by Mavis Cheek
The following day, when she walked past the flower shop and peered in, the girl was not there. She went in, bought a little spray of something, asked where the pretty girl had gone. The owner pursed her lips. 'She is arranging the flowers for a man who has a chateau in Perpignan,' she said. There was that French shrug again. The woman did not believe it either.
Desolate, she returned to her apartment and telephoned the chateau. Edwin answered. She said that she knew he was there with the girl and that she was hurt and humiliated and leaving him to go back to England.
'But I love you,' he said. 'And I will be home in three days. I should not like to return and find you had gone away.'
Audrey sat on her large and beautiful bed, in her pretty room, with the sounds of the city drifting in through the balcony windows, and sobbed - at first with rage, then with pity for herself - and finally with resolution. She would leave. She began to pack, tearing the beautiful clothes from their hangers and throwing them on to the beautiful bed. Opening the drawers of her Louis - whatever number it-bloody-well-bugger-was - cabinet and hurling out the contents. From the back of the cupboard she hauled out her big suitcase and opened it. There was Patrick's face, smiling up at her from yet another news cutting sent to her by her mother. This time it was about a new housing estate he had designed, somewhere in England. The headline was 'Head in the clouds. Sir Leslie Martin gives approval. Patrick Parker continues to create a Brave New World.'
She stared at the photograph. Happy the man with talent, she thought despondently. In the photograph next to Patrick there was a more detailed picture of the design. A tall, plain block of flats, with a walkway (the famous bridge motif, as the caption commented) at its base leading to a long, low-rise, unadorned shopping complex. Outside the plain-looking shops were two prams and a couple of dumpy-looking women. Patrick was quoted as saying that he 'had expected some argument or dissent from some quarters, given the height he had chosen - but so far there was none. I have always enjoyed a good debate.'
Debate, she thought amused, was - debatable. She remembered him telling her not to be so passive - couldn't remember what about - might have been whether to have the top of the milk on your cornflakes, might have been the Value to Man of building rockets to the moon. She also remembered that what usually happened if she said her piece was that he told her she was being silly - or that she didn't know enough about it. Whatever it was. Oh, happy the man who has talent, she said again, But where am I? In Paris, actually, she reminded herself. Which was a great deal better than a woman of no talent (bar one, apparently) could expect. When her maid arrived in the morning she was still there, her clothes scattered.
When Edwin returned she was cold. Firmly unforgiving. He went away again. He telephoned her. ‘I am alone,' he said. 'And I want to make love to my beautiful mistress - whom I love - and not some unkind iceberg. You will telephone me and I shall come to you.' Then he hung up.
Audrey paced the apartment. She had already thrown away the birthday flowers, tearing them apart in her hands. Now she prepared to break the vases - she had seen it done in films often enough. She selected the first, held it, looked at it, one of Edwin's favourites, Venetian glass, light and delicate as air. She prepared to dash it to the ground. After all, she had the right. And then she stopped herself. What would she do once she had finished with the vases? Would she wreck the rest of the apartment? Would she then leave? And go where? Her heart was not broken by his behaviour, it was merely humiliated. She knew the feeling of a broken heart and it was not like this. She decided to take her mother's eternal advice and be a good girl. She replaced the vases carefully on the writing table and picked up the telephone. She apologised for her harsh words. He accepted the apology. While she waited for him to arrive she dressed herself in white linen. The right clothes for the right job. And when he arrived - she laughed at herself. He was right - it meant nothing.
So it happened from time to time. Edwin was not secretive about it but he was discreet. She did not pry. And it was usually over as quickly as it began. Just once, when the little sweetheart had a bit more mileage left, and Edwin went from Perpignan down to Cadaques still with her prancing ballet-girl delights in tow, Audrey felt a mixture of jealousy and envy. Jealousy because Cadaques was somewhere special on account of its picturesque red roofs and dazzling white houses - and the memory of the overwhelming moment when Salvador Dali himself had bent to kiss her hand at a luncheon. Envy because she had only the dimmest memory of what it was like to lie with a supple young body - Patrick - and know the pleasure of smooth, unblemished skin. She fretted in between both emotions until they fused into anger.
Paris was hot again, and restive, with much activity going on in the streets below. She had seen headlines on news stands - about Vietnam and Cambodia - and once she and Edwin saw the French and American flags being burnt together. It reminded her of the street violence they witnessed over Algeria but Edwin said it was different.
'Why?' she asked.
'Because they already have their independence from us. It seems there is no such thing as gratitude nowadays - only rebellion.' ‘I know so little,' she said.
'Oh, I don't think Vietnam is something you need bother yourself about.'
Out on the midday boulevard - dressed as provocatively as Edwin's little sweethearts, in a pink clinging sun top and a very short skirt -she picked up a pretty boy-man with dark, angry eyes, long curling tresses and no shoes. At the Cafe de Lilas. The streets were full of them - all young - somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, wearing red bandannas and pictures of heroes printed on their ‘T-shirts. They were students, they were protesting, and they were - so Audrey's told her - going to change the world. 'How?' she asked. And laughed when he said Free Love might do it. He had bloody hands and filthy broken nails. From ripping up cobblestones to fling at the police, he said. She ordered red wine for them both and when it came it tasted like vinegar. He laughed as she spat it out and asked for something better, for she had never drunk such poor wine before. He taunted her for her soft ways and urged her to come and join them that night. He told her that, just as in the days of the Revolution, the women were at the barricades. 'This,' he said, 'is the second revolution, this is the one that counts. This one is truly Power to the People.' He gripped her hands and told her that their votes counted for nothing, armed rebellion was the only way for governments to see sense.
Audrey nodded at every word he said. She was quite relieved that their votes counted for nothing, because she had never - actually -voted.
He was so beautiful, she thought, but he was still talking, talking, talking. 'Come and join us,' he said again. "They are waiting.'
We will see about that, she thought. And she leaned towards him, taking a mouthful of the sour wine and putting her mouth to his so that it trickled through his lips and down his chin.
So much for the Second Barricades. She took him back to her apartment and, while the Revolution That Counted raged throughout the capital, they smoked dope and rolled around and drank Cointreau as if it were schnapps. She kept him there for a night and a day while the cobbles flew and the tear gas swirled in the streets below. When Edwin telephoned in something of a panic to see that she was all right and staying safely indoors, her boy-man, her petit frisottis was still there, naked in her sheets, and she was still giggling. She tugged on his curls and indicated that he should make some kind of little noise — perhaps a cough - just so that Edwin would know. It was not to hurt him, it was to establish that she, too, was a separate entity with a life and entitlement to its pleasures of her own. An Epicurean.
The petit frisottis dutifully coughed and then laughed. He blew a raspberry right into the receiver, and laughed ever more loudly. She was mid-sentence, saying that she was desperately missing him, when Edwin put down the phone. She rolled over on to her naked back and laughed and laughed and laughed.
The beautiful boy left the next day, urging her to come with him. For a moment she considered it. Sitting on th
e rumpled bed, cross-legged, watching her lover dress, his hair wet from the shower, his body so different from Edwin's - fire in his eyes instead of sophisticated ennui - she almost went. But the past held her back. Where did following a man with fire in his eyes ever get you? She waved him goodbye from the balcony and watched him swing off down the busy street below, his hair streaming behind him as he started to rim - free as air - already linking up with others - ready to die for the cause. She yawned and went back to bed.
It felt good. Right up until she knew that Edwin had returned to Paris and did not come to the apartment. She waited. And she waited. It was then that Audrey Wapshott discovered she did not have a separate identity - nor an entitlement to her own independent pleasures. She was not and never would be an Epicurean. She had not been a good girl and she would be punished for it.
Edwin refused to speak to her on the telephone, his door was not open to her, his domestic staff were instructed to turn her away and he did not go near his office. All business was conducted through his male personal assistant, whose expression remained as still and cold as a Napoleonic marble in the face of all her importunings. Edwin remained incommunicado for a month. He wrote her one chilling letter saying that he was destroyed by her disloyalty. She had broken their agreement. If she wished, now, to return to England, he would not stop her.
How could she go home? Instead she went down on her knees at the door of his house until - as he said afterwards - he thought her wailing would awaken the dead (he lived near the small Cimetiere Fatidique, which he said would be convenient one day) - and brought her into the house, if not immediately into his forgiveness.
Eventually, when he did speak to her, he said most seriously, 'That is not your part of the bargain. If you do such a thing again -' She hung her head. He relented and put his arms around her, telling her that -providing she was truly sorry and would never do it again - they would be happy ever after. 'It is not something,' he said, 'that a woman needs to do.'
She learned to accept her own passivity. It was easier to look the other way when he became enchanted elsewhere. Easier to welcome him back, to not ask questions. Safer too. While she remained quiet, she remained. She learned to enjoy the pleasurable part of a mostly unpalatable soup, the pleasurable part being that - once he returned to her - he was more happy to be with her than ever. He was right about this, as he was right about always wearing a hat in the sun. Once she learned these rules she could bear them. And as the years went by he seemed less inclined to make his little visits to Perpignan.
Audrey never did vote. When she asked her mother about it, Dolly said she had never voted either, apart from Anthony Eden. But then - he was lovely-looking. What was the point? thought Audrey. Wiser and sharper now, she knew that the petits frisottis of today would be the Grandees of the future when they were sixty. Already, from press cuttings, she saw how far Patrick had already travelled down the road of respectable living, to understand what became of so-called rebels. Anyway - neither Harold Wilson nor Edward Heath was the slightest bit attractive. So she just didn't bother. Instead Audrey tucked the memory of her passionate petit frisottis away - and she never drank Cointreau again.
Nor did she call herself an Epicurean. The new word she used was Pragmatist. From Pragma, she told herself (1941-?), British, meaning a woman who just shuts up, and gets on, and makes the best of it.
8
Florence and Lilly
It was time for Apsu to consider marriage. She refused.
Her grandmother hid her face in her apron, her mother cajoled, her father threatened and her brother said she was no sister of his.
'Don't be so silly’ she told them all. And resumed her studies.
Audrey rarely went back to London but always, when she did, her mother had kept some new cuttings about Patrick for her. It was as if Dolly could not stop rubbing in the salt and Audrey could not help holding open the wound to oblige, though she always affected indifference. At these times she rediscovered a painful hollow inside herself. And if she thought about it at all, the word fulfilment came to mind. But she tried not to think. There was one press cutting that cut more sharply than most. The photograph of Patrick, proud father, with his newborn son.
'At last’ said Dolly. 'And now we won't hear the last of it.'
Not a sign of Peggy Boxer As Was anywhere. If Audrey did not exist in her world in Paris, Peggy Boxer scarcely seemed to exist in hers. Faceless and voiceless seemed to be the way of things when you served Genius. Faceless and voiceless for both of them then. Which seemed fair.
The years moved on, slipped by, rolled away - quite easily. In Paris there was a good rhythm to life. Sometimes she would try out the words to her mirror 'kept woman' but it caused her more surprise than shame. At least Edwin had kept her. Patrick just threw her away. How had she gone from being Little Audrey Wapshott, climbing trees and marvelling at spiders' webs, to this wicked sophisticate? She could hardly remember. But she knew she had done it quite easily. Very easily. Too easily, was the next stage in the consideration, but she never went there.
'We are not kept,' said Pauline, fourteen years with the head of Parisian Police (now retired). 'It is us who keeps them.'
Gradually on her visits to London her mother ceased to say the word 'grandchildren' and look at her meaningfully, and instead concentrated on her son Sandy's offspring - overpraising the poor little dribbling, snotty things in Audrey's opinion, though she smiled and nodded and looked interested at every informative morsel. It was highly unlikely that they could talk, write, draw, play any musical instrument, do sums, have several sets of the finest teeth and make you laugh till your eyes dropped out at the tender ages of two and four - but Audrey accepted it. She also accepted that Jeannie, Sandy's wife, was probably the best mother in the world (barring the Queen Mother) and that Dolly could not wish for a better daughter-in-law. If the implication was that she could wish for a better daughter, Audrey did not rise. Her mother made the best of it and referred to her daughter as 'a successful businesswoman'. Audrey hoped that fate would not intervene and inform Mrs Wapshott just what business it was at which her daughter was so successful.
She went on keeping the cuttings her mother saved her about Patrick. Couldn't help it. She tucked them into her suitcase to take back to France to read. And in France she hid them away at the back of a cupboard under piles of yellowing linen.
'Interested are you?' said Dolly, watching her fold them into her packing so carefully
'I'm always interested in old friends,' she replied sweetly.
Audrey knew all about discretion. It did not do to tell anyone that she thought of Patrick every time she crossed a bridge - that she thought of him when she looked at a painting in the Louvre or at the Prado - that when she heard a certain kind of jazz or saw the title of a familiar book - she still thought of Patrick. As to what she felt when she thought about Patrick, she could not say. It was not love, that was certain. It was just a something. Like her mother saying she could fancy a little bit of a something but she didn't know what.
And her life in general? Was she happy or not? Happiness, it seemed to her, was what other people required it to be on your behalf. 'Are you happy?' Edwin said occasionally. What he meant was,
'Reassure me things will continue as they are . . .' And her mother -not that she ever actually came out with the word, happiness being an extravagant concept - sometimes asked, 'So - everything all right, then?' which came to the same thing, and as with Edwin, required a reply to reassure. She gave it. It was a nice life, easy. Edwin spent more time with her as the years went on. He talked to her about European Union Cultural Matters. She listened, politely, but she was never engaged by any of it. Art, music, poetry, buildings - they were painful things. Items upon which a door had been closed. When she looked at that smug little Maya with her neat naked body and her dainty, silly feet, she merely wanted to smack her. She didn't know the half of it, locked into paint like that. And neither, actually, did Goya.
&n
bsp; In Paris she had an elderly maid, Evie, who commented if she hummed to herself, or did anything of a foolish, spontaneous nature, saying, 'You seem happy today, Madame ...' in that doubtful way of the true Roman Catholic. All in all it seemed that the world was made anxious by happiness and its existence or not was best not speculated upon. Pragma, she reminded herself, I am Pragma.
When her father died she was relieved to go home and take with her real, deep feelings. In the chapel she put her hands together and bowed her head and thanked her father for being real. For being someone about whom she did not have to pretend. She was so used to impersonating the woman that everyone in Paris thought she should be that she was unsure where she ended and the real Audrey Wapshott began. At least these tears were her own. At least when she put her arms around her mother she meant it. Even Sandy touched her heart with his painful face. Well - those were her bridges, she supposed. Small compared to Patrick's, of course. Hardly worth considering.
'How's Florence?' she asked, to take her mother's mind off the day for a while.