by Dirk Bogarde
A PERIOD
OF ADJUSTMENT
Dirk Bogarde
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 1
Giles said, ‘Well, now that you’ve found him and he’s dead, what will you do?’
We had just turned into rue des Serbes down towards the sea.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Does it mean we’ll have to go back? To England?’
‘Not sure yet.’
‘I expect so. I expect there will have to be a funeral, won’t there?’
‘I expect so.’
I turned right on to the Croisette, lights in my favour. People stood in impatient clusters waiting to cross to the beaches. Arms piled high with umbrellas, beach-balls, inflatable ducks and sea-lions, towels. Light breeze flicked and snapped the flags and pennants on the yachts sliding at anchor on the gently heaving water of the harbour. The sky was achingly blue: morning blue, clean, refreshed by the night. Men unravelled long skeins of net along the cobbles of the quay, stacked lobster pots, bawled and laughed to each other. They were still washing and sweeping the pavement and street outside the bars and restaurants along quai Saint-Pierre, sunlight sequinning the spilt water among the cobbles. It was still reasonably early; up on the clock of Le Suquet it said ten-thirty. But you couldn’t be absolutely sure of that really. Inaccurate.
It seemed to me that I had been gutted. I felt transparent. Hollow. Tap me and I’d sound like an empty vessel. I was driving all right, no problems, automatic reflexes were all intact, it was just that my real mind seemed to be mislaid. Elsewhere. I could hear Giles’s voice as if he were speaking into an empty bottle. A vaguely booming sound, far too adult for a nine-year-old boy to use.
‘What is AIDS?’ he said.
I turned left at the port, straight down to the sea and then right on boulevard Jean Hibert, and the Hôtel Méditerranée, along the coast road to La Napoule, past the Aérospatiale factory, the umbrella pines of the golf course. The traffic was already heavy.
‘Will? Is it something really bad? Something like … an appendix?’
‘Who said anything about AIDS?’
‘You did. Talking to that man, your friend at the clinic place. The tall man in the blazer.’
‘No such thing. I never said anything.’
‘“So that’s what AIDS does,” you said. And he said, “Yes. I did warn you.”’
‘Little pitchers have large ears.’ I had said it, I remembered. Just forgot to lower my voice, I suppose. I thought the boy was still in the car, but of course he’d got out and wandered about the parking. He was sitting in the shade under a mimosa bush – it was already hot – and he’d heard Aronovich and me talking. I’d forgotten. Naturally. I was not altogether used to having him around all the time.
‘Yes. Pretty awful. Shut up for a bit, will you?’
‘I thought it was. You look funny.’
‘Do I? What sort of “funny”?’
He shook his head, dismissing thought. ‘Nothing. Just funny. Nothing …’
‘Do you want a coffee? Orangina? Something?’
‘Well, we had breakfast ages ago … But I wouldn’t mind … A croissant? Can I have one? Some honey?’
At a small café by the harbour in La Napoule we sat under an umbrella at a tin table. A girl in flip-flops set a tray of things before me, cups, pot, so on. There were two other people having a late breakfast. Probably German or English. She in a white cardigan and bright floral print, he in baggy cotton trousers and an over-washed Aertex shirt. He studied a folded map; she sipped her coffee or whatever, contented, smiling vaguely, peering fatly at a happy world through pink-rimmed sunglasses.
Giles was slowly unwrapping a butter pat. ‘It’s frozen hard. Silly. Terribly hard to undo.’
‘Leave it in the sun for a bit. It’ll melt. Get soft …’
‘Was he a doctor or something? The man in white trousers and a blazer?’
‘No. No, he was a friend of Uncle James. Knew him very well, nice man. Didn’t you meet him once? At Jericho? When he came to collect some stuff? Paintings.’
Giles had unwrapped his butter and was pressing lumps of it on to a piece of warm croissant, with his thumb. He shook his head at my question. ‘I don’t think so. Perhaps I was with Dottie and Arthur or … I don’t know. I didn’t recognize him.’ He stuffed a piece of croissant into his mouth.
‘His name is Solomon Aronovich. Just keep your voice down. I think they may be English at that table there. Don’t look! Just talk, if you have to, about “ill” instead of the other thing. Okay? “Ill”.’
‘Instead of AIDS?’
‘Clever boy.’
‘I suppose now you’ll have to tell Florence, won’t you? I mean she’s his wife and so on. Did she know he was … “ill”? Well, dying really?’
‘No. No. She didn’t know. But she was sure that he was dead. She said so … she had a hunch. You know? People do get hunches like that. When he went away all that time ago, she was pretty certain he’d gone for good. Wasn’t around …’
‘But all the time he was at that clinic! Dead.’ He pushed another piece of honey-dripping croissant into his mouth.
The amazing insouciance of youth almost made me laugh. Almost. Yes, now I’d have to tell Florence. I’d have to tell my wife Helen – Giles’s mother – as well. Not that she’d care a jot, but she’d have to know that the ‘job’, my search for a missing little brother, had ended this morning. Now I would be free to return to family life and pick up the reins which I had laid down on the reception of a small package from France all those weeks ago. There on the kitchen table in Parsons Green. No duty to pay, an old key and a message: Don’t come to try and find me. I’ve gone away for ever. My house is yours. Here’s the key.
Tempted by that challenge I had come here to find him. And had. As Giles had so correctly said – dead. Up in the clinic, the Villa Mimosa, by the Observatoire in the hills above Cannes. Now all that I had to do was the tidying up. A funeral, of course; first tell his French family, and then decide just what to do myself. What to do with myself was going to be difficult. Helen had cleared off with her lover, a not frightfully savoury gentleman, big in commercial television, immensely rich, leaving me with what she had called a ‘sullen and sulky’ son of nine. I’d lived with him all his life but, frankly, hadn’t really bothered to get to know him. And here he was, right now, stuffing himself with honey and croissant, swinging his legs cheerfully, nodding about with contentment.
I’d agreed to let him stay in France with me while I searched for his uncle. I didn’t at all regret the decision: he was a pleasant companion, I didn’t see anything sullen or sulky about him. But I hadn’t actually ever seen Helen’s friend lying in her bed with his pig-tail untied. Giles had. So.
But now what? Florence was the non-wife of his Uncle James. By that I mean they had actually never been married in a church but had gone through some kind of larky betrothal on a rock on some beach one blazing summer day (I had a snapshot of the silly event to prove it), when they exchanged vows and some cheap metal ring before witnesses, and mingled their blood from a couple of midget scratches on their wrists. All very fey and idiotic. But it had made shacking up together and having a child – she was pregnant it seemed – more acceptable to the people of the village in which she had spent a great deal of her life. A small village full of small minds. Naturally. But the child was ill-born. Down’s Syndrome
. Adorable, as they so often are, if you could handle it; desperate and ruinous if not. Florence could. James could not. He had eventually fled, convinced that he was guilty, shattered that his own secret and ugly predilections for being bashed to hell by a strong male before other gloating males might very well have resulted in this deformity in his child. Seeking ‘punishment’ for this hideous frailty in his infant, he had succumbed entirely to depravity, and died from the loathsome spores which his passions had spawned. I suppose it was all pretty predictable, and it was equally predictable that I, for my part, had of course fallen very much in love with his bewildered wife, Florence. ‘Malchance’, as they say in France. Florence had not fallen in love with me. Ah, well…
Giles accidentally kicked me under the table. I slopped coffee down my wrist. He apologized, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a golden fringe of crumbs stuck under his lower lip.
‘Crumbs. On your chin. Wipe them off … Want any more?’
He shook his head, poked about in the little basket covered with a red gingham cloth. ‘No, thank you. What’s this?’
‘A brioche.’
‘Would I like it?’
‘I don’t know. You have them for breakfast, don’t you? At the hotel?’
He seemed to remember, nodded, pushed the basket aside, sat back in his chair squinting into the sun. ‘I expect you’ll have to say it all to Florence. Won’t you?’
‘I will. Yes.’
‘I bet she’ll be sad. Especially if she didn’t know. Very sad, I expect.’
‘Very sad. Look, do shut up for a bit. I really am trying to think things out and you go rabbiting on. Just for a little time? Look at the view, the sea, anything. Be a good chap. All right?’
He looked perfectly pleasant, nodded, swung his legs, sat on his hands, rested his head on his shoulder. I called the girl in flip-flops for the bill. The sunlight sparkled on the little puddles where she had recently washed down the terrace. The man in the Aertex shirt started folding his map; it cracked and rustled. The woman opened her bag, took out a compact, pushed the sunglasses high on her head, pursed her lips, bared them in a deathly plastic smile, snapped the compact shut, fumbled it into her bag. The girl brought the bill, I paid and we walked up to the car in the parking.
It only then dawned on me that we were on the wrong road. I was on the coast road, not the ‘Provençal’. Old habits died hard. I was familiar with the coast road, but it would take a couple of hours or more to get to Bargemon-sur-Yves that way.
‘We’re on the wrong road. Got to turn back into Cannes, get on to the autoroute.’
Giles had started to stoop into the car. ‘It’s jolly hot. Burning. The car, I mean, don’t touch it. I think this way is nicer. Must we go back?’
We must and we did; finally we got on to the slip road and started off again. James, the golden ewe lamb, my younger brother by about ten years, had not, as Aronovich had warned me on the telephone when he announced the death, looked remotely like anyone I had ever known. The sunken face, the dark skin, the grinning lips, stretched taut as thin elastic, the teeth like a mad beast’s, the sores. Almost no hair; the fair tumbling fall, so very much a feature of his conceit and youth, once worn like a glittering cap, was now so sparse and thin that the speckled scalp showed through it like a bird’s egg.
We had stood, Aronovich, his guardian and help, and I, silently in the small white room in the half-light thrown by the morning through tightly slatted shutters. There was nothing to say. Nothing at all. On a small glass shelf a shabby, canvas hand-grip, faded green, leather handles, an old label hanging still in the airless room. Aronovich nodded towards me across the thing on the bed, a sort of ‘Enough? Seen enough?’ look. I nodded back and he drew up the sheet and covered the deathly face and then took the hand-grip from the shelf and offered it to me.
‘This was his. All that he had left. You’d better take it. It has an out-of-date passport, the remainder of what little money he had, and … I don’t know … bits and pieces. Nothing much. A sketch-block, some pencils, a rubber …’
The bag was light, the things shuffled about. There was no clothing of any description, but the old family photograph from Dieppe which I had given Aronovich only the day before, and which he had begged for, was there. I took it out. It had been removed from its frame to copy. The copy which he had had done was not there.
‘You asked to copy this. For James? Did you?’
‘I did. I told you. I was just in time … he was very moved to see it, he had always kept it. He asked no questions, he had not the strength anyway. Just held it as close to himself as he could. He kissed it…’
‘A reminder of a time of happiness. The family on the beach at Dieppe; Mama, Papa, our sister Elspeth, James and me. God! So long ago. Where is the copy?’
Aronovich shrugged gently, began to open the door into the corridor. ‘I have it. You do not mind? I would like to keep it if I may? Everything else of his is in the bag you have … Shall we leave now?’
I looked down at the covered body of my younger brother. His nose thrust in a peak through the sheet, there was a vague outline of folded hands. I followed Aronovich into the polished, shadowy corridor.
‘Of course, keep it. Thank you for this stuff … no clothing? Nothing?’
‘Oh. Some bits. A couple of shirts, jeans, underpants. At my flat.’
‘He lived with you?’
‘Towards the end, yes. Before, some friends with a small villa gave him shelter. But when things became too difficult … I took him, until we got him here.’
We had reached the bright, glassy, light hall of the clinic. People in white, a girl behind a high ebony desk, telephones purring, a glass tank of darting tropical fish, flowers. It was almost like an hotel, not a place to which one came to die hideously from a vicious, untreatable disease. There was not the slightest sign down here of the crumbling destruction in the rooms above.
Aronovich pushed wide the glass doors into the sunbleached gravel courtyard. The air was warm, scented, our feet scattered little stones. The car I rented from the mayor of my village sparked and glittered in the morning light. For a moment we stood together in silence. He sniffed the air, I took a deep breath, expelling the imagined odour of ether or formaldehyde from my nostrils. There was nothing, at that moment, left to say to each other. With his help I had located James, and with his help James had managed to die at the very least in comfort and with some tattered shreds of dignity. He was a good man. Thinking that, I smiled at him, one of those idiotic, embarrassed, very English smiles. Meaning a great deal more than I could at that moment say. Instead he shook his head sadly and murmured, ‘Pneumocystis pneumonia. It sounds so simple.’
‘So that’s what AIDS does. God Almighty …’
‘I did warn you.’
‘I know, but you see now that it was essential? I mean, I had to see him. Thank you. Inadequate. I’ll call you when I have -’
He interrupted me with a brief movement of his hand. ‘Call when you have settled things. I will call you if there are any immediate problems. We will have to move reasonably quickly, you know? A funeral. Cremation? It would be wiser …’ He smoothed his hair, fished a key ring from his pocket, smiled, nodded, turned away crossing back to the glass doors of the clinic.
I walked, carrying the battered bag, towards the car, baking in the sun, and heard Giles call out from under the bush in the centre of a raised bed in the courtyard.
‘I’m here! Will! In the shade. The car’s too hot. You’ve been ages.’ He came scuffling through the gravel. The gently buffeting wind, the fag end of a mistral, ruffled his hair. ‘I left the doors open, to get some air. All right?’
‘Yes, all right. Probably run down the battery. However …’ I slung the hand-grip into the back seats. ‘Come along, get in, let’s get home.’
‘Was it all right? In there? Did you see him? Uncle James?’
‘Yes. We were too late, Giles. He was dead. But I saw him, yes. Paid
my respects.’
‘I bet it was a terrible shock. But you knew he was ill, so that was good.’
‘Yes. That was good. Now we have to find our way back down to the town.’
I began winding slowly down the hill under a vast canopy of wind-tossing green leaves, shadows freckled and danced over the road. At the side a small milestone, red and white, indicated that Cannes was 4 kilometres ahead, and ahead of that I had some explaining to do. To Florence, to Madame Mazine who ran our hotel, to Helen in Marbella, to Arthur and Dottie who had been waiting for Giles to begin his French lessons. It was already after ten: it would be well after noon by the time we got back to the village. But at least my main job had been accomplished: I’d found James. All that was left to me now was a tidying-up job. No problem.
Except that, along the way, I had suddenly acquired the custody, as far as he was concerned anyway, of my neglected son. I had someone in my life after all.
He gave a great shout of delight suddenly as we rounded a bend: ‘Bamboo! Look at it! A forest, huge, thick as your leg! It’s so high … Bamboo! Awesome!’
I’d have to adjust to things now. Like Giles.
The mistral, which had been blowing hard when we left for Cannes earlier in the morning, had now exhausted itself and, apart from an occasional snarling gust, had drifted off to sea leaving a litter of branches, twigs and broken tile all along the way.
Dottie Theobald was tying up the lengths of vine which had fallen and now trailed across her terrace, a fat bunch of raffia in the pocket of her cotton pinafore. She looked up with some surprise, as I pulled into their narrow track leading up to the house, holding on to her straw hat, the little gusts of left-over mistral still puffing and tumbling into the rose bushes. She hurried down towards us, a pair of old secateurs jiggling in her hand.
‘Terribly late! Goodness, I have been worried! It’s almost lunchtime.’ And as Giles scrambled out of the car, she said, ‘Arthur’s up at the aviary. If you have the energy, run up and see him.’ She turned to me as Giles started up the little hill towards the ornate bird-cages and the vague shape of a man moving about beside them. I began to apologize, but she waved me silent, and started up to the terrace. ‘Don’t explain anything. Just so long as all is well. One does get such a fright at sudden changes. Do you know what I mean? Question of age. Unprepared in the midst of one’s apparent serenity. Do sit down …’