A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Would you like a nibble of something?’ Paul interprets. ‘Or shall we have a walk.’

  ‘Martine is a good cook. Better than my mother,’ Marie-Françoise announces.

  ‘Hush,’ Paul chides her.

  ‘You say it too.’ Nicolas takes his sister’s side.

  We go out through a back door into a garden lush with rhododendrons and vast hydrangea bushes. There are pebbled paths with rose trellises and further from the house, lanes shadowed by trees. Paul is quiet as we walk, abstracted, quiet for so long that finally I say, ‘You’re elsewhere.’

  ‘No. Yes,’ he grins. ‘I was thinking about a case. It’s funny, the country always makes me think of death. Maybe it’s all the vegetation. The sound of things growing. Look,’ he points to a window at the top of the house. ‘That’s where I do a lot of my writing. Maybe that’s why I’m preoccupied.’ He pauses. ‘And because I can’t touch you.’

  I shiver.

  ‘Cold?’

  I shake my head and he casts me a brooding look. ‘The blue suits you. You could wear the brooch with it.’

  We walk. ‘I never thanked you for it. It’s lovely. A memento.’ My voice cracks.

  He laughs gruffly. ‘It would be lovelier if we had a future to match the memories.’

  We hear the sound of a car in the drive then and walk quickly round the house towards the front. As we walk, I try to shake off my sense of melancholy. It won’t quite go. It persists while I introduce Steve and Chuck and Pierre to Paul and his mother. It clings through fast talk about driving adventures. It follows me through the evening which nonetheless has its hilarious moments as I translate erratically whenever anyone’s French or English breaks down.

  Madame Arnault takes Pierre over. She is honoured, she tells him, to meet Guy Regnier’s son. Pierre seems equally pleased to meet her and politely lets himself be led away for a tour of the house and reminiscences about our father. My New York and Paris sides are slightly trickier. Steve begins by eyeing Paul too openly and says in English, ‘So you’re the scoundrel who’s stolen away my best partner.’

  I don’t think Paul has quite caught the tone, for he gives me a quick glance and then says, ‘I think she came willingly. At first.’

  ‘Lucky dog.’

  ‘I am that.’

  ‘Wasting her time with the law,’ Steve shakes his shaggy head mournfully. ‘Good thing it’s not America. We already have more lawyers than the rest of the world put together.’

  ‘We need them,’ Chuck intervenes, chortles so that his elfin face looks even more impish. ‘We got more crime. More wrongs to right. More rights to fight.’

  Paul looks at them both and suddenly smiles his most charming smile. It’s taken him a moment, but he’s there now. ‘Welcome to the outskirts of Douarnenez, gentlemen. And to France, birthplace of the rights of man and a few women.’

  Steve bows dramatically, then drapes his arm round me. ‘Best PR in New York, she was. That’s public relations. We’re not sure about the private relations. They’re still open to reasonable doubt.’

  ‘Stop it, Steve. You’re with serious people.’

  ‘So who wasn’t being serious? Oh and here are two more deeply serious people.’ He bends to Marie-Françoise’s height and puts out his hand, ‘Enchanté, Mademoiselle. Je suis Steve Nichols et ça c’est mon ami, Chuck. Comment allez-vous?’ He delivers all this in such exaggerated schoolboy French that Marie-Françoise bursts out laughing.

  ‘And I am Marie-Françoise and this is my brother, Nicolas,’ she says in a perfect English mirror image of Steve.

  We all giggle.

  ‘And I can tell we are going to be amis, all of us,’ Steve pats Nicolas on the shoulder.

  The dining room has a fireplace at either end in which Madame Arnault has arranged vast bowls of flowers. We sit at the long table over which she regally presides. Pierre is next to her and I am next to him. I worry about all the questions he is being asked about Vietnam and realise at one point that he can take care of himself better than I can. His manner is always courteous so that even when he avoids answers, he seems to have made them. That pleases me and I find myself drifting and thinking again about how the trials of his life have shaped him. When I come out of my daydream everyone is suddenly arguing with great earnestness about the law.

  ‘The reason you have so many lawyers,’ Paul is saying in English to Steve ‘is that your society is based on contract. Everything is there to be argued, signed and sealed. And claimed against, when the contract is broken. Here, we have contracts, yes, but behind them a whole weight of how shall I say it, woolly tradition, customs, that many of us understand without having to put contracts to. Because we were way back then mostly the same people. But in America, you were all new. You had to write things down, so all the different peoples with their different customs could understand each other.’

  ‘And now we understand each other even less because we have so many rules that no one knows which ones he or she or it, not to mention hyphen American this and hyphen American that, is breaking or needing to put right.’ Steve grunts. ‘So we have to have lawyers everywhere to work them out. And we pretend they’re heroes.’ He slaps his forehead with a thud.

  Paul smiles but looks perplexed and I have to translate which isn’t easy, since I think only Chuck and I will know what Steve is on about in whatever language.

  But Paul has read his newspapers. ‘Oh, you mean because of all the insult laws.’

  Chuck laughs, ‘We’re a delicate, sensitive people. Peoples.’

  ‘And litigious. Good for my profession, but maybe not so good for the society as a whole. Perhaps we could compare it in one way with what has happened in Italy. When politics fail, people look to the courts for justice.’

  ‘Checks and balances.’

  ‘And when the judges fail?’ I ask.

  ‘We go right back to the beginning.’

  ‘Or bang bang. We shoot each other.’

  ‘We have done too much of that,’ Pierre suddenly intervenes.

  ‘On that merry note, I think we could do with some dessert.’ Madame Arnault rises and for a moment I think we have upset her. I follow her into the kitchen. She has tears in her eyes, but she wipes them calmly. ‘Thank you for bringing them all,’ she says. ‘It’s just like when my husband was here. All noise and commotion.’ She gives me a tranquil smile.

  Morning dawns clear and bright and we brave the chill to clamber down to the beach while the tide is right. There are little rock pools and stretches of fine sand and the gulls call is shrill and high above the noise of the waves. My bathing suit, unworn for too long, is too white and too skimpy, and I feel shy as I lift off my sweatshirt in front of my brother.

  ‘Your sister is a very beautiful woman,’ Paul is watching me.

  ‘It runs in the family,’ Steve chuckles and I think Pierre will be insulted, but he simply smiles and goes off to kick a ball round with Nicolas. ‘Nice guy, your brother. Told him he should come to New York and visit the enemy’s jungle so we could compare guerilla tactics and he didn’t blink. Just said, “Yes, one day.”‘

  ‘He’s a diplomat.’

  Steve and I lie side by side in the sun while Paul and Chuck go beachcombing with Marie-Françoise and her ever present Rabelais. ‘So ‘fess up,’ he says after a moment. ‘What’s between you and this Maître Arnault?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Hey, I haven’t been your private relations adviser for all these years without being able to tell something from nothing. If he looked at me the way he looks at you, I’d chuck Chuck in a twinkle. Well for a day or two.’

  ‘Triangle,’ I say after a moment.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Not again. I’m not having any more.’ I turn over and hide my face in my arms.

  ‘And you know his mother, so you must know his wife?’

  ‘My oldest friend.’

  Steve whistles. ‘Ever thought of becoming gay? It’s a much simpler, cleaner life.’ />
  ‘What? So I could have an affair with his wife?’

  ‘That’s hardly what I meant. Is she nice?’

  ‘She’s my friend.’

  ‘And he’s your enemy? Funny kind of enemy. We’re gonna end up by having to take you back to New York.’

  I throw sand at him and race into the water. It is icy. As icy as a long slow punishment. I bound through the surf until it is deep enough to plunge and then strike through cold. Eventually my limbs grow used to it. One can grow used to a lot of things.

  In the afternoon we pile into two cars and head out for a walk the children particularly love. The woods are deep and shady and fern strewn and the steep ridges appear from nowhere, as surprising as the glimmer of the distant lake. Paul walks in front with Pierre. Steve and Chuck are on either side of Madame Arnault and her occasional bursts of laughter remind me how stupid my worries were that she would be shocked by them. On the contrary. Over lunch they seemed to have become fast friends, have extracted from her the story of every bit of furniture and bric a brac in the house, not to mention details of her wardrobe over the seventy years of her largely Parisian life.

  The children and I make up the rear. I am teaching them a song I used particularly to love as a child, probably because I thought it was naughty and the rhymes made me laugh. They make them laugh too.

  Qui a eu cette idée folle

  Un jour d’inventer l’école?

  C’est ce sacré Charlemagne

  sacré Char-le-magne

  (Who was the benighted fool

  Who had the idea of inventing school?

  It was blasted Charlemagne

  blasted Charlemagne)

  I am strangely happy with the children. Maybe it’s because it keeps me safe from their father’s eyes which I’ve been avoiding all day. At one point I find myself thinking that if I had married Robinson way back then, I would now have at least a couple of my own and I wallow a little in the sentimentality of that and then come out the other side to find Paul beside me and the groupings of our walk all changed. I glance at him and think that if I had stayed with Robinson I would never have known him. I would have been unhappy not to have known him. Though perhaps it would have been better. And then I stop thinking, because he is speaking to me.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve invited Pierre to the office to meet René. He needs advice on international business contracts. And whatever we may have said about contracts last night and their clumsiness for dealing with the finer points of life, we don’t want the Vietnamese losing their coastline to sharp practitioners.’

  ‘Why should I mind?’

  He laughs. ‘You’re so protective of him. I’ve been watching you. You’re afraid he might break. Or that we might shatter him.’

  I consider this. ‘He doesn’t know his way round our particular by-ways. And he’s had a hard life.’

  ‘Yes.’ He doesn’t say anything for a moment, then he adds. ‘Sometimes that puts one’s feet firmly on the ground. And one walks very well. While the protectors end up constructing prisons which no one, not even they, want to stumble round in.’

  I don’t know what he is talking about, so I say, ‘Thank you for being concerned about Pierre.’

  ‘You spend all your time thanking me,’ he mutters, ‘and none of it being with me.’

  After a leisurely breakfast the following morning, Steve and Chuck announce that they’re going to head off and start a winding journey back to Paris. So they can take in some more sights. Pierre says he would like to go with them. I am tempted to go, too, rather than take the train back, but Madame Arnault restrains me.

  ‘Oh no, Maria. It’s too soon. You can’t all run off and leave me at once. I’ve got enough food in the house to feed the French army. And I was hoping you might stay at least another day or two.’

  I make a demurring sound, but she rushes on. ‘And Paul is staying until Tuesday. It would be nicer for you to go back with him. No point checking into the office when the Maître isn’t there.’ She stops herself. ‘Unless you have other pressing engagements, of course.’

  Before I can answer, Paul comes into the room and she puts the matter to him. ‘She works for you, doesn’t she? Tell her there’s no rush to get back,’ she laughs girlishly.

  Paul hesitates for a moment, ‘If there’s nothing in particular waiting for you in Paris, Maria, it would be nice if you stayed. We could even work here, if you feel like it.’

  ‘I haven’t brought my computer.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘So it’s all settled,’ Madame Arnault is all smiles. ‘And now we can take the children down to the beach. It might not be so fine after lunch.’

  She comes to the beach with us this time, manoeuvring the steep path with casual dexterity. I sit with her while Paul goes off crab-hunting with the children. I watch her putting cream on her legs, her arms, her face. I note that her toe nails beneath the trim sandals are beautifully manicured, her hair neatly gathered in a black velvet ribbon at the base of her long neck. She is one of those women who treats her body like a small private business in which the investment is largely but not wholly hers. There is no particular narcissism, only a matter-of-fact distance. If the paint is fresh, the articles nicely laid out, trade will be good and that will be better all round. It’s a workable compromise between too passionate an identification with the firm and slovenly carelessness. And it seems to have served her well into age.

  She is talking to me now, talking a great deal as old ladies so often do. I don’t know whether it’s a result of loneliness or too many years spent politely listening to husbands and hoarding chatter. I hope she doesn’t regret her confidences when she stops to notice them. She is telling me about her youngest son whose address she has given to Steve. He lives in California and he’s like them, has Paul told me? Yes. And she worries about him, but what can one do? There is so little one seems to be able to do about anything.

  ‘Oh look,’ she gestures into the distance. ‘There’s Danielle.’

  I see a dark, longhaired woman, nicely rounded, with her arms round Paul. He is bending familiarly to kiss her.

  ‘I always hoped Paul would marry Danielle. They’ve known each other since they were children. Her parents have the place round the corner and she’s an investigating magistrate. Still, he didn’t. Married Beatrice instead.’ She casts me a searching look. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I have anything against Beatrice. I know you’re her particular friend. It’s just that she hasn’t made Paul very happy. And he’s my favourite, grows more like his father all the time. But I’m babbling and you’ll begin to think I’m a demented old woman,’ she laughs. ‘It’s just that I feel I’ve known you forever. Like a daughter. Maybe because I knew Guy. Off you go now. You’ll be wanting a swim. Or go and meet Danielle. She’s a treasure.’

  I opt for the swim. I’m not ready for any treasures. Nor do I know what to do with all the information I’ve just been given. I walk for a bit in the opposite direction, towards the boulders, dunk my feet in the shallow pools between them, stroll back letting my toes make gooey imprints in wet sand. I see an old man with turned up trousers ahead of me and I think of my last catastrophic trip to the seashore and my heart starts to beat wildly and so loudly that for a few moments I am utterly unaware of a presence at my side. It is a man with curling dark hair and a matted chest and he is saying the usual silly things men say to women walking alone on the beach and I bark at him, ‘Leave me alone,’ more forcefully than is necessary and then Paul is beside me and he says ‘Made a new friend?’ in that flat way of his and I say, ‘I’m always making new friends,’ and I run into the water and plunge and wish the sea would wash me away and deliver me to a place where memories didn’t live.

  When I emerge from under a wave Paul is swimming beside me, his strokes matched to mine. I try to outdistance him, but I can’t and we swim side by side for a while until my breath runs out and the tide washes us up in shallows far from the beach and
he pulls me up onto a boulder. We lie there resting, the sun on our faces and when I open my eyes he is looking at me so intently that for the first time in weeks I meet his gaze. He pulls a strand of hair softly away from my face and that melancholy floods through me and I know I’m going to cry so I turn away to stare out to sea.

  ‘Not quite the one I’d had in mind for us,’ he murmurs. ‘But the sea nonetheless.’

  ‘I don’t think the sea likes me anymore,’ I say. I tell him then about the old man in Martha’s Vineyard and my intuition abut Sandro. I don’t put it very well, but he folds his arm round me and holds me close and lets me cry and when I stop he says, ‘I’m glad you’ve decided to stay, Maria. Even if it’s hard.’

  We sit for a little while longer listening to the waves. Then he says we had better get back even though he doesn’t want to because Nicolas will start to worry, he always worries when Paul stays out in the water too long.

  ‘Why?’ I ask him.

  He shrugs. ‘I’m not sure. He had a bit of a bad experience as a child. Maybe it’s that.’

  ‘What experience?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ He waves it away. ‘He swallowed too much water when no one was looking. I’ll tell you another time.’

  And I know he won’t tell me because it has to do with Beatrice and he doesn’t want to name her because I’ll start defending her or maybe he just doesn’t want to name her. But when we get back to the beach and I see Nicolas standing there all skinny legs and arms and looking out to sea, I wave to him and ask him whether he wants to come in with me.

  He shakes his head, ‘Not now.’

  ‘Tomorrow then. And I’ll show you all my life-saving tricks. You can save me. It’s a snap.’

  When he nods and gives me his crooked smile, I feel like a saint and a conniving creep all at once.

  Later that afternoon clouds gather and burst with an overwhelming suddenness. Martine lights a fire and we gather in the living room and listen to thunderclaps and watch fat drops of rain plop onto shiny leaves. The felt tips come out and the books and when everyone is settled Paul says he is going up to his study and asks me if I’d like to come and inspect it.