The Villa Golitsyn

by Piers Paul Read

  He stopped and stretched out his hand – so thin it already seemed like that of a skeleton – towards his cup of tea. It was empty. Simon came back from the window to his bedside, filled the cup, and handed it to his friend.

  ‘Real tea, this time?’ said Willy with a smile.

  ‘Real tea,’ said Simon.

  ‘Washes out the liver.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or what’s left of it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can the liver renew itself?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘The brain can’t. Once it’s dead, it’s dead.’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘And the soul?’

  ‘I don’t believe in the soul.’

  ‘No you don’t, do you. You can’t if you don’t believe in God.’ He sighed and looked with some pathos at his friend. ‘But if there was a God, Simon, He could forgive …’

  ‘Yes. You could go down to Sainte Hélène and confess. It would provide a little excitement for the parish priest.’

  ‘But I should have to repent to be forgiven, wouldn’t I? I should have to leave this bed and never again have her body next to mine.’

  Simon shrugged his shoulders. ‘You would be free to marry Helen. A white wedding, and then you could have her body next to you in bed.’

  ‘And her conversation at breakfast!’

  ‘You could talk to Priss at breakfast.’

  ‘She could stay, could she?’

  ‘Yes, so long as you lived together like … brother and sister.’ He laughed.

  ‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Willy.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She sacrificed everything to become my wife.’

  ‘No more than you sacrificed to become her husband.’

  ‘Oh yes, much more,’ said Willy. ‘You see I could still have children, but she can’t.’

  ‘That isn’t your fault.’

  ‘Oh yes it is,’ said Willy. ‘You see, before she came out to Singapore, when she knew we were going to live together for the rest of our lives, she had herself sterilized in Tangier.’

  THREE

  Priss was in the drawing-room when Simon came down, and before she noticed his presence he studied her face, trying to imagine what she had been like as a girl, looking from beneath her veil at her brother across the open grave. Plumper, perhaps, with pinker cheeks – but with the same inscrutable expression.

  She heard his footsteps and turned to meet his eyes with a questioning look in hers. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s quite calm.’

  ‘By tomorrow he’ll be screaming for a drink.’

  ‘He wants Helen to go.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I said I’d try to persuade her.’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll go unless … unless I insist.’

  ‘And will you insist?’

  Priss looked into her glass. ‘No.’

  ‘Your plans for her haven’t changed?’

  ‘No.’

  Simon sat down on an armchair next to Priss. ‘He certainly suffers from remorse,’ he said in the voice of a doctor who has been called in to give a second opinion. ‘Almost, I would say, from religious belief.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. Is it middle age? The fear of death?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘He may have just got bored with scepticism.’

  ‘Or bored with me,’ said Priss, ‘and he now needs religion to justify dumping me.’

  ‘No,’ said Simon. ‘He isn’t bored with you. I only wish he was.’

  She blushed. ‘Bored in general, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think you’re right. I underestimated the effect idleness would have on him. Love isn’t enough. A man should have a job.’

  ‘There’s his play …’

  ‘It isn’t serious. I dare say it might have been if he had started writing before he had started drinking.’

  ‘Even if this relapse into religiosity is caused by boredom,’ said Simon, ‘we must still treat it seriously.’

  A twisted, almost ugly expression came onto Priss’s face. ‘How can one treat it seriously? It’s bunk, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Simon. ‘That’s to say, I don’t believe in it, but Willy does, or so it would seem.’

  She now looked merely stubborn. ‘My mother was Church of England,’ she said, ‘and my father was an aggressive atheist. I went to an Anglican Convent school, and believed more or less until I was fifteen or sixteen. I was confirmed. Then Will seduced me. I was willing enough, but he made the move. He said there wasn’t a God, and that since there wasn’t a God there couldn’t be absolute right or wrong. I believed it then and I believe it now. Nothing I have seen or heard since has ever tempted me to go back on what I decided at seventeen. On the contrary. All the superstition in Argentina and Mexico convinced me that I was right.’

  ‘So how do you account for Willy’s change of heart?’

  She sighed. ‘You see Will has a weakness – he always had – for drama. To put it bluntly, he was always a bit of a show-off.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘He was frightfully good at arguing. He’d convince you of something, then argue that the opposite was true until you were forced to agree with him; then he’d argue the first proposition all over again. He told me that he’d once made Charlie change his mind on the same subject seven times.’

  ‘I can believe it.’

  ‘Now this sudden faith, this remorse – if you ask me – is a stunt. After all, not everyone marries their sister, but what’s the point of doing something outrageous if you haven’t got an audience.’

  ‘He has us.’

  ‘But you aren’t astounded, are you? No one would be, nowadays. They might think it a bit odd, but they wouldn’t see it as a cosmic drama like the rebellion of Lucifer in Milton.’

  ‘No, but if Willy was insincere he wouldn’t suffer.’

  ‘Oh, he isn’t insincere,’ she said. ‘He’s like an actor who lives the role he’s playing; or a barrister convinced of his brief. But an actor can change roles, and the barrister can prosecute the same man he has defended with equal conviction; and Willy, if we humour him, will switch back from religion to scepticism again.’ She smiled to herself. ‘What he would really like would be to convince us all that he is right; to have us down there at Sainte Hélène murmuring the rosary in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary. Then he’d laugh at us for being such gullible, superstitious fools.’

  Simon shook his head. ‘You think, then, that the whole thing is just showing off?’

  ‘He loves the drama.’

  ‘A drama that could kill him.’

  ‘Climbing a mountain can kill the mountaineer.’

  ‘Is it unreasonable,’ asked Simon – choosing his words carefully, and speaking in the most tactful and judicious tone he could manage – ‘to have second thoughts, later in life, about marrying one’s sister?’

  She looked almost angrily into his eyes. ‘Do you think that what we did was wrong?’

  Simon hesitated. ‘I don’t much like my sister.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

  ‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘by the criteria by which we have come to judge these things these days, I can see no argument against it.’

  Her expression changed to one of triumph. ‘So you don’t think it is wrong?’

  ‘No. I don’t see how I can.’

  ‘If you don’t, then why does Will?’

  ‘Only because of the Bible, because of Leviticus: “Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy sister.”’

  ‘How absurd,’ she said with a snort, ‘to suffer so much because of something scribbled by an old Jew thousands of years ago.’

  It was growing dark. Charlie, who had been with Willy, came down to the drawing-room.

  ‘How is he?’ asked Priss.

  ‘Not too bad.’

&n
bsp; ‘I’d better go up and see if he wants anything to eat.’

  ‘Would you mind,’ Charlie asked Priss, ‘if I went down town for supper this evening?’

  ‘Not at all. There’s nothing much here.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Simon.

  Charlie frowned – an unusual expression for his bland face. ‘All right,’ he said. He tugged at the lapel of his shirt, as if to draw attention to his slightly altered appearance. He had brushed his hair in a different way: whereas before a lock of soft, blond hair had flopped over his face, it was now brushed straight back and held in place by water or oil to expose his forehead. He wore a newly laundered blue shirt, but despite the coolness of the evening the buttons were undone halfway to his waist, exposing a large part of his sunburnt chest. The trousers were trousers he had worn before – tight black denim – but they were held in place by a thick, black belt with a heavy brass buckle.

  ‘Are you sure you want me along?’ Simon asked, as if inferring from Charlie’s appearance that he was going to a party to which Simon had not been asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Charlie without conviction.

  ‘Do go,’ said Priss. ‘It’ll be very boring here.’

  Charlie stood and went towards the hall. Simon hesitated for a moment, but unable to think of a convincing excuse for changing his mind, followed Charlie out through the front door to the Jaguar.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ Charlie asked as they drove around the loop of the Boulevard de Cambrai.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Simon. ‘I just wanted to get out of the house for a while.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘Me too.’

  They went to the Old Town, parked near the Préfecture and ate at a small restaurant on the market place. Charlie was silent, even sour, which was unusual for someone who was usually so eager to please. ‘I find one gets kind of exhausted just being in Villa Golitsyn,’ he said with a trace of an American accent back in his voice.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s so claustrophobic.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I’m beginning to doubt whether any of us can really do anything to help.’

  ‘We can try, can’t we?’

  Charlie sighed. ‘What I’m trying to say,’ he said, ‘is that perhaps it might be as well to let Willy drink himself to death if he feels so awful when he’s sober.’

  ‘Were you shocked to realize that Priss was his sister?’

  Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s strange. I mean, I thought I’d come across most kinds of strange sex, but never a brother and a sister.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  Again he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wasn’t shocked but I was kind of irritated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Willy could have told us. And I feel sorry for Priss. Willy has this great idea when they’re young – a sort of Lord Byron stunt – and he leads her into it because he’s been through every other kind of sex; but now he goes into reverse and says it’s wrong and sinful, and makes Priss out to be a kind of Eve who tempted him with the forbidden fruit.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘He always used to do that – to convince us of one thing, then the other, then the first again.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Which is OK with intellectual arguments, but not with a whole life.’

  ‘What about you?’ asked Simon. ‘Do you feel that you’ve been manipulated?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, he more or less drove Carmen away.’

  ‘I know, but it wouldn’t have worked out between Carmen and me. Willy saw that before I did.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it have worked out?’

  Charlie looked away. ‘Because I’m gay, I guess.’

  ‘But you must have thought …’

  ‘I liked the idea of marriage, of a home and children and all that. Carmen seemed a way out of the gay ghetto, because she knew what I was and didn’t care. We slept together, which was OK.’ He sounded dubious. ‘Except that women are sort of bulgy, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re not all as bulgy as Carmen.’

  ‘And they don’t seem to like sex for its own sake. There’s always some emotional tie-in. They want to be flattered or reassured. It’s a lot of hard work. Whereas with men, well, they usually want what you want – sex without strings.’

  ‘I can see the attraction,’ said Simon. Then he quickly added: ‘If, that is, you find other men attractive.’

  ‘It’s better than wanking,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Simon doubtfully. ‘I’ve just never fancied the idea.’

  ‘You’re indelibly straight,’ said Charlie.

  ‘It goes with the pin-striped suit.’

  ‘I know some guys in pin-striped suits,’ Charlie began; then he stopped. ‘Never mind. It’s good to have one sane person around.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And Willy’s pleased you’re here, too. He’s counting on you, isn’t he, to take Helen back to England?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll come.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Unless Priss tells her to.’

  ‘And Priss won’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She still thinks that Willy must have a child.’

  ‘It’s bizarre, isn’t it?’ said Charlie.

  ‘It all seems quite reasonable to her.’

  ‘You’re attached to Priss, aren’t you?’ Charlie asked.

  Simon half-laughed. ‘That’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘And what does she feel about you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He grinned. ‘I wasn’t with you on that walk in the woods.’

  ‘We didn’t go very far.’

  ‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘She’ll never leave him, will she?’ Simon’s voice faltered as he asked this.

  Charlie turned to him with a look of great sympathy. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I’d say that she was fond of you – as fond of you as she can be of anyone else – but that none of us count beside Willy.’

  Simon sighed. ‘It’s a nuisance,’ he said. ‘She’s more or less taken all the love I had left.’

  ‘Forget love,’ said Charlie. ‘Stick with lust. At least you know where you are.’

  ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Carmen?’

  ‘Lost and gone forever.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Back to the gay ghetto, I guess.’

  ‘Here in Nice?’

  ‘Sure. There are bars … There’s one on the Rue Hotel des Postes.’

  ‘Like a consulate of Sodom and Gomorrah.’

  ‘Yes.’ He hesitated, then asked: ‘Do you want to come along?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Charlie looked at him. ‘You don’t seem to have any vices.’

  Simon smiled. ‘“If we resist our passions, it is not through our strength but their weakness.”’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘La Rochefoucauld.’

  ‘Passions aren’t vices.’

  ‘They often come to the same thing.’

  They parted outside the restaurant. Charlie offered to drive Simon back to the Villa Golitsyn, but Simon preferred to walk. The air was now cold but he wore a pullover as well as a jacket and kept off the sea front to avoid the wind. The prostitutes in the doorways along the Rue de France and the Avenue de la Californie smiled and winked and softly suggested their services; but even though some of them were young and pretty, Simon looked neither to his left nor to his right – an image of British rectitude.

  It was almost midnight when he got back to the house. As he crossed the garden from the gate at the top of the steps he saw a dim light come through the drawn curtains of the drawing-room. He came into the ha
ll, closed the front door behind him and then paused to listen to any sound which might tell him whether anyone was still awake. There was none. He went into the drawing-room to turn off the light but saw as soon as he entered that Priss lay asleep on the green sofa. She was wearing her old-fashioned, dark-blue dressing-gown with twisted piping down the side and huge tassels at each end of the cord. Her mouth was half-open and her face seemed small in repose. This, and the white lace of her nightdress, made her seem vulnerable like a child – not the adolescent child who had been seduced by her brother, but the much younger child who had suffered from things she could not understand.

  Simon went back to the hall, took a travelling rug from the cupboard under the stairs and returned with it to cover Priss. He then switched off the lamp and left her to sleep.

  He climbed the stairs to the landing and wondering if Willy too might be lying uncovered on his bed he opened the door to the Ludleys’ room and went in. Here too a lamp had been left on in the far corner of the room. The bed itself was lit by the dim light reflected from the ceiling – enough to show Simon that Helen lay at Willy’s side.

  He went nearer to study the two sleeping bodies. Willy was on his back, more or less in the centre of the bed, covered by the sheet and blankets. Helen lay not in the bed but on it, curled up like a cat at his side. It seemed as if she had come to him when he was already asleep, had sat down beside him, leaning against the bedhead, and had then fallen asleep. Her body must then have slipped down the mattress: her short nightdress of white embroidered cotton had ridden up to uncover the length of her legs and the base of her buttocks.