“And she started talking about some guy called Charpentier or something.”
Zac still did not look at Rae, but he could tell she was holding her breath.
“And then… then she started talking about what happened the night Patrice Moreau died.”
“I see.”
“Did you kill Patrice, Rae?”
“Is that what Marianne said?”
“No. But there is all this talk about you being ‘the blonde woman’. Were you?”
There was silence. Zac watched Rae’s face, waiting so long for the answer that he gave up.
“Yes.”
Zac almost missed the word it was said so quietly. When he looked up, he saw a single tear running from the corner of Rae’s eye. He watched it roll down her face, dripping from the cliff of her cheek onto the table. He waited a minute before speaking again. Rae quickly brushed her face with the heel of her hand but seemed composed.
“What happened?”
Rae shook her head, unable to speak.
“You killed him?”
“As good as,” she said finally.
What did that mean, Zac wondered.
“Rae…?”
She did not answer.
“Rae, did you argue with Patrice?”
“I loved him.”
“But did something…” Zac broke off.
Rae looked up at Zac
“Marianne was so jealous. I broke her, destroyed her. I should have protected her more.”
“As you said yourself – Marianne is strong.”
“As you said yourself – we are all weak.”
Rae caught the arm of a passing waiter.
“Deux cafés, s’il vous plait.”
“Madame.”
“What is Marianne’s weakness?”
“She fears rejection. She knows what it is to be abandoned. I never took account of it. I pushed her too far.”
“Who rejected her?”
“Her mother, her contemporaries, life… and….”
“And…?”
“And me.”
“How did her mother…?”
“Dumped at birth. On a doorstep.”
“Poor Marianne.”
Rae looked at Zac curiously.
“You are a nice person.”
“Am I?”
“Not many people say that - ‘poor Marianne’.”
That was true, Zac thought, as the waiter put a coffee cup in front of him. People didn’t like Marianne. He stirred a sugar into his coffee, thinking of Shona and her nervous distaste around the old woman.
“People never liked her much,” said Rae, echoing Zac’s thoughts. “I saw something different. I knew what lay beneath. Marianne never belonged. Not anywhere, really.”
“Like you?”
“Like me.”
Like me too, thought Zac, looking out of the window as a young man in a navy suit hurried by with a bag from a boulangerie. Office worker, he thought. Identikit. He wished he was him, that office worker, with his safe, dull life mapped out in front of him. What would it feel like, he wondered, to blend into a crowd? To have everything happen easily, naturally, instead of freefalling through the air, the sound of disaster whistling in your ears, and the ground constantly rushing to meet you.
“I knew all of that,” Rae continued. “I knew it, and I still left.”
“Marianne told me.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t blame you.”
Rae looked as though she might crumble.
“The baby,” said Zac. “It changed everything.”
“Yes.”
Zac could see the maelstrom in Rae’s eyes.
“Why?”
“There was nothing left to keep me as Raymond.”
“Just Marianne.”
“And it wasn’t enough. God forgive me, but she wasn’t enough.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Marianne
I could never have imagined that I would feel like this on the way back to Britain. I was prepared for take-off feeling like the death of everything, the end of the last hurrah. Who would have believed that I would be returning with Raymond by my side? He is behaving strangely, insisting that I call him Zac, but I know it is something to do with Charpentier so I am playing along when I remember. I know he is simply trying to protect us both.
I have plaster on my arm. I cannot remember how that happened and when I asked Raymond, he told me something had happened, but I don’t remember now what he said. I think he said I tripped in the street. It doesn’t matter. He says it is nothing to worry about. He is very solicitous, tucking the blanket round my knees on the plane, ensuring my comfort. I am very lucky.
There is an air hostess who tries to give me a small pillow for my head but I will have none of it. I can tell the way she smiles at Raymond, licking those glossy lips in his presence and calling him Sir with naked flirtatiousness, that she is attracted to him. She does not look him directly in the eye, but glances upwards through black eyelashes heavy with mascara.
“I don’t like her,” I tell Raymond.
“Why ever not?”
“She is flirting with you.”
“Don’t be silly!”
“Men never see these things. They are foolish creatures sometimes.”
“Yes… well…”
Outside the window, the cloud is drifting, white and free.
“Look, there is a dragon, Raymond.”
“No, Marianne. No dragons.”
“Yes, look. That part of the cloud is like the breath from his mouth.”
“Oh, I see. The cloud… yes.”
“Well what did you think I meant? I’m not stupid!”
The air hostess leans in to me, smiling in the way one smiles at a child. It annoys me.
“Would you like another drink, madam?”
“No.”
“Marianne!” mutters Raymond. He looks up apologetically at the air hostess.
“No thank you,” he smiles.
I ignore them both.
“Where are we going?” I ask Raymond.
“Home,” he says. “We’re going home.”
Home. The word makes me feel so content. Home with Raymond at long last.
“What is going on? Raymond? What is going on?”
“Shh, Marianne.” Raymond is rummaging in his pocket for change for the taxi driver. The blooms have all gone from the rhododendron bushes; the leaves carpet the lawns in the dusk. It is evening and there is only patchy light left in the sky, luminous strips radiating a ghostly light through the clouds in a blue velour sky.
“No! NO RAYMOND!”
“It’s okay, Marianne. Please…” His hand is on my arm but I try to brush him off.
“Marianne, I will look after you,” he says desperately. “Marianne, look at me. Look at me! It will be fine. I promise. I promise.”
“Raymond, we cannot live here. I know this place! I know it.”
“Marianne, your nails are digging into me.”
“You’re not listening! Raymond I have been here before. We cannot stay here. It is a terrible place. Listen to me. They will take me from you. They will keep me here. Raymond darling, listen. I have been here before!”
“Shh, Marianne, shhh.” Raymond is trying to comfort me, stroking my arm, making soothing noises into my hair but I feel too angry with him to allow myself to be pacified.
Then I hear her, that voice, and I freeze.
“Come on, Marianne pet. Let’s get you inside now.”
Shona.
“No! NO!”
“There, there now sweetheart. You must be exhausted after the journey. Let’s get you tucked up nice and snug.”
I lash out at her, but I have no strength to fight her off.
Raymond looks on helplessly. Why is he doing nothing? I cannot believe this betrayal.
“Do not leave me here, Raymond!”
“Marianne…”
“Zac, hold her arms for me!”
“No, leave her Shona. I’ll bring her in. No, please!”
A little gathering has assembled at the front door, a couple of the staff alerted by the commotion. The watched with folded arms
Shona turned her back to me then, murmuring to Raymond but I heard what she said. I heard her quite distinctly.
“Put her in the Blue Room. I have prepared the blue room for her.”
“Mary…?”
“Died while you were away,” Shona mouthed audibly. She thinks I am deaf now as well as senile.
“Perhaps she should have the familiarity of her old room,” said Raymond. I could tell he was uneasy and so he should have been. Why did he not protest more strongly? Why did he not defend me? Why do those you love always let you down? Why do they never love you quite enough? I would have expected to know life’s answers by now but I still have only questions.
“It’s better this way,” said Shona to Zac, walking towards the door. “Avoids another move in a few weeks.”
If I could have killed her in that moment, I would have.
You do not come out of the Blue Room. I know that. The walls are a pale, thin, cold kind of blue, not the warm blue of a summer sky. The blue of the hospital where Raymond had his surgery. I do not like that colour, never have. It feels like a prison.
There is a terrible pain in my chest when I breathe, a sharp stabbing pain so intense it makes me want to hold my breath to avoid it, but eventually, I have to gasp for air. I have pneumonia, they say, and my body aches, every muscle grumbling when I turn in sweat soaked sheets. Perhaps the air conditioning on the plane, I heard Shona say. Or the bugs in those French hospitals. She is a ninny.
Despite the aches, it is betrayal that is the greatest pain. Raymond has abandoned me again, comes only to visit. My sense of loving him fills every thought and every minute. It is in the shaft of sunlight that hits my bed in the daytime and the rippled moonlight that tries to penetrate the wall of curtains in the Blue Room at night, creating silver waves across the floor. There is nowhere to go except inside myself, inside my own longing. I am trapped at the centre of my own physical grotesqueness, filled with beautiful thoughts of what love could have brought me in my final days. Even the whistle of my chest feels like a love song.
All of it for nothing. Unrequited love floods out like a living stream… and into nowhere. Unabsorbed. Pouring away like liquid gold into a dank drain. The lover and the loved. Raymond comes to visit and the pain becomes both a little sharper and a little sweeter. He does not explain the betrayal but a little part of me hopes that he has a plan that he will reveal in time. I replay the conversation in the graveyard in France over and over in my mind. Its sense of promise, of hope, of a new beginning. Surely it meant something. It had to mean something.
Raymond changes my sheets and helps me shower, but he is not here as often as I would like. It is lonely here in this pale blue prison. He does not talk as once he did. I blame her. That Shona one.
“She is so much worse,” I hear her say to Raymond. She talks as if I hear nothing, comprehend nothing. “And she is totally confused by that fall. It is so often the way.”
I hate her primness. I got my own back today, exerted the little power that I still have. She came into the room in that way she does, apparently vaporising in the middle of it rather than walking in the door. I watched her creeping round, refreshing water jugs and replacing towels, my eyes following her with hatred.
“Oh Marianne, pet!” she said with a start when she suddenly became aware that I was watching her every move. “You’re awake! How are you feeling?”
I said nothing.
“Will I open the window just for a few minutes to air the room?” she said brightly, pulling back the blue floral curtains and opening the lock on the window that looked down over the gardens. “It’s not a bad day out there, Marianne, though it started out a bit nippy this morning. Up at 5am, so I was, to come to work. Too early isn’t it? Much nicer to be tucked up in a lovely cosy bed like yours.”
She turned to me and smiled.
“Now can I get anything for you, sweetheart?”
“Come here,” I whispered, beckoning her over.
I saw the smile freeze a little on her lips but she moved towards me.
“What is it, pet?”
“Sit down,” I said, nodding at the chair beside the bed.
She sat, but I could see it was reluctantly.
“Is it a wee chat you’re looking for Marianne?” she said. “That’s nice, but I have to go and see to Mrs Leslie in a minute. Will I send Zac to see you when he gets in?”
“Remember I told you about Raymond?” I said, ignoring her question.
“About his painting?” Her voice held a false, brittle kind of enthusiasm.
She knows I don’t mean his painting.
“No,” I hissed. “About the murder. The blood dripping into the ceiling. The man who died like a pig with his throat slit…”
“Ah, come on now Marianne. Don’t you be worrying about things like that, now.” Her cool, pallid hand slid onto my brow. “You’re a bit fevered. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Good, that’s good.”
She stood up. I knew she was desperate to be gone.
“Remember I said it was Raymond who was accused of murder?”
“Yes, yes I remember.”
“Well it wasn’t him who actually killed the man.”
“No, of course it wasn’t,” she said, and I could hear the little glimmer of relief in her voice.
“It was me.”
“No, no, pet, don’t you be thinking that now. You’ve just got a wee bit confused.”
“Not at all,” I said, refusing to let my eyes fall from her face. “I know exactly what happened. I cut his throat with a carving knife. The knife that was on the plate with a noisette of lamb.” Shona looks like she doesn’t know where to run. “I cut his throat and I saw the blood drip from him like a pig.”
I watched every flicker on her face - the surprise and the fear and the uncertainty - and I relished every emotion my words painted on her face. She had put me in the Blue Room but I was putting her somewhere she found just as frightening.
“Oh Marianne!” Her face contorted into a little grimace of concern.
“The police interviewed me but they never found out. I fooled them. It was the perfect murder.”
Shona grabbed the water jug from beside my bed and headed for the sink.
“You’ve already done that.”
“No, not this one.”
“Yes! Yes you did!”
“Don’t get excited now, Marianne. It’s not good for you. Look, your face is going all red!”
“I told you that you have already changed it! Why don’t you stop meddling?”
“I’ll go and get Doctor Bell,” she said, scurrying from the bedside.
I knew then that another dose of sedation was coming my way, that when I woke again there would be no more light streaming in the window and I would be facing evening. I considered it worth it.
When Doctor Bell arrived, hair slicked back with gel and his white coat flapping casually open, he looked at me indulgently, like one might look at a naughty child.
“Are you misbehaving, Marianne?” he said.
“No, I am not!”
“Well, what are these terrible stories you are telling Shona?”
“Was she frightened?” I couldn’t disguise my relish at the prospect.
“They would frighten me! Why did you tell her you murdered someone?”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh really?”
“No. I told her my husband murdered someone.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And did he?”
“Did he what?”
Dr Bell looked sideways at me. “Murder someone.”
I am not sure there wasn’t a gl
int of amusement in his eyes. He put a stethoscope into his ears and placed the end into the front of my nightdress to listen to my chest.
I lay back without answering.
“What is the truth of all these colourful stories, Marianne?” he asked, moving the stethoscope slightly and listening carefully. “Hmm?”
“I get confused.”
He gave a small laugh. “Sometimes your confusion is very selective.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Dr Bell smiled and gave me a surreptitious wink. “Be a good girl, Marianne,” he said. “Or I’ll have to put you to sleep.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Zac
Conchetta sat stiffly at one end of the sofa in her living room, her husband at the other, arms folded across his body. Conchetta studiously avoided looking at him. This was, Zac realised looking round with new eyes, very much her sitting room, with its extravagant baroque influences: gold cherubs on the mantelpiece and heavy gilt mirrors, ornate plaster roses on the coving and amber marble light stands. He looked across at her and smiled, an empathetic smile like she used to give him when he was growing up and in trouble. Her eyes softened as she looked at him.
Everything seemed different since his return, Zac thought, looking out the window at a sky that was grey with gathering storm clouds. So much had happened. Maurice, Marianne, Rae… He realised that something fundamental had shifted inside him. In a strange way all that tumult had left him calmer. Sadder in a resigned kind of way. He had stopped looking for perfect solutions. The first drops of rain splashed against the window panes. Maybe, he thought, he had grown up.
Grown up enough to know that Alain had been a conduit to a possible other life, but was not, in himself, that other life. The moment of take-off from France had been painful for Zac but he knew deep inside him that the feeling was temporary – for both of them. A few tears, a pang of regret, a wonder about how their relationship might have turned out in another time, another place, another life… but no, nothing that cut below skin level. Zac did not harbour notions that his future would revolve round a move to Saint Estelle where he and Alain would live happily ever after. Alain was already the past. He had a future to face.
Marianne had promised he would find himself in Saint Estelle. He could not honestly say that had happened but still… he knew that things had changed. That he had changed. Maurice’s soft, podgy face flitted through his mind. His sad, kind eyes. Zac’s own eyes welled up. In many ways, Maurice had been a more important part of the journey than Alain. That was the one thing he knew: whatever happened, he did not want to become a Maurice, a victim. A heavy sigh from the sofa cut into his thoughts.
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