by Dirk Bogarde
‘I understand. I’ll never speak of it. I promise.’
She smoothed the flowered voile over her knees, shook her head sadly.
‘Too good to waste, so I wear it here. I am still too hot.’ Giles slithered across the terrace, a tin of biscuits in his hand and raced down to the gate. ‘The energy! I so hate being my age. Now . . .’ She eased herself in the chair, plucking at the ridge of steel which was her corset, poking through the thin floral voile. ‘I am alerted, by my notaire, Monsieur Duvernoise, that a sum of money has been paid into my bank. I imagine that you know what that is?’ I nodded. ‘And I have the receipt from a jeweller in Cannes. Thank you. I am always amazed how much people value these vulgar trinkets. A gold watch! So much! Boff! … It is disgraceful.’
‘It had a jewel for each quarter. A ruby, a sapphire, an emerald and a diamond to mark mid-day. It was rare. Especially commissioned.’
‘I prefer not to know. But I am not proud. I accept the money for Thomas.’
‘Not a great amount, Madame. The best I could do.’
‘I am grateful.’ She looked up into the heavy canopy of the vine above. ‘I am sorry about the de Terrehaute affair, he seemed a pleasant boy and she was, I imagine, quite charming. Ah well. . .’
From far across the garden, behind the motionless fig trees, a clatter of laughter, a voice calling, Giles shouting, Tow! Pow! Pow!’
Madame Prideaux picked up her hat and the raffia bag. ‘To hear laughter again at Jericho is very pleasant. Florence likes to be here, after all.’
‘To my astonishment and pleasure.’
‘She would not even come over to check the fabric of the house after a mistral. The place filled her with dread. Astonishing indeed.’
‘She laughs now, you know?’
She got to her feet, set the hat on her head, moved to the steps. ‘I know. I am aware of it. Thank you, Monsieur. Ah look! Above! The swallows are very high. A change in the weather, we shall have a great storm, a wind is coming, it is so still. No air, the sky is like copper.’ She skewered the pins into her hat, patted her hips, the bag swinging from her wrist. ‘Ah! I almost forgot this: most important. I grow older and sillier.’ She fished in the raffia bag, brought out a sealed envelope, handed it to me. ‘From Duvernoise. We have discussed the situation, Florence and I, and he has been most helpful. A good man. You and I do not discuss anything, you must do that with him at his convenience. My husband trusted the firm implicitly … I hope that you will also and we never speak of Oran? Good day.’ She turned and started down the path to the gate. As she pushed it open she called up sharply. ‘This needs oiling.’ Then she closed herself out and was lost behind the wall of the pigeonnier.
I went into the shadow cool of the Long Room, ripped open the envelope. Jericho could be mine in permanence if I wished, no rentals. At a reasonable price. Monsieur Fabrice Duvernoise, Notaire, was ‘at your disposal when convenient’.
In the kitchen Clotilde was singing, shutting drawers, closing cupboards. ‘Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise . . . birds in the trees . . .’ I went out on to the terrace. The vine above was heavy, motionless, in the heat. ‘Can it be true, someone like you could love me . . .’
I sat down on the top step, the letter in my hand. Folded it, refolded it, tapped it on my knee. Monsieur le Propriétaire. I said it aloud, just to try it. It sounded good.
My relationship with Madame Prideaux had always been as crisp and fragile as a brandy snap, but it had held. In some odd, and unexpected, way we had come to terms with each other. I liked her, and obviously it had shown. She trusted me and I had made it clear that she could. The story of Oran and her husband’s brutal death was proof. My behaviour towards Florence, her adored only child (now that Raymond was dead), my ease with Thomas, the determined changes I had made to Jericho, the behaviour of my son, Giles, my tact about mudguards and the full awareness that I knew what she had set out to do, and why, all these things had added up to this unexpected gesture: the offer to sell me her house and land, the admission that she was desperate to have the money. She had delivered herself into my hands. She was concerned not with her inheritance, not with her ‘land’, but with securing some kind of future for Florence and her unhappy child. It was fortunate that, through Helen, I had become aware, and sympathetic to, that overwhelming oddity in women, the arbitrary, unexpected, often wild, mood swings. They all seemed to manage it with ease. Florence, Lulu at our last meeting, Dottie herself even and, without any question at all, Madame Prideaux. Guarded, hostile, cold at first, changing to become a close accomplice in conspiracy, almost with a shadow of respect? At least I chose to see it that way. Selling one’s land to a stranger and a ‘foreigner’ was, for a Frenchwoman, a devastatingly extreme gesture. She had made it today. I would accept willingly. My whole future and Giles’s lay shimmering ahead in the blazing sun. In four rather bewildering months my entire life had altered for ever.
Florence suddenly appeared down at the gate, came slowly up the path, walking cautiously barefoot. She offered me a battered biscuit tin (a bit of junk from Simla Road) with one hand, an empty Evian bottle with the other. ‘Biscuits! Almost finished. Now he’ll be sick . . . Then Giles was showing us all how fast he was with a gun, being Clint Eastwood and upsetting the last of our Evian water. Pow! Pow! Pow!’ She sat beside me, leant against the trellis. ‘We are all parched! Can you give me another bottle?’ She was smiling, her hair sticking to her brow with the fine beaded sweat from her walk.
I got a fresh bottle, took, and rattled, the biscuit tin. ‘Two left? Three? Goodness! This water isn’t chilled. It’s cool enough in the room though.’
She reached up and took the plastic container. ‘I am sorry, William. I didn’t say it to you before. It is perfectly appalling about Louise de Terrehaute. It is the cruellest, cruellest thing . . .’
‘Yes. Cruellest. At least it was instantaneous as far as we know . . .’
She nodded slowly, moving bare feet in the heat of the sun, arching her back against the trellis. ‘I hear that someone has already been to the villa, clearing it. It’s going to be on the market, they say in the village. So, that is that . . .’ She stood up slowly, pushed the hair from her brow. ‘I’ll take this over. They are so thirsty. You have a letter from Mama, it is so? She didn’t forget? Perhaps you will think it over?’
‘No. I have it. Thought it over. Tell her yes. Absolutely yes. I will speak to her notaire tomorrow. Will you, also, say thank you? I understand what it means to her.’
For a moment she stood quite still, then looked slowly around her, down to the gate, back to the house, across to the still, brooding cluster of the fig trees. ‘How strange it is,’ she said quietly. ‘Another Caldicott at Jericho! I will tell her.’
‘You are not cross? Sad? You don’t mind . . . Florence?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Not cross, why? Not sad? What for? If you will be happy here . . .’ She shrugged.
‘I will … I will. I am overwhelmed, rather.’
She smiled a very little smile and turned down to the path. Enigmatic, calm, but certainly more familiar than she had ever been before. Another example of her change of mood? But this, I reckoned, had been almost entirely due to the news from Marseilles. The intense relief from desperate stress, apprehension and fear. I took the biscuit box down to the kitchen.
Clotilde was washing the floor, a final swing with her mop. ‘Mon Dieu! It is hot, there will be a storm. It is too still! I hate it when it is still like this, and it is getting so dark. No air, nothing moves, even the birds don’t fly. You see . . .’ She wrung out her cloth in the sink, spread it out to dry, started to untie her apron. ‘Gilles has said thank you, eh, Monsieur? My papa was very . . . pleasant . . . very shy! He said that he would go to Saint-Basile, soon, to speak with the papa of mon ami.’ She hung her apron on a hook behind the door. ‘Now that, that, Monsieur, is like the tiger walking with the lamb! You are a writer! You have a way with words! It is magic. Truly magic’ She le
ant out of the window over the sink and called out to Mon-Ami, who was carrying a pile of cut grass and garden rubbish on a pitchfork. ‘No more! It is time to finish. There is some cold beer here.’ She had deliberately turned away from me to avoid, out of shyness, any further comment on the ‘tiger and the lamb’ situation. She had, in her few words, thanked me fully, and that was accepted. We discussed, instead, what she had left us for supper and then I got a list of things I had to buy the next day when I went into the market. I left her singing again, and laying up our evening tray.
In the Long Room I re-read my letter, almost in disbelief. The first letter I got from my publisher accepting my third attempt at a book had had exactly the same effect. One of amazed, but doubting, joy. I had to return to read it constantly just for reassurance that it really was true, and that I had not made some grave error, or that perhaps there was some dreadful hidden clause tucked away in the sparsely encouraging prose. But all was well. It was a clear and simple statement. Jericho was mine. If I wanted it.
I looked up, probably with an inane smile on my face, and saw Florence coming back up the path. Behind her, down at the gate, Giles and Madame. Prideaux, with the straining figure of Thomas in his reins, were crossing the garden.
‘Come on! Come on! You can, you can!’ Giles’s voice was light with encouragement and laughter.
Florence put the half-empty bottle of water on the tin table. ‘We are leaving. It’s late, and Mama fears that we shall have a terrible mistral. It’s so still, do you notice, oppressive? Annette is stealing from the de Terrehaute land. Can you believe it! Marjoram! There is a big patch there. She can easily buy it in the market for a couple of sous, but it is more attractive to steal it from the field! The peasant mind . . .’ She stooped and started to ease into her old espadrilles which she had stuck under her arm. ‘I must go and help Céleste, she’s struggling with all the pique-nique things. Annette is so stubborn.’
‘I only hope that if this, shall we call it “transaction”, between your mama and myself goes through, there will be enough cash for you to afford another Céleste. That’s the idea, isn’t it?’
She smiled, fixed an ear-ring which had fallen. ‘Correct. A Céleste for the night! It is a night-time job often. That is difficult.’ Céleste passed the open gate carrying a couple of plastic sacks. Florence waved down to her and shouted that she was coming to help. ‘I must go. She is a saint but not a very young saint. I’ll have to call for Annette too, silly woman. What a funny day, William! Do you feel strange when you think that you never knew that this house existed until a few months ago? There was no Jericho! No de Terrehaute! No Teeobalds even!’
‘No Giles even! And no Florence …’
She looked at me steadily, the smile fading, her eyes kind, ‘Ah yes! There was always a Giles and a Florence. It is just that you didn’t know . . . But this is an old, old house, it has seen many, many hundreds of people. We are only fragments, shadows, in its existence. It will outlast us all . . . the Prideaux and the Caldicotts! Voilà!’
‘And all the others since – when? Sixteen-whatever. Since the first cornerstone was set into this hillside. All the children who were born here, the people who have died, whole generations long before us. And it’ll go on, Jericho, sheltering new generations. We only rest here for a little time, then others move in. Maybe Giles? I hope . . .’
Down at the gate stood Annette, laughing. She called up waving a fat bunch of green leaves, under her other arm a bundled travelling rug and a paper parasol. ‘Voilà, Madame Florence! C’est tout fini.’ Hurried to Céleste and the car.
‘A new dynasty, do you think that?’ Florence was still smiling.
‘I think of that. Yes. Sure. I think of that, starting again, then I think of all the ghosts that there must be watching us -’
Swiftly, suddenly, she placed her hand over my mouth, shaking her head. ‘No ghosts, William! No ghosts. I see no ghosts.’
Leaning towards me she kissed my cheek at the exact moment that Clotilde’s voice cut into the still heat of the darkening afternoon, high, harsh with terror. ‘M’sieur! M’sieur! At the back! Vite! Venez vite! Vite!’
Florence froze, arms half raised. I turned and raced to the back of the house, up towards the rearing cliffs and the red earth path. Running towards me, hair flying, arms waving frantically, face flour-white, Giles, mouthing silently, agonizingly. He saw me, screamed, ‘Don’t look! Don’t look! He fell – he fell in!’ Then he crashed into my side, burying his face into my body, burrowing, clutching. I thrust out my arm to stop Florence as Mon-Ami came down towards us, in his arms the swinging sodden body of Thomas, arms and head bouncing, jigging, water dripping, mouth agape.
Florence screamed, ‘No! No! No!’, broke my hold, tearing towards Mon-Ami as he slowly lowered his burden to the grass.
‘C’est trop tard,’ he said. ‘Trop tard.’
Florence was on her knees grabbing, pulling, cradling the wobbling head with its sagging mouth, water-spiked hair. ‘No! No! Thomas?
Behind me somewhere the gull-cries and mewing of the terrified women. Crushed against my side the shuddering body of my son. Standing far up, by the cane-break, hair tumbled in a frayed silver rope, her skirt muddied at the knees, the tangled harness bunched in one hand, Sidonie Prideaux. For a shocked instant we looked across the terrible tableau of grief between us. She dropped the leather reins loosely, and with an almost obscene gesture of benediction, raised her empty hands towards me. Smiling gently, head high, eyes wide, fingers spread.
No one had fallen.
Dirk Bogarde
10.5.93
28.12.93
For
FANNY BLAKE
With my love
and admiration
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Motley Films Ltd, 1994
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ISBN: 9781448206858
eISBN: 9781448206780
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