The dead were easy to cherish, he thought. Tomas could never be said to be unfaithful, or that he had failed to live up to expectation.
She moved a fraction and additional pleasure shot through him. ‘Petr, what happened to Eva was terrible but you do know what happened to her. But that is what makes it possible to live with.’
The sensations were overpowering. Petr closed his eyes and willed the moment to be sweet, valedictory, tender – to be a moment when the barriers dissolved. He reached up and touched her cheek. Was it possible that what he felt for Laure would ever confer the inner peace, the richness, that he craved? ‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘I don’t know what happened to Tomas.’
Her movements stilled. ‘Then we are in my bed under false pretences.’ Abruptly, she moved off him and sat on the edge of the bed.
In some discomfort, he cursed silently. ‘Come back.’
She stood up and reached for the robe hanging on the back of the door. ‘You knew what I was asking.’
He lay back and put his arm across his eyes, aware that he would have a ferocious ball ache for the rest of the evening. ‘Laure, if you think aborting this is a punishment, you’re wrong.’
The truth was: it came close. His passion, his history, put him at a gross disadvantage, not least because he was fighting the strongest, most durable of entities: the ghost. ‘You’re no good to anyone if you’re obsessed with a vanished man,’ he said.
‘That’s my problem.’
The spots flashing behind his closed lids made him a touch nauseated. Throwing back the sheets, he levered himself upright, and made for the bathroom, slamming the door shut. Inside, he placed his hands on the basin rim and struggled to master his anger and intense disappointment.
He wanted to kill Laure. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to make her shut up. Aghast, he looked up into the bathroom and saw the reflection of a man whom he did not recognize.
Eventually, he took down a clean towel from a stack on the shelf and wrapped it around himself. She was sitting on the bed but had put on her robe. He stood over her and said, ‘Laure, you took a bloody stupid risk. Women get beaten up. For less. I could have beaten you up.’
‘Maybe.’ She looked up at him. ‘But I don’t think you are that kind of man.’
Lust still coursed through him and made him additionally savage. ‘It’s bloody foolish and you’re not a fool.’
How many violent emotions was it possible to feel in a few hours? Many, as it turned out, and he was exhausted by them. Looking into Laure’s face, he read in it triumph and, also, shame.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘For how changed you are.’
She stood up and her hair fell over her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry too, Petr. But you did something to me all those years ago that makes it possible for me to behave… well,’ she shrugged, ‘as I have just done.’
‘So be it.’ He reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette and thought the better of it. He shoved the cigarettes back into the jacket pocket. ‘For what it’s worth, Tomas made it to the railway station where he was arrested and put into solitary.’
She was on him like a shot. ‘Which prison?’
‘On the Bartolomĕjská. It used to be a convent.’ He settled himself against the bedhead. ‘The nuns’ cells turned out to be fit for purpose.’ He frowned. ‘And the church was used as a shooting gallery.’
‘And you weren’t going to tell me even that?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it will haunt you.’
‘Like it must haunt you? Or, should do.’
‘Have some pity.’
To his surprise, she nodded. ‘How can I find out? The StB must have kept records. Like the Nazis and the Stasi.’
‘Good luck looking.’
‘You will look for me, Petr. To right the wrong, to be peaceful … you find the information.’ She twisted up her hair into a knot. ‘You destroyed a future. Think of it as reparation.’
He had read somewhere that love was heightened and deepened by pain. But there was a limit and he was close to snapping point. ‘Laure, did you ever really consider Tomas was probably using you?’
She had gone white. ‘You’ve used that method before, Petr. Wasn’t it called the contamination method? Maybe you still use it?’ She refused to look at him and wrenched open the door. ‘Tomas was a man who dared to take you all on and who never compromised. Who was brave. Who I loved. Who loved…’ She stopped. ‘Get out,’ she said. ‘Get out.’
He put on his shirt and began buttoning it up. She picked up her scattered clothes and placed them on the chair. ‘Let yourself out.’
She moved off into the other room.
He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. The old wild lusts and griefs swirled around his head along with the whisky, which he doubted he would ever drink again.
Laure moved around in the next room. He heard the clink of glasses and a shuffle of furniture. A silence fell.
He went over to the door and stepped through, only to bump into Laure coming back into the room. They faced each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ she spoke first. ‘But you hurt me.’
‘I’m sorry too.’
How eagerly love made do with the slivers that were offered.
Various expressions registered in the green eyes, none of which he could quite read. ‘I honour my bargains.’
‘I know Tomas loved me…’ There was just a hint of uncertainty.
So that was it, he thought. The doubt he had planted had rooted. It had taken time but it was there.
Love went with pity? Power went with love? Cheating and shortchanging too.
He swallowed. ‘If I tell you what I know, you must promise to forget it and to live your life?’ Her eyes were now so vexed and troubled that he was being dragged into their shadows. ‘For your sanity.’
She allowed herself to be sat back down on the bed.
The new Czech Republic was not a cheap territory in which to operate and he had paid well for the information that he was about to pass on to Laure. In one sense, he had bought his own discomfort. To live with what he had unearthed was to be faced with the crimes and misdemeanours of the regime he had supported.
‘Tomas was on the watchlist. He was a known dissident. You know he was frequently picked up and questioned. And beaten up. It was thought he and the group were trying to get information out to the West. He was arrested as he boarded a train to Vienna and taken to the Bartolomĕjská.’
She uttered a small sound of distress.
‘Prisoners there were divided into three categories. Minor offenders, repeat offenders and serious offenders, which usually included the political prisoners. It was not a good category to be in.’
He was not about to give the details. In the past, political prisoners were assigned to the uranium mines, which were poisoned, brutal hells, run by thugs and killers. But Laure did not need to know the half of it. That he could do for her.
She folded her arms across her stomach.
‘Do you wish me to continue?’
She looked this way and that. ‘Yes.’
‘Tomas was in the serious offender category. He was interrogated for three days at the end of which he was admitted to the prison hospital. The records show that he had broken arms, a broken leg and a serious head wound.’
‘And who knows what else.’ Laure dropped her face into her hands. Greatly daring, Petr stroked her hair. ‘He was due to be transported to a prison outside Prague.’
‘Oh God.’ Pale with emotion, she lifted her face from her hands. ‘Was there anything else?’
He hesitated, and she repeated the question impatiently.
‘There’s no record of him leaving the hospital, which could mean he died or someone was negligent. The records aren’t infallible and many have been destroyed.’
She seemed to have got herself under control. ‘OK. He could have died there. But we don’t know for certain.’ Her voice shook. �
��Could he have got out from the Bartolomĕjská?’
Her accent had not improved. In fact, it was terrible, but it was one of the many attractive things about Laure. ‘In his state, he would have had to have had powerful friends. I think you must accept that Tomas probably did not survive.’
Laure wasn’t listening. ‘Then it’s possible he was sprung from the hospital and made it to… somewhere? Hungary?’
‘Even if he did, it would be tough living on the run. Very. No papers. No money.’
‘You’re saying he was tortured?’
‘If he wasn’t talking, almost certainly.’
‘Tomas wouldn’t have talked.’
‘Sweet Laure. He was being beaten up.’
‘No,’ she contradicted. ‘Tomas had armed himself. Prepared. Mentally, I mean because he knew what might happen.’
‘We both know that we don’t know what someone would do in those circumstances,’ he said, and Laure gave a sharp intake of breath. ‘The ones you expect to hold out, don’t. But the meek and flavourless sometimes do. They dig something out of themselves. Or they tell themselves that this is their last chance to make a mark on life, whether it’s witnessed or not.’
‘Well, you would be the expert.’ Her hand resting on her thigh balled into a fist. ‘I knew it, really. I felt it. I felt his suffering.’
‘Listen to me: Tomas is almost certainly dead.’
She was silent. Then, she shook her head. ‘Until I know for certain, I will leave the door open. But I can’t forgive you for betraying him.’
‘Are you quite sure that’s true?’ He flashed back at Laure.
She went as white as paper. ‘It’s a common reaction for the guilty to off-load guilt onto others.’
He spoke more gently. ‘It’s a function of human psychology to hide unpleasant truths behind so-called memory loss.’
‘You lie,’ she said. ‘You always lied.’
‘And you were careless with your words. Did you ever think about that?’
There was a long pause, and he saw her picking her way down the memories. ‘I was frightened.’
‘And angry with Tomas?’
She shook her head.
‘Laure,’ he said, ‘you’re older now. You must see the love affair in a different light. It was a thing of youth. Not real.’
Again, she shook her head. More than a little contemptuous. Impatient.
After a moment, he said: ‘I had a family, a sick wife. Tell me, what would you do in the circumstances?’
‘I calculated that, because you were fond of me, you would say nothing.’
The featureless bedroom, the rumpled bed, Laure’s anguish, the harsh and unpalatable truths that were being aired… he knew he would never forget this encounter.
What if he took her by the arm and pulled her down onto the bed to take his fill of the pearly skin, of the tumble of hair, the sweep from shoulder to hip? He would murmur her name and tell her that all would be well between them and there would be peace, and ideology would lie down with ideology. He would tell her that he loved her and had done so for a long time and carrying that love through his life had scraped him raw and, yet, had been his greatest delight. It had been, he would add, a contorted, tainted love but, in its strange way, a true one.
Was it her grief or, because of her own, a heightened sensitivity to Petr’s distress? Perhaps she prided herself on being someone who kept to their bargain? Laure turned to Petr and put her arms around his neck.
His surprise was intense, but he kissed her. She tasted of olives and the recent cigarette. He drew her down and moved his body so it lay against hers. Running his hand up from her thigh, he traced the waist and the softness of a breast collapsed against her torso.
As so often, the reality was different to the imagined one of surrender and hungry encounter. Laure tensed as he ran his hand up and down her body and stroked a nipple. ‘Shall I stop?’
‘No.’
It was cool enough in the room to cause her skin to gooseflesh and tiny fine hairs on her arms stood upright. He felt behind him for a sheet to draw over them but only succeeded in getting his hand tangled up in its folds. He fought free and tried to touch her between her legs. She moved away from under him.
‘Let’s not draw it out,’ she said.
Halfway through, he opened his eyes. Laure looked contained, slightly indifferent, almost maternal. Nothing like the passionate, responsive woman that he had wished for. But this was the best he was going to get. He closed his eyes and allowed the hot, hard impulses to take him over.
Towards the end, she reached up, drew his face to hers and kissed him. For a few moments, that was good enough – until he realized that she was kissing a memory.
Getting dressed, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror and noted it was wiped clean of anything much. He brushed back his hair and knotted the French tie and stepped into the sitting room.
Laure was in her dressing gown, crouched down beside Marenka.
‘This is goodbye,’ he said. ‘In another life, it might have been different.’ She did not look up. ‘Laure, please think about yours. Do you intend to spend it snooping and hanging around in the shadows at the behest of your embassy? Yes? All the things you rejected when you were in Prague.’ Her shoulders tensed. ‘Don’t do it. I’ve had my life and made the mistakes. But I wouldn’t want you to do the same.’
She shook back her hair as if to brush away unwelcome knowledge. ‘I hope your life is how you wish it. And successful.’ She stood upright and faced him and he ached to kiss her one final time. ‘You’re a good man, but a divided one, I think. You love your children. You were generous to me but your politics took you in other directions.’
He considered pleading for them both to begin again, to make something out of the disaster – and dismissed the idea.
‘Do you remember the Pierrot piece I was talking about?’ Laure stood up. ‘The marionette who plucked his own strings out? I used to be frightened that it was Tomas. But, I think after all, it was you. You once said that Tomas would be the broken man but it’s you who’s broken.’
‘And you,’ he said.
There was a long silence.
‘You and I are done,’ she said. ‘Done.’
He got back to his hotel room and stood for a long time with his back to the door, unable to put one foot in front of the other.
Not even after the death of Eva had he felt like this. Scorched inside and as if the roots tethering him to his life had been pulled up, one by one. Whether he could ever atone for the things that had been done, he did not know.
The contradictions of his history were savage but – not forgetting Czech humour – also funny. What would have happened if the Prince in the folk story had ended up helpless and out of control as he now was? What would have happened if the Prince had hacked through the defensive hedge of thorns only to find that Sleeping Beauty was not only not waiting for him, but hostile?
He ran a shower as hot as he could take it and stood under it for a long time. He dried himself, put on the hotel dressing gown and mixed himself a drink from the mini-bar and took it to bed.
Since the fall of the Wall, the hotel management had made efforts to compete with its Western counterparts, but the bed was far from comfortable and the sheets were cheap and slippery. He did not expect to get much sleep. Nor did he.
The following day, he attended the meeting. Afterwards, he ordered a taxi and drove to the airport where he got on a plane and flew out of the once divided city back to his life in Prague.
CHAPTER 23
Paris, today
THE CELEBRATION LUNCH AT THE MAISON DE GRASSE WAS every bit as sybaritic and sophisticated as May wanted. Observing her reactions Laure was reminded that to take a delight in the luxurious was sane and pleasurable.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ said May, on viewing the room where the lunch was to be held. ‘So beautiful… that it hurts.’
The flowers – lilies, orange blossom and hyd
rangeas – had been flown in from the south of France. An arch of them had been constructed over the entrance to the dining room. Elsewhere, they were massed on the tables and in every nook and cranny. The effect was extraordinary and their scent intoxicating.
The tables were exquisite, each one a dream in white lawn, silver and flowers. Beside each setting was a bottle of Maison de Grasse’s most expensive perfume and a nosegay of herbs, including rosemary. ‘For remembrance,’ Laure informed May.
‘Well, that’s what you’re about, isn’t it?’ she replied.
Laure’s audience, as she got to her feet after a lunch of wild salmon and red-currant Vacherin, was inclined to be kind. It was the kindness that stemmed from fabulous dining, champagne and the magic of white Burgundy.
‘This is a very important occasion,’ she began. ‘In fact, it is quite a day when two sides of our culture come together. The one that does and makes…’ she made a graceful obeisance to the Maison de Grasse top table, ‘and the one that preserves.’ She gestured towards the table around which were seated Nic, May, Simon, the lawyers and the trustees.
She was used to public speaking and generally it held no perils. But this was a moment for which she had plotted and worked, and she was close to betraying her emotions. ‘Like many of you, I suspect, museums exert a fascination. As a child, I set up a button museum. Buttons being the only things which I could lay my hands on. I charged my long-suffering family sixpence to visit it. I learnt then that people love looking at objects, especially if the guiding curation behind their display gives an explanation and a coherence and connection. Who could fail to respond, one way or another, to the paintings on a cake tin that show the yearnings of a trapped housewife? Or, the picture of the grave up a Spanish mountainside which bears the inscription: “You promised not to take any risks”. What is special to the Museum of Broken Promises is the explanations. In most museums it is the experts that supply the information. In ours, it is you, the public, who do so. Our museum gives a voice to the people in a way that few other institutions provide.’
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 26