I saw it now in the same hallucinatory, distanced way that I had seen Evan-David wandering in a Welsh graveyard, far off but clear; and had known his purpose as if I were also within him. Only, this time, it was myself I saw, and I was both within and without this self. I was walking in the river meadow by the mill-house.
Other people had been there in the days before, but they had left. Marigold and I had been swimming in the river, and I had gone briefly back to the house wearing my wet shorts with a shirt pulled over them. I was returning now across the meadows: the remains of an exotic sunset lit one end of the sky, but elsewhere the dark had almost come. Much of the summer had been wet, the river was high for the season and the grass long as it brushed against my legs; but that day had been hot and even now, when the temperature had dropped, the air reverberated with the creatures of heat: dragonflies, may-bugs, cicadas. A late bird was still calling from the big elm; I stopped a moment to listen and to breathe the dank scent of the river.
Marigold’s voice called from below the bank:
‘There you are, Daddy. I’m just getting cold.’
I approached to the edge. She was standing on the sandspit rubbing one foot with a towel, reduced by the coming-on of night to little more than a silhouette, a pale line of shoulder and back, silvery planes of limb. She still wore, I suppose, the miniature bikini she had bought that year in Argenton. She was not quite fifteen but as tall, now, as her mother had been, and the same slight build. It was the summer after Simone’s death.
‘You should have followed me up to the house if you were cold,’ I said. I jumped heavily down beside her.
‘I wanted you to dry me.’
Her tone was matter-of-fact and childish. So was the request. I had been ritualistically bear-hugging and rubbing her dry after swims since always. Not, however, this year.
Did I say, this time, as I had perhaps before, ‘Dry yourself, you big baby!’ Did I, an indulgent but prudent father, remove myself to the bank again, telling her to pick up her clothes before the dew descended on them? I don’t know. I don’t know.
What I see in my mind, separate from myself, now in long shot, now in close-up, is myself with my arms round Marigold in a violent embrace, her small shape crumpled by my strength and weight, my fingers brown and time-worn against her whiteness, her face a pale blur in the dark below my chest. And what I feel within myself – can feel now, years after – is the known yet never entirely known scent of her skin, her damp hair, herself, herself.
No. I do not think anything very terrible happened. Not terrible. Desperately I prod at memory and imagination takes over – but I do not think that anything happened. I know I was suddenly consumed with feeling and – must I call it desire? Carnal desire I suppose it must have been too, since that had lain almost dormant within me since Simone’s dying, and no doubt the mindless springs of life were now inexorably renewing themselves in me. But for a few seconds my desire to possess her went beyond that, into a dimension where I wanted to absorb her, smother her, take her into me, destroy her even, if that would keep her mine for ever.
Then, with a cry of protest, she escaped. Or did I, terrified by the strength of my own feeling, put her abruptly from me?
– Or did we never really quite reach this point of conflict except in my dark subsequent fantasy, but each retrieved ourselves, shocked, from the brink of emotion, gathered our clothes and made our way in sedate, self-conscious Indian file across the darkening meadow to the lighted house?
The most extraordinary paradox, said Hermione. The body’s corruption, she said. It is the temple of the soul, the only thing we have to venerate and which must not be desecrated. Yet the body is not made to last, she said. She meant: it can rot. Be rotted.
She was talking Christianity, not human love. But I interpreted it on that level too. And she saw, and changed the conversation.
Marigold’s body. Flesh of my flesh. The thing I loved more than I could love anything else. The thing I most needed to possess yet needed, even more, in shrinking horror, not to possess, not to desecrate. Not to corrupt.
… It cometh up like a flower and like a flower is cut down. My Marigold.
‘All flesh is grass.’ the Preacher says. Yes, in the end. But she is not grass. She lies in a wet vault in Limoges, unviewable and by now unrecognizable. A thing. Like the dead girl in ‘Jacquou le Croquant’ – ‘… perdant toute forme humaine, tombant en décomposition …’ Possessed and destroyed by corruption. This world’s corruption. An act of man. Did he desire her too? Lay hands on her, as he did with Simone before her, try –. Was that originally to be his long-prepared revenge, and only when she thrust him away did killing replace it? Did he?
Or was the repetition in my own heart? In my own darkest, most agonized dreams, Simone and Marigold are the same person.
Enough. No more.
Part Six
After we had spent part of our summer holiday clearing up my aunt’s house in Edinburgh, we drove further north for a few days, into the highlands. It seemed a good opportunity, for I had an idea that I, at any rate, would never have a reason to return to those parts. We did not stay away very long, however, as I was planning to take some time off again in October to go to France. An international conference in Lyon on language teaching had provided me with the pretext I needed.
When we came back at the end of August to our hot, quiet house in London, the police appeared on our doorstep within a few hours. I was disconcerted. Melvyn’s case was not due to come to Court till November.
But Melvyn, it seemed, had lost confidence, one empty summer day, in his own power to prove his innocence. He had persuaded Birgit to take the children away for a holiday with her family in Sweden, and then had efficiently killed himself in his kitchen. The police were kindly coming to tell me – perhaps even to assure me, in case I was about to ask them irritable questions, that his action had been nothing to do with them. Please Sir, it wasn’t our fault, Sir. We didn’t do anything … These days all police, except for the Sergeant Pelhams, are young. The echoes of a lifetime of schoolboys rose in my mind.
When they had left, Ann said to me, embarrassed and subdued:
‘It sounds awfully callous to ask – but will we lose our five thousand now?’
I laughed aloud.
‘Good God – you don’t think I’d have talked so sympathetically about him to the police if that had been the case? No, no – it wasn’t part of my duty to stop Melvyn from killing himself. That’s the end of it. We all get let off the hook now: the police, the local education authority, Melvyn too, in a sense. Though not much of a let-off, for him.’
Ann said sadly:
‘Everyone will think he was guilty now. Won’t they?’
‘Oh, he must have known that, poor sod,’ I said easily; though in fact I do not believe one can tell what suicides really know about the message of their own action and its finality.
I felt light. It was as if I too had been working obliquely toward some crisis, some fate – and now Melvyn had sprung the trap for me. Had acted for me. Or had freed me for some action of my own.
So, in late October, I drove in a hired French car across the autumn fields of central France. I had duly put in an appearance at the conference in Lyon. Now I was making my way westwards to the Creuse.
I had seldom approached the area from this direction. But all the same, as I neared it, the small towns and villages became ghostly familiar: either I had driven through all of them before, one way or another, on excursions over the last thirty years, or they had finally all become for me one, an irreducible rural habitat, place of zero summer and every other season. A curving street lined with irregular, low, pitched-roof buildings opening out into some sort of square; a cracked church bell chiming, flowers in pots, a war-memorial, a garish poster for a local event, a whiff of woodsmoke, a café bright with plastic chairs … And a shop or two, these days with newish facades papering the old stone, but still as ever advertising Vin fou – ‘Mad Wine’
– and Laines de Pingouin – ‘Penguin Wool’. When Marigold was small, Simone and I used to joke with her that it really did come from penguins.
Penguin. Ah, Penguin! I had meant to contact Amanda Goring again; out of friendship, or desire to make efforts for other prisoners on her list, or perhaps in vague masculine intent – whatever that means. She could easily have been my daughter.
Yes. Anyway … I had not contacted her. I regretted this a little, now, when it was too late. But perhaps it was better so.
I stopped in one village at random to buy some provisions and to drink a glass of Mad Wine – thin red stuff imported from Algeria, nothing like Jacquou’s purplish local brew which we called the Real Wine. But I knew from the hilly roads lined with oaks and Spanish chestnuts through which I had been passing, and the pinkish light that was now, in the late afternoon, clothing the landscape, that I was in the right countryside. I was home.
And there, on the wall of the café, as if in travesty of what I had found again, was an eye-catching poster: a rendition of an autumn wood, all lush reds and golds and mauves, advertising an exhibition of the work of ‘local artists’.
I was disconcerted by the phrase. Gripped as I was by the past, it had not occurred to me that there might, by now, be more than one man appropriating to himself the local artist rôle. The café proprietor assured me that there were a number of them, that the Creuse was becoming ‘quite a little centre’.
It looked as peaceful and unenterprising as ever, to me. I pointed out that the dates of the exhibition were long past.
Yes, but his wife liked the picture, so he had left the poster up. Beautiful, wasn’t it? Real, you might say.
Did the proprietor recall a Polish painter called Maryk who had worked in the area for many years. Was he still alive?
The man became vague. He thought he recalled the name, but there were a number of painters now, like he said. Anyway he and his wife had only been in these parts for five years. But there was a man had a studio several villages away that attracted visitors in the summer, like, though not much now in the off-season. Might that be the one? He named the place.
It was indeed where Maryk had had his workshop, in the old barn that Jacquou had found for him.
I tried another name on the man, but it meant nothing to him. A lot of these painters seemed to be foreigners, he said tolerantly. Perhaps a lot of people painted in my country, did they? Indeed perhaps I was an artist myself?
Yes, I agreed, yes actually I was. This satisfied both of us.
Covering my tracks.
By the time I reached the mill-house, it was getting dark. I had not written to Paul and Hermione to tell them I was going there; I was counting on avoiding the unlikely chance of them being there at that time themselves, and it was all right. No vehicle stood in the yard, where the autumn grass had pushed up undisturbed. In the beds at the side, flowers, which Hermione must have gone on planting out there each year, had grown tall and tangled. The shutters were drawn at the windows. All the doors were locked. With my set of keys I unfastened the big outhouse; someone had tidied it since I had last seen it and there were some tiles, re-roofing spares, at one end. Contrary to old custom, I put my hired car away inside it. Then I let myself into the silent kitchen.
The next day I drove to the village I had known as Maryk’s, but I avoided his barn which stood by itself on the edge of a wood. Instead I sought out the local Mayor; Mayors are numerous in France, as every village has one. The Mairie, of course, was shut; I was directed by a notice to a relentlessly modern bungalow. The Mayor wore a cap indoors, and looked as if he would have been more comfortable in a plainer home without mock-leather chairs chosen by his wife and daughter. I think I caught him just as he was contemplating an after-lunch nap. He was not especially pleased to see me, but resigned himself to answering my queries.
Yes, he knew Monsieur Maryk. Everyone did. But he was old and ill now, in the hospital. The Mayor doubted if he would ever come out. Not too good in the head any longer, see.
I had been told he still had his workshop, though?
Yes, but it had been taken over by his apprentice. (Evidently it seemed quite in order to the Mayor that an artist should hand on his business, like a plumber or a garage-owner.)
Yes, the apprentice was a foreigner, like Maryk, but the Mayor thought that he too had lived in France for years. No, he couldn’t call his name to mind right now. It might be written down in the Mairie but he wasn’t sure of that either. It would depend who was paying the rates now, see.
I hinted that it might perhaps be possible to go round the corner to the Mairie and look this up, but the Mayor replied that Thursday afternoons were when the Mairie was open. ‘Today’s Friday, Monsieur.’
He stared firmly past me, an elderly peasant farmer who was not going to be pushed around by a stranger. I gazed at the bought-from-a-catalogue tapestry, an Alpine scene which dominated the small sitting room, and decided to take a chance.
‘But if this apprentice has been here a long time he must have a carte de séjour?’
The Mayor resented me more openly:
‘I didn’t say he’d been here a long time. He comes and goes. We don’t see much of him here in the village. And as for a carte de séjour, yes, I daresay he has one, but I wouldn’t be knowing about that. You’d have to ask the police that, down at Gueret. I don’t meddle in other people’s affairs.’
An enthusiastic interest in other people’s affairs is really the only requirement for being a French Mayor, besides basic literacy. This Mayor seemed to be fulfilling his rôle only minimally, if that, but, re-running the conversation in my mind after I had driven off again, I thought that his general lack of interest was perhaps just as well.
He had at least told me the whereabouts of the hospital where I would find Maryk. It was, I realized only as I arrived there, the place where we had visited Joyce after Evan’s disappearance.
It was just the same. But also quite different. A new country hospital in the glass-and-concrete idiom of the 1970s had risen airily nearby; the ancient building, cleaned up and garnished with neat lawns and flower beds, had become an old people’s home. This still seemed to be run by a religious order, but the crowding and squalor I recalled had been abolished. Pastel floor tiles lapped the seventeenth-century pillars, partitions divided the echoing wards into tidy, four-bedded suites. I was shown into one of these by a portly teenage boy in an overall, who remarked with middle-aged kindness that it would be nice for Le Pére Maryk to have a visitor for once.
As I approached the indicated bed, I thought that the Maryk I remembered would have felt more at home in the old place as it had been before. But the ruffian-like character in a dirty undershirt I expected to see rearing up like a bear from the pillows seemed to be no more either. The Maryk whose bony hand, extended to me automatically in vague bewilderment, I now shook, was much diminished: a shrunken old man in respectable pyjamas, more or less shaven, his sparse white hair neatly clipped. If he had not been pointed out to me I should not have known him. Only by looking into his remarkable eyes, faded by age to a baby blue, could I perceive the man I had once known.
I was a stranger to him of course. Even when I mentioned Jacquou’s name, and Simone’s, I elicited only the uncertain response of someone who wishes to be helpful but cannot call to mind the necessary information just at present, though he feels it to be lurking somewhere. Because I mentioned the painted chests – trying vainly to stir the deep waters of his memory – he decided that I must be a prospective customer, and attempted a brisk manner.
‘I don’t take on commissions any more, Monsieur. I’ve retired now – been ill, you see. But that’s all right, I worked hard in my time, I made my pile …’ He seemed to be saying more, but the old voice rambled off into a mutter.
‘I’d like to show you some of my work, though,’ he said suddenly, loudly, like a radio set coming back on station again. ‘Nice things, I make, I take a lot of trouble. Birds and that … P
eople like them. People like my pictures too.’
‘I know. I like them very much.’ I wished I could get this fact at least through to him, but his attention seemed to have drifted away again. In the opposite bed a corpulent old man lay, like a contented baby, while several female visitors gossiped in subdued voices above and around him.
‘I don’t have any materials here today,’ said Maryk, returning mentally to me again. ‘If I had, I could show you …’ He began to look restlessly around, leaning his fragile body perilously far over the edges of the bed. I was afraid he would fall out, and tried to settle him back against the pillows. He became distressed, and called a woman’s name. The gossipers stopped momentarily to stare, and then the teenage boy reappeared. With a practised manner he soothed Maryk down, promising him: ‘You shall go and get your materials tomorrow. Or Anya shall bring them tomorrow, if you’re tired.’
‘Tired …’ agreed the old man obediently. ‘Yes, I am tired and that’s a fact. I’ve done my bit.’ He shut his blue eyes. I said to the boy:
‘Who’s Anya?’
He shrugged. ‘We don’t know. He calls for her sometimes, but no one knows anybody of that name round here. We think perhaps it was someone once in his own country. A girl – a sister perhaps – or a servant … No one knows.’
He went away again. With eyes still shut, Maryk said distinctly:
‘I should like to go out to the café.’
‘I am very sorry,’ I said, meaning it, ‘that I can’t take you out there.’
He opened his eyes, and looked candidly into mine.
‘They don’t like me saying I want to go to the café. They say I’ve got everything I want here. Of course that’s true. But I still should like …’ His voice petered out once more but then returned, with his stronger, more boastful tone:
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