by C. K. Stead
But I was intercepted in the darkness of their garden. There was an old painter, I knew him only as Aristide, who lived in the apartment next to theirs. He spoke no English, but Clifton had long halting conversations with him about the theory of art. Aristide was a sort of uncle to the children. He’d been a pastry cook before retiring to be a painter, and he liked to make cakes and pastries for the family.
Aristide was just coming out into the garden as I arrived. He saw me in the light over the gate and stopped me. ‘You’d better not visit them,’ he said in French. ‘They won’t want to be interrupted.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, or what it meant or implied. He tapped me importantly on the shoulder with two fingers. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘This way.’
It was like being led to your seat in a theatre, quietly, discreetly, after the performance had begun. From the garden you looked up to the Scarfs’ front balcony. But the olive grove was on higher ground, more or less level with their floor. Every room in their apartment had a balcony looking towards the olives across a narrow concrete canyon that let light and air down into the concierge’s basement quarters. So if the shutters weren’t closed you could look from the grove into any of their rooms.
There was no more than a faint flush of light in the western sky when Aristide led me through the gate and up the slope among the trees.
I asked where he was taking me.
He hushed me and led me on. Opposite the side-windows of the Scarfs’ sitting room he stopped. ‘Here we are,’ he murmured. ‘Bonsoir, Madame.’
‘Bonsoir, Messieurs.’
I peered in the twilight and made out the figure of Madame Hugo, concierge of the apartment block. She was sitting on a camp stool and knitting.
Aristide introduced us and she shook my hand rather grandly. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said, pointing to a log on which Aristide was already settling himself. She spoke in a hoarse whisper, as the painter had done.
In the sitting room the shutters were open. I could see Clifton looking at a newspaper as if he was trying to read it but couldn’t settle to any particular item. He was holding it awkwardly, at arm’s length, turning the pages over, dropping them and picking them up again. Katy was running her hand along a shelf of books, taking one down, glancing at it and returning it, taking another. The television was on. I couldn’t see it but its bluish light flickered in the room and I could just hear the voices and sound effects of one of those interminable ORTF dramas about life in occupied France that were still in fashion even though the war was more than twenty-five years in the past.
This was a strange, unexpected, awkward situation in which to find myself. ‘Do you mean to watch them?’ I asked.
‘Well as to that,’ Madame Hugo husked at me, ‘it is my habit to sit up here in the evenings, especially in the warmer weather. Le parc du Pian is public land, Monsieur. In any case I hear most of what they say to one another down in my quarters, especially when voices are raised. It echoes down that well there. What difference does it make if I watch? It’s like radio or television. For my part I prefer to see the faces. Have no fear, Monsieur. They are a strong family—not Catholic, it’s true, but a family. You understand? It will resolve itself, I assure you.’
There were footsteps, the sound of a dog snuffling and panting in the grass. A middle-aged couple were walking their spaniel. Madame Hugo greeted them. They exchanged whispered bonsoirs with her and Aristide. I was introduced as a friend of the Scarfs.
‘Ah!’ They shook my hand. ‘And how is it going?’
‘I was just explaining,’ Madame Hugo said. ‘In my opinion it is not serious. These things need time. They have to be allowed to run their course.’
‘Let’s hope you are right,’ the man said.
‘And which one do you blame?’ the woman asked.
Madame Hugo spread her hands, puffing herself up. ‘Who am I to blame either one?’ she asked grandly. ‘Do I blame the wind when it breaks the trees?’
Ah yes, they thought that was pretty wise, and there was much nodding of heads and murmuring of assent, interrupted by a small crash and the tinkle of falling glass. Whether we had missed an angry exchange, or Clifton’s nerve had just broken out of the protracted silence, it appeared he had suddenly punched his fist through one of the small squares of glass in the french doors opening on to the balcony.
Madame Hugo clucked disapprovingly.
Katy had come over to him and was looking at his hand, dabbing it with a handkerchief. They were half out on the balcony and I could hear their voices.
‘You’re a chump,’ she said. ‘You’ll have the old crow after us now.’
I hoped ‘the old crow’ had not heard, or didn’t understand.
‘Sorry,’ Clifton said. And then, smiling at her: ‘In case of emergency, break the glass.’
As they withdrew indoors I whispered a translation.
‘Bravo,’ Aristide said. ‘That’s the spirit!’
Madame Hugo was still clucking. ‘That’s the spirit yes. But he will have to pay for the glass.’
… And it had been the afternoon after sailing with Carlo and before his party that I arrived home to find Javine waiting, sitting in a deckchair on the terrace. I hadn’t expected her. She usually spent Sunday with her parents on the little farm, and as soon as I saw her I knew trouble was coming. She was not pleased with me.
She asked, frowning, where I had been.
I began to tell her I’d been to lunch at Fabrice’s, and out on Carlo’s yacht, and that I hadn’t expected to see her because it was Sunday …
But she cut across me. She didn’t mean today. She’d hardly seen me all week.
I was confused. It was true we hadn’t seen much of one another, but I thought it was I who hadn’t been able to find her.
‘I want to spend the evening with you,’ she said. ‘The night.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That’s great. Carlo’s putting on a party. It’s some kind of celebration. Down the coast near Bordighera—at a friend’s villa. I’m taking the Scarfs in my car. Come with us.’
She seemed checked by that, as if it was not what she’d expected. ‘I don’t like the Scarfs,’ she said. ‘They’re boring. People who talk about their kids …’
‘But there’s a party. Carlo’s …’
‘Carlo’s a drug dealer.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Everybody knows it. And I don’t want a party. I want you. It’s time we sorted out a few things.’
I groaned—wrong of me, but this ‘sorting things out’ was a conversation I was wanting to avoid. It would have to come, but why tonight?
She stamped her foot on the tiles. Didn’t she have any rights? Why should she be treated as a plaything, taken up and used when it suited me, dropped when it didn’t? A wife might put up with that but a wife had no choice. A mistress might have no rights but at least she had free will. Why should she let herself be treated as a prostitute—an unpaid prostitute …
‘If you’d prefer to be paid,’ I said. (Wrong again—ridiculously wrong. Culpable.)
‘Oh, I’d prefer to be loved,’ she said, beginning to weep. And she ran away down the street under the pepper trees. I went to the edge of the terrace and called to her to come back, that I was sorry …
But she took no notice and I didn’t run after her, which I knew I was meant to do. It was in the script. She was right and I was wrong, and that was in the script too, probably, but I was still young and morally lazy. I was on some kind of a roll. There was a party, Carlo’s (was he a drug dealer?—I didn’t know, or care) and I was going to be there with Katy and Clifton, and Javine was running away from me, down the hill.
It was to be my day for watching things running away downhill.
5. The crash
STOCKHAUSEN’S GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE in the beautiful Salle Garnier at Monte Carlo. Chopped children’s voices and gobbled electronics, clicks, bumps, wails (and whales), trills, all stereophonically d
irected under a green light, growing steadily brighter, bathing the auditorium. Everyone’s flashback. The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees. The old subdued or outraged.
I was thinking of the skins of tomatoes, how durable they are. Boiled, grilled or fried, pickled, thrown out with the rubbish, eaten raw or cooked and excreted twenty-four hours later, a tomato skin remains what it was—a tomato skin. Indestructible. So I was thinking if you could grow them big enough, outsize tomatoes, tomatoes big as houses (small houses), you could manufacture tents of them. I imagined them in camping grounds, tomato-coloured tents … The lights were changing all the time, red was slowly swelling alongside the green. The tomatoes were ripening, the children’s voices gargling and garbling, and all at once clear as day I had gone back to my first morning in the room with the balcony, only the earliest signs of buds showing on the grape stems beyond the french windows. I was lying naked in the big bed, just awake, and Javine beside me was running her hands over her thighs and telling me she was a good Catholic.
‘So you’ll have to confess,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. And then, ‘Maybe a prayer of thanks.’
‘Not to the Virgin.’
‘No just to—Him, tu sais?’
‘Just to ’eem,’ I mimicked. ‘That might be blasphemy.’
‘Ah, so you are a theologian now, mon ami?’
JAVINE HAD WARNED ME I would have to hold on to my hat, but I knew now that wouldn’t be enough. I needed to hold on to my heart as well.
That key hanging on the nail under the stairs—to me it seemed like the key to Javine herself. I used to go there in the middle of the day when she was away and sit in her chair or lie on her bed, read her books, and sometimes her diary, and play her records. There was a special scent there, composed partly of cosmetics, but also of woman, one woman, Javine. Now and then, in the years since, I have seemed to encounter that scent again. Scent is such a powerful reminder—you can be pulled up sharp by it, riven with nostalgia that borders on regret.
There were three floors to her uncle’s house and they were divided into small apartments so the entrance and the stairway belonged to all the tenants. Javine’s rooms were on the middle floor and the balcony opened off her bedroom. The bedroom was not large but she had jammed into it a double bed, and a wardrobe with full-length mirror. Over the bed were prints of Picasso’s drawings of a naked satyr-like male and a girl, reclining together in the same kind of room, with a balcony somewhere at the edge of the picture and light coming from the sea. Hanging down from hooks in the ceiling there were always three or four dresses, linen or silk, with patterns of tightly interwoven leaves and flowers and long-feathered birds. They swayed up there on hangers, and to put them up or get them down she used a pole with an iron hook of the kind used for sash windows. The wardrobe was hung too with silk scarves that fluttered like an excited crowd at every movement of breeze from the sea.
Her dining room and kitchen were one room, long and narrow with unsealed brick walls which she had persuaded her student friend Raoul to help her plaster white. She’d put a desk in there with a yellow lamp hanging low over it. Against the white-plastered brick there was a crucifix, rough-cast in heavy black iron.
Javine’s uncle was one of those Frenchmen who never seem quite drunk or sober but remain permanently stewed somewhere in between. She had told him that I was teaching her English. I don’t suppose he believed it but he accepted the bottles of wine I brought him from time to time and made no objection, and no report to Javine’s mother, his sister.
Now and then Javine arranged to come home from college after midday and we would make a lunch of things you could buy from the local patisserie—make lunch and make love. After that we would take a siesta together, the windows open, the shutters almost closed, just the odd glint and flash of sun off water darting light here and there on the ceiling.
Those were our best times together—and I remember once looking into her eyes and telling her I was in love with her. I meant it at that moment, and felt it, and was surprised when she laughed and said in English, ‘Oh, we are such actors, you and I.’
It came as if in inverted commas—as if she was quoting something. I didn’t know what it was, who was being quoted, but I had to recognise that it was true. I was sincere, and yet I was acting.
So I had to hold on to my heart. I was half in love with Javine, as Keats was ‘half in love with easeful Death’. But it was also with the Côte d’Azur, that region Colette calls ‘meretricious’ and Great-uncle Desmond said was ‘heaven’—and how could they, the place and the person, Javine and the ‘warm South’, ever be separated?
I AM TO HAVE COFFEE with Captain (I will call him) Dupont of the town gendarmerie under the colonnades across the square from the town hall. The captain’s approach is puzzling—‘unofficial’ is how he describes it, a meeting on ‘neutral territory’, ‘an exchange of views’. And he insists on using English, I suspect because he is proud of being able to use it and wants to impress me. So the opening exchange goes something like this:
‘Ze car you ’ave reported volée, Monsieur Meellaire … We ’ave retrouved it. I am afraid it is … ’ow you say?’
‘Damaged?’
‘Oui. Bad dom-age. Quite ’opeless.’
‘Wrecked.’
‘Oui, yes, as you say, wreckered.’
I am trying to look surprised and shocked. I ask has he any idea who stole it but at this point he orders the coffee. The waitress appears to be a favourite of his and their exchange of witticisms and compliments is so rapid I can only smile, as if I understand it all. If he is lame in English, in French he appears to be an acrobat. At last the coffee is brought and we go back to the subject of my car. There are a few questions he wants to ask and I tell him to fire away.
‘Fire …?’
‘Posez vos questions, Monsieur.’
He wants to know what I did on the day it disappeared—and when my answers reveal next-to-nothing (I was reading, listening to the radio, going to the market) he asks about the evening.
‘In the evening,’ I tell him, ‘I got drunk.’
‘Tout seul?’ he asks. ‘Alone?’
With what is an attempt at Gallic sententiousness I say in French that when one is drunk one is always alone, isn’t it so?
He bows his head, it seems approvingly. But a few moments later, having sipped his coffee and paid my observation the respect of this thoughtful silence, he comes suddenly nearer to the point. I have not been—just for example—at a lunch party given by Monsieur Fabrice Laurent, the town’s Director of Tourism? Or out on a yacht?
My problem is that I don’t know what the others might have told him, so I resort to that bang on the head. I don’t think I did any of these things, Monsieur, but since I fell down drunk and banged my head on the stones, I am suffering lapses of memory.
I don’t think he believes this—or indeed anything I say. But I also have the impression that lies are quite acceptable. It’s not the truth he is seeking; just a tidy story that will cover the facts of the case. I’m sure Carlo has a long arm and plenty of money for bribes.
I ask Captain Dupont where my car was found.
He tells me it was below the autoroute directly above Garavan. It wasn’t identified at once. His colleagues were puzzled because it crashed and burned but the driver wasn’t found, dead or alive.
‘If you steal a car and crash it, you run away,’ I suggest.
He looks at me for a moment. ‘Monsieur Meellaire, would you tell me, ’ave you assisted at a party zat eve-ning?’
‘Une par-tie?’ I am mimicking him now and must stop.
‘Oui, Monsieur, down ze ghost?’
My puzzlement is not faked, but now he makes it clear what he means. ‘Near Bordighera.’ He means down the coast.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur. This bang on the ’ead … On the head …’ And I shake it.
‘No memory?’
‘None.’
&
nbsp; ‘A night of lost memories, Monsieur.’ (And he is smiling.) ‘You are not alone.’
I look at him squarely, frankly. ‘Captain Dupont, are you accusing me of anything? Do you intend to lay charges?’
His smile is broader now, as if he is applauding my acting. He picks up the printed ticket and waves the question away. ‘Monsieur, zis ’as been most ’elpfool.’
CAPTAIN DUPONT HAD MENTIONED that I had bought my car from the old architect, Hirondelle, whom, it seemed, he knew, and that gave me a twinge of guilt because I’d promised I would call on him and his wife and let them know how the car, which they had been fond of, was performing. I’d never been back. It would be too bad if they should hear of the crash from the police.
When I got away from my interview I went hunting for Katy. I wanted to call on ‘Mr and Mrs Martin’, as she and I called them—but not alone. I found her in the market with little Hermi and she agreed to come with me.
We each took one of Hermi’s hands and led her along the rue St Michel, hoisting her high when the pavement ahead was clear, making swooping noises to accompany her squeals of pleasure. This was where Katy, her black hair shining under the plastic of her transparent umbrella, had told me the French for ‘luggage rack’ was une galerie de bagages. We turned into the stone passageway, up the stone steps, through the gateway into the walled garden. I had seen it first under a downpour. Now it was full of sunshine. The yellow walls of the building soaked it up. The pool with its pale-blue tiles threw light up to the great vine leaves that absorbed it into their richness of green. Everything was in leaf or in flower. The shutters were open wide. Sounds of a woman singing, a child crying, the clatter of plates, the crack of a mat being shaken came from the apartments.
We climbed the stairs slowly, waiting for Hermi, who stopped often to look at things close to the ground and wouldn’t be hurried or carried. At each landing I stopped and looked down. The sun struck down on the leaves and through them, making a chequered pattern on the paths and beds.