“Why ever not?” I said. “It’s a wedding present.”
“It’s too much.”
I had written the check in the hope that it might bring them happiness—or if not happiness, opportunity. I didn’t need the money myself. I no longer had any use for it.
He tried to press the check into my hand, but I refused to take it.
“Alan, I want you to have the money. If you don’t feel you can spend it now, put it in the bank. It will come in useful later—if you need a mortgage, or if you have children.”
He looked down at the check. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Stepping towards me, he put his arms round me, and I smelled sea salt, paint, and something sweet, like straw. I felt the tears coming.
No one had held me in almost twenty years.
READING PALMS
1972
I sit at my desk, in front of the green window. A Friday morning in February. Outside, the traffic rushes by. Sometimes I sense Lucille behind me in the doorway, looking in. The first time she saw my painted window, her nose wrinkled up. Like an aquarium, she said. I told her I was thinking of a wood, in summer. She shrugged as if to say it wasn’t worth discussing. Not many words ever pass between us—she follows the same routine as always, and picks up her money from the table in the hall—though I know she likes to hear me talking French. She speaks Jèrriais, a version of the Norman language that is native to the island, but is beginning to die out.
The pains return, a stabbing sensation low down, in my pelvis.
“Miss Suzanne?” Lucille is calling up the stairs. “I’m off now.”
Trying to keep my voice strong and level, I call out goodbye. The front door opens and closes.
She’s gone.
I get to my feet and make my way down to the hall. My legs are stiff and sore, and it takes me several minutes to negotiate the stairs. The telephone crouches on a small round table under the mirror. Picking up the receiver, I dial the surgery. I ask Dr. Brown’s secretary if he can make a house call. I tell her I have gastric problems. She says it’s his half-day, and that he’s not available. He could probably call by in the morning, though.
I thank her and put down the receiver.
Back upstairs, I sit at my kitchen table with a cup of tea. The window frames a square of dull gray sky. Rain hides the sea. The radio is on, the volume turned down low. Nixon has left for China. In Britain, the miners’ strike is causing blackouts and power cuts. The wind is from the northeast, and the hours of sunshine forecast are nil. I glance at the calendar. Lucille isn’t due again till Tuesday, and the doctor won’t be here until morning. I’m seventy-nine years old. Perhaps this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. Perhaps, at long last, the time has come.
I sip my tea.
When Dr. Brown arrives tomorrow he’ll ring the doorbell, but I won’t answer. He’ll ring again. Still no reply. Perhaps he’ll step back and look up at the house. I have seen people do that. Then he’ll ring for a third time, more insistently. When nobody comes he’ll walk round to the back. My bedroom curtains will be closed. Scaling the garden wall, he’ll knock on the window. Madame Malherbe? Madame Malherbe! After failing to elicit a response, he’ll climb the spiral staircase and try the door that leads to the kitchen, where I’m sitting now. It will be locked. He’ll peer through the window. There won’t be any sign of me. Eventually, he’ll cross the road and walk into the hotel and ask if he can use the telephone. He’ll call the fire brigade, who will break down my front door. He’ll find me lying on my bed. When he puts his fingers to my neck to feel for a pulse he’ll realize that I’m dead. I don’t know what will happen after that. It’s possible that I’ve already imagined too much.
I switch off the radio.
I didn’t expect my final moments to be so ordinary, so calm. I can’t hear the fridge or the clock, only the tapping of my ancient, stubborn heart. The place where my left breast used to be is aching. It’s lucky I don’t have a cat. If I did, I’d have to find a home for it. Who would I ask? Alan? No, it would be too much of an imposition—and anyway, he might become suspicious…At the very least, I would have to fill a number of bowls with food and water, just in case the doctor doesn’t come. I remember how Kid used to sit in doorways and stare at me, the tip of his striped tail curled neatly round his two front paws. If he saw me put down several bowls at once, he would know something wasn’t right. Cats always know. I remember how the top of his head smelled of burnt coffee, and how I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye.
Something about the rain reminds me of touching, or being touched. The gentleness, the repetition. I lean my forehead against the big, cold pane of glass. Outside, the gray is giving way to black. It seems an age since I saw sunlight. And suddenly the dream I had the night before comes back to me. It was the early fifties, and I was with Lucie—I think of her as Lucie now, as I did at the beginning—and we had traveled to Andratx, the little seaside place Charles-Henri always talked about. We arrived on a bus from Palma in the late afternoon, children running alongside, their arms and foreheads varnished by the heat. I thought of something Dalí said. To look is to invent. The one-story villa we had rented was in the hills above the town. We followed the owner up the steps that led to the front door, lemon trees growing in narrow terraces on either side. Lucie had to stop halfway to catch her breath. The house smelled of the wood fires people lit in the evenings. There were terra-cotta tiles on the floor, and the whitewashed walls were smeared with small brown streaks and splashes where mosquitoes had been killed. The Bakelite radio was tuned to a station that played opera. The heat was fierce but the house was cool.
That evening we took chairs out onto the terrace. I opened a bottle of white wine and emptied black olives into a bowl. The whole town was arranged below us, a jumble of flat rooftops, shuttered windows, and small backyards hung with vines or washing. People had just woken from their siestas. A man in a pale singlet appeared on a balcony. He yawned and scratched his belly, then lit a cigarette, the blue of the smoke he exhaled lost against the blue of the harbor. Somewhere a motorcycle growled and snapped. The restaurants on the waterfront would soon be opening. Since the sun set behind the house, the part of the terrace that was closest to the front wall was already in shadow. A ginger cat sprawled on the tiles near our feet. Lucie had christened him Cooper, after a brand of marmalade she used to eat in England when she was young. We sat in a strip of gold that narrowed as we talked.
Lucie let out a sigh of pleasure. “Why didn’t we think of doing this before?”
“We were happy where we were.”
“But couldn’t our happiness have been moved from place to place,” she said, “like furniture?”
I smiled.
A fishing boat eased round the headland, a thin dark flap opening in the water behind it. The muffled chug of its engine carried through the stillness. The sun was warm on my shoulders and on the back of my head.
“My hands look old.” Lucie was holding them out in front of her, palms facing down.
“Oh, stop it,” I said.
But she insisted. “They’re the hands of an old woman.”
“I have held those hands,” I said, “and kissed those hands. I’ve felt those hands in my hair and on my body. They’ve touched every inch of me. They’re part of me and known to me, but somehow they’re also new. They’re always new. It takes a long time for all that to happen.” I looked out over the town again. “They’re the age they are.”
She turned her head towards me and for a few long seconds she didn’t speak. The dark glasses she was wearing were large and opaque, and enclosed her eyes completely.
“My philosopher,” she said at last.
“You always mock me.”
“It’s affectionate.” She reached across and took my hand. “I’m glad we came. I don’t have long.”
My throa
t began to ache. “You don’t know that.”
“There’s no point fooling ourselves.”
Lucie’s kidneys were failing, and the doctors had told us that nothing could be done. Her eyes had grown paler. The skin had loosened around her jaw. She had lost a lot of weight, but her ankles had swollen. White marks showed in the pink of her fingernails. I had lived with the possibility of her death for more than forty years, a death that would come about because she was careless with her life. Her desire to be with me could never quite outweigh her desperation to be gone. I tended to push that knowledge to the very edges of my mind, where I could no longer see it, but she seemed determined, with the last of her strength, to drag it out into the light.
“What will I do without you?” I murmured, in my dream.
What have I done?
Deprived of her company, I have deprived myself of all company. I have lived like a recluse, seeing only the people I need to see—the doctor, the postman, the newsagent. Charles-Henri commented on my lack of friends, and later, when his wife arrived, he talked about my anonymity. Not only had I not been celebrated for what I had done during the war, he told her. No one even knew who I was! I thought he was exaggerating, but his disbelief seemed genuine, and I felt obliged to offer him some kind of explanation. Lucie and I had always guarded our privacy, I told him, from the moment we first moved to Jersey. Since her death I had lived even more quietly, if that was possible. It was all my fault, I said. I had brought obscurity upon myself.
I fill a glass with whiskey and switch on the radio. The news is just starting. Nixon has landed in Hawaii. In my bedroom are the barbiturates I was prescribed on my last visit to Paris. This time, I know that taking too many pills is as ineffective as taking too few, and I have worked out the optimum dose, based on my weight and tolerance. This time, there will be no awakenings, and no mistakes. It seems a final irony that Lucie, the would-be suicide, died naturally, while I, the one who devoted myself to keeping her alive, have decided to kill myself. I remember the late-night conversation in Le Croisic when we were young. The glitter of her eyes, the darkness of her arms and hands. The fishing boats beyond the open window. You’d let me go first? she said. You’d do that for me? And I said yes. Even at the age of twenty, I somehow knew that I would be better equipped to face life on my own—and I have been proved right, I suppose, though it has not been much of a life…Stepping into the lounge, I reach for Disavowals, the book she published in 1930, and turn to one of the pages where I appear. I see her eyes, the color of the weather. I see her little teeth, white petals. No tension in her lips. The eternal snow of her shoulders…I move round the room, pulling plugs out of the wall, then I pour more whiskey into my glass and go downstairs. As I look at myself in the hall mirror—the gray hair flat against my skull, the thick-rimmed glasses, the wide, implacable mouth—I wonder if it could possibly be me who Lucie was referring to. White petals, eternal snow…It seems beyond belief that I could ever have been seen that way—by anyone…
The pains come back, stiletto-sharp. I clutch at the place and murmur something. They will probably say I took my life “while of unsound mind,” but my mind is the only sound thing I have left. It’s my body that is unsound. My knees, my hips. My pelvis. Leaving the curtains open, I lie down on my bed. Rain still falling, dusk falling too…
I switch off the light.
Life was simple in my dream. At dawn, we walked on the sloping land behind the house, the sun yet to rise above the ridge, the air musty with wild herbs. Later, on the terrace, we breakfasted on black coffee and local fruit—cherries, oranges, green figs. We swam in the sea and lay in the sun. We read books. The heavy heat softened our Atlantic hearts. I photographed the villa and its terraces, the distant mountains, the thin stray dog that moped about at the foot of the steps, but Lucie, at her insistence, remained outside the frame. My pictures were scenic but empty. When the sun dropped behind the hills, we dined in a restaurant that overlooked the harbor. The wooden tables were painted a dusty pale blue, and hurricane lamps hung from a vine-covered pergola above our heads. The owner had hair that clung to his skull in tight white curls. His resemblance to a sheep was quite uncanny. When the meal was over, he treated us to slices of almond cake made by his wife, and glasses of a brown liqueur. I leaned close to Lucie. After this, I said, it will be impossible to eat anywhere else.
I get up and look out of the window. The rain is falling harder, and there are no breaks in the cloud. I have the feeling it will rain all night. I return to my bed and start to take the pills. I realize I have left the back door open. It doesn’t matter. I’m not likely to have any visitors between now and tomorrow morning. I reach for my whiskey, the glass almost empty. Things will be easier when I am gone. It’s not that I believe in a world beyond this one, or that I have hopes of seeing Lucie again, wonderful as that would be. No, the comfort lies elsewhere. Once dead, I will no longer be aware of being without her. That’s why the past eighteen years have been so difficult. It’s not true what they say. Time heals nothing.
“You were everything to me,” I say out loud, “whether you liked it or not. There was never anyone but you.”
My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Are the pills beginning to take effect?
In the dream, as we sipped our liqueurs, Lucie told me she missed Robert.
“Desnos?” I said.
“Yes.”
I began to recite one of his poems, the poem he had written for the singer, Yvonne George, his unrequited love. “Never anyone but you will put her hand on my forehead over my eyes / Never anyone but you and I renounce lying and unfaithfulness—” I broke off and looked at Lucie. “I’ve forgotten what comes next.”
“You may cut the rope of this anchored ship,” she said.
There were tears in her eyes. Mine too.
In the late 1950s I traveled to Paris. I had heard that Youki was still living on rue Mazarine, and prompted by Lucie’s account of their meeting a few years before I decided to call on her. Though it was early evening when I reached her building, the air was stifling. I stood in the shadow, staring up at her apartment. All the shutters were closed. It would be just my luck, I thought, if she had gone away. I began to climb the stairs. Several times I had to stop and rest. The building was quiet and cool—people at the seaside, or lying in darkened rooms. At last I reached the floor where Youki lived. I rang the bell and waited. I was about to turn away, disappointed, when the door opened and Youki’s face appeared.
“Suzanne! Good God, is that you?”
In the twenty years since I had seen her last she had grown much heavier. Her neck was thick, and deep curving folds ran from the sides of her nose down to her jaw. In her right hand she was holding a black fan. It was gloomier in the apartment than it was on the stairwell, and I followed her through a kind of twilight, the silver patches on her kimono floating ahead of me, disembodied, the rest of her invisible. She had closed the shutters against the heat, she said. The heat had been frightful.
She led me into a room I didn’t remember, a small lamp burning in one corner. She was having gin, she said. I asked for water. When she returned with the water, she told me she had been devastated by the news of Claude’s death. There was nobody like Claude, she said. It was so dark that I could only see her properly when she struck a match and leaned into the flame to light a cigarette. I felt she was using the heat as an excuse, and that she always kept the shutters closed, no matter what the weather was like. She didn’t want to be seen. I asked about her life. She mentioned a few friends, people whose names I only dimly recalled, or didn’t recognize at all. There was no talk, this time, of affairs. She didn’t seem remotely curious about me. We no longer had much in common, perhaps. Everything that had bound us together—Lucie, Robert, youth itself—was gone. We were two people struggling to remember why we knew each other, and there were long silences filled only by the creaking of her fan and the crackle of her cigare
tte as she inhaled. It had been wrong of me to come, I decided, and I was about to take my leave when she began to tell me about a Czechoslovakian doctor who had called on her.
“He turned up unannounced,” she said, “like you.”
He told her he had sought her out because he had known Robert. She asked him in. He had thin hair and hollow cheeks, and his ill-fitting suit looked decades old. Her first thought was that he wanted something—money probably—and she wished she had closed the door in his face, but after a few minutes she noticed a sort of distance in his eyes, as if he were focusing on another, more rarefied world, one to which she had no access. He didn’t show the slightest interest in her or her surroundings. He wasn’t envious of what she had, or even aware of it. She felt insulted by his all-encompassing indifference. He wouldn’t accept anything, not even water.
“So what did he want?” I asked.
Youki reached for her gin. “He wanted to tell me a story.”
While in Auschwitz—or it might have been Birkenau, she couldn’t quite remember—the doctor, then a medical student, had found himself caught up in a straggling group of prisoners who were being herded towards a low brick building. At the time, he had no idea that the building housed a gas chamber. He didn’t even ask himself where he might be going. He was too exhausted and too ravenous to think at all. He was simply putting one foot in front of the other. Doing what he was told. In front of him was a man wearing spectacles and a dark wool cape. He had heard the man speaking French. A dull rain fell, and the mud was ankle-deep. The sky above was thick and gray. It was impossible in that place to believe that there might be another kind of weather—sunshine, for example…
Less than a hundred yards from the brick building, the Frenchman became animated and jumped sideways, out of line. As a rule, this would have earned him a blow from a rifle butt or a casual bullet in the back of his head, but none of the guards reacted. It was the sheer unlikeliness of what was happening that wrong-footed them, perhaps. You can induce a kind of paralysis in people, the doctor said, if you’re sufficiently original.
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