She accepted her strange condition, which threatened to become permanent, as an accurate reflection of her state of mind, which she saw as one of endless rumination, quite divorced from any thought of action. For this reason there were few outward manifestations of an abnormal state, no tears, no tantrums, no untoward appetites, only an immense fatigue, which she disguised with a half smile, thinking any allusion to it vulgar and unnecessary. She managed the formal part of her life successfully, so that none of Edward’s business friends suspected her of anything more grave than a constitutional delicacy. If her mother had doubts about a hereditary illness she was strongminded enough to keep them to herself, encouraged by the fact that Maud had never until now suffered any alteration in her health. With Eve in the background the household ran successfully: the little girl went to school, made friends, was encouraged to invite them home, and did so. It was not thought unusual to be given tea by the nanny. Since there was little for Eve to do as the child grew older, Maud encouraged her to begin a fashion course, and afternoons would be spent in the calm of an otherwise empty flat, an emptiness which Maud, reclining on her sofa, did little to disturb.
Maffy grew used to her mother’s quietness, less so to her father’s love, which she sensed was both diffident and excessive. By the time Eve left, regretfully, she was largely able to take care of herself. She had inherited her mother’s sense of order, was tidy, calm, and studious, although in looks she resembled her father, with her father’s dark hair and slender build, and only her steady gaze unnervingly like her mother’s. At the age of ten she was judged competent to spend her holidays alone at Eastbourne, although they telephoned her anxiously every evening to see whether she was happy. They were both relieved and puzzled by what they judged to be her stoicism, not realising that she felt nothing more potent than boredom. She was driven every morning to Bibi’s house and instructed to play with Bibi’s son William, aged three. She did not dislike William, or Bibi, or Polly Harrison, but she found them rather restricting. She looked forward to spending future holidays in Dijon with her other grandmother, whom her parents had taken her to visit, in Nadine’s new flat in the rue Alphonse Ballu. Both the move and the family visit were an unexpected success. Nadine’s former taciturnity had yielded to her new-found status as a family member: once she had satisfied herself that Maud was not physically ill, that Edward was prosperous, and that her granddaughter was apparently fond of her, she surrendered to an unusual sense of well-being.
At fourteen, at fifteen, Maffy thought it entirely natural to sit in the garden of the Château d’Eau with her grandmother, who passed her sections of the newspaper when she had finished with them and congratulated her on her French accent. On the way home there would be cakes in a tea-room. Grandmotherly status had restored Nadine to her former dignity. Her hair was now grey, her face innocent of the colours with which she had formerly enlivened it, and the gaze which fell on Maffy was attentive, no more, or so she liked to think. When she saw Maffy off on the train at the end of her summer holiday she felt a pain in her heart which was not merely organic (although there had been warnings, which she chose to ignore). She mentioned to Edward, with whom she was now on excellent terms, that it might be convenient for Maffy to go to university in Dijon.
‘I couldn’t bear to lose her for so long,’ he confessed. But he did agree to letting her spend part of her year off with her grandmother.
‘I only suggest it because good French is such an advantage,’ said Nadine negligently.
Edward smiled. He had seen that noble face crumple when, as a small child, Maffy had fallen over and hurt herself. He did not begrudge Nadine her hunger, knowing how admirably she would always control it. And Maffy was no longer a small child, could return affection in such a way as to appease her grandmother’s unknowable heart. Cautiously he began to consider whether his fears had not been exaggerated. His feelings were quite another matter. These, he knew, would never fall quite within the recognised boundaries. This knowledge too he managed to keep to himself.
FOURTEEN
SO, SEAMLESSLY, THEIR LIVES CONTINUED, AT LEAST TO A less than observant eye. Maud’s strange languor gradually improved. Edward, meanwhile, kept concealed certain changes taking place in himself. He did this out of a love fast threatening to turn to helplessness. He set himself the task of holding on until his daughter was old enough to leave home, by which time Maud and he would cling together, their frailties combined, with a sense of duties discharged. Privately, each had a warning of endings. Maud, still intermittently weakened by lassitude, sought and sometimes found solace in her books, her ordered empty life, although she would start up as if in fear when the silence of the afternoon threatened to overwhelm her, would go to the window to see if she could catch a glimpse of an absent sun, would will her daughter away from this sad place and out into the world and another life. She had no fears for her, knew that their communion was close, but longed to set her free. So might her own mother once have felt, she reflected, but to reflect on her own case was unwise: better by far to rejoice in Maffy’s untroubled passage through adolescence, her wholly agreeable acceptance of adulthood. She had never expected to feel so confident, so detached, in the presence of so great a love. The experience was so astonishing to her that it merited all her spare moments of reflection. She tried to restrain her expressions of that love, and was successful: she saw where Edward blundered, and felt sorry for him. She had always felt sorry for him. This too was not a matter on which it was wise to reflect. She valued him, appreciated him, and even loved him, though not, she knew, in any way that would make him happy. She had reached an accommodation with her feelings, was not anxious to examine them, deliberately kept them out of sight. Her one success, she thought, was her daughter, their daughter. As for her husband, she hoped that she was mistaken in her perception of him as unhappy. She thought he seemed angry, despairing; Maffy’s forthcoming absence would leave him desolate. He was if anything desolate already. There was a desolation in him which she could not reach. She wondered when it had begun to overtake him, wondered whether to blame herself, thought on the whole that this was not appropriate.
‘Are you comfortable, Edward? You are frowning.’
‘I’m fine, fine,’ he would say, his eyes preoccupied. ‘Where’s Maffy?’
‘At Sophie’s house. She won’t be late.’
‘I don’t want her to be late.’
‘You will have to get used to it. Don’t worry,’ she would say, more and more often. ‘It will be all right. She will only be in Dijon.’
‘And then at Cambridge.’
‘Did you think you could keep her here for ever?’
‘I wanted to.’
‘Come, Edward.’
‘Oh, I know. I think I’ll go out for a walk. You don’t mind, do you? I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
‘I don’t mind, of course not.’ She was bewildered. ‘Won’t you take something for it?’
‘I just need some air. It’s too hot in here.’
‘Then open a window.’
‘Leave it, Maud. I shan’t be long. You go to bed. Yes, that’s it. You go to bed.’
She watched with anxious eyes as he wound his scarf round his throat and jerked his arms into his raincoat. She thought his movements hasty, exaggerated. She put a hand on his arm.
‘She will love us more if we let her go,’ she said. ‘Whatever you feel—and I feel—is irrelevant, irrelevant to her, that is. You must not grieve for her, Edward. She’ll come back, but only if you let her go …’
He pulled his arm away. ‘Goodnight, Maud.’
She heard the front door shut, felt the first whisper of alarm. Then she slowly put the room to rights and went to bed. Thus she was not aware of his strange behaviour in the street, his uncertain walk, his shaking of his head as if to clear his vision, his hands clasping and unclasping in his pockets. She stayed awake until he returned, which was late. She heard him listen outside Maffy’s door, then come to bed.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Goodnight, then, Edward.’
‘What? Oh, goodnight, Maud.’
In the dark he put up no resistance to what he thought of despairingly as his night thoughts. He loved his daughter as extravagantly as he loved his wife, and with, he knew, the same lack of success. The impossibility of being loved as he had hoped, as he had dreamed of being loved, began to play on his mind. Sleep deserted him; his headaches increased. He accepted that his daughter was as undemonstrative as her mother, whom she so closely resembled; what he could not accept was the fact that she felt for him only a steady affection, and not the rapture that he longed to inspire. If he searched his mind and his memory, as he so often did these days, when he felt so strange, he discovered yet again those images which seemed to have accompanied him for as long as he could remember. First among these was an impression of light and heat; then came a garden; then a spray of droplets iridescent in the summer sun. In the background was always the loved figure of his sister as a baby, and his urge to cherish and protect her. But now that his sister was older, she was somehow less lovable. She had married rather late, and had immediately taken on the caretaking properties of advanced wifemanship. ‘I’m afraid my husband can’t eat anything fried,’ she might say, or ‘Tim! I’ve warned you about going out without a jacket,’ as if her husband, a moderately successful dentist, were incapable of thinking or answering for himself. It occurred to him now that the reason why he went to the Louvre every day, during that fateful sojourn in Paris, was to gaze at the Egyptian brother and sister, small, rigid, smiling through eternity, in the glass case that everyone passed by on their way to the Winged Victory. Those two small tense but contented figures, married to each other, appeared to have no fear of this world, or the next.
And that was what had escaped him: lack of fear. There was no need of complicated explanations. It was the look of calm-eyed plenitude on the Egyptian faces that had moved him. He himself could not recapture that original wholeness, first experienced in the garden of his childhood and restored to him in dreams, so that he remembered waking with a feeling of bliss. He had tried to read some spiritual message into those waking moments; for a time he had firmly believed in Wordsworth’s clouds of glory. But now there was no choice; he had to experience those shades of the prison house by which he felt more and more constricted. It was not merely the headache that descended on him for most of every day. It was more likely to be the fact that he had tried, and failed, to strike an answering spark from both his wife and his daughter, who continued to be all that his rational mind could desire them to be, but who, he thought, could quite well live without him. If he should die unexpectedly soon (and he had secretly taken out additional insurance policies), he thought that they would not greatly notice his absence.
He envied his wife her apparent wholeness, thinking her without guile. What she concealed from him was so little concealed; his imagination had always supplied what her words had never conveyed. Out of a sort of modesty they never referred to the past: his outburst, when he heard that Tyler had been present at Xavier’s wedding, had been heated, certainly, but his feeling of jealousy related to the remote past rather than to the few days of her absence. He knew that she had not been unfaithful to him, that she would never deceive him. What doubt remained attached itself to a matter which he could not bring himself to discuss: her enjoyment of Tyler as a lover. And here his own dolorous excitement entered into the equation: that was why the matter could never be discussed. The proof that it was he who was at fault lay in his present state of doubt and disorder, as if both had grown throughout the years of a marriage which most would judge to be successful. And his wife, who was the principal victim of that original hurt, had matured into an apparent calmness which was denied to him. The very fact that it could find no place in his life put him on edge, caused him to grind his teeth. She would look at him wide-eyed, as if distressed for him, but, he could see, quite uncomprehending. He longed to shout at her, ‘What do you feel? What did you feel? What did he do to you? How do we compare?’ but would never do so. Thus he prolonged his own strange torment, which again he tried to infuse with some spiritual meaning. Was it loss of innocence? And was all innocence doomed to be lost? Apparently not, for Maud had not lost hers, and this was puzzling, for hers was the first defection, while he had been conscious of behaving ‘well’. He remembered his brief glow of satisfaction in the rue Laugier: ‘I have behaved well,’ he had told himself. And yet that good behaviour had led to this despair, as if bad behaviour might have yielded better results.
But all this was in the past: the present was a wife whom he loved more hopelessly with every year that passed, and a daughter made in her mother’s image, as if she had been immaculately conceived, only her dark colouring a polite acknowledgment of his paternity. As a child he had hoped to drown her with love, only to see her back away, frightened by his exuberance. Her attitude now was one of respect: she questioned him about the shop, about Cambridge, where she was due to read Modern Languages, but seemed uninterested in him as a person, whereas he had heard her ask her mother, ‘Did you do this when you were young?’ He thought that when she was older—and she was already extremely self-possessed—she would resemble the French side of the family completely, and he would be excluded all over again. His mother, who had made the connection long before he had, was now more open in her dislike, which overflowed onto Maffy herself. Polly Harrison, being a simpler, cruder character, had already made her adjustments: Bibi’s son William received all her love, William’s father having been judged sufficiently malleable to be entirely satisfactory. Every time Edward contemplated his nephew, during his increasingly rare visits to Eastbourne, he was convinced of the beauty and superiority of his own child. Something of the same conviction might have struck Bibi: her contact with Maud was now more intermittent than before.
‘You were restless in the night,’ Maud said to him. ‘Should you see the doctor?’
‘I don’t need a doctor.’
‘Nelly thought you were looking unwell. She thought you were pale. Are you pale, Edward?’
‘I’m quite well. You’re supposed to be the one who isn’t well.’
‘But I’m better,’ she said, with some surprise. ‘I hadn’t noticed. I was so used to feeling odd, under a cloud, almost behind a pane of glass. That feeling seems to have vanished, quite suddenly. What do you think it was?’
‘That doctor of yours called it depression. Depression is a form of anger, or so I’ve read.’
‘I’m not angry.’ She looked at him wonderingly. ‘Why on earth should I be angry?’
‘Maybe you were angry without knowing it. Maybe anger is merely undigested experience.’
She looked at him with her calm eyes, as if judging him to be a danger not to her but to himself. She went to the window and opened it wide. ‘Look, the sun! It seems to be spring. Somehow we’ve managed to get through the winter. Maybe that’s why I feel better.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Don’t let us be on bad terms, Edward. We’ve always managed to be on good terms, haven’t we? And now that Maffy is no longer at home so much it is even more important for us to be on good terms. Do you miss her so terribly?’
‘Appallingly.’
‘I can see that. I think I can bear it better than you, partly because we are so alike that I know what she is thinking. Now that she is with Mother in Dijon I have only to look back to know where she is going and what she is doing. When she is at Cambridge I shall truly feel that I have lost her. She will be closer to you then.’
‘I doubt it. I’ve lost her already.’
‘Don’t say that. Can’t you see how she looks up to you?’
‘I wanted more than that.’
‘But it is wrong for a father to want too much feeling from a daughter. Do you remember my friend Julie? Her father was alway
s kissing and hugging her, and she hated it. It was all quite innocent: he was such a nice man. But he loved her too much. In the end she couldn’t return his love. It was awfully sad.’
‘Am I like that with Maffy?’
‘No, of course not. You are impeccable. She is quite proud of you, you know.’
‘But you are the one she wants to be with.’
‘But of course. I’m her mother.’
‘You say that with such pride.’
‘I am proud,’ she said quietly. ‘I am proud because you have allowed me to be. My prospects were not good. I had none of the advantages that my mother thought indispensable for a girl who wanted to attract a husband. I can remember being a poor relation. Yet thanks to you I married and had a daughter who will never know any of this, and who has grown up beautiful and clever and good. Why shouldn’t I be proud? And grateful to you.’
‘Grateful!’
‘What is wrong with gratitude? Why aren’t you grateful? We are comfortably off, we have a handsome home (though strangely enough I preferred the other flat: perhaps we should move again?), a healthy child, and no worries that can’t be dealt with. If only you could relax, Edward, stop grinding your teeth. It is grinding your teeth that gives you those headaches. Or used to. You’ve been better lately, haven’t you?’
‘Much better,’ he lied.
‘All you need is a mild sleeping pill. And Maffy will do well at Cambridge, and you can go and visit her, and take her out. You know it so well. I thought it a cold place. Beautiful, but cold. You will know her life as well as I know it now. It will be your life all over again.’
‘I don’t want my life over again.’
‘Then you had better make the most of this one. There are muffins for breakfast, and some of that apricot jam that you like.’
Incidents in the Rue Laugier Page 21