What Was Rescued

by Jane Bailey

  ‘You’re going to make wine? Do you know how?’

  ‘No, but Denis does.’ He pronounced the name ‘Dunny’.

  ‘Dunny?’

  ‘Patsy’s husband – Claudine’s father. He’s French. He helps look after the place, but he has his own vineyard.’

  ‘So that’s why Claudine speaks such good French.’

  ‘She speaks French because she goes to school here.’

  We entered the pinewood again and made our way back down to the house on a winding path through its glorious resiny smell.

  I had carefully let pass his reference to getting the vines back into shape and all the references so far that seemed to indicate something more than a summer holiday here, but I determined to broach it with him soon. Did he expect me to return home alone? What sort of holiday invitation was that? And if, on the other hand, he had notions of my staying with him, he would have to think again. I had my teacher training to finish first. And Daphne’s wedding to go to in September.

  In the evening there was a meal in the kitchen at which everyone I had met so far seemed to be invited, as well as Denis, the housekeeper’s French husband. They all sprawled around the long table, clinking glasses and chattering loudly. Some conversation I could follow, but none of the French made any sense to me. Ralph spoke in French a little more than he needed to, I felt, given that the women present spoke English. I supposed, however, that he was just showing off to me and had not considered how it excluded me. At length he caught my eye.

  ‘We always have communal meals,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the best things about living here.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was embarrassed not to have taken part in any of the preparation for this small feast. Food was still being rationed in England, and what was on offer here had been cooked with great care. ‘Surely, then, we should have done something to contribute to it ourselves . . . if they’re communal?’

  Patsy, the young housekeeper, laughed. ‘Well said, Dora! You tell him!’

  Ralph looked at me coldly then, as if I had in some way made him look a fool, but all I had intended was to offer my services, to muck in with everyone else. ‘Everyone does what they can,’ he said with authority. ‘If you have cooking skills, then your help will be welcome, I’m sure. But don’t forget that your main role is to help me with the book. You are my researcher.’

  A few words were muttered in French by Denis at which Sylvain laughed. Ralph flared his nostrils and said something emphatically to them both, and Denis raised his hands in a gesture of mock defence. Patsy turned to me and started asking about my home and my teacher training course. Claudine stood up behind me and started plaiting my hair as if I were a school friend, and I quite forgot about Ralph and the chilling look that had so unexpectedly crossed his face.

  A couple of days passed. Ralph and I did little except walk and eat and take siestas. At no point did he attempt to sleep with me, and I began to feel that his interest in me had diminished. But then I didn’t know Ralph very well at all at that point. I didn’t know what a calculated game he played.

  After maybe three days he took me on a walk and said, ‘Well, Dora, what do you think?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of the house. Of Les Amandiers.’

  ‘It’s striking. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced.’

  ‘And yet you’re not happy.’ He stopped in his tracks and held my shoulders.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I can tell that this isn’t quite what you had in mind, is it?’

  ‘Well, no, perhaps not.’

  ‘In what way?’

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to see his look of disapproval again. ‘Well, I suppose I just didn’t expect so many people. I thought we’d be alone until Tighe came out with his friends.’

  ‘Ah, Tighe! He’s coming out next week. We’ll have some fun then!’ He drew me close to him and kissed my neck. ‘My poor Dora. You wanted some time alone, just the two of us.’

  I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t really true. I wasn’t sure I had wanted time alone with him, except that his avoidance of it had, it was true, left me feeling a little neglected. I had almost gone from fearing he would make a pass at me to longing for him to make one. And of course he knew that far better than I did myself.

  ‘Dora,’ he whispered, ‘I’ve been neglectful. Tomorrow we’ll go for an evening picnic – just the two us.’

  It was about six-thirty in the evening when we set off. The sun was still warm, but we walked at a leisurely pace for a couple of miles until we came to the edge of a wood overlooking another lavender field.

  ‘This is the place,’ said Ralph, dropping the basket he was carrying and turning to smile at me. ‘Let’s spread the rug here, in the shade.’

  I helped him lay out an old, grey service rug, and he proceeded to unpack wine and bread, pâté, cheese and strawberries. It was a feast. It was the sort of picnic you read about, not the sort I had ever been on. He even handed me a linen napkin, took two carefully wrapped glasses out of the basket and uncorked the wine. When he poured it, glugging into the glasses that I held out, it was the only sound except for the cicadas.

  ‘Here’s to . . . us!’ he said, winking.

  We clinked glasses. Did I want an ‘us’? Did I want an ‘us’ with Ralph? We ate and drank and talked. The sun moved soundlessly towards the violet skyline. We ate and drank and giggled in the lavender-scented air. We drank and touched. We touched, we kissed, we lay down. Everything was golden now, except for the lavender, which was magenta. There was no one else around: just us and the cicadas.

  He ran his hands over my breasts, my hips, my thighs. I let him touch me in places that only Arthur had ever touched me before. I let him do this with a weary, drink-smudged abandon. I was aware of a sense of betrayal: I was betraying Arthur. But, I reminded myself, he had betrayed me. He could hardly expect me to remain intact for him, if he did ever want me back . . . but then I would be lost to anyone else . . . How much I wanted . . . I wanted . . .

  ‘I know you want me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m . . .’ I heard myself murmur, ‘I’m saving myself . . . for the man I marry.’

  I felt my cheek being stroked. How I wished it were Arthur. Arthur smiling, crazed with desire. Well, let’s hope he bears an uncanny resemblance to me.

  Ralph leant in close to my ear: ‘Good girl.’ Then he held one of my arms down hard to the blanket and kissed me. ‘But you know you want me,’ he said softly. ‘It’s all right, Dora. It’s all right. I can wait, because it won’t be long.’

  Then he pulled away from me and started to pack the things, leaving me flushed and aching, outstretched to the violet and reddened dome of the sky.

  The next couple of days seemed hotter than before. All I wanted to do was stay in the cool of my room and lie on the bed. And I could think of nothing but my desire, uncorked and breathing heavily in the Mediterranean heat. But when I recalled – as I did almost every moment – Ralph’s hands on my body, memories of Arthur kept winging back to me. He was like a scrunched-up letter in a waste bin, moving and opening long after it had been thrown away.

  Tighe had arrived, along with a girlfriend who played the flute and a male friend who played the fiddle. Each night we ate outside on an old wooden table. I covered it in clean linen cloths and Claudine put flowers in little pots to decorate it. Flypapers were strung from the trees to catch the mosquitoes, and we ate and talked and laughed until the sun went down and the moon rose over the vineyards. Then the music started: fiddle, flute and concertina, old Provençal songs from Denis and Sylvain, and the latest hits from Claudine. There were foot-stamping jigs and reels, and when there were waltzes and polkas everyone who wasn’t playing got up to dance.

  How we danced! They were heady times. I began to fall in love with the place. Bleached and burnt out in the day, it became rich and exotic by night. I only wished Arthur were here. If only he could see me now. I wondered what he would think if he kne
w I was having so much fun. Would he want me back? I imagined telling him about it all at Daphne’s wedding in September. He would ask me what I was up to these days and I would casually say that I had just spent the summer in the south of France – with friends. I would walk away from him and mingle, and later he would follow me, intrigued, just as he had been intrigued by Pippa. He would buy me a drink and comment on my tanned arms, and perhaps he would comment too, with a little jolt of despair, at the sight of a giant diamond ring on my finger. ‘Are you married?’ he would ask in panic. ‘No,’ I would say, ‘but I’m engaged.’ I would sense his relief mingled with agitation. Just time, he would think, if I’m quick, to win her back. But, of course, he would need to woo me like no one on earth to win me back after all that had happened. I could stand it, though, perhaps, being wooed like no one else on earth . . .

  One afternoon – I can’t remember when, exactly, but some time after Tighe arrived – I was lying on my bed taking a siesta. It was too hot to wear a petticoat, which was what I usually stripped down to, and I had on just my underwear. I heard footsteps on the flagstones out on the landing. I listened, wondering if there was something to cover myself with but having no energy to get under the coverlet. The footsteps stopped. Whoever it was, they were in no hurry: listening, perhaps. Ralph came in and closed the door behind him. He said nothing, but took off the rest of my clothes as if I had been waiting for him. His arrogance shocked me. But perhaps it wasn’t shock it stirred in me. I was so . . .

  There was no excuse for it. I could blame the sunshine or the music or Ralph – or Arthur – but I knew what I was doing, and I kept on wanting it. In the days that followed, I wanted Ralph more, not less. I wanted him to make love to me all the time. He was like a drug, and I began to wonder if I wasn’t, perhaps, in love with him after all.

  25

  ARTHUR

  Married life with Pippa was a whirlwind. I had to keep rebuking myself for making comparisons with what it might have been like with Dora. But the truth was I enjoyed coming home at the end of the day to find Pippa busy in the kitchen. I would go and slip my arms around her waist from behind, running my hands up and down her curves, and she would shoo me away or turn around and kiss me, and I would never know which it was to be. Sometimes there was the smell of cooking in the air, and this pleased me more than anything after a long day’s work. At other times, and this happened quite often, there would be a smell of burning, and she would be in a foul mood as she threw a tray of charred meat on the hob. On the whole, though, she seemed to enjoy playing housewife in those first few months. It was like a new game for her. There would be pots of flowers on every surface and music playing on the radio, and she filled the house with new tea towels, salad bowls, vases, cushions and colourful bedspreads. I was impressed with her style. It is true I was less impressed with our joint bank statements, which ran into several sheets of paper instead of one, but then I was earning good money, and I told myself it was gratifying to see it put to good use.

  Sometimes I would watch her dressing or putting on make-up and I would hardly be able to contain my pride at having such a gorgeous wife. The way she held her hair up as she sat at the new dressing table, the little wisps of hair at her neck, the pout as she applied her red lipstick, the way she folded her lips over a tissue to blot them: all these things thrilled me. I would pick up the tissues with the imprint of her lips and marvel at them, then remind myself that I didn’t need mementos, because she was here with me under my roof. She was mine, and mine alone.

  Sharing a bed with Pippa was another joy. Again, I had to stop myself wondering what it might have been like if Dora . . . Well, anyway, it was a new experience for me, wrapping myself around a woman, skin on skin, all night long. And I no longer had to feel awkward about things, wondering if I could or couldn’t make love to her. She was my wife, my woman. Coming home to her each day, eating with her, sleeping with her, touching her, making her moan with pleasure and taking my own: these were the delights of this marriage I had once feared.

  I could hardly believe my luck.

  As the months went on and the evenings became long and warm, she began to reject me sometimes. At first, I barely noticed. I was tired myself and occasionally fell asleep straight away. By August she would roll away from me in bed, refusing even the gentlest of cuddles. Len told me it was usual for a woman to be a little less active as pregnancy progressed and explained that it was because she was tired. He gave me some tips on relaxing her, which had worked well with Maureen, and they had even made love on the night their son was born. I tried these on Pippa. I brought home fish and chips one evening to save her cooking, I put her legs up on a cushion and played soft music, I massaged her feet and stroked her skin and took her to bed at seven o’clock. She allowed me to carry on stroking her for nearly an hour, then pushed me away and called me a brute.

  Len told me to be patient. I had no choice. I would come home from work and find her slumped on the sofa. There would be nothing cooking and the fridge was always empty. She no longer shopped, except for luxury items, and I began to think that pregnancy must be some kind of illness, and felt guilty for putting her through it.

  ‘There’s a tin of salmon in the cupboard,’ she murmured one day when I came home. ‘You can make us a sandwich if you like.’

  I put down my briefcase and went to kneel beside the sofa. I noticed the ship in the bottle had disappeared from the mantelpiece and had been replaced by a bronze statuette.

  ‘What is it? Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course I’m not all right! I’m five months pregnant! Look at me. I can’t get into a decent dress. I’m disgusting.’

  ‘Oh no, you’re not. You’re beautiful, Pippa. You’re beautiful in your clothes and even more beautiful naked.’

  ‘Naked? Uh! Have you seen what you’ve done to my skin? You did this to me, Arthur! You did this! I look like a hippo!’

  I put my hand out to stroke her and she flung it away. I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle to make her some tea and opened the tin of salmon, which sat alone in the empty cupboard. There was no bread; there was no butter. Unwashed knives and forks and pots were stacked up in the sink. I began to wash them and noticed that the washing-up liquid was low and I had to turn the bottle upside down and shake it. As I held a dirty saucepan under the tap, some spots of tomato sauce spattered my jacket. I put on the apron hanging on the back of the door and continued washing and scrubbing until they were all clean. Then I took her a cup of tea.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ She propped herself up from her reclining position on the sofa and closed her eyes slowly with disdain.

  I placed the cup beside her. ‘What? Would you prefer cocoa?’

  ‘Oh for crying out loud!’

  I looked at her for clues. She seemed utterly repulsed by me, but for what reason at that precise moment I couldn’t be sure. I studied the cup of tea I had put down for some guidance.

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, look at you! Standing there in a pinny!’

  ‘I’m sorry, but someone had to clean the dishes.’

  She rolled her eyes emphatically. ‘Oh, so that’s it, is it? I’m not as domestic as you were expecting, am I? Well why can’t we do like everyone else and get a cleaning lady?’

  ‘A cleaning lady?’ The thought had never entered my head. No one I knew had a cleaning lady. It was ridiculous, and I must have laughed or smiled or something, because she hit the roof.

  ‘What’s so offensive to your plebeian ways about that? I’m five months pregnant, let me remind you. Five months pregnant. How am I supposed to go shopping and do the washing and the cleaning and cook for you? Mmm?’

  ‘My mother had two children and never had a cleaning lady. None of the women in this street have cleaning ladies, and a lot of them are pregnant.’ I thought of Len’s wife, Maureen, who was eight months gone with a toddler in tow, and he still had fresh socks each day and a meal on the table when he got home. ‘Most other women seem to manage
it.’

  She swung her legs round and stood up, her face rosy with rage. ‘Well I am not most other women. I wasn’t finished in Switzerland to be a skivvy in a backstreet house in Bristol!’

  I didn’t know where to start. ‘You weren’t “finished” in Switzerland, were you?’

  She looked awkward, but only briefly. ‘Well, I would’ve been, if Daddy hadn’t buggered off with some tart or other. But that’s beside the point. I wasn’t meant for the slums!’

  ‘And no one has put you in a slum!’

  ‘Oh no, I suppose this pathetic little house would seem like a palace to your sort, wouldn’t it? That little Dora of yours, she’d have lapped it up! And I suppose she’d be out heaving bags of shopping at nine months pregnant or herding bally sheep on a Welsh mountain!’

  How I wished she hadn’t said that. It immediately conjured up the memory of Dora skipping up the steep mountain path ahead of me, sure-footed as a goat. Despite the vitriol with which it had been delivered, I think we both knew there was truth in Pippa’s diatribe. Dora would have been happy with this home. She would not have complained about its shortcomings, she wouldn’t have been ashamed of a model ship, and I knew she would have taken the ups and downs of pregnancy in her stride like all the women in her family before her, blooming more with each passing day, and excited to be bringing a new life into the world.

  The shops were all closed, so I said I would go out and fetch us fish and chips from the chip shop a few streets away. She pulled a face at the thought of it, but she was crying now, great dramatic sobs that must have worried the neighbours. I went to the bathroom to get her some tissue, but there was no toilet roll, just an empty cardboard tube hanging in its holder.

  At the end of August my parents came to stay for a long weekend. They still hadn’t seen the new house and were anxious to establish good relations with Pippa. They rarely travelled, so I invited them for the week, but my mother was adamant that Pippa should not be put out, what with her being pregnant and me being at work. They would come instead for the bank holiday weekend, and when I told Pippa the plan she nearly hit the roof.