Mazarine

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

  ‘Okay. A cheap hotel. Good.’

  ‘The receptionists asked after Jasmine. They remember her because she’s so charming. Everyone loves her.’

  ‘Really.’

  Mazarine sighed. ‘I told them Jasmine would be joining me. Why did I do that? So stupid.’ She looked at the floor. ‘I guess divorce is a bit shameful.’

  There was a silence.

  I sat down. ‘Widowhood feels a bit shameful too.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘You feel embarrassed, yeah, and other people do too. They cross the street to avoid having to say how sorry they are. It’s excruciatingly awkward.’

  She laughed. ‘Jet lag doesn’t usually bother me, but—’ She put a hand to her forehead.

  I realised I was still holding her pill bottle. Closing my fingers around it I said, ‘Speaking of widows, I had an idea. I thought I’d go and see the wife of Maya’s dead colleague. And maybe his best friend, too.’

  Mazarine’s next cough turned into a paroxysm.

  I waited. ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

  She nodded, dabbing her eyes with a large crumpled handkerchief, and croaked, ‘I’d better take some vitamin C.’

  Crossing the room, I said, ‘You know supplements are a scam. They just end up in the loo.’

  She shook her head, dismissing this. ‘I have a terrible backache.’

  I sighed. ‘Go on then, lie down. I’ll make a hot drink and get you some Panadol.’

  When I came back she was stretched out on the bed looking pained, trying to get comfortable.

  ‘Here’s the tea. And some proper drugs, not the bullshit kind.’

  She struggled up. ‘My back. I should have seen the chiropractor before I left.’

  ‘A chiropractor? But they’re complete fakes. You know that, don’t you? You might as well see a witch doctor.’

  ‘You are very cynical, Frances.’

  She washed down the pills. ‘Thank you, I’ll rest for a minute then I’ll make my way to Cartwright Gardens. It’s not far to walk.’

  ‘Okay. The drugs should kick in soon.’

  We waited in silence, drinking tea.

  After a while she said, ‘You mentioned the dead man’s friend?’

  ‘Yes, she’s a journalist. Apparently, she used to introduce people she’d interviewed to Aiden Wood, and if he was interested he’d get them to do a book, either ghosted or they’d write it. There was one by a boy who escaped from Isis. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Why do you want to talk to her?’

  ‘I thought she might tell me about Aiden. I looked at her CV, she’s written a piece recently about the leader of Chechnya, one of Russia’s “attack dogs”.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The piece is about whether the Chechen leader murdered some politician who was shot in Moscow. And if he did, whether he’s “slipped the leash”, or whether Russia still controls him.’

  ‘Those people are vicious. It’s why I question Emin travelling home so often.’

  ‘Those people? Who’s Emin?’

  ‘My ex-husband.’

  ‘Oh right, you said.’

  ‘He goes to see family.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s his excuse anyway.’

  ‘His excuse?’

  ‘He’s got a relative who’s a high government official there. Emin doesn’t have anything much to do with him, but he feels free to come and go.’

  ‘Did you ever visit?’

  ‘No, I never did.’

  ‘The Chechen leader has a massive following on Instagram apparently.’ I yawned. ‘He put it all over social media when he lost his pet dog.’

  Mazarine yawned too, closing her eyes. ‘Sentimentality and cruelty go together.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Remind me, what did you say about your mother’s voice?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That it has a quality?’

  ‘I can’t describe it. Metallic.’

  Mazarine laughed. ‘Is she a robot?’

  ‘Very funny.’ I thought about it. ‘It does take on a sort of grinding quality. When I’m annoying her.’

  ‘Cold, then?’

  ‘But it may just be the wrong voice, for me. Not her fault.’

  ‘Wrong? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I’m adopted. She once said to me that she couldn’t look after me — me specifically, not my siblings, who aren’t adopted — because I was too different.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  Through another yawn I said, ‘She’s originally American, from Ann Arbor. Anyway, I remember when I told her I was coming home to live in Auckland with Maya, she had a sort of tantrum. She so didn’t want me back, she couldn’t control herself. I was struck by that. Then she stopped talking to me altogether. She’s totally baffling.’

  ‘That’s because she’s your mother.’

  ‘According to most people, she’s the soul of kindness. I went to a psychotherapist for a while; I realised people’s personalities depend on who they’re with. Also, that it’s pretty hard to apportion blame. Everyone’s a product of their environment.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’

  ‘The shrink was German; his relatives had been Nazi sympathisers, which he was horrified by. He’d spent part of his career running a forensic unit up north, where people are locked up — lots of Maori. I always wanted to ask him, Do you think locking up people, giving them a number and assessing them for dangerousness, is in your DNA? I didn’t, though, because it would have seemed an offensive question, and I really liked him. His heart was in the right place, he was a good guy.’

  ‘I can see he might have taken offence.’

  ‘But I was genuinely interested, because for me there’s a gap. I don’t know what’s in my DNA.’

  Mazarine sighed and wriggled. ‘My back has loosened up. I’ll pack up my things, get going.’

  ‘Okay. That bag looks quite heavy. I’ll help you to the lift.’

  ‘Do you feel she’s kind?’

  ‘Inez? To other people, for sure.’

  ‘Do you trust your own perceptions?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are they invalidated by your family?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘People are never straightforward, Frances. The Chechen leader crying online over his pet dog …’

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed, wincing, a hand to the small of her back. ‘And meanwhile, if you cross him, watch out.’

  I sat watching her move slowly around the room, folding clothes, laying them in her suitcase, stopping to grind her knuckles into her spine.

  ‘Mother’s always said I’m as hard as nails,’ I said.

  She faced me, her hands on her hips. ‘Really. I can’t imagine why.’

  ‘Crazy, I know.’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll go to Cartwright Gardens. You stay here and rest your back.’

  She came back to the bed and lowered herself down to lie on her side, one hand massaging her round hip. Eyes closed, smiling. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Right, no problem.’

  She put her hand on my arm. ‘Don’t go yet. Keep talking.’

  I was woken by students returning late to their rooms on the floor below, voices echoing up through the stairwell, young drunk men with American accents, one with a high-pitched laugh. I stood with my eye to the peephole for a moment, then went out on the roof terrace, where the sky was starting to lighten after the short night. It was warm and windless, the city air heavy with scents of fuel and fumes, summer dust.

  What had I told Mazarine about Dr Werner Bismarck? I was wide awake now, but earlier I’d been so tired I’d sunk into a trance, and now I could barely remember what we’d said as we lay side by side on the bed (it was only a double, much smaller than the super king I slept in at home), both of us exhausted, on the very edge of sleep, and murmuring awa
y, until perhaps there wasn’t a conversation but two monologues running alongside each other, unheard …

  Why did Werner keep coming into my mind? According to him, my premature exit from his treatment had left unfinished business. His theory that my personality was divided into different states required us to work on an integration that, he argued, could only be achieved by at least another year of meetings. I’d wondered whether he was more interested in paying off his mortgage; on the other hand, if he was right, I remained a divided self.

  There’d been a final session in which Werner had spoken of an ‘emotional wall’ within me; he had said that we must work together to effect openness, a kind of glasnost and perestroika; in other words, to borrow from Ronald Reagan, we needed, Werner and I, to ‘tear down that wall’.

  Could one’s personality really be made up of different, walled-off selves? I remained in two minds about it. Hollow laugh …

  Beyond the curtains, Mazarine said something in her sleep, turned.

  I’d asked him: So, what caused this division? Werner had spoken of insecure attachment, ambivalence. I was listening with half an ear, or with only half a mind, the other already calling time on him and his earnest theories. I told him I had a new ambition: to write my first novel.

  I had been lonelier without Dr Bismarck, yet less short of money.

  ‘Why do I find it hard to read women?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  ELEVEN

  I argued for a café in Lamb’s Conduit Street, but Mazarine wanted breakfast in the dining hall because it was cheap. Earlier, I had sat on the bed with the warm summer wind blowing on me from the open door, listening to her moving around in the bathroom. The drowsy trance of the night had gone; I was wide awake and bristling again with the discomfort of proximity. She had some Dutch heritage, I recalled. I wondered if the Dutch were like the Germans, weirdly militant about nudity, and steeled myself for the challenge of Mazarine parading nude through the room Berlin-style, where I’d seen the unselfconscious citizens strolling naked in parks and at lakesides, casting disapproving glances at anyone so uptight as to be clothed.

  Well, I had felt uptight that morning, waking to find Mazarine’s calf hotly pressed against mine, and the thin duvet covering both of us, and her hand right next to my face on the pillow. At least, thank god, we were both fully clothed. I drew away immediately, and slid half off the bed, which woke her, and she smiled.

  She had a creased look, her face was flushed, and she raised a chunky white forearm and stretched and yawned — and I fled, locking myself in the bathroom, taking a long and furious shower and emerging, fully dressed, to tidy up the small space, make the bed and tensely wait while she took her turn.

  When I found my watch, I saw that despite the heat and sunshine it was still early, so I went out onto the roof terrace and turned on the laptop, shading the screen against the light and conducting my usual searches, finding nothing new.

  I saw Mazarine cross the doorway wearing a towel, with another towel wrapped around her head. Her legs were shapely underneath the curves of her body, and her feet were narrow, surprisingly delicate.

  Sudden inexplicable desire to laugh; was it because she made me uneasy?

  She wiped the steam off her glasses and rummaged in her suitcase, taking out a rattling plastic bottle, more of her magic potions.

  ‘You have a mania for vitamins.’

  ‘Here, take one. For your immune system.’ She came out on the terrace and passed me a large brown pill, the colour of bird shit.

  ‘Cheers.’ I took it between finger and thumb.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.

  I had to admit to myself that I did.

  ‘Barely at all,’ I said.

  In the dining hall, she heaped her bowl with muesli and fruit, eating with enjoyment while I nibbled on toast, eyeing her occasionally, mostly keeping my head down and focusing on a newspaper I’d found on the seat, in particular on an article about Nuit Debout, the popular movement that had held the protests in Paris that Maya and Joe had attended.

  Mazarine tapped her finger on the article. ‘When we’re done here, I think we should go to Paris.’

  ‘How will we know when we’re done here?’

  ‘When we’ve spoken to everyone we can think of.’

  I looked across the room. The academics and students milled around the tables, a mix of nationalities, all graduates undertaking studies in London universities and hospitals. It was a noisy, convivial crowd of folk who looked so confident and sane they made me feel insubstantial.

  A sense of unreality came over me; I was in the room and yet some other part of myself was watching from a parallel universe as Mazarine leaned across the shaft of light slanting in through the high window and tapped her finger on the newspaper, and I drew back as I did every time she came too near, and crossed my arms and eyed her with wariness, and she gave that smile of hers, which was sharp but contained some kind of sweet optimism too, as though she was willing me to believe her, or believe in her, or both.

  I’d noticed that same light in her son’s face, come to think of it; it was why I’d understood the point of him, despite his evasiveness and his lay-about persona. Once or twice I’d caught him with an expression of, what would you call it? Merriment is an old-fashioned word, but still.

  ‘Why did Joe not go to university?’ I asked. ‘All that time Maya was doing her BA, he worked in bars.’

  She made a dismissive sound. ‘Oof. He’s lazy. Not like Mikail.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sure. Mikail’s a software engineer. He always planned to do a PhD.’

  I was surprised. I’d formed an impression of Mikail as thuggish, and had assumed he’d be uneducated.

  ‘Mikail’s unbelievably bright,’ she said. ‘When he was a child he frightened me with his logic. He’s like his father. I used to think he was too logical.’

  ‘Can one be too logical?’

  Her expression was solemn, with that pedagogical look she had. ‘I think so. There should be room for the spiritual.’

  ‘But what is that, spirituality? What does the word even mean?’

  ‘I am a very spiritual person.’

  ‘Right. It goes with the meditation and the diet supplements.’

  She shrugged. The sweet smile. It was hard to annoy her.

  And here came unreality again. Was one self watching another? I looked at Mazarine’s large hands. Blunt nails cut short, a cheap bronze bracelet, a couple of hippyish silver rings to match her flimsy shell and bead necklace, oh go away, Inez, with your ‘eye for fashion’, what is that but a vehicle for malice, could it be that you’re stitched together by malice, your bones are made of malice, you get up in the morning for malice—

  ‘Frances? Do you have a headache?’

  Silence.

  ‘I’ll go and get you another coffee,’ she said, and I nodded and turned my attention to a couple nearby, a man and woman with their heads together, laughing over an iPad on the table in front of them, the woman screwing up her face and wiping her eyes, the man glancing sideways to gauge her reaction as he gently touched the screen; she let out a small strangled shriek and fell against him and he gripped her arm with a smirk of satisfaction.

  Remember what that’s like. Closeness, touch. Oh, Patrick …

  I went on looking at the woman, the way her whole body expressed laughter.

  Across the room, Mazarine, with two steaming mugs in her hands, making her way back through honey-coloured shafts of light from the high windows.

  If Maya really was missing, we should go to the police. We’d got distracted from what was the sane thing to do, Mazarine and I, caught up in a story we were creating between us.

  Worse, was there some hidden part of me that was busily fictionalising already, some other entity determined to have its way with the material we had so far? A self that agreed to not involving the police because, if we did, we would get an answer straight away (ch
eap hotel in Ibiza, holed up with boyfriend, having the time of my life, stop bothering me, Mum) and where was the drama in that?

  Who was the I who yearned to hold my daughter? Did that I cohabit with a different self, the writer, who watched and waited in order to requisition everything, every secret and injury and loss, for one purpose: the first novel? A self so single-minded, it would turn even the rawest, most private pain into fodder …

  And who, for that matter, was Mazarine Libard, with her opaque secretiveness and her blonde hair and her round figure, and her eye that had a flaw in it, a coloboma of the iris that was the same rare defect, it suddenly occurred to me, as could be noticed in photos of another missing daughter, a much younger one, the tragic Madeleine McCann, who’d been abducted in Portugal in 2007 and never seen again. What did that weird coincidence signify? It was certainly stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make it up.

  She put the mug in front of me. I said, ‘We need to go to the police.’

  ‘Have some coffee.’

  ‘We should go now and ask their advice.’

  What upset me most was the idea that some wayward, ungovernable part of myself would even consider making fiction out of the situation. How to explain that to Mazarine — to anyone?

  She glanced around. No one was paying attention to us. A spoon-wielding child bashed out a tattoo on its highchair; there was a loud crash from the kitchen; conversations and laughter echoed off the wooden walls.

  ‘You’re upset.’

  ‘I want my daughter.’

  ‘Frances. Here.’

  She offered me her large crumpled handkerchief and when I blenched she patiently found me a paper napkin, which I pressed to my eyes.

  ‘Why are we not asking the police for advice?’

  She put her hands around her mug, calm. ‘Well, we could, but I don’t think they’d do anything except fill out a form. Maya and Joe, we think of them as kids, but they’re adults. And also, Maya’s emailed you. It’d be hard to convince the police there’s something wrong with her message.’

  I ripped pieces off the napkin. ‘Are we making a drama out of this? Are we prolonging the agony? Are we inventing reasons to be worried?’