Why did Scree do that? Easy. Malice and guilt.
Then Orford Mulhouse told his wife Nancy. Or perhaps Scree told them both together, over drinks on a terrace in bloody Biarritz, knowing that Nancy Mulhouse would pass it on to her niece Billie – who, last night at supper, told Marina. Acting sincerely out of concern for her, no doubt. Such kindly people. Scree, Nancy and Billie had already known that he was involved with Marina.
He could murder the lot of them.
* * *
His passport was where he always kept it, in the zipped compartment inside his briefcase. He boarded the next available flight to Paris, where he changed planes. At Marseille he hired a car – a red Ford Ka – and slowly, his mind a blank, took the familiar route to Cabrières d’Aigues and, beyond it, to the farmhouse. Up the track, through the wood, over the bridge, past the orchard where the trees were hung with clusters and festoons of ripe cherries, glistening in the early-evening sun like baubles. Then on, between the lines of olive trees, to the long, low little house in its garden. So lovely, so familiar. It was going to be all right.
Marina was on the terrace, in the sphinx chair. She did not rise to greet him.
‘What a silly little car,’ she said.
‘It’s very nippy, pretty good, actually,’ he replied, going towards her to embrace her. She avoided him, walking ahead into the house.
* * *
‘How could you? How could you?’
‘I owe you an explanation.’
In that instant he decided to be completely honest with her. For honour’s sake – Marina’s honour and his own, even though he had behaved dishonourably. It would be a relief. Back on track.
But he could not get back on track. He didn’t know how to begin to explain.
‘Events took over. It’s complicated. It had nothing at all to do with us, you and me, with the way we are. It was quite separate. In a way, I couldn’t help myself.’
‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing. That is so pathetic, so feeble. Try again, Marteau. It’s always the woman’s fault when something happens, is that what you think?’
‘No, of course not.’
They were sitting at the little wooden table in the kitchen, with a bowl of cherries between them. Martagon started eating the cherries, lining up the stones on the table in front of him. Marina had a glass of wine. He shook his head when she offered him one.
He couldn’t explain Julie to Marina. That one word kept coming into his mind. Since he was determined to be honest, he had better say it and take the consequences.
‘It was because she was – she is – flawless.’
Marina stared. ‘I don’t understand that word.’
Marina’s English was so good that he was always surprised when her vocabulary proved inadequate. He flailed around for a translation.
‘Sans défaut. Sans tache.’
‘You mean she’s a saint, or a nun, or a virgin?’
‘None of those things. You know perfectly well she isn’t.’
‘I don’t know perfectly well anything. Who is she? They said I had met her, in your friend Giles’s house, that it’s his sister. But I don’t remember. It’s been driving me mad.’
It had not occurred to Martagon that Marina didn’t yet know who Julie was. ‘She was there at dinner with you, at the millennium time.’
‘I said to Billie, “Who is this, what is she like, is she short or tall, dark or fair, is she more pretty than me?”’
‘Billie doesn’t know her.’
‘But she could find out. She asked Nancy to find out.’
‘Then you will know already that she is small and thin. Fairish hair. And nowhere near as lovely as you are, Marina.’
‘I remember at that dinner, Giles’s wife with the Alice band. It’s not her. I remember which one is the wife of the lord who is the friend of the Mulhouses. Not her. I remember one other woman, with a white shirt and glasses and untidy hair. A nothing woman. It’s her. How could you?’
Martagon thought back. ‘That’s not her. That’s a woman called Mirabel, she’s not a nothing woman, she’s a water-engineer with Harper Cox.’
‘But I don’t remember anyone else.’
‘Julie was very quiet that evening. She’s not really someone you would notice particularly, if you didn’t already know her.’ He tried to remember what Julie had been wearing, and couldn’t.
‘Julie. Another nothing woman. A less than nothing woman. So why, Marteau?’
Martagon took some more cherries. Marina poured herself more wine.
Martagon, stripping himself of surface, looked down into a small pool of truth to see what he found there. From now on he had no idea what he would find himself saying. He said, ‘She trusts me. She needed me.’
‘Do you think that I did not trust you? Do you think that I do not need you?’
‘It’s quite different. You could have anybody, you are strong, you have a world, you know who you are. Being in love with you is the most magical and extraordinary thing that ever happened to me, you know that. You are in a different category. You are the love of my life.’
‘So?’
Martagon arranged his cherry stones in two parallel lines.
‘Julie is … she is homely, not in the American sense, meaning that she is plain. Though maybe she is that too. I mean, she is like home. She belongs to the world I belong to, or could belong to. With her, I feel, I felt – kind of placed. Which I have never been. I don’t know how to express this.’
‘What you mean is she’s English, and I’m just some sort of foreigner, a frog, good for a good time but not serious. Is that how it is?’
‘You know it’s not that. Don’t insult me or yourself … Maybe sometimes, when I am tired, I do feel I don’t altogether understand you.’
Marina stared at him, unblinking. Then she said, ‘I saw a postcard once, that she sent you. At least I suppose now that it was her. It said “J” at the end. It was in an envelope, but you left it around so I read it.’
When he was abroad, Martagon sometimes sent Julie picture postcards. Sometimes he addressed them to Fasil. He sent postcards to lots of people. Sometimes Julie sent a postcard to him, in return. This had been so ever since he first got to know her. The cards never conveyed anything much. They were just a friendly way of keeping in touch.
‘If I left one of her postcards around it was because there was absolutely nothing secret or private about it.’
‘That’s why it frightened me, even then. Because it wasn’t a love letter. It meant that there was a long, long haul ahead.’
‘Haul’ was hard for her to pronounce. At first Martagon did not understand. He thought she had said ‘hole’. Not that it made much difference. They worked it out.
‘But that’s just perverse,’ he said, thinking about what she meant. ‘You might as well be afraid of an electricity bill.’
‘Not so perverse,’ she replied. ‘Because I was right. Anyway, I have been very afraid of electricity bills. That’s why I sold Bonplaisir.’
Martagon took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t lost you, have I?’ he asked, looking across the table and into her eyes. ‘Can you forgive me?’
‘Does she know about you and me, this Julie?’
‘No.’ And then, remembering her plea of this morning – ‘Please don’t go to France!’ – ‘Well, I’m not sure.’ What had Tom Scree been saying to her?
‘It’s still going on, then. Not over at all.’
‘I can stop it straight away. Any time I want. I was going to anyway, even if all this hadn’t happened. I just wanted to do it gently, so that she was all right about it. I’ve already told her that I am going to be living in France.’
‘You disgust me.’
* * *
When, later, he was lying alone in that garden on the day of the airport opening, going over everything that had happened to them all, he thought, I should have been straight with Julie from the beginning. Of course I should. After that extraordinary
first evening at her flat. I should have explained to her that Marina and I were a couple, that it was for ever. I should have given Julie the chance to say, ‘No more,’ at that point. Or to go on, in the full knowledge that it could not last. Not being honest with Julie was perhaps where I stepped off the critical path.
What about not being honest with Marina, though? It was she I betrayed. It’s hard to regret the experience of that first time in Julie’s bed. There’s a grain of truth in that feeble thing I said to Marina, about it having nothing to do with ‘us’, and about not being able to help myself. Biology, hydraulics, whatever. The engine starts up and everything else is blotted out. And when it’s over it can be – though it wasn’t with Julie – as if nothing ever happened. That’s why you can feel not unfaithful when you are unfaithful. If I hadn’t been found out – God, what a squalid phrase – if I hadn’t been found out, and had brought things to an end with Julie, and gone to live with Marina as we planned, nothing bad would have happened.
But it will not do, thought Martagon, lying in the grass with his eyes closed, looking down into the small pool of truth deep inside him. That is the argument of a deceiver. Of a shallow philanderer. Of a Tom Scree. Worse, it could be the argument of a rapist.
I stepped off the path of my intentions, of my morality, of my love, when I let my mind close down and fucked Julie. I might as well have torn up the map. Yet Julie cannot just be written off as what my parents’ church would call ‘an occasion of sin’. There is reality in our relationship. An undramatic, everyday reality. I had no right to it. I was greedy. You can’t have this and that.
And now I’m being self-important and portentous. A real piss-artist. If it were not for what has happened, all this would be an everyday story, the sort of a mess everyone gets into at one time or another. A total farce, really.
* * *
In the kitchen at the farmhouse it was growing darker. The sun was going down. Down by the bridge, the frogs had started to croak.
‘I think I’ll have that drink now,’ said Martagon to Marina. ‘Or do you want me to go straight away?’
She rose, found a clean glass, and poured him some wine. She opened a second bottle, and put it ready. Now the nightingales were starting up as well. Soon it would be time for the owls. It was going to be a long night.
NINE
‘I went to see Virginie this morning,’ said Marina. ‘She always knew how to comfort me. But it’s too late. She’s too old and ill. I can’t tell her my troubles any more.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martagon.
Martagon kept saying he was sorry. Because he was.
He asked Marina where Billie was. Marina said that Billie had gone back to Houston with her aunt Nancy, to look after her. ‘Nancy is ill too. She has cancer. She will have the treatment but she is going to die, she knows she is going to die.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She isn’t sorry. When I called to say goodbye before they left, she told me. She can’t stand her husband. That’s why she spent so much time over here. She’s always called him Awful Orford, but I’d thought it was a joke. She said that dying was the only way she could get away from him permanently. Drastic, she said, but effective. A last resort. She was actually laughing. I had to laugh too. It was so strange.’
‘Why couldn’t they just divorce?’
‘He wouldn’t, and she sort of couldn’t. Both their families are very prominent in the community, they’re a famous couple, and everyone’s very religious, they believe marriage is for ever, and Orford and Nancy fund art shows and head up lots of charities. Divorce was unthinkable. A French person can understand that.’
‘She must have been unhappy, then. I’d always imagined her as a sort of superannuated good-time girl. All those parties.’
‘That’s how it was. She said she thought life was absolute hell for most people but, in the full knowledge of that, you could choose whether to be happy or unhappy. She chose to be happy. Some people, strong people, can do that. I can’t.’
Happiness as an orientation. Just what he had thought himself – in the good times. For the first time, Martagon wished he had met Nancy Mulhouse. Now, he never would.
Marina was crying, silently – for Nancy, for herself? She wiped away the tears brusquely with the back of her hand.
‘It’s like what you once said to me, about one of us having to die before the other,’ she said. ‘But we meant it so differently.’
‘Please stop talking in the past tense,’ said Martagon. ‘Nothing has changed.’
‘Hasn’t it? Hasn’t it? It’s easy for you to say that.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry.’
‘Please stop saying you are sorry.’
They talked and drank and were silent and talked again. Angers and resentments flared in her, and in him, but only briefly. Neither wanted a conflagration.
‘You never told me about the chair,’ he said, out of the blue. ‘Just why it’s so important to you and Jean-Louis.’
Marina shrugged and sighed. ‘It will seem nothing to you. You see, it was the only thing in the château which was really our mother’s, which belonged to her.’
Papa, she told him, insisted on keeping everything, in every room, exactly as it had been when he was a child. Maman could never move anything, or change anything, or he flew into a rage. She could not reorganize or redecorate her own bedroom, because it had been his mother’s. She could not put up a picture or even a photograph.
‘When I was about seven, she got out a little wooden ikon she’d always had. She’d brought it from Greece when she married, and hid it in the drawer where she kept her stockings. I knew it was there, I used to go and play with it sometimes. Anyway, she put it up over the cheminée in the salon. Papa threw it on the fire.’
‘He was a madman.’
‘He was as he was … She was like a little ghost in her own home. Even her rings were not really her own, they had been her mother-in-law’s and belonged to the family, and he never let her forget it. Her great chair was the one and only precious thing of her own – apart from her dog – which he allowed her to have. He respected it, because he knew it was unique and very, very old. She always went to the chair when she was sad, as if she herself were a little dog going to its basket. She spent half the day in the chair, on the terrace, like I told you. When we were little we sat on her knee and played with the sphinx heads on the arms. I used to curl up in it all by myself when she wasn’t there, and feel safe.’
‘Presumably Jean-Louis wants it because he knows how valuable it is.’
‘Not really. It’s because the chair is all we have of our mother. It’s as if the chair is our mother. Jean-Louis and I are children saying to each other, “She loves me much more than she loves you, and I love and understand her better than you do.”’
‘But you aren’t children. It seems absurd. And you’ve always told me you couldn’t wait to get away from home, from – all that.’
‘Yes, yes, Mr Englishman, I know I’m not rational.’
When finally they dragged themselves upstairs, they lay side by side in her big bed, taut and tense, not touching or talking. The contrast with the way they used to be was horrible.
Martagon could not sleep. He thought about the chair story, and about the shape of Marina’s life and of his own. They both had a driving need to have and to hold and to belong; to be rooted. They both had an equally strong driving need to get away and fly free. It’s the same for everyone. With some people one of these urges predominates, so there’s no problem. Some people achieve equilibrium, or a compromise. But lots of people expend emotional energy veering wildly between the two poles and wondering why they aren’t happier. This was suddenly so obvious to Martagon that as an insight it seemed banal. It was just that he hadn’t formulated it before. He suspected both he and Marina fell into the last category, but he was too stressed, right now, to see anything straight. He wanted to talk to her about it, but it was not the moment.
At about four in the morning Marina got up, put on her dressing-gown, and went downstairs. He heard the terrace door being opened. Looking out of the bedroom window, he saw her lie down in the grass under an olive tree, the white silk of her dressing-gown glimmering in the light from the open door.
He did not go to her. What could he do or say? Perhaps she got some sleep there. He, too, must have slept a little, because he dreamed the stumps dream – with a difference. A variant. Thud-thud, thud-thud on the car window – but it was himself as a child, banging and banging on the glass with arms that had no hands, desperate to be allowed back inside, into safety.
‘Maybe I should go,’ he said, defeated, in the morning. ‘Maybe I really am bad for you. Maybe you should move along.’
‘Move along? Move along? Moving along means running through a thick wood in the dark leaving shreds of bleeding flesh dripping from the branches of trees. That’s what I dreamed last night.’
So she had slept a little. They did not leave the house all that day. They sat on the terrace. Marina was ashy pale, the sockets of her great eyes blue-black, her mouth dry and flaking. With her fingers, she kept raking her unbrushed hair, hanging in dark strings.
This is how you will look when you are old. I shall be old then too. An inexpressible tenderness for her flooded him. He put his head in his hands.
‘I wish my father was still here,’ she said.
Martagon was surprised and irritated. He connected her father only with selfishness, overindulgence, and abuse of his wife and daughter. Not to mention the car-crash that had killed Marina’s mother as well as himself.
‘He used to take me round all the Roman ruins, when I was a child. The theatres at Orange and Nîmes. The remains of the town at Vaison-la-Romaine. He made it all alive. He loved the Romans, it wasn’t history to him, he saw continuity, he showed me the way we go on building houses in Provence just like the way the Romans did. What he admired was their respect for order.’
‘But from what you told me his own life was completely disordered, apart from his obsession about the house staying the same.’
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