Dead Romantic

by Simon Brett

  Madeleine gave a coy smile. ‘I’ve got a good memory, Paul. You introduced me in the pub, remember.’ The smile became knowing. ‘And I could see then that you were absolutely over the moon about her. You looked goggle-eyed. I’ve never seen anyone so smitten.’

  ‘But that wasn’t –’

  ‘Don’t deny it.’ She shook his hand from side to side, playfully.

  ‘But I–’

  ‘Looked to me remarkably like an expression of love.’

  He decided to take the risk. ‘Yes, all right. It was an expression of love. But what you don’t realise is –’

  Whether he would ever have made the revelation he intended, and how she would have reacted to it, were questions that would never be answered. At that moment there was a little tap on the door and it opened to admit Bernard Hopkins.

  Madeleine looked up at his entrance and let go of Paul’s hand. This was not done with any guilt or embarrassment; she simply discarded it. Paul remained frozen in midsentence, crouched on the edge of his chair.

  ‘Just your schedule for next week,’ said Bernard’s voice behind him. ‘I was up in Julian’s office and saw it there and since I was passing. . .’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ Madeleine stretched out the hand that had so recently held Paul’s and took the envelope.

  ‘Well, cheerio,’ Paul heard Bernard say. But he didn’t see the older man mouth, ‘Six-thirty’, before he left the room. He did, however, see Madeleine’s acknowledgement of the assignation, which took the form of a quick wink, and which filled Paul with black, unreasoning fury.

  Her pupil did not say much more as Madeleine completed the tutorial and set him some Shelley to read before their next meeting. He left with only the most perfunctory goodbye, his eyes dark and preoccupied.

  Madeleine sat still for a moment before she gathered up her books and papers. She felt pleased with her morning’s work. She had really got through to the boy on a personal level, she had really helped him. It was a good feeling to know that one was doing something important for someone else.

  Through her spread the warm glow that always came as, unwittingly, with infinite care and solicitude, she cut her dainty swathe through everyone who came into contact with her.

  Paul’s chameleon mood had settled now to black hatred, and the hatred was fixed on Bernard Hopkins. The hatred born of the fact that the man was seeing Madeleine had now been compounded by his interruption of Paul’s declaration. Paul had felt so confident at that moment; he had felt confident even that Madeleine had been joking about Sharon, teasing, knowing that she herself was the real object of his affections.

  And then Bernard Hopkins had come in and spoiled it.

  Paul was too angry to suffer the confinement of the bus, so he walked home. At least home was his ultimate destination, but he walked by a circuitous route, glaring truculently into shop windows, reading into everything he saw some criticism, some stricture on his own failure.

  It was in a shop in one of the shabby roads that run down from Brighton Station. The shop sold Army Surplus goods, camouflage-jackets, billycans, rucksacks, boots and suchlike.

  And knives.

  The one that caught his eye was a sheath-knife with a black handle.

  He went into the shop and bought it.

  His mother was out at work when he got back to the house. He went straight up to his bedroom and fixed the sheath-knife on to his belt. Facing the large mirror on the wall, he suddenly whipped the blade out of the sheath and slashed at the space before him.

  He snarled into the mirror and felt strong.

  He made a few more exploratory jabs and slashes.

  Then, very calmly, he rolled up the sleeves of his pullover and shirt, baring his forearm. He inspected the exposed flesh. He had no wish to cut a vein. This was to be no gesture of escapism or defeat. It was a gesture of strength.

  He set the point of the new blade against the skin and, with a quick, steady movement, drew it across.

  At first there was just a white line. Then, slowly, bubbles of blood welled up and joined until there was a red line. Slowly, this began to trickle down towards his hand.

  Paul went into the bathroom to wash the wound in cold water. And on the face that stared back at him from the mirror over the basin was a look of triumph.

  Chapter 9

  In her choice of clothes Madeleine Severn did not follow current fashion, though people who liked her had always said that she had style. She favoured a ‘natural’ look, avoiding man-made fibres and angularities of cut. For her working days, in the same way that she put her hair up to express a kind of benign efficiency, so she selected a variety of skirts and jumpers which looked businesslike but retained fuzzy, tactile outlines. She avoided bright colours and defined patterns, preferring subtler half-tones and designs whose contours melted together.

  When she was not at work, she went for garments that moved around a lot. She liked flowing skirts and hanging sleeves, either in faded pastel colours or smudged Indian prints. She wore many gratuitous shawls and scarves. The style, though personalised, was full of echoes of the sixties, and indeed it had been while she was at Oxford that she had first adopted it.

  For the first time she was to entertain Bernard Hopkins in her own home, Madeleine dressed with care. Her tutorial with Paul in the morning had been her only work commitment that day, so she had plenty of time to plan her effects, plenty of time also to prepare the ‘light supper’ she had offered her guest. After considerable thought, she selected a flowing full-length Indian dress whose tiny design of black on brown blurred into an impression of russet, which she knew would set off the red-gold hair, to be worn that evening deliberately loose, punctiliously dishevelled. It would be the first time Bernard had seen her hair down, and she did not want him to lose any of the impact.

  Over her simple peasant robe she draped a fine cream wool shawl, carelessly pinned at the front with a circular silver brooch, rather in the manner of Flora Macdonald. A pair of beige leather clogs completed the ensemble.

  Madeleine Severn did not wear make-up, wishing to face the world as herself and confident of the excellence of her complexion. When nature had chosen so skilfully to complement her hair with her skin, it seemed perverse to upset the balance. She did however use a cleansing-lotion made from natural ingredients (largely rose-water) and maintained the perfection of her teeth by rigorous brushing and flossing. A dab of the perfume which had had such an effect on Paul (again a subtle distillation of the aroma of flowers) was then applied behind each ear and to the inside of each wrist. Madeleine Severn’s appearance was complete.

  She moved on to the promised ‘light supper’. A soufflé, she had decided, would be an appropriate demonstration of the breadth of her skills. Haddock, she thought. Folding in the egg whites, of course, would have to be done at the last minute, but she made the béchamel sauce, adding the egg yolks and flaked fish. Then she turned her attention to a little selection of unexpected salads. Mozzarella and orange. Watercress, celery and walnut. Flageolets and fennel. She put the bottle of Liebfraumilch she had bought into the fridge.

  By half-past five all these preparations had been made, and she turned her attention to the tiny sitting-room. The pile of cushions on the low sofa did not look sufficiently random, so she disarrayed them with care. She draped a beaded shawl artlessly over the back of her old rocking- chair. She opened the Guardian, which she had not had time to look at that day, at the Features page, folded it back on itself and laid it asymmetrically on the low pine coffee-table. She inspected her bookshelves and, finding the spines too parallel, leant a few this way and that, took out others and replaced them horizontally on top. She extracted a Penguin edition of Swinburne, opened it at ‘A Forsaken Garden’, and laid it, text down, on the floor by the sofa, as if it had just been abandoned there at the sound of the doorbell.

  She went across to the record-player. This was an old Dansette she had bought while at university. Though she could easily have afforded a more
modern set-up, she stuck with calculated eccentricity to the outmoded mono machine. Most of the records dated from the same period. Some of the pop ones, her copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, her two Mamas and Papas LPs, were crackly with over-use. But she went on playing them. There had been few additions to her collection since Oxford. She bought Leonard Cohen and still, in mournful moods, wallowed in his pretension. Joni Mitchell, too. And a Billie Holliday reissue. But that, the most recent purchase, had been bought over ten years before.

  For Bernard, though, she didn’t think pop music was right. He was that much older, seemed perhaps a little too serious for the Mamas and the Papas. She realised, with a little spurt of excitement, that she did not yet know him well enough to be able to gauge his tastes. She just felt confident that there would be time, that they would get to know each other, that they were embarking on more than a brief relationship.

  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons seemed bright enough, tasteful, and safe. She slipped the worn LP out of its sleeve, and put it on the turntable. Just as the music started, the telephone rang.

  She switched the record-player off and went across to answer the ringing. She felt sure it would Bernard. He would be calling perhaps to say he’d been delayed, that he would be a little late. She wasn’t worried. She knew he would come.

  It wasn’t Bernard. It was her niece, Laura.

  ‘Laura, how lovely. Seems ages since I’ve seen you.’

  ‘I know. Been busy.’ But it was said amicably, not with that new, rather upsetting, tone that had been creeping into Laura’s conversations with her aunt recently.

  ‘Everything going well? I gather from Aggie there’s a new boyfriend on the scene.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s going well?’

  ‘Pretty well, I think,’ Laura replied cautiously. Then suddenly she said, ‘I’d like to see you, Madeleine. Have a talk.’

  ‘Of course.’ Madeleine was all warmth. She had known the estrangement would only be temporary. She had known that Laura would soon come back to her, would soon need her womanly advice. ‘What, a lunch?’

  Laura worked in Brighton and, until recently, the two of them had met fairly regularly at lunchtime.

  ‘Yes, that’d be fine. Any day, really, from my point of view.’

  ‘Well, let me think. How am I placed for classes?’ Madeleine made some play of consulting an imaginary diary. ‘Thursday. Thursday be all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Look forward to seeing you then. Usual time? Usual place?’

  The usual time was a quarter to one. The usual place was a health-food shop in the Lanes which had a small restaurant area behind.

  ‘OK,’ said Laura.

  Madeleine was filled with satisfaction as she put the phone down. It was such a good feeling, helping people. In the morning she had been able to give so much to the young boy, Paul, and now Laura was coming back with her problems. Because, in spite of the insouciance of her niece’s manner, Madeleine had no doubt that the girl had some sort of problem, one that she needed to share with someone of her own sex, someone with a little more knowledge of the world.

  At that moment the doorbell rang. Madeleine restarted the Vivaldi and gave the room one final look. The reproduction of Millais’ The Bridesmaid over the fireplace was too aggressively straight. She nudged the frame at the bottom to set it slightly askew. Inspired, she took the string of black mourning-beads that hung from the mirror and draped them over the corner of the picture. It was the little touches, she knew, that counted.

  Then she went to answer the door.

  Bernard was properly appreciative of the soufflé, but he did not eat a great deal of it. He felt remarkably nervous, alone with Madeleine. It was a long time since he had been in this sort of situation with a woman and he would no doubt take a while to adjust. At the moment he felt as jumpy as he had in his late teens when he had made his first stumbling attempts at forming relationships with girls.

  In those days his worries had been mainly about whether he felt enough for them, but this time he had no doubts about his feelings for Madeleine. He wondered if he had ever been so preoccupied with one person, so blinkered to the rest of the world. But, in spite of his certainty, the nervousness remained. He toyed gamely with his mozzarella and orange salad.

  ‘More wine?’ asked Madeleine, proffering the Liebfraumilch.

  Bernard put his hand warily over his glass. ‘Perhaps I’d better not. Still got my Turk to see at nine. Must be coherent. Wouldn’t do for him to go back to Turkey imagining conversational English is all slurred and garbled.’

  Madeleine laughed, gently raised his fingers and poured wine into the glass. ‘You’ll be all right. From what you say of his aptitude, even getting Mr Nassiri to speak drunken English will be quite an achievement.’

  Bernard turned his hand, and hers nestled into it. His brown eyes looked into her violet-blue ones. ‘Oh, Madeleine,’ he said, in a voice tinged with resignation. ‘Madeleine, Madeleine.’

  She smiled at him serenely.

  ‘Oh, Madeleine, what am I going to do about you?’

  ‘Keep seeing me, I hope.’

  He nodded ruefully, in a way that was both troubled and at the same time seemed to mock its trouble. ‘Yes. I’m afraid we have no alternative.’

  She pouted. ‘You sound as if you wish you did have an alternative.’

  ‘No. I don’t. It’s just. . .’ He sighed. ‘If only things were always as straightforward as they seem to be at this moment.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I mean that while we’re here together, everything seems logical and simple. But as soon as we’re apart, everything else will crowd in, all the problems, all the things that are difficult, all the things that don’t work, that don’t fit.’

  ‘Are you talking about your wife?’

  He shook his head abruptly, almost in exasperation. ‘No, I’m not talking about my wife. My wife’s irrelevant. She doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. I wish I’d never mentioned her to you.’

  ‘You didn’t, actually. I heard about her from the Eyes and Ears of Garrettway, Stella Franklin. But I would have found out anyway. You couldn’t have kept it from me.’

  ‘I don’t know. With you I wanted a new start. I didn’t want there to be any lies between us, just honesty, so that our relationship could grow, without being . . . sort of . . . pressured.’

  ‘Saying you hadn’t got a wife,’ Madeleine rebuked gently, ‘would hardly have been honest, would it?’

  ‘But we could have. . .’ He abandoned the idea with a sad shake of his head. ‘No. I’ve got myself locked into this situation now.’ He shrugged, then brightened. ‘So you were asking Stella about me?’

  ‘As soon as I saw you, I wanted to know everything about you.’

  ‘I had the same problem with you.’ He sighed. Yes, I m afraid we both seem to have got it.’ His tone implied that ‘it’ was not necessarily a very desirable thing to have.

  Madeleine shook his hand from side to side in gentle admonition. ‘Don’t sound so gloomy. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Of course. If something’s meant to happen, it happens. The right thing happens.’

  ‘It hasn’t in the past,’ he said dully.

  She was stung. ‘You mean you’ve been in this situation lots of times?’

  ‘No,’ he said wearily. ‘Just life generally. Things don’t always work out – don’t seem to work out for me, perhaps I should say.’ He felt very close to her. He wanted to say more, to confide his real meaning, but something held him back.

  ‘You mean your Shirley?’ asked Madeleine.

  Again he denied it, but she did not take any notice. ‘No, it must have been terrible for you. To have had a love that worked and that is then destroyed, not by any infidelity or loss of passion, but by something external, something over which you have no control.’

  He felt too tired to corre
ct her view of his situation. She knew nothing about it, and he knew that, for him to keep her, she would probably have to remain in ignorance.

  ‘You must feel terribly guilty,’ she said softly.

  He nodded. That at least was true.

  ‘But you shouldn’t, really. It’s not your fault. It’s just your misfortune. And, Bernard, whatever happens with us, we will be discreet. She’ll never find out, I promise.’

  He looked away.

  ‘I have moments of guilt, too. I told you about John. John Kaczmarek. The one who died. I told you. And I never thought that I would ever feel anything for anyone else comparable to what I felt for him. Now I feel a little guilty, as if in some way I’ve let him down.’

  Her brow furrowed, as with emotion. In fact, it was furrowing as she tried to summon up the image of John Kaczmarek. She had increasing difficulty these days in remembering exactly what he had looked like, and had constantly to consult the few photographs she had kept of him. But they proved inadequate prompts, their colours now subtly false, his expressions unlike the expressions she remembered. John Kaczmarek had become just a feeling in her mind, a memory of something important that had once happened to her, that had shaped her character, but whose details remained obstinately imprecise.

  ‘Guilt and sex’, Bernard observed with resignation, ‘seem to go together.’

  Madeleine tossed her head in exasperation at this fact. Her red-gold hair rippled, just as it was meant to. ‘I’m sure it’s only in this country that we react like that. Or at least this country’s worse than most. Primitive societies don’t have these hang-ups,’ she generalised blithely. ‘Oh, I long sometimes just to be simple and primitive. I’m sure if we took away all the trappings of society and convention, if people could just get together as people, everything would work so much better.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Bernard agreed. ‘I think that about you.’

  ‘About me? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’d like to be with you somewhere that’s out of time, somewhere that’s peaceful, that’s cut off from the rest of the world, away from memories of the past and fears of the future, somewhere where there could just be the two of us, insulated from everything else.’