“Don’t talk like that Marianne,” he said.
But he does not understand. I am not upset by the prospect because I thought the last had already been. This is such a wonderful bonus and the sense of anticipation outweighs any possible sadness.
“Marianne?”
Zac’s voice is full of concern when I glance up at him.
He bends down beside my chair.
“I have been trying to talk to you for a few minutes,” he says. “You seemed very far away. Are you feeling all right?” His cool hand steals across my brow.
“Yes,” I say, looking round. For a moment, a fraction, I feel confused and cannot quite remember what day it is, or what I am to do.
“Is it time to go?” I ask.
“No, Marianne,” he says gently, “it is another week before we go.”
“Well I know that!” I snap, because I feel foolish. “I meant time to go into the garden.”
I didn’t mean that at all.
“Oh I see,” said Zac uncertainly. “Sorry. Well, yes, I suppose we could take a quick stroll.”
These moments of confusion frighten me. They seem to be happening more frequently. I do not dare to look too far ahead. Most women lose their looks as they age but I lost mine a long time ago. To lose the brain that compensated for them is too cruel. It proves to me that there is no order in the universe, that there is only anarchy. I do not believe in God.
The rhododendron flowers are falling from the bushes, a pink velvet carpet on the path.
“It will be hot in Saint Estelle,” I caution Zac. “You must pack lightly.”
“Yes.”
His voice is full of unease.
“You are worried about being on your own and responsible for an old woman.”
“No, no.” He smiles but I can see it is half hearted.
“How is your French?”
“It’s pretty good because of my mother but my father always insisted she spoke in English to us, so it’s not as perfect as it might be. My comprehension is better than my spoken French.”
“Mine was good… a long time ago.”
“We will manage, won’t we?” he says.
“There will be help in France. It is being taken care of, I promise. There will be someone staying in the house to help.” I hesitate. It is hard for me to show emotion but I want to thank Zac. “I… I am grateful to you,” I say. “This chance… it means everything.”
It is not like me to be meek and I can see that Zac is surprised. He smiles at me, so very sweetly, as if I have made all his effort worthwhile.
“It will be good to get away for a little while. You are doing me a favour too.”
“I have no-one else. No family…”
“I know, Marianne.” He lifts my hand for a moment and squeezes it.
“Did you…?” he starts his sentence but then hesitates as if he has thought better of it.
“Did I…?” I prompt.
“Did you ever want children?”
“I was pregnant once.”
“Were you?” Zac’s voice is full of surprise. He clearly does not think I was the maternal type.
A breeze ripples through the bushes, whispering.
“I was told that the baby probably had Down’s syndrome.”
Even all these years later, it feels strange to say it so matter of factly. Like it was nothing when actually, it was everything.
“I am sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
It was and it wasn’t. The past is never far away. I can feel Raymond’s devastation still. Having allowed himself to let go, to have the dream of being a parent that he always believed was beyond his grasp, the news was too cruel. He felt he was being punished. I think he felt our baby’s abnormality was some kind of payback for who he was; it was nature’s way of rejecting him, of telling him he didn’t deserve to be a dad.
As for me, everything crumbled then. My sense of security with Raymond, my power over Sebastian, my dream of what my marriage might become. The tests were not conclusive. There was a chance that the baby would be born healthy but neither Raymond nor I really believed that to be possible. Somehow, it seemed destined that we were not to be allowed to walk the normal path in life.
What I had to decide was whether I was prepared to look after a handicapped child – and whether I was equipped to. I felt differently about the baby’s movements inside me. They were no longer a joy but a reminder of a predicament. I felt invaded, like the space inside me was being taken up by something alien.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I warned Raymond, “particularly not Sebastian.” But when I came in one night I knew that Raymond had talked, just by the calculated look of concern that Sebastian shot in my direction. He could not hide his triumph.
“Marianne…” Zac is talking quietly and I look up into his kind, dark eyes. “Don’t cry Marianne,” he says, wiping my cheek softly with his finger.
“I am not crying,” I tell him. “When you get old, even the slightest breeze makes your eyes rheumy. It is most inconvenient.”
The girl in the café fingered her pearl earrings, and then moved her hands to stroke the trailing scarf around her neck, in a way that fascinated me as I sat at the next table. It was so sensuous the way she took pleasure in the feel of the smooth pearls beneath her fingers, in the brightness of the silver strands of her pink scarf as the café light hit them. It was the fact that she had Down’s syndrome that made me notice her first, I suppose, but within minutes she absorbed me for her own sake. She looked like a child and yet I realised after a few minutes that it was hard to place her age. She could have been fourteen or twenty four, or even thirty four. It was impossible for me to say.
She sat on her own, preening herself like a grown-up lady while her mother and brother sat at a table next to her. I was so mesmerised by the girl that I did not at first realise I vaguely knew her mother, who had consulted me after her divorce, looking for advice about drawing up documents concerning provision for her children should she die. It was simply a legal exercise to me at the time, but here were the children she had been providing for. When I caught the woman’s eye, she nodded at me briefly, with a half-smile of recognition.
The girl’s brother was disabled too, his body enormously fat - presumably because of whatever syndrome he suffered from - and his face permanently contorted into a grimace that looked almost like pain. He scared me, that boy. I felt the baby inside me kick against me as I looked at him, as if in protest. If I had a child like that, I would be constantly terrified, uncertain how to help him, how to keep him alive. But the girl was a different matter, her exaggerated femininity both instinctive and enchanting. She, too, was heavy – as Down’s children often are – yet there was a delicacy, a daintiness about her movements, and her dark eyes darted lightly, like beams of light.
I could not take my eyes off her as her fingers twirled and stroked, and primped and prettified. She clearly revelled in colour and texture and she liked the effect of adornment. When she smiled, it was in a way that managed to be simultaneously coquettish yet sexless. It was obvious that she felt like a woman, despite having a limited understanding of what being a woman was. Was gender all about instinct? For the girl, it was about pearls and scarves and pretty pink lipstick, and for a moment I wanted to cry that it was not really so.
If only the accoutrements of gender could solve Raymond’s problem.
Her mother indulged her little display of independence, the sitting-alone-but-together, simply flashing an occasional smile in her direction. She was a large woman with a round, pleasant face and an air of calm. Her clothes were immaculate, if a little old-fashioned, an expensive tweed winter coat with a fur collar draped over her chair, and a scarf that I recognised as designer wound round her neck. Her children, too, were in the finest of clothes. Money was clearly no object. Much good it had done her.
“You have your hands full,” I said, when I caught her eye.
“That is why I had to make
arrangements… in case anything happened,” she said, then looked at me tentatively. “You remember me?”
“Yes, of course.”
She smiled.
Her daughter ignored our conversation completely, lifting a delicate china cup from her saucer with great care, pinkie finger rising into the air.
“Is it very difficult for you?” I blurted out.
The woman looked startled at the directness of my question.
“I’m sorry,” I said instantly. “I… that must have sounded strange.” I indicated the vacant seat beside her. “Do you mind? There is something I would like to ask you.”
She looked a little taken aback but she was such an accommodating woman that she pulled the seat out for me.
“Of course,” she said.
“Forgive me – I have forgotten your name.”
“Harriet.”
I held out a hand.
“Of course. Marianne.”
“Yes,” she said, shaking hands.
Her son tugged at her jacket, grimacing, and she ran a hand soothingly over his hair. I watched, lost in my own thoughts.
“You had a question for me?” she said after a minute or two.
I am pregnant,” I said. “My baby has been diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome.”
A look of compassion – she finally understood why I was talking to her – crossed her face.
“I see.”
I noticed she did not say she was sorry like most people. There was no uncomfortable pause, no suppressed, embarrassed horror, no sense of searching for words.
“I have to decide…” I left the rest unsaid.
“You are frightened.”
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you consider…?” I looked across at her daughter who smiled back at me
“I didn’t have the choice. I only knew when Millie was born and she came out blue and still and the nurses tried to revive her. She had heart problems too. And then the doctor came and told me that she had Down’s.”
“But you loved her?”
As the question leaves my lips, I realise that is the one I needed to ask most. That is my fear. I have only loved – really loved – Raymond in my life.
“No,” said Harriet.
I was startled by her response but at this point Millie left her seat and came to her mother, wrapping her arms round her and whispering in her ear. Harriet stroked her short, elfin hair in an instinctive gesture. All this time, her son simply sat grimacing and wriggling in his chair and every so often Harriet reached out to touch him reassuringly in some way: stroking his knee, or his cheek, or fixing his hair which was so short it did not need fixing.
“How…?” I said, inhibited by Millie’s presence.
“Look at the little dog, Millie,” said Harriet. “Look…outside the window.” Millie rushed over excitedly and looked out as a small, lively black dog leapt up at the window. She bent down, placing her hands where his paws were.
“I screamed,” said Harriet quietly, “and cried, and told them to take her away. I did not want to see her.”
Her answer created turmoil in me.
“I said I hated her. I wanted her dead.”
Harriet looked at me and smiled.
“You are shocked. Or perhaps reassured?”
I was not reassured, as it happens. This woman, who exuded such love, had rejected her child and I do not know where that left someone like me. What chance did I have?
“When did you change?”
“When I saw her wheeled away for surgery and I knew I wanted her to return. When I saw her poor little blue face scrunched up in pain. When I watched her gasp for breath and every breath she took constricted the air in my own chest. I wanted to blow life into her. I knew I would kill to save her.”
I had never met anyone who talked as starkly as this woman.
“And then, when she grew, she showed me how to love her by the way she loved me.”
Millie rushed back excitedly, all business, telling her mother about the dog at the window and we could not say more. I did not know how much Millie understood but perhaps enough for us to remain silent round her. I watched the interaction of this little family silently, drinking in the gestures and the glances and wondering if there was a new man who completed it.
“Your husband left…” I said tentatively.
“Long gone,” said Harriet matter-of-factly.
“Yes, I remember.”
She smiled. “But his money isn’t. I kept the best of him.”
“Nobody new?”
“With my two?” She did not sound resentful and merely shook her head.
Millie’s show of independence was over now, suddenly and completely, and she hung on her mother’s arm, nuzzling her head into Harriet’s shoulder and looking up at her face, waiting for Harriet to look at her and respond. I had never seen such adoration in another human being’s eyes as I saw in Millie’s. I am not a woman who cries often. Perhaps it was simply hormones from my pregnancy but I had a lump in my throat watching her.
Her capacity for affection seemed limitless. But your life, I thought to myself, your life will never be the same. And the boy… the boy… what if… I glanced again at the way Millie held Harriet’s arm, and the grip seemed metaphorical as well as physical. Was it, I wondered, claustrophobic to have her there always?
“Do you ever get… tired?” I said to Harriet. “Tired of being needed so much?”
Harriet’s fingers stilled suddenly on top of Millie’s head where she was smoothing her hair down. Then she smiled at me.
“Do you ever get tired of love?” she replied.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Zac
Zac rested his head back on the seat as the aeroplane engine throbbed. Spots of rain splattered onto the small round cabin windows and the world outside seemed grey and somehow far away. It had been an enormous effort to get Marianne here, so much of an effort that frankly, he had wondered why on earth he had agreed. At the other end, it would all start again, the medical assistance, the wheelchair, the interminable waiting and snail’s pace progress. He wasn’t sure he could cope.
Beside him, Marianne’s eyes were closed but he knew that she was awake, waiting. With a lurch, the plane suddenly surged forward, trundling down the runway, faster and faster, the overhead locker doors rattling with the vibration. There was that familiar feeling of contained power, the surge of expectation, the delayed moment of climax until the wheels finally lifted and the plane tilted upwards. The inevitable release of energy when the gathering momentum simply exploded into lift-off.
Zac turned his head sideways on his headrest, just at the same moment Marianne turned hers towards him.
“Things will happen now,” she said.
He felt a knot of apprehension in his stomach and turned back towards the window as the plane headed into grey cloud. All he could do was brace himself and wait for the inevitable.
Sweat dripped down Zac’s back as he tried to negotiate the narrow, unfamiliar streets of Saint Estelle, impatient horns blaring at his back. The light was bright and harsh in his eyes as he hit the square where a sprawling farmers’ market was in full swing. He inched forward round an array of stalls and gaily striped awnings, fruit piled high and cheese covered by nets to escape the flies, an untidy assortment of scattered empty boxes and crates littering the way and forcing him to edge out past them. A horn blared as an oncoming driver shouted angrily at him through his open window. Zac looked round desperately, trying to find an exit.
Marianne sat silently beside him, drinking it all in greedily. Another horn blared.
“Round the back,” she said. “Take the next road to the right.”
Zac wondered if she could possibly remember any meaningful directions after all this time but he was not in a position to argue.
“Down there,” Marianne continued, “past that pizzeria then go left into the cul de sac. “Bar Patrice,” she murmured, turning her head to l
ook more closely. Her voice seemed full of wonder to Zac, reverent almost. She tried to turn to him. “Bar Patrice,” she repeated.
The road was quiet and Zac paused, relieved to be able to look around unimpeded. He had no idea where he could legitimately leave the car but it didn’t look like legitimacy was much of an issue. Cars were parked higgledy-piggledy on pavements, crammed into corners and left at odd angles in spaces that were too small to properly contain them.
“There should be some parking spaces further on,” said Marianne, and he pulled forward before spotting a tight space and coming to a halt. He would take her up, they agreed, and then come back down for their bags.
It was almost impossible to push Marianne’s chair over the small cobbled stretch of the alley and Zac heaved and sweated as the wheels caught in the ruts. But even in the absorption of the task, he noticed Marianne’s fascination with Bar Patrice, the way she turned her head towards it and peered in closely as they went past. As far as he could see, it was just a rather dingy traditional bar with an assortment of older Frenchmen sipping black coffee and aperitifs. He was not sure why it was of such intense interest to Marianne and he soon turned his attention back to the difficulties of manoeuvring the chair.
He was relieved to reach the pavement and feel the wheels run smoothly again.
“There it is,” Marianne said eagerly.
“Where?”
“You see the pâtisserie?”
Zac looked down the road and saw a stylish, black painted façade with a striking black and pink striped awning.
“The entrance is just to the side of the door,” said Marianne.
Zac could feel her agitation now, a sense of anticipation, that same feeling they had sitting on the runway when the engines throbbed with potential power. There were two high spots of colour in her cheeks and for a moment he felt a sense of panic, wondering how he would cope if Marianne became ill on this trip. God forbid, but what if her heart gave out? What if she had a heart attack with all the excitement and died? Had he been foolish in agreeing to come here?
The Chrysalis Page 11
