“No,” she replied with what dignity could be salvaged in her current position, “and please don’t address me as if I were one of your great bloody, broody mares.”
Jamie’s relief quickly turned to anger.
“What the hell were you doing, spurring him on like that? You could have broken his leg and your own bloody neck in the bargain.” He looked at her in exasperation as she gingerly clutched her ribs with one hand and bit the back of her other to refrain from laughing.
“Women,” was Jamie’s final and inadequate pronouncement as he got to his feet and scanned the horizon for the horse.
“He’ll go to the pond; he drinks like he’s a camel about to cross the desert. We’ll find him there. Besides it’s a lovely spot for a picnic,” she cast a glance at the basket his obedient gray mare carried. “Please don’t be angry, Jamie.”
“Come on then,” he said in as short a tone as he knew how to manage.
She wanted to scream at him, to ask why his memory held no echo. That she had laughed because they had, so precisely, been here before. Instead, she mutely took his hand up into the saddle.
The pond sat in the middle of a glade of pine, a still body of water, murky brown and edged with grass bent over and wilted from the heat. The air, strong with resin, was still and heavy.
Jamie helped Pamela down from the horse, found a shady spot to tether it just as her own horse, aptly named Lickety-Split, ambled into the clearing, reins dangling, blowing drops of water off his lips and looking supremely pleased with himself. Jamie unsaddled him and tethered him near his own horse.
When he turned back, a blanket had been spread upon the burned grass, food laid out that was in quality and form, rather alarming. Item by item his consternation grew as each toothsome delicacy was revealed in all its aphrodisiacal glory. Oysters, gray, chill and raw, figs melting in their own sugar, strawberries with a complement of Devonshire cream and a bottle of Chateau du Papillon Blanc 1954 (a very good year, though hardly the picnicker’s choice). The food of seduction, not subtle and somehow all the more effective for it. And in the midst of it, Lolita, bare feet limned with dirt, nose dusted with freckles, a strawberry tucked in her cheek along with a flush that told him she was frightened of her own audacity.
“What, no peanut butter and jelly?” he asked lightly, finding a seat on the grass beyond the blanket.
“No, I thought a picnic called for something a bit grander.” Still flushed and uncertain, she poured two glasses of wine near to overflowing and handed him one.
“Tell me about her, Jamie,” she said quite suddenly, nibbling on a fig in a manner as to make him believe that her virtue, such as it was, had better make a run for its life.
“About whom?” he asked, quite used by now, to her abrupt turn-abouts in conversation.
“The woman who taught you the art of love.”
The opening gambit, a bold move, designed to knock distracting pawns off the board with one sweep. Jamie decided to play.
“What makes you think I know anything about the art of love?” he asked, reclining on his elbows, a look of curious amusement on his face.
“Even a girl of twelve knows the difference between a man who simply loves a series of different women in his life and a man who adores the entirety of female kind and knows—yes knows,” she stated, emphatically ignoring his grin, “how to really love a woman. And that would indicate to me—” she paused to take a swallow of her champagne, blissfully unaware that near to five hundred francs of bubbles had just slid down her slender throat, “that a woman taught you the finer points. Oh, the instinct was there from birth, I’ve no doubt, but only a woman could have brought it into full flower.”
“Indeed,” replied Jamie, feeling rather like a petunia must with a brimming water can poised above its wide open head.
“Yes,” she replied, warming to her subject and Jamie noted with a twinge of alarm, filling her glass for the second time. “You see, my father, who I might add, attracted women in only slightly smaller droves than yourself, told me that for a man to truly love a woman, love her as she needs to be loved, must be loved in order that she not wither away on the stem before her prime. For her to blossom fully,” (all these metaphorical flowers, Jamie mused, were making him feel a bit like a bee who’d overdone it on the nectar) “she must have a man who knows how to respond innately to her cues without needing to be given point for point instructions.” This last given added emphasis by the tossing back the remains of her second (or was it third?) flute of Chateau du Papillon Blanc, 1954. She was beginning to sport a perilously reckless glint in her eyes.
If he’d the sense of a tiny, wee gopher, Jamie reflected later, he would have taken his pieces, one by one, without hurting or alarming her, off the board and made it clear he could not be a partner to this game. A woman was truly one of the great luxuries, the necessities a man simply could not do without. And a woman such as this one, fine and rare, eloquent and bold, was rather like having a case of the very best scotch set in front of an alcoholic with the three day shakes. Surely though her question was harmless, she had asked and he struck into obliging by a combination of the sun’s fist, alcohol and a lurking weakness, would answer. Anything would be easier than watching her toss back champagne and oysters, with one sinuous toss of shiny black curls, as if she’d been fed them in her crib.
“Her name was Clothilde and she was thirty-one and I was eighteen.”
“A-ha, a Frenchwoman, the best of teachers.”
“Your father’s sage wisdom again?” Jamie commented with a light sarcasm.
She nodded, taking the time to finish her delicate munching on a whisper-thin slice of toast burdened with paté. “He said that every woman should have an Irishman at least once, and every man, a Frenchwoman—a ripe one, I believe were his exact words.”
“Have?” Jamie inquired.
“In the biblical sense of course,” she said sweetly.
“Of course,” he echoed rather stupidly, wondering if somehow the alcohol she was drinking was affecting him.
“Please continue,” she prompted, as if he were the rather slow schoolboy he presently felt himself to be.
“As I said, her name was Clothilde and she was a lady in the grandest sense of the word, the French sense if you will—”
“Ah, I see it, four impossibly perfect Chanel suits in sensible colors, black of course for lunch meetings, Mainbocher for days in the country, Dior for evenings out and very special occasions. But nevair ze frippery of say a St. Laurent, no—no St. Laurent is ze stuff of dreams, not hard-line serious couture. She knew the perfect wines, her Brie was always just the right temperature, her servants knew their place and she had a collection of lingerie that would give a harem the night sweats.”
He had best, Jamie thought with some alarm, hide what little was left of the champagne. He was slightly amazed by her assessment of Clothilde, she’d come very close and indeed her servants had known their place. Unlike, it would seem, his own employees.
“She was a Madame, not some inconsequential mademoiselle.”
“A married woman, Jamie? My respect for you grows immeasurably.”
He eyed her with mock sternness, “One more interruption and I’ll not give you another word of my lurid tale.”
“I shall be a paragon of silence, pray go on.” She made a creditable attempt at seriousness, spoiling the gesture by lying down on her front, hands propped into fists under her chin. The Queen flashing the Bishop a naughty bit of leg, he supposed. He sighed and resumed his story.
“Her husband died in his eighties, most honorably acquitting himself to the end, dying in a manner entirely befitting a French gentleman of his means and advanced years. Meaning of course that he died in his mistress’ arms.”
“Was she very beautiful—Clothilde I mean?” Picking the crown off a strawberry, Pamela had apparently forgotten her recent
vow of silence.
“In a refined manner, like purest Meissen china, looks very fragile but in reality is tougher than hell.” Memory, rather than distraction, bore him along on his tale now. “Her hair was very pale, ash-blonde I suppose you’d call it but her eyes were dark, so dark there seemed hardly any separation between pupil and iris. She did wear Chanel and Dior and, just for your note, she thought St. Laurent was a genius. She had that certain something, a grace of carriage, a presence, a bit like Grace Kelly after she became the Princess of Monaco.”
His mind, aided by the champagne, was drifting back along the current of recollection, to that summer in the south of France. Clothilde de Rengac had been a friend of the family, her father having done business with two generations of the Kirkpatricks. As a child he’d admired her from afar, she was quiet, not easy to know and he suspected later, stifled by rank and religion. As he’d grown, his admiration had become more frank. She had never, for all her formality, condescended to him. His opinions she listened to with interest, finding them of worth, never dismissing him as a child. They’d spent hours discussing poetry, music, authors and philosophy as well as lighter topics.
Jamie had been at her wedding, watched her drift, hauntingly pale and drawn, down the aisle to join her life with that of a sixty-year-old minister of the French cabinet and had seen her, in that centuries old act, grow immeasurably ancient. She had become what so many women before her had been, a chattel, a bit of goods sold to the highest bidder. Clothilde had, as those in her circle were wont to say, married very well. In Jamie’s opinion, it was the poorest match he’d ever seen made.
‘Exchanges, James,’ she’d told him some time later, ‘marriage in my world and no doubt many others, is about exchanges. I have something Henri wants, and in return he has something my family is desperate for.” The somethings as it turned out were her family name, one of the oldest and bluest in France, which came with all the rarefied privilege and respect that Henri so craved. In exchange, Clothilde’s family had access to his numerous and very lucrative business contacts. Clothilde however, was not quite as valuable as Henri had first estimated, for after five years of marriage and numerous consultations with a variety of specialists it was concluded that Clothilde was unable to conceive, she was, in that cruelest of summations, barren.
‘Ah James,’ she’d said as they lolled about one lazy summer afternoon in Provence, first editions of Byron, Shelley and Jamie’s omnipresent Yeats scattered in the grass about them. ‘Have you not heard the words, ‘when I was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a child but now I am a man and have put the things of childhood away?’ Love is the thought, the wish of a child. I have learned slowly and yes painfully to put away the wishes and dreams of a child. But I never thought, not once, to be denied the joy, the absolute right to see those dreams in the faces of my children, no I did not. Bitterness is a very bad thing James; try never to drink from its cup, for the taste can become appealing in a perverse fashion. Just a few sips are enough to make an addict.”
He had kissed her for the first time that day, hardly knowing how long he’d wanted to. She had let him, let him kiss her with all the pain and passion his tender young heart had felt, but after she had shook her head sadly and said ‘no James, as much as we might desire it, some things are simply not possible.’
That had not been her opinion the following summer, his eighteenth. He was spending an idle month of it in France, free from the teachings of Jesuits, headed for Oxford in the autumn. Caught between an ending and a beginning, he was in a poor humor, he’d never liked those lapses in time, they made him feel quite lost. He attended a dinner with her and Henri, to which Henri saw fit to invite his mistress. Clothilde, all things considered, had been perfectly composed, gracious to all who sought her company, though Jamie had noticed she was a shade or two paler than was usual. She made the excuse of a headache to their hostess early in the evening, and left without so much as a glance in Henri’s direction.
“Jamie will you take me home please,” was all she said, but he had noticed her use of the more familiar form of his name and wondered at it. She’d taken his arm in what he perceived as tightly controlled rage and smiling politely, left the house. He was not, as it turned out, completely off the mark in his assumption, only mistaken about the precise nature of her anger.
“Jealous?” she had scoffed in reply to his question. “Oh my naïve boy, that is absurd. Of course I know of his mistresses, that is hardly shocking, in fact I approve of it wholeheartedly, it saves me a great deal of unpleasant business, does it not? No Jamie, it is the humiliation—that he should flaunt her so publicly, so flagrantly in front of our friends, in front of the President, mon dieu, it is unthinkable that he should be so—so stupid, so disregarding of the proprieties. Dignity is precious little, but it is what I have in this marriage.” She had turned away then, but Jamie had seen some unnameable quantity in her face that he hoped never to see again.
She came to his room that night, once again composed, dressed in a white silk peignoir, seeming no more than the girl he’d first known her to be. She’d stood silent as Jamie hastened to cover himself with the Kirkpatrick linens she had his bed freshly made with each morning. Then she’d come towards him slowly, sitting on the edge of his bed with the dignity of a born princess, sadly fragile in the light of a summer moon.
“Would you make love to me Jamie, just this once, make me feel like the woman I have never had the privilege of being. If I thought you would find this task distasteful I would not ask, but the desire in your eyes mirrors the desire I have kept hidden.”
Jamie, with a knowledge older than his eighteen years, knew she did not want words, could not indeed have borne them. She wanted no declarations of love, no messy scandale from which to extricate herself, so Jamie gave his heart in silence, for no matter the cost to himself he would never cause her a moment of pain.
And so he made love to her gently at first, then with a wildness of heart he’d been unaware of possessing. Clothilde stayed with him all that night, leaving only when dawn streaked into view. Returning, he knew, to her rooms before the household staff arose. Henri might have reneged on the delicate deal of their marriage but Clothilde de Rengac had not been raised for such unseemly behavior.
Their affair continued throughout that summer, Jamie learning bit by bit the subtleties and nuances, the thousand shades of gray that lay at the foundation of every woman.
There were only two instances in Clothilde’s life when her rigidly set mask slipped, one was when she made love with Jamie, and the other was to come years later, in a manner he had not wished to see.
It seemed hardly more than yesterday and yet a lifetime away. The last time he’d made love to Clothilde, out in the country, away from suspicious eyes, she had discarded his clothes along with her own. She’d drunk him in with unabashed pleasure, knowing it was the last day, the final time, basking herself in the pained adoration that shone from his own eyes.
She had cried a little, afterwards, clinging to him in a manner so foreign to her sharply controlled nature, that he knew it came from depths she could scarcely acknowledge.
It was the way he remembered her. Face flushed with love, the heavy branches of an apple tree dappling her face in sunshine and shadow, her hair, fine as a child’s spread about her face like watered rays of light. She had grasped his face between her hands and stared at him with a fierceness that made her seem angry.
“Whatever happens Jamie, don’t let them sell you, don’t be just another part of their ludicrous business dealings. You are too fine for that, keep that sweet soul of yours—swear to me James that you won’t let them do that to you, swear to me.” Jamie had in his innocence sworn, never knowing for one minute what terrible little tricks life could play upon one.
The next day he flew back to Ireland to prepare for his sojourn at Oxford as five generations of Kirkpatricks had done before him.
&
nbsp; His path would not cross Clothilde’s again for some years, though he always sent her a breathtaking arrangement of flowers on her birthday and a polite note at Christmas.
Then one wintry day in Paris, where he was conducting a lengthy round of negotiations for the purchase of two Belgian linen mills, he saw a slender figure in a deep gray coat alighting from the back of a silver Daimler. Her ash-blonde hair was a little paler but still not a strand of it out of place.
Henri had died a year earlier and Jamie had sent the proper condolences, though he’d felt congratulations were more in order. Clothilde would finally have her freedom and at forty-two a woman, such as she was, was only coming into her vintage years.
He’d coaxed her into dinner that night and it was then she brought up the past they’d so carefully skirted all afternoon.
“So James you too have grown a little older, perhaps a little wiser. Ah, mon dieu, is that a touch of the cynic I see in your eyes? Well, James, that is what comes of breaking promises. Do not give me that puzzled look, acting is not one of your talents. You made me a promise once, not such a long time ago. But you broke it, didn’t you? You let them have what was most precious in you for their own ends.”
“Life only gives you so many choices,” he’d said quietly, eyes turned away from Clothilde’s all-seeing dark ones.
“Don’t lie to me James, it ill suits your nature. It was an exchange, you gave your dreams to save your father’s soul, one of you was cheated though and it wasn’t your father.”
Jamie made no reply, for Clothilde expected none. He had no argument to make in his defense. She knew as well as he the reasons he’d let go of the deepest desires of his heart, that his father, to whom he’d given love and loyalty without measure all his days, had used the very fineness of his son’s character against him in the end.
It wasn’t until after they had returned to her beautiful apartment, overlooking the Seine, for after-dinner cognac, that Jamie saw how tired she appeared, how drawn and old.
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