by Jane Bailey
He grinned, delighted. I managed a smile in return.
‘Vous vous cachez, mademoiselle?’
My French was pretty awful, considering how long I’d been there. I’d picked up a fair bit of vocabulary, but how to put it together was another matter. I put my finger to my lips to ask him not to give me away. He looked about, and crouched down beside me.
‘Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’ He looked genuinely concerned.
‘Lettres,’ I ventured, pointing at them. ‘Pour moi?’ I pointed at myself. ‘Lettres de la Grande-Bretagne?’ I pointed at myself again. ‘Pour moi?’
He nodded and looked through the letters. ‘Rien aujourd’hui,’ he said apologetically. ‘Vous êtes anglaise?’
He seemed excited at the prospect, so I didn’t complicate things by mentioning Wales. ‘Oui. Anglaise.’
‘Ah! Good morning! Goodnight!’ He pronounced the ‘night’ as though a doctor had asked him to open his mouth and say ‘aaah’, and I giggled.
‘Good morning. I’m Dora.’
‘Doh-ra? Me, I am Marius.’
‘Mari-oos?’
‘Ça y est! Marius.’
He smiled some more, a wide infectious smile.
‘Demain?’ I ventured. ‘Lettres? Moi . . . ici.’
I got to my feet, afraid that Ralph would come down for the post. Marius rose too and stuffed the letters into the mailbox that was nailed to a grey post by the side of the road at the entrance to Les Amandiers.
‘À demain,’ he said smiling, slinging his leg over his bicycle.
‘Secret,’ I said. ‘Secret?’
He beamed and rode off, waving behind him as he went: ‘Gooood-baaay!’
I was elated. I made my way back to the house through some undergrowth, feeling less trapped than before.
Patsy and Denis both knew I was looking for my passport, and they knew why. The pair of them had been on the lookout for it for weeks now, but none of us had had any luck. Denis had even found the excuse of a leaking roof to go up into the attic in case it was there somewhere. Instead he found a pretty big hole in the roof that had been letting in water over the winter. It would need professionals in to mend it, and it was going to cost a good three thousand francs. When he told Ralph this, Ralph said he would just write off to his Aunty Bee. Denis wasn’t at all happy. Aunty Bee employed him to do all the maintenance, and if she thought he wasn’t up to it, she might sack him. This was nonsense, according to Ralph. He would ask Aunty Bee for five thousand francs, and he and Denis could share the profit. I was appalled when I heard this. Denis pretended to be appalled as well, but he was ready to take the money. It made me shudder to think Ralph would so willingly cheat his kind aunt out of two thousand francs.
Wherever Ralph had hidden it, it was a clever hiding place. I hoped he hadn’t destroyed it. Denis had run out of ideas too, but what he did tell me, though, was that he had seen Ralph put a letter in the fire one day, so I felt hopeful that letters were still coming for me.
The following morning, and every morning I could manage, I was up before Ralph and waiting in the bushes for Marius. There were no letters from Britain, and I became even more worried about Our Dad. Once Ralph came down to the road as we were talking quietly, but Marius was on his feet at the sound of the gravel crunching, and he handed the letters to Ralph with commendable calm. Ralph thanked him and walked back up to the house. Marius assured me that he hadn’t seen me and suspected nothing. He referred to Ralph as ‘l’Anglais’ and asked if he had been ‘méchant’ towards me. I didn’t answer him, but his smile disappeared, and I knew he would help me. I knew he was sweet on me, and I didn’t want to use him or anything, but to be honest, I was growing to like him too. I couldn’t wait for the morning sunlight and the prospect of seeing him. I believed him, I think, when he said Ralph had suspected nothing (I think Ralph’s mind was all on Sophie at the time), but even so, I decided to step up my hunt for the passport.
It was an evening in late April when I found myself alone in the kitchen with Ralph. It was Sylvain’s birthday. The others were outside on the terrace, and he had come in for a bottle of champagne while I was clearing some dishes.
‘Ralph,’ I said suddenly, full of determination, ‘I need to talk to you.’
He lifted the bottle of champagne from the rack and tore off the foil.
‘Come,’ he said, motioning to the stairs.
I should have insisted on talking to him there in the kitchen. I don’t know why I didn’t. He scared me, I suppose. Anyway, I went with him to his bedroom, a room I hadn’t been invited to for some time.
‘What is it?’ His voice was disarmingly gentle, and I was afraid he was going to try to make love to me, ring the changes a bit from Sophie.
‘I need my passport. Where is it?’
‘Your passport? Why ever do you need that?’
‘My father’s ill. You know he is. He could be dying. I just want to go and visit him.’ I carefully avoided mentioning that he had promised to take me home himself some months back and had broken his promise. I tried to sound as reasonable as possible.
‘Why should he be dying? Ill is not the same as dying.’
‘But he might be! He was very ill, my mother said. Very. She doesn’t exaggerate stuff. I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid . . .’
‘Oh, don’t fret, Dora.’ He put the champagne bottle on the bedside table, approached me and put his hands on my hips. It was an effort not to flinch. ‘Surely if he was really ill, they would have written again. And yet you’ve heard nothing.’
I couldn’t look him in the eye in case he saw my fury. I swallowed and spoke to the floor: ‘I . . . just want you to give me my passport. Why won’t you give it to me?’
He began to stroke my hips and to run his hands up and down my body. ‘But why should I have it? Mm?’
I was desperate. ‘I promise I’ll come back. Just let me go for a visit. Please. Please, Ralph.’
‘But I told you, I don’t know where it is.’ He continued caressing me and pushed his fingers inside the waistband of my skirt. ‘Oh dear, we are getting a bit too big for this, aren’t we?’
‘Well I need some new clothes, but you won’t let me out to buy any!’
‘Tut-tut. Don’t get cross with me. Of course you can go out. Where can you buy material? Orange? I’ll take you to Orange next week.’
All this time he didn’t stop touching me. He undid my skirt as if to relieve me from its tightness, and he slipped it off me. He continued with my blouse and my petticoat. I felt cheapened and angry. I wanted to push him away, but I knew what would happen if I did. And now I had the baby inside me to think of too.
‘I’m sorry – you have to stop! I’m sorry, Ralph. I can’t share you. You’ve chosen Sophie. I can’t share you.’
I waited, heart racing, for the anger.
He smiled.
‘You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?’
He ignored my protest and continued in his quest for my intimate parts.
‘Ralph! I don’t share your ideas . . . I don’t want to . . .’
‘Mmm? You don’t want to what?’
‘It’s all right for you, isn’t it? I carry your child and you sleep with who you like because “what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine”! All very handy. But what if I started sleeping with the other men in the house? What would you think of that?’
He gripped my shoulders very hard. He pushed me down on the bed, and I can’t say it was love that he made. It was cruel. It made me bleed.
I pleaded with him: ‘But I’m carrying your child! Don’t hurt your baby!’
He sneered.
‘My child? Mine?’
He let go of me then – pushed me away from him on the bed.
‘You come here telling me that child is mine, when you’ve as good as told me you sleep with other men!’
‘I don’t!’
He snarled at me, teeth clenched. ‘Don’t tell me that child is mine! It could be anyone’s! An
yone’s! Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Tricking me into marriage? Then I find a little Frédéric or a Sylvain or a Denis inheriting the family home. Oh, yes, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? Hmm? Hmm?’
I would hate to tell anyone what he did. I thought it would never stop. I lay on the bed shaking, not daring to move or speak. He dressed and left. I heard him mutter something in an angry voice to Sophie, who must’ve come looking for him. She didn’t venture into his room, though, which was a shame, because she would’ve seen something to enlighten her.
I remembered his family home. I remembered the antlers on the wall and all the dark heavy furniture. I remembered his stepmother talking about his mother, saying that Ralph’s father ‘may have . . . treated her rather badly’. Badly. In that room on that day, I completely let go of any wish to marry Ralph, no matter what reconciliation he offered me in the future.
I lay on the bed for nearly two hours, sore and weeping. I stared for some time at the wire on the top of the champagne bottle, which was lying beside me, and then I had to turn away from it. I gazed instead at the rainbow lozenges on the bedcover that were so familiar to me. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. They were staggered in the next row, and the row after that. I traced them with my finger and saw how the pattern repeated itself.
He took me to Orange. We went by bus, because the petrol would have been too expensive, and the car was not that reliable.
Passing through the Vaucluse countryside, I felt like a prisoner allowed to look over the prison wall. The vines were beginning to show lush leaves that were bright in the early May sunshine. Pink rooftops, tall cypresses, men in berets: the view through the bus window looked like a continuous painting of Provence.
Orange was beautiful.
I was dismayed at its beauty. I felt false walking its streets.
It was a game, you see. The thing about abuse is that it becomes a sinister sort of game. By that I do not mean that it’s enjoyable – at least, certainly not for its victims. What I mean is that you are forever having to think one move ahead. Ralph’s last attack really marked the end for me, but I couldn’t let him know that. Knowledge that it was all over for me would have signalled the certainty of my need to escape, and it was crucial that he be lulled into a false sense of security with me. Of course he suspected my longing for escape, otherwise he would have let me come to Orange by myself or with Patsy. He was keeping a close eye on me. But when he had seen me the following morning barely able to walk, his fervent apology had to be received by acceptance on my part. I didn’t know how long I could play-act like this. Smiling at his jokes, taking his arm, letting him pretend he was looking after me, when all the time I was fighting back the urge to spit at him. This falsity, born of the need for self-preservation, weighed on me like a heavy cloak around my shoulders as I walked the ancient sunny streets of Orange.
Knowing it would give him a chance to show off, I asked if the town had anything to do with oranges, and he explained that the name was based on a Celtic settlement named Aurasio, which had become Auranja in Provençal. It may sound silly, but that little boost to his ego gave me a few extra notches of confidence in my safety.
He took me first to a fabric shop, where I bought three metres each of two floral cottons: one was white with red poppies, and the other was pale blue with deep blue flowers on it. I also bought a pattern for a maternity dress, two zips and some thread. This allowed me to thank him profusely, which gave me another safety notch. He was feeling very good about himself by the time he took me to the Roman theatre. I was speechless. I could see he was enjoying my awe, and I let him. As we walked around in the sunshine and he talked about its history, all I could think of was the cruel sport that had inspired such beautiful architecture. I thought of cruelty passed on from generation to generation and wondered how far we’d come. Still the cruelty, but now without the architecture.
Ralph took me for a coffee before we caught the bus home. We sat on the main street in the sunshine and watched the passers-by.
‘If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Jeremy Richard. Richard’s my father’s name, and he’ll like that.’
‘And if it’s a girl?’
‘You can call her what you like. She won’t inherit. He won’t mind what you call her, as long as it’s not after a film star or something vulgar like that.’
The idea that Ralph’s father should have any say in the naming of a baby Ralph had so recently disowned filled me with renewed fury – fury that I presented to him as a warm smile, which I hoped was convincing. Another notch, I hoped.
When I asked where the cafe’s toilets were, I noticed the alarm that swept briefly across his face. Like me, he was playing a game, then.
‘It won’t be a toilette anglaise, you know. You might want to wait until we get back.’
He must have realized he was sounding too desperate, because he swiftly smiled and said they would be at the back of the shop. I found the toilet, and it was indeed just a hole in the floor with footrests either side. I thought about the back door I had seen on my way in. I pictured myself slipping out into a little alleyway behind, hitching my way to Calais, explaining that my passport had been lost, finding a way. A pregnant woman, alone, surely there would be a way to get me back home . . . But I knew that wasn’t how to play this game. The thing to do was to go right back out there willingly and sit down and smile. That way he would trust me just a little more, and I needed to build up his trust until he felt he could take his eyes off me long enough for me to take my chance. It was a slow, careful game, and one I was beginning to get the hang of.
I sat down opposite him and said he had been right about the toilets.
‘Did you manage okay?’
He sounded so full of concern. He even put his hand on mine. I didn’t flinch. I made myself look straight into his eyes, as lovingly as I knew how. I smiled and simpered, as I thought, My child will not have a cruel man for a father, and will never be called Jeremy Richard.
We went arm in arm to the bus stop and chatted amicably all the way home. I hated the falsity. I hated myself for that.
45
ARTHUR
I found something very peculiar that belonged to Pippa. When I saw it, I had that feeling you get when something isn’t right, but because I could make no sense of it I let it go. I should have paid more attention.
We had a phone call from Pippa’s mother. Cynthia occasionally rang up at inconvenient moments having had a skinful, but on this occasion I answered the phone and she barely slurred her words at all. She was clearly in a genuine panic. It seemed that she had received a letter from the family solicitor telling her she had one month to vacate the house.
‘Why? Do you have any idea why?’
‘The bastard’s turfing me out. That horrid man wants to live in it.’
The horrid man was Pippa’s father, and he had got wind of the fact that Pippa was married and that the only person remaining in the family home was his ex-wife.
‘Can he do that? Doesn’t he have to make provision for you?’
There was a long silence before she explained that she had been divorced from Pippa’s father for ten years and had only been allowed to live in the house until Pippa’s twenty-first birthday, or until Pippa married. She had managed to stave him off before by claiming that Pippa still lived at home and that it would be cruel to make his daughter homeless. Now someone had told him the truth, and he had served notice on her.
As for provision, he had indeed provided for her, giving her an allowance each month. This was to continue, but at a reduced rate now that Pippa had married and left home. You couldn’t really blame him for being annoyed. Cynthia had deceived him by keeping quiet about Pippa’s marriage to me. She must’ve known he would find out at some point, but by tricking him she had provoked this one-month ultimatum. She rabbited on for ages, letting go of even more information about her ex-husband having had two children by another woman and how it wasn’t fair. She wept and wailed
on the telephone, cross with me because I wasn’t sufficiently indignant for her.
‘Let me speak to Philippa! Put my daughter on the phone!’
Whilst Pippa was talking to her in the hallway, I sat in the living room and pondered something else I had just learnt from Cynthia: the house was never going to be inherited by Pippa, since her father now had two sons by his new wife, and any inheritance went down the male line. Pippa had known this when she married me.
It’ll be mine when Daddy dies.
The prospect of inheriting Ashleycroft Hall was not the reason I married Pippa, but I must say it had a huge bearing on my financial thinking for the future. One day, I had thought, we would move into that grand old house and have more children. We would have room to expand. I could sell the house in Bristol or let it out, and we would be able to afford the lifestyle that Pippa craved: holidays abroad, a car, garden parties or whatever. It was only a distant thought, but it was always present, somewhere between an aspiration and a free insurance policy.
I was grappling with Pippa’s deceit when she swept into the living room holding her head.
‘This is a disaster! This jolly well takes the biscuit! You do know that my father is throwing my mother out on the street, don’t you? Can you believe that of a gentleman? Mmm? And now she has nowhere to go, so we shall simply have to invite her here for a while, until she can find somewhere more suitable.’ She paced around the room. ‘What? Don’t look at me like that. Why are you looking like that? I didn’t ask for this to happen! I don’t want her here either, with her bloody awful gin bottles stuck in every corner. But what else can she do? Where else can she go? You’ve got to realize how difficult this is for her. And to come and live in a three-bedroom semi after Ashleycroft Hall . . . It’s so humiliating for her!’
My house was humiliating.
‘We don’t have a spare room,’ I tried. This was true. I clung on to its truth for dear life. ‘Unless you give up the small room.’