“Christian, I’m sorry—I can’t. My mother’s arriving any moment and—I ought to be here when she arrives, that’s all.” He hesitated slightly, then shrugged. “Also, I have work I should do…”
“This is supposed to be a holiday.” Christian looked at him sternly. “I know you never have them, but you ought to learn. Lotus-eating. It grows on one, you know…”
He paused, but Edouard only shook his head. Christian shrugged. The atmosphere in the house was beginning to get on his nerves, and it would only be made worse by the arrival of Louise, whom Christian had never liked. Too many bloody women, he thought; Clara would be leaving later that morning; Louise would probably give Ghislaine short shrift—then things might improve somewhat. Except for the fact that Hélène Harte was not only in the country right now, she was close by—less than a hundred kilometers along the coast. Was that why Edouard was in this impossible mood?
He had had enough of moods, he decided; he lifted his hand in a gentle salute.
“I’ll see you later then. I might watch a game of boules in the Place des Lices. Drop into the museum, perhaps. I’d like to look at their Vuillard again—and they have a quite perfect Seurat. I’ll be back this afternoon…” He hesitated, and then smiled wickedly. “And if Ghislaine makes a move, I want to hear all about it. Every disgusting detail—do you swear?”
“Christian—stop this, will you? If you’re going, go…”
“Oh, all right.” Christian sighed once more. “Sometimes, Edouard,” he added as he drifted away, “sometimes your probity wears me out…”
Edouard watched him leave: a tall thin figure in a crumpled but elegant linen suit, a straw hat that had seen better days shading his face from the sun. The trousers were belted with his old school tie, and there was a bandanna handkerchief, of bright red silk, in his top pocket. He disappeared from view. Edouard sat alone a little longer on the terrace, looking out at the sea. One white-sailed yacht lay on the horizon, becalmed. The air smelled clean and salty.
After a while, abruptly, he rose, and took the path down to the beach. It was bordered by bushes of wild thyme, rosemary, and lavender. As he walked, he caught their scent, strong in the sun: aromatic, sharp, the fragrance of Provence.
On the deserted beach, Edouard walked back and forth for a while, kicking at the pale sand with his feet. Philippe de Belfort’s parting remarks had been in his mind all week; they returned to him now. You have no children. It was as good as true. He had a daughter whom he could not acknowledge, a daughter who had never known him. He loved a woman who now led her own life, and would never return to him. And he had an empty obsession which he had allowed to dominate his thoughts for almost three years. He turned away, angrily, to an outcrop of rocks, and sat there looking out at the still sea.
He should marry again, perhaps. There were other reasons for marriage besides love, after all. He was thinking this when he heard footsteps crunch on the sand, and, looking up, saw that it was Clara.
He watched her approach, walking a little awkwardly on the sand, lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. As she came closer, she began to smile, and Edouard stood up.
“I’ve come to say good-bye,” she called to him when she was still a short distance away. She drew level with him, and stopped, a little out of breath.
“It’s finally finished. My part of it anyway. I just wanted to see you before I left—there’s a car coming for me in a minute…”
“You should have let me drive you…”
“No—why should you? Louise is arriving any minute. It’s all arranged. And besides, it’s easier this way…” She stopped suddenly. “Edouard—is there something wrong?”
“No. Nothing. Here, come and sit down for a while—I had an unrealistic thought, that’s all. It’s gone now…” He spoke lightly, smiling at her, holding out his hand. Clara took it, and he drew her down beside him. They sat in silence for a while; Clara leaned back a little on her arms, so that she could look at him. He was staring out at the sea again now, as he had been when she saw him from the terrace above. There was a slight breeze from the water, and it lifted the dark hair from his forehead. He looked tired, she thought with a rush of affection for him; tired, and also bleak—and she thought for a moment of the young Edouard, back in France after finishing at Oxford, filled with such energy, and such optimism: he had captured her heart, just like that. But even then, all that time ago, he had had this ability to close himself off, gently, scrupulously, and with a regard which had pained her, allowing her to come just so near to him, and no further. He had never lied to her. He had never made her promises he knew he would not fulfill, and he had never said that he loved her.
Clara looked away. She had loved him too much to argue, too much to quarrel, and too much to leave him. She wasn’t particularly proud, she thought, of the way she had accepted his terms, and she was not proud of what had happened later, when it was finally over.
She had survived; people did. But there had been five years of a hell she never wanted to experience again—a period in which she had despised herself, and felt without identity or purpose. Her work, and being successful at her work, had brought her up and out of that particular pit, and she was determined never to return there. She never wanted to fall in love again—not the way she had loved Edouard. Now she would think sometimes, when a brief affair was over: I’m lucky; I’m a free woman. Women’s lives were happier without men, she had decided—even men like Edouard.
He had picked up a handful of small pebbles and began to throw them idly into the water. Quite suddenly, he said: “Are you happy, Clara?”
The question took her by surprise, and she hesitated.
“I suppose so,” she said at last. “Yes. I think I am.”
“I’m glad.” He had turned back to look at her. He paused, and then, with something of the old simplicity, he said: “I made you unhappy. I know that. I wish I hadn’t.”
“Oh, Edouard—it was my choice as well, you know.” She reached forward and pressed his arm gently. “No regrets. Except in my weaker moments. And I don’t have those anymore.”
Edouard smiled, a little wryly. He nodded, and once more turned away. Clara had seen the expression in his eyes though, he could not hide it from her; she felt it again, that rush of impotent pity and affection, and she leaned toward him impulsively.
“Oh, Edouard—what is it that’s happened to you? What is it you’re looking for?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
He stood up, suddenly and angrily, and threw the stone he was holding. It flew in a high wide arc; they both watched it rise and then fall.
“I don’t know anymore,” he said again. “I knew once. I think I did.”
He began to walk back up the beach, and Clara followed him. She caught his hand, and Edouard stopped. Clara looked up into his face, and what she saw there frightened her.
“The world seems to me a miserable place. A formless place.” He jerked out the words, then stopped, and regained his control. “I felt this before. After Isobel died…I’m sorry. There’s no reason to burden you with this. Let me see you back to your car.”
He began walking again, and Clara stood still for a moment, looking after him. She wanted to run after him, and catch up with him. She wanted to put her arms around him and shake him. She wanted to shout: Life isn’t like that; life isn’t like that. She did none of those things. She believed the words, but she knew they would sound ridiculous. A stupid defiant little cry: Edouard would not listen to it—she would not have listened to it either, a few years before, when she was in her wilderness.
She walked after him, slowly. Above them, on the terrace, Ghislaine, who had been watching them, turned away.
That night, Louise and Ghislaine, Edouard and Christian had dinner together—since Louise was present, an elaborate formal dinner, for which everyone was required to dress. The atmosphere around the table was tense; Christian, unable to understand its undercurrents, blamed Louise, who wa
s in an ill temper, and had been from the moment of her arrival.
She came in her dark blue Bentley; behind it were two more cars, in one of which traveled her personal maid with her jewel cases, in the other the fifteen Vuitton trunks, suitcases and hatboxes Louise required for a stay of some seven days. Ghislaine joined Edouard to greet her, and that, Christian assumed, was a mistake, for from that moment on, once Louise had given them both a long cold hard look, she made it imperiously clear that Ghislaine’s presence in her house was an irritant, and an insolent imposition. Ghislaine had stuck to her guns to the extent of one more night; she was leaving in the morning—and that fact had not improved her own temper either.
Louise had been taken on a tour of the completed house, and had complained mercilessly.
“Are you sure I approved that material, Ghislaine? I remember it quite differently. Much softer. A more subtle color altogether. Perhaps it’s the way it’s been hung. It looks most unattractive.” She was querulous, almost tearful, in her bedroom; the other bedrooms she hardly examined at all. The billiards room was beastly; the conservatory was spoiled; the dining room was unflattering. By the time she had reached the salon again, she was giving her peevishness full rein.
“Well, really, Ghislaine, I suppose you must have explained it was going to be like this. But now that I see it, I’m not sure at all. There seems so very little furniture—and what there is seems so assertive. It creeps up on one, and crowds one in the most extraordinary way. And this pink! Did we discuss pink? Well, perhaps it’s a sort of beige. It looks so dreadfully drab, Ghislaine, and somehow…somehow rather limp. What is it exactly?”
“It’s raw silk, Louise.” Ghislaine was keeping her temper with difficulty. She sounded strangled. “It’s raw silk, hand woven and hand dyed. You get that particular kind of silk, Louise, only from certain silkworms, and it’s very rare. I get it from a special supplier in Thailand, and it’s absolutely the latest thing. Everyone is trying to get their hands on it…”
“I really can’t imagine why,” Louise said tartly. “I’ve never liked Thailand anyway. I greatly preferred Burma.”
She had sunk into a chair; now she rose again and gave a little cry of distress. Christian and Edouard, who had joined the grand tour, exchanged a wry glance.
“The walls, Ghislaine! What have you done to the walls? It has the most terrible effect on my lovely Cézannes. And even the Matisse Xavi loved so much. They look quite sad. Quite diminished. Edouard, Christian, don’t you agree?”
Christian thought you could hang the Cézannes in a filthy attic and it would not make an atom of difference. He shrugged.
“It would be a little difficult to diminish them, Maman,” Edouard said, echoing Christian’s thoughts, his manner tactful. Ghislaine smiled at this; Louise glared at him furiously for such treachery.
“Perhaps if you had a brief rest, Maman…You must be tired after your journey.”
“I am not in the least tired. Please do not address me as if I were an invalid. Really, Edouard, you can be most astonishingly stupid sometimes…”
Here she paused. She looked at Edouard; she turned and looked at Ghislaine. Her gaze traveled slowly from the top of Ghislaine’s carefully arranged dark hair down to the toes of her black sling-back shoes, and up to her face once more.
“I see my mistake,” she said bitingly. “I should have known better than to trust the judgment of a friend.”
With that she had swept out of the room, calling for her maid. And Ghislaine and Edouard had—to Christian’s enormous surprise—exchanged a look which appeared possibly guilty, and certainly conspiratorial. He could hardly believe his eyes.
And now they were at dinner. A room filled with huge vases of flowers: mimosa, jasmine, roses, orange blossom—their scent was stiflingly sweet. Four silver candelabra spaced along the length of the dining table. The Limoges dinner service. Four tight-lipped people. Louise in velvet and pinkish pearls; Ghislaine defiant in scarlet; Edouard, silent and abstracted; Christian in a green velvet smoking jacket which he wore with a canary-yellow silk bow tie. An uneasy hour passed.
Christian found it all absurd; he could hardly suppress his laughter, and became rather drunk. Then he looked down the table, saw Edouard’s face, and felt remorseful. He stopped drinking immediately, but it made no difference; drunk or sober—the air was icy with suspicion and hostility.
Louise seemed to Christian to be trying out a new role: that of an imperious, impossibly demanding old woman. The only accessory she was lacking was a silver-topped cane, and Christian had a horrific vision of her, a few years from now, with just such a cane, banging it on the floor, enjoyably making everyone else’s life a misery. She was now sixty-seven; her love affairs had, over the past ten years, grown more sporadic—or so Christian had heard. Presumably, she knew her charms were now inexorably fading, and this new role was the replacement for the old one of enchantress and seductress. Christian looked at her, and realized that for the first time since he had met her, she was beginning to look her age. She is old, he thought gloomily; we’re all getting old. I’ll be forty in two years—that’s half my life gone, probably, maybe more.
He looked up at Edouard—stony-faced, saying virtually nothing—and thought: even Edouard, he is aging in front of my eyes. He looks tired, and miserable and bleak—and I remember him so well, at Oxford. When we were twenty. When we thought anything was possible. Before our choices started narrowing…
Christian bowed his head; he indulged his own melancholy; he began to think of graves and worms and epitaphs.
Edouard, looking at him, thought: Christian has drunk too much. He is getting maudlin…Ghislaine and his mother were arguing, shrilly.
“My dear. It was Harriet Cavendish, and it was 1952. She was married to Binky at the time. I remember perfectly…”
“Ghislaine. If you will forgive me. I have known Harriet since she was a child. It was 1948, and she was most certainly not married to Binky then, she was married to—”
“Would you excuse me?”
Edouard stood up. He looked down the table into the sudden silence that fell; into his mother’s face, which was lifted to his; into the flames of the candles, which flickered and guttered. The room seemed to him to fragment, to disintegrate into crazy shards, arbitrary debris. It buckled before his gaze, then steadied. Edouard looked down the table, and he thought: this, this, is how we lead our lives. This malice. This pettiness. This irrelevance. How we live them, and how we end them—wasting time.
He stepped back politely from the table.
“If you will forgive me. Maman. Ghislaine. Christian. I shall have to leave you, I’m afraid. There’s some urgent work I should do.”
Christian had thought he would walk straight out, but he did not. He paused at his mother’s chair, his face growing gentle. They looked at each other for a moment, then Louise lifted her hand to him. Edouard took it between his own, and bent over it formally. Then, abruptly, and for no apparent reason, Louise pulled her hand away.
“You are so dreadfully selfish, Edouard,” she said snappishly. “I’ve been here only a few hours, and already you can’t wait to get back to your everlasting work. Well, go—go. Leave me by myself—just as you always do…”
“Hardly by yourself, Maman,” Edouard began, but Louise cut him off shrilly.
“Yes, I am! Alone, and growing old. With no one caring a jot for me…”
“Maman—please. You know that’s not true. You know that I—”
“You? And what use are you? What use have you ever been? None. Ah…” She gave a little moan of distress. “It’s at times like this that I most miss my beloved Jean-Paul…”
She reached for a lace-edged handkerchief as she said this, and applied it to her eyes. Christian, staring at her in appalled disbelief, trying to figure out what had caused this display, saw that she was actually crying; a little.
Edouard said nothing. He had paled slightly, but otherwise betrayed no emotion. He stood stiffly
by his mother’s chair, looking down at her bent head. Then he wished her good night in a perfectly even tone. He gave her, as he always did, that dutiful half bow, learned in his childhood. Then he turned, and quietly left the room.
That was at ten o’clock. Some two hours later, Ghislaine stood outside her room, on the terrace overlooking the darkness which was the sea.
Edouard’s departure at the end of the dinner had finished the evening. Shortly afterward, Louise had retired to bed fretfully, and Ghislaine and Christian had been left alone. Coffee was brought to them in the salon, and Ghislaine eyed Christian hopefully. She did not like him, but she knew he was closer to Edouard than almost anyone else, and it occurred to her that it might be helpful to question him—he had been drinking a good deal, which might make him less cautious than usual.
But Christian gave her no opportunity. With conscious rudeness, he sprawled on one of the sofas; he propped one of the new and exquisite cushions under his feet, which were clad, Ghislaine saw, in tattered and old-fashioned black velvet evening slippers.
“Ah. Time to read, how wonderful!” Christian remarked. He cocked one eye at Ghislaine, picked up a much-thumbed book, and opened it. It was Proust, and in French. Ghislaine, who had never read Proust, felt more irritated.
“Such a treat.” Christian looked up at her over the top of the pages. “I reread it every summer. Well, as much of it as I can every summer. When I was younger, it was Le Rouge et Le Noir, and sometimes L’Éducation Sentimentale, and of course I still like them very much. But now I am become a man…” he sighed. “And such a middle-aged man, I find it has to be Proust.”
“Do you never read English novels?” Ghislaine said with a certain acidity.
“Practically never,” Christian replied. “If I can help it.”
He flicked the pages back and forth in an annoying manner, as if to find his place. Ghislaine observed that he had the deplorable habit of bending down their corners, and that in this particular volume, a whole host of pages had been so desecrated. She pursed her lips: she read few books, but felt obscurely that all books should be treated with more respect.
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