A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  I follow him up two flights of stairs and along a corridor where the ceilings are lower and he opens the door to a large beamed room which is all nooks and arches like a little world of its own. There are books ceiling high and windows giving out onto an expanse of stormy sea. There is a vast desk, a table, a green divan, some easy chairs, a collection of drawings and pastels on the walls and tucked away behind an arch a tiny fridge and a coffee maker.

  He laughs as he looks at me. ‘Like it? This is why I come here so often, even on short weekends when I can. It’s my hideaway.’

  ‘What are you hiding from?’

  ‘At the moment myself mostly. Don’t like what I see when I find it.’ He makes a face, then grins. ‘You’ve got freckles.’

  I rub my nose and make a face back.

  ‘If you like, tomorrow, you can work in here with me. Or there’s a smaller version down the hall.’

  ‘Beatrice’s room?’

  He looks away, shakes his head. ‘I’ve told you. Beatrice never comes here. Hasn’t in years and years. But since you don’t believe what I say about Beatrice, let’s just leave that to one side.’ He walks quickly to the door and gestures me through, but I can’t let it go.

  ‘She doesn’t come here because your mother doesn’t like her.’

  ‘That too. My mother with all her virtues is a terrible old bourgeoise and isn’t very keen on alliances with people whose parents she can’t name. They’ve both tried in their own ways, I guess. Let’s leave it now, shall we?’

  He ushers me out the door and into another room, smaller and less lived in, but with the same view. He looks sad now. I’ve taken the pleasure of it away from him and he’s rubbing his forehead the way he did in my apartment that day. I touch his shoulder and he studies me for a moment, then covers my hand with his.

  ‘Nice room,’ I say. ‘It’s altogether nice here. Nice for the children. They’re freer.’

  ‘Yes,’ he smiles so that his whole face lights up. ‘Nice for the children.’

  We work then, discuss his penultimate chapter which is on parricide, the most serious crime in the code books, tantamount to treason. The law of the father may not be what it once was, but the crime still carries its mythic weight, its sense that the natural order of things has been overturned - even more so when the parricide is a daughter. Lizzie Borden and her axe, the infamous Violette Nozière. I tell him that I have found some extraordinary recent cases in the U.S.

  ‘But you many not want to risk going so far afield.’

  He looks at me seriously, considers. Then he say, ‘The only risk I want at the moment Maria is you.’

  I stare at him and melancholy creeps over me again, rests like a thick mantle over my shoulders. I think to myself that I have never felt less dangerous in my life.

  -33-

  Monday morning dawns chill and with too much breeze and at breakfast Paul suggests we reverse the order of the day and leave beach or walks to the afternoon. He doesn’t look well. He looks as if he hasn’t slept all night. I hope it isn’t my doing, but from the way he avoids my eyes I suspect it might be.

  Madame Arnault suggests she takes the children off to a friend’s farm some miles away. They can have lunch there and we can be free to work. We wave them off and then Paul says to me abruptly that he wants to write and if I feel like working he has left some things on the desk of the small study. There’s a thermos flask of coffee in the kitchen for me ready to go up.

  I shouldn’t be, I know, but frankly I’m miffed, and I take a coat off the peg in the hall and stomp round the grounds until my feet are so muddy that I think I might as well go in and be a good employee and earn my hours.

  There is a brown folder on my desk. It is tatty and looks old, as if Paul had dug it out of some dusty back shelf just to keep me out of his way. Inside the folder there is a stack of handwritten sheets, unpaginated. Nor is the writing particularly easy to decipher. Only when I have turned a few pages randomly does it come to me that the writing is Paul’s and that these must be notes towards one of his own cases. He had told me that the book wouldn’t include any of these, but perhaps he has changed his mind. Or perhaps he’s just keeping me busy.

  I start to read again with new determination, a sheet at my side to scribble queries on. I haven’t had access to many lawyer’s personal notes before and the going isn’t easy. It takes me a good while to work out what the case is about and that the pages are sequential, going through the period of the magistrate’s and police investigation up to the trial itself. There are so many leaps and lapses that at one point I almost give up in frustration. Nor do there seem to be any names only initials, and even these aren’t clear, since A could just as easily stand for accused as P does for prosecution. But I don’t like giving up, particularly when Paul has set the challenge, so I reconstruct best as I can, drowning myself with coffee as I go.

  It seems the case concerns a double charge of arson and manslaughter. The accused are two girls, sisters. One is a minor who is being tried in a juvenile court. Paul is defending the elder sister. The investigating magistrate and the prosecution would have it that the girls set fire to their home on the outskirts of a village and far enough from a town so that help could not instantly be got and deliberately choosing a moment when their father was asleep, inebriated on the downstairs divan. The actual cause of death is asphyxiation.

  The material evidence is all arguable: the presence of paraffin in the garden shed, which didn’t catch fire since it was at some distance from the house; the presence there of paraffin soaked rope, the remains of a piece of which was found in the house not far from the father’s body; the presence on the father’s wrists and ankles of contusions which could have been caused by the tying of rope but for which the forensic evidence isn’t definitive.

  The motive is the prosecution’s strong card. After much questioning, the younger girl who is fourteen has admitted that the father had begun to abuse her and claimed that he had been violating her sister systematically at least since their mother’s death. The elder sister had on various occasions tried to protect the younger by interposing herself. The younger declares emphatically that she is glad the father (who is in effect a long time stepfather) is dead but she is equally emphatic that the sisters had nothing to do with it and were lucky to emerge from the fire alive.

  The elder makes no accusations against the father. She is altogether more silent than her younger sister. The only thing she repeats over and over is that the flames were very hot, the smoke thick and they are lucky to be alive. She mourns the family dog who has vanished. He was the one who liked to chew rope and it is possibly his rope that the police found near the father’s body. About the father she only says that he drank too much. The problem is that at the time of the fire the doctor’s report showed her to be some four months pregnant. She herself makes no allusion to the pregnancy.

  I am so immersed in the reconstruction of this case that I do not hear the knock at the door until Nicolas pokes his head in.

  ‘Mémère says Papa is a terrible host and you’re to come down straightaway for some late lunch.’ He grins at me.

  I look at my watch and realise it is almost two and I follow him reluctantly downstairs. Madame Arnault is busily chastising Paul while she and Martine heap the table with pâtés and cheese and bread and salad. Meanwhile Paul is desultorily laying place mats and settings.

  ‘Papa was too silly to remember lunch,’ Marie-Françoise announces to me as if this were his greatest achievement to date.

  ‘If you treat your employees like this, you’ll have a strike on your hands,’ Madame Arnault adds for good measure.

  ‘Sorry,’ Paul glances up at me, but his attempt at a smile doesn’t quite work. ‘I was writing.’

  ‘Those notes you’ve given me,’ I decide to add my complaints to the rest, ‘they’re barely readable. But what a case. What I don’t understand…’

  ‘Not now Maria.’ It is almost a growl and only then do I notice he
is looking at the children with something like panic.

  ‘Of course.’

  We sit down to eat and spend the next hour listening to the tale of Rabelais’ misadventures among the chickens, and then despite the fact that I would rather go back up to the study, Madame Arnault insists that we must all have at least an hour’s walk. Otherwise what are we in the country for?

  Paul brings out the wellies and we trudge along a cloud swept strand and can barely hear ourselves for the wind and the crashing of the waves. Not that there would be much to hear. Paul has retreated into silence and Nicolas who walks beside me is never very talkative. Only Marie-Françoise lets out the occasional shriek as she picks up a particularly uninspiring shell. For all that the drama of sky and sea is exhilarating and at one point as I brush against Paul and he gives me one of those lingering looks and touches my hand, I think perhaps I have misinterpreted his mood. He is simply concentrating and not concentrating on me. It is a humbling realisation.

  When we get back I decline tea and games and race back to the study. The case grips me again. I have come to a section where Paul is making notes for the defence. He argues that all the evidence of arson is circumstantial. On the other hand, the wiring in the house was ancient and the place itself something of a tip. The summer was particularly dry. The father smoked and in his inebriated state could easily have started a conflagration. The divan he was found on was made of highly flammable foam. Then too witnesses abound on the father’s bad character, particularly after the mother’s death some three years before, though some also attest that he was responsible for driving the poor woman to an early grave. Conversely, though the girls weren’t particularly loved in the village, the reports are good. The elder in particular often helped out with childminding in the neighbouring town and not a word was spoken against her - except for one mother who objected to the fact that she prayed with the children too often in an utterly unconventional way.

  There are then some sketchy sentences about Paul’s client and how he can possibly coach her to appear at her best in court. He writes that she is beautiful in a wholly untypical way. She is very quiet, not like someone in a state of shock, but with an inner serenity. There is almost a saintliness about her, a particular beauty of the gaze. It is as if she only sees inwardly.

  I don’t know why but I stop as I read this. There is an uncanny sensation in my spine. My skin tingles uncomfortably. I read the passage again three times and try to still my apprehension, then hurry on.

  Paul is uncertain about how best to use the accused. She is soft spoken and that will impress the jury together with her manner. He doesn’t want to emphasize her pregnancy since that will play into the prosecution’s description of motive; on the other hand jury’s have a soft spot for pregnant women and it would do the accused good to have the fact of her pregnancy made obvious to her in court. At the moment she refuses to acknowledge the notion.

  I am just going back to the description of the accused again since I still have this sensation in my spine when Marie-Françoise comes into the room without knocking. She announces that dinner will be in twenty minutes and I may want to change since we have guests. She adds happily that she and Nicolas are going to eat with us. I nod at her and quickly skim through the remaining pages of the folder. It is right at the bottom of the second-to-last page that I notice a strange single paragraph. ‘The accused says I am to contact a teacher called Françoise as a character witness but she won’t or can’t give me a family name; nor name a school. The village school has no Françoise and the Françoise in the nearest town school has never met the accused.’

  I sit very still and feel the tingle in my spine explode into panic. For a few moments I cannot move. Then I get up slowly, like a sleep-walker, and knock on Paul’s door. There is no answer. He has already gone downstairs. I dress without knowing what I am putting on, brush my hair too hard, forget then remember to dab on some lipstick.

  Downstairs there are too many people and too much noise. I look for Paul. He is sitting in the far corner with a dark haired woman. I walk towards him slowly, seek out his eyes. He looks at me and I hear him mumble, ‘Will you excuse me for a moment?’ Then he is beside me, ushering me to the other side of the room, through an alcove.

  I stare at him and I can’t find the words.

  ‘So you understand,’ he says.

  I shake my head. I don’t understand anything.

  ‘You do. I can see it.’ He grasps my arm briefly. He looks anxious and elated all at once.

  ‘We have to talk.’ My voice is a croak.

  ‘Later, we’ll have lots of time later.’

  I don’t know quite how I get through that dinner. There is an old man at my side, a retired colonel or something, who talks ceaselessly and irritatingly about the impossibility of sending troops into Ruanda. Paul on my left is largely silent. The woman, Danielle, the one from the beach, is opposite him and keeps making fetching eyes and provoking him into speech. I wonder if she knows. I look round the table and wonder who does know. Madame Arnault, slimly majestic in a deep red gown? The children, who are on their best behaviour? No, not the children. But the others, the plump elderly woman who must be the colonel’s wife and whom Madame Arnault talks to like an old friend. Danielle’s husband, for there must be a husband somewhere, since there is a dark-eyed girl at the table who I think I’ve been told is her daughter? No wonder Beatrice doesn’t want to come here. My heart beats for Beatrice. Beatrice who lived with fear, with suspicion. Beatrice who needed my mother, but wouldn’t name her. Why? Was my mother already dead? Had she tried herself to reach her and had no reply and assumed my mother wanted nothing to do with her?

  I don’t understand anything. Anything. I glance at Paul and feel his hand on my knee and I try to chew the food on my plate.

  We are walking in the grounds. Pebbles crunch under our feet and the moon is high, lighting up passing clouds, casting shadows on trees and shrubs. And his face. He hasn’t said anything yet except, ‘Yes. Beatrice.’ He gripped my hand then and he still grips it and I realise as we walk that it isn’t easy for him to talk and that to talk is to betray, a far greater betrayal than going to bed with me. I’m not sure why he should feel that, except perhaps that Beatrice hasn’t told me herself. A fire is terrible. A death is terrible. But surely there cannot be any blame.

  I suddenly remember Sandro and my sense of guilt for his death, even without the ordeal of a trial. And then I realise that I don’t even know the outcome of the trial and that must be my first question to him. I am loathe to be the one to break the silence but I do.

  ‘And the outcome?’

  He jumps a little as if my voice were wholly unexpected. ‘Oh that was fine. There was enough reasonable doubt. And I imagine the jury felt the accused had suffered enough; had in any case already spent three months behind bars.’

  ‘The accused?’

  ‘Beatrice.’ He has difficulty saying her name. ‘And her sister. Separately.’

  He is silent again and I want to prod him. I also want to see his face, not these shadows. ‘Will you tell me about it?’ I ask softly. ‘In your own words. The notes were so sketchy.’

  ‘I’ll try. It’s just that it’s all so unclear now. It’s as if there’s a film over those years.’

  ‘Shall we go in. Up to your study. I want to be able to see you.’

  We sit opposite each other in armchairs and sip the claret he has insisted on pouring out. He lights a cigarette, blows the smoke up to the ceiling, shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘I think I’ll have to tell you about myself first. It’s the only way in. And it’s my story, too.’ He laughs gruffly.

  ‘I was young then. My ideals were as big as my pocket-book was small. I had been practising for two, maybe three years. I had moved away from Paris, so that I wouldn’t be in the shadow of my father. Or have my life made too easy. I went to Clermont Ferrand, the depths of France. I took all kinds of cases, any that came my way, from the city, fr
om the surrounding area. My clients were largely poor. Ordinary people who had been kicked out of their apartments when rent was in arrears; kids from rough backgrounds who got mixed up in robbery or drugs; illegal immigrants, prostitutes. I spent more time in prison in a month in those days than I do now in six. I would talk endlessly to the accused, get to know their families, try to see things the investigators had missed or at least see them differently. I never failed to go to a session with a magistrate. I read dossiers assiduously.’ He looks up at me. Irony plays over his features. ‘You get the picture. Lawyer on horseback, sword blazing. I was going to change the world by defending the little man’s rights. And woman’s.’

  He pauses, waits for me to say something, but I don’t speak and he goes on.

  ‘The arson and manslaughter case was a big one for me. Important. There was enough evidence on the other side for it to be a real challenge, but I felt I could win - win over the investigating magistrate whom I knew a little, as well as the jury.’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘And in the process of it all, I fell in love with Beatrice. She had been through so much, endured so much. The psychiatrist’s report made that clear. Her stepfather had abused her for years, while her mother was alive as well. Beatrice had shielded her, taken her place in a way. Not that she ever spoke to me about it. Beatrice was largely silent. She just kept very still, her hands folded in front of her like a schoolgirl. And she looked at me with those eyes or maybe it wasn’t even at me, and I thought “I can save her, I can help her. I can make up to her for what she’s suffered”. Delusions of omnipotence, you see. I thought I could embody justice, make it work concretely, give her life, liberty, happiness.’

  He gets up and starts to pace, stares out the window into darkness. ‘No, to be fair to myself and to her, it wasn’t altogether like that. Beatrice was simply so much more substantial than any of the young women I had known up until then - fellow students, coy pretty Parisians. Beatrice had felt things deeply.