A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  He needs to know and the question touches me. I give it the seriousness he has put into it.

  ‘Not as happy as you and Nina, Robinson. You know that too.’

  It is only when we are speeding down the motorway back to London that I notice Paul has removed his wedding band, has probably removed it this morning.

  I touch his finger where it should have been. ‘That was nice of you,’ I murmur.

  He darts a glance at me, ‘They’re nice people. Like family.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There doesn’t seem to be much more to say. The flurry, the tensions of the afternoon, have driven us apart. It is better that way. It will make Paul’s going easier.

  ‘And Robinson?’ he asks abruptly after we have covered some miles.

  I shrug. ‘Robinson is the past.’

  ‘And the future?’

  I don’t answer him. I don’t answer him until he puts the question again. We are back at the hotel and there are very few minutes left before he leaves for Heathrow. We are sitting, staring at each other in the front seat of the car, our hands clasped.

  ‘I haven’t much future, Paul.’ I kiss him softly on the lips. ‘But thank you for this gift of the present.’

  I bound out of the car, but he doesn’t release my hand for a moment.

  ‘I hope the trial is over quickly,’ he says.

  -23-

  The trial lasts another week, but I do not return to Paris immediately. I have the legitimate excuse of more library work to do, but of course the motor for my reason is Paul: I do not want to face him too soon, much as I miss him. He is a slow ache inside me. I cherish it, as I would have cherished him.

  As soon as he has left, I move out of the Savoy to a bed and breakfast near the British Museum. I do not want to sleep in the bed we have been in together. Nor do I see why my extended stay should cost quite so much as it has. I may not be good, but I am not an abuser of favour.

  I see Jennifer Walters after the trial. We go and visit Martha Roberts together. The woman is oddly calm. All the tension I sensed in her before has vanished. She has left us for another space. The only emotion she manifests is in the sudden and tight clasp of her hand round Jennifer’s. She answers the few questions I put to her briefly and as if they concerned someone else.

  Afterwards, Jennifer says to me that it neither went as well for Martha as it might have, or as badly. Six years: with good behaviour she will be out in much less. Jennifer is matter-of-fact, about her own role too. Though she did her best, she couldn’t get Martha to perform as well as she might have in the witness stand. Martha went cold. Her tears were all spent. She could neither cry, nor recapture in words the emotions, the fear, which had driven her to the act. So she came across as hard. And juries don’t like hard women. The impression of hardness always conjures up the notion of scheming, of forethought, of full possession of mental powers. Nor did Martha manage to convey her abasement, the brutality of her husband, out of pride perhaps, or because it was no longer fully present as a threat. Compound all that with the lateness of her confession, the head in the closet, and the jury couldn’t bring itself to exonerate her.

  ‘But why did she keep the head?’ I ask. It is something I, too, cannot understand.

  Jennifer shrugs. ‘Don’t know. Maybe she couldn’t think how to get rid of it. Maybe it had a talismanic force for her. Maybe she still loved him and it was a memento. Maybe she wanted to be found out and punished. All of those, I imagine. And people do, you know, want the punishment. They feel guilty, even if the murder was deserved. Whoops,’ she stops herself and grins, ‘I shouldn’t say that.’

  My time is up.

  ‘Give my best to the Maître,’ Jennifer says. ‘You’ll report to him?’

  ‘Weekly diskettes. Sometimes bi-weekly.’

  She smiles wryly. ‘I suspect he’s rather fond of you, the Maître.’

  ‘And of you,’ I return the smile and wonder for a moment whether Paul and I could settle into what he called an ‘amitié amoureuse’. An amorous friendship.

  At first Paul rings me every night. I do not like to think that he is ringing me from home, but in any event, I am rigourously professional. Every night he tells me, in a voice that makes the ache inside me bigger, that he misses me. When I say that I am staying on in London, he tells me he will join me for the weekend. I refuse. I am firm. I make it clear that if he suddenly turns up, I will leave the job altogether. I do not want to leave. I like to finish what I have begun. And I am learning too much - about crime, about punishment. Perhaps it will help.

  I do not altogether know why I am quite so firm with Paul, except that I have made the vow and I know I must keep it. When I bump into an English advertising acquaintance in front of the British Museum, that knowledge grows clearer again. The woman’s eyes and voice light up with that familiar gleeful sympathy as she utters her, ‘Maria, whatever’s become of you?’ and I want to hide again. I am reminded of how well gossiped the Anglo-American networks are and why I chose to come to Paris.

  It is odd, but as the days pass I miss Paul more acutely. Images of him have grown into a loop which plays over and over in my mind, freeze-framing of its own accord. They are hardly all images of bed either. It’s a puzzling, complicated old business this tangled matter of sex and love, where they come together, where they float apart. I can’t ever wholly separate them: the separations seem to come from outside, from notions about morality; from time, from patterns of social life; from sloganizing pundits.

  If only it were all as simple as some of them want to make it, I could have become celibate years ago, a veritable nun in black gown and splendid headdress. Seriously. If sex were merely a matter of orgasm as so many of them clamour, if that were the whole edifice, the touchstone of good and bad, we could have done away with it years ago. As far as I can make out, it takes about sixty seconds of well-administered fingers and fantasy to arrive at that lovely little thrill. But the supposed Big-or-Little-or-Medium-O is a mere incidental, isn’t it? We’re not crude input-output machines, with buttons marked O for mechanical release - not even men, I suppose.

  No. There’s an awful lot more to it than that. Others for one, the adventure of them, the discovery. The voice on the telephone or beside you. Bodies taking over from words and words flowing back, secret, intimate. The little things, the curve of a shoulder, the flutter of a breath; and big things, the caring, the pain of separation. Play and passion all in one. Pleasure and exchange. Imagination and memory.

  Those are the good things. Paul has reminded me that I was once a creature of the bright side.

  PART THREE

  _____________________________________________

  -24-

  I arrive in Paris early on a Friday morning three weeks later. My case is replete with photocopies, the laptop half a megabyte fuller. I am pleased with myself, with Paris too. The grit and sprawl of London had made me forget the sparkling majesty of this city. My journey homeward takes me along boulevards lined with chestnut and plane trees, past the formal splendour of the Place de la Concorde, the iridescence of the Invalides. I find myself wondering why I ever abandoned all this for the wilderness of New York.

  Despite the layer of dust, the apartment, too, is welcoming. I shower and change quickly and on a whim ring Beatrice. I know she will not be there, but I want to announce myself to housekeeper or answering machine. Beatrice’s knowledge of my return will steady me. I told her I was going off on a research trip, though I didn’t tell her for how long or what I was researching. I have a sense that Beatrice wouldn’t approve, would judge me prurient, or might ask why.

  Beatrice’s voice on the answering machine is calm and sweet and perfectly paced. All is well with her world. I tell her I am back and ask whether she would like to come out for dinner or a drink sometime soon. Having done that I feel prepared for the office.

  Paul is not expecting me. I didn’t want him to. Active waiting is not a pleasant emotion in these circumstances and he has on
ly ever been good to me. I think I led him to suspect I was returning Saturday. He may not even be there.

  Madame Duval whom I check in with first is as impeccable and efficient as ever. I give her an assortment of carefully selected expenses chits, along with three pretty canisters of Harrod’s tea. She is visibly touched by the present and full of questions about London. But she stops herself. Maître Arnault will undoubtedly want to see me and he has only an hour or so before the day’s meetings begin. She pauses and warns me that he’s not in the best of tempers. It’s always the same, she sighs, when he’s working on a case which involves Tournier, a juge d’instruction he finds particularly trying. She buzzes him a little hesitantly, then tells me to go straight through.

  Paul is sitting behind his cluttered desk. He is unusually still, pale, too handsome. I hadn’t thought the sight of him would so affect me.

  He stares at me, as if I were a ghost, but doesn’t rise. ‘I worried that you mightn’t come back,’ he says softly.

  ‘I’m here.’

  He is suddenly all motion. He comes towards me, but I move away. I cannot allow myself to be touched. I lift my case to my bosom. ‘I’ve brought lots of clippings, photocopies.’

  He raises his arms as if I were a policeman holding a gun to him. ‘Okay, no hands,’ he laughs strangely, ‘Next thing I know you’ll have me up for harassment.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Men at the desiring end of an unwanted relationship are always ridiculous.’

  I would like to say that it hasn’t been unwanted, but he goes on.

  ‘Alright then, let’s see what you’ve found.’ He clears a space on the table at the end of the room, shows me formally to a chair opposite him, finds a pad, a pen. I lay out the materials and we talk, politely, coolly, though I have a sense that if our fingers brush against each other, we will explode. We have not got very far when the phone rings.

  ‘Thank-you,’ Paul murmurs. ‘Five minutes.’ He turns to me. ‘Are you going to have dinner with me tonight, Maria?’

  Despite the look on his face, I shake my head.

  ‘So you meant it?’

  ‘I meant it.’

  ‘Who…?’

  I stop him. ‘It’s not what you think, Paul. It’s not like that. There isn’t anyone.’

  ‘Why then?’

  He looks so wretched that in utter self-contradiction, I think that if he had asked me again or for tomorrow, I would have broken down and said yes. But I am in France where the order of mistresses is even better regulated than in New York. Weekends are not part of that order. I used, on the whole, to be glad of that.

  ‘It’s a promise I made myself. It’s for the best,’ I say softly. ‘We can meet this afternoon, if there’s time. Or Monday, to go through the rest of this.’

  ‘Can’t. And I’m in court Monday. Will you come?’

  ‘If you’d like me to.’

  ‘I’d like you to.’

  I gather up the things, stop for a moment at the alternate door which leads to my office. As I look back at him, it comes to me that it’s a lot harder being good than I ever imagined. Particularly when selfishness has been a life-time habit.

  My desk has a neat stack of new folders on it, together with some diskettes. ‘For your comments and perusal as soon as poss. Diskettes first’ says the note attached to them. I am pleased by the ordinary business-like tone of this and I set to work. Perhaps the two of us will manage it all gracefully, despite the difficulties of the initial encounter. He is a sensible, intelligent man, after all. And serious.

  The first diskette is labelled ‘Draft Chapter Five (incomplete)’. Paul has been working in my absence. This is the section on husbands and lovers and the English material I have collected will have to be woven into it.

  I switch on the screen. A single paragraph sits at its centre, somehow as startling as an erotic image, despite its source in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics:

  Pleasures are an impediment to rational deliberation, and the more so the more pleasurable they are, such as the pleasures of sex - it is impossible to think about anything while absorbed in them.

  At the bottom of the screen, Paul has written, ‘Is this accepted truth true in your experience? Comment please.’

  I stare at the citation and don’t know how to comment. I read on, am increasingly aware as I read, that Paul has used this draft to talk to me in my absence. There are little notes dotted through the text, probing questions, asides. He is trying to understand - my behaviour, me. I am at once subtly flattered, touched and troubled. Mostly the last. I do not want to be laid bare, understood; but I want to be kind. Perhaps the greatest kindness would be for me to leave.

  It is the end of the afternoon before I reach the end of the draft. I go back to the beginning and under the quotation from Aristotle, I write, ‘Pleasure is quick. Life is long. One man’s pleasure is another woman’s pain.’ I want to write more but a knock disrupts my thought.

  ‘Finishing off?’ Tanya Walker pokes her cropped head round the door.

  ‘Just about.’ I gesture her in, am pleased to see her, relieved that she isn’t Paul.

  ‘I wanted to hear about your trip.’

  Tanya has taken to making abrupt incursions into my office. I suspect she’s lonely and even if I’m not the ideal female friend, or one she’s terribly interested in, I’m at least not a superior whom she has to impress. Then too, she has a kind of political zeal for Paul’s project: she’s afraid that we’ll make a hash of things, that we won’t situate women’s murdering acts against the appropriate background, that we’ll describe the perpetrators as exceptional monsters rather than typical women driven over the edge by men. She has lectured me any number of times on this score.

  What I find extraordinary about her lectures and wonderfully contradictory is the way she can combine the high moral tone with a relish for gruesome detail. She is both fascinated and terrified by violence, which is always sexual violence, and her fascination means that there is potential terror everywhere. Like a talking tabloid she brings me stories about deranged men running over their wives at high speed, or immersing them in vats of acid; about serial killers stalking suburban streets in search of school girls, or jealous lovers trailing former girlfriends in order to hack them into pieces. When it is women who stab husbands or lovers, cut off or cut up their parts, there is a vengeful glee in her stories, as if here we were in the sphere of rational action.

  Tanya reminds me of New York, where sexual violence is both fact and fantasy of every day life, one feeding off the other in an ever increasing spiral of fear and menace. Sitting with her, looking out over this sedately elegant Paris street, I am taken back to the incomprehension I felt in my first days in Manhattan when people would counsel me to beware: to beware of walking in the streets alone at night, of taking the subway, of strangers, of men in general. To beware of the violence round the corner, a violence which always had a sexual tinge. I was taken aback by this. I had been brought up to think of violence as what the police did to North Africans or what unjust states perpetrated on their inhabitants; or simply and most terribly, as war.

  Despite all my years in America, I am still at root my mother’s daughter. When I feel the rare urge to generalize about violence, it is not sex I think about. I cannot bring myself to see men’s violence towards women in anything but terms of individual pathology. I suspect this is the real reason Tanya lectures me. She doesn’t like that fact that I have no general views.

  But today Tanya isn’t lecturing. She is listening to details of Martha Roberts’ trial and as I recount them, her pretty, regular features settle for a moment into peevish discontent.

  ‘Sounds great. Wish I’d been there. I wanted to come, but Paul dissuaded me. He keeps saying it isn’t my field. You two got something going?’ her tone is breezy.

  ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you,’ I laugh, notice in consternation that the tell-tale passage is still on the screen and rap
idly switch it off.

  ‘So you are finished. Feel like a movie? I could use some entertaining.’

  ‘Great idea.’ It is so long since I have done anything as ordinary as go to a film with an office acquaintance that I grasp at the proposition with real delight.

  As we pass through Madame Duval’s office, Paul is standing by her desk. There is a sheaf of papers in his hand and the face he turns on us freezes into a frown.

  ‘Off for the weekend?’ he asks. Tension strains the politeness in his voice.

  ‘Off to a movie,’ Tanya announces. ‘Want to join us?’ She is bold.

  ‘Can’t.’ He passes a hand wistfully through his hair. ‘Got to finish up here.’

  ‘Too bad. Another time.’

  She is so pleased with herself that she is still grinning when we reach the street. ‘I’ve never dared to do that before,’ she admits. ‘You give me courage.’

  ‘Safety in numbers,’ I murmur.

  ‘I think that boring wife of his keeps him under lock and key, you know.’

  ‘You’ve met her?’ It comes out before I can restrain myself.

  ‘At René Cournot’s,’ Tanya crows a little. ‘He has an annual party around Christmas time.’

  I try to deflect her by pointing to a beautifully-cut frock in a boutique window. But Tanya won’t be deflected.

  ‘Ordinary little woman she is. And he treats her with extraordinary consideration. I can only think that either she’s appallingly rich or he’s a very guilty man.’

  ‘And you’d like to make him guiltier.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you? What are men for?’ She laughs with more gaiety than I’ve ever heard from her.

  ‘I imagine I’ve done enough for mankind in that direction.’

  She eyes me critically for a moment. ‘I bet you have.’

  It is when we turn the corner into the Champs Elysées that Paul is suddenly upon us. His tie is askew, his hair dishevelled. He has been running. And his voice is a little too full of a forced jollity.