by Rose Tremain
‘And you take sixty per cent of everything I sell!’
Penelope smiled. She noticed, fleetingly, that the prawns in the soufflé echoed perfectly the colour of the dining-room walls.
‘I expect,’ she said, ‘we could make an exception in your case.’
*
The princess couldn’t sleep. She went to the rosewood bureau. She re-read Lorna’s letter, written in large writing she had always considered plain and lacking in character. The letter told her that Lorna (now twenty-eight by Penelope’s calculations) would ‘take advantage, this year, of a European summer vacation’. The visit to the château was planned for August.
Memories of her daughter (‘always clever, Penelope. Lorna was always clever . . .’) made her fidget with guilt and irritation. She tugged at a piece of stiff writing paper and began: ‘My dear Lorna, I’m so very sorry to say that an August visit won’t be possible as I shall be travelling . . .’ but quickly crumpled it. The clever girl would find some way to see her. The clever girl’s eyes would ferret among the telltale creases of fifty-five years and decide with satisfaction, Mother’s power is waning. Oh it was cruel, miserable! Why ever had this teacher daughter decided to poke and pry after eight blissful years of separation and silence?
She pulled out her portfolio (how it had dwindled!) of stocks and shares. How utterly miserable to be selling off yet more. But the bronze, though. She must find a way to purchase this wretched bronze for Guy. The princess rubbed her eyes, puffy from snatched sleep. Money is power. So whispered the de Villemorin aunts, clucking over each her own fortune. They died in their bonnets and were buried unmourned. The money was shared among the cousins who squandered it, so complained the prince, on American luxuries, not forgetting American women . . .
The sun came up beyond the steep apple orchards. The house began to murmur with the tiptoeing of servants. It was the hour when the princess usually rose and washed her body, before presenting it, creamed and scented, to Guy. Obliterate me, said this scented yearning body. But this morning, immobile at her desk, the princess felt too tired.
*
The bronze and Lorna arrived the same day, 10 August. Guy stood in the laundry, fingering the blackish lumps, beautiful as yet only by their incredible weight.
A stubbornly hot fortnight and the death of the one stockbroker she trusted had ravaged the poise of the princess. She had enraged Guy by drinking more wine than she could hold and wailing in her little-girl’s voice that she had never been loved. As he touched the bronze, the sun falling on his wide hand, he tried not to measure the price he was paying for this precious metal.
He stayed in the laundry studio all day, working in clay. When the sun dipped from the high windows, he came out into the hot evening. He was tired. He longed to lie down in a cool bed, alone.
He showered and changed (this much I can do for Penelope’s daughter) and went to find the two women. Penelope looked glittering. As a defence against Lorna’s arrival, she had had her hair re-tinted, she had draped her body in a white, off-the-shoulder dress. She fingered the pearl choker clenched at her neck. ‘This is Lorna. Lorna, this is Guy who . . . has the old laundry house as his studio. He’s a very, very talented sculptor, aren’t you darling?’
Lorna got up. The flamboyant introduction had seemed to demand movement of some kind. Guy saw a thin, bony girl with clever brown eyes and thick hair cut very short. She wore an Indian dress, skimpy and creased. Her breasts, covered by this whisper of material, seemed oddly plump, the only part of her body that betrayed any blood tie with her mother. Her smile suggested a knowingness that must surely irritate Penelope.
‘My mother didn’t say you were here.’
Australia. Yes, he could see it now, the woman-stayed-girl at twenty-eight. Freckled. Nourished by enormous skies.
Guy held out his hand, tried to stare past the smile.
‘You’ve come a long way.’
‘Yes. But then it’s years since I saw Mother. I expect she told you.’
‘Lorna loves the house, Guy.’
Penelope had never attempted to quell the enjoyment she got from showing other people her riches. Why bother with Aubusson carpets if no one ever admires them? And Lorna had clearly been astonished by the château and its treasures. She had remembered her mother was rich, yet seemed to have forgotten that riches can gleam at you from surfaces you can touch and smell.
‘And she’s going to stay for ten days, which is wonderful for me. So much to catch up on, haven’t we Lorna?’
Oh yes, thought the Australian girl. But surely you understand that that’s precisely why I came over, to get a full account of a life I’ve only allowed myself to guess at since you left my father and married the stiff and straight prince and became wealthy. And of course you never told me about the sculptor, young enough to be my brother. You left me to imagine you getting old by yourself. I thought at last time had punished you.
Guy sat down. Penelope reached for the champagne in its brimming bucket and poured him a glass. The sun on the terrace was still warm. He took the glass from Penelope and turned to the daughter. Her eyes were lowered, seeming to contemplate her slim, dusty feet in flat sandals.
‘To Lorna!’ said Guy.
*
The nights are extraordinary, thought Lorna. So perfectly peaceful. Mother has created an ‘island’. In it, everything breathes as ordained by her, and the world outside, the world I know of cramped rooms and pushing your body into the little corner of sun left on your balcony after four o’clock in the blistering Sydney summers, exists beyond. Useless to tell her of that other world. In it, for her, exists only terror, and she doesn’t want to look. Sufficient that the stockbroker died. That was terror enough! She still talks of it: ‘With my kind of money, you have to be careful, you see Lorna. Because people can milk you. I’m being milked by everyone. By the servants, by accountants and even by the gallery in Paris. I honestly don’t believe I’m getting my due on my investment. And this spring, I was forced to sell the one mingy tiara given to me by belle-mère de Villemorin. Luckily I know Arnaud Clerc of the Bijouterie Clerc in Paris, or even that could have gone for next to nothing . . .’
Oh Mother, what deafening complaint clanks across the acres of quiet, so carefully tended! I can hear your mind stoking its engines of dissatisfaction, even as you sit on your terrace, so poised, reaching for the bottle in the ice bucket, reaching for the sculptor’s smile. Fears group and regroup in you. Your white dress, at dinner, was splashed with some reddish sauce or other. You looked to the sculptor for help, but he turned away. He turned to me with his smile, yet all I could do was stare. Because what does an artist do to himself if he locks himself inside Mother’s island? What are you doing? Working you say, but working in an old laundry where women were paid a pittance to plunge their red arms into the stained, suddy water of the unassailably rich. How has Mother stained you? Guy, the sculptor. Why do you smile at me when, even this minute perhaps, Mother opens her arms and receives you like a gift of amber, spreads you on her like an ointment – your youth to heal her age.
Yet there is something. Not in you, Guy, as much as in me. Some feeling that made me turn away, made me gabble about myself, telling jokes about my Head of Department to see if you laughed and showing off my clever self (‘Lorna is so unlike you, Penelope dear,’ said long-ago friends) to let you know there was substance inside the shorn head, inside the cheap Indian dress so marvellously wrong for Mother’s dining room. And you listened. You watched. Mother buys you. She buys you afresh each day. But a look in you – and in me – lets me believe I could have you free.
*
‘Promise me,’ whispered Penelope, ‘that you won’t.’
Half asleep, deliciously comfortable in the enfolding satin, Guy mumbled ambiguous assent, let the princess caress the side of his face, then slipped with perfect ease into a dream of Lorna. He was bathing in a river. Lorna waded in from a rock, still wearing the skinny dress which, once wetted, clung to her.
He gazed at her eyes, lashes flecked with water like minuscule diamonds. When he kissed her, her tongue was long and gentle.
The princess wanted to pull him back from sleep. It was as if, sleeping, Guy deserted her. She said his name. He lay still and golden beside her, barely covered. Look at him, she wanted to wail to the ghost of the prince walled up in some mausoleum near Tours, look at my lover!
*
The princess had never known such terrible days. Ten in all, she reminded herself. After ten days, she will be gone. She belongs in the history classroom. She belongs in some ugly suburb. Only Guy and I belong here, with my treasures that keep us safe, with each our own role to play.
‘I hate having my role confused, darling.’
‘Your role?’
‘Yes. Lorna confuses my role, Guy.’
The laugh was mocking, ungentle. The princess looked up sharply. ‘Guy, you did promise me, didn’t you?’
‘Promise you?’
‘That you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t ever, would you?’
‘I already have.’
Not merely in his dreams. He and Lorna had gone walking early on the fourth morning of the ten. The princess sat in bed with her silver breakfast tray, calling Paris, calling London, too preoccupied with the telephone to imagine they could be gone all morning, gone still at lunchtime, eating joyously in a little café with memories of their morning bright in their eyes. Yet what made him admit it? What made him decide not to lie, when lying was so easy? You believe what you want to believe.
‘Oh Guy . . .’ Penelope’s hands were rammed against her mouth. Guy stared, horrified. For a second, he imagined that neither words nor tears would come gushing out from between the fingers, but blood.
‘Penelope . . .’
‘Don’t speak! I can’t listen to anything!’
‘It was terribly innocent, Penelope.’
‘Innocent! Don’t Guy! Don’t! You make me want to be sick. You make me want to die!’
The act innocent because so joyful, he thought, yet the inspiration cruel: two people who approach each other, aware of the invisible onlooker, whose torment drives them on. As they enfold each other, there she is in the touch and push of their bodies, there she is tangled in their moist hair, there she is in their breaths. And afterwards – the glorious knowledge that together they had conquered her, where each had failed to conquer alone. As they walk back, they hear it, the click-clack of Penelope’s high heels, the clink and trinkle of Mother’s bracelets. Perfect, thinks Guy. Perfect, thinks Lorna.
*
The Princesse de Villemorin sat alone by the first fire of September. The London accountant had been and gone, the Paris gallery owner had been and gone. She was left with their sums and her misery.
Maurice announced himself. Penelope sipped at her whisky and didn’t turn. A reminder, Madame, says Maurice, only a reminder that no one in the château has received any salaire this month . . .
She waved him away. Let them all desert her. Nothing mattered any more. Only the plans she made in the golden whisky haze: she would buy bronze in quantities no mortal could dream of owning, she would fill the laundry with bronze, she would lay her head on the vast, unmoving lumps of bronze and let her tears flow onto its darkness.
I know him, she whispers to the spent fire, I know he will trade his Sydney teacher (firm though her breasts are, clever though her damned head has always been) for his own statues. The artist in him will win and without money the artist in him will pine. The mouldering de Villemorin jewels will go. They must all go. And Maurice must realise that no one can be paid now, not till I have wedged that studio with what he calls his ‘substance’. Life drowns and gurgles in the sea of the whisky glass. Life sleeps. I am Sleeping Beauty (‘What a joke, at your age, Mother!’) and I refuse to wake up till the prince has picked his way through the briars and grown roses of my daughter’s mind and comes crashing down here, his weight as potent as the weight of bronze, to crush me and still me with life.
Guy stayed with Lorna till his money and the summer ran out, then made his way south to the Princesse de Villemorin’s château.
On her long flight home to Sydney, Lorna ate none of the food offered her and stayed absolutely still in her seat, talking to no one. Around her parting from Guy, a man who, had she found him before he strayed into a bar one night and met her mother, she believed she might have loved, she concocted an essay subject for her sixth-form students: “What is the function of the creative artist in our materialistic society?” She saw the blackboard where she would write up the title. She saw the thirty or so faces staring at it with anxious frowns. One of the girls raised her hand. ‘Please, miss, I don’t understand.’
Words With Marigold
I don’t know why me. I don’t know why you want to talk to me. I’m no different from anyone. I mean, there are hundreds – thousands – of girls like me, aren’t there? Perhaps you’re going to talk to us all, are you? Lost Generation, or whatever it is they call us. I’ve always wondered how they do surveys. I bet they take a tiny sample of people and call it a silent majority. I mean, I bet they can’t be bothered to go round asking hundreds of people the same stupid questions. Except I met one on a train once. A survey person. She tried to make me answer things like ‘How frequently do you travel on this train?’ I said, that’s my business, dearie, I said I don’t own much, but I own what I do and why I do it. She went puce. I followed her down into First Class and she got this group of men in business suits and they invited her to sit down. I suppose it was a great day for them. I suppose they’d been longing for years for someone to ask them what they were doing on that train! They were drinking whiskies an’ that. They travelled on that train every day.
I’m not extraordinary though. I suppose it’s considered extraordinary to have a termination at sixteen, but I can tell you it isn’t, if that’s what you’re thinking. I mean, it’s no more extraordinary than having a fuck. In fact, that’s all it is, if you think about it. A screw. With consequences. No one worries about anyone having a screw, less they’re real actual kids or something. But try getting a termination at sixteen. I mean the stuff you have to put up with. Fine till they suss your age. I mean, perfectly okay an’ that, but then they start on at you. They start implying your whole life could be fucked, like you’ve screwed your whole personality and your whole chances and you’re psychologically damaged. They want to make you start believing these things or they wouldn’t just act like that, would they? And the stuff about your parents. They imply your Mum’s to blame or something because you’re too young to think for yourself. They say things like, ‘Was your Mother aware of your relationship?’ So I said, no love, my Mum’s not aware of any sodding thing these days. She’s out of her mind most of the time on Special Brew. And her eyes are going as well – disappearing inside her flesh. She’s put on three stone since last year.
But actually that is when things started to get bad. I’d have said I was quite alright, like you know, quite happy till that all began. I was working for my O-levels. Biology was my best subject. Biology and Art, but they said you can’t take Art. I was okay at Maths. Not fantastic, you know, but okay. I could have got something like a C or something. Eddie used to help me with Maths. I mean quite a lot. Not just five minutes to get you through your homework, but he’d sit down with me when Mum was getting tea and he used to say, Marigold, you’ve got this tendency to think in straight lines and what I’ve got to do is to help you think in circles or spirals. He had a name for this kind of thinking. He was very interesting about it and it really started to help me because I’d tended to think there was always one way of doing something and this was the meant way. Because at school they never noticed things like how you were thinking, I mean they didn’t have time, did they, but Eddie said he’d make time and he did.
I really enjoyed Maths homework after Eddie started to help me. I’d bring extra work home and you could just hear the teachers thinking God, Marigold Rickards taking extra Maths t
o do at home! But my results got better. It was terrific seeing the results get good. I mean, let’s not exaggerate. I’d never be a mathematician or anything, like I could be a painter probably if I could get into art school and get my technique better. I still think I could be a painter. I mean I haven’t lost hope, have I, and I know about one of the medical aspects of people in depressions is they lose hope. They just look into the future and see black or brown or something, just some dark colour and nothing in it. But I don’t. I mean, I even write letters to people asking them for money to help me get through art college. I don’t get any money back, but I keep writing, don’t I, so that must be a good sign. I wrote to Lady Falkender. Someone told me she was a patron of the arts or whatever. Do you think she’ll write back or send me something? I mean, I don’t know. I can’t really imagine how Lady Falkender lives, can you? I don’t know if she’d write to someone like me.
I’ve thought of writing to Eddie, except neither of us – my Mum nor me – know his address. And I bet it wouldn’t do any good to write. But it did all start then, when I think about it. Till Eddie left our house I think we were alright. They’d have rows, Eddie and my Mum, but not terrible ones. He never hit her. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t at all a violent person. He liked jokes. He’d make jokes the minute he woke up. Sometimes his jokes got on my wick, but other times I’d think, he kind of keeps us all going and if he weren’t here or something we’d probably have nothing to laugh at and we’d just go quiet like I suppose we must have been before. I suppose when I think about it, I dreaded the idea of Eddie leaving us. I mean I knew my Mum would just go to bits, because you could tell what he was to her. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. He got the works. Best food she could afford, terrific ironing, thermos washed up, cufflinks and stuff at Christmas . . .
It was the age difference, I think. They were about the same age about, but she looked older. I don’t blame him. He was with us for seven years and that’s quite long, isn’t it? I mean, I was nine or nearly nine when he came. And he never said, I don’t think he said Marigold’s a fucking nuisance and got me palmed off with neighbours. He just accepted me and treated me like his own kid. I mean, better than some fathers are to their kids. Quite a bit better. Like helping me with my Maths I told you about. And other things. They used to go on outings to London and he’d always say, let’s take Marigold, she should have the chance to see the big city an’ that. His favourite thing in London was the Science Museum. He knew masses about some of the old compasses and chronometers. There was this man who invented a type of chronometer and he was a kind of hero for Eddie. Harrison. I don’t know which century he was. Before Nelson, probably.