A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  We were very late getting to La Coupole and I remember just before we left the house and he was holding my coat for me, he asked, ‘Do you like me, just a little, Maria?’

  The question had never occurred to me, blandly, like that and I think I must have smiled at him a little curiously, for he murmured, ‘The enigmatic Maria.’

  In the restaurant while we ate and chatted, I kept looking at him covertly to see what he had meant by his question. Olivier had kind eyes with creases round them, a charming smile and when he undressed he had nice slender legs and smooth skin. And he was wonderfully generous to me. Of course I liked him, but there seemed to be more to his question than that answered.

  It was that night, too, that Olivier asked me what I wanted to do after my Bac. I had assumed that I would go to university. It was what my mother had wanted and all the necessary steps were in place. But the fact that Olivier had posed it as a question made it no longer seem a given and that discomfited me too.

  After that evening, everything seemed to change, not dramatically, but subtly, as if there had been a minuscule shift in our relations which grew greater by the week. I don’t know if it was because of the black dress, or because so many men in the restaurant seemed to have stared at me, as Olivier kept pointing out. Or simply because I was now eighteen. But the change was palpable. Olivier would look up at me in the midst of our love-making with that question in his eyes. Or he would shudder convulsively when I took his penis in my mouth and gaze at me beseechingly when it was all over. If we went out, he would grip me possessively anytime another man so much as glanced in our direction. And he laughed less. Anytime I told him what I thought was a funny story, he would grill me about who, what, where. We went out together less and I began to tell him less.

  Then, one morning, a few days after my finals were over and I was spring cleaning the flat and feeling a little sorry for myself since Olivier had said nothing about holiday plans, a strange woman came to the door. She had one of those pert little faces with liquid eyes beneath a dark fringe.

  ‘So you’re the little slut,’ she said, after she had stared at me for a moment. Then she lifted her hand and slapped my face hard.

  I was so taken aback I didn’t even have the wherewithal to ask her who she was. I just looked at her receding figure and then burst into tears. It was the second time I had cried since my mother died and I couldn’t seem to stop.

  A grim, distraught Olivier arrived a few hours later. He took one look at me and buried his face in my bosom. ‘I’m sorry you were subjected to that,’ he murmured. It was only then, as he talked, not quite making sense, that I realized that all along he had been more or less living with another woman. That woman.

  ‘I told her. Told her about you. Told her I was in love with you,’ he mumbled and started to make love to me, savagely, fiercely. I was strangely inert in his arms. In the midst of it all, he said to me, ‘I told her I want to marry you, Maria. Will you marry me?’

  I think I laughed then or it felt as if I were laughing while I kissed him, and when we had finished I said to him, ‘No Olivier, I won’t marry you. I’m going to America. Straight after my orals, I’m going to New York.’ The idea had just come into my head and I remember looking at him calmly, but with compassion, because he was so wide-eyed with surprise.

  Oh, it didn’t end there. For weeks Olivier begged and beseeched, and then because he was really a good man, he helped me. He gave me the address of a friend of his in New York, who taught at Columbia University. He helped me sell the lease on the apartment. But by that time, I was getting quite good at doing things for myself.

  For a year while I was in New York, he wrote ardent letters to me. Then they stopped. I suspect he married the woman with the fringe.

  Amongst the many other things Olivier taught me was that the less you tell men you love them, the more they love you. Perhaps, too, he led me to understand the value of a clean break. It is not a lesson I have always been able to follow.

  -7-

  Last night I dreamt of Olivier. In the dream he was very large and had snow white hair, whereas I was very small, just a child. My mother was there too and we were both thanking him for something, I don’t know what. I woke up feeling very happy, even though the rain is still falling and the sky is a colourless grey.

  Time has taken on a new texture. I no longer feel it in compartments like the hourly segments on the pages of my once crowded diary. There is no compulsion to lop off the present and race into the future. Sometimes I don’t even know where the present is, I float in and out of the past so freely.

  On the bookshelves in Steve’s apartment, I found exactly the same edition of the biography of Madame de Pompadour that Olivier gave me that Christmas. I dip into it erratically and the excitement of the life of the royal courtesan comes back to me with all its initial flavour. To survive, the King’s Favourite had to become an adept at the management of cabals and intrigues. Basic prettiness, talents for music and singing and acting, had all to feed the overarching art of pleasing. Appearance was of singular importance, from the velvet beauty spot adroitly placed on the cheek to the creation of settings, interiors, new houses great and small. Then too, the King had to be entertained, ‘distrait’, as the French say, and witty conversation was a must, together with a flair for organizing parties and drawing out or patronizing artists, writers, intellectuals.

  So fascinated was I by Madame de Pompadour, that I remember scouring our shelves for books of a similar ilk. I found a surprising number - the signal was always a Madame in the name - and it occurred to me that my mother, for all her insistence that appearances counted for nought, must have shared my interest for these women who lived by their wits and often beauty, and who cultivated the ability to please. One other thing struck me as I read: husbands for all these women were at best of secondary importance. Perhaps that was the real reason for my mother’s interest.

  Amongst these books, there was another which bore the seductive title of Femmes Fatales. It was old and the print was quite large, which meant, I had learnt from my mother, that it was probably a cheap edition intended for popular consumption. I read through the book quickly, entranced by its sensationalist prose, its lurid tales of La Dame aux Camélias and Lola Montez, both of whom I learned were real women whose names I can’t now recall, and Nana and Lulu, perhaps Carmen, too. The stories told of enticing young women who had risen from nowhere, who had danced their way to fame and enslaved men; they told of strings of passionate affairs with artists and bankers and kings, of men enraptured and dying for love. But the women all died too, tragically young and horribly. When I had finished, I couldn’t decide whether these women were meant to be fatal to themselves or to men.

  It comes back to me now that one night Olivier spied this book on my desk. ‘Studying, are you?’ he said to me, his mouth tight. I didn’t know what he meant and I must have smiled, as I always did when words eluded me. Perhaps now I do.

  The sun has suddenly emerged, brightening the room with watery light. I decide to run down to the boulangerie. I have reverted to subsisting on bread and cheese, as I did for much of that last year in Paris. But as I near the shop, I change my mind and head for the metro instead. The familiar names unfurl before me, Rue du Bac, Solferino, Assemblée Nationale. A young man and woman get onto the train and sardonically announce they have been sent to us courtesy of the Ministry of Culture to show us what culture is. They start to perform an operatic duet, the woman’s face lighting up with stagey smiles and simpers so that one forgets her lank stringy hair and tattered skirt. I reach into my pocket for the loose change I always have to hand these days for the derelicts who crowd streets and subways, but a man’s shouting, louder than the couple’s song, distracts me as the train pulls into Concorde. A stream of curses and spitfire rage pours from him, though he looks quite ordinary in his tweed coat and well soled shoes. Nor does he seem drunk.

  ‘If I want music, I’ll go to the opera,’ he hollers. ‘I’m not here
for your cruddy songs.’ He pushes through the doors and I follow him. He is still bellowing, charging towards the drivers cubicle. ‘Can’t one even read one’s newspaper in peace in the metro anymore?’ He waves his fist at the driver. ‘Take care of your train.’

  I am fascinated by his rage, but I slip away through the arch marked Correspondence. Only when I get on the next train do I realise where I am heading. Louvre, Chatelet, Hotel de Ville, St. Paul. Have I ever felt anger as pure and as uncontrollable as that? I am here.

  I come up into the air on one of the spokes of the vast wheel which is La Bastille. In the centre stands the bronze column Louis Philippe built to commemorate the abortive revolution of 1830. A winged liberty may soar defiantly at its head, but at the base of the column the victims lie buried, together, someone once told me, with two Egyptian pharaohs a wily Louvre curator bundled into the collective grave. The mummies were decomposing and a perfect opportunity for illicit burial offered itself.

  These morbid thoughts present themselves to me as I approach the spoke in the wheel where my mother was killed - flung to her death on her way home by an overly boisterous driver, so that her body landed at the entrance to the Rue de la Roquette, the very street the hearses take on route to the Cemetery of Père Lachaise.

  I last stood on this corner a day or two after her death. I was angry. I was so angry that I think I must have been screaming out loud for a policeman came up to me and started to quieten me down. I was so angry that I remember feeling that I could kill my mother if she weren’t already dead. I wanted to shake her, slap her. I wanted to ask her what was all her goodness for if it only came to this. Why had she bothered to be so blameless, so self-effacing, so kind, so selfless? Why had she always skimped on herself, forgiven? There was no justice.

  I came home and marched up to her room, banging my head on the low slope of the attic roof. I opened her wardrobe and I started to heave out her clothes, ripping as I went, creating chaos. Exhausted, I flung myself on her bed and cried or screamed, I don’t know which. All I remember is that I vowed to myself I would never be like her. I would be a winner, not a loser; I would be selfish, not selfless; I would never mourn for a man who had abandoned me.

  At some point I know I must have tidied up the mess I had made, for when Olivier came over to look through her desk for official documents, the room was once again neat.

  I didn’t like rifling through her desk. Its order demanded to be left pristine. Olivier did the searching, not that there was much to be done for everything was meticulously labelled and he found what he needed quickly enough. After that I left the room untouched until my return from Provence, when I decided I would make it mine. Olivier’s and mine.

  At the marché aux puces, I found one of those brightly coloured Indian bedspreads and some printed scatter cushions. I splurged on bizarre cloth flowers, outsize yellow marguerites with velvety centres whose textures I can still feel. To top it all off, I bought a poster in iridescent blue from Matisse’s Jazz sequence. Armed with my purchases I set out to transform my mother’s room. It was while I was at last sorting through her things, - putting clothes into jumble bags, lecture notes into boxes - that I came across the letters and the diary.

  By the side of the bed, there was an old oak nighttable with five small drawers. Nothing of great interest here: odds and ends of newspaper clippings, a pair of reading glasses, a jar of night cream, a small jewellry case containing some simple gold earrings, a chain, ancient report cards of mine, a pack of untouched butterfly notepaper I had once given her for a birthday present, and then in the bottom drawer I saw a blue folder with those elastic grips that come up over each end. Next to it, tucked into the far corner of the drawer, a black notebook.

  I don’t know why, but as soon as I saw these two objects, I had the sense that here was what I had been searching for all my conscious life. With slightly shaky fingers, I carefully edged the elastic round the edges of the folder. Inside there was a small stack of letters on cheap yellowy paper.

  ‘Ma très chère Françoise,’ the first began. The writing was tiny, difficult to read. A doctor’s writing, I thought, and my eyes raced to the bottom of the page, ‘Je te serre très fort, Guy.’ Guy, my father. I trembled. I had coached myself to despise my father for so long, but now I trembled, and my first thought was that I would write to him, go to him instantly. Did he know of my mother’s death, his ‘très chère Françoise’? There was an address under the signature. A long, complicated address, but the city was clear. Saigon.

  Then my eyes fell on the date. 9 December 1962. I think the tears came into my eyes. Too long ago. Over sixteen years. I quickly lifted the stack of letters from the folder and turned to the last. This one was written in stubby pencil and there was no date on it, only a month, July, and no address. I leafed back a sheet and now there was a date, November 1971, but still no address. Could there have been one on the envelope? I wanted to scream. There were no envelopes in the folder. I ransacked the letters and then calming myself began to read in what I knew, given my mother’s habits, must be a sequence.

  I read and reread into the small hours of the night. After the first letter, I grew hesitant, slightly shy. This was, after all, private material, and I could feel my mother’s disapproval. So I skimmed to begin with, looking for my name, needing to know whether they talked about me, what he felt about me.

  Each and every letter bore some reference to me. At first they were of the kind, ‘Please give Maria a huge cuddle for me,’ and then, as the years passed, there were questions, ‘How does she look now? How is she doing at school?’ Once there was a thank-you for a picture sent, a comment about how pretty I was, how wonderful it would be if he could see me in the flesh, perhaps one day, he would. This must have been when I was about four.

  The tone was always tender and solicitous, as it was towards my mother, but tinged with what I understood as sadness. On the whole, though, the letters were oddly impersonal, as if some of their feeling had been soaked up in the vast distance they had to cross to reach us. There weren’t that many either, given the long passage of time. More in the first years and then less and less, though I worked out that these were at relatively regular intervals, my mother’s birthday, holidays. How he could have bothered with these, in the midst of the growing horror of the war he was living, was in itself a marvel. For horror there was and it occasionally erupted on the page like a howl of pain, despite the terseness of the language. He would talk of the dearth of supplies, of severed limbs, of savage burns, of the bravery of children. These letters felt like messages in bottles flung into swirling seas, as if he knew they would be indecipherable by the time they reached us, but the gesture of writing them was a call towards another world, of safety, of calm, where a light in the dark signalled electricity and not the flare of a gun.

  Towards the bottom of the pile there was a letter which I couldn’t understand at first. When I did, it made me so angry that I wanted to hit my mother again, tear her hair out. It seemed that my father had been in Paris. Had been in Paris and I hadn’t seen him. From what I could make out, it must have been during one of my English summers. 1969. But the thought that the simple Channel crossing hadn’t been made, that I hadn’t been brought over or they come to see me was so perverse I didn’t know how to express my rage. And it was my mother’s doing.

  I read this letter so many times that it stayed imprinted on my mind.’I am still saddened,’ my father wrote, ‘that you thought it best that I not see Maria. I understand your reasons, that it would have unbalanced her, that you get on perfectly well without me. But she may not. It consoles me a little that you say you speak well of me when the occasion arises, though that may not allow her to hate me the less. Still I have no choice but to bow to your decisions. The blame is, there is no question of that, all mine. Despite all this, it was a comfort to me to see you and to find you so well…’

  It was no comfort to me, however. I was devastated. I had the feeling that if only I had been
allowed to see him, I would have kept him with us. I would never have allowed him to return to Vietnam. I would have had a real, a living father. And would have had someone to turn to now that my mother was dead. I despised my mother for taking this opportunity from me. Despised him too, for not seizing it of his own accord.

  I remember sobbing, thumping the pillow on her bed with my fists, thrusting it across the room, so that the feathers spilled from it.

  There was another thing about my father’s letters which troubled me. To start with they always talked of ‘we’. ‘We arrived safely’, ‘We have found an apartment’ and so on. My instant assumption was that my mother had lied to save face. There was another woman in the picture and my father had gone off with her. Beneath my pitying reflex of ‘poor mother’, another voice bubbled up in me and sneered, ‘It serves her right. She should have dressed better, done something with herself.’

  And then I was no longer sure that this ‘we’ did incorporate another woman. It was someone called P. and P. it turned out was a little confused, but quite happy. P. sometimes joined in embracing my mother and myself at the end of letters. Then P. disappeared from this one-sided correspondence and was not heard from again.

  When at last I turned to the black notebook, I felt as if I were poised on the final threshold. To cross over meant never to come back again. My mother, I sensed, would be forever altered if I picked any further at the lock of her secrets and opened the door to the final chamber. So I hesitated. And then I leapt.

  The writing was my mother’s familiar schoolteacher hand, straight, orderly letters, not too crowded together. But the spacing was erratic, as if all of her despair was contained in the gulfs between words.

  The first paragraph is etched in my mind.

  ‘Today he left me. I am numb, as if all the parts of me he touched have been anaesthetized. I hold Maria to me, cling to her body in the hope that its warmth will warm the dying that I am. Hope. I have written it, so it must be there. But first there will be that second death.’