by John Tagholm
‘Watch,’ he said.
Beatrice did as she was told and in front of her Flotsam came to life as skin, lips, hair and then eyes were added to the skull in a slowly animated sequence which finished with the face turning to look at her and, disconcertingly, blinking. Beatrice could feel her breathing change, grow shallower, the image almost as shocking as the bare skull had been when it was first in her hands.
‘I meant to save this up, but I simply had to show you.’ He pressed the return key again and the head began to turn and the perspective widen to reveal a slim figure standing, naked, with small breasts, her hands placed modestly across the top of her legs.
Beatrice shook her head at Flotsam made real and she reached out and followed the shape of the girl’s face with her forefinger.
‘From the basic geometry the head gave us, we came up with this. We can’t be certain, of course and we’ll never be able to prove anything, but I think this is a pretty good stab of what the young girl might have looked like.’
‘You’ve decided that she is a she, then?’
He looked uneasy. ‘Well, actually, I did this for you. We really can’t establish one hundred percent that Flotsam is feminine, but I know you’re sure that she is, so for the purposes of today…’
Beatrice could see that he was slightly embarrassed, as though he had not only transgressed the strict disciplines of his science but declared his hand too early. She was still taking in the shape of Flotsam, which continued to rotate before her so realistically that she expected it to walk from the screen at any minute.
‘We’ve made her a teenager, just.’
The face that looked back at Beatrice had a small, firm mouth and wide brown eyes with short dark hair giving her an almost boyish appearance.
‘Did you decide that she should look like this?’
‘Don’t you like her?’ Harry Wesley sounded concerned and retreated into his professional manner. ‘Some things we can be sure of, the basic shape of the face, the hair-line, the size of the eyes…’
‘…but not the colour?’
‘No, that’s artistic licence.’
‘May I have a cup of coffee now, please?’
‘Oh, gosh, sorry.’
She watched him order and in those few seconds tried to decide whether he had done all this work for her or would have done it anyway, as part of his job. What she then asked rather took her by surprise.
‘Why did you make her naked?’ She remembered her awkwardness at that age and knew that she would never, ever have wanted to be seen naked.
‘We often do,’ he said. ‘We’re interested in the physiognomy and we’re speculating on body shapes and type.’ He was still in osteoarchaeologist mode.
‘I was thinking of her…’ She thought for a moment ‘… dignity. Or perhaps pudeur would be a better word.’
‘Her modesty,’ he added. ‘I think you’re right. I’m sorry.’
As far as romantic lunches in Paris were concerned, she thought this was a strange opening exchange, a discussion on the sensibilities of a thousand year old pubescent girl.
‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ he said
‘What did you imagine?’
‘I always intended to show you the computer realisations, but I wanted to do that later. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure how I was going to kick off, so Flotsam sort of saved the day.’
‘A thousand year old go between…’
There was a commotion around them, two large Americans with appropriately sized bags were attempting to get into the brasserie to the distain of the waiters. The distraction, Beatrice noted, allowed Harry Wesley to revert to the script he had originally prepared.
‘Have you found what you wanted in Paris?’
‘No. Troumeg’s gone to ground again. He could be anywhere so I’m at a bit of a loss. Tomorrow I go down to Toulon to see my mother and I shall pay a visit to Marseille to see where his first restaurant used to be.’
‘Do you think he’s deliberately avoiding you?’
‘Well, I suppose I do.’
‘So, he must have something he doesn’t want you to find out.’
‘Or he couldn’t care a damn, one way or the other.’
‘Is he like that?’
‘He’s charming but wilful, would be the best way of putting it, I think.’
Outside it began to rain heavily, scattering people for the cover of doorways and back to the entrance to the station opposite.
‘Where was it you were going to take me to lunch?’
‘To tell you the truth, I hadn’t booked anywhere.’
She looked at him and then at the rain teaming down outside. ‘I think the decision’s been made for you,’ she said. ‘Chances are you’ll come all this way to Paris to travel no further than a hundred metres from the Eurostar terminal.’
‘It would have been worth it, though.’
This was the first declaration outside the safe territory of Flotsam and she wasn’t quite sure how to react. Perhaps taken aback by his own forwardness, Harry was now negotiating with a waiter for a table for lunch and so Beatrice was relieved of having to make a response.
‘So, what’s so fascinating about Joseph Troumeg?’ he asked and Beatrice could hear that the question was not a challenge, but a genuine request for information. So she told him about the famous food writer and restaurateur and what she’d learned in Paris, describing the two old women and the visit to the town hall and he listened as the rain continued to beat down.
‘What do you think happened between Joseph and his mother?’ he asked, responding to the story and just as curious as Beatrice at the information she’d unearthed. They discussed the possibilities and, looking back on the lunch afterwards, Beatrice remembered how easy it had been to talk to him, how well he listened. The phone call changed all that and she cursed herself for having answered it, but there was no way of telling it was Jean-Paul. As it was, she left the table and took the phone to stand under the awnings outside.
‘It’s me.’
‘I’m in the middle of lunch. I need to get back.’ She was annoyed and was about to end the conversation.
‘So you don’t want to know where your Monsieur Troumeg is at the moment? If you’re free, I’ll tell you this evening over a drink.’
And with that he’d gone. When she returned to the table Harry could see something had happened and she ended up telling him about Jean-Paul.
‘You mean you had dinner with him last night?’
‘He’s boring and self-absorbed,’ she’d told Harry but she could see he wasn’t convinced.
‘When did you arrange this?’
‘Why is that important?’ Now she was irritated at his reaction. ‘Yesterday, a few moments before I called you, if that makes any difference.’
‘Well it does.’
So for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, a meal began to go downhill and she was cross with both Jean-Paul for having caused it and with Harry for making claims on her which she believed were unjustified and presumptuous. The prediction she had made that Harry would see very little of Paris turned out to be true because he returned to the station after lunch with a nod of the head and a tight smile not far distant from a grimace.
By the time she saw Jean-Paul in the evening she was in no mood for his usual antics and point blank refused his offer to go clubbing later that night in return for the information about Troumeg.
‘Look, Jean-Paul, get it into that French head of yours, I’m not interested in going out with you. Got it?’
In the end, he’d given her the piece of paper in disgust, not the least troubled by her reaction to him but convinced that she was stuck up English girl, not worth the trouble.
And so, here she was, still in the bar two hours and several whiskies later, tracking over the ruins of the day. When she fished her phone out of her bag, she had a missed call and when she played it back she could tell he was still on Eurostar and she struggled to hear a
ll he said.
‘Look, I’m sorry. That was very pathetic of me. I had built this Paris thing into something larger than it was and I have no right to be cross that you had dinner with someone else. I’ve spoilt what started out really well and I could kick myself. Sorry. Harry.’
How strange to be caught between two extremes of male behaviour, she thought, comparing the arrogance of Jean-Paul with the jealous indignation of Harry but, on further examination over another whisky, she realised their similarities. Both men had made a series of assumptions about her, Jean-Paul that his good looks would cause her to fall into his arms and Harry that because he had shown interest in her she should put the rest of her life with men on hold. Another whisky had her examining the doomed relationships with Joshua, Ben and Anthony, not to mention other, briefer flings. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it but somewhere in her slightly drunk state she understood that in here was an equation she had to understand for failure to do so would finally undermine her and no matter how cleverly she was able to stack these disastrous relationships on some dusty shelf at the back of her mind she couldn’t forget them or her failure to make them work.
Was it wise to try and call Harry now? Had she been insensitive to tell him about Jean-Paul? Would it seem that she was protesting too much if she said that she’d only decided to see the chef so that she could contrast his behaviour with that of Harry’s and to get a free meal? She tried to focus on the piece of paper that Jean-Paul had tossed at her when he realised he wasn’t going to have his way: 12 rue de Petit Puits, Marseille, it told her, road of the little well. She would go there after she had seen her mother and the very thought of that meeting brought further gloom to a day that had promised so much more.
She got unsteadily off the bar stool and her phone chirruped. It was a text from Dr Harry Wesley. ‘I’m sorry about the naked Flotsam. She deserved better. Harry.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The arms of the great trees are bare and gaunt, black fingers against the blue sky. She is distracted by the gurgling water of the fountain and the sounds of bartering in the market. When she hears the horses and screams she is suddenly back in the grey town looking down on the old river, a spectator to the death of her father. The memory makes her as incapable of movement as the tree whose bulk she rests against. The horsemen come closer and they are silent because her mind will not accept their presence. Even the screaming women now have no sound, just their distorted faces and they run past her without looking. She could see the men with stakes and swords silhouetted against the pale dust of the square broken apart by the bulk of the dashing horses, scattered and thrown to the side. The very thought that she had left this behind makes her reluctant to accept the evidence of her eyes and she stands by the tree in denial. She would resist the destruction of her happiness. The first horse comes by and the foam from its mouth flecks into the air and drops on her bare arm. Behind six more horses bear down on her, still in silence, for she continues not to acknowledge them, allow them entry into her life. Even when the boy tackles her and bundles her to the other side of the flaking tree she is not of the moment and does not feel the gravel bite into her arms and face nor hear her own scream. The boy covers her with his cape and she retreats further into its blackness, his hot breath on her face.
When he pulls her to her feet, the first thing she sees are the fish covered in grit, their blank eyes looking upwards at the trees. He drags her away, across the stony ground and into the alleyways beyond the open space. She watches him go back to the square and scoop up food that had been abandoned before sprinting back to her with it bundled on his back. More horsemen come through and they wait until the dust from their hooves has settled before slipping out of the town. She is angry now and when she recognises the path which had brought them in the day before, she shakes her head and points eastwards, along the banks of the river. They follow the valley before turning southwards into the hills. It would take them three days to return to the port, but they would be quicker without the donkeys. She is restored, in charge of her senses again and they follow the contours of the hills towards the sun which moves across their horizon as the day unfolds. Only then does she wonder if, in the larger scheme of things, this was destined to happen, that some good was meant to follow the evil, that somehow she had been blessed.
In amongst the low trees and the rough white stones of the hills, they find a recess which gives them shelter and they lay together, his cloak once again covering her but this time for warmth, his breath calm on her neck and they sleep, the fall of his arm over her stomach and soon she is beyond even the strange cries of the night. When dawn wakes them, stiff limbed and cold, she knows the trust between them was made real. They stand and point southwards, each in slightly different directions, waiting for the sun to come over the horizon and tell which of them is closest to guessing the route they should take. She has no fear now, if indeed she’d had fear at all. The hills, over which one day the metal arms of pylons would link to carry power down to the great city, rise before them and they move onwards, the boy taking her hand as she steps off the limestone ridge into the meagre warmth of the sun. Behind them they can see the bald mountain, its bare outline pink in the sun but soon it is swallowed by the hills that are carrying them southwards. They stop finally in the northern shadows of what would become the Chaîne de l’Étoile and rest at the abbey. When she lies alone that night she feels in her cloak for the brooch and the sudden chill that runs through her when she cannot find it is greater than her concern about the charging horsemen of the day before. She goes to the stone window and looks out to the countryside and knows that somewhere in that dark landscape she has dropped the crimson stone. She does not cry for a part of her believes it was meant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The train swooped down over the broad valley carried on what seemed an endless bridge. Beneath her she could see the pattern of habitation, the zigzag of linking roads and paths, the isolated farms and, fleetingly, the outline of an old building, the stone foundations revealing that it was probably of some importance. The grass around it was carefully tended and Beatrice imagined it was an ancient monument, perhaps an abbey. It was gone almost as soon as it arrived. The journey wasn’t quite long enough for her to finish Joseph Troumeg’s book about Provence in which he extolled its virtues, paid homage to the region’s influence on his life and described how to cook a series of typical dishes, each illustrated in glorious colour. Real life, of course, was absent from these pages; Joseph Troumeg, with his undoubted skills, was presenting an ideal, almost fantastic world, to seduce the aspiring reader.
The journey was a comfort and she had switched off her mobile, leaving behind the haughty Jean-Paul and, for the time being at least, the remorseful Harry. Even though she was heading towards a mother who exhibited a range of behaviour that would put these two men in the shade, she was happy with the fact that purpose had been restored to this journey. She was changing at Marseille, where she would be returning the following day to continue her pursuit of Troumeg, and today she wanted to walk down to the port to familiarise herself before going on to Toulon. La Canabière in all its faded grandeur, took her straight down to the old port which lay snug between the hills, watched over by the all-seeing figure of the Virgin Mary standing on top of the Basilica. She saw another opening for her film, with a panorama of old, black and white footage taken from the church – she was sure some must exist – mixed with a closer sequence down here by the port, continuing in monochrome before bleeding into colour as Troumeg walks into shot surveying a scene hardly changed in the fifty years since he’d opened his first restaurant. Somewhere over to the right it had been, but she wanted to save that investigation until tomorrow and turned to retrace her steps to the station and her less than all-seeing mother.
It took just under an hour for the train to follow a tortuous route around to Toulon, time enough for her to list the questions she wanted to put to her mother. She hoped these would complete
a sequence with those she’d asked Jean-Paul – and meant to put to Harry – and if she already knew the task was incomplete she expected it to get worse with a form of extreme obfuscation from her mother. Every so often she saw the Mediterranean in cracks through the hills, in the same way she saw herself, never long enough to draw a conclusion or to be certain that it wasn’t simply a mirage.
The cruise ship was disproportionately large in the harbour, its white bulk a brash contrast to the old buildings which it dwarfed. At least the aircraft carrier, larger still, had the grace to be painted grey and was absorbed by the background. Her mother’s hotel was modern, modest but with a marvellous position on the quay. Quite what Beatrice expected from the meeting she wasn’t quite clear except to know that she would be made to feel that she was doing her mother a favour rather than responding to an invitation. And so it was, Eileen Palmenter in the pink, blue and white flowered dress which she had shown Beatrice in John Lewis, appearing surprised when she saw her daughter in the foyer.
‘Darling,’ she exclaimed, ‘is everything alright?’
‘Fine, mother. You invited me down, don’t you remember?’
‘Did I? Oh, well, what does it matter. I’m afraid I’m wearing the dress you didn’t like when I showed it to you.’
‘No, that’s not quite true. You thought I wouldn’t like it, but I think it suits you perfectly.’
‘How long can you spare for me?’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard, once again opening a new arena for dispute, into which Beatrice refused to enter.
‘Have you found somewhere nice for us to have supper? My treat.’