by Carla McKay
After his little contretemps with Judith, Lance was in no mood for inane social chatter as expertly practised by most of the daft women at these gatherings – and not a few of the men. Nor did he fancy squaring up to Mickey Mouse just yet – though he relished the thought of a future encounter. Bloody little red-faced arriviste with his mousey wife – if she was his wife. Typical of the kind of people with money nowadays.
Ducking inside the house to avoid Jean’s nitwit friend Peggy approaching with the ghastly Bailey pair, he made for Alan’s study where he knew the whisky was kept, and poured himself a slug.
Damn that woman, he thought, thinking of Judith. His heart was pumping uncomfortably and he knew his blood pressure had soared another few degrees. Just what was she bloody implying, and just what had she seen in Vevey? Looking at himself in the mirror above Alan’s mantelpiece, from habit, he noted with annoyance and not a little alarm that he looked sweaty and dishevelled. If he were back in London, he would adjust his trademark bow tie at this point, but as it was his ‘fun’ Hawaiian shirt was sticking unattractively to his chest and his arms protruded fatly like hairy ginger logs from the too tight short sleeves.
Really, leisure clothes did not suit him, he allowed, not for the first time. He didn’t look… well, he didn’t look important enough to put it bluntly. After all, at his age with a fine career at the top of the advertising tree behind him, and a splendid one as an author and eminence grise on la belle France in front of him, he should, and deserved to, cut a dash. He must make a shopping trip to Montpellier soon and get some summer suits made up.
Sinking into one of Alan’s faux-leather armchairs, he reproached himself – an unfamiliar response – with getting so angry with Judith so quickly. It looked bad. What was it about that woman that got up his nose so much? He had the impression that she was sneering at him, perhaps that was it. She was aloof and not easy to know, unlike the rest of the gang out here who were only too bloody easy to know. He felt as though she had got the measure of him and didn’t admire what she saw. He could see that she had the kind of quick intelligence that could be a challenge to him, and he wasn’t used to women challenging him.
Well, he’d show her. He too, had got the measure of her. She wasn’t quite what she seemed, he was sure of that. Why had she given up teaching so young? She had something to hide – or if she didn’t, she must have been born anxious. She looked like a frightened rabbit at times – the kind of rabbit Lance would like to squash under the heel of his boot. You could bet your bottom dollar she was a virgin too, which is why any hint of sexual activity was distasteful to her. Her mouth had actually puckered like a cat’s bottom when she was talking about seeing him and Sophie. Silly cow.
And what of it, if he and Soph had been in a bit of a clinch. It wasn’t as if he had done anything to encourage her. The girl was like a bitch on heat. Probably all those teenage hormones rioting. It was only natural that she wanted to experiment and found an older, wiser man like himself more alluring than the spotty young boobies of her own age who could only grunt by way of communication and wouldn’t be able to afford to buy her a drink.
True, he wouldn’t want Rex and Camilla knowing about his ‘tendresse’ with their daughter, but dammit, the girl was old enough to look out for herself even if she was underage technically. He was looking forward to their planned dinner together before she went back to school. He would take her to a little place he knew by the beach where they weren’t likely to be spotted by anyone. And after dinner, perhaps, a moonlit stroll along the beach…
Anticipated pleasure at the thought of this was interrupted by footsteps in the house and Jenny Knight calling him. Hurriedly he drained his whisky and left the study. More shaken than he cared to reflect on, he decided to head down to the local bar and find Roland, the elderly owner’s son, a man of about his own age with whom he found he could converse easily in a mixture of French and English. Not only did they like drinking together when the going got tough at home, in Lance’s case, but he had also discovered that Roland and he shared an interest in pubescent girls.
Roland had taken him into his living quarters above the bar one day some weeks back and shown him some magazines and a website on his computer that featured some very interesting material. He also said that he knew of a club in Montpellier where the two of them might go one day soon and explore the situation further.
Yes, thought, Lance. I’ll head off to Roland’s now for a nightcap. It’s good to have at least one friend and ally in this kingdom of bloody fools.
‘Just off to get a cigar at the bar,’ he called to Jean on the way out. ‘Don’t wait up for me. I’ll find my own way home.’
6
London
Campion and co. had its head office in Kensington Church Street, handily placed for expensive restaurants where Lance took his prospective clients for long, self-congratulatory lunches.
In the mid-90s his advertising and marketing company had probably reached its peak. Lance had capitalised on pitching for accounts that more principled companies wouldn’t touch, and the clients were so indebted to him that they paid over the odds. Plus, Lance was smart. He knew his market and his charm, facility with words and general chutzpah won him accounts in the first place. After that, his snappy slogans and successful campaigns kept them coming back for more. Plus, of course, he knew his clients’ weaknesses. And it was here that Lance emerged triumphant. He knew how to make a virtue of the less ethical aspects of a business so that, recently for example, he had successfully promoted an armaments fair in London; turned around the finances of a dodgy steroid manufacturer; and recruited hundreds of new members into a cult church where, in time-honoured fashion, vulnerable young people were parted from any money they had.
‘Imagination, dear’, that’s what I’ve got, he explained to his increasingly tiresome wife Jean who didn’t even try to understand what he did for a living. But she understood more than he thought. ‘What Lance is really good at is marketing himself’, she disloyally told her mother once – her mother, who couldn’t fathom why her once beautiful and sought-after daughter was now shackled to a man who clearly bullied her and had now alienated their only child too. Sarah was just fifteen and had turned from a bright, enquiring, enthusiastic girl into a sullen, withdrawn, tearful soul who distressed her mother and angered her father.
But Lance had other things on his mind these days. He was hopeful of landing a really big fish – a publisher called Kevin Prince, who had a stranglehold on the young teen magazine market. Prince had eleven titles in all with oily names like Sweetpea and Spicechick and they absolutely raked it in.
What they were peddling, Lance found to his surprise, was sex. Even he, man of the world, had been astonished by the nakedly raunchy content of some of them. He had assumed, had he thought about it, they would be full of make-up tips and harmless gossip about boybands. What he found was porn dressed up as ‘Health issues’. ‘Why oral sex is good for you’; ‘Yoga to make you orgasmic’; ‘Sandwich anyone? Why threesomes are cool’ were sample headlines. Surely the parents of these 12-17 year old girl target audiences were unaware of what their little chicks were reading? But not for much longer, he thought. Already some concerned organisations like Family Comes First were causing problems for Kevin by speaking out in the media about the ‘offensive, predatory, demeaning’ material in such magazines, and Kevin was understandably rattled.
‘What we need mate,’ he said to Lance, over a splendid lunch in Launceston Place, ‘is to have answers ready when we’re attacked. I want you to prime our editors on how to cope with hostile enquiries. You know the sort of thing– how we’re working to Department of Health guidelines to ensure young girls know how to take responsibility for themselves; how we actually promote safe sex, and then, ‘course, only for those over the legal age; how we tackle serious issues that they’re too afraid to discuss with parents and teachers and such like… I want our agony aunts to emerge as caring counsellors rather than sex-mad porn
queens.
‘But we’re gonna have to be a bit more careful’, he conceded. ‘I’m gonna suggest that we start carrying more book reviews or something, so we can point to our unbeatable ‘arts coverage’’. Here he gave a wheezy laugh and stubbed out his cigar. ‘I take it we’re on the same wavelength aren’t we Lance old man? You should be able to put a more respectable spin on things? You’re good with words. All this recent fuss is just a storm in a teacup I hope. Once it all dies down and parents forget to check their kids’ reading matter, we’ll be back in business. Come to think of it, they should be celebrating that their kids are reading anything – right?’
‘Of course,’ said Lance smoothly, thinking that priming some of the bird-brain editors he’d been introduced to in Kevin’s office would be an uphill task. Perhaps he could hold up autocue cards for them if they went on air. He doubted whether many of them could pronounce ‘responsibility’ let alone know what it meant. ‘Don’t worry, Kevin. I know just how to handle this.’
Still, this would be a useful exercise for him, he thought. This world of teen magazines had confirmed for him something he had long thought: teenage girls are up for it, even those of ten or eleven. They were gagging for sex and the fact that they bought these magazines in their thousands just went to prove it. A nasty saying he had once heard came to mind: ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher’. Just so.
In the past he had justified his interest in pubescent girls to himself by quoting the classical poets. Andrew Marvell for instance had fallen in love with the 15-year-old daughter of a friend of his and written about her without fear of condemnation in his poem ‘Young Love’. In fact his poetry, and that of many others who were now deified as great poets, swarmed with references to tender shepherdesses and young nymphs. This, of course, was before the bloody nanny state and its crass laws governing the age of consent. Lance knew he sailed close to the wind, very close, in this day and age, and knew he had to be careful in pursuing his interests.
Only recently, he had had a scary brush with the law over that silly little tart, Louise, a schoolfriend of Sarah’s. She’d been up for it all right but at the crucial moment had kicked up a terrible fuss and there’d been a discreet visit to his office by Mr Plod in the form of a plain clothes officer. Charges, thankfully, were not going to be pressed, but he was left in no doubt that if anything of this kind were reported again, there would be real trouble.
If he hadn’t been so busy pursuing the Kevin Prince account, he’d have pointed out in his defence to the police the kind of material that these young girls liked to read, not to mention act upon. Really, the whole thing was ridiculous.
7
The main square of La Prairie resembled that of nearly every other medieval village for miles around. It was dominated by the church with its elegant wrought iron bell tower and clock that not only chimed every hour, but also chimed it five minutes before the hour. Judith had asked various people why this was so and only elicited the reply that it was the custom in the Languedoc for the church clocks to chime twice over, once, presumably to warn you that the hour approached, and once more to herald the actual arrival of the hour.
This was all very well and quaint, thought Judith, but not so charming for those who suffered from insomnia. At midnight the huge, creaky gong had only just come to the end of its seemingly interminable tolling, when it cranked up and delivered all over again. In England, she had read in local newspapers of long-standing feuds between those in the village who wanted the church bells to chime, and those who wanted them silenced, at least at night. She reckoned it would end in murder down one day down here.
Beside the church there was an area of pollarded trees and benches where the village elders gathered, tiny old men in flat caps who had lived in the same village all their lives and now had no need to speak to each other, having long ago said all there was to say. Across the small street was a patisserie for the daily baguette and a Tabac. The real focal point of the village, however, was the Café Le Square, a modest affair, with a bar and a few sticky tables inside, and a few more plastic tables outside under awnings.
When she first arrived, Judith had been too intimidated to go in and brave the stares. The bar was peopled every morning from 7am onwards by a surly group of locals known by Lance as the pastis and Gauloises crowd. All were men of an indeterminate age; all wore caps of some kind; all smoked, and all of them stared, menacingly, at anyone else who came in. They appeared to be fixtures, for whatever time of the day, Judith passed by on her way to get her bread, they were there. In time, she learned that the stares weren’t so much menacing as curious, or not even that. ‘People just do stare down here, Judith,’ Alan told her when she mentioned it. ‘They are peasants, literally, and no-one’s taught them not to. Just as well they don’t go on the London tube – they’d be beaten up. Also, you have to remember that most of them have lived here all their lives and it’s only in the past few years that the place has opened up at all, not just to foreigners, but, worse, to Parisians and other northerners seeking the good life. And I can tell you that they detest the Parisians far, far more than you.’
After that, Judith would brave the occasional mid morning café crème whilst reading the local paper. At least, I don’t bring in the Daily Mail she thought. It was extraordinary how preoccupied the English were out here by events back home. Most of the English national papers could be bought in the bigger villages, and were, by the dozen.
Once, soon after she arrived in the village, she passed by to see Lance and some his cronies enjoying the set lunch there. ‘Come and join us, Judith’, cried Lance. ‘You should be here – this is your local. You can have three decent courses and all the wine you can drink for just 12 Euros.’ On the point of declining, not least because she had already eaten, Lance added, ‘And come and meet Roland who runs this celebrated eaterie with his father.’
Roland was a dark swarthy man in his fifties who gave her a cursory handshake. After a few moments, he went back inside saying to Lance ‘A bientôt, Lance. See you later.’ ‘I come here to enjoy a jar with Roland in the evenings sometimes,’ explained Lance. ‘I think it’s important to mix with the locals. Roland’s all right, although his father, Jean-Baptiste, who owns the joint, is a curmudgeonly old sod. Apparently he was some kind of great war hero in the Resistance, except that now he seems to be resisting the English as well.’
‘Was there much Resistance activity down in this area then?’ asked Judith, interested. ‘Oh quite a bit,’ said Lance. ‘Rumour has it that Jean-Baptiste, who must have been in his early twenties then was involved with a local group who tried to blow up part of the railway line between here and Beziers when a German ammunition freight train was passing through. But they were betrayed by someone. He managed to escape, but all his friends were shot.
‘The trouble with any resistance activity like that was that the reprisals were terrible. Apart from shooting the participants, the Germans would take it out on the families and indeed on the whole community. They had a very hard war down here. At one point, Roland, told me, the only source of protein they got was from the wild snails they collected. No wonder they’re so fond of the bloody things.’
The day following the barbeque was surprising in a number of ways. The first surprise was that light was not streaming in through the shutters as it normally did. That could mean that a storm was about to break and bring some much needed rain. It also meant that Judith awoke much later than normal from an unusually heavy sleep, the kind where your legs feel welded to the bed. She lay without moving for at least twenty minutes thinking over the night before.
The second surprise was that as she mulled over Lance’s reaction to her suggestion that he had been in Vevey with Sophie, she no longer felt any fear. Indeed, all the uncertainties and anxiety she had suffered over the last year appeared to have fallen away – and to have fallen away just when one would think they should have intensified.
It’s as if, she thought to herself, I hav
e spent the last year sensing that I had an enemy and yet not knowing the nature of him. Now, I know, only too well who my enemy is. It’s true I don’t know what he wants of me, or why, but I know something better than that. I know that he too has something to hide. He may scare me, but I, sure as hell, now scare him back.
This revelation of some kind of score settled revived her spirits and she hurried to dress, looking forward to settling down to work on her latest poem, a romantic epic this time in the style of one of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Her own idyll wasn’t to last for long, however. Her telephone rang, a source of pleasure for cheery souls, no doubt, but usually a harbinger of doom for solitary depressives like Judith who imagined, often rightly, that unexpected telephone calls spelt anything from annoyance to disaster.
This one was at the less catastrophic end of the scale but it was certainly irritating. Gillian Evans apologising to Judith for disturbing her Sunday, but – that correct supposition out of the way – could she possibly find the time to see Rose that day who was struggling with her Eng. Lit. revision and wanted to ask her about her Shakespeare set book. It wouldn’t take long, Gillian promised. Only Rose was so grumpy at the moment and Gillian put it down to anxiety over her imminent exams. It would be just so helpful, knowing Judith had been a teacher, if she could spare her an hour later on.