That time passed, as it had to. When Marigold had turned sixteen, she began going off on visits on her own, coming to join me at the mill-house once I was established there. Later again, in her university vacations, she several times stayed at the mill-house with friends from school or college, playing mistress of the house. I, in my turn, would be the traveller who eventually arrived, stained and hungry, in the light of the setting sun.
I did not really like her staying there quite alone. Some basic paternal emotion made me feel it was unsuitable, though the irrationality of this was apparent even to me. I would not have felt it had she been older, yet age has little to do with vulnerability. I knew Marigold to be, by now, well organized and sensible beyond her years. In any case she had always been a little shy of strangers. The idea of her making unsuitable acquaintances – for instance – in some camp-site bar, and letting them follow her back to the mill-house, was preposterous. Also, as she herself pointed out to me, I made no fuss about her being alone for a few nights in our London home, yet everyone knew the high figures for burglaries and crimes of violence in large cities. By comparison, the Creuse was almost devoid of incident, a great peaceful green womb. And, when it came to it, I, like Jacquou, did not want to be cast in the role of Monsieur Seguin. Choufleur-Blanquette had been dead for many a year, a little heap of bones beneath the roots of the mulberry tree, but her name and that of her owner had long passed into our family language as a cipher for an unnecessarily repressive or protective attitude.
I suppose that the accusation ‘Don’t be a Monsieur Seguin!’ was such a useful one that we had lost sight of the fact that when Monsieur Seguin’s goat did go free the result was tragic. Monsieur Seguin had been right all the time.
In 1977 Marigold would be twenty-one. That September, she and a friend from schooldays called Sophie were at the mill-house. I had to leave in the middle of the month although I had that term off, a sabbatical awarded to me by the local education authority on some amiable pretext. I was due to go into hospital in London for surgery, the removal of a knee cartilage I had injured playing rugby many years before and which was now causing me problems. The plan was that Marigold should leave central France just before I was due to come out of hospital, in order to be back in London to wait on me for a week or two before her own last year at university began. Sophie, I understood, would leave a little earlier: she had an arrangement to meet her boyfriend in Paris.
I would have preferred to think of the two girls travelling together, but to say so would have come so clearly under the Monsieur Seguin heading that I kept my vague thought to myself and presently forgot it.
Neither of the girls could drive (Marigold had begun learning that summer), so when I left I took the car. I made sure they each had plenty of money for their respective journeys home. They waved me a cheerful goodbye from the corner of the track leading to the road, bright in their shorts and T-shirts. Marigold then had eleven more days to live.
My knee, in hospital, gave more trouble than had been anticipated. So I was still there, lying in bed, on 26 September, when the young police officer came into the ward and spoke to Sister, and they both looked anxiously in my direction and then came towards me, and my life was changed for ever.
A car crash, the previous day, they said. On the winding road down to Argenton. And however much I told them that she didn’t drive, that she had been going to get the local taxi to take her to the bus, that she never accepted lifts from strangers, that Argenton was the wrong direction anyway – the fact still remained the same, the same.
A principal member of ‘them’ that terrible month was my old friend, the lawyer Lewis Greenfield. Because of the state of my leg, and no doubt for other reasons as well, it was he who travelled to the centre of France, who saw the local police and the equivalent of the coroner, who identified Marigold and had her quietly buried, at my distracted insistence, beside her grandfather in Limoges. (Simone, dying in London, had been cremated: there seemed no reason now to bring our daughter back for such a pointless ritual.) Lewis dealt with everything, asking me how much I wanted to hear and then, at my cry that I wished to hear nothing since nothing would bring her back, told me almost nothing and kept his own counsel.
He did just tell me that the car involved was a Paris-registered one, and that the driver had told the police he had given Marigold, who was hitchhiking, a lift. He apparently lost control going round a bend. The car hit a bollard, went off the road, and the door burst open. Marigold, flung down a rocky slope above the river, had been dead when she was picked up, among the ferns and heather.
‘The police did consider prosecuting him for dangerous driving,’ Lewis told me some weeks later. ‘But I heard yesterday that they’ve decided to take no action.’
‘No action? … I see.’ Dear God.
He murmured something apologetic about there having been no witnesses to the accident … driver injured himself … no other car involved … a dangerous road … such a bloody lot of accidents on French roads anyway.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said at last, for his sake, because he sounded so miserable. ‘Forget it, Lewis. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway.’
‘No. It wouldn’t. I’m glad you see it like that, Tom.’
‘… Just one thing, though. You said the driver was injured himself. Badly?’ I hoped so, yes, I hoped so. In a couple of seconds I envisioned paraplegia – no, tetraplegia – life never ever the same again for him either.
‘Mm – no. Just slight injuries. Or so I gather. But you said you didn’t want to hear any details, Tom.’
‘No. I don’t. You’re right. Forget it. It’s happened. That’s all.’
He took my hand.
And so, for several years, I carried in my mind the stereotyped image of a bad French driver, some arrogant fool of a Parisian, passing casually through the Creuse in his over-powered car, an almost incidental agent of destruction. Of course I hated him, bitterly, eternally. But it is safe to hate the unknown enemy, the cardboard cut-out: Wicked Lord, German Gauleiter, rotten driver.
The Mayor of the district wrote me a flowery letter of condolence, assuring me in passing, as if I cared any more, that he had personally checked on the mill-house and that everything appeared to be locked and shuttered and in good order. Evidently Marigold’s final car ride was to have been the first lap of her journey home. How, why, she was in that car at that moment, was not something I could understand. I did not even want to. As Lewis said, no knowledge now would make any difference.
That autumn, I would simply have left the mill-house and everything in it to the spiders and the field mice and the encroaching damp of the river, locked and shuttered for ever. But my two oldest friends in France, Hermione the American and Paul, whom she had married, came to London in December, when Sophie and her parents and other friends organized an informal memorial ceremony for Marigold. Paul and Hermione had several times stayed with us at the mill-house. They did not try to convince me of anything, but told me that the house – Marigold’s house, Simone’s house, Jacquou’s house – must not be left to rot, and that they would like to take charge of it ‘for the time being’. So I gave them the keys, and after that, every few months, they sent me unasked-for rent and a report on taps repaired, roof tiles replaced and grazing rights re-let to a local farmer.
For the first years, I was not at all grateful for these attentions. It was only later, after I had married again, and it was borne in on me that I would never want to take Ann to the mill-house nor she to be taken there, that I began to be relieved that Paul and Hermione were looking after the place, all the same.
Part Two
I realize that, all this time, I have said nothing more of Evan Brown and his girl Joyce.
In fact it was through Simone that I met them, or rather met him. He seemed to me just one of the usual loose-knit band of students that, for want of more select company, then formed Simone’s Parisian circle. It is like that, when you are young and consciously
making a life for yourself: discrimination and cynicism are only gradually acquired. It took me some time to realize that Evan was not in fact following any courses at the Sorbonne. He was one of the shadowy army of étudiants fantômes who had once signed on for a minimal course in order to acquire a student card for the university canteens. When I discovered, by chance, from his own laughing reference, that he regularly updated his card ‘with a bit of art work’ I was inclined to be Britishly disapproving. I was a little disconcerted when Simone, normally scrupulous herself, defended him.
‘After all, he has to live. It’s his painting he cares about, nothing else. Perhaps, you know Tom, he’s right?’
She sounded hopeful but troubled. I did not think much of this hackneyed Vie de Bohéme argument, which I accounted unworthy of her, but I did not say so: I would rather think she might be right.
I’d noticed that Simone seemed to like Evan, and indeed when he was on form no one was better company. I saw him charming his way into a nightclub for free and then amusing even the jaded, naked hostesses with his impersonation of an American tourist. He sang well too, in an effortless Welsh tenor, and played the guitar. Wary of being caught out myself in a dislike born of envy, I agreed with everyone that Evan was great fun, talented, un numéro, would go far. Actually I rather wished he would go away. But when he did, temporarily, on missions to sell pictures or other unspecified ‘business’, I had to admit that the evening gatherings in the café were less amusing, and that by comparison the French students seemed rather an uninventive lot, ‘unconventional’ only in a noisy, conventional French way.
At first, that summer, Joyce was not there. I heard her name mentioned, but it seemed that she had gone back to England to see her sick grandmother. She was an orphan, Evan explained, and ‘Nan’ had brought her up.
‘I’m not sure she’s coming back,’ said Simone to me.
‘Really? He seems quite sure that she is.’
‘Oh yes. He’s very loyal to her – in his way. But I’m not sure she will.’
She did not elaborate. I had not then noticed, though I did soon afterwards, that Evan was discreetly promiscuous, and had clearly slept with more than one other girl in the group. I did not, however, mention this to Simone, partly out of some vague sense of masculine solidarity and discretion, and partly because of the tension that had at that time begun to surround the subject of sex between herself and me.
But Joyce did come back. Her Nan had died; she had no one else to keep her in England. Simone, I thought, must have been mistaken about her. Pink-cheeked, smiling but rarely talkative, she adored Evan with a desperate single-mindedness. She seemed to like me, probably because her own French was very poor and I was therefore the only other person besides Evan with whom she could talk freely. (Simone’s English, eventually to become so good, was then rather sparse. That first year, and for several years afterwards, she and I normally used French, so that it became my true second language and, in the circumstances, the language of my deepest emotions and experiences. I had been happy enough as a child. But now I had found a different country of the mind.)
Joyce’s homely Midlands accent, so at variance with her cosmopolitan urban-gipsy appearance, was akin to the one that had been ironed out of me by education. I could imagine so well – though I did not tell her so – the little brick house in Northampton from which she had come, and she probably knew I could imagine it. She was quite intelligent, but poorly educated; Evan was not just her man, charismatic and handsome, but a whole world to her. With that too, I could empathize.
Once, trudging by the Seine with me, carrying the portfolio of Evan’s drawings that she offered tenaciously round café terraces, she asked me if I could recommend some ‘literature’ to her. She had, she said, never read anything: she felt that if she read a few ‘proper books’ she would be a better companion for Evan. She sounded wistful. What about Sartre, was he translated into English? And wasn’t there a writer called Madame Bovary?
I had no doubts as to whether Sartre and Flaubert would really give her much in common with Evan. Though he flourished the names of famous writers, I suspected that he had never read them. It was hard to imagine Evan just sitting and reading for long, even in public on a café terrace. He always seemed to have something more pressing to do. I told Joyce that I thought Sartre over-rated (an arrogant if truthful line of mine which seemed to shock her slightly) but that she could read Camus. I lent her an English translation of L’Etranger, telling her it was an important study of an abnormal personality, superficially like anyone else but deficient in deeper feelings. I lent it just because I appreciated Camus myself and because it was, for a ‘great work’, manageably short: I do not think I reflected at the time on whether, as reading matter for Joyce, it had any particular appropriateness.
I’m not sure I ever heard what she thought about it. I don’t suppose she gave it back to me. The next image that comes to me is of her giggly-drunk in one of those packed cellars where we used to dance to traditional jazz in a haze of cigarette smoke. Evan, probably drunker but betraying it less, was showing off about how he and Joyce had managed covertly to move themselves, their clothes and all his painting gear from one Left Bank hotel to another without settling their account.
This time, talking to Simone afterwards, I had fewer scruples about appearing priggish. Such hotels, in those days, charged trifling amounts, and the broken-down old Parisians who ran them often seemed poorer than their obstreperous, careless clients.
‘I know.’ Simone looked troubled. ‘I know Evan shouldn’t behave like that. It’s different about the canteens, but one shouldn’t exploit actual people … As a matter of fact, I’m rather sick of Evan and a lot of the crowd and I’d really rather not spend so many evenings with them.’
‘Suits me.’ I glowed to hear her say it. ‘We often have a nicer time on our own, don’t we?’
She squeezed my hand gratifyingly, but went on looking preoccupied:
‘Only – you see, Evan particularly asked me if I’d be a friend to Joyce and look after her, you know … So I don’t like to let him – her – down.’
‘Oh?’ I said jealously. ‘When did he ask you that?’
‘When Joyce was coming back again from England. He and I went for a long walk and he asked me then.’
It was the first I’d heard of this long walk. It was Simone’s business of course, not mine, and she had known Evan before I came on the scene, but I had not realized she was such a particular friend. As for Joyce, Simone’s attitude to her had vaguely puzzled me. She seemed solicitous, like an elder sister, but faintly censorious, and had continued to hint at intervals to me that Joyce might not be going to stay in Paris.
‘Joyce had an abortion while she was in England,’ Simone said suddenly. ‘She told me just the other day.’ Her voice sounded flat, strained.
‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘I thought they were much easier to get here. I mean, people seem to have them here so much more.’
‘Well, but she was in England … She told me about it. Some woman in her home town with a syringe. She said it hurt dreadfully. It sounded horrible.’ Simone shuddered compassionately. ‘And she said she minded too about the idea of the baby, killing it you know … So you see, Tom, why I feel I must go on being her friend. She doesn’t really have anybody. Except Evan himself, of course.’
‘Yes, I see. Does Evan know about this, by the way?’
‘She said he didn’t, she hadn’t wanted to bother him, and I said he ought to know. That was right, wasn’t it?’
‘Of course it was! I’m surprised she managed it on her own anyway. What did she use for money? It’s very expensive in England – so I’m told,’ I added hastily.
‘Her grandmother had just died, at last … She said there was a clock and one or two other things her grandmother had left her, so she sold those. Poor girl.’
‘Poor girl – yes.’
I suppose my tone was faintly ominous. Simone looked anxious again, bu
t a mixture of emotions prevented me from saying anything more then, or even knowing what I wanted to say. I had difficulty with Evan, to whom everyone, even my thoughtful, finely-reared Simone, gave such ready admiration and forgiveness. Once she came to meet me, happy and talkative, clutching a large bunch of flowers – white daisies – which she said that Evan had presented to her when she ran into him near the flower market on the quay.
‘That was nice of him,’ I said. Concealed jealousy ignited in me. Girls liked me all right too, but I had never yet, I thought furiously, bought any girl flowers. Why had I never thought of it? From whence Evan’s natural grace?
Simone must have sensed my tension. She said quickly: ‘Oh, it was just one of his pretty impulses, you know what he’s like! But it was nice of him – they’re country flowers, you see, and he knows how much I miss the country here in Paris, now that it’s got so hot. I think he misses it too.’
‘I see.’
It must have been not very long after that we were both due to go on our separate holidays, and I found Simone weeping in the dark passage by my door, and she became mine.
That autumn, after our successful visit to the Creuse, Simone’s life and mine took on a more regular pattern. Till then, she had been living in a university hostel in the south of Paris. Now she found a room even smaller than mine but nearby, vertiginously overlooking the tracks of the Petite Ceinture railway, and we went back and forth between the two eyries. Instinctively nest-building already, we spent much less time sitting in cafés or wandering the streets, and more buying bargain vegetables in Les Halles and concocting stews with them on an oil stove. My thesis – now known as the Great Work on the Left – thrived in the tranquillity of this new bourgeois idyll, and so did Simone’s studies: she was due to take her own degree the following summer. After that, she was hoping for a part-time teacher’s job like mine in the Paris region. ‘I’ll have to sign up for some research project as well,’ she said, ‘to justify being in Paris. Otherwise the Ministry might send me absolutely anywhere.’
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