by Rachel Rhys
Afterwards it’s that ‘ship-shape’ that sticks in my mind.
For a few weeks after the diagnosis I go about my business as if nothing is different. Do I drink more than usual? Probably, but then my usual is quite a prodigious amount. Am I more than ordinarily quick-tempered? Without a doubt. But conversely, I am also given to moments of unbridled sentimentality.
One morning I come across Diana sitting by the pool, huddled in a blanket without a lick of make-up, and she looks so much like the young girl I fell in love with all those years ago that I throw my arms around her and bury my face in her neck as if I could burrow back to the person I was then and do it all differently. I feel her stiffen in my arms, and really who can blame her? How many times have I come home straight from another woman’s bed, guilt making me overcompensate wildly with gifts and grand gestures of affection? Too many to count. And always promising myself that this will be the last time, that the itch has been well and truly scratched.
It never is, of course. Always looking for validation. For the proof that I am worth something despite what I’ve done.
Predictably, after the weeks of denial comes the reckoning. The thought of dying wakes me in the middle of the night, damp with sweat and fear. Throughout my life I have surrounded myself with people – my wives, my children, the parties, the women – so it is a shock to find that, when it comes down to it, I am quite alone.
I start to tell people, breaking the news lightly: ‘You know that ugly old lump in my throat?’ Noel is furious both at the disease and at me for catching it. He looks like he wants to hit me, then crushes me to him instead and I don’t tell him he’s hurting my neck. Then we both get very drunk. Duncan cries. So does Libby, though I don’t think she really understands.
I’m hoping the diagnosis might make Diana abandon her plans to move to Nice but it only galvanizes her further. ‘I don’t want to be left here in this crumbling house,’ she says. She tries to be sympathetic but ours is a relationship where there are limits on everything. I think I broke Diana’s heart so many times early on, she now keeps it buried in a tin box. Impossible to delve too deeply into Diana’s emotions without coming up against the clang of metal.
Inevitably during these long wide-awake hours the guilt comes to find me, setting hard in my veins and arteries, until my liver, lungs, heart become leaden inside me.
If I close my eyes, I relive it again as if no time has passed. The stillness of that early morning, the sun casting long shadows of the trees on dewy grass. The birds just waking up. Us jumping the park railings, young and drunk and invincible. The last blissful moments of ‘before’.
Lying in bed, my body wracked by spasms of coughing, I put myself on trial. First come the excuses. The money I’ve given away, the people I’ve helped. The guests I’ve welcomed and fed without thought of repayment. I’ve tried to make amends. I’ve done what I could.
Now the prosecution. You ran away. You escaped unpunished. You never probed below the surface because it suited you not to.
You’re a bloody coward.
I close my eyes again and now I see her face. Young and lovely and spattered with blood and lumps of something else, raw and ghastly and gristly, caught on her cheeks and in the long strands of her hair.
I know what I must do.
To get my affairs ship-shape.
5
2 June 1948
‘WHAT DO YOU mean, a house?’
Clifford’s voice on the long-distance line sounds strange. Tinny. As though he is talking from inside an empty can rather than from his office.
‘It’s a pink house right on the sea with green shutters, a little shabby, it’s true, but—’
‘Pink?’
Eve stifles a shudder of irritation.
‘It’s a very nice pink.’
Already she feels deflated. This momentous event, and her husband has reduced it straight away to a question of paint colour. Already she is on the defensive.
‘And how much is it worth?’
Eve is silent. She has heard his question but she does not want to recognize that she has heard it. Wants for it to have been a different question entirely. One about the view of the sunset or the scent of the lavender.
‘The house. How much will we get for it?’
‘I don’t know. I have not asked. It doesn’t belong to me, don’t forget. And I haven’t yet set foot inside.’
‘But a quarter of it is ours. It will be worth quite a sum. Right by the sea, you say? A devil to keep up, I should think. We will sell at the first opportunity.’
‘But don’t you think it strange?’ she presses him. ‘That this man I have never heard of should have left me such a gift? If only he hadn’t died before he could meet me to explain, as he planned. I shouldn’t accept, should I? Not when we have no idea what these wrongs the will refers to might turn out to be.’
Clifford, however, seems not to share her concerns.
‘No doubt there is a close connection somewhere down the line that we will discover when we finally share the news with your mother. Perhaps he was a disgraced uncle whom your parents disowned. Every family has a black sheep hidden away. We can discuss all this when you return on Saturday, though you’ll be needing a rest, I’m sure, after travelling all night. And then as soon as I am able I will travel down to France myself to discuss the sale. Rest assured, my dear, you won’t have to bother yourself with all this once you’re back.’
By the time she puts down the phone in the hotel’s reception, the buoyancy of the last fifteen hours has completely drained away. Whatever happens from now with Villa La Perle, it will not alter the facts of her life with Clifford. The house in Sutton. Her daily routine. True, there might be more money for holidays. Perhaps an upgrade to a more luxurious hotel for this summer’s annual trip to Bournemouth. Or maybe they’ll venture further afield. Clifford has often mentioned Jersey.
In her room, she stands at the open window gazing at the sea. Slightly overcast today. The sun is hidden behind a bank of high white cloud, filtering out weakly through the occasional gap.
All the previous night Eve lay in bed picturing the house blazing gloriously in the reflection of the setting sun, but now she reminds herself that this is nothing more than an amusing interlude in the more serious business of real life.
In the car she is mostly silent. While Marie drives, Bernard explains that they will have some time on their own to look around the house before Mrs Lester arrives to go over the terms of the will. Eve fights her building dread at the thought of seeing Guy Lester’s cool, immaculate widow again. What must she think of her? What must they all think of her?
This time they approach the house from a different direction, taking the coastal road after Juan-les-Pins, past rocky inlets and a tiny beach, then cutting across the tip of the tiny peninsula. ‘That’s the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, of course,’ says Bernard, as if she must already know of it. Eve does not put him right. Further along the road they pass a series of gates, each offering a suggestion of the house it conceals. As the sea comes back into view, another set of gates appears off to the right, higher and grander than any of the others.
‘The Duke and Duchess,’ Bernard murmurs, and Eve just has time to register the presence of two blond, black-uniformed guards, before they turn left and head back along the coast.
‘I will wait for you here,’ Marie says once they are parked in the little gravel courtyard of Villa La Perle. She is leaning against the car, lighting a cigarette.
Bernard nods. Smiles. Face creasing with love. Eve looks away.
There is a peculiar weight to the day now, as if the overhanging clouds are dragging down the sky itself so it presses in closer. Yet still, Eve feels it: the quickening of her heart when she glimpses the pink cladding of the villa’s walls between the dense green branches of the cypresses.
Stepping through the gap in the trees into the front garden, they pass a jasmine bush so ripe with fragrance Eve feels momentarily light-headed.
A monstrous wisteria, sagging with buds, conceals a doorway that had been disguised by shutters the day before. The wooden frame is painted the same green as the shutters, though there are chips and cracks in the paintwork, and the glass panes in the heavy door are opaque so they cannot see in.
As Bernard raises his hand to knock, Eve takes a deep breath to steady her nerves, and he shoots her a look of sympathy.
‘Courage,’ he murmurs again.
Eve is steeling herself for an encounter with Diana Lester, but instead the door is opened by a middle-aged woman wearing a dress printed all over with outsized yellow flowers, and a smile that somehow blooms from her face. She introduces herself as Mrs Finch, the housekeeper.
Oh. Eve has not entertained the possibility of staff. At home there is Mrs Jenkins, but Eve inherited her along with the heavy dark wood furniture and has always looked upon her as something to be borne in the same way as the wardrobe is to be borne, or the hideous grandfather clock.
Where Mrs Jenkins is thin and wiry, Mrs Finch is round and full-bodied, although her face escapes being plump thanks to a set of fine cheekbones. When she smiles, as now, one can see a noticeable gap between her front teeth, but such is the warmth of her smile and the liveliness of her hazel eyes that the flaws in her features seem only to add character to her face. She is one of those ageless women who could as easily be fifty-five as thirty-five.
Bernard begins to explain who Eve is, but Mrs Finch interrupts.
‘I’m afraid the jungle drums have already been beating, Monsieur Gaillard.’ When Bernard looks confused, she breaks into a peal of laughter. ‘What I mean is that I’ve already been told all about Mrs Forrester.’
As she steps back to let them in, Eve searches for something to say to cover the confusion she feels at finding herself already the subject of local gossip.
‘Have you been here long, Mrs Finch? In France, I mean?’
‘It was Mrs Lester who hired me. The first Mrs Lester, that is. Just a couple of years before she died, sadly. I’ve been here ever since, more or less. Well, apart from the war, of course. Everything stopped for that.’
They enter a large bright hallway with a black and white tiled floor. There is a miniature palm tree in a blue and white pot and an ivory-coloured chaise longue, but Eve can’t help noticing that some of the floor tiles are chipped and cracked, and the cushion of the chaise longue is worn and lumpy. Straight ahead a tall window spills light on to a curving white stairwell leading down to the lower floor. Through the window the grey sky conjoins with a cloudy sea.
‘As you know, the house is built into the small hillside, unusual for this section of the coastline, which tends to be quite flat, so you might find it seems upside down compared to what you are used to,’ says Bernard. ‘We have entered on street level, but this is directly into the upper floor of the house.’
‘That’s right. We’re completely topsy-turvy here,’ says Mrs Finch. When she beams, a dimple appears at the top of her right cheek. ‘Don’t know if we’re coming or going most of the time. The two doors you see on the right lead to guest rooms. We call them the floral room and the green room because we’re woefully lacking in imagination.’ She ushers them into the room at the front, which is painted a pale green with darker green curtains and a large bed with a mint green cover. The floor is waxed parquet and if it wasn’t for the extravagant window leading out on to a balcony overlooking the sea, one could almost imagine oneself to be back in England. There is also a small bathroom, which Mrs Finch refers to coyly as ‘the facilities’.
‘You must excuse the furniture in the house,’ she continues. ‘Mrs Lester moved all the best pieces to the house in Nice, leaving a mish-mash of the things she didn’t like, and other things that had been stored in the cellar – so they might smell a bit mildewy – plus a job lot of old furniture that Mr Lester acquired sight unseen from a chap down the road who was moving abroad. Mrs Lester was furious. She’d been trying to empty the place out ready to sell it.’
Eve thinks she detects a note of satisfaction in the housekeeper’s voice as she relates Diana Lester’s thwarted plans.
The room at the back also has a small balcony, this time overlooking a thickly planted terrace at the side of the house and the row of cypresses that screen the courtyard where Marie waits in the car. In contrast to the rest of the house, which is immaculate, Eve is surprised to find this room in disarray. There is a messy desk pushed up against the window, on which sits a typewriter and several wine glasses in various states of fullness. A man’s mustard-coloured scratchy woollen jumper dangles off the back of the chair that is pulled up underneath the desk, while a canvas shoe lies on its side in the middle of a sand-speckled rug. By the side of the bed, laid with a rumpled chintz counterpane – thus explaining the ‘floral’ epithet – there are three teetering piles of books, on the tallest of which rests a large, shallow ashtray piled with cigarette ends.
‘Mr Sullivan believes orderliness is detrimental to creativity,’ says Mrs Finch from the doorway. The dent in her cheek winks like an eye.
‘Mr Sullivan?’ queries Eve. She notices that Bernard is looking shifty.
‘Perhaps I forgot to mention,’ he says, not meeting her eyes. ‘Mr Lester was a great patron of the arts. He often had painters and writers staying in the house for extended periods of time. Mr Picasso himself spent a couple of days here a few years ago while he was working at Château Grimaldi in Antibes. For the last few months, Mr Sullivan – perhaps you have heard of him, Stanley Sullivan, the American writer?’ He looks at Eve hopefully, but she shakes her head. ‘Ah, well. Mr Sullivan has been staying here to work on his next book. Of course, if the house is to be sold he will need to make alternative arrangements.’
Eve feels an irrational twinge of guilt.
They cross the hall to the room opposite, which is lighter, with a full-length window overlooking the swimming pool terrace. This room has pale pink tones; the curtains and bed pane are decorated with sprigs of pink flowers and there’s an armchair covered in the same fabric. A large wooden dolls’ house pushed against the wall in the corner gives off an air of neglect. Arranged on the mantelpiece above the fireplace is a selection of stuffed toys that have seen better days.
‘Libby’s room,’ Mrs Finch remarks unnecessarily. ‘At least, it was Libby’s room.’
She picks up a moth-eaten teddy bear and gazes absently into the bear’s glass eyes, lost in some distant memory or other. Momentarily her smile deserts her, making her appear instantly a decade older. Then she replaces the toy with a small, sad sigh.
‘Shall we?’ she says, leading the way back out to the one remaining door on this level. ‘The master bedroom,’ she announces.
Eve holds her breath. The room is spectacular. Even on this overcast day, light floods in from the two full-height double doors to the front and the side. A terrace houses a collection of exotic-looking plants in rustic pots, though not all of them appear in the best of health. Aside from the caramel-coloured parquet floor, everything in this room is white or cream, from the thick rugs to the billowing curtains and the velvet sofa behind a low table from where one might sit and watch the painted fishing boats weaving among the gleaming oak prows of the yachts.
There is a dressing room at the back with banks of wardrobes lining each wall. And a huge bathroom with a large window giving out on to the side of the house. A free-standing bath is positioned so one might lie with one’s head resting on the rim and gaze at the tops of the trees blowing in the breeze, following the progress of the clouds across the sky.
The bed is vast, with a curved headboard made of shiny walnut and a white counterpane and pillows. Eve looks quickly away, trying not to think about Diana Lester and the mysterious Guy Lester and the things this room might have seen.
She thinks of the bed she shares with Clifford in the front bedroom at home, crowded with Clifford’s parents’ ungainly mahogany furniture, remembering how, when she props herself up on her pillows in the mornings a
fter he has left for work, she is looking straight at a wardrobe with brass handles that reminds her of a coffin. That bed is half as wide as this one and sometimes her muscles ache from the effort of keeping herself from rolling down into the dip in the middle where a careless knee or elbow making contact with bare skin might cause her husband to flinch.
Eve imagines lying here in this light, bright room, with the windows thrown open on to the terrace and a breeze coming in and the only thing in sight the vastness of the sky and the sea.
‘Ready to go downstairs?’
Mrs Finch is appraising her with those bright, intelligent eyes and Eve feels herself growing hot, wondering if her thoughts are written on her face.
They make their way down the curving staircase. The balustrades are white, and missing in places, but the wooden treads have been lovingly polished. When Eve peers over the edge, she sees the handrail spiralling downwards alarmingly. The window halfway down the staircase has cracks running the length of the frame, but Eve is glad to look through it and see the sun now breaking through the cloud.
This house is partly mine, she tells herself. Testing how it sounds. Then she dismisses the thought, but not in time to halt a treacherous flare of excitement.
The ground floor is wider than the top, reaching out further towards the sea, following the slope of the hill into which the house is set. Downstairs the hallway has high ceilings and towering glazed doors on to the lower terrace where the nascent sunlight filters in through the two umbrella pines, and beyond them the Mediterranean sea roils. Two large square rooms open out on either side of the hallway – one scattered with sofas and rugs and potted plants, and the other bisected by a formal dining table surrounded by tall-backed chairs.
The kitchen is surprisingly modest, and situated at the rear where the house leans into the hillside; it smells slightly of damp. However, to Eve’s unprofessional eye, it seems well stocked and equipped with the requisite number of ovens and sinks and cupboards and places for chopping things, and boards for chopping on.