Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Suddenly in the middle of a bar the music stopped. The voices now seemed too loud, and abruptly they died out as well. Princesse Mathilde and Jacob looked at each other from across the room.

  ‘I think we’ll be able to eat now,’ Julie Ezard rose in cloaked embarrassment and addressed the assembled company. ‘I know we’re a little late, but I didn’t want to start without Sylvie. She seems to be finished her playing now.’ She smiled, a little tremulously. Only she knew that she had been trying to coax Sylvie downstairs for the last hour and a half, though she was certain that the others suspected. Why was the girl proving so difficult just when Jacob Jardine was here?

  She led her guests through to the dining room and showed them to their respective places. Sylvie walked in just as the last one was sitting down. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Am I late?’ she asked innocently. In a black dress with a little lace collar, her hair pulled back with a black ribbon which yet allowed the tendrils to play round the fine clear lines of her face, she looked at once ravishing and vulnerable. Every male eye, old and young, turned.

  ‘Oh no, Tante Julie, I told you I wanted to sit next to Gérard, not here with Jacob. I have to explain to Gérard how he can improve his tennis. Don’t I Gérard?’ Sylvie pouted a little. ‘Caroline will change places with me.’ The switch was made with a minimum of fuss.

  Only the Princesse intercepted the blazing look that passed between Jacob and the young woman. Her nails dug into her hands. Something was going on there. She knew Jacob’s face so well and beneath the polite smile he levelled at his neighbour, his expression was grim. Princesse Mathilde shuddered. There it was again. That look. Desire, yes, and pain. Why hadn’t he said anything, written? She rubbed her arm where the tennis ball had accidentally hit her. So strange, so sudden, out of the blue. And now there was that ugly welt, hidden under her sleeve. Almost like a sign.

  It was always so difficult when she came back to Paris after a long absence. And this one had been particularly long. There had been an extended round of weddings, official family visits which she had had to take part in - Greece, Spain, England, the royal roll call. She had written to Jacob as she always did, those carefully worded letters which didn’t dare to speak her love except in a code which she trusted he would understand. His answers had been regular, but increasingly bland, filled with reports of her school where he now acted as a consultant. Not like in those first two years of their passion, when absence was only a tantalizingly prolonged anticipation of being together. And even in the third, though she had recognized then that his desire for her was abating. The lightly poached salmon tasted like sawdust in the Princesse’s throat. She swallowed with difficulty. She had no idea what her friend Julie was saying to her. She pleaded tiredness. Her eyes flew to Jacob’s face across the table. He had grown even more ruggedly attractive with the years, his face leaner, the dark eyes deeper. A knot coiled in her stomach.

  ‘Sylvie grows more and more beautiful every year, don’t you think?’ Julie addressed her in a low voice as the maid filled their glasses.

  Mathilde observed the profile at the other end of the table. Those vast blue eyes, the arch of the immaculate throat as Sylvie emptied her glass in a gulp. Yes the girl was stunning. Not a girl now. Not the little tearful orphan of fourteen she had first met at Julie’s. But a woman. A young woman, the Princesse thought bitterly. Jealousy cut through her with the force of a butcher’s knife.

  Just then, as if Sylvie had read her thoughts, she heard her say to her neighbour, ‘And would you believe, Princesse Mathilde’s boys are as tall as me now.’ Perhaps she had imagined it. But no, that stiff Maître Darieux had distinctly turned to stare at her.

  She had to speak to Jacob, get him to acknowledge her somehow. She couldn’t bear the pained look on his face. She searched for a subject.

  ‘I read that poor Gaitan de Clérambault, your old teacher, committed suicide in rather bizarre circumstances,’ the Princesse said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jacob looked at her a little wildly. ‘On the morning of the 17th of November in his house in Montrouge.’ Jacob remembered every detail reported about the event. It had coincided almost exactly with his meeting Sylvie. He was sometimes haunted by the sense that his teacher had left him an uncanny legacy.

  ‘Didn’t they say something about finding hundreds of wax mannequins, intricately draped dolls, in his home? Strange, when you think of Clérambault’s reputation as a fierce celibate, a woman hater.’

  All eyes at the table had focussed on the Princesse and Jacob. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and spoke quietly.

  ‘He had an outlandish, a fetishistic love for drapery. It started when he lived in North Africa. The intricate folds and pleats and materials of the Arab women’s robes and veils fascinated him. They became an obsessive passion. A secret and abiding, inescapable one. That’s probably why he was such a genius at describing erotic obsession. Mad and single-minded love. What our surrealist friends have called l’amour fou.’

  Jacob paused to sip his wine. There was silence the length of the table. ‘ Clérambault killed himself after he was blinded. He couldn’t study the detail of his draped dolls anymore. Things became too much for him.’ Jacob shrugged. He looked up to find Sylvie staring at him. There was a taunting set to her features. He met her gaze painfully.

  The Princesse recalled his attention. ‘Poor man. To lose his sight must have been to lose everything. I have read that he had a singular talent for observation. A rigorous and impeccable vigilance. Almost a disease, an imbalance of the seeing faculty. Like a police detective. It distorted everything else in him.’

  Jacob flinched and studied the Princesse’s calm features, her perfect composure. She was quoting his own words back at him, words they had exchanged at the height of their affair. Yet there was no trace of any emotion, of any memory in her face.

  Women all wore veils which draped and shrouded them in mystery. What had Freud said of them - the last mysterious continent. More than ever Jacob felt as if he were a cartographer who had only recently learned the art of mapping.

  He met the Princesse’s eyes and allowed himself a little complicit smile.

  She returned it.

  Yes, she knew what she was doing. She had not chanced on the subject of Clérambault accidentally. She was reminding him and warning him, perhaps. Had she already guessed his obsession with Sylvie? They knew each other so well.

  He wished he had been told Mathilde was coming to the Ezards this weekend. He might have stayed away. It wasn’t right meeting here, like this, now. He hadn’t prepared her.

  And yet he couldn’t have stayed away. Sylvie had been proving so elusive, it drove him to frenzy. And now look at her, flirting outrageously with Gérard so that the boy was tied up in knots. No wonder he couldn’t play tennis with her. Even that Maître Darieux, who reeked of celibacy, had a hectic flush about him. Yet Jacob felt certain her gestures were all somehow for his benefit. She had seen him with Mathilde. That tennis ball had been her message. He was sure of it.

  Sylvie’s voice suddenly rang round the table. ‘What I’d like most in the world now is a swim. Before the moon vanishes. Who’s game?’ She cut Jacob, avoided his eyes. ‘Gérard, Caroline?’

  ‘Not me,’ Caroline answered. ‘It’s too cold.’

  ‘Come on, you coward. You know Tante Julie will fuss if I’m left alone with a man.’ Sylvie announced in a girlish voice intended for everyone’s ears.

  ‘And quite right, she would be, too,’ Paul Ezard intervened, looking significantly at Jacob.

  ‘All right, I’ll come. Will you join us Jacob?’ Caroline asked, politely. She wished she knew him better, could speak to him. Sylvie’s fitful moodiness of late worried her. Jacob would understand, she felt sure.

  ‘No, no not this evening,’ Jacob shook his head, met Mathilde’s secret smile. He wasn’t going to fall in with Sylvie’s pranks. He couldn’t bear the teasing game she played with him socially. He needed to see her alone.

  ‘Perhaps a
little coffee for those of us who prefer a different sort of liquid refreshment,’ Paul Ezard said amiably. ‘And then a stroll. It is a lovely evening.’

  Sylvie, her skin still coolly moist from the pool, draped herself in a long robe and stole out of her room. She slipped silently down the length of the long corridor to Jacob’s door. She lifted her hand to knock and then stopped herself. No, it would be better to go straight in. He might be asleep and she didn’t want to wake anyone with her knocking. Gently, she twisted the knob. The bedside lamp threw a soft light on the bed. There was no one in it.

  So, she had been right. Her hand trembled. He was with Princesse Mat. Never let a man in there, Babushka had warned. Sylvie raced out of the house to lose herself in the shelter of the small wood. The stars were bright now that the moon had gone. In Poland you could never see the stars in the woods. The forest was vast, gnarled, thick, an ancient world of trees ripe with boar and deer. Clearings were a little miracle of light. The gamekeeper’s house was in one of those clearings. Sylvie shivered and drew her robe more tightly round her. The scene she had so often evaded came back to her now with a frightening urgency.

  Tadzio had been ill and she was left to her own devices, irritable, slightly bored. In the late afternoon she wandered, found herself near the gamekeeper’s cottage and with a sullen sense of repetition perched herself at the small kitchen window. She peered in. The room was empty. Even here there was no entertainment today. Suddenly she heard a twig crack behind her. She turned. The gamekeeper. His eyes two black coals, beneath the lank overlong hair. Sylvie whipped away. She could hear the heavy thud of his boots just behind her as she raced into the twilight of the woods. Her heart pounded. She stumbled.

  In a moment his fingers bit into her arm, forcing her to turn towards him. ‘I warned you. Warned you if I caught you here spying again …’ The low menace of his words was succeeded by the lash of his hand across her bottom. Sylvie bit her lip to restrain her cry. She never liked anyone to see her cry. As he hit her again, her eyes focussed on his trouser buttons. They were undone. For some reason they were undone. She could see dark, curling hair. Something in there was moving.

  With his third slap, she moaned, but her eyes did not move. He followed her gaze. ‘So that’s what you’re interested in. ‘Curva,’ he hissed at her, ‘Slut.’ With his free hand, he brought out the hooded creature. She watched in fascination as it grew under her gaze. Her legs felt wobbly, twinged. She had a momentary sense of power. It increased when she heard his breathing change. ‘That’s what you want, is it? Stroke it.’ His words were half-command. Half plea.

  Sylvie stroked. A bone. Smooth. But warm, alive. It leapt to the power of her fingers. She sucked in her breath. Curva, he repeated again. And again, forcing her fingers to the rhythm of his imprecation, wrapping her hand round his bone with the greater strength of his own. She looked up and met his eyes. They were blind to her. His face was a grotesque of exaltation and punitive disgust. Cold fear enveloped her for the first time. She lurched her hand away, escaped. The gesture startled him. But only for a moment. In the next, he leapt after her, tumbled her to the ground. His weight covered her. Suffocated her. Sylvie struggled, screamed, a high shrill shriek which pierced the stillness of the forest world. A large hand muffled her mouth and simultaneously a vast object tore at the secret places of her body. The last thing she remembered before the world went dark was the hiss of his voice in her ear, ‘If you tell anyone, I shall string you up like one of my rabbits.’

  When she woke, she was being carried. A murmur of low voices, her mother’s, her father’s. She was in her father’s arms. She could smell that particular mixture of lemon and tobacco which she loved. She snuggled close to him. He stiffened, holding her away from him like a suspect parcel. Through lowered lids Sylvie stole a glance at him. In the half-light of the long corridor, he was gazing down at her body with barely concealed disgust. She closed her eyes again quickly. The back of her head throbbed.

  ‘You wash her yourself,’ Papush said. ‘Don’t let the servants see the blood.’

  ‘Stasek said he found her like that in the forest?’ her mother’s voice was angry, suspicious. ‘I’ve never trusted that gamekeeper of yours.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have brought her back himself, would he, if it had been him? Not like this. All bloody.’ Her father, her beloved Papush, seemed to recoil even further away from her. He let her fall unceremoniously on a bed.

  Soon after, she was sent to Paris. Banished. Expelled. The big pink stuccoed house with its rounded turrets receded into the still distance as she gazed out of the window of the large, lumbering car. Only Tadzio waved and waved, a tiny, solitary figure etched against a vastness. Papush, with his clean white shirts, his manicured fingernails, hadn’t even held her to say goodbye. He never held her again.

  Sylvie clasped her bathrobe more firmly around her. She was cold, cold with memory more than with the chill of the night air. ‘Never let a man in there,’ Babushka had said. How right she had been. A man had forced his way in and Papush had been lost to her forever. She had wanted to explain to him in those weeks that it wasn’t her fault, but she had been afraid, afraid of the memory, afraid of the gamekeeper, most afraid of Papush’s eyes which now never met hers though she could feel them secretly burning into her with contempt, distaste, as if she were irrevocably sullied, unclean. That was the effect of letting a man in there. She had lost her power. Before that Papush’s eyes used to dance over her. He would hold her close. She could do anything with him she wanted.

  And now Jacob. Secret tears gathered in Sylvie’s eyes. She had let him in. He hadn’t forced his way. He didn’t look at her with contempt. No never that. But he was lost to her, too. Her hold over him had gone. Heavily, Sylvie lifted herself from the stump where she had been sitting and made her way back to the house. The tears streamed down her face, as she silently opened Caroline’s room. She curled round her sleeping form. Caroline. Her friend.

  It had been Caroline who had come into her small hard bed that night many years ago in the cold, dark convent dormitory. The nuns had made a fuss of Sylvie all week, because her parents had died. Every night at evening mass the girls were urged to pray for Sylvie’s parents to ease the passage of their souls into heaven. Sylvie didn’t cry. She tried to imagine her parents and brother with wings making their way past the archangels. Her prayers were propelling them on, giving lightness to their bodies. But the harder she prayed, the funnier the image seemed and she would break into giggles. The nuns gave her stern looks. She tried praying alone. She went to the small chapel and threw herself prostrate before the pretty virgin who looked a little like her mother. The only image that came to her mind was that of a large rat that she and Tadzio had found in the barn one day. The rat’s eyes were wide open, but it lay motionless, its head severed from its body. Tadzio prodded it with a stick. ‘It’s dead,’ he announced importantly. ‘It can’t move. It won’t move ever again.’

  That night Sylvie started to cry. Tadzio was dead. He wouldn’t move ever again, not even if she prodded him with her prayers. Nothing would make him quicken. Nothing. Sylvie sobbed into her pillow and beat it with her fists. She wished she had been the one to die. She should have been the one to die. She hated her life here, hated the grim cold corridors, the constant surveillance. I will die, she thought, and then the girls can pray for me to go to heaven. Suddenly she felt a cold hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Shh,’ Caroline the girl who slept in the bed next to hers enjoined her. ‘Move over’ she crawled in next to Sylvie and pulled the blanket over their heads. ‘I’ll be your friend,’ she whispered. She cradled Sylvie, stroked her hair. Gradually the tears stopped. Caroline’s body was warm round her. Her hands were nestling her breasts. One of them dropped to her stomach. Sylvie drew in her breath. There was a pulling at her loins, a sensation she sometimes had when she listened to particular music, a stirring which had always accompanied her secret escapades to the gamekeeper’s house. Caroline’s brea
thing was different now too. The girl rubbed against her, pressed her hand against her mount. Suddenly Sylvie was engulfed in waves of pleasure. Caroline kissed her lightly on the head and snuck back to her own bed.

  Now Sylvie wrapped herself round Caroline and held her close. Her hands strayed over her friend’s firm, rounded body. Caroline woke.

  ‘No,’ Caroline said adamantly. ‘I told you that was all finished. We’re too old now.’

  ‘Why? Just because we’ve left the nuns? You think because we’re not forced to pray everyday, we won’t be forgiven our sins?’ Sylvie laughed maliciously. She knew that Caroline took this taunt seriously, as if somehow the ritual of school prayer, the little penances they imposed on themselves, had absolved them of their nighttime guilt - for they had carried on loving each other, well past that first night, their games growing more refined. They knew the schedule of the nun’s nightly rounds so well that they had only been caught after some six months, when one particular nun had broken the routine. Then, they had been moved to separate dormitories, punished. All that this meant was that now they spent the weekends at one or another’s home and paradoxically, once it had been dared, they enjoyed far greater freedom.

  No one suspected the closeness of their friendship. Indeed, the Ezards were relieved that Sylvie finally had a friend, a serious, responsible girl like Caroline Berger. But in the quiet of their large rooms, the girls invented elaborate games. Sylvie, more adventurous, had begun to take the lead, and when one night Caroline wouldn’t accede to her wishes, she had threatened that she would find a man. She had. For three weeks, Caroline in a flush of jealous pique refused to speak to her. Sylvie had vowed that she loved Caroline far more than any man and it had begun again. Then Sylvie began to add extra spice to their relationship by occasionally making illicit little forays into the world of men. She would dress herself up well beyond her years, go out to a dance hall and dance with strangers. If their advances grew too bold, she ran away. Though once or twice it had grown unpleasant. And once, she had succumbed rather more than she might wish. The stories which she told Caroline of these encounters fuelled their lovemaking. And so it had gone on until Sylvie had met Jacob, introduced Caroline to him. Then Caroline had announced it had to stop between them. ‘Finished,’ Caroline had slapped her hands together in a definitive gesture, ‘otherwise I refuse to see you at all anymore.’