I never brought out. He is still sitting there when I get back, still rubbing his forehead.
‘Would you like an aspirin?’ I ask lamely.
He doesn’t answer me. Then suddenly he says, ‘So you prefer to believe Beatrice, trust her rather than me?’
Our eyes meet and I turn away before his take me over. ‘I… She’s an old friend,’ I say lamely. ‘She’s good.’
‘Yes.’
He goes. He doesn’t slam the door, but he doesn’t say goodbye either. And I stand there looking after him. After a moment, the temptation to lift back the curtain and peer through the window is overpowering. I don’t. I lie on the bed and close my eyes very tight and try to think of other things.
What I think about is my old adage of the clean break, the value I had learnt young of finishing things off swiftly and sharply, of being able to say ‘it’s over’ and sticking to it. No regrets. No mess. And how increasingly I never seem to be able to make the breaks clean enough. Maybe life is just too dirty.
And it has a funny way of going on just when you think it can’t anymore. We muddle along. Paddle in murky everyday pools far from the sea.
Over the next days, I cook dinner for my brother and we talk and he tells me about his wife and two children and how he is only in Paris for three months, but may come back. I learn that he is in charge of the development of a new tourist zone for the Vietnamese government. Steve and Chuck arrive and we laugh a lot and wine and dine and go to the opera. Paul’s mother rings me up and insists that I come to Brittany for the weekend. When I tell her about my guests, about Pierre, she insists that I bring them all along. The house will love the life. We fix tentatively for the first weekend in July.
Meanwhile, I take Nicolas to Wayne’s World II and enjoy his enjoyment. Marie-Françoise eats so huge a sundae at a café we go to that she
tells me she thinks she’s probably had enough to last her a year. Jasha’s operation is a partial success and I give him a guitar which seems too large for his body but which he strums with rapt delight. Vesna tells me that she has found a job for the summer managing a small Serbian restaurant while its owners are on holiday. She hugs me and tells me I can bring all my friends to eat. Maître Cournot throws a party to mark Tanya’s return to the US and she confesses to me that she thinks her moral fibre has crumbled in France and she isn’t fit for the stringency of the midwest. Beatrice looks more radiant than I have ever seen her and I assume Paul has decided to concentrate on making her happy. When I go into the office for our now twice-weekly meetings, he is quiet and courteous. We work very hard and talk only of work. He doesn’t touch me, hardly looks at me. I sit there afterwards and wait for the glow which is supposed to come with goodness and I ache for him.
Sometimes, late at night, I take out the pin which was in the box he gave me, for I opened it at last, and finger it. It is a formalized flower, its petals of lapis lazuli, as blue as the bluebells in our country wood. Lost and found again. Paul has returned many things to me, my father, my brother, bits of myself. And I have lost him in the process.
We muddle along.
-32-
The train speeds through the countryside eating distance as smoothly as if it were churn butter. Cows graze and turn limpidly into sheep who are metamorphosed into villages which disappear in the blink of an exclamation to leave only expanses of sky over tufted fields. It is my first journey in a TGV - a Very High Speed train and I feel as young as Marie-Françoise who is at my side, but far more excited. She is an experienced traveller, I a novice.
Between exclamations, we play cards. Nicolas sits opposite her and opposite me is Paul. He didn’t know until yesterday I was coming and I wasn’t sure he was. He rang me to cancel our Friday meeting, said he had completely forgotten it was the start of the summer break and he always took the children up to his mother’s to get them settled in.
‘But I’m coming too,’ I said.
There was a pause, a low grumble. ‘No one seems to tell me anything anymore. Not even my mother.’
‘Maybe she thought we talked.’
‘I suppose she did.’
‘There are others, too. My friends from New York. My brother.’
Another pause. ‘Well, that will be nice. The 3.20 train. Taxi in front of the house at 2.45. Bring a bathing costume. It might be warm for a change.’
In fact, Steve and Chuck decided to drive up and take the opportunity to visit a bit of France. They offered to take Pierre along so he could do the same. I didn’t think he’d accept. He met them once, but I couldn’t tell what he made of them - a gay American couple who talk enough to make up for all of his silences. And there are limits to what one can ask a long lost brother from the other side of the world. I didn’t think the Embassy would approve either, after all it’s meant to have been a puritan revolution. But Pierre accepted the offer. Maybe he thinks Steve and Chuck will be useful to him in the future. I told him that between them they knew everyone who was worth knowing in New York. Maybe he just likes the idea of consorting with the former enemy, though he knows better than I do that many of them weren’t.
Apart from the excitement of finding him, I like my new brother more all the time.
So there are only four of us on the train and Paul has been so silent for the last hour that it feels more like three. Now he bleakly mutters, ‘Gin,’ and lays his cards out on the table.
‘Not fair,’ Marie-Françoise blurts out, complains. ‘I only had one more jack to go. Not fair.’
‘Not fair? What do you mean not fair!’ I exclaim, start to tickle her so that she wriggles and squirms and finally bursts into bright laughter.
Paul suddenly gives me a dazzling smile, the kind he used to woo me with. ‘What do you say to a little walk?’ he asks. ‘I think it’s about time for the other kind of gin. ‘
‘Can I have a coke, Papa?’ Marie-Françoise, all charm now, smiles up at her father.
‘One a day for the whole weekend.’ Paul ruffles her hair, ‘And Nicolas can have a little something with the grown-ups, if he likes.’
Nicolas flushes bright red, but when he gets up I notice his shoulders are high. He isn’t hiding so much these last weeks. A change is slowly creeping over him. Maybe it’s the computer camp. He told me about it when we went to the cinema, told me it was really all because of me that he was allowed to go. His grandmother had taken my words to heart and told his father it might not be such a terrible thing. And Paul wasn’t all that against it in any case: now that he had a computer of his own he was coming round. He had even told Nicolas he would have to teach his father a trick or two when he came back.
‘And your Mum?’ I asked him.
‘Oh she doesn’t care what I do, as long as I don’t bother her,’ he said to me.
I told him I was sure that wasn’t true, but he just shrugged and I remembered then that Beatrice never seemed to pay any attention to him when we were together. More than that. Never even looked at him. The family’s ugly duckling.
The train may be smooth to sit in, but when we walk it’s speed is evident in bumped shins and hips. Paul looks back at me over the children’s heads and mouths an ‘ouch’, shows me how to position my hands on each forthcoming seat to keep my balance. Something seems to have woken him from his brooding slumber. Maybe it is simply the sight of the sea, darkly blue now in the distance.
I asked Beatrice why she didn’t come up with us since we were to be a whole party and her mother-in-law would have little time to make her uncomfortable. It would be jolly. She looked at me blankly, ‘You’ve forgotten Maria, I’m sure I told you. I go off on holiday on Monday. I need some time alone to prepare.’ She smiled dreamily then, ‘Three whole weeks to myself, on an island. Bliss. Maybe I’ll stay longer,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll be just like you.’
Beatrice, I have to say, has been looking wonderful in anticipation of her holiday. She went on a diet so my dress would fit her better and it worked, so I told her to keep it. That wonderful serenity is back in her face too. But she’s been growing a little forgetful. She forgot to turn up to the French class on Wednesday and I ended up with both groups; then she forgot to buy Marie-Françoise a pair of trainers for Brittany and asked me whether I’d pick up a pair on Thursday. Perhaps her duties are really getting on top of her.
By the time we finish our drinks we have almost arrived and we have to make a dash back to our seats to collect our things. When the door slides open and releases us onto the platform, the air is moist, already salty. Paul takes a deep breath and smiles. ‘Alright scamps, find us the biggest taxi.’
We pile into a cab willing to take all of us and ride lazily through dips and turns of a lush green countryside which reminds me of nothing so much as England.
‘Been here before?’ Paul asks.
I shake my head.
‘Hope you like it.’
‘Of course Maria will like it. It’s beautiful,’ Marie-Françoise answers for me.
The house is tall and solid and whitewashed. It sits at the crest of a hill off a small winding road. Squat windcurved trees surround it and when we reach the top of the hill, the sea is a surprise on the other side. It bounds against rocks, curls white and spits against a cliff. The sun sits on the horizon, a plump yellow ball washing the sky pink in its wake.
‘I like it,’ I murmur to Paul.
He looks at me in a way I thought the last weeks had obliterated and then Madame Arnault is upon us, waving from the porch, urging the children in, holding a large and tugging golden retriever by the collar.
‘Rabelais,’ Marie-Françoise falls on the dog and lets him lick her face.
‘Your grandmother first,’ Madame Arnault smiles at me, gives her cheek to Marie-Françoise and Nicolas in turn. ‘Welcome,’ she kisses me lightly, then moves to embrace her son. ‘The others haven’t arrived yet, so you’ve plenty of t
ime for a wash, a stroll through the grounds, a drink. I’m so glad to have you all here.’
She looks less daunting than she did in Paris. Perhaps its the casual slacks and fawn sweater. Perhaps it’s just because we’re in her own home.
‘I’ve put you in the guest wing, my dear, far from the children, so you can sleep in in the morning. And next door to your brother. Isn’t it exciting. You’ll have to tell me all about it. But first we must show you round. Paul will you do it or shall I?’
Paul chooses to see to the children.
‘You know, we all used to come here as a family when I was a child and then when my own children were small,’ Madame Arnault chats as she shows me round. ‘When they grew up, we didn’t come so much anymore and the place got all shabby with disuse. Then, after my husband died, I really thought I’d had enough of Paris. I wanted a garden, quiet, the sea, glimpses of my own childhood. And now when my friends or the children come to see me, it’s a special occasion. We have longer together than we do in the city. It’s some kind of solution, I guess. To old age.’
I smile into her loneliness and exclaim over the beauties of the house. It seems larger on the inside than the outside, big generous rooms which give onto each other filled with just enough comfortable old furniture not to be empty or crowded. And all of the windows look out onto views I want to pause over. The room she shows me to is all warm oak and white walls with a big old-fashioned bed in the centre.
‘It creaks a little,’ Madame Arnault chuckles, ‘but you can watch the sea from here.’ She throws open the windows and I hear the whoosh of the waves. ‘You’ll be alright?’
‘Wonderful, thank-you.’
I wash in the corner sink and melancholy creeps up on me. I can’t chase it away. Perhaps it’s just the sound of the sea. I put on a bright blue sweater and brighter white trousers to chase it away and laugh at myself.
Downstairs the children are having supper in the kitchen. They’re being fussed over by a plump dark-haired woman who is introduced by Paul as Martine. She wipes her hand on her apron before shaking mine and says something in an accent I can’t immediately fathom.
A Good Woman Page 34
