by Nick Salaman
‘A friend? I did not know…’ she thought he was going to say he did not know that she had any friends – but he went on, after a pause, ‘any friends were here.’
‘Nor did I. It was a friend from school.’
‘I did not know you had any friends at school. You always seemed to be so … aloof. That is what your report said.’
Why was he so keen for her not to have friends? Could David be right? Was he jealous?
‘A friend from school and her brother.’
She had thought this out rather carefully in case Maximilien or someone reported that they had seen her with a young man. For some reason of self-protection or instinct of privacy, she didn’t want to tell Hubert the truth about David.
***
By great good fortune, Hubert was suddenly taken up with a flurry of business.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told her at breakfast, looking up from the mail, the very morning after the fateful meeting on the plage. ‘Something has come up and I have to go to Geneva for a day or two. Will you be able to amuse yourself? Your school friend, what is her name incidentally, is staying for a while?’
‘Yes,’ said Marie, giving the answer she had prepared. ‘Teresa Sarle. She is staying at the Carlton with her family.’
It amused her to give the name of the arch enemy. She had specified the Carlton because she knew it would give off the right overtones of money. Hubert liked her to move within her class. It was one reason he would disapprove of Mephistopheles.
‘My father’s in oil,’ David had told her.
‘Like a sardine.’
‘Like a sardine, but not as rich. Not everybody’s a millionaire in oil.’
Her attention returned to the breakfast table as Hubert, fastidiously wiping the last vestige of croissant crumb from his lips with a blindingly white napkin, prepared to rise.
‘Goodbye then, my, ah, dear. Maximilien and Claudine will look after you. Do not keep Maximilien from his afternoon siesta otherwise we will have a, ha, palace revolution. I trust that you will behave prudently. There are a lot of rascals in Cannes – as indeed there are everywhere.’
He brushed her cheek with crumbless lips, gathered up his papers, and was gone. She was surprised that, after his grave faces last night, he should so lightly have left her to her own devices but she guessed – rightly – that Hubert, faced with the choice, would always put finance before family.
When he had left for the airport, driven by the fatigable Maximilien, she telephoned the Bleu Rivage from the drawing room.
‘Hello, Mephistopheles,’ she said. ‘Ça va? Things are looking up here. Guardian has gone to Geneva and the mice can play.’
‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Meet you at the plage at eleven.’
She had the feeling as she put the phone down that someone might have been listening on another extension. There was just the faintest click of another receiver but she decided it must, after all, be funny French telephone noises and not significant.
Next she went to find Claudine and asked her how she might get a taxi.
‘You wish to go somewhere, Mademoiselle?’
She had the feeling there was aversion in the black-olive eyes. Perhaps Maximilien had made a gallant reference to her bottom to the detriment of Claudine’s own seating arrangements.
‘I am going to the beach.’
‘Mademoiselle does not like the swimming pool?’
‘There is more company on the beach.’
‘Ah. Company.’
She said it as though company might bite. But she came up with the number and time, yes, she was definitely listening when Marie gave the destination to the taxi switchboard.
However, once on the Plage Sportive again, in her favourite corner with two mattresses under the umbrella this time, all considerations apart from her joy at seeing David again were forgotten (though she did manage to write another quick postcard to Nanny telling her of his wondrous reappearance).
So began a sequence of the happiest days she had ever known. Life is, in emotional terms, a black and white affair, but love seems to flood it with colour – a colouring which is also in some strange way a drug. As Napoleon is said to have been inadvertently poisoned by his copper-arsenic green wallpaper in the damp climate of St Helena, so Marie was wafted to the garden of delight on the heady pigments of romance.
They swam, they lay in the sun, they sailed, they drank citrons pressés when they were thirsty, and cold wine when they weren’t, they ate at Chantal’s and at other little places along the Croisette. Sometimes, to Claudine’s disapproval, she would take a taxi and drive out with him to mountain restaurants less grand than the Colombe d’Or but no less pleasurable.
And afterwards they would walk on battlements and kiss under the coming moon, sucking balm from each other’s mouths for the bittersweet inflammations of the heart.
She met his parents after a day or two. They appeared pleasant, friendly, civilised people – the sort of Americans you rarely see portrayed on television drama series and who therefore come as a surprise to the European. They seemed pleased that their son, whom they clearly adored, had found such a decorous and charming companion, and because they were happy with each other’s company, they didn’t begrudge the time he spent with Marie.
Happily, her guardian was detained on business for the whole week. He had had to move on to Paris and then London. It seemed that he might be gone for ever and that she could go on living in heaven indefinitely. Then Claudine, with some satisfaction, dropped her bombshell.
‘I have heard from Monsieur. He is coming back tomorrow.’
Marie told David about it on the beach. A shadow loomed over the day, dulling the sun and permeating every corner of the plage. The very citron lost its zest.
‘What are we to do?’
‘It’s not the end of the world,’ he told her. ‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t see each other.’
‘He’ll find a reason,’ she said. ‘He hates other people’s pleasure.’
He thought she was over reacting, but the feeling of incipient doom started to communicate itself to him.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll borrow my parents’ hire car and we’ll drive up to that place you liked for dinner tonight.’
The prospect cheered her. It was a little restaurant, high on the edge of a hill with a breath-catching view of the bay, where an old man and his wife bustled about among candles and chequered tablecloths, although for all their bustling there were – strangely, in view of the excellent if simple food – few customers. Perhaps it was too simple for these parts. Or up too wiggly a track. But whatever it was, it was the perfect place for the painful pleasure of the occasion.
They swore love for each other, they held hands, gazed into each other’s eyes, vowed nothing could come between them except salade niçoise, and wood-grilled fresh daurade. And then, afterwards, between lone pine trees, lying on turf so aromatic it was the only garnish that could possibly improve each other’s edibility, she felt her breasts blossom under his touch and her underwear (summer) being gently removed and something else, as she melted, replacing it, something that seemed to fill for ever all the emptiness and loneliness she had known in her life, and wasn’t in the very slightest bit like the reflective and even philosophical activities of the negro in Nice.
‘I want to marry you,’ he said when it was over.
‘You don’t have to say that.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘All right. Darling Mephistopheles. Why not? I am eighteen. I can do what I like.’
‘I’ve one more year at Oxford. I’ll get a job and we’ll get married.’
‘A whole year?’
‘Eleven months.’
‘I shall never want anyone but you.’
***
She didn’t get back to Le Bavolet until three in the morning. She was aware that Claudine had spotted her coming in but she was too exhausted and happy to care, and she fell into a sleep of wonderful profundity as soon as she san
k into bed.
The next thing she knew, there was an urgent knocking at the door, and a brilliant light in the room. She had forgotten to draw the curtains. It was morning, she discovered, but early: about seven o’clock. Couldn’t they have let her sleep till nine as usual?
‘What is it?’
‘Mr Brickville is on the telephone. He wants to speak with you.’
It was Claudine.
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No, it cannot wait. He rang last night but I told him you were not in.’
Marie felt her heart sink. She knew there would be trouble. Yet, nonetheless, she felt buoyed up by the memories of last night and the wonderful sense of loving and being loved.
‘All right. I’m coming.’
She huddled on her dressing-gown and shuffled along after Claudine to the drawing room.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello. Is that you, Marie? Marie, I am deeply displeased. I understand from Claudine that you did not return until three in the morning.’
Thank you for nothing, Claudine, thought Marie.
‘Well?’ said Mr Brickville, more than slightly pained, ‘I am waiting.’
Really, thought Marie, this is absurd. I’m eighteen and I’m being treated like a child.
‘I was with my friends,’ said Marie. ‘And do we have to talk about it at seven o’clock in the morning?’
‘Do not be impertinent, we will talk about it at any hour of my choosing.’
‘You are my guardian not my jailer.’
‘We shall see about that,’ said Mr Brickville with a menace that she had not heard before in his voice.
‘Was that all you wanted to say?’ she asked.
‘No, it is not. I told you, I believe, that my American colleague, Tony Prelati, and his daughter Francesca will be coming to stay with us. Well, they are coming today and, alas, I shall not be back until this evening. I want you to receive them and to see that they are looked after. I imagine it would not be too much to ask you to desist from your hectic social whirl for one day, at least until I am back. Then we can perhaps discuss the whole matter and see if I cannot persuade you to adopt a rather more moderate course. I naturally only want what is best for you. Well?’
‘Of course I’ll receive them, Hubert. I’m not completely graceless. I won’t leave them alone for a second if that’s what you want. But I still have my own life to lead.’
‘That is what we shall discuss. Meanwhile I have given instruction to Claudine for the day’s refreshment, and Maximilien will collect our guests from the airport. They will be with you at 12.30.’
She had at least anticipated that today would be out as far as David was concerned, so she was able to feel calm about it; but the notion of further separation – which Hubert had more than hinted at – was deeply troubling. However, there was nothing she could do about it now.
‘Very well, Hubert. And what time will you arrive?’
‘I shall be with you for dinner.’
‘Good,’ she said, though her heart did not feel it. It was better to humour him.
‘You do not have to say that,’ he said in a grisly imitation of her own words to David yesterday.
‘It sprang unbidden to my lips,’ she replied, too glibly.
‘We shall see,’ he said again. ‘Until tonight, then.’
‘Until tonight. Goodbye.’
He could have said it all at nine o’clock, she thought as she put the telephone down; only that would have been far too amenable of him.
She wondered suddenly whether she should have told David that she wasn’t on the pill. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to talk about when you were lying under such brilliant stars with the scent of all the herbs of Provence about you.
***
Tony Prelati was a great smiler which was a considerable relief. She had been afraid that he would turn out to be someone in the mould of Hubert. Indeed, you couldn’t really imagine Hubert having such a smiling friend, but there it was, the evidence was large as life: deeply tanned, dark curly haired and doubtless lecherous as a sparrow. His daughter was another matter. She was, of course, a brunette, she had to be with a father like that, but in other respects she was an archetypal Californian: beautiful in a rather beefy way but ever so slightly sulky about the mouth, and very, very cool. You could see that she felt she was coming, and indeed had come, to a dump.
‘Did you have a good flight?’ Marie asked them as she met them on the steps.
‘Fine, great, terrific,’ said Mr Prelati.
‘Lousy,’ said Francesca.
It set the tone for the visit.
Funny that Hubert hadn’t mentioned that Prelati was a Reverend.
She spoke to David on the telephone after lunch, and they confirmed their vows of dedication. Now that they had become so close, the parting seemed intolerable.
‘Never mind, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you tonight after he gets back. We’ll meet tomorrow.’
She was conscious again of the strange clickety noise on the telephone. Did they never stop watching, these people?
After a late afternoon round the pool with the Prelatis during which she covertly examined the smiling Reverend, wondering what made him smile so much, and whether it was the same thing that made his daughter frown, and what had happened to Mrs Prelati, they all wandered in to change and prepare themselves for dinner and Mr Brickville’s return. She was missing David so much that it hurt. Every minute away from him seemed an age; a whole day was an unendurable epoch, a vast grey dreary pre-Cambrian landscape, featureless and fog-bound.
As if to echo her sentiments, the afternoon’s imperceptible haze was turning into cloud. There were faint mutterings from far behind the villa, way up in the mountains where the clouds normally sat like fat white cottage loaves, but now seemed to be rolling down like porridge.
She took a shower and lay on her bed, trying to read the latest John le Carré. She got up, paced about, sat down and started to write a letter.
‘Darlingest and far above the ordinarily wonderful David, since Mephistopheles sounds much too diabolical for such a good egg, and talking of good eggs, I suddenly wondered whether…’
She stopped. This was no time to voice anxieties about birth control, a subject upon which she knew very little anyway. It certainly hadn’t been part of the convent’s curriculum. She threw the letter into the waste paper basket, and started again. She had written no more than a line, however, when she heard the crunch of a car on the gravel outside. Mr Brickville had at last returned.
She dressed hurriedly, wishing she could get rid of that sense of dread when he was in the offing, and went to the drawing room. He was standing there talking to Claudine. He did not smile when he saw Marie, but merely acknowledged her presence with a slight bow. She waited while the muttered conversation continued and helped herself to a vodka and tonic from the tray by the window. Drops of rain as big as chaffinch’s eggs started to fall very slowly upon the terrace outside. The muttered conversation ceased. Claudine withdrew. Marie could feel Mr Brickville watching her, but he said nothing. To break the silence, she asked some ritual questions about his flight.
‘The journey was satisfactory, thank you,’ he said at last.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘I see you have got into the drinking habit.’
‘It’s not exactly a habit,’ she said, biting back the irritation. ‘I thought you might like some company.’
‘I am used to my own company,’ he remarked bleakly, ‘but yes, I will have a small whisky since you are there.’
She poured him the whisky, and added water and no ice the way he liked it.
‘Enough, enough,’ he said, then more mildly, ‘The Prelatis are comfortable, I hear.’
‘Yes.’
‘She is a charming girl, is she not?’
‘She seemed somewhat … er, tired.’
‘Of course, of course. I am sure that you will get along famously.’
&
nbsp; She thought it most unlikely, but said nothing. He sipped his whisky as if it might be poisoned.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘I must ask you to do something, or rather not to do something that may conflict considerably with your wishes.’
‘What is that, Hubert?’
‘I must ask you to see no more of your, ah, friends, at least for the few days the Prelatis are here.’
So that was it. She was to be denied the very oxygen of life. She swallowed hard, her heart pounding. ‘May I ask why?’
‘The Prelatis are very dear friends. It could be rude if you were always haring off on your own account.’
‘I would not be always haring off.’
‘Nonetheless, I wish you to do as I ask.’
‘And if I refuse?’
‘Then we shall have to take certain steps.’
She imagined him for a moment on the floor of Bettina Darby’s Dancing Academy, above Bettina’s stables, where she had been taught the rudiments of the foxtrot and the quickstep one summer holidays, gravely taking certain or indeed uncertain steps. Then she turned on her heel and left the room. As she hurried down the corridor towards her bedroom, she saw the smiling Prelati coming towards her, but she simply couldn’t face him. She tore open her door, banged it shut and threw herself onto her bed, sobbing.