“Francoise, you should keep your imaginings for your writing.” Georgina says.
“Vincent believes me, don't you?” Francoise insists, waving towards me. “Vincent pretends to be so cynical, but his mind is alive with possibilities, isn't it true? He inherits that from his father.”
Georgina looks carefully at me as I smile, aware of many eyes on me. “It must be one of the few things we do share.”
Georgina laughs dryly, blushing on my behalf. “He's being modest. You've embarrassed him!”
The hostess chuckles to herself and places a glass in my hand. “Your father is in the country at the moment, isn't he? Perhaps he will surprise us with a visit tonight.”
“Don't tease him,” Georgina says.
“You wouldn't do that to me,” I say to Francoise. She holds my gaze and then looks bemused.
I can see on the grass below us seven ice sculptures, slender and glassy, contrasted against the inky black of the garden. A creamy cloud surrounds them, from the steam rising off their bodies. The drink suddenly possesses me, and for a second it appears that one of them is moving nearer to me, advancing clumsily in our direction before settling back into its icy frame.
“It is a strange evening, isn't it?” Georgina whispers, as her scent passes behind me. I steady myself as she moves to my side. “These early summer nights have a mercurial quality unlike any other time of year. It makes my mind shimmer with possibilities.” I look up, surprised at how close to her I suddenly feel. She smiles, holding my gaze for a second, and then looks over the edge of the balcony.
“The feeling I get at the start of the summer never ceases to amaze me. It's as if the world shrugs off its shrouds, no longer bashful about how beautiful it is.” I smile in a way which I hope shows agreement. “If it's any comfort, I think you are the opposite of your father,” she then says; as if acknowledging something that's plaguing me.
“I find that quite comforting.”
She meets my eye and smiles. “We are so similar, you and I. We are both expected to be pleased to live in a parent's shadow. As if it is some mighty achievement just to be spawned by someone the public recognises!” She sips her glass three times in quick succession, as though steeling herself from this thought.
“I agree. My father's legacy is a tricky thing to constantly run from. Unlike most men, who merely have to achieve something, I have to write three masterpieces instead of his mere two before I can have any impact on the world.”
“Yes.” Her eyes pass over to Barbara, who is laughing loudly at a card trick Franz is showing her. Barbara pretends to find his awkwardness amusing and clasps her hands to his arm. Franz looks back at her with a steeliness that is quite disconcerting. Barbara drapes her arm across his shoulder before Franz looks over at the two of us, suddenly caught by Georgina's gaze, as his fingers reach up to hold her mother's hand. Georgina looks away sharply. A breeze lifts the curls from her shoulder, exposing the pale skin on her neck. She suddenly looks very vulnerable. “Isn't she a little old to be a groupie? And isn't Franz a little too familiar with her to be this easily seduced?”
“Perhaps she just likes being the centre of attention.”
“She's always had to be the centre of attention. At least your father actually achieved something. I mean, like you I'm not a fan of his work. Too self-important and heavy for me. But unlike my mother, he did at least achieve his potential. She's so obsessed with who she might have been.”
I turn my head away from Barbara, and notice how little her daughter resembles her. “Well she made three films, didn't she? They did reasonably well, didn't they?”
“I suppose. But were they in any way memorable? I think it's better to leave an undiscovered batch of outsider art than a familiar bundle of mediocrity. Were her films, in any way, art?” A pause hangs in the air. We both catch each others eye and laugh quickly, as if the same thought has occurred to both of us but should not be said.
“I can't sit through them,” she hisses, leaning back. “Those terrible, sexist light comedies. She was just a pale imitation of Anita Ekberg, making sure her cleavage was on show as she laughed coquettishly throughout. At least with Marilyn Monroe you got a sense of compromised intellect. With my mother…” she pauses as Barbara whoops at another failed card trick, “there's nothing behind the eyes. She represents to me the shabbiest type of film, where achieving the demands its surface requires, supersedes the importance of creating any resonance. At least your father created work of some substance. In total she achieved nothing, and yet I'm forced to live in the shadow of it. The shadow of nothing.”
“He loves the thought that my achievements will never equal his,” I respond without missing a beat. Her eyes widen, as if she recognises this nascent anger. “He lambastes whatever writing of mine he can get his hands on, with criticisms hollow enough to always be entirely unconstructive.”
“They don't want us to do well, do they? My mother wouldn't even let me be an actress. It scared her that I was so literate; she couldn't get her head around it. She says she was just concerned that showbiz would chew me up and spit me out, but I know now she was just so scared that I might make a success of it. She talks about the world of cinema as if it's a conquest. A past lover, clamouring to get back in through the window. But the truth is, once she fell pregnant with my brother and I, the offers dried up. Straight away. Her appeal was as an untarnished, sexy girl-next-door. The idea of her having a family clashed too much with her image. Her window of opportunity passed… thanks to me and him.”
I watch Barbara pulling her dress behind her, sticking her breasts out over the balcony as Franz chases her. She is laughing uproariously, as though thoroughly enjoying a man giving her his undivided attention. “Francoise wants us to play some party games later, which will doubtless involve a little acting. Did you see my mother's eyes light up when she suggested it? She'll play every part as if it's the title role in Some Like It Hot. We'll see more of her cleavage than is strictly necessary throughout it, and she'll embarrass me. I promise you, all of those things will happen.”
I pause for a second, as both of us watch the grim flirtation between Franz and her mother play out.
“Do you ever feel like she gives you a hard time for just being born?” I whisper, half-hoping my words will be drowned out by Barbara's laughter.
“Yes. Ye s . Even now. ‘An actress' figure cannot endure childbirth,' she says. ‘My time ended the moment I had you both.'” Georgina hisses the words, her voice a prissy caricature of her mother's. “She doesn't even mention my brother; we barely ever talk about him anymore.”
“He died just after you were both born, didn't he?”
“Yes. But it's as if he never happened. She wasn't ready to be a mother, and didn't want to be, and he died weeks after coming into the world. His death was just the first barrier between me and her.”
“I'm sorry,” I say. “Relationships with parents are almost always difficult.”
She nods her agreement. “What about your father? Does he ever support your writing?”
I quote his comments on my last piece precisely. It surprises me how exact the memory of insult is. The tone, the inflections, the emphases. Georgina laughs sympathetically, throwing her hair back – which in my memory splays over the light from the lamp behind her. It stays there like a snapshot, the fine gossamers layered against the canvas of the rich, dark sky. When the sensations from that moment have settled I look back at her, clutching a cocktail to her chest, her head bowed as she watches Franz circle her mother. “Don't stand here watching them,” I admonish. “Do you remember the summer house down in Francoise's garden?” My words tear her from her preoccupation for a second and she smiles, as if arrested by the arrival of comforting memory.
“Do you think it is still there?” she asks, a little guiltily. “Let's find out.”
As I walk deeper into the garden, I remember how Georgina and I had been the first to arrive at The Fountains that afternoon. The two of us had
stayed out on that lawn for as long as we could, until Francoise drew us inside, away from the fading heat.
It had felt good that afternoon to leave my usual routine. As I walked onto the sunlit lawn of The Fountains I felt as if I had entered a sanctuary. Though I usually felt taunted by uncertainty, here it no longer seemed pertinent. To reside in that house for one evening made me believe it inevitable that one day all my ambitions would be fulfilled; that my time outside The Fountains was a mere testing ground. It seemed I had returned home, to a place where all the usual questions were now irrelevant.
Seeing Francoise reclining on the lawn, sipping a glass of iced tea with the sun on her face, I felt I had entered a world of elegance which I could only be privy to by possessing some talent. I knew then that over the course of the party I would try to find a way to permanently inhabit this world. I suspected that by giving me a glimpse of what success might offer, Francoise had encouraged such rumination. As the gates closed behind me, sealing away my problems for one glorious evening, Georgina waved a tennis racket in my direction and Francoise peered up from the wide rim of her summer hat; I instantly felt lighter.
That afternoon, watched by Francoise's cool maternal gaze, Georgina and I reclaimed The Fountains. We played tennis on the mossy and overgrown court with battered rackets, ducking and diving over the drooping net and blasting winning shots into the overgrowth of trees that surrounded it. We found abandoned chalets at the end of the grounds, filled with decaying newspapers left by the previous owner, which Francoise had doubtless been too laconic to remove. As we circled a forgotten tree house in a wooded copse Georgina notes that ‘Francoise has probably never even bothered to walk through the grounds. She would have seen a few charming photos of it, in a carefully designed flier, and fallen in love with the hallway'. I had to concede that she was probably right.
The Fountains had its own voice that seemed to breathe from every corner. The more overgrown and neglected it revealed itself to be, the more that voice grew pronounced, steady and assuring. The Fountains was full of secrets, and however hard we tried to see every corner of it, it became increasingly apparent that it was too ephemeral a place to cover. As our time there progressed, more and more of it was alluded to until it seemed bigger than any of us. I would think we had seen every inch of it, just to find out about another corner essential to its essence. Like the feeling of success it evoked, The Fountains was a place where timeless resonance was taken for granted.
Francoise's butler had been looking for us for half an hour before he was able to call us inside to dress for dinner. Georgina and I had taken the iced tea Francoise had offered and lain by an empty swimming pool at the foot of the garden. In the afternoon sun the walls of the pool were coloured by precise maps of algae. Nonetheless, Georgina found it charming and she insisted that we unbutton our shirts and lay on our backs beside it. We looked up at the clouds and played our favourite childhood game, trying to find random shapes within each of them. At first I had resisted relaxing there, thinking there was something tragic and uneasy about the pool.
The same feeling returned to me as Georgina led me into the garden, which was this time cloaked in darkness. I couldn't help feeling uncertain about entering it at night, even following someone that I knew as intimately as her.
Georgina lifts her dress as she steps a few paces in front of me. As we draw nearer I see that each of the seven sculptures have been made to depict one of The Intimates.
“Have you seen this?” she asks. “Only Francoise would think of doing something like this for her guests. Which one is supposed to be me?”
The iced version of James clenches a paint brush, every limb of his elongated to the point of caricature, making him seem made purely of sinew and muscle. The sculpture of Barbara is pressing her hand to the skin above her bosom, her mouth open wide in rapture, as if she is embracing the adulation of an audience. Georgina stares directly into the face of her mothers sculpture. “No, still nothing behind the eyes.”
We weave in and out of the silver steam emanating from each precisely chiselled form, Georgina posing and laughing as she loops her arm through Francoise's model, a picture of Gallic poise, taller than the rest. Graham's statue holds aloft two surgical knives, and appears ready to plummet them back into the prostrate torso of some invisible patient. “Here you are, looking rather handsome, but a little short.” My sculpture has a Kenneth Williams-like look of camp disgust on his face. “I think you're being aloof in this one,” Georgina says, walking towards the statue of herself.
“I don't have a profession I could be attached to, hence the lack of props,” I offer. The model of Georgina stands on the end, clutching what appears to be a wilting bunch of flowers under one arm, holding one out rather desperately. There appears to be a rather pleading look upon her face.
“There I am, touting whatever wares I can give away. Look, there's the summer house.”
At the end of the lawn, only just visible amongst the vegetation covering its decaying façade, is the summer house. Georgina steps towards it, abandoning her heels in the spectral grass that's illuminated by the light from the house. “I can't believe it's still here,” she says, moving to the swings next to it, which I remember her favouring during summer parties. I join her as she slips into one of the seats.
“Do you remember us being unsure about Francoise at first, until we had that party here during the first year?” I ask her.
“I was more uncertain of her than anyone. But at that party she seemed to treat us as though we were the people we one day would be, rather than the snotty students we actually were. There was something insightful about her, and it made me warm to her a little more.”
“I remember her offering expensive bottles of champagne, and us spilling them onto one another on the lawn as we didn't know how to open them. I also remember you and I accidently smashing one of her windows during a game of tennis. But she just waved her hand nonchalantly and said, ‘Try to take out one of the top ones. That would really impress me.'”
“Yes – I remember that. All of us lounging about on the grass in our tight fitting school sports gear, drinking champagne from teacups. And the whole time, me looking so suspiciously at her.”
“I remember that,” I laugh.
“I felt she lacked the history the rest of us had. And then I realised during the party that this summer house was an exact copy of the one your mother had made for us as children. It seemed a sign – that perhaps we should allow her into our gang.”
“I remember my mum designing that summer house on a napkin during a garden party, when she couldn't bear to speak to any of the other adults there. I was sitting on her lap and telling her to add more turrets to it, and I remember thinking that my father would never allow it to be made. I was wrong – but then she always was the only one able to convince him to do anything.”
“Your mum was the only parent who would ever play with us children. You remember that time we all went away to the lakes, don't you? Your family, my family, Carina and James' family. Your mum was the only one who spent more time with the children than discussing politics with the elders.”
“I don't blame her for wanting to stay away from them that summer.”
“I know. That was the summer they all decided to take a firm hand with our lives, wasn't it? We didn't know at the time what all those discussions were about, but when we went back to our usual lives we soon found out. They'd agreed to make all of us into child prodigies. I think those discussions cost each of us a rather large portion of our childhoods.”
“My mum was the only one who voiced dissent at that agreement. Who said that it was ridiculous to expect little children to be brilliant when they were only just finding their feet. And after that the other parents shut her out. She was so different to all of the other parents there, she was a mother. When my father used to rage at me for being lost in a daydream, she used to tell him that it was a good thing, a sign that I would be as creative as him. But he used
to hate hearing that. He always said a man should be focused, pragmatic. That she was far too soft on me, and when she died I think he felt that he now had the chance to compensate for how much I'd been indulged. He became even more forthright in his opinions of me. I'm sure he felt a keen sense of responsibility to her, to put me on the right path, even if it was not how she would have done it.
“She never pushed me; she wanted to leave me the space to find my own way. When she passed away there was no longer someone telling me that it was alright to feel as lost as this, that one day I would find my place in the world. That I didn't have to carry this enormous burden on my shoulders; that everything would eventually work itself out. I've tried so hard to remember her voice, but over the years it has gradually faded into the past. Always drowned out by louder voices, voices less distinct than hers.”
“She was a wonderful woman Vincent. A single voice of sanity, particularly during that holiday. There was a lot going on behind the scenes that summer, wasn't there?”
“There was. I won't forget that in a hurry. That was the holiday when your mum fell out spectacularly with my Dad, and the atmosphere – ”
“It was awful. I remember thinking that this must be what a divorce feels like – they were just so bitter and hateful towards each other. What was so sad about it was that the two of them went back further than anyone, they are the reason our little group actually exists today. Your mum acted in the first play he ever wrote, didn't she? And yet on that holiday your mum was so scared of him – hysterically, ridiculously scared. And all the parents took sides, and had to fall into one camp or the other. The start of that summer was all about diving in rivers, learning to catch fish, making snorkels out of the hollow branches of trees. The other half was like being on a daytime chat show.”
The Intimates Page 3