The Villa Golitsyn

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘I was brought up to believe that it was ill-bred to be earnest about anything – even love. But one had to study, after all. That was why one was there.’

  ‘Did you go to those lectures by Carr on the meaning of history?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They seem to me – and his earlier book too – to justify treason.’

  Willy looked surprised. ‘Do they really? He seemed such a reasonable fellow.’

  ‘He talks about progress; about Britain and Europe passing the torch to Eastern Europe and Asia.’

  ‘Is that treason?’

  ‘I can imagine someone taking it as a justification for treason – a young Burgess or Philby, for example, deciding at the time of Suez that their government was frustrating history, and so doing what they could for the other side.’

  Willy gulped down his wine. ‘It’s so long ago, now. I can hardly remember. Was Nasser the future and Eden the past? They must have thought that at the time of Cromwell and Charles I, but the Restoration followed, didn’t it? You couldn’t call Charles II an unhistorical figure – or Sadat, for that matter.’

  ‘So you didn’t accept Carr’s fundamental philosophy of history?’

  ‘Dear boy, I can’t remember. Perhaps I did, for a time. I remember reading those books over and over again.’

  ‘And Carr led you to Herzen?’

  ‘Yes, but Herzen appealed to me more because his view of life encompassed everything – love and sex as well as politics and economics.’

  ‘But Herzen was a traitor of a kind.’

  ‘To whom.’

  ‘To the Tsar.’

  ‘Yes, of course, and the Russian Revolution makes him a prophet, just as a revolution in Western Europe in the 1990s will make Baader and Meinhof into the heroes of our time.’

  ‘Would we have thought of Herzen and Herwegh as the Baader-Meinhof gang of the mid-nineteenth century?’

  ‘I think so, don’t you? If we were law-abiding Russian bourgeois of the 1860s. After all, one of Herzen’s closest friends here in Nice was Orsini, who went on to throw a bomb at Napoleon III, like a member of the Red Brigade who murdered Moro in Rome.’

  ‘Is all judgement, then, retrospective?’

  ‘Yes. If Ireland is united, the Republican terrorists will be transformed from criminals into heroes. If Western Europe becomes Communist in the twenty-first century, Baader and Meinhof will give their names to streets and railway stations.’

  They went upstairs to change, but the conversation about politics and history continued over dinner. It was, for the most part, a dialogue between Willy and Simon; and as the evening went on Simon became merely a prompter for Willy, who, with increasingly wild gestures, expounded upon everything without saying much. Certainly Simon, who had hoped he would inadvertently say something about the Djakarta leak, was disappointed.

  The other three appeared bored by Willy’s impromptu lecture, and in a lull Helen asked what had happened to Herzen after he had left Nice.

  ‘He went to London,’ said Willy. ‘He buried his wife by the castle here in Nice and then set off to London, never expecting to love again. And who should join him there but his old friend, Nick Ogarev, with another Natalie, Natalie Tuchkov, Ogarev’s wife. They moved in with Herzen, and Natalie II fell for him. She shifted from Ogarev’s bedroom to Herzen’s. She bore him a daughter; then twins. Lucky Herzen? Not at all. Not only was he tormented by guilt at sleeping with the wife of his oldest friend, he was also stuck with a hideous, hysterical middle-aged Slav whose fits of neurosis could only be calmed par les relations intimes. In other words, to coin a phrase, he had to fuck her and fuck her and fuck her just to keep her quiet. What a fate! To feel guilty for something you don’t even enjoy! “Se sacrifier à ses passions, passe; mats à des passions qu’on n’apas! Oh triste dix-neuvième siecle!”’

  ‘There’s no evidence that he felt guilty at all,’ said Priss crossly.

  ‘He must have felt guilty,’ said Willy.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was doing as he wouldn’t be done by. The fateful symmetry. His best friend seduces his wife: he suffers. He seduces the wife of his best friend: his best friend must suffer.’

  ‘But Ogarev didn’t suffer.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He was probably glad to be rid of the hideous, hysterical, middle-aged Natalie Tuchkov.’

  ‘A man may be happy to be rid of his wife, but still not want to see her seduced by his best friend.’

  ‘That would be unfair and inconsistent.’

  ‘Or perhaps he just thought the adultery was wrong.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Priss fiercely. ‘If it was an amicable agreement that Herzen should sleep with Ogarev’s wife – and it must have been amicable because Ogarev didn’t move out – then no one suffered. And if no one suffered, then nothing was wrong, so why should Herzen have felt guilty?’

  ‘Even if no one suffers,’ said Willy, ‘one can feel guilty. There are the norms of the society one lives in.’

  ‘Muddled, middle-class, Judeo-Christian norms,’ said Priss angrily.

  ‘Of course,’ said Willy, as if conceding a point he had conceded many times before. ‘Muddled, middle-class, Judeo-Christian norms …’

  ‘Based upon religious beliefs he did not hold.’

  ‘Yes.’ Willy bowed his head.

  ‘So give him the courage of his convictions,’ said Priss, ‘and admit that he didn’t feel guilty.’

  Will reached for the bottle and filled his glass. ‘How in Hell can we know what he felt?’ he said with a scowl. ‘People don’t always feel what they want to feel or what they’re meant to feel. I don’t even know what Simon feels, or Helen, or Charlie …’ He looked wearily at Priss. ‘I don’t even know what you feel, and we’ve slept in the same bed for thirteen years.’

  Simon awoke between three and four in the morning. Like many of those who are calm and judicious by day, he was often awakened by nervous anxiety at night. He lay listening to the wind in the palms outside his window. A shutter below had come loose and banged against the wall at irregular intervals. He wanted the noise to stop but his body was too heavy to rise from his bed. Instead phrases drifted in and out of his mind. He repeated conversations of the day before: he thought of Priss in the garden and suddenly the idea came to him that Willy was impotent.

  He opened his eyes and stared into the dark. Willy was impotent and he was drunk, but was he drunk because he was impotent or impotent because he was drunk? Another riddle. But certainly he was impotent because only impotence could explain the paradox of Willy and Priss – a couple at once close yet pulling apart. Priss loved her husband but wanted Simon to make love to her.

  This thought both alarmed and excited him as he lay on the edge of sleep. The image of her desire shocked his fastidious nature, but he was not immune to the vanity which nature foists on the male of any species; and the thought that she longed for him to do to her what her husband could not overcame all the reservations he had felt until now about sleeping with the wife of a friend. He lived in an age, after all, when the right to sexual fulfilment was thought equal to the right to life itself.

  He was convinced that his hypothesis was right. It explained all the oddity of her flirtation that afternoon – an attempt to disguise desire as sentiment. But did Willy know? Did he suspect? Simon remembered the look of irony in his eye when Willy had asked him upon returning from Cap Ferrat what he had been up to. Was he alluding to the fact that he and Priss alone had decided to remain at the Villa Golitsyn? Yes, he must suspect, for it would explain the unusual vehemence of their argument at dinner about Herzen, Ogarev and Natalie Tuchkov. ‘A man may be happy to be rid of his wife,’ Willy had said, ‘but still not want her to be seduced by his best friend.’ Had that referred to him? And was the very fierceness with which Priss had attacked the concept of sexual guilt a defence of her own feelings that afternoon? Or an attempt to reassure him?

  He would not fail her a
gain. What scruples he had had were gone, and with a grim smile on his face Simon closed his eyes. He drew his body into a ball, and conjured up Priss in his imagination, naked and smiling like the concubine in the harem of a sultan. With her image in his mind he fell asleep.

  THREE

  Simon came down the next day to find preparations already under way for an expedition into the mountains. Priss, the partner of his concupiscent dreams, walked briskly in and out of the kitchen carrying delicacies prepared by Aisha. She packed them into a wicker hamper which lay open on the table while Charlie stacked bottles of wine and mineral water into a cardboard box.

  ‘It’s going to be a beautiful day,’ she said. ‘We must get going as soon as we can.’

  They set off soon after nine. Charlie drove the Jaguar with Willy beside him while Simon sat between the two girls on the back seat. Priss, if she had been angry with him the night before – if she had felt herself a woman scorned – had forgiven him now. Her chatter was addressed to everyone in the car, but she had turned her body away from the window to face Simon, and it was only to him that she looked for a reaction to what she said. Her glances had a special expression – not flirtatious, nor merely friendly, but humorous, comradely, as if they were the two grown-ups in charge of a group of children.

  Simon’s feelings towards her were now quite decided and calm. Desire, admiration, affection and respect had come together in a pleasure in her presence which was certainly a kind of love. Her blonde hair, her thin face, her almost bony arms and legs, now seemed to him quite perfect: and he basked in the confident feeling that should he want them they were his for the taking.

  They took the old road from Nice to Turin. The mountains were savage and steep. Their very size and suddenness was what protected the coast from the colder climate of the rest of Europe and allowed the exotic vegetation and farouche society on the narrow strip of land between Menton and Antibes. With little effort from its powerful engine, the Jaguar carried them up the Col de Brouis, and then down again among mists and majestic pine trees towards the town of Sospel. Here they stopped to stretch their legs. Willy walked only twelve or fifteen paces to a café where he ordered a glass of cognac. The others, after a longer perambulation to look at the walls of the old town, sat at a table outside the same café where Willy stood at the bar. Priss looked anxiously at the three empty glasses already lined up beside her husband. ‘We’d better not be long,’ she said. ‘There’s quite a long way to go.’

  ‘I’m beginning to see the point of our licensing laws,’ said Charlie, rising from his seat to go to Willy.

  ‘Bring him out here,’ said Priss.

  He came, holding his glass, and when the waiter came with coffee for the others, he ordered yet another glass of cognac.

  ‘Don’t get paralytic, please,’ said Priss. ‘At least wait until lunch.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Willy – paying no attention to what Priss had said – ‘I think we’re being followed.’

  ‘By whom?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘A man, a very ordinary man, a Belgian, I think, with a camera slung around his neck.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s following us?’ asked Simon.

  ‘When we went up to the castle in Nice, do you remember? He was there.’

  ‘He’s probably just following the same route touristique,’ said Priss.

  ‘I could see him from the bar,’ said Willy. ‘He was watching you.’

  ‘Paranoia,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Yes,’ said Priss. ‘It’s a symptom of delirium tremens.’

  ‘What’s delirium tremens?’ asked Helen.

  ‘It’s when people go mad from drinking too much,’ said Willy. ‘They think rats and mice are running all over their body …’ He started to scream and kick and shiver as if the rats were crawling up his chair. Helen laughed. Simon paid the bill.

  They drove on towards the Col de Brouis. Charlie swung the Jaguar around the hairpin bends at some speed, so that Simon was thrown alternately onto the plump body of Helen and the less comfortable but more welcome shoulders of Priss. At the top of the pass they stopped to let the engine cool down, and then descended more slowly into the valley of the Roya.

  Here the landscape changed again. The road ran through narrow gorges, and although it was now midday, it became almost dark as the sun and sky were obscured by the high mountains and overhanging rocks. Then the river itself rose out of the gorge and they found themselves in less sombre Alpine countryside. At the village of Dalmas they turned off the main road, and drove along a narrow lane flanked with plane trees past fields of sunflowers and an orchard of peach trees.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Helen, looking out on the flat little fields at the foot of the deep valley.

  ‘When Cavour gave Nice to Napoleon III,’ said Willy, ‘he had to leave out this little piece of the country because it was the King of Italy’s favourite hunting ground.’

  They stopped again at the village of La Brigue. ‘I’ll get some fresh bread,’ said Priss to Willy, ‘if you get the key to the Chapel.’ She set off with Helen in one direction while the three men walked across the square to the café on the far side.

  ‘What chapel?’ Simon asked Willy.

  ‘Further up the valley,’ said Willy, ‘there’s a charming little place of pilgrimage. Look …’ He turned and pointed to the church of La Brigue, which was larger and more ornate than one would expect in a village of that size. ‘Thousands of pilgrims used to pass through here, hoping for a miracle from Notre Dame des Fontaines. They must have done a very good trade, whereas now, alas, there’s only a dribble of tourists.’ They went into the café. ‘That’s why,’ he whispered, ‘it’s terribly important not just to grab the key and move on, but to linger a little and patronize these poor people.’ And with an expression of selfless benevolence on his face, Willy ordered three cognacs from the old man behind the bar.

  Neither Simon nor Charlie wanted to drink brandy at that time of day so Willy, with a shrug of his shoulders, gulped them down himself. He then paid for the drinks, was given the key, and within a few minutes of entering the café was back in the bright light of the square. Priss and Helen took longer to buy the bread, and when they finally returned to the car Willy pretended to be cross. ‘If only we had known you were going to be so long,’ he said – winking at Simon and Charlie – ‘we would have had time for a drink at the café.’

  Priss now sat in the front of the car to guide Charlie out of La Brigue. They left on a narrow road which ran up the valley into the mountains. All cultivation had now ceased. The wilder growth of pine, beech and scrub oak lapped at the side of the road, which finally came to an end at the iron gates to the Chapel of Notre Dame des Fontaines.

  ‘Let’s have a quick look at the frescoes,’ said Priss. ‘Then we can walk a little further up the valley and have our picnic by the river in the woods.’

  The outside of the chapel seemed to Simon of no particular interest. It was a rectangular building of white painted stucco with a loggia at the front as a shrine for a statue of the Virgin. He could see, however, that its situation made it a good point for a day’s excursion from Nice. It was perched on the steep side of the mountain, with a wilderness of rock and pine above, and a fast-running torrent below. The air smelt of pines, and was filled with the sound of the falling water.

  They walked from the car to the chapel and with some difficulty unlocked its heavy door. It creaked on its hinges but together with the seven or eight small clover-leafed windows it let in enough daylight to reveal an array of thirty vivid frescoes depicting the life of Christ. Priss and Willy let their guests enter first, and remained near the door as if to watch the effect these paintings would have on them. Simon, Charlie and Helen wandered forward towards the altar and then stood, their heads bent back, to study this work by a pious, obscure genius of five hundred years before.

  On the altar itself there was a small statue of the Virgin Mary. She was dressed in a blue robe while the Chr
ist-child in her arms wore a crown on his head. On the walls behind this statue were scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, and on each side of the chapel others from the life of Christ. The back wall held a single giant painting of the Last Judgement – the Just rising to Heaven while the Damned went down to punishment in Hell. Their torments were vividly depicted, with some sinners strapped naked onto spiked wheels while others sank into a sea of flame, but the most awesome treatment of the suffering of a sinner was not among these Damned in the next world, but of one suffering remorse in this one – a separate panel on the left-hand wall showing the suicide of Judas Iscariot. He dangled by a rope from an orange tree. His hair was tangled and matted, his face contorted, his eyes demented, his swollen tongue stuck out from between his teeth. His body, half-clothed in a smock, had been disembowelled: his innards dangled free beneath his chest, and from among the liver and the spleen a tiny naked man – his soul – was claimed by a horned, hairy demon with an eagle’s claws, bat’s wings and a rat’s tail.

  ‘Nasty, isn’t it?’ said Willy, coming up behind Simon. They both stood in front of the painting.

  ‘Very strong,’ said Simon dryly, discomfited by the violence of the image before his eyes. The painter must have been the local butcher.’

  Willy shook his head. ‘You have to be more than a butcher to understand despair.’ He turned away and started walking towards the door.

  ‘It seems odd,’ said Simon, ‘that Judas suddenly lost the courage of his convictions and killed himself.’

  ‘Remorse,’ said Willy, stopping in front of the Last Judgement.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Simon. ‘But Peter also betrayed Christ and felt remorse, but he didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘He didn’t despair.’

  ‘So the sin of Judas was not that he betrayed Christ but that he despaired of forgiveness?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willy. ‘Despair was the sin.’

  ‘And the suicide set the seal on his despair?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willy, ‘I think so. That’s why suicide was always thought such a serious sin.’