by Louise Dean
The Justin Timberlake track stopped inside of Max’s head.
‘There’s no such thing as a coincidence,’ said Max.
His father took the front seat next to the driver. His father was English again, and he turned to address Rachel in his language. The children sat and watched the two adults undertaking the excruciating business of being careful when much is at stake, the very English way of doing things, the tight faces, the short sentences, the polite enquiries as the car crept sluggishly through the roadside village that at midday was abandoned. In the winter nothing much was reliably or consistently open, apart from the boulangeries, advertising in neon, three hundred and sixty-five days a year: ‘PAIN’.
‘Well, I’m assuming you were heading to the house . . .’ said Richard, and he gave that little laugh that was not really amusement and Rachel returned its notes, beat for beat.
Facing forward as the car rounded the summit of the hill, Richard said, ‘Did you get my last email?’
‘I got it.’ The children looked at her. She averted her face, looking out of the window. ‘That little chalet house is still up for sale then.’
‘Yes, it will never sell. It’s too gloomy and there are even more new houses now.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, even in just a couple of months.’
‘Goodness.’
Richard put a hand on the back of the driver’s seat and glanced back. His face fell, eyes first, right into her lap. She reached to cover his fingers with hers and swaddled them tight. They looked at their two hands and then at each other. Neither withdrew their hand until the taxi pulled into the grounds of Abrams’ villa.
There were two phallic conifers either side of the gateway; one was brown. Other trees had failed to take; one, a great palm tree that Jeff had bought for eight thousand euros, came up the hill like a sedated elephant on the back of a circus trailer and was planted into a cavernous hole, exposed to the winds on the hillside, and died. A magnolia in front of the house withered on one side and lost its leaves; ambitious flowers were rooted out annually, desiccated, defeated, and finally all that remained was what had been there before them; lavender, cacti, some straggling roses, the same as those that guarded the vines opposite.
The villa they’d had built for Abrams was grand, in its white eminence with its olive-green shutters and hacienda-style rear extending over stone terraces, but the grounds were bedraggled and recalcitrant and it seemed that here as elsewhere in the Var, nature resisted imported ideas.
On the hilltop, nothing moved, nothing stirred and it was silent. The car came to a halt before the front door. Rachel held her breath. The driver cranked the handbrake. When she opened the door and stepped outside, the true cold shocked her.
Chapter 55
Simone was bent over a flowerbed , extracting dead dahlias, her hair in a topknot, wearing her sleeveless jacket over a thick sweater and knee-length leggings with cross-stitching at the knee, reminiscent of corsetry, but the sexy black was an expired grey.
Guy was soaring across the paddock on the ride-on mower in his cardigan and pyjamas, like a tramp come into his kingdom on a chariot of fire, an ashtray affixed to the bonnet.
After Rachel left, Jeff had asked them for help and paid them a small wage, which they accepted since Simone was worried about their finances with Richard’s change of circumstances.
Guy cut the motor and stared. Simone stood straight, then put her hands to her hair; she dropped her trowel and ran to the white Mercedes taxi.
Maud released herself from the seat belt and got out of the car. She and Simone embraced, Simone in tears, cooing and clutching at the little girl, while Guy came up behind, his slippers grassy, his face perturbed.
Richard and Max got out and Max dropped his rucksack to the ground and went inside the house.
‘We met at the station,’ Richard explained, though neither of them heard him.
‘Oh, how we’ve missed the little princess! Come in and see how I’ve still got all your playthings, I’ve been keeping them for you all nice and safe for when you came home, my own little French girl,’ Simone insisted with heavy propaganda. ‘You’re not English, are you? No! Come to Tatie. Oh, what’s happened to you over there? You look so thin! Tatie Simone’s going to fatten you up with some of her cake . . .’
‘Can we watch television?’
‘Television!’ Guy said, with mock indignation. ‘You’ve come all this way to watch our television?’
‘Of course you can, ma puce.’
‘I’ll do the washing-up after I’ve seen my programme. And I’ll make you lunch, Uncle Guy. I’ll make you a croque-monsieur. But don’t get it in your beard.’
Guy laughed and rubbed his beard.
‘Come and have a drink with us. Come on,’ said Simone to Rachel and Richard, wiping her eyes. ‘Are you staying a while?’ She looked from one to the other. ‘We’ve been helping in the garden. For something to do.’ She raised her shoulders, wrinkling her nose. ‘That’s all. We barely see either of them.’
‘Well, I haven’t come to see them,’ said Rachel. ‘I came to see
Richard.’
‘You can stay with us! We’ll make room. Will you be here for Christmas? I should run down to the shops . . . but come on, come and have a drink, let’s open a bottle! Champagne? Oh, this is such a good surprise.’ She took Rachel’s hand in hers.
Rachel looked at Richard, ‘Shall we have a drink then?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I need to be with you now.’
Simone looked from one to the other. Her mouth moved but she said nothing.
The taxi driver got out of the car. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Christmas is coming. Maybe I’ll miss it standing here. I turned the meter off. I’ll have to start it up again if we’re going on. I’m not doing this for my pleasure.’
The little girl was almost at Guy and Simone’s house, holding Guy by the sleeve, pulling the long cardigan arm down. ‘So, the princess of the Var. Or are you now the princess of London?’ he was asking her.
Simone glanced at them, and a smile broke out on her face along with a little shimmering sweat.
‘Christmas, yes. The man must go. That’s good. So, go! Go on. Have fun!’ Simone said to the adults, waving towards the taxi, breathless suddenly, perspiring and rosy-faced. ‘Go on! Go and do what you need to do, we’ll look after Maud.’
* * *
Inside the house, Max sat down on the sofa. His mother had cleaned the mirror. She was in the kitchen, he could hear her moving pots and pans.
‘Max?’ she called out, and came through with her sleeves rolled up. Her eyes were puffy.
‘I’m back,’ he said. He put his legs out, his dirty shoes making marks on the Persian carpet.
‘What happened? Where’s your father?’
‘With Rachel.’
She knelt before him. ‘My poor son. It’s all my fault.’ She said,
‘Let me make you something to drink. A hot chocolate.’ She put her arms around him and screwed her eyes shut. ‘I love you.’
‘You love Gérard,’ he said. ‘You can’t love this one and then that one, this one and then that one . . .’ and he sighed heavily like an old man getting bad news. He got up and put the television on.
Jeff came in through the French doors. He’d been in the vineyard. His woollen hat stood high on his head. ‘What the hell’s going on? What’s the kid doing back?’
‘Rachel loves Richard and Richard loves Rachel,’ said Max, not looking at him, changing channels. ‘Your daughter’s over at Simone’s house.’
‘You lost me there, pal,’ said Jeff. ‘Say that again?’
Valérie was kneeling on the floor by the boy, who was moving sideways to sit farther away from her.
When Jeff saw Valérie there, defeated, he knew it was true and he found the pure clean warm smile he’d looked for everywhere in those last few weeks and he took it and wore it and dashed out, leaving the double doors wobbling in his wake, letting the cold blow right t
hrough Abrams’ house.
Chapter 56
In Maître Kanter’s Tavern, satisfaction runs to several variations sausage-wise. The choucroute comes heaped high, damp and cold, along with boiled potatoes. As for the Master himself, according to depiction here, there and everywhere, he remains young and virile, the eternal German, with his wide-brimmed hat and braces, one arm out, open-handed, the other offering a great big jug of beer.
The aluminium plate of standard restaurant design sat atop the gas burner between them and sizzled. The rain was lashing down and this was a good place to be.
Rachel looked at Richard. He had seedless-grape green eyes, his blond hair was shying away at either temple, his long nose was thin, but when he smiled his cheeks were full.
She was not really listening to him, she was watching him speak. (They were waiting for the Riesling to be served and the six ‘fines de claire’ apiece.) A comma in his sentences was marked with the lift of his right eyebrow. He was telling her that he’d stopped working, and that he’d enjoyed being with Max. When Max went, he had nothing to live for.
She drank down her glass of wine.
In his recounting of the events leading up to his diagnosis, there was apprehensiveness to his eyes, which told of what was to come after the humorous account of failure; intimacy.
* * *
There are many side effects to losing your mind, Rachel, and the one that’s not printed on any leaflet is living in a shithole. The state psychiatrist tells me I am in the grip of depression with schizotypy affect. She’s hedging her bets. The depressive blames himself for his unhappiness, but the schizophrenic thinks he’s not so much responsible for his own state as he is for other people’s. I’d rather go with the schizophrenia than the depression; the voices and the magical thinking. I mean I think there are some delusions that are necessary if one’s to make it. I took the pills to sort myself out, though not in the way they’d think. I used them to take sex off the agenda. I think a spell of abstinence has done me some good actually. I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t want to lie any more, at all. I took the pills, Rachel, the very ones I used to sell. Now that’s irony. Jeff never did get irony; everything that was sheer bad luck he called ironic. Not good for a cartoonist. Still he had the right profession, quick sketches of ‘funny’. I think everyone chooses their profession pretty well. We all find our cover. But when I began to sell pills to people who were quite plainly not unhappy or mad, my cover slipped and I saw myself for who I was. In Africa, instead of looking at the punters, which was what I was out there to do, I saw them looking at me. It all came at the same time, you know, that insight and losing everything. I can’t tell you which came first but they came together. There you go. Talk to me, Rachel, you have no idea how I’ve missed you.
* * *
I’ve been sleeping so badly, Richard, the street lights and of course I had no curtains, and one night, it came right into my head this phrase — ‘Do any of us even know that someone loves us in another place, or another time?’ In the daytime, when I wandered around London, by about three or something I knew it was you. So I just started packing. I did. The vicar at Maud’s school’s church in London told me that communion is the great metaphor. He said to me — He takes you, He breaks you and then He blesses you and gives you. That’s what’s happened to us, Richard. He took us and broke us at the same time, in the same place . . .
* * *
‘You are lovely, Rachel, but how can I be sure? Of you? How can I know nothing bad’s going to happen? How can I just hand myself over to you?’
‘You just do. It’s a leap of faith. I’m not talking about God. Faith; it’s all we can have really.’
His eyes were hooded, and a single vein to the left of his left eye flickered blue. He put a fist over his mouth. He nodded.
Then he spoke. He told her that he’d done it; he’d made the leap. Right there and then. He’d done it.
‘I’m yours,’ he said.
* * *
He sat beside her on the bed in Room 118 in the hotel next door. He took off his shirt slowly, button by button, flexed each shoulder in turn, left then right, and let his shirt slide.
‘Pour water over me,’ he said. He gave her the water bottle from on top of the minibar. ‘Pour it over my head.’
She knelt up behind him, her hands on both of his shoulders.
‘All of it.’
She poured it and he shook at the shock of it.
‘Everything is you and when I look at you, I see everything,’ she said, looking at the both of them in the mirror, her hands about his waist, her face on his wet shoulder blade.
‘It’s all about us now,’ he said, holding her hands.
The resuscitation; mouth to mouth. The years slid off the scales, the future failed to weigh, there was nothing in the balance and the two of them were poised, touching in two places.
Chapter 57
‘I don’t mind the boy jumping up and down on the trampoline half naked every morning, I don’t mind that, that’s fine, I haven’t got a problem with that . . .’
Maud was standing on the pedal bin coating the kitchen counter in arcs of bubbles, Simone behind her, her hands twitching, ready to catch her fall. Guy was at the kitchen window.
‘But I don’t think it’s good for him to be up on the roof with no clothes on. It’s winter.’
‘What time is it?’ asked Simone.
He checked the clock, screwing up his eyes. ‘Nine.’
‘How long’s he been there?’ She pushed past Guy to the window to look. ‘My God, he’s naked.’
‘He has a baseball cap on.’
‘This is ridiculous! You watch Maud for me.’
‘He’s not happy,’ said Maud, shaking her head as Simone left, the glass-fronted doors shaking in their frames.
* * *
Jeff went out on to the balcony of a guest room and stood on the ledge of the balcony, holding on to the edge of the roof. Max was sitting cross-legged on the apex, looking at the sun. If he’d cared to, he’d have seen Jeff ’s bald pate, with its genital frizz and blotchy marks, and he’d have heard the rolling reason of his American inflection, but he didn’t.
Jeff rested the side of his head against the crépi of the wall and rubbed his few days’ growth of beard against it like an animal. He heard the kid begin speaking.
‘In the beginning was the word. There was no God until then. The words are the magic. Not the cards, not the cups, not the balls, not the wands . . .’
‘He’s up there talking shit,’ Jeff said moodily when he came back down into the kitchen where Guy and Valérie were both drinking a consolatory glass of red. ‘He must have been reading Rachel’s books. He’s spouting on up there like a preacher man.’
Simone came in with Maud. Jeff took his daughter in his arms and made a fuss of her. He’d been disappointed when she chose to stay the night with Guy and Simone. He’d been very irritable that evening, and kept going to the front door and looking across to their house, thinking how once he’d stood there, and not so long ago, looking the wrong way.
‘I’m going to call the fire brigade,’ said Simone, hands on her hips, slightly excited, as ever disaster-hungry. ‘My God, he could fall and kill himself.’
‘Good that it’s rained, the ground is soft,’ Guy reflected, finishing his glass.
Valérie went out on to the lawn to look up at the roof. She put her hands to her mouth and called out, her voice uncertain as if she were reading for a part, ‘Max! Max! What are you doing? Come down . . .’
He was looking towards the Mediterranean, his mouth was moving.
‘Max! Is this to punish me?’
Jeff came out and stood by her. His daughter followed. ‘Max. Don’t be a screwball. Just get your butt down here. You could kill yourself . . .’
‘Don’t say that, you might make him nervous, you might upset him . . .’
‘I know what I’m doing. Look, all of this, it’s all about getting our attention.
He’s on a roof, he’s like I want you all to look at me, to look up to me. All the magic and the Bible stuff it’s to compensate, isn’t it? For not being good at sport, for not being good at school, for not being good at anything really, and you and Richard splitting up. That’s what’s going on here. You don’t need a degree in psychology to figure that out. You can play along if you want but I’m not going to. He’s still a kid. Come down, you little screw-up! Come down or Gérard’s going to come up there and whup your ass . . .’
‘Oh, stop it, Jeff. Stop it. You’re not helping.’
‘Little shit! He’s just holding you to ransom, Valérie.’
‘He’s not a little shit.’ She was crying, she turned to him with her hands balled, angry. ‘Like mother like son, you think! You don’t love me at all, you’re a liar, Jeff, a liar. You should never have said it if you didn’t. What are you? What are you? Nothing. It’s you, the shit!’
‘Oh, wow, that’s good, that’s really fucking good. You crazy bitch! Love you? You’re impossible to love, you don’t give anything and you talk all the time. No wonder your kid’s on the roof. You don’t know how to love anyone. You totally fucked up my life! I oughta be up there with him.’
Guy came over to them, holding the ladder; he put it down on the driveway, then, the cigarette still between his lips, he walked across the grass to stand squarely in front of Jeff.
He showed him a finger and almost touched the end of Jeff ’s nose, his eyes dark. ‘Just be quiet. Just hold your tongue. Be cool, be very cool. Or I swear I’ll kill you.’