“What?”
“I kept delaying. I told myself that if he came back – if she came back – if he begged me to join him and told me his life would not be complete without me… well, then I would go. I would risk coming back here to join him.”
“And he did not.”
It is not a question. Zac’s eyes are full of compassion.
“No, he did not.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Marianne.”
“Love is almost always unequal. That is why it so rarely lasts.”
“That’s depressing.”
“It is also true.”
“Perhaps.”
“Yes, perhaps,” I interrupt with a smile. “You are young, Zac. Perhaps you will find your equal love.”
Zac smiles at me like a child.
Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you up now. Jasmine and Rae will be here to help you soon. Shall we use some of that French lavender spray this morning – the stuff that I got you in the market?” Zac is rummaging around in the drawers of the chest next to my bed. “Look, here it is.”
“Lavender Blue, dilly dilly…” I sing as he produces the bottle.
“Lavender Green…” sings Zac.
“When I am king, dilly dilly…”
“You shall be queen!”
We both smile and it melts my heart a little. Sometimes, it feels so easy with Zac, so natural.
“He wrote sometimes, at first. Raymond, I mean.”
“Did he? Perhaps that should have been enough Marianne. To tell you that you should have followed him here. I am sure he loved you. You can tell.”
“Do you think so?”
“It’s obvious.”
Zac’s hand pats mine reassuringly.
“Smell!” he says, taking the top off the bottle.
“I can’t really smell it,” I say. “I have no sense of smell.”
“Yes, of course,” says Zac, stricken at his thoughtlessness. “Sorry. But I will put a little on your wrists, shall I?”
I do not tell him that I have never liked lavender. When I was young, I thought it an old woman’s smell. Now that I am old, I am certain that if I could smell it, I still would not like it.
“And then I was diagnosed.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
“Oh Marianne! You should have told him. You should have given him the chance…”
“He had stayed with me long enough. I was not going to trap him inside this grotesque illness, watching as my body grew rigid and my limbs shook. It revolted me, let alone him.”
“You are not revolting.”
“My body is.”
“It is just a body. He would have wanted to look after you… the essence of you.”
“I am not sure about that, Zac. Perhaps. But I did not want it. He was my lover once. I did not want him to be my nursemaid.”
“You coped all alone?”
“For a while. And when I could no longer cope, I went into a home.”
“You are very brave, Marianne. You are! Why are you laughing?”
“Because bravery makes it sound like I had a choice. I had none.”
“Did you tell him where you were?”
“Absolutely not!”
“But…”
“In any case, he had fallen in love and moved to Paris by then.”
“With Jasmine?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Who?”
“Someone who didn’t last.”
There is a noise out in the hall, the sounds of a key in the lock and voices.
“That must be Jasmine and Rae,” says Zac. He opens the door and then turns back.
“Marianne, you said something earlier…”
“Yes?”
“You said that if Raymond had come back for you, you would have risked coming here. Why would it have been a ‘risk’?”
For a moment, I am baffled.
“I don’t think I said risk.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Really? It’s just a word. I suppose because I would have had to give up my job and my life.”
“I see.”
“Yoo-hoo!”
Jasmine’s voice is full of insouciance, but when she and Rae come into the room it is obvious immediately that the atmosphere of last night is hanging over them still. I know how vulnerable Rae will be feeling. If this exposure had happened thirty years ago, I am sure I would have felt the same way, too. But other people knowing holds no threat for me anymore. I am entering the kind of territory where the past can’t follow me.
The window is open in the sitting room and the curtains are shimmering gently in the breeze in the way they used to do. The light is beautiful: soft and muted and full of promise of heat to come. The house has lost its pristine, just-opened-up feel and is alive, breathing again with the signs of living. A few days of discarded newspapers lie on the table, an overlooked coffee cup left discarded on the floor beside one of the chairs, the tell-tale flurry of biscuit crumbs from afternoon tea. A bar of chocolate is lying on the table, a broken piece nestling in a shower of almond and chocolate flakes.
“Can I have it?” I ask.
“Chocolate first thing in the morning? Goodness me, your appetite has improved since getting here!” teases Rae.
“It is delicious.”
“Of course you can have it.”
“Are you two going to talk about nothing all morning?” demands Jasmine.
The door is ajar and I can see Zac out in the hall. He is alert to Jasmine’s aggression and is pretending to occupy himself with something outside the door.
“Well?” demands Jasmine. “Don’t you think it is time to get our stories straight?”
Zac moves closer to the open door.
“Don’t be silly, Jasmine,” I say swiftly. “There is nothing to get straight. Zac!”
Zac’s head appears round the door.
“Yes?”
“Would it be possible to go downstairs to the boulangerie for bread?”
“Yes, of course.”
He cannot hide his reluctance.
“Do not speak in front of him again!” I tell Jasmine as the outside door bangs.
Jasmine does not care.
“There will be a lot more people than Zac who want to know what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” says Rae.
“So you were with Patrice that night, Rae, but you did not kill him?”
“Correct.”
Jasmine looks at each of us in turn and then walks from the room. The outside door closes for a second time.
Rae comes over to my seat and grasps my hand.
“Oh Marianne,” he whispers. “How complicated things get when we are together! There was always that strange energy round us, but I would not have believed that time could roll back in this way.”
“It cannot.”
“No?”
“I wish it could. Oh Raymond, what would you give to have even just a year of it back? A year of being young.”
“It’s going to catch up with us, Marianne.”
I have called him Raymond but he does not correct me. He is my Raymond again: needy, vulnerable, reliant on my strength. It makes this frail shell that traps me seem like an imposter. I rise up from inside it with a kind of euphoria, reaching out to him, transcending my physical limitations one last time.
“Haven’t I always kept you safe, Raymond?” My hands rub lightly over his arms. “Have I ever let you down?”
“I abandoned you.”
“Shh!” I put my finger to his lips, and he grasps my hand. “I made you abandon me.”
“I should have been stronger.”
“Did you love any of them?”
“Who?”
“The ones who came after me.”
“You have no need to be jealous. I have never loved any woman the way I have loved you.”
“No, it is the men I had reason to be jealous of!”
�
�I have never loved any person in quite the way I have loved you, Marianne.”
“Not even…”
He puts his fingers to my lips.
“Not even.”
For the first time in many years, I feel a surge of pure happiness. Not just contentment, real happiness. People expect too much in life. Perfect happiness can only ever be a moment, budding, blooming, fading in a self-contained cycle. I suppose there was a similar feeling of happiness when Raymond and I married but there was too much fear for that emotion to be true happiness. Life was starting out and everything I had was there to be lost. Now it is ending, I have the unexpected joy of hearing Raymond say no one surpassed me.
I am obsessed. I was always obsessed.
“What if the police come? What do I say?” whispers Rae.
“They won’t come.”
The outside door bangs. Zac is back. When he comes into the room carrying bread, it is obvious he realises he is interrupting. He looks at both of us uncertainly.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I say. “Is it nice out?”
“Beautiful.”
He goes into the kitchen and switches on the kettle, then begins to cut the bread.
“I saw Maurice,” he calls. “He looked awful.”
“He would. I am surprised he was out of bed,” says Rae. “He will kill himself if he continues to drink in that way.”
“He was going to the chemist for painkillers. Well, so he said. The last I saw him as I came out of the boulangerie, he was going into the wine shop.”
Zac emerges from the kitchen with a plate for me.
“It was strange,” he says, laying a clean cloth over a tray for me, “but he called to me from a distance.”
“To say what?”
“Did I want to join him for lunch.”
“What was strange about that?”
“Nothing. The way he said it… I don’t know.”
“Are you going?”
“No, I said I would stay with you.”
“That was nice of you but you don’t need to. Rae is here. She will look after me.”
“I want to.”
Zac pauses, smiling at me. He is a nice boy. Like my boy would have been.
“We can all have lunch together. Where’s Jasmine?”
Rae waves her hand dismissively in response, but says nothing.
“After lunch, Zac,” I say, “you must go and find Maurice. Be with him.”
“But…”
“No buts. Rae and I have something to do.”
“Do we?” Rae looks at me quizzically.
“We do.”
“If you are sure…”says Zac.
“Perfectly.”
I can tell Zac is happy to escape and I am happy for him to do so. He and Maurice will sit in Bar Patrice and drink coffee with Alain. He will pass the afternoon pleasantly and I can spend it alone with Raymond. I am glad that Jasmine has stormed off. This afternoon, Raymond and I have to complete what we started, finish the circle, lay it all to rest. There will only be him and me, the way it should be. The way it should always have been.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Zac
Maurice was nowhere to be found when Zac went looking for him after lunch: not at his office, nor his flat, nor at Bar Patrice. Zac felt uneasy for reasons he couldn’t quite identify; something about the way Maurice had looked earlier. It was obvious something wasn’t right. He paused as a hunched figure in a black coat scurried out of Sainte Maria church on the corner of Saint Estelle’s main street, an old woman turning her collar up against the first giant splotches of warm rain beginning to fall from a sullen sky.
Out of the corner of his eye, Zac saw another movement, a flash of a retreating figure in a crumpled grey suit. He hesitated. Was that Maurice who just disappeared inside the church? He had been so busy watching the woman that he did not see a face, just a shapeless middle-aged man - who may, or may not, have been Maurice. The damp splotches fell onto Zac’s white tee-shirt more insistently and the sky darkened. He ran, darting between cars that honked belligerently.
The swing doors of the church thudded behind him as he looked through the windows from the back porch into the interior. Zac always felt a bit frightened in churches. It was the coldness of them, the sterile beauty of soaring angles and hard stone, the feeling of being forced to face something he did not want to face. He always wanted to be back out into the streets, feel the brush of an arm in a crowd, see the flashing neon of a Coca Cola sign: the displacement activity of a life that seemed, in the moment, deep rooted enough to last forever.
The figure in the grey suit sat hunched in a pew. Was it Maurice? Yes, Zac thought uncertainly as he peered through the window at the back of the church, looking at the baldness on the back of the head, the tufts of hair round the barren patch. There was something about the way the figure was physically curled that made Zac uneasy. He recognised that position of the body, the way despair moved from something abstract in your mind into something physical and concrete that could be touched. He moved softly to the side door to enter the church, carefully closing it gently behind him to ensure there was no noise. As soon as he closed the door, he heard a wail, like the wail from an animal, and he stopped dead, hesitating to move forward into the light.
Zac stood motionless, concealed by a stone pillar at the back of the church that soared to a chorus of gold angels on the ceiling. The rain pattered on the stained glass above him, then turned into a relentless drumming, and he glanced up at the deep blue and purple hues of the figure of Christ with a lamb in his arms. The wail continued above the rain and Zac looked round, trying to see where it emanated from. Could it possibly be Maurice making that terrible noise, that unfettered, primal sound? He didn’t know what to do. Then he heard a voice murmuring. Zac pressed himself close to the pillar and looked round the side. Maurice was not alone. A figure in black, a priest, had sat down beside Maurice.
“Francine,” Maurice was saying, “Francine will marry. Here? Today?”
“Yes,” the priest agreed. “She will marry here late this afternoon.”
“But I love her.”
The priest sighed.
“We have been through this, Maurice. So often. Francine is settled now. Let her go.”
There was silence.
“Maurice, do not turn up here at the wedding,” the priest said earnestly. “I absolutely forbid you to do so.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“How did you find out?”
“She wrote.”
Maurice’s voice broke. His sobs cut through Zac as he listened. That noise was so primitive, so deeply affecting. He tilted his head back onto the pillar and closed his eyes, thinking of Abbie. The day he tried to… He lifted his head from the cold stone, opening his eyes again quickly. He could not think of that.
“Maurice,” said the priest gently, “This perversion. You will never be happy while you indulge this perversion.”
Zac gasped silently for breath, as though someone had punched his stomach.
Perversion. This was what he, too, suffered from. Perversion. But his was worse than Maurice’s. He and Abbie could have coped with Maurice’s perversion. The voices dropped and he turned round, placing his hands against the pillar.
And still Maurice sobbed.
“But I can’t…”
“Yes, Maurice. Yes, you can – or you will never be happy. God never intended for you to live this way. You must be prepared to live as God wants you to live. You must love God.”
“I do love God, Fr Michel,” Maurice protested. “I do!”
Fr Michel said nothing in response. Zac felt that silence as Maurice must: as a rejection. Was the priest holding him, Zac wondered? Was he touching? He peered round the side of the pillar but the priest sat upright while Maurice was bent forward, his head on the pew in front. Only a few inches between them, Zac thought, but a gulf, a gulf of pain and experience. That gulf could never be crossed with right
eousness and judgement. It could only be filled with acceptance and love.
The stone felt rough and cold against his fingers. What did any person in the world want but to be loved as they were? For who they were. He could not see his friend but he could feel Maurice’s spirit reaching out of his body in the stillness, hovering in the air above them, somewhere between the floor and the stained glass arches above, pleading to be rescued.
It was hopeless, Zac thought suddenly. Acceptance would never be his, or Maurice’s or Rae’s or Jasmine’s. They didn’t fit anywhere. Maurice was rocking now, rocking back and forth, back and forth. The priest sat motionless beside him.
“I do love God,” Maurice repeated in a voice Zac scarcely recognised.
“Well show it,” urged the priest. “Maurice, do you see now how much this… this… confusion has cost you? Why you must call a halt?”
“I want her back. I want Francine. I WANT FRANCINE.”
Zac felt overcome by nausea. His back was to the pillar now and he slid down onto his heels. Such despair. Why did this man in black not comfort Maurice? Rescue him? Could he not hear the pain of those wails? Was he unaffected by them?
“Francine is gone, Maurice. You must use this, use it to force change in your life. No more of this… madness. Stay away from Bar Patrice. No good will come of you mixing with those people.”
“They are my friends.”
“False friends! They lead you into ways you must resist. With the grace of God you can resist.”
“It is who I am.”
Then change who you are.”
“Did God not make me this way?”
“Do not blame God for your choices, Maurice!”
There was silence with only muffled sobs from Maurice. His voice when he spoke was clearer, but anguished.
“How Father? How? How do I change?”
Zac, resting on his heels, tilted his head and held his breath. What was the answer? How did a person change? How did he become someone else and leave behind what he was inside, right inside in the core of him. This was Maurice’s question but it was Zac’s too.
“You pray, Maurice,” said the priest earnestly. “You pray to God for grace and for strength. You turn from temptation. You live like the man you were made by God to be. You offer the sacrifice on God’s altar.”
The Chrysalis Page 19
