A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  He says to me, ‘It’s going to be very dull living together after this.’

  ‘I haven’t said I would yet,’ I murmur. ‘I have to see Beatrice first.’

  We haven’t spoken about her since the night I had that dream and neither of us say anything for a few minutes.

  Then he says, ‘I’ve started to look for a new apartment. If you like, you can help me. I want it to be in place by the time the children start school.’

  ‘And Beatrice?’ I say in a small voice.

  He meets my eyes. ‘I’ve tried to reach her at her hotel but she either doesn’t get or doesn’t answer my messages.’

  I don’t say anything else. I don’t really want the holiday to end.

  One evening, just before they’re about to leave Paris, we take Steve and Chuck out for dinner. We all talk and giggle too much and afterwards as we’re walking along the quais and Steve is at my side, he says, ‘The triangle’s resolved itself, I see. You’ve killed off the wife.’

  ‘Steve!’ I gasp.

  ‘Sorry. Just kidding.’

  ‘She’s more likely to kill me off, anyway.’

  ‘Cause her husband looks so happy. Transformed since I saw him up in Brittany. Clark become Superman. Gotta hand it to you, kid.’ He chuckles ruefully. ‘And here I’d put my money on having you back in New York by the fall.’

  ‘Your filly may still come in. I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you’ve been doing much thinking.’

  The following evening I go to a concert with Pierre. I watch him surreptitiously as we listen to a Bach concerto and afterwards, when we’re home together having a late meal, I watch him some more. He’s a stranger really, even though he is my brother, but because he is my brother I take my courage in hand and I say to him, ‘Pierre, would you be horrified if I were to tell you that I was in love with Paul? And he with me,’ I finish dismally.

  He looks at me with what I think is incomprehension, a little sadly perhaps. Then he puts his arm over my shoulder in that way he’s started to do and he says, ‘Little sister, love never horrifies me. Only it’s opposite.’

  Later he asks me when I am going to come and visit him in Vietnam and meet his wife and my niece and nephew. The words niece and nephew make me smile and I tell him, ‘As soon as you’re back and settled and you invite me.’

  He nods and I think he’s pleased.

  Vesna comes round the next day for a French lesson with Jasha and his guitar. The school has closed down for the summer but we thought we’d carry on, if a little erratically. Jasha plays me two French songs he’s learned and she looks on proudly.

  After we have had our lesson, she announces to me in English and in her deep-throated, deadpan voice, ‘I have met a man. A little old perhaps. But he is kind. Funny, no?’ she grins, twists her long browngold hair round her fingers. ‘He is a bit like you. He doesn’t expect me to be good always, like the others, and say thank you every time I breathe.’

  I smile at this characterization of myself.

  She smiles too, then whispers comically, ‘And he thinks I am beautiful.’

  ‘You are,’ I say.

  ‘What? With my skinny legs and face and my hundred wrinkles? I look like a dried up old paprika,’ she bursts into gleeful laughter. ‘Jasha, your mother is an old paprika, right?’

  We laugh some more and hug each other and then she says I must come and eat in her restaurant tonight, because there is a new cook and he will only be good for a week before he gets lazy.

  I take Paul. The restaurant is behind the Bastille which is still not an area I like to come to, but I hold on tightly to his arm as we cross the spoke of the wheel on which my mother was killed. Then I tell him about it and he kisses my nose and says, ‘Poor little, Maria,’ and just as we go into the restaurant, he adds, ‘I’ll lend you mine.’

  Vesna treats us like visiting royalty, bringing us dishes so heaped we cannot finish them. At one point she puts her arm around me and whispers dramatically, ‘So this is what you have been hiding?’

  I don’t answer and she turns to Paul, puts her hand on her hip and says in her not altogether French, ‘I hope you are very good to her. Maria is my especial friend.’

  She sounds like a tough barmaid issuing a challenge and Paul laughs and says he tries very very hard, but he will try even harder.

  When we go, he kisses her on the cheek and in the street, he tells me he likes her very much and asks me what her status is in the country and whether she needs help with papers. I tell him shamefully that I don’t know, but that I will find out.

  We walk on a little, then he turns to me and says, ‘I know it’s a little late, Maria; but this report came in today from England. I’d really like to go through it with you. Would you mind if we went back to the office for a bit? It’s easier to work there than in a hotel room.’

  I startle myself and ask, ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to go back to my place?’

  He looks at me as if he hasn’t heard me properly and then he kisses me right there in the midst of the Bastille.

  I hope my mother doesn’t mind.

  It is the next day that the postcard comes from Beatrice. I stare at the picture for a long time not daring to turn it over. The picture shows swirling surf and rocky tree clad cliffs and very blue skies above a caption saying Ile de la Réunion. I don’t know why she has chosen to go there. Perhaps it’s simply the furthest place from France where you can still speak French.

  Finally, holding my breath, I turn the card over.

  ‘Dear, dear Maria,’ Beatrice writes. ‘I am so happy. I feel so free, as free as you. Maybe I’m becoming a little bit like you. No cares, no children, no committees, no husband!!! It’s bliss. You are my teacher. Just like your mother. I may stay an extra week. Your friend, Beatrice.’

  I examine the handwriting on the card carefully to make sure this is really from Beatrice. I know it is, yet I can’t quite believe it. The Beatrice who has taken up residency in my mind, the Beatrice of Paul’s narrative is not this person. I put the card away carefully in a drawer. I do not tell Paul about it. Maybe because it is so obviously directed at me and it would be a further betrayal.

  But I do fly up to Brittany with him. I wasn’t going to but somehow after Beatrice’s card, I feel more entitled to my holiday time. And he wants me so much to come. I told him if he was going to talk to the children, I really shouldn’t be there, and he looked at me with a perplexed air and said he didn’t see why, but that in any case he wasn’t going to talk to them now. He wanted to wait until he had longer with them. And in all fairness, he wants to speak to Beatrice first, and he still hasn’t been able to reach her.

  ‘She’ll be back next week in any event,’ he says to me. ‘And then we’ll sort everything out.’ When I flinch he puts his arm round me and reassures me and tells me he knows everything will be fine.

  So we go to Brittany and we play with the children and we pack them up for their respective camps. At night Paul steals into my room and when I plead familial modesty, he laughs and tell me his mother is a woman of the world and the children never wake at night and we’ll be a lot quieter than the weather.

  And when he comes into me to the sound of the sea, I am very happy.

  -36-

  Beatrice does not come back when she is expected. Paul frets and I mention as casually as I can that I had a card from her and she said she might stay an extra week.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asks

  I flush and mumble that I thought I had doublecrossed Beatrice enough.

  ‘Did she say something I shouldn’t know?’

  Sometimes I think Paul should have been an American lawyer. He enjoys cross-examination.

  ‘Woman talk. And that she was having a good time.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ he says and I know he wants to ask me more but then changes his mind.

  He is on holiday from the office now and he writes every day, working from home. He printed out t
he first chapters for me and the title page and I gasped a little when I saw it because it has my name on it under his.

  ‘That’s not right,’ I tell him. ‘I haven’t written anything.’

  ‘Yes you have. This book is more than the words on the page. Think of all those hours. Anyhow it will help in your chosen career,’ he winks at me.

  ‘It’s still not right. It’s not accurate.’

  ‘Okay,’ he growls, takes a pen and crosses out the ‘and’ between our names and replaces it with a ‘with’.

  ‘Better?’ he laughs.

  ‘A little better.’ I laugh too.

  By the following week, we’re not laughing. Beatrice has still not come back and by the week after that we’re seriously worried. Paul rings the hotel she was staying at to find that she’s checked out and there’s no forwarding address. He rings the airline only to be told that no, they have no record of her changing her flight.

  I say we will have to go to the police and he is not certain about this because he thinks if Beatrice is alright, she will be terrified to have the police inquiring after her. He faxes a lawyer’s office on the island and asks them to make discreet inquiries about any accidents or hospitalisations. We wait. We are both nervous.

  Paul jokes and says, ‘I really haven’t done away with her you know. I only love you to distraction, not to madness.’ The joke doesn’t quite work and he tells me he has found an apartment and he wants me to see it and I say I want to see Beatrice first. He tells me if she isn’t back in another week, and we’ve had no news, he is going to fly out there.

  I sit and look out my window onto the house opposite and I think of Beatrice. My eyes wander across the empty windows and up to the attic room and I wonder what Beatrice is doing. And then that memory comes back to me of that couple locked in embrace, that couple I thought were Beatrice and her husband all those months back. I think of Beatrice’s postcard and I feel my lips curling into a smile.

  I know you’re going to think I made this up so that I could be happy, have Paul and keep him daily too. And that Beatrice is really sitting up there in her attic room flinging poisoned darts at me. But it isn’t like that.

  I had a letter from her on the day Paul was set to fly off to the island. Here it is. She really wrote it. And there was no return address.

  My dear dear Maria,

  I have become just like you. Really I have and it’s wonderful. I didn’t want to tell you before, because I didn’t quite know how to, but I’m not coming back. I don’t ever want to come back. I’m in love, you see. Funny. I met him at a teacher’s conference in Paris during the winter, just after we found each other you and I. I think you gave me the courage for him. He stayed for a while and we got to know each other a little. Now we know each other more. He’s a lot younger than me and I think I prefer that. You remember you said, ‘it depends.’ He’s very very sweet and we’re happy together. Like that. Like you. He loves your dress, though I haven’t told him it’s yours.

  He’s from here and so we want to stay here. I feel so free here. I feel I can do anything, become anyone.

  You’ll tell Paul for me, won’t you? He won’t mind. He doesn’t get angry, not very often anyhow. And he’ll explain it to the children. They won’t miss me. I know they won’t. I’m not really very good with them. Paul is better at all that than I am. I just pretended. And you’ll look in on them from time to time. I would like that. Would like to think of you with them.

  Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for coming back and showing me. I don’t think I quite knew how to be a woman before.

  Your friend always,

  Beatrice

  I show the letter to Paul and now I dig out the postcard too and he reads them both. When he looks up at me his eyes are very blue and dreamy and he hugs me and says, ‘She’s learned to fly. She’d learned to walk and now she’s learned to fly.’

  And there’s our happy ending. Except in the soft morning light we rarely walk off arm in arm into a golden distance. Unless we have the children with us, that is. And the past is still there. I see it everyday in Nicolas. But in any event, as I’ve lived all this through, I’ve learned it’s better not to try to eradicate it, despite its weight and miseries. Otherwise it leaps out to confront you when you’re least ready with even a more frightening face on.

  We live in an apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. I’m very happy that there’s no house opposite. I’ve stopped looking into other people’s windows.

  When we moved in there and the children arrived, Marie-Françoise asked me, ‘Do you think Maman hates us? Is that why she left?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think she just wanted to live something different.’

  Marie-Françoise nodded wisely. But she looked a little sad. ‘I hope she’s alright,’ she said.

  ‘Do you miss her very much?’ I asked.

  She thought about this and said, ‘I’m not sure. I’m happy, I think. And I like you.’ She curled up to me then. ‘But it’s strange.’ She was quiet for a while, then she lowered her voice and said in a very grown-up way, ‘I think Papa’s happier though.’

  ‘Let’s hope he stays like that,’ I laughed.

  ‘Oh he’s not difficult to please,’ she reassured me. ‘All you have to do is tickle him under the chin. Like this.’ And she showed me.

  I’ve tried it and it seems to work. But I have a whole new set of worries now which I didn’t have before. I sometimes worry when I see women eyeing my altogether too attractive partner in a particular way. I worry when Nicolas is home late or when I’m late getting home from my classes. Ordinary, everyday worries.

  But most of all I worry about Beatrice. I worry about her having become me. She is so alone. And what if her past comes tumbling in on her or if her man leaves her?

  I worry too that one day she will come walking through the door and demand what is hers back. I want her to know that it wasn’t a theft, more of an exchange. That’s fair isn’t it? The law allows exchanges. We just walked through each other’s windows and into our dreams of each other, a little blindly perhaps, but then seeing is always partial.

  So this book is really for Beatrice. To tell her how we came to change places and fill up the bits in us that were lacking. Maybe that’s all we ever wanted.

  About the Author

  Lisa Appignanesi is a prize-winning novelist, writer and broadcaster. She has been the President of English PEN, Deputy Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and is a Visting Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London.